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 LIFE, GENIUS 
 
 ACHIEVEMENT

 
 BURNS 
 
 LIFE, GENIUS 
 
 ACHIEVEMENT 
 
 BY 
 
 W. R HENLEY 
 
 Reprinted from "The Centenary Burns' 
 
 EDINBURGH 
 
 T. C. AND E. C. JACK 
 
 LONDON : WHITTAKER AND CO 
 
 1898
 
 A33.1 
 HAS'
 
 TO 
 
 T. F. HENDERSON 
 
 IN MEMORY OP 
 
 MUCH DIFFICULT YET SATISFYING 
 
 WORK 
 
 HIS FELLOW IN BURNS 
 
 W. E. H. 
 
 Muswell Hill, 
 Sth July 1897.
 
 ROBERT BURNS 
 
 (1759-1796) 
 
 In 1759 the Kirk of Scotland, though a less potent 
 and offensive tyranny than it had been in the good 
 old times, was still a tyranny, and was still offensive 
 and still potent enough to make life miserable, to 
 warp the characters of men and women, and to turn 
 the tempers and affections of many from the kindly, 
 natural way. True it is that Hutcheson (1694-1746) 
 had for some years taught, and taught with such 
 authority as an University chair can give, a set of 
 doctrines in absolute antagonism with the prin- 
 ciples on which the Kirk of Scotland's rule was based, 
 and with the ambitions which the majority in the 
 Kirk of Scotland held in view. But these doctrines, 
 sane and invigorating as they were, had not reached 
 the general ; and in all departments of life among 
 the general the Kirk of Scotland was a paramount 
 influence, and, despite the intrusion of some generous 
 intelligences, was largely occupied with the work of 
 narrowing the minds, perverting the instincts, and 
 constraining the spiritual and social liberties of its 
 subjects. In 1759, however, there was secreted the 
 certainty of a revulsion against its ascendency ; for 
 that year saw the birth of the most popular poet, 
 and the most anti-clerical withal, that Scotland ever
 
 234 ROBERT BURNS 
 
 bred. He came of the people on both sides ; he had 
 a high courage, a proud heart, a daring mind, a 
 matchless gift of speech, an abundance of humour 
 and wit and fire ; he was a poet in whom were quint- 
 essentialised the elements of the Vernacular Genius, 
 in whose work the effects and the traditions of the 
 Vernacular School, which had struggled back into 
 being in the Kirk's despite, were repeated with sur- 
 passing brilliancy ; and in the matter of the Kirk 
 he did for the people a piece of service equal and 
 similar to that which was done on other lines and 
 in other spheres by Hutcheson and Hume and 
 Adam Smith. He was apostle and avenger as well 
 as maker. He did more than give Scotland songs to 
 sing and rhymes to read : he showed that laughter 
 and the joy of life need be no crimes, and that 
 freedom of thought and sentiment and action is 
 within the reach of him that will stretch forth his 
 hand to take it. He pushed his demonstration to 
 extremes; often his teaching has been grossly misread 
 and misapprehended ; no doubt, too, he died of his 
 effort — and himself. But most men do as they must 
 — not as they will. It was Burns's destiny, as it 
 was Byron's in his turn, to be ' the passionate and 
 dauntless soldier of a forlorn hope ' ; and if he fell 
 in mid-assault, he found, despite the circumstances 
 of his passing, the best death man can find. He 
 had faults and failings not a few. But he was 
 ever a leader among men ; and if the manner of 
 his leading were not seldom reckless, and he did 
 some mischief, and gave the Fool a great deal of 
 what passes for good Scripture for his folly, it will 
 be found in the long-run that he led for truth —
 
 ROBERT BURNS 235 
 
 the truth which ' maketh free ' ; so that the Scotland 
 he loved so well, and took such pride in honouring, 
 could scarce have been the Scotland she is, had 
 he not been. 
 
 His father, William Burness (or Burnes), and his 
 mother, Agnes Brown, came both of yeoman stock: 
 native the one to Kincardineshne, the other to Ayr- 
 shire. William Burness began life as a gardener, and 
 was plying his trade in the service of one Fergusson, 
 the then Provost of Ayr, when, with a view to setting 
 up for himself, he took a lease of seven acres in the 
 parish of Alloway, with his own hands built a two- 
 roomed clay cottage — (still standing, but in use as 
 a Burns Museum), — and in the December of 1757 
 married Agnes Brown, his junior by eleven years. 
 She was red-haired, dark-eyed, square-browed, well- 
 made, and quick-tempered. He was swarthy and 
 thin ; a man of strong sense, a very serious mind, 
 the most vigilant affections, 1 and a piety not even 
 the Calvinism in which he had been reared could 
 ever make brooding and inhumane. And in the 
 clay cottage to which he had taken his new-mai-ried 
 wife, Robert, the first of seven children, was born 
 to them on the 25th January 1759- 
 
 1 In times of storm, he would seek out and stay with his 
 daughter, where she was herding in the fields, because he knew 
 that she was afraid of lightning ; or, when it was fair, to teach 
 her the names of plants and flowers. He wrote a little 
 theological treatise for his children's guidance, too, and was, 
 it is plain, an exemplary father, and so complete a husband that 
 there is record of but a single unpleasantness between him and 
 Agues his wife.
 
 236 ROBERT BURNS 
 
 The Scots peasant lived hard, toiled incessantly, 
 and fed so cheaply that even on high days and 
 holidays his diet (as set forth in The Blithesome 
 Bridal) consisted largely in preparations of meal and 
 vegetables and what is technically known as ' offal.' 
 But the Scots peasant was a creature of the Kirk ; 
 the noblest ambition of Knox x was an active in- 
 fluence in the Kirk ; and the Parish Schools enabled 
 the Kirk to provide its creatures with such teach- 
 ing as it deemed desirable. William Burness was 
 ' a very poor man ' (R. B.). But he had the 
 right tradition ; he was a thinker and an observer ; 
 he read whatever he could get to read ; he wrote 
 English formally but with clarity ; 2 and he did 
 the very best he could for his children in the 
 matter of education. Robert went to school at 
 
 1 The Reformer had a vast deal more in common with Burns 
 than with the ' sour John Knox ' of Browning's ridiculous verses. 
 He was the man of a crisis, and a desperate one ; and he played 
 his part in it like the stark and fearless opposite that he was. 
 But he was a humourist, he loved his glass of wine, he abounded 
 in humanity and intelligence, he married two wives, he was as 
 well beloved as he was extremely hated and feared. He could 
 not foresee what the collective stupidity of posterity would make 
 of his teaching and example, nor how the theocracy at whose 
 establishment he aimed would presently assert itself as largely a 
 system of parochial inquisitions. The minister's man who had 
 looked through his keyhole would have got short shrift from h vm : 
 and in the Eighteenth Century he had as certainly stood with 
 Bums against the Kirk of Scotland, as represented by Auld and 
 Russell and the like, as in the Sixteenth he stood with Moray 
 and the nobles against the Church of Rome, as figured in David 
 Beaton and the 'twa infernal monstris, Pride and Avarice.' 
 
 2 See the aforesaid treatise : — ' A Manual of Religious Belief, in 
 a Dialogue between Father and Son, compiled by "William Burnes, 
 fanner at Mount Oliphant, and transcribed, with grammatical cor- 
 rections, by John Murdoch, teacher.'
 
 ROBERT BURNS 237 
 
 six; 1 and in the May of the same year (1765) a 
 lad of eighteen, one John Murdoch, was * engaged 
 by Mr. Burness and four of his neighbours to teach, 
 and accordingly began to teach, the little school 
 at Alloway ' : his ' five employers ' undertaking to 
 board him 'by turns, and to make up a certain 
 salary at the end of the year,' in the event of his 
 ' quarterly payments ' not amounting to a specified 
 sum. He was an intelligent pedagogue — (he had 
 William Burness behind him) — especially in the 
 matter of grammar and rhetoric ; he trained his 
 scholars to a full sense of the meaning and the 
 value of words; he even made them 'turn verse 
 into its natural prose order/ and ' substitute synony- 
 mous expressions for poetical words and . . . supply 
 all the ellipses.' 2 One of his school-books was the 
 Bible, another Masson's Collection of Prose and Verse, 
 excerpted from Addison 3 and Steele and Dryden, 
 
 1 ' I was a good deal noted at these years,' says the Letter to 
 Moore, ' for a retentive memory, a stubborn, sturdy something in 
 my disposition, and an enthusiastic idiot-piety. ... In my infant 
 and boyish days, too, I owed much to an old maid of my mother's, 
 remarkable for her ignorance, credulity, and superstition,' who 
 had, ' I suppose, the largest collection in the county of tales and 
 songs concerning devils, ghosts, fairies, brownies, witches, war- 
 locks, spunkies, kelpies, elf -candles, death-lights, wraiths, appari- 
 tions, cantraips, enchanted towers, giants, dragons, and other 
 trumpery. This cultivated the latent seeds of Poesy,' etc. 
 
 2 As Robert Louis Stevenson has remarked (Some Aspects of 
 Robert Burns) :— ' "We are surprised at the prose style of Robert ; 
 that of Gilbert need surprise us no less.' 
 
 3 ' The earliest thing of composition I recollect taking pleasure 
 in, was The Vision of Mirza, and a hymn of Addison's begin- 
 ning, "How are thy servants blessed, O Lord" ' (R. B., Letter to 
 Moore). ' The first two books,' he adds, 'I ever read in private, 
 and which gave me more pleasure than any two books I ever read 
 again, were the Life of Hannibal and the History of Sir William
 
 238 ROBERT BURNS 
 
 from Thomson and Shenstone, Mallet and Henry 
 Mackenzie, with Gray's Elegy, scraps from Hume 
 and Robertson, and scenes from Romeo and Juliet, 
 Othello, and Hamlet. And one effect of his method 
 was that Robert, according to himself, ' was abso- 
 lutely a critic in substantives, verbs, and participles,' 
 and, according to Gilbert, ' 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.' It is very char- 
 acteristic of Murdoch that when, his school beino- 
 broken up, he came to take leave of William Burness 
 at Mount Oliphant, ' he brought us,' Gilbert says, 
 c a present and memorial of him, a small English 
 grammar and the tragedy of Titus Andronicus,' and 
 that ' by way of passing the evening ' he ' began to 
 read the play aloud.' Not less characteristic of all 
 concerned was the effect of his reading. His hearers 
 melted into tears at the tale of Lavinia's woes, and, 
 ' in an agony of distress,' implored him to read no 
 more. Ever sensible and practical, William Burness 
 remarked that, as nobody wanted to hear the play, 
 Murdoch need not leave it. Robert, ever a senti- 
 mentalist and ever an indifferent Shakespearean, 1 
 
 Wallace. Hannibal gave my young ideas such a turn that I used 
 to strut in raptures up and down after the recruiting-drum and 
 bag-pipe, and wish myself tall enough that I might be a soldier ; 
 while the story of Wallace poured a Scottish prejudice in my 
 veins which will boil along there (sic) till the floodgates of life 
 shut in eternal rest.' 
 
 1 If we may judge him from his extant work. Cf. the absurd 
 line : — 
 
 ' Here Douglas forms wild Shakespeare into plan.' 
 
 He cribs but once from Shakespeare, and the happiest among his
 
 ROBERT BURNS 239 
 
 — « Robert replied that, if it was left, he would burn 
 it.' And Murdoch, ever the literary guide, philo- 
 sopher, and friend, was so much affected by his 
 pupil's 'sensibility/ that 'he left The School for 
 Love (translated, I think, from the French) ' in 
 Shakespeare's place. 1 
 
 At this time Bui*ns had but some two and a half 
 years of Murdoch. William Burness liked and be- 
 lieved in the young fellow ; for when, still urged 
 by the desire to better his children's chance, he 
 turned from gardening to cultivation on a larger 
 scale, and took, at a .£40 rental, the farm of Mount 
 Oliphant, his two sons went on with Murdoch at 
 Alloway, some two miles off. The school once 
 broken up, however, Robert and his brother fell 
 
 few quotations is prefixed to one of the most felicitous — and 
 therefore the least publishable — of his tributes to the Light-heeled 
 Muse. 'Sing me a bawdy song,' he says with Sir John Falstaff, 
 'to make us merry.' And he adds this note, in which he is 
 Shakespearean once again : — 'There is — there must be some truth 
 in original sin. My violent propensity to b — dy convinces me 
 of it. Lack a day ! If that species of composition be the special 
 sin never-to-be-forgotten in this world nor in that which is to 
 come, then I am the most offending soul alive. Mair for token, ' 
 etc. (R. B. to Cleghorn, 25th October 1793). 
 
 1 There is no trace of any School for Love. It is therefore 
 probable that what Gilbert meant was The School for Lovers : 
 'A Comedy. As it is acted at the Theatre Royal in Drury Lane. 
 By William Whitehead, Esq. ; Poet Laureat. London : Printed 
 for R. and J. Dodsley in Pall-Mall ; and Sold by J. Hinxman, in 
 Pater-noster-row. mdcclxji.' The first sentence of the author's 
 Advertisement runs thus: — 'The following Comedy is formed on 
 a plan of Monsieur do Fontenelle's, never intended for the stage, 
 and printed in the eighth volume of his works, under the title of 
 Le Testament.' 1 The names of the chief 'persons represented' 
 are Sir John Dorilant, Model}', Belmour, Lady Beverley, Cselia, 
 and Araminta : an unlikely lot, one would say, for an Ayrshire 
 farmstead, even though it sheltered the youthful Burns.
 
 240 ROBERT BURNS 
 
 into their father's hands, and, for divers reasons, 
 Gilbert says, 'we rarely saw any body but the 
 members of our own family,' so that f my father 
 was for some time the only companion we had.' 
 It will scarce be argued now that this sole com- 
 panionship was wholly good for a couple of lively 
 boys ; but it is beyond question that it was rather 
 good than bad. For, 'he conversed on all subjects 
 with us familiarly, as if we had been men,' and, 
 further, ' was at great pains, as we accompanied him 
 in the labours of the farm, to lead the conversation 
 to such subjects as might tend to increase our know- 
 ledge or confirm our virtuous habits.' Also, he got 
 his charges books — a Geographical Grammar, a 
 Physico and Astro-Theology, Stackhouse's History of 
 the Bible, Ray's Wisdom of God in the Creation ; and 
 these books Robert read ' with an avidity and in- 
 dustry scarcely to be equalled.' 1 None, says 
 Gilbert, ' was so voluminous as to slacken his in- 
 dustry or so antiquated as to damp his research ' : 
 with the result that he wasn't very far on in his 
 
 1 Robert's list {Letter to Moore) includes Guthrie and Salmon's 
 Geographical Grammar ; The Spectator ; Pope ; ' some plays 
 of Shakespear ' (acting editions ? or odd volumes ?) ; ' Tull and 
 Dickson on Agriculture'; The Pantheon; Locke On the Human 
 Understanding; Stackhouse; with 'Justice's British Gardener, 
 Boyle's Lectures, Allan Ramsay's Works, Dr. Taylor's Scripture 
 Doctrine of Original Sin, A Select Collection of English Songs, 
 and Harvey's Meditations.' Later he knew Thomson, Shenstone, 
 Beattie, Goldsmith, Gray, Fergusson, Spenser even: with The 
 Tea- Table Miscellany and many another song-book, Adam 
 Smith's Theory of the Moral Sentiments, Reid's Inquiry into the 
 Human Mind, Bunyan, Boston (The Fourfold State), Shake- 
 speare, John Brown's Self -Interpreting Bible, and The Wealth of 
 Nations, which last he is found reading (at Ellisland) with a 
 sense of wonder that so much wit should be contained between
 
 ROBERT BURNS 241 
 
 'teens ere he had ' a competent knowledge of ancient 
 history/ with e something of geography, astronomy 
 and natural history.' Then, owing to the mistake of 
 an uncle, who went to Ayr to buy a Ready Reckoner 
 or Tradesman s Sure Guide, together with a Complete 
 Letter-Writer, but came back with 'a collection of 
 letters by the most eminent writers,' he was moved 
 by ' a strong desire to excel in letter-writing.' At 
 thirteen or fourteen he was sent ( f week about ' 
 with Gilbert) to Dalrymple Parish School to better 
 his handwriting ; ' about this time ' he fell in with 
 Pamela, Fielding, Hume, Robertson, and the best of 
 Smollett ; and 'about this time ' Murdoch set up as 
 a schoolmaster in Ayr, and 'sent us Pope's Works 
 and some other poetry, the first that we had an 
 opportunity of reading, excepting what is contained 
 in the English Collection and in the volume of the 
 Edinburgh Magazine for 1772.' l The summer after 
 
 the boards of a single book. One favourite novel was Tristram 
 Shandy ; another, the once renowned, now utterly forgotten Man 
 of Feeling. At Ellisland, again, he is found ordering the works of 
 divers dramatists — as Jonson, "Wycherley, Moliere — with a view to 
 reading and writing for the stage. But you find no trace of them 
 in his work ; nor is there any evidence to show that he could 
 ever have written a decent play, though there is plenty of proof 
 that he could not. No doubt, The Jolly Beggars will be quoted 
 against me here. But the essential interests of that masterpiece 
 are character and description. Now, there go many more things 
 to the making of a play than character, while, as for description, 
 the less a play contains of that the better for the play. 
 
 1 The English Collection I take to be Masson's aforesaid. At 
 all events I can find no other. So far as verse is concerned, 
 another exception was found in ' those Excellent new Songs that 
 are hawked about the country in baskets or spread on stalls in the 
 streets' (G. B.). They were probably as interesting to Robert as 
 Pope's Works or the poetry in The Edinburgh Magazine. At 
 VOL. IV. Q
 
 242 ROBERT BURNS 
 
 the writing-lessons at Dalrymple, Robert spent 
 three weeks with Murdoch at Ayr, one over the 
 English Grammar, the others over the rudiments 
 of French. The latter language he was presently 
 able to read, 1 for the reason that Murdoch would 
 go over to Mount Oliphant on half-holidays, partly 
 for Robert's sake and partly for the pleasure of 
 talking with Robert's father. Thus was Robert 
 schooled ; and 'tis plain that in one, and that an 
 essential particular, he and his brother were ex- 
 ceptionally fortunate in their father and in the 
 means he took to train them. 2 
 
 In another respect — one of eminent importance — 
 their luck was nothing like so good. Mount Oliphant 
 was made up of 'the poorest land in Ayrshire'; 
 William Burness had started it on a borrowed 
 hundred ; he was soon in straits ; only by un- 
 remitting diligence and the strictest economy 
 could he hope to make ends meet ; and the burden 
 of hard work lay heavy on the whole family — 
 heavier, as I think, on the growing lads than on 
 
 any rate, his first essays in song were imitated from them, and 
 he had the trick of them, when he listed, all his life long. 
 
 1 Currie saw his Moliere at Dumfries. There is no question 
 but he would have got on excellent well with Argan and Jourdain 
 and Pourceaugnac ; but could he have found much to interest him 
 in Arnolphe and Agnes, in Philinte and Alceste and Celimene ? 
 I doubt it. On the other hand, he would certainly have loved 
 the flon-flons which Colle wrote for the Regent's private theatre ; 
 and I have always regretted that he read (1789) to no better 
 purpose the La Fontaine of the Contcs : a Scots parallel to which 
 he was exactly fitted to achieve. 
 
 2 Eobert mastered, besides, the first six books of Euclid, and 
 even dabbled a little in Latin now and then : reverting to his 
 'Rudiments' (says Gilbert) when he was crossed in love, or bad 
 tiffed with his sweetheart.
 
 ROBERT BURNS 243 
 
 the made man and woman. ' For several years,' 
 says Gilbert, ' butcher's meat was a stranger to the 
 house.' Robert was his father's chief hand at fifteen 
 — ' for we kept no hired servant ' — and could after- 
 wards describe his life at this time as a combination 
 of ' the cheerless gloom of a hermit with the un- 
 ceasing toil of a galley-slave.' The mental wear was 
 not less than the physical strain: for William Burness 
 grew old and broken, and his family was seven strong, 
 and of money there was as little as there seemed of 
 hope. The wonder is, not that Robert afterwards 
 broke out but, that Robert did not then break down : 
 that he escaped with a lifelong tendency to vapours 
 and melancholia, and at the time of trial itself with 
 that 'dull headache' of an evening, which 'at a future 
 period . . . was exchanged,' says Gilbert, ' for a pal- 
 pitation of the heart and a threatening of fainting and 
 suffocation in his bed in the night-time.' William 
 Burness is indeed a pathetic figure ; but to me the 
 Robert of Mount Oliphant is a figure more pathetic 
 still. Acquired or not, stoicism was habitual with 
 the father. With the son it was not so much as 
 acquired; for in that son was latent a world of 
 appetites and forces and potentialities the reverse 
 of stoical. And, even had this not been : if Robert 
 hadn't proved a man of genius, with the tem- 
 perament which genius sometimes entails : he must 
 still have been the worse for the experience. He 
 lived in circumstances of unwonted harshness and 
 bitterness for a lad of his degree; with a long 
 misery of anticipation, he must endure a quite un- 
 natural strain on forming muscle and on nerves and 
 a brain yet immature; he had perforce to face the
 
 244 ROBERT BURNS 
 
 necessity of diverting an absolute example of the 
 artistic temperament to laborious and squalid ends, 
 and to assist in the repression of all those natural 
 instincts — of sport and reverie and companionship 
 — the fostering of which is for most boys, have they 
 genius or have they not, an essential process of 
 development ; and the experience left him with 
 stooping shoulders and a heavy gait, an ineradicable 
 streak of sentimentalism, what he himself calls 
 'the horrors of a diseased nervous system,' and 
 that very practical exultation in the joie de vivre, 
 once it was known, which, while it is brilliantly 
 expressed in much published and unpublished verse 
 and prose, is nowhere, perhaps, so naively signified 
 as in a pleasant parenthesis addressed, years after 
 Mount Oliphant, to the highly respectable Thom- 
 son : — ' Nothing (since a Highland wench in the 
 Cowgate once bore me three bastards at a birth) has 
 surprised me more than,' etc. The rest is not to 
 my purpose : which is to argue that, given Robert 
 Burns and the apprenticeship at Mount Oliphant, 
 a violent reaction was inevitable, and that one's 
 admiration for him is largely increased by the re- 
 flection that it came no sooner than it did. William 
 Burness knew that it must come ; for, as he lay 
 dying, he confessed that it troubled him to think of 
 Robert's future. This, to be sure, was not at Mount 
 Oliphant : when Robert had done no worse than 
 insist on going to a dancing-school : but years after, 
 at Lochlie, when Robert had begun to assert himself. 
 True it is that at Kirkoswald — a smuggling village, 
 whither he went, at seventeen, to study mensura- 
 tion, 'dialling,' and the like — he had learned, he says,
 
 ROBERT BURNS 246 
 
 'to look unconcernedly on a large tavern bill and mix 
 without fear in a drunken squabble.' True it is, too, 
 that at Lochlie the visible reaction had set in. But, 
 so far as is known, that reaction was merely formal ; 
 and one may safely conjecture that, as boys are not in 
 the habit of telling their fathers everything, William 
 Burness knew little or nothing of those gallant hours 
 at Kirkoswald. For all this, though, he seems to 
 have discerned, however dimly and vaguely, some 
 features of the prodigious creature he had helped 
 into the world ; and that he should not have 
 discerned them till thus late is of itself enough 
 to show how stern and how effectual a discipline 
 Mount Oliphant had proved. 
 
 11 
 
 The Mount Oliphant period lasted some twelve 
 years, and was at its hardest for some time ere it 
 reached its term. 'About 1775 my father's gener- 
 ous master died,' l says Robert ; and ' to clench 
 the curse we fell into the hands of a factor, who 
 sat for the picture 2 I have drawn of one in my tale 
 of "Twa Dogs." . . . My father's spirit was soon 
 irritated, but not easily broken. There was a free- 
 
 1 This was that Fergusson (of Ayr) in whose service "William 
 Burness had been at the time of his marriage with Agnes Brown, 
 and (apparently) for some years after it — in fact, till he took on 
 Mount Oliphant. This he did on a hundred pounds borrowed 
 from his old employer ; and one may conjecture that the legal 
 proceedings which Robert thus resented were entailed upon 
 Fergusson's agents by the work of winding up the estate. 
 
 2 ' Sat for the picture I have drawn of one ' is precise and 
 definite enough. But surely the Factor verses in The Twa Dogs
 
 246 ROBERT BURNS 
 
 dom in his lease in two years more, and to weather 
 these we retrenched expenses ' — to the purpose and 
 with the effect denoted ! Then came easier times. 
 In 1777 William Burness removed his family to 
 Lochlie, a hundred-and-thirty-acre farm, in Tar- 
 bolton Parish. ' The nature of the bargain,' Robert 
 wrote to Moore, ' was such as to throw a little i - eady 
 money in his hand in the commencement/ or ' the 
 affair would have been impracticable.' At this 
 place, he adds, 'for four years we lived comfortably'; 
 and at this place his gay and adventurous spirit be- 
 gan to free itself, his admirable talent for talk to 
 find fit opportunities for exercise and display. The 
 reaction set in, as I have said, and he took life as 
 gallantly as his innocency might, wore the only 
 tied hair in the parish, was recognisable from afar 
 by his fillemot plaid, was made a ' Free and Ac- 
 cepted Mason,' 1 founded a Bachelors' Club, 2 and 
 
 are less a picture than a record of proceedings, a note on the 
 genus Factor : — 
 
 ' He '11 stamp and threaten, curse and swear, 
 He '11 apprehend them, poind their gear, 
 While they must stand, wi' aspect humble, 
 An' hear it a', and fear and tremble.' 
 
 The statement is accurate enough, no doubt, but where is th-j 
 ' picture ' ? Compare the effect of any one of Chaucer's Pilgrims, 
 or the sketches of Cresar and Luath themselves, and the Factor as 
 individual is found utterly wanting. 
 
 1 Burns was always an enthusiastic Mason. The Masonic idea 
 — whatever that be — went home to him ; and in honour of the 
 Craft he wrote some of his poorest verses. One set, the 'Adieu, 
 Adieu,' etc., of the Kilmarnock Volume, was popular outside 
 Scotland. At all events, I have seen a parody in a Belfast chap 
 which is set to the tune of Burn's Farciocll. 
 
 2 It was, in fact, part drinking-club and part debating-society. 
 But Rule X. of its constitution insisted that every member must
 
 ROBERT BURNS 247 
 
 took to sweethearting with all his heart and soul 
 and strength. He had hegim with a little harvester 
 at fifteen ; and at Kirkoswald he had been en- 
 amoured of Peggy Thomson to the point of sleepless 
 nisfhts. Now, says his brother Gilbert, f he was 
 constantly the victim of some fair enslaver ' — some- 
 times of two or three at a time ; and ' the symptoms 
 of his passion were often such as nearly to equal 
 those of the celebrated Sappho/ so that ' the agita- 
 tion of his mind and body exceeded anything I 
 know in real life.' Such, too, was the quality of 
 what he himself was pleased to call f un penchant 
 a (sic) l'adorable moitie du genre humain,' in com- 
 bination with that 'particular jealousy' he had ' of 
 people that were richer than himself, or who had 
 more consequence in life,' that a plain face was 
 quite as good as a pretty one: especially and par- 
 ticularly if it belonged to a maid of a lower degree 
 than his own. To condescend upon one's women — 
 to some men that is an ideal. It was certainly the 
 ideal of Robert Burns. ' His love,' says Gilbert, 
 ' rarely settled upon persons of this description ' — 
 that is, persons ' who were richer than himself, or 
 who had more consequence in life.' He must still 
 be Jove — still stoop from Olympus to the plain. 
 Apparently he held it was an honour to be admired 
 by him; and when, a short while hence (1786), he 
 ventured to celebrate, in rather too realistic a strain, 
 
 have at least one love-affair on hand ; and if potations were gener- 
 ally thin, and debates were often serious, there can be no question 
 that the talk ran on all manner of themes, and especially on that 
 one theme which men have ever found fruitful above all others. 
 The club was so great a success that an offshoot was founded, by 
 desire, on Robert's removal to Mossgiel.
 
 248 ROBERT BURNS 
 
 the Lass of Ballochmyle, and was l'ebufFed for his 
 impertinence — (it was so felt in those unregenerate 
 days !) — he was, 'tis said, extremely mortified. In 
 the meanwhile, his loves, whether pretty or plain, 
 were goddesses all ; and the Sun was f entering 
 Virgo, a month which is always a carnival in my 
 imagination ' the whole year round ; and the wonder 
 is that he got off so little of it all in verse which 
 he thought too good for the fire. Rhyme he did 
 (of course), and copiously : as at this stage every 
 coming male must rhyme, who has instinct enough 
 to ' couple but love and dove.' But it was not till 
 the end of the Lochlie years that he began rhyming 
 to any purpose. Indeed, the poverty of the Lochlie 
 years is scarce less ' wonderful past all whooping ' 
 than the fecundity of certain memorable months at 
 Mauchline : especially if it be true, as Gilbert and 
 himself aver, that the Lochlie love - affairs were 
 ' governed by the strictest rules of modesty and 
 virtue, from which he never deviated till his twenty- 
 third year.' l For desire makes verses, and verses 
 
 1 Saunders Tait, the Tarbolton poetaster, insists that, long 
 before Mossgiel, Burns and Sillar — 'Davie, a Brother Poet' — 
 were the most incontinent youngsters in Tarbolton Parish ; and, 
 after asseverating, in terms as solemn as he can make them, that 
 in all Scotland 
 
 ' There 's none like you and Burns can tout 
 The bawd}' horn,' 
 
 goes on to particularise, and declares that, what with ' Moll and 
 Meg, 
 
 Jean, Sue, and Lizzey, a' decoy't, 
 There 's sax wi' egg.' 
 
 Worse than all, he indites a 'poem,' a certain B — ns hi his 
 Infancy, which begins thus : —
 
 ROBERT BURNS 249 
 
 rather good than bad, as surely as fruition leaves 
 verses, whether bad or good, unmade. 
 
 It was natural and honourable in a young man of 
 this lusty and amatorious habit to look round for a 
 wife and to cast about him for a better means of 
 keeping one than farm-service would afford. In 
 respect of the first he found a possibility in Ellison 
 Begbie, a Galston farmer's daughter, at this time a 
 domestic servant, on whom he wrote (they say) his 
 ' Song of Similes,' and to whom he addressed some 
 rather stately, not to say pedantic, documents in 
 the form of love-letters. For the new line in life, 
 he determined that it might, perhaps, be flax- 
 dressing ; so, at the midsummer of 17S1 (having 
 just before been sent about his business by, as he 
 might himself have said, f le doux objet de son 
 attachement') he removed to Irvine, a little port on 
 the Firth of Clyde, which was also a centre of the 
 industry in which he hoped to excel. Here he 
 established himself, on what terms is not known, 
 with one Peacock, whom he afterwards took occa- 
 
 ' Now I must trace his pedigree, 
 Because he made a song on me, 
 And let the world look and sec, 
 
 Just wi' my tongue, 
 How he and Clootie did agree 
 
 When he was young ' : — 
 
 and of which I shall quote no more. But Robert and his brother 
 are both explicit on this point ; and, despite the easy morals 
 of the class in which the Bard sought now and ever 'to crown 
 his flame,' it must be held, I think, as proven that he was 
 dc'uiaise by Richard Brown at Irvine and by Betty Paton at 
 Lochlic. 
 
 This is the place to say that I owe my quotations from 
 Saunders Tait to Dr. Grosart, who told mo of the cop}- (pro-
 
 250 ROBERT BURNS 
 
 sion to describe as f a scoundrel of the first water, 
 who made money by the mystery of Thieving'; 1 
 here he saw something more of life and character 
 and the world than he had seen at Mount Oliphant 
 and Lochlie ; here, at the year's end, he had a 
 terrible attack of vapours (it lasted for months, he 
 says, so that he shuddered to recall the time); 
 here, above all, he formed a friendship with a 
 certain Richard Brown. According to him, Brown, 
 being the son of a mechanic, had taken the eye of 'a 
 great man in the neighbourhood,' and had received 
 
 bably unique) of that worthy's Poems and Songs : ' Printed for 
 and Sold by the Author Only, 1796': in the Mitchell Library, 
 Glasgow, and at the same time communicated transcripts which 
 he had made from such numbers in it as referred to Burns. As 
 my collaborator, Mr. T. F. Henderson, was then in Scotland, I 
 asked him to look up Tait's volume. It was found at last, after 
 a prolonged search ; was duly sent to the Burns Exhibition ; 
 and in a while was pronounced 'a discovery.' Tait, who was 
 pedlar, tailor, soldier in turn, had a ribald and scurrilous tongue, 
 a certain rough cleverness, and a good enough command of the 
 vernacular ; so that his tirades against Burns — (he was one of 
 the very few who dared to attack that satirist) — are still read- 
 able, apart from the interest which attaches to their theme. It 
 is a pity that some Burns Club or Burns Society has not reprinted 
 them in full, coarse as they are. 
 
 1 Nobody knows what this may mean. It seems to be only 
 Robert's lofty way of saying that Peacock swindled him. "What 
 follows is explicit (Letter to Moore) : — 'To finish the whole, 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 
 sixpence.' How much is here of fact, how much of resentment, 
 who shall say ? What is worth noting in it all is that Burns, 
 despite his 'penchant a Padorable,' etc., is first and last a peasant 
 so far as 'l'adorable inoitie' is concerned, and, for all his senti- 
 mentalism, can face facts about it with all the peasant's shrewd- 
 ness and with all the peasant's cynicism.
 
 ROBERT BURNS 251 
 
 'a genteel education, with a view to bettering his 
 situation in life.' His patron had died, however, 
 and he had had perforce to go for a sailor (he was 
 afterwards captain of a West-Indiaman). He had 
 known good luck and bad, he had seen the world, 
 he had the morals of his calling, at the same time 
 that ' his mind was fraught with courage, independ- 
 ance, and magnanimity, and every noble, manly 
 virtue ' ; and Burns, who ' loved him,' and ' admired 
 him,' not only ' strove to imitate him ' but also ' in 
 some measure succeeded.' ' I had,' the pupil owns, 
 'the pride before'; but Brown 'taught it to flow 
 in proper channels.' Withal, Brown ' was the only 
 man I ever saw who was a greater fool than myself 
 when Woman was the presiding star.' Brown, 
 however, was a practical amorist ; and he ' spoke of a 
 certain fashionable failing with levity, which hither- 
 to I had regarded with horror.' In fact, he was 
 Mephisto to Burns's Faust ; * and ' here,' says the 
 Bard, ' his friendship did me a mischief, and the 
 consequence was, that soon after I assumed the 
 plough, I wrote the enclosed Welcome.' This 
 enclosure (to Moore) was that half-humorous, half- 
 defiant, and wholly delightful Welcome to His Love- 
 Begotten Daughter, 2 through which the spirit of the 
 
 1 Brown denied it. ' Illicit love ! ' quoth he. ' Levity of a 
 sailor ! "When I first knew Burns he had nothing to learn in that 
 respect.' It is a case of word against word ; and I own that I 
 prefer the Bard's. 
 
 2 'The same cheap self-satisfaction finds a yet uglier vent 
 when he plumes himself on the scandal at the birth of his first 
 bastard child.' Thus Stevenson. But Stevenson, as hath been 
 said, had in him ' something of the Shorter Catechist ' ; and 
 either he did not see, or he would not recognise, that Burns's
 
 252 ROBERT BURNS 
 
 true Burns — the Burns of the good years : proud, 
 generous, whole-hearted, essentially natural and 
 humane — thrills from the first line to the last. 
 And we have to recall the all-important fact, that 
 Burns was first and last a peasant, 1 and first and 
 last a peasant in revolt against the Kirk, a peasant 
 resolute to be a buck, to forgive the really scandal- 
 ous contrast presented in those versions of the 
 affair — (versions done in the true buckish style : 
 the leer and the grin and the slang in full 
 blast) — which he has given in The Fornicator, the 
 Epistle to John Rankine, and — apparently — the 
 Reply to a Trimming Epistle from a Tailor. At 
 the same time we must clearly understand that we 
 recall all this for the sake of our precious selves, 
 and not in any way, nor on any account, for the 
 sake of Burns. He was absolutely of his station 
 and his time ; the poor-living, lewd, grimy, free- 
 spoken, ribald, old Scots peasant-world 2 came to 
 a full, brilliant, even majestic close in his work; 
 and, if we would appreciate aright the environment 
 in which he wrote, and the audience to which such 
 writings were addressed, we must transliterate into 
 the Vernacular Brantome and the Dames Galantes 
 and Tallemant and the Historiettes. As for reading 
 
 rejoicings in the fact of paternity were absolutely sincere through- 
 out his life. 
 
 1 Here and elsewhere the word is used, not opprobriously but, 
 literally. Burns was specifically a peasant, as Byron was speci- 
 fically a peer, and as Shakespeare was specifically a man of the 
 burgess class. 
 
 2 I do not, of course, forget its many solid and admirable 
 virtues ; but its elements were mixed, and it was to the grosser 
 that the Burns of these and other rhymes appealed.
 
 ROBERT BURNS 253 
 
 them in Victorian terms — Early-Victorian terms, or 
 Late — that way madness lies: madness, and a Burns 
 that by no process known to gods or men could 
 ever have existed save in the lubber-land of some 
 Pious Editor's dream. 
 
 At Lochlie, whither he seems to have returned 
 in the March of 1782, the studious years 1 and the 
 old comparative prosperity had come, or were 
 coming, to a close. There had been a quarrel be- 
 tween William Burness and his landlord, one M'Clure, 
 a merchant in Ayr ; and this quarrel, being about 
 money, duly passed into the Courts. Its circum- 
 stances are obscure ; but it is history that arbitra- 
 tion went against the tenant of Lochlie, that he 
 was ordered to ' quite possession,' that he was 
 strongly suspected of ' preparing himself accordingly 
 by dispossessing of his stock and crops,' and that 
 a certain ' application at present craving ' resulted, 
 on shrieval authority, in the 'sequestration' of all 
 the Lochlie stock and plenishing and gear. What- 
 ever the rights and wrongs of the affair, an end 
 came to it with the end of William Burness. By 
 this time his health was broken — he was far gone 
 in what Robert calls ' a phthisical consumption ' ; 
 and he died in the February of the next year 
 (17S4), when, as the same Robert romantically puts 
 it in his fine, magniloquent fashion, ' his all went 
 among the rapacious hell-hounds that growl in the 
 Kennel of Justice.' 2 The fact that Robert and 
 
 1 It was parish gossip that, if you called on "William Burness at 
 meal-time, you found the whole family with a book in one hand 
 and a horn spoon in the other. 
 
 2 M'Clure's 'answers' and 'counter-answers,' together with the 
 sheriff's officer's account of the seizure at Lochlie, were published
 
 254 ROBERT BURNS 
 
 Gilbert were able (Martinmas 1783), when their 
 father's affairs were ' drawing to a crisis/ to secure 
 another farm — Mossgiel — in Mauchline Parish, some 
 two or three miles off Lochlie, is enough to show 
 that neither errors nor crosses, neither sequestra- 
 tions nor lampoons, had impaired the family credit, 
 
 ill 
 
 William Burness had paid his children wages during 
 his tenancy of Lochlie; and the elder four, by present- 
 ing themselves as his creditors for wages due, were 
 enabled to secure a certain amount of ' plenishing 
 
 in The Glasqoio Herald early in the present year (1897). I need 
 scarce say that Saunders Tait produced a Burns at Lochly, in 
 which he fell on his enemy tooth and claw. His statements are 
 as specific as M'Clure's, and are substantially in agreement with 
 some of them, besides : — ■ 
 
 ' To Lochly ye came like a clerk, 
 And on your back was scarce a sark, 
 The dogs did at } T our buttocks bark, 
 
 But now ye 're bra', 
 Ye pouchH the rent, ye was sae stark, 
 Made payment sma'.' 
 
 In another stanza, 'M'Clure,' he says — 
 ' Ye scarcely left a mite 
 
 To fill his horn. 
 You and the Lawyers gied him a skyte, 
 Sold a' his corn.' 
 
 In a third he appears to record the particulars of a single combat 
 between Robert and his father's landlord : — 
 ' His ain gun at him he did cock, 
 
 An' never spared, 
 Wi't owre his heid came a clean knock 
 Maist killed the laird.' 
 
 And in the last of all, after bitterly reproaching Robert and the 
 whole Burns race witli ingratitude : —
 
 ROBERT BURNS 255 
 
 and gear ' wherewith to make a start at Mossgiel. It 
 was a family venture, in whose success the Burnesses 
 were interested all and severally, and to which each 
 one looked for food and clothes and hire (the 
 brothers got a yearly fee of £7 apiece) ; and, as all 
 were well and thoroughly trained in farming work, 
 and had never lived other than sparely, it was 
 reasonable in them to believe that the enterprise 
 would prosper. That it did not begin by prospering 
 was no fault of Robert's. He made excellent re- 
 solutions, and, what was more to the purpose, he 
 kept them — for a time. He ' read farming books ' 
 (thus he displays himself), he 'calculated crops,' he 
 ' attended markets ' ; he worked hard in the fields, 
 
 ' M 'Clure he put you in a farm, 
 And coft you coals your a to warm 
 
 And meal and maut. . . . 
 He likewise did the mailin stock, 
 
 And built you barns' :— 
 
 he sets forth explicitly this charge : — 
 
 ' M 'Clure's estate has ta'en the fever, 
 And heal again it will be never, 
 The vagabonds, they ca' you clever, 
 
 Ye 're sic a sprite, 
 To rive fra' him baith ga' and liver, 
 And baith the feet.' 
 
 The fact of the Laird's generosity is reaffirmed with emphasis in 
 A Compliment : — 
 
 ' The horse, corn, pets, kail, kye, and ewes, 
 Cheese, pease, beans, rye, wool, house and flours, 
 Pots, pans, crans, tongs, bran-spits, and skewrs, 
 
 The milk and barm, 
 Each thing they had was a' M 'Clure's, 
 
 He stock'd the farm.' . . . 
 
 And with the remark that 'Fire hundred pounds they were 
 behind,' the undaunted Saunders brings his libel to a close.
 
 256 ROBERT BURNS 
 
 he kept his body at least in temperance and sober- 
 ness, and, as for thrift, there is Gilbert's word for it, 
 that his expenses never exceeded his income of £Tl 
 a year. It availed him nothing. Gilbert is said to 
 have been rather a theorist than a sound practician ; 
 and Robert, though a skilled farmer, cared nothing 
 for business, and left him a free hand in the conduct 
 of affairs. Luck, too, was against them from the 
 first ; and very soon the elder's genius was revealed 
 to him, and he had other than farmer's work to do. 
 ' In spite of the Devil,' he writes, c the world, and 
 the flesh, I believe 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.' Naturally, ' this ' (and some other 
 things) 'overset all my wisdom, and I returned, 
 "like the dog to his vomit" — (be it remembered, it 
 is Robert Burns who speaks : not I) — " and the sow 
 that was washed, to her wallowing in the mire." 
 That the confession, with its rather swaggering 
 allusion to the Armour business, was true, is plain. 
 But we do not need Burns's assui'ance to know that, 
 though he could do his work, and prided himself on 
 the straightness of his furrows, he was scarce cut 
 out for a successful farmer — except, it may be, in 
 certain special conditions. Endurance, patience, 
 diligence, a devout attention to one's own interest 
 and the land's, an indomitable constancy in labour 
 to certain ends and in thought on certain lines — 
 these are some of the qualities which make the hus- 
 bandman ; and, this being so, how should Mossgiel 
 have prospered under Rab the Ranter? His head 
 was full of other things than crops and cattle. He
 
 ROBERT BURNS 257 
 
 was bursting with intelligence, ideas, the conscious- 
 ness of capacity, the desire to take his place among 
 men ; and in Mauchline he found livelier friends x 
 and greater opportunities than he had found else- 
 whei - e. Being a Scot, he was instinctively a theo- 
 logian ; being himself, he was inevitably liberal- 
 minded ; born a peasant of genius, and therefore a 
 natural rebel, he could not choose but quarrel with 
 the Kirk — especially as her hand was heavy on his 
 friends and himself, — and it was as a Mauchline man 
 that the best of his anti-clei*ical woi'k was done. 2 
 
 1 As his landlord, the lawyer Gavin Hamilton, to whom he 
 dedicated the Kilmarnock Volume, and the story of whose wrangle 
 with the Mauchline Kirk-Session (see Vol. i. pp. 147-152, 1S8, 
 378-9, etc.) is to some extent that of Burns's assault upon the 
 Kirk (see Vol. ii. Holy Willie's Prayer, pp. 25-30, and Notes, 
 pp. 320-324). Another was Robert Aiken, also a lawyer, by 
 whom he was 'read into fame, 5 to whom he dedicated The 
 Cotter's Saturday Night, and whom he celebrated in an Epitaph 
 (Vol. i. p. 188). Yet another was Richmond, the lawyer's clerk, 
 whose room he was afterwards to share in Edinburgh, and who 
 appears to be partly responsible for the preservation of The Jolly 
 Beggars. Again, there was the Bachelors' Club, on the model of 
 that he had founded at Tarbolton, for whose edification, and in 
 explanation of whose function, he appears to have written The 
 Fornicator and The Court of Equity. This last is Burns's idea 
 of what the proceedings of the Kirk-Session ought, in certain 
 cases, to have been. It is capital fun, but something too frank 
 and too particular for latter-day print. 
 
 2 He was ever a theological liberal and a theological dis- 
 putant — a champion of Heterodox}-, in however mild a form, 
 whose disputations made him notorious, so that his name was 
 as a stumbling-block and an offence to the Orthodox. For 
 the series of attacks which he delivered against the Kirk — The 
 Holy Fair, the Address to the Dcil, The Twa Herds, The Ordina- 
 tion, Holy Willie, The Kirk's Alarm, the Epistles To the Unco 
 Guidand To John Goldic — see Vols. i. and ii. (Text and Notes). 
 There is no record of an appearance on the stool with Baton ; but 
 the circumstances of this his initial difficulty appear to be set 
 
 VOL. IV. R
 
 258 ROBERT BURNS 
 
 Then, too, he was full of rhymes, and they must out 
 of him : his call had come, and he fell to obeying it 
 with unexampled diligence. More than all, perhaps, 
 he had the temperament of the viveur — the man who 
 rejoices to live his life ; and his appetites had been 
 intensified, his gift of appreciation made abnormal 
 (so to say), by a boyhood and an adolescence of 
 singular hardship and quite exceptional continence. 
 It is too late in the world's history to apologise 
 for the primordial instinct; and to do so at any 
 time were sheer impertinence and unreasoning in- 
 gratitude. To apologise in the case of a man who 
 so exulted in its manifestations and results, and 
 who so valiantly, not to say riotously, insisted on 
 the fact of that exultation, as Robert Burns, were 
 also a rank and frank absurdity. On this point 
 he makes doubt impossible. The ' white flower 
 of a blameless life ' was never a button-hole for 
 him : 1 his utterances, published and unpublished, 
 
 forth in the Epistle to Bankinc (i. 155) and the Reply to a Trim- 
 ming Epistle (ii. 96), with the Notes thereto appended. All 
 these read, considered, and digested, what interest remains in 
 Burns's quarrel with the Kirk consists in the fact that, being a 
 person naturally and invincibly opposed to the 'sour-featured 
 Whiggism ' on which the Stuarts had wrecked themselves, Burns 
 was naturally and invincibly a Jacobite. His Jacobitism was, he 
 said, ' by way of vive la bagatelle.' He told Ramsay of Auchtertyre 
 that he owed it to the plundering and unhousing (1715) of his grand- 
 father, who was gardener to Earl Marischal at Inverurie {sic). But 
 it came to him mainly through Gavin Hamilton (who was Episco- 
 palian by descent) and his own resentment of clerical tyranny. 
 1 It is true that he wrote thus ' To a Young Friend ' :— 
 'The sacred lowe o' weel-plac'd love, 
 
 Luxuriantly indulge it ; 
 But never tempt th' illicit rove, 
 Tho' naething should divulge it :
 
 ROBERT BURNS 259 
 
 are there to show that he would have disdained the 
 presumption that it ever could have been. And it 
 is from Mauchline, practically, that, his affair with 
 Betty Paton over and done with, and, to anticipate 
 a little, his affair with Jean Armour left hanging 
 in the wind, he starts on his career as amorist at 
 large. 
 
 And now for a little narrative. In the November 
 of 1784 Elizabeth Paton bore him a daughter: 'the 
 First Instance,' so he wrote above his Welcome, 
 ' that entitled him to the Venerable Appellation of 
 Father.' The mother is described as ' very plain- 
 looking/ but of ' an exceedingly handsome figure ' ; 
 'rude and uncultivated to a great degree,' with a 
 'strong masculine understanding, and a thorough, 
 though unwomanly, contempt for any sort of refine- 
 ment '; withal, ' so active, honest, and independent a 
 creature ' that Mrs. Burns would have had Robert 
 marry her, but ' both my aunts and Uncle Gilbert 
 opposed it,' in the belief that 'the faults of her 
 character would soon have disgusted him.' There 
 had been no promise on his part ; and though the 
 
 I waive the quantum o' the sin, 
 
 The hazard of concealing ; 
 But, och ! it hardens a' within, 
 And petrifies the feeling ! ' 
 But there is plenty to show that the writer was a great deal 
 better at preaching than at practice. And he owns as much him- 
 self in his own epitaph :— 
 
 ' Is there a man, whose judgment clear 
 Can others teach the course to steer, 
 Yet runs, himself, life's mad career 
 
 Wild as the wave ? — 
 Here jJause — and, thro' the starting tear, 
 Survey this grave.'
 
 260 ROBERT BURNS 
 
 reporter (his niece, Isabella Begg) has his own sister's 
 warrant — (Mrs. Begg, by the way, was rather what 
 her brother, in a mood of acute fraternal piety, 
 might possibly have called ' a bletherin' b — tch ') — 
 for saying that ' woman never loved man with a more 
 earnest devotion than that poor woman did him/ 
 he in nowise sentimentalised about her. She is 
 identified with none of his songs ; and while there 
 is a pleasant reference to her in the Welcome : — 
 
 ' Thy mitlier's person, grace, and merit ' : — 
 
 she is recognisably the 'paitrick' of the Epistle to 
 Rankine, she is certainly the heroine of The Forni- 
 cator, she probably does duty in the Reply to a 
 Trimming Epistle, none of which pieces shows the 
 writer's 'penchant a 1 'adorable/ etc., to advantage. 
 No doubt, they were addressed to men. No doubt, 
 too, they were, first and last, satirical impeachments 
 of the Kirk : impeachments tinctured with the pea- 
 sant's scorn of certain existing circumstances, and 
 done with all the vigour and the juria which one 
 particular peasant — a peasant who could see through 
 shams and was intolerant of them — could with both 
 hands bestow. And that the women did not resent 
 their share in such things is shown by the fact that 
 such things got done. It was ' the tune of the time ' 
 — in the peasant-world at least. Still, as Diderot 
 says somewhere or other : — ' On aime celle a qui on 
 le donne, on est aime de celle a qui on le prend.' 
 And one can't help regretting that there are few or 
 none but derisive references to Betty Paton in her 
 lover's work.
 
 ROBERT BURNS 2dl 
 
 IV 
 
 Of vastly greater importance than his mistresses, 
 at this or any period of his life, is the entity, which, 
 with an odd little touch of Eighteenth Century 
 formality, he loved to call his Muse. That entity 
 was now beginning to take shape and substance as 
 a factor in the sum of the world's happiness ; 
 and the coming of that other entity in whose 
 existence he took so high a pride and so constant 
 a delight — I mean 'the Bard' — was but a matter of 
 time. Burns had been ever a rhymester; and 
 Burns, who, as Stevenson observed, and as the 
 Notes to these Volumes have shown, 'was always 
 ready to borrow the hint of a design, as though 
 he had some difficulty in commencing,' had begun 
 by borrowing his style, as well as divers hints of 
 designs, from stall-artists and neighbour-cuckoos. 
 But, once emancipated, once a man, once practi- 
 cally assured of the primal concerns of life, once 
 conscious that (after all) he might have the root 
 of the matter in him, the merely local poet begins 
 to waver and dislimn, and the Burns of Poor 
 Mailie (written at Lochlie) and the Epistle to 
 Davie reigns — intermittently, perhaps, but ob- 
 viously — in his stead. It is all over with stall-artists 
 and neighbour- cuckoos. Poor Fergusson's book 1 
 
 1 Robert Fergusson (1750-1774) was certainly a prime influence 
 in Burns's poetical life. Nevertheless — or shall I say consequently? 
 —he has had less than justice from the most of Burns's Editors. 
 Yet in his way he was so remarkable a creature that there can 
 be no question but in his death, at four-and-twenty, a great 
 loss was inflicted on Scottish literature. He had intelligence 
 and an eye, a right touch of humour, the gifts of invention
 
 262 ROBERT BURNS 
 
 has fallen into his hands, and (as he says in his 
 ridiculous way) has ' caused him to string anew his 
 wildly-sounding rustic lyre with emulating vigour.' 
 At last the hour of the Vernacular Muse has come ; 
 and he is hip to haunch with such adepts in her 
 mystery as the Sempills, and Hamilton of Gilbert- 
 field, and Allan Ramsay, and Robert Fergusson, and 
 the innominates whose verses, decent or not, have 
 lived in his ear since childhood : catching their tone 
 and their sentiment ; mastering their rhythms; copy- 
 ing their methods ; considering their effects in the 
 one true language of his mind. 1 He could write 
 
 and observation and style, together with a true feeling for 
 country and city alike ; and his work in the Vernacular (his 
 English verse is rubbish), with its easy expressiveness, its vivid 
 and unshrinking realism, and a merit in the matter of character 
 and situation which makes it — not readable only, but — interesting 
 as art, at the same time that it is valuable as history, is nothing 
 less than memorable : especially in view of the miserable circum- 
 stances — (the poor lad was a starveling scrivener, and died, partly 
 of drink, in the public madhouse) — in which it was done. Burns, 
 who learned much from Fergusson, was an enthusiast in his 
 regard for him ; bared his head and shed tears over 'the green 
 mound and the scattered go wans ' under which he found his ex- 
 emplar lying in Canongate Churchyard ; got leave from the 
 managers to put up a headstone at his own cost there, and wrote 
 an epitaph to be inscribed upon it, one line of which — 
 
 ' No storied urn nor animated bust,' 
 
 is somehow to be read in Gray's Elegy in a Country Churchyard. 
 Fergusson was as essentially an Edinburgh product — (the old 
 Scots capital : gay, squalid, drunken, dirty, lettered, vener- 
 able : lives in his verses much as Burns knew it twelve years 
 after his death)— as the late R. L. S. himself ; and, while I write, 
 old memories come back to me of the admiring terms : terms 
 half-playful, half-affectionate : in which the later artist was wont 
 to speak of his all but forgotten ancestor. 
 
 1 I do not forget that Dugald Stewart noted the correctness of 
 his speech and the success with which he avoided the use of
 
 ROBERT BURNS 263 
 
 deliberate English, and, when he wanted to be not 
 so much sincere as impressive and e fine,' he wrote 
 English deliberately, as the worse and weaker part 
 of his achievement remains to prove. He could 
 even write English, as Jourdain talked prose, ' with- 
 out knowing it' — as we know from Scots Wha 
 Hue. He read Pope, Shenstone, Beattie, Gold- 
 smith, Gray, and the rest, with so much enthusiasm 
 that one learned Editor has made an interesting 
 little list of pilferings from the works of these dis- 
 tinguished beings. But, so far as I can see, he 
 might have lived and died an English-writing Scot, 
 and nobody been a thrill or a memory the better 
 for his work. It is true that much of the Saturday 
 Night and the Vision and the Mountain Daisy is 
 written in English ; l but one may take leave to 
 
 Scotticisms. But in his day Scots was, not an accent but, a living 
 tongue ; and he certainly could not have talked at Mauchline and 
 at Dumfries as he did in a more or less polite and Anglified 
 Edinburgh. 
 
 1 He contrives a compromise, to admirable purpose, too, in 
 Tarn o' Shantcr : which is written partly in English and partly in 
 the Vernacular. But (1) Tamo' Shantcr is in a rhythmus classical 
 in Scotland since the time of Barbour's Bruce ; (2) the English 
 I_arts of Tarn o' Shantcr are of no particular merit as poetry — that 
 \i, 'the only words in the only order'; and (3) the best of Taia 
 o' Shanter is in the Vernacular alone. Contrast, for instance, 
 the diabolical fire and movement and energy of these lines : — 
 ' They reeled, they set, they cross'd, they cleekit, 
 
 Till ilka carlin swat and reekit, 
 
 And coost her duddies to the wark, 
 
 And linket at it in her sark' : — 
 
 with another famous — perhaps too famous — passage : — 
 
 ' But pleasures are like poppies spread : 
 You seize the flower, its bloom is shed,' etc. 
 
 In the second the result is merely Hudibrastic. In the first the
 
 264 ROBERT BURNS 
 
 wonder if these pieces, with so much else of Burns's 
 own, would have escaped the ' iniquity of Oblivion/ 
 had they not chanced, to their good fortune, to 
 be companioned with Halloween, and Holy Willie, 
 and The Farmer to His Aidd Marc, and a score of 
 masterpieces besides, in which the Vernacular is 
 carried to the highest level — in the matter of force 
 and fire, and brilliancy of diction, and finality of 
 effect, to name but these — it has ever reached in 
 verse. 1 Let this be as it may : there can be no ques- 
 tion that when Burns wrote English he wrote what, 
 on his own confession, was practically a foreign 
 
 suggestion — of mingled fury and stink and motion and heat and 
 immitigable ardour— could only have been conveyed by the 
 Vernacular Burns. 
 
 1 It was "Wordsworth's misfortune that, being in revolt against 
 Augustan ideals and a worn-out poetic slang, he fell in with 
 Burns, and sought to make himself out of common English just 
 such a vocabulary as Burns's own. For he forgot that the 
 Vernacular, in which his exemplar achieved such surprising and 
 delectable results, had been a literary language for centuries 
 when Burns began to work in it — that Burns, in fact, was 
 handling with consummate skill a tool whose capacity had been 
 long since proved by Ramsay and Fergusson and the greater men 
 who went before them ; and, having no models to copy, and no 
 verbal inspiration but his own to keep him straight, he came tc 
 immortal grief, not once but many times. It is pretended, too, 
 that in the matter of style Burns had a strong influence on 
 Byron. But had he ? Byron praises Burns, of course ; but is 
 there ever a trace of Burns the lyrist in the Byron songs? 
 Again, the Byron of Childe Harold and the tales was as it were 
 a Babel in himself, and wrote Scott plus Coleridge plus Moore 
 plus Beattie and Pope and the Augustan Ago at large ; while the 
 Byron of JBcppo and the Vision and Don Juan approves himself 
 the master of a style of such infernal brilliancy and variety, of 
 such a capacity for ranging heaven-high and hell-deep, that it 
 cannot without absurdity be referred to anything except the fact 
 that ho also was a born great writer.
 
 ROBERT BURNS 265 
 
 tongue — a tongue in which he, no more than Fergus- 
 son or Ramsay, could express himself to any sufficing 
 purpose ; but that, when he used the dialect which 
 he had babbled in babyhood, and spoken as boy and 
 youth and man — the tongue, too, in which the 
 chief exemplars and the ruling influences of his 
 poetical life had wrought — he at once revealed 
 himself for its greatest master since Dunbar. 1 More, 
 much more, than that : his bearings once found, 
 he marked his use of it by the discovery of a 
 quantity hitherto unknown in literature. Himself, 
 to wit: the amazing compound of style and senti- 
 ment with gaiety and sympathy, of wit and tender- 
 
 1 For that is what it comes to in the end. He may seem to 
 have little to do with Catholic and Feudal .Scotland, and as little 
 with the Scotland of the Early Reformation and the First Cove- 
 nant. Also, it is now impossible to say if he knew any more of 
 Scott and Dunbar and the older makers (Davie Lindsaj 7 and 
 Harbour excepted) than he found in The Ever Green, which Ramsay 
 garbled out of The Bannatyne MS., if he were read in Pinker- 
 ton (1786), or if he got much more out of Gawain Douglas than 
 the verse which serves as a motto to Tarn o' Shanter : though 
 a letter to Cleghorn shows that he certainl}- possessed a' copy of 
 that poet before 1700. The Scotland he represents, and of which 
 his verses are the mirror, is the Scotland out of which the 'wild 
 Whigs' crushed the taste for everj-thing but fornication and 
 theology and such expressions of derision and revolt as Jenny 
 M l C?-aiv and Eri-ock Brae : the Scotland whose literal - }- beginnings 
 date, you'd fancy, not from Henryson, not from Dunbar and 
 Douglas and the Lyon King-at-Arms, but from Sempill of Beltrees 
 and the men who figure in the three issues of Watson's Choice 
 Collection. But Ramsay and his fellows were a revival — not a 
 new birth. The Vernacular School is one and indivisible. There 
 are breaks in the effect ; but the tradition remains unbroken. 
 And Burns, for all his comparative modernity, descends directlj- 
 from, and is, in fact, the last of that noble line which begins with 
 Robert Henryson.
 
 266 ROBERT BURNS 
 
 ness with radiant humour and an admirable sense 
 of art, which is Robert Burns. 
 
 He could write ill, and was capable of fustian. 
 But, excepting in his ' Epigrams ' and ' Epitaphs' 
 and in his imitations of poets whose methods he did 
 not understand, he was nearly always a great writer, 
 and he was generally (to say the least) incapable of 
 fustian in the Vernacular. In essaying the effects 
 of Pope and Shenstone and those other unfamiliars, 
 he was like a man with a personal hand set to 
 imitate a writing-master's copy : he made as good 
 a shot as he could at it, but there was none of him- 
 self in the result. It was otherguess work when he 
 took on the methods and the styles in which his 
 countrymen had approved themselves: these he 
 could compass so well that he could far surpass his 
 exemplars technically, and could adequately express 
 the individual Burns besides. The Death and Dying 
 Words of Poor Mailie (written at Lochlie, and there- 
 fore very early work) trace back to Gilbertfield's 
 Bonnie Heck; but the older piece is realistic in 
 purpose and brutal in effect, while in the later — to 
 say nothing of the farce in Hughoc— the whole 
 philosophy of life of a decent mother - ewe is 
 imagined with delightful humour, and set forth in 
 terms so kindly in spirit and so apt in style, that 
 the Death and Dying Words is counted one of the 
 imperishables in English letters. Contrast, again, 
 the Elegy, written some time after the Death and 
 Dying Words, on this immortal beast, with its 
 exemplars in Watson and Ramsay : — 
 
 ' lie was right nacky in liis way, 
 An' eydent baith be night and day ;
 
 ROBERT BURNS 267 
 
 He wi' the lads his part could play 
 When right sair need, 
 
 He gart them good bull-sillar pay ; 
 
 But now he 's dead. . . .' 
 
 ( Wha'll jow Ale on my drouthy Tongue, 
 To cool the heat of Lights and Lung ? 
 \Y r ha '11 bid me, when the Kaile-bell 's rung, 
 
 To Buird me speed ? . . . 
 Wha'll set me by the Barrel-bung? 
 
 Since Sanny 's dead ? . . .' 
 
 He was good Company at Jeists, 
 And wanton when he came to Feasts ; 
 He scorn'd the Converse of great Beasts 
 
 [F]or a Sheep's-head ; 
 He leugh at Stories about Ghaists — 
 
 Blyth Willie's dead':— 
 
 and you shall find the difference still more glaring. 
 Cleverness apart — cleverness and the touch of life, 
 the element of realism — the Laments for HabSimson 
 and Sanny Briggs, for John Cowper and Luckie 
 Wood and the Writer Lithgow, 1 are merely squalid 
 and cynical ; while in every line the Elegy, in despite 
 of realism and the humorous tone and intent 
 
 1 All five, together with Ramsay's on Luckie Spence (an Edin- 
 burgh bawd) and Last Words of a Wretched Miser, should be 
 read for the sake of their likeness, and at the same time their 
 unlikeness, to not a little in Burns, and in illustration of the truth 
 that the Vernacular tradition was one of humorous, and even 
 brutal realism. I have cited R. L. S. in connexion with Fergusson. 
 He had a far higher esteem for that maker than ho had for that 
 maker's ancestor, Allan Ramsay. Yet he quoted to me one day 
 a stanza from the John Coivper, a certain phrase in which — a 
 phrase obscenely significant of death — was, we presently agreed, 
 as good an example of ' the Squalid-Picturesque ' as could bo 
 found out of Villon.
 
 268 ROBERT BURNS 
 
 (essential to the models and therefore inevitable 
 in the copy) is the work of a writer of genius, who 
 is also a generous human being. 1 Very early work, 
 again, are Corn Rigs and Green Grow the Rashes ; in 
 suggestion, inspiration, technical quality, both are 
 unalterably Scots ; and in both the effect of mastery 
 and completeness is of those that defy the touch 
 of Time. To compare these two and any two of 
 Burns's songs in English, or pseudo-English, is to 
 realise that the poet of these two should never 
 have ventured outside the pale of his supremacy. 
 English had ten thousand secrets which he knew 
 not, nor could ever have known, except imperfectly; 
 for he recked not of those innumerable traditions, 
 associations, connotations, surprises, as it were ambi- 
 tions, which make up the romantic and the literary 
 life of words — even as he was penetrated and 
 possessed by the sense of any such elements as 
 may have existed in the Vernacular. Thus, if he 
 read Milton, it was largely, if not wholly, with a 
 view to getting himself up as a kind of Tarbolton 
 Satan. He was careless, so I must contend, of 
 Shakespeare. With such knowledge as he could 
 glean from song-books, he was altogether out of 
 touch with the Elizabethans and the Carolines. 
 Outside the Vernacular, in fact, he was a rather 
 
 1 His suppression of such an old-fashioned touch in the first 
 draft as this one : — 
 
 ' Now Robin greetan chows the hams 
 Of Mailie dead ' :— 
 
 is significant. It is quite in the vein of Bonnie Heck, as indeed 
 arc the first four stanzas. But it would have ruined the Elegy 
 
 as the world has known it since 1780.
 
 ROBERT BURNS 269 
 
 unlettered Eighteenth Century Englishman, and 
 the models which he must naturally prefer before 
 all others were academic, stilted, artificial, and 
 unexemplary to the highest point. It may be 
 that I read the verse of Burns, and all Scots 
 verse, with something of that feeling of 'precious- 
 ness ' which everybody has, I take it, in reading a 
 language, or a dialect, not his own : the feeling 
 which blinds one to certain sorts of defect, and 
 gives one an uncritical capacity for appreciating 
 certain sorts of merit. However this be, I can cer- 
 tainly read my mother-tongue ; and most English- 
 men — with, I should imagine, many Scots — will 
 agree with me in the wish that Burns, for all the 
 brilliant compromise between Scots and English 
 which is devised and done in Tarn o Shanter and 
 elsewhere, had never pretended to a mastery which 
 assuredlv he had not, nor in his conditions ever 
 could have had. 
 
 I have stressed this point because I wish to stress 
 another, and with a view to making clear, and to 
 setting in its proper perspective, the fact that, 
 genius apart, Burns was, no miracle but, a natural 
 development of circumstance and time. The fact 
 is patent enough to all but them that, for a super- 
 stition's sake, insist on ignoring history, and decline 
 to recognise the unchanging processes of natural 
 and social Law. Without the achievement of 
 vEschylus, there can be no such perfection as 
 Sophocles : just as, that perfection achieved, the 
 decline of Tragedy, as in Euripides, is but a matter 
 of time. But for the Middle Ages and the reaction 
 against the Middle Ages there could have been
 
 270 ROBERT BURNS 
 
 no Ronsard, no Rabelais, no Montaigne in France. 
 Had there been no Surrey and no Marlowe,, no 
 Chaucer and no Ovid (to name no more than 
 these in a hundred influences), who shall take on 
 himself to say the shape in which we now should 
 be privileged to regard the greatest artist that ever 
 expressed himself in speech ? It is in all depart- 
 ments of human energy as in the eternal round of 
 nature. There can be no birth where there is no 
 preparation. The sower must take his seedsheet, 
 and go afield into ground prepared for his minis- 
 trations ; or there can be no harvest. The Poet 
 springs from a compost of ideals and experiences 
 and achievements, whose essences he absorbs 
 and assimilates, and in whose absence he could 
 not be the Poet. This is especially true of Burns. 
 He was the last of a school. It culminated in 
 him, because he had more genius, and genius of 
 a finer, a rarer, and a more generous quality, than 
 all his immediate ancestors put together. But 
 he cannot fairly be said to have contributed any- 
 thing to it except himself. He invented none 
 of its forms; its spirit was not of his origin- 
 ating ; its ideals and standards of perfection were 
 discovered, and partly realised, by other men ; and 
 he had a certain timidity, as it were a faineantise, 
 in conception — a kind of unreadiness in initiative — 
 which makes him more largely dependent upon 
 his exemplars than any great poet has ever been. 
 Not only does he take whatever the Vernacular 
 School can give in such matters as tone, senti- 
 ment, method, diction, phrase ; but also, he is 
 content to run in debt to it for suggestions as
 
 ROBERT BURNS 271 
 
 regards ideas and for models in style. Hamilton 
 of Gilbertfield and Allan Ramsay conventionalise 
 the Rhymed Epistle ; and he accepts the conven- 
 tion as it left their hands, and produces epistles 
 in rhyme which are glorified Hamilton-Ramsay. 
 Fergusson writes Caller Water, and Leilh Races, 
 and The Farmer's Ingle, and Planeslanes and Causey, 
 and the Ode to the Gowdspink ; and he follows 
 suit with Scotch Drink, and the Saturday Night, 
 and The Holy Fair, and The Brigs of Ayr, and 
 the Mouse and the Mountain Daisy. Sempill of 
 Beltrees starts a tradition with The Piper of Kil- 
 barchan ; and his effect is plain in the elegies 
 on Tarn Samson and Poor Mailie. Ramsay sees 
 a Vision, and tinkers old, indecent songs, and 
 writes comic tales in glib octo-syllabics ; and in- 
 stinctively and naturally Burns does all three. 
 It is as though some touch of rivalry were needed 
 to put him on his mettle : l as though, instead of 
 writing and caring for himself alone — (as Keats and 
 Byron did, and Shelley : new men all, and founders 
 of dynasties, not final expressions of sovranty) — to 
 be himself he must still be emulous of some one 
 
 1 It was with 'emulating vigour' that he strung his 'wildly- 
 sounding rustic lyre ' ; and he read Ramsay and Fergusson not 
 'for servile imitation' but ' to kindle at their flame.' Another 
 instance, or rather another suggestion, from himself, and I have 
 done. It ' exalted,' it ' enraptured ' him ' to walk in the sheltered 
 side of a wood, or high plantation, in a cloudy winter day,' and 
 hear the wind roaring in the trees. Then was his ' best season for 
 devotion,' for then was his mind 'rapt up in a kind of enthusiasm to 
 Him who ..." walks on the wings of the wind." ' The ' rapture' 
 and the ' exaltation ' are but dimly and vaguely reflected in his 
 Winter. But if some ancestor had tried to express a kindred 
 feeling, then had Winter been a masterpiece.
 
 272 ROBERT BURNS 
 
 else. This is not written as a reproach : it is 
 stated as a fact. On the strength of that fact 
 one cannot choose but abate the old, fantastic 
 estimate of Burns's originality. But originality (to 
 which, by the way, he laid no claim) is but one 
 element in the intricately formed and subtly 
 ordered plexus, which is called genius ; and I 
 do not know that we need think any the less 
 of Burns for that it is not predominant in him. 
 Original or not, he had the Vernacular and its 
 methods at his fingers' ends. He wrote the heroic 
 couplet (on the Dryden-Pope convention) clumsily, 
 and without the faintest idea of what it had been in 
 Marlowe's hands, without the dimmest foreshadow- 
 ing of what it was presently to be in Keats' s ; he had 
 no skill in what is called ' blank verse ' — by which I 
 mean the metre in which Shakespeare triumphed, and 
 Milton after Shakespeare, and Thomson and Cowper, 
 each according to his lights, after Shakespeare and 
 Milton ; he was a kind of hob-nailed Gray in his use 
 of choric strophes and in his apprehension of the 
 ode. But he entered into the possession of such 
 artful and difficult stanzas as that of Montgomerie's 
 Banks of Helicon and his own favourite sextain as 
 an heir upon the ownership of an estate which he 
 has known in all its details since he could know 
 anything. It was fortunate for him and for his 
 book, as it was fortunate for the world at large — as, 
 too, it was afterwards to be fortunate for Scots 
 song — that he was thus imitative in kind and thus 
 traditional in practice. He had the sole ear of the 
 Vernacular Muse ; there was not a tool in her 
 budget of which he was not master ; and he took
 
 ROBERT BURNS 273 
 
 his place, the moment he moved for it, not so 
 much, perhaps, by reason of his uncommon capa- 
 city l as, because he discovered himself to his 
 public in the very terms — of diction, form, style, 
 sentiment even — with which that public was 
 familiar from of old, and in which it was waiting 
 and longing to be addressed. 
 
 It was at Mossgiel that the enormous possibilities 
 in Burns were revealed to Burns himself; and it 
 was at Mossgiel that he did nearly all his best and 
 strongest work. The revelation once made, he staved 
 not in his course, but wrote masterpiece after master- 
 piece, with a rapidity, an assurance, a command of 
 means, a brilliancy of effect, which make his achieve- 
 ment one of the most remarkable in English letters. 
 To them that can rejoice in the Vernacular his very 
 titles are enough to recall a little special world of 
 variety and character and delight : the world, in 
 fact, where you can take your choice among lyrical 
 gems like Corn Rigs and Green Grow the Rashes and 
 Mary Morison and masterpieces of satire like Holy 
 Willie and the Address io the Unco Guid. To this time 
 belong The Jolly Beggars and Halloween and The 
 Holy Fair; to this time the Louse and the Mouse, 
 the Auld Mare and the Tiva Dogs ; to this time, 
 
 1 In the same way Byron sold four or five editions of the English 
 Bards, because it was written on a convention which was as old 
 as Bishop Hall, and had been used by every satirist from the time 
 of that master down to Mathias and Giiford. If he had cast his 
 lihellus into the octaves of Don Juan, the strong presumption 
 is that it would have fallen still-born from the press. Other 
 cases in point are Blake, Wordsworth, Shelley, Keats, and 
 Browning : the manner of each was new, and not all have reached 
 the general yet. 
 
 VOL. IV. S
 
 274 ROBERT BURNS 
 
 Scotch Drink and the Address to the Deil, the Earnest 
 Cry and the Mountain Daisy, the Epistles to Smith 
 and Rankine and Sillar and Lapraik, the Elegies on 
 Tarn Samson and the never-to-be-forgotten Mailie, 
 the Reply to a Tailor and the Welcome and the Satur- 
 day Night. In some, as The Ordination, The Holy 
 Tulyie, and, despite an unrivalled and inimitable 
 picture of drunkenness, Hornbook itself, with others 
 in a greater or less degree, the interest, once you 
 have appreciated the technical quality as it deserves, 
 is very largely local and particular. 1 In others, 
 as the Saturday Night and The Vision (after the 
 first stanzas of description), it is also very largely 
 sentimental ; and in both these it is further 
 vitiated by the writer's 'falling to his English,' 
 to a purpose not exhilarating to the student of 
 Shakespeare and Milton and Herrick. But all 
 this notwithstanding, and notwithstanding quite a 
 little crowd of careless rhymes, the level of excel- 
 lence is one that none but the born great writer 
 can maintain. Bold, graphic, variable, expressive, 
 packed with observations and ideas, the phrases go 
 ringing and glittering on through verse after verse, 
 through stave after stave, through poem after poem, 
 in a way that makes the reading of this peasant a 
 
 1 There is a sense in which the most are local— are parochial even. 
 In Holy Willie itself the type is not merely the Scots Calvinistic 
 pharisec : it is a particular expression of that type ; the thing is a 
 local satire introducing the ' kail and potatoes ' of a local scandal. 
 Take, too, The Holy Fair : the circumstances, the manners, the 
 characters, the experience— all are local. Apply the test to 
 almost any— not forgetting the Tarn o' Sfianter which is the top 
 of Burns's achievement— and the result is the same.
 
 ROBERT BURNS 275 
 
 peculiar pleasure for the student of style. 1 And 
 if, with an eye for words and effects in words, that 
 student have also the faculty of laughter, then are 
 his admiration and his pleasure multiplied ten-fold. 
 For the master-quality of Burns, the quality which 
 has gone, and will ever go, the furthest to make him 
 universally and perennially acceptable — acceptable 
 in Melbourne (say) a hundred years hence as in 
 Mauchline a hundred years syne — is humour. His 
 sentiment is sometimes strained, obvious, and 
 deliberate — as might be expected of the poet who 
 foundered two pocket-copies of that very silly 
 and disgusting book, The Man of Feeling ; and it 
 
 1 It is not, remember, for 'the love of lovely words,' not for 
 such perfections of human utterance as abound in Shakespeare: — 
 
 ' Gilding pale streams with heavenly alchemy ' : — 
 in Milton : — 
 
 ' Now to the moon in wavering morrice move ' : — 
 in Keats : — 
 
 ' And hides the green hill in an April shroud ' : — 
 in Herrick : — 
 
 ' Ye have been fresh and green, 
 Ye have been filled with flowers, 
 And ye the walks have been 
 
 "Where maids have spent their hours ' : — 
 
 that we revert to Burns. Felicities he has — felicities innumer- 
 able ; but his forebears set themselves to be humorous, racy, 
 natural, and he could not choose but follow their lead. Th 
 Colloquial triumphs in his verse as nowhere outside the Vision 
 and Don Juan ; but for Beauty we must go elsewhither. He has 
 all manner of qualities : wit, fancy, vision of a kind, nature, gaiety, 
 the richest humour, a sort of homespun verbal magic. But, if we 
 be in quest of Beauty, we must e'en ignore him, and ' fall to our 
 English ' : of whose secrets, as I 've said, he never so much as 
 suspected the existence, and whose supreme capacities were sealed 
 from him until the end.
 
 276 ROBERT BURNS 
 
 often rings a little false, as in much of the Saturday 
 Night. But his humour — broad, rich, prevailing, 
 now lascivious or gargantuan and now fanciful 
 or jocose, now satirical and brutal and now in- 
 stinct with sympathy, is ever irresistible. Holy 
 Willie is much more vigorously alive in London, 
 and Sydney, and Cape Town to-day than poor 
 drunken old Will Fisher was in the Mauchline of 
 1785. That ' pagan full of pride,' the vigilant, tricksy, 
 truculent, familiar, true-blue Devil lives ever in 
 Burns's part pitying and fanciful, part humorous 
 and controversial presentment ; but he has long 
 since faded out of his strongholds in the Kirk : — 
 
 1 But fare-ye-weel, Auld Nickie-Ben, 
 O, wad ye tak' a thocht, an' men', 
 Ye aiblins micht — I dinna ken — 
 
 Still liae a stake ! 
 I 'm wae to think upon yon den, 
 
 Ev'n for your sake.' 
 
 Lockhart, ever the true Son of the Manse, was so 
 misguided — so mansified, to coin a word — as to wish 
 that Burns had written a Holy Fair in the spirit and 
 to the purpose of The Cotter's Saturday Night. But 
 the bright, distinguishing qualities of The Holy Fair 
 are humour and experience and sincerity ; the 
 intent of the Saturday Night is idyllic and senti- 
 mental, as its effect is laboured and unreal ; and I, 
 for my part, would not give my Holy Fair, still 
 less my Halloween or my Jolly Beggars — observed, 
 selected, excellently reported — for a wilderness of 
 Saturday Nights. It is not hard to understand that 
 (given the prcstance of its author) the Saturday Night
 
 ROBERT BURNS 277 
 
 was doomed to popularity from the first : a being of 
 its essence sentimental and therefore pleasingly un- 
 true, and being, also of its essence, patriotic — an 
 assertion of the honour and the glory and the piety 
 of Scotland. But that any one with an eye for fact 
 and an ear for verse should prefer its tenuity of 
 inspiration and its poverty of rhythm and diction 
 before the sincere and abounding humour and the 
 notable mastery of means, before the plenitude of 
 life and the complete accord of design and effect, 
 by which Halloween, and The Holy Fair, and nine- 
 tenths of the early pieces in the Vernacular are 
 distinguished, appears inexplicable. In these Burns 
 is an artist and a poet : in the Saturday Night he 
 is neither one nor other. In these, and in Tarn 
 o' Shanter, the Scots School culminates : as English 
 Drama, with lyrical and elegiac English, culminates 
 in Othello and the Sonnets, in Antony and Cleopatra 
 and the Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece : more 
 gloriously far than the world would ever have 
 wagered on its beginnings. It is the most indi- 
 vidual asset in the heritage bequeathed by ' the 
 Bard ' ; and still more, perhaps,' 2 than the Songs, 
 
 1 And such popularity! 'Poosie Nansie's' — (thus writes a 
 friend, even as these sheets are passing through the press) — 'or 
 rather a house on the site of Poosie Nansie's, is, as j r ou know, 
 still a tavern. There is a large room (for parties) at the back. 
 And what, think you, is the poem that, printed and framed and 
 glazed, is hung in the place of honour on its walls ? " The Jolly 
 Beggars — naturally ? " Not a bit of it. The Cotter's Saturday 
 Night ! Surrounded, too, by engravings depicting its choicest 
 moments and its most affecting scenes.' 
 
 2 I say, ' perhaps, ' because Burns, among the general at least, 
 is better sung than read. But if the Songs, his own and those 
 which are effects of a collaboration, be the more national, the
 
 278 ROBERT BURNS 
 
 it stamps and keeps him the National Poet. The 
 world it pictures — the world of ' Scotch morals, 
 Scotch Religion, and Scotch drink ' — may be ugly 
 or not (as refracted through his temperament, 
 it is not). Ugly or not, however, it was the world 
 of Burns ; to paint it was part of his mission ; it 
 lives for us in his pictures ; and many such attempts 
 at reconstruction as The Earthly Paradise and The 
 Idylls of the King will ' fade far away, dissolve/ and 
 be quite forgotten, ere these pictures disfeature or 
 dislimn. He had the good sense to concern himself 
 with the life he knew. The way of realism x lay 
 
 Poems are the greater, and it is chiefly to the Poems that Burns 
 is indebted for his place in literature. 
 
 1 It is claimed for him, with perfect truth, that he went straight 
 to Nature. But the Vernacular makers seldom did anjthing else. 
 An intense and abiding consciousness of the common circum- 
 stances of life was ever the distinguishing note of Scots Poetry. 
 It thrills through Henryson, through Dunbar and the Douglas of 
 certain ' Prolougs ' to Eneados, through Lindsay and Scott, 
 through the nameless lyrist of Peeblis at the Play and Christ's 
 Kirk on the Green, through much of The Bannatyne MS., the 
 Sempill of the Tulchene Bischope, the Montgomerie of the 
 Flyting with Polwarth and of certain sonnets : — 
 
 ' Raw reid herring reistit in the reik.' 
 
 It is even audible in the Guid and Godlie Ballats ; and after the 
 silence it is heard anew in the verse which was made despite the 
 Kirk, and in the verse which proceeded from that verse — the 
 verse, that is, of Ramsay and Fergusson and Burns. This vivid 
 and curious interest in facts is, as I think, a characteristic of the 
 'perfervid ingyne.' Compare, for instance, Pitscottie and Knox 
 on the murder of Cardinal Beaton. The one is something naive, 
 the other as it were Shakespearean ; but in both the element 
 of particularity is vital to the complete effect. These are two 
 instances only ; but I could easily give two hundred. (See jiost 
 p. 323, Note 1.) To return to Burns and his treatment of 
 weather (say) and landscape. His verse is full of realities : —
 
 ROBERT BURNS 279 
 
 broad-beaten by his ancestors, and was natural to 
 his feet ; he followed it with vision, with humour, 
 with ' inspiration and sympathy,' and with art ; 
 and in the sequel he is found to have a place of his 
 own in the first flight of English poets after Milton, 
 Chaucer, Shakespeare. 
 
 I take it that Burns was not more multifarious in 
 his loves than most others in whom the primordial 
 instinct is of peculiar strength. But it was written 
 that English literature — the literature of Chaucer, 
 Shakespeare, Fielding — should be turned into a 
 kind of schoolgirls' playground ; so that careful 
 Editors have done their best to make him even as 
 themselves, and to fit him with a suit of practical 
 and literary morals, which, if his own verse and 
 prose mean anything, he would have refused, with 
 all the contumely of which his ' Carrick lips ' were 
 
 ' When lyart leaves bestrow the yird, 
 Or, wavering like the bauckie-bird, 
 
 Bedim cauld Boreas' blast ; 
 When hailstanes drive wi' bitter skyte. . . .' 
 'The burn stealing under the lang, yellow broom. . . .' 
 'When, tumbling brown, the burn comes down. . . .' 
 'The speedy gleams the darkness swallowed. . . .' 
 ' Yon murky cloud is foul with rain. . . .' 
 'November chill blaws loud wi' angry sugh' :— 
 
 all exactly noted and vividly recorded (a very instructive instance 
 is the 'burnie' stanza in Halloween; for he had, they say, a 
 peculiar delight in running water). But for great, imaginative 
 impressions : — 
 
 ' Those green-robed senators of mighty woods, 
 Tall oaks branch-charmed by the earnest stars' :— 
 you turn to other books than his.
 
 280 ROBERT BURNS 
 
 capable, to wear. Nothing has exercised their in- 
 genuity, their talent for chronology, their capacity 
 for invention (even), so vigorously as the task of 
 squaring their theory of Burns with the story of 
 his marriage and the legend of his Highland Lassie. 
 Now is the moment to deal with both. 
 
 Elizabeth Paton's child was born in the November 
 of 1784. In the April of that year, a few weeks 
 after the general settlement at Mossgiel, he made 
 the acquaintance of Armour the mason's daughter, 
 Jean. She was a handsome, lively girl ; the 
 acquaintance ripened into love on both sides ; and 
 in the end, after what dates approve a prolonged 
 and serious courtship, Armour fell with child. 
 Her condition being discovered, Burns, after some 
 strong revulsions of feeling against — not Jean, I 
 hope, but — the estate of marriage, gave her what 
 he presently had every reason to call 'an unlucky 
 paper,' recognising her as his wife ; and, had things 
 been allowed to drift in the usual way, the world 
 had lacked an unforgotten scandal and a great 
 deal of silly writing. This, though, was not to be. 
 Old Armour — ( f a bit mason body, who used to 
 snuff a guid deal, and gey af 'en tak' a bit dram ') 
 — is said to have 'hated' Burns : so that he would 
 'reyther hae seen the Deil himsel' comin' to the 
 hoose to coort his dochter than him.' Thus a 
 contemporary of both Armour and Burns ; and in 
 any case Armour knew Burns for a needy and reck- 
 less man, the father of one by-blow, a rebel at 
 odds with the Orthodox, of whom, in existing 
 circumstances, it would be vain to ask a comfort- 
 able living. So he first obliged Jean to give up
 
 ROBERT BURNS 281 
 
 the ' unlucky paper,' with a view to unmaking any 
 engagement it might confirm, 1 and then sent her 
 to Paisley, to he out of her lover's way. In the 
 meanwhile Bui-ns himself was in straits, and had 
 half-a-dozen designs in hand at once. Mossgiel 
 was a failure ; he had resolved to deport him- 
 self to the West Indies; he had made up his 
 mind to print, and the Kilmarnock Edition was 
 setting, when Jean was sent into exile. Worst of 
 all, he seems to have been not very sure whether 
 he loved or not. When he knew that he and she 
 had not eluded the Inevitable, he wrote to James 
 Smith that 'against two things — staying at home 
 and owning her conjugally ' — he was ' fixed as fate.' 
 ' The first,' he says, ' by heaven I will not do ! ' Then, 
 in a burst of Don-Juanism — Don-Juanism of the 
 kind that protests too much to be real — 'the last, 
 by hell I will never do.' Follows a gush of senti- 
 mentalism (to Smith), which is part nerves and part 
 an attempt — as the run on the g's and the tv's shows 
 — at literature : — ' A good God bless you, and make 
 you happy, up to the warmest weeping wish of part- 
 ing friendship.' And this is succeeded by a message 
 to the poor, pregnant creature, of whom, but two 
 lines before, he has sworn ' by hell ' that he will 
 never make her honest : — ' If you see Jean, tell her 
 
 1 I take it that the paper was 'unluck}',' because it became a 
 weapon in old Armour's hands, and was the means of inflicting on 
 the writer the worst and the most painful experience of his life. 
 At the same time there seems to be no doubt that it made Jean 
 Mrs. Burns, so that, consciously or not, Auld (who probably had 
 a strong objection to the marriage) was guilty of an illegal act in 
 certifying Burns a bachelor. Burns, in fact, was completely 
 justified in his anger with the Kirk and in the scorn with which 
 he visited the tyranny of her ministers.
 
 282 ROBERT BURNS 
 
 I will meet her, so help me God in my hour of 
 need.' This scrap is undated, but it must have 
 been written before 17th February 1786, when he 
 wrote thus to Richmond : — ' I am extremely happy 
 with Smith ; he is the only friend I have now in 
 Mauchline.' Well, he does meet Jean; and, his better 
 nature getting the upper hand, the ' unlucky paper' 
 is written. Then on the 20th March he writes 
 thus to Muir : — ' I intend to have a gill between us 
 or a mutchkin stoup,' for the reason that it ' will 
 be a great comfort and consolation ' : — which seems to 
 show that Jean has repudiated him some time be- 
 tween the two letters. Before the 2nd April, on 
 which day the Kirk-Session takes cognisance of the 
 matter, Jean has gone to Paisley ; the ' unlucky 
 paper' is cancelled (apparently about the 14th 
 April, the names were cut out with a penknife) ; 
 so that Don Juan finds himself plante-la, and being 
 not really Don Juan — (as what sentimentalist could 
 be ?) — he does not affect Don Juan any more. The 
 prey has turned upon the hunter; the deserter 
 becomes the deserted, the privilege of repudiation, 
 ' by hell ' or otherwise, has passed to the other 
 side. The man's pride, inordinate for a peasant, 
 is cut to the quick ; and his unrivalled capacity 
 for ' battering himself into an affection ' or a mood 
 has a really notable opportunity for display. In 
 love before, he is ten times more in love than ever; 
 he feels his loss to desperation ; he becomes the 
 disappointed lover — even the true-souled, generous, 
 adoring victim of a jilt : — 
 
 ( A jillet brak his heart at last 
 That's owre the sea.'
 
 ROBERT BURNS 283 
 
 In effect, his position was sufficiently distracting. 
 He had made oath that he would not marry Jean ; 
 then he had practically married her ; then he found 
 that nobody wanted her married to him — that, on 
 the contrary, he was the most absolute ' detrimental ' 
 in all Ayrshire ; when, of course, the marriage be- 
 came the one thing that made his life worth living. 
 He tried to persuade old Armour to think better of 
 his resolve ; and, failing, ran ' nine parts and nine 
 tenths out of ten stark staring mad.' Also he 
 wrote the Lament, in which he told his sorrows to 
 the moon x (duly addressing that satellite as ' O 
 thou pale Orb '), and took her publicly into his 
 confidence, in the beautiful language of Eighteenth 
 Century English Poetry, and painted what is in the 
 circumstances a really creditable picture of the 
 effects upon a simple Bard of f a faithless woman's 
 broken vow.' Further, he produced Despondency in 
 the same elegant lingo ; and, in Despondency , having 
 called for ' the closing tomb,' and pleasingly praised 
 'the Solitary's lot,' — 
 
 ' Who, all-forgetting, all-forgot 
 
 Within his humble cell — 
 The cavern, wild with tangling roots — 
 Sits o'er his newly gathered fruits, 
 
 Beside his crystal well ! ' etc. — 
 
 he addressed himself to Youth and Infancy in these 
 affecting terms : — 
 
 1 Is it worth noting that, later, when he comes to sing of 
 Mary Campbell, his confidant is no longer the Moon but the 
 Morning Star ?
 
 284 ROBERT BURNS 
 
 ' O enviable early days, 
 When dancing thoughtless Pleasure's maze, 
 
 To care, to guilt unknown ! 
 How ill exchang'd for riper times, 
 To feel the follies or the crimes 
 
 Of others, or my own ! 
 Ye tiny elves that guiltless sport, 
 
 Like linnets in the bush, 
 Ye little know the ills ye court, 
 When manhood is your wish ! 
 The losses, the crosses 
 
 That active man engage ; 
 The fears all, the tears all 
 Of dim declining Age ! ' 1 
 
 Moreover, he took occasion to refer to Jean (to 
 David Brice; 12th June 1786) as 'poor, ill-advised, 
 ungrateful Armour ' ; vowed that he could ' have 
 no nearer idea of the place of eternal punishment ' 
 than f what I have felt in my own breast on her 
 
 1 I cannot attach any great importance to these exercises in 
 Poetic English. Burns wrote to a very different purpose when 
 he wrote from his heart and in his native tongue : — 
 
 ' Had we never loved sae kindly . . .' 
 ' Of a' the airts the wind can blaw 
 I dearly like the west ' :— 
 
 and so on, and so on. Still, there can be no doubt that they 
 mean something. At any rate they are designed to be impressive 
 and 'fine' ; and probably the Bard believed in them to the extent 
 to which he was satisfied with his achievement in what must cer- 
 tainly have seemed to him real poetry. None of your Vernacular 
 (that is), but downright, solid, unmistakable English Verse : verse 
 which might stand beside the works of Beattie and Shenstone and 
 Thomson and the 'elegantly melting Gray.' That life departed 
 them long since is plain. But it is just as plain that they meant 
 something to Burns, for (apparently) he took much pains with 
 them, saw not their humorous aspect, and included them in his 
 first (Kilmarnock) Volume.
 
 ROBERT BURNS 285 
 
 account ' ; and finally confessed himself to this pur- 
 pose: — ' I have tried often to forget her: I have run 
 into all kinds of dissipation and riot ... to drive her 
 out of my head, but all in vain.' Long before this, 
 however — as early, it would seem, as some time in 
 March — his ' maddening passions, roused to tenfold 
 fury,' having done all sorts of dreadful things, and 
 then 'sunk into a lurid calm,' he had 'subsided into 
 the time-settled sorrow of the sable widower,' and 
 had lifted his ' grief-worn eye to look for — another 
 wife.' In other words, he had pined for female 
 society, and had embarked upon those famous love- 
 passages with Highland Mary. 
 
 Little that is positive is known of Mary Campbell 
 except that she once possessed a copy of the 
 Scriptures (now very piously preserved at Ayr), and 
 that she is the subject of a fantasy, in bronze, 
 at Dunoon. But to consider her story is, almost 
 inevitably, to be forced back upon one of two 
 conclusions: — either (1) she was something of a 
 lightskirts ; or (2) she is a kind of Scottish Mrs. 
 Harris. The theory in general acceptance — what 
 is called the Episode Theory — is that she was 'an 
 innocent and gentle Highland nursery-maid ' (thus, 
 after Chambers, R. L. S.) 'in the service of a neigh- 
 bouring family ' (Gavin Hamilton's) ; that she con- 
 soled Burns — mats •pour le bon motif- — for Jean's de- 
 sertion ; that they agreed to marry ; that, on her 
 departure for the West to prepare for the event, 
 ' Ayr, gurgling, kissed his pebbled shore,' and they 
 exchanged vows and Bibles ; and that she died, of a 
 malignant fever, some few months after her return to 
 Greenock. Another identifies her (on Richmond's
 
 286 ROBERT BURNS 
 
 authority) with a serving-maid in Mauchline, who 
 was the mistress of a Montgomerie, and had withal 
 such a hold upon Burns that for a brief while he was 
 crazy to make her his wife ; and some have thought 
 that this may be the Maiy Campbell who, according 
 to the Dundonald Session Records, fathered a child 
 on one John Hay. This last hypothesis is, of course, 
 most hateful to the puzzle-headed puritans who can- 
 not, or will not, believe, despite the fact that the 
 world has always teemed with Antonies, each of 
 them mad for his peculiar Cleopatra, that Burns, 
 particularly in his present straits, might very well 
 have been enamoured of a gay girl to the point of 
 marriage. So, for the consolation of these, there 
 has been devised a third, according to which her 
 name was either Mary Campbell or something un- 
 known ; but, whatever she was called, she was so 
 far and away the purest and sweetest of her sex 
 — the one 'white rose,' in fact, which grew up 
 among ' the passion flowers ' of the Bard's cai'eer 
 — that she must, had she married him, have en- 
 tirely ' rectified ' his character, and have trans- 
 formed him into a pattern Kirk-of-Scotland puritan 
 of the puritans. On the other hand, it has be- 
 come obvious to some whole-hearted devotees of 
 the Marian Ideal that a ' young person ' of this sort 
 could scarce have been of so coming a habit as 
 to skip with alacrity into Jean's old shoes, and — 
 shutting her innocent eyes to the fact that Burns, 
 a man notoriously at war with the Kirk and the 
 seducer of two unmarried women, was at the same 
 time at his wits' end for cash — consent to cast in 
 her lot with his at a moment's notice and with
 
 ROBERT BURNS 287 
 
 never a sign from the family she was to enter. If 
 she could do that, plainly she could not, except on 
 strong positive testimony, be made to do duty as a 
 white rose among passion-flowers ; or if, on some 
 unknown and inenarrable hypothesis, she could, 
 then, says one of the devout, 'the conduct of Burns 
 was that of a scoundrel.' This is absurd ! So of 
 late (1896-97) there has come into being a wish 
 to believe that either Mary Campbell preceded 
 Armour in the Bard's affections, or the Highland 
 Lassie never existed at all, but was a creature of 
 Burns's brain : an ideal of womanhood to which his 
 thought ascended from the mire of this world — (the 
 world of Ellisland, and Jean, and the children, and 
 the songs in Johnson's Musetmi) — as Dante's to his 
 Beatrice of dream. Given Burns's own habit and 
 the habit of the Scots peasant woman, there is 
 still no earthly reason for rejecting the Episode 
 Theory — even were rejection possible — however 
 seriously it reflect upon the morals of the parties con- 
 cerned. But it is fair to add that the subject is both 
 complicated and obscure. Burns's own references 
 to his Highland Lassie are deliberately insignificant 
 and vague : for once in his life he was reticent. His 
 statement that she went home to prepare for their 
 marriage is heavily discounted by the fact that he did 
 not introduce her to his family as his betrothed, in 
 nowise prepared for marriage on his own account, 
 never dreamed, except in sporadic copies of verse, 
 of taking her to the West Indies, and was all the 
 while so desperately enamoured of Jean that not 
 by any amount of self-indulgence could he rid his 
 breast of her : by the fact, too, that, if his thought
 
 288 ROBERT BURNS 
 
 went back to the Highland Lassie in after years, his 
 report of the journey is strongly tinctured with 
 remorse. 1 Currie's statement is that ' the banks of 
 Ayr formed the scene of youthful passions . . . the 
 history of which it would be improper to reveal/ etc. 
 Gilbert Burns, after noting that Nanie Fleming's 
 charms were ' sexual ' — ' which indeed was the 
 characteristic of the greater part of his (Robert's) 
 mistresses ' — is careful, perhaps with an eye on the 
 heroine of Thou Ling'ring Star, to record the state- 
 ment that Robert, at least, ' was no platonic lover, 
 whatever he might pretend or suppose of himself to 
 the contrary.' There is Richmond's statement, as 
 reported by Train. There is the Mary Campbell of 
 the Dundonald Register. There is the certainty 
 that relations there were between Burns and a Mary 
 Campbell. There is the strong probability that Mary 
 Campbell and the Highland Lassie were one and 
 the same person. There is Burns' s own witness to 
 the circumstance that they met and parted under 
 extremely suspicious conditions. That, really, is 
 all. Yet, on the strength of a romantic impulse on 
 the part of Robert Chambers, the heroine-in-chief 
 of Burns's story is not the loyal and patient soul 
 whom he appreciated as the fittest to be his wife 
 he 'd ever met : not the Jean who endured his 
 affronts, and mothered his children (her own and 
 another's), and took the rough and the smooth, 
 
 1 He sent Thou Lingering Star to Mrs. Dunlop in a letter 
 dated 8th November 1789. In acknowledging it, the lady noted 
 its remorseful cast, and hoped it didn't set forth a personal ex- 
 perience. There is nothing to show that he gave her any par- 
 ticulars, or essayed to disabuse her of the idea that remorse there 
 well might be.
 
 ROBERT BURNS 289 
 
 the best and the worst of life with him, and wore 
 his name for well-nigh forty years after his death 
 as her sole title to regard. On the contrary, that 
 heroine-in-chief is a girl of whom scarce anything 
 definite is known, while what may be reasonably 
 suspected of her, though natural and feminine 
 enough, is so displeasing to some fanatics, that, for 
 Burns's sake (not hers) they would like to mytho- 
 logise her out of being ; or, at the least, to make 
 her as arrant an impossibility as the tame, proper, 
 figmentary Burns, the coinage of their own tame, 
 proper brains, which they have done their best to 
 substitute for the lewd, amazing peasant of genius, 1 
 the inspired faun, whose voice has gone ringing 
 through the courts of Time these hundred years 
 and more, and is far louder and far clearer now than 
 when it first broke on the ear of man. 
 
 Stevenson was an acute and delicate critic at 
 many points; but he wrote like a novelist — like 
 Thackeray, say, of Fielding and Sterne — when he 
 wrote of Armour as a ' facile and empty-headed 
 girl,' and insisted, still possessed by Chambers's 
 vain imaginings, that she was first and last in love 
 with another man. In truth the facility was on 
 the other side. In 1784 Burns is willing to marry 
 Betty Paton, and writes thus to Thomas Orr : — ' I 
 am very glad Peggy [Thomson] is off my hand, 
 as I am at present embarrassed enough without her.' 
 In 1785 he is courting Jean Armour, and very early 
 in 1786 Jean is in the family way, and ' by hell ' she 
 shall never be his wife. But some time in March 
 
 1 'Peculiarly like nobody else' (R. B. toArnot, April 1786). 
 VOL. IV. T
 
 290 ROBERT BURNS 
 
 Jean is sent to Paisley ; and the ' maddening 
 passions/ etc., set to work ; and he can no more ' se 
 consoler de son depart ' than Calypso could for that 
 of Ulysses. So in a hand's turn he becomes the 
 stricken deer, and, as we have seen, protests (to the 
 Moon) that to marry Jean, and wear ' The promised 
 father's tender name ' are his sole ambitions. As 
 Jean does not return, however, he seeks (and finds) 
 such comfort as he may in exchanging vows and 
 Bibles and what Chamfort called ' fantaisies ' with 
 Mary Campbell. On the 12th- 13th May he writes 
 The Court of Equity — a task the strangest con- 
 ceivable for a lover, whether rejoicing or distraught. 
 On the 14th ' Ayr gurgling kisses his pebbled 
 shore,' and ' The flowers spring wanton to be 
 pressed,' and Highland Mary leaves for the West 
 to make these famous preparations. On the 15th 
 May he dates (at least) the Epistle to a Young 
 Friend : — 
 
 ' The sacred lowe o' weel-placed love 
 Luxuriantly indulge it/ etc. :— 
 
 and, as for some time past, he is still the gallant, 
 howbeit in jest, of Betty Miller : till on the 9th June 
 ' poor ill-advised Armour ' returns to Mauchline ; 
 and on the 12th he writes that 'for all her part in a 
 certain black affair' he 'still loves her to distraction/ 
 and, with a view to forgetting her has ' run into all 
 kinds of dissipation and riot . . . but in vain.' On 
 the 2Sth June he appears before ' the Poacher 
 Court/ acknowledges paternity, and is ' promised a 
 certificate as a single man ' : on condition that he 
 do penance before the congregation on three suc- 
 cessive Sundays. On the 9th July, the occasion
 
 ROBERT BURNS 2<)1 
 
 of his first appearance, he has ' a foolish hankering 
 fondness' for Jean, but, calling on her and being 
 put to the door, he remarks that she does not ' show 
 that penitence that might have been expected '; so, 
 on the 22nd, he executes a deed by which he 
 makes over all his property to the ' wee image of 
 his bonie Betty,' to the exclusion of whatever 
 might come of his affair with the recusant. Then, 
 on the 30th (old Armour having, meanwhile, got a 
 warrant against him, and sent him into hiding l ), he 
 adjures Richmond — (who, he knows, will ' pour an 
 execration' on Jean's head) — to ' spare the poor, 
 ill-advised girl for my sake ' ; and on the 14th 
 August he calls on Heaven to < bless the Sex/ for 
 that ' I feel there is still happiness for me among 
 them.' Against this panorama of tumult and 
 variety and adventure, enlarged in Edinburgh, and 
 enriched at Ellisland and in Dumfries, there are to 
 set the years of simple abnegation, magnanimity, 
 and devotion with which the 'facile and empty- 
 headed girl' repaid the husband of her choice. 
 The conclusion is obvious. The Novelist turned 
 Critic is still the Novelist. Consciously or not, he 
 develops preferences, for, consciously or not, he 
 must still create. 2 Stevenson's preferences were 
 
 1 No doubt ho retired on information sent by Jean. 
 
 2 Thus Stevenson, who himself liked 'dressing a part' (so to 
 speak), was persuaded that Burns did likewise, and accepted bodily 
 that absurd, fantastic story (told by two Englishmen), in which 
 the Bard, in a fox-skin cap and an enormous coat, and girt with 
 a Highland broadsword, is seen angling from a Nithside rock. 
 Jean denied it, and said that Robert (who hated field-sports, as 
 we know) never angled in his life. But the Novelist was roused ; 
 and all that was ignored.
 
 292 ROBERT BURNS 
 
 with Rab Mossgiel. And the result was a grave — 
 but not, I hope, a lasting — injustice to an excellent 
 and very womanly woman and a model wife. 1 
 
 As to Highland Mary, one of two conclusions : 
 (1) Either she was a paragon; or (2) she was not. 
 In the first case, her story has yet to be written, 
 and written on evidence that is positive and irre- 
 futable. In the second, the bronze at Dunoon 
 bears abiding witness to the existence (at a certain 
 time) of what can only be described as a national 
 delusion. 
 
 VI 
 
 By this time the end of Mauchline, and of much 
 besides, was nearer than Burns knew. Probably sent 
 to press in the May of 1786, the Kilmarnock Volume 
 was published at the end of July. 2 Most of, if not 
 
 1 On the 3rd September Jean lay in of twins. They were 
 presently taken by their respective grandmothers, to whom, I 
 doubt not, they gave great i'oy: as in that and other stages of 
 society the appearance of the third generation, whether its right to 
 exist be legal or not, does always. Burns announced the event 
 as only Burns could, by sending Nature's Law : — 
 
 ' Kind Nature's care had given him share 
 Large of the flaming current,' etc.: — 
 
 to Gavin Hamilton ; a ' God bless the little dears ' ; with a snatch 
 of indecent song, to Richmond, and a really heartfelt and affect- 
 ing bit of prose on the subject of paternity to Robert Muir. 
 
 2 One effect of its publication was to secure him the friendship 
 of Mrs. Dunlop (ii. 352-3). It is evident from this lady's letters 
 that her interest in him could scarce have been warmer had he 
 been her son. She prized his correspondence as beyond rubies, 
 and as a rule he was slower to reply than she (once, being hurt 
 by his silence, she told him she wouldn't write again till he asked
 
 ROBERT BURNS 293 
 
 all, the numbers contained in it were probably 
 familiar to the countryside. Some had certainly 
 been received with 'a roar of applause'; Burns, 
 who was not the man to hide his light under a 
 bushel (his temperament was too radiant and too 
 vigorous for that), was given to multiplying his 
 verses in Ms. copies for friends; he had been 'read 
 into fame ' by Aiken the lawyer : so that Poems, 
 Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect was, in a sense, as 
 ' well advertised ' as book could be. Its triumph 
 was not less instant than well-deserved : l the first 
 issue, six hundred copies strong, was exhausted 
 in a month ('tis said that not one could be spared 
 for Mossgiel). But Burns himself, according to 
 himself, and he was ever punctiliously exact and 
 scrupulous on the score of money, was but £20 in 
 
 her, and, failing to draw him, within a week she is found begging 
 his pardon for her petulance). She made him many gifts — 
 apparently in money and in kind — gifts at New Year and other 
 times, and accepted gifts from him (once he sent her a keg of old 
 brandy). Her influence made ever for decency, and it may well 
 have been on her remonstrances, which were strong, that he 
 finally resolved to remove some of the coarser phrases in his 
 earlier editions. Her last (extant) letter is dated 11th January 
 1795. For some unexplained reasons she ceased from writing 
 several months before the January of 1796. It may have been 
 that she heard of him as often in drink, or that she was told of the 
 affair at Woodley Park. In any case she esteemed him so highly, 
 and admired him so lavishly, that 'tis quite impossible to believe 
 the breach in the correspondence due to any fault of hers. 
 
 1 'Old and young,' says Heron, 'high and low, grave and gay, 
 learned or ignorant, all were alike delighted, agitated, transported. 
 I was at that time resident in Galloway, contiguous to Ayrshire : 
 and I can well remember, how that even the plough-boys and 
 maid-servants would have gladly bestowed the wages which they 
 earned the most hardly, and which they wanted to purchase 
 necessary clothing, if they might but secure the works of Burns.'
 
 294 ROBERT BURNS 
 
 pocket by it ; the Kilmarnock printer declined to 
 strike off a second impression, with additions, unless 
 he got the price of the paper (£27) in advance ; and 
 for some time it seemed that there was nothing but 
 Jamaica for the writer, Local Bard and Local Hero 
 though he were : so that he looked to have sailed in 
 mid- August, and again on the 1st September, and 
 at some indeterminate date had ' conveyed his chest 
 thus far on the road to Greenock,' and written that 
 solemn and moving song — far and away the best, I 
 think, and the sincerest thing he left in English 
 — The Gloomy Night is Gathering Fast. It was to be 
 the 'last effort' of his 'Muse in Caledonia.' But, 
 for one or another reason, his departure was ever 
 deferred ; and, though on the 30th October (some 
 ten days, it is surmised, after the death of Mary 
 Campbell), he was still writing that, ' ance to the 
 Indies he was wonted,' he 'd certainly contrive to 
 ' mak' the best o' life Wi' some sweet elf,' on the 
 18th November, 'I am thinking for my Edinburgh 
 expedition on Monday or Tuesday come s'ennight.' 
 In effect, an ' Edinburgh expedition ' was natural 
 and inevitable. Ballantine of Ayr is said to have 
 suggested the idea of such an adventure ; Gilbert 
 and the family are said to have applauded it. But 
 as early as the 4th September the excellent Black- 
 lock — (in ' a letter to a friend of mine which over- 
 threw all my schemes') — had called — 'for the sake 
 of the young man ' — for a second edition, ' more 
 numerous than the former ' : inasmuch as ' it appears 
 certain that its intrinsic merit, and the exertions of 
 the author's friends, might give it a more universal 
 circulation than anything of the kind which has
 
 ROBERT BURNS 295 
 
 been published within my memory.' Thus Black- 
 lock ; and the ' friend of mine,' which was Lawrie, 
 the minister of Loudoun, had communicated Black- 
 lock's letter to the person most concerned in 
 Blacklock's suggestion. Bold, proud, intelligent au 
 •possible, strongly possessed too (so he says, and so I 
 believe) by the genius of paternity, Burns the Man, 
 who had a very becoming opinion of Burns the 
 Bard, and could fairly appreciate that worthy's 
 merits, must certainly have seen that in Edinburgh 
 he had many chances of succeeding at the very 
 point where the Kilmarnock printer failed him. 
 I do not doubt, either, that he was tired of being 
 the Local Poet, the Local Satirist, the Local Wit, 
 the Local Lothario (even), and eager to essay 
 himself on another and a vaster stage than Mauch- 
 line ; for, if he hadn't been thus tired and thus 
 eager, he wouldn't have been Robert Burns. The 
 fighting spirit, the genius of emulation, is so strong 
 in us all that a man of temperament and brains 
 must assert himself, and get accepted at his own 
 (or another) valuation, exactly as a cock must 
 crow. And I love to believe that Burns, being 
 immitigably of this metal, entered upon his adven- 
 ture — (27th November : on a borrowed nag, with 
 not much money, a letter of introduction to Dal- 
 rymple of Orangefield, and a visiting list consisting 
 entirely in Dugald Stewart and Richmond the 
 lawyer's clerk) — with the joyous heart and the stiff 
 neck of one who knows himself a man among men, 
 and whose chief ambition is to ' drink delight of 
 battle with his peers ' — if he can find them. 
 
 He reached the capital on the 28th November,
 
 296 ROBERT BURNS 
 
 and was hospitably entertained by Richmond — to 
 the extent, indeed, of a bedfellow's share in the 
 clerk's one little room in Baxter's Place, Lawn- 
 market. Through Dalrymple of Orangefield he got 
 access to Lord Glencairn and others : among them 
 Harry Erskine, Dean of Faculty, and that curious, 
 irascible, pompous ass, the Earl of Buchan, and 
 Creech the publisher, who had been Glencairn's 
 tutor, and who advertised the Edinburgh Edition 
 on the 14th December. He was everywhere re- 
 ceived as he merited, and he made such admirable 
 use of his vogue that, five days before Creech's 
 advertisement was printed, he could tell his friend 
 and patron, Gavin Hamilton, that he was rapidly 
 qualifying for the position of Tenth Worthy and 
 Eighth Wise Man of the World. He saw everybody 
 worth seeing, and talked with everybody worth talk- 
 ing to ; he was made welcome by ' heavenly Burnett ' 
 and her frolic Grace of Gordon, and welcome by 
 the ribald, scholai-ly, hard-drinking wits and jinkers 
 of the Crochallan Fencibles, for whose use and 
 edification he made the unique and precious collec- 
 tion now called The Merry Muses of Caledonia; he 
 moved and bore himself as easily at Dugald Stewart's 
 as in Baxter's Place, in Creech's shop, with Henry 
 Mackenzie and Gregory and Blair, as at that extra- 
 ordinary meeting of the St Andrew's Lodge, where, 
 at the Grand Master's bidding, the Brethren assem- 
 bled drank the health of ' Caledonia and Caledonia's 
 Bard — Brother Burns ' : a toast received with 'multi- 
 plied honours and repeated acclamations.' To look 
 at, ' he was like a farmer dressed to dine with the 
 laird'; his manners were 'rustic, not clownish'; he
 
 ROBERT BURNS 297 
 
 had 'a sort of dignified plainness and simplicity.' 
 Then, ' his address to females was always extremely 
 deferential, and always ' — this on the authority of 
 the Duchess of Gordon — ' with a turn to the pathetic 
 or humorous, which engaged their attention particu- 
 larly.' For the rest, 'I never saw a man in company 
 with his superiors in station and information more 
 perfectly free from either the reality or the affecta- 
 tion of embarrassment.' Thus, long afterwards, Sir 
 Walter, who noted also, boy as he was, ' the strong 
 expression of sense and shrewdness in all his linea- 
 ments/ and who, long afterwards, had never seen 
 such an eye as Burns's 'in a human head, though 
 I have seen the most distinguished men ' — 
 (Byron among them; and Byron's eye was one of 
 Byron's points) — 'of my time.' It is not won- 
 derful, perhaps, that Burns, with his abounding 
 temperament, his puissant charm, his potency in 
 talk, his rare gifts of eye and voice, 1 should have 
 strongly affected Edinburgh Society, brilliant in its 
 elements and distinguished in its effect as it was. 
 There has been no Burns since Burns ; or history 
 would pretty certainly have repeated itself. What 
 is really wonderful is the way in which Burns kept 
 his head in Edinburgh Society, and stood prepared 
 for the inevitable reaction. Through all the ' thick, 
 strong, stupefying incense smoke ' (and there was 
 certainly a very great deal of it), he held a steady 
 eye upon his future. He saw most clearly that the 
 
 1 Thus Maria Riddell : — 'His voice alone could improve upon 
 the magic of his eye. Sonorous, replete with the finest modula- 
 tions,' etc. It will be remembered that children used to speak 
 of Byron as ' the gentleman with the beautiful voice.
 
 298 ROBERT BURNS 
 
 life of a nine-days' wonder is at most nine days, 
 and that now was his time or never. But if he ex- 
 pected preferment, he was neither extravagantly 
 elated in anticipation, nor unduly depressed by dis- 
 appointment ; and, for all his self-consciousness — 
 ( f And God had given his share ') — he was not too 
 platonic to disdain the favours of at least one servant- 
 girl (he was arrested, August 1787, on a warrant 
 In meditatione fugce), nor too punctilious to make 
 love to ' a Lothian farmer's daughter, a very pretty 
 girl, whom I 've almost persuaded to accompany 
 me to the West Country, should I ever return/ 
 etc., nor too philosophical not to regret his Jean, 
 and reflect (in this very letter to Gavin Hamilton) 
 that he 'd never ' meet so delicious an armful again.' 
 In the long-run his magnanimity suffered a certain 
 change. The peasant at work scarce ever goes 
 wrong; but abroad and idle he is easily spoiled, 
 and soon. Edinburgh was a triumph for Burns ; but 
 it was also a misfortune. It was a centre of con- 
 viviality — a city of clubs and talk and good-fellow- 
 ship, a city of harlotry and high jinks, a city (above 
 all) of drink : — 
 
 ' Whare couthy cliiels at e'enin meet, 
 Their bizzin craigs and mou's to weet : 
 An' blythely gar auld Care gae by 
 Wi' blinket and wi' bleering eye ' : — 
 
 a dangerous place for a peasant to be at large in, 
 especially a peasant of the conditions and the stamp 
 of Burns. He was young, he was buckishly given, 
 and he was — Burns. He had, as certain numbers 
 in The Merry Muses witness, an entirely admirable
 
 ROBERT BURNS 299 
 
 talent of a kind much favoured by our liberal 
 ancestors. To hear him talk was ever a privilege ; 
 while to hear him make such use as he might of 
 this peculiar capacity cannot but have constituted 
 an unique experience. After all, a gift 's a gift, and 
 a man must use the gifts he has. No reasonable 
 being can question that Burns used this one of 
 his. 1 In those days he could scarce be buckish 
 — or even popular — and do other. Even in the 
 country, says Heron, in his loose yet lofty way, ' the 
 
 1 This is noted neither in praise nor in dispraise. It is noted 
 to show that Burns was essentially a man of his time : as how, 
 peasant of genius that he was, could he be anything else ? Our 
 fathers loved sculduddery, and Burns, who came from Carrick 
 — where, as Lockhart has remarked, the Vernacular was spoken 
 with peculiar gaiety and vigour — was the best gifted of them 
 all in this respect by virtue of his genius, his turn of mind, 
 his peasanthood, and his wonderful capacity for talk. Josiah 
 Walker notes of Burns that his conversation was 'not more 
 licentious' than the conversation heard at the tables of the 
 great ; Lockhart regrets that he can give but few of Burns's mots, 
 for the reason that the most of those preserved and handed down 
 were unquotable. It was a trick of the time, and long after — (re- 
 member Colonel Newcome's indignant retreat before old Costigan) 
 — so that Lord Cork of The Bumper Toast, and Captain Morris at 
 Carlton House and Burns among the Crochallan Fencibles are 
 but expressions of the same fashion in humour, the same tendency 
 in the human mind to apprehend and rejoice in the farce of sex. 
 I do not know that Burns and M 'Queen of Braxfield (Stevenson's 
 Weir of Hermiston) ever met. But it was said of M'Queen that 
 he had never read anything but sculduddery and law ; and to 
 Ramsay of Auchtertyre, in whom Sir Walter found some elements 
 of Monkbarns, the two men seemed cast in the same mould. 
 Burns, in any case, was a man of the later Eighteenth Century 
 (he sent one of his best-known facetice to Graham of Fintry, with 
 a view to correcting some illiberal report about his politics) ; and to 
 take him out of it, and essay to make him a smug, decent, Late- 
 Victorian journalist is, as I think, to essay a task at once dis- 
 creditable in aim and impossible of execution.
 
 300 ROBERT BURNS 
 
 votaries of intemperate joys, with persons to whom 
 he was recommended by licentious wit . . . had 
 begun to fasten on him, and to seduce him to em- 
 bellish the gross pleasures of their looser hours with 
 the charms of his wit and fancy.' These temptations 
 — (he was known, be it i - emembered, for the ribald of 
 The Fornicator and The Court of Equity as well as for 
 the poet of the Mountain Daisy and the Saturday 
 Night) — he was by no means incapable of putting by. 
 Mr. Arthur Bruce, indeed, 'a gentleman of great 
 worth and discernment,' assured Heron that he had 
 ' seen the Poet steadily resist such solicitations and 
 allurements to convivial enjoyment, as scarcely any 
 other person could have withstood.' But — thus this 
 author : intelligent, not unfriendly on the whole, on 
 the whole competent — 'the bucks of Edinburgh ac- 
 complished . . . that in which the boors of Ayrshire 1 
 had failed. After residing some months in Edinburgh 
 he began to estrange himself, not altogether, but in 
 some measure, from the society of his graver friends. 
 . . . He suffered himself to be surrounded by a race of 
 miserable beings who were proud to tell that they 
 had been in company with Burns, and had seen 
 Burns as loose and as foolish as themselves.' 2 One 
 result of this condescension was this : always the 
 
 1 This appears to be a polite description, by a staunch (though 
 drunken) Churchman, of those desperate spirits, Gavin Hamilton 
 and Robert Aiken. 
 
 2 I give all this for what it is worth. Heron himself was some- 
 thing of a wastrel. Yet he had a clerical habit and a clerical 
 bias which made him easily censorious in the case of so hardened 
 and so militant an anti-cleric as the Bard. He was personally 
 acquainted, however, with that hero ; and his little biography 
 (17W) is neither unintelligent nor ill-written.
 
 ROBERT BURNS 301 
 
 best man in the room, ' the cock of the company/ 
 as Heron puts it, ' he began to contract something 
 of new arrogance in conversation ' ; till in the long- 
 run 'he could scarcely refrain from indulging in 
 similar freedom and dictatorial decision of talk, even 
 in the presence of persons 1 who could less patiently 
 endure his presumption.' Heron's detail is vague — 
 not to say indefinite ; his effect may be misleading. 
 But, as I said, the peasant at large — the peasant 
 without hard work to keep him straight — must, 
 almost of necessity, run to waste. And it is plain 
 that, treading thus closely on the heels of ' the 
 dissipation and riot,' the 'mason-meetings, drinking- 
 matches, and other mischief,' of the year before, 
 the distractions and the triumphs of Edinburgh 
 continued the work which the mistakes and follies 
 of Dumfries were to finish ten years after. 
 
 At last, however, the First Edinburgh Edition 
 appeared (21st April 1787). The issue ran to 
 2S00 copies, and 1500 of these were subscribed in 
 advance. What Burns got for it is matter of doubt. 
 Creech informed Heron that it was £1100 — which 
 is a plain untruth ; Chambers says £500 ; Burns 
 himself told Mrs. Dunlop (25th March 1789) that 
 he expected to clear some £440 to £450. (Other 
 impressions were called for in the course of the 
 year, but the Bard had sold his copyright, and had 
 no interest in them.) Whatever the amount, 2 Creech 
 
 1 Heron himself, no doubt. He 'had the tongues,' and thought 
 himself the better man. 
 
 2 At the instancing of Henry Mackenzie, Creech paid Burns 
 (23rd April 1787) a hundred guineas for the copyright of the 
 Poems, besides subscribing five hundred copies. The Caledonian 
 Hunt subscribed another hundred ; and Hums sent seventy to
 
 302 ROBERT BURNS 
 
 was a slow paymaster ; and, as Edinburgh was bad 
 for Burns, and Creech was responsible for Burns's 
 detention in Edinburgh, it is impossible not to regret 
 that Burns had not another publisher. Burns in effect, 
 his Second Edition once published, had nothing to 
 do but pocket his receipts, 1 and be gone. This, 
 
 Ballantine for ' a proper person ' in Ayr, and wrote from Dunse 
 (17th Ma} - ) to acknowledge the receipt, from Pattison, the Paisley 
 bookseller, of 'Twenty-two pounds, seven shillings sterling, 
 payment in full, after carriage deducted for ninety copies ' more. 
 Twenty-four copies went to the Earl and Countess of Glencairn, 
 twenty to Prentice of Conington Mains, forty to Muir of Kilmar- 
 nock, twenty-one to Her Grace of Gordon, forty-two to the Earl 
 of Eglintoun, and a certain number to the Scots Benedictionaries 
 at Maryborough and Ratisbon, and the Scots Colleges at Douay, 
 Paris, and Valladolid. The subscription price was five, the price 
 to non-subscribers six, shillings: the extra shilling being (Burns 
 to Pattison, ut sup.) 'Creech's profit.' 
 
 1 Heron ' had reason to believe that he had consumed a much 
 larger proportion of these gains than prudence could approve; 
 while he superintended the impression, paid his court to his 
 patrons, and wasted the full payment of the subscription money.' 
 In effect, it is hard to see how, coming to Edinburgh with next to 
 nothing in his pocket (the £20 from "Wilson could not have gone 
 very far), he could otherwise have lived. It would have been 
 natural enough for him to have accepted gratuities, for the Age 
 of Patronage was still afoot, and relief in this kind would have 
 come as easily (to say the least) to the 'ploughing poet,' 
 howbeit he was the proudest and in some respects the most 
 punctilious of men, as to any other. I find it hard to believe 
 that there were none. But there is no record of any ; and a 
 letter (unpublished) of this period in acknowledgment of a gift 
 of money from Mrs. Dunlop is almost painful in its embarrass- 
 ment of gratitude and discomfort. On the whole, I take it that, 
 however cheaply he lived in Edinburgh, he must of necessity have 
 had to discount his profits, though not to anything like the extent 
 suggested by Heron. Moreover, it is like enough that he spent a 
 certain amount upon his Tours, and it is certain that Mossgiel was 
 a dead loss to him.
 
 ROBERT BURNS 303 
 
 however, was what Creech could not let him do : 
 so that he went and came, and came and went, and 
 it was not until the March of 1789 that the two 
 men squared accounts. 1 
 
 The Edition floated, comes a jaunt to the Border 
 (begun 5th May) with Robert Ainslie. Then, by 
 the 9th June, Burns is back at Mauchline, a much 
 richer and a vastly more important person than he 
 left it : able to lend his brother £180; reconciled, 
 too, with Jean and her people, but disgusted, or 
 feigning himself disgusted (for, after the repudia- 
 tion, he is ever the superior and the injured 
 party in regard to Jean), with the 'mean, servile 
 compliance' with which his advances are met. 
 Follows a tour to the West Highlands, which 
 seems to be largely an occasion for drink and talk ; 
 and in July you find him back at Mauchline, 
 boasting how he, 'an old hawk at the sport,' has 
 brought 'a certain lady' — (unknown) — 'from her 
 aerial towerings, pop, down at my foot, like Corporal 
 Trim's hat ' : despite which Jean is presently with 
 child by him for the second time. In August he is at 
 Edinburgh, intent on a settlement with Creech, but 
 on the 25th he starts for the Highland tour with his 
 friend Nicol. 2 After a couple of excursions more — 
 
 1 Of the work he did about this time the best is to be found 
 in the Haggis and the Epistles to Creech and the Guidwife of 
 "Wauchope House. What is very much more to the purpose is 
 that he made Johnson's acquaintance, and at once began con- 
 tributing to the Musical Museum. 
 
 2 Heron describes Nicol as a man who ' in vigour of intellect, 
 and in wild yet generous impetuosity of passion, remarkably 
 resembled , , . Burns ' ; who ' by the most unwearied and extra- 
 ordinary professional toil, in the midst of as persevering dissipa-
 
 304 ROBERT BURNS 
 
 one to Ayrshire, to look at certain holdings — he is 
 resolved on quitting Edinburgh, settlement or no 
 settlement, to farm or go to the Indies, as circum- 
 stances shall dictate. But it is written that his 
 life shall have another disputable episode and the 
 world an immortal scrap of song : — 
 
 ' Had we never loved sae kindly, 
 Had we never loved sae blindly, 
 Never met or never parted, 
 We had ne'er been broken-hearted.' 
 
 So in the beginning of December he falls in with 
 Mrs. M'Lehose ; he instantly proposes to ' cultivate 
 her friendship with the enthusiasm of religion'; 
 and the two are languishing in Arcady in the 
 twinkling of a cupid's wing. 
 
 She was a handsome, womanly creature — ' of a 
 somewhat voluptuous style of beauty ' : a style the 
 Bard appreciated — lively but devout, extremely sen- 
 timental yet inexorably dutiful : a grass widow with 
 children — nine times in ten a lasting safeguard — 
 
 tion . . . won and accumulated an honourable and sufficient 
 competence'; and who died of 'a jaundice, with a complication 
 of other complaints, the effects of long-continued intemperance.' 
 Burns admired Nicol, named a son after him, and immortalised 
 him as the 'Willie' who 'breVd a peck o' maut.' He had a 
 generous heart and a brutal temper, with plenty of brains, a great 
 contempt for custom and the Kirk, and what Lockhart calls 'a 
 rapturous admiration of Burns's genius.' The violent vulgarity 
 of his behaviour at Castle Gordon is typical of the man. He 
 bought a little property not far from Ellisland, and, what with 
 pride and vanity and republican independence (so called) and an 
 immitigable turn for liquor, was certainly as bad a neighbour as 
 the Bard could possibly have had.
 
 ROBERT BURNS 305 
 
 and the strictest notions of propriety — a good enough 
 defence for a time ; but young (she was the Bard's 
 own age), clever, 'of a poetical fabric of mind,' and 
 all the rest. The upsetting of a hackney coach dis- 
 abled Burns from calling on her for some weeks. 
 But he wrote her letters, and she answered them ; and 
 he was Sylvander, and she signed herself Clarinda ; 
 and they addressed each other in verse as well as 
 prose ; and she said it could never be ; and he said 
 that at least he must know her heart was his ; and 
 Religion was her 'balm in every woe'; and he gave 
 her his ideas of Deity; and, when they could meet, 
 Clarinda was ever afraid lest she had let Sylvander 
 go too far ; and Sylvander, for his part, was monstrous 
 eloquent about ' Almighty Love ' — (he was some- 
 times dreadfully like his favourite Man of Feeling) 
 — and was 'ready to hang himself about ' a young 
 Edinburgh widow.' Widow she was not ; but her 
 husband, who cared not a snap of the fingers for 
 her, was away in the West Indies ; and it may 
 perhaps have suited her lover — who never, so far 
 as is known, was trained to the compromises and 
 the obsequiencies of adultery — to soothe his con- 
 science by making believe that the affair was at 
 the most a simple everyday amour. Clarinda was 
 of another make. In the prime of life, deserted, 
 sentimental, a tangle of simple instincts and as 
 simple pieties, she had the natural woman's desire 
 for a lover and the religious woman's resolve to 
 keep that lover's passion within bounds. It is 
 scarce questioned that she succeeded : though there 
 is a legend that a certain gallant and insinuating 
 little lyric : — 
 
 VOL. iv. u
 
 306 ROBERT BURNS 
 
 ' O May, thy morn was ne'er sae sweet 
 
 As the mirk night o' December 
 For sparkling was the rosy wine, 
 
 And secret was the chamber ! 
 And dear was she I winna name 
 
 But I will aye remember ! ' — 
 
 commemorates, not only their final meeting (De- 
 cember 6th, 1791) but also, the triumph of the 
 Bard. 1 In any event she was plainly an excellent 
 creature, bent on keeping herself honest and her 
 lover straight ; and it is impossible to read her 
 letters to Sylvander without a respect, a certain 
 admiration even, which have never been awakened 
 yet by the study of Sylvander's letters to her. For 
 Sylvander's point of view, as M'Lehose was still 
 alive, and an open intrigue with a married woman 
 would have been ruin, only one inference is pos- 
 sible : that he longed for the shepherd's hour to 
 strike for the chime's sake only ; so that, when 
 he thought of his future, as he must have done 
 anxiously and often, he cannot ever have thought 
 
 1 Both Ae Fond Kiss and O May, thy Morn were sent to 
 Clarinda after the final parting ; but the legend is ail-too obviously 
 an effect of the very common human sentiment in deference 
 to which so many novels end happily. For the rest, Sir Walter 
 Scott wrote thus on the fly-leaf of a copy of the very scarce 
 Belfast Edition (1806) of the Letters Addressed to Clarinda 
 by Robert Burns, now at Abbotsford: — 'Clarinda was a Mrs. 
 Meiklehose, wife of a person in the "West Indies, from whom she 
 lived separate but without any blemish, I believe, ou her reputa- 
 tion. I don't wonder that the Bard changed her "thrice 
 unhappy name " for the classical sound of Clarinda. She was a 
 relative of my friend the late Lord Craig, at whose house I have 
 seen her, old, charmless and devote. There was no scandal at- 
 tached to her philandering with the Bard, though the Lady ran 
 risques, for Burns was anything but platouic in his amours,' etc.
 
 ROBERT BURNS 307 
 
 of it as Clarinda's, even though in a moment of 
 peculiar exaltation he swore to keep single till that 
 wretch, the wicked husband, died. 1 
 
 Very early in 1788, Jean— brought, she also, some 
 time in the preceding summer 'pop, down at my 
 feet, like Corporal Trim's hat 5 — was expelled her 
 parents' house and took refuge at Tarbolton Mill. 
 There Burns found her on his return, and thence 
 he removed her to a house in ' Mauchline toun/ to 
 the particular joy, a short while after, of Saunders 
 Tait :— 
 
 c The wives they up their coats did kilt, 
 And through the streets so clean did stilt, 
 Some at the door fell wi' a pelt 
 
 Maist broke their leg, 
 To see the Hen, poor wanton jilt ! 
 
 Lay her fourth egg.' 2 
 
 Follows what is perhaps the most perplexing 
 sequence of circumstances in a perplexing life. To 
 Clarinda, who knew of the affair with Armour, pitied 
 
 1 M'Lehose outlived him many years. 
 
 2 Some stanzas later in B — rns's Hen Clockin in Mauchline, 
 Saunders (who has been likening Jean to a ship) thus notes her 
 state : — 
 
 ' Now she is sailing in the Downs, 
 Calls at the ports of finest towns, 
 To buy bed hangings and galloons'' : 
 and comments with fury on the fact that she 's got, not only ' twa 
 2>acks o' human leather,' but also 
 
 ' A fine cap and peacock feather, 
 And wi't she's douce, 
 With a grand besom made of heather, 
 To sweep her house.' 
 It is worth noting that he winds up his lampoon by accusing the 
 gossips at the lying-in of talking scandal of the rankest and 
 reading The Hohj Fair \
 
 308 ROBERT BURNS 
 
 the victim — (this does not mean that she wished 
 her married to Burns) — and had sped her shepherd 
 on his homeward way with ' twa wee sarkies ' for the 
 victim's little boy : a mistress, be it remembered, 
 to whom he had written (14th February) in such 
 terms as these : — ' I admire you, I love you as a 
 woman beyond any one in the circle of creation ' : 
 — he wrote, a few days after his arrival at Mauch- 
 line, that he had ' this morning ' (23rd February 
 178S) ' called for a certain woman/ and been 'dis- 
 gusted with her,' so that he could not ' endure her.' 
 Though his heart ' smote him for the profanity,' 
 he sought to compare the two ; and ' 'twas setting 
 the expiring glimmer of a farthing taper beside the 
 cloudless glory of the meridian sun.' ' Here,' the 
 Old Hawk continues, ' 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.' This to the contrary, it needs no great 
 knowledge of life, and still less of Burns and Armour, 
 to divine what happened ; and it needs as little 
 of Burns at this point in his career to see why 
 he ended his confession to Clarinda thus : — ' I 
 have done with her, and she with me.' Eight 
 days after this (3rd March 17S8), in a letter to 
 Ainslie, some parts of it too ' curious ' for a Victorian 
 page, he tells a different story. 1 'Jean,' says he, 
 
 1 The letter is best described as a Crochallanisrn — as something 
 written by one Fencible for the edification of another Fencible, 
 and dealing with its subject in right Fencible style and from the 
 correct Fencible point of view. I am afraid that, like the afore- 
 said letter to Clarinda, it was designed as what Ainslie himself, 
 then unrcgenerate, might have called 'a d d bite.'
 
 ROBERT BURNS 309 
 
 ' I found banished like a martyr — forlorn, desti- 
 tute, 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 
 mahogany bed : I have given her a guinea ; and 
 I have '- — but here Scott Douglas's garbling begins, 
 and Burns's inditing ends ; and the original must 
 be read, or the reader will never wholly understand 
 what manner of man the writer was. Then comes 
 an avowal so disconcerting that I cannot choose but 
 disbelieve it, and conclude that it was made for 
 some special purpose. ' But/ says the Old Hawk, 
 ' but, as I always am, on every occasion — I have 
 been prudent and cautious to an astounding degree ; 
 I swore her, privately and solemnly, never to attempt 
 any claim on me as a husband, even though anybody 
 should persuade her she had such a claim, which 
 she had not, 2 neither during my life nor after my 
 death. She did all this like a good girl, and . . .' 
 The rest is unquotable. At first consideration, the 
 spectacle of the Bard keeping 'the wish'd, the 
 trysted hour,' with a settled purpose of ' prudence 
 and caution ' in his mind, and as it were the 
 materials for swearing in his pocket, in no wise 
 makes for enlightenment. On reflection, however, 
 it becomes evident that Burns wrote thus to Ainslie, 
 whom he had asked to call on Clarinda in his 
 absence, simply that Ainslie might quote her his 
 report of a second (and an entirely superfluous) act of 
 
 1 Was reconciliation possible without a second offer of marriage ? 
 I doubt it. 
 
 2 This is literally true : the ' unlucky paper ' was destroyed.
 
 310 ROBERT BURNS 
 
 repudiation on Jean's part : * to the end, as I cannot 
 doubt, of using the fact for all it was worth, when 
 he himself appeared upon the scene. That this is 
 at least a possible theory is shown by the terms in 
 which he tells (7th March) the story of his recon- 
 ciliation to Brown : 2 — ' I found Jean with her cargo 
 very well laid in. ... I have turned her into a 
 convenient harbour where she may lie snug till she 
 unload, and have taken the command myself, not 
 ostensibly, but for a time in secret.' This can only 
 mean that he purposes to marry the girl. For all 
 that, though, he still has hopes of a practical issue to 
 his Edinburgh affair ; for in his next letter (writ the 
 same day) to Clarinda, who has reproached him for 
 silence, and at the same time owned that she counts 
 'all things (Heaven excepted) but lost, that I may 
 win and keep you,' ' Was it not blasphemy, then,' 
 he asks, ' against your own charms and against my 
 feelings, to suppose that a short fortnight could 
 abate my passion ! ' With a vast deal more to the 
 same purpose. Three days after, he starts again for 
 Edinburgh, and plunges deeper in desire than ever 
 for his 'dearest angel' (so he calls her on the 
 17th March), the ' dearest partner of his soul ' (four 
 days after). ' Oh Clarinda' (same date), 'what 
 do I owe to Heaven for blessing me with such 
 
 1 There was no need of oaths from Jean : her lover had had 
 his bachelor's certificate in his pocket for months. And such 
 swearing as there was — was it not all on the other side ? 
 
 2 It is important to note the difference in manner and tone and 
 suggestion between Burns to Brown and Burns to Ainslie. Burns 
 writes to Brown as friend to friend; to Ainslie as Fencible to 
 Bencible— much, in fact, as Swiveller, President of the Glorious 
 Apollos, to Chuckstcr, Vice of the same sublime Society.
 
 ROBERT BURNS 311 
 
 a piece of exalted excellence as you ! ' He must 
 leave for Ellisland,w7/ Mauchline, on the 24th; and 
 ' Will you open,' he asks, ' with satisfaction and 
 delight a letter' — ('twas all to be limited to letters 
 soon) — ' from a man who loves, who has loved you, 
 and who will love you to death, through death, and 
 for ever ! ' They are to meet the next night, and 
 he is to watch — (right Arcady, this !) — her lighted 
 window : — f 'Tis the star that guides me to Paradise.' 
 And for him ' the great relish to all is — that Honor 
 — that Innocence — that Religion, are the witnesses 
 and guarantees of our happiness.' Follows a bit of 
 the Bible adapted to their peculiar case ; and with 
 an c Adieu, Clarinda ! I am going to remember you 
 in my prayers,' the Old Hawk stoops to his perch 
 for the night. Nothing is known of the last engage- 
 ment ; but apparently the citadel remains inviolate, 
 for the leaguer is raised next day, and the besieger 
 draws off his forces by way of Glasgow. Thence he 
 writes to Brown (26th March) that ' these eight days ' 
 he has been 'positively crazed.' And by the 7th 
 April he has made Jean Armour his wife. 
 
 An amazing-love story ? True. But that love- 
 story it was — that Burns was first and last enamoured 
 of the woman he made his wife — is shown, I think, 
 by the fact that to all intents and purposes he 
 married her twice over. As for Clarinda, well . . . ! 
 Clarinda complicates and exhilarates the interest to 
 this extent at least : that if words mean anything, 
 and the Bard be judged by those he wrote, the 
 Bard, had Clarinda been indeed a widow, might at 
 a given moment have found himself incapable of 
 making Jean an honest woman. And had he
 
 312 ROBERT BURNS 
 
 followed his fancy, not his heart ? How had the 
 two Arcadians fared ? 'Tis for some future 
 Chambers to divine and say. 
 
 VII 
 
 Meanwhile he had taken Ellisland, a farm in 
 Dumfriesshire, of Miller of Dalswinton : with an 
 allowance from his landlord, a worthy and generous 
 man, of £300, for a new steading and outhouses. 
 His marriage at last made formal and public (it seems 
 to have been celebrated by Gavin Hamilton), on the 
 5th August 1788 the bride and bridegroom appeared 
 before the Session, acknowledged its irregularity, 
 demanded its ' solemn confirmation/ were sentenced 
 to be rebuked, were 'solemnly engaged to adhere 
 faithfully to one another as husband and wife all 
 the days of their life,' and were finally ' absolved 
 from any scandal ' on the old account. But the new 
 steading was long a-building. It was not till the 
 6th November that Burns and Jean set up their 
 rest in Dumfriesshire ; and even so, they had to go, 
 not to their own farmhouse — (it was not ready for 
 them till the August of 1789) — but, to a place called 
 1 The Isle,' about a mile away from it. Burns had 
 taken Ellisland on the advice of a friendly expert -, 1 
 
 1 'A lease was granted to the poetical farmer' (thus Heron, 
 who knew the country) ' at the annual rent which his own friends 
 declared that the due cultivation of his farm might easily enable 
 him to pa)-.' But those friends, being Ayrshiremen, 'were little 
 acquainted with the soil, with the manures, with the markets, 
 with the dairies, with the modes of improvement in Dumfries- 
 shire ' ; they had estimated his rental at Ayrshire rates ; so that, 
 'contrary to his landlord's intention,' he must pay more for 
 Ellisland than Ellisland was worth. According to the elder 
 Cunningham, Ellisland was a poet's choice, not a farmer's.
 
 ROBERT BURNS 313 
 
 but he had had his doubts about the wisdom of ' euid 
 auld Glen's' decision, and these were soon justified. 
 For a time, however, he stuck to his work like a 
 man : conversing much, it would seem, in his leisure 
 with his neighbour, Glenriddell, and others, whose 
 honoured guest he was, making and vamping songs, 
 paying some heed to national and local politics, 
 and finding time for letters not a few — among 
 them a long and elaborate criticism on some worth- 
 less verses by that crazy creature, Helen Maria 
 Williams. 1 But by the end of July 1789 he had 
 resolved to turn his holding into a dairy farm to be 
 run by Jean and his sisters, and to take up his 
 Gaugership 2 in earnest; and on the 10th of August, 
 some brief while after the completion of The Kirk's 
 Alaiin, he learned from Graham of Fintry (whom he 
 had met, in 1787, at the Duke of Athole's, on his 
 Second Highland Tour) that he was appointed 
 Exciseman for that district of Dumfriesshire in 
 which Ellisland is situate. The work was hard, 
 for he had charge of ten parishes, and must 
 ride two hundred miles a week to get his duty 
 
 1 Burns was not only a reader himself : he was ever the cause 
 of reading in others. One of his occupations at Ellisland was the 
 foundation and the management of a book-club. He took the 
 keenest interest in the work, was especially careful in selection, 
 and, according to Glenriddell, did whatever must be done himself. 
 Like his father, he believed in education ; and, like his father, he 
 did his best to educate his kind by all the means which lay to 
 his hand. He held that the peasant could not but be the better 
 for good reading ; and he exerted himself to the utmost to give the 
 peasant what seemed to him the best that could be had. That he 
 did so is as honourable a circumstance as is found in his career. 
 
 2 By Glencairn's interest he had been appointed to a place in 
 the Excise as early as 1787.
 
 314 ROBERT BURNS 
 
 done. But by the beginning of December, ' I have 
 found,' he writes, ' the Excise business go a great 
 deal smoother with me than I expected ' ; and that 
 he 'sometimes met the Muses,' as he jogged through 
 the Nithsdale hills, is shown by the fact that The 
 Whistle, the excellent verses on Captain Grose 
 (with whom he made acquaintance at Glenriddell's 
 table), and Thou Ling ring Star, with Willie Brew'd, 
 that best of drinking-songs, and The Five Carlines 
 (a notable piece of mimicry, if no more), all be- 
 long to the period of his probation, and were all 
 written before the end of the year. Plainly, too, 
 he was an officer at once humane and vigilant : since, 
 while it is told of him that he could always wink 
 when staring would mean blank ruin to some old 
 unchartered alewife (say), his first year's ' decreet ' 
 — his share, that is, of the fines imposed upon his 
 information — was worth some fifty or sixty pounds. 
 Exercise and the open air are held good for a man's 
 health; yet in the winter of 1789-90 this man 
 suffered cruelly from his old ailment. As for verse, 
 the Elegy on Matthew Henderson and Tarn o' Shanter 
 (1790) seem a poor year's output for the poet of 
 those wonderful months at Mossariel. But work for 
 Johnson was going steadily on ; so that the results 
 of these barren-looking times are in a sort the best 
 known of his titles to greatness and to fame. Thus 
 he strove, and faltered, and achieved till 1791, by 
 the beginning of which year he had realised that 
 Ellisland was impossible ; that he could not afford 
 his rent, which (so he told Mrs. Dunlop) was raised 
 that year by .£20, and must depend entirely on his 
 Excisemanship : when he asked for service in a port,
 
 ROBERT BURNS 315 
 
 and, by Mrs. Dunlop's interest, was transferred to 
 ' a vacant side-walk ' in Dumfries town. Thither, 
 his landlord setting no manner of impediment in his 
 way, and his crops and gear having been well and 
 profitably sold, 1 he removed himself in December, 
 and established his family in a little house in the 
 Wee Vennel. 
 
 'Tis a circumstance to note that, beginning at 
 Ellisland as the Burns of Of A' the Avis, some 
 time before the end he was the Burns of Yestreen 
 I Had a Pint o Wine. 2 That is, he married Jean 
 in the April of 1788, and some two years after 
 he got Anne Park with child. Jean bore him 
 his second son (in wedlock) the 9th April 1791 ; 
 and Anne Park had been delivered of a daughter 
 by him ten days before (31st March). Some say 
 that she died in childbed ; some that she lived to 
 marry a soldier. Nobody knows, and, apparently, 
 nobody cares, what became of her. She was no 
 ' white rose ' (with a legend). She was scarce a 
 
 1 The standing crops were ' rouped ' in the last week of August. 
 They realised ' a guinea an acre above the average.' But such 
 a riot of drunkenness was 'hardly ever seen in this country.' 
 See Burns to Sloan (Scott Douglas, v. 394) for details and for a 
 confession : — 'You will easily guess how I enjoyed the scene ; as 
 I was no farther over than you used to see me ' : — which take 
 you back to the Burns of The Jolly Beggars. The stock and 
 gear 'were not sold till August" (Scott Douglas, v. 392). 'We 
 did not come empty-handed to Dumfries,' Mrs. Burns told 
 M'Diarmid. ' The Ellisland sale was a very good one. A 
 cow in her first calf brought eighteen guineas, and the purchaser 
 never rued his bargain. Two other cows brought good prices. 
 They had been presented by Mrs. Dunlop of Dunlop.' 
 
 2 I have read somewhere that the first quatrain — the flower of 
 the song — is old ; but I cannot verify the description.
 
 316 ROBERT BURNS 
 
 ' passion flower ' ; x and though the Bard himself 
 thought the ditty he made upon her one of his best, 
 the 'episode' in which she played a principal part 
 is not regarded with any special interest by his 
 biographers. She was a tavern waitress, and he 
 was the Bard ; and she pleased him ; and she lived, 
 or died — it matters not which ; and there 's an end 
 on't. The true interest consists, perhaps, in the 
 magnanimity of Jean, who, lying-in a few days 
 after the interloper, was somehow moved to receive 
 the interloper's child, and to suckle it with her 
 own. It is further to note that Anne Park is the 
 last of Burns's mistresses who has a name. That 
 she was not the last in fact you gather from 
 Currie ; 2 but this one is innominate. So far as is 
 
 1 Chambers declares that, if Jean had not been away in Ayr- 
 shire, there would have been no Elizabeth Burns : which is surely 
 the boldest apology for a husband's lapse, at the same time that 
 it is the frankest admission of this particular husband's inability 
 to cleave to his wife in absence, that has ever been offered to an 
 admiring world. Scott Douglas knocks it on the head, and shows 
 that Chambers's valour is greater than Chambers's sense of 
 history, by proving that neither in the June nor the July of 1790 
 could Jean have been away. 
 
 2 He has been roundly and deservedly reproved for the manner 
 and the circumstances in which he published his report — (of an 
 'accidental complaint')— which, by the way, was started by 
 Heron. For another piece of scandal, whether published or not 
 I do not know — that at Dumfries the Bard walked openly with 
 harlots — it is, of course, entirely unauthenticated ; and I here 
 refer to it but for the purpose of pointing out that, if it were 
 true, the fact of such familiarities, however horrifying to respect- 
 able Dumfries, would sit lightly enough both on Burns the 
 peasant and on Burns the poet of The Jolly Beggars and My 
 Auntie Jean Held to the Shore : that, if it were true, the memory 
 of Burns exchanging terms with the light-heels of the port were 
 simply one to set beside the memory of Burton rejoicing in the 
 watermen at the bridge-foot at Oxford.
 
 ROBERT BURNS 317 
 
 known, the goddesses of the years to come, the 
 Chlorises and Marias and Jessies : — 
 
 ' 'Tis sweeter for thee despairing 
 
 Than aught in the world beside ' : — 
 
 are all platonic in practice, if not in idea. The 
 recipe for song-making was soon to be this : — * I put 
 myself in the regimen of adoring a fine woman, 
 and in proportion to the adorability of her charms, 
 in proportion you' — Thomson — c are delighted 
 with my verses.' It was a mistake, so far as the 
 world is concerned. But Burns made it ; and by 
 the time it was made, he probably knew no better. 
 In his last years, indeed, the irresponsible Faunus 
 of Mossgiel and Edinburgh becomes a kind of 
 sentimental sultan, who changes, or rewards, his 
 slaves of dream with a magnificence which, edi- 
 fying or not, is at least amusing. Thus, you find 
 him designing the publication of a book of songs, 
 with portraits of the beauties by whom they are 
 inspired ; Maria Riddell is expelled his lyrical 
 harem as with a fork, because she has offended 
 him ; Jean Lorimer, she of ' the lint-white locks ' 
 — (' Bonie lassie, artless lassie ! ') — is the Chloris 
 of ditty after ditty, till of a sudden Chloris is a 
 disgusting name, and ' what you once mentioned 
 of "flaxen locks" is just' — so just, indeed, that 
 ' they cannot enter into an elegant description 
 of beauty.' 1 This he discovers in the February 
 
 1 Is it not all the Peasant and his womankind ? The 
 peasant's women are his equals. The sentiment of chivalry is not 
 included in his heritage ; and he treats his associates in that lot 
 of penury and toil which is his birthright as the ' predominant 
 partner,' the breadwinner, the provider of children, may : he
 
 318 ROBERT BURNS 
 
 of 1796, in the July of which year he dies. And 
 he keeps up his trick of throwing the lyric hand- 
 kerchief till the end. All through his last illness 
 he is tenderly solicitous about his wife, be it re- 
 membered ; yet the deathbed songs for Jessie 
 Lewars are the best of those closing years. 
 
 In the result, then, Ellisland was a mistake : 
 not so much because it was a farm, as because 
 it was not Burns's own. 1 He was essentially and 
 unalterably a peasant; and as a peasant-poet, a 
 crofter taking down the best verses ever dictated 
 by the Vernacular Muse, he might, one would like 
 to think, what with work in the fields, and work at 
 his desk, and the strong, persuasive inducements 
 of home, have attained to length of days and peace 
 of mind and the achievement of still greater fame, 
 at the same time that he realised the ideal which 
 he has sublimated in some famous lines : — 
 
 e To mak' a happy fireside clime 
 
 For weans and wife, 
 That 's the true pathos and sublime 
 Of human life.' 
 
 Plainly, though, it could not be. He had too much 
 genius, too much temperament, for it to be : with 
 too much interest in life, which to him, however 
 diverse and however variable his moods, meant, 
 
 punishes, that is, and he rewards. It is unlikely that this was 
 Burns's practice with Jean ; but assuredly it was his practice 
 with the ' fine women ' of his dreams. 
 
 1 He woidd have liked the life well enough, he says, had he 
 tilled his own acres. But to take care of another man's, at 
 the cost, too, of a horrible and ever-recurring charge called rent — 
 that was the devil !
 
 ROBERT BURNS 319 
 
 largely, if not wholly, Wine and Woman and Song. 
 Also, he had been too hardly used, too desperately 
 driven in his youth, and too splendidly petted and 
 pampered in his manhood, to endure with constancy 
 the work by which the tenant-farmer has to earn 
 his bread. He had seen his father fail at Mount 
 Oliphant and Lochlie ; and he had shared his 
 brother's failure at Mossgiel. By no fault of his 
 own, but owing to the circumstance that he had 
 taken a holding out of which he could not make 
 his rent, he failed himself at Ellisland ; and though, 
 in his case, there was small risk of 'a. factor's snash,' 
 he was infinitely too honest and too proud to take un- 
 due advantage of another man's bounty : so, to make 
 ends meet, he turned gauger, and took charge of 
 ten parishes, and rode two hundred miles a week in 
 all weathers. It was a thing he 'd always wanted 
 to do, and, at the time he took to doing it, it was 
 the only thing that could profitably be done by 
 him. But his misfortune in having to do it was 
 none the less for that. It took him from his home, 
 it unsettled his better habits, it threw him back 
 on Edinburgh and his triumphing experience as 
 an idler and a Bard, it led him into temptation 
 by divers ways. And when Pan, his goat-foot 
 father — Pan, whom he featured so closely, in his 
 great gift of merriment, his joy in life, his puissant 
 appetites, his innate and never-failing humanity 
 — would whistle on him from the thicket, he 
 could not often stop his ears to the call. He was 
 the most brilliant and the most popular figure in 
 the district ; he loved good-fellowship ; he needed 
 applause ; he rejoiced in the proof of his own
 
 320 ROBERT BURNS 
 
 pre-eminence in talk — rejoiced, too, in the tran- 
 scendentalising effect of liquor upon the talker, 1 as 
 in the positive result of his name and fame, his 
 prestance and his personality, upon adoring women. 
 Is it not plain that Dumfries was inevitable ? Or, 
 rather, is it not plain that, first and last, the life 
 was one logical, irrefragable sequence of prepara- 
 tions for the death ? That Mount Oliphant and 
 Lochlie led irresistibly to Mauchline, as Mauchline 
 to Edinburgh, and Edinburgh to Ellisland, and 
 Ellisland to the house in the Mill Vennel ? And 
 is not the lesson of it all that there is none so un- 
 fortunate as the misplaced Titan — the man too great 
 for his circumstances ? Speaking broadly, I can 
 call none to mind who, in strength and genius and 
 temperament, presents so close a general likeness 
 to Burns as Mirabeau. Born a noble, and given an 
 opportunity commensurate with himself, Burns would 
 certainly have done such work as Mirabeau's, and 
 done it at least as well. Born a Scots peasant, 
 Mirabeau must, as certainly, have lived the life and 
 died the death of Burns. In truth, it is only the 
 fortune of war that we remember the one by his 
 conduct of the Revolution, which called his highest 
 capacities into action, while we turn to the other for 
 his verses, which are the outcome (so Maria Riddell 
 thought, and was not alone in thinking) of by no 
 means his strongest gift. 
 
 1 He complained (to Clarinda) long ere this of the 'savage 
 hospitality ' he could not choose hut accept. And, in effect, he 
 had the ill-luck to start drinking at a time when whisky, fire- 
 new from the Highlands, was the fashionable tipple, and was fast 
 superseding ale. Born a generation earlier, when ale and claret 
 were the staple comforters, he had stood a better chance.
 
 ROBERT BURNS 321 
 
 VIII 
 
 Whatever the sequel, it may fairly be said for 
 Ellisland that Burns and Jean were happy there, 
 and that it saw the birth of Tarn d Shanter and the 
 perfecting, in the contributions to Johnson's Museum, 
 of the Vernacular Song. 1 The last, as we know, was 
 Burns' s work ; but he had assistants, and they did 
 him yeoman service. He worked in song exactly 
 as he worked in satire and the rest — on familiar, 
 old-established bases ; but he did so to a very much 
 greater extent than in satire and the rest, and with 
 a great deal more of help and inspiration from with- 
 out. I have said that he contributed nothing to 
 Vernacular Poetry except himself, but, his contribu- 
 tion apart, was purely Scots-Traditional ; and this is 
 especially true of his treatment of the Vernacular 
 Song. What he found ready to his hand was, 
 in brief, his country's lyric life. Scotland had 
 had singers before him ; and they, nameless now 
 and forgotten save as factors in the sum of his 
 achievement, had sung of life and the experiences 
 of life, the tragedy of death and defeat, the farce 
 and the romance of sex, the rapture and the fun of 
 
 1 I say nothing of the numbers sent to Thomson. Very many 
 are copied from the Museum, and the others need not here be 
 discussed with even an approach to particularity. A point to note 
 in connexion with the contributions both to the Museum and to 
 Scottish Airs is that Burns was honourably and intensely proud 
 of them. He regarded them as work done in the service of the 
 Scotland whose 'own inspired Bard' he was, and neither asked 
 money, nor would take it, for them. To think that he was writ- 
 ing for Thomson to the very end is to have at least one pleasant 
 memory of Dumfries. 
 
 VOL. IV. X
 
 322 ROBERT BURNS 
 
 battle and drink, with sincerity always, and often, 
 very often, with rich or rich-rank humour. Among 
 them they had observed and realised a little world 
 of circumstance and character ; among them they 
 had developed the folk-song, had fixed its type, had 
 cast it into the rhythms which best fitted its aspira- 
 tions, had equipped it with all manner of situations 
 and refrains, and, above all, had possessed it of 
 a great number of true and taking lyrical ideas. 
 Any one who has tried to write a song will agree 
 with me, when I say that a lyrical idea — by which 
 I mean a rhythm, a burden, and a drift — once 
 found, the song writes itself. It writes itself 
 easily or with difficulty, it writes itself well or ill ; 
 but in the end it writes itself. In this matter of 
 lyrical ideas Burns was fortunate beyond any of 
 Apollo's sons. He had no need to quest for them : 
 there they lay ready to his hand, and he had but to 
 work his will with them. That they were there 
 explains the wonderful variety of his humours, his 
 effects, and his themes : that he could live and work 
 up to so many among them is proof positive and 
 enduring of the apprehensiveness of his humanity, 
 his gift of right, far-ranging sympathy. It is certain 
 that, had he not been, they had long since passed 
 out of practical life into the Chelsea Hospital of 
 some antiquarian publication. But it is also certain 
 that, had they not been there for him to take and 
 despoil and use, he would not have been — he 
 could not have been — the master-lyrist we know. 
 What he found was of quite extraordinary worth 
 to him ; what he added was himself, and his 
 addition made the life of his find perennial. But,
 
 ROBERT BURNS 323 
 
 much as are the touch of genius and the stamp 
 of art, they are not everything. The best of many 
 nameless singers lives in Burns' s songs; but that 
 Burns lives so intense a lyric life is largely due 
 to the fact that he took to himself, and made his 
 own, the lyrical experience, the lyrical longing, the 
 lyrical invention, the lyrical possibilities of many 
 nameless singers. He was the last and the greatest 
 of them all ; but he could not have been the great- 
 est by so very much as he seems, had these innomi- 
 nates not been, nor could his songs have been so 
 far-wandered as they are, nor so long-lived as they 
 must be, had these innominates not lived their lyric 
 life before him. In other terms, the atmosphere, 
 the style, the tone, the realistic method and design, 1 
 Avith much of the material and the humanity, of 
 Burns's songs are inherited. Again and again his 
 forefathers find him in lyrical ideas, in whose absence 
 there must certainly — there cannot but have been — 
 
 1 As I have said (see ante, pp. 278-9, Note 1), realism is the dis- 
 tinguishing note of the Vernacular School ; and the folk-singers 
 are not less curious in detail than their literary associates and 
 forebears. Even that long sob of pain, 0, Wall/, Waly, has its 
 elements of everyday life and circumstance : — 
 
 'My love was clad in the black velvet, 
 And I myself in cramasie' : — 
 its references to St. Anton's Well and Arthur's Seat and the 
 sheets that 'sail ne'er be pressed by me.' Cf., too, that wonder- 
 ful little achievement in romance, The Two, Corbies: — 
 ' Ye '11 sit on his white hause-bane, 
 And I '11 pykc out his bonie blue een, 
 Wi' ae lock o' his gowden hair 
 "We'll theck our nest when it grows bare.' 
 Cf., too, in other styles, Toddlin Hamc and Ellibauks and Elli- 
 bracs and — well, any folk-song you care to try !
 
 324 ROBERT BURNS 
 
 a blank in his work. They are his best models, and 
 he does not always surpass them, as he is sometimes 
 not even their equal. 1 And if his effect along 
 certain lines and in certain specified directions be 
 so intense and enduring as it is, the reason is that 
 they are a hundred strong behind him, and that he 
 has selected from each and all of them that which 
 was lyrical and incorruptible. A peasant like them- 
 selves, he knew them as none else could ever know. 
 He sympathised from within with their ambitions, 
 their fancies, their ideals, their derisions, even as he 
 was master, and something more, of their methods. 
 And, while it is fair to say that what is best in 
 them is sublimated and glorified by him, it is also 
 fair to say that, but for them, he could never have 
 approved himself the most exquisite artist in folk- 
 song the world has seen. 
 
 It has been complained that, thus much of his 
 claim to be original removed, he must henceforth 
 shine in the lyrical heaven with a certain loss of 
 magnitude and his splendour something dimmed. 
 And this is so far true that the Burns of fact differs, 
 and differs considerably and at many points, from 
 
 1 Cf. O, Waly, Waly and The Twa Corbies and Helen of 
 Kirkconnel ; with Toddlin Hamc, which Burns thought ' the first 
 bottle-song in the world, ' the old sets of A Cock-Laird, Fu' Cadgic 
 and Fee Him, Father, and, in yet another genre, 0, Were My Love. 
 Even in The Merry Muses Burns, who wrote a particular class of 
 song with admirable gust and spirit, does no better work than 
 some of the innominates — the poets of Erroch Brae and Johnie 
 Scott and Jenny M'Cra/ta, for example; while his redaction of 
 Ellibanks and Ellibraes — ('an old free-spoken song which cele- 
 brates this locality would be enough in itself to bring the poet 
 twenty miles out of his way to see it') — is in no wise superior to 
 the original.
 
 ROBERT BURNS 325 
 
 the Burns of legend. The one is an effect of cer- 
 tain long-lived, inexorable causes ; the other — that 
 'formidable rival of the Almighty/ who, deriving 
 from nobody, and appearing from nowhere, does in 
 ten years the work of half-a-dozen centuries — is an 
 impossible superstition, as it were a Scottish Mumbo- 
 Jumbo. The one comes, naturally and inevitably, 
 at the time appointed, to an appointed end ; but 
 by no conceivable operation in the accomplishing of 
 human destiny could the other have so much as begun 
 to be. And, after all, however poignant the regret, 
 and however wide-eyed and resentful the amaze- 
 ment of those who esteem a man's work on the 
 same terms as they Avoulcl a spider's, and value it 
 in proportion as it does, or does not, come out of 
 his own belly, enough remains to Burns to keep 
 him easily first in the first flight of singers in the 
 Vernacular, and to secure him, outside the Ver- 
 nacular, the fame of an unique artist. I have said 
 that, as I believe, his genius was at once imi- 
 tative and emulous ; and, so far as the Vernacular 
 Song is concerned, to turn the pages of our Third 
 Volume is to see that, speaking broadly, his function 
 was not origination but treatment, and that in 
 treatment it is that the finer qualities of his en- 
 dowment are best expressed and displayed. His 
 measures are high-handed enough ; but they are 
 mostly justified. 1 He never boggles at appropriation, 2 
 
 1 Not always. See Vol. iii. (p. 9G and Note) for an attempt to 
 improve upon Ayton (or another), and ante (p. 42 and Note) for 
 another to improve npon Carew. Both are failures ; but only 
 one is in the Vernacular, and neither owns a Vernacular original. 
 
 2 Besides the folk-singers and the nameless lyrists of the 
 song-books, he is found pilfering from Sedley, Garrick, Lloyd,
 
 326 ROBERT BURNS 
 
 so that some of his songs are the oddest con- 
 ceivable mixture of Burns, Burns's original, and 
 somebody Burns has pillaged. Take, for instance, 
 that arch and fresh and charming thing, For the Sake 
 of Somebody. In the first place, ' Somebody ' comes 
 to Burns as a Jacobite catchword ; and in the next, 
 the lyrical idea is found in a poor enough botch by 
 Allan Ramsay: — 
 
 ' For the sake of Somebody, 
 For the sake of Somebody, 
 
 I could wake a winter's night 
 For the sake of Somebody.' 
 
 This is pretty certainly older than The Tea-Table 
 Miscellany, and has nothing whatever to do with the 
 verses which the later minstrel has tagged it withal. 
 But it is a right lyrical idea, and in the long-run a 
 lyrical idea is a song. So thinks Burns ; and you 
 have but to compare the two sets to see the differ- 
 ence between master and journeyman at a glance. 
 The old, squalid, huckstering little comedy of court- 
 ship : — 
 
 c First we '11 buckle, then we '11 tell, 
 
 Let her flyte and syne come to . . . 
 I '11 slip hame and wash my feet, 
 
 An' steal on linens fair and clean, 
 Syne at the trysting place we '11 meet, 
 
 To do but what my dame has done ': — 
 
 Ramsay, Fergusson, Theobald, Carew, Mayne, Dodsle}-, and Sir 
 Robert Ay ton (or another). See also our Notes (Vol. iii. ) on Duncan 
 Davison, on Landlady, Count the Lawin, on Sweetest May, on The 
 Winter it is Past, on We 're A' Nodclin, to name but these ; and, 
 as a further illustratian of his method, note that, according to Scott 
 Douglas (ms. annotation), the first three lines of Gat Ye Me belong 
 to old song No. i., the next five to Burns, and the last eight to 
 old song No. ii.
 
 ROBERT BURNS 327 
 
 gives place to a thing to-day as comfortable to the 
 ear and as telling to the heart as when Burns vamped 
 it from Ramsay's vamp from somebody unknown. 
 What is further to note is that not all the latest 
 vamp is Burns plus Ramsay plus Innominate i. plus 
 Jacob te catchword : inasmuch as the first line of 
 Stanza ii. is conveyed from an owlish lover in The 
 Tea-Table Miscellany : — 
 
 ' Ye powers that preside over virtuous love. ' 
 
 Thus some solemn poetaster a good half-century at 
 lease ere Burns ; and for over a hundred years 
 ' Ye powers that smile on virtuous love ' has lived 
 as pure Burns, and as pure Burns is now passed 
 intJ the language. Yet, despite the pilferings and 
 the hints, it were as idle to pretend that Somebody, 
 as it stands, is not Burns, as it were foolish to assert 
 tliat Burns would have written Somebody without a 
 certain unknown ancestor. Another flash of illustra- 
 tion comes from It Was A' For Our Rightfu King: with 
 i:s third stanza lifted clean from Mally Stewart, and 
 set in a jewel of Burnsian gold, especially contrived 
 and chased to set it off and make the lyric best of 
 it. A third example is found in A Red, Red Rose, 
 which, as we have shown (iii. 143 and Note), is a 
 mosaic of rather beggarly scraps of English verse : 
 just as Jonson's peerless Drink To Me Only With 
 Thine Eijes is a mosaic contrived in scraps of 
 conceited Greek prose. It is exquisitely done, of 
 course ; but, the beggarly scraps of verse away, 
 could it ever have been done at all ? And An Id 
 Lang Syne ? It passes for pure Burns ; but was the 
 phrase itself — the phrase which by his time had
 
 328 ROBERT BURNS 
 
 rooted itself in the very vitals of the Vernacular — 
 was the phrase itself, I say, not priceless to him ? 
 Something or nothing may be due to Ramsay for 
 his telling demonstration of the way in wliich it 
 should not be used as a refrain. But what cf that 
 older maker and the line which Burns himself 
 thought worth repeating, and which the world re- 
 joices, and will long rejoice, to repeat with Burns : — 
 
 ' Should auld acquaintance be forgot, 
 An' never thoclit upon ? ' 
 
 Is there nothing of his cadence, no taste of his 
 sentiment, no smack of his lyrical idea, no memory 
 (to say the least) of his burden : — 
 
 ' On old long syne, my jo, 
 
 On old long syne, 
 That thou canst never once reflect 
 On old long syne ' : — 
 
 in the later masterpiece ? To say f No ' were surely 
 to betray criticism. And Ay Wauhin, — should 
 we, could we ever, have had it, had there beer, 
 nobody but Burns to start the tune and invent the 
 lyrical idea ? 
 
 f O, wat, wat, 
 
 O, wat and weary ! 
 Sleep I can get nane 
 
 For thinkin o' my dearie. 
 
 ' A' the night I wake, 
 A' the day I weary, 
 Sleep I can get nane 
 
 For thinkin o' my dearie.' 
 
 Thus, it may be, some broken man, in hiding among 
 the wet hags; some moss-trooper, drenched and
 
 ROBERT BURNS 329 
 
 prowling, with a shirtful of sore bones ! Whoever 
 he was, and whatever his calling and condition, he 
 had at least one lyrical impulse, he has his part in a 
 masterpiece by Burns, and his part is no small one. 
 I might multiply examples, and pile Pelion upon 
 Ossa of proof. But to do so were simply to repeat 
 the Bibliographical and the Notes to our Third 
 Volume; and in this place I shall be better employed 
 in pointing out that these double conceptions (so to 
 speak), these achievements in lyrical collaboration, 
 are for the most part the best known and the best 
 liked of Burns's songs, and are, moreover, those 
 among Burns's songs which show Burns the song- 
 smith at his finest. The truth is that he wrote two 
 lyric styles: (l) the style of the Eighteenth Cen- 
 tury Song-Books, 1 which is a bad one, and in which 
 
 1 He was trained in it from the first. In early youth he carried 
 an English song-book about with him — wore it in his breeches- 
 pocket, so to speak. This was The Lark : ' Containing a Collec- 
 tion of above Four Hundred and Seventy Celebrated English and 
 Scotch Songs, None of which are contain'd in the other Collec- 
 tions of the same size, call'd The Syren and The Nightingale. 
 With a Curious and Copious Alphabetical Glossary for Explain- 
 ing the Scotch words. London. Printed (1746) for John Osborn 
 at the Golden Ball in Pater Noster Row.' 'Tis a fat little book, 
 and as multifarious a collection of Restoration and — especially — 
 post-Restoration songs as one could wish to have. Antiquated 
 political squibs ; ballads, as Clievy Chace, with Gilderoy, the 
 Queen's Old Soldier, and Katherine Hayes ; a number of in- 
 decencies from D'Urfey's Pills; Scots folk-songs, like Toddlin 
 Hame and The Ewe Bughts, and O, Waly, Waly and John 
 Ochiltree and The Blithesome Bridal ; current English ditties like 
 Old Sir Simon and Phillida Flouts Me ; a song of a Begging 
 Soldier, whose vaunt, ' "With my rags upon my bum,' is echoed in 
 The Jolly Beggars ; much Allan Ramsay; with scattered examples 
 of Dryden, Dorset, Congreve, Alexander Scott, Brome, Prior, 
 Wycherley, Rochester, Farquhar, Cibber — even Skelton ; and a
 
 330 ROBERT BURNS 
 
 he could be as vulgar, or as frigid, or as tame, as very 
 much smaller men ; x and (2) the style of the Verna- 
 cular Folk-Song, which he handled with that under- 
 standing and that mastery of means and ends which 
 stamp the artist. To consider his experiments in 
 the first is to scrape acquaintance with Clarinda, 
 Mistress of My Soul, and Turn Again, Thou Fair 
 Eliza, and On A Bank of Flowers, and Sensibility, 
 How Charming, and Castle Gordon, and A Big-Bellied 
 Bottle, and Strathallan's Lament, and Raving Winds 
 Around Her Blowing, and How Pleasant the Banks, 
 and A Rosebud By My Farly Walk," and many a thing 
 besides, which, were it not known for the work of a 
 
 wilderness of commonplace ditties about love and drink. On 
 the whole, an interesting collection. Particularly if you take it 
 as an element in the education of the lyric Burns. 
 
 1 Cf. Their Groves of Sweet Myrtle (Vol. iii. 252-3 and Note), 
 among other things : — 
 
 ' The slave's spicy forests and gold-bubbling fountains 
 
 The brave Caledonian views wi' disdain ; 
 He wanders as free as the winds of his mountains, 
 Save Love's willing fetters — the chains o' his Jean. 
 
 Such achievements in what Mr. Meredith calls ' the Bathetic,' are 
 less infrequent in Burns than could be wished. 
 
 2 It is understood that Scots Wha Hac is an essay in the 
 Vernacular (I gather, by the way, that it is one of the two or 
 three pieces by 'the Immortal Exciseman nurtured ayont the 
 Tweed' which are most popular in England). But, even so, 
 one has but to contrast it with 7s There for Honest Poverty, 
 to recognise that in the one the writer's technical and lyrical 
 mastery is complete, while in the other it is merely academic — 
 academic as the lyrical and technical mastery of (say) Rule 
 Britannia. Now, 7s There for Honest Poverty is caique" on 
 a certain disreputable folk-song ; while Scots Wlia Hac is 
 for all practical purposes the work of an Eighteenth Century 
 Scotsman writing in English, and now and then propitiating the 
 fiery and watchful Genius of Caledonia by spelling a word as it 
 is spelt in the Vernacular.
 
 ROBERT BURNS 331 
 
 great poet, would long since have gone down into 
 the limbo that gapes for would-be art. In the 
 other are all the little masterpieces by which Burns 
 the lyrist is remembered. He had a lead in The 
 Silver Tassie x and in Auld Lang Syne, in A Man 's a 
 Man and Duncan Davison, in A Waukrife Minnie 
 and Duncan Gray and Finlay, in I Hae a Wife and 
 It Was A' For Our Rightfu King and A Red, Red 
 Rose, in Macpherson s Lament, and Ay Waulcin, 0, 
 and Somebody, and Whistle, and I '11 Come to You — 
 in all, or very nearly all, the numbers which make 
 his lyrical bequest as it were a little park apart — 
 an unique retreat of rocks and sylvan corners and 
 heathy spaces, with an abundance of wildings, and 
 here and there a hawthorn brake where, to a sound 
 of running water, the Eternal Shepherd tells his 
 tale — in the spacious and smiling demesne of 
 English literature. And my contention — that it is 
 to Burns the artist in folk-song that we must turn 
 for thorough contentment — is proved to the hilt 
 by those lyrics in the Vernacular for which, so far 
 as we know, he found no hint elsewhere, and in 
 which, so far as we know, he expressed himself 
 and none besides. He had no suggestions, it seems 
 (but I would not like to swear), no catchwords, no 
 lyrical material for Tarn Glen and Of A' the Airts, 
 for Willie Brewed and Bonie Doon, for Last May a 
 Bran> Wooer and 0, Wert Thou in the Cauld Blast, 2 
 
 1 ' The first four lines are old,' he says, ' the rest is mine.' And, 
 in effect, the quatrain is unique in his work. 
 
 2 It is oddly and amusingly illustrative of Burns's trick of 
 mosaic that a line in this charming song . 
 
 ' The brightest jewel in my crown ' : — 
 comes bodily from — The Court of Equity !
 
 332 ROBERT BURNS 
 
 and Mary Morison — to name no more. But, if they 
 be directly referable to nobody but himself, they 
 feature his whole ancestry. They are folk-songs 
 writ by a peasant of genius, who was a rare and 
 special artist; and they show that the closer he 
 cleaved to folk-models, and the fuller and stronger 
 his possession by the folk-influence, the more of the 
 immortal Burns is there to-day. 
 
 Suggested or not, the songs of Burns were devised 
 and written by a peasant, devising and writing for 
 peasants. The emotions they deal withal are the 
 simplest, the most elemental, in the human list, and 
 are figured in a style so vivid and direct as to be 
 classic in its kind. Romance there is none in them, 
 for there was none in Burns l — 'tis the sole point, 
 perhaps, at which he was out of touch with the 
 unrenowned generations whose flower and crown he 
 was. But of reality, which could best and soonest 
 
 1 None, or so little that if his Jacobitisms seem romantic, it is 
 only by contrast with the realities in which they occur. The 
 interest of even It Was A' For Our Bightfu' King is centred in 
 the vamper's sympathy with, not the romantic situation : — 
 
 ' He turned him richt and round about 
 Upon the Irish shore,' etc. : — 
 
 but with that living, breathing, palpitating 'actuality ' of senti- 
 ment developed in both hero and heroine by the disastrous turn 
 of circumstances : — ■ 
 
 ' Now a' is done that man can do, 
 And a' is done in vain ' : — 
 
 and the position created by those circumstances at the end : — 
 
 ' But I hae parted from my love 
 Never to meet again ' : — 
 
 which places this lyric somewhere near the very top of homely 
 and familiar song.
 
 ROBERT BURNS 333 
 
 bring them home to the class in which their genius 
 was developed, and to which themselves were 
 addressed : — 
 
 ' Grain de muse qui git invisible 
 Au fond de leur (5ternite ' : — 
 
 there is enough to keep them sweet while the Ver- 
 nacular is read. They are for all, or nearly all, the 
 peasant's trades and crafts : so that the gangrel 
 tinker shares them with the spinner at her wheel, 
 the soldier with the ploughman, the Aveaver with 
 the gardener and the tailor and the herd. Morals, 
 experiences, needs, love and liquor, the rejoicing 
 vigour and unrest of youth, the placid content 
 of age — there is scarce anything he can endure 
 which is not brilliantly, and (above all) sincerely 
 and veraciously, set forth in them. That old-world 
 Scotland, whose last and greatest expression was 
 Burns, either has passed or is fast passing away. 
 In language, manners, morals, ideals, religion, sub- 
 stance, capacity, the theory and practice of life — in 
 all these the country of Burns has changed : in some, 
 has changed ' beyond report, thought, or belief.' But 
 that much of her which was known to her Poet is 
 with us still, and is with us in these songs. For 
 man and woman change not, but endure for ever : 
 so that what was truly said a thousand years ago 
 comes home as truth to-day, and will go home as 
 truth when to-day is a thousand years behind. To 
 the making of these things there went the great 
 and generous humanity of Burns, with the humanity, 
 less great but still generous and sincere, of those 
 unknowns, whose namelessness was ever a regret to
 
 334 ROBERT BURNS 
 
 him. 1 They are art in their kind. And there is 
 no reason why this e little Valclusa fountain ' should 
 lack pilgrims, or run dry, for centuries. 2 
 
 IX 
 
 I purpose to deal with the Dumfries period with 
 all possible brevity. The story is a story of de- 
 cadence ; and, even if it were told in detail, 
 would tell us nothing of Burns that we have not 
 already heard or are not ail-too well prepared to 
 learn. In a little town, where everybody 's known 
 
 1 'Are you not quite vexed to think that these men of genius, 
 for such they certainly were, who composed our fine Scottish 
 lyrics, should be unknown? It has given me many a heartache ' 
 (R. B. to Thomson, 19th November 1794). And see his Journal 
 for a more heart-felt recognition still. 
 
 2 They lived not long the limited life of Johnson's Musical 
 Museum and Thomson's Scottish Airs. Thus, in a collection of 
 North of England chap-books (c. 1810-20) which I owe to the kind- 
 ness of the Earl of Crawford, I find at least two Burns 'Songsters' 
 — (they are the same, but one is called ' The Ayrshire Bard's Song- 
 ster,' the other something else) — both 'Printed by J. Marshall in 
 the Old Fleshmarket, ' Newcastle. In a third — a miscellany, this 
 one — is Scots Wlia Hue, 'As sung by Mr. Braham at the Newcastle 
 Theatre Royal' (Carlyle thought this famous lyric should be 'sung 
 by the throat of the whirlwind ' ; but it had better luck than that). 
 The great Jew tenor further warbled a couple of stanzas of The 
 Winter It is Past at a concert in the same city, when Miss Stephens 
 was responsible for Charlie He 's My Darling. In other chaps 
 Burns is found rubbing shoulders with Moore and Campbell and 
 Tom Dibdin, and a hundred others, among them Allan Ramsay. 
 In these Of A' the Airts is sandwiched between The Twopenny 
 Postman and the Wedding at Ballyporecn, while Somebody is 
 kept in countenance by Paddy Carey and The Wounded Hussar. 
 The most popular, perhaps, are Of A' the Airts, and Scots Wha 
 Hae, and Willie Brcw'd ; but On a Bank of Flowers lacks not 
 admirers.
 
 ROBERT BURNS 335 
 
 to everybody, there is ever an infinite deal of 
 scandal ; and Burns was too reckless and too con- 
 spicuous not to become a peculiar cock-shy for the 
 scandalmongers of Dumfries. In a little town, 
 especially if it be a kind of provincial centre, there 
 must of necessity be many people with not much to 
 do besides talking and drinking; and Burns was 
 ever too careless of consequences, as well as ever too 
 resolute to make the most of the fleeting hour — it 
 may be, too, was by this time too princely and too 
 habitual a boon-companion — to refrain from drink 
 and talk when drink and talk were to be had. In 
 the sequel, also, it would seem that that old jealousy 
 of his betters (to use the ancient phrase) had come 
 to be a more disturbing influence than it had ever 
 been before. He knew, none better, that, however 
 brilliantly the poet had succeeded, the man was 
 so far a failure as an investment, that, with bad 
 health and a growing family, he had nothing to look 
 forward to but promotion in the Excise ; and his dis- 
 content with the practical outcome of his ambition 
 and the working result of his fame was certainly not 
 soothed, and may very well have been exacerbated, 
 by his rather noisy sympathy with the leading 
 principles of the French Revolution. He was too 
 fearless and too proud to dissemble that sympathy, 
 Avhich was presently (1794) to find expression in one 
 of his most vigorous and telling lyrics ; he was, 
 pei'haps, too powerful a talker not to exaggerate its 
 quality and volume ; and, though it was common, 
 in the beginning at least, to many Scotsmen, its 
 expression got him, as was inevitable, into trouble 
 with his superiors, and in the long-run was pretty
 
 336 ROBERT BURNS 
 
 certainly intensified, to the point at which resentment 
 is translated into terms of indiscretion and impru- 
 dence, by the reflection, whether just or not, 1 that 
 it had damaged his chances of promotion. That 
 he fought against temptation is as plain as that 
 he proved incapable of triumph, and that, as Carlyle 
 has wisely and humanely noted, the best for him, 
 certain necessary conditions being impossible, was 
 to die. Syme, 2 who knew and loved him, said that he 
 was ' burnt to a cinder ' ere Death took him ; we can 
 see for ourselves that the Burns of the Kilmarnock 
 Volume and the good things in the Museum had 
 
 1 It seems to have been unjust. Pitt, though he loved the 
 poetry of Burns, did nothing for him — was probably, indeed, too 
 busy to think of doing anything once the page was read and the 
 bottle done ; and Fox, to whom Burns looked for advancement, 
 was ever out of office, and could do nothing, even had he been 
 minded to do something, which we are not told that he was. 
 But the Bard had a sure stay in Graham of Fintry ; and, though 
 Glencairn was dead, and he was sometimes reprimanded (ct pour 
 cause), there is no reason to believe that he would have missed 
 preferment had he lived to be open to it. 
 
 2 It has been said, I believe, that Syme's evidence is worthless, 
 inasmuch as it tends to discredit Burns. But one eye-witness, 
 however dull and prejudiced (and Syme was neither one nor 
 other), is worth a wilderness of sentimental historians ; and Syme's 
 phrase, howbeit it is so picturesque that it conveys what is, 
 perhaps, too violent an impression, probably means no more than 
 that Burns had damaged himself with drink. That much Burns 
 admitted time and again ; and Currie — who cannot but have got 
 his information from Maxwell — remarks that for over a year 
 bef ore the end ' there was an evident decline of our Poet's 
 personal appearance, and, though his appetite continued unim- 
 paired, he was himself sensible that his constitution was sinking.' 
 It was all, the doctor thought, the effect of alcohol on a difficult 
 digestion and a sensitive nervous system; and, though he was 
 something of a fanatic in this matter, I see no reason, as he wau 
 also an honest man, to question his diagnosis.
 
 ROBERT BURNS 337 
 
 ceased to be some time before the end ; there is 
 evidence that some time before the end he was 
 neither a sober companion nor a self-respecting 
 husband. And the reflection is not to be put by, 
 that he left the world at the right moment for 
 himself and for his fame. 
 
 There is small doubt that the report of his mis- 
 conduct was at best unkindly framed ; there is none 
 that certain among his apologists have gone a very 
 great deal too far in the opposite direction. We may 
 credit Findlater, for instance, but it is impossible, 
 having any knowledge of the man, to believe in the 
 kind of Exciseman-Saint of Gray : impeccable in all 
 the relations of life and never the worse for liquor : 
 even as it is impossible to believe in the bourgeois 
 Burns of the latest apotheosis. As Lockhart says, 
 the truth lies somewhere between the two extremes ; 
 and one is glad to agree with Lockhart. Even so, 
 however, tradition, as reported by friends and enemies 
 alike, runs stronger in his disfavour than it does 
 the other way. 1 And, though we know that party 
 feeling ran high in Dumfries, and that Burns — 
 with his stiff neck, and his notable distinction, 
 and his absolute gift of speech — did certainly damn 
 
 1 ' We are raising a subscription (horrid word) ' — (thus Sir 
 Walter, to Morritt, loth January 1814) — 'for a monument to 
 Burns, an honour long delayed, perhaps till some parts of his 
 character were forgotten by those among whom he lived.' This 
 was written within twenty years of Burns's death : when the 
 grievance of the Revolution was lost in the shadow cast by the 
 tremendous presence of Napoleon. And, if it be urged that 
 Burns's offending against Toryism must have been rank indeed to 
 be recalled thus bitterly and thus late, it may be retorted that by 
 no possibility can it have been an hundredth part so indecent as 
 VOL. IV. y
 
 338 ROBERT BURNS 
 
 himself in the eyes of many by what, in the 
 circumstances, must have seemed a suicidal intem- 
 perance of feeling and expression, we know also 
 that, once extremely popular, he was presently cut 
 by Dumfries society ; that after a time his reputa- 
 tion was an indifferent one on other counts than 
 politics ; and that more than once — as in the case 
 of Mrs. Riddell, and again, when he had to apologise 
 for a toast no reasonable or well-bred man would 
 have proposed in the presence of a King's officer, 
 unless he were prepared to face the consequences — 
 he behaved himself ill, according to the standard of 
 good manners then and now. The explanation in 
 these and other cases is that he was drunk ; and, as 
 matter of fact, drink and disappointment were pretty 
 certainly responsible between them for the mingled 
 squalor and gloom and pathos of the end. There is 
 nothing like liquor to make a strong man vain of his 
 strength and jealous of his prerogative — even while 
 it is stealing both away ; and there is nothing like 
 disappointment to confirm such a man in a friend- 
 ship for liquor. Last of all, there needs but little 
 knowledge of character and life to see that to 
 apologise for Burns is vain : that we must accept 
 him frankly and without reserve for a peasant of 
 genius perverted from his peasanthood, thrust into 
 a place for which his peasanthood and his genius 
 
 the conduct of the Parliamentary Whigs during the life and 
 long after the death of Pitt. Of all men living Burns was 
 entitled to an opinion ; of all men living he had the best gift of 
 expression. Well, he had his opinion, and he used his gift ; and 
 Dumfries could not forgive him. It is again a question of cir- 
 cumstances. Fox and the rest were honoured Members of His 
 Majesty's Opposition. Burns was only an exciseman.
 
 ROBERT BURNS 339 
 
 alike unfitted him, denied a perfect opportunity, 
 constrained to live his qualities into defects, and in 
 the long-run beaten by a sterile and unnatural en- 
 vironment. We cannot make him other than he was, 
 and, especially, we cannot make him a man of our 
 own time : a man born tame and civil and unexces- 
 sive — 'he that died o' Wednesday,' and had obituary 
 notices in local prints. His elements are ail-too gross, 
 are ail-too vigorous and turbulent for that. ' God 
 have mercy on me,' he once wrote of himself, ' a poor 
 damned, incautious, duped, unfortunate fool ! the 
 sport, the miserable victim of rebellious pride, hypo- 
 chondriac imaginations, agonising sensibility and 
 bedlam passions.' Plainly he knew himself as his 
 apologists have never known him, nor will ever 
 know. 
 
 That his intellectual and temperamental endow- 
 ment was magnificent we know by the way in 
 which he affected his contemporaries, and through 
 the terms in which some of them — Robertson, Heron, 
 Dugald Stewart, and, especially, Maria Riddell — 
 recorded their impression of him ; yet we know also 
 that, for all its magnificence, or, as I prefer to 
 think, by reason of its magnificence, it could not 
 save him from defeat and shame. Where was the 
 lesion ? What was the secret of his fall ? Lord 
 Rosebery, as I believe, has hit the white in' saying 
 that he was 'great in his strength and great in 
 his weaknesses.' 1 His master-qualities, this critic 
 
 1 I note with pleasure that Lord Rosebery knows too much of 
 life, and is too good a judge of evidence, to think of putting a 
 new complexion on the facts of these last, unhappy years. But 
 has he been explanatory enough ? What, after all, but failure is 
 possible for strength misplaced and misapplied ?
 
 340 ROBERT BURNS 
 
 very justly notes, were ' inspiration and sympathy.' 
 But if I would add f and character' — which, to be 
 sure, is largely an effect of conditions — how must 
 the commentary run ? There is pride — the pride of 
 Lucifer : what did it spare him in the end ? There 
 is well-nigh the finest brain conceivable ; yet is 
 there a certain curious intolerance of facts which 
 obliges the owner of that brain, being a Government 
 officer and seeing his sole future in promotion, to 
 flaunt a friendship with roaring Jacobins like Max- 
 well and Syme, and get himself nicknamed a ' Son 
 of Sedition,' and have it reported of him, rightly 
 or not, that he has publicly avowed disloyalty at 
 the local theatre. 1 There is a passionate regard 
 for women ; with, as Sir Walter noted, a lack of 
 chivalry which is attested by those lampoons on 
 living Mrs. Riddell and on dead Mrs. Oswald. 
 There is the strongest sense of fatherhood, with 
 the tenderest concern for ' weans and wife ' ; and 
 there is that resolve for pleasure which not even 
 these uplifting influences can check. There is a 
 noble generosity of heart and temper ; but there is 
 so imperfect a sense of conduct, so practical and so 
 habitual a faith in a certain theory :• — 
 
 1 I do not for an instant forget that here is more circumstance : 
 that he was a true Briton at heart, and that in the heginning his 
 Jacobinism was chiefly, if not solely, an effect of sympathy with 
 a tortured people. But there are ways and ways of favouring an 
 unpopular cause; and Burns's were alike defiant and unwise. 
 Thus Maxwell was practically what most people then called a 
 'murderer' — of the French King ; yet it was while, or soon after, 
 the enormities of the Terror were at their worst, that he became 
 a chief associate of Burns. To some this seems a ' noble im- 
 prudence.' Was it not rather pure incontinence of self ?
 
 ROBERT BURNS 341 
 
 ' The heart ay 's the part ay 
 That maks us richt or wrang ' : — 
 
 that in the end you have a broken reputation, and 
 death at seven or eight and thirty, is the effect of 
 a variety of discrediting causes. Taking the pre- 
 cisian's point of view, one might describe so extra- 
 ordinary a blend of differences as a bad, well- 
 meaning man, and one might easily enough defend 
 the description. But the precisian has naught to 
 do at this grave-side ; and to most of us now it is 
 history that, while there was an infinite deal of the 
 best sort of good in Burns, the bad in him, being 
 largely compacted of such purely unessential defects 
 as arrogance, petulance, imprudence, and a turn for 
 self-indulgence, this last exasperated by the condi- 
 tions in which his lot was cast, was not of the worst 
 kind after all. Yet the bad was bad enough 
 to wreck the good. The little foxes were many 
 and active and greedy enough to spoil a world 
 of grapes. The strength was great, but the weak- 
 nesses were greater ; for time and chance and 
 necessity were ever developing the weaknesses at 
 the same time that they were ever beating down 
 the strength. That is the sole conclusion possible. 
 And to the plea, that the story it rounds is very 
 pitiful, there is this victorious answer : — that the 
 Man had drunk his life to the lees, while the Poet 
 had fulfilled himself to the accomplishing of a 
 peculiar immortality ; so that to Burns Death came 
 
 as a deliverer and a friend. 
 
 W. E. H.
 
 INDEX TO ESSAY 
 
 A Bard's Epitaph, 259. 
 
 A Big - Bellied Bottle (No 
 
 Churchman Am I), 330. 
 A Cock-Laird Fu' Cadgie, 324. 
 Addison, 237. 
 
 Address to a Haggis, 27G, 303. 
 Address to the Unco Guid, 257, 
 
 273. 
 Address to the Dcil, 257, 274. 
 Ae Fond Kiss, and Then We 
 
 Sever, 304, 306. 
 Aiken, Robert, 257, 293, 300. 
 Ainslie, Robert, 303, 308, 309, 
 
 310. 
 Alloway Cottage, 235. 
 A Poet's Welcome to His Lore- 
 begotten Daughter, 251, 259, 
 
 260, 274. 
 A Bed Red Rose, 327, 331. 
 Armour, Jean, 280-292. 
 Reconciliation with, 303, 
 
 307. 
 Arnot, John, 289. 
 A Rosebud By My Early Walk, 
 
 330. 
 Aidd, Rev. William, 281. 
 Auld Lang S[in' , 327, 331. 
 Authors read by Eurns, 240, 
 
 241, 263. 
 A Waukrifc Minnie, 331. 
 Ayr, 242. 
 
 Ayton, Sir Robert, 325, 326. 
 Ay Waukin, O, 328, 331. 
 
 Bachelors' Club, 246, 257. 
 
 Ballantync, John, 294, 302. 
 
 Ballochmyle, Lass of, 24S. 
 
 Barbour, 265. 
 
 Boattie, 263, 284. 
 
 Begbie, Ellison, 249. 
 
 Begg, Mrs., 260. 
 
 Birth, 233, 235. 
 
 Blacklock, Dr. Thomas, 294. 
 
 Blair, Dr. Hugh, 296. 
 
 Blake, 273. 
 
 Bonnie Heck, 266. 
 
 Border Tour, 303. 
 
 Braxfield, M 'Queen of, 299. 
 
 Brice, David, 284. 
 
 Brown, Agnes (Mrs. William 
 
 Burness), 235. 
 
 Richard, 249, 250, 310, 311. 
 
 Browning, 273. 
 Bruce, Arthur, 300. 
 Buchan, Earl of, 296. 
 Burness (or Burnes), "William, 
 
 235-246, 253. 
 Burnet, Miss Elizabeth, 296. 
 Burns, Elizabeth, 316. 
 Gilbert, 237, 238, 240, 
 
 241, 247, 248, 254, 256, 288, 
 
 294. 
 Burns, Robert — 
 Birth, 233, 235. 
 Character and Influence, 
 
 234. 
 Parentage, 235.
 
 344 
 
 INDEX TO ESSAY 
 
 Burns, Robert — continued : — 
 Education and Favourite 
 
 Authors, 236-242. 
 Mount Oliphant, 239-245. 
 Effects of Early Hardship, 
 
 243, 244. 
 Lochlie, 245-254. 
 Early Love Affairs, 247, 
 
 248, 249. 
 Attitude towards Women, 
 
 247. 
 Irvine, 249-253. 
 Love - begotten Daughter, 
 
 251, 259. 
 Death of his father, 253. 
 MossgieL 254-312. 
 As a Farmer, 256. 
 Anti-clerical Poems, 257. 
 Jacobitism, 258. 
 Temperament, 258. 
 Elizabeth Paton, 259. 
 Characteristics of his 
 
 Poetry, 261-279. 
 Robert Fergusson and Ver- 
 nacular Poets, Influence 
 
 of, 262. 
 Vernacular and English 
 
 Verse contrasted, 262-269. 
 Wordsworth and Byron, 
 
 Influence on, 264. 
 Relation to his Predeces- 
 sors, 269-279. 
 Masterpieces, 273. 
 Humour, 275. 
 Realism, 278. 
 Jean Armour and Mary 
 
 Campbell, 279-292. 
 Kilmarnock Edition, 292. 
 Mrs. Dunlop's Influence, 
 
 292. 
 Edinburgh, 294-303. 
 Conversational Powers and 
 
 Dissipation, 299, 300. 
 
 Burns, Robert — continued : — 
 
 First Edinburgh Edition, 
 301. 
 
 Border Tour, 303. 
 
 Highland Tours, 303. 
 
 John son' s3fusical Museum, 
 303. 
 
 Reconciliation with Jean 
 Armour, 303. 
 
 Mrs. M'Lehose (Clarinda), 
 304-312. 
 
 Relations with Jean 
 Armour, 307-310. 
 
 Marriage, 311, 312. 
 
 Ellisland, 312-315. 
 
 Excise Appointment, 313, 
 319. 
 
 Sale at Ellisland and re- 
 moval to Dumfries, 315. 
 
 Anne Park, 315, 316. 
 
 Chloris, 317. 
 
 Too great for his Circum- 
 stances, 320. 
 
 As a Song-writer, 321-334. 
 
 Dumfries, 334-342. 
 
 Decadence and Failing 
 Health, 335. 
 
 Intellectual and Tempera- 
 mental Endowment, 339. 
 
 Jacobinism, 340. 
 
 Death, 341. 
 Byron, 234, 264, 271, 273, 275, 
 297. 
 
 Caledonian Hunt, 301. 
 Campbell, Mary, 283, 285-292. 
 Carew, 325, 326. 
 Castle Gordon, 330. 
 Chambers, Robert, 285, 288, 
 
 301, 316. 
 Charlie He 's my Darling, 334. 
 Chloris, 317. 
 Clarinda, 304-312, 320.
 
 INDEX TO ESSAY 
 
 345 
 
 Clarinda, Mistress of My Soul, 
 
 330. 
 Clegkorn, Robert, 239. 
 Conversational Powers, 300. 
 Cork, Lord, 299. 
 Corn Rigs, 268, 273. 
 Cowper, 272. 
 
 Creech, William, 296, 301. 
 Crochallan Fencibles, 296, 299, 
 
 308. 
 Currie, Dr., 288, 316, 336. 
 
 Dalrymple, James, of Orange- 
 field, 295, 296. 
 
 Dalrymple Parish School, 241. 
 
 Death and Dr. Hornbook, 274. 
 
 Death, 318, 341. 
 
 Despondency, 283. 
 
 Dodsley, 326. 
 
 Douglas, Gawain, 265, 278. 
 
 Drink to Me Only With Thine 
 Eyes, 327. 
 
 Dumfries, 315, 334-342. 
 
 Dunbar, William, 265, 278. 
 
 Duncan Davison, 326, 331. 
 
 Duncan Gray, 331. 
 
 Dunlop, Mrs., 288, 292, 301, 
 302, 314, 315. 
 
 Edinburgh, Burns in, 294-303. 
 
 Edinburgh Edition, First, 301. 
 
 Education and Favourite 
 Authors, 236-242. 
 
 Eglintoun, Earl of, 302. 
 
 Elegy on Captain Matthew Hen- 
 derson, 314. 
 
 Ellibanks and Ellibraes, 323, 
 324. 
 
 Ellisland, 311, 312-315. 
 
 Epistle to a Youny Friend, 258, 
 290. 
 
 to Davie, 261, 341. 
 
 to Lapraik, 274. 
 
 Epistle to James Smith, 274. 
 
 to John Rankinc, 252, 258, 
 
 260, 274. 
 
 Epitaph on Robert Fcryusson, 
 262. 
 
 Errock Brae, 265, 324. 
 
 Erskine, Harry, Dean of 
 Faculty, 296. 
 
 Excise Appointment, 313. 
 
 Prospects of Pro- 
 motion, 335. 
 
 Fee Him, Father, 324. 
 Fergusson, Provost of Ayr, 
 
 235, 245. 
 Robert, 261, 264, 271, 278, 
 
 326. 
 Findlater, Alexander, 337. 
 Finlay (Wha is That at My 
 
 Bower Door ?), 331. 
 Flax-dressing at Irvine, 249. 
 Fleming, Nanie, 288. 
 For the Sake of Somebody, 326, 
 
 331. 
 Fox, Charles James, 336, 338. 
 Freemasonry, 246. 
 French Revolution, Sympathy 
 
 with, 335, 340. 
 
 Garrick, 325. 
 
 Gat Ye Me, 326. 
 
 Glencairn, Lord, 296, 302, 313, 
 
 336. 
 Glenriddell, Riddell of, 313. 
 Goldsmith, 263. 
 Gordon, Duchess of, 296, 297. 
 Graham of Fintry, 299, 313, 336. 
 Gray, 262, 263, 272, 284. 
 Gray, Farquhar, 337. 
 Green Grow the Rashes, 268, 
 
 273. 
 Gregory, Dr., 296. 
 Grose, Captain, 314.
 
 346 
 
 INDEX TO ESSAY 
 
 Halloween, 264, 273, 276, 277, 
 
 279. 
 Hamilton, Gavin, 257, 258, 285, 
 
 292, 296, 298, 300, 312. 
 Hamilton of Gilbertfield, 262, 
 
 266, 271. 
 Helen of Kirkconnel, 324. 
 Henryson, Robert, 265, 278. 
 Heron, Robert, Author of Life 
 
 of Burns, 293, 299, 300, 301, 
 
 302, 312, 316, 339. 
 Herrick, 275. 
 Highland Tours, 303. 
 
 Holy Willie's Prayer, 257, 264, 
 
 273, 274, 276. 
 Hoio Pleasant the Banks of the 
 
 Clear Winding Devon, 330. 
 Hume, David, 234. 
 Hutcheson, Francis, 233, 234. 
 
 i" Hae a Wife, 331. 
 
 Irvine, 249. 
 
 Is There For Honest Poverty, 
 
 330, 331. 
 It Was A' For Our Ricjhtfu' 
 
 King, 327, 331, 332. 
 
 Jacobinism, 335, 340. 
 Jacobitism, 258, 332. 
 Jenny M'Craw, 265, 324. 
 Johnie Scott, 324. 
 Johnson's Musical Museum, 
 
 303, 314, 321, 334. 
 
 Keats, 271, 272, 273, 275. 
 Kilmarnock Edition, 281, 292. 
 Kirk of Scotland, 233, 234, 236, 
 
 257, 260, 281. 
 Kirkoswald, 244, 247. 
 Knox, John, 236, 278. 
 
 Laments on Luckie Spence and 
 
 Others, 267. 
 Landlady, Count theLa/win,326. 
 
 Last May a Braw Wooer, 331. 
 Lawrie, Rev. Dr., 295. 
 Lewars, Jessie, 318. 
 Lindsay, David, 265, 278. 
 Lloyd, 325. 
 Lochlie, 245-254. 
 Lockhart, 276, 299, 337. 
 Lorimer, Jean, 317. 
 
 M'Diarmid, 315. 
 
 Mackenzie, Henry, 275, 296, 
 
 301. 
 M'Lehose, Mrs. (Clarinda), 304- 
 
 312, 320. 
 M 'Lure (William Burness's 
 
 landlord), 253. 
 3I'Pherson , s Lament, 331. 
 Matty Stewart, 327. 
 Marlowe, 272. 
 Marriage, 312. 
 Mary Morison, 273, 332. 
 Mauchline, 257, 303, 307. 
 Maxwell, Dr. William, 336, 
 
 340. 
 Mayne, 326. 
 Merry Muses of Caledonia, 296, 
 
 298, 324. 
 Miller, Betty, 290. 
 , Patrick, of Dalswinton, 
 
 312. 
 Milton, 268, 272, 275. 
 Mirabeau, 320. 
 Montgomerie, 272, 278. 
 Moore, Letters to, 237, 240, 246, 
 
 250, 251. 
 Morris, Captain, 299. 
 Mossgiel, 254-312. 
 Mount Oliphant, 239-245. 
 Muir, Robert, 282, 292, 302. 
 Murdoch, John, Schoolmaster, 
 
 237-242. 
 My Auntie Jean Held to the 
 
 Shore, 316.
 
 INDEX TO ESSAY 
 
 347 
 
 Nature's Law, 292. 
 Nicol, William, 303. 
 No Churchmctn Am I (A Big- 
 bellied Bottle), 256. 
 
 Of A' the Airts, 315, 331, 334. 
 
 Oliphaut, Mount, 239-2 !.">. 
 
 O May, Thy Morn Was Ne'er 
 
 Sae Sivect, 306. 
 On a Bank of Flotoers, 330, 334. 
 On Captain Grose, 314. 
 On William Creech, 303. 
 Orr, Thomas, 289. 
 Oswald, Mrs., 340. 
 Waly, Wahj, 323, 324. 
 O Were my Love, 324. 
 O Wert Thou in the Cauld Blast, 
 
 331. 
 
 Parentage, 235. 
 Taik, Anne, 315. 
 Paton, Elizabeth, 249, 257, 259, 
 
 260, 280, 289, 291. 
 Peacock, Flax-dresser, Irvine, 
 
 249, 250. 
 Peasant, Scots, Character of, 252. 
 Peasant's, Scots, Condition of 
 
 Life, 236. 
 Pinkerton, 265. 
 Pitscottie, Lindsay of, 278. 
 Pitt, William, 336, 338. 
 Poor Mailie's Elegy, 266, 271. 
 Poosie Nansie, 277. 
 Pope, 263, 266. 
 
 Ramsay, Allan, 262, 265, 266, 
 
 267, 271, 278, 326, 328. 
 Ramsay of Auchtertyre, 258, 
 
 299. 
 Raving Winds Around Her 
 
 Blowing, 330. 
 Reply to a Trimming Epistle, 
 
 252, 258, 260, 274. 
 
 Richmond, John, 257, 282, 285, 
 288, 291, 292, 295, 296. 
 
 Riddell, Maria, 297, 317, 320, 
 338, 339, 340. 
 
 Robertson the Historian, 339. 
 
 Rosebery, Earl of, 339. 
 
 St. Andrew's Lodge, Edin- 
 burgh, 296. 
 
 Scotch Drink, 271, 274. 
 
 Scots Wha Hac, 263, 330, 334. 
 
 Scott, Alexander, 265, 278. 
 
 Sir Walter, 297, 306, 337, 
 
 340. 
 
 Scott Douglas, 315, 316. 
 
 Sedley, 325. 
 
 Sempills, The, 262, 265, 271, 
 278. 
 
 Sensibility How Charming, 330. 
 
 Shakespeare, 238, 268, 272, 275 
 
 Shelley, 271, 273. 
 
 Shenstone, 263, 266, 2S4. 
 
 Sillar, David, 248. 
 
 Sloan, John, 315. 
 
 Smith, Adam, 234. 
 
 James, 281, 282. 
 
 Songs of Burns, 321-334. 
 
 Stevenson, R. L., 251, 262,267, 
 285, 289, 291. 
 
 Stewart, Dugald, 262, 295, 296, 
 339. 
 
 Strathallan's Lament, 330. 
 
 Sweetest May, 326. 
 
 Sylvander, 305. 
 
 Syme, John, 336, 340. 
 
 Tait, Saunders, 248, 249, 254, 
 
 307. 
 Tarn Glen, 331. 
 Tarn o' Shantcr, 263, 265, 269, 
 
 274, 277, 314, 321. 
 Tarn Samson's Elegy, 271, 274. 
 Tarbolton Mill, 307.
 
 348 
 
 INDEX TO ESSAY 
 
 The Author's Earnest Cry and 
 
 Prayer, 274. 
 The Brigs of Ayr, 271. 
 The Bumper Toast, 299. 
 The Cotter's Saturday Night, 
 
 257, 263, 271, 274, 276, 
 
 300. 
 The Court of Equity, 257, 290, 
 
 300, 331. 
 The Death and Dying Words of 
 
 Poor Mailie, 261, 266, 271, 
 
 274. 
 The Farmer to His Anld Mare, 
 
 264, 273. 
 The Five Carlins, 314. 
 The Fornicator, 252, 257, 260, 
 
 300. 
 The Gloomy Night is Gathering 
 
 Fast, 294. 
 The Holy Fair, 257, 271, 273, 
 
 274, 276, 277, 307. 
 The Holy Tulyie, 274. 
 Their Groves of Sweet Myrtle, 
 
 330. 
 'The Isle,' 312. 
 The Jolly Beggars, 257, 273, 
 
 276, 277, 315, 316. 
 The Kirk's Alarm, 257, 313. 
 The Lament, 283. 
 The Lark, 329. 
 The Lass of Ballochmylc, 248. 
 Theobald, 326. 
 The Ordination, 257, 274. 
 The School for Love, 239. 
 The Silver Tassie, 331. 
 The Twa Corbies, 323, 324. 
 The Twa Dogs, 245, 273. 
 The Twa Herds, 257, 274. 
 
 The Vision, 263, 274. 
 
 The Whistle, 314. 
 
 The Winter It Is Past, 326, 334. 
 
 Thomson, George, 317, 321, 334. 
 
 James, 272, 284. 
 
 — Peggy, 247, 289. 
 Thomson's Scottish Airs, 321. 
 Thou Lingering Star, 288, 314. 
 To a Louse, 273. 
 To a Mountain Daisy, 263, 271, 
 
 274, 300. 
 To a Mou,se, 271, 273. 
 Toddlin Hamc, 323, 324. 
 To John Goldic, 257. 
 To the Guidwife of Wauchope 
 
 House, 303. 
 Turn Again, Thou, Fair Eliza, 
 
 330. 
 
 Vernacular School of Poetrv, 
 234, 261, 263-279, 321-334. 
 
 Walker, Josiah, 299. 
 We're A' Noddin, 326. 
 West Indies, 281, 285, 287, 294. 
 llliistle and I'll Come To You, 
 
 331. 
 Williams, Helen Maria, 313., 
 Willie Brcw'd a Peck o' Maut 
 
 304, 314, 331, 334. 
 Winter, 271. 
 Wordsworth, 264, 273. 
 
 Yestreen I Had a Pint o' Wine, 
 
 315. 
 Ye Banks and Braes o' Bonic 
 
 Doon, 331. 
 
 Printed by T. and A. Constable, Printers to Her Majesty 
 
 at the Edinburgh University Press 
 
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