On this day in 1796, Robert Burns died in Dumfries, Scotland, at the age of thirty-seven. A decade earlier, almost to the day, had been the publication of Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect (Kilmarnock edition), the collection which caused Burns to be toasted in Edinburgh as "ploughman poet" and the voice of Scotland. This fame, wrote acquaintance William Grierson in his dairy on the day of the funeral, was the underlying cause of Burns's personality confusion and death ... FULL STORY »
