Evening Republican, Volume 21, Number 19, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 31 January 1918 — Robert Burns Never Went To School, but Read and Wrote at Very Early Age [ARTICLE]

Robert Burns Never Went To School, but Read and Wrote at Very Early Age

Robert Burns, the "patron saint” of Scotland, and undoubtedly one of the world’s greatest poets, never went to school, relates London Tit-Bits. His father, although his income probably never exceeded the proverbial forty pounds a year, was a man of exceptional intelligence and a great reader, and the future poet of “The Cottar’s Saturday Night” could himself read the Bible at an early age, and was writing verses when most boys are learning multiplication. It is quite possible that hack Burns had great advantages Instead of great reverses and hardships he would not have developed his peculiar gifts. Perhaps the greatest of LloydGeorge’s predecessors never went .to school. This was Pitt the younger, the marvelous boy who talked on equal terms with the greatest men of his day at fourteen, and was prime minister at the age of twenty-four, when the average young man is just beginning to earn his bread and butter. But Pitt had the advantage of a home education which would put the best schools in the shade.