Auchinleck is now the property of Sir James Boswell, Baronet, grandson of the biographer of Johnson. ELIZABETH BURNET. AMONG the eminent literary and philosophical personages who befriended Burns on his arrival in Edinburgh, was the kind and hospitable, though eccentric, James Burnet, author of the treatise on the Origin of Languages, and a judge of the supreme civil court of Scotland, under the designation of Lord Monboddo. This aged scholar, who had entertained Johnson and Boswell, at his country seat in Kincardineshire, on their journey to the north, was accustomed, at his house in Edinburgh, to give suppers to the learned, in a style resembling that which obtained amongst the enlightened friends of Augustus. Burns, though the most unsuitable of guests for a classic feast, had no sooner arrived in Edinburgh than he was welcomed to these entertainments. * Lord Monboddo had at this time a second and sole unmarried daughter, who is described by all who recollect her, as the most perfectly beautiful creature that human imagination could conceive. Some time before Burns was known out of Ayrshire, a certain Hugh Chisholm, one of the seven "broken men" who had protected Prince Charles Stuart in 1746, was brought in éxtreme old age to see and be seen by several Jacobite friends in the Scottish capital, and, like many strangers of different descriptions, he was taken to the hospitable evening table of Monboddo. He sat silent in a sort of stupor for the most part of the night; but when at length the company rose to withdraw, and his conductor asked what he thought of Miss Burnet, he burst out with an exclamation, in his own language, to the effect that "she was the finest animal he had ever set eyes on,”—an odd phrase to an English ear, but which, if we reflect on its comprehensiveness, will appear as no common mark of admiration, especially coming as it did from a perfectly untutored, though not vulgar mind. The impressions of Burns we can learn from the verse and prose he has left behind him. In his Address to Edinburgh, he thus alludes to Miss Burnet: "Thy daughters bright thy walks adorn! Gay as the gilded summer sky, And own his work indeed divine!" "There has not," he says, in a letter enclosing a manuscript copy of this poem to a country friend, "been anything nearly like her [Miss Burnet] in all the combinations of beauty, In St John Street, Canongate, the house marked No. 13. grace, and goodness, the great Creator has formed, since Milton's Eve on the first day of her existence." Consumption terminated her days, at Braid Farm, near Edinburgh, on the 17th of June, 1790. According to an elegant contemporary, Miss Burnet was "endowed with all her father's benevolence of temper, and with all his taste for elegant literature, without his whim or caprice. It was her chief delight to be the nurse and companion of his declining age. It is supposed she was the person who is elegantly praised in one of the papers of the Mirror, as rejecting the most flattering and advantageous opportunities of settlement in marriage, that she might amuse a father's loneliness, nurse the sickly infirmity of his age, and cheer him with all the tender cares of filial affection. Her presence contributed to draw around him, in his house, and at his table, all that was truly respectable among the youth of his country. She delighted in literary conversation, in poetry, and in the fine arts; without contracting from this taste any of that pedantic self-conceit and affectation which usually characterise literary ladies." Burns, who could never have forgot so admirable a creature as Miss Burnet, testified the depth of his feelings on the occasion of her death by the following elegy, written at Ellisland:-- |