To celebrate the birthday of Robert Burns, we found a newspaper article from 1796 reporting on the life, death, and funeral of Scotland’s Bard and ‘peasant poet’ (hmm, it can be debated if he was a ‘heaven-taught ploughman’, as we suspect he read quite a bit whenever he had time!).

As two of Burns’s most famous lines are:

O wad some Pow’r the giftie gie us
To see oursels as ithers see us!