ROBERT
BURNS:

ROBERT
BURNS

BY
GABRIEL
SETOUN

FAMOUS

·SCOTS·
·SERIES·

PUBLISHED BY
OLIPHANT ANDERSON
& FERRIER · EDINBURGH
AND LONDON

{4}

June 1896.

{5}

CONTENTS

{7}

ROBERT BURNS

CHAPTER I

BIRTH AND EDUCATION

Of the many biographies of Robert Burns that have
been written, most of them laboriously and carefully,
perhaps not one gives so luminous and vivid a portrait,
so lifelike and vigorous an impression of the personality
of the poet and the man, as the picture the author has
given of himself in his own writings. Burns’s poems
from first to last are, almost without exception, the
literary embodiment of his feelings at a particular
moment. He is for ever revealing himself to the
reader, even in poems that might with propriety be
said to be purely objective. His writings in a greater
degree than the writings of any other author are the
direct expression of his own experiences; and in his
poems and songs he is so invariably true to himself, so
dominated by the mood of the moment, that every one
of them gives us some glimpse into the heart and soul
of the writer. In his letters he is rarely so happy; frequently
he is writing up to certain models, and ceases to
be natural. Consequently we often miss in them the
character and spirituality that is never absent from his{8}
poetry. But his poems and songs, chronologically
arranged, might make in themselves, and without the
aid of any running commentary, a tolerably complete
biography. Reading them, we note the development of
his character and the growth of his powers as a poet;
we can see at any particular time his attitude towards
the world, and the world’s attitude towards him; we
have, in fine, a picture of the man in his relations to his
fellow-man and in relation to circumstances, and may
learn if we will what mark he made on the society of
his time, and what effect that society had on him.
And that surely is an important essential of perfect
biography.

But otherwise the story of Burns’s life has been told
with such minuteness of detail, that the internal evidence
of his poetry would seem only to be called in to verify
or correct the verdict of tradition and the garbled gossip
of those wise after the fact of his fame. It is so easy
after a man has compelled the attention of the world
to fill up the empty years of his life when he was all
unknown to fame, with illustrative anecdotes and almost
forgotten incidents, revealed and coloured by the light
of after events! This is a penalty of genius, and it is
sometimes called fame, as if fame were a gift given of
the world out of a boundless and unintelligent curiosity,
and not the life-record of work achieved. It is easier to
collect ana and to make them into the patchwork pattern
of a life than to read the character of the man in his
writings; and patchwork, of necessity, has more of
colour than the homespun web of a peasant-poet.

Burns has suffered sorely at the hands of the anecdote-monger.
One great feature of his poems is their perfect{9}
sincerity. He pours out his soul in song; tells the tale
of his loves, his joys and sorrows, of his faults and
failings, and the awful pangs of remorse. And if a man
be candid and sincere, he will be taken at his word when
he makes the world his confessional, and calls himself a
sinner. There is pleasure to small minds in discovering
that the gods are only clay; that they who are guides
and leaders are men of like passions with themselves,
subject to the same temptations, and as liable to fall.
This is the consolation of mediocrity in the presence of
genius; and if from the housetops the poet proclaims
his shortcomings, the world will hear him gladly and
believe; his faults will be remembered, and his genius
forgiven. What more easy than to bear out his testimony
with the weight of collateral evidence, and the charitable
anecdotage of acquaintances who knew him not? Information
that is vile and valueless may ever be had for the
seeking; and it needs only to be whispered about for
a season to find its way ultimately into print, and to
flourish.

It might naturally be expected at this time of day that
all that is merely mythical and traditional might have
been sifted from what is accredited and attested fact,
that the chaff might have been winnowed from the grain
in the life of Burns. In some of the most recently-published
biographies this has been most carefully and
conscientiously done; but through so many years wild
and improbable stories had been allowed to thrive and
to go unchallenged, that fiction has come to take the
colour and character of fact, and to pass into history.
‘The general impression of the place,’ that unfortunate
phrase on which the late George Gilfillan based an{10}
unpardonable attack on the character of the poet, has
grown by slow degrees, and gained credence by the
lapse of time, till it is accepted as the general impression
of the country. Those who would speak of the poet
Robert Burns are expected to speak apologetically, and
to point a moral from the story of a wasted life. For
that has become a convention, and convention is always
respectable. But after all is said and done, the devil’s
advocate makes a wretched biographer. It seems
strange and unaccountable that men should dare to
become apologists for one who has sung himself into
the heart and conscience of his country, and taken the
ear of the world. Yet there have been apologists even
for the poetry of Burns. We are told, wofully, that
he wrote only short poems and songs; was content with
occasional pieces; did not achieve any long and sustained
effort—to be preserved, it is to be expected, in a
folio edition, and assigned a fitting place among other
musty and hide-bound immortals on the shelves of
libraries under lock and key. As well might we seek
to apologise for the fields and meadows, in so far as
they bring forth neither corn nor potatoes, but only
grasses and flowers, to dance to the piping of the wind,
and nod in the sunshine of summer.

It is a healthier sign, however, that the more recent
biographers of Burns snap their fingers in the face of
convention, and, looking to the legacy he has left the
world, refuse to sit in sackcloth and ashes round his
grave, either in the character of moralising mourners
or charitable mutes. Whatever has to be said against
them nowadays, the ‘cant of concealment’—to adopt
another of Gilfillan’s phrases—is not to be laid to their{11}
charge. Rather have they rushed to the other extreme,
and in their eagerness to do justice to the memory of
the poet, led the reader astray in a wilderness of
unnecessary detail. So much is now known of Burns,
so many minute and unimportant details of his life and
the lives of others have been unearthed, that the poet is,
so to speak, buried in biography; the character and the
personality of the man lost in the voluminous testimony
of many witnesses. Reading, we note the care and
conscientiousness of the writer; we have but a confused
and blurred impression of the poet. Although a century
has passed since his death, we do not yet see the events
of Burns’s life in proper perspective. Things trifling in
themselves, and of little bearing on his character, have
been preserved, and are still recorded with painful
elaboration; while the sidelights from friends, companions,
and acquaintances, male and female, are many
and bewildering.

Would it not be possible out of this mass of material
to tell the story of Robert Burns’s life simply and clearly,
neither wandering away into the family histories and
genealogies of a crowd of uninteresting contemporaries,
nor wasting time in elaborating inconsequential trifles?
What is wanted is a picture of the man as he was, and
an understanding of all that tended to make him the
name and the power he is in the world to-day.

William Burness, the father of the poet, was a native
of Kincardineshire, and ‘was thrown by early misfortunes
on the world at large.’ After many years’ wanderings,
he at last settled in Ayrshire, where he worked at first
as a gardener before taking a lease of some seven acres
of land near the Bridge of Doon, and beginning business{12}
as a nurseryman. It was to a clay cottage which he
built on this land that he brought his wife, Agnes Broun,
in December 1757; and here the poet was born in 1759.
The date of his birth is not likely to be forgotten.

To his father Burns owed much; and if there be anything
in heredity in the matter of genius, it was from
him that he inherited his marvellous mental powers.
His mother is spoken of as a shrewd and sagacious
woman, with education enough to enable her to read her
Bible, but unable to write her own name. She had a
great love for old ballads, and Robert as a boy must
often have listened to her chanting the quaint old songs
with which her retentive memory was stored. The poet
resembled his mother in feature, although he had the
swarthy complexion of his father. Attempts have been
made now and again to trace his ancestry on the
father’s side, and to give to the world a kind of
genealogy of genius. Writers have demonstrated to
their own satisfaction that it was perfectly natural that
Burns should have been the man he was. But the
other children of William Burness were not great poets.
It has even been discovered that his genius was Celtic,
whatever that may mean! Excursions and speculations
of this kind are vain and unprofitable, hardly more
reputable than the profanities of the Dumfries craniologists
who, in 1834, in the early hours of April 1st,—a
day well chosen,—desecrated the poet’s dust. They
fingered his skull, ‘applied their compasses to it, and{13}
satisfied themselves that Burns had capacity enough to
write Tam o’ Shanter, The Cotter’s Saturday Night, and
To Mary in Heaven.’ Let us take the poet as he comes
to us, a gift of the gods, and be thankful. As La
Bruyère puts it, ‘Ces hommes n’ont ni ancêtres ni
postérités; ils forment eux seuls toute une descendance.’

What Burns owed particularly to his father he has
told us himself both in prose and verse. The exquisite
and beautiful picture of the father and his family at
their evening devotions is taken from life; and William
Burness is the sire who

and in his fragment of autobiography the poet remarks:
‘My father picked up a pretty large quantity of observation
and experience, to which I am indebted for
most of my pretensions to wisdom. I have met with
few men who understood men, their manners and their
ways, equal to him; but stubborn, ungainly integrity and
headlong, ungovernable irascibility are disqualifying circumstances;
consequently I was born a very poor man’s
son…. It was his dearest wish and prayer to have it
in his power to keep his children under his own eye till
they could discern between good and evil; so with the
assistance of his generous master, he ventured on a small
farm in that gentleman’s estate.’

This estimate of William Burness is endorsed and
amplified by Mr. Murdoch, who had been engaged by
him to teach his children, and knew him intimately.

‘I myself,’ he says, ‘have always considered William{14}
Burness as by far the best of the human race that ever
I had the pleasure of being acquainted with. He was
an excellent husband; a tender and affectionate father.
He had the art of gaining the esteem and goodwill of
those that were labourers under him. He carefully
practised every known duty, and avoided everything
that was criminal; or, in the apostle’s words, Herein did
he exercise himself in living a life void of offence towards
God and man.’

Even in his manner of speech he was different from
men in his own walk in life. ‘He spoke the English
language with more propriety (both with respect to
diction and pronunciation) than any man I ever knew
with no greater advantages.’

Truly was Burns blessed in his parents, especially in
his father. Naturally such a father wished his children
to have the best education his means could afford. It
may be that he saw even in the infancy of his firstborn
the promise of intellectual greatness. Certain it is he
laboured, as few fathers even in Scotland have done, to
have his children grow up intelligent, thoughtful, and
virtuous men and women.

Robert Burns’s first school was at Alloway Mill, about
a mile from home, whither he was sent when in his
sixth year. He had not been long there, however, when
the father combined with a few of his neighbours to
establish a teacher in their own neighbourhood. That
teacher was Mr. Murdoch, a young man at that time in
his nineteenth year.

This is an important period in the poet’s life, although
he himself in his autobiography only briefly touches on
his schooling under Murdoch. He has more to say of{15}
what he owed to an old maid of his mother’s, remarkable
for her ignorance, credulity, and superstition.
‘She had, I suppose, the largest collection in the
country of tales and songs concerning devils, ghosts,
fairies, brownies, witches, warlocks, spunkies, kelpies,
elf-candles, dead-lights, wraiths, apparitions, cantraips,
enchanted towers, giants, dragons, and other trumpery.
This cultivated the latent seeds of Poesy; but had so
strong an effect on my imagination, that to this hour,
in my nocturnal rambles, I sometimes keep a sharp lookout
in suspicious places; and though nobody can be
more sceptical in these matters than I, yet it often
takes an effort of philosophy to shake off these idle
terrors.’

It ought not to be forgotten that Burns had a better
education than most lads of his time. Even in the
present day many in better positions have not the
advantages that Robert and Gilbert Burns had, the
sons of such a father as William Burness, and under
such an earnest and thoughtful teacher as Mr. Murdoch.
It is important to notice this, because Burns is too often
regarded merely as a lusus naturæ; a being gifted with
song, and endowed by nature with understanding from
his birth. We hear too much of the ploughman poet.
His genius and natural abilities are unquestioned and
unquestionable; but there is more than mere natural
genius in his writings. They are the work of a man
of no mean education, and bear the stamp—however
spontaneously his songs sing themselves in our ears—of
culture and study. In a letter to Dr. Moore several
years later than now, Burns himself declared against
the popular view. ‘I have not a doubt but the knack,{16}
the aptitude to learn the Muses’ trade is a gift
bestowed by Him who forms the secret bias of the
soul; but I as firmly believe that excellence in the
profession is the fruit of industry, attention, labour,
and pains. At least I am resolved to try my doctrine
by the test of experience.’ There is a class of people,
however, to whom this will sound heretical, forbidding
them, as it were, the right to babble with grovelling
familiarity of Rab, Rob, Robbie, Scotia’s Bard, and
the Ploughman Poet; and insisting on his name being
spoken with conscious pride of utterance, Robert Burns,
Poet.

Gilbert Burns, writing to Dr. Currie of the school-days
under Mr. Murdoch, says: ‘We learnt to read English
tolerably well, and to write a little. He taught us, too,
the English Grammar. I was too young to profit much
by his lessons in grammar, but Robert made some proficiency
in it—a circumstance of considerable weight in
the unfolding of his genius and character, as he soon
became remarkable for the fluency and correctness of
his expression, and read the few books that came in
his way with much pleasure and improvement; for even
then he was a reader when he could get a book.’

After the family removed to Mount Oliphant, the
brothers attended Mr. Murdoch’s school for two years
longer, until Mr. Murdoch was appointed to a better
situation, and the little school was broken up. Thereafter
the father looked after the education of his boys
himself, not only helping them with their reading at
home after the labours of the day, but ‘conversing
familiarly with them on all subjects, as if they had been
men, and being at great pains, as they accompanied{17}
him on the labours of the farm, to lead conversation to
such subjects as might tend to increase their knowledge
or confirm them in virtuous habits.’ Among the books
he borrowed or bought for them at that period were
Salmon’s Geographical Grammar, Derham’s Physico-Theology,
Ray’s Wisdom of God in the Works of
Creation, and Stackhouse’s History of the Bible. It
was about this time, too, that Robert became possessed
of The Complete Letter-Writer, a book which Gilbert
declared was to Robert of the greatest consequence,
since it inspired him with a great desire to excel in
letter-writing, and furnished him with models by some
of the first writers in our language. Perhaps this book
was a great gain. It is questionable. What would
Robert Burns’s letters have been had he never seen a
Complete Letter-Writer, and never read ‘those models
by some of the first writers in our language’? Easier
and more natural, we are of opinion; and he might
have written fewer. Those in the Complete Letter-Writer
style we could easily have spared. His teacher,
Mr. Murdoch, furnishes some excellent examples of the
stilted epistolary style that was then fashionable.

‘But now the plains of Mount Oliphant began to
whiten, and Robert was summoned to relinquish the
pleasing scenes that surrounded the grotto of Calypso,
and, armed with a sickle, to seek glory by signalising
himself in the fields of Ceres.’ Though Robert Burns
never perpetrated anything like this, his models were
not without their pernicious effect on his prose compositions.

When Robert was about fourteen years old, he and
Gilbert were sent for a time, week about, to a school{18}
at Dalrymple, and the year following Robert was sent
to Ayr to revise his English grammar under Mr. Murdoch.
While there he began the study of French,
bringing with him, when he returned home, a French
Dictionary and Grammar and Fenelon’s Telemaque.
In a little while he could read and understand any
French author in prose. He also gave some time to
Latin; but finding it dry and uninteresting work, he
soon gave it up. Still he must have picked up a little
of that language, and we know that he returned to the
rudiments frequently, although ‘the Latin seldom predominated,
a day or two at a time, or a week at most.’
Under the heading of general reading might be mentioned
The Life of Hannibal, The Life of Wallace, The
Spectator, Pope’s Homer, Locke’s Essay on the Human
Understanding, Allan Ramsay’s Works, and several
Plays of Shakspeare. All this is worth noting, even at
some length, because it shows how Burns was being
educated, and what books went to form and improve
his literary taste.

Yet when we consider the circumstances of the
family we see that there was not much time for study.
The work on the farm allowed Burns little leisure, but
every spare moment would seem to have been given
to reading. Father and sons, we are told by one who
afterwards knew the family at Lochlea, used to sit at
their meals with books in their hands; and the poet
says that one book in particular, A Select Collection of
English Songs, was his vade mecum. He pored over
them, driving his cart or walking to labour, song by
song, verse by verse, carefully noting the true, tender, or
sublime from affectation or fustian. ‘I am convinced,’{19}
he adds, ‘I owe to this practice much of my critic craft,
such as it is.’

The years of their stay at Mount Oliphant were years of
unending toil and of poverty bravely borne. The whole
period was a long fight against adverse circumstances.
Looking back on his life at this time, Burns speaks of
it as ‘the cheerless gloom of a hermit with the unceasing
moil of a galley slave’; and we can well believe
that this is no exaggerated statement. His brother
Gilbert is even more emphatic. ‘Mount Oliphant,’
he says, ‘is almost the poorest soil I know of in a
state of cultivation…. My father, in consequence
of this, soon came into difficulties, which were increased
by the loss of several of his cattle by accident and
disease. To the buffetings of misfortune we could only
oppose hard labour and the most rigid economy. We
lived very sparingly. For several years butcher’s meat
was a stranger in the house, while all the members of
the family exerted themselves to the utmost of their
strength, and rather beyond it, in the labours of the
farm. My brother, at the age of thirteen, assisted in
thrashing the crop of corn, and at fifteen was the
principal labourer on the farm; for we had no hired
servant, male or female. The anguish of mind we felt
at our tender years under these straits and difficulties
was very great. To think of our father growing old
(for he was now above fifty), broken down with the
long-continued fatigues of his life, with a wife and five
other children, and in a declining state of circumstances,
these reflections produced in my brother’s mind and
mine sensations of the deepest distress. I doubt not
but the hard labour and sorrow of this period of his{20}
life was in a great measure the cause of that depression of
spirits with which Robert was so often afflicted through
his whole life afterwards. At this time he was almost
constantly afflicted in the evenings with a dull headache,
which at a future period of his life was exchanged
for a palpitation of the heart and a threatening of
fainting and suffocation in his bed in the night-time.’

This, we doubt not, is a true picture—melancholy,
yet beautiful. But not only did this increasing toil and
worry to make both ends meet, injure the bodily health
of the poet, but it did harm to him in other ways. It
affected, to a certain extent, his moral nature. Those
bursts of bitterness which we find now and again in
his poems, and more frequently in his letters, are
assuredly the natural outcome of these unsocial and
laborious years. Burns was a man of sturdy independence;
too often this independence became aggressive.
He was a man of marvellous keenness of perception;
too frequently did this manifest itself in a sulky suspicion,
a harshness of judgment, and a bitterness of speech.
We say this in no spirit of fault-finding, but merely
point it out as a natural consequence of a wretched
and leisureless existence. This was the education of
circumstances—hard enough in Burns’s case; and if it
developed in him certain sterling qualities, gave him
an insight into and a sympathy with the lives of his
struggling fellows, it at the same time warped, to a
certain extent, his moral nature.

What was his outlook on the world at this time? He
measured himself with those he met, we may be sure,
for Burns certainly (as he says of his father) ‘understood
men, their manners and their ways,’ as it is given{21}
to very few to be able to do. Of the ploughmen, farmers,
lairds, or factors, he saw round about him there was none
to compare with him in natural ability, few his equal in
field-work. ‘At the plough, scythe, or reap-hook,’ he
remarks, ‘I feared no competitor.’ Yet, conscious of
easy superiority, he saw himself a drudge, almost a slave,
while those whom nature had not blessed with brains
were gifted with a goodly share of this world’s wealth.

His father, his brother, and himself—all the members
of the family indeed—toiled unceasingly, yet were unable
to better their position. Matters, indeed, got worse, and
worst of all when their landlord died, and they were left
to the tender mercies of a factor. The name of this man
we do not know, nor need we seek to know it. We know
the man himself, and he will live for ever a type of
tyrannous, insolent insignificance.

Is it to be wondered at that Burns’s blood boiled at
times, or that he should now and again look at those in
easier circumstances with snarling suspicion, and give{22}
vent to his feelings in words of rankling bitterness?
Robert Burns and his father were just such men as an
insolent factor would take a fiendish delight in torturing.
‘My indignation yet boils,’ Burns wrote years afterwards,
‘at the recollection of the scoundrel factor’s insolent,
threatening letters, which used to set us all in tears.’
Had they ‘boo’d and becked’ at his bidding, and
grovelled at his feet, he might have had some glimmering
sense of justice, and thought it mercy. But the Burnses
were men of a different stamp. ‘William Burness always
treated superiors with a becoming respect, but he never
gave the smallest encouragement to aristocratical arrogance’;
and his son Robert was not less manly and
independent. He was too sound in judgment; too
conscious of his own worth, to sink into mean and abject
servility. But this factor, perhaps more than anyone
else, did much to pervert, if he could not kill, the poet’s
spirit of independence.

Curiously enough, the opening sentences of his autobiographical
sketch have a suspicious ring of the pride
that apes humility. There is something harsh and
aggressive in his unnecessary confidence. ‘I have not
the most distant pretensions to assume the character
which the pye-coated guardians of escutcheons call a
gentleman. When at Edinburgh last winter I got acquainted
at the Herald’s office; and, looking through
that granary of honours, I there found almost every name
in the kingdom; but for me,

Gules, Purpure, Argent, etc., quite disowned me.’ All
this is quite gratuitous and hardly in good taste.{23}

Yet, in spite of untoward circumstances, ceaseless
drudgery, and insufficient diet, the family of Mount
Oliphant was not utterly lost to happiness. With such a
shrewd mother and such a father as William Burness—a
man of whom Scotland may be justly proud—no home
could be altogether unhappy. In Burns’s picture of the
family circle in The Cotter’s Saturday Night there is
nothing of bitterness or gloom or melancholy.

In the work of the farm, too, hard as it was, there was
pleasure, and the poet’s first song, with the picture he
gives of the partners in the harvest field, breaks forth
from this life of cheerless gloom and unceasing moil like
a blink of sunshine through a lowering sky. Burns’s
description of how the song came to be made is worthy
of quotation, because it gives us a very clear and well-defined
likeness of himself at the time, a lad in years,
but already counting himself among men. ‘You know
our country custom of coupling a man and a woman
together in the labours of harvest. In my fifteenth
autumn my partner was a bewitching creature who just
counted an autumn less. In short, she, unwittingly to
herself, initiated me into a certain delicious passion,
which … I hold to be the first of human joys…. I did not
well know myself why I liked so much to loiter behind{24}
her when returning in the evening from our labours;
why the tones of her voice made my heart-strings thrill
like an Æolian harp; and particularly why my pulse
beat such a furious rantann when I looked and fingered
over her hand to pick out the nettle-stings and thistles.
Among her other love-inspiring qualifications she sang
sweetly; and ’twas her favourite Scotch reel that I attempted
to give an embodied vehicle to in rhyme. I
was not so presumptive as to imagine I could make verses
like printed ones composed by men who had Greek and
Latin; but my girl sung a song which was said to be
composed by a small country laird’s son, on one of his
father’s maids with whom he was in love; and I saw no
reason why I might not rhyme as well as he.’

He had already measured himself with this moorland
poet, and admits no inferiority; and what a laird’s son
has done he too may do. Writing of this song afterwards,
Burns, who was always a keen critic, admits that it is
‘very puerile and silly.’ Still, we think there is something
of beauty, and much of promise, in this early effusion.
It has at least one of the merits, and, in a sense, the
peculiar characteristic of all Burns’s songs. It is sincere
and natural; and that is the beginning of all good writing.

‘Thus with me,’ he says, ‘began love and poetry,
which at times have been my only and … my highest
enjoyment.’ This was the first-fruit of his poetic genius,
and we doubt not that in the composition, and after the
composition, life at Mount Oliphant was neither so
cheerless nor so hard as it had been. A new life was
opened up to him with a thousand nameless hopes and
aspirations, though probably as yet he kept all these
things to himself, and pondered them in his heart.{25}

CHAPTER II

LOCHLEA AND MOSSGIEL

The farm at Mount Oliphant proved a ruinous failure,
and after weathering their last two years on it under the
tyranny of the scoundrel factor, it was with feelings of
relief, we may be sure, that the family removed to Lochlea,
in the parish of Tarbolton. This was a farm of 130
acres of land rising from the right bank of the river Ayr.
The farm appeared to them more promising than the
one they had left. The prospect from its uplands was
extensive and beautiful. It commanded a view of the
Carrick Hills, and the Firth of Clyde beyond; but where
there are extensive views to be had the land is necessarily
exposed. The farm itself was bleak and bare, and
twenty shillings an acre was a high rent for fields so
situated.

The younger members of the family, however, were
now old enough to be of some assistance in the house
or in the fields, and for a few years life was brighter than
it had been before; not that labour was lighter to them
here, but simply because they had escaped the meshes
and machinations of a petty tyrant, and worked more
cheerfully, looking to the future with confidence. Father,
mother, and children all worked as hard as they were
able, and none more ungrudgingly than the poet.{26}

We know little about those first few years of life at
Lochlea, which should be matter for special thanksgiving.
Better we should know nothing at all than that
we should learn of misfortunes coming upon them, and
see the family again in tears and forced to thole a factor’s
snash; better silence than the later unsavoury episodes,
which have not yet been allowed decent burial. Probably
life went evenly and beautifully in those days.
The brothers accompanied their father to the fields;
Agnes milked the cows, reciting the while to her younger
sisters, Annabella and Isabella, snatches of song or
psalm; and in the evening the whole family would again
gather round the ingle to raise their voices in Dundee or
Martyrs or Elgin, and then to hear the priest-like father
read the sacred page.

The little that we do know is worth recording.
‘Gilbert,’ to quote from Chambers’s excellent edition of
the poet’s works, ‘used to speak of his brother as being
at this period a more admirable being than at any other.
He recalled with delight the days when they had to go
with one or two companions to cut peats for the winter
fuel, because Robert was sure to enliven their toil with
a rattling fire of witty remarks of men and things,
mingled with the expressions of a genial glowing heart,
and the whole perfectly free from the taint which he
afterwards acquired from his contact with the world.
Not even in those volumes which afterwards charmed his
country from end to end, did Gilbert see his brother in so
interesting a light as in those conversations in the bog,
with only two or three noteless peasants for an audience.’

This is a beautiful picture: the poet enlivening toil
with talk, lighting and illustrating all he said with his{27}
lively imagination; Gilbert listening silently, and a group
of noteless peasants dumb with wonder. No artist has
yet painted this picture of Burns, as his brother saw him,
at his best. Writers have glanced at the scene and
passed it by. It needed to be looked at with naked,
appreciative eyes; they had come with microscopes to
the study of Burns. Far more interesting material
awaited them farther on: The Poet’s Welcome, for example!
They could amplify that. Here, too, is the
first hint of Burns’s brilliant powers as a talker; a
glimpse on this lonely peat moss of the man who, not
many years afterwards, was to dazzle literary Edinburgh
with the sparkle and force of his graphic speech.

Probably it was about this time that Burns went for
a summer to a school at Kirkoswald. In his autobiography
he says it was his seventeenth year, and, if so,
it must have been before the family had left Mount
Oliphant. Gilbert’s recollection was that the poet
was then in his nineteenth year, which would bring
the incident into the Lochlea period. In the new
edition of Chambers’s Burns, William Wallace accepts
Robert’s statement as correct; yet we hardly think the
poet would have spent a summer at school at a time
when the family was under the heel of that merciless
factor. Besides, although he speaks of his seventeenth
year, he has just made mention of the fact that he was
in the secret of half the amours of the parish; and it
was in the parish of Tarbolton that we hear of him
acting ‘as the second of night-hunting swains.’ Probably
also it would be after the family had found comparative
peace and quiet in their new home that it would
occur to Burns to resume his studies in a methodical{28}
way. The point is a small one. The important thing
is, that in his seventeenth or nineteenth summer he went
to a noted school on a smuggling coast to learn mathematics,
surveying, dialling, etc., in which he made a
pretty good progress. ‘But,’ he says, ‘I made a greater
progress in the knowledge of mankind. The contraband
trade was at this time very successful; scenes of swaggering
riot and roaring dissipation were as yet new to
me, and I was no enemy to social life. Here, though I
learnt to look unconcernedly on a large tavern bill and
mix without fear in a drunken squabble, yet I went on
with a high hand in my geometry.’

The glimpses we have of Burns during his stay here
are all characteristic of the man. We see a young man
looking out on a world that is new to him; moving in a
society to which he had hitherto been a stranger. His
eyes are opened not only to the knowledge of mankind,
but to a better knowledge of himself. Thirsting for information
and power, we find him walking with Willie Niven,
his companion from Maybole, away from the village to
where they might have peace and quiet, and converse
on subjects calculated to improve their minds. They
sharpen their wits in debate, taking sides on speculative
questions, and arguing the matter to their own satisfaction.
No doubt in these conversations and debates he was
developing that gift of clear reasoning and lucid expression
which afterwards so confounded the literary and
legal luminaries of Edinburgh. They had made a study
of logic, but here was a man from the plough who held
his own with them, discussing questions which in their
opinion demanded a special training. For an uncouth
country ploughman gifted with song they were prepared,{29}
but they did not expect one who could meet them in
conversation with the fence and foil of a skilled logician.
We may see also his burning desire for distinction in that
scene in school when he led the self-confident schoolmaster
into debate and left him humiliated in the eyes
of the pupils. Even in his contests with John Niven
there was the same eagerness to excel. When he could
not beat him in wrestling or putting the stone, he was
fain to content himself with a display of his superiority in
mental calisthenics. The very fact that a charming
fillette overset his trigonometry, and set him off at a
tangent, is a characteristic ending to this summer of
study. Peggy Thomson in her kail-yard was too much
for the fiery imagination of a poet: ‘it was in vain to
think of doing more good at school.’

Too much stress is not to be laid on Burns’s own
mention of ‘scenes of swaggering riot and dissipation’
at Kirkoswald. Such things were new to him, and
made a lasting impression on his mind. We know that
he returned home very considerably improved. His
reading was enlarged with the very important addition
of Thomson’s and Shenstone’s works. He had seen
human nature in a new phasis, and now he engaged in
literary correspondence with several of his schoolfellows.

It was not long after his return from Kirkoswald that
the Bachelor’s Club was founded, and here could Burns
again exercise his debating powers and find play for his
expanding intellect. The members met to forget their
cares in mirth and diversion, ‘without transgressing the
bounds of innocent decorum’; and the chief diversion
appears to have been debate.

If we are to believe Gilbert, the seven years of their{30}
stay in Tarbolton parish were not marked by much
literary improvement in Robert. That may well have
been Gilbert’s opinion at the time; for the poet was
working hard on the farm, and often spending an evening
at Tarbolton or at one or other of the neighbouring farms.
But he managed all the same to get through a considerable
amount of reading; and though, perhaps, he did
not devote himself so sedulously to books as he had been
accustomed to do in the seclusion of Mount Oliphant, he
was storing his mind in other ways. His keen observation
was at work, and he was studying what was of more
interest and importance to him than books—’men, their
manners and their ways.’ ‘I seem to be one sent into
the world,’ he remarks in a letter to Mr. Murdoch, ‘to
see and observe; and I very easily compound with the
knave who tricks me of my money, if there be anything
original about him, which shows me human nature in a
different light from anything I have seen before.’ Partly it
was this passion to see and observe, partly it was another
passion that made him the assisting confidant of most of
the country lads in their amours. ‘I had a curiosity, zeal,
and intrepid dexterity in these matters which recommended
me as a proper second in duels of that kind.’
His song, My Nannie, O, which belongs to this period, is
not only true as a lyric of sweet and simple love, but is also
true to the particular style of love-making then in vogue.

According to Gilbert, the poet himself was constantly
the victim of some fair enslaver, although, being jealous{31}
of those richer than himself, he was not aspiring in his
loves. But while there was hardly a comely maiden in
Tarbolton to whom he did not address a song, we are not
to imagine that he was frittering his heart away amongst
them all. A poet may sing lyrics of love to many while
his heart is true to one. The one at this time to Robert
Burns was Ellison Begbie, to whom some of his songs
are addressed—notably Mary Morrison, one of the
purest and most beautiful love lyrics ever poet penned.
Nothing is more striking than the immense distance
between this composition and any he had previously
written. In this song he for the first time stepped to
the front rank as a song-writer, and gave proof to himself,
if to nobody else at the time, of the genius that was in
him. A few letters to Ellison Begbie are also preserved,
pure and honourable in sentiment, but somewhat artificial
and formal in expression. It was because of his love
for her, and his desire to be settled in life, that he took to
the unfortunate flax-dressing business in Irvine. That
is something of an unlovely and mysterious episode in
Burns’s life. Suffice it to say in his own words: ‘This
turned out a sadly unlucky affair. My partner was a
scoundrel of the first water, and, to finish the whole
business, while we were giving a welcome carousal to the
New Year, our shop, by the drunken carelessness of my
partner’s wife, took fire and burned to ashes, and I was
left, like a true poet, not worth a sixpence.’

His stay at Irvine was neither pleasant for him at the
time nor happy in its results. He met there ‘acquaintances
of a freer manner of thinking and living than he
had been used to’; and it needs something more than
the family misfortunes and the deathbed of his father to{32}
account for that terrible fit of hypochondria when he
returned to Lochlea. ‘For three months I was in a
diseased state of body and mind, scarcely to be envied
by the hopeless wretches who have just got their sentence,
Depart from me, ye cursed.’

Up to this time, the twenty-fifth year of his age, Burns
had not written much. Besides Mary Morrison might
be mentioned The Death and Dying Words of Poor
Mailie, and another bewitching song, The Rigs o’ Barley,
which is surely an expression of the innocent abandon,
the delicious rapture of pure and trustful love. But
what he had written was work of promise, while at least
one or two of his songs had the artistic finish as well as
the spontaneity of genuine poetry. In all that he had
done, ‘puerile and silly,’ to quote his own criticism of
Handsome Nell, or at times halting and crude, there was
the ring of sincerity. He was not merely an echo, as too
many polished poetasters in their first attempts have been.
Such jinglers are usually as happy in their juvenile
effusions as in their later efforts. But Burns from the
first tried to express what was in him, what he himself
felt, and in so far had set his feet on the road to perfection.
Being natural, he was bound to improve by practice,
and if there was genius in him to become in time a great
poet. That he was already conscious of his powers we
know, and the longing for fame, ‘that last infirmity of noble
mind,’ was strong in him and continually growing stronger.

Before this he had thought of more ambitious things
than songs, and had sketched the outlines of a tragedy;
but it was only after meeting with Fergusson’s Scotch
Poems that he ‘struck his wildly resounding lyre with
rustic vigour.’ In his commonplace book, begun in 1783,
we have ever-recurring hints of his devoting himself to
poetry. ‘For my own part I never had the least
thought or inclination of turning poet till I got once
heartily in love, and then Rhyme and Song were in a
measure the spontaneous language of my heart.’

The story of Wallace from the poem by Blind Harry
had years before fired his imagination, and his heart
had glowed with a wish to make a song on that hero in
some measure equal to his merits.

This was written afterwards, but it is retrospective of
the years of his dawning ambition.

For a time, however, all dreams of greatness are to
be set aside as vain. The family had again fallen on
evil days, and when the father died, his all went ‘among
the hell-hounds that grovel in the kennel of justice.’
This was no time for poetry, and Robert was too much
of a man to think merely of his own aims and ambitions
in such a crisis. It was only by ranking as creditors to
their father’s estate for arrears of wages that the children
of William Burness made a shift to scrape together a
little money, with which Robert and Gilbert were able to{34}
stock the neighbouring farm of Mossgiel. Thither the
family removed in March 1784; and it is on this farm
that the life of the poet becomes most deeply interesting.
The remains of the father were buried in Alloway Kirkyard;
and on a small tombstone over the grave the poet
bears record to the blameless life of the loving husband,
the tender father, and the friend of man. He had
lived long enough to hear some of his son’s poems, and
to express admiration for their beauty; but he had also
noted the passionate nature of his first-born. There
was one of his family, he said on his deathbed, for
whose future he feared; and Robert knew who that one
was. He turned to the window, the tears streaming
down his cheeks.

Mossgiel, to which the brothers now removed, taking
with them their widowed mother, was a farm of about
one hundred and eighteen acres of cold clayey soil,
close to the village of Mauchline. The farm-house,
having been originally the country house of their landlord,
Mr. Gavin Hamilton, was more commodious and
comfortable than the home they had left. Here the
brothers settled down, determined to do all in their
power to succeed. They made a fresh start in life,
and if hard work and rigid economy could have compelled
success, they might now have looked to the
future with an assurance of comparative prosperity.
Mr. Gavin Hamilton was a kind and generous landlord,
and the rent was only £90 a year; considerably
lower than they had paid at Lochlea.

But misfortune seemed to pursue this family, and ruin
to wait on their every undertaking. Burns says: ‘I
entered on this farm with a full resolution, “Come, go{35}
to, I will be wise.” I read farming books; I calculated
crops; I attended markets; and, in short, in spite of
the devil, the world, and the flesh, I should have been
a wise man; but the first year, from unfortunately
buying in bad seed; the second from a late harvest, we
lost half of both our crops. This overset all my wisdom,
and I returned like the dog to his vomit, and the sow
that was washed to her wallowing in the mire.’

That this resolution was not just taken in a repentant
mood merely to be forgotten again in a month’s time,
Gilbert bears convincing testimony. ‘My brother’s
allowance and mine was £7 per annum each, and
during the whole time this family concern lasted, which
was four years, as well as during the preceding period
at Lochlea, his expenses never in any one year exceeded
his slender income. His temperance and frugality were
everything that could be wished.’

Honest, however, as Burns’s resolution was, it was
not to be expected that he would—or, indeed, could—give
up the practice of poetry, or cease to indulge in
dreams of after-greatness. Poetry, as he has already
told us, had become the spontaneous expression of his
heart. It was his natural speech. His thoughts
appeared almost to demand poetry as their proper
vehicle of expression, and rhythmed into verse as
inevitably as in chemistry certain solutions solidify
in crystals. Besides this, Burns was conscious of his
abilities. He had measured himself with his fellows,
and knew his superiority. More than likely he had
been measuring himself with the writers he had studied,
and found himself not inferior. The great misfortune
of his life, as he confessed himself, was never to have{36}
an aim. He had felt early some stirrings of ambition,
but they were like gropings of Homer’s Cyclops round
the walls of his cave. Now, however, we have come
to a period of his life when he certainly did have an
aim, but necessity compelled him to renounce it as
soon as it was recognised. It was not a question of
ploughing or poetry. There was no alternative. However
insidiously inclination might whisper of poetry,
duty’s voice called him to the fields, and that voice he
determined to obey. Reading farming books and
calculating crops is not a likely road to perfection in
poetry. Yet, in spite of all noble resolution, the voice
of Poesy was sweet, and he could not shut his ears to it.
He might sing a song to himself, even though it were
but to cheer him after the labours of the day, and he
sang of love in ‘the genuine language of his heart.’

For song must come in spite of him. The caged
lark sings, though its field be but a withered sod, and the
sky above it a square foot of green baize. Nor was his
commonplace book neglected; and in August we come
upon an entry which shows that poetical aspirations were
again possessing him; this time not to be cast forth,
either at the timorous voice of Prudence or the importunate
bidding of Poverty. Burns has calmly and
critically taken stock—so to speak—of his literary
aptitudes and abilities, and recognised his fitness for a
place in the ranks of Scotland’s poets. ‘However I am
pleased with the works of our Scotch poets, particularly
the excellent Ramsay, and the still more excellent{37}
Fergusson, yet I am hurt to see other places of
Scotland, their towns, rivers, woods, haughs, etc., immortalised
in such celebrated performances, whilst my
dear native country, the ancient Bailieries of Carrick,
Kyle, and Cunningham, famous both in ancient and
modern times for a gallant and warlike race of inhabitants;
a country where civil and particularly religious
liberty have ever found their first support and their
last asylum, a country the birthplace of many famous
philosophers, soldiers, and statesmen, and the scene of
many important events in Scottish history, particularly a
great many of the actions of the glorious Wallace, the
saviour of his country; yet we have never had one
Scottish poet of any eminence to make the fertile banks
of Irvine, the romantic woodlands and sequestered
scenes of Aire, and the heathy mountainous source and
winding sweep of Doon, emulate Tay, Forth, Ettrick,
Tweed, etc. This is a complaint I would gladly remedy;
but, alas! I am far unequal to the task, both in native
genius and education. Obscure I am, and obscure I
must be, though no young poet nor young soldier’s
heart ever beat more fondly for fame than mine.’ The
same thoughts and aspirations are echoed later in his
Epistle to William Simpson—

The dread of obscurity spoken of here was almost a
weakness with Burns. We hear it like an ever-recurring
wail in his poems and letters. In the very next entry
in his commonplace book, after praising the old bards,
and drawing a parallel between their sources of inspiration
and his own, he shudders to think that his fate may be
such as theirs. ‘Oh mortifying to a bard’s vanity, their
very names are buried in the wreck of things that were!’

Close on the heels of these entries came troubles on
the head of the luckless poet, troubles more serious
than bad seed and late harvests. During the summer
of 1784, we know that he was in bad health, and again
subject to melancholy. His verses at this time are of a
religious cast, serious and sombre, the confession of
fault, and the cry of repentance.

Perhaps this is only the prelude to his verses to
Rankine, written towards the close of the year, and his
poem, A Poet’s Welcome. They must at least be all
read together, if we are to have any clear conception of
the nature of Burns. It is not enough to select his
Epistle to Rankine, and speak of its unbecoming levity.
This was the time when Burns was first subjected to
ecclesiastical discipline; and some of his biographers
have tried to trace the origin of that wonderful series of
satires, written shortly afterwards, to the vengeful feelings
engendered in the poet by this degradation. But Burns’s
attack on the effete and corrupt ceremonials of the
Church was not a burst of personal rancour and bitterness.{39}
The attack came of something far deeper and
nobler, and was bound to be delivered sooner or later.
His own personal experience, and the experience of his
worthy landlord, Gavin Hamilton, may have given the
occasion, but the cause of the attack was in the Church
itself, and in Burns’s inborn loathing of humbug, hypocrisy,
and cant.

Well was it the satires were written by so powerful a
satirist, that the Church purged itself of the evil thing
and cleansed its ways. This, however, is an episode of
such importance in the life of Burns, and in the religious
history of Scotland, as to require to be taken up carefully
and considered by itself.{40}

CHAPTER III

THE SERIES OF SATIRES

Before we can clearly see and understand Burns’s
attitude to the Church, we must have studied the nature
of the man himself, and we must know something also of
his religious training. It will not be enough to select
his series of satires, and, from a study of them alone,
try to make out the character of the man. His previous
life must be known; the natural bent of his mind apprehended,
and once that is grasped, these satires will
appeal to the heart and understanding of the reader
with a sense of naturalness and expectedness. They are
as inevitable as his love lyrics, and are read with the
conviction that his merciless exposure of profanity masquerading
in the habiliments of religion, was part of the
life-work and mission of this great poet. He had been
born, it is recognised, not only to sing the loves and joys
and sorrows of his fellow men and women, but to purge
their lives of grossness, and their religion of the filth of
hypocrisy and cant. Let it be admitted, that he himself
went ‘a kennin wrang.’ What argument is there? We
do not deny the divine mission of Samson because of
Delilah. Surely that giant’s life was a wasted one, yet
in his very death he was true to his mission, and fulfilled
the purpose of his birth. In other lands and in{41}
other times the satirist is recognised and his work appraised;
the abuses he scourged, the pretensions he
ridiculed, are seen in all their hideousness; but when a
great satirist arises amongst ourselves to probe the ulcers
of pharisaism, he is banned as a profaner of holy things,
touching with impious hands the ark of the covenant.
Why should the cloth—as it is so ingenuously called—be
touched with delicate hands, unless it be that it is
shoddy? Yet the man who would stand well in the
eyes of society must not whisper a word against pharisaism;
for the Pharisee is a highly respectable person, and
observes the proprieties; he typifies the conventional
righteousness and religion of his time.

Let us have done with all this timidity and coward
tenderness. If the Church is filthy, it must be cleansed;
if there be money-changers within its gates, let them be
driven out with a whip of small cords. This awe of the
cloth, not yet stamped out in Scotland, is but the remains
of a pagan superstition, and has nothing to do with
the manliness and courage of true religion. But prophets
have no honour in their own country, rarely in
their own time; they have ever been persecuted, and it
is the Church’s martyrs that have handed down through
the ages the light of the world.

The profanities and religious blasphemies Burns attacked
were evils insidious and poisonous, eating to the
very heart of the religious life of the country, and they
required a desperate remedy. Let us be thankful that
the remedy was applied in time; and, looking to the
righteousness he wrought, let us bless the name of
Burns.

Burns’s father, stern and severe moralist as he was,{42}
was not a strict Calvinist. Anyone who takes the
trouble to read ‘The Manual of Religious Belief in a
Dialogue between Father and Son, compiled by William
Burness, Farmer, Mount Oliphant, and transcribed with
Grammatical Corrections by John Murdoch, Teacher,’
will see that the man was of too loving and kindly a
nature to be strictly orthodox. What was rigid and
unlovely to him in the Calvinism of the Scottish Church
of that day has been here softened down into something
not very far from Arminianism. He had had a
hard experience in the world himself, and that may have
drawn him nearer to his suffering fellow-men and into
closer communion with his God. He had learned that
religion is a thing of the spirit, and not a matter of
creeds and catechisms. Of Robert Burns’s own religion
it would be impertinent to inquire too curiously. The
religion of a man is not to be paraded before the public
like the manifesto of a party politician. After all, is
there a single man who can sincerely, without equivocation
or mental reservation, label himself Calvinist,
Arminian, Socinian, or Pelagian? If there be, his
mind must be a marvel of mathematical nicety and
nothing more. All that we need know of Burns is
that he was naturally and sincerely religious; that he
worshipped an all-loving Father, and believed in an
ever-present God; that his charity was boundless; that
he loved what was good and true, and hated with an
indignant hatred whatever was loathsome and false.
He loved greatly his fellow-creatures, man and beast
and flower; he could even find something to pity in
the fate of the devil himself. That he was not orthodox,
in the narrow interpretation of orthodoxy in his{43}
day, we are well enough aware, else had he not been
the poet we love and cherish.

In his early days at Mount Oliphant there is a hint
of these later satires. ‘Polemical divinity about this
time was,’ he says, ‘putting the country half-mad, and
I, ambitious of shining on Sundays, between sermons,
in conversation parties, at funerals, etc., in a few years
more, used to puzzle Calvinism with so much heat and
indiscretion that I raised a hue and cry of heresy against
me, which has not ceased to this hour.’ And heresy is a
terrible cry to raise against a man in Scotland. In
those days it was Anathema-maranatha; even now it is
still the war-slogan of the Assemblies.

The polemical divinity which he refers to as putting
the country half-mad was the wordy war that was being
carried on at that time between the Auld Lights and the
New Lights. These New Lights, as they were called,
were but a birth of the social and religious upheaval that
was going on in Scotland and elsewhere. The spirit of
revolution was abroad; in France it became acutely
political; in Scotland there was a desire for greater
religious freedom. The Church, as reformed by Knox,
was requiring to be re-reformed. The yoke of papacy
had been lifted certainly, but the yoke of pseudo-Protestantism
which had taken its place was quite as
heavy on the necks of the people. So long as it had
been new; so long as it had been of their own choosing,
it had been endured willingly. But a generation was
springing up—stiff-necked they might have been called,
in that they fretted under the yoke of their fathers—that
sought to be delivered from the tyranny of their
pastors and the fossilised formalism of their creed. To{44}
the people in their bondage a prophet was born, and
that prophet was Robert Burns.

It was natural that a man of Burns’s temperament and
clearness of perception should be on the side of the
‘common-sense’ party. In one of his letters to Mr.
James Burness, Montrose, wherein he describes the
strange doings of a strange sect called the Buchanites,—surely
in itself a convincing proof of the degeneracy of
the times in the matter of religion,—we have an interesting
reflection which gives us some insight into the
poet’s mind. ‘This, my dear Sir, is one of the many
instances of the folly in leaving the guidance of sound
reason and common sense in matters of religion. Whenever
we neglect or despise those sacred monitors, the
whimsical notions of a perturbed brain are taken for the
immediate influences of the Deity, and the wildest
fanaticism and the most inconsistent absurdities will
meet with abettors and converts. Nay, I have often
thought that the more out of the way and ridiculous
their fancies are, if once they are sanctified under the
name of religion, the unhappy, mistaken votaries are the
more firmly glued to them.’

The man who wrote that was certainly not the man,
when the day of battle came, to join himself with the
orthodox party, the party that stuck to the pure, undiluted
Puritanism of Covenanting times. Yet many
biographers have not seen the bearing that such a letter
has on Burns’s attitude to the Church. Principal Shairp
seems to say that Burns, had it not been for the accident
of ecclesiastical discipline to which he had been
subjected, would have joined the orthodox party. The
notion is absurd. Burns had attacked orthodox Calvinism{45}
even in his boyhood, and was already tainted
with heresy. ‘These men,’ the worthy Principal informs
us, ‘were democratic in their ecclesiastical views, and
stout protesters against patronage. All Burns’s instincts
would naturally have been on the side of those who
wished to resist patronage and “cowe the lairds” had
not this, his natural tendency, been counteracted by a
stronger bias drawing him in an opposite direction.’
This is a narrowing—if not even a positive misconception—of
the case with a vengeance. The question was
not of patronage at all, but of moral and religious
freedom; while the democracy of those ministers was
a terribly one-sided democracy. The lairds may have
dubbed them democrats, but they were aristocratic
enough, despotic even, to their herds. But Principal
Shairp has been led altogether wrong by imagining that
‘Burns, smarting under the strict church discipline,
naturally threw himself into the arms of the opposite
or New Light party, who were more easy in their life
and in their doctrine.’ More charitable also, and Christ-like
in their judgments, I should fain hope; less blinded
by a superstitious awe of the Church. ‘Nothing could
have been more unfortunate,’ he continues, ‘than that
in this crisis of his career he should have fallen into
intimacy with those hard-headed but coarse-minded
men.’ Surely this zeal for the Church has carried him
too far. Were these men all coarse minded? Nobody
believes it. The coarse-minded Dr. Dalrymple of Ayr,
and the coarse-minded Mr. Lawrie of Loudon! This is
not argument. Besides, it is perfectly gratuitous. The
question, again, is not one of men—that ecclesiastical
discipline has been an offence and a stumbling-block—either{46}
coarse minded or otherwise. It is a question of principle,
and Burns fought for it with keen-edged weapons.

It would be altogether a mistake to identify Burns
with the New Light party, or with any other sect. He
was a law unto himself in religion, and would bind himself
by no creed. Because he attacked rigid orthodoxy
as upheld by Auld Light doctrine, that does not at all
mean that he was espousing, through thick and thin, the
cause of the New Light party. He fought in his own
name, with his own weapons, and for humanity. It
ought to be clearly understood that in his series of
satires he was not attacking the orthodoxy of the Auld
Lights from the bulwarks of any other creed. His
criticism was altogether destructive. From his own
conception of a wise and loving God he satirised what
he conceived to be their irrational and inhuman conception
of Deity, whose attitude towards mankind was
assuredly not that of a father to his children. Burns’s
God was a God of love; the god they worshipped was
the creation of their creed, a god of election. It is
quite true that Burns made many friends amongst the
New Lights, but we are certain he did not hold by all
their tenets or subscribe to their doctrine. In the
Dictionary of National Biography we read: ‘Burns
represented the revolt of a virile and imaginative
nature against a system of belief and practice which,
as he judged, had degenerated into mere bigotry and
pharisaism…. That Burns, like Carlyle, who at once
retained the sentiment and rejected the creed of his race
more decidedly than Burns, could sympathise with the
higher religious sentiments of his class is proved by The
Cotter’s Saturday Night.’{47}

Principal Shairp, however, has not seen the matter in
this broad light. All he sees is a man of keen insight
and vigorous powers of reasoning, who ‘has not only his
own quarrel with the parish minister and the stricter
clergy to revenge, but the quarrel also of his friend and
landlord, Gavin Hamilton, a county lawyer who had
fallen under church censure for neglect of church ordinances,’—a
question of new potatoes in fact,—’and had
been debarred from the communion.’

It is pleasing to see that the academic spirit is not
always so blinding and blighting. Professor Blackie
recognises that the abuses Burns castigated were real
abuses, and admits that the verdict of time has been in
his favour. ‘In the case of Holy Willie and The Holy
Fair,’ he remarks, ‘the lash was wisely and effectively
wielded’; and on another occasion he wrote, ‘Though
a sensitive pious mind will naturally shrink from the
bold exposure of devout abuses in holy things, in The
Holy Fair and other similar satires, on a broad view of
the matter we cannot but think that the castigation was
reasonable, and the man who did it showed an amount
of independence, frankness, and moral courage that
amply compensates for the rudeness of the assault.’

Rude, the assault certainly was and overwhelming.
Augean stables are not to be cleansed with a spray of
rose-water.

Lockhart, whilst recognising the force and keenness
of these satires, has regretfully pointed out that the very
things Burns satirised were part of the same religious
system which produced the scenes described in The
Cotter’s Saturday Night. But is this not really the
explanation of the whole matter? It was just because{48}
Burns had seen the beauty of true religion at home, that
he was fired to fight to the death what was false and
rotten. It was the cause of true religion that he
espoused.

Compare the reading of the sacred page, when the
family is gathered round the ingle, and ‘the sire turns
o’er with patriarchal grace the big ha’-bible’ and ‘wales
a portion with judicious care,’ with the reading of
Peebles frae the Water fit—

What a contrast! The two readings are as far apart
as is heaven from hell, as far as the true from the
false. It is strange that both Lockhart and Shairp
should have stumbled on the explanation of Burns’s
righteous satire in these poems; should have been so
near it, and yet have missed it. It was just because
Burns could write The Cotter’s Saturday Night that he
could write The Holy Tulzie, Holy Willie’s Prayer, The
Ordination, and The Holy Fair. Had he not felt the
beauty of that family worship at home; had he not seen
the purity and holiness of true religion, how could such
scenes as those described in The Holy Fair, or such
hypocrisy as Holy Willie’s, ever have moved him to
scathing satire? Where was the poet’s indignation to{49}
come from? That is not to be got by tricks of rhyme
or manufactured by rules of metre; but let it be alive
and burning in the heart of the poet, and all else will
be added unto him for the perfect poem, as it was to
Burns. That Burns, though he wrote in humorous
satire, was moved to the writing by indignation, he tells
us in his epistle to the Rev. John M’Math—

The first of Burns’s satires, if we except his epistle to
John Goudie, wherein we have a hint of the acute differences
of the time, is his poem The Twa Herds, or
The Holy Tulzie. The two herds were the Rev. John
Russell and the Rev. Alexander Moodie, both afterwards
mentioned in The Holy Fair. These reverend gentlemen,
so long sworn friends, bound by a common bond
of enmity against a certain New Light minister of the
name of Lindsay, ‘had a bitter black outcast,’ and, in
the words of Lockhart, ‘abused each other coram populo
with a fiery virulence of personal invective such as has
long been banished from all popular assemblies.’ This
degrading spectacle of two priests ordained to preach
the gospel of love, attacking each other with all the
rancour of malice and uncharitableness, and foaming
with the passion of a pothouse, was too flagrant an
occasion for satire for Burns to miss. He held them
up to ridicule in The Holy Tulzie, and showed them
themselves as others saw them. It has been objected{50}
by some that Burns made use of humorous satire; did
not censure with the fiery fervour of a righteous indignation.
Burns used the weapon he could handle best;
and a powerful weapon it is in the hands of a master.
We acknowledge Horace’s satires to be scathing enough,
though they are light and delicate, almost trifling and
flippant at times. He has not the volcanic utterance of
Juvenal, but I doubt not his castigations were quite as
effective. ‘Quamquam ridentem dicere verum quid
vetat?’ Burns might have well replied to his censors
with the same question. Quick on the heels of this
poem came Holy Willie’s Prayer, wherein he took up
the cudgels for his friend, Mr. Gavin Hamilton, and
fought for him in his own enthusiastic way. The satire
here is so scathing and scarifying that we can only read
and wonder, shuddering the while for the wretched
creature so pitilessly flayed. Not a word is wasted;
not a line without weight. The character of the self-righteous,
sensual, spiteful Pharisee is a merciless exposure,
and, hardest of all, the picture is convincing.
For Burns believed in his own mind that these men,
Holy Willie and the crew he typified, were thoroughly
dishonest. They were not in his judgment—and Burns
had keen insight—mere bigots dehumanised by their
creed, but a pack of scheming, calculating scoundrels.

But it must be noted in Holy Willie that the poet is{51}
not letting himself out in a burst of personal spleen.
He is again girding at the rigidity of a lopped and
maimed Calvinism, and attacking the creed through the
man. The poem is a living presentment of the undiluted,
puritanic doctrine of the Auld Light party, to whom
Calvinism meant only a belief in hell and an assurance
of their own election. It is evident that Burns was not
sound on either essential. The Address to the Unco
Guid is a natural sequel to this poem, and, in a sense,
its culmination. There is the same strength of satire,
but now it is more delicate and the language more
dignified. There is the same condemnation of pharisaism;
but the poem rises to a higher level in its appeal
for charitable views of human frailty, and its kindly
counsel to silence; judgment is to be left to Him who

Of all the series of satires, however, The Holy Fair is
the most remarkable. It is in a sense a summing up of
all the others that preceded it. The picture it gives of
the mixed and motley multitude fairing in the churchyard
at Mauchline, with a relay of ministerial mountebanks
catering for their excitement, is true to the life.
It is begging the question to deplore that Burns was
provoked to such an attack. The scene was provocation
sufficient to any right-thinking man who associated the
name of religion with all that was good and beautiful
and true. Such a state of things demanded reformation.
The churchyard—that holy ground on which the church
was built and sanctified by the dust of pious and saintly
men—cried aloud against the desecration to which it{52}
was subjected; and Burns, who alone had the power to
purify it from such profanities, would have been untrue
to himself and a traitor to the religion of his country
had he merely shrugged his shoulders and allowed things
to go on as they were going. And after all what was the
result? For the poem is part and parcel of the end it
achieved. ‘There is a general feeling in Ayrshire,’ says
Chambers, ‘that The Holy Fair was attended with a good
effect; for since its appearance the custom of resorting
to the occasion in neighbouring parishes for the sake of
holiday-making has been much abated and a great increase
of decorous observance has taken place.’ To that
nothing more need be added.

In this series of satires The Address to the Deil ought
also to be included. Burns had no belief at all in that
Frankenstein creation. It was too bad, he thought, to
invent such a monster for the express purpose of imputing
to him all the wickedness of the world. If such
a creature existed, he was rather sorry for the maligned
character, and inclined to think that there might be
mercy even for him.

Speaking of this address, Auguste Angellier says: ‘All
at once in their homely speech they heard the devil
addressed not only without awe, but with a spice of
good-fellowship and friendly familiarity. They had
never heard the devil spoken of in this tone before. It
was a charming address, jocund, full of raillery and good-humour,
with a dash of friendliness, as if the two speakers
had been cronies and companions ready to jog along{53}
arm in arm to the nether regions. He simply laughs
Satan out of countenance, turns him to ridicule, pokes
his fun at him, scolds and defies him just as he might
have treated a person from whom he had nothing to
fear. Nor is that all. He must admonish him, tell him
he has been naughty long enough, and wind up by
giving him some good advice, counselling him to mend
his ways. This was certainly without theological precedent.
It was, however, a simple idea which would
have arranged matters splendidly…. Even to-day to
speak well of the devil is an abomination almost as
serious as to speak evil of the Deity. There was
assuredly a great fortitude of mind as well as daring of
conduct to write such a piece as this.’

The poem has done more than anything else to kill
the devil of superstition in Scotland. After his death
he found, it is averred, a quiet resting-place in Kirkcaldy,
where pious people have built a church on his grave.

When Burns later in life made the witches and warlocks
dance to the piping of the devil in Alloway’s auld
haunted kirk, he was but assembling them in their fit
and proper house of meeting. Here had they been
called into being; here had they the still-born children
of superstition been thrashed into life and trained in
unholiness. One can imagine them oozing out from the
walls that had echoed their names so often through
centuries of Sabbath days. The devil himself, by virtue
of his rank, takes his place in the east, rising we have no
doubt from the very spot on which the pulpit once had
stood. In the church had superstition exorcised this
hellish legion out of the dead mass of ignorance into the
swarming maggots that batten on corruption; and it was{54}
in accordance with the eternal fitness of things that here
their spirits should abide, and, when they took bodily
shape, that they should assume the form and feature in
which their mother Superstition had conceived them.

Upon the holy table too lay ‘twa span-lang wee unchristened
bairns.’ For this hell the poet pictures is the
creation of a creed that throngs it with the souls of
innocent babes. ‘Suffer little children to come unto
me,’ Christ had said; ‘for of such is the kingdom of
heaven.’ ‘But unbaptized children must come unto
me,’ the devil of superstition said; ‘for of such is the
kingdom of hell.’

What pathos is in this line of Burns! There is in its
slow spondaic movement an eternity of tears. Could
satire or sermon have shown more forcibly the revolting
inhumanity of a doctrine upheld as divine? Yet were
there devout men, in other things gentle and loving and
charitable, who preached this as the law of a loving God.
With one stroke of genius they were brought face to face
with the logical sequence of their barbarous teaching,
and that without a word of coarseness or a touch of
caricature.

Only once again did Burns return to this attack on
bigotry and superstition, and that was when he was induced
to fight for Dr. Macgill in The Kirk’s Alarm.
But he had done his part in the series of satires of this
year to expose the loathsomeness of hypocrisy and to
purge holy places and the most solemn ceremonies of
what was blasphemous and grossly profane. That in
this Burns was fulfilling a part of his mission as a poet,
we can hardly doubt; and that his work wrought for
righteousness, the purer religious life that followed{55}
amply proves. The true poet is also a prophet; and
Robert Burns was a prophet when he spoke forth boldly
and fearlessly the truth that was in him, and dared to
say that sensuality was foul even in an elder of the kirk,
and that profanities were abhorred of God even though
sanctioned and sanctified under the sacred name of
religion.{56}

CHAPTER IV

THE KILMARNOCK EDITION

The Holy Tulzie had been written probably in April
1785, and the greatest of the satires, The Holy Fair, is
dated August of the same year. It may, however, have
been only drafted, and partly written, when the recent
celebration of the sacrament at Mauchline was fresh in
the poet’s mind. At the very latest, it must have been
taken up, completed, and perfected, in the early months
of 1786. That is a period of some ten months between
the first and the last of this series of satires; and during
that time he had composed Holy Willie’s Prayer, The
Address to the Deil, The Ordination, and The Address to
the Unco Guid. But this represents a very small part of
the poetry written by Burns during this busy period.
From the spring of 1785 on to the autumn of 1786 was
a time of great productiveness in his life, a productiveness
unparalleled in the life of any other poet. If, according
to Gilbert, the seven years of their stay at Lochlea were
not marked by much literary improvement in his brother,
we take it that the poet had been ‘lying fallow’ all those
years; and what a rich harvest do we have now! Here,
indeed, was a reward worth waiting for. To read over
the names of the poems, songs, and epistles written
within such a short space of time amazes us. And there{57}
is hardly a poem in the whole collection without a claim
to literary excellence. A month or two previous to the
composition of his first satire he had written what Gilbert
calls his first poem, The Epistle to Davie, ‘a brother poet,
lover, ploughman, and fiddler.’ It is worthy of notice
that, in the opening lines of this poem—

we see the poet and his surroundings, as he sets himself
down to write. He plunges, as Horace advises, in medias
res, and we have the atmosphere of the poem in the first
phrase. This is Burns’s usual way of beginning his
poems and epistles, as well as a great many of his songs.
The metre of this poem Burns has evidently taken from
The Cherry and the Slae, by Alexander Montgomery,
which he must have read in Ramsay’s Evergreen. The
stanza is rather complicated, although Burns, with his
extraordinary command and pliancy of language, uses it
from the first with masterly ease. But there is much
more than mere jugglery of words in the poem. Indeed,
such is this poet’s seeming simplicity of speech that his
masterly manipulation of metres always comes as an
afterthought. It never disturbs us in our first reading
of the poem. Gilbert’s opinion of this poem is worth
recording, the more especially as he expressly tells us
that the first idea of Robert’s becoming an author was
started on this occasion. ‘I thought it,’ he says, ‘at
least equal to, if not superior, to many of Allan Ramsay’s
epistles, and that the merit of these and much other
Scottish poetry seemed to consist principally in the knack{58}
of the expression; but here there was a strain of interesting
sentiment, and the Scotticism of the language scarcely
seemed affected, but appeared to be the natural language
of the poet.’ It startles us to hear Gilbert talking thus
of the Scotticism, after having heard so much of Robert
Burns writing naturally in the speech of his home and
county. In this poem we have, at least, the first proof
of that graphic power in which Burns has never been
excelled, and in it we have the earliest mention of his
Bonnie Jean. In his next poem, Death and Dr.
Hornbook, his command of language and artistic phrasing
are more apparent, while pawky humour and genial satire
sparkle and flash from every line. The poem is written
in that form of verse which Burns has made particularly
his own. He had become acquainted with it, it is most
likely, in the writings of Fergusson, Ramsay, and Gilbertfield,
who had used it chiefly for comic subjects; but
Burns showed that, in his hands at least, it could be made
the vehicle of the most pensive and tender feeling. In
an interesting note to the Centenary Burns, edited by
Henley and Henderson, it is pointed out that ‘the six-line
stave in rime couée built on two rhymes,’ was used
by the Troubadours in their Chansons de Gestes, and that
it dates at the very latest from the eleventh century.
Burns’s happiest use of it was in those epistles which
about this time he began to dash off to some of his friends;
and it is with these epistles that the uninterrupted stream
of poetry of this season may be said properly to begin.
Perhaps it was in the use of this stanza that Burns first
discovered his command of rhymes and his felicity of
phrasing. Certain it is, that after his first epistle to
Lapraik, we have epistles, poems, songs, satires flowing{59}
from his pen, uninterrupted for a period, and apparently
with marvellous ease. It has to be remembered, too,
that he was now inspired by the dream of becoming an
author—in print. When or where or how, had not been
determined; but the idea was delightful all the same; the
hope was inspiration itself. Some day his work would
be published, and he would be read and talked about!
He would have done something for poor auld Scotland’s
sake. The one thing now was to make the book, and to
that he set himself deliberately. Poetry was at last to
have its chance. Farming had been tried, with little
success. The crops of 1784 had been a failure, and this
year they were hardly more promising. In these discouraging
circumstances the poet was naturally driven in
upon himself. His eyes were turned ad intra, and he
sought consolation in his Muse. He was conscious of
some poetical ability, and he knew that his compositions
were not destitute of merit. Poetry, too, was to him, and
particularly so at this time, its own exceeding great reward.
He rhymed ‘for fun’; and probably he was finding in
the exercise that excitement his passionate nature craved.
Herein was his stimulant after the routine of farm-work—spiritless
work that was little better than slavery, incessant
and achieving nothing. We can imagine him in
those days returning from the fields, ‘forjesket, sair, with
weary legs,’ and becoming buoyant as soon as he has
opened the drawer of that small deal table in the garret.

But, lazy or not, she becomes ‘ramfeezled’ with constant
work, when he vows if ‘the thowless jad winna mak
it clink,’ to prose it,—a terrible threat. For he must
write, though it be but to keep despondency at arm’s
length. Yet it had become more than a pleasure and a
recreation to him; and this he was beginning to understand.
This, after all, was his real work, not the drudgery
of the fields; in it he must live his life, and fulfil his
mission. The more he wrote the more he accustomed
himself with the idea of being an author. He knew that
the critic-folk, deep read in books, might scoff at the very
suggestion of a ploughman turning poet, but he recognised
also that they might be wrong. It was not by dint
of Greek that Parnassus was to be climbed. ‘Ae spark
o’ Nature’s fire’ was the one thing needful for poetry that
was to touch the heart.

The works of such scholars enjoyed of the moths! There
is gentle satire here. They themselves had grubbed on
Greek, and now is Time avenged.

It is in his epistles that we see Burns most vividly
and clearly, the man in all his moods. They are just
such letters as might be written to intimate friends
when one is not afraid of being himself, and can speak
freely. In sentiment they are candid and sincere, and
in language transparently unaffected. Whatever occurs
to him as he writes goes down; we have the thoughts
of his heart at the time of writing, and see the varying
expressions of his face as he passes from grave to gay,
from lively to severe. Now he is tender, now indignant;
now rattling along in good-natured raillery without
broadening into burlesque; now becoming serious and
pensively philosophic without a suggestion of mawkish
morality. For Burns, when he is himself, is always an
artist; says his say, and lets the moral take care of
itself; and in his epistles he lets himself go in a very
revelry of artistic abandon. He does not think of
style—that fetich of barren minds—and style comes to
him; for style is a coquette that flies the suppliant
wooer to kiss the feet of him who worships a goddess;
a submissive handmaiden, a wayward and moody
mistress. But along with delicacy of diction, force and
felicity of expression, pregnancy of phrase and pliancy
of language, what knowledge there is of men—the
passions that sway, the impulses that prompt, the
motives that move them to action. Clearness of
vision and accuracy of observation are evidenced in
their vividness of imagery; naturalness and truthfulness—the
first essential of all good writing—in their{62}
convincing sincerity of sentiment. Wit and humour,
play and sparkle of fancy, satire genial or scathing, a
boundless love of nature and all created things, are
harmoniously unified in the glowing imagination of
the poet, and welded into the perfect poem. Behind
all is the personality of the writer, captivating the
reader as much by his kindliness and sympathy as by
his witchery of words. Others have attempted poetic
epistles, but none has touched familiar intercourse to
such fine issues; none has written with such natural
grace or woven the warp and woof of word and sentiment
so cunningly into the web of poetry as Robert
Burns. Looseness of rhythm may be detected, excruciating
rhymes are not awanting, but all are forgiven and
forgotten in the enjoyment of the feast as a whole.

Besides the satires and epistles we have during this
fertile period poems as different in subject, sentiment,
and treatment as The Cotter’s Saturday Night and
The Jolly Beggars; Hallowe’en and The Mountain
Daisy; The Farmer’s Address to his Auld Mare Maggie
and The Twa Dogs; Address to a Mouse, Man was
made to Mourn, The Vision, A Winter’s Night, and The
Epistle to a Young Friend. Perhaps of all these poems
The Vision is the most important. It is an epoch-marking
poem in the poet’s life. All that he had
previously written had been leading to this; the finer
the poem the more surely was it bringing him to this
composition. The time was bound to come when he
had to settle for himself finally and firmly what his
work in life was to be. Was poetry to be merely a pastime;
a recreation after the labours of the day were done; a
solace when harvests failed and ruin stared the family{63}
in the face? That question Burns answered when he
sat down by the ingle-cheek, and, looking backward,
mused on the years of youth that had been spent ‘in
stringing blethers up in rhyme for fools to sing.’ He
saw what he might have been; he knew too well what
he was—’half-mad, half-fed, half-sarket.’ Yet the
picture of what he might have been he dismissed
lightly, almost disdainfully; for he saw what he might
be yet—what he should be. Turning from the toilsome
past and the unpromising present, he looked to the
future with a manly assurance of better things. He
should shine in his humble sphere, a rustic bard;
his to

The poem is pitched on a high key; the keynote is
struck in the opening lines, and the verses move to
the end with stateliness and dignity. It is calm, contemplative,
with that artistic restraint that comes of
conscious power. Burns took himself seriously, and
knew that if he were true to his genius he would become
the poet and prophet of his fellow-men.

It is worth while dwelling a little on this particular
poem, because it marks a crisis in Burns’s life. At
this point he shook himself free from the tyranny of the
soil. He had considered all things, and his resolution
for authorship was taken. Some of the other poems will
be mentioned afterwards; meantime we have to consider
another crisis in his life—some aspects of his nature less
pleasing, some episodes in his career dark and unlovely.{64}

Speaking of the effect Holy Willie’s Prayer had on
the kirk-session, he says that they actually held three
meetings to see if their holy artillery could be pointed
against profane rhymers. ‘Unluckily for me,’ he adds,
‘my idle wanderings led me on another side, point-blank
within reach of their heaviest metal. This is the
unfortunate story alluded to in my printed poem The
Lament. ‘Twas a shocking affair, which I cannot yet
bear to recollect, and it had very nearly given me one
or two of the principal qualifications for a place with
those who have lost the chart and mistaken the reckoning
of rationality.’

Throughout the year 1785 Burns had been acquainted
with Jean Armour, the daughter of a master mason in
Mauchline. Her name, besides being mentioned in
his Epistle to Davie, is mentioned in The Vision, and
we know from a verse on the six belles of Mauchline
that ‘Armour was the jewel o’ them a’.’ From the
depressing cares and anxieties of that gloomy season
the poet had turned to seek solace in song, but he had
also found comfort and consolation in love.

Now in the spring of 1786 Burns as a man of honour
must acknowledge Jean as his wife. The lovers had imprudently
anticipated the Church’s sanction to marriage,
and it was his duty, speaking in the homely phrase of
the Scottish peasantry, to make an honest woman of
his Bonnie Jean. But, unfortunately, matters had been
going from bad to worse on the farm of Mossgiel, and{65}
about this time the brothers had come to a final decision
to quit the farm. Robert, as Gilbert informs us, durst
not then engage with a family in his poor, unsettled
state, but was anxious to shield his partner by every
means in his power from the consequences of their
imprudence. It was agreed, therefore, between them,
that they should make a legal acknowledgment of
marriage, that he should go to Jamaica to push his
fortune, and that she should remain with her father till
it should please Providence to put the means of supporting
a family in his power. He was willing even to
work as a common labourer so that he might do his
duty by the woman he had already made his wife. But
Jean’s father, whatever were his reasons, would allow
her to have nothing whatever to do with a man like
Burns. A husband in Jamaica was, in his judgment,
no husband at all. What inducement he held out, or
what arguments he used, we may not know, but he
prevailed on Jean to surrender to him the paper
acknowledging the irregular marriage. This he deposited
with Mr. Aitken of Ayr, who, as Burns heard,
deleted the names, thus rendering the marriage null
and void. This was the circumstance, what he regarded
as Jean’s desertion, which brought Burns, as he has
said, to the verge of insanity.

Now it was that he finally resolved to leave the
country. It was not the first time he had thought of
America. Poverty, before this, had led him to think of
emigrating; the success of others who had gone out
as settlers tempted him to try his fortune beyond the
seas, even though he ‘should herd the buckskin kye
in Virginia.’ Now, imprudence as well as poverty urged{66}
him, while, wounded so sorely by the action of the
Armours both in his love and his vanity, he had little
desire to remain at home. There is no doubt that,
prior to the birth of his twin children and the publication
of his poems, he would have quitted Scotland with little reluctance.
But he was so poor that, even after accepting
a situation in Jamaica, he had not money to pay
his passage; and it was at the suggestion of Gavin
Hamilton that he began seriously to prepare for the
publication of his poems by subscription, in order to
raise a sum sufficient to buy his banishment. Accordingly
we find him under the date April 3, 1786, writing
to Mr. Aitken, ‘My proposals for publishing I am just
going to send to press.’

But what a time this was in the poet’s life! It was
a long tumult of hope and despair, exultation and
despondency, poetry and love; revelry, rebellion, and
remorse. Everything was excitement; calmness itself
a fever. Yet through it all inspiration was ever with
him, and poem followed poem with miraculous, one
might almost say, unnatural rapidity. Now he is
apostrophising Ruin; now he is wallowing in the mire
of village scandal; now he is addressing a mountain
daisy in words of tenderness and purity; now he is
scarifying a garrulous tailor, and ranting with an alien
flippancy; now it is Beelzebub he addresses, now the
King; now he is waxing eloquent on the virtues of
Scotch whisky, anon writing to a young friend in words
of wisdom that might well be written on the fly-leaf of
his Bible.

This was certainly a period of ageing activity in
Burns’s life. It seemed as if there had been a conspiracy{67}
of fate and circumstance to herald the birth of
his poems with the wildest convulsions of labour and
travail. The parish of Tarbolton became the stage of
a play that had all the makings of a farce and all the
elements of a tragedy. There were endless complications
and daily developments, all deepening the dramatic
intensity without disturbing the unity. We watch with
breathless interest, dumbly wondering what the end will
be. It is tragedy, comedy, melodrama, and burlesque
all in one.

Driven almost to madness by the faithlessness of
Jean Armour, he rends himself in a whirlwind of passion,
and seeks sympathy and solace in the love of Mary
Campbell. What a situation for a novelist! This is
just how the story-teller would have made his jilted
hero act; sent him with bleeding heart to seek consolation
in a new love. For novelists make a study of the
vagaries of love, and know that hearts are caught in
the rebound.

Most of the biographers of Burns are agreed that
this Highland lassie was the object of by far the deepest
passion he ever knew. They may be right. Death
stepped in before disillusion, and she was never other
than the adored Mary of that rapturous meeting when
the white hawthorn-blossom no purer was than their
love. Thus was his love for Mary Campbell ever a
holy and spiritual devotion. Auguste Angellier says:
‘This was the purest, the most lasting, and by far the
noblest of his loves. Above all the others, many of
which were more passionate, this one stands out with
the chasteness of a lily. There is a complete contrast
between his love for Jean and his love for Mary. In{68}
the one case all the epithets are material; here they
are all moral. The praises are borrowed, not from the
graces of the body, but from the features of the soul.
The words which occur again and again are those of
honour, of purity, of goodness. The idea of seeing her
again some day was never absent from his mind. Every
time he thought of eternity, of a future life, of reunions
in some unknown state, it was to her that his heart
went out. The love of that second Sunday of May was
ever present. It was the love which led Burns to the
most elevated sphere to which he ever attained; it was
the inspiration of his most spiritual efforts. This sweet,
blue-eyed Highland lassie was his Beatrice, and waved
to him from the gates of heaven.’

We know little about Mary Campbell from the poet
himself; and though much has been ferreted out about
her by a host of snappers-up of unconsidered trifles,
this episode in his life is still involved in mystery. It
is pleasant to reflect that his reticence here has kept at
least one love passage in his life sacred and holy. Is
not mystery half the charm and beauty of love? Yet,
in spite of his silence, or probably because of it, details
have been raked up from time to time, some grey
and colourless fossil-remains of what was once fresh
and living fact. From Burns himself we know that the
lovers took a tender farewell in a sequestered spot by
the banks of the Ayr, and parted never to meet again.
All the romance and tragedy are there, and what need
we more? We are not even certain as to either the
place or the date of her death. Mrs. Begg, the poet’s
sister, knew little or nothing about Mary Campbell.
She remembered, however, a letter being handed in to{69}
him after the work of the season was over. ‘He went
to the window to open and read it, and she was struck
by the look of agony which was the consequence. He
went out without uttering a word.’ What he felt he
expressed afterwards in song—song that has become
the language of bereaved and broken hearts for all
time. The widowed lover knows ‘the dear departed
shade,’ but he may not have heard of Mary Campbell.

It was in May that Burns and Highland Mary had
parted; in June he wrote to a friend about ungrateful
Armour, confessing that he still loved her to distraction,
though he would not tell her so. But all his letters
about this time are wild and rebellious. He raves in
a tempest of passion, and cools himself again, perhaps
in the composition of a song or poem. Just about the
time this letter was written, his poems were already in
the press. His proposal for publishing had met with
so hearty a reception, that success financially was to a
certain extent assured, and the printing had been put
into the hand of John Wilson, Kilmarnock. Even yet
his pen was busy. He wrote often in a gay and lively
style, almost, it would seem, in a struggle to keep
himself from sinking into melancholy, ‘singing to keep
his courage up.’ His gaiety was ‘the madness of an
intoxicated criminal under the hands of the executioner.’
A Bard’s Epitaph, however, among the many pieces of
this season, is earnest and serious enough to disarm
hostile criticism; and his loose and flippant productions
are read leniently in the light of this pathetic confession.
It is a self-revelation truly, but it is honest, straightforward,
and manly. There {70}is nothing plaintive or
mawkish about it.

We next find Burns flying from home to escape legal
measures that Jean Armour’s father was instituting against
him. He was in hiding at Kilmarnock to be out of the
way of legal diligence, and it was in such circumstances
that he saw his poems through the press. Surely never
before in the history of literature had book burst from
such a medley of misfortunes into so sudden and certain
fame. Born in tumult, it vindicated its volcanic birth,
and took the hearts of men by storm. Burns says little
about those months of labour and bitterness. We know
that he had then nearly as high an idea of himself and
his works as he had in later life; he had watched every
means of information as to how much ground he occupied
as a man and a poet, and was sure his poems would meet
with some applause. He had subscriptions for about
three hundred and fifty, and he got six hundred copies
printed, pocketing, after all expenses were paid, nearly
twenty pounds. With nine guineas of this sum he
bespoke a passage in the first ship that was to sail for
the West Indies. ‘I had for some time,’ he says, ‘been
skulking from covert to covert under all the terrors of a
jail, as some ill-advised, ungrateful people had uncoupled
the merciless, legal pack at my heels. I had taken the
last farewell of my friends; my chest was on the road to
Greenock; I had composed the song The Gloomy Night
is Gathering Fast, which was to be the last effort of my
muse in Caledonia, when a letter from Dr. Blacklock to
a friend of mine overthrew all my schemes, by rousing
my poetic ambition. The doctor belonged to a class of
critics, for whose applause I had not even dared to hope.
His idea that I would meet with every encouragemen{71}t
for a second edition fired me so much, that away I
posted to Edinburgh, without a single acquaintance in
town, or a single letter of recommendation in my pocket.’

It was towards the end of July that the poems were
published, and they met with a success that must have
been gratifying to those friends who had stood by the
poet in his hour of adversity, and done what they could
to ensure subscriptions. In spite of the fact that Burns
certainly looked upon himself as possessed of some
poetic abilities, the reception the little volume met with,
and the impression it at once made, must have exceeded
his wildest anticipations. Even yet, however, he did not
relinquish the idea of going to America. On the other
hand, as we have seen, the first use he made of the
money which publication had brought him, was to
secure a berth in a vessel bound for Jamaica. But he
was still compelled by the dramatic uncertainty of circumstance.
The day of sailing was postponed, else had
he certainly left his native land. It was only after Jean
Armour had become the mother of twin children that
there was any hint of diffidence about sailing. In a
letter to Robert Aitken, written in October, he says:
‘All these reasons urge me to go abroad, and to all these
reasons I have one answer—the feelings of a father.
That in the present mood I am in overbalances everything
that can be laid in the scale against it.’

His friends, too, after the success of his poems, were
beginning to be doubtful about the wisdom of his going
abroad, and were doing what they could to secure for
him a place in the Excise. For his fame had gone
beyond the bounds of his native county, and others than
people in his own station had recognised his genius.{72}
Mrs. Dunlop of Dunlop was one of the first to seek the
poet’s acquaintance, and she became an almost lifelong
friend; through his poems he renewed acquaintance
with Mrs. Stewart of Stair. He was ‘roosed’ by Craigen-Gillan;
Dugald Stewart, the celebrated metaphysician,
and one of the best-known names in the learned and
literary circles of Edinburgh, who happened to be
spending his vacation at Catrine, not very far from
Mossgiel, invited the poet to dine with him, and on that
occasion he ‘dinnered wi’ a laird’—Lord Daer. Then
came the appreciative letter from Dr. Blacklock to the
Rev. George Lawrie of Loudon, already mentioned.
Even this letter might not have proved strong enough to
detain him in Scotland, had it not been that he was
disappointed of a second edition of his poems in Kilmarnock.
Other encouragement came from Edinburgh
in a very favourable criticism of his poems in the Edinburgh
Magazine. This, taken along with Dr. Blacklock’s
suggestion about ‘a second edition more numerous than
the former,’ led the poet to believe that his work would
be taken up by any of the Edinburgh publishers. The
feelings of a father also urged him to remain in Scotland;
and at length—probably in November—the thought of
exile was abandoned. It was with very different feelings,
we may be sure, that he contemplated setting out from
Mossgiel to sojourn for a season in Edinburgh—a name
that had ever been associated in his mind with the{73} best
traditions of learning and literature in Scotland.

CHAPTER V

THE EDINBURGH EDITION

Edinburgh towards the close of last century was a
very different place from Edinburgh of the present day.
It was then to a certain extent the hub of Scottish
society; the centre of learning and literature; the winter
rendezvous of not a few of the nobility and gentry of
Scotland. For in those days it had its society and its
season; county families had not altogether abandoned
the custom of keeping their houses in town. All roads
did not then lead to London as they do now, when Edinburgh
is a capital in little more than name, and its
prestige has become a tradition. A century ago Edinburgh
had all the glamour and fascination of the capital
of a no mean country; to-day it is but the historical
capital invested with the glamour and fascination of a
departed glory. The very names of those whom Burns
met on his first visit to Edinburgh are part of the history
of the nation. In the University there were at that time,
representative of the learning of the age, Dugald Stewart,
Dr. Blair, and Dr. Robertson. David Hume was but
recently dead, and the lustre of his name remained.
His great friend, Adam Smith, author of The Wealth of
Nations, was still living; while Henry Mackenzie, Th{74}e
Man of Feeling, the most popular writer of his day, was
editing The Lounger; and Dr. Blacklock, the blind poet,
was also a name of authority in the world of letters.
Nor was the Bar, whose magnates have ever figured in
the front rank of Edinburgh society, eclipsed by the
literary luminaries of the University. Lord Monboddo
has left a name, which his countrymen are not likely to
forget. He was an accomplished, though eccentric
character, whose classical bent was in the direction of
Epicurean parties. His great desire was to revive the
traditions of the elegant suppers of classical times. Not
only were music and painting employed to this end, but
the tables were wreathed with flowers, the odour of
incense pervaded the room; the wines were of the
choicest, served from decanters of Grecian design. But,
perhaps, the chief attraction to Burns in the midst of
all this super-refinement was the presence of ‘the
heavenly Miss Burnet,’ daughter of Lord Monboddo.
‘There has not been anything nearly like her,’ he wrote
to his friend Chalmers, ‘in all the combinations of
beauty and grace and goodness the great Creator has
formed since Milton’s Eve in the first day of her
existence.’ The Hon. Henry Erskine was another well-known
name, not only in legal circles, but as well in
fashionable society. His genial and sunny nature made
him so great a favourite in his profession, that having
been elected Dean of the Faculty of Advocates in 1786,
he was unanimously re-elected every year till 1796, when
he was victorious over Dundas of Arniston, who had
been brought forward in opposition to him. The leader
of fashion was the celebrated Duchess of Gordon, who
was never absent from a public place, and ‘the late{75}r the
hour so much the better.’ Her amusements—her life,
we might say—were dancing, cards, and company. With
such a leader, the season to the very select and elegant
society of Edinburgh was certain to be a time of brilliance
and gaiety; while its very exclusiveness, and the fact
that it affected or reflected the literary life of the University
and the Bar, would make it all the more ready to
lionise a man like Burns when the opportunity came.

The members of the middle class caught their tone
from the upper ranks, and took their nightly sederunts
and morning headaches as privileges they dared aristocratic
exclusiveness to deny them. Douce citizens, merchants,
respectable tradesmen, well-to-do lawyers, forgathered
when the labours of the day were done to spend
a few hours in some snug back-parlour, where mine host
granted them the privileges and privacy of a club. Such
social beings as these, met to discuss punch, law, and
literature, were no less likely than their aristocratic
neighbours to receive Burns with open arms, and once
he was in their midst to prolong their sittings in his
honour. Nor was Burns, if he found them honest and
hearty fellows, the man to say them nay. He was
eminently a social and sociable being, and in company
such as theirs he could unbend himself as he might not
do in the houses of punctilious society. The etiquette
of that howff of the Crochallan Fencibles in the Anchor
Close or of Johnnie Dowie’s tavern in Libberton’s
Wynd was not the etiquette of drawing-rooms; and the
poet was free to enliven the hours with a rattling fire of
witty remarks on men and things as he had been wont
to do on the bog at Lochlea, with only a few noteless
peasants for audience.

{76}

Burns entered Edinburgh on November 28, 1786.
He had spent the night after leaving Mossgiel at the
farm of Covington Mains, where the kind-hearted host,
Mr. Prentice, had all the farmers of the parish gathered
to meet him. This is of interest as showing the popularity
Burns’s poems had already won; while the eagerness
of those farmers to see and know the man after they had
read his poems proves most strikingly how straight the
poet had gone to the hearts of his readers. They had
recognised the voice of a human being, and heard it
gladly. This gathering was convincing testimony, if such
were needed, of the truthfulness and sincerity of his
writings. No doubt Burns, with his great force of understanding,
appreciated the welcome of those brother-farmers,
and valued it above the adulation he afterwards
received in Edinburgh. The Kilmarnock Edition was
but a few months old, yet here was a gathering of hard-working
men, who had read his poems, we may be sure,
from cover to cover, and now they were eager to thank
him who had sung the joys and sorrows of their workaday
lives. Of course there was a great banquet, and
night wore into morning before the company dispersed.
They had seen the poet face to face, and the man was
greater than his poems.

Next morning he resumed his journey, breakfasting at
Carnwath, and reaching Edinburgh in the evening. He
had come, as he tells us, without a letter of introduction
in his pocket, and he took up his abode with John
Richmond in Baxter’s Close, off the Lawnmarket. He
had known Richmond when he was a clerk with Gavin
Hamilton, and had kept up a correspondence with him
ever since he had left Mauchline. The lodging was a{77}
humble enough one, the rent being only three shillings a
week; but here Burns lodged all the time he was in
Edinburgh, and it was hither he returned from visiting
the houses of the rich and great, to share a bed with his
friend and companion of many a merry meeting at
Mauchline.

It would be vain to attempt to describe Burns’s feelings
during those first few days in Edinburgh. He had never
before been in a larger town than Kilmarnock or Ayr;
and now he walked the streets of Scotland’s capital, to
him full of history and instinct with the associations of
centuries. This was really the heart of Scotland, the
home of heroes who fought and fell for their country,
‘the abode of kings of other years.’ His sentimental
attachment to Jacobitism became more pronounced as
he looked on Holyrood. For Burns, a representative of
the strength and weakness of his countrymen, was no less
representative of Scotland’s sons in his chivalrous pity for
the fate of Queen Mary and his romantic loyalty to the
gallant Prince Charlie. His poetical espousal of the cause
of the luckless Stuarts was purely a matter of sentiment, a
kind of pious pity that had little to do with reason; and
in this he was typical of his countrymen even of the
present day, who are loyal to the house of Stuart in
song, and in life are loyal subjects of their Queen.

We are told, and we can well believe that for the first
few days of his stay he wandered about, looking down
from Arthur’s Seat, gazing at the Castle, or contemplating
the windows of the booksellers’ shops. We know that he
made a special pilgrimage to the grave of Fergusson, and
that in a letter, dated February 6, 1787, he applied to
the honourable bailies of Canongate, Edinburgh, for{78}
permission ‘to lay a simple stone over his revered ashes’;
which petition was duly considered and graciously
granted. The stone was afterwards erected, with the
simple inscription, ‘Here lies Robert Fergusson, Poet.
Born September 5th, 1751; died 16th October, 1774.

On the reverse side is recorded the fact that the stone
was erected by Robert Burns, and that the ground was
to remain for ever sacred to the memory of Robert
Fergusson.

It is related, too, that he visited Ramsay’s house, and
that he bared his head when he entered. Burns over
and over again, both in prose and verse, turned to these
two names with a kind of fetich worship, that it is difficult
to understand. He must have known that, as a poet,
he was immeasurably superior to both. It may have
been that their writings first opened his eyes to the
possibilities of the Scots tongue in lyrical and descriptive
poetry; and there was something also which appealed to
him in the wretched life of Fergusson.

His elder brother indeed by some six years! But there
is more of reverence than sound judgment in his estimate
of either Ramsay or Fergusson.

Burns, however, had come to Edinburgh with a fixed
purpose in view, and it would not do to waste his time
mooning about the streets. On December 7 we find{79}
him writing to Gavin Hamilton, half seriously, half
jokingly: ‘I am in a fair way of becoming as eminent as
Thomas à Kempis or John Bunyan, and you may expect
henceforth to see my birthday inserted among the
wonderful events in the Poor Robins’ and Aberdeen
Almanacs along with the Black Monday and the Battle
of Bothwell Bridge. My Lord Glencairn and the Dean
of Faculty, Mr. H. Erskine, have taken me under their
wing, and by all probability I shall soon be the tenth
worthy and the eighth wise man of the world. Through
my lord’s influence it is inserted in the records of the
Caledonian Hunt that they universally one and all subscribe
for the second edition.’

This letter shows that Burns had already been taken
up, as the phrase goes, by the élite of Edinburgh; and
it shows also and quite as clearly in the tone of quiet
banter, that he was little likely to lose his head by the
notice taken of him. To the Earl of Glencairn, mentioned
in it, he had been introduced probably by Mr.
Dalrymple of Orangefield, whom he knew both as a
brother-mason and a brother-poet. The Earl had
already seen the Kilmarnock Edition of the poems, and
now he not only introduced Burns to William Creech,
the leading publisher in Edinburgh, but he got the
members of the Caledonian Hunt to become subscribers
for a second edition of the poems. To Erskine he had
been introduced at a meeting of the Canongate Kilwinning
Lodge of Freemasons; and assuredly there
was no man living more likely to exert himself in the
interests of a genius like Burns.

Two days after this letter to Gavin Hamilton there
appeared in The Lounger Mackenzie’s apprec{80}iative
notice of the Kilmarnock Edition. This notice has
become historical, and at the time of its appearance
it must have been peculiarly gratifying to Burns. He
had remarked before, in reference to the letter from
Dr. Blacklock, that the doctor belonged to a class of
critics for whose applause he had not even dared to
hope. Now his work was criticised most favourably by
the one who was regarded as the highest authority on
literature in Scotland. If a writer was praised in The
Lounger, his fame was assured. He went into the world
with the hall-mark of Henry Mackenzie; and what more
was needed? The oracle had spoken, and his decision
was final. His pronouncement would be echoed and
re-echoed from end to end of the country. And this
great critic claimed no special indulgence for Burns on
the plea of his mean birth or poor education. He saw
in this heaven-taught ploughman a genius of no ordinary
rank, a man who possessed the spirit as well as the fancy
of a great poet. He was a poet, and it mattered not
whether he had been born a peasant or a peer. ‘His
poetry, considered abstractedly and without the apologies
arising from his situation, seems to me fully entitled to
command our feelings and obtain our applause….
The power of genius is not less admirable in tracing the
manners, than in painting the passions or in drawing the
scenery of nature. That intuitive glance with which a
writer like Shakspeare discerns the character of men,
with which he catches the many changing hues of life,
forms a sort of problem in the science of mind, of which
it is easier to see the truth than assign the cause.’

But Mackenzie did more than praise. He pointed
out the fact that the author had had a terrible struggle{81}
with poverty all the days of his life, and made an appeal
to his country ‘to stretch out her hand and retain the
native poet whose wood-notes wild possessed so much
excellence.’ There seems little doubt that the concluding
words of this notice led Burns for the first time
to hope and believe that, through some influential patron,
he might be placed in a position to face the future
without a fear, and to cultivate poetry at his leisure.
There is no mistaking the meaning of Mackenzie’s
words, and he had evidently used them with the conviction
that something would be done for Burns.
Unfortunately, he was mistaken; the poet, at first
misled, was slowly disillusioned and somewhat embittered.
‘To repair the wrongs of suffering or neglected
merit; to call forth genius from the obscurity where it
had pined indignant, and place it where it may profit or
delight the world—these are exertions which give to
wealth an enviable superiority, to greatness and to
patronage a laudable pride.’

To Burns, at the time, such a criticism as this must
have been all the more pleasing, inasmuch as it was the
verdict of a man whose best-known work had been one
of the poet’s favourite books. We can easily imagine
that, under the patronage of Lord Glencairn and Henry
Erskine, and after Mackenzie’s generous recognition of
his genius, the doors of the best houses in Edinburgh
would be open to him. His letter to John Ballantine,
Ayr, written a few days after this criticism appeared,
shows in what circles the poet was then moving. ‘I
have been introduced to a good many of the noblesse,
but my avowed patrons and patronesses are, the Duchess
of Gordon, the Countess of Glencairn with my Lord{82}
and Lady Betty, the Dean of Faculty, Sir John Whitefoord.
I have likewise warm friends among the literati;
Professors Stewart, Blair, and Mr. Mackenzie, The Man
of Feeling…. I am nearly agreed with Creech to print
my book, and I suppose I will begin on Monday….
Dugald Stewart and some of my learned friends put me
in a periodical called The Lounger, a copy of which I
here enclose you. I was, Sir, when I was first honoured
with your notice, too obscure; now I tremble lest I
should be ruined by being dragged too suddenly into
the glare of learned and polite observation.’

Burns was now indeed the lion of Edinburgh. It
must have been a great change for a man to have come
straight from the stilts of the plough to be dined and
toasted by such men as Lord Glencairn, Lord Monboddo,
and the Hon. Henry Erskine; to be fêted and
flattered by the Duchess of Gordon, the Countess of
Glencairn, and Lady Betty Cunningham; to count
amongst his friends Mr. Mackenzie and Professors
Stewart and Blair. It would have been little wonder if
his head had been turned by the patronage of the
nobility, the deference and attention of the literary and
learned coteries of Edinburgh. But Burns was too
sensible to be carried away by the adulation of a season.
A man of his keenness of penetration and clearness of
insight would appreciate the praise of the world at its
proper value. He bore himself with becoming dignity,
taking his place in refined society as one who had a
right there, without showing himself either conceitedly
aggressive or meanly servile. He took his part in
conversation, but no more than his part, and expressed
himself with freedom and decision. His conversation,{83}
in fact, astonished the literati even more than his poems
had done. Perhaps they had expected some uncouth
individual who would stammer crop-and-weather
commonplaces in a rugged vernacular, or, worse still,
in ungrammatical English; but here was one who held
his own with them in speculative discussion, speaking
not only with the eloquence of a poet, but with the
readiness, clearness, and fluency of a man of letters.
His pure English diction astonished them, but his
acuteness of reasoning, his intuitive knowledge of men
and the world, was altogether beyond their comprehension.
All they had got by years of laborious study
this man appeared to have as a natural gift. In repartee,
even, he could more than hold his own with them, and
in the presence of ladies could turn a compliment with
the best. ‘It needs no effort of imagination,’ says
Lockhart, ‘to conceive what the sensations of an isolated
set of scholars (almost all either clergymen or professors)
must have been in the presence of this big-boned, black-browed,
brawny stranger, who, having forced his way
among them from the plough-tail at a single stride,
manifested in the whole strain of his bearing and conversation
a most thorough conviction that in the society
of the most eminent men of his nation he was exactly
where he was entitled to be.’ It was a new world to
Burns, yet he walked about as if he were of old familiar
with its ways; he conducted himself in society like
one to the manner born.

All who have left written evidence of Burns’s visit to
Edinburgh are agreed that he conducted himself with
manliness and dignity, and all have left record of the
powerful impression his conversation made on them.{84}
His poems were wonderful; himself was greater than
his poems, a giant in intellect. A ploughman who
actually dared to have formed a distinct conception of
the doctrine of association was a miracle before which
schools and scholars were dumb. ‘Nothing, perhaps,’
Dugald Stewart wrote, ‘was more remarkable among his
various attainments than the fluency, precision, and
originality of his language when he spoke in company;
more particularly as he aimed at purity in his turn of
expression, and avoided more successfully than most
Scotchmen the peculiarities of Scottish phraseology.’

And Professor Stewart goes further than this when he
speaks of the soundness and sanity of Burns’s nature.
‘The attentions he received during his stay in town from
all ranks and descriptions of persons, were such as would
have turned any head but his own. He retained the
same simplicity of manner and appearance which had
struck me so forcibly when I first saw him in the country;
nor did he seem to feel any additional self-importance
from the number and rank of his new acquaintance.
His dress was perfectly suited to his station, plain and
unpretentious, with a sufficient attention to neatness.’
Principal Robertson has left it on record, that he had
scarcely ever met with any man whose conversation
displayed greater vigour than that of Burns. Walter
Scott, a youth of some sixteen years at the time, met
Burns at the house of Dr. Adam Ferguson, and was
particularly struck with his poetic eye, ‘which literally
glowed when he spoke with feeling or interest,’ and with
his forcible conversation. ‘Among the men who were
the most learned of their time and country, he expressed
himself with perfect firmness, but without the l{85}east intrusive
forwardness; and when he differed in opinion, he
did not hesitate to express it firmly, and at the same
time with modesty…. I never saw a man in company
more perfectly free from either the reality or the affectation
of embarrassment.’ To these may be added the
testimony of Dr. Walker, who gives, perhaps, the most
complete and convincing picture of the man at this
time. He insists on the same outstanding characteristics
in Burns, his innate dignity, his unaffected demeanour
in company, and brilliancy in conversation. In no part
of his manner, we read, was there the slightest degree of
affectation, and no one could have guessed from his
behaviour or conversation, that he had been for some
months the favourite of all the fashionable circles of a
metropolis. ‘In conversation he was powerful. His
conceptions and expression were of corresponding vigour,
and on all subjects were as remote as possible from
commonplace.’

But whilst ladies of rank and fashion were deluging
this Ayrshire ploughman with invitations, and vying
one with another in their patronage and worship, the
mind of the poet was no less busy registering impressions
of every new experience. If the learned men
of Edinburgh set themselves to study the character of a
genius who upset all their cherished theories of birth
and education, and to chronicle his sayings and doings,
Burns at the same time was studying them, gauging their
powers intuitively, telling their limitations at a glance.
For he must measure every man he met, and himself
with him. His standard was always the same; every
brain was weighed against his own; but with Burns this
was never more than a comparison of capacities. He{86}
took his stand, not by what work he had done, but by
what he felt he was capable of doing. And that is not,
and cannot be, the way of the world. In all his letters
at this time we see him studying himself in the circles
of fashion and learning. He could look on Robert
Burns, as he were another person, brought from the
plough and set down in a world of wealth and refinement,
of learning and wit and beauty. He saw the
dangers that beset him, and the temptations to which he
was exposed; he recognised that something more than
his poetic abilities was needed to explain his sudden
popularity. He was the vogue, the favourite of a season;
but public favour was capricious, and next year the doors
of the great might be closed against him; while patrician
dames who had schemed for his smiles might glance at
him with indifferent eyes as at a dismissed servant once
high in favour. His letter to Mrs. Dunlop, dated
January 15, may be taken as a just, deliberate, and clear
expression of his views of himself and society at this time.
The letter is so quietly dignified that we may quote at
some length. ‘You are afraid I shall grow intoxicated
with my prosperity as a poet. Alas! madam, I know
myself and the world too well. I do not mean any airs
of affected modesty; I am willing to believe that my
abilities deserve some notice, but in a most enlightened,
informed age and nation, where poetry is and has been
the study of men of the first natural genius, aided with
all the powers of polite learning, polite books, and polite
company—to be dragged forth to the full glare of learned
and polite observation, with all my imperfections of
awkward rusticity and crude and unpolished ideas on
my head—I assure you, madam, I do not dissemble{87}
when I tell you I tremble for the consequences. The
novelty of a poet in my obscure situation, without any
of those advantages that are reckoned necessary for that
character, at least at this time of day, has raised a partial
tide of public notice which has borne me to a height
where I am absolutely, feelingly certain my abilities are
inadequate to support me; and too surely do I see that
time when the same tide will leave me and recede, perhaps
as far below the mark of truth. I do not say this
in the ridiculous affectation of self-abasement and
modesty. I have studied myself, and know what ground
I occupy; and however a friend or the world may differ
from me in that particular, I stand for my own opinion
in silent resolve, with all the tenaciousness of property.
I mention this to you once for all to disburden my mind,
and I do not wish to hear or say more about it. But—

you will bear me witness that when my bubble of fame
was at the highest, I stood unintoxicated with the inebriating
cup in my hand, looking forward with rueful
resolve to the hastening time when the blow of calamity
should dash it to the ground with all the eagerness of
vengeful triumph.’

In a letter to Dr. Moore he harps on the same string,
for he sees clearly enough that though his abilities as a
poet are worthy of recognition, it is the novelty of his
position and the strangeness of the life he has pictured
in his poems that have brought him into polite notice.
The field of his poetry, rather than the poetry itself,
is the wonder in the eyes of stately society. To the
Rev. Mr. Lawrie of Loudon he writes in a similar strain,{88}
and speaks even more emphatically. From all his letters,
indeed, at this time we gather that he saw that novelty
had much to do with his present éclat; that the tide
of popularity would recede, and leave him at his leisure
to descend to his former situation; and, above all, that
he was prepared for this, come when it would.

All this time he had been busy correcting the proofs
of his poems; and now that he was already assured the
edition would be a success, he began to think seriously
of the future and of settling down again as farmer.
The appellation of Scottish Bard, he confessed to Mrs.
Dunlop, was his highest pride; to continue to deserve
it, his most exalted ambition. He had no dearer aim
than to be able to make ‘leisurely pilgrimages through
Caledonia, to sit on the fields of her battles, to wander
on the romantic banks of her rivers, and to muse by the
stately towers or venerable ruins, once the honoured
abodes of her heroes.’ But that was a Utopian dream;
he had dallied long enough with life, and now it was
time he should be in earnest. ‘I have a fond, an aged
mother to care for; and some other bosom ties perhaps
equally tender.’

Perhaps, had Burns received before he left Edinburgh
the £500 which Creech ultimately paid him for the
Edinburgh Edition, he might have gone straight to a
farm in the south country, and taken up what he considered
the serious business of life. He himself, about
this time, estimated that he would clear nearly £300 by
authorship, and with that sum he intended to return to
farming. Mr. Miller of Dalswinton had expressed a
wish to have Burns as tenant of one of his farms, and
the poet had been already approached on the subject.{89}
We also gather from almost every letter written just
before the publication of his poems, that he contemplated
an immediate return ‘to his shades.’ However, when
the Edinburgh Edition came out, April 21, 1787, the
poet found that it would be a considerable time before
the whole profits accruing from publication could be
paid over to him. Indeed, there was certainly an unnecessary
delay on Creech’s part in making a settlement.
The first instalment of profits was not sufficient for
leasing and stocking a farm; and during the months that
elapsed before the whole profits were in his hands, Burns
made several tours through the Borders and Highlands
of Scotland. This was certainly one of his dearest aims;
but these tours were undertaken somewhat under compulsion,
and we doubt not he would much more gladly
have gone straight back to farm-life, and kept these
leisurely pilgrimages to a more convenient season. One
is not in a mood for dreaming on battlefields, or wandering
in a reverie by romantic rivers, when the future is
unsettled and life is for the time being without an aim.
There is something of mystery and melancholy hanging
about these peregrinations, and the cause, it seems to
us, is not far to seek. These months are months of
waiting and wearying; he is unsettled, oftentimes moody
and despondent; his bursts of gaiety appear forced, and
his muse is well-nigh barren. In the circumstances, no
doubt it was the best thing he could do, to gratify his
long-cherished desire of seeing these places in his native
country, whose names were enshrined in song or story.
But how much more pleasant—and more profitable both
to the poet himself and the country he loved—had these
journeys been made under more favourable conditions!

{90}

The past also as much as the future weighed on the
poet’s mind. His days had been so fully occupied in
Edinburgh that he had little leisure to think on some
dark and dramatic episodes of Mauchline and Kilmarnock;
but now in his wanderings he has time not only
to think but to brood; and we may be sure the face of
Bonnie Jean haunted him in dreams, and that his heart
heard again and again the plaintive voices of little
children. In several of his letters now we detect a
tone of bitterness, in which we suspect there is more
of remorse than of resentment with the world. He
certainly was disappointed that Creech could not pay
him in full, but he must have been gratified with the
reception his poems had got. The list of subscribers
ran to thirty-eight pages, and was representative of
every class in Scotland. In the words of Cunningham:
‘All that coterie influence and individual exertion—all
that the noblest and humblest could do, was done to
aid in giving it a kind reception. Creech, too, had
announced it through the booksellers of the land, and
it was soon diffused over the country, over the colonies,
and wherever the language was spoken. The literary
men of the South seemed even to fly to a height beyond
those of the North. Some hesitated not to call him the
Northern Shakspeare.’

This surely was a great achievement for one who,
a few months previously, had been skulking from covert
to covert to escape the terrors of a jail. He had
hardly dared to hope for the commendation of the
Edinburgh critics, yet he had been received by the best
society of the capital; his genius had been recognised
by the highest literary authorities of Scotland; {91}and
now the second edition of his poems was published
under auspices that gave it the character of a national
book.

If the poems this volume contained established fully
and finally the reputation of the poet, the subscription
list was a no less substantial proof of a generous and
enthusiastic appreciation of his genius on the part of his
countrymen. And that Burns must have recognised.
A man of his s{92}ound common sense could not have
expected more.

CHAPTER VI

BURNS’S TOURS

The Edinburgh Edition having now been published,
there was no reason for the poet to prolong his stay in
the city. It was only after being disappointed of a
second Kilmarnock Edition of his poems that he had
come to try his fortunes in the capital; and now that his
hopes of a fuller edition and a wider field had been
realised, the purpose of his visit was accomplished, and
there was no need to fritter his time away in idleness.

In a letter to Lord Buchan, Burns had doubted the
prudence of a penniless poet faring forth to see the
sights of his native land. But circumstances have
changed. With the assured prospect of the financial
success of his second venture, he felt himself in a
position to gratify the dearest wish of his heart and
to fire his muse at Scottish story and Scottish scenes.
Moreover, as has been said, it would be some time
before Creech could come to a final settlement of
accounts with the poet, and he may have deemed
that the interval would be profitably spent in travel.
His travelling companion on his first tour was a Mr.
Robert Ainslie, a young gentleman of good education
and some natural ability, with whom he left Edinburgh{93}
on the 5th May, a fortnight after the publication of his
poems. We are told that the poet, just before he
mounted his horse, received a letter from Dr. Blair,
which, having partly read, he crumpled up and angrily
thrust into his pocket. A perusal of the letter will
explain, if it does not go far to justify, the poet’s irritation.
It is a sleek, superior production, with the tone of
a temperance tract, and the stilted diction of a dominie.
The doctor is in it one of those well-meaning, meddlesome
men, lavish of academic advice. Burns resented
moral prescriptions at all times—more especially from
one whose knowledge of men was severely scholastic;
and we can well imagine that he quitted Edinburgh in
no amiable mood.

From Edinburgh the two journeyed by the Lammermuirs
to Berrywell, near Duns, where the Ainslie family
lived. On the Sunday he attended church with the
Ainslies, where the minister, Dr. Bowmaker, preached a
sermon against obstinate sinners. ‘I am found out,’
the poet remarked, ‘wherever I go.’ From Duns they
proceeded to Coldstream, where, having crossed the
Tweed, Burns first set foot on English ground. Here
it was that, with bared head, he knelt and prayed for a
blessing on Scotland, reciting with the deepest devotion
the two concluding verses of The Cotter’s Saturday Night.

The next place visited was Kelso, where they admired
the old abbey, and went to see Roxburgh Castle, thence
to Jedburgh, where he met a Miss Hope and a Miss
Lindsay, the latter of whom ‘thawed his heart into
melting pleasure after being so long frozen up in the
Greenland Bay of indifference amid the noise and nonsense
of Edinburgh.’ When he left this romantic city{94}
his thoughts were not of the honour its citizens had done
him, but of Jed’s crystal stream and sylvan banks, and,
above all, of Miss Lindsay, who brings him to the verge
of verse. Thereafter he visited Kelso, Melrose, and
Selkirk, and after spending about three weeks seeing
all that was to be seen in this beautiful country-side,
he set off with a Mr. Ker and a Mr. Hood on a visit to
England. In this visit he went as far as Newcastle, returning
by way of Hexham and Carlisle. After spending
a day here he proceeded to Annan, and thence to
Dumfries. Whilst in the Nithsdale district he took the
opportunity of visiting Dalswinton and inspecting the
unoccupied farms; but he did not immediately close
with Mr. Miller’s generous offer of a four-nineteen years’
lease on his own terms. From Nithsdale he turned
again to his native Ayrshire, arriving at Mossgiel in the
beginning of June, after an absence from home of six
eventful months.

We can hardly imagine what this home-coming would
be like. The Burnses were typical Scots in their undemonstrative
ways; but this was a great occasion, and
tradition has it that his mother allowed her feeling so far
to overcome her natural reticence that she met him at
the threshold with the exclamation, ‘O Robert!’ He
had left home almost unknown, and had returned with a
name that was known and honoured from end to end of
his native land. He had left in the direst poverty, and
haunted with the terrors of a jail, now he came back
with his fortune assured; if not actually rich, at least
with more money due to him than the family had ever
dreamed of possessing. The mother’s excess of feeling
on such an o{95}ccasion as this may be easily understood
and excused.

Of this Border tour Burns kept a scrappy journal, but
he was more concerned in jotting down the names and
characteristics of those with whom he forgathered than
of letting himself out in snatches of song. He makes
shrewd remarks by the way on farms and farming, on
the washing and shearing of sheep, but the only verse
he attempted was his Epistle to Creech. He who had
longed to sit and muse on ‘those once hard-contested
fields’ did not go out of his way to look on Ancrum
Moor or Philiphaugh, nor do we read of him musing
pensive in Yarrow.

However, we are not to regard these days as altogether
barren. The poet was gathering impressions which
would come forth in song at some future time.
‘Neither the fine scenery nor the lovely women,’
Cunningham regrets, ‘produced any serious effect on
his muse.’ This is a rash statement. Poets do not
sow and reap at the same time—not even Burns. If
his friends were disappointed at what they considered
the sterility of his muse on this occasion, the fault did
not lie with the poet, but with their absurd expectations.
It may be as well to point out here that the greatest
harm Edinburgh did to Burns was that it gathered round
him a number of impatient and injudicious admirers
who could not understand that poetry was not to be
forced. The burst of poetry that practically filled the
Kilmarnock Edition came after a seven years’ growth of
inspiration; but after his first visit to Edinburgh he
was never allowed to rest. It was expected that he
should write whenever a subject was suggested, or burst
into verse at the first glimpse of a lovely landscape{96}.
Every friend was ready with advice as to how and what
he should write, and quite as ready, the poet unfortunately
knew, to criticise afterwards. The poetry
of the Mossgiel period had come from him spontaneously.
He had flung off impressions in verse fearlessly, without
pausing to consider how his work would be appreciated
by this one or denounced by that; and was true to
himself. Now he knew that every verse he wrote would
be read by many eyes, studied by many minds; some
would scent heresy, others would spot Jacobitism, or
worse, freedom; some would suspect his morality,
others would deplore his Scots tongue; all would criticise
favourably or adversely his poetic expression. It
has to be kept in mind, too, that Burns at this time
was in no mood for writing poetry. His mind was
not at ease; and after his long spell of inspiration and
the fatiguing distractions of Edinburgh, it was hardly to
be wondered at that brain and body were alike in need
of rest. The most natural rest would have been a
return direct to the labours of the farm. That, however,
was denied him, and the period of his journeyings
was little else than a season of unsettlement and
suspense.

Burns only stayed a few days at home, and then set
off on a tour to the West Highlands, a tour of which
we know little or nothing. Perhaps this was merely a
pilgrimage to the grave of Highland Mary. We do
not know, and need not curiously inquire. Burns, as
has been already remarked, kept sacred his love for
this generous-hearted maiden, hidden away in his own
heart, and the whole story is a beautiful mystery. We
do know that before he left he visited the Armours{97},
and was disgusted with the changed attitude of the
family towards himself. ‘If anything had been wanting,’
he wrote to Mr. James Smith, ‘to disgust me
completely at Armour’s family, their mean, servile compliance
would have done it.’ To his friend, William
Nicol, he wrote in the same strain. ‘I never, my
friend, thought mankind very capable of anything
generous; but the stateliness of the patricians in Edinburgh,
and the servility of my plebeian brethren (who
perhaps formerly eyed me askance) since I returned
home, have nearly put me out of conceit altogether with
my species.’

This shows Burns in no very enviable frame of mind;
but the cause is obvious. He is as yet unsettled in
life, and now that he has met again his Bonnie Jean,
and seen his children, he is more than ever dissatisfied
with aimless roving. ‘I have yet fixed on nothing with
respect to the serious business of life. I am just as
usual a rhyming, mason-making, raking, aimless, idle
fellow. However, I shall somewhere have a farm soon.
I was going to say a wife too, but that must never be
my blessed lot.’

To his own folks he was nothing but kindness, ready
to share with them his uttermost farthing, and to have
them share in the glory that was his; but he was at
enmity with himself, and at war with the world. Like
Hamlet, who felt keenly, but was incapable of action, he
saw that ‘the times were out of joint’; circumstances
were too strong for him. Almost the only record we
have of this tour is a vicious epigram on what he considered
the flunkeyism of Inveraray. Nor are we in the
least astonished to hear that on the homeward route he{98}
spent a night in dancing and boisterous revel, ushering
in the day with a kind of burlesque of pagan sun-worship.
This was simply a reaction from his gloom
and despondency; he sought to forget himself in reckless
conviviality.

About the end of July we find him back again in
Mauchline, and on the 25th May he set out on a
Highland tour along with his friend William Nicol, one
of the masters of the High School. Of this man Dr.
Currie remarks that he rose by the strength of his
talents, and fell by the strength of his passions. Burns
was perfectly well aware of the passionate and quarrelsome
nature of the man. He compared himself with such a
companion to one travelling with a loaded blunderbuss
at full-cock; and in his epigrammatic way he said of him
to Mr. Walker, ‘His mind is like his body; he has a
confounded, strong, in-kneed sort of a soul.’ The man,
however, had some good qualities. He had a warm
heart; never forgot the friends of his early years, and
he hated vehemently low jealousy and cunning. These
were qualities that would appeal strongly to Burns, and
on account of which much would be forgiven. Still we
cannot think that the poet was happy in his companion;
nor was he yet happy in himself. Otherwise the Highland
tour might have been more interesting, certainly
much more profitable to the poet in its results, than it
actually proved.

In his diary of this tour, as in his diary of the Border
tour, there is much more of shrewd remark on men
and things than of poetical jottings. The fact is, poetry
is not to be collected in jottings, nor is inspiration to
be culled in catalogue cuttings; and if many of {99}his
friends were again disappointed in the immediate
poetical results of this holiday, it only shows how
little they understood the comings and goings of inspiration.
Those, however, who read his notes and
reflections carefully and intelligently are bound to notice
how much more than a mere verse-maker Burns was.
This was the journal of a man of strong, sound sense
and keen observation. It has also to be recognised that
Burns was at his weakest when he attempted to describe
scenery for mere scenery’s sake. His gift did not lie
that way. His landscapes, rich in colour and deftly
drawn though they be, are always the mere backgrounds
of his pictures. They are impressionistic sketches, the
setting and the complement of something of human
interest in incident or feeling.

The poet and his companion set out in a postchaise,
journeying by Linlithgow and Falkirk to Stirling. They
visited ‘a dirty, ugly place called Borrowstounness,’
where he turned from the town to look across the Forth
to Dunfermline and the fertile coast of Fife; Carron
Iron Works, and the field of Bannockburn. They were
shown the hole where Bruce set his standard, and the
sight fired the patriotic ardour of the poet till he saw in
imagination the two armies again in the thick of battle.
After visiting the castle at Stirling, he left Nicol for a
day, and paid a visit to Mrs. Chalmers of Harvieston.
‘Go to see Caudron Linn and Rumbling Brig and Deil’s
Mill.’ That is all he has to say of the scenery; but in
a letter to Gavin Hamilton he has much more to tell
of Grace Chalmers and Charlotte, ‘who is not only
beautiful but lovely.’

From Stirling the tourists proceeded northwards by{100}
Crieff and Glenalmond to Taymouth; thence, keeping
by the banks of the river, to Aberfeldy, whose birks he
immortalised in song. Here he had the good fortune
to meet Niel Gow and to hear him playing. ‘A short,
stout-built, honest, Highland figure,’ the poet describes
him, ‘with his greyish hair shed on his honest, social
brow—an interesting face, marking strong sense, kind
open-heartedness mixed with unmistaking simplicity.’

By the Tummel they rode to Blair, going by Fascally
and visiting—both those sentimental Jacobites—’the
gallant Lord Dundee’s stone,’ in the Pass of Killiecrankie.
At Blair he met his friend Mr. Walker, who
has left an account of the poet’s visit; while the two
days which Burns spent here, he has declared, were
among the happiest days of his life.

‘My curiosity,’ Walker wrote, ‘was great to see how
he would conduct himself in company so different from
what he had been accustomed to. His manner was
unembarrassed, plain, and firm. He appeared to have
complete reliance on his own native good sense for
directing his behaviour. He seemed at once to perceive
and appreciate what was due to the company and
to himself, and never to forget a proper respect for the
separate species of dignity belonging to each. He did
not arrogate conversation, but when led into it he spoke
with ease, propriety, and manliness. He tried to exert
his abilities, because he knew it was ability alone gave
him a title to be there.’

Burns certainly enjoyed his stay, and would, at the
family’s earnest solicitation, have stayed longer, had the
irascible and unreasonable Nicol allowed it. Here it
was he met Mr. Graham of Fintry, and if he had stay{101}ed
a day or two longer he would have met Dundas, a man
whose patronage might have done much to help the
future fortunes of the poet. After leaving Blair, he
visited, at the Duke’s advice, the Falls of Bruar, and a
few days afterwards he wrote from Inverness to Mr.
Walker enclosing his verses, The Humble Petition of
Bruar Water to the Noble Duke of Athole.

Leaving Blair, they continued their journey northwards
towards Inverness, viewing on the way the Falls of
Foyers,—soon to be lost to Scotland,—which the poet
celebrated in a fragment of verse. Of course two such
Jacobites had to see Culloden Moor; then they came
through Nairn and Elgin, crossed the Spey at Fochabers,
and Burns dined at Gordon Castle, the seat of the
lively Duchess of Gordon, whom he had met in
Edinburgh. Here again he was received with marked
respect, and treated with the same Highland hospitality
that had so charmed him at Blair; and here also
the pleasure of the whole party was spoilt by the
ill-natured jealousy of Nicol. That fiery dominie,
imagining that he was slighted by Burns, who seemed
to prefer the fine society of the Duchess and her friends
to his amiable companionship, ordered the horses to
be put to the carriage, and determined to set off alone.
As the spiteful fellow would listen to no reason, Burns
had e’en to accompany him, though much against his
will. He sent his apologies to Her Grace in a song in
praise of Castle Gordon.

From Fochabers they drove to Banff, and thence to
Aberdeen. In this city he was introduced to the Rev.
John Skinner, a son of the author of Tullochgorum, and
was exceedingly disappointed when he learned that {102}on
his journey he had been quite near to the father’s
parsonage, and had not called on the old man. Mr.
Skinner himself regretted this, when he learned the
fact from his son, as keenly as Burns did; but the
incident led to a correspondence between the two
poets. From Aberdeen he came south by Stonehaven,
where he ‘met his relations,’ and Montrose to Dundee.
Hence the journey was continued through Perth, Kinross,
and Queensferry, and so back to Edinburgh, 16th
September 1787.

His letter to his brother from Edinburgh is more
meagre even than his journal, being simply a catalogue
of the places visited. ‘Warm as I was from Ossian’s
country,’ he remarks, ‘what cared I for fishing towns or
fertile carses?’ Yet although the journal reads now
and again like a railway time-table, we come across
references which give proof of the poet’s abounding
interest in the locality of Scottish Song; and it was
probably the case, as Professor Blackie writes, that
‘such a lover of the pure Scottish Muse could not fail
when wandering from glen to glen to pick up fragments
of traditional song, which, without his sympathetic touch,
would probably have been lost.’

Burns’s wanderings were not yet, however, at an end.
Probably he had expected on his return to Edinburgh
some settlement with Creech, and was disappointed.
Perhaps he was eager to revisit some places or people—Peggy
Chalmers, no doubt—without being hampered
in his movements by such a companion as Nicol.
Anyhow, we find him setting out again on a tour
through Clackmannan and Perthshire with his friend
Dr. Adair, a warm but somewhat injudicious admi{103}rer
of the poet’s genius. It was probably about the
beginning of October that the two left Edinburgh, going
round by Stirling to Harvieston, where they remained
about ten days, and made excursions to the various
parts of the surrounding scenery. The Caldron Linn
and Rumbling Bridge were revisited, and they went to
see Castle Campbell, the ancient seat of the family of
Argyle. ‘I am surprised,’ the doctor ingenuously remarks,
‘that none of these scenes should have called
forth an exertion of Burns’s muse. But I doubt if he
had much taste for the picturesque.’ One wonders
whether Dr. Adair had actually read the published
poems. What a picture it must have been to see the
party dragging Burns about, pointing out the best views,
and then breathlessly waiting for a torrent of verse.
The verses came afterwards, but they were addressed,
not to the Ochils or the Devon, but to Peggy Chalmers.

From Harvieston he went to Ochtertyre on the
Teith to visit Mr. Ramsay, a reputed lover of Scottish
literature; and thence he proceeded to Ochtertyre in
Strathearn, in order to visit Sir William Murray.

In a letter to Dr. Currie, Mr. Ramsay speaks thus of
Burns on this visit: ‘I have been in the company of
many men of genius, some of them poets, but never
witnessed such flashes of intellectual brightness, the
impulse of the moment, sparks of celestial fire! I
never was more delighted, therefore, than with his company
for two days’ tête-à-tête.’ Of his residence with Sir
William Murray he has left two poetical souvenirs, one
On Scaring some Water Fowl in Loch Turit, and the
other, a love song, Blithe, Blithe, and Merry was She,
in honour o{104}f Miss Euphemia Murray, the flower of
Strathearn.

Returning to Harvieston, he went back with Dr.
Adair to Edinburgh, by Kinross and Queensferry. At
Dunfermline he visited the ruined abbey, where, kneeling,
he kissed the stone above Bruce’s grave.

It was on this tour, too, that he visited at Clackmannan
an old Scottish lady, who claimed to be a
lineal descendant of the family of Robert the Bruce.
She conferred knighthood on the poet with the great
double-handed sword of that monarch, and is said to
have delighted him with the toast she gave after dinner,
‘Hooi Uncos,’ which means literally, ‘Away Strangers,’
and politically much more.

The year 1787 was now drawing to a close, and Burns
was still waiting for a settlement with Creech. He could
not understand why he was kept hanging on from month
to month. This was a way of doing business quite new
to him, and after being put off again and again he at last
began to suspect that there was something wrong. He
doubted Creech’s solvency; doubted even his honesty.
More than ever was he eager to be settled in life, and
he fretted under commercial delays he could not understand.
On the first day of his return to Edinburgh he
had written to Mr. Miller of Dalswinton, telling him of
his ambitions, and making an offer to rent one of his
farms. We know that he visited Dalswinton once or
twice, but returned to Edinburgh. His only comfort at
this time was the work he had begun in collecting
Scottish songs for Johnson’s Museum; touching up old
ones and writing new ones to old airs. This with Burns
was altogether a labour of love. The idea of writing a song
with a view to money-making was abhorrent to him. ‘He{105}
entered into the views of Johnson,’ writes Chambers, ‘with
an industry and earnestness which despised all money
considerations, and which money could not have purchased’;
while Allan Cunningham marvels at the number
of songs Burns was able to write at a time when a sort of
civil war was going on between him and Creech. Another
reason for staying through the winter in Edinburgh
Burns may have had in the hope that through the influence
of his aristocratic friends some office of profit,
and not unworthy his genius, might have been found for
him. Places of profit and honour were at the disposal
of many who might have helped him had they so wished.
But Burns was not now the favourite he had been when
he first came to Edinburgh. The ploughman-poet was
no longer a novelty; and, moreover, Burns had the pride
of his class, and clung to his early friends. It is not
possible for a man to be the boon-companion of peasants
and the associate of peers. Had he dissociated himself
altogether from his past life, the doors of the nobility might
have been still held open to him; and no doubt the
cushioned ease of a sinecure’s office would have been
had for the asking. But in that case he would have lost
his manhood, and we should have lost a poet. Burns
would not have turned his back on his fellows for the
most lucrative office in the kingdom; that, he would
have considered as selling his soul to the devil. Yet, on
the other hand, what could any of these men do for a
poet who was ‘owre blate to seek, owre proud to snool’?
Burns waited on in the expectation that those who had
the power would take it upon themselves to do something
for him. Perhaps he credited them with a sense
and a generosity they could not lay claim to; though{106}
had one of them taken the initiative in this matter, he
would have honoured himself in honouring Burns, and
endeared his name to the hearts of his countrymen
for all time. But such offices are created and kept
open for political sycophants, who can importune with
years of prostituted service. They are for those
who advocate the opinions of others; certainly not for
the man who dares to speak fearlessly his own mind,
and to assert the privileges and prerogatives of his
manhood. The children’s bread is not to be thrown
to the dogs. Burns asked for nothing, and got nothing.
The Excise commission which he applied for, and
graduated for, was granted. The work was laborious,
the remuneration small, and gauger was a name of
contempt.

But whilst waiting on in the hope of something
‘turning up,’ he was still working busily for Johnson’s
Museum, and still trying to bring Creech to make a
settlement. At last, however, out of all patience with
his publisher, and recognising the futility of his hopes of
preferment, he had resolved early in December to leave
Edinburgh, when he was compelled to stay against his
will. A double accident befell him; he was introduced
to a Mrs. Maclehose, and three days afterwards, through
the carelessness of a drunken coachman, he was thrown
from a carriage, and had his knee severely bruised.
The latter was an accident that kept him confined to
his room for a time, and from which he quickly recovered;
but the meeting with Mrs. Maclehose was a
serious matter, and for both, most unfortunate in its
results.

It was while he was ‘on the rack of his present agon{107}y’
that the Sylvander-Clarinda correspondence was begun
and continued. That much may be said in excuse for
Burns. A man, especially one with the passion and
sensitiveness of a poet, cannot be expected to write in all
sanity when he is racked by the pain of an injured limb.
Certainly the poet does not show up in a pleasant light in
this absurd interchange of gasping epistles; nor does Mrs.
Maclehose. ‘I like the idea of Arcadian names in a
commerce of this kind,’ he unguardedly admits. The
most obvious comment that occurs to the mind of
the reader is that they ought never to have been
written. It is a pity they were written; more than a
pity they were ever published. It seems a terrible
thing that, merely to gratify the morbid curiosity of the
world, the very love-letters of a man of genius should
be made public. Is there nothing sacred in the lives
of our great men? ‘Did I imagine,’ Burns remarked
to Mrs. Basil Montagu in Dumfries, ‘that one half of the
letters which I have written would be published when
I die, I would this moment recall them and burn
them without redemption.’

After all, what was gained by publishing this correspondence?
It adds literally nothing to our knowledge
of the poet. He could have, and has, given more of
himself in a verse than he gives in the whole series
of letters signed Sylvander. Occasionally he is natural
in them, but rarely. ‘I shall certainly be ashamed of
scrawling whole sheets of incoherence.’ We trust he
was. The letters are false in sentiment, stilted in
diction, artificial in morality. We have a picture of the
poet all through trying to batter himself into a passion
he does not feel, into love of an accomplished{108} and intellectual
woman; while in his heart’s core is registered
the image of Jean Armour, the mother of his children.
He shows his paces before Clarinda and tears passion to
tatters in inflated prose; he poses as a stylist, a moralist,
a religious enthusiast, a poet, a man of the world, and
now and again accidentally he assumes the face and figure
of Robert Burns. We read and wonder if this be really
the same man who wrote in his journal, ‘The whining
cant of love, except in real passion and by a masterly
hand, is to me as insufferable as the preaching cant of
old father Smeaton, Whig minister at Kilmaurs. Darts,
flames, cupids, love graces and all that farrago are just
… a senseless rabble.’

Clarinda comes out of the correspondence better than
Sylvander. Her letters are more natural and vastly
more clever. She grieves to hear of his accident, and
sympathises with him in his suffering; were she his sister
she would call and see him. He is too romantic in his
style of address, and must remember she is a married
woman. Would he wait like Jacob seven years for a
wife? And perhaps be disappointed! She is not unhappy:
religion has been her balm for every woe. She
had read his autobiography as Desdemona listened to
the narration of Othello, but she was pained because of
his hatred of Calvinism; he must study it seriously.
She could well believe him when he said that no woman
could love as ardently as himself. The only woman
for him would be one qualified for the companion, the
friend, and the mistress. The last might gain Sylvander,
but the others alone could keep him. She admires him
for his continued fondness for Jean, who perhaps does
not possess his tenderest, faithfulest friendship. How{109}
could that bonnie lassie refuse him after such proofs of
love? But he must not rave; he must limit himself to
friendship. The evening of their third meeting was one
of the most exquisite she had ever experienced. Only
he must now know she has faults. She means well, but
is liable to become the victim of her sensibility. She
too now prefers the religion of the bosom. She cannot
deny his power over her: would he pay another evening
visit on Saturday?

When the poet is leaving Edinburgh, Clarinda is heartbroken.
‘Oh, let the scenes of nature remind you of
Clarinda! In winter, remember the dark shades of her
fate; in summer, the warmth of her friendship; in
autumn, her glowing wishes to bestow plenty on all; and
let spring animate you with hopes that your friend may
yet surmount the wintry blasts of life, and revive to taste
a spring-time of happiness. At all events, Sylvander,
the storms of life will quickly pass, and one unbounded
spring encircle all. Love, there, is not a crime. I
charge you to meet me there, O God! I must lay down
my pen.’

Poor Clarinda! Well for her peace of mind that the
poet was leaving her; well for Burns, also, that he was
leaving Clarinda and Edinburgh. Only one thing
remained for both to do, and it had been wise, to burn
their letters. Would that Clarinda had been as much
alive to her own good name, and the poet’s fair fame, as
Peggy Chalmers, who did not preserve her letters from
Burns!

It was February 1788 before Burns could settle with
Creech; and, after discharging all expenses, he found a
balance in his favour of about five hundred pounds. To{110}
Gilbert, who was in sore need of the money, he advanced
one hundred and eighty pounds, as his contribution to
the support of their mother. With what remained of
the money he leased from Mr. Miller of Dalswinton
the f{111}arm of Ellisland, on which he entered at Whitsunday
1788.

CHAPTER VII

ELLISLAND

When Burns turned his back on Edinburgh in February
1788, and set his face resolutely towards his native
county and the work that awaited him, he left the city a
happier and healthier man than he had been all the
months of his sojourn in it. The times of aimless roving,
and of still more demoralising hanging on in the hope of
something being done for him, were at an end; he looked
to the future with self-reliance. His vain hopes of preferment
were already ‘thrown behind and far away,’ and
he saw clearly that by the labour of his own hands he
had to live, independent of the dispensations of patronage,
and trusting no longer to the accidents of fortune.
‘The thoughts of a home,’ to quote Cunningham’s words,
‘of a settled purpose in life, gave him a silent gladness
of heart such as he had never before known.’

Burns, though he had hoped and was disappointed,
left the city not so much with bitterness as with contempt.
If he had been received on this second visit with punctilious
politeness, more ceremoniously than cordially, it
was just as he had himself expected. Gossip, too, had
been busy while he was absent, and his sayings and
doings had been bruited abroad. His worst fault was{112}
that he was a shrewd observer of men, and drew, in a
memorandum book he kept, pen-portraits of the people
he met. ‘Dr Blair is merely an astonishing proof of
what industry and application can do. Natural parts
like his are frequently to be met with; his vanity is proverbially
known among his acquaintance.’ The Lord
Advocate he pictured in a verse:

Had pen-portraits, such as these, been merely caricatures,
they might have been forgiven; but, unfortunately,
they were convincing likenesses, therefore libels. We
doubt not, as Cunningham tells us, that the literati of
Edinburgh were not displeased when such a man left
them; they could never feel at their ease so long as he
was in their midst. ‘Nor were the titled part of the
community without their share in this silent rejoicing;
his presence was a reproach to them. The illustrious
of his native land, from whom he had looked for patronage,
had proved that they had the carcass of greatness,
but wanted the soul; they subscribed for his poems, and
looked on their generosity “as an alms could keep a god
alive.” He turned his back on Edinburgh, and from that
time forward scarcely counted that man his friend who
spoke of titled persons in his presence.’

It was with feelings of relief, also, that Burns left the
super-scholarly litterateurs; ‘white curd of asses{113}‘ milk,’
he called them; gentlemen who reminded him of some
spinsters in his country who ‘spin their thread so fine
that it is neither fit for weft nor woof.’ To such men,
recognising only the culture of schools, a genius like
Burns was a puzzle, easier dismissed than solved. Burns
saw them, in all their tinsel of academic tradition,
through and through.

Coming from Edinburgh to the quiet home-life of
Mossgiel was like coming out of the vitiated atmosphere
of a ballroom into the pure and bracing air of early
morning. Away from the fever of city life, he only
gradually comes back to sanity and health. The artificialities
and affectations of polite society are not to be
thrown off in a day’s time. Hardly had he arrived at
Mauchline before he penned a letter to Clarinda, that
simply staggers the reader with the shameless and heartless
way in which it speaks of Jean Armour. ‘I am
dissatisfied with her—I cannot endure her! I, while my
heart smote me for the profanity, tried to compare her
with my Clarinda. ‘Twas setting the expiring glimmer
of a farthing taper beside the cloudless glory of the
meridian sun. Here was tasteless insipidity, vulgarity
of soul, and mercenary fawning; there, polished good
sense, heaven-born genius, and the most generous, the
most delicate, the most tender passion. I have done
with her, and she with me.’

Poor Jean! Think of her too confiding and trustful
love written down mercenary fawning! But this was not
Burns. The whole letter is false and vulgar. Perhaps
he thought to please his Clarinda by the comparison;
she had little womanly feeling if she felt flattered. Let
us believe, for her own sake, that she was disgusted.{114}
His letter to Ainslie, ten days later, is something very
different, though even yet he gives no hint of acknowledging
Jean as his wife. ‘Jean I found banished like a
martyr—forlorn, destitute, and friendless—all for the
good old cause. I have reconciled her to her fate; I
have reconciled her to her mother; I have taken her a
room; I have taken her to my arms; I have given her a
guinea, and I have embraced her till she rejoiced with
joy unspeakable and full of glory.’

This is flippant in tone, but something more manly in
sentiment; Burns was coming to his senses. On 13th
June, twin girls were born to Jean, but they only lived
a few days. On the same day their father wrote from
Ellisland to Mrs. Dunlop a letter, in which we see the
real Burns, true to the best feelings of his nature, and
true to his sorely-tried and long-suffering wife. ‘This
is the second day, my honoured friend, that I have been
on my farm. A solitary inmate of an old smoky spence,
far from every object I love, or by whom I am beloved;
nor any acquaintance older than yesterday, except Jenny
Geddes, the old mare I ride on; while uncouth cares
and novel plans hourly insult my awkward ignorance and
bashful inexperience…. Your surmise, madam, is just;
I am, indeed, a husband…. You are right that a
bachelor state would have ensured me more friends;
but, from a cause you will easily guess, conscious peace
in the enjoyment of my own mind, and unmistrusting
confidence in approaching my God, would seldom have
been of the number. I found a once much-loved and
still much-loved female, literally and truly cast out to the
mercy of the naked elements; but I enabled her to
purchase a she{115}lter,—there is no sporting with a fellow-creature’s
happiness or misery.’

It was not till August that the marriage was ratified
by the Church, when Robert Burns and Jean Armour
were rebuked for their acknowledged irregularity, and
admonished ‘to adhere faithfully to one another, as man
and wife, all the days of their life.’

This was the only fit and proper ending of Burns’s
acquaintance with Jean Armour. As an honourable
man, he could not have done otherwise than he did.
To have deserted her now, and married another, even
admitting he was legally free to do so, which is doubtful,
would have been the act of an abandoned wretch, and
certainly have wrought ruin in the moral and spiritual
life of the poet. In taking Jean as his wedded wife, he
acted not only honourably, but wisely; and wisdom and
prudence were not always distinguishing qualities of
Robert Burns.

Some months had to elapse, however, before the wife
could join her husband at Ellisland. The first thing he
had to do when he entered on his lease was to rebuild
the dwelling-house, he himself lodging in the meanwhile
in the smoky spence which he mentions in his letter to
Mrs. Dunlop. In the progress of the building he not
only took a lively interest, but actually worked with his
own hands as a labourer, and gloried in his strength:
‘he beat all for a dour lift.’ But it was some time
before he could settle down to the necessarily monotonous
work of farming. ‘My late scenes of idleness
and dissipation,’ he confessed to Dunbar, ‘have enervated
my mind to a considerable degree.’ He was restless
and rebellious at times, and we are not surprised
to find the sudden settling down from gaiety and travel{116}
to the home-life of a farmer marked by bursts of impatience,
irritation, and discontent. The only steadying
influence was the thought of his wife and children, and
the responsibility of a husband and a father. He grew
despondent occasionally, and would gladly have been
at rest, but a wife and children bound him to struggle
with the stream. His melancholy blinded him even to
the good qualities of his neighbours. The only things
he saw in perfection were stupidity and canting. ‘Prose
they only know in graces, prayers, etc., and the value
of these they estimate, as they do their plaiding webs,
by the ell. As for the Muses, they have as much an
idea of a rhinoceros as of a poet.’ He was, in fact,
ungracious towards his neighbours, not that they were
boorish or uninformed folk, but simply because, though
living at Ellisland in body, his mind was in Ayrshire
with his darling Jean, and he was looking to the future
when he should have a home and a wife of his own. His
eyes would ever wander to the west, and he sang, to
cheer him in his loneliness, a song of love to his Bonnie
Jean:

It was not till the beginning of December that he was
in a position to bring his wife and children to Ellisland;
and this event brought him into kindlier relations with
his fellow-farmers. His neighbours gathered to bid his
wife welcome; and drank to the roof-tree of the house
of Burns. The poet, now that he had made his home
amongst them, was regarded as one of themselves;{117}
while Burns, on his part, having at last got his wife and
children beside him, was in a healthier frame of mind
and more charitably disposed towards those who had
come to give them a welcome. That he was now as
one settled in life with something worthy to live for,
we have ample proof in his letter written to Mrs. Dunlop
on the first day of the New Year. It is discursive, yet
philosophical and reflective, and its whole tone is that
of a man who looks on the world round about him with
a kindly charity, and looks to the future with faith and
trust. Life passed very sweetly and peacefully with the
poet and his family for a time here. The farm, it would
appear, was none of the best,—Mr. Cunningham told him
he had made a poet’s not a farmer’s choice,—but Burns
was hopeful and worked hard. Yet the labour of the
farm was not to be his life-work. Even while waiting
impatiently the coming of his wife, he had been contributing
to Johnson’s Museum, and he fondly imagined
that he was going to be farmer, poet, and exciseman
all in one. Some have regretted his appointment to
the Excise at this time, and attributed to his frequent
absences from home his failure as a farmer. They
may be right. But what was the poet to do? He
knew by bitter experience how precarious the business
of farming was, and thought that a certain salary, even
though small, would always stand between his family
and absolute want. ‘I know not,’ he wrote to Ainslie,
‘how the word exciseman, or, still more opprobrious,
gauger, will sound in your ears. I too have seen the
day when my auditory nerves would have felt very
delicately on this subject; but a wife and children have
a wonderful power in blunting these kind of sensation{118}s.
Fifty pounds a year for life and a pension for widows
and orphans, you will allow, is no bad settlement for a
poet.’ And to Blacklock he wrote in verse:

This was nobly said; and the poet spoke from the
heart.

Not content with being gauger, farmer, and poet,
Burns took a lively interest in everything affecting the
welfare of the parish and the well-being of its inhabitants.
For this was no poet of the study, holding himself aloof
from the affairs of the world, and fearing the contamination
of his kind. Burns was alive all-round, and always
acted his part in the world as a husband and father; as
a citizen and a man. He made himself the poet of
humanity, because he himself was so intensely human,
and joyed and sorrowed with his fellows. At this time{119}
he established a library in Dunscore, and himself undertook
the whole management,—drawing out rules, purchasing
books, acting for a time as secretary, treasurer,
and committee all in one. Among the volumes he
ordered were several of his old favourites, The Spectator,
The Man of Feeling, and The Lounger; and we know
that there was on the shelves even a folio Hebrew
Concordance.

A favourite walk of the poet’s while he stayed here
was along Nithside, where he often wandered to take a
‘gloamin’ shot at the Muses.’ Here, after a fall of rain,
Cunningham records, the poet loved to walk, listening
to the roar of the river, or watching it bursting impetuously
from the groves of Friar’s Carse. ‘Thither he
walked in his sterner moods, when the world and its
ways touched his spirit; and the elder peasants of the
vale still show the point at which he used to pause and
look on the red and agitated stream.’

In spite of his multifarious duties, he was now more
than ever determined to make his name as a poet. To
Dr. Moore he wrote (4th January 1789): ‘The character
and employment of a poet were formerly my pleasure,
but now my pride…. Poesy I am determined to
prosecute with all my vigour. Nature has given very
few, if any, of the profession the talents of shining in
every species of composition. I shall try (for until trial
it is impossible to know) whether she has qualified me
to shine in any one.’

It was inevitable that one whose district as an exciseman
reached far and wide could not regularly attend to
ploughing, sowing, and reaping, and the farm was very
often left to the care of servants. Dr. Currie appears{120}
to count it as a reproach that his farm no longer occupied
the principal part of his care or his thoughts. Yet it
could not have been otherwise. Burns after having
undertaken a duty would attend to it religiously, and
we know that he pursued his work throughout his ten
parishes diligently, faithfully, and with unvarying punctuality.
Others have bemoaned that those frequent Excise
excursions led the poet into temptation, that he was
being continually assailed by the sin that so easily beset
him. Let it be admitted frankly that the temptations
to social excess were great; is it not all the more
creditable to Burns that he did not sink under those
temptations and become the besotted wreck conventional
biography has attempted to make him? If those who
raise this plaint mean to insinuate that Burns became
a confirmed toper, then they are assuredly wrong; if they
be only drawing attention to the fact that drinking was
too common in Scotland at that time, then they are
attacking not the poet but the social customs of his
day. It would be easy if we were to accept ‘the
general impression of the place,’ and go by the tale
of gossip, to show that Burns was demoralised by his
duties as a gauger, and sank into a state of maudlin
intemperance. But ascertained fact and the testimony
of unimpeachable authority are at variance with the
voice of gossip. ‘So much the worse for fact,’ biography
would seem to have said, and gaily sped on the work of
defamation. We only require to forget Allan Cunningham’s
Personal Sketch of the Poet, the letters from Mr.
Findlater and Mr. Gray, and to close our eyes to the
excellence of the poetry of this period, in order to see
Burns on the downgrade, and to preach g{121}rand moral
lessons from the text of a wasted life.

But, after all, ‘facts are chiels that winna ding,’ and
we must take them into account, however they may
baulk us of grand opportunities of plashing in watery
sentiment. Speaking of the poet’s biographers, Mr.
Findlater remarks that they have tried to outdo one
another in heaping obloquy on his name; they have
made his convivial habits, habitual drunkenness; his
wit and humour, impiety; his social talents, neglect of
duty; and have accused him of every vice. Then he
gives his testimony: ‘My connection with Robert
Burns commenced immediately after his admission into
the Excise, and continued to the hour of his death.
In all that time the superintendence of his behaviour as
an officer of the revenue was a branch of my especial
province; and it may be supposed I would not be an
inattentive observer of the general conduct of a man
and a poet so celebrated by his countrymen. In the
former capacity, so far from its being impossible for
him to discharge the duties of his office with that
regularity which is almost indispensable, as is palpably
assumed by one of his biographers, and insinuated, not
very obscurely even, by Dr. Currie, he was exemplary
in his attention as an Excise officer, and was even
jealous of the least imputation on his vigilance.’

But a glance at the poems and songs of this period
would be a sufficient vindication of the poet’s good
name. There are considerably over a hundred songs
and poems written during his stay at Ellisland, many
of them of his finest. The third volume of Johnson’s
Museum, published in February 1790, contained no
fewer than forty songs by Burns. Among the Ellislan{122}d
songs were such as, Ye Banks and Braes o’ Bonnie
Doon, Auld Lang Syne, Willie brewed a Peck o’ Maut,
To Mary in Heaven, Of a’ the Airts the Wind can blaw,
My Love she’s but a Lassie yet, Tam Glen, John Anderson
my Jo, songs that have become the property of the
world. Of the last-named song, Angellier remarks that
the imagination of the poet must have indeed explored
every situation of love to have led him to that which
he in his own experience could not have known. Even
the song Willie brewed a Peck o’ Maut, the first of
bacchanalian ditties, is the work of a man of sane
mind and healthy appetite. It is not of the diseased
imagination of drunken genius. But the greatest poem
of this period, and one of Burns’s biggest achievements,
is Tam o’ Shanter. This poem was written in answer
to a request of Captain Grose that the poet would
provide a witch story to be printed along with a drawing
of Alloway Kirk, and was first published in Grose’s
Antiquities of Scotland. We have been treated by
several biographers to a private view of the poet, with
wild gesticulations, agonising in the composition of this
poem; but where his wife did not venture to intrude, we
surely need not seek to desecrate. ‘I stept aside with
the bairns among the broom,’ says Bonnie Jean; not, we
should imagine, to leave room for aliens and strangers.
He has been again burlesqued for us rending himself
in rhyme, and stretched on straw groaning elegiacs to
Mary in heaven. All this is mere sensationalism provided
for illiterate readers. We have the poem, and its
excellence sufficeth.

It is worthy of note that in Tam o’ Shanter, as well as
in To Mary in Heaven, the poet goes back to{123} his earlier
years in Ayrshire. They are posthumous products of
the inspiration which gave us the Kilmarnock Edition.
I am not inclined to agree with Carlyle in his estimate
of Tam o’ Shanter. It is not the composition of a man
of great talent, but of a man of transcendent poetical
genius. The story itself is a conception of genius, and
in the narration the genius is unquestionable. It is a
panorama of pictures so vivid and powerful that the
characters and scenes are fixed indelibly on the mind,
and abide with us a cherished literary possession. After
reading the poem, the words are recalled without
conscious effort of memory, but as the only possible
embodiment of the mental impressions retained. Short
as the poem is, there is in it character, humour, pathos,
satire, indignation, tenderness, fun, frolic, diablerie,
almost every human feeling. I have heard Burns in
the writing of this poem likened to a composer at an
organ improvising a piece of music in which, before he
has done, he has used every stop and touched every
note on the keyboard. Even the weakest lines of the
piece, which mark a dramatic pause in the rapid narration,
have a distinctive beauty and are the most frequently
quoted lines of the poem. In artistic word-painting
and graphic phrasing Burns is here at his best. His
description of the horrible is worthy of Shakspeare; and
it is questionable if even the imagination of that master
ever conceived anything more awful than the scene and
circumstance of the infernal orgies of those witches and
warlocks. What Zolaesque realism there is! In the
line, ‘The grey hairs yet stack to the heft,’ all the
gruesomeness of murder is compressed into a distich.
Yet the horrible details are controlled and unified {124}in
the powerful imagination of the poet. We believe Dr.
Blacklock was right in thinking that this poem, though
Burns had never written another syllable, would have
made him a high reputation. Certainly it was not the
work of a man daily dazing his faculties with drink;
no more was that exquisite lyric To Mary in Heaven.
Another poem of this period deserving special mention
is The Whistle, not merely because of its dramatic force
and lyrical beauty, but because it gives a true picture
of the drinking customs of the time. And again I dare
assert that this is not the work of a mind enfeebled or
debased by drink. It is a bit of simple, direct, sincere
narration, humanly healthy in tone; the ideas are clear
and consecutive, and the language fitting. It is not so
that drunken genius expresses itself. The language of
a poetical mind enfeebled by alcohol or opium is
frequently mystic and musical; it never deals with the
realities and responsibilities of life, but in a witchery
of words winds and meanders through the realms of
reverie and dream. It may be sweet and sensuous;
it is rarely narrative or simple; never direct nor
forcible.

In the Kirk’s Alarm, wherein he again reverted to
his Mossgiel period, he displayed all his former force of
satire, as well as his sympathy with those who advocated
rational views in religion. Dr. Macgill had written a
book which the Kirk declared to be heretical, and
Burns, at the request of some friends, fought for the
doctor in his usual way, though with little hope of doing
him any good. ‘Ajax’s shield consisted, I think, of
seven bull-hides and a plate of brass, which altogether
set Hector’s utmost force at defiance. Alas! I am not{125}
a Hector, and the worthy doctor’s foes are as securely
armed as Ajax was. Ignorance, superstition, bigotry,
stupidity, malevolence, self-conceit, envy—all strongly
bound in a massy frame of brazen impudence; to such
a shield humour is the peck of a sparrow and satire the
pop-gun of a schoolboy. Creation-disgracing scélérats
such as they, God only can mend, and the devil only
can punish.’ The doctor yielded, Cunningham tells
us, and was forgiven, but not the poet; pertinently
adding, ‘so much more venial is it in devout men’s eyes
to be guilty of heresy than of satire.’

Into political as well as theological matters Burns
also entered with all his wonted enthusiasm. Of his
election ballads, the best, perhaps, are The Five Carlins
and the Epistle to Mr. Graham of Fintry. But these
ballads are not to be taken as a serious addition to the
poet’s works; he did not wish them to be so taken.
He was a man as well as a poet; was interested with
his neighbours in political affairs, and in the day of
battle fought with the weapons he could wield with
effect. Nor are his ballads always to be taken as
representing his political principles; these he expressed
in song that did not owe its inspiration to the excitement
of elections. Burns was not a party man; he had
in politics, as in religion, some broad general principles,
but he had ‘the warmest veneration for individuals of
both parties.’ The most important verse in his Epistle
to Graham of Fintry is the last:

Burns’s life was, therefore, quite full at Ellisland, too
full indeed; for, towards the end of 1791, we find him
disposing of the farm, and looking to the Excise alone
for a livelihood. In the farm he had sunk the greater
part of the profits of his Edinburgh Edition; and now
it was painfully evident that the money was lost. He
had worked hard enough, but he was frequently absent,
and a farm thrives only under the eye of a master. On
Excise business he was accustomed to ride at least two
hundred miles every week, and so could have little
time to give to his fields. Besides this, the soil of
Ellisland had been utterly exhausted before he entered
on his lease, and consequently made a miserable return
for the labour expended on it. The friendly relations
that had existed between him and his landlord were
broken off before now; and towards the close of his stay
at Ellisland Burns spoke rather bitterly of Mr. Miller’s
selfish kindness. Miller was, in fact, too much of a lord
and master, exacting submission as well as rent from his
tenants; while Burns was of too haughty a spirit to beck
and bow to any man. ‘The life of a farmer is,’ he wrote
to Mrs. Dunlop, ‘as a farmer paying a dear, unconscionable
rent, a cursed life…. Devil take the life of reaping
the fruits that others must eat!’

The poet, too, had been overworking himself, and was
again subject to his attacks of hypochondria. ‘I feel
that horrid hypochondria pervading every atom of both
body and soul. This farm has undone my enjoyment
of myself. It is a ruinous affair on all hands.’ In the
midst of his troubles and vexations with his farm, he
began to look more hopefully to the Excise, and to see{127}
in the future a life of literary ease, when he could devote
himself wholly to the Muses. He had already got
ranked on the list as supervisor, an appointment that he
reckoned might be worth one hundred or two hundred
pounds a year; and this determined him to quit the farm
entirely, and to try to make a living by one profession.
As farmer, exciseman, and poet he had tried too much,
and even a man of his great capacity for work was bound
to have succumbed under the strain. Even had the
farm not proved the ruinous bargain it did, we imagine
that he must have been compelled sooner or later to
relinquish one of the two, either his farm or his Excise
commission. Circumstances decided for him, and in
December 1791 he sold by auction his stock and implements,
and removed to Dumfries, ‘leaving nothing at
Ellisland but a putting-stone, with which he loved to
exercise his strength; a memory of his musings, which
can never die; and three hundred pounds of his money,
sunk beyond redemption {128}in a speculation from which
all augured happiness.’

CHAPTER VIII

DUMFRIES

When Burns removed from Ellisland to Dumfries, he
took up his abode in a small house of three apartments
in the Wee Vennel. Here he stayed till Whitsunday
1793, when the family removed to a detached house of
two storeys in the Mill Vennel. A mere closet nine
feet square was the poet’s writing-room in this house,
and it was in the bedroom adjoining that he died.

The few years of his residence in Dumfries have been
commonly regarded as a period of poverty and intemperance.
But his intemperance has always been most
religiously exaggerated, and we doubt not also that the
poverty of the family at this time has been made to
appear worse than it was. Burns had not a salary
worthy of his great abilities, it is true, but there is good
reason to believe that the family lived in comparative
ease and comfort, and that there were luxuries in their
home, which neither father nor mother had known in
their younger days. Burns liked to see his Bonnie Jean
neat and trim, and she went as braw as any wife of
the town. Though we know that he wrote painfully,
towards the end of his life, for the loan of paltry sums, we
are to regard this as a sign more of temporary {129}embarrassment
than of a continual struggle to make ends meet.
The word debt grated so harshly on Burns’s ears that he
could not be at peace with himself so long as the pettiest
account remained unpaid; and if he had no ready
money in his hands to meet it, he must e’en borrow
from a friend. His income, when he settled in Dumfries,
was ‘down money £70 per annum,’ and there
were perquisites which must have raised it to eighty or
ninety. Though his hopes of preferment were never
realised, he tried his best on this slender income ‘to
make a happy fireside clime to weans and wife,’ and in
a sense succeeded.

What he must have felt more keenly than anything
else in leaving Ellisland was, that in giving up farming
he was making an open confession of failure in his ideal
of combining in himself the farmer, the poet, and the
exciseman. There was a stigma also attaching to the
name of gauger, that must often have been galling to
the spirit of Burns. The ordinary labourer utters the
word with dry contempt, as if he were speaking of a spy.
But the thoughts of a wife and bairns had already prevailed
over prejudice; he realised the responsibilities of a husband
and father, and pocketed his pride. A great change
it must have been to come from the quiet and seclusion
of Ellisland to settle down in the midst of the busy life
of an important burgh.

Life in provincial towns in Scotland in those days was
simply frittered away in the tittle-tattle of cross and
causeway, and the insipid talk of taverns. The most
trifling incidents of everyday life were dissected and discussed,
and magnified into events of the first importance.
Many residents had no trade or profession whateve{130}r.
Annuitants and retired merchants built themselves
houses, had their portraits painted in oil, and thereafter
strutted into an aristocracy. Without work, without hobby,
without healthy recreation, and cursed with inglorious
leisure, they simply dissipated time until they should pass
into eternity. The only amusement such lumpish creatures
could have was to meet in some inn or tavern, and
swill themselves into a debauched joy of life. Dumfries,
when Burns came to it in 1791, was no better and no
worse than its neighbours; and we can readily imagine
how eagerly such a man would be welcomed by its
pompously dull and leisured topers. Now might their
meetings be lightened with flashes of genius, and the lazy
hours of their long nights go fleeting by on the wings of
wit and eloquence. Too often in Dumfries was Burns
wiled into the howffs and haunts of these seasoned casks.
They could stand heavy drinking; the poet could not.
He was too highly strung, and if he had consulted his
own inclination would rather have shunned than sought
the company of men who met to quaff their quantum of
wine and sink into sottish sleep. For Burns was never
a drunkard, not even in Dumfries; though the contrary
has been asserted so often that it has all the honour that
age and the respectability of authority can give it. There
was with him no animal craving for drink, nor has he
been convicted of solitary drinking; but he was intensely
convivial, and drank, as Professor Blackie put it, ‘only
as the carnal seasoning of a rampant intellectuality.’
There is no doubt that he came to Dumfries a comparatively
pure and sober man; and if he now began to
frequent the Globe Tavern, often to cast his pearls before
swine, let it be remembered that he was compelled{131}
frequently to meet there strangers and tourists who had
journeyed for the express purpose of meeting the poet.
Nowadays writers and professional men have their
clubs, and in general frequent them more regularly than
Burns ever haunted the howffs of Dumfries. But
we have heard too much about ‘the poet’s moral
course after he settled in Dumfries being downward.’
‘From the time of his migration to Dumfries,’
Principal Shairp soberly informs us, ‘it would
appear that he was gradually dropped out of acquaintance
by most of the Dumfriesshire lairds, as he had long been
by the parochial and other ministers.’ Poor lairds!
Poor ministers! If they preferred their own talk of
crops and cattle and meaner things to the undoubted
brilliancy of Burns’s conversation, surely their dulness
and want of appreciation is not to be laid to the charge
of the poet. I doubt not had the poet lived to a good
old age he would have been gradually dropped out of
acquaintance by some who have not scrupled to write
his biography. Politics, it is admitted, may have formed
the chief element in the lairds’ and ministers’ aversion,
but there is a hint that his irregular life had as much
to do with it. Is it to be seriously contended
that these men looked askance at Burns because
of his occasional convivialities? ‘Madam,’ he answered
a lady who remonstrated with him on this very subject,
‘they would not thank me for my company if I did not
drink with them.’ These lairds, perhaps even these
ministers, could in all probability stand their three
bottles with the best, and were more likely to drop the
acquaintance of one who would not drink bottle for
bottle with them than of one who indulged to excess.{132}
It was considered a breach of hospitality not to imbibe
so long as the host ordained; and in many cases glasses
were supplied so constructed that they had to be drained
at every toast. ‘Occasional hard drinking,’ he confessed
to Mrs. Dunlop, ‘is the devil to me; against this I have
again and again set my resolution, and have greatly
succeeded. Taverns I have totally abandoned; it is the
private parties in the family way among the hard-drinking
gentlemen of this county that do me the mischief;
but even this I have more than half given over.’ Most
assuredly whatever these men charged against Robert
Burns it was not drunkenness. But he has been accused
of mixing with low company! That is something
nearer the mark, and goes far to explain the aversion of
those stately Tories. But again, what is meant by low
company? Are we to believe that the poet made
associates of depraved and abandoned men? Not for
a moment! This low company was nothing more than
men in the rank of life into which he had been born;
mechanics, tradesmen, farmers, ploughmen, who did not
move in the aristocratic circles of patrician lairds or
ministers ordained to preach the gospel to the poor.
It was simply the old, old cry of ‘associating with
publicans and sinners.’

We do not defend nor seek to hide the poet’s aberrations;
he confessed them remorselessly, and condemned
himself. But we do raise our voice against the exaggeration
of occasional over-indulgence into confirmed
debauchery; and dare assert that Burns was as sober a
man as the average lairds and ministers who had the
courage of their prejudices, and wrote themselves down
asses to all posterity.

{133}

But here again the work the poet managed to do is a
sufficient disproof of his irregular life. He was at this
time, besides working hard at his Excise business, writing
ballads and songs, correcting for Creech the two-volume
edition of his poems, and managing somehow or other
to find time for a pretty voluminous correspondence.
His hands were full and his days completely occupied.
He would not have been an Excise officer very long had
he been unable to attend to his duties. William Wallace,
the editor of Chambers’s Burns, has studied very carefully
this period of the poet’s life, and found that in those
days of petty faultfinding he has not once been reprimanded,
either for drunkenness or for dereliction of duty.
There were spies and informers about who would not
have left the Excise Commissioners uninformed of the
paltriest charge they could have trumped up against
Burns. Nor is there, when we look at his literary work,
any falling off in his powers as a poet. He sang as
sweetly, as purely, as magically as ever he did; and this
man, who has been branded as a blasphemer and a
libertine, had nobly set himself to purify the polluted
stream of Scottish Song. He was still continuing his
contributions to Johnson’s Museum, and now he had
also begun to write for Thomson’s more ambitious
work.

Some of the first of his Dumfriesshire songs owe
their inspiration to a hurried visit he paid to Mrs.
Maclehose in Edinburgh before she sailed to join her
husband in the West Indies. The best of these
are, perhaps, My Nannie’s Awa’ and Ae Fond Kiss. The
fourth verse of the latter was a favourite of Byron’s,
while Scot{134}t claims for it that it is worth a thousand
romances—

Another song of a different kind, The Deil’s awa wi’ the
Exciseman, had its origin in a raid upon a smuggling
brig that had got into shallow water in the Solway. The
ship was armed and well manned; and while Lewars, a
brother-excisemen, posted to Dumfries for a guard of
dragoons, Burns, with a few men under him, watched to
prevent landing or escape. It was while impatiently
waiting Lewars’s return that he composed this song.
When the dragoons arrived Burns put himself at their
head, and wading, sword in hand, was the first to board
the smuggler. The affair might ultimately have led to
his promotion had he not, next day at the sale of the
vessel’s arms and stores in Dumfries, purchased four
carronades, which he sent, with a letter testifying his admiration
and respect, to the French Legislative Assembly.
The carronades never reached their destination, having
been intercepted at Dover by the Custom House
authorities. It is a pity perhaps that Burns should have
testified his political leanings in so characteristic a way.
It was the impetuous act of a poet roused to enthusiasm,
as were thousands of his fellow-countrymen at the time,
by what was thought to be the beginning of universal
brotherhood in France. But whatever may be said as
to the impulsive imprudence of the step, it is not to be
condemned as a most absurd and presumptuous breach
of decorum. We were not at war with France at this
time; had not even begun to await developments with{135}
critical suspicion. Talleyrand had not yet been slighted
by our Queen, and protestations of peace and friendship
were passing between the two Governments. Any subject
of the king might at this time have written a friendly
letter or forwarded a token of goodwill to the French
Government, without being suspected of disloyalty.
But by the time the carronades had reached Dover the
complexion of things had changed; and yet even in those
critical times Burns’s action, though it may have hindered
promotion, does not appear to have been interpreted as
‘a most absurd and presumptuous breach of decorum.’
That interpretation was left for biographers made wise
with the passions of war; and yet they have not said in
so many words, what they darkly insinuate, that the poet
was not a loyal British subject. His love of country is too
surely established. That, later, he thought the Ministry
engaging in an unjust and unrighteous war, may be
frankly admitted. He was not alone in his opinion; nor
was he the only poet carried away with a wild enthusiasm
of Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity. Societies were then
springing up all over the country calling for redress of
grievances and for greater political freedom. Such
societies were regarded by the Government of the day
as seditious, and their agitations as dangerous to the
peace of the country; and Burns, though he did not
become a member of the Society of the Friends of the
People, was at one with them in their desire for reform.
It was known also that he ‘gat the Gazeteer,’ and that
was enough to mark him out as a disaffected person.
No doubt he also talked imprudently; for it was not the
nature of this man to keep his sentiments hidden in his
heart, and to talk the language of expediency. What he{136}
thought in private he advocated publicly in season and
out of season; and it was quite in the natural course of
things that information regarding his political opinions
should be lodged against him with the Board of Excise.
His political conduct was made the subject of official
inquiry, and it would appear that for a time he was in
danger of dismissal from the service. This is a somewhat
painful episode in his life; and we find him in a
letter to Mr. Graham of Fintry repudiating the slanderous
charges, yet confessing that the tender ties of wife
and children ‘unnerve courage and wither resolution.’
Mr. Findlater, his superior, was of opinion that only a very
mild reprimand was administered, and the poet warned
to be more prudent in his speech. But what appeared
mild to Mr. Findlater was galling to Burns. In his letter
to Erskine of Mar he says: ‘One of our supervisors-general,
a Mr. Corbet, was instructed to inquire on the
spot and to 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.’

We can hardly conceive a harsher sentence on one of
Burns’s temperament, and we doubt not that the degradation
of being thus gagged, and the blasting of his
hopes of promotion, were the cause of much of the
bitterness that we find bursting from him now more
frequently than ever, both in speech and writing. That
remorse for misconduct irritated him against himself and
against the world, is true; but it is none the less true
that he must have chafed against the servility of an
office that forbade him the freedom of personal opinion.
In the same letter he unburdens his heart in a burst of
eloquent and noble indignation.

{137}

‘Burns was a poor man from birth, and an exciseman
by necessity; but—I will say it—the sterling of his
honest worth no poverty could debase; his independent
British mind oppression might bend, but could not
subdue…. I have three sons who, I see already,
have brought into the world souls ill-qualified to inhabit
the bodies of slaves…. Does any man tell me that
my full efforts can be of no service, and that it does not
belong to my humble station to meddle with the concerns
of a nation? I can tell him that it is on such individuals
as I that a nation has to rest, both for the hand
of support and the eye of intelligence.’

What the precise charges against him were, we are not
informed. It is alleged that he once, when the health
of Pitt was being drunk, interposed with the toast of
‘A greater than Pitt—George Washington.’ There can
be little fault found with the sentiment. It is given to
poets to project themselves into futurity, and declare the
verdict of posterity. But the occasion was ill-chosen,
and he spoke with all a poet’s imprudence. In another
company he aroused the martial fury of an unreasoning
captain by proposing the toast, ‘May our success in the
present war be equal to the justice of our cause.’ A
very humanitarian toast, one would think, but regarded
as seditious by the fire-eating captain, who had not the
sense to see that there was more of sedition in his
resentment than in Burns’s proposal. Yet the affair
looked black enough for a time, and the poet was
afraid that even this story would be carried to the ears
of the commissioners, and his political opinions be again
misrepresented.

Another thing that came to disturb his peace of mi{138}nd
was his quarrel with Mrs. Riddell of Woodley Park,
where he had been made a welcome guest ever since
his advent to this district. That Burns, in the heat of a
fever of intoxication, had been guilty of a glaring act of
impropriety in the presence of the ladies seated in the
drawing-room, we may gather from the internal evidence
of his letter written the following morning ‘from the
regions of hell, amid the horrors of the damned.’ It
would appear that the gentlemen left in the dining-room
had got ingloriously drunk, and there and then proposed
an indecorous raid on the drawing-room. Whatever it
might be they did, it was Burns who was made to suffer
the shame of the drunken plot. His letter of abject
apology remained unanswered, and the estrangement
was only embittered by some lampoons which he wrote
afterwards on this accomplished lady. The affair was
bruited abroad, and the heinousness of the poet’s offence
vastly exaggerated. Certain it is that he became deeply
incensed against not only the lady, but her husband as
well, to whom he considered he owed no apology whatever.
Matters were only made worse by his unworthy
verses, and it was not till he was almost on the brink
of the grave that he and Mrs. Riddell met again, and
the old friendship was re-established. The lady not
only forgot and forgave, but she was one of the first
after the poet’s death to write generously and appreciatively
of his character and abilities.

That the quarrel with Mrs. Riddell was prattled about
in Dumfries, and led other families to drop the acquaintance
of the poet, we are made painfully aware; and in
his correspondence now there is rancour, bitterness, and
remorse more pronounced and more settled than at any{139}
other period of his life. He could not go abroad without
being reminded of the changed attitude of the world;
he could not stay at home without seeing his noble wife
uncomplainingly nursing a child that was not hers. He
cursed himself for his sins and follies; he cursed the
world for its fickleness and want of sympathy. ‘His
wit,’ says Heron, ‘became more gloomy and sarcastic,
and his conversation and writings began to assume a
misanthropical tone, by which they had not been before
in any eminent degree distinguished. But with all his
failings his was still that exalted mind which had raised
itself above the depression of its original condition, with
all the energy of the lion pawing to free his hinder limbs
from the yet encumbering earth.’

His health now began to give his friends serious
concern. To Cunningham he wrote, February 24, 1794:
‘For these two months I have not been able to lift
a pen. My constitution and my frame were ab origine
blasted with a deep, incurable taint of hypochondria,
which poisons my existence.’ A little later he confesses:
‘I have been in poor health. I am afraid that I am
about to suffer for the follies of my youth. My medical
friends threaten me with a flying gout, but I trust they
are mistaken.’ His only comfort in those days was his
correspondence with Thomson and with Johnson. He
kept pouring out song after song, criticising, rewriting,
changing what was foul and impure into songs of the
tenderest delicacy. He showed love in every mood,
from the rapture of pure passion in the Lea Rig, the
maidenly abandon of Whistle and I’ll come to you, my
Lad, to the humour of Last May a Braw Wooer and
Duncan Gray, and the guileless devotion of {140}O wert
thou in the Cauld Blast. But he sang of more than
love. Turning from the coldness of the high and
mighty, who had once been his friends, he found
consolation in the naked dignity of manhood, and
penned the hymn of humanity, A Man’s a Man for a’
that. Perhaps he found his text in Tristram Shandy:
‘Honours, like impressions upon coin, may give an
ideal and local value to a bit of base metal, but gold
and silver pass all the world over with no other recommendation
than their own weight.’ Something like
this occurs in Massinger’s Duke of Florence, where it
is said of princes that

Gower also had written—

But the poem is undoubtedly Burns’s, and it is one he
must have written ere he passed away. Scots wha hae
is another of his Dumfries poems. Mr. Syme gives a
highly-coloured and one-sided view of the poet riding in
a storm between Gatehouse and Kenmure, where we are
assured he composed this ode. Carlyle accepts Syme’s
authority, and adds: ‘Doubtless this stern hymn was
singing itself, as he formed it, through the soul of Burns;
but to the external ear it should be sung with the throat
of the whirlwind.’ Burns gives an account of the writing
of the poem, which it is difficult to reconcile with
Mr. Syme’s sensational details. It matters not, however,
when or how it was written; we have it now, one of {141}the
most martial and rousing odes ever penned. Not only
has it gripped the heart of Scotsmen, but it has taken
the ear of the world; its fire and vigour have inspired
soldiers in the day of battle, and consoled them in the
hour of death. We are not forgetful of the fact that
Mrs. Hemans, who wrote some creditable verse, and
the placid Wordsworth, discussed this ode, and agreed
that it was little else than the rhodomontade of a schoolboy.
It is a pity that such authorities should have
missed the charm of Scots wha hae. More than likely
they made up for the loss in a solitary appreciation of
Betty Foy or The Pilgrim Fathers.

Another martial ode, composed in 1795, was called
forth by the immediate dangers of the time. The
country was roused by the fear of foreign invasion, and
Burns, who had enrolled himself in the ranks of the
Dumfriesshire Volunteers, penned the patriotic song,
Does Haughty Gaul Invasion threat? This song itself
might have reinstalled him in public favour, and dispelled
all doubt as to his loyalty, had he cared again to
court the society of those who had dropped him from
the list of their acquaintance. But Burns had grown
indifferent to any favour save the favour of his Muse;
besides, he was now shattered in health, and assailed
with gloomy forebodings of an early death. For himself
he would have faced death manfully, but again
it was the thought of wife and bairns that unmanned
him.

Not content with supplying Thomson with songs, he
wrote letters full of hints and suggestions anent songs
and song-making, and now and then he gave a glimpse
of himself at work. We see him sitting under the shade{142}
of an old thorn crooning to himself until he gets a verse
to suit the measure he has in his mind; looking round
for objects in nature that are in unison and harmony
with the cogitations of his fancy; humming every now
and then the air with the verses; retiring to his study to
commit his effusions to paper, and while he swings at
intervals on the hind legs of his elbow-chair, criticising
what he has written. A common walk of his when he
was in the poetical vein was to the ruins of Lincluden
Abbey, whither he was often accompanied by his eldest
boy; sometimes towards Martingdon ford, on the north
side of the Nith. When he returned home with a set of
verses, he listened attentively to his wife singing them,
and if she happened to find a word that was harsh in
sound, a smoother one was immediately substituted;
but he would on no account ever sacrifice sense to
sound.

During the earlier part of this year Burns had taken
his full share in the political contest that was going on,
and fought for Heron of Heron, the Whig candidate,
with electioneering ballads, not to be claimed as great
poems nor meant to be so ranked, but marked with
all his incisiveness of wit and satire, and with his
extraordinary deftness of portraiture. Heron was the
successful candidate, and his poetical supporter again
began to indulge in dreams of promotion: ‘a life
of literary leisure with a decent competency was the
summit of his wishes.’ But his dreams were not to
be realised.

In September his favourite child and only daughter,
Elizabeth, died at Mauchline, and he was prostrated
with grief. He had also taken very much to heart the{143}
inexplicable silence of his old friend, and for many years
constant correspondent, Mrs. Dunlop. To both these
griefs he alludes in a letter to her, dated January 31,
1796: ‘These many months you have been two packets
in my debt. What sin of ignorance I have committed
against so highly valued a friend I am utterly at a loss to
guess. Alas! madam, I can ill afford at this time to be
deprived of any of the small remnant of my pleasures.
I have lately drunk deep of the cup of affliction. The
autumn robbed me 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 my last duties to
her. I had scarcely begun to recover from that
shock when I became myself the victim of a severe
rheumatic fever, and long the die spun doubtful, until,
after many weeks of a sickbed, it seems to have turned
up life.’

There was an evident decline in the poet’s appearance,
Dr. Currie tells us, for upwards of a year before
his death, and he himself was sensible that his constitution
was sinking. During almost the whole of the
winter of 1795-96 he had been confined to the house.
Then follows the unsubstantiated story which has done
duty for Shakspeare and many other poets. ‘He dined
at a tavern, returned home about three o’clock in a very
cold morning, benumbed and intoxicated. This was
followed by an attack of rheumatism.’ It is difficult to
kill a charitable myth, especially one that is so agreeable
to the levelling instincts of ordinary humanity, and
of such sweet consolation to the weaker brethren. Of
course there are variants of the story, with a stair and
sleep and snow brought in as sensational, if improb{144}able,
accessories; but such stories as these all good men
refuse to believe, unless they are compelled to do so by
the conclusive evidence of direct authority; and that, in
this case, is altogether awanting. All evidence that has
been forthcoming has gone directly against it, and the
story may be accepted as a myth. The fact is that brains
have been ransacked to find reason for the poet’s early
death,—as if the goings and comings of death could be
scientifically calculated in biography,—and the last years
of his ‘irregular life’ are blamed: Dumfries is set apart
as the chief sinner. No doubt his life was irregular
there; his duties were irregular; his hours were irregular.
But Burns in his thirty-six years, had lived a full life,
putting as much into one year as the ordinary sons of
men put into two. He had had threatenings of rheumatism
and heart disease when he was an overworked
lad at Lochlea; and now his constitution was breaking
up from the rate at which he had lived. Excess of work
more than excess of drink brought him to an early
grave. During his few years’ stay at Dumfries he had
written over two hundred poems, songs, etc., many of
them of the highest excellence, and most of them now
household possessions. Besides his official duties, we
know also that he took a great interest in his home and
in the education of his children. Mr. Gray, master of
the High School of Dumfries, who knew the poet intimately,
wrote a long and interesting letter to Gilbert
Burns, in which he mentions particularly the attention
he paid to his children’s education. ‘He was a kind
and attentive father, and took great delight in spending
his evenings in the cultivation of the minds of his children.
Their education was the grand object of his life;{145}
and he did not, like most parents, think it sufficient to
send them to public schools; he was their private
instructor; and even at that early age bestowed great
pains in training their minds to habits of thought and
reflection, and in keeping them pure from every form of
vice. This he considered a sacred duty, and never to
his last illness relaxed in his diligence.’

Throughout the winter of 1795 and spring of 1796,
he could only keep up an irregular correspondence with
Thomson. ‘Alas!’ he wrote in April, ‘I fear it will be
long ere I tune my lyre again. I have only known
existence by the pressure of the heavy hand of sickness,
and counted time by the repercussion of pain. I close my
eyes in misery and open them without hope.’ Yet it was
literally on his deathbed that he composed the exquisite
song, O wert thou in the Cauld Blast, in honour of
Jessie Lewars, who waited on him so faithfully. In June
he wrote: ‘I begin to fear the worst. As to my individual
self I am tranquil, and would despise myself if I
were not; but Burns’s poor widow and half a dozen of
his dear little ones—helpless orphans!—there, I am
weaker than a woman’s tear.’

From Brow, whither he had gone to try the effect of
sea-bathing, he wrote several letters all in the same
strain, one to Cunningham; a pathetic one to Mrs.
Dunlop, regretting her continued silence; and letters
begging a temporary loan to James Burness, Montrose,
and to George Thomson, whom he had been supplying
with songs without fee or reward. Thomson at once
forwarded the amount asked—five pounds! To his wife,
who had not been able to accompany him, he wrote:
‘My dearest love, I delayed writing until I could tell {146}you
what effect sea-bathing was likely to produce. It would
be injustice to deny it has eased my pain…. I will
see you on Sunday.’

During his stay at Brow he met again Mrs. Riddell,
and she has left in a letter her impression of his
appearance at that time. ‘The stamp of death was
imprinted on his features. He seemed already touching
the brink of eternity…. He spoke of his death with
firmness as well as feeling as an event likely to happen
very soon…. He said he was well aware that his
death would occasion some noise, and that every scrap
of his writing would be revived against him, to the
injury of his future reputation…. The conversation
was kept up with great evenness and animation on
his side. I had seldom seen his mind greater or more
collected.’

When he returned from Brow he was worse than when
he went away, and those who saw him tottering to his
door knew that they had looked their last on the poet.
The question in Dumfries for a day or two was, ‘How
is Burns now?’ And the question was not long in
being answered. He knew he was dying, but neither
his humour nor his wit left him. ‘John,’ he said to
one of his brother volunteers, ‘don’t let the awkward
squad fire over me.’

He lingered on for a day or two, his wife hourly
expecting to be confined and unable to attend to
him, and Jessie Lewars taking her place, a constant
and devoted nurse. On the fourth day after his
return, July 21, he sank into delirium, and his children
were summoned to the bedside of their dying
father, who quietly and gradually sank to rest. His{147}
last words showed that his mind was still disturbed
by the thought of the small debt that had caused him
so much annoyance. ‘And thus he passed,’ says
Carlyle, ‘not softly, yet speedily, into that still country
where the hailstorms and fire-showers do not reach, and
the he{148}aviest laden wayfarer at length lays down his
load.’

CHAPTER IX

SUMMARY AND ESTIMATE

In Mrs. Riddell’s sketch of Burns, which appeared
shortly after his death, she starts with the somewhat
startling statement that poetry was not actually his forte.
She did not question the excellence of his songs, or
seek to depreciate his powers as a poet, but she spoke
of the man as she had known him, and was one of the
first to assert that Burns was very much more than an
uneducated peasant with a happy knack of versification.
Even in the present day we hear too much of the inspired
ploughman bursting into song as one that could
not help himself, and warbling of life and love in a
kind of lyrical frenzy. The fact is that Burns was a
great intellectual power, and would have been a force
in any sphere of life or letters. All who met him and
heard him talk have insisted on the greatness of the
man, apart from his achievements in poetry. It was not
his fame as a poet that made him the lion of a season
in Edinburgh, but the force and brilliancy of his conversation;
and it needs more than the reputation of a
minstrel to explain the hold he has on the affection and
intelligence of the world to-day.

On the other hand, it would be a mistake to accept{149}
his intellectual greatness as a mere tradition of those
who knew him, and to regret that he has not left us
some long and ponderous work worthy of the power he
possessed. It is an absurd idea to imagine that every
great poet ought to write an epic or a play. Burns’s
powers were concentrative, and he could put into a
song what a dramatist might elaborate into a five-act
tragedy; but that is not to say that the dramatist is
the greater poet. After all, the song is the more likely
to live, and the more likely, therefore, to keep the
mission of the poet an enduring and living influence in
the lives of men.

Still Burns might have been a great song-writer
without becoming the name and power he is in the
world to-day. The lyrical gift implies a quick emotional
sense, which in some cases may be little more than
a beautiful defect in a weak nature. But Burns was
essentially a strong man. His very vices are the vices
of a robust and healthy humanity. Besides being
possessed of all the qualities of a great singer, he was
at the same time vigorously human and throbbing with
the love and joy of life. It is this sterling quality of
manhood that has made Burns the poet and the power
he is. He looked out on the world with the eyes of a
man, and saw things in their true colours and in their
natural relations. He regarded the world into which
he had been born, and saw it not as some other poet
or an artist or a painter might have beheld it,—for the
purposes of art,—but in all its uncompromising realism;
and what his eye saw clearly, his lips as clearly uttered.
His first and greatest gift, therefore, as a poet was his
manifest sincerity. His men and women are living{150}
human beings; his flowers are real flowers; his dogs,
real dogs, and nothing more. All his pictures are
presented in the simplest and fewest possible words.
There is no suspicion of trickery; no attempt to force
words to carry a weight of meaning they are incapable
of expressing. He knew nothing of the deification of
style, and on absolute truthfulness and unidealised
reality rested his poetical structure. Wordsworth
speaks of him—

It is this quality that made Burns the interpreter of
the lives of his fellow-men, not only to an outside world
that knew them not, but to themselves. And he has
glorified those lives in the interpretation, not by the
introduction of false elements or the elimination of
unlovely features, but simply by his insistence, in spite
of the sordidness of poverty, on the naked dignity of
man.

Everything he touched became interesting because
it was interesting to him, and he spoke forth what he
felt. For Burns did not go outside of his own life,
either in time or place, for subject. There are poetry
and romance, tragedy and comedy ever waiting for the
man who has eyes to see them; and Burns’s stage
was the parish of Tarbolton, and he found his poetry
in (or rendered poetical) the ordinary humdrum life
round about him. For that reason it is, perhaps, that
he has been called the satirist and singer of a parish.
Had he lived nowadays, he would have been relegated{151}
to the kailyard, there to cultivate his hardy annuals and
indigenous daisies. For Burns did not affect exotics,
and it requires a specialist in manure to produce blue
dandelions or sexless ferns. In the narrow sense of the
word he was not parochial. Whilst true to class and
country, he reached out a hand to universal man. A
Scotsman of Scotsmen, he endeared himself to the
hearts of a people; but he was from first to last a man,
and so has found entrance to the hearts of all men.
Although local in subject, he was artistic in treatment;
he might address the men and women of Mauchline,
but he spoke with the voice of humanity, and his message
was for mankind.

Besides interpreting the lives of the Scottish peasantry,
he revived for them their nationality. For he was but
the last of the great bards that sang the Iliad of Scotland;
and in him, when patriotism was all but dead, and
a hybrid culture was making men ashamed of their land
and their language, the voices of nameless ballad-makers
and forgotten singers blended again into one
great voice that sang of the love of country, till men
remembered their fathers, and gloried in the name
of Scotsmen. His patriotism, however, was not
parochial. It was no mere prejudice which bound him
hand and foot to Scottish theme and Scottish song.
He knew that there were lands beyond the Cheviots,
and that men of other countries and other tongues joyed
and sorrowed, toiled and sweated and struggled and hoped
even as he did. He was attached to the people of his
own rank in life, the farmers and ploughmen amongst
whom he had been born and bred; but his sympathies
went out to all men, prince or peasant, beggar or ki{152}ng,
if they were worthy of the name of men he recognised
them as brothers. It is this sympathy which gives him
his intimate knowledge of mankind. He sees into the
souls of his fellows; the thoughts of their hearts are
visible to his piercing eye. He who had mixed only
with hard-working men, and scarcely ever been beyond
the boundary of his parish, wrote of court and parliament
as if he had known princes and politicians from his boyhood.
The goodwife of Wauchope House would hardly
credit that he had come straight from the plough-stilts—

But his intuitive knowledge of men is apparent in
almost all he wrote. Every character he has drawn
stands out a living and breathing personality. This is
greatly due to the fact that he studied those he met,
as men, dismissing the circumstance of birth and rank,
of costly apparel, or beggarly rags. For rank and
station after all are mere accidents, and count for
nothing in an estimate of character. Indeed, Burns
was too often inclined from his hard experience of life
to go further than this, and to count them disqualifying
circumstances. This aggressive independence was, however,
always as far removed from insolence as it was
from servility. He saw clearly that the ‘pith o’ sense
and pride o’ worth’ are beyond all the dignities a king
can bestow; and he looked to the time when class distinctions
would cease, and the glo{153}ry of manhood be the
highest earthly dignity.

Besides this abiding love of his fellow-man, or because
of it, Burns had also a childlike love of nature and all
created things. He sings of the mountain daisy turned
up by his plough; his heart goes out to the mouse
rendered homeless after all its provident care. Listening
at home while the storm made the doors and windows
rattle, he bethought him on the cattle and sheep and
birds outside—

Nor is there in his love of nature any transcendental
strain; no mawkish sentimentality, and consequently in
its expression no bathos. Everywhere in his poetry
nature comes in, at times in artistically selected detail,
at times again with a deft suggestive touch that is
telling and effective, yet always in harmony with the
feeling of the poem, and always subordinate to it. His
descriptions of scenery are never dragged in. They are
incidental and complementary; human life and human
feeling are the first consideration; to this his sc{154}enery is
but the setting and background. He is never carried
away by the force or beauty of his drawing as a smaller
artist might have been. The picture is given with
simple conciseness, and he leaves it; nor does he ever
attempt to elaborate a detail into a separate poem. The
description of the burn in Hallowe’en is most beautiful
in itself, yet it is but a detail in a great picture—

That surely is the perfection of description; whilst the
wimple of the burn is echoed in the music of the
verse!

Allied to the clearness of vision and truthfulness of
presentment of Burns, growing out of them it may be,
is that graphic power in which he stands unexcelled.
He is a great artist, and word-painting is not the least
of his many gifts. He combines terseness and lucidity,
which is a rare combination in letters; his phrasing is
as beautiful and fine as it is forcible, which is a distinction
rarer still. Hundreds of examples of his
pregnant phrasing might be cited, but it is best to see
them in the poems. Many have become everyday expressions,
and have passed into the proverbs of the
country.

Another of Burns’s gifts was the saving grace of humour.
This, of course, is not altogether a quality distinct{155} in
itself, but rather a particular mode in which love or
tenderness or pity may manifest itself. This humour is
ever glinting forth from his writings. Some of his poems—The
Farmer’s Address to his Auld Mare, for example—are
simply bathed in it, and we see the subject glowing
in its light, soft and tremulous, as of an autumn sunset.
In others, again, it flashes and sparkles, more sportive
than tender. But, however it manifest itself, we recognise
at once that it has a character of its own, which marks
it off from the humour of any other writer; it is a peculiar
possession of Burns.

Perhaps the poem in which all Burns’s poetic qualities
are seen at their best is The Jolly Beggars. The subject
may be low and the materials coarse, but that only makes
the finished poem a more glorious achievement. For the
poem is a unity. We see those vagabonds for a moment’s
space holding high revel in Poosie Nansie’s; but in that
brief glance we see them from their birth to their death.
They are flung into the world, and go zigzagging through
it, chaffering and cheating, swaggering and swearing;
kicked and cuffed from parish to parish; their only joy
of existence an occasional night like this, a carnival of
drink and all sensuality; snapping their fingers in the
face of the world, and as they have lived so going down
defiantly to death, a laugh on their lips and a curse in
their heart. Every character in it is individual and
distinct from his neighbour; the language from first to
last simple, sensuous, musical. Of this poem Matthew
Arnold says: ‘It has a breadth, truth, and power which
make the famous scene in Auerbach’s cellar of Goethe’s
Faust seem artificial and tame beside it, and which are
only matched by Shakspeare and Aristophanes.’

{156}

The Cotter’s Saturday Night has usually, in Scotland,
been the most lauded of his poems. Many writers give
it as his best. It is a pious opinion, but is not sound
criticism. Burns handicapped himself, not only by the
stanza he selected for this poem, but also by the attitude
he took towards his subject. He is never quite himself
in it. We admire its many beauties; we see the life of
the poor made noble and dignified; we see, in the end,
the soul emerging from the tyranny of time and circumstance;
but with all that we feel that there is something
awanting. The priest-like father is drawn from life, and
the picture is beautiful; not less deftly drawn is the
mother’s portrait, though it be not so frequently quoted:

The last line gives one of the most natural and most
subtle touches in the whole poem. The closing verses
are, I think, unhappy. The poet has not known when
to stop, keeps writing after he has finished, and so becomes
stilted and artificial.

It is in his songs, however, more than in his poems,
that we find Burns most regularly at his best. And
excellence in song-writing is a rare gift. The snatches
scattered here and there throughout the plays of Shakspeare
are perhaps the only collection of lyrics that can
at all stand comparison with the wealth of minstrelsy
Burns has left behind him. This was his undying legacy
to the world. Song-writing was a labour of love, almost
his only comfort and consolation in the dark days of his
later years. He set himself to this as to a congenial t{157}ask,
and he knew that he was writing himself into the hearts
of unborn generations. His songs live; they are immortal,
because every one is a bit of his soul. These
are no feverish, hysterical jingles of clinking verse, dead
save for the animating breath of music. They sing
themselves, because the spirit of song is in them. Quite
as marvellous as his excellence in this department of
poetry is his variety of subject. He has a song for every
age; a musical interpretation of every mood. But this is
a subject for a book to itself. His songs are sung all
over the world. The love he sings appeals to all, for it
is elemental, and is the love of all. Heart speaks to
heart in the songs of Robert Burns; there is a freemasonry
in them that binds Scotsmen to Scotsmen across
the seas in the firmest bonds of brotherhood.

What place Burns occupies as a poet has been determined
not so much by the voice of criticism, as by the
enthusiastic way in which his fellow-mortals have taken
him to their heart. The summing-up of a judge counts for
little when the jury has already made up its mind. What
matters it whether a critic argues Burns into a first
or second or third rate poet? His countrymen, and
more than his countrymen, his brothers all the world
over, who read in his writings the joys and sorrows, the
temptations and trials, the sins and shortcomings of a
great-hearted man, have accepted him as a prophet, and
set him in the front rank of immortals. They admire
many poets; they love Robert Burns. They have been
told their love is unreasoning and unreasonable. It may
be so. Love goes by instinct more than by reason; and
who shall say it is wrong? Yet Burns is not loved
because of his faults and failings, but in spite o{158}f them.
His sins are not hidden. He himself confessed them
again and again, and repented in sackcloth and ashes.
If he did not always abjure his weaknesses, he denounced
them, and with no uncertain voice; nor do we know how
hardly he strove to do more.

What estimate is to be taken of Burns as a man
will have many and various answers. Those who still
denounce him as the chief of sinners, and without
mercy condemn him out of his own mouth, are those
whom Burns has pilloried to all posterity. There are
dull, phlegmatic beings with blood no warmer than
ditch-water, who are virtuous and sober citizens because
they have never felt the force of temptation. What
power could tempt them? The tree may be parched
and blistered in the heat of noonday, but the parasitical
fungus draining its sap remains cool—and poisonous.
So in the glow of sociability the Pharisee remains cold
and clammy; the fever of love leaves his blood at zero.
How can such anomalies understand a man of Burns’s
wild and passionate nature, or, indeed, human nature
at all? The broad fact remains, however much we may
deplore his sins and shortcomings, they are the sins
and shortcomings of a large-hearted, healthy, human
being. Had he loved less his fellow men and women,
he might have been accounted a better man. After all,
too, it must be remembered that his failings have been
consistently exaggerated. Coleridge, in his habit of
drawing nice distinctions, admits that Burns was not a
man of degraded genius, but a degraded man of genius.
Burns was neither the one nor the other. In spite of
the occasional excesses of his later years, he did not
degenerate into drunkenness, nor was the sense of his{159}
responsibilities as a husband, a father, and a man less
clear and acute in the last months of his life than it had
ever been. Had he lived a few years longer, we should
have seen the man mellowed by sorrow and suffering,
braving life, not as he had done all along with the
passionate vehemence of undisciplined youth, but with
the fortitude and dignity of one who had learned that
contentment and peace are gifts the world cannot give,
and, if he haply find them in his own heart, which it
cannot take away. That is the lesson we read in the
closing months of Burns’s chequered career.

But it was not to be. His work was done. The
message God had sent him into the world to deliver he
had delivered, imperfectly and with faltering lips it may
be, but a divine message all the same. And because it
is divine men still hear it gladly and believe.

Let all his failings and defects be acknowledged, his
sins as a man and his limitations as a poet, the want of
continuity and purpose in his work and life; but at the
same time let his nobler qualities be weighed against
these, and the scale ‘where the pure gold is, easily turns
the balance.’ In the words of Angellier: ‘Admiration
grows in proportion as we examine his qualities. When
we think of his sincerity, of his rectitude, of his kindness
towards man and beast; of his scorn of all that is
base, his hatred of all knavery which in itself would be
an honour; of his disinterestedness, of the fine impulses
of his heart, and the high aspirations of his spirit; of
the intensity and idealism necessary to maintain his soul
above its circumstances; when we reflect that he has
expressed all these generous sentiments to the extent
of their constituting his intellectual life; that the{160}y have
fallen from him as jewels … as if his soul had been
a furnace for the purification of precious metals, we are
tempted to regard him as belonging to the elect spirits
of humanity, to those gifted with exceptional goodness.
When we recall what he suffered, what he surmounted, and
what he has effected; against what privations his genius
struggled into birth and lived; the perseverance of his
apprenticeship; his intellectual exploits; and, after all,
his glory, we are inclined to maintain that what he failed
to accomplish or undertake is as nothing in comparison
with his achievements…. There is nothing left but to
confess that the clay of which he was made was thick
with diamonds, and that his life was one of the most
valiant and the most noble a poet ever has lived.’

With Burns’s own words we may fitly conclude.
They are words not merely to be read and admired,
but to be remembered in our hearts and practised in
our lives—