Address associated with the unveiling.   This had been prepared for the Hon John Darling but was in fact delivered by  Mr MacDonald at concert to mark Burns Night a couple of days earlier

We have met here to-night to celebrate the anniversary of Scotland’s greatest and most gifted poet, the immortal Burns, and I rejoice to see the large gathering that has assembled to do honour to the occasion.  Our worthy Chief, the Hon John Darling, had intended to give you an address, but in his unavoidable absence I have been asked to take his place.   I assented on the condition that I should not be asked to give an address nor speak for more than five or ten minutes.   Burns is such a large subject that when a man gets into it he cannot get out in a hurry and I really believe the people assembled here to-night do not want to be bored with a speech.   What then am I to say?   Burns has been described as the Shakespeare of Scotland.   Strictly speaking they cannot be compared except in that Burns is the greatest of Scottish poets as Shakespeare is the brightest diadem in English poesy.   We readily grant that Shakespeare in the grandeur of his poetic genius stands pre-eminently unrivalled, but he is not understood by the masses of the English people.   He has touched nothing that he has not adorned, but with all his glorious conceptions he appeals rather to the intellect than to the heart.  His works have to be studied.   So true is this that the expression “Shakespearean scholar” has passed into vogue.   Burns, on the other hand, strikes straight home.    He has written a large proportion of his work in the sturdy vernacular of his countrymen, with the irrepressible force of good broad Scotch and the sympathetic language of the fireside, with a directness and a vitality that make vibrate every cord in the heart.   As principal Shairp has said, he has interpreted the lives, the thoughts, the feelings and manners of his countrymen as they have never been interpreted before and never will be again.   He enters into their wants and trials, their joys and their sorrows and depicts them with a thrilling sympathy that tingles even the fingertips.    There is at once in his poems a manliness and yet a tenderness , a mirthfulness and humour, a drollery and a pathos and a beautiful simplicity all his own that are so bewitching that old and young, high and low, are entranced with their magnetism.   He is too, in a particular sense our greatest national poet; for he more that all others awakened anew in his countrymen a spirit of nationality that will never die.   Never in the history of the world in ancient or modern times, not even with the ancient Greeks, who declaimed in their own gymnasia to enthusiastic audiences the choicest works of their grandest poets with all the force and majesty of glorious and incomparable Greek, and coming down through the ages, not even excepting Dante, has ever a poet held such power over people as Burns over his countrymen.   It is for this reason, then, that tonight in every Scottish hamlet and the wide world over, wherever Scotsmen meet and glasses jingle, yielding a willing submission to his benign away, and perhaps to the genial influence of barley bree, his countrymen will celebrate his anniversary with song and story and jollity and good fellowship.

Oh ye who, sleep in beds of down

Feel not want but what yourselves create

Think for a moment on his wretched fate

Whom friends and fortune quite disown

In connection with the work of the past twelve months I tender my grateful thanks to the Council of the Royal Caledonian Society for the ever ready help at all times accorded to me; to the Secretary (Mr. Drummond); to the Hon Secretary of the Statue Committee (Mr. Hugh Fraser), who has toiled early and late to make the undertaking a success; and last, but not least, to the daily Press of Adelaide who, in their advocacy of the claims of the poet to recognition at our hands have done honour to themselves in honouring the genius of the “inspired ploughman.”   It affords me great satisfaction to have the assistance of your Excellency, His Worship – The Mayor and a distinguished company of my fellow colonists at this function today; but the gratification is increased by the fact that I have at my right direct descendents of Scotland’s gifted son –Mrs. McLellan, granddaughter and Mrs. Burns-Scott, a great granddaughter of the poet, are now with us on the platform.  If it were necessary for me to show the importance which we, as Scotsmen, attach to this ceremony of perpetuating in imperishable marble the features and form of one who did so much for his native country, and not for it only but for the human race everywhere the fact that we have representatives from kindred Societies from such distances as Mount Gambier and Melbourne would amply explain the veneration in which Burns is held by his fellow countrymen.   I have much pleasure in extending a Scottish welcome to the representatives of the various Caledonian Societies present here today.  You are aware most of you that the Caledonian Society celebrated the poet’s birthday on January 25^th last by an open-air concert at the Exhibition Gardens, when some 6,000 persons of all nationalities attended to do honour to his name, and thinking over this has suggested to me the fact that with the exception of the birthday of our beloved Queen there is no birthday so universally celebrated over the whole world as that of Coila’s sweet singer.   Not only in every hamlet, village, town and city in Scotland is it made the occasion of a Burns celebration in some form or other, but amid the snows of north-west Canada, on the diamond fields of South Africa, from the banks of the Ganges to the cities and towns of our own land “by the long wash of Australian seas,” January 25^th is celebrated by music, song and story and grateful hearts remember what they owe to him who lived and died, aye, and suffered in Auld Scotland 100 years ago – Robert Burns.   Nor is this admiration of the genius of Burns confined to Scotsmen or to those of Scottish descent.   Amongst the most advanced thinkers of the present day on the continent of Europe his genius is venerated and his wrings oft quoted, the sentiment of such pieces as A Man’s a Man for a’ that and others of a similar nature being especially admired.    The telegraph conveyed to us a few weeks ago the intelligence that that noble patriot, Louis Kossuth, had entered his rest at the advanced age of 92, and that recalls our recollection that tribute paid by him to Burns when he was in exile in Great Britain.   He spent a night in the classic town of Ayr and the centre of attraction for him was the auld clay biggin where Burns first saw the light.  On being asked to inscribe his name in the visitors’ book he wrote “Louise Kossuth in exile to Robert Burns in immortality.  The man of independent mind is king o’ men for a’ that.” 

The life of Burns divides itself into five eras –

that passed beneath his father’s roof at Mount Oliphant and Lochlea;

the years he lived with his brother, Gilbert at Mossgiel

his visits to Edinburgh

his residence at Ellisland and, finally

his closing years in Dumfries.

We are all of us familiar with the hardships, the poverty, the struggles which he and other members of his family endured with the sturdy independence so characteristic of the Scottish peasantry during their sojourn under their father’s roof at Mount Oliphant, and although the hard toil he had to endure but a mere boy no doubt tinged the whole of his future life with that depression of spirits of which he complains so bitterly in his letters, yet we must not forget that it is to these early experiences that we owe The Cotter’s Saturday Night – perhaps of all Burns’ pieces the one whose exclusion from the collection, were such things possible nowadays, would be the most injurious, if not to the genius, at least to the character of the man.

“From scenes like these auld Scotia’s grandeur springs

That makes her loved at home, revered abroad,

Princes and Lords are but the breath of Kings

An honest man’s the noblest work of God.”

It is to the next era of his life – that passed at Mossgiel that we are indebted for some of his most beautiful songs.  It was reserved for Burns to interpret the inmost soul of the Scottish peasant in all its modes and in verse exquisitely and intensely Scottish, without degrading either his sentiments or his language with one touch of vulgarity.   Such is the delicacy of native taste and the power of a truly masculine genius.   Nor must we forget that which is greatly to the honour of Burns, namely that he was emphatically the purifier of Scottish song.   He did what all the preachers in the land could not encompass.  By putting something better in place of the old indecent songs he ensured that they should not be consigned to oblivion.   It is indeed Burns’ songs that will permeate his fame, for they appeal to all ranks, they touch all ages and they cheer toil worn man under every clime.   Wherever the British tongue is spoken – wherever Britons are gathered to express their kindliest, deepest, most-genial feelings – it is to the songs they instinctively turn, and in them find at once an effective expression and a fresh tie of brotherhood.  It is this which constitutes Burns’ lasting claim on the gratitude, not only of Scotsmen, but of the world.   The outstanding feature of his songs – that which gives them their lasting popularity – is that they deal with what is most permanent in humanity – those primary affections, those permanent relations of life which cannot change while man’s nature is what it is.   No time can change the subjects of which Burns has sung; they are rooted in the deepest strata of our nature, so to speak, which are everlasting.

The next important epoch of the poet’s life is that ushered in by his appearance in Edinburgh on November 28^th 1786.   He at once was recognised as the central figure in the fashionable and aristocratic society of Scotland’s capital.  His genius was immediately discernible to such men as Lord Glencairn, Harry Erskine (Dean of Faculty), Henry MacKenzie and many others who at that time constituted the world of letters in Edinburgh.   He was the favoured guest at the house of the brilliant Duchess of Gordon and the statue now before you represents the poet in the dress of the period usually worn by his patrons of the Caledonian Hunt.  But I need not dwell longer on his career during the two winters spent in Edinburgh.

He next appears to us leading the simple life of a farmer at Ellisland, near Dumfries, a beautifully situated farm on the banks of the Nith.  There he wrote many of his finest strains, and above all, the immortal burst of passion To Mary in Heaven.   It was at Ellisland he penned that beautiful song O’ a’ the Airts, the Jean referred to being of course Jean Armour, who by this time had become his wife and during the period he calls his honeymoon.  There also he wrote Auld Lang Syne, which has been aptly described as the Scottish National Anthem.   But although the subject is inexhaustible, yet our time is limited and the closing years of the poet’s life from 1791, when he left Ellisland leaving “behind him” as Alan Cunningham says “a memory of his musings which can never die and £300 of his money,” to that of his death in 1796, the time was all too short – too short for him, struggling against “cauld poorith,” sickness and official neglect and certainly too short for posterity.  Certain it is that had his lot during those closing years of his career at Dumfries been cast under more favourable circumstances the world would have been the richer today with the gems of poetic thought which fell so freely from his pen.   He had his faults.   Who is without them?   And yet he requires no carping critic to drag them forth into the garish light of day.  He had a most merciless critic in himself, and he wielded the lash with unpitying vengeance.   And therefore, as Mr. Courthope in his biography says that even granting that Burns as regards his life was very much like ordinary man, neither great sinner or a great saint, it is no reason why we should ignore his divine gift and the priceless bequest he has left to the world in his poetry and songs.   The clouds that too long obscured the personal character of Burns for his genius has always burned bright – have been, after all, blown away chiefly by the breath of the people of Scotland.    Their gratitude would not suffer such obscuration, nor would their justice.   But the feelings of the whole people have been nobly expressed by many of the first of the land.   All her best poets have triumphantly spoken in his vindication.   And coming down to our own time, that great and good man, George MacDonald, in a lecture delivered in Glasgow last year in speaking of Burns confidently stated that he very soon hoped to meet Burns in heaven.

“What’s done we partly may compute,

But ken na what’s resisted”

“Then gently scan your brither man,

Still gentler sister woman,

Tho’ they may gang a’ kenning wrang,

Tae step aside is human”

“Burns” says Allan Cunningham, “was a zealous lover of his country, and has stamped his patriotic feelings in many a lasting verse.”   A recent biographer has observed “If Scotsmen today love and cherish their country with a pride unknown to their ancestors of last century; if strangers of all countries look on Scotland as a land of romance, this we owe in great measure to Burns, who first turned the tide which Scott afterwards carried to flood.   All that Scotland had done and suffered, her romantic history, the manhood of her people, the beauty of her scenery would have disappeared in modern commonplace and manufacturing ugliness if she had been left without her two sacred poets.”   On one point there can be no controversy – the poetry of Burns has had a most powerful influence in reviving and strengthening the national feelings of his countrymen.   Amidst penury and labour, his youth fed on the old minstrelay and traditional glories of his nation, and his genius divined, that what he felt so deeply must belong to a spirit that might lay smothered around him, but could not be extinguished.   But what can I say more, or what can be written on Burns that has not already been penned?   His name is indelibly imprinted on the hearts of his countrymen, and not his countrymen only: he is claimed by the world at large; his fame is cosmopolitan.   He has sung to us of our joys and sorrows, of nature as he saw it when communing in the fields and pastures of Scotland with nature’s God, of youth and old age, of courtship and the joys of married life, he has given to us the most soul stirring warlike ode ever written in any language, and at the same time that other strain which ends like the last sound of a funeral bell, when the aged have been buried –

“We’ll sleep the gither at the foot,

John Anderson my Jo”

And he is still singing, and will sing through all the ages. Such then is the man whom we as Caledonians have this day delighted to honour, and, Alderman Buik in the name of the Caledonian Society of South Australia, I have much pleasure in handing to the citizens of Adelaide through you, on behalf of their Chief Magistrate the statue of Scotland’s sweetest singer – ROBERT BURNS