[Transcriber's note: Obvious printer's errors have been corrected, all other inconsistencies are as in the original. Author's spelling has been maintained. Missing page numbers correspond to blank pages. ]

 ROBERT BURNS

 BY

 PRINCIPAL SHAIRP, PROFESSOR OF POETRY IN THE UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD

 London

 MACMILLAN AND CO. , Limited

 NEW YORK: THE MACMILLAN COMPANY

 1906

 _All rights reserved_

 _First Edition April 1879_

 _Reprinted December 1879, 1883, 1887, 1895, 1902, 1906_

CONTENTS. 

 Page CHAPTER I. 

 Youth in Ayrshire 1

 CHAPTER II. 

 First Winter in Edinburgh 42

 CHAPTER III. 

 Border and Highland Tours 60

 CHAPTER IV. 

 Second Winter in Edinburgh 79

 CHAPTER V. 

 Life at Ellisland 94

 CHAPTER VI. 

 Migration To Dumfries 135

 CHAPTER VII. 

 Last Years 155

 CHAPTER VIII. 

 Character, Poems, Songs 188

 INDEX 209

ROBERT BURNS. (p.  001)

CHAPTER I. 

YOUTH IN AYRSHIRE. 

Great men, great events, great epochs, it has been said, grow as werecede from them; and the rate at which they grow in the estimation ofmen is in some sort a measure of their greatness. Tried by thisstandard, Burns must be great indeed, for during the eighty years thathave passed since his death, men's interest in the man himself andtheir estimate of his genius have been steadily increasing. Eachdecade since he died has produced at least two biographies of him. When Mr. Carlyle wrote his well-known essay on Burns in 1828, he couldalready number six biographies of the Poet, which had been given tothe world during the previous thirty years; and the interval between1828 and the present day has added, in at least the same proportion, to their number. What it was in the man and in his circumstances thathas attracted so much of the world's interest to Burns, I must makeone more attempt to describe. 

If success were that which most secures men's sympathy, Burns wouldhave won but little regard; for in all but his poetry his was a (p.  002)defeated life--sad and heart-depressing to contemplate beyond thelives even of most poets. 

Perhaps it may be the very fact that in him so much failure andshipwreck were combined with such splendid gifts, that has attractedto him so deep and compassionate interest. Let us review once more thefacts of that life, and tell again its oft-told story. 

It was on the 25th of January, 1759, about two miles from the town ofAyr, in a clay-built cottage, reared by his father's own hands, thatRobert Burns was born. The "auld clay bigging" which saw his birthstill stands by the side of the road that leads from Ayr to the riverand the bridge of Doon. Between the banks of that romantic stream andthe cottage is seen the roofless ruin of "Alloway's auld hauntedkirk, " which Tam o' Shanter has made famous. His first welcome to theworld was a rough one. As he himself says, --

 A blast o' Janwar' win' Blew hansel in on Robin. 

A few days after his birth, a storm blew down the gable of thecottage, and the poet and his mother were carried in the dark morningto the shelter of a neighbour's roof, under which they remained tilltheir own home was repaired. In after-years he would often say, "Nowonder that one ushered into the world amid such a tempest should bethe victim of stormy passions. " "It is hard to be born in Scotland, "says the brilliant Parisian. Burns had many hardships to endure, buthe never reckoned this to be one of them. 

His father, William Burness or Burnes, for so he spelt his name, was anative not of Ayrshire, but of Kincardineshire, where he had beenreared on a farm belonging to the forfeited estate of the noble (p.  003)but attainted house of Keith-Marischal. Forced to migrate thence atthe age of nineteen, he had travelled to Edinburgh, and finally settledin Ayrshire, and at the time when Robert, his eldest child, was born, he rented seven acres of land, near the Brig o' Doon, which hecultivated as a nursery-garden. He was a man of strict, even stubbornintegrity, and of strong temper--a combination which, as his son remarks, does not usually lead to worldly success. But his chief characteristicwas his deep-seated and thoughtful piety. A peasant-saint of the oldScottish stamp, he yet tempered the stern Calvinism of the West withthe milder Arminianism more common in his northern birthplace. Robert, who, amid all his after-errors, never ceased to revere his father'smemory, has left an immortal portrait of him in _The Cotter's SaturdayNight_, when he describes how

 The saint, the father, and the husband prays. 

William Burness was advanced in years before he married, and his wife, Agnes Brown, was much younger than himself. She is described as anAyrshire lass, of humble birth, very sagacious, with bright eyes andintelligent looks, but not beautiful, of good manners and easyaddress. Like her husband, she was sincerely religious, but of a moreequable temper, quick to perceive character, and with a memory storedwith old traditions, songs, and ballads, which she told or sang toamuse her children. In his outer man the poet resembled his mother, but his great mental gifts, if inherited at all, must be traced to hisfather. 

Three places in Ayrshire, besides his birthplace, will always beremembered as the successive homes of Burns. These were Mount (p.  004)Oliphant, Lochlea (pronounced Lochly), and Mossgiel. 

MOUNT OLIPHANT. --This was a small upland farm, about two miles fromthe Brig o' Doon, of a poor and hungry soil, belonging to Mr. Ferguson, of Doon-holm, who was also the landlord of William Burness'previous holding. Robert was in his seventh year when his fatherentered on this farm at Whitsuntide, 1766, and he had reached hiseighteenth when the lease came to a close in 1777. All the yearsbetween these two dates were to the family of Burness one long sorebattle with untoward circumstances, ending in defeat. If the hardesttoil and severe self-denial could have procured success, they wouldnot have failed. It was this period of his life which Robertafterwards described, as combining "the cheerless gloom of a hermitwith the unceasing moil of galley-slave. " The family did their best, but a niggard soil and bad seasons were too much for them. At length, on the death of his landlord, who had always dealt generously by him, William Burness fell into the grip of a factor, whose tender mercieswere hard. This man wrote letters which set the whole family in tears. The poet has not given his name, but he has preserved his portrait incolours which are indelible:--

 I've noticed, on our Laird's court-day, An' mony a time my heart's been wae, Poor tenant bodies, scant o' cash, How they maun thole a factor's snash; He'll stamp an' threaten, curse and swear, He'll apprehend them, poind their gear, While they maun stan', wi aspect humble, And hear it a', an' fear an' tremble. 

In his autobiographical sketch the poet tells us that, "The farmproved a ruinous bargain. I was the eldest of seven children, and (p.  005)my father, worn out by early hardship, was unfit for labour. Hisspirit was soon irritated, but not easily broken. There was a freedomin the lease in two years more; and to weather these two years weretrenched expenses, and toiled on. " Robert and Gilbert, the twoeldest, though still boys, had to do each a grown man's full work. Yetfor all their hardships these Mount Oliphant days were not withoutalleviations. If poverty was at the door, there was warm familyaffection by the fireside. If the two sons had, long before manhood, to bear toil beyond their years, still they were living under theirparents' roof, and those parents two of the wisest and best ofScotland's peasantry. Work was no doubt incessant, but education wasnot neglected--rather it was held one of the most sacred duties. WhenRobert was five years old, he had been sent to a school at AllowayMill, and when the family removed to Mount Oliphant, his fathercombined with four of his neighbours to hire a young teacher, whoboarded among them, and taught their children for a small salary. Thisyoung teacher, whose name was Murdoch, has left an interestingdescription of his two young pupils, their parents, and the householdlife while he sojourned at Mount Oliphant. At that time Murdochthought that Gilbert possessed a livelier imagination, and was more ofa wit than Robert. "All the mirth and liveliness, " he says, "were withGilbert. Robert's countenance at that time wore generally a grave andthoughtful look. " Had their teacher been then told that one of his twopupils would become a great poet, he would have fixed on Gilbert. Whenhe tried to teach them church music along with other rustic lads, theytwo lagged far behind the rest. Robert's voice especially wasuntuneable, and his ear so dull, that it was with difficulty he coulddistinguish one tune from another. Yet this was he who was to (p.  006)become the greatest song-writer that Scotland--perhaps the world--hasknown. In other respects the mental training of the lads was of themost thorough kind. Murdoch taught them not only to read, but toparse, and to give the exact meaning of the words, to turn verse intothe prose order, to supply ellipses, and to substitute plain forpoetic words and phrases. How many of our modern village schools evenattempt as much? When Murdoch gave up, the father himself undertookthe education of his children, and carried it on at night afterwork-hours were over. Of that father Murdoch speaks as by far the bestman he ever knew. Tender and affectionate towards his children hedescribes him, seeking not to drive, but to lead them to the right, byappealing to their conscience and their better feelings, rather thanto their fears. To his wife he was gentle and considerate in anunusual degree, always thinking of her ease and comfort; and sherepaid it with the utmost reverence. She was a careful and thriftyhousewife, but, whenever her domestic tasks allowed, she would returnto hang with devout attention on the discourse that fell from her wisehusband. Under that father's guidance knowledge was sought for as hidtreasure, and this search was based on the old and reverential faiththat increase of knowledge is increase of wisdom and goodness. Thereadings of the household were wide, varied, and unceasing. Some oneentering the house at meal-time found the whole family seated, eachwith a spoon in one hand and a book in the other. The books which Burnsmentions as forming part of their reading at Mount Oliphant surprise useven now. Not only the ordinary school-books and geographies, not onlythe traditional life of Wallace and other popular books of that (p.  007)sort, but The Spectator, odd plays of Shakespeare, Pope (his Homerincluded), Locke on the Human Understanding, Boyle's Lectures, Taylor's Scripture Doctrine of Original Sin, Allan Ramsay's works, formed the staple of their reading. Above all there was a collectionof songs, of which Burns says, "This was my _vade mecum_. I pored overthem driving my cart, or walking to labour, song by song, verse byverse; carefully noting the true tender or sublime, from affectationand fustian, I am convinced I owe to this practice much of mycritic-craft, such as it is!" And he could not have learnt it in abetter way. 

There are few countries in the world which could at that time haveproduced in humble life such a teacher as Murdoch and such a father asWilliam Burness. It seems fitting, then, that a country which couldrear such men among its peasantry should give birth to such a poet asRobert Burns to represent them. The books which fed his youngintellect were devoured only during intervals snatched from hard toil. That toil was no doubt excessive. And this early over-strain showeditself soon in the stoop of his shoulders, in nervous disorder aboutthe heart, and in frequent fits of despondency. Yet perhaps too muchhas sometimes been made of these bodily hardships, as though Burns'sboyhood had been one long misery. But the youth which grew up in sokindly an atmosphere of wisdom and home affection, under the eye ofsuch a father and mother, cannot be called unblest. 

Under the pressure of toil and the entire want of society, Burns mighthave grown up the rude and clownish and unpopular lad that he has beenpictured in his early teens. But in his fifteenth summer there came tohim a new influence, which at one touch unlocked the springs of (p.  008)new emotions. This incident must be given in his own words:--"Youknow, " he says, "our country custom of coupling a man and womantogether as partners in the labours of the harvest. In my fifteenthsummer my partner was a bewitching creature, a year younger thanmyself. My scarcity of English denies me the power of doing herjustice in that language, but you know the Scottish idiom. She was abonnie, sweet, sonsie lass. In short, she, altogether unwittingly toherself, initiated me in that delicious passion, which, in spite ofacid disappointment, gin-horse prudence, and book-worm philosophy, Ihold to be the first of human joys here below! How she caught thecontagion I cannot tell.... Indeed I did not know myself why I likedso much to loiter behind with her, when returning in the evening fromour labours; why the tones of her voice made my heartstrings thrilllike an Ĉolian harp; and especially why my pulse beat such a furiousratan when I looked and fingered over her little hand, to pick out thecruel nettle-stings and thistles. Among her love-inspiring qualities, she sung sweetly; and it was her favourite reel to which I attemptedgiving an embodied vehicle in rhyme. I was not so presumptuous as toimagine that I could make verses like printed ones, composed by menwho read Greek and Latin; but my girl sung a song which was said to becomposed by a country laird's son, on one of his father's maids withwhom he was in love; and I saw no reason why I might not rhyme as wellas he; for, excepting that he could shear sheep, and cast peats, hisfather living in the moorlands, he had no more scholar-craft thanmyself. Thus with me began love and poetry. "

The song he then composed is entitled "Handsome Nell, " and is the (p.  009)first he ever wrote. He himself speaks of it as very puerile andsilly--a verdict which Chambers endorses, but in which I cannot agree. Simple and artless it no doubt is, but with a touch of that gracewhich bespeaks the true poet. Here is one verse which, for directnessof feeling and felicity of language, he hardly ever surpassed:--

 She dresses aye sae clean and neat, Baith decent and genteel, And then there's something in her gait Gars ony dress look weel. 

"I composed it, " says Burns, "in a wild enthusiasm of passion, and tothis hour I never recollect it but my heart melts, my blood sallies atthe remembrance. "

LOCHLEA. --Escaped from the fangs of the factor, with some remnant ofmeans, William Burness removed from Mount Oliphant to Lochlea in theparish of Tarbolton (1777), an upland undulating farm, on the northbank of the River Ayr, with a wide outlook, southward over the hillsof Carrick, westward toward the Isle of Arran, Ailsa Craig, and downthe Firth of Clyde, toward the Western Sea. This was the home of Burnsand his family from his eighteenth till his twenty-fifth year. For atime the family life here was more comfortable than before, probablybecause several of the children were now able to assist their parentsin farm labour. "These seven years, " says Gilbert Burns, "broughtsmall literary improvement to Robert, " but I can hardly believe thiswhen we remember that Lochlea saw the composition of _The Death andDying Words of Poor Mailie_, and of _My Nannie, O_, and one or two moreof his most popular songs. It was during those days that Robert, (p.  010)then growing into manhood, first ventured to step beyond the range ofhis father's control, and to trust the promptings of his own socialinstincts and headlong passions. The first step in this direction wasto go to a dancing school, in a neighbouring village, that he mightthere meet companions of either sex, and give his rustic manners "abrush, " as he phrases it. The next step was taken when Burns resolvedto spend his nineteenth summer in Kirkoswald, to learn mensuration andsurveying from the schoolmaster there, who was famous as a teacher ofthese things. Griswold, on the Carrick coast, was a village full ofsmugglers and adventurers, in whose society Burns was introduced toscenes of what he calls "swaggering riot and roaring dissipation. " Itmay readily be believed that with his strong love of sociality andexcitement he was an apt pupil in that school. Still the mensurationwent on till one day, when in the kail-yard behind the teachers house, Burns met a young lass, who set his heart on fire, and put an end tomensuration. This incident is celebrated in the song beginning--

 Now westlin winds and slaughtering guns Bring Autumn's pleasant weather, --

"the ebullition, " he calls it, "of that passion which ended the schoolbusiness at Kirkoswald. "

From this time on for several years, love making was his chiefamusement, or rather his most serious business. His brother tells usthat he was in the secret of half the love affairs of the parish ofTarbolton, and was never without at least one of his own. There wasnot a comely girl in Tarbolton on whom he did not compose a song, andthen he made one which included them all. When he was thus inly (p.  011)moved, "the agitations of his mind and body, " says Gilbert, "exceededanything of the kind I ever knew in real life. He had always aparticular jealousy of people who were richer than himself, or hadmore consequence. His love therefore rarely settled on persons of thisdescription. " The jealousy here noted, as extending even to his loves, was one of the weakest points of the poet's character. Of the dittiesof that time, most of which have been preserved, the best specimen is_My Nannie, O_. This song, and the one entitled _Mary Morison_ renderthe whole scenery and sentiment of those rural meetings in a manner atonce graphic and free from coarseness. Yet, truth to speak, it must besaid that those gloaming trysts, however they may touch the imaginationand lend themselves to song, do in reality lie at the root of muchthat degrades the life and habits of the Scottish peasantry. 

But those first three or four years at Lochlea, if not free fromperil, were still with the poet times of innocence. His brotherGilbert, in the words of Chambers, "used to speak of his brother as atthis period, to himself, a more admirable being than at any other. Herecalled with delight the days when they had to go with one or twocompanions to cut peats for the winter fuel, because Robert was sureto enliven their toil with a rattling fire of witty remarks on men andthings, mingled with the expressions of a genial glowing heart, andthe whole perfectly free from the taint which he afterwards acquiredfrom his contact with the world. Not even in those volumes whichafterwards charmed his country from end to end, did Gilbert see hisbrother in so interesting a light as in these conversations in thebog, with only two or three noteless peasants for an audience. "

While Gilbert acknowledges that his brother's love-makings were at (p.  012)this time unceasing, he asserts that they were "governed by thestrictest rules of virtue and modesty, from which he never deviatedtill he reached his twenty-third year. " It was towards the close ofhis twenty-second that there occurs the record of his first seriousdesire to marry and settle in life. He had set his affections on ayoung woman named Ellison Begbie, daughter of a small farmer, and atthat time servant in a family on Cessnock Water, about two miles fromLochlea. She is said to have been not a beauty, but of unusualliveliness and grace of mind. Long afterwards, when he had seen muchof the world, Burns spoke of this young woman as, of all those on whomhe ever fixed his fickle affections, the one most likely to have madea pleasant partner for life. Four letters which he wrote to her arepreserved, in which he expresses the most pure and honourable feelingsin language which, if a little formal, is, for manliness andsimplicity, a striking contrast to the bombast of some of his laterepistles. Songs, too, he addressed to her--_The Lass of CessnockBanks_, _Bonnie Peggy Alison_, and _Mary Morison_. The two former areinconsiderable; the latter is one of those pure and beautifullove-lyrics, in the manner of the old ballads, which, as Hazlitt says, "take the deepest and most lasting hold on the mind. "

 Yestreen, when to the trembling string, The dance gaed thro' the lighted ha', To thee my fancy took its wing, I sat, but neither heard nor saw: Tho' this was fair, and that was braw, And yon the toast of a' the town, I sigh'd, and said amang them a', "Ye are na Mary Morison. "

 Oh, Mary, canst thou wreck his peace, (p.  013) Wha for thy sake wad gladly die; Or canst thou break that heart of his, Whase only faut is loving thee? If love for love thou wilt na gie, At least be pity to me shown; A thought ungentle canna be The thought o' Mary Morison. 

In these lines the lyric genius of Burns was for the first timeundeniably revealed. 

But neither letters nor love-songs prevailed. The young woman, forsome reason untold, was deaf to his entreaties, and the rejection ofthis his best affection fell on him with a malign influence, just ashe was setting his face to learn a trade which he hoped would enablehim to maintain a wife. 

Irvine was at that time a centre of the flax-dressing art, and asRobert and his brother raised flax on their farm, they hoped that ifthey could dress as well as grow flax, they might thereby double theirprofits. As he met with this heavy disappointment in love just as hewas setting out for Irvine, he went thither downhearted and depressed, at Midsummer, 1781. All who met him at that time were struck with hislook of melancholy, and his moody silence, from which he rousedhimself only when in pleasant female society, or when he met with menof intelligence. But the persons of this sort whom he met in Irvinewere probably few. More numerous were the smugglers and rough-livingadventurers with which that seaport town, as Kirkoswald, swarmed. Among these he contracted, says Gilbert, "some acquaintance of a freermanner of thinking and living than he had been used to, whose societyprepared him for over-leaping the bonds of rigid virtue which hadhitherto restrained him. " One companion, a sailor-lad of wild life (p.  014)and loose and irregular habits, had a wonderful fascination for Burns, who admired him for what he thought his independence and magnanimity. "He was, " says Burns, "the only man I ever knew who was a greater foolthan myself, where woman was the presiding star; but he spoke oflawless love with levity, which hitherto I had regarded with horror. _Here his friendship did me a mischief. _"

Another companion, older than himself, thinking that the religiousviews of Burns were too rigid and uncompromising, induced him to adopt"more liberal opinions, " which in this case, as in so many others, meant more lax opinions. With his principles of belief, and his rulesof conduct at once assailed and undermined, what chart or compassremained any more for a passionate being like Burns over thepassion-swept sea of life that lay before him? The migration to Irvinewas to him the descent to Avernus, from which he never afterwards, inthe actual conduct of life, however often in his hours of inspiration, escaped to breathe again the pure upper air. This brief but disastrousIrvine sojourn was brought to a sudden close. Burns was robbed by hispartner in trade, his flax-dressing shop was burnt to the ground byfire during the carousal of a New Year's morning, and himself, impaired in purse, in spirits, and in character, returned to Lochleato find misfortunes thickening round his family, and his father on hisdeath-bed. For the old man, his long struggle with scanty means, barren soil, and bad seasons, was now near its close. Consumption hadset in. Early in 1784, when his last hour drew on, the father saidthat there was one of his children of whose future he could not thinkwithout fear. Robert, who was in the room, came up to his bedside (p.  015)and asked, "O father, is it me you mean?" The old man said it was. Robert turned to the window, with tears streaming down his cheeks, andhis bosom swelling, from the restraint he put on himself, almost tobursting. The father had early perceived the genius that was in hisboy, and even in Mount Oliphant days had said to his wife, "Whoeverlives to see it, something extraordinary will come from that boy. " Hehad lived to see and admire his son's earliest poetic efforts. But hehad also noted the strong passions, with the weak will, which mightdrive him on the shoals of life. 

MOSSGIEL. --Towards the close of 1783, Robert and his brother, seeingclearly the crash of family affairs which was impending, had taken ontheir own account a lease of the small farm of Mossgiel, about two orthree miles distant from Lochlea, in the parish of Mauchline. Whentheir father died in February, 1784, it was only by claiming thearrears of wages due to them, and ranking among their father'screditors, that they saved enough from the domestic wreck, to stocktheir new farm. Thither they conveyed their widowed mother, and theiryounger brothers and sisters, in March, 1784. Their new home was abare upland farm, 118 acres of cold clay-soil, lying within a mile ofMauchline village. Burns entered on it with a firm resolution to beprudent, industrious, and thrifty. In his own words, "I read farmingbooks, I calculated crops, I attended markets, and, in short, in spiteof the devil, the world, and the flesh, I should have been a wise man;but the first year from unfortunately buying bad seed--the second, from a late harvest, we lost half our crops. This overset all mywisdom, and I returned like the dog to his vomit, and the sow that waswashed to her wallowing in the mire. " Burns was in the beginning (p.  016)of his twenty-sixth year when he took up his abode at Mossgiel, wherehe remained for four years. Three things those years and that baremoorland farm witnessed, --the wreck of his hopes as a farmer, therevelation of his genius as a poet, and the frailty of his characteras a man. The result of the immoral habits and "liberal opinions"which he had learnt at Irvine were soon apparent in that event ofwhich he speaks in his _Epistle to John Rankine_ with such unbecominglevity. In the Chronological Edition of his works it is painful toread on one page the pathetic lines which he engraved on his father'sheadstone, and a few pages on, written almost at the same time, theepistle above alluded to, and other poems in the same strain, in whichthe defiant poet glories in his shame. It was well for the old manthat he was laid in Alloway Kirkyard before these things befell. Butthe widowed mother had to bear the burden, and to receive in her homeand bring up the child that should not have been born. When silenceand shame would have most become him, Burns poured forth his feelingsin ribald verses, and bitterly satirized the parish minister, whorequired him to undergo that public penance which the discipline ofthe Church at that time exacted. Whether this was a wise discipline ornot, no blame attached to the minister, who merely carried out therules which his Church enjoined. It was no proof of magnanimity inBurns to use his talent in reviling the minister, who had done nothingmore than his duty. One can hardly doubt but that in his inmost hearthe must have been visited with other and more penitential feelingsthan those unseemly verses express. But, as Lockhart has well observed, "his false pride recoiled from letting his jovial associates know (p.  017)how little he was able to drown the whispers of the still small voice;and the fermenting bitterness of a mind ill at ease within himselfescaped--as may be often traced in the history of satirists--in angrysarcasms against those who, whatever their private errors might be, had at least done him no wrong. " Mr. Carlyle's comment on this crisisof his life is too weighty to be omitted here. "With principlesassailed by evil example from without, by 'passions raging likedemons' from within, he had little need of sceptical misgivings towhisper treason in the heat of the battle, or to cut off his retreatif he were already defeated. He loses his feeling of innocence; hismind is at variance with itself; the old divinity no longer presidesthere; but wild Desires and wild Repentance alternately oppress him. Ere long, too, he has committed himself before the world; hischaracter for sobriety, dear to a Scottish peasant as few corruptedworldlings can even conceive, is destroyed in the eyes of men; and hisonly refuge consists in trying to disbelieve his guiltiness, and isbut a refuge of lies. The blackest desperation gathers over him, broken only by the red lightnings of remorse. " Amid this trouble itwas but a poor vanity and miserable love of notoriety which couldconsole itself with the thought

 The mair they talk, I'm kent the better, E'en let them clash. 

Or was this not vanity at all, but the bitter irony of self-reproach?

This collision with the minister and Kirk Session of his parish, andthe bitter feelings it engendered in his rebellious bosom, at oncelaunched Burns into the troubled sea of religious controversy that wasat that time raging all around him. The clergy of the West were dividedinto two parties, known as the Auld Lights and the New Lights. (p.  018)Ayrshire and the west of Scotland had long been the stronghold ofPresbyterianism and of the Covenanting spirit; and in Burns's day--acentury and a half after the Covenant--a large number of the ministersstill adhered to its principles, and preached the Puritan theologyundiluted. These men were democratic in their ecclesiastical views, and stout protestors against Patronage, which has always been thebugbear of the sects in Scotland. As Burns expresses it, they didtheir best to stir up their flocks to

 Join their counsel and their skills To cowe the lairds, An' get the brutes the power themsels To chuse their herds. 

All Burns's instincts would naturally have been on the side of thosewho wished to resist patronage and "to cowe the lairds, " had not thishis natural tendency been counteracted by a stronger bias drawing himin an opposite direction. The Auld Lights, though democrats in Churchpolitics, were the upholders of that strict church discipline underwhich he was smarting, and to this party belonged his own minister, who had brought that discipline to bear upon him. Burns, therefore, naturally threw himself into the arms of the opposite, or New Lightparty, who were more easy in their life and in their doctrine. Thislarge and growing section of ministers were deeply imbued withrationalism, or, as they then called it, "common-sense, " in the lightof which they pared away from religion all that was mysterious andsupernatural. Some of them were said to be Socinians or even pure Deists, most of them shone less in the pulpit, than at the festive board. (p.  019)With such men a person in Burns's then state of mind would readilysympathize, and they received him with open arms. Nothing could havebeen more unfortunate than that in this crisis of his career he shouldhave fallen into intimacy with those hard-headed but coarse-mindedmen. They were the first persons of any pretensions to scholarlyeducation with whom he had mingled freely. He amused them with thesallies of his wit and sarcasm, and astonished them by his keeninsight and vigorous powers of reasoning. They abetted those verytendencies in his nature which required to be checked. Theircountenance, as clergymen, would allay the scruples and misgivings hemight otherwise have felt, and stimulate to still wilder recklessnesswhatever profanity he might be tempted to indulge in. When he had letloose his first shafts of satire against their stricter brethren, those New Light ministers heartily applauded him; and hounded him onto still more daring assaults. He had not only his own quarrel withhis parish minister and the stricter clergy to revenge, but thequarrel also of his friend and landlord, Gavin Hamilton, a countylawyer, who had fallen under Church censure for neglect of Churchordinances, and had been debarred from the Communion. Burns espousedGavin's cause with characteristic zeal, and let fly new arrows oneafter another from his satirical quiver. 

The first of these satires against the orthodox ministers was _The TwaHerds, or the Holy Tulzie_, written on a quarrel between two brotherclergymen. Then followed in quick succession _Holy Willie's Prayer_, _The Ordination_, and _The Holy Fair_. His good mother and his brotherwere pained by these performances, and remonstrated against them. ButBurns, though he generally gave ear to their counsel, in this (p.  020)instance turned a deaf ear to it, and listened to other advisers. Thelove of exercising his strong powers of satire and the applause of hisboon-companions, lay and clerical, prevailed over the whispers of hisown better nature and the advice of his truest friends. Whatever maybe urged in defence of employing satire to lash hypocrisy, I cannotbut think that those who have loved most what is best in Burns' poetrymust have regretted that these poems were ever written. Some havecommended them on the ground that they have exposed religious pretenceand Pharisaism. The good they may have done in this way is perhapsdoubtful. But the harm they have done in Scotland is not doubtful, inthat they have connected in the minds of the people so many coarse andeven profane thoughts with objects which they had regarded till thenwith reverence. Even _The Holy Fair_, the poem in this kind which isleast offensive, turns on the abuses that then attended thecelebration of the Holy Communion in rural parishes, and with greatpower portrays those gatherings in their most mundane aspects. Yet, asLockhart has well remarked, those things were part of the samereligious system which produced the scenes which Burns has sobeautifully described in _The Cotter's Saturday Night_. Strange thatthe same mind, almost at the same moment, should have conceived twopoems so different in spirit as _The Cotter's Saturday Night_ and _TheHoly Fair_!

I have dwelt thus long on these unpleasant satires that I may not haveagain to return to them. It is a more welcome task to turn to theother poems of the same period. Though Burns had entered on Mossgielresolved to do his best as a farmer, he soon discovered that it wasnot in that way he was to attain success. The crops of 1784 and (p.  021)1785 both failed, and their failure seems to have done somethingto drive him in on his own internal resources. He then for the firsttime seems to have awakened to the conviction that his destiny was tobe a poet; and he forthwith set himself, with more resolution than heever showed before or after, to fulfil that mission. Hitherto he hadcomplained that his life had been without an aim; now he determinedthat it should be so no longer. The dawning hope began to gladden himthat he might take his place among the bards of Scotland, who, themselves mostly unknown, have created that atmosphere of minstrelsywhich envelopes and glorifies their native country. This hope and aimis recorded in an entry of his commonplace book, of the probable dateof August, 1784:--

"However I am pleased with the works of our Scotch poets, particularlythe excellent Ramsay, and the still more excellent Fergusson, yet I amhurt to see other places of Scotland, their towns, rivers, woods, andhaughs, immortalized in such celebrated performances, while my dearnative country, --the ancient bailieries of Carrick, Kyle, and Cunningham, famous both in ancient and modern times for a gallant and warlike raceof inhabitants--a country where civil, and particularly religiousliberty, have ever found their first support, and their last asylum--acountry, the birthplace of many famous philosophers, soldiers, andstatesmen, and the scene of many important events recorded in Scottishhistory, particularly a great many of the actions of the gloriousWallace, the saviour of his country--yet we have never had one Scotchpoet of any eminence to make the fertile banks of Irvine, the romanticwoodlands and sequestered scenes of Ayr, and the heathy mountainoussource and winding sweep of Doon, emulate Tay, Forth, Ettrick, (p.  022)Tweed. This is a complaint I would gladly remedy; but, alas! I am farunequal to the task, both, in native genius and in education. ObscureI am, obscure I must be, though no young poet nor young soldier'sheart ever beat more fondly for fame than mine. "

Though the sentiment here expressed may seem commonplace and thelanguage hardly grammatical, yet this extract clearly reveals thedarling ambition that was now haunting the heart of Burns. It was thesame wish which he expressed better in rhyme at a later day in his_Epistle to the Gude Wife of Wauchope House_. 

 E'en then, a wish, I mind its power, A wish that to my latest hour Shall strongly heave my breast, That I for poor Auld Scotland's sake Some usefu' plan or beuk could make, Or sing a sang at least. The rough burr-thistle, spreading wide Amang the bearded bear, I turn'd the weeder-clips aside, An' spar'd the symbol dear. 

It was about his twenty-fifth year when he first conceived the hopethat he might become a national poet. The failure of his first twoharvests, 1784 and '85, in Mossgiel may well have strengthened thisdesire and changed it into a fixed purpose. If he was not to succeedas a farmer, might he not find success in another employment that wasmuch more to his mind?

And this longing so deeply cherished, he had, within less than twoyears from the time that the above entry in his diary was written, amply fulfilled. From the autumn of 1784 till May 1786 the fountainsof poetry were unsealed within, and flowed forth in a continuousstream. That period so prolific of poetry that none like it ever (p.  023)afterwards visited him, saw the production not only of the satiricalpoems already noticed, and of another more genial satire, _Death andDr. Hornbook_, but also of those characteristic epistles in which hereveals so much of his own character, and of those other descriptivepoems in which he so wonderfully delineates the habits of the Scottishpeasantry. 

Within from sixteen to eighteen months were composed, not only sevenor eight long epistles to rhyme-composing brothers in the neighbourhood, David Sillar, John Lapraik, and others, but also, _Halloween_, _To aMouse_, _The Jolly Beggars_, _The Cotter's Saturday Night_, _Addressto the Deil_, _The Auld Farmer's Address to his Auld Mare_, _TheVision_, _The Twa Dogs_, _The Mountain Daisy_. The descriptive poemsabove named followed each other in rapid succession during thatspring-time of his genius, having been all composed, as the latestedition of his works shows, in a period of about six months, betweenNovember, 1785, and April, 1786. Perhaps there are none of Burns'compositions which give the real man more naturally and unreservedlythan his epistles. Written in the dialect he had learnt by hisfather's fireside, to friends in his own station, who shared his owntastes and feelings, they flow on in an easy stream of genial happyspirits, in which kindly humour, wit, love of the outward world, knowledge of men, are all beautifully intertwined into one strand ofpoetry, unlike anything else that has been seen before or since. Theoutward form of the verse and the style of diction are no doubt afterthe manner of his two forerunners whom he so much admired, Ramsay andFergusson; but the play of soul and power of expression, the naturalgrace with which they rise and fall, the vividness of every image, (p.  024)and transparent truthfulness of every sentiment, are all his own. Ifthere is any exception to be made to this estimate, it is in thegrudge which here and there peeps out against those whom he thoughtgreater favourites of fortune than himself and his correspondents. Buttaken as a whole, I know not any poetic epistles to be compared withthem. They are just the letters in which one friend might unbosomhimself to another without the least artifice or disguise. And thebroad Doric is so pithy, so powerful, so aptly fitted to the thought, that not even Horace himself has surpassed it in "curious felicity. "Often, when harvests were failing and the world going against him, hefound his solace in pouring forth in rhyme his feelings to sometrusted friend. As he says in one of these same epistles, --

 Leeze me on rhyme! it's aye a treasure, My chief, amaist my only pleasure, At hame, a-fiel', at wark, at leisure, The Muse, poor hizzie! Tho' rough an' raploch be her measure, She's seldom lazy. 

Of the poems founded on the customs of the peasantry, I shall speak inthe sequel. The garret in which all the poems of this period werewritten is thus described by Chambers:--"The farmhouse of Mossgiel, which still exists almost unchanged since the days of the poet, isvery small, consisting of only two rooms, a but and a ben as they arecalled in Scotland. Over these, reached by a trap stair, is a smallgarret, in which Robert and his brother used to sleep. Thither, whenhe had returned from his day's work, the poet used to retire, and seathimself at a small deal table, lighted by a narrow skylight in the roof, to transcribe the verses which he had composed in the fields. His (p.  025)favourite time for composition was at the plough. Long years afterwardshis sister, Mrs. Begg, used to tell how when her brother had goneforth again to field work, she would steal up to the garret and searchthe drawer of the deal table for the verses which Robert had newlytranscribed. "

In which of the poems of this period his genius is most conspicuous itmight not be easy to determine. But there can be little question aboutthe justice of Lockhart's remark, that "_The Cotter's Saturday Night_is of all Burns's pieces the one whose exclusion from the collectionwould be most injurious, if not to the genius of the poet, at least tothe character of the man. In spite of many feeble lines, and someheavy stanzas, it appears to me that even his genius would suffer morein estimation by being contemplated in the absence of this poem, thanof any other single poem he has left us. " Certainly it is the onewhich has most endeared his name to the more thoughtful and earnest ofhis countrymen. Strange it is, not to say painful, to think that thispoem, in which the simple and manly piety of his country is so finelytouched, and the image of his own religious father so beautifullyportrayed, should have come from the same hand which wrote nearly atthe same time _The Jolly Beggars_, _The Ordination_, and _The HolyFair_. 

During those two years at Mossgiel, from 1784 to 1786, when the timeswere hard, and the farm unproductive, Burns must indeed have foundpoetry to be, as he himself says, its own reward. A nature like hisrequired some vent for itself, some excitement to relieve the pressureof dull farm drudgery, and this was at once his purest and noblestexcitement. In two other more hazardous forms of excitement he was bytemperament disposed to seek refuge. These were conviviality and (p.  026)love-making. In the former of these, Gilbert says that he indulgedlittle, if at all, during his Mossgiel period. And this seems provedby his brother's assertion that during all that time Robert's privateexpenditure never exceeded seven pounds a year. When he had dressedhimself on this, and procured his other necessaries, the margin thatremained for drinking must have been small indeed. But love-making--thathad been with him, ever since he reached manhood, an unceasingemployment. Even in his later teens he had, as his earliest songsshow, given himself enthusiastically to those nocturnal meetings, which were then and are still customary among the peasantry ofScotland, and which at the best are full of perilous temptation. Butever since the time when, during his Irvine sojourn, he forsook thepaths of innocence, there is nothing in any of his love-affairs whichthose who prize what was best in Burns would not willingly forget. Ifhere we allude to two such incidents, it is because they are toointimately bound up with his life to be passed over in any account ofit. Gilbert says that while "one generally reigned paramount inRobert's affections, he was frequently encountering other attractions, which formed so many underplots in the drama of his love. " This isonly too evident in those two loves which most closely touched hisdestiny at this time. 

From the time of his settlement at Mossgiel frequent allusions occurin his letters and poems to flirtations with the belles of theneighbouring village of Mauchline. Among all these Jean Armour, thedaughter of a respectable master-mason in that village, had the chiefplace in his affections. All through 1785 their courtship hadcontinued, but early in 1786 a secret and irregular marriage, with (p.  027)a written acknowledgment of it had to be effected. Then followed thefather's indignation that his daughter should be married to so wildand worthless a man as Burns; compulsion of his daughter to give upBurns, and to destroy the document which vouched their marriage;Burns's despair driving him to the verge of insanity; the lettingloose by the Armours of the terrors of the law against him; hisskulking for a time in concealment; his resolve to emigrate to theWest Indies, and become a slave-driver. All these things were passingin the spring months of 1786, and in September of the same year JeanArmour became the mother of twin children. 

It would be well if we might believe that the story of his betrothalto Highland Mary was, as Lockhart seems to have thought, previous toand independent of the incidents just mentioned. But the more recentinvestigations of Mr. Scott Douglas and Dr. Chambers have made it toopainfully clear that it was almost at the very time when he was halfdistracted by Jean Armour's desertion of him, and while he was writinghis broken-hearted _Lament_ over her conduct, that there occurred, asan interlude, the episode of Mary Campbell. This simple andsincere-hearted girl from Argyllshire was, Lockhart says, the objectof by far the deepest passion Burns ever knew. And Lockhart gives atlength the oft-told tale how, on the second Sunday of May, 1786, theymet in a sequestered spot by the banks of the River Ayr, to spend oneday of parting love; how they stood, one on either side of a smallbrook, laved their hands in the stream, and, holding a Bible betweenthem, vowed eternal fidelity to each other. They then parted, neveragain to meet. In October of the same year Mary came from Argyllshire, as far as Greenock, in the hope of meeting Burns, but she was (p.  028)there seized with a malignant fever which soon laid her in an earlygrave. 

The Bible, in two volumes, which Burns gave her on that parting day, has been recently recovered. On the first volume is inscribed, inBurns's hand, "And ye shall not swear by My Name falsely, I am theLord. Levit. 19th chap. 12th verse;" and on the second volume, "Thoushalt not forswear thyself, but shalt perform unto the Lord thineoath. Matth. 5th chap. 33rd verse. " But the names of Mary Campbell andRobert Burns, which were originally inscribed on the volumes, havebeen almost obliterated. It has been suggested by Mr. Scott Douglas, the most recent editor who has investigated anew the whole incident, that, "in the whirl of excitement which soon followed that Sunday, Burns forgot his vow to poor Mary, and that she, heart-sore at hisneglect, deleted the names from this touching memorial of their secretbetrothal. "

Certain it is that in the very next month, June, 1786, we find Burns, in writing to one of his friends about "poor, ill-advised, ungratefulArmour, " declaring that, "to confess a truth between you and me, I dostill love her to distraction after all, though I won't tell her so ifI were to see her. " And Chambers even suggests that there was still athird love interwoven, at this very time, in the complicated web ofBurns's fickle affections. Burns, though he wrote several poems aboutHighland Mary, which afterwards appeared, never mentioned her name toany of his family. Even, if there was no more in the story than whathas been here given, no wonder that a heart like Burns, which, for allits unsteadfastness, never lost its sensibility, nor even a sense ofconscience, should have been visited by the remorse which forms theburden of the lyric to Mary in heaven, written three years after. (p.  029)

 See'st thou thy lover lowly laid? Hear'st thou the pangs that rend his breast?

The misery of his condition, about the time when Highland Mary died, and the conflicting feelings which agitated him, are depicted in thefollowing extract from a letter which he wrote probably about October, 1786, to his friend Robert Aiken:--

"There are many things that plead strongly against it [seeking a placein the Excise]: the uncertainty of getting soon into business; theconsequences of my follies, which perhaps make it impracticable for meto stay at home; and, besides, I have been for some time pining undersecret wretchedness, from causes which you pretty well know--the pangof disappointment, the sting of pride, with some wandering stabs ofremorse, which never fail to settle on my vitals like vultures, whenattention is not called away by the calls of society or the vagariesof the Muse. Even in the hour of social mirth, my gaiety is themadness of an intoxicated criminal under the hands of the executioner. All these reasons urge me to go abroad, and to all these reasons Ihave only one answer--the feelings of a father. This, in the presentmood I am in, overbalances everything that can be laid in the scaleagainst it. You may perhaps think it an extravagant fancy, but it is asentiment which strikes home to my very soul; though sceptical in somepoints of our current belief, yet I think I have every evidence forthe reality of a life beyond the stinted bourne of our present existence:if so, then how should I, in the presence of that tremendous Being, the Author of existence, how should I meet the reproaches of those whostand to me in the dear relation of children, whom I deserted in (p.  030)the smiling innocency of helpless infancy? Oh, Thou great unknownPower! Thou Almighty God! who hast lighted up reason in my breast, andblessed me with immortality! I have frequently wandered from thatorder and regularity necessary for the perfection of Thy works, yetThou hast never left me nor forsaken me.... "

 * * * * *

"You see, sir, that if to know one's errors were a probability ofmending them, I stand a fair chance; but, according to the reverendWestminster divines, though conviction must precede conversion, it isvery far from always implying it. "

This letter exhibits the tumult of soul in which he had been tossedduring the last six months before it was written. He had by his ownconduct wound round himself complications from which he could notextricate himself, yet which he could not but poignantly feel. Onecannot read of the "wandering stabs of remorse" of which he speaks, without thinking of Highland Mary. 

Some months before the above letter was written, in the April of thesame year, at the time when he first fell into trouble with JeanArmour and her father, Burns had resolved to leave his country andsail for the West Indies. He agreed with a Mr. Douglas to go toJamaica and become a book-keeper on his estate there. But how werefunds to be got to pay his passage-money? His friend Gavin Hamiltonsuggested that the needed sum might be raised, if he were to publishby subscription, the poems he had lying in his table-drawer. 

Accordingly, in April, the publication of his poems was resolved on. His friends, Gavin Hamilton of Mauchline, Aiken and Ballantyne of Ayr, Muir and Parker of Kilmarnock, and others--all did their best to (p.  031)get the subscription lists quickly filled. The last-named person putdown his own name for thirty-five copies. The printing of them wascommitted to John Wilson, a printer in Kilmarnock, and during May, June, and July of 1786, the work of the press was going forward. Inthe interval between the resolution to publish and the appearance ofthe poems, during his distraction about Jean Armour's conduct, followed by the episode of Highland Mary, Burns gave vent to his owndark feelings in some of the saddest strains that ever fell fromhim--the lines on _The Mountain Daisy_, _The Lament_, the Odes to_Despondency_ and to _Ruin_. And yet so various were his moods, soversatile his powers, that it was during that same interval that hecomposed, in a very different vein, _The Twa Dogs_, and probably alsohis satire of _The Holy Fair_. The following is the account the poetgives of these transactions in the autobiographical sketch of himselfwhich he communicated to Dr. Moore:--

"I now began to be known in the neighbourhood as a maker of rhymes. The first of my poetic offspring that saw light was a burlesquelamentation of a quarrel between two reverend Calvinists; both of themwere _dramatis personĉ_ in my _Holy Fair_. I had a notion myself, thatthe piece had some merit; but to prevent the worst, I gave a copy ofit to a friend who was fond of such things, and told him that I couldnot guess who was the author of it, but that I thought it prettyclever. With a certain description of the clergy as well as the laity, it met with a roar of applause. 

"_Holy Willie's Prayer_ next made its appearance, and alarmed the KirkSession so much, that they held several meetings to look over theirspiritual artillery, if haply any of it might be pointed against (p.  032)profane rhymers. Unluckily for me, my wandering led me on anotherside, within point-blank shot of their heaviest metal. This is theunfortunate incident which gave rise to my printed poem, _The Lament_. This was a most melancholy affair, which I cannot yet bear to reflecton, and had very nearly given me one or two of the principalqualifications for a place among those who have lost the chart andmistaken the reckoning of Rationality. 

"I gave up my part of the farm to my brother, and made what littlepreparation was in my power for Jamaica. But, before leaving mynative country for ever, I resolved to publish my poems. I weighed myproductions as impartially as was in my power; I thought they hadmerit; and it was a delicious idea that I should be called a cleverfellow, even though it should never reach my ears--a poornegro-driver, or perhaps a victim to that inhospitable clime, and goneto the world of spirits! I can truly say, that _pauvre inconnu_ as Ithen was, I had pretty nearly as high an idea of my works as I have atthis moment, when the public has decided in their favour.... 

"I threw off about six hundred copies, of which I got subscriptionsfor about three hundred and fifty. My vanity was highly gratified bythe reception I met with from the public; and besides, I pocketed, allexpenses deducted, nearly twenty pounds. This sum came veryseasonably, as I was thinking of indenting myself, for want of money, to procure a passage. As soon as I was master of nine guineas, theprice of wafting me to the torrid zone, I took a steerage passage inthe first ship that was to sail from the Clyde, for

 Hungry ruin had me in the wind. 

"I had been for some days skulking from covert to covert, under (p.  033)all the terrors of a jail, as some ill-advised people had uncoupledthe merciless pack of the law at my heels. I had taken the lastfarewell of my friends; my chest was on the way to Greenock; I hadcomposed the last song I should ever measure in Caledonia, '_Thegloomy night is gathering fast_, ' when a letter from Dr. Blackwood toa friend of mine overthrew all my schemes, by opening up new prospectsto my poetic ambition. "

It was at the close of July while Burns was, according to his ownaccount, "wandering from one friend's house to another, " to avoid thejail with which he was threatened by Jean Armour's father, that thevolume appeared, containing the immortal poems (1786). That Burnshimself had some true estimate of their real worth is shown by the wayin which he expresses himself in his preface to his volume. 

Ushered in with what Lockhart calls, a "modest and manly preface, " theKilmarnock volume went forth to the world. The fame of it spread atonce like wild-fire throughout Ayrshire and the parts adjacent. Thisis the account of its reception given by Robert Heron, a youngliterary man, who was at that time living in the Stewartry ofKirkcudbright:--"Old and young, high and low, grave and gay, learnedor ignorant, were alike delighted, agitated, transported. I was atthat time resident in Galloway, contiguous to Ayrshire, and I can wellremember how even ploughboys and maid-servants would have gladlybestowed the wages they earned most hardly, and which they wanted topurchase necessary clothing, if they might procure the works ofBurns. " The edition consisted of six hundred copies--three hundred andfifty had been subscribed for before publication, and the remainderseems to have been sold off in about two mouths from their first (p.  034)appearance. When all expenses were paid, Burns received twenty poundsas his share of the profits. Small as this sum was, it would have morethan sufficed to convey him to the West Indies; and, accordingly, withnine pounds of it he took a steerage passage in a vessel which wasexpected to sail from Greenock at the beginning of September. But fromone cause or another the day of sailing was postponed, his friendsbegan to talk of trying to get him a place in the Excise, his fame wasrapidly widening in his own country, and his powers were finding aresponse in minds superior to any which he had hitherto known. Up tothis time he had not associated with any persons of a higher gradethan the convivial lawyers of Mauchline and Ayr, and the mundaneministers of the New Light school. But now persons of every rank wereanxious to become acquainted with the wonderful Ayrshire Ploughman, for it was by that name he now began to be known, just as in the nextgeneration another poet of as humble birth was spoken of as TheEttrick Shepherd. The first persons of a higher order who sought theacquaintanceship of Burns were Dugald Stewart and Mrs. Dunlop ofDunlop. The former of these two was the celebrated Scotch metaphysician, one of the chief ornaments of Edinburgh and its University at theclose of last and the beginning of this century. He happened to bepassing the summer at Catrine, on the Ayr, a few miles from Burns'sfarm, and having been made acquainted with the poet's works andcharacter by Mr. Mackenzie, the surgeon of Mauchline, he invited thepoet and the medical man to dine with him at Catrine. The day of thismeeting was the 23rd of October, only three days after that on whichHighland Mary died. Burns met on that day not only the professor (p.  035)and his accomplished wife, but for the first time in his life dinedwith a live lord--a young nobleman, said to have been of high promise, Lord Daer, eldest son of the then Earl of Selkirk. He had been aformer pupil of Dugald Stewart, and happened to be at that time hisguest. Burns has left the following humorous record of his ownfeelings at that meeting:--

 This wot ye all whom it concerns, I, Rhymer Robin, alias Burns, October twenty-third, A ne'er to be forgotten day, Sae far I sprachled up the brae [clambered], I dinner'd wi' a Lord. 

 * * * * *

 But wi' a Lord! stand out my shin, A Lord, --a Peer, an Earl's Son! Up higher yet my bonnet! And sic a Lord! lang Scotch ells twa, Our Peerage he o'erlooks them a', As I look o'er a sonnet. 

 But oh for Hogarth's magic power! To show Sir Bardie's willyart glower [bewildered], And how he stared and stammered, When goavan, as if led in branks, [moving stupidly], And stumpin' on his ploughman shanks, He in the parlour hammered. 

 I sidling sheltered in a nook, An' at his Lordship steal't a look Like some portentous omen; Except good sense and social glee, An' (what surprised me) modesty, I marked nought uncommon. 

 I watched the symptoms o' the great, The gentle pride, the lordly state, The arrogant assuming; The fient a pride, nae pride had he, Nor sauce, nor state, that I could see, Mair than an honest ploughman. 

From this record of that evening given by Burns, it is interesting (p.  036)to turn to the impression made on Professor Stewart by this theirfirst interview. He says, --

"His manners were then, as they continued ever afterwards, simple, manly, and independent; strongly expressive of conscious genius andworth, but without anything that indicated forwardness, arrogance, orvanity. He took his share in conversation, but not more than belongedto him; and listened with apparent attention and deference on subjectswhere his want of education deprived him of the means of information. If there had been a little more of gentleness and accommodation in histemper, he would, I think, have been still more interesting; but hehad been accustomed to give law in the circle of his ordinaryacquaintance, and his dread of anything approaching to meanness orservility rendered his manner somewhat decided and hard. Nothingperhaps was more remarkable among his various attainments than thefluency, and precision, and originality of his language, when he spokein company; more particularly as he aimed at purity in his turn ofexpression, and avoided, more successfully than most Scotchmen, thepeculiarities of Scottish phraseology. "

Burns parted with Dugald Stewart, after this evening spent with him inAyrshire, to meet him again in the Edinburgh coteries, amid which theprofessor shone as a chief light. 

Not less important in the history of Burns was his first introductionto Mrs. Dunlop of Dunlop, a lady who continued the constant friend ofhimself and of his family while she lived. She was said to be a linealdescendant of the brother of the great hero of Scotland, WilliamWallace. Gilbert Burns gives the following account of the way in (p.  037)which his brother's acquaintance with this lady began. 

"Of all the friendships, which Robert acquired in Ayrshire orelsewhere, none seemed more agreeable to him than that of Mrs. Dunlopof Dunlop, nor any which has been more uniformly and constantlyexerted in behalf of him and his family, of which, were it proper, Icould give many instances. Robert was on the point of setting out forEdinburgh before Mrs. Dunlop heard of him. About the time of mybrother's publishing in Kilmarnock, she had been afflicted with a longand severe illness, which had reduced her mind to the most distressingstate of depression. In this situation, a copy of the printed poemswas laid on her table by a friend; and happening to open on _TheCotter's Saturday Night_, she read it over with the greatest pleasureand surprise; the poet's description of the simple cottagers operatingon her mind like the charm of a powerful exorcist, expelling the demon_ennui_, and restoring her to her wonted inward harmony andsatisfaction. Mrs. Dunlop sent off a person express to Mossgiel, distant fifteen or sixteen miles, with a very obliging letter to mybrother, desiring him to send her half a dozen copies of his poems, ifhe had them to spare, and begging he would do her the pleasure ofcalling at Dunlop House as soon as convenient. This was the beginningof a correspondence which ended only with the poet's life. Nearly thelast use he made with his pen was writing a short letter to this ladya few days before his death. "

The success of the first edition of his poems naturally made Burnsanxious to see a second edition begun. He applied to his Kilmarnockprinter, who refused the venture, unless Burns could supply readymoney to pay for the printing. This he could not do. But the (p.  038)poems by this time had been read and admired by the most cultivatedmen in Edinburgh, and more than one word of encouragement had reachedhim from that city. The earliest of these was contained in a letterfrom the blind poet, Dr. Blacklock, to whom Mr. Laurie, the kindly andaccomplished minister of Loudoun, had sent the volume. This Mr. Lauriebelonged to the more cultivated section of the Moderate party in theChurch, as it was called, and was the friend of Dr. Hugh Blair, Principal Robertson, and Dr. Blacklock, and had been the channelthrough which Macpherson's fragments of Ossian had first been broughtunder the notice of that literary circle, which afterwards introducedthem to the world. The same worthy minister had, on the firstappearance of the poems, made Burns' acquaintance; and had receivedhim with warm-hearted hospitality. This kindness the poetacknowledged, on one of his visits to the Manse of Loudoun, by leavingin the room in which he slept a short poem of six very feelingstanzas, which contained a prayer for the family. This is the laststanza, --

 When soon or late they reach that coast, O'er life's rough ocean driven, May they rejoice, no wanderer lost, A family in heaven!

As soon as Mr. Laurie received the letter from Dr. Blacklock, writtenon the 4th September, in which warm admiration of the Kilmarnock volumewas expressed, he forwarded it to Burns at Mossgiel. The result of itfell like sunshine on the young poet's heart; for as he says, "Thedoctor belonged to a set of critics for whose applause I had not daredto hope. " The next word of approval from Edinburgh was a highlyappreciative criticism of the poems, which appeared in a number (p.  039)of _The Edinburgh Magazine_ at the beginning of November. Up till thistime Burns had not abandoned his resolution to emigrate to the WestIndies. But the refusal of the Kilmarnock printer to undertake a newedition, and the voices of encouragement reaching him from Edinburgh, combining with his natural desire to remain, and be known as a poet, in his native country, at length made him abandon the thought ofexile. On the 18th November we find him writing to a friend, that hehad determined on Monday or Tuesday, the 27th or 28th November, to sethis face toward the Scottish capital and try his fortune there. 

At this stage of the poet's career, Chambers pauses to speculate onthe feelings with which the humble family at Mossgiel would hear ofthe sudden blaze of their brother's fame, and of the change it hadmade in his prospects. They rejoiced, no doubt, that he was thusrescued from compulsory banishment, and were no way surprised that thepowers they had long known him to possess had at length won theworld's admiration. If he had fallen into evil courses, none knew itso well as they, and none had suffered more by these aberrations. Still, with all his faults, he had always been to them a kind son andbrother, not loved the less for the anxieties he had caused them. Butthe pride and satisfaction they felt in his newly-won fame, would bedeep, not demonstrative. For the Burns family were a shy, reservedrace, and like so many of the Scottish peasantry, the more they felt, the less they would express. In this they were very unlike the poet, with whom to have a feeling and to express it were almost synonymous. His mother, though not lacking in admiration of her son, is said tohave been chiefly concerned lest the praises of his genius should makehim forget the Giver of it. Such may have been the feelings of (p.  040)the poet's family. 

What may we imagine his own feeling to have been in this crisis of hisfate? The thought of Edinburgh society would naturally stir thatambition which was strong within him, and awaken a desire to meet themen who were praising him in the capital, and to try his powers inthat wider arena. It might be that in that new scene something mightoccur which would reverse the current of his fortunes, and set himfree from the crushing poverty that had hitherto kept him down. Anyhow, he was conscious of strong powers, which fitted him to shine, not in poetry only, but in conversation and discussion; and, ploughmanthough he was, he did not shrink from encountering any man or any setof men. Proud, too, we know he was, and his pride often showed itselfin jealousy and suspicion of the classes who were socially above him, until such feelings were melted by kindly intercourse with someindividual man belonging to the suspected orders. He felt himself tosurpass in natural powers those who were his superiors in rank andfortune, and he could not, for the life of him, see why they should befull of this world's goods, while he had none of them. He had not yetlearned--he never did learn--that lesson, that the genius he hadreceived was his allotted and sufficient portion, and that his wisdomlay in making the most of this rare inward gift, even on a meagreallowance of the world's external goods. But perhaps, whether he knewit or not, the greatest attraction of the capital was the secret hopethat in that new excitement he might escape from the demons of remorseand despair which had for many months been dogging him. He may havefancied this, but the pangs which Burns had created for himself (p.  041)were too deep to be in this way permanently put by. 

The secret of his settled unhappiness lay in the affections that hehad abused in himself and in others who had trusted him. The course hehad run since his Irvine sojourn was not of a kind to give peace tohim or to any man. A coarse man of the world might have stifled thetender voices that were reproaching him, and have gone on his wayuncaring that his conduct--

 Hardened a' within, And petrified the feeling. 

But Burns could not do this. The heart that had responded so feelinglyto the sufferings of lower creatures, the unhoused mouse, the shiveringcattle, the wounded hare, could not without shame remember the wrongshe had done to those human beings whose chief fault was that they hadtrusted him not wisely but too well. And these suggestions of asensitive heart, conscience was at hand to enforce--a consciencewonderfully clear to discern the right, even when the will was leastable to fulfil it. The excitements of a great city, and the loudpraises of his fellow-men might enable him momentarily to forget, butcould not permanently stifle inward voices like these. So it was witha heart but ill at ease, bearing dark secrets he could tell to no one, that Burns passed from his Ayrshire cottage into the applause of theScottish capital. 

CHAPTER II (p.  042)

FIRST WINTER IN EDINBURGH

The journey of Burns from Mossgiel to Edinburgh was a sort oftriumphal progress. He rode on a pony, lent him by a friend, and asthe journey took two days, his resting-place the first night was atthe farm-house of Covington Mains, in Lanarkshire, hard by the Clyde. The tenant of this farm, Mr. Prentice, was an enthusiastic admirer ofBurns' poems, and had subscribed for twenty copies of the secondedition. His son, years afterwards, in a letter to Christopher North, thus describes the evening on which Burns appeared at his father'sfarm:--"All the farmers in the parish had read the poet's thenpublished works, and were anxious to see him. They were all asked tomeet him at a late dinner, and the signal of his arrival was to be awhite sheet attached to a pitchfork, and put on the top of a corn-stackin the barn-yard. The parish is a beautiful amphitheatre, with theClyde winding through it--Wellbrae Hill to the west, Tinto Hill andthe Culter Fells to the south, and the pretty, green, conical hill, Quothquan Law, to the east. My father's stack-yard, lying in thecentre, was seen from every house in the parish. At length Burnsarrived, mounted on a borrowed _pownie_. Instantly was the white flaghoisted, and as instantly were seen the farmers issuing from their (p.  043)houses, and converging to the point of meeting. A glorious evening, orrather night, which borrowed something from the morning, followed, andthe conversation of the poet confirmed and increased the admirationcreated by his writings. On the following morning he breakfasted witha large party at the next farm-house, tenanted by James Stodart; ... Took lunch with a large party at the bank in Carnwath, and rode intoEdinburgh that evening on the _pownie_, which he returned to the ownerin a few days afterwards by John Samson, the brother of the immortal_Tam_. "

This is but a sample of the kind of receptions which were henceforthto await Burns wherever his coming was known. If such welcomes werepleasing to his ambition, they must have been trying both to hisbodily and his mental health. 

Burns reached Edinburgh on the 28th of November, 1786. The one man ofnote there with whom he had any acquaintance was Professor DugaldStewart, whom, as already mentioned, he had met in Ayrshire. But itwas not to him or to any one of his reputation that he first turned;but he sought refuge with John Richmond, an old Mauchline acquaintance, who was humbly lodged in Baxter's Close, Lawnmarket. During the wholeof his first winter in Edinburgh, Burns lived in the lodging of thispoor lad, and shared with him his single room and bed, for which theypaid three shillings a week. It was from this retreat that Burns wasafterwards to go forth into the best society of the Scottish capital, and thither, after these brief hospitalities were over, he had toreturn. For some days after his arrival in town, he called on noone--letters of introduction he had none to deliver. But he is said tohave wandered about alone, "looking down from Arthur's Seat, (p.  044)surveying the palace, gazing at the castle, or looking into thewindows of the booksellers' shops, where he saw all books of the day, save the poems of the Ayrshire Ploughman. " He found his way to thelowly grave of Fergusson, and, kneeling down, kissed the sod; hesought out the house of Allan Ramsay, and, on entering it, took offhis hat. While Burns is thus employed, we may cast a glance at thecapital to which he had come, and the society he was about to enter. 

Edinburgh at that time was still adorned by a large number of thestars of literature, which, although none of those then living mayhave reached the first magnitude, had together made a galaxy in thenorthern heavens, from the middle till the close of last century. Atthat time literature was well represented in the University. The Headof it was Dr. Robertson, well known as the historian of Charles V. , and as the author of other historic works. The chair of Belles Lettreswas filled by the accomplished Dr. Hugh Blair, whose lectures remainone of the best samples of the correct and elegant, but narrow andfrigid style, both of sentiment and criticism, which then flourishedthroughout Europe, and nowhere more than in Edinburgh. Another stillgreater ornament of the University was Dugald Stewart, the Professorof Moral Philosophy, whose works, if they have often been surpassed indepth and originality of speculation, have seldom been equalled forsolid sense and polished ease of diction. The professors at that timewere most of them either taken from the ranks of the clergy, orclosely connected with them. 

Among the literary men unconnected with the University by far thegreatest name, that of David Hume, had disappeared about ten years (p.  045)before Burns arrived in the capital. But his friend, Dr. Adam Smith, author of _The Wealth of Nations_, still lingered. Mr. Henry Mackenzie, 'The Man of Feeling, ' as he was called from his best known work, wasat that time one of the most polished as well as popular writers inScotland. He was then conducting a periodical called the _Lounger_, which was acknowledged as the highest tribunal of criticism inScotland, and was not unknown beyond it. 

But even more influential than the literary lights of the Universitywere the magnates of the Bench and Bar. During the eighteenth centuryand the earlier part of the nineteenth, the Scottish Bar was recruitedalmost entirely from the younger sons of ancient Scottish families. Tothe patrician feelings which they brought with them from their homesthese men added that exclusiveness which clings to a professionclaiming for itself the highest place in the city where they resided. Modern democracy has made rude inroads on what was formerly somethingof a select patrician caste. But the profession of the Bar has neverwanted either then or in more recent times some genial and originalspirits who broke through the crust of exclusiveness. Such, at thetime of Burns's advent, was Lord Monboddo, the speculative andhumorous judge, who in his own way anticipated the theory of man'sdescent from the monkey. Such, too, was the genial and graceful HenryErskine, the brother of the Lord Chancellor of that name, the prideand the favourite of his profession--the sparkling and ready wit who, thirteen years before the day of Burns, had met the rude manners ofDr. Johnson with a well-known repartee. When the Doctor visited theParliament House, Erskine was presented to him by Boswell, and wassomewhat gruffly received. After having made his bow, Erskine (p.  046)slipped a shilling into Boswell's hand, whispering that it wasfor the sight of his _bear_!

Besides these two classes, the occupants of the Professorial chair andof the Bar, there still gathered every winter in Edinburgh a fairsprinkling of rank and beauty, which had not yet abandoned theScottish for the English capital. The leader at that time in gaysociety was the well-known Duchess of Gordon, --a character soremarkable in her day that some rumour of her still lives in Scottishmemory. The impression made upon her by Burns and his conversationshall afterwards be noticed. 

Though Burns for the first day or two after his arrival wandered aboutcompanionless, he was not left long unfriended. Mr. Dalrymple, ofOrangefield, an Ayrshire country gentleman, a warm-hearted man, and azealous Freemason, who had become acquainted with Burns during theprevious summer, now introduced the Ayrshire bard to his relative, theEarl of Glencairn. This nobleman, who had heard of Burns from hisAyrshire factor, welcomed him in a very friendly spirit, introducedhim to his connexion, Henry Erskine, and also recommended him to thegood offices of Creech, at that time the first publisher in Edinburgh. Of Lord Glencairn, Chambers says that "his personal beauty formed theindex to one of the fairest characters. " As long as he lived he didhis utmost to befriend Burns, and on his death, a few years after thistime, the poet, who seldom praised the great unless he respected andloved them, composed one of his most pathetic elegies. 

It was not, however, to his few Ayrshire connexions only, Mr. Dalrymple, Dugald Stewart, and others, that Burns was indebted for his introductionto Edinburgh society. His own fame was now enough to secure it. (p.  047)A criticism of his poems, which appeared within a fortnight afterhis arrival in Edinburgh, in the _Lounger_, on the 9th of December, did much to increase his reputation. The author of that criticism wasThe Man of Feeling, and to him belongs the credit of having been thefirst to claim that Burns should be recognized as a great originalpoet, not relatively only, in consideration of the difficulties he hadto struggle with, but absolutely on the ground of the intrinsicexcellence of his work. He pointed to his power of delineating manners, of painting the passions, and of describing scenery, as all bearingthe stamp of true genius; he called on his countrymen to recognizethat a great national poet had arisen amongst them, and to appreciatethe gift that in him had been bestowed upon their generation. Alludingto his narrow escape from exile, he exhorted them to retain and tocherish this inestimable gift of a native poet, and to repair, as faras possible, the wrongs which suffering or neglect had inflicted onhim. The _Lounger_ had at that time a wide circulation in Scotland, and penetrated even to England. It was known and read by the poetCowper, who, whether from this or some other source, became acquaintedwith the poems of Burns within the first year of their publication. InJuly, 1787, we find the poet of _The Task_ telling a correspondentthat he had read Burns's poems twice; "and though they be written in alanguage that is new to me ... I think them, on the whole, a veryextraordinary production. He is, I believe, the only poet thesekingdoms have produced in the lower rank of life since Shakespeare (Ishould rather say since Prior), who need not be indebted for any partof his praise to a charitable consideration of his origin, and (p.  048)the disadvantages under which he has laboured. " Cowper thus endorsesthe verdict of Mackenzie in almost the same language. 

It did not however require such testimonials, from here and there aliterary man, however eminent, to open every hospitable door inEdinburgh to Burns. Within a month after his arrival in town he hadbeen welcomed at the tables of all the celebrities--Lord Monboddo, Robertson, the historian, Dr. Hugh Blair, Dugald Stewart, Dr. AdamFerguson, The Man of Feeling, Mr. Fraser Tytler, and many others. Weare surprised to find that he had been nearly two months in townbefore he called on the amiable Dr. Blacklock, the blind poet, who inhis well-known letter to Dr. Laurie had been the first Edinburghauthority to hail in Burns the rising of a new star. 

How he bore himself throughout that winter when he was the chief lionof Edinburgh society many records remain to show, both in his ownletters and in the reports of those who met him. On the whole, hisnative good sense carried him well through the ordeal. If he showedfor the most part due respect to others, he was still more bent onmaintaining his respect for himself; indeed, this latter feeling waspushed even to an exaggerated independence. As Mr. Lockhart hasexpressed it, he showed, "in the whole strain of his bearing, hisbelief that in the society of the most eminent men of his nation hewas where he was entitled to be, hardly deigning to flatter them byexhibiting a symptom of being flattered. " All who heard him wereastonished by his wonderful powers of conversation. These impressedthem, they said, with a greater sense of his genius than even hisfinest poems. 

With the ablest men that he met he held his own in argument, astonishingall listeners by the strength of his judgment, and the keenness (p.  049)of his insight both into men and things. And when he warmed onsubjects which interested him, the boldest stood amazed at the flashesof his wit, and the vehement flow of his impassioned eloquence. Withthe "high-born ladies" he succeeded even better than with the "statelypatricians, "--as one of those dames herself expressed it, fairlycarrying them off their feet by the deference of his manner, and themingled humour and pathos of his talk. 

It is interesting to know in what dress Burns generally appeared inEdinburgh. Soon after coming thither he is said to have laid aside hiscountry clothes for "a suit of blue and buff, the livery of Mr. Fox, with buckskins and top-boots. " How he wore his hair will be seenimmediately. There are several well-known descriptions of Burns'smanner and appearance during his Edinburgh sojourn, which, often asthey have been quoted, cannot be passed by in any account of his life. 

Mr. Walker, who met him for the first time at breakfast in the houseof Dr. Blacklock, says, "I was not much struck by his firstappearance. His person, though strong and well-knit, and much superiorto what might be expected in a ploughman, appeared to be only of themiddle size, but was rather above it. His motions were firm anddecided, and, though without grace, were at the same time so free fromclownish constraint as to show that he had not always been confined tothe society of his profession. His countenance was not of that elegantcast which is most frequent among the upper ranks, but it was manlyand intelligent, and marked by a thoughtful gravity which shaded attimes into sternness. In his large dark eye the most striking index ofhis genius resided. It was full of mind.... He was plainly but properlydressed, in a style midway between the holiday costume of a (p.  050)farmer and that of the company with which he now associated. His blackhair without powder, at a time when it was generally worn, was tiedbehind, and spread upon his forehead. Had I met him near a seaport, Ishould have conjectured him to be the master of a merchant vessel.... In no part of his manner was there the slightest affectation; norcould a stranger have suspected, from anything in his behaviour orconversation, that he had been for some months the favourite of allthe fashionable circles of the metropolis. In conversation he waspowerful. His conceptions and expressions were of correspondingvigour, and on all subjects were as remote as possible fromcommonplaces. Though somewhat authoritative, it was in a way whichgave little offence, and was readily imputed to his inexperience inthose modes of smoothing dissent and softening assertion, which areimportant characteristics of polished manners. 

"The day after my first introduction to Burns, I supped with him atDr. Blair's. The other guests were few, and as they had come to meetBurns, the Doctor endeavoured to draw him out, and to make him thecentral figure of the group. Though he therefore furnished thegreatest proportion of the conversation, he did no more than what hesaw evidently was expected. From the blunders often committed by menof genius Burns was unusually free; yet on the present occasion hemade a more awkward slip than any that are reported of the poets ormathematicians most noted for absence of mind. Being asked from whichof the public places he had received the greatest gratification, henamed the High Church, but gave the preference as a preacher to thecolleague of our worthy entertainer, whose celebrity rested on hispulpit eloquence, in a tone so pointed and decisive as to throw (p.  051)the whole company into the most foolish embarrassment!" Dr. Blair, we are told, relieved their confusion by seconding Burns's praise. Thepoet saw his mistake, but had the good sense not to try to repair it. Years afterwards he told Professor Walker that he had never spoken ofthis unfortunate blunder, so painful to him had the remembrance of itbeen. 

There seems little doubt from all the accounts that have beenpreserved, that Burns in conversation gave forth his opinions withmore decision than politeness. He had not a little of that mistakenpride not uncommon among his countrymen, which fancies that gentlemanners and consideration for others' feelings are marks of servility. He was for ever harping on independence, and this betrayed him intosome acts of rudeness in society which have been recorded with perhapstoo great minuteness. 

Against these remarks, we must set the testimony of Dugald Stewart, who says, --"The attentions he received from all ranks and descriptionsof persons would have turned any head but his own. I cannot say that Iperceived any unfavourable effect which they left on his mind. Heretained the same simplicity which had struck me so forcibly whenfirst I saw him in the country, nor did he seem to feel any additionalself-importance from the number and rank of his new acquaintance. Hewalked with me in spring, early in the morning, to the Braid Hills, when he charmed me still more by his private conversation than he hadever done in company. He was passionately fond of the beauties ofnature; and he once told me, when I was admiring a distant prospect inone of our morning walks, that the sight of so many smoking cottagesgave a pleasure to his mind which none could understand who had (p.  052)not witnessed, like himself, the happiness and worth which theycontained.... The idea which his conversation conveyed of the powersof his mind exceeded, if possible, that which is suggested by hiswritings. All his faculties were, as far as I could judge, equallyvigorous, and his predilection for poetry was rather the result of hisown enthusiastic and impassioned temper, than of a genius exclusivelyadapted to that species of composition. I should have pronounced himfitted to excel in whatever walk of ambition he had chosen.... Theremarks he made on the characters of men were shrewd and pointed, though frequently inclining too much to sarcasm. His praise of thosehe loved was sometimes indiscriminate and extravagant.... His wit wasready, and always impressed with the marks of a vigorous understanding;but, to my taste, not often pleasing or happy. "

While the learned of his own day were measuring him thus coolly, andforming their critical estimates of him, youths of the youngergeneration were regarding him with far other eyes. Of Jeffrey, when alad in his teens, it is recorded that one day in the winter of1786-87, as he stood on the High Street of Edinburgh, staring at a manwhose appearance struck him, a person at a shop door tapped him on theshoulder and said, "Aye, laddie, ye may weel look at that man. That'sRobbie Burns. " This was the young critic's first and last look at thepoet of his country. 

But the most interesting of all the reminiscences of Burns, during hisEdinburgh visit, or indeed, during any other time, was the day whenyoung Walter Scott met him, and received from him that one look ofapprobation. 

This is the account of that meeting which Scott himself gave to (p.  053)Lockhart: "As for Burns, I may truly say, '_Virgilium vidi tantum_. 'I was a lad of fifteen when he came to Edinburgh. I saw him one day atthe late venerable Professor Adam Fergusson's. Of course we youngsterssat silent, looked and listened. The only thing I remember which wasremarkable in Burns's manner, was the effect produced upon him by aprint of Bunbury's, representing a soldier lying dead on the snow, hisdog sitting in misery on one side, --on the other, his widow, with achild in her arms. These lines were written beneath:--

 Cold on Canadian hills, or Minden's plain, Perhaps that parent wept her soldier slain, -- Bent o'er the babe, her eye dissolved in dew, The big drops mingling with the milk he drew, Gave the sad presage of his future years, The child of misery baptized in tears. 

"Burns seemed much affected by the print: he actually shed tears. Heasked whose the lines were, and it chanced that nobody but myselfremembered that they occur in a half-forgotten poem of Langhorne's, called by the unpromising title of The Justice of Peace. I whisperedmy information to a friend present, who mentioned it to Burns, whorewarded me with a look and a word, which though of mere civility, Ithen received with very great pleasure. His person was strong androbust; his manner rustic, not clownish; a sort of dignified plainnessand simplicity. His countenance was more massive than it looks in anyof the portraits. I would have taken the poet, had I not known who hewas, for a very sagacious country farmer of the old Scotch school, --the_douce gudeman_ who held his own plough. There was a strong expressionof sense and shrewdness in all his lineaments; the eye alone, I think, indicated the poetical character and temperament. It was large, (p.  054)and of a dark cast, which glowed (I say literally glowed) when hespoke with feeling or interest. I never saw such another eye in ahuman head, though I have seen the most distinguished men of my time. "

While men of the upper ranks, old and young, were thus receiving theirimpressions, and forming their various estimates of Burns, he, we maybe sure, was not behind-hand in his reflections on them, and on himself. He had by nature his full share of that gnawing self-consciousnesswhich haunts the irritable tribe, from which no modern poet but WalterScott has been able wholly to escape. While he was bearing himselfthus manfully to outward appearance, inwardly he was scrutinizinghimself and others with a morbid sensitiveness. In the heyday of hisEdinburgh popularity, he writes to Mrs. Dunlop, one of his mosttrusted friends, what he repeats to other correspondents, that he hadlong been at pains to take a true measure of himself and to form ajust estimate of his powers: that this self-estimate was not raised byhis present success, nor would it be depressed by future neglect; thatthough the tide of popularity was now at full flood, he foresaw thatthe ebb would soon set in, and that he was prepared for it. In thesame letters he speaks of his having too much pride for servility, asthough there was no third and more excellent way; of "the stubbornpride of his own bosom, " on which he seems mainly to have relied. Indeed throughout his life there is much talk of what Mr. Carlyle wellcalls the altogether barren and unfruitful principle of pride; muchprating about "a certain fancied rock of independence, "--a rock whichhe found but a poor shelter when the worst ills of life overtook him. This feeling reached its height when soon after leaving Edinburgh, (p.  055)we find him writing to a comrade in the bitterness of his heart thatthe stateliness of Edinburgh patricians and the meanness of Mauchlineplebeians had so disgusted him with his kind, that he had bought apocket copy of Milton to study the character of Satan, as the greatexemplar of "intrepid, unyielding independence. "

If during his stay in Edinburgh, his "irascible humour" never went sofar as this, "the contumely of condescension" must have entered prettydeeply into the soul of the proud peasant when he made the followingmemorable entry in his diary, on the 9th April, 1787. After someremarks on the difficulty of true friendship, and the hazard of losingmen's respect by being too confidential with friends, he goes on: "Forthese reasons, I am determined to make these pages my confidant. Iwill sketch every character that any way strikes me, to the best of mypower, with unshrinking justice. I will insert anecdotes and take downremarks, in the old law phrase, without feud or favour.... I think alock and key a security at least equal to the bosom of any friendwhatever. My own private story likewise, my love adventures, my rambles;the frowns and smiles of fortune on my bardship my poems and fragments, that must never see the light, shall be occasionally inserted. Inshort, never did four shillings purchase so much friendship, sinceconfidence went first to the market, or honesty was set up forsale.... 

"There are few of the sore evils under the sun give me more uneasinessand chagrin, than the comparison how a man of genius, nay, of avowedworth, is received everywhere, with the reception which a mere ordinarycharacter, decorated with the trappings and futile distinctions offortune, meets: I imagine a man of abilities, his breast glowing (p.  056)with honest pride, conscious that men are born equal, still givinghonour to whom honour is due; he meets at a great man's table a SquireSomething or a Sir Somebody; he knows the noble landlord at heartgives the bard, or whatever he is, a share of his good wishes, beyond, perhaps, any one at the table; yet how will it mortify him to see afellow whose abilities would scarcely have made an eightpenny tailor, and whose heart is not worth three farthings, meet with attention, andnotice that are withheld from the son of genius and poverty!

"The noble Glencairn has wounded me to the soul here, because I dearlyesteem, respect, and love him. He showed so much attention, engrossingattention, one day, to the only blockhead at table (the whole companyconsisted of his lordship, dunder-pate, and myself), that I was withinhalf a point of throwing down my gage of contemptuous defiance, but heshook my hand and looked so benevolently good at parting, God blesshim! though I should never see him more, I shall love him to my dyingday! I am pleased to think I am so capable of gratitude, as I ammiserably deficient in some other virtues. "

Lockhart, after quoting largely from this Common-place Book, adds, "This curious document has not yet been printed entire. Anothergeneration will, no doubt, see the whole of the confession. " All thatremains of it has recently been given to the world. The originaldesign was not carried on, and what is left is but a fragment, writtenchiefly in Edinburgh, with a few additions made at Ellisland. The onlycharacters which are sketched are those of Blair, Stewart, Creech, andGreenfield. The remarks on Blair, if not very appreciative, are mildand not unkindly. There seems to be irony in the praise of Dugald (p.  057)Stewart for the very qualities in which Burns probably thought him tobe deficient. Creech's strangely composite character is well touchedoff. Dr. Greenfield, the colleague of Dr. Blair, whose eloquence Burnson an unfortunate occasion preferred to that of his host, alone comesin for unaffected eulogy. The plain and manly directness of theseprose sketches is in striking contrast to the ambitious flights whichthe poet attempts in many of his letters. 

Dugald Stewart in his cautious way hints that Burns did not always keephimself to the learned circles which had welcomed him, but sometimesindulged in "not very select society. " How much this cautious phrasecovers may be seen by turning to Heron's account of some of the scenesin which Burns mingled. Tavern life was then in Edinburgh, aselsewhere, more or less habitual in all classes. In those clubs andbrotherhoods of the middle class, which met in taverns down the closesand wynds of High Street, Burns found a welcome, warmer, freer, morecongenial than any vouchsafed to him in more polished coteries. Thither convened when their day's work was done, lawyers, writers, schoolmasters, printers, shopkeepers, tradesmen, --ranting, roaringboon companions--who gave themselves up, for the time, to coarsesongs, rough raillery, and deep drinking. At these meetings allrestraint was cast to the winds, and the mirth drove fast and furious. With open arms the clubs welcomed the poet to their festivities; eachman proud to think that he was carousing with Robbie Burns. The poetthe while gave full vein to all his impulses, mimicking, it is said, and satirizing his superiors in position, who, he fancied, had lookedon him coldly, paying them off by making them the butt of his raillery, letting loose all his varied powers, wit, humour, satire, drollery, and throwing off from time to time snatches of licentious song, (p.  058)to be picked up by eager listeners, --song wildly defiant of all theproprieties. The scenes which Burns there took part in far exceededany revelries he had seen in the clubs of Tarbolton and Mauchline, anddid him no good. If we may trust the testimony of Heron, at themeetings of a certain Crochallan club, and at other such uproariousgatherings, he made acquaintances who, before that winter was over, led him on from tavern dissipations to still worse haunts and habits. 

By the 21st of April (1787), the ostensible object for which Burns hadcome to Edinburgh was attained, and the second edition of his poemsappeared in a handsome octavo volume. The publisher was Creech, thenchief of his trade in Scotland. The volume was published by subscription, "for the sole benefit of the author, " and the subscribers were sonumerous that the list of them covered thirty-eight pages. In thatlist appeared the names of many of the chief men of Scotland, some ofwhom subscribed for twenty--Lord Eglinton for as many as forty-two, copies. Chambers thinks that full justice has never been done to theliberality of the Scottish public in the way they subscribed for thisvolume. Nothing equal to the patronage that Burns at this time metwith, had been seen since the days of Pope's Iliad. This secondedition, besides the poems which had appeared in the Kilmarnock one, contained several additional pieces the most important of which hadbeen composed before the Edinburgh visit. Such were _Death and DoctorHornbook_, _The Brigs of Ayr_, _The Ordination_, _The Address to theUnco Guid_. The proceeds from this volume ultimately made Burns thepossessor of about 500_l. _, quite a little fortune for one who, as (p.  059)he himself confesses, had never before had 10_l. _ he could call hisown. It would, however, have been doubly welcome and useful to him, had it been paid down without needless delay. But unfortunately thiswas not Creech's way of transacting business, so that Burns was keptfor many months waiting for a settlement--months during which he couldnot for want of money turn to any fixed employment, and which weretherefore spent by him unprofitably enough. 

CHAPTER III. (p.  060)

BORDER AND HIGHLAND TOURS. 

Some small instalments of the profits of his new volume enabled ourPoet, during the summer and autumn of 1787, to make several tours tovarious districts of Scotland, famous either for scenery or song. Theday of regular touring had not yet set in, and few Scots at that timewould have thought of visiting what Burns called the classic scenes oftheir country. A generation before this, poets in England had led theway in this--as when Gray visited the lakes of Cumberland, and Dr. Johnson the Highlands and the Western Isles. In his ardour to lookupon places famous for their natural beauty or their historicassociations, or even for their having been mentioned in some oldScottish song, Burns surpassed both Gray and Johnson, and anticipatedthe sentiment of the present century. Early in May he set out with oneof his Crochallan club acquaintances, named Ainslie, on a journey tothe Border. Ainslie was a native of the Merse, his father and familyliving in Dunse. Starting thence with Ainslie, Burns traversed thegreater part of the vale of Tweed from Coldstream to Peebles, recalling, as he went along, snatches of song connected with the places he passed. He turned aside to see the valley of the Jed, and got as far as Selkirkin the hope of looking upon Yarrow. But from doing this he was (p.  061)hindered by a day of unceasing rain, and he who was so soon to becomethe chief singer of Scottish song was never allowed to look on thatvale which has long been its most ideal home. Before finishing histour, he went as far as Nithsdale, and surveyed the farm of Ellisland, with some thought already, that he might yet become the tenant of it. 

It is noteworthy, but not wonderful, that the scenes visited in thistour called forth no poetry from Burns, save here and there anallusion that occurred in some of his later songs. When we rememberwith what an uneasy heart Burns left Ayrshire for Edinburgh, that thetown life he had there led for the last six months had done nothing tolighten--it had probably done something to increase the load of hismental disquietude, --that in an illness which he had during his tourhe confesses that "embittering remorse was scaring his fancy at thegloomy forebodings of death, " and that when his tour was over, soonafter his return to Edinburgh, he found the law let loose against him, and what was called a "fugĉ" warrant issued for his apprehension, owing to some occurrence like to that which a year ago had terrifiedhim with legal penalties, and all but driven him to Jamaica, --when allthese things are remembered, is it to be wondered, that Burns shouldhave wandered by the banks of Tweed, in no mood to chaunt beside it "amusic sweeter than its own"?

At the close of his Border tour Burns had, as we have seen, visitedNithsdale and looked at the farm of Ellisland. From Nithsdale he madehis way back to native Ayrshire and his family at Mossgiel. I haveheard a tradition that his mother met him at the door of the smallfarm-house, with this only salutation, "O Robbie!" Neither Lockhartnor Chambers mentions this, but the latter says, his sister, (p.  062)Mrs. Begg, remembered the arrival of her brother. He came in unheralded, and was in the midst of them before they knew. It was a quiet meeting, for the Mossgiel family had the true Scottish reticence or reserve;but though their words were not "mony feck, " their feelings werestrong. It was, indeed, as strange a reverse as ever was made byfortune's fickle wheel. "He had left them, " to quote the words ofLockhart, "comparatively unknown, his tenderest feelings torn andwounded by the behaviour of the Armours, and so miserably poor that hehad been for some weeks obliged to skulk from the sheriff's officersto avoid the payment of a paltry debt. He returned, his poetical fameestablished, the whole country ringing with his praise, from a capitalin which he was known to have formed the wonder and delight of thepolite and the learned; if not rich, yet with more money already thanany of his kindred had ever hoped to see him possess, and withprospects of future patronage and permanent elevation in the scale ofsociety, which might have dazzled steadier eyes than those of maternaland fraternal affection. The prophet had at last honour in his owncountry, but the haughty spirit that had preserved its balance inEdinburgh was not likely to lose it at Mauchline. " The haughty spiritof which Lockhart speaks was reserved for others than his own family. To them we hear of nothing but simple affection. His youngest sister, Mrs. Begg, told Chambers, "that her brother went to Glasgow, andthence sent home a present to his mother and three sisters, namely, aquantity of _mode_ silk, enough to make a bonnet and a cloak to each, and a gown besides to his mother and youngest sister. " This was theway he took to mark their right to share in his prosperity. Mrs. Beggremembers going for rather more than a week to Ayr to assist in (p.  063)making up the dresses, and when she came back on a Saturday, herbrother had returned and requested her "to put on her dress that hemight see how smart she looked in it. " The thing that stirred hispride and scorn was the servility with which he was now received byhis "plebeian brethren" in the neighbourhood, and chief among these bythe Armours, who had formerly eyed him with looks askance. If anything"had been wanting to disgust me completely with Armour's family, theirmean, servile compliance would have done it. " So he writes, and it wasthis disgust that prompted him to furnish himself, as we have seen hedid, with a pocket copy of Milton, to study the character of Satan. This fierce indignation was towards the family; towards "bonny Jean"herself his feeling was far other. Having accidentally met her, hisold affection revived, and they were soon as intimate as of old. 

After a short time spent at Mossgiel wandering about, and once, itwould seem, penetrating the West Highlands as far as Inverary, ajourney during which his temper seems to have been far from serene, hereturned in August to Edinburgh. There he encountered, and in time gotrid of, the law troubles already alluded to, and on the 25th of Augusthe set out, on a longer tour than any he had yet attempted, to theNorthern Highlands. 

The travelling companion whom he chose for this tour was a certain Mr. Nicol, whose acquaintance he seems to have first formed at the Crochallanclub, or some other haunt of boisterous joviality. After many ups anddowns in life Nicol had at last, by dint of some scholastic ability, settled as a master of the Edinburgh High School. What could havetempted Burns to select such a man for a fellow-traveller? He was (p.  064)cast in one of nature's roughest moulds; a man of careless habits, coarse manners, enormous vanity, of most irascible and violent temper, which vented itself in cruelties on the poor boys who were the victimsof his care. Burns compared himself with such a companion to "a mantravelling with a loaded blunderbuss at full cock. " Two things onlyare mentioned in his favour, that he had a warm heart, and anunbounded admiration of the poet. But the choice of such a man was anunfortunate one, and in the upshot did not a little to spoil both thepleasure and the benefit, which might have been gathered from thetour. 

Their journey lay by Stirling and Crieff to Taymouth and Breadalbane, thence to Athole, on through Badenoch and Strathspey to Inverness. Thereturn by the east coast was through the counties of Moray and Banffto Aberdeen. After visiting the county whence his father had come, andhis kindred who were still in Kincardineshire, Burns and his companionpassed by Perth back to Edinburgh, which they reached on the 16th ofSeptember. The journey occupied only two and twenty days, far tooshort a time to see so much country, besides making several visits, with any advantage. During his Border tour Burns had ridden hisRosinante mare, which he had named Jenny Geddes. As his friend, theschoolmaster, was no equestrian, Burns was obliged to make hisnorthern journey in a post-chaise, not the best way of taking in thevaried and ever-changing sights and sounds of Highland scenery. 

Such a tour as this, if Burns could have entered on it under happierauspices, that is, with a heart at ease, a fitting companion, andleisure enough to view quietly the scenes through which he passed, andto enjoy the society of the people whom he met, could not have (p.  065)failed, from its own interestingness, and its novelty to him, to haveenriched his imagination, and to have called forth some lastingmemorials. As it was, it cannot be said to have done either. Thereare, however, a few incidents which are worth noting. The first ofthese took place at Stirling. Burns and his companion had ascended theCastle Rock, to look on the blue mountain rampart, that flanks theHighlands from Ben Lomond to Benvoirlich. As they were both stronglyattached to the Stuart cause, they had seen with indignation, on theslope of the Castle hill, the ancient hall, in which the Scottishkings once held their Parliaments, lying ruinous and neglected. Onreturning to their inn, Burns, with a diamond he had bought for suchpurposes, wrote on the window-pane of his room some lines expressiveof the disgust he had felt at that sight, concluding with someoffensive remarks on the reigning family. The lines, which had nopoetic merit, got into the newspapers of the day, and caused a gooddeal of comment. On a subsequent visit to Stirling, Burns himselfbroke the pane of the window on which the obnoxious lines werewritten, but they were remembered, it is said, long afterwards to hisdisadvantage. 

Among the pleasantest incidents of the tour was the visit to BlairCastle, and his reception by the Duchess of Athole. The two days hespent there he declared were among the happiest of his life. We haveseen how sensitive Burns was to the way he was received by the great. Resentful as he was equally of condescension and of neglect, it musthave been no easy matter for persons of rank so to adapt their manneras to exactly please him. But his hosts at Blair Castle succeeded toadmiration in this. They were assisted by the presence at the Castleof Mr. , afterwards Professor, Walker, who had known Burns in (p.  066)Edinburgh, and was during that autumn living as a tutor in the Duke'sfamily. At dinner Burns was in his most pleasing vein, and delightedhis hostess by drinking to the health of her group of fair youngchildren, as "honest men and bonny lassies"--an expression with whichhe happily closes his _Petition of Bruar Water_. The Duchess had hertwo sisters, Mrs. Graham and Miss Cathcart, staying with her on avisit, and all three ladies were delighted with the conversation ofthe poet. These three sisters were daughters of a Lord Cathcart, andwere remarkable for their beauty. The second, Mrs. Graham, has beenimmortalized as the subject of one of Gainsborough's most famousportraits. On her early death her husband, Thomas Graham of Balnagown, never again looked on that beautiful picture, but left his home for asoldier's life, distinguished himself greatly in the Peninsular War, and was afterwards known as Lord Lynedoch. After his death, thepicture passed to his nearest relatives, who presented it to theNational Portrait Gallery of Scotland, of which it is now the chiefornament. All three sisters soon passed away, having died even beforethe short-lived poet. By their beauty and their agreeableness theycharmed Burns, and did much to make his visit delightful. Theythemselves were not less pleased; for when the poet proposed to leave, after two days were over, they pressed him exceedingly to stay, andeven sent a messenger to the hotel to persuade the driver of Burns'schaise to pull off one of the horse's shoes, that his departure mightbe delayed. Burns himself would willingly have listened to theirentreaties, but his travelling mate was inexorable. Likely enoughNicol had not been made so much of as the poet, and this was enough torouse his irascible temper. For one day he had been persuaded to (p.  067)stay by the offer of good trout-fishing, which he greatly relished, but now he insisted on being off. Burns was reluctantly forced toyield. 

This rapid departure was the more unfortunate because Mr. Dundas, whoheld the keys of Scottish patronage, was expected on a visit to Blair, and had he met the poet he might have wiped out the reproach oftencast on the ministry of the day, that they failed in their duty towardsBurns. "That eminent statesman, " as Lockhart says, "was, though littleaddicted to literature, a warm lover of his own country, and, ingeneral, of whatever redounded to her honour; he was, moreover, veryespecially qualified to appreciate Burns as a companion; and had suchan introduction taken place, he might not improbably have been inducedto bestow that consideration on the claims of the poet, which, in theabsence of any personal acquaintance, Burns's works ought to havereceived at his hands. " But during that visit Burns met, and made theacquaintance of, another man of some influence, Mr. Graham of Fintray, whose friendship afterwards, both in the Excise business, and in othermatters, stood him in good stead. The Duke, as he bade farewell toBurns at Blair, advised him to turn aside, and see the Falls of theBruar, about six miles from the Castle, where that stream coming downfrom its mountains plunges over some high precipices, and passesthrough a rocky gorge to join the river Garry. Burns did so, andfinding the falls entirely bare of wood, wrote some lines entitled_The Humble Petition of Bruar Water_, in which he makes the streamentreat the Duke to clothe its naked banks with trees. The poet'spetition for the stream was not in vain. The then Duke of Athole wasfamous as a planter of trees, and those with which, after the poet'sPetition, he surrounded the waterfall remain to this day. 

After visiting Culloden Muir, the Fall of Fyers, Kilravock Castle, (p.  068)where, but for the impatience of Mr. Nicol, he would fain haveprolonged his stay, he came on to Fochabers and Gordon Castle. This isBurns's entry in his diary:--"Cross Spey to Fochabers, fine palace, worthy of the noble, the polite, and generous proprietor. The Dukemakes me happier than ever great man did; noble, princely, yet mildand condescending and affable--gay and kind. The Duchess, charming, witty, kind, and sensible. God bless them!"

Here, too, as at Blair, the ducal hosts seem to have entirelysucceeded in making Burns feel at ease, and wish to protract hisvisit. But here, too, more emphatically than at Blair, his friendspoilt the game. This is the account of the incident, as given byLockhart, with a few additions interpolated from Chambers:--

"Burns, who had been much noticed by this noble family when inEdinburgh, happened to present himself at Gordon Castle, just at thedinner-hour, and being invited to take a place at the table, did so, without for a moment adverting to the circumstance that his travellingcompanion had been left alone at the inn, in the adjacent village. Onremembering this soon after dinner, he begged to be allowed to rejoinhis friend; and the Duke of Gordon, who now for the first time learnedthat he was not journeying alone, immediately proposed to send aninvitation to Mr. Nicol to come to the Castle. His Grace sent amessenger to bear it; but Burns insisted on himself accompanying him. They found the haughty schoolmaster striding up and down before theinn-door in a high state of wrath and indignation at, what heconsidered, Burns's neglect, and no apologies could soften his mood. He had already ordered horses, and was venting his anger on the (p.  069)postillion for the slowness with which he obeyed his commands. Thepoet, finding that he must choose between the ducal circle and hisirascible associate, at once chose the latter alternative. Nicol andhe, in silence and mutual displeasure, seated themselves in thepost-chaise, and turned their backs on Gordon Castle, where the poethad promised himself some happy days. This incident may serve tosuggest some of the annoyances to which persons moving, like our poet, on the debatable land between two different ranks of society must everbe subjected. " "To play the lion under such circumstances must, " asthe knowing Lockhart observes, "be difficult at the best; but adelicate business indeed, when the jackals are presumptuous. Thepedant could not stomach the superior success of his friend, andyet--alas for poor human nature!--he certainly was one of the mostenthusiastic of his admirers, and one of the most affectionate of allhis intimates. " It seems that the Duchess of Gordon had some hope thather friend, Mr. Addington, afterwards Lord Sidmouth and the futurepremier, would have visited at Gordon Castle while Burns was there. Mr. Addington was, Allan Cunningham tells us, an enthusiastic admirerof Burns's poetry, and took pleasure in quoting it to Pitt andMelville. On that occasion he was unfortunately not able to accept theinvitation of the Duchess, but he forwarded to her "these memorablelines--memorable as the first indication of that deep love whichEngland now entertains for the genius of Burns:"--

 Yes! pride of Scotia's favoured plains, 'tis thine The warmest feelings of the heart to move; To bid it throb with sympathy divine, To glow with friendship, or to melt with love. 

 What though each morning sees thee rise to toil, (p.  070) Though Plenty on thy cot no blessing showers, Yet Independence cheers thee with her smile, And Fancy strews thy moorland with her flowers!

 And dost thou blame the impartial will of Heaven, Untaught of life the good and ill to scan? To thee the Muse's choicest wreath is given-- To thee the genuine dignity of man!

 Then to the want of worldly gear resigned, Be grateful for the wealth of thy exhaustless mind. 

It was well enough for Mr. Addington, and such as he, to advise Burnsto be content with the want of worldly gear, and to refer him forconsolation to the dignity of man and the wealth of his exhaustlessmind. Burns had abundance of such sentiments in himself to bringforth, when occasion required. He did not need to be replenished withthese from the stores of men who held the keys of patronage. What hewanted from them was some solid benefit, such as they now and thenbestowed on their favourites, but which unfortunately they withheldfrom Burns. 

An intelligent boy, who was guide to Burns and Nicol from Cullen toDuff House, gave long afterwards his remembrances of that day. Amongthese this occurs. The boy was asked by Nicol if he had read Burns'spoems, and which of them he liked best. The boy replied, "'I was muchentertained with _The Twa Dogs_ and _Death and Dr. Hornbook_, but Ilike best _The Cotter's Saturday Night_, although it made me _greet_when my father had me to read it to my mother. ' Burns, with a suddenstart, looked at my face intently, and patting my shoulder, said, 'Well, my callant, I don't wonder at your _greeting_ at reading thepoem; it made me greet more than once when I was writing it at myfather's fireside. '"... 

On the 16th of September, 1787, the two travellers returned to (p.  071)Edinburgh. This tour produced little poetry directly, and what it didproduce was not of a high order. In this respect one cannot butcontrast it with the poetic results of another tour made, partly overthe same ground, by another poet, less than twenty years after thistime. When Wordsworth and his sister made their first visit toScotland in 1803, it called forth some strains of such perfect beautyas will live while the English language lasts. Burns's poetic famewould hardly be diminished if all that he wrote on his tours wereobliterated from his works. Perhaps we ought to except some allusionsin his future songs, and especially that grand song, _Macpherson'sFarewell_, which, though composed several months after this tour wasover, must have drawn its materials from the day spent at Duff House, where he was shown the sword of the Highland Reiver. 

But look at the lines composed after his first sight of Breadalbane, which he left in the inn at Kenmore. These Lockhart has pronouncedamong "the best of his purely English heroics. " If so, we can but sayhow poor are the best! What is to be thought of such lines as

 Poetic ardours in my bosom swell, Lone wandering by the hermit's mossy cell, &c. , &c. 

Nor less stilted, forced, and artificial are the lines in the samemeasure written at the Fall of Fyers. 

The truth is, that Burns's _forte_ by no means lay in describingscenery alone, and for its own sake. All his really inspired descriptionsof it occur as adjuncts to human incident or feeling, slips oflandscape let in as a background. Again, as Burns was never at hisbest when called on to write for occasions--no really spontaneouspoet ever can be--so when taken to see much talked-of scenes, and (p.  072)expected to express poetic raptures over them, Burns did not answer tothe call. 

"He disliked, " we are told, "to be tutored in matters of taste, andcould not endure that one should run shouting before him, whenever anyfine object came in sight. " On one occasion of this kind, a lady atthe poet's side said, "Burns, have you nothing to say of this?""Nothing, madam, " he replied, glancing at the leader of the party, "for an ass is braying over it. " Burns is not the only person who hassuffered from this sort of officiousness. 

Besides this, the tours were not made in the way which most conducesto poetic composition. He did not allow himself the quiet and theleisure from interruption which are needed. It was not with suchcompanions as Ainslie or Nicol by his side that the poet's eyediscovered new beauty in the sight of a solitary reaper in a Highlandglen, and his ear caught magical suggestiveness in the words, "What!you are stepping westward, " heard by the evening lake. 

Another hindrance to happy poetic description by Burns during thesejourneys was that he had now forsaken his native vernacular, and takento writing in English after the mode of the poets of the day. This withhim was to unclothe himself of his true strength. His correspondent, Dr. Moore, and his Edinburgh critics had no doubt counselled him towrite in English, and he listened for a time too easily to theircounsel. He and they little knew what they were doing in giving andtaking such advice. The truth is, when he used his own Scottishdialect he was unapproached, unapproachable; no poet before or sincehas evoked out of that instrument so perfect and so varied melodies. When he wrote in English he was seldom more than third-rate; in (p.  073)fact, he was but a common clever versifier. There is but one purelyEnglish poem of his which at all approaches the first rank--the lines_To Mary in Heaven_. 

These may probably have been the reasons, but the fact is certain thatBurns's tours are disappointing in their direct poetic fruits. But inanother way Burns turned them to good account. He had by that timebegun to devote himself almost entirely to the cultivation of Scottishsong. This was greatly encouraged by the appearance of _Johnson'sMuseum_, a publication in which an engraver of that name living inEdinburgh had undertaken to make a thorough collection of all the bestof the old Scottish songs, accompanying them with the best airs, andto add to these any new songs of merit which he could lay hands on. Before Burns left Edinburgh for his Border tour, he had begun anacquaintance and correspondence with Johnson, and had supplied himwith four songs of his own for the first volume of _The Museum_. Thesecond volume was now in progress, and his labours for this publication, and for another of the same kind to be afterwards mentioned, henceforth engrossed Burns's entire productive faculty, and were to behis only serious literary work for the rest of his life. He thereforeemployed the Highland tour in hearing all he could, that had anybearing on his now absorbing pursuit, and in collecting materials thatmight promote it. With this view, when on his way from Taymouth toBlair, he had turned aside to visit the famous fiddler and composer ofScotch tunes, Neil Gow, at his house, which is still pointed out, atInver, on the Braan water, opposite the grounds of Dunkeld. This isthe entry about him in Burns's diary:--"Neil Gow plays--a short, stout-built, honest Highland figure, with his grey hair shed on (p.  074)his honest social brow; an interesting face marking strong sense, kind open-heartedness, mixed with unmistrusting simplicity; visit hishouse; Margaret Gow. " It is interesting to think of this meeting ofthese two--the one a Lowlander, the other a Highlander; the one thegreatest composer of words, the other of tunes, for Scottish songs, which their country has produced. 

As he passed through Aberdeen, Burns met Bishop Skinner, a Bishop ofthe Scottish Episcopal Church; and when he learnt that the Bishop'sfather, the author of the song of _Tulloch-gorum_, and _The Ewie wi'the crookit horn_, and other Scottish songs, was still alive, an agedEpiscopalian clergyman, living in primitive simplicity in _a but and aben_ at Lishart, near Peterhead, and that on his way to Aberdeen hehad passed near the place without knowing it, Burns expressed thegreatest regret at having missed seeing the author of songs he sogreatly admired. Soon after his return to Edinburgh, he received fromold Mr. Skinner a rhyming epistle, which greatly pleased the poet, andto which he replied, --"I regret, and while I live shall regret, thatwhen I was north I had not the pleasure of paying a younger brother'sdutiful respect to the author of the best Scotch song ever Scotlandsaw, _Tulloch-gorum's my delight_. " This is strong, perhaps too strongpraise. Allan Cunningham, in his _Songs of Scotland_, thus freelycomments on it:--"_Tulloch-gorum_ is a lively clever song, but I wouldnever have edited this collection had I thought with Burns that it isthe best song Scotland ever saw. I may say with the king in myfavourite ballad, --

 I trust I have within my realm, Five hundred good as he. "

We also find Burns, on his return to Edinburgh, writing to the (p.  075)librarian at Gordon Castle to obtain from him a correct copy of aScotch song composed by the Duke, in the current vernacular style, _Cauld Kail in Aberdeen_. This correct copy he wished to insert in theforthcoming volume of _Johnson's Museum_, with the name of the authorappended. 

At Perth he made inquiries, we are told, "as to the whereabouts of theburn-brae on which be the graves of Bessy Bell and Mary Gray. " Whetherhe actually visited the spot, near the Almond Water, ten miles west ofPerth, is left uncertain. The pathetic story of these two haplessmaidens, and the fine old song founded on it, had made it to him aconsecrated spot. 

 O Bessy Bell and Mary Gray! They were twa bonny lasses, They biggit a bower on yon burn-brae, And theekit it owre wi' rashes, is the beginning of a beautiful song which Allan Ramsay did his bestto spoil, as he did in many another instance. Sir Walter Scottafterwards recovered some of the old verses which Ramsay's hadsuperseded, and repeated them to Allan Cunningham, who gives them inhis _Songs of Scotland_. Whether Burns knew any more of the song thanthe one old verse given above, with Ramsay's appended to it, is morethan doubtful. 

As he passed through Perth he secured an introduction to the family ofBelches of Invermay, that, on crossing the river Earn on his southwardjourney, he might be enabled to see the little valley, running downfrom the Ochils to the Earn, which has been consecrated by the old andwell-known song, _The Birks of Invermay_. 

It thus appears that the old songs of Scotland, their localities, (p.  076)their authors, and the incidents whence they arose, were now uppermostin the thoughts of Burns, whatever part of his country he visited. This was as intense and as genuinely poetical an interest, though amore limited one, than that with which Walter Scott's eye afterwardsranged over the same scenes. The time was not yet full come for thatwide and varied sympathy, with which Scott surveyed the whole past ofhis country's history, nor was Burns's nature or training such as togive him that catholicity of feeling which was required to sympathizeas Scott did, with all ranks and all ages. Neither could he have soseized on the redeeming virtues of rude and half-barbarous times, andinvested them with that halo of romance which Scott has thrown overthem. This romantic and chivalrous colouring was an element altogetheralien to Burns's character. But it may well be, that these verylimitations intensified the depth and vividness of sympathy, withwhich Burns conceived the human situations portrayed in his bestsongs. 

There was one more brief tour of ten days during October, 1787, whichBurns made in the company of Dr. Adair. They passed first to Stirling, where Burns broke the obnoxious pane; then paid a second visit toHarvieston near Dollar--for Burns had paid a flying visit of one daythere, at the end of August, before passing northward to theHighlands--where Burns introduced his friend, and seems to haveflirted with some Ayrshire young ladies, relations of his friend GavinHamilton. Thence they passed on a visit to Mr. Ramsay at Ochtertyre onthe Teith, a few miles west from Stirling. They then visited SirWilliam Murray at Ochtertyre in Strathearn, where Burns wrote his_Lines on scaring some waterfowl in Lock Turit_, and a pretty (p.  077)pastoral song on a young beauty he met there, Miss Murray of Lintrose. From Strathearn he next seems to have returned by Clackmannan, thereto visit the old lady who lived in the Tower, of whom he had heardfrom Mr. Ramsay. In this short journey the most memorable thing wasthe visit to Mr. Ramsay at his picturesque old country seat, situateon the river Teith, and commanding, down the vista of its oldlime-tree avenue, so romantic a view of Stirling Castle rock. ThereBurns made the acquaintance of Mr. Ramsay, the laird, and was charmedwith the conversation of that "last of the Scottish line of Latinists, which began with Buchanan and ended with Gregory, "--an antiquary, moreover, whose manners and home Lockhart thinks that Sir Walter mayhave had in his recollection, when he drew the character of Monkbarns. Years afterwards, in a letter addressed to Dr. Currie, Ramsay thuswrote of Burns:--"I have been in the company of many men of genius, some of them poets, but I never witnessed such flashes of intellectualbrightness as from him, the impulse of the moment, sparks of celestialfire. I never was more delighted, therefore, than with his company twodays _tête-à-tête_. In a mixed company I should have made little ofhim; for, to use a gamester's phrase, he did not know when to playoff, and when to play on.... When I asked, whether the Edinburghliterati had mended his poems by their criticisms, 'Sir, ' said he, 'these gentlemen remind me of some spinsters in my country, who spintheir thread so fine, that it is neither fit for weft nor woof. "

There are other incidents recorded of that time. Among these was avisit to Mrs. Bruce, an old Scottish dame of ninety, who lived in theancient Tower of Clackmannan, upholding her dignity as the linealdescendant and representative of the family of King Robert Bruce, (p.  078)and cherishing the strongest attachment to the exiled Stuarts. Both ofthese sentiments found a ready response from Burns. The one wasexemplified by the old lady conferring knighthood on him and hiscompanion with the actual sword of King Robert, which she had in herpossession, remarking as she did it, that she had a better right toconfer the title than some folk. Another sentiment she charmed thepoet by expressing in the toast she gave after dinner, "_Hooi Uncos_, "that is, Away Strangers, a word used by shepherds when they bid theircollies drive away strange sheep. Who the strangers were in this casemay be guessed from her known Jacobite sentiments. 

On his way from Clackmannan to Edinburgh he turned aside to see LochLeven and its island castle, which had been the prison of the haplessMary Stuart; and thence passing to the Norman Abbey Church ofDunfermline, with deep emotion he looked on the grave of Robert Bruce. At that time the choir of the old church, which had contained thegrave, had been long demolished, and the new structure which nowcovers it, had not yet been thought of. The sacred spot was onlymarked by two broad flagstones, on which Burns knelt and kissed them, reproaching the while the barbarity that had so dishonoured theresting-place of Scotland's hero king. Then, with that sudden changeof mood, so characteristic of him, he passed within the ancientchurch, and mounting the pulpit, addressed to his companion, who had, at his desire, mounted the cutty stool, or seat of repentance, aparody of the rebuke, which he himself had undergone some time beforeat Mauchline. 

CHAPTER IV. (p.  079)

SECOND WINTER IN EDINBURGH. 

These summer and autumn wanderings ended, Burns returned to Edinburgh, and spent there the next five months from the latter part of October, 1787, till the end of March, 1788, in a way which to any man, muchmore to such an one as he, could give small satisfaction. Theostensible cause of his lingering in Edinburgh was to obtain asettlement with his procrastinating publisher, Creech, because tillthis was effected, he had no money with which to enter on thecontemplated farm, or on any other regular way of life. Probably inthus wasting his time, Burns may have been influenced more than hehimself was aware, by a secret hope that something might yet be donefor him--that all the smiles lavished on him by the great and powerfulcould not possibly mean nothing, and that he should be left to drudgeon in poverty and obscurity as before. 

During this winter Burns changed his quarters from Richmond's lodgingin High Street, where he had lived during the former winter, to ahouse then marked 2, now 30, St. James's Square in the New Town. Therehe lived with a Mr. Cruikshank, a colleague of his friend Nicol in theHigh School, and there he continued to reside till he left Edinburgh. More than once he paid brief visits to Nithsdale, and examined (p.  080)again and yet again the farm on the Dalswinton property, on which hehad long had his eye. This was his only piece of serious businessduring those months. The rest of his time was spent more or less inthe society of his jovial companions. We hear no more during thissecond winter of his meetings with literary professors, able advocatesand judges, or fashionable ladies. His associates seem to have beenrather confined to men of the Ainslie and Nicol stamp. He would seemalso to have amused himself with flirtations with several youngheroines, whose acquaintance he had made during the previous summer. The chief of these were two young ladies, Miss Margaret Chalmers andMiss Charlotte Hamilton, cousins of each other, and relatives of hisMauchline friend, Gavin Hamilton. These he had met during the twovisits which he paid to Harvieston, on the river Devon, where theywere living for a time. On his return to Edinburgh he continued tocorrespond with them both, and to address songs of affection, if notof love, now to one, now to another. To Charlotte Hamilton headdressed the song beginning, --

 How pleasant the banks of the clear winding Devon;

To Miss Chalmers, one with the opening lines, --

 Where, braving angry winter's storms, The lofty Ochils rise;

And another beginning thus, --

 My Peggy's face, my Peggy's form. 

Which of these young ladies was foremost in Burns's affection, it isnot easy now to say, nor does it much signify. To both he wrote someof his best letters, and some of not his best verses. Allan (p.  081)Cunningham thinks that he had serious affection for Miss Hamilton. Thelatest editor of his works asserts that his heart was set on MissChalmers, and that she, long afterwards in her widowhood, told ThomasCampbell the poet, that Burns had made a proposal of marriage to her. However this may be, it is certain that while both admitted him tofriendship, neither encouraged his advances. They were better "advisedthan to do so. " Probably they knew too much of his past history andhis character to think of him as a husband. Both were soon after thistime married to men more likely to make them happy than the erraticpoet. When they turned a deaf ear to his addresses, he wrote: "Myrhetoric seems to have lost all its effect on the lovely half ofmankind; I have seen the day, but that is a tale of other years. In myconscience, I believe, that my heart has been so often on fire that ithas been vitrified!" Well perhaps for him if it had been so, suchsmall power had he to guide it. Just about the time when he foundhimself rejected, notwithstanding all his fine letters and his verses, by the two young ladies on Devon banks, he met with an accidentthrough the upsetting of a hackney coach by a drunken driver. The fallleft him with a bruised limb, which confined him to his room from the7th of December till the middle of February (1787). 

During these weeks he suffered much from low spirits, and the letterswhich he then wrote under the influence of that hypochondria anddespondency contain some of the gloomiest bursts of discontent withhimself and with the world, which he ever gave vent to either in proseor verse. He describes himself as the "sport, the miserable victim ofrebellious pride, hypochondriac imagination, agonizing sensibility, and Bedlam passions. I wish I were dead, but I'm no like to (p.  082)die.... I fear I am something like undone; but I hope for the best. Come, stubborn Pride and unshrinking Resolution; accompany me throughthis to me miserable world! I have a hundred times wished that onecould resign life, as an officer resigns a commission; for I would nottake in any poor wretch by selling out. Lately I was a sixpennyprivate, and, God knows, a miserable soldier enough; now I march tothe campaign, a starving cadet--a little more conspicuously wretched. "

But his late want of success on the banks of Devon, and his consequentdespondency, were alike dispelled from his thoughts by a newexcitement. Just at the time when he met with his accident, he hadmade the acquaintance of a certain Mrs. M'Lehose, and acquaintance allat once became a violent attachment on both sides. This lady had beendeserted by her husband, who had gone to the West Indies, leaving herin poverty and obscurity to bring up two young boys as best she might. We are told that she was "of a somewhat voluptuous style of beauty, oflively and easy manners, of a poetical fabric of mind, with some wit, and not too high a degree of refinement or delicacy--exactly the kindof woman to fascinate Burns. " Fascinated he certainly was. On the 30thDecember he writes; "Almighty love still reigns and revels in mybosom, and I am at this moment ready to hang myself for a youngEdinburgh widow, who has wit and wisdom more murderously fatal thanthe assassinating stiletto of the Sicilian bandit, or the poisonedarrow of the savage African. " For several months his visits to herhouse were frequent, his letters unremitting. The sentimentalcorrespondence which they began, in which Burns addresses her asClarinda, assuming to himself the name of Sylvander, has been (p.  083)published separately, and become notorious. Though this correspondencemay contain, as Lockhart says, "passages of deep and noble feeling, which no one but Burns could have penned, " it cannot be denied that itcontains many more of such fustian, such extravagant bombast, as Burnsor any man beyond twenty might well have been ashamed to write. Onecould wish that for the poet's sake this correspondence had never beenpreserved. It is so humiliating to read this torrent of falsettosentiment now, and to think that a man gifted like Burns should havepoured it forth. How far his feelings towards Clarinda were sincere, or how far they were wrought up to amuse his vacancy by playing atlove-making, it is hard to say. Blended with a profusion of forcedcompliments and unreal raptures, there are expressions in Burns'sletters which one cannot but believe that he meant in earnest, at themoment when he wrote them. Clarinda, it would seem, must have regardedBurns as a man wholly disengaged, and have looked forward to thepossible removal of Mr. M'Lehose, and with him of the obstacle to aunion with Burns. How far he may have really shared the same hopes itis impossible to say. We only know that he used again and againlanguage of deepest devotion, vowing to "love Clarinda to death, through death, and for ever. "

While this correspondence between Sylvander and Clarinda was in itshighest flight of rapture, Burns received, in January or February, 1788, news from Mauchline which greatly agitated him. His renewedintercourse with Jean Armour had resulted in consequences which againstirred her father's indignation; this time so powerfully, that heturned his daughter to the door. Burns provided a shelter for herunder the roof of a friend; but for a time he does not seem to (p.  084)have thought of doing more than this. Whether he regarded the originalprivate marriage as entirely dissolved, and looked on himself as anunmarried man, does not quite appear. Anyhow, he and Clarinda, whoknew all that had passed with regard to Jean Armour, seem to have thenthought that enough had been done for the seemingly discardedMauchline damsel, and to have carried on their correspondence asrapturously as ever for fully another six weeks, until the 21st ofMarch (1788). On that day Sylvander wrote to Clarinda a final letter, pledging himself to everlasting love, and following it by a copy ofverses beginning, --

 Fair empress of the poet's soul, presenting her at the same time with a pair of wineglasses as aparting gift. 

On the 24th of March, he turned his back on Edinburgh, and neverreturned to it for more than a day's visit. 

Before leaving town, however, he had arranged three pieces of business, all bearing closely on his future life. First, he had secured forhimself an appointment in the Excise through the kindness of "LangSandy Wood, " the surgeon who attended him when laid up with a bruisedlimb, and who had interceded with Mr. Graham of Fintray, the chief ofthe Excise Board, on Burns' behalf. When he received his appointment, he wrote to Miss Chalmers, "I have chosen this, my dear friend, aftermature deliberation. The question is not at what door of fortune'spalace shall we enter in, but what doors does she open for us. I wasnot likely to get anything to do. I got this without hanging-on, ormortifying solicitation; it is immediate bread, and though poor incomparison of the last eighteen months of my existence, 'tis (p.  085)luxury in comparison of all my preceding life. "

Next, he had concluded a bargain with Mr. Miller of Dalswinton, tolease his farm of Ellisland, on which he had long set his heart, andto which he had paid several visits in order to inspect it. 

Lastly, he had at last obtained a business settlement with Creechregarding the Second Edition of his Poems. Before this was effected, Burns had more than once lost his temper, and let Creech know hismind. Various accounts have been given of the profits that now accruedto Burns from the whole transaction. We cannot be far wrong in takingthe estimate at which Dr. Chambers arrived, for on such a matter hecould speak with authority. He sets down the poet's profits at asnearly as possible 500_l. _ Of this sum Burns gave 180_l. _ to hisbrother Gilbert, who was now in pecuniary trouble. "I give myself noairs on this, " he writes, "for it was mere selfishness on my part; Iwas conscious that the wrong scale of the balance was pretty heavilycharged, and I thought that throwing a little filial piety andfraternal affection into the scale in my favour, might help to smoothmatters at the grand reckoning. " This money was understood by thefamily to be the provision due from Robert on behalf of his mother, the support of whom he was now, that he was setting up for himself, about to throw on his younger brother. Chambers seems to reckon thatas another 120_l. _ must have been spent by Burns on his tours, hisaccident, and his sojourn in Edinburgh since October, he could nothave more than 200_l. _ over, with which to set up at Ellisland. We seein what terms Burns had written to Clarinda on the 21st of March. Onhis leaving Edinburgh and returning to Ayrshire, he married JeanArmour, and forthwith acknowledged her in letters as his wife. (p.  086)This was in April, though it was not till August that he and Jeanappeared before the Kirk-Session, and were formally recognized as manand wife by the Church. 

Whether, in taking this step, Burns thought that he was carrying out alegal, as well as a moral, obligation, we know not. The interpretersof the law now assert that the original marriage in 1786 had neverbeen dissolved, and that the destruction of the promissory lines, andthe temporary disownment of him by Jean and her family, could not inany way invalidate it. Indeed after all that had happened, for Burnsto have deserted Jean, and married another, even if he legally couldhave done so, would have been the basest infidelity. Amid all hisother errors and inconsistencies, and no doubt there were enough ofthese, we cannot but be glad for the sake of his good name that he nowacted the part of an honest man, and did what he could to repair themuch suffering and shame he had brought on his frail but faithfulJean. 

As to the reasons which determined Burns to marry Jean Armour, and notanother, this is the account he himself gives when writing to Mrs. Dunlop, one of his most trusted correspondents, to whom he spoke outhis real heart in a simpler, more natural way, than was usual with himin letter-writing:--

"You are right that a bachelor state would have ensured me morefriends; but, from a cause you will easily guess, conscious peace inthe enjoyment of my own mind, and unmistrusting confidence inapproaching my God, would seldom have been of the number. I found aonce much-loved, and still much-loved, female, literally and trulycast out to the mercy of the naked elements; but I enabled her topurchase a shelter;--there is no sporting with a fellow-creature's (p.  087)happiness or misery. The most placid good-nature and sweetness ofdisposition; a warm heart, gratefully devoted with all its powers tolove me; vigorous health and sprightly cheerfulness, set off to thebest advantage by a more than commonly handsome figure: these I think, in a woman may make a good wife, though she should never have read apage but the Scriptures of the Old and New Testament, nor have dancedin a brighter assembly than a penny pay wedding. "

To Miss Chalmers he says:--

"I have married my Jean. I had a long and much-loved fellow-creature'shappiness or misery in my determination, and I durst not trifle withso important a deposit, nor have I any cause to repent it. If I havenot got polite tittle-tattle, modish manners, and fashionable dress, Iam not sickened and disquieted with the multiform curse ofboarding-school affectation; and I have got the handsomest figure, thesweetest temper, the soundest constitution, and the kindest heart inthe country.... A certain late publication of Scots poems she hasperused very devoutly, and all the ballads in the country, as she hasthe finest wood-note wild I ever heard. "

There have been many comments on this turning-point in Burns' life. Some have given him high praise for it, as though he had done a heroicthing in voluntarily sacrificing himself, when it might have been opento him to form a much higher connexion. But all such praise seemsentirely thrown away. It was not, as it appears, open to him to formany other marriage legally; certainly it was not open to him morally. The remark of Lockhart is entirely true, that, "had he hesitated tomake her his wife, whom he loved, and who was the mother of his children, he must have sunk into the callousness of a ruffian. " Lockhart (p.  088)need hardly have added, "or into that misery of miseries, the remorseof a poet. "

But even had law and morality allowed him to pass by Jean, --which theydid not, --would it have been well for Burns, if he had sought, as oneof his biographers regrets that he had not done, a wife among ladiesof higher rank and more refined manners? That he could appreciate whatthese things imply, is evident from his own confession in looking backon his introduction to what is called society: "A refined andaccomplished woman was a being altogether new to me, and of which Ihad formed a very inadequate idea. " It requires but little knowledgeof the world and its ways to see the folly of all such regrets. Greatdisparity of condition in marriage seldom answers. And in the case ofa wayward, moody man, with the pride, the poverty, and theirregularities of Burns, and the drudging toil which must needs awaithis wife, it is easy to see what misery such a marriage would havestored up for both. As it was, the marriage he made was, to put it atthe lowest, one of the most prudent acts of his life. Jean proved tobe all, and indeed more than all, he anticipates in the letters abovegiven. During the eight years of their married life, according to alltestimony, she did her part as a wife and mother with the most patientand placid fidelity, and bore the trials which her husband's irregularhabits entailed on her, with the utmost long-suffering. And after hisdeath, during her long widowhood, she revered his memory, and did herutmost to maintain the honour of his name. 

With his marriage to his Ayrshire wife, Burns had bid farewell toEdinburgh, and to whatever high hopes it may have at anytime kindledwithin him, and had returned to a condition somewhat nearer to thatin which he was born. With what feelings did he pass from this (p.  089)brilliant interlude, and turn the corner which led him back to thedreary road of commonplace drudgery, which he hoped to have escaped?There can be little doubt that his feelings were those of bitterdisappointment. There had been, it is said, a marked contrast betweenthe reception he had met with during his first and second winters inEdinburgh. As Allan Cunningham says, "On his first appearance thedoors of the nobility opened spontaneously, 'on golden hinges turning, 'and he ate spiced meats and drank rare wines, interchanging nods andsmiles with high dukes and mighty earls. A colder reception awaitedhis second coming. The doors of lords and ladies opened with a tardycourtesy; he was received with a cold and measured stateliness, wasseldom requested to stop, seldomer to repeat his visit; and one of hiscompanions used to relate with what indignant feeling the poetrecounted his fruitless calls and his uncordial receptions in the goodtown of Edinburgh.... He went to Edinburgh strong in the belief thatgenius such as his would raise him in society; he returned not withouta sourness of spirit, and a bitterness of feeling. "

When he did give vent to his bitterness, it was not into man's, butinto woman's sympathetic ear that he poured his complaint. It is thushe writes, some time after settling at Ellisland, to Mrs. Dunlop, showing how fresh was still the wound within. "When I skulk into acorner lest the rattling equipage of some gaping blockhead shouldmangle me in the mire, I am tempted to exclaim, 'What merits has hehad, or what demerit have I had, in some previous state of existence, that he is ushered into this state of being with the sceptre of rule, and the keys of riches in his puny fist, and I am kicked into theworld, the sport of folly, or the victim of pride?... Often as I (p.  090)have glided with humble stealth through the pomp of Princes Street, ithas suggested itself to me, as an improvement on the present humanfigure, that a man, in proportion to his own conceit of his ownconsequence in the world, could have pushed out the longitude of hiscommon size, as a snail pushes out his horns, or as we draw out aprospect-glass. '"

This is a feeling which Burns has uttered in many a form of prose andverse, but which probably never possessed him more bitterly than whenhe retired from Edinburgh. Many persons in such circumstances may havefelt thoughts of this kind pass over them for a moment. But they havefelt ashamed of them as they rose, and have at once put them by. Burnsno doubt had a severer trial in this way than most, but he never couldovercome it, never ceased to chafe at that inequality of conditionswhich is so strongly fixed in the system in which we find ourselves. 

It was natural that he should have felt some bitterness at the changedcountenance which Edinburgh society turned on him, and it is easy tobe sarcastic on the upper ranks of that day for turning it; but werethey really so much to blame? There are many cases under the presentorder of things, in which we are constrained to say, "It must needs bethat offences come. " Taking men and things as they are, could it wellhave been otherwise?

First, the novelty of Burns's advent had worn off by his second winterin Edinburgh, and, though it may be a weakness, novelty always countsfor something in human affairs. Then, again, the quiet decorous men ofBlair's circle knew more of Burns's ways and doings than at first, andwhat they came to know was not likely to increase their desire for (p.  091)intimacy with him. It was, it seems, notorious that Burns kept thatformidable memorandum-book already alluded to, in which he wassupposed to sketch with unsparing hand, "stern likenesses" of hisfriends and benefactors. So little of a secret did he make of this, that we are told he sometimes allowed a visitor to have a look at thefigures which he had sketched in his portrait-gallery. The knowledgethat such a book existed was not likely to make Blair and his friendsmore desirous of his society. 

Again, the festivities at the Crochallan Club and other such haunts, the habits he there indulged in, and the associates with whom heconsorted, these were well known. And it was not possible that eitherthe ways, the conversation, or the cronies of the Crochallan Clubcould be welcomed in quieter and more polished circles. Men of theAinslie and Nicol stamp would hardly have been quite in place there. 

Again--what is much to the honour of Burns--he never in the highestaccess of his fame, abated a jot of his intimacy and friendshiptowards the men of his own rank, with whom he had been associated inhis days of obscurity. These were tradesmen, farmers, and peasants. The thought of them, their sentiments, their prejudices and habits, ifit had been possible, their very persons, he would have taken withhim, without disguise or apology, into the highest circles of rank orof literature. But this might not be. It was impossible that Burnscould take Mauchline with its belles, its Poosie-Nansies and itsSouter Johnnies, bodily into the library of Dr. Blair or thedrawing-room of Gordon Castle. 

A man, to whom it is open, must make his choice; but he cannot live atonce in two different and widely sundered orders of society. To (p.  092)no one is it given, not even to men of genius great as that ofBurns, for himself and his family entirely to overleap the barrierswith which custom and the world have hedged us in, and to weld theextremes of society into one. To the speculative as well as to thepractically humane man, the great inequality in human conditionspresents, no doubt, a perplexing problem. A little less worldly pride, and a little more Christian wisdom and humility, would probably havehelped Burns to solve it better than he did. But besides the socialgrievance, which though impalpable is very real, Burns had anothermore material and tangible. The great whom he had met in Edinburgh, whose castles he had visited in the country, might have done somethingto raise him at once above poverty and toil, and they did little ornothing. They had, indeed, subscribed liberally for his SecondEdition, and they had got him a gauger's post, with fifty or sixtypounds a year, that was all. What more could they, ought they to havedone? To have obtained him an office in some one of the higherprofessions was not to be thought of, for a man cannot easily at theage of eight-and-twenty change his whole line and adapt himself to anentirely new employment. The one thing they might have combined to do, was to have compelled Dundas, or some other of the men then in power, to grant Burns a pension from the public purse. That was the day ofpensions, and hundreds with no claim to compare with Burns's were thenon the pension list: 300_l. _ a year would have sufficed to place himin comfort and independence, and could public money have been betterspent? But though the most rigid economist might not have objected, would Burns have accepted such a benefaction, had it been offered?And if he had accepted it, would he not have chafed under the (p.  093)obligation, more even than he did in the absence of it? Such questionsas these cannot but arise, as often as we think over the fate ofBurns, and ask ourselves, if nothing could have been done to avert it?Though natural, they are vain. Things hold on their own course totheir inevitable issues, and Burns left Edinburgh, and set his facefirst towards Ayrshire, then to Nithsdale, a saddened and embitteredman. 

CHAPTER V. (p.  094)

LIFE AT ELLISLAND. 

"Mr. Burns, you have made a poet's not a farmer's choice. " Such wasthe remark of Allan Cunningham's father, land-steward to the laird ofDalswinton, when the poet turned from the low-lying and fertile farmof Foregirth, which Cunningham had recommended to him, and selectedfor his future home the farm of Ellisland. He was taken by thebeautiful situation and fine romantic outlook of the poorest ofseveral farms on the Dalswinton estate which were in his option. Ellisland lies on the western bank of the river Nith, about six milesabove Dumfries. Looking from Ellisland eastward across the river, "apure stream running there over the purest gravel, " you see the richholms and noble woods of Dalswinton. Dalswinton is an ancient historicplace, which has even within recorded memory more than once changedits mansion-house and its proprietor. To the west the eye falls on thehills of Dunscore, and looking northward up the Nith, the view isbounded by the heights that shut in the river towards Drumlanrig, andby the high conical hill of Corsincon, at the base of which the infantstream slips from the shire of Ayr into that of Dumfries. Thefarmsteading of Ellisland stands but a few yards to the west of theNith. Immediately underneath there is a red scaur of considerable (p.  095)height, overhanging the stream, and the rest of the bank is coveredwith broom, through which winds a greensward path, whither Burns usedto retire to meditate his songs. The farm extends to upwards of ahundred acres, part holm, part croft-land, of which the former yieldedgood wheat, the latter oats and potatoes. The lease was for nineteenyears, and the rent fifty pounds for the first three years, seventyfor the rest of the tack. The laird of Dalswinton, while Burns leasedEllisland, was Mr. Patrick Millar, not an ordinary laird, but one wellknown in his day for his scientific discoveries. There was no properfarm-house or offices on the farm--it was part of the bargain thatBurns should build these for himself. The want of a house made itimpossible for him to settle at once on his farm. His bargain for ithad been concluded early in March (1788); but it was not till the 13thof June that he went to reside at Ellisland. In the interval betweenthese two dates he went to Ayrshire, and completed privately, as wehave seen, the marriage, the long postponement of which had caused himso much disquiet. With however great disappointment and chagrin he mayhave left Edinburgh, the sense that he had now done the thing that wasright, and had the prospect of a settled life before him, gave him fora time a peace and even gladness of heart, to which he had for longbeen a stranger. We can, therefore, well believe what he tells us, that, when he had left Edinburgh, he journeyed towards Mauchline withas much gaiety of heart, 'as a May-frog, leaping across thenewly-harrowed ridge, enjoying the fragrance of the refreshed earthafter the long-expected shower. ' Of what may be called the poet'smarriage settlement, we have the following details from AllanCunningham:--

"His marriage reconciled the poet to his wife's kindred: there was (p.  096)no wedding portion. Armour was a respectable man, but not opulent. Hegave his daughter some small store of plenishing; and, exerting hisskill as a mason, wrought his already eminent son-in-law a handsomepunch-bowl in Inverary marble, which Burns lived to fill often, to thegreat pleasure both of himself and his friends.... Mrs. Dunlop bethoughtherself of Ellisland, and gave a beautiful heifer; another friendcontributed a plough. The young couple from love to their nativecounty ordered their furniture from a wright in Mauchline; thefarm-servants, male and female, were hired in Ayrshire, a matter ofquestionable prudence, for the mode of cultivation is different fromthat of the west, and the cold humid bottom of Mossgiel bears noresemblance to the warm and stony loam of Ellisland. "

When on the 13th June he went to live on his farm, he had, as therewas no proper dwelling-house on it, to leave Jean and her onesurviving child behind him at Mauchline, and himself to seek shelterin a mere hovel on the skirts of the farm. "I remember the housewell, " says Cunningham, "the floor of clay, the rafters japanned withsoot, the smoke from a hearth-fire streamed thickly out at door andwindow, while the sunshine which struggled in at those aperturesproduced a sort of twilight. " Burns thus writes to Mrs. Dunlop, "Asolitary inmate of an old smoky spence, far from every object I loveor by whom I am beloved; nor any acquaintance older than yesterday, except Jenny Geddes, the old mare I ride on, while uncouth cares andnovel plans hourly insult my awkward ignorance and bashful inexperience. "It takes a more even, better-ordered spirit than Burns' to stand suchsolitude. His heart, during those first weeks at Ellisland, (p.  097)entirely sank within him, and he saw all men and life coloured by hisown despondency. This is the entry in his commonplace book on thefirst Sunday he spent alone at Ellisland:--"I am such a coward inlife, so tired of the service, that I would almost at any time, withMilton's Adam, 'gladly lay me in my mother's lap, and be at peace. 'But a wife and children bind me to struggle with the stream, till somesudden squall shall overset the silly vessel, or in the listlessreturn of years its own craziness reduce it to wreck. "

The discomfort of his dwelling-place made him not only discontentedwith his lot, but also with the people amongst whom he found himself. "I am here, " he writes, "on my farm, but for all the pleasurable partof life called social communication, I am at the very elbow ofexistence. The only things to be found in perfection in this countryare stupidity and canting.... As for the Muses, they have as much ideaof a rhinoceros as a poet. "

When he was not in Ayrshire in bodily presence, he was there inspirit. It was at such a time that looking up to the hills that divideNithsdale from Ayrshire, he breathed to his wife that most natural andbeautiful of all his love-lyrics, --

 Of a' the airts the wind can blaw I dearly like the west, For there the bonnie lassie lives, The lassie I lo'e best. 

His disparagement of Nithsdale people, Allan Cunningham, himself aDumfriesshire man, naturally resents, and accounts for it by supposingthat the sooty hovel had infected his whole mental atmosphere. "TheMaxwells, the Kirkpatricks, and Dalzells, " exclaims honest Allan, "werefit companions for any man in Scotland, and they were almost his (p.  098)neighbours; Riddell of Friars Carse, an accomplished antiquarian, lived almost next door; and Jean Lindsay and her husband, PatrickMiller, the laird of Dalswinton, were no ordinary people. The former, beautiful, accomplished, a writer of easy and graceful verses, with anatural dignity of manners which became her station; the latter animprover and inventor, the first who applied steam to the purposes ofnavigation. " But Burns's hasty judgments of men and things, the resultof momentary feeling, are not to be too literally construed. 

He soon found that there was enough of sociality among all ranks ofDumfriesshire people, from the laird to the cotter, indeed, more thanwas good for himself. Yet, however much he may have complained, whenwriting letters to his correspondents of an evening, he was too manlyto go moping about all day long when there was work to be done. Hewas, moreover, nerved to the task by the thought that he was preparingthe home that was to shelter his wife and children. On the laying ofthe foundation-stone of his future house, he took off his hat andasked a blessing on it. "Did he ever put his own hand to the work?"was asked of one of the men engaged in it. "Ay, that he did, mony atime, " was the answer, "if he saw us like to be beat wi' a big stane, he would cry, 'Bide a wee, ' and come rinning. We soon found out whenhe put to his hand, he beat a' I ever met for a dour lift. "

During his first harvest, though the weather was unfavourable, and thecrop a poor one, we find Burns speaking in his letters of beingindustriously employed, and binding every day after the reapers. ButAllan Cunningham's father, who had every opportunity of observing, used to allege that Burns seemed to him like a restless and (p.  099)unsettled man. "He was ever on the move, on foot or on horseback. Inthe course of a single day he might be seen holding the plough, angling in the river, sauntering, with his hands behind his back, onthe banks, looking at the running water, of which he was very fond, walking round his buildings or over his fields; and if you lost sightof him for an hour, perhaps you might see him returning from FriarsCarse, or spurring his horse through the hills to spend an evening insome distant place with such friends as chance threw in his way. "Before his new house was ready, he had many a long ride to and frothrough the Cumnock hills to Mauchline, to visit Jean, and to return. It was not till the first week of December, 1788, that his lonelybachelor life came to an end, and that he was able to bring his wifeand household to Nithsdale. Even then the house at Ellisland was notready for his reception, and he and his family had to put up for atime in a neighbouring farm-house called the Isle. They brought withthem two farm-lads from Ayrshire, and a servant lass called ElizabethSmith, who was alive in 1851, and gave Chambers many details of thepoet's way of life at Ellisland. Among these she told him that herfather was so concerned about her moral welfare that, before allowingher to go, he made Burns promise to keep a strict watch over herbehaviour, and to exercise her duly in the Shorter Catechism; and thatboth of these promises he faithfully fulfilled. 

The advent of his wife and his child in the dark days of the year keptdulness aloof, and made him meet the coming of the new year (1789)with more cheerful hopes and calmer spirits than he had known forlong. Alas, that these were doomed to be so short-lived!

On New Year's morning, 1789, his brother Gilbert thus (p.  100)affectionately writes to the poet: "Dear Brother, --I have justfinished my New Year's Day breakfast in the usual form, whichnaturally makes me call to mind the days of former years, and thesociety in which we used to begin them; and when I look at our familyvicissitudes, 'through the dark postern of time long elapsed, ' Icannot help remarking to you, my dear brother, how good the God ofseasons is to us, and that, however some clouds may seem to lower overthe portion of time before us, we have great reason to hope that allwill turn out well. " On the same New Year's Day Burns addressed toMrs. Dunlop a letter, which, though it has been often quoted, is toopleasing to be omitted here. "I own myself so little a Presbyterian, that I approve set times and seasons of more than ordinary acts ofdevotion for breaking in on that habituated routine of life andthought, which is so apt to reduce our existence to a kind ofinstinct, or even sometimes, and with some minds, to a state verylittle superior to mere machinery. This day--the first Sunday ofMay--a breezy, blue-skied noon some time about the beginning, and ahoary morning and calm sunny day about the end, of autumn--these, timeout of mind, have been with me a kind of holiday.... We know nothing, or next to nothing of the substance or structure of our souls, socannot account for those seeming caprices in them, that we should beparticularly pleased with this thing, or struck with that, which onminds of a different cast makes no extraordinary impression. I havesome favourite flowers in spring, among which are the mountain-daisy, the harebell, the fox-glove, the wild-brier rose, the budding birch, and the hoary hawthorn, that I view and hang over with particulardelight. I never hear the loud, solitary whistle of the curlew in asummer noon, or the wild mixing cadence of a troop of gray plovers (p.  101)in an autumnal morning, without feeling an elevation of soul like theenthusiasm of devotion or poetry. Tell me, my dear friend, to what canthis be owing? Are we a piece of machinery, which, like the Ĉolianharp, passive, takes the impression of the passing accident? Or dothese workings argue something within us above the trodden clod? I ownmyself partial to such proofs of those awful and important realities--aGod that made all things--man's immaterial and immortal nature--and aworld of weal or woe beyond death and the grave!"

On reading this beautiful and suggestive letter, an ornithologistremarked that Burns had made a mistake in a fact of natural history. It is not the 'gray plover, ' but the golden, whose music is heard onthe moors in autumn. The gray plover, our accurate observer remarks, is a winter shore bird, found only at that season and in that habitat, in this country. 

It was not till about the middle of 1789 that the farm-house ofEllisland was finished, and that he and his family, leaving the Isle, went to live in it. When all was ready, Burns bade his servant, BettySmith, take a bowl of salt, and place the Family Bible on the top ofit, and, bearing these, walk first into the new house and possess it. He himself, with his wife on his arm, followed Betty and the Bible andthe salt, and so they entered their new abode. Burns delighted to keepup old-world _freits_ or usages like this. It was either on thisoccasion, or on his bringing Mrs. Burns to the Isle, that he held ahouse-heating mentioned by Allan Cunningham, to which all theneighbourhood gathered, and drank, "Luck to the roof-tree of the houseof Burns!" The farmers and the well-to-do people welcomed him gladly, and were proud that such a man had come to be a dweller in their (p.  102)vale. Yet the ruder country lads and the lower peasantry, we are told, looked on him not without dread, "lest he should pickle and preservethem in sarcastic song. " "Once at a penny wedding, when one or twowild young lads quarrelled, and were about to fight, Burns rose up andsaid, 'Sit down and ----, or else I'll hang you up like potatoe-boglesin sang to-morrow. ' They ceased, and sat down as if their noses hadbeen bleeding. "

The house which had cost Burns so much toil in building, and which hedid not enter till about the middle of the year 1789, was a humbleenough abode. Only a large kitchen, in which the whole family, masterand servants, took their meals together, a room to hold two beds, acloset to hold one, and a garret, coom-ceiled, for the femaleservants, this made the whole dwelling-house. "One of the windowslooked southward down the holms; another opened on the river; and thehouse stood so near the lofty bank, that its afternoon shadow fellacross the stream, on the opposite fields. The garden or kail-yard wasa little way from the house. A pretty footpath led southward along theriver side, another ran northward, affording fine views of the Nith, the woods of Friars Carse, and the grounds of Dalswinton. Half-waydown the steep declivity, a fine clear cool spring supplied water tothe household. " Such was the first home which Burns found for himselfand his wife, and the best they were ever destined to find. The monthsspent in the Isle, and the few that followed the settlement atEllisland, were among the happiest of his life. Besides trying hisbest to set himself to farm-industry, he was otherwise bent onwell-doing. He had, soon after his arrival in Ellisland, started (p.  103)a parish library, both for his own use and to spread a love ofliterature among his neighbours, the portioners and peasants ofDunscore. When he first took up house at Ellisland, he used everyevening when he was at home, to gather his household for familyworship, and, after the old Scottish custom, himself to offer upprayer in his own words. He was regular, if not constant, in hisattendance at the parish church of Dunscore, in which a worthyminister, Mr. Kirkpatrick, officiated, whom he respected for hischaracter, though he sometimes demurred to what seemed to him the toogreat sternness of his doctrine. 

Burns and his wife had not been long settled in their newly-builtfarm-house, when prudence induced him to ask that he might beappointed Excise officer in the district in which he lived. Thisrequest Mr. Graham of Fintray, who had placed his name on the Exciselist before he left Edinburgh, at once granted. The reasons thatimpelled Burns to this step were the increase of his family by thebirth of a son in August, 1789, and the prospect that his secondyear's harvest would be a failure like the first. He often repeatsthat it was solely to make provision for his increasing family that hesubmitted to the degradation of--

 Searching auld wives' barrels, -- Och, hon! the day! That clarty barm should stain my laurels, But--what 'ill ye say? These movin things, ca'd wives and weans, Wad move the very hearts o' stanes. 

That he felt keenly the slur that attached to the name of gauger iscertain, but it is honourable to him that he resolved bravely toendure it for the sake of his family. 

"I know not, " he writes, "how the word exciseman, or the still (p.  104)more opprobrious gauger, will sound in your ears. I, too, have seenthe day when my auditory nerves would have felt very delicately onthis subject; but a wife and children are things which have awonderful power in blunting this kind of sensations. Fifty pounds ayear for life, and a provision for widows and orphans, you will allow, is no bad settlement for a poet. "

In announcing to Dr. Blacklock his new employment, he says, --

 But what d'ye think, my trusty fier, I'm turned a gauger--peace be here! Parnassian queans, I fear, I fear, Ye'll now disdain me! And then my fifty pounds a year Will little gain me. 

 * * * * *

 Ye ken, ye ken That strang necessity supreme is 'Mang sons o' men. I hae a wife and twa wee laddies, They maun hae brose and brats o' duddies; Ye ken yoursels my heart right proud is, I need na vaunt, But I'll sned besoms, thraw saugh woodies, Before they want. 

He would cut brooms and twist willow-ropes before his children shouldwant. But perhaps, as the latest editor of Burns' poems observes, hisbest saying on the subject of the excisemanship was that word to LadyGlencairn, the mother of his patron, "I would much rather have it saidthat my profession borrowed credit from me, than that I borrowed itfrom my profession. "

In these words we see something of the bitterness about his new (p.  105)employment, which often escaped from him, both in prose and verse. Nevertheless, having undertaken it, he set his face honestly to thework. He had to survey ten parishes, covering a tract of not less thanfifty miles each way, and requiring him to ride two hundred miles aweek. Smuggling was then common throughout Scotland, both in the shapeof brewing and of selling beer and whiskey without licence. Burns tooka serious yet humane view of his duty. To the regular smuggler he issaid to have been severe; to the country folk, farmers or cotters, whosometimes transgressed, he tempered justice with mercy. Many storiesare told of his leniency to these last. At Thornhill, on a fair day, he was seen to call at the door of a poor woman who for the day wasdoing a little illicit business on her own account. A nod and amovement of the forefinger brought the woman to the doorway. "Kate, are you mad? Don't you know that the supervisor and I will be in uponyou in forty minutes?" Burns at once disappeared among the crowd, andthe poor woman was saved a heavy fine. Another day the poet and abrother gauger entered a widow's house at Dunscore and seized aquantity of smuggled tobacco. "Jenny, " said Burns, "I expected thiswould be the upshot. Here, Lewars, take note of the number of rolls asI count them. Now, Jock, did you ever hear an auld wife numbering herthreads before check-reels were invented? Thou's ane, and thou's noane, and thou's ane a'out--listen. " As he handed out the rolls, andnumbered them, old-wife fashion, he dropped every other roll intoJenny's lap. Lewars took the desired note with becoming gravity, andsaw as though he saw not. Again, a woman who had been brewing, onseeing Burns coming with another exciseman, slipped out by the backdoor, leaving a servant and a little girl in the house. "Has (p.  106)there been ony brewing for the fair here the day?" "O no, sir, we haenae licence for that, " answered the servant maid. "That's no true, "exclaimed the child; "the muckle black kist is fou' o' the bottles o'yill that my mither sat up a' nicht brewing for the fair. "... "We arein a hurry just now, " said Burns, "but when we return from the fair, we'll examine the muckle black kist. " In acts like these, and in manyanother anecdote that might be given, is seen the genuinehuman-heartedness of the man, in strange contrast with thebitternesses which so often find vent in his letters. Ultimately, aswe shall see, the exciseman's work told heavily against his farming, his poetry, and his habits of life. But it was some time before thisbecame apparent. The solitary rides through the moors and dales thatborder Nithsdale gave him opportunities, if not for composing longpoems, at any rate for crooning over those short songs in which mainlyhis genius now found vent. "The visits of the muses to me, " he writes, "and I believe to most of their acquaintance, like the visits of goodangels, are short and far between; but I meet them now and then as Ijog through the hills of Nithsdale, just as I used to do on the banksof Ayr. "

Take as a sample some of the varying moods he passed through in thesummer and autumn of 1789. In the May-time of that year an incidentoccurs, which the poet thus describes:--"One morning lately, as I wasout pretty early in the fields, sowing some grass-seeds, I heard theburst of a shot from a neighbouring plantation, and presently a poorlittle wounded hare came hirpling by me. You will guess my indignationat the inhuman fellow who could shoot a hare at this season, when allof them have young ones. Indeed there is something in the business ofdestroying, for our sport, individuals in the animal creation that (p.  107)do not injure us materially, which I could never reconcile to my ideasof virtue. " The lad who fired the shot and roused the poet'sindignation, was the son of a neighbouring farmer. Burns cursed him, and being near the Nith at the time, threatened to throw him into theriver. He found, however, a more innocent vent for his feelings in thefollowing lines:--

 Inhuman man! curse on thy barbarous art, And blasted be thy murder-aiming eye! May never pity soothe thee with a sigh, Nor ever pleasure glad thy cruel heart!

 Go live, poor wanderer of the wood and field, The bitter little that of life remains: No more the thickening brakes and verdant plains To thee shall home, or food, or pastime yield. 

 Seek, mangled wretch, some place of wonted rest, No more of rest, but now thy dying bed! The sheltering rushes whistling o'er thy head, The cold earth with thy bloody bosom prest. 

 Perhaps a mother's anguish adds its woe; The playful pair crowd fondly by thy side; Ah! helpless nurslings, who will now provide That life a mother only can bestow!

 Oft as by winding Nith, I, musing, wait The sober eve, or hail the cheerful dawn, I'll miss thee sporting o'er the dewy lawn, And curse the ruffian's aim, and mourn thy hapless fate. 

This, which is one of the best of the very few good poems which Burnscomposed in classical English, is no mere sentimental effusion, butexpresses what in him was a real part of his nature--his tender feelingtowards his lower fellow-creatures. The same feeling finds (p.  108)expression in the lines on _The Mouse_, _The Auld Farmer's Address tohis Mare_, and _The Winter Night_, when, as he sits by his fireside, and hears the storm roaring without, he says, --

 I thought me on the ourie cattle, Or silly sheep, wha bide this brattle O' wintry war. Or thro' the drift, deep-lairing, sprattle, Beneath a scaur. Ilk happing bird, wee helpless thing, That in the merry months o' spring, Delighted me to hear thee sing, What comes o' thee? Whare wilt then cow'r thy chittering wing, And close thy e'e?

Though for a time, influenced by the advice of critics, Burns hadtried to compose some poems according to the approved models ofbook-English, we find him presently reverting to his own Doric, whichhe had lately too much abandoned, and writing in good broad Scotch hisadmirably humorous description of Captain Grose, an Antiquary, whom hehad met at Friars Carse:--

 Hear, Land o' Cakes, and brither Scots, Frae Maidenkirk to Johnnie Groats-- If there's a hole in a' your coats, I rede you tent it: A chield's amang you, takin' notes, And, faith, he'll prent it. 

 By some auld, houlet-haunted biggin, Or kirk deserted by its riggin, It's ten to ane ye'll find him snug in Some eldritch part, Wi' deils, they say, Lord save's! colleaguin' At some black art. 

 It's tauld he was a sodger bred, (p.  109) And ane wad rather fa'n than fled; But now he's quat the spurtle-blade, And dog-skin wallet, And taen the--Antiquarian trade, I think they call it. 

 He has a fouth o' auld nick-nackets; Rusty airn caps, and jinglin' jackets, Wad haud the Lothians three in tackets, A towmont gude And parritch-pats and auld saut-backets, Before the Flood. 

 * * * * *

 Forbye, he'll shape you aff fu' gleg The cut of Adam's philibeg; The knife that nicket Abel's craig He'll prove you fully, It was a faulding jocteleg Or lang-kail gullie. 

The meeting with Captain Grose took place in the summer of 1789, andthe stanzas just given were written probably about the same time. Tothe same date belongs his ballad called _The Kirk's Alarm_, in whichhe once more reverts to the defence of one of his old friends of theNew Light school, who had got into the Church Courts, and was injeopardy from the attacks of his more orthodox brethren. The ballad initself has little merit, except as showing that Burns still clung tothe same school of divines to which he had early attached himself. InSeptember we find him writing in a more serious strain to Mrs. Dunlop, and suggesting thoughts which might console her in some afflictionunder which she was suffering. "... In vain would we reason andpretend to doubt. I have myself done so to a very daring pitch; butwhen I reflected that I was opposing the most ardent wishes, and (p.  110)the most darling hopes of good men, and flying in the face of allhuman belief, in all ages, I was shocked at my own conduct. "

That same September Burns, with his friend Allan Masterton, crossedfrom Nithsdale to Annandale to visit their common friend Nicol, whowas spending his vacation in Moffatdale. They met and spent a night inNicol's lodging. It was a small thatched cottage, near Craigieburn--aplace celebrated by Burns in one of his songs--and stands on theright-hand side as the traveller passes up Moffatdale to Yarrow, between the road and the river. Few pass that way now without havingthe cottage pointed out, as the place where the three merry comradesmet that night. 

"We had such a joyous meeting, " Burns writes, "that Mr. Masterton andI agreed, each in our own way, that we should celebrate the business, "and Burns's celebration of it was the famous bacchanalian song, --

 O, Willie brewed a peck o' maut, And Bob and Allan cam to pree. 

If bacchanalian songs are to be written at all, this certainly must bepronounced "The king amang them a'. " But while no one can withholdadmiration from the genius and inimitable humour of the song, still weread it with very mingled feelings, when we think that perhaps it mayhave helped some topers since Burns's day a little faster on the roadto ruin. As for the three boon-companions themselves, just ten yearsafter that night, Currie wrote, "These three honest fellows--all menof uncommon talents--are now all under the turf. " And in 1821, JohnStruthers, a Scottish poet little known, but of great worth and somegenius, thus recurs to Currie's words:-- (p.  111) Nae mair in learning Willie toils, nor Allan wakes the melting lay, Nor Rab, wi' fancy-witching wiles, beguiles the hour o' dawning day; For tho' they were na very fou, that wicked wee drap in the e'e Has done its turn; untimely now the green grass waves o'er a' the three. 

_Willie brewed a Peck o' Maut_ was soon followed by anotherbacchanalian effusion, the ballad called _The Whistle_. Three lairds, all neighbours of Burns at Ellisland, met at Friars Carse on the 16thof October, 1789, to contend with each other in a drinking-bout. Theprize was an ancient ebony whistle, said to have been brought toScotland in the reign of James the Sixth by a Dane, who, after threedays and three nights' contest in hard drinking, was overcome by SirRobert Laurie, of Maxwelton, with whom the whistle remained as atrophy. It passed into the Riddell family, and now in Burns's time itwas to be again contested for in the same rude orgie. Burns wasappointed the bard to celebrate the contest. Much discussion has beencarried on by his biographers as to whether Burns was present or not. Some maintain that he sat out the drinking-match, and shared the deeppotations. Others, and among these his latest editor, Mr. ScottDouglas, maintain that he was not present that night in body, but onlyin spirit. Anyhow, the ballad remains a monument, if not of hisgenius, at least of his sympathy with that ancient but now happilyexploded form of good fellowship. 

This "mighty claret-shed at the Carse, " and the ballad commemorativeof it, belong to the 16th of October, 1789. It must have been within afew days of that merry-meeting that Burns fell into another and verydifferent mood, which has recorded itself in an immortal lyric. Itwould seem that from the year 1786 onwards, a cloud of melancholy (p.  112)generally gathered over the poet's soul toward the end of each autumn. This October, as the anniversary of Highland Mary's death drew on, hewas observed by his wife to "grow sad about something, and to wandersolitary on the banks of Nith, and about his farmyard in the extremestagitation of mind nearly the whole night. He screened himself on thelee-side of a corn-stack from the cutting edge of the night wind, andlingered till approaching dawn wiped out the stars, one by one, fromthe firmament. " Some more details Lockhart has added, said to havebeen received from Mrs. Burns, but these the latest editor regards asmythical. However this may be, it would appear that it was only afterhis wife had frequently entreated him, that he was persuaded to returnto his home, where he sat down and wrote as they now stand, thesepathetic lines:--

 Thou lingering star, with lessening ray, That lovest to greet the early morn, Again thou usherest in the day My Mary from my soul was torn. O Mary! dear departed shade! Where is thy place of blissful rest? See'st thou thy lover lowly laid? Hear'st thou the groans that rend his breast?

That Burns should have expressed, in such rapid succession, the heightof drunken revelry in _Willie brewed a Peck o' Maut_ and in the balladof _The Whistle_, and then the depth of despondent regret in the lines_To Mary in Heaven_, is highly characteristic of him. To have many moodsbelongs to the poetic nature, but no poet ever passed more rapidlythan Burns from one pole of feeling to its very opposite. Such a poemas this last could not possibly have proceeded from any but the (p.  113)deepest and most genuine feeling. Once again, at the same season, threeyears later (1792), his thoughts went back to Highland Mary, and hepoured forth his last sad wail for her in the simpler, not lesstouching song, beginning--

 Ye banks, and braes, and streams around The castle o' Montgomery! Green be your woods, and fair your flowers, Your waters never drumlie; There simmer first unfauld her robes, And there the langest tarry; For there I took the last Fareweel O' my sweet Highland Mary. 

It would seem as though these retrospects were always accompanied byspecial despondency. For, at the very time he composed this lattersong, he wrote thus to his faithful friend, Mrs. Dunlop:--

"Alas! who would wish for many years? What is it but to drag existenceuntil our joys gradually expire, and leave us in a night of misery, like the gloom which blots out the stars, one by one from the face ofheaven, and leaves us without a ray of comfort in the howling waste?"

To fits of hypochondria and deep dejection he had, as he himself tellsus, been subject from his earliest manhood, and he attributes toovertoil in boyhood this tendency which was probably a part of hisnatural temperament. To a disposition like his, raptures, exaltations, agonies came as naturally as a uniform neutral-tinted existence tomore phlegmatic spirits. But we may be sure that every cause ofself-reproach which his past life had stored up in his memory tendedto keep him more and more familiar with the lower pole in thatfluctuating scale. 

Besides these several poems which mark the variety of moods which (p.  114)swept over him during the summer and autumn of 1789, there was also acontinual succession of songs on the anvil in preparation forJohnson's _Museum_. This work of song-making, begun during his secondwinter in Edinburgh, was carried on with little intermission duringall the Ellisland period. The songs were on all kinds of subjects, andof all degrees of excellence, but hardly one, even the most trivial, was without some small touch which could have come from no hand butthat of Burns. Sometimes they were old songs with a stanza or twoadded. Oftener an old chorus or single line was taken up, and made thehint out of which a new and original song was woven. At other timesthey were entirely original both in subject and in expression, thoughcast in the form of the ancient minstrelsy. Among so many and sorapidly succeeding efforts, it was only now and then, when a happiermoment of inspiration was granted him, that there came forth one songof supreme excellence, perfect alike in conception and in expression. The consummate song of this summer, 1789, was _John Anderson my Jo, John_, just as _Auld Lang Syne_ and _The Silver Tassie_ had been thoseof the former year. 

During the remainder of the year 1789 Burns seems to have continuedmore or less in the mood of mind indicated by the lines _To Mary inHeaven_. He was suffering from nervous derangement, and this, as usualwith him, made him despondent. This is the way in which he writes toMrs. Dunlop on the 13th December, 1789:--

"I am groaning under the miseries of a diseased nervous system--asystem, the state of which is most conducive to our happiness, or themost productive of our misery. For now near three weeks I have been soill with a nervous headache, that I have been obliged for a time togive up my Excise-books, being scarce able to lift my head, much (p.  115)less to ride once a week over ten muir parishes. What is man?... "

And then he goes on to moralize in a half-believing, half-doubtingkind of way, on the probability of a life to come, and ends byspeaking of or rather apostrophizing Jesus Christ in a strain whichwould seem to savour of Socinianism. This letter he calls "adistracted scrawl which the writer dare scarcely read. " And yet itappears to have been deliberately copied with some amplification froman entry in his last year's commonplace book. Even the few passagesfrom his correspondence already given are enough to show that therewas in Burns's letter-writing something strained and artificial. Butsuch discoveries as this seem to reveal an extent of effort, and evenof artifice, which one would hardly otherwise have guessed at. 

In the same strain of harassment as the preceding extract, butpointing to another and more definite cause of it, is the following, written on the 20th December, 1789, to Provost Maxwell of Lochmaben:--

"My poor distracted mind is so torn, so jaded, so racked andbedevilled with the task of the superlatively damned, to make oneguinea do the business of three, that I detest, abhor, and swoon atthe very word business, though no less than four letters of my veryshort surname are in it. " The rest of the letter goes off in a wildrollicking strain, inconsistent enough with his more serious thoughts. But the part of it above given points to a very real reason for hisgrowing discontent with Ellisland. 

By the beginning of 1790 the hopelessness of his farming prospectspressed on him still more heavily, and formed one ingredient in themental depression with which he saw a new year dawn. Whether he didwisely in attempting the Excise business, who shall now say? In (p.  116)one respect it seemed a substantial gain. But this gain was accompaniedby counterbalancing disadvantages. The new duties more and morewithdrew him from the farm, which, in order to give it any chance ofpaying, required not only the aid of the master's hand, but theundivided oversight of the master's eye. In fact, farming to profitand Excise-work were incompatible, and a very few months' trial musthave convinced Burns of this. But besides rendering regular farmindustry impossible, the weekly absences from home, which his newduties entailed, had other evil consequences. They brought with themcontinual mental distraction, which forbade all sustained poeticeffort, and laid him perilously open to indulgences which were sure toundermine regular habits and peace of mind. About this time (thebeginning of 1790), we begin to hear of frequent visits to Dumfries onExcise business, and of protracted lingerings at a certain _howff_, place of resort, called the Globe Tavern, which boded no good. Therewere also intromissions with a certain company of players thenresident in Dumfries, and writings of such prologues for theirsecond-rate pieces, as many a penny-a-liner could have done to orderas well. Political ballads, too, came from his pen, siding with thisor that party in local elections, all which things as we read, we feelas if we saw some noble high-bred racer harnessed to a dust-cart. 

His letters during the first half of 1790 betoken the same restless, unsatisfied spirit as those written towards the end of the previousyear. Only we must be on our guard against interpreting his real stateof mind too exclusively from his letters. For it seems to have beenhis habit when writing to his friends to take one mood of mind, (p.  117)which happened to be uppermost in him for the moment, and with whichhe knew that his correspondent sympathized, and to dwell on this soexclusively that for the moment it filled his whole mental horizon, and shut out every other thought. And not this only, which is thetendency of all ardent and impulsive natures, but we cannot altogetherexcuse Burns of at times half-consciously exaggerating these momentarymoods, almost for certain stage effects which they produced. It isnecessary, therefore, in estimating his real condition at any time, toset against the account, which he gives of himself in his letters, theevidence of other facts, such as the testimony of those who met himfrom time to time, and who have left some record of those interviews. This I shall now do for the first half of the year 1790, and shallplace, over against his self-revelations, some observations which showhow he at this time appeared to others. 

An intelligent man named William Clark, who had served Burns as aploughman at Ellisland during the winter half-year of 1789-90, survived till 1838, and in his old age gave this account of his formermaster: "Burns kept two men and two women servants, but he invariablywhen at home took his meals with his wife and family in the littleparlour. " Clark thought he was as good a manager of land as most ofthe farmers in the neighbourhood. The farm of Ellisland was moderatelyrented, and was susceptible of much improvement, had improvement beenthen in repute. Burns sometimes visited the neighbouring farmers, andthey returned the compliment; but that way of spending time was not socommon then as now. No one thought that the poet and his writingswould be so much noticed afterwards. He kept nine or ten milch (p.  118)cows, some young cattle, four horses, and several pet sheep: of thelatter he was very fond. During the winter and spring-time, when notengaged in Excise business, "he sometimes held the plough for an houror two for him (W. Clark), and was a fair workman. During seed-time, Burns might be frequently seen at an early hour in the fields with hissowing sheet; but as he was often called away on business, he did notsow the whole of his grain. "

This old man went on to describe Burns as a kindly and indulgentmaster, who spoke familiarly to his servants, both at home anda-field; quick-tempered, when anything put him out, but quicklypacified. Once only Clark saw him really angry, when one of the lasseshad nearly choked one of the cows by giving her potatoes not cut smallenough. Burns's looks, gestures, and voice were then terrible. Clarkslunk out of the way, and when he returned, his master was quite calmagain. When there was extra work to be done, he would give hisservants a dram, but he was by no means _over-flush_ in this way. During the six months of his service, Clark never once saw Burnsintoxicated or incapable of managing his business. The poet, when athome, used to wear a broad blue bonnet, a long-tailed coat, drab orblue, corduroy breeches, dark blue stockings, with _cootikens_ orgaiters. In cold weather he would have a plaid of black and whitecheck wrapped round his shoulders. The same old man described Mrs. Burns as a good and prudent housewife, keeping everything neat andtidy, well liked by her servants, for whom she provided good andabundant fare. When they parted, Burns paid Clark his wages in full, gave him a written character, and a shilling for a _fairing_. 

In the summer or autumn of the same year, the scholarly Ramsay of (p.  119)Ochtertyre in the course of a tour looked in on Burns, and here is therecord of his visit which Ramsay gave in a letter to Currie. "Seeinghim pass quickly near Closeburn, I said to my companion, 'That isBurns. ' On coming to the inn the hostler told us he would be back in afew hours to grant permits; that where he met with anything seizable, he was no better than any other gauger; in everything else that he wasperfectly a gentleman. After leaving a note to be delivered to him onhis return, I proceeded to his house, being curious to see his Jean. Iwas much pleased with his 'uxor Sabina qualis, ' and the poet's modestmansion, so unlike the habitation of ordinary rustics. In the eveninghe suddenly bounced in upon us, and said, as he entered, 'I come, touse the words of Shakespeare, _stewed in haste_. ' In fact, he hadridden incredibly fast after receiving my note. We fell intoconversation directly, and soon got into the _mare magnum_ of poetry. He told me he had now gotten a subject for a drama, which he was tocall _Rob McQuechan's Elshin_, from a popular story of Robert Brucebeing defeated on the water of Cairn, when the heel of his boot havingloosened in his flight, he applied to Robert MacQuechan to fit it, who, to make sure, ran his awl nine inches up the king's heel. We werenow going on at a great rate, when Mr. Stewart popped in his head, which put a stop to our discourse, which had become very interesting. Yet in a little while it was resumed, and such was the force andversatility of the bard's genius, that he made the tears run down Mr. Stewart's cheeks, albeit unused to the poetic strain. From that timewe met no more, and I was grieved at the reports of him afterwards. Poor Burns! we shall hardly ever see his like again. He was, in truth, a sort of comet in literature, irregular in its motions, which did (p.  120)no good, proportioned to the blaze of light it displayed. "

It seems that during this autumn there came a momentary blink inBurns's clouded sky, a blink which alas never brightened into fullsunshine. He had been but a year in the Excise employment, when, through the renewed kindness of Mr. Graham of Fintray, there seemed anear prospect of his being promoted to a supervisorship, which wouldhave given him an income of 200_l. _ a year. So probable at the timedid it seem, that his friend Nicol wrote to Ainslie expressing somefears that the poet might turn his back on his old friends when to thepride of applauded genius was added the pride of office and income. This may have been ironical on Nicol's part, but he might have sparedhis irony on his friend, for the promotion never came. 

But what had Burns been doing for the last year in poetic production?In this respect--the whole interval between the composition of thelines _To Mary in Heaven_, in October, 1789, and the autumn of thesucceeding year, is almost a blank. Three electioneering ballads, besides a few trivial pieces, make up the whole. There is not a linewritten by him during this year which, if it were deleted from hisworks, would anyway impair his poetic fame. But this long barrennesswas atoned for by a burst of inspiration which came on him, in thefall of 1790, and struck off at one heat the matchless _Tale of Tam o'Shanter_. It was to the meeting already noticed of Burns with CaptainGrose, the antiquary, at Friars Carse, that we owe this wonderfulpoem. The poet and the antiquary suited each other exactly, and theysoon became

 Unco pack and thick thegither. 

Burns asked his friend when he reached Ayrshire to make a drawing (p.  121)of Alloway kirk, and include it in his sketches, for it was dear tohim because it was the resting-place of his father, and there hehimself might some day lay his bones. To induce Grose to do this, Burns told him that Alloway kirk was the scene of many witch storiesand weird sights. The antiquary replied, "Write you a poem on thescene, and I'll put in the verses with an engraving of the ruin. "Burns having found a fitting day and hour, when "his barmy noddle wasworking prime, " walked out to his favourite path down the western bankof the river. 

The poem was the work of one day, of which Mrs. Burns retained a vividrecollection. Her husband had spent most of the day by the river side, and in the afternoon she joined him with her two children. He wasbusily engaged _crooning to himsel_; and Mrs. Burns, perceiving thather presence was an interruption, loitered behind with her little onesamong the broom. Her attention was presently attracted by the strangeand wild gesticulations of the bard, who was now seen at somedistance, agonized with an ungovernable access of joy. He was recitingvery loud, and with tears rolling down his cheeks, those animatedverses which he had just conceived, --

 Now Tam! O Tam! had thae been queans, A' plump and strappin' in their teens. '

"I wish ye had seen him, " said his wife; "he was in such ecstasy thatthe tears were happing down his cheeks. " These last words are given byAllan Cunningham, in addition to the above account, which Lockhart gotfrom a manuscript journal of Cromek. The poet having committed theverses to writing on the top of his sod-dyke above the water, (p.  122)came into the house, and read them immediately in high triumph at thefireside. 

Thus in the case of two of Burns's best poems, we have an account ofthe bard as he appeared in his hour of inspiration, not to anyliterary friend bent on pictorial effect, but from the plain narrativeof his simple and admiring wife. Burns speaks of _Tam o' Shanter_ ashis first attempt at a tale in verse--unfortunately it was also hislast. He himself regarded it as his master-piece of all his poems, andposterity has not, I believe, reversed the judgment. 

In this, one of his happiest flights, Burns's imagination bore himfrom the vale of Nith back to the banks of Doon, and to the weirdtales he had there heard in childhood, told by the winter firesides. The characters of the poem have been identified; that of Tam is takenfrom a farmer, Douglas Graham, who lived at the farm of Shanter, inthe parish of Kirkoswald. He had a scolding wife, called HelenMcTaggart, and the tombstones of both are pointed out in Kirkoswaldkirkyard. Souter Johnnie is more uncertain, but is supposed, with someprobability, to have been John Davidson, a shoemaker, who lies buriedin the same place. Yet, from Burns's poem we would gather that thislatter lived in Ayr. But these things matter little. From hisexperience of the smuggling farmers of Kirkoswald, among whom "hefirst became acquainted with scenes of swaggering and riot, " and hisremembrance of the tales that haunted the spot where he passed hischildhood, combined with his knowledge of the peasantry, their habitsand superstitions, Burns's imagination wove the inimitable tale. 

After this, the best poetic offspring of the Ellisland period, Burnscomposed only a few short pieces during his tenancy of that farm. (p.  123)Among these, however, was one which cannot be passed over. In January, 1791, the Earl of Glencairn, who had been his first, and, it may bealmost said, his only real friend and patron among the Scottishpeerage, died at the early age of forty-two, just as he returned toFalmouth after a vain search for health abroad. Burns had always lovedand honoured Lord Glencairn, as well he might, --although hislordship's gentleness had not always missed giving offence to thepoet's sensitive and proud spirit. Yet on the whole he was the bestpatron whom Burns had found, or was ever to find among his countrymen. When then he heard of the earl's death, he mourned his loss as that ofa true friend, and poured forth a fine lament, which concludes withthe following well-known lines:--

 The bridegroom may forget the bride, Was made his wedded wife yestreen; The monarch may forget the crown, That on his head an hour has been; The mother may forget the child, That smiles sae sweetly on her knee; But I'll remember thee, Glencairn, And a' that thou hast done for me. 

Burns's elegies, except when they are comical, are not among hishappiest efforts. Some of them are frigid and affected. But this wasthe genuine language of sincere grief. He afterwards showed thepermanence of his affection by calling one of his boys JamesGlencairn. 

A few songs make up the roll of the Ellisland productions during 1791. One only of these is noteworthy--that most popular song, _The Banks o'Doon_. His own words in sending it to a friend are these:--"March, 1791. While here I sit, sad and solitary, by the side of a fire, (p.  124)in a little country inn, and drying my wet clothes, in pops a poorfellow of a sodger, and tells me he is going to Ayr. By heavens! say Ito myself, with a tide of good spirits, which the magic of that sound, 'Auld Toon o' Ayr, ' conjured up, I will send my last song to Mr. Ballantine. "

Then he gives the second and best version of the song, beginningthus--

 Ye flowery banks o' bonnie Doon, How can ye blume sae fair? How can ye chant, ye little birds, And I sae fu' o' care!

The latest edition of Burns's works, by Mr. Scott Douglas, gives threedifferent versions of this song. Any one who will compare these, willsee the truth of that remark of the poet, in one of his letters to Dr. Moore, "I have no doubt that the knack, the aptitude to learn theMuses' trade is a gift bestowed by Him who forms the secret bias ofthe soul; but I as firmly believe that excellence in the profession isthe fruit of industry, attention, labour, and pains; at least I amresolved to try my doctrine by the test of experience. "

The second version was that which Burns wrought out by carefulrevision, from an earlier one. Compare, for instance, with the versegiven above, the first verse as originally struck off, --

 Sweet are the banks, the banks of Doon, The spreading flowers are fair, And everything is blythe and glad, But I am fu' of care. 

And the other changes he made on the first draught are all in the (p.  125)way of improvement. It is painful to know, on the authority of AllanCunningham, that he who composed this pure and perfect song, and manyanother such, sometimes chose to work in baser metal, and thatsong-ware of a lower kind escaped from his hands into the press, andcould never afterwards be recalled. 

 * * * * *

When Burns told Dr. Moore that he was resolved to try by the test ofexperience the doctrine that good and permanent poetry could not becomposed without industry and pains, he had in view other and widerplans of composition than any which he ever realized. He told Ramsayof Ochtertyre, as we have seen, that he had in view to render intopoetry a tradition he had found of an adventure in humble life whichBruce met with during his wanderings. Whether he ever did more thanthink over the story of Rob McQuechan's Elshin, or into what poeticform he intended to cast it, we know not. As Sir Walter said, any poemhe might have produced on this subject would certainly have wantedthat tinge of chivalrous feeling which the manners of the age and thecharacter of the king alike demanded. But with Burns's ardentadmiration of Bruce, and that power of combining the most homely andhumorous incidents with the pathetic and the sublime, which hedisplayed in _Tam o' Shanter_, we cannot but regret that he never hadthe leisure and freedom from care, which would have allowed him to tryhis hand on a subject so entirely to his mind. 

Besides this, he had evidently, during his sojourn at Ellisland, meditated some large dramatic attempt. He wrote to one of hiscorrespondents that he had set himself to study Shakespeare, andintended to master all the greatest dramatists, both of England (p.  126)and France, with a view to a dramatic effort of his own. If hehad attempted it in pure English, we may venture to predict that hewould have failed. But had he allowed himself that free use of theScottish dialect of which he was the supreme master, especially if hehad shaped the subject into a lyrical drama, no one can say what hemight not have achieved. Many of his smaller poems show that hepossessed the genuine dramatic vein. _The Jolly Beggars_, unpleasantas from its grossness it is, shows the presence of this vein in a veryhigh degree, seeing that from materials so unpromising he could makeso much. As Mr. Lockhart has said, "That extraordinary sketch, coupledwith his later lyrics in a higher vein, is enough to show that in himwe had a master capable of placing the musical drama on a level withthe loftiest of our classical forms. "

Regrets have been expressed that Burns, instead of addressing himselfto these high poetic enterprises, which had certainly hovered beforehim, frittered away so much of his time in composing for musicalcollections a large number of songs, the very abundance of which musthave lessened their quality. And yet it may be doubted whether thisurgent demand for songs, made on him by Johnson and Thomson, was notthe only literary call to which he would in his circumstances haveresponded. These calls could be met by sudden efforts, at leisuremoments, when some occasional blink of momentary inspiration came overhim. Great poems necessarily presuppose that the original inspirationis sustained by concentrated purpose and long-sustained effort; mentalhabits, which to a nature like Burns must have at all times beendifficult, and which his circumstances during his later years renderedsimply impossible. From the first he had seen that his farm would (p.  127)not pay, and each succeeding year confirmed him in this conviction. Toescape what he calls "the crushing grip of poverty, which, alas! Ifear, is less or more fatal to the worth and purity of the noblestsouls, " he had, within a year after entering Ellisland, recourse toExcise work. This he did from a stern sense of duty to his wife andfamily. It was, in fact, one of the most marked instances in whichBurns, contrary to his too frequent habit, put pride in his pocket, and sacrificed inclination to duty. But that he had not accepted theyoke without some painful sense of degradation, is shown by thebitterness of many of his remarks, when in his correspondence healludes to the subject. There were, however, times when he tried totake a brighter view of it, and to persuade himself, as he says in aletter to Lady Harriet Don, that "one advantage he had in this newbusiness was the knowledge it gave him of the various shades ofcharacter in man--consequently assisting him in his trade as a poet. "But, alas! whatever advantages in this way it might have brought, werecounteracted tenfold by other circumstances that attended it. Thecontinual calls of a responsible business, itself sufficient to occupya man, --when divided with the oversight of his farm, overtasked hispowers, and left him no leisure for poetic work, except from time totime crooning over a random song. Then the habits which his rovingExcise life must have induced were, even to a soul less social thanthat of Burns, perilous in the extreme. The temptations he was in thisway exposed to, Lockhart has drawn with a powerful hand. "From thecastle to the cottage, every door flew open at his approach; and theold system of hospitality, then flourishing, rendered it difficultfor the most soberly inclined guest to rise from any man's board (p.  128)in the same trim that he sat down to it. The farmer, if Burns was seenpassing, left his reapers, and trotted by the side of Jenny Geddes, until he could persuade the bard that the day was hot enough to demandan extra libation. If he entered an inn at midnight, after all theinmates were in bed, the news of his arrival circulated from thecellar to the garret; and ere ten minutes had elapsed, the landlordand all his guests were assembled round the ingle; the largestpunch-bowl was produced, and, --

 Be ours to-night--who knows what comes to-morrow?

was the language of every eye in the circle that welcomed him. Thehighest gentry of the neighbourhood, when bent on special merriment, did not think the occasion complete unless the wit and eloquence ofBurns were called in to enliven their carousals. "

It can readily be imagined how distracting such a life must have been, how fatal to all mental concentration on high objects, not to speak ofthe habits, of which it was too sure to sow the seeds. The frequentvisits to Dumfries, which his Excise work entailed, and the hauntingof the Globe Tavern, already spoken of, led to consequences, whichmore than even deep potations, must have been fatal to his peace. 

His stay at Ellisland is now hastening to a close. Before passing, however, from that, on the whole the best period of his life sincemanhood, one or two incidents of the spring of 1791 must be mentioned. In the February of that year Burns received from the Rev. ArchibaldAlison, Episcopalian clergyman in Edinburgh, a copy of his once famous, but now, I believe, forgotten, _Essay on Taste_, which contained (p.  129)the authorized exposition of that theory, so congenial to Scotchmetaphysics, that objects seem beautiful to us only because our mindsassociate them with sensible objects which have previously given uspleasure. In his letter to the author, acknowledging the receipt ofhis book, Burns says, "I own, sir, at first glance, several of yourpropositions startle me as paradoxical: that the martial clangour of atrumpet had something in it vastly more grand, heroic, and sublimethan the twingle-twangle of a Jew's-harp; that the delicate flexure ofa rose-twig, when the half-blown flower is heavy with the tears of thedawn, was infinitely more beautiful and elegant than the upright stubof a burdock; and that from something innate and independent of allassociation of ideas--these I had set down as irrefragable orthodoxtruths until perusing your book shook my faith. " These words so piercethis soap-bubble of the metaphysicians, that we can hardly read themwithout fancying that the poet meant them to be ironical. DugaldSteward expressed surprise that the unschooled Ayrshire ploughmanshould have formed "a distinct conception of the general principles ofthe doctrine of association;" on which Mr. Carlyle remarks, "We ratherthink that far subtler things than the doctrine of association hadbeen of old familiar to him. "

In looking over his letters at this time (1791), we are startled by afierce outburst in one of them, apparently apropos of nothing. He hadbeen recommending to the protection of an Edinburgh friend aschoolmaster, whom he thought unjustly persecuted, when all at once hebreaks out: "God help the children of Dependence! Hated and persecutedby their enemies, and too often, alas! almost unexceptionally, receivedby their friends with disrespect and reproach, under the thin disguiseof cold civility and humiliating advice. Oh to be a sturdy savage, (p.  130)stalking in the pride of his independence, amid the solitary wilds ofhis deserts, rather than in civilized life helplessly to tremble for asubsistence, precarious as the caprice of a fellow-creature! Every manhas his virtues, and no man is without his failings; and curse on thatprivileged plain-speaking of friendship which, in the hour of mycalamity, cannot reach forth the helping-hand without at the same timepointing out those failings, and apportioning them their share inprocuring my present distress.... I do not want to be independent thatI may sin, but I want to be independent in my sinning. "

What may have been the cause of this ferocious explosion there is noexplanation. Whether the real source of it may not have lain incertain facts which had occurred during the past spring, that musthave rudely broken in on the peace at once of his conscience and hishome, we cannot say. Certainly it does seem, as Chambers suggests, like one of those sudden outbursts of temper which fasten on some merepassing accident, because the real seat of it lies too deep for words. Some instances of the same temper we have already seen. This is asample of a growing exasperation of spirit, which found expressionfrom time to time till the close of his life. 

Let us turn from this painful subject, to one of the only notices weget of him from a stranger's hand during the summer of 1791. TwoEnglish gentlemen, who were travelling, went to visit him; one of whomhas left an amusing account of their reception. Calling at his house, they were told that the poet was by the river-side, and thither theywent in search of him. On a rock that projected into the stream, theysaw a man employed in angling, of a singular appearance. He had a capof fox's skin on his head, a loose great coat fixed round him by a (p.  131)belt, from which depended an enormous Highland broadsword. It wasBurns. He received them with great cordiality, and asked them to sharehis humble dinner--an invitation which they accepted. "On the tablethey found boiled beef, with vegetables and barley broth, after themanner of Scotland. After dinner the bard told them ingenuously thathe had no wine, nothing better than Highland whiskey, a bottle ofwhich he set on the board. He produced at the same time his punch-bowl, made of Inverary marble; and, mixing it with water and sugar, filledtheir glasses and invited them to drink. The travellers were in haste, and, besides, the flavour of the whiskey to their southern palates wasscarcely tolerable; but the generous poet offered them his best, andhis ardent hospitality they found impossible to resist. Burns was inhis happiest mood, and the charm of his conversation was altogetherfascinating. He ranged over a variety of topics, illuminating whateverhe touched. He related the tales of his infancy and youth; he recitedsome of his gayest and some of his tenderest poems; in the wildest ofhis strains of mirth he threw in some touches of melancholy, andspread around him the electric emotions of his powerful mind. TheHighland whiskey improved in its flavour; the marble bowl was againand again emptied and replenished; the guests of our poet forgot theflight of time and the dictates of prudence; at the hour of midnightthey lost their way to Dumfries, and could scarcely distinguish itwhen assisted by the morning's dawn. There is much naïveté in the waythe English visitor narrates his experience of that 'nicht wi' Burns. "

Mr. Carlyle, if we remember aright, has smiled incredulously at (p.  132)the story of the fox-skin cap, the belt, and the broadsword. But ofthe latter appendage this is not the only record. Burns himselfmentions it as a frequent accompaniment of his when he went out by theriver. 

The punch-bowl here mentioned is the one which his father-in-law hadwrought for him as a marriage-gift. It was, when Chambers wrote hisbiography of Burns, in the possession of Mr. Haistie, then M. P. ForPaisley, who is said to have refused for it three hundred guineas--"asum, " says Chambers, "that would have set Burns on his legs for ever. "

This is the last glimpse we get of the poet in his home at Ellislandtill the end came. We have seen that he had long determined ifpossible to get rid of his farm. He had sunk in it all the proceedsthat remained to him from the sale of the second edition of his poems, and for this the crops he had hitherto reaped had given no adequatereturn. Three years, however, were a short trial, and there was a goodtime coming for all farmers, when the war with France broke out, andraised the value of farm produce to a hitherto unknown amount. IfBurns could but have waited for that!--but either he could not, or hewould not wait. But the truth is, even if Burns ever had it in him tosucceed as a farmer, that time was past when he came to Ellisland. Independence at the plough-tail, of which he often boasted, was nolonger possible for him. He could no more work as he had done of yore. The habits contracted in Edinburgh had penetrated too deeply. Even ifhe had not been withdrawn from his farm by Excise duties, he couldneither work continuously himself, nor make his servants work. "Faith, " said a neighbouring farmer, "how could he miss but fail? (p.  133)He brought with him a bevy of servants from Ayrshire. The lassesdid nothing but bake bread (that is, oat-cakes), and the lads sat bythe fireside and ate it warm with ale. " Burns meanwhile enjoyinghimself at the house of some jovial farmer or convivial laird. Howcould he miss but fail?

When he had resolved on giving up his farm, an arrangement was come towith the Laird of Dalswinton by which Burns was allowed to throw uphis lease and sell off his crops. The sale took place in the last weekin August (1791). Even at this day the auctioneer and the bottlealways appear side by side, as Chambers observes; but then far morethan now-a-days. After the roup, that is the sale, of his crop wasover, Burns, in one of his letters, describes the scene that tookplace within and without his house. It was one which exceeded anythinghe had ever seen in drunken horrors. Mrs. Burns and her familyfortunately were not there to witness it, having gone many weeksbefore to Ayrshire, probably to be out of the way of all the pain thataccompanies the breaking up of a country home. When Burns gave up hislease, Mr. Miller, the landlord, sold Ellisland to a stranger, becausethe farm was an outlying one, inconveniently situated, on a differentside of the river from the rest of his estate. It was in November orDecember that Burns sold off his farm-stock and implements ofhusbandry, and moved his family and furniture into the town ofDumfries, leaving at Ellisland no memorial of himself, as AllanCunningham tells us, "but a putting-stone with which he loved toexercise his strength, and 300_l. _ of his money, sunk beyondredemption in a speculation from which all had augured happiness. "

It is not without deep regret that even now we think of Burns's (p.  134)departure from this beautiful spot. If there was any position on earthin which he could have been happy and fulfilled his genius, it wouldhave been on such a farm--always providing that it could have givenhim the means of a comfortable livelihood, and that he himself couldhave guided his ways aright. That he might have had a fair opportunity, how often one has wished that he could have met some landlord whocould have acted towards him, as the present Duke of Buccleuch didtowards the Ettrick Shepherd in his later days, and have given a farmon which he could have sat rent-free. Such an act, one is apt tofancy, would have been honourable alike to giver and receiver. Indeed, a truly noble nature would have been only too grateful to find such anopportunity put in his way of employing a small part of his wealth forso good an end. But the notions of modern society, founded as they areso entirely on individual independence, for the most part preclude thedoing and the receiving of such favours. And with this social feelingno man was ever more filled than Burns. 

CHAPTER VI. (p.  135)

MIGRATION TO DUMFRIES. 

A great change it must have been to pass from the pleasant holms andbroomy banks of the Nith at Ellisland to a town home in the Wee Vennelof Dumfries. It was, moreover, a confession visible to the world ofwhat Burns himself had long felt, that his endeavour to combine theactual and the ideal, his natural calling as a farmer with theexercise of his gift as a poet, had failed, and that henceforth hemust submit to a round of toil, which, neither in itself nor in itssurroundings, had anything to redeem it from commonplace drudgery. Hemust have felt from the time when he first became Exciseman, that hehad parted company with all thought of steadily working out his ideal, and that whatever he might now do in that way must be by randomsnatches. To his proud spirit the name of gauger must have been galland wormwood, and it is much to his credit that for the sake of hiswife and children he was content to undergo what he often felt to be asocial obloquy. It would have been well for him if this had been theonly drawback to his new calling. Unfortunately the life into which itled him, exposed him to those very temptations which his nature wasleast able to withstand. If social indulgence and irregular habits hadsomewhat impaired his better resolves, and his power of poetic (p.  136)concentration, before he left Ellisland, Dumfries, and the societyinto which it threw him, did with increased rapidity the fatal workwhich had been already begun. His biographers, though with varyingdegrees of emphasis, on the whole agree, that from the time he settledin Dumfries, "his moral course was downwards. "

The social condition of Dumfries at the time when Burns went to livein it was neither better nor worse than that of other provincial townsin Scotland. What that was, Dr. Chambers has depicted from his ownyouthful experience of just such another country town. The curse ofsuch towns, he tells us, was that large numbers of their inhabitantswere either half or wholly idle; either men living on competences, with nothing to do, or shopkeepers with their time but half employed;their only amusement to meet in taverns, soak, gossip, and make stupidpersonal jokes. "The weary waste of spirits and energy at thosesoaking evening meetings was deplorable. Insipid toasts, pettyraillery, empty gabble about trivial occurrences, endless disputes onsmall questions of fact, these relieved now and then by a song, "--suchChambers describes as the items which made up provincial town life inhis younger days. "A life, " he says, "it was without progress orprofit, or anything that tended to moral elevation. " For such dullcompanies to get a spirit like Burns among them, to enliven them withhis wit and eloquence, what a windfall it must have been! But for himto put his time and his powers at their disposal, how great thedegradation! During the day, no doubt, he was employed busily enoughin doing his duty as an Exciseman. This could now be done with lesstravelling than in the Ellisland days, and did not require him asformerly to keep a horse. When the day's work was over, his small (p.  137)house in the Wee Vennel, and the domestic hearth with the familyties gathered round it, were not enough for him. At Ellisland he hadsung, --

 To make a happy fire-side clime, For weans and wife, Is the true pathos and sublime Of human life. 

But it is one thing to sing wisely, another to practise wisdom. Toofrequently at nights Burns's love of sociality and excitement drovehim forth to seek the companionship of neighbours and drouthy cronies, who gathered habitually at the Globe Tavern and other such haunts. From these he was always sure to meet a warm welcome, abundantappreciation, and even flattery, for to this he was not inaccessible, while their humble station did not jar in any way on his socialprejudices, nor their mediocre talents interfere with his love ofpre-eminence. In such companies Burns no doubt had the gratificationof feeling that he was, what is proverbially called, cock of the walk. The desire to be so probably grew with that growing dislike to therich and the titled, which was observed in him after he came toDumfries. In earlier days we have seen that he did not shrink from thesociety of the greatest magnates, and when they showed him thatdeference which he thought his due, he even enjoyed it. But now sobitter had grown his scorn and dislike of the upper classes, that weare told that if any one named a lord, or alluded to a man of rank inhis presence, he instantly "crushed the offender in an epigram, orinsulted him by some sarcastic sally. " In a letter written during hisfirst year at Dumfries, this is the way he speaks of his dailyoccupations:--"Hurry of business, grinding the faces of the (p.  138)publican and the sinner on the merciless wheels of the Excise, makingballads, and then drinking and singing them; and over and above all, correcting the press of two different publications. " But besides theseduties by day, and the convivialities by night, there were other callson his time and strength, to which Burns was by his reputationexposed. When those of the country gentry whom he still knew were inDumfries for some hours, or when any party of strangers passingthrough the town, had an idle evening on their hands, it seems to havebeen their custom to summon Burns to assist them in spending it; andhe was weak enough, on receiving the message, to leave his home andadjourn to the Globe, the George, or the King's Arms, there to drinkwith them late into the night, and waste his powers for theiramusement. Verily, a Samson, as has been said, making sport forPhilistines!

To one such invitation his impromptu answer was--

 The king's most humble servant, I Can scarcely spare a minute; But I'll be with you by-and-by, Or else the devil's in it. 

And this we may be sure was the spirit of many another reply to theseill-omened invitations. It would have been well if, on theseoccasions, the pride he boasted of had stood him in better stead, andrepelled such unjustifiable intrusions. But in this, as in so manyother respects, Burns was the most inconsistent of men. 

From the time of his migration to Dumfries, it would appear that hewas gradually dropped out of acquaintance by most of the Dumfriesshirelairds, as he had long been by the parochial and all other (p.  139)ministers. I have only conversed with one person who remembered in hisboyhood to have seen Burns. He was the son of a Dumfriesshire baronet, the representative of the House of Redgauntlet. The poet wasfrequently in the neighbourhood of the baronet's country seat, but theold gentleman so highly disapproved of "Robbie Burns, " that he forbadehis sons to have anything to do with him. My informant, therefore, though he had often seen, had never spoken to the poet. When Iconversed with him, his age was nigh four score years, and the onething he remembered about Burns was "the blink of his black eye. " Thisis probably but a sample of the feeling with which Burns was regardedby most of the country gentry around Dumfries. What were the variousingredients that made up their dislike of him, it is not easy nowexactly to determine. Politics most likely had a good deal to do withit, for they were Tories and aristocrats, Burns was a Whig andsomething more. Though politics may have formed the chief, they werenot probably the only element in their aversion. Yet though themajority of the county families turned their backs on him, there weresome with which he still continued intimate. 

These were either the few Whig magnates of the southern counties, whose political projects he supported by electioneering ballads, charged with all the powers of sarcasm he could wield; or those stillfewer, whose literary tastes were strong enough to make them willing, for the sake of his genius, to tolerate both his radical politics andhis irregular life. Among these latter was a younger brother ofBurns's old friend, Glen Riddel, Mr. Walter Riddel, who with his wifehad settled at a place four miles from Dumfries, formerly calledGoldie-lea, but named after Mrs. Riddel's maiden name, Woodley (p.  140)Park. Mrs. Riddel was handsome, clever, witty, not without sometincture of letters, and some turn for verse-making. She and herhusband welcomed the poet to Woodley Park, where for two years he wasa constant and favourite guest. The lady's wit and literary tastefound, it may be believed, no other so responsive spirit in all thesouth of Scotland. In the third year came a breach in theirfriendship, followed by a savage lampoon of Burns on the lady, becauseshe did not at once accept his apology; then, a period ofestrangement. After an interval, however, the Riddels forgave theinsult, and were reconciled to the poet, and when the end came, Mrs. Riddel did her best to befriend him, and to do honour to his memorywhen he was gone. 

It ought perhaps to have been mentioned before, that about the time ofBurns's first settling at Dumfries, that is towards the close of 1791, he paid his last visit to Edinburgh. It was occasioned by the newsthat Clarinda was about to sail for the West Indies, in search of thehusband who had forsaken her. Since Burns's marriage the silencebetween them seems to have been broken by only two letters to Clarindafrom Ellisland. In the first of these he resents the name of"villain, " with which she appears to have saluted him. In the secondhe admits that his past conduct had been wrong, but concludes byrepeating his error and enclosing a song addressed to her in the mostexaggerated strain of love. Now he rushed to Edinburgh to see her oncemore before she sailed. The interview was a brief and hurried one, andno record of it remains, except some letters and a few impassionedlyrics which about that time he addressed to her. The first letter isstiff and formal, as if to break the ice of long estrangement. Theothers are in the last strain of rapturous devotion--language (p.  141)which, if feigned, is the height of folly; if real, is worse. Thelyrics are some of them strained and artificial. One, however, standsout from all the rest, as one of the most impassioned effusions thatBurns ever poured forth. It contains that one consummate stanza inwhich Scott, Byron, and many more, saw concentrated "the essence of athousand love-tales, "--

 Had we never loved so kindly, Had we never loved so blindly; Never met, or never parted, We had ne'er been broken-hearted. 

After a time Mrs. M'Lehose returned from the West Indies, but withouthaving recovered her truant husband. On her return, one or two moreletters Burns wrote to her in the old exaggerated strain--the last inJune, 1794--after which Clarinda disappears from the scene. 

Other Delilahs on a smaller scale Burns met with during his Dumfriessojourn, and to these he was ever and anon addressing songs of fanciedlove. By the attentions which the wayward husband was continuallypaying to ladies and others into whose society his wife could notaccompany him, the patience of "bonny Jean, " it may easily beconceived, must have been severely tried. 

It would have been well, however, if stray flirtations and Platonicaffections had been all that could be laid to his charge. But there isa darker story. The facts of it are told by Chambers in connexion withthe earlier part of the Dumfries period, and need not be repeatedhere. Mrs. Burns is said to have been a marvel of long-suffering andforgivingness; but the way she bore those wrongs must have touched herhusband's better nature, and pierced him to the quick. When his calmermoments came, that very mildness must have made him feel, as (p.  142)nothing else could, what self-reproach was, and what

 Self-contempt bitterer to drink than blood. 

To the pangs of that remorse have, I doubt not, been truly attributedthose bitter outpourings of disgust with the world and with society, which are to be found in some of his letters, especially in those ofhis later years. Some samples of these outbreaks have been given, moremight easily have been added. The injuries he may have received fromthe world and society, what were they compared with those which hecould not help feeling that he had inflicted on himself? It is when aman's own conscience is against him that the world looks worst. 

During the first year at Dumfries, Burns for the first time began todabble in politics, which ere long landed him in serious trouble. Before this, though he had passed for a sort of Jacobite, he had beenin reality a Whig. While he lived in Edinburgh he had consorted morewith Whigs than with Tories, but yet he had not in any marked waycommitted himself as a partisan. The only exception to this were someexpressions in his poetry favourable to the Stuarts, and his avoweddislike to the Brunswick dynasty. Yet, notwithstanding these, hisJacobitism was but skin deep. It was only with him, as with so manyanother Scot of that day, the expression of his discontent with theUnion of 1707, and his sense of the national degradation that hadfollowed it. When in song he sighed to see _Jamie come hame_, this wasonly a sentimental protest against the existing order of things. Butby the time he came to Dumfries the day of Jacobitism was over, (p.  143)and the whole aspect of the political heavens seemed dark withcoming change. The French Revolution was in full swing, and vibrationsof it were felt in the remotest corners of Europe. These reached evento the dull provincial towns of Scotland, and roused the pot-housepoliticians with whom Burns consorted, at the Globe and other taverns, to unwonted excitement. Under this new stimulus, Burns's previousJacobitism passed towards the opposite, but not very distant, extremeof Jacobinism. At these gatherings we may easily imagine that, withhis native eloquence, his debating power, trained in the TarboltonClub, and his ambition to shine as a public speaker, the voice ofBurns would be the loudest and most vehement. Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, these were words which must have found an echo in hisinmost heart. But it was not only the abstract rights of man, but theconcrete wrongs of Scotland that would be there discussed. And wrongsno doubt there were, under which Scotland was suffering, ever sincethe Union had destroyed not only her nationality, but almost herpolitical existence. The franchise had become very close--in thecounties restricted to a few of the chief families--in the boroughsthrown into the hands of the Baillies, who were venal beyondconception. It was the day, too, of Henry Dundas. A prominent memberof the Pitt administration, he ruled Scotland as an autocrat, and asthe dispenser of all her patronage. A patriotic autocrat no doubt, loving his country, and providing well for those of her people whom hefavoured--still an autocrat. The despotism of Dundas has beenpictured, in colours we may well believe sufficiently strong, by LordCockburn and others bent on inditing the Epic of Whiggery, in whichthey and their friends should figure as heroes and martyrs. Butwhatever may be said against Dundas's régime, as a permanent (p.  144)system, it must be allowed that this was no time to remodel it whenEngland was face to face with the French troubles. When the tempest isbreaking over the ship, the captain may reasonably be excused forthinking that the moment would be ill chosen for renewing cordage orrepairing timbers. Whatever may have been right in a time of quiet, itwas not unnatural that the Pitt administration should postpone allthoughts of reform, till the vessel of the State had weathered thestorm which was then upon her. 

Besides his conviction as to public wrongs to be redressed, Burns had, he thought, personal grievances to complain of, which, as is so oftenseen, added fuel to his reforming zeal. His great powers, which hebelieved entitled him to a very different position, wereunacknowledged and disregarded by the then dispensers of patronage. Once he had been an admirer of Pitt, latterly he could not bear themention of his name. Of the ministry, Addington, we have seen, wasfully alive to his merits, and pressed his claims on Pitt, who himselfwas quite awake to the charm of Burns's poetry. The Premier, it issaid, "pushed the bottle on to Dundas, and did nothing, "--to Dundas, too practical and too prosaic to waste a thought on poets and poetry. Latterly this neglect of him by public men preyed on the spirit ofBurns, and was seldom absent from his thoughts. It added force, nodoubt, to the rapture with which he, like all the younger poets of thetime, hailed the French Revolution, and the fancied dawn of that day, which would place plebeian genius and worth in those high places, whence titled emptiness and landed incapacity would be at lengththrust ignominiously down. 

Burns had not been more than three months in Dumfries, before he (p.  145)found an opportunity of testifying by deed his sympathy with theFrench Revolutionists. At that time the whole coast of the Solwayswarmed with smuggling vessels, carrying on a contraband traffic, andmanned by men of reckless character, like the Dirk Hatteraick of _GuyMannering_. In 1792, a suspicious-looking brig appeared in the Solway, and Burns, with other excisemen, was set to watch her motions. She gotinto shallow water, when the gaugers, enforced by some dragoons, wadedout to her, and Burns, sword in hand, was the first to board her. Thecaptured brig "Rosamond, " with all her arms and stores, was sold nextday at Dumfries, and Burns became the purchaser of four of her guns. These he sent, with a letter, to the French Legislative Assembly, requesting them to accept the present as a mark of his admiration andsympathy. The guns with the letter never reached their destination. They were, however, intercepted by the Custom-House officers at Dover, and Burns at once became a suspected man in the eye of the Government. Lockhart, who tells this incident, connects with it the song, _TheDeil's awa' wi' the Exciseman_, which Burns, he said, composed whilewaiting on the shore to watch the brig. But Mr. Scott Douglas doubtswhether the song is referable to this occasion. However this may be, the folly of Burns's act can hardly be disputed. He was in the employof Government, and had no right to express in this way his sympathywith a movement, which, he must have known, the Government, under whomhe served, regarded, if not yet with open hostility, at least withjealous suspicion. Men who think it part of their personal right andpublic duty unreservedly to express, by word and deed, their views onpolitics, had better not seek employment in the public service. (p.  146)Burns having once drawn upon himself the suspicions of his superiors, all his words and actions were no doubt closely watched. It was foundthat he 'gat the Gazetteer, ' a revolutionary print published inEdinburgh, which only the most extreme men patronized, and which aftera few months' existence was suppressed by Government. As the year 1792drew to a close, the political heaven, both at home and abroad, becameominously dark. In Paris the king was in prison, the Reign of Terrorhad begun, and innocent blood of loyalists flowed freely in thestreets; the republic which had been established was threatening topropagate its principles in other countries by force of arms. In thiscountry, what at the beginning of the year had been but suspicion ofFrance, was now turned to avowed hostility, and war against therepublic was on the eve of being declared. There were uneasy symptoms, too, at home. Tom Paine's _Rights of Man_ and _Age of Reason_ werespreading questionable doctrines and fomenting disaffection. Societiesnamed Friends of the People were formed in Edinburgh and the chieftowns of Scotland, to demand reform of the representation and otherchanges, which, made at such a time were believed by those in power tocover seditious aims. At such a crisis any government might beexpected to see that all its officers, from the highest to the lowest, were well affected. But though the Reign of Terror had alarmed manyothers who had at first looked favourably on the Revolution in France, Burns's ardour in its cause was no whit abated. He even denounced thewar on which the ministry had determined; he openly reviled the men inpower; and went so far in his avowal of democracy that at a socialmeeting, he proposed as a toast, "Here's the last verse of the (p.  147)last chapter of the last Book of Kings. " This would seem to be but onespecimen of the freedom of political speech in which Burns at thistime habitually indulged, --the truculent way in which he flaunteddefiance in the face of authority. It would not have been surprising, if at any time the Government had ordered inquiry to be made into suchconduct, much less in such a season of anxiety and distrust. That aninquiry was made is undoubted; but as to the result which followed it, there is uncertainty. Some have thought that the poet received fromhis superiors only a slight hint or caution to be more careful infuture. Others believed, that the matter went so far that he was inserious danger of dismissal from his post; and that this was onlyaverted by the timely interposition of some kind and powerful friends. That Burns himself took a serious view of it, and was sufficientlyexcited and alarmed, may be seen from two letters which he wrote, theone at the time of the occurrence, the other soon after it. It wasthus that in December, 1792, he addressed Mr. Graham of Fintray, thesame person whose good offices had at first obtained for the poet hisappointment, and whose kindness never failed him while he lived:--

"Sir, --I have been surprised, confounded, and distracted by Mr. Mitchell, the collector, telling me that he has received an order fromyour Board, to inquire into my political conduct, and blaming me as aperson disaffected to Government. 

"Sir, you are a husband and a father. You know what you would feel tosee the much-loved wife of your bosom, and your helpless, prattlinglittle ones turned adrift into the world, degraded and disgraced froma situation in which they had been respectable and respected, and leftalmost without the necessary support of a miserable existence. (p.  148)

"Alas! sir, must I think that such soon will be my lot! and from thedark insinuations of hellish, groundless envy, too! I believe, sir, Imay aver it, and in the sight of Omniscience, that I would not tell adeliberate falsehood, no, not though even worse horrors, if worse canbe, than those I have mentioned, hung over my head; and I say, thatthe allegation, whatever villain has made it, is a lie! To the BritishConstitution, on revolution principles, next after my God, I am mostdevoutly attached. You, sir, have been much and generously myfriend. --Heaven knows how warmly I have felt the obligation, and howgratefully I have thanked you. Fortune, sir, has made you powerful, and me impotent--has given you patronage, and me dependence. I wouldnot, for my single self, call on your humanity; were such my insular, unconnected situation, I would despise the tear that now swells in myeye. I would brave misfortune--I could face ruin, for at the worstDeath's thousand doors stand open; but the tender concerns that I havementioned, the claims and ties that I see at this moment, and feelaround me, how they unnerve courage and wither resolution! To yourpatronage, as a man of some genius, you have allowed me a claim; andyour esteem, as an honest man, I know is my due. To these, sir, permitme to appeal; by these may I adjure you, to save me from that miserywhich threatens to overwhelm me, and which--with my latest breath Iwill say it--I have not deserved. R. B. "

That this appeal was not without effect may be gathered from a letteron this same affair, which Burns addressed on the 13th April, 1793, toMr. Erskine, of Mar, in which he says one of the supervisors-general, a Mr. Corbet, "was instructed to inquire on the spot, and to (p.  149)document me that my business was to act, _not to think_: and that, whatever might be men or measures, it was for me to be _silent_ and_obedient_. "

Much obloquy has been heaped upon the Excise Board--but on whatgrounds of justice I have never been able to discover--for the way inwhich they on this occasion dealt with Burns. The members of the Boardwere the servants of the Government, to which they were responsiblefor the conduct of all their subordinates. To have allowed any oftheir subordinates to set themselves up by word or deed in oppositionto the Ministry, and especially at such a crisis, was inconsistentwith the ideas of the time as to official duty. And when called on toact, it is hard to see how they could have done so with more leniencythan by hinting to him the remonstrance which so alarmed and irritatedthe recipient of it. Whatever may be said of his alarm, --his irritation, if perhaps natural, was not reasonable. No man has a right to expectthat, because he is a genius, he shall be absolved from those rules ofconduct, either in private or in public life, which are held bindingon his more commonplace brethren. About the time when he received thisrebuke, he wrote to Mrs. Dunlop, "I have set, henceforth, a seal on mylips as to these unlucky politics. " But neither his own resolve northe remonstrance of the Excise Board seem to have weighed much withhim. He continued at convivial parties to express his feelings freely, and at one of these, shortly after he had been rebuked by the ExciseBoard, when the health of William Pitt was drunk, he followed it bycraving a bumper "to the health of a much better man--GeneralWashington. " And on a subsequent occasion, as we shall see, he broughthimself into trouble by giving an injudicious toast. The (p.  150)repression brought to bear on Burns cannot have been very stringentwhen he was still free to sport such sentiments. The worst effect ofthe remonstrance he received seems to have been to irritate histemper, and to depress his spirits by the conviction, unfounded thoughit was, that all hope of promotion for him was over. 

But amid all the troubles entailed on him by his conduct, domestic, social, and political, the chief refuge and solace which he found, wasin exercising his gifts of song. All hope of his ever achieving agreat poem, which called for sustained effort, was now over. Evenpoems descriptive of rustic life and characters, such as he hadsketched in his Ayrshire days--for these he had now no longer eithertime or inclination. His busy and distracted life, however, left himleisure from time to time to give vent to his impulses, or to soothehis feelings by short arrow-flights of song. He found in his ownexperience the truth of those words of another poet, --

 They can make who fail to find Short leisure even in busiest days, Moments to cast a look behind, And profit by those kindly rays, Which through the clouds will sometimes steal, And all the far-off past reveal. 

Such breaks in the clouds he eagerly waited for, and turned everygolden gleam to song. 

It may be remembered that while Burns was in Edinburgh he becameacquainted with James Johnson, who was engaged in collecting the Songsof Scotland in a work called the _Musical Museum_. He had at oncethrown himself ardently into Johnson's undertaking, and put all hispower of traditional knowledge, of criticism, and of originalcomposition at Johnson's disposal. This he continued to do through (p.  151)all the Ellisland period, and more or less during his residence inDumfries. To the _Museum_ Burns from first to last gratuitouslycontributed not less than one hundred and eighty-four songs original, altered, or collected. 

During the first year that Burns lived in Dumfries, in September, 1792, he received an invitation from Mr. George Thomson, to lend theaid of his lyrical genius to a collection of Scottish melodies, airs, and words, which a small band of musical amateurs in Edinburgh werethen projecting. This collection was pitched to a higher key than thecomparatively humble _Museum_. It was to be edited with more rigidcare, the symphonies and accompaniments were to be supplied by thefirst musicians of Europe, and it was to be expurgated from all leavenof coarseness, and from whatever could offend the purest taste. ToThomson's proposal Burns at once replied, "As the request you make tome will positively add to my enjoyment in complying with it, I shallenter into your undertaking with all the small portion of abilities Ihave, strained to their utmost exertion by the impulse ofenthusiasm.... 

"If you are for English verses, there is, on my part, an end of thematter. Whether in the simplicity of the ballad, or the pathos of thesong, I can only hope to please myself in being allowed at least asprinkling of our native tongue.... As to remuneration, you may thinkmy songs either above or below price; for they shall be absolutely theone or the other. In the honest enthusiasm with which I embark in yourundertaking, to talk of money, wages, fee, hire, &c. , would bedownright prostitution of soul. "

In this spirit he entered on the enterprise which Thomson opened (p.  152)before him, and in this spirit he worked at it to the last, pouringforth song after song almost to his latest breath. Hardly lessinteresting than the songs themselves, which from time to time he sentto Thomson, were the letters with which he accompanied them. In thesehis judgment and critical power are as conspicuous, as his genius andhis enthusiasm for the native melodies. For all who take interest insongs and in the laws which govern their movement, I know not whereelse they would find hints so valuable as in these occasional remarkson his own and others' songs, by the greatest lyric singer whom themodern world has seen. 

The bard who furnished the English songs for this collection was acertain Dr. Wolcot, known as Peter Pindar. This poetizer, who seems tohave been wholly devoid of genius, but to have possessed a certaintalent for hitting the taste of the hour, was then held in highesteem; he has long since been forgotten. Even Burns speaks of himwith much respect, "The very name of Peter Pindar is an acquisition toyour work, " he writes to Thomson. Well might Chambers say, "It is ahumiliating thought that Peter Pindar was richly pensioned by thebooksellers, while Burns, the true sweet singer, lived in comparativepoverty. " Hard measure has been dealt to Thomson for not havingliberally remunerated Burns for the priceless treasures which hesupplied to the Collection. Chambers and others, who have thoroughlyexamined the whole matter, have shown this censure to be undeserved. Thomson himself was by no means rich, and his work brought him nothingbut outlay as long as Burns lived. Indeed once, in July, 1793, whenThomson had sent Burns some money in return for his songs, the bardthus replied:--

"I assure you, my dear sir, that you truly hurt me with your (p.  153)pecuniary parcel. It degrades me in my own eyes. However, to return itwould savour of affectation; but, as to any more traffic of thatdebtor and creditor kind, I swear, by that honour which crowns theupright statue of _Robert Burns's Integrity_, on the least motion ofit, I will indignantly spurn the by-pact transaction, and from thatmoment commence entire stranger to you. Burns's character forgenerosity of sentiment and independence of mind, will, I trust longoutlive any of his wants which the cold, unfeeling ore can supply; atleast I will take care that such a character he shall deserve. "

This sentiment was no doubt inconsistent, and may be deemed Quixotic, when we remember that for his poems Burns was quite willing to acceptall that Creech would offer. Yet one cannot but honour it. He feltthat both Johnson and Thomson were enthusiasts, labouring to embalm ina permanent form their country's minstrelsy, and that they were doingthis without any hope of profit. He too would bear his part in thenoble work; if he had not in other respects done full justice to hisgreat gifts, in this way he would repay some of the debt he owed tohis country, by throwing into her national melodies the whole wealthand glory of his genius. And this he would do, "all for love andnothing for reward. " And the continual effort to do this worthily wasthe chief relaxation and delight of those sad later years. When hedied, he had contributed to Thomson's work sixty songs, but of theseonly six had then appeared, as only one half-volume of Thomson's workhad then been published. Burns had given Thomson the copyright of allthe sixty songs; but as soon as a posthumous edition of the poet'sworks was proposed, Thomson returned all the songs to the poet'sfamily, to be included in the forthcoming edition, along with (p.  154)the interesting letters which had accompanied the songs. Thomson'scollection was not completed till 1841, when the sixth and last volumeof it appeared. It is affecting to know that Thomson himself, who wasolder than Burns by two years, survived him for more than five-and-fifty, and died in February, 1851, at the ripe old age of ninety-four. 

CHAPTER VII. (p.  155)

LAST YEARS. 

During those Dumfries years little is to be done by the biographer butto trace the several incidents in Burns's quarrel with the world, hisgrowing exasperation, and the evil effects of it on his conduct andhis fortunes. It is a painful record, but since it must be given, itshall be with as much brevity as is consistent with truth. 

In July, 1793, Burns made an excursion into Galloway, accompanied by aMr. Syme, who belonging, like himself, to the Excise, admired thepoet, and agreed with his politics. Syme has preserved a record ofthis journey, and the main impression left by the perusal of it is thestrange access of ill-temper which had come over Burns, who keptventing his spleen in epigrams on all whom he disliked, high and low. They visited Kenmure, where lived Mr. Gordon, the representative ofthe old Lords Kenmure. They passed thence over the muirs to Gatehouse, in a wild storm, during which Burns was silent and crooning to himselfwhat, Syme says, was the first thought of _Scots wha hae_. They wereengaged to go to St. Mary's Isle, the seat of the Earl of Selkirk, butBurns was in such a savage mood against all lords, that he was withdifficulty persuaded to go thither, though Lord Selkirk was no Tory, but a Whig, like himself, and the father of his old friend, Lord (p.  156)Daer, by this time deceased, who had first convinced him that a lordmight possibly be an honest and kind-hearted man. When they were onceunder the hospitable roof of St. Mary's Isle, the kindness with whichthey were received appeased the poet's bitterness. The Earl wasbenign, the young ladies were beautiful, and two of them sang Scottishsongs charmingly. Urbani, an Italian musician who had edited Scotchmusic, was there, and sang many Scottish melodies, accompanying themwith instrumental music. Burns recited some of his songs amid the deepsilence that is most expressive of admiration. The evening passed verypleasantly, and the lion of the morning had, ere the evening was over, melted to a lamb. 

_Scots wha hae_ has been mentioned. Mr. Syme tells us that it wascomposed partly while Burns was riding in a storm between Gatehouseand Kenmure, and partly on the second morning after this when theywere journeying from St. Mary's Isle to Dumfries. And Mr. Syme addsthat next day the poet presented him with one copy of the poem forhimself, and a second for Mr. Dalzell. Mr. Carlyle says, "ThisDithyrambic was composed on horseback; in riding in the middle oftempests over the wildest Galloway moor, in company with a Mr. Syme, who, observing the poet's looks, forebore to speak--judiciouslyenough, --for a man composing Bruce's address might be unsafe to triflewith. Doubtless this stern hymn was singing itself, as he formed it, through the soul of Burns, but to the external ear it should be sungwith the throat of the whirlwind. "

Burns, however, in a letter to Mr. Thomson dated September, 1793, gives an account of the composition of his war-ode, which is difficultto reconcile with Mr. Syme's statement. "There is a tradition (p.  157)which I have met with in many places in Scotland, " he writes, "thatthe old air, _Hey, tuttie taitie_ was Robert Bruce's march at thebattle of Bannockburn. This thought, in my yesternight's evening walk, warmed me to a pitch of enthusiasm on the theme of liberty andindependence, which I threw into a kind of Scottish ode, fitted to theair, that one might suppose to be the gallant royal Scot's address tohis heroic followers on that eventful morning. " He adds, that "theaccidental recollection of that glorious struggle for freedom, associated with the glowing ideas of some struggles of the samenature, _not quite so ancient_, roused my rhyming mania. " So _Bruce'sAddress_ owes its inspiration as much to Burns's sympathy with theFrench Republicans as to his Scottish patriotism. As to the intrinsicmerit of the ode itself, Mr. Carlyle says, "So long as there is warmblood in the heart of Scotchmen or man, it will move in fierce thrillsunder this war-ode, the best, we believe, that was ever written by anypen. " To this verdict every son of Scottish soil is, I suppose, boundto say, Amen. It ought not, however, to be concealed that there hasbeen a very different estimate formed of it by judges sufficientlycompetent. I remember to have read somewhere of a conversation betweenWordsworth and Mrs. Hemans, in which they both agreed that the famousode was not much more than a commonplace piece of school-boyrhodomontade about liberty. Probably it does owe not a little of itspower to the music to which it is sung, and to the associations whichhave gathered round it. The enthusiasm for French Revolutionsentiments, which may have been in Burns's mind when composing it, hashad nothing to do with the delight with which thousands since havesung and listened to it. The Poet, however, when he first (p.  158)conceived it was no doubt raging inwardly, like a lion, not onlycaged, but muzzled with the gag of his servitude to Government. Butfor this, what diatribes in favour of the Revolution might we not havehad, and what pain must it have been to Burns to suppress these underthe coercion of external authority. Partly to this feeling, as well asto other causes, may be ascribed such outbursts as the following, written to a female correspondent, immediately after his return fromthe Galloway tour:

"There is not among all the martyrologies that ever were penned, sorueful a narrative as the lives of the poets. In the comparative viewof wretches, the criterion is not what they are doomed to suffer, buthow they are formed to bear. Take a being of our kind, give him astronger imagination, and a more delicate sensibility, which betweenthem will ever engender a more ungovernable set of passions than arethe usual lot of man; implant in him an irresistible impulse to someidle vagary, ... In short, send him adrift after some pursuit whichshall eternally mislead him from the paths of lucre, and yet curse himwith a keener relish than any man living for the pleasures that lucrecan purchase; lastly, fill up the measure of his woes by bestowing onhim a spurning sense of his own dignity--and you have created a wightnearly as miserable as a poet. " This passage will recall to many thecatalogue of sore evils to which poets are by their temperamentexposed, which Wordsworth in his Leech-gatherer enumerates. 

 The fear that kills, And hope that is unwilling to be fed; Cold, pain, and labour, and all fleshly ills; And mighty poets in their misery dead. 

In writing that poem Wordsworth had Burns among others prominently (p.  159)in his eye. What a commentary is the life of the more impulsive poeton the lines of his younger and more self-controlling brother! Duringthose years of political unrest and of growing mental disquiet, hischief solace was, as I have said, to compose songs for Thomson'sCollection, into which he poured a continual supply. Indeed it iswonderful how often he was able to escape from his own vexations intothat serener atmosphere, and there to suit melodies and moods mostalien to his own with fitting words. 

Here in one of his letters to Thomson is the way he describes himselfin the act of composition. "My way is--I consider the poetic sentimentcorrespondent to my idea of the musical expression; then choose mytheme; begin one stanza; when that is composed, which is generally themost difficult part of the business, I walk out, sit down now andthen, look out for objects in nature around me that are in unison andharmony with the cogitations of my fancy and workings of my bosom;humming every now and then the air with the verses I have framed. WhenI feel my Muse beginning to jade, I retire to the solitary fireside ofmy study, and there commit my effusions to paper; swinging atintervals on the hind legs of my elbow-chair, by way of calling forthmy own critical strictures as my pen goes on. " To this may be addedwhat Allan Cunningham tells us. "While he lived in Dumfries he hadthree favourite walks; on the Dock-green by the river-side; among theruins of Lincluden College; and towards the Martingdon-ford, on thenorth side of the Nith. This latter place was secluded, commanded aview of the distant hills, and the romantic towers of Lincluden, andafforded soft greensward banks to rest upon, within sight and (p.  160)sound of the stream. As soon as he was heard to hum to himself, hiswife saw that he had something in his mind, and was prepared to seehim snatch up his hat, and set silently off for his musing-ground. When by himself, and in the open air, his ideas arranged themselves intheir natural order--words came at will, and he seldom returnedwithout having finished a song.... When the verses were finished, hepassed them through the ordeal of Mrs. Burns's voice, listenedattentively when she sang; asked her if any of the words weredifficult; and when one happened to be too rough, he readily found asmoother; but he never, save at the resolute entreaty of a scientificmusician, sacrificed sense to sound. The autumn was his favouriteseason, and the twilight his favourite hour of study. "

Regret has often been expressed that Burns spent so much time andthought on writing his songs, and, in this way, diverted his energiesfrom higher aims. Sir Walter has said, "Notwithstanding the spirit ofmany of his lyrics, and the exquisite sweetness and simplicity ofothers, we cannot but deeply regret that so much of his time andtalents was frittered away in compiling and composing for musicalcollections. There is sufficient evidence that even the genius ofBurns could not support him in the monotonous task of writinglove-verses, on heaving bosoms and sparkling eyes, and twisting theminto such rhythmical forms as might suit the capricious evolutions ofScotch reels and strathspeys. " Even if Burns, instead of continualsong-writing during the last eight years of his life, had concentratedhis strength on "his grand plan of a dramatic composition" on thesubject of Bruce's adventures, it may be doubted whether he would havedone so much to enrich his country's literature as he has done by thesongs he composed. But considering how desultory his habits (p.  161)became, if Johnson and Thomson had not, as it were, set him a congenialtask, he might not have produced anything at all during those years. There is, however, another aspect in which the continual compositionof love-ditties must be regretted. The few genuine love-songs, straight from the heart, which he composed, such as _Of a' the Airts_, _To Mary in Heaven_, _Ye Banks and Braes_, can hardly be too highlyprized. But there are many others, which arose from a lower andfictitious source of inspiration. He himself tells Thomson that whenhe wished to compose a love-song, his recipe was to put himself on a"regimen of admiring a beautiful woman. " This was a dangerous regimen, and when it came to be often repeated, as it was, it cannot havetended to his peace of heart, or to the purity of his life. 

The first half of the year 1794 was a more than usually unhappy timewith Burns. It was almost entirely songless. Instead of poetry, wehear of political dissatisfaction, excessive drinking-bouts, quarrels, and self-reproach. This was the time when our country was at war withthe French Republic--a war which Burns bitterly disliked, but hisemployment under Government forced him to set "a seal on his lips asto those unlucky politics. " A regiment of soldiers was quartered inthe town of Dumfries, and to Burns's eye the sight of their red coatswas so offensive, that he would not go down the plain-stones lest heshould meet "the epauletted puppies, " who thronged the street. One ofthese epauletted puppies, whom he so disliked, found occasion to pullBurns up rather smartly. The poet, when in his cups, had in thehearing of a certain captain proposed as a toast, "May our (p.  162)success in the present war be equal to the justice of our cause. " Thesoldier called him to account--a duel seemed imminent, and Burns hadnext day to write an apologetic letter, in order to avoid the risk ofruin. About the same time he was involved, through intemperance, inanother and more painful quarrel. It has been already noticed that atWoodley Park he was a continual guest. With Mrs. Riddel, who was bothbeautiful and witty, he carried on a kind of poetic flirtation. Mr. Walter Riddel, the host, was wont to press his guests to deeperpotations than were usual even in those hard-drinking days. Oneevening, when the guests had sat till they were inflamed with wine, they entered the drawing-room, and Burns in some way grossly insultedthe fair hostess. Next day he wrote a letter of the most abject andextravagant penitence. This, however, Mr. And Mrs. Riddel did notthink fit to accept. Stung by this rebuff, Burns recoiled at once tothe opposite extreme of feeling, and penned a grossly scurrilousmonody on "a lady famed for her caprice. " This he followed up by otherlampoons, full of "coarse rancour against a lady, who had showed himmany kindnesses. " The Laird of Friars Carse and his lady naturallysided with their relatives, and grew cold to their old friend ofEllisland. While this coldness lasted, Mr. Riddel, of Friars Carse, died in the spring-time, and the poet, remembering his friend's worthand former kindness, wrote a sonnet over him--not one of his best ormost natural performances, yet showing the return of his better heart. During the same spring we hear of Burns going to the house of one ofthe neighbouring gentry, and dining there, not with the rest of theparty, but, by his own choice, it would seem, with the housekeeper inher room, and joining the gentlemen in the dining-room, after the (p.  163)ladies had retired. He was now, it seems, more disliked by ladies thanby men, --a change since those Edinburgh days, when the highest damesof the land had spoken so rapturously of the charm of hisconversation. 

Amid the gloom of this unhappy time (1791), Burns turned to his oldEdinburgh friend, Alexander Cunningham, and poured forth thispassionate and well-known complaint:--"Canst thou minister to a minddiseased? Canst thou speak peace and rest to a soul tossed on a sea oftroubles, without one friendly star to guide her course, and dreadingthat the next surge may overwhelm her? Of late, a number of domesticvexations, and some pecuniary share in the ruin of these cursedtimes, --losses which, though trifling, were what I could illbear, --have so irritated me, that my feelings at times could only beenvied by a reprobate spirit listening to the sentence that dooms itto perdition. --Are you deep in the language of consolation? I haveexhausted in reflection every topic of comfort. A heart at ease wouldhave been charmed with my sentiments and reasonings; but as to myself, I was like Judas Iscariot preaching the Gospel.... Still there are twogreat pillars that bear us up amid the wreck of misfortune and misery. The one is composed of a certain noble, stubborn something in man, known by the names of Courage, Fortitude, Magnanimity. The other ismade up of those feelings and sentiments which, however the scepticmay deny them, or the enthusiast may disfigure them, are yet, I amconvinced, original and component parts of the human soul, thosesenses of the mind--if I may be allowed the expression--which connectus with, and link us to those awful obscure realities--an all-powerfuland equally beneficent God, and a world to come, beyond death and thegrave. The first gives the nerve of combat, while a ray of hope (p.  164)beams on the field: the last pours the balm of comfort into the woundswhich time can never cure. "

This remarkable, or, as Lockhart calls it, noble letter was written onFebruary 25, 1794. It was probably a few months later, perhaps in Mayof the same year, while Burns was still under this depression, thatthere occurred an affecting incident, which has been preserved byLockhart. Mr. David McCulloch, of Ardwell, told Lockhart, "that he wasseldom more grieved, than when, riding into Dumfries one fine summer'sevening, to attend a country ball, he saw Burns walking alone, on theshady side of the principal street of the town, while the oppositepart was gay with successive groups of gentlemen and ladies, all drawntogether for the festivities of the night, not one of whom seemedwilling to recognize the poet. The horseman dismounted, and joinedBurns, who, on his proposing to him to cross the street, said, 'Nay, nay, my young friend, that's all over now, ' and quoted, after a pause, some verses of Lady Grizzell Baillie's pathetic ballad:--

 His bonnet stood ance fu' fair on his brow, His auld ane looked better than mony ane's new; But now he lets 't wear ony way it will hing, And caste himsell dowie upon the corn-bing. 

 O, were we young, as we ance hae been, We suld hae been galloping down on yon green, And linking it owre the lily-white lea, -- And werena my heart light, I wad die. 

"It was little in Burns's character to let his feelings on certainsubjects escape in this fashion. He immediately after citing theseverses assumed the sprightliness of his most pleasing manner; andtaking his young friend home with him, entertained him very (p.  165)agreeably until the hour of the ball arrived, with a bowl of his usualpotation, and Bonnie Jean's singing of some verses which he hadrecently composed. "

In June we find him expressing to Mrs. Dunlop the earliest hint thathe felt his health declining. "I am afraid, " he says, "that I am aboutto suffer for the follies of my youth. My medical friends threaten mewith flying gout; but I trust they are mistaken. " And again, a fewmonths later, we find him, when writing to the same friend, recurringto the same apprehensions. Vexation and disappointment within, andexcesses, if not continual, yet too frequent, from without, had forlong been undermining his naturally strong but nervously sensitiveframe, and those symptoms were now making themselves felt, which weresoon to lay him in an early grave. As the autumn drew on, his singingpowers revived, and till the close of the year he kept pouring intoThomson a stream of songs, some of the highest stamp, and hardly onewithout a touch such as only the genuine singer can give. 

The letters, too, to Thomson, with which he accompanies his gifts, arefull of suggestive thoughts on song, hints most precious to all whocare for such matters. For the forgotten singers of his native land heis full of sympathy. "By the way, " he writes to Thomson, "are you notvexed to think that those men of genius, for such they certainly were, who composed our fine Scottish lyrics, should be unknown?"

Many of the songs of that autumn were, as usual, love-ditties; butwhen the poet could forget the lint-white locks of Chloris, of whichkind of stuff there is more than enough, he would write as good songson other and manlier subjects. Two of these, written, the one in (p.  166)November, 1794, the other in January, 1795, belong to the latterorder, and are worthy of careful regard, not only for their excellenceas songs, but also as illustrations of the poet's mood of mind at thetime when he composed them. 

The first is this, ---

 Contented wi' little, and cantie wi' mair, Whene'er I forgather wi' sorrow and care, I gie them a skelp as they're creepin' alang, Wi' a cog o' gude swats, and an auld Scottish sang. 

 I whyles claw the elbow o' troublesome thought; But man is a soger, and life is a faught; My mirth and gude humour are coin in my pouch, And my Freedom's my lairdship nae monarch dare touch. 

 A towmond o' trouble, should that be my fa', A night o' gude fellowship sowthers it a'; When at the blythe end o' our journey at last, Wha the deil ever thinks o' the road he has past?

 Blind Chance, let her snapper and stoyte on her way; Be't to me, be't frae me, e'en let the jade gae: Come Ease, or come Travail, come Pleasure or Pain, My warst word is--Welcome, and welcome again. 

This song gives Burns's idea of himself, and of his struggle with theworld, when he could look on both from the placid, rather than thedespondent side. He regarded it as a true picture of himself; for, when a good miniature of him had been done, he wrote to Thomson thathe wished a vignette from it to be prefixed to this song, that, in hisown words, "the portrait of my face, and the picture of my mind may godown the stream of time together. " Burns had more moods of mind thanmost men, and this was, we may hope, no unfrequent one with him. Butif we would reach the truth, we probably ought to strike a balance (p.  167)between the spirit of this song and the dark moods depicted in some ofthose letters already quoted. 

The other song of the same time is the well-known _A Man's a Man fora' that_. This powerful song speaks out in his best style a sentimentthat through all his life had been dear to the heart of Burns. It hasbeen quoted, they say, by Béranger in France, and by Goethe inGermany, and is the word which springs up in the mind of allforeigners when they think of Burns. It was inspired, no doubt, by hiskeen sense of social oppression, quickened to white heat by influencesthat had lately come from France, and by what he had suffered for hissympathy with that cause. It has since become the watchword of all whofancy that they have secured less, and others more, of this world'sgoods, than their respective merit deserves. Stronger words he neverwrote. 

 The rank is but the guinea's stamp, The man's the gowd for a' that. 

That is a word for all time. Yet perhaps it might have been wishedthat so noble a song had not been marred by any touch of socialbitterness. A lord, no doubt, may be a "birkie" and a "coof, " but maynot a ploughman be so too? This great song Burns wrote on the firstday of 1795. 

Towards the end of 1794, and in the opening of 1795, the panic whichhad filled the land in 1792, from the doings of the Frenchrepublicans, and their sympathizers in this country, began to abate;and the blast of Government displeasure, which for a time had beatenheavily on Burns, seemed to have blown over. He writes to Mrs. Dunlopon the 29th of December, 1794. "My political sins seem to be (p.  168)forgiven me, " and as a proof of it he mentions that during the illnessof his superior officer, he had been appointed to act as supervisor--aduty which he discharged for about two months. In the same letter hesends to that good lady his usual kindly greeting for the coming year, and concludes thus:--"What a transient business is life! Very lately Iwas a boy; but t' other day I was a young man; and I already begin tofeel the rigid fibre and stiffening joints of old age coming fast o'ermy frame. With all the follies of youth, and, I fear, a few vices ofmanhood, still I congratulate myself on having had, in early days, religion strongly impressed on my mind. " Burns always keeps his mostserious thoughts for this good lady. Herself religious, she no doubttried to keep the truths of religion before the poet's mind. And henaturally was drawn out to reply in a tone more unreserved than whenhe wrote to most others. 

In February of the ensuing year, 1795, his duties as supervisor ledhim to what he describes as the "unfortunate, wicked little village"of Ecclefechan in Annandale. The night after he arrived, there fellthe heaviest snowstorm known in Scotland within living memory. Whenpeople awoke next morning they found the snow up to the windows of thesecond story of their houses. In the hollow of Campsie hills it lay tothe depth of from eighty to a hundred feet, and it had not disappearedfrom the streets of Edinburgh on the king's birthday, the 4th of June. Storm-stayed at Ecclefechan, Burns indulged in deep potations and insong-writing. Probably he imputed to the place that with which his ownconscience reproached himself. Currie, who was a native of Ecclefechan, much offended, says, "The poet must have been tipsy indeed to abusesweet Ecclefechan at this rate. " It was also the birthplace of the (p.  169)poet's friend Nicol, and of a greater than he. On the 4th of Decemberin the very year on which Burns visited it, Mr. Thomas Carlyle wasborn in that village. Shortly after his visit, the poet beat hisbrains to find a rhyme for Ecclefechan, and to twist it into a song. 

In March of the same year we find him again joining in local politics, and writing electioneering ballads for Heron of Heron, the Whigcandidate for the Stewartry of Kirkcudbright, against the nominee ofthe Earl of Galloway, against whom and his family Burns seems to haveharboured some peculiar enmity. 

Mr. Heron won the election, and Burns wrote to him about his ownprospects:--"The moment I am appointed supervisor, in the commonroutine I may be nominated on the collectors' list; and this is alwaysa business of purely political patronage. A collectorship varies much, from better than 200_l. _ to near 1000_l. _ a year. A life of literaryleisure, with a decent competency, is the summit of my wishes. "

The hope here expressed was not destined to be fulfilled. It requiredsome years for its realization, and the years allotted to Burns werenow nearly numbered. The prospect which he here dwells on may, however, have helped to lighten his mental gloom during the last yearof his life. For one year of activity there certainly was, between thetime when the cloud of political displeasure against him disappearedtowards the end of 1794, and the time when his health finally gave wayin the autumn of 1795, during which, to judge by his letters, heindulged much less in outbursts of social discontent. One proof ofthis is seen in the following fact. In the spring of 1795, a volunteercorps was raised in Dumfries, to defend the country, while the (p.  170)regular army was engaged abroad, in war with France. Many of theDumfries Whigs, and among them Burns's friends, Syme and Dr. Maxwell, enrolled themselves in the corps, in order to prove their loyalty andpatriotism, on which some suspicions had previously been cast. Burnstoo offered himself, and was received into the corps. Allan Cunninghamremembered the appearance of the regiment, "their odd but notungraceful dress; white kerseymere breeches and waistcoat; short bluecoat, faced with red; and round hat, surmounted by a bearskin, likethe helmets of the Horse Guards. " He remembered the poet too, as heshowed among them, "his very swarthy face, his ploughman stoop, hislarge dark eyes, and his awkwardness in handling his arms. " But if hecould not handle his musket deftly, he could do what none else in thator any other corps could, he could sing a patriotic stave whichthrilled the hearts not only of his comrades, but every Briton fromLand's-end to Johnny Groat's. 

This is one of the verses:--

 The kettle o' the kirk and state Perhaps a clout may fail in't; But deil a foreign tinkler loan Shall ever ca' a nail in't. Our fathers' blade the kettle bought, And wha wad dare to spoil it; By heavens! the sacrilegious dog Shall fuel be to boil it! By heavens; the sacrilegious dog Shall fuel be to boil it!

This song flew throughout the land, hit the taste of the country-peopleeverywhere, and is said to have done much to change the feelings ofthose who were disaffected. Much blame has been cast upon the Tory (p.  171)Ministry, then in power, for not having offered a pension to Burns. Itwas not, it is said, that they did not know of him, or that theydisregarded his existence. For Mr. Addington, afterwards LordSidmouth, we have seen, deeply felt his genius, acknowledged it inverse, and is said to have urged his claims upon the Government. Mr. Pitt, soon after the poet's death, is reported to have said of Burns'spoetry, at the table of Lord Liverpool, "I can think of no verse sinceShakespeare's, that has so much the appearance of coming sweetly fromnature. " It is on Mr. Dundas, however, at that time one of theMinistry, and the autocrat of all Scottish affairs, that the heaviestweight of blame has fallen. But perhaps this is not altogetherdeserved. There is the greatest difference between a literary man, whoholds his political opinions in private, but refrains from mingling inparty politics, and one who zealously espouses one side, and employshis literary power in promoting it. He threw himself into everyelectioneering business with his whole heart, wrote, while he mighthave been better employed, electioneering ballads of little merit, inwhich he lauded Whig men and theories, and lampooned, oftenscurrilously, the supporters of Dundas. No doubt it would have beenmagnanimous in the men then in power to have overlooked all thesethings, and, condoning the politics, to have rewarded the poetry ofBurns. And it were to be wished that such magnanimity were more commonamong public men. But we do not see it practised even at the presentday, any more than it was in the time of Burns. 

During the first half of 1795 the poet had gone on with his accustomedduties, and, during the intervals of business, kept sending to Thomsonthe songs he from time to time composed. 

His professional prospects seemed at this time to be brightening, (p.  172)for about the middle of May, 1795, his staunch friend, Mr. Graham ofFintray, would seem to have revived an earlier project of having himtransferred to a post in Leith, with easy duty and an income of nearly200_l. _ a year. This project could not at the time be carried out; butthat it should have been thought of proves that political offences ofthe past were beginning to be forgotten. During this same year therewere symptoms that the respectable persons who had for some timefrowned on him, were willing to relent. A combination of causes, hispolitics, the Riddel quarrel, and his own many imprudences, had kepthim under a cloud. And this disfavour of the well-to-do had notincreased his self-respect or made him more careful about the companyhe kept. Disgust with the world had made him reckless and defiant. Butwith the opening of 1795, the Riddels were reconciled to him, andreceived him once more into their good graces, and others, theirfriends, probably followed their example. 

But the time was drawing near, when the smiles or the frowns of theDumfries magnates would be alike indifferent to him. There has beenmore than enough of discussion among the biographers of Burns, as tohow far he really deteriorated in himself during those Dumfries years, as to the extent and the causes of the social discredit into which hefell, and as to the charge that he took to low company. His earlybiographers, Currie, Walker, Heron drew the picture somewhat darkly;Lockhart and Cunningham have endeavoured to lighten the depth of theshadows. Chambers has laboured to give the facts impartially, hasfaithfully placed the lights and the shadows side by side, and hassummed up the whole subject in an appendix on _The Reputation (p.  173)of Burns in his Later Years_, to which I would refer any who desire tosee this painful subject minutely handled. Whatever extenuations orexcuses may be alleged, all must allow that his course in Dumfries wason the whole a downward one, and must concur, however reluctantly, inthe conclusion at which Lockhart, while decrying the severe judgmentsof Currie, Heron, and others, is forced by truth to come, that "theuntimely death of Burns was, it is too probable, hastened by his ownintemperances and imprudences. " To inquire minutely, what was theextent of those intemperances, and what the nature of thoseimprudences, is a subject which can little profit any one, and onwhich one has no heart to enter. If the general statement of fact betrue, the minute details are better left to the kindly oblivion, which, but for too prying curiosity, would by this time have overtakenthem. 

Dissipated his life for some years certainly had been--deeplydisreputable many asserted it to be. Others, however, there were whotook a more lenient view of him. Findlater, his superior in theExcise, used to assert, that no officer under him was more regular inhis public duties. Mr. Gray, then teacher of Dumfries school, has leftit on record, that no parent he knew watched more carefully over hischildren's education--that he had often found the poet in his homeexplaining to his eldest boy passages of the English poets fromShakespeare to Gray, and that the benefit of the father's instructionswas apparent in the excellence of the son's daily school performances. This brighter side of the picture, however, is not irreconcilable withthat darker one. For Burns's whole character was a compound of themost discordant and contradictory elements. Dr. Chambers has wellshown that he who at one hour was the _douce_ sober Mr. Burns, in (p.  174)the next was changed to the maddest of Bacchanals: now he was glowingwith the most generous sentiments, now sinking to the very oppositeextreme. 

One of the last visits paid to him by any friend from a distance wouldseem to have been by Professor Walker, although the date of it issomewhat uncertain. Eight years had passed since the Professor hadparted with Burns at Blair Castle, after the poet's happy visit there. In the account which the Professor has left of his two days' interviewwith Burns at Dumfries, there are traces of disappointment with thechange which the intervening years had wrought. It has been allegedthat prolonged residence in England had made the Professor fastidious, and more easily shocked with rusticity and coarseness. However thismay be, he found Burns, as he thought, not improved, but moredictatorial, more free in his potations, more coarse and gross in histalk, than when he had formerly known him. 

For some time past there had not been wanting symptoms to show thatthe poet's strength was already past its prime. In June, 1794, he had, as we have seen, told Mrs. Dunlop that he had been in poor health, andwas afraid he was beginning to suffer for the follies of his youth. His physicians threatened him, he said, with flying gout, but hetrusted they were mistaken. In the spring of 1795, he said to one whocalled on him, that he was beginning to feel as if he were soon to bean old man. Still he went about all his usual employments. But duringthe latter part of that year his health seems to have suddenlydeclined. For some considerable time he was confined to a sick-bed. Dr. Currie, who was likely to be well informed, states that thisillness lasted from October, 1795, till the following January. No (p.  175)details of his malady are given, and little more is known of hiscondition at this time, except what he himself has given in a letterto Mrs. Dunlop, and in a rhymed epistle to one of his brotherExcisemen. 

At the close of the year he must have felt that, owing to hisprolonged sickness, his funds were getting low. Else he would not havepenned to his friend, Collector Mitchell, the following request:--

 Friend of the Poet, tried and leal, Wha, wanting thee, might beg or steal; Alake, alake, the meikle deil Wi' a' his witches Are at it, skelpin'! jig and reel, In my poor pouches. 

 I modestly fu fain wad hint it, That one pound one, I sairly want it; If wi' the hizzie down ye sent it, It would be kind; And while my heart wi' life-blood dunted, I'd bear't in mind. 

 * * * * *

 _POSTSCRIPT. _

 Ye've heard this while how I've been licket And by fell death was nearly nicket: Grim loun! he gat me by the fecket, And sair me sheuk; But by gude luck I lap a wicket, And turn'd a neuk. 

 But by that health, I've got a share o't, And by that life, I'm promised mair o't, My heal and weel I'll take a care o't A tentier way; Then fareweel folly, hide and hair o't, For ance and aye. 

It was, alas! too late now to bid farewell to folly, even if he (p.  176)could have done so indeed. With the opening of the year 1796, hesomewhat revived, and the prudent resolve of his sickness disappearedwith the first prospect of returning health. Chambers thus records afact which the local tradition of Dumfries confirms:--"Early in themonth of January, when his health was in the course of improvement, Burns tarried to a late hour at a jovial party in the Globe tavern. Before returning home, he unluckily remained for some time in the openair, and, overpowered by the effects of the liquor he had drunk, fellasleep.... A fatal chill penetrated his bones; he reached home withthe seeds of a rheumatic fever already in possession of his weakenedframe. In this little accident, and not in the pressure of poverty ordisrepute, or wounded feelings or a broken heart, truly lay thedetermining cause of the sadly shortened days of our national poet. "

How long this new access of extreme illness confined him seemsuncertain. Currie says for about a week; Chambers surmises a longertime. Mr. Scott Douglas says, that from the close of January till themonth of April, he seems to have moved about with some hope ofpermanent improvement. But if he had such a hope, it was destined notto be fulfilled. Writing on the 31st of January, 1796, to Mrs. Dunlop, the trusted friend of so many confidences, this is the account hegives of himself:--

"I have lately drunk deep of the cup of affliction. The autumn robbedme of my only daughter and darling child, and that at a distance, too, and so rapidly as to put it out of my power to pay the last duties toher. I had scarcely begun to recover from that shock, when I becamemyself the victim of a most severe rheumatic fever, and long the (p.  177)die spun doubtful; until, after many weeks of a sick-bed, it seemsto have turned up life, and I am beginning to crawl across my room, and once indeed have been before my own door in the street. " In thesewords Burns would seem to have put his two attacks together, as thoughthey were but one prolonged illness. 

It was about this time that, happening to meet a neighbour in thestreet, the poet talked with her seriously of his health, and saidamong other things this: "I find that a man may live like a fool, buthe will scarcely die like one. " As from time to time he appeared onthe street during the early months of 1796, others of his oldacquaintance were struck by the sight of a tall man of slovenlyappearance and sickly aspect, whom a second look showed to be Burns, and that he was dying. Yet in that February there were still someflutters of song, one of which was, _Hey for the Lass wi' a Tocher_, written in answer to Thomson's beseeching inquiry if he was never tohear from him again. Another was a rhymed epistle, in which he answersthe inquiries of the colonel of his Volunteer Corps after his health. 

From about the middle of April, Burns seldom left his room, and for agreat part of each day was confined to bed. May came--a beautifulMay--and it was hoped that its genial influences might revive him. Butwhile young Jeffrey was writing, "It is the finest weather in theworld--the whole country is covered with green and blossoms; and thesun shines perpetually through a light east wind, " Burns was shiveringat every breath of the breeze. At this crisis his faithful wife waslaid aside, unable to attend him. But a young neighbour, Jessie Lewars, sister of a brother exciseman, came to their house, assisted in (p.  178)all household work, and ministered to the dying poet. She was at thistime only a girl, but she lived to be a wife and mother, and to see anhonoured old age. Whenever we think of the last days of the poet, itis well to remember one who did so much to smooth his dying pillow. 

Burns himself was deeply grateful, and his gratitude as usual foundvent in song. But the old manner still clung to him. Even then hecould not express his gratitude to his young benefactress withoutassuming the tone of a fancied lover. Two songs in this strain headdressed to Jessie Lewars. Of the second of these it is told, thatone morning the poet said to her that if she would play to him anyfavourite tune, for which she desired to have new words, he would dohis best to meet her wish. She sat down at the piano, and played overseveral times the air of an old song beginning thus:--

 The robin cam to the wren's nest, And keekit in, and keekit in. 

As soon as Burns had taken in the melody, he set to, and in a fewminutes composed these beautiful words, the second of the songs whichhe addressed to Jessie:--

 Oh! wert thou in the cauld blast, On yonder lea, on yonder lea, My plaidie to the angry airt, I'd shelter thee, I'd shelter thee. Or did misfortune's bitter storms Around thee blaw, around thee blaw, Thy bield should be my bosom, To share it a', to share it a. '

 Or were I in the wildest waste, (p.  179) Sae black and bare, sae black and bare, The desert were a paradise, If thou wert there, if thou wert there: Or were I monarch o' the globe, Wi' thee to reign, wi' thee to reign, The brightest jewel in my crown Wad be my queen, wad be my queen. 

Mendelssohn is said to have so much admired this song, that hecomposed for it what Chambers pronounces an air of exquisite pathos. 

June came, but brought no improvement, rather rapid decline of health. On the 4th of July (1796) he wrote to Johnson, "Many a merry meetingthis publication (the _Museum_) has given us, and possibly it may giveus more, though, alas, I fear it. This protracting, slow consumingillness, will, I doubt much, my ever dear friend, arrest my sun beforehe has reached his middle career, and will turn over the poet to farmore important concerns than studying the brilliancy of wit or thepathos of sentiment. " On the day on which he wrote these words, heleft Dumfries for a lonely place called Brow on the Solway shore, totry the effects of sea-bathing. He went alone, for his wife was unableto accompany him. While he was at Brow, his former friend, Mrs. WalterRiddel, to whom, after their estrangement, he had been reconciled, happened to be staying for the benefit of her health in theneighbourhood. She asked Burns to dine with her, and sent her carriageto bring him to her house. This is part of the account she gives ofthat interview:--

"I was struck with his appearance on entering the room. The stamp ofdeath was imprinted on his features. He seemed already touching thebrink of eternity. His first salutation was. 'Well, madam, have (p.  180)you any commands for the other world?' I replied that it seemed adoubtful case, which of us should be there soonest, and that I hopedhe would yet live to write my epitaph. He looked in my face with anair of great kindness, and expressed his concern at seeing me look soill, with his accustomed sensibility.... We had a long and seriousconversation about his present situation, and the approachingtermination of all his earthly prospects. He spoke of his deathwithout any of the ostentation of philosophy, but with firmness aswell as feeling, as an event likely to happen very soon, and whichgave him concern chiefly from leaving his four children so young andunprotected, and his wife hourly expecting a fifth. He mentioned, withseeming pride and satisfaction, the promising genius of his eldestson, and the flattering marks of approbation he had received from histeachers, and dwelt particularly on his hopes of that boy's futureconduct and merit. His anxiety for his family seemed to hang heavy onhim, and the more perhaps from the reflection that he had not donethem all the justice he was so well qualified to do. Passing from thissubject, he showed great concern about the care of his literary fame, and particularly the publication of his posthumous works. He said hewas well aware that his death would create some noise, and that everyscrap of his writing would be revived against him to the injury of hisfuture reputation; that his letters and verses written with unguardedand improper freedom, and which he earnestly wished to have buried inoblivion, would be handed about by idle vanity or malevolence, when nodread of his resentment would restrain them, or prevent the censuresof shrill-tongued malice, or the insidious sarcasms of envy, frompouring forth all their venom to blast his fame. 

"He lamented that he had written many epigrams on persons against (p.  181)whom he entertained no enmity, and whose characters he would be sorryto wound; and many indifferent poetical pieces, which he feared wouldnow, with all their imperfections on their head, be thrust upon theworld. On this account he deeply regretted having deferred to put hispapers in a state of arrangement, as he was now incapable of theexertion.... The conversation, " she adds, "was kept up with greatevenness and animation on his side. I had seldom seen his mind greateror more collected. There was frequently a considerable degree ofvivacity in his sallies, and they would probably have had a greatershare, had not the concern and dejection I could not disguise dampedthe spirit of pleasantry he seemed not unwilling to indulge. 

"We parted about sunset on the evening of that day (the 5th July, 1796), the next day I saw him again, and we parted to meet no more!"

It is not wonderful that Burns should have felt some anxiety about theliterary legacy he was leaving to mankind. Not about his best poems;these, he must have known, would take care of themselves. Yet evenamong the poems which he had published with his name, were some, "which dying" he well might "wish to blot. " There lay among his papersletters too, and other "fallings from him, " which he no doubt wouldhave desired to suppress, but of which, if they have not all been madepublic, enough have appeared to justify his fears of that idle vanity, if not malevolence, which after his death, would rake up every scraphe had written, uncaring how it might injure his good name, or affectfuture generations of his admirers. No poet perhaps has suffered morefrom the indiscriminate and unscrupulous curiosity of editors, (p.  182)catering too greedily for the public, than Burns has done. 

Besides anxieties of this kind, he, during those last days, had tobear another burden of care that pressed even more closely home. Topain of body, absence from his wife and children, and haunting anxietyon their account, was added the pressure of some small debts and thefear of want. By the rules of the Excise, his full salary would not beallowed him during his illness; and though the Board agreed tocontinue Burns in his full pay, he never knew this in time to becomforted by it. With his small income diminished, how could he meetthe increased expenditure caused by sickness? We have seen how at thebeginning of the year he had written to his friend Mitchell to ask theloan of a guinea. One or two letters, asking for the payment of someold debts due to him by a former companion, still remain. During hisstay at Brow, on the 12th of July, he wrote to Thomson the followingmemorable letter:--

"After all my boasted independence, curst necessity compels me toimplore you for five pounds. A cruel scoundrel of a haberdasher, towhom I owe an account, taking it into his head that I am dying, hascommenced a process, and will infallibly put me into jail. Do, forGod's sake, send that sum, and that by return of post. Forgive me thisearnestness, but the horrors of a jail have made me half distracted. Ido not ask all this gratuitously; for, upon returning health, I herebypromise and engage to furnish you with five pounds' worth of theneatest song-genius you have seen. I tried my hand on Rothemurchiethis morning. The measure is so difficult that it is impossible toinfuse much genius into the lines. They are on the other side. Forgive, forgive me!"

And on the other side was written Burns's last song beginning, (p.  183)"Fairest maid, on Devon banks. " Was it native feeling, or inveteratehabit, that made him that morning revert to the happier days he hadseen on the banks of Devon, and sing a last song to one of the twobeauties he had there admired? Chambers thinks it was to CharlotteHamilton, the latest editor refers it to Peggy Chalmers. 

Thomson at once sent the sum asked for. He has been much, but notjustly, blamed for not having sent a much larger sum, and indeed fornot having repaid the poet for his songs long before. Against suchcharges it is enough to reply that when Thomson had formerlyvolunteered some money to Burns in return for his songs, the indignantpoet told him that if he ever again thought of such a thing, theirintercourse must thenceforth cease. And for the smallness of the sumsent, it should be remembered that Thomson was himself a poor man, andhad not at this time made anything by his Collection of Songs, andnever did make much beyond repayment of his large outlay. 

On the same day on which Burns wrote thus to Thomson, he wrote anotherletter in much the same terms to his cousin, Mr. James Burnes, ofMontrose, asking him to assist him with ten pounds, which was at oncesent by his relative, who, though not a rich, was a generous-heartedman. 

There was still a third letter written on that 12th of July (1796)from Brow. Of Mrs. Dunlop, who had for some months ceased hercorrespondence with him, the poet takes this affecting farewell:--"Ihave written you so often, without receiving any answer, that I wouldnot trouble you again but for the circumstances in which I am. (p.  184)An illness which has long hung about me, in all probability willspeedily send me beyond that 'bourn whence no traveller returns. ' Yourfriendship, with which for many years you honoured me, was afriendship dearest to my soul. Your conversation, and especially yourcorrespondence, were at once highly entertaining and instructive. Withwhat pleasure did I use to break up the seal! The remembrance yet addsone pulse more to my poor palpitating heart. Farewell!"

On the 14th he wrote to his wife, saying that though the sea-bathinghad eased his pains, it had not done anything to restore his health. The following anecdote of him at this time has been preserved:--"Anight or two before Burns left Brow, he drank tea with Mrs. Craig, widow of the minister of Ruthwell. His altered appearance excited muchsilent sympathy; and the evening being beautiful, and the sun shiningbrightly through the casement, Miss Craig (afterwards Mrs. HenryDuncan) was afraid the light might be too much for him, and rose tolet down the window-blinds. Burns immediately guessed what she meant, and regarding the young lady with a look of great benignity, said, 'Thank you, my dear, for your kind attention; but oh! let him shine;he will not shine long for me. '"

On the 18th July he left Brow, and returned to Dumfries in a smallspring cart. When he alighted, the onlookers saw that he was hardlyable to stand, and observed that he walked with tottering steps to hisdoor. Those who saw him enter his house, knew by his appearance thathe would never again cross that threshold alive. When the news spreadin Dumfries that Burns had returned from Brow and was dying, the wholetown was deeply moved. Allan Cunningham, who was present, thusdescribes what he saw:--"The anxiety of the people, high and low, (p.  185)was very great. Wherever two or three were together, their talkwas of Burns, and of him alone. They spoke of his history, of hisperson, and of his works; of his witty sayings, and sarcastic replies, and of his too early fate, with much enthusiasm, and sometimes withdeep feeling. All that he had done, and all that they had hoped hewould accomplish, were talked of. Half-a-dozen of them stopped Dr. Maxwell in the street, and said, 'How is Burns, sir?' He shook hishead, saying, 'He cannot be worse, ' and passed on to be subjected tosimilar inquiries farther up the way. I heard one of a group inquire, with much simplicity, 'Who do you think will be our poet now?'"

During the three or four days between his return from Brow and theend, his mind, when not roused by conversation, wandered in delirium. Yet when friends drew near his bed, sallies of his old wit would for amoment return. To a brother volunteer who came to see him he said, with a smile, "John, don't let the awkward squad fire over me. " Hiswife was unable to attend him; and four helpless children wanderedfrom room to room gazing on their unhappy parents. All the while, Jessie Lewars was ministering to the helpless and to the dying one, and doing what kindness could do to relieve their suffering. On thefourth day after his return, the 21st of July, Burns sank into hislast sleep. His children stood around his bed, and his eldest sonremembered long afterwards all the circumstances of that sad hour. 

The news that Burns was dead, sounded through all Scotland like aknell announcing a great national bereavement. Men woke up to feel thegreatness of the gift which in him had been vouchsafed to theirgeneration, and which had met, on the whole, with so poor areception. Self-reproach mingled with the universal sorrow, as (p.  186)men asked themselves whether they might not have done more to cherishand prolong that rarely gifted life. 

Of course there was a great public funeral, in which the men ofDumfries and the neighbourhood, high and low, appeared as mourners, and soldiers and volunteers with colours, muffled drums, and armsreversed, not very appropriately mingled in the procession. At thevery time when they were laying her husband in his grave, Mrs. Burnsgave birth to his posthumous son. He was called Maxwell, after thephysician who attended his father, but he died in infancy. The spotwhere the poet was laid was in a comer of St. Michael's churchyard, and the grave remained for a time unmarked by any monument. After someyears his wife placed over it a plain, unpretending stone, inscribedwith his name and age, and with the names of his two boys, who wereburied in the same place. Well had it been, if he had been allowed torest undisturbed in this grave where his family had laid him. Butwell-meaning, though ignorant, officiousness would not suffer it to beso. Nearly twenty years after the poet's death, a huge, cumbrous, unsightly mausoleum was, by public subscription, erected at a littledistance from his original resting-place. This structure was adornedwith an ungraceful figure in marble, representing, "The muse of Coilafinding the poet at the plough, and throwing her inspiring mantle overhim. " To this was added a long, rambling epitaph in tawdry Latin, asthough any inscription which scholars could devise could equal thesimple name of Robert Burns. When the new structure was completed, onthe 19th September, 1815, his grave was opened, and men for a momentgazed with awe on the form of Burns, seemingly as entire as on the (p.  187)day when first it was laid in the grave. But as soon as they began toraise it, the whole body crumbled to dust, leaving only the head andbones. These relics they bore to the mausoleum, which had beenprepared for their reception. But not even yet was the poet's dust tobe allowed to rest in peace. When his widow died, in March, 1834, themausoleum was opened, that she might be laid by her husband's side. Some craniologists of Dumfries were then permitted, in the name ofso-called science, to desecrate his dust with their inhuman outrage. At the dead of night, between the 31st of March and the 1st of April, these men laid their profane fingers on the skull of Burns, "triedtheir hats upon it, and found them all too little;" applied theircompasses, registered the size of the so-called organs, and "satisfiedthemselves that Burns had capacity enough to compose _Tam o' Shanter_, _The Cotter's Saturday Night_, and _To Mary in Heaven_. " This done, they laid the head once again in the hallowed ground, where, let ushope, it will be disturbed no more. The mausoleum, unsightly though itis, has become a place of pilgrimage whither yearly crowds oftravellers resort from the ends of the earth, to gaze on theresting-place of Scotland's peasant poet, and thence to pass to thatother consecrated place within ruined Dryburgh, where lies the dust ofa kindred spirit by his own Tweed. 

CHAPTER VIII. (p.  188)

CHARACTER, POEMS, SONGS. 

If this narrative has in any way succeeded in giving the lights andthe shadows of Burns's life, little comment need now be added. Thereader will, it is hoped, gather from the brief record of facts herepresented, a better impression of the man as he was, in his strengthand in his weakness, than from any attempt which might have been madeto bring his various qualities together into a moral portrait. Thosewho wish to see a comment on his character, at once wise and tender, should turn to Mr. Carlyle's famous essay on Burns. 

What estimate is to be formed of Burns--not as a poet, but as aman--is a question that will long be asked, and will be variouslyanswered, according to the principles men hold, and the temperamentthey are of. Men of the world will regard him in one way, worshippersof genius in another; and there are many whom the judgments of neitherof these will satisfy. One thing is plain to every one; it is thecontradiction between the noble gifts he had and the actual life helived, which make his career the painful tragedy it was. When, however, we look more closely into the original outfit of the man, weseem in some sort to see how this came to be. 

Given a being born into the world with a noble nature, endowments (p.  189)of head and heart beyond any of his time, wide-ranging sympathies, intellectual force of the strongest man, sensibility as of thetenderest woman, possessed also by a keen sense of right and wrongwhich he had brought from a pure home--place all these high gifts onthe one side, and over against them a lower nature, fierce andturbulent, filling him with wild passions which were hard to restrainand fatal to indulge--and between these two opposing natures, a weakand irresolute will, which could overhear the voice of conscience, buthad no strength to obey it; launch such a man on such a world as this, and it is but too plain what the end will be. From earliest manhoodtill the close, flesh and spirit were waging within him interminablewar, and who shall say which had the victory? Among his countrymenthere are many who are so captivated with his brilliant gifts and hisgenial temperament, that they will not listen to any hint at the deepdefects which marred them. Some would even go so far as to claimhonour for him, not only as Scotland's greatest poet, but as one ofthe best men she has produced. Those who thus try to canonize Burnsare no true friends to his memory. They do but challenge thecounter-verdict, and force men to recall facts which, if they cannotforget, they would fain leave in silence. These moral defects it isours to know; it is not ours to judge him who had them. 

While some would claim for Burns a niche among Scotland's saints, others would give him rank as one of her religious teachers. Thisclaim, if not so absurd as the other, is hardly more tenable. Thereligion described by Burns in _The Cotter's Saturday Night_ is, itshould be remembered, his father's faith, not his own. The fundamentaltruths of natural religion, faith in God and in immortality, amid (p.  190)sore trials of heart, he no doubt clung to, and has forciblyexpressed. But there is nothing in his poems or in his letters whichgoes beyond sincere deism--nothing which is in any way distinctivelyChristian. 

Even were his teaching of religion much fuller than it is, oneessential thing is still wanting. Before men can accept any one as areligious teacher, they not unreasonably expect that his practiceshould in some measure bear out his teaching. It was not as anauthority on such matters that Burns ever regarded himself. In his_Bard's Epitaph_, composed ten years before his death, he took a fartruer and humbler measure of himself than any of his critics orpanegyrists have done:---

 The poor inhabitant below Was quick to learn and wise to know, And keenly felt the friendly glow And softer flame; But thoughtless folly laid him low, And stained his name. 

 Reader, attend!--whether thy soul Soars fancy's flight beyond the pole, Or darkling grubs this earthly hole, In low pursuit; Know, prudent, cautious self-control Is wisdom's root. 

"A confession, " says Wordsworth, "at once devout, poetical, andhuman--a history in the shape of a prophecy. "

Leaving the details of his personal story, and--

 Each unquiet theme, Where gentlest judgments may misdeem, it is a great relief to turn to the bequest that he has left to (p.  191)the world in his poetry. How often has one been tempted to wish thatwe had known as little of the actual career of Burns as we do of thelife of Shakespeare, or even of Homer, and had been left to read hismind and character only by the light of his works! That poetry, thougha fragmentary, is still a faithful transcript of what was best in theman; and though his stream of song contains some sediment we couldwish away, yet as a whole, how vividly, clearly, sunnily it flows, howfar the good preponderates over the evil. 

What that good is, must now be briefly said. To take his earliestproductions first, his poems as distinct from his songs. Almost allthe best of these are, with the one notable exception of _Tam O'Shanter_, contained in the Kilmarnock edition. A few pieces actuallycomposed before he went to Edinburgh were included in later editions, but, after leaving Mossgiel he never seriously addressed himself toany form of poetry but song-writing. The Kilmarnock volume containspoems descriptive of peasant life and manners, epistles in versegenerally to rhyming brethren, a few lyrics on personal feelings, oron incidents like those of the mouse and the daisy, and three songs. In these, the form, the metre, the style and language, even that whichis known as Burns's peculiar stanza, all belong to the traditionalforms of his country's poetry, and from earlier bards had been handeddown to Burns by his two immediate forerunners, Ramsay and Fergusson. To these two he felt himself indebted, and for them he alwaysexpresses a somewhat exaggerated admiration. Nothing can more showBurns's inherent power than to compare his poems with even the best ofthose which he accepted as models. The old framework and metres whichhis country supplied, he took; asked no other, no better, and into (p.  192)those old bottles poured new wine of his own, and such wine! What, then, is the peculiar flavour of this new poetic wine of Burns'poetry? At the basis of all his power lay absolute truthfulness, intense reality, truthfulness to the objects which he saw, truthfulness to himself as the seer of them. This is what Wordsworthrecognized as Burns's leading characteristic. He who acknowledged fewmasters, owned Burns as his master in this respect when he speaks ofhim--

 Whose light I hailed when first it shone, And showed my youth, How verse may build a princely throne On humble truth. 

Here was a man, a son of toil, looking out on the world from hiscottage, on society low and high and on nature homely or beautiful, with the clearest eye, the most piercing insight, and the warmestheart; touching life at a hundred points, seeing to the core all thesterling worth, nor less the pretence and hollowness of the men hemet, the humour, the drollery, the pathos, and the sorrow of humanexistence; and expressing what he saw, not in the stock phrases ofbooks, but in his own vernacular, the language of his fireside, with adirectness, a force, a vitality that tingled to the finger tips, andforced the phrases of his peasant dialect into literature, and madethem for ever classical. Large sympathy, generous enthusiasm, recklessabandonment, fierce indignation, melting compassion, rare flashes ofmoral insight, all are there. Everywhere you see the strong intellectmade alive, and driven home to the mark, by the fervid heart behindit. And if the sight of the world's inequalities, and some naturalrepining at his own obscure lot, mingled from the beginning, as (p.  193)has been said, "some bitternesses of earthly spleen and passion withthe workings of his inspiration, and if these in the end ate deep intothe great heart they had long tormented, " who that has not known hisexperience may venture too strongly to condemn him?

This prevailing truthfulness of nature and of vision manifested itselfin many ways. First. In the strength of it, he interpreted the lives, thoughts, feelings, manners of the Scottish peasantry to whom hebelonged, as they had never been interpreted before, and never can beagain. Take the poem which stands first in the Kilmarnock edition. TheCotter's Dog, and the Laird's Dog, are, as has been often said, forall their moralizing, true dogs in all their ways. Yet through these, while not ceasing to be dogs, the poet represents the whole contrastbetween the Cotters' lives, and their Lairds'. This old controversy, which is ever new, between rich and poor, has never been set forthwith more humour and power. No doubt it is done from the peasant'spoint of view. The virtues and hardships of the poor have full justicedone to them; the prosperity of the rich, with its accompanyingfollies and faults, is not spared, perhaps it is exaggerated. Thewhole is represented with an inimitably graphic hand, and just whenthe caustic wit is beginning to get too biting, the edge of it isturned by a touch of kindlier humour. The poor dog speaks of

 Some gentle master, Wha, aiblins thrang a-parliamentin, For Britain's guid his saul indentin--

Then Caesar, the rich man's dog, replies, --

 Haith, lad, ye little ken about it: For Britain's guid!--guid faith! I doubt it. Say rather, gaun as Premiers lead him, (p.  194) An' saying aye or no's they bid him: At operas an' plays parading, Mortgaging, gambling, masquerading! Or, may be, in a frolic daft, To Hague or Calais takes a waft, To make a tour an' tak a whirl, To learn _bon ton_, an' see the worl'. Then, at Vienna or Versailles, He rives his father's auld entails; Or by Madrid he takes the rout, To thrum guitars and fecht wi' nowt. 

 * * * * *

 For Britain's guid! for her destruction! Wi' dissipation, feud an' faction. 

Then exclaims Luath, the poor man's dog, --

 Hech, man! dear sirs! is that the gate They waste sae many a braw estate! Are we sae foughten and harass'd For gear to gang that gate at last?

And yet he allows, that for all that

 ---- Thae frank, rantin', ramblin' billies, Fient haet o' them's ill-hearted fellows. 

"Mark the power of that one word, 'nowt, '" said the late Thomas Aird. "If the poet had said that our young fellows went to Spain to fightwith bulls, there would have been some dignity in the thing, but thinkof his going all that way 'to fecht wi' nowt. ' It was felt at once tobe ridiculous. That one word conveyed at once a statement of thefolly, and a sarcastic rebuke of the folly. "

Or turn to the poem of _Halloween_. Here he has sketched the Ayrshirepeasantry as they appeared in their hours of merriment--painted with afew vivid strokes a dozen distinct pictures of country lads and (p.  195)lasses, sires and dames, and at the same time preserved for everthe remembrance of antique customs and superstitious observances, which even in Burns's day were beginning to fade, and have now all butdisappeared. 

Or again, take _The auld Farmer's New-year-morning Salutation to hisauld Mare_. In this homely, but most kindly humorous poem, you havethe whole toiling life of a ploughman and his horse, done off in twoor three touches, and the elements of what may seem a commonplace, butwas to Burns a most vivid, experience, are made to live for ever. Fora piece of good graphic Scotch, see how he describes the sturdy oldmare in the plough setting her face to the furzy braes. 

 Thou never braing't, an' fetch't, and fliskit, But thy auld tail thou wad hae whiskit, An spread abreed thy weel-fill'd brisket, Wi' pith an' pow'r, Till spritty knowes wad rair't and riskit, An' slypet owre. 

To paraphrase this, "Thou didst never fret, or plunge and kick, butthou wouldest have whisked thy old tail, and spread abroad thy largechest, with pith and power, till hillocks, where the earth was filledwith tough-rooted plants, would have given forth a cracking sound, andthe clods fallen gently over. " The latter part of this paraphrase istaken from Chambers. What pure English words could have rendered thesethings as compactly and graphically?

Of _The Cotter's Saturday Night_ it is hardly needful to speak. As awork of art, it is by no means at Burns's highest level. The metre wasnot native to him. It contains some lines that are feeble, wholestanzas that are heavy. But as Lockhart has said, in words alreadyquoted, there is none of his poems that does such justice to the (p.  196)better nature that was originally in him. It shows how Burns couldreverence the old national piety, however little he may have been ableto practise it. It is the more valuable for this, that it is almostthe only poem in which either of our two great national poets hasdescribed Scottish character on the side of that grave, deep, thoughundemonstrative reverence, which has been an intrinsic element in it. 

No wonder the peasantry of Scotland have loved Burns as perhaps neverpeople loved a poet. He not only sympathized with the wants, thetrials, the joys and sorrows of their obscure lot, but he interpretedthese to themselves, and interpreted them to others, and this too intheir own language made musical, and glorified by genius. He made thepoorest ploughman proud of his station and his toil, since RobbieBurns had shared and had sung them. He awoke a sympathy for them inmany a heart that otherwise would never have known it. In looking upto him, the Scottish people have seen an impersonation of themselveson a large scale--of themselves, both in their virtues and in theirvices. 

Secondly, Burns in his poetry was not only the interpreter ofScotland's peasantry, he was the restorer of her nationality. When heappeared, the spirit of Scotland was at a low ebb. The fatigue thatfollowed a century of religious strife, the extinction of herparliament, the stern suppression of the Jacobite risings, the removalof all symbols of her royalty and nationality, had all but quenchedthe ancient spirit. Englishmen despised Scotchmen, and Scotchmenseemed ashamed of themselves and of their country. A race of literarymen had sprang up in Edinburgh who, as to national feeling, were entirelycolourless, Scotchmen in nothing except their dwelling-place. The (p.  197)thing they most dreaded was to be convicted of a Scotticism. Amongthese learned cosmopolitans in walked Burns, who with the instinct ofgenius chose for his subject that Scottish life which they ignored, and for his vehicle that vernacular which they despised, and who, touching the springs of long-forgotten emotions, brought back on thehearts of his countrymen a tide of patriotic feeling to which they hadlong been strangers. 

At first it was only his native Ayrshire he hoped to illustrate, toshed upon the streams of Ayr and Doon, the power of Yarrow, andTeviot, and Tweed. But his patriotism was not merely local; thetraditions of Wallace haunted him like a passion, the wanderings ofBruce he hoped to dramatize. His well-known words about the Thistlehave been already quoted. They express what was one of his strongestaspirations. And though he accomplished but a small part of what heonce hoped to do, yet we owe it to him first of all that "the oldkingdom" has not wholly sunk into a province. If Scotchmen to-day loveand cherish their country with a pride unknown to their ancestors ofthe last century, if strangers of all countries look on Scotland as aland of romance, this we owe in great measure to Burns, who firstturned the tide, which Scott afterwards carried to full flood. Allthat Scotland had done and suffered, her romantic history, the manhoodof her people, the beauty of her scenery, would have disappeared inmodern commonplace and manufacturing ugliness, if she had been leftwithout her two "sacred poets. "

Thirdly. Burns's sympathies and thoughts were not confined to classnor country; they had something more catholic in them, they reached touniversal man. Few as were his opportunities of knowing the (p.  198)characters of statesmen and politicians, yet with what "random shotso' countra wit" did he hit off the public men of his time! In hisaddress to King George III. On his birthday, how gay yet caustic isthe satire, how trenchant his stroke! The elder, and the younger Pitt, "yon ill-tongued tinkler Charlie Fox, " as he irreverently callshim--if Burns had sat for years in Parliament, he could scarcely haveknown them better. Every one of the Scottish M. P. 's of the time, from--

 That slee auld-farran chiel Dundas

to--

 That glib-gabbit Highland baron The Laird o' Graham, and--

 Erskine a spunkie Norlan billie, --he has touched their characters as truly as if they had all been hisown familiars. But of his intuitive knowledge of men of all ranks, there is no need to speak, for every line he writes attests it. Of hisfetches of moral wisdom something has already been said. He would nothave been a Scotchman, if he had not been a moralizer; but then hismoralizings are not platitudes, but truths winged with wit and wisdom. He had, as we have seen, his limitations--his bias to overvalue oneorder of qualities, and to disparage others. Some pleading of his owncause and that of men of his own temperament, some disparagement ofthe severer, less-impulsive virtues, it is easy to discern in him. Yet, allowing all this, what flashes of moral insight, piercing to thequick! what random sayings flung forth, that have become proverbs inall lands--"mottoes of the heart"!

Such are-- (p.  199)

 O wad some Power the giftie gie us, To see oursel as ithers see us: It wad frae mony a blunder free us, An' foolish notion;

Or the much-quoted--

 Facts are chiels that winna ding And downa be disputed;

Or--

 The heart ay's the part ay That makes us right or wrang. 

Who on the text, "He that is without sin among you, let him first casta stone, " ever preached such a sermon as Burns in his _Address to theunco Guid_? and in his epistle of advice to a young friend, whatwisdom! what incisive aphorisms! In passages like these scatteredthroughout his writings, and in some single poems, he has passedbeyond all bonds of place and nationality, and spoken home to theuniversal human heart. 

And here we may note that in that awakening to the sense of humanbrotherhood, the oneness of human nature, which began towards the endof last century, and which found utterance through Cowper first of theEnglish poets, there has been no voice in literature, then or since, which has proclaimed it more tellingly than Burns. And then hishumanity was not confined to man, it overflowed to his lowerfellow-creatures. His lines about the pet ewe, the worn-out mare, thefield-mouse, the wounded hare, have long been household words. In thistenderness towards animals we see another point of likeness betweenhim and Cowper. 

Fourthly. For all aspects of the natural world he has the same (p.  200)clear eye, the same open heart that he has for man. His love of natureis intense, but very simple and direct, no subtilizings, nor refiningsabout it, nor any of that nature-worship which soon after his timecame in. Quite unconsciously, as a child might, he goes into theoutward world for refreshment, for enjoyment, for sympathy. Everywherein his poetry, nature comes in, not so much as a being independent ofman, but as the background of his pictures of life and humancharacter. How true his perceptions of her features are, how pure andtransparent the feeling she awakens in him! Take only two examples. Here is the well-known way he describes the burn in his _Halloween_--

 Whyles owre a linn the burnie plays, As thro' the glen it wimpl't; Whyles round a rocky scaur it strays, Whyles in a wiel it dimpl't; Whyles glitter'd to the nightly rays, Wi' bickerin', dancin' dazzle: Whyles cookit underneath the brass, Below the spreading hazel, Unseen that night. 

Was ever burn so naturally, yet picturesquely described? The nextverse can hardly be omitted--

 Amang the brachens on the brae, Between her an' the moon, The deil, or else an outler quey, Gat up an' gae a croon: Poor Leezie's heart maist lap the hool; Near lav'rock height she jumpit; But miss'd a fit, an' in the pool Out-owre the lugs she plumpit, Wi' a plunge that night

"Maist lap the hool, " what condensation in that Scotch phrase! (p.  201)The hool is the pod of a pea--poor Lizzie's heart almostleapt out of its encasing sheath. 

Or look at this other picture:--

 Upon a simmer Sunday morn, When Nature's face is fair, I walked forth to view the corn, And snuff the caller air. The risin' sun owre Galston muirs Wi' glorious light was glintin; The hares were hirplin down the furrs, The lav'rocks they were chantin Fu' sweet that day. 

I have noted only some of the excellences of Burns's poetry, which faroutnumber its blemishes. Of these last it is unnecessary to speak;they are too obvious, and whatever is gross, readers can of themselvespass by. 

Burns's most considerable poems, as distinct from his songs, werealmost all written before he went to Edinburgh. There is, however, onememorable exception. _Tam o' Shanter_, as we have seen, belongs toEllisland days. Most of his earlier poems were entirely realistic, atranscript of the men and women and scenes he had seen and known, onlylifted a very little off the earth, only very slightly idealized. Butin _Tam o' Shanter_ he had let loose his powers upon the materials ofpast experiences, and out of them he shaped a tale which was a pureimaginative creation. In no other instance, except perhaps in _TheJolly Beggars_, had he done this; and in that cantata, if the geniusis equal, the materials are so coarse, and the sentiment so gross, asto make it, for all its dramatic power, decidedly offensive. It isstrange what very opposite judgments have been formed of the intrinsicmerit of _Tam o' Shanter_. Mr. Carlyle thinks that it might have (p.  202)been written "all but quite as well by a man, who, in place of genius, had only possessed talent; that it is act so much a poem, as a pieceof sparkling rhetoric; the heart of the story still lies hard anddead. " On the other hand, Sir Walter Scott has recorded this verdict:"In the inimitable tale of _Tam o' Shanter_, Burns has left ussufficient evidence of his abilities to combine the ludicrous with theawful and even the horrible. No poet, with the exception ofShakespeare, ever possessed the power of exciting the most varied anddiscordant emotions with such rapid transitions. His humorousdescription of death in the poem on Dr. Hornbrook, borders on theterrific; and the witches' dance in the Kirk of Alloway is at onceludicrous and horrible. " Sir Walter, I believe, is right, and theworld has sided with him in his judgment about _Tam o' Shanter_. Nowhere in British literature, out of Shakespeare, is there to befound so much of the power of which Scott speaks--that of combining inrapid transition almost contradictory emotions--if we except perhapsone of Scott's own highest creations, the tale of Wandering Willie, in_Redgauntlet_. 

On the songs of Burns a volume might be written, but a few sentencesmust here suffice. It is in his songs that his soul comes out fullest, freest, brightest; it is as a song-writer that his fame has spreadwidest, and will longest last. Mr. Carlyle, not in his essay, whichdoes full justice to Burns's songs, but in some more recent work, hassaid something like this, "Our Scottish son of thunder had, for wantof a better, to pour his lightning through the narrow cranny ofScottish song--the narrowest cranny ever vouchsafed to any son ofthunder. "--The narrowest, it may be, but the most effective, if a mandesires to come close to his fellow-men, soul to soul. Of all forms ofliterature the genuine song is the most penetrating, and the most (p.  203)to be remembered; and in this kind Burns is the supreme master. To make him this, two things combined. First, there was the greatbackground of national melody and antique verse, coming down to himfrom remote ages, and sounding through his heart from childhood. Hewas cradled in a very atmosphere of melody, else he never could havesung so well. No one knew better than he did, or would have owned morefeelingly, how much he owed to the old forgotten song-writers of hiscountry, dead for ages before he lived, and lying in their unknowngraves all Scotland over. From his boyhood he had studied eagerly theold tunes, and the old words where there were such, that had come downto him from the past, treasured every scrap of antique air and verse, conned and crooned them over till he had them by heart. This was theone form of literature that he had entirely mastered. And from thefirst he had laid it down as a rule, that the one way to catch theinspiration, and rise to the true fervour of song, was, as he phrasedit, "to _sowth_ the tune over and over, " till the words camespontaneously. The words of his own songs were inspired bypre-existing tunes, not composed first, and set to music afterwards. But all this love and study of the ancient songs and outward melodywould have gone for nothing, but for the second element, that is theinward melody born in the poet's deepest heart, which received intoitself the whole body of national song; and then when it had passedthrough his soul, sent it forth ennobled and glorified by his owngenius. 

That which fitted him to do this was the peculiar intensity of hisnature, the fervid heart, the trembling sensibility, the headlongpassion, all thrilling through an intellect strong and keen beyond (p.  204)that of other men. How mysterious to reflect that the same qualitieson their emotional side made him the great songster of the world, andon their practical side drove him to ruin! The first word which Burnscomposed was a song in praise of his partner on the harvest-rig; thelast utterance he breathed in verse was also a song--a faintremembrance of some former affection. Between these two he composedfrom two to three hundred. It might be wished perhaps that he hadwritten fewer, especially fewer love songs; never composed underpressure, and only when his heart was so full he could not helpsinging. This is the condition on which alone the highest order ofsongs is born. Probably from thirty to forty songs of Burns could benamed which come up to this highest standard. No other Scottishsong-writer could show above four or five of the same quality. Of hissongs one main characteristic is that their subjects, the substancethey lay hold of, belongs to what is most permanent in humanity, thoseprimary affections, those permanent relations of life which cannotchange while man's nature is what it is. In this they are whollyunlike those songs which seize on the changing aspects of society. Asthe phases of social life change, these are forgotten. But no time cansuperannuate the subjects which Burns has sung; they are rooted in theprimary strata, which are steadfast. Then as the subjects are primary, so the feeling with which Burns regards them is primary too--that is, he gives us the first spontaneous gush--the first throb of his heart, and that a most strong, simple, manly heart. The feeling is not turnedover in the reflective faculty, and there artistically shaped, --notsubtilized and refined away till it has lost its power and freshness;but given at first hand, as it comes warm from within. When he is (p.  205)at his best you seem to hear the whole song warbling through hisspirit, naturally as a bird's. The whole subject is wrapped in anelement of music, till it is penetrated and transfigured by it. No oneelse has so much of the native lilt in him. When his mind was at thewhite heat, it is wonderful how quickly he struck off some of his mostperfect songs. And yet he could, when it was required, go back uponthem, and retouch them line by line, as we saw him doing in _Ye Banksand Braes_. In the best of them the outward form is as perfect as theinward music is all-pervading, and the two are in complete harmony. 

To mention a few instances in which he has given their ultimate andconsummate expression to fundamental human emotions, four songs may bementioned, in each of which a different phase of love has beenrendered for all time--

 Of a' the airts the wind can blaw, Ye flowery banks o' bonnie Doon, Go fetch to me a pint o' wine;

and that other, in which the calm depth of long-wedded and happy loveutters itself, so blithely yet pathetically, --

 John Anderson, my Jo, John. 

Then for comic humour of courtship, there is--

 Duncan Gray cam here to woo. 

For that contented spirit which, while feeling life's troubles, yetkeeps "aye a heart aboon them a', " we have--

 Contented wi' little, and cantie wi' mair. 

For friendship rooted in the past, there is-- (p.  206)

 Should auld acquaintance be forgot, even if we credit antiquity with some of the verses. 

For wild and reckless daring, mingled with a dash of finer feeling, there is _Macpherson's Farewell_. For patriotic heroism--

 Scots wha hae wi' Wallace bled;

and for personal independence, and sturdy, if self-asserting, manhood--

 A man's a man for a' that. 

These are but a few of the many permanent emotions to which Burns hasgiven such consummate expression, as will stand for all time. 

In no mention of his songs should that be forgotten which is sogreatly to the honour of Burns. He was emphatically the purifier ofScottish song. There are some poems he has left, there are also a fewamong his songs, which we could wish that he had never written. But wewho inherit Scottish song as he left it, can hardly imagine how muchhe did to purify and elevate our national melodies. To see what he hasdone in this way, we have but to compare Burns's songs with thecollection of Scottish songs published by David Herd, in 1769, a fewyears before Burns appeared. A genuine poet, who knew well what hespoke of, the late Thomas Aird, has said, "Those old Scottishmelodies, sweet and strong though they were, strong and sweet, were, all the more for their very strength and sweetness, a moral plague, from the indecent words to which many of them had long been set. Howwas the plague to be stayed? All the preachers in the land could notdivorce the grossness from the music. The only way was to put (p.  207)something better in its stead. This inestimable something betterBurns gave us. "

So purified and ennobled by Burns, these songs embody human emotion inits most condensed and sweetest essence. They appeal to all ranks, they touch all ages, they cheer toil-worn men under every clime. Wherever the English tongue is heard, beneath the suns of India, amidAfrican deserts, on the western prairies of America, among thesquatters of Australia, whenever men of British blood would give ventto their deepest, kindliest, most genial feelings, it is to the songsof Burns they spontaneously turn, and find in them at once a perfectutterance, and a fresh tie of brotherhood. It is this which formsBurns's most enduring claim on the world's gratitude. 

INDEX (p.  209)

 Adair, Dr. , 76. Addington, Mr. , 69-70, 144, 171. _Address to the Deil_, 23. _Address to the Unco Guid_, 58, 199. Aiken, Robert, 29. Ainslie, Mr. , 60, 72, 91. Aird, Thomas, 194. Alison, Rev. A. , 128-129. Alloway Kirk, 121; Kirkyard, 16. Alloway Mill, school at, 5. _A Man's a Man for a' that_, 167. Armour, Jean, 26-27, 62-63, 83-84, 85-88, 141, 160. Armour, Mr. , 26, 33, 83-84, 96. Athole, Duchess of, 65. Athole, Duke of, 67. _Auld Lang Syne_, 206. Auld Lights, The, 18. Ayr, river, 27. 

 _Banks o' Doon_, 123-124, 161, 205. _Bard's Epitaph_, the, 190. Begbie, Ellison, 12. Begg, Mrs. (Burns's sister), 25, 62. Belches of Invermay, The, 75. _Birks of Invermay, The_, 75. Blacklock, Dr. , 38, 48-49, 104. Blair Castle, 65, 67. Blair, Dr. H. , 38, 44, 48, 50-51, 56-57. _Bonnie Peggie Alison_, 12. _Brigs of Ayr_, 58. Brow, 179, 184. Brown, Agnes (Burns's mother), 3. _Bruar Water, Humble Petition of_, 66-67. Bruce, Mrs. , of Clackmannan, 77-78. Bruce, Robert, 78, 157. Burnes, James (Burns's cousin), 183. Burness (or Burnes), William (Burns's father), 2-3, 6-7, 14-15. Burns, Gilbert, 5, 9-12, 26, 36, 85, 99-100. Burns, Mrs. _See_ Armour, Jean. Burns, Robert, biographies of, 1; birth, 2; parentage, 2-3, 6-7, 14-15; successive homes: Mount Oliphant, 4-9, Lochlea, 9-15, Mossgiel, 15, 20, 22, 24; school-days, 5-7; household reading, 6-7; early love affairs, 8-10, 12, 26-30; youthful dissipation, 10, 13-15; Burns as a farmer, 15-16, 20-21, 95, 98-99, 132-133; religious controversy, 17-20; poetic aspirations, 21; two prolific years, 22-26; Jean Armour, 26, 27; resolves to emigrate, 27, 30, 32, 34; Kilmarnock edition of the poems published, 30-34; literary earnings, 32, 58-59, 85, 152; immediate popularity, 33-34, 37, 39; his manners, 36; first winter in Edinburgh, 42-59; literary and legal lights, 44-46; the lion of the season, 48-57; his appearance, 49-50, 118, 170; tavern life, 57-58; second edition of the poems, 58-59; Border and Highland tours, 60, 63-78; Burns's descriptions of scenery, 71-72; disappointing poetic fruits, 73; knighted by Mrs. Bruce, 78; second winter in Edinburgh, 79-93; reasons for his stay, 79; hypochondria and despondency, 81; Mrs. M'Lehose, 82-84; appointment in the excise, 84; marriage, 85-88; change in the attitude of Edinburgh society, 89-90; some reasons for it, 90-92; life at Ellisland, 94-134; Burns's farm, 95; discomfort and despondency, 96-97; happiest period of his life, 99, 102; house at Ellisland, 101-102; as an exciseman, 105-106; restlessness and discontent, 113, 115-116; _Tam o' Shanter_, 120-122; dramatic aspirations, 126; gives up his farm, 133; migration to Dumfries, 135; downward course, 138, 162, 164, 172; social discredit, 139, 173; politics, 139, 142-149, 161, 168-169, 171; friendship with the Liddels, 140, 162, 179-180; Mrs. M'Lehose reappears, 140-141; relations with Johnson and Thomson, 150-154, 159; excursion into Galloway, 156-157; an unhappy time, 161-164; declining health, 165, 174; joins the volunteers, 169-170; last illness, 176-179; poverty and anxiety, 180-184; death, 185; Burns's grave, 186-187; character, 188, 189. As a poet: satires, 19-20, 31-32, epistles, 23, pure landscape not his forte, 71, 72, at his best in the Scottish dialect, 73, 151, tenderness towards animals, 106-108, 179, Bacchanalian songs, 110-112, Burns in the hour of inspiration, 121-122, elegies, 123, circumstance and mental habits forbade long poems, 126, love songs, 140-141, 160-161, in the act of composition, 159-160, piercing insight and large sympathy, 192, truthfulness of nature, 193, caustic wit, 193, the interpreter of Scotland's peasantry, 196, the restorer of her nationality, 196-197, catholicity, 197-198, intense love of nature, 200, Burns as a song-writer, 202-206. 

 Campbell, Mary. _See_ Highland Mary. Carlyle, Thomas, 17, 54, 129, 131-132, 156-157, 169, 202. Cathcart, Miss, 66. Chalmers, Margaret, 80-81, 84, 87, 183. Chambers, Dr. , 11, 27, 39 _et passim_. Clarinda. _See_ M'Lehose, Mrs. Clark, William, 117-118. Commonplace Book, Burns's, 55-56, 115. _Cotter's Saturday Night, The_, 20, 23, 25, 37, 70, 195. Cowper, 47, 48. Craig, Mrs. , 184. Creech, Mr. , 56-59, 79, 85, 153. Crochallan Club, The, 58, 61, 63, 91. Cruikshank, Mr. , 78. Cunningham, Alexander, 163. Cunningham, Allan, 75, 89, 96, 97, 125, 133 _et passim_. Currie, Dr. , 174. 

 Daer, Lord, 35, 156. Dalrymple, Mr. , 46. Dalswinton, 94. Davidson, John (Souter Johnnie), 122. _Death and Dr. Hornbook_, 23, 58, 70. _Death of Poor Mailie, The_, 9. _Deil's awa' wi' the Exciseman, The_, 145. _Despondency, Ode to_, 31. Don, Lady Harriet, 127. Doon, Brig of, 2, 3, 4. Dumfries, Burns's life at, 135-154; social condition of, 136. Dundas, Mr. Henry, 67, 92, 143, 171. Dunlop, Mrs. , 34, 36-37, 96; letters to, 54, 86, 89, 96, 100, 109, 113, 114, 149, 165, 169, 174, 175, 183. 

 Ecclefechan, 168-169. Edinburgh, Burns's first winter in, 42-59; tavern life in, 57-58; second winter in, 79-93. Eglinton, Lord, 58. Ellisland, 56, 61, 80, 85, 89, 94-134. Epistles, Burns's, 23-24. Erskine, H. , 45-46. Erskine of Mar, Mr. , 148. _Essay on Taste_, Alison's, 128-129. 

 _Farmer's Address to his Mare_, 23, 108, 195. Ferguson, Dr. Adam, 48, 53. Fergusson, the poet, 44, 191. French Revolution, Burns's sympathy with, 144-146, 157. 

 Galloway, Burns's tour in, 155-156. "Geddes, Jenny, " 128. Glencairn, Lady, 104. Glencairn, Lord, 46, 56, 123. Globe Tavern, the, 116, 128, 137-138, 176. Gordon Castle, 68-69. Gordon, Duchess of, 46, 69. Gordon, Duke of, 68. Gow, Neil, 73-74. Graham, Douglas (Tam o' Shanter), 122. Graham, Mrs. , 66. Graham of Balnagown, 66. Graham of Fintray, Mr. , 67, 84, 103, 120, 147, 172. Greenfield, Mr. , 56-57. Grose, Captain, 108-109, 120-121. 

 _Halloween_, 23, 194, 200. Hamilton, Charlotte, 80-81, 183. Hamilton, Gavin, 19, 30, 76, 80. Hazlitt, 12. Heron of Heron, 169. Heron Robert, 33, 57, 58. Hemans, Mrs. , 157. Highland Mary, 27-31, 34, 112-113. _Highland Mary, Lament for_, 27, 31-32, 113. _Holy Fair, The_, 19-20, 25, 31. _Holy Willie's Prayer_, 19, 31. Hume, David, 44. 

 Irvine, 13-14, 26, 41. 

 Jacobitism, Burns's, 142-143. Jeffrey, 52, 177. _John Anderson my Jo_, 114. Johnson, Dr. , 45. _Johnson's Museum_, 73, 75, 114, 150-151. Johnson, the engraver, 73, 150, 179. _Jolly Beggars, The_, 23, 25, 126, 201. _Justice of Peace_ (Langhorne's), 53. 

 Kilmarnock edition of the poems, 30-33, 191. Kirkoswald, 10, 13, 122. _Kirk's Alarm, The_, 109. 

 _Land o' Cakes_, 108-109. _Lass of Cessnock Water, The_, 12. Laurie, Dr. , 38, 48. Lewars, Jessie, 178, 185. Lewars, Mr. , 105. Lochlea, 9-15. Lockhart, Mr. , 20, 27, 48, 62, 67, 87, 127, 145. _Lounger, The_, 45, 47. 

 M'Culloch, David, 164. Mackenzie, H. , 45, 48. M'Lehose, Mrs. , 82-85, 140-141. _Macpherson's Farewell_, 71. _Mary in Heaven_, 73, 112, 114, 120, 161. _Mary Morrison_, 11-12. Masterton, Allan, 110. Mauchline, 15, 62, 99. Maxwell, Provost, 115. Mendelssohn, 179. Miller of Dalswinton, Mr. , 85, 95, 98, 133. Milton, 55, 63. Mitchell, Collector, 175, 182. Monboddo, Lord, 45, 48. Moore, Dr. , 72, 125. Mossgiel, 15, 20, 22, 24, 38, 61. _Mountain Daisy, The_, 23, 36. Mount Oliphant, 4-9. _Mouse, To a_, 23, 108. Murdoch, Burns's tutor, 5-7. _My Nannie, O_, 9, 11. 

 "Nell, Handsome, " 7-9. New Lights, 18-19, 34, 109. "Nicht wi' Burns, " a, 130-131. Nicol, Mr. , 61, 63, 66, 68-70, 72, 91. North, Christopher, 42. 

 _Of a' the airts_, 161. _Oh, wert thou in the cauld blast_, 178. _Ordination, The_, 19, 25, 58. 

 Paine, Tom, 146. Pindar, Peter, 152. Poems, Kilmarnock edition, 30-33, 191; second edition, 58-59. Politics, Burns's part in, 139, 142-149, 161, 169, 171. Prentice, Mr. , 42. Punch-bowl, Burns's, 96, 131-132. 

 Ramsay, Allan, 21, 23, 44, 75, 191. Ramsay of Ochtertyre, 119, 125. _Rankine, Epistle to John_, 16. Richmond, John, 43. Riddel, Mrs. W. , 141, 179-180. Riddel of Friars' Carse, 98, 162. Riddel, Walter, 139, 162. Robertson, Dr. , 44-48. "Rosamond, " the brig, 145. _Ruin, Ode to_, 31. 

 Samson, John, 43. _Scots wha hae_, 155-157, 206. Scott-Douglas, Mr. , 27-28, 124. Scott, Sir W. , 52, 54, 75-76, 197. Selkirk, Lord, 155. Sidmouth, Lord. _See_ Addington, Mr. _Silver Tassie_, the, 114. Skinner, Bishop, 74. Smith, Adam, 45. Smith, Betty, 99, 101. Songs, Burns's, 202-205. Stewart, Dugald, 34-36, 43-44, 46, 51, 56-57. Syme, Mr. , 154-155, 170. 

 _Tam o' Shanter_, 120-122, 125, 191, 201-202. Tarbolton, 10. Thomson, Geo. , 126, 151-153, 156, 161, 165, 171, 177, 182-183. Tours, Border and Highland, 60-78. _Twa Dogs, The_, 23, 31, 70, 193, 194. _Twa Herds, The_, 19. Tytler, Mr. Fraser, 48. 

 _Vision, The_, 23. 

 Walker, Prof. , 49, 51, 66, 174. Wallace, William, 21, 36, 197. Wee Vennel, the, 135, 137. _Whistle, The_, 111-112. _Willie brewed a peck o' maut_, 110-112. Wilson, John (painter), 31. _Winter Night, The_, 108. Wolcot, Dr. _See_ Pindar, Peter. Woodley Park, 140, 162. Wordsworth, 71, 157-159, 190. 

_Printed by_ R. & R. Clark, Limited, _Edinburgh_.