News at Eleven: It is written that 10,000 mourners

lined the streets of Dumfries to say goodbye to Robbie Burns in July 1796. He was 37 years and seven months old when he died "inside a drab little house, his wife in hourly expectation of being confined; four helpless children wandering from room to room, gazing on their miserable parents and but too little food or cordial to pacify the whole or soothe the sick." His wife gave birth to their ninth child, a son who lived but briefly, as Burns went penniless to his grave.

from Times Colonist: Robbie Burns' sad end darkens his mighty shadow

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