The Sun.
London, England, 1844-08-13 00:00:00

QY bet/all -';‘) Atilt

LONDON, TUESDAY, AUGUST 13, 1844.

The great meeting at Alloway Kirk, to honour the
memory of BURNS, deserves a few brief remarks. It
was honourable to the people of the United Kingdom,
for men, and women too, from England and Ireland,
Were present to celebrate this great national tribute
to the most remarkable poet of modern times. There
could not be a better proof of the irresistible force of
genius, than the fact that a peasant wrote songs in
what has been called the Doric tongue, but unintel-
ligible to Englishmen and Irishmen, and in time they
were compelled, by the beauty and vigour of his
poetry, to learn the barbarous language, and sing his
divine airs with all the enthusiasm of nationality. No
man ever wrote so many songs destined to
immor-
tality, and if,we except the beautiful odes of HORACE,
none have been so generally diffused over the habit-
able globe. In India, America, in nearly all the
islands of the ocean, and now even in China, the
songs of BURNS form a necessary accompaniment of
every festival, and the " Banks and Braes of Bonny
Doon," " Highland Mary," and " Scots wha hae
wi' Wallace bled," are as well known and as much
admired as on the banks of Ayr. Such a man was
worthy of a nation's gratitude, and nobly was the
tribute paid. The crowds who thronged to celebrate
the festival far exceeded expectation ; and at the head
of them was appropriately placed a chief whose family
and domains BURNS has rendered immortal. None
could be better fitted for the chair than the proprietor
of the " Castle of Montgomery," and in justice to
nobility, no one performed his part better than the
Earl of EauirroN. His speech was by far
tho best that was made on the occasion.
It contained nothing extraneous. It was all directed
the main object of the day. It glowed with pa-

triotic feeling, and embodied sentiments which will
only make the world regret that the present heir to
that illustrious family did not live in the time of
BURNS, to screen him, as he would willingly have
done, from the pangs of poverty, and rescue Scotland
from the disgrace of allowing the first poet of the age
to pass his latter days in an ignoble employment.
The speech of Lord EGLINTON was all good, but
the following passages deserve particular notice,
and will thrill the heart of every Scotchman :
" Oh ! that he could have foreseen the futurity of
fame created for him this day, when the poet and the
historian, ;the peer and the peasant, vie with each
other in paying their tribute of admiration to the
humble but mighty genius of him whom we hail as
the first of Scottish poets. Such a foresight might
have alleviated the dreary hours of his sojourn at
Mossgiel —might have lightened the dark days of his
pilgrimage on earth. Well does he deserve our
homage who has portrayed the Cottar's Saturday
Night,' not in strains of inconsiderate mirth, but in
solemnity and truth, who breathed the patriotic
words that tell of the glories of our Wallace, immor-
talising alike the poet and the hero; he who
could draw inspiration from the humble daisy,
breathed forth the heroic words of ' The Song of
Death,' strains, the incarnation of poetry and love,
and yet of the bitterest shafts of satire and ridicule
—obeying but the hand of nature, despising all the
rules of art, yet trampling over the very rules he set
at nought. At his name every Scottish heart beats
high. He has become a household word alike in the
palace and the cottage." These sentiments, though
expressed in glowing language, are only matters of
fact, but they do not come up to the truth. The
words of BURNS make every Scottish heart, it is
true, beat high ; but what heart do they not move ?
His words are sung on the banks of the Ganges, of
the Indus, and the Mississippi ; his fame has extended
over the world, and his songs of liberty hold out
hopes even to the most wretched slave. Scotland
may well be proud of a " ploughman" who has
spread her fame far and wide, and made a rude and
uncultivated language familiar to every civilised
nation.

Railroads are undoubtedly among the most ori-
ginal and characteristic features of the material eco-
nomy of our times. Their uses and relations are so
multiplied, so intimately mixed up with the business
and interests of all classes of the community—they
form so indispensable and prominent an element in
the scheme of modern European society—they are so
obviously the high roads of moral as well as physical
intercommunication between the remotest localities of
empires—and, in this country, the vastness of their
design, the magnificence of their execution, and
the perfect system of their administration are
so far superior to those of any other
State, that there are no public works in the
management and welfare of which the solicitude of
the English people is so universally manifested. The
proverbial passion of our active races for travel is
gratified by railway locomotion, though within the
circumscribed limits of their own islands, with a
facility which appears to be absolutely magical, and
with a velocity of transition that more than realises
the demands of even our unreasonable appetite for
speed. No wonder that the progress and manage-
ment of undertakings so closely identified with the
constitutional temperament of the people have been
watched by that people with an incessant
and scrutinising jealousy. All kind of hard
things (it must be confessed) have been
suspected—and not a few have been openly
said—about the overwhelming monopoly, and reck-
less selfishness, and unprincipled extension of profits,
which, alone, railway companies it was supposed
would consult, in comparative indifference to the great
interests of the community, and utter disregard of
the wants, the wishes, and the limited means of the
poorer classes, who might, whether for business, or
health, or relaxation, be solicitous of journeying by
the only conveyances, with few exceptions, now avail-
able for such a purpose.
It is not necessary for us to inquire whether the
disposition manifested, and the conduct and proceed-
ings adopted, by particular railway companies in the
first years of their operations, justified to any—or to
what—extent, these fears and anticipations. It would
be, moreover, ungracious in us to ask, in what de-
gree the active part recently taken by Parliament,
in combining a series of carefully considered
enactments for the general regulation of rail-
roads and their affairs, may have quickened the
tendency of Boards of Directors to give a liberal
and humane consideration, to the exigencies of that
numerous body, to which we allude, who with the
most inadequate means for paying highly for railway
accommodation, have the most need for its facilities
of occasional transport from the metropolis,
and other swarming marts of long-continued
and all but incessantly-plied toil, in their
brief and scanty intervals of leisure. Much
more to our purpose and our taste, it is to express
the feeling of unfeigned satisfaction with which we
regard the liberal and ever generous spirit in which,
month after month, the great Railway Companies
come forward to announce the arrangements they
have made for procuring the most valuable, healthful,
and instructive of all recreations to the sons and
daughters of industrial labour, at a cost cheaper than
we had really supposed it could ever be afforded.
The second and third-class passengers, the latter
more especially, are the objects of these excellent
arrangements. The London and Birmingham,
Great Western, London and Dover, London
and Brighton, and Eastern Counties Railway
Companies, we most particularly notice as en-
titled to the best thanks of the public for the
efforts they have made in this direction. They have
reduced the charge per head on the several pleasure
or holiday excursions, which they have opened to the
enjoyment of hundreds—of thousands, rather—who,
but for such manifestations of a kindly spirit in these
bodies, might never have come within sight of the
chance of such enjoyments, to a point which cannot
reimburse their expenditure, unless the numbers who
avail themselves of their offers be immoderatelygreat ;
but which, in that case, must yield a corresponding
profst to which their spirited liberality establishes in
these companies, the most legitimate of claims. Who
that remembers a Sunday in Manchester, but twelve
years ago, with the gin-shops swarming, as
we have seen them, with whole families
of artisans, well behaved, indeed, and attired
in their best, but compelled, as it were, to make out
their day of rest in such unfitting quarters, from the
utter hopelessness of penetrating into the country—
were they ever so disposed—by dragging their ex-
hausted limbs, say through the dreary length of the
brick-and-mortar suburb of Oldham, for example, a
weary four or five miles, unreclaimed by an open
space half as big as Kennington-common ;—who
that has seen, on Sundays, the suburbs inhabited by
the poorest weavers of Glasgow, or the operatives of
Huddersfield, but must rejoice at the light and easy
terms on which the Act of the Legislature has now
secured, to such as are desirous to avail themselves
of it, the privilege of being conveyed, for a few happy
and refreshing hours, once in every week, through
the purer air, and cheerful inspiration of large tracts
of open country—over moors and through vallies and
round the bases of breezy hills, or near the banks of

fresh and sparkling rivers—far away from the polluted

atmosphere, and oppressive monotony of the town in
which they have to earn their hard subsistence ?
After excitement and gratification like those of the

the "railway trip," we may be sure they return with
kindlier feelings to all the world—increased self-

respect, and augmented alacrity. The prospect of re

newing at short intervals their glimpses of " the world"
beyond the dingy streets of mills and factories, in
which they have been so long over-wearied denizens,
... .. .

will lighten the toils of the week, strengthen the re-
lations and good understanding between the manu-
facturer and the operative, the master and the ser-
vant, and gradually extinguish that painful sense of
virtual exclusion from the enjoyments common to all
classes above them which has too long, and most un-
wisely, been permitted both by the Government and
the capitalist, to pre-occupy and poison the mind
of the labouring artisans. The Legislature has done
nobly in providing that there shall be on all the great
lines of railway, where passenger-trains of any class
are run on Sundays, third-class trains—and in
spirit, energy, and liberality, we must say the Rail-
way Directors have gone ahead even of the Legis-
lature. Witness the last announcement of the
Brighton Railway Company.
At what angle of elevation the Bishop of LONDON
up-turns his episcopal eyes at monster trains of forty