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 ROBERT BURNS. 
 
 A SUMMARY OF HIS CAREER AND GENIUS. 
 
 " They say best men are moulded out of faults, 
 And, for the most, become much more the better 
 For being a little bad." 
 
 — Measure for Measure, Act v. Scene 1. 
 
 " Salve vetustse vitas imago 
 Et specimen venientis ^Evi." — G. Buchanan. 
 
 I.— INTRODUCTORY. 
 
 In a bibliography, scarcely inferior in variety to that which has 
 gathered around Shakespeare, there is a tract with the head- 
 ing, " Men who have failed." Its purpose is apparent ; we 
 can construct the sermon from the text, as Cuvier recon- 
 structed a monster from the inspection of a bone : but the 
 title, as applied, is false. Whatever Burns's merits or de- 
 merits as a man, the vital part of his career was a swift suc- 
 cess, and, what is of more moment, a lasting. Every decade 
 in which his presence recedes his power grows : his pas- 
 sionate strength has overleapt the barriers of his dialect. 
 Almost every British critic, during the last half century, has 
 pelted or hailed him : everything that should be said of him, 
 and everything that should not, has been said, often clumsily, 
 often disconnectedly, yet on the whole exhaustively ; so that 
 little remains but to correct conflicting exaggerations. Burns 
 has suffered from two sets of assailants. The " unco guid," 
 who "compound for " social meanness and religious malice, by 
 
 A
 
 2 ROBERT BURNS. 
 
 damning other things " they have no mind to," had a score 
 against him, which, during his life and after, they did their 
 best to pay : and they believed him to be worse than he 
 was because they wished it. The " unco " bad were keen to 
 exaggerate his weakness, that they might throw over their 
 own vulgar vices the shield of his great name. On the 
 other hand, the idolatry of a nation, prone to canonise its 
 illustrious dead, has oppositely erred. " No poet, from the 
 blind singer of Troy downwards, is his peer ; " " What would 
 become of the civilised world were his writings obliterated : " — 
 such are the common-places of festival speeches, of journalists 
 patriotically inspired. He has been worshipped, shouted 
 about, preached at, pointed to as a warning, held forth as an 
 example. " The roar of his drunkards " has proclaimed him 
 a saint; the grim moralist, to the zealot's joy, has denounced 
 him as the chief of sinners. It is as natural as harmless 
 that a recent accomplished biographer, selected on the 
 Heraclitean principle of contrasts, should sigh over his 
 " Socinian tendencies," and daintily regret the publication 
 of his quenchless satires : it is inevitable that a literary 
 censor, whose writings are sometimes models of style always 
 mirrors of complacency, should label his wood-notes as 
 hardly superfine. He has had plenty of praise, plenty 
 of blame, enough of " allowances," far more than enough of 
 patronage : he has rarely had — what few men have often 
 — simple justice. 
 
 " The work of Burns," says his first editor, " may be con- 
 sidered as a monument not to his own name only but to the 
 expiring genius of an ancient and independent nation." The 
 antithesis of our chief latinist better represents the attitude 
 of our chief poet, who was at once the last of the old and 
 the first of the new. He came in the autumn or evening of 
 our northern literature, but around him was the freshness of 
 the morning and the May. Like Chaucer, he stood on the 
 edge of two eras, and was a prophet as well as a recorder, 
 embalming and exalting legend and song, affronting and 
 rending inveterate superstitions ; the satirist as well as 
 the lyrist of his race. A Jacobite and a Jacobin, holding
 
 A SUMMARY OF Ills CAREER AND GENIUS. ."3 
 
 out hands to Charlie over the straits and to Washington 
 across the Atlantic, the monument of his verse "vetustae 
 vitas imago" bears a beacon " venientis sevi." Pupil of 
 Ramsay, master of Tannahill, it is natural that Chloris 
 and Damon should linger in his pages beside Jean and Gavin 
 and Davie, and the beggars at Nanse's splore. Everyone 
 of judgment sees that his most underived and passionate 
 work was his best, that his fame rests most firmly on the 
 records of his wildest or freest moods ; more on the Songs 
 and the Satires and Tarn O'Shanter and the Cantata than 
 on the " Cottar's Saturday Night," But to realise his 
 relation to the thought and music of his country requires 
 a study of his antecedents. Our space confines us to a brief 
 statement of his historical position and an exhibition of his 
 character in a summary of his life. 
 
 Burns was an educated, but not a learned man, and he 
 drew next to nothing from our early literature. Of the old 
 Ballads, despite his residence in the border land, he made 
 comparatively little use. The seventeenth century had little 
 to give him ; when the strife of Covenanter and Cavalier 
 held the hearts and threatened the lives of men, the northern 
 Muses were dumb. Poetry was shrivelled under the frown 
 of Presbyteries. The stream of native song had been 
 flowing, under black weeds, till it came to light again in the 
 Jacobite minstrelsy, — where the spirit of the hills first makes 
 itself felt in the voices of the plain, — in the pastorals of 
 Eamsay, the fresh canvass of Thomson and Beattie, and 
 the sketches of native life by Pergusson. Prom these, his 
 generously acknowledged masters, Burns inherited much ; 
 most from the ill-starred genius of the last. The loves, 
 animosities, and temptations of the two poets were akin ; 
 they were both, almost to boasting, devotees of independence ; 
 both keen patriots, they were alike inspired with a livid 
 hate of their country's besetting sin, hypocrisy ; but there is, 
 on a smaller scale, the same difference between them that 
 there is between Chaucer and Shakespeare. " The Farmer's 
 Ingle " is a quaint picture of a rustic fireside north of 
 the Tweed, but " The Cottar " is a store of household words
 
 4 ROBERT BURNS. 
 
 for every Scottish home in the nineteenth century; "Plain- 
 staines and Causey" prattle, witli playful humour, of the 
 freaks and follies of the society that moves over them ; but 
 about the bridges that span the Doon there is thrown the 
 moonlight of the fairies of the " Midsummer Night." In 
 greater measure, Burns was the heir of the nameless minstrels, 
 on whose ungraven tombs he throws a wreath of laurels wet 
 with grateful tears. But he likewise exalts them, idealising 
 their plain-spoken pathos or laughter, making their local 
 interests universal and abiding. 
 
 He was enabled to do so by the fact of his being inspired 
 by the spirit of the Future as well as of the Past. He lived 
 when the so-called " Komantic " literary movement had been 
 initiated by the publication of Percy's Eeliques, Macpherson's 
 Ossian, and the immortal forgeries of the most precocious 
 genius in our tongue. Burns never names Chatterton, — 
 probably because he could not read his masterpieces, — but 
 they have many points of contact. Both were emphatically 
 Bards, as opposed to the poets of culture by whom they 
 were, in the eighteenth century, almost exclusively preceded ; 
 both were "sleepless souls," but their themes lay far apart. 
 The mysteriously stranded child to whose dingy garret there 
 came visions of armies in the air, the flapping of ravens' wings, 
 the sound of seas in a tumult like that of Kubla Khan, is 
 the ancestor of Coleridge on his magic side : Burns, of 
 Wordsworth, to whom he bequeathed his pathetic interpreta- 
 tion of nature ; and of Byron, the inheritor of his " passions 
 wild and strong." They are together petrels of the storm 
 that, shaking "thrones, princedoms, powers, dominions," con- 
 verted Versailles into a moral Pompeii, and drove the classic 
 canons of art into a museum of antiquities. The "Freedom 
 dreste in blodde steyned veste" of the one is like the "stal- 
 wart ghaist" with the " sacred-poesie-Libertie" of the other. 
 But if the Eowley poems had any influence on Burns, it 
 came indirectly through Cowper, who may have borrowed 
 the Olney Hymn, "God moves in a mysterious way," from 
 Chatterton's, beginning "O God, whose thunder shakes the
 
 A SUMMARY OF HIS CAREER AND GENIUS. 5 
 
 sky," and handed on the same devotional mood to the 
 author of the prayer — 
 
 " O thou Great Being what Thou art 
 Surpasses me to know." 
 
 The same breath blows through diverse instruments that 
 have, as regards religion, the same note of scorn for insin- 
 cerity, and beneath it one major key of perplexity, awe, and 
 resignation. The defiance that rises in Queen Mab and the 
 Revolt of Islam, almost to the shrillness of a shriek, the 
 lurid light of the red star of Cain, belong to a later age. 
 
 William Cowper — a reed shaken with the wind, and yet 
 a prophet — a terror-stricken "castaway," and yet the most 
 conspicuous leader of a revolt, found in Scotland a vicegerent 
 greater than himself, — a mighty mass of manhood, who, free 
 from the intellectual fetters that bound, the ghastly clouds 
 that obscured his elder contemporary, struck more ringing 
 blows, and soared into a higher heaven. 
 
 Finally — jpac6 Mr Carlyle to the contrary — the condition 
 of our literature at the time was, on the whole, favourable to 
 the appearance of our greatest interpreter. It has been the 
 fashion to talk contemptuously of the men who, though with 
 different ideas of finish, reared many of the foundations upon 
 which we build ; but, if we except Poetry and Physical 
 Science, the eighteenth century produced most of what the 
 nineteenth is content to criticise. " In its latter half," says 
 Mr Charles Scott in a paper displaying rare insight and 
 sympathy, " Scotland was at the culmination of its intel- 
 lectual glory. It never stood higher relatively to the rest 
 of Europe." After supporting his assertion by the names of 
 Hume, Robertson, Reid, Stewart, and Adam Smith, he pro- 
 ceeds, "The Bench, the Bar, and the Pulpit were adorned by 
 men who, sometimes rough and quaint, were always vigorous 
 and original. We had in those days the greatest statesmen 
 Britain has seen . . . the approach of the French Revolu- 
 tion had stirred the blood of the people . . . their great 
 poet alone was wanting. The hour struck and the man 
 appeared."
 
 () ROBERT BURNS. 
 
 1L— SUEVEY OF BUKNS' LIFE. 
 
 I. — First Period, Alloway, 1759 — 1766. {JEt. 1-7.) 
 
 Burns was qualified to be a national poet by his start 
 from the meeting of all the waters of his country's literature, 
 n*o less so by the circumstances of his birth and the grasp 
 of his genius. Scion of a family on the North-East, mem- 
 bers of which, by his own account, had shared the fortunes 
 of the Earl of Mar, he was born and lived in the South- 
 West among the descendants of the Covenanters. He was 
 a peasant more in virtue of his prevailing themes than by 
 his actual rank. Addressing every grade from the Prince 
 of Wales to roadside tramps, the " annals of the poor" are 
 dearest to the heart of one who was often by painful experi- 
 ence familiar with their sorrows. But Burns himself, save 
 latterly as a government official, never did a day's work for 
 others than himself and his family. His father's status as 
 a tenant farmer in the Lowlands was equivalent to that of 
 an English yeoman. His own position in society, in the 
 lower section of the middle class, went with his education 
 and his free spirit to make him as much at ease in the 
 reception rooms of the aristocracy as in the lanes of Mauch- 
 line. Everything conspired to make him what he was, a 
 national rather than a peasant poet. In one of the 
 passages in which he almost petulantly resents the claims 
 of rank, he speaks of his " ancient but ignoble blood." In 
 the same spirit Beranger, answering those who " criticise the 
 paltry de " before his name, rejoices in being " a very scamp 
 of common stamp." But both were only half in earnest, and 
 neither without some pride in their ancestors. Those of Burns 
 can be traced at least to the later years of the seventeenth 
 century, when they are found well settled in the Mearns. It 
 is worthy of note that the poet's grandfather, inspired by a 
 zeal which characterised his descendants, built the first school- 
 house in the district of his farm. His third son, William, born 
 in 1721, continued to reside in Kincardineshire till 1748, 
 when he migrated southwards as a gardener; in 1749 laying
 
 A SUMMARY OF HIS CAREER AND GENIUS. 7 
 
 out the Edinburgh meadows, and from 1750 onwards 
 similarly engaged in Ayrshire, till, having taken a lease of 
 seven acres in Alloway, he built on them, largely with his 
 own hands, the " auld clay biggin " of two rooms, to which, 
 in 1757, at the age of thirty-six, he brought home his 
 bride, Agnes Brown of Maybole. In this house — now 
 almost a Mecca to northern patriots — Robert, the first off- 
 spring of the marriage, was born on the 25th January 1759. 
 For the little record left of the cottage life at Alloway, 
 we are indebted to three sometimes conflicting authori- 
 ties: — Burns' letter (vol. iv. 4-20) to Dr Moore (Aug. 
 1787); that addressed to Mrs Dunlop by his brother 
 Gilbert ; and the reminiscences of his tutor, Mr John 
 Murdoch, a young man of rare accomplishments and 
 sagacity, to whom during their childhood, and much to 
 their profit, the education of the family was in large 
 measure committed. The autobiographic sketch is a strange 
 chequer of fancy, philosophy, and recklessness, written in 
 the sunshine of success, crossed by the shade of afflictions 
 and of follies, which the writer was simultaneously deplor- 
 ing and recommitting. It is written with great apparent 
 candour, and with the author's constant force of style ; the 
 facts, often lighted up by brilliancies of setting, are sometimes, 
 it may be, magnified in the haze of imagination. From the 
 blessing or bane of the excess of this faculty, Gilbert — the 
 only other junior member of the family who in a rapid 
 sketch calls for comment — was, in his maturity at least, 
 singularly free. An intelligent and canny Scot of enlarged 
 mind, he is studiously proper, respectable, and orthodox, 
 speaking in one strain of " an atheist, a demagogue, or any 
 vile thing." He is a more or less sympathetic apologist for 
 his brother's weaknesses ; but, in the interests of truth or of 
 popular feeling, he more than once attempts to disenchant 
 Robert's narrative of an element of romance. E.g. The poet 
 attributes the family migration southward to political causes, 
 describing his ancestors as " renting lands of the noble 
 Keiths of Marischal," as having had " the honour of sharing 
 their fate " and " shaking hands with ruin for what they
 
 8 ROBERT BURNS. 
 
 esteemed the cause of their King and their country." Else- 
 where the same assertion reappears in verse : — 
 
 " My fathers that name have revered on a throne, 
 My fathers have fallen to right it ; 
 Those fathers would spurn their degenerate son, 
 That name should he scoffingly slight it." 
 
 Gilbert, on the alleged authority of a parish certificate, em- 
 phatically asserts that his father had " no concern in the 
 late wicked rebellion." Between the romance of the elder 
 and the caution of the younger brother we have, in this 
 instance, no means of deciding. A variation of more 
 interest appears in their diverse estimates of the charac- 
 ter of William Burness himself. There is nothing in the 
 poet's prose inconsistent either with the picture of the 
 Cottar, or the noble epitaph ending with Goldsmith's line — 
 "For e'en his failings leaned to Virtue's side." But of 
 these failings Robert was far from being piously unconscious. 
 " I have met with few," he says of his father, " who under- 
 stood men, their manners and their ways, equal to him ; but 
 stubborn ungainly integrity and headlong ungovernable 
 irascibility are disqualifying circumstances, consequently I 
 was born a very poor man's son." Elsewhere he complains 
 of being the victim of parental prejudice. Gilbert, on the 
 other hand, always defends his father, saying, " I bless 
 his character for almost everything in my disposition or 
 habits I can approve." " He was proud of Robert's genius, 
 but the latter was not amenable to controul," which indeed 
 appears to have been the fact. Genius seldom is amenable 
 to control : the same applies to dense stupidity. Murdoch, 
 writing from London in later years, is lavish in expressions 
 of love and veneration for his old employer, in whose two- 
 roomed cottage, a " tabernacle of clay, there dwelt a larger 
 portion of content than in any palace in Europe." " He 
 spoke the English language with more propriety than any 
 man I ever knew with no greater advantages. This had a 
 very good effect on the boys, who talked and reasoned like 
 men long before others. for a world of such ... he was 
 worthy of a place in Westminster Abbey." Allowing for 
 the exaggerations of filial piety and tutorial gratitude, we
 
 A SUMMARY OF HIS CAREER AND GENIUS. 9 
 
 gather that William Burness was, on the whole, as Mr 
 Carlyle describes him, a man worth going far to meet, of 
 that force of character which rises into originality, with 
 a thirst for knowledge and power of communicating it 
 alike remarkable, but defective in tact; none farther from 
 Macklin's Scotchman, for instead of " booing " he was 
 ostentatiously independent, manly to the core, and religious, 
 with a softened Calvinism, expressed in his Manual of Belief 
 (vide vol. iv. 341, and seq.), fond of speculation, within limits, 
 and keen in argument. In person he was above common 
 stature, thin and bent ; in essence honesty incarnate. The 
 secret of Scotland's greatness, says the Times, is oatmeal ; 
 a notorious champion of the Free Church says it is Sabba- 
 tarianism ; a zealous Presbyter, that it is hatred of Prelacy. 
 Does it not rely as much on the influence of a few men of 
 such character as we have described ? Murdoch's remaining 
 recollections of the quiet household, of the father who be- 
 queathed his proud, quick temper without the strong con- 
 trolling will, of the mother from whom Eobert inherited 
 his bright eyes and love of song, of the precocious boys, the 
 gravity of the future poet, and the gaiety of the douce 
 farmer, of the early love of books, and the integrity common 
 to them all, are our only reliable records of the life at 
 Alloway, unless we refer to this period the " warlock and 
 spunkie " stories of the old woman, — germs of the fancies 
 that afterwards conjured up an eerie " something " on the 
 Tarbolton road, and set the ruined kirk "ableeze" with the 
 most wonderful witch dance in literature. 
 
 II. — Second Period, Mount Oliphant, 1766 — 1777. 
 
 (ML 7-18.) 
 
 The happiest days of William Burness went by in the 
 clay cottage. Henceforth, as before, he wrought hard, and 
 practised, as he preached, economy, temperance, and persever- 
 ance, but the winds and tides of adversity were ruthless, 
 and he played a losing game. Desirous of cultivating land 
 on his own account, he obtained a lease of Mount Oliphant in 
 1765, and entered on residence in the following vear. The
 
 10 ROBERT BURNS. 
 
 sad story of the bad farm, — " with the poorest soil under cul- 
 tivation," writes Gilbert in 1800, — of the scanty crops, the 
 inclement seasons, the death of the kind landlord, and the 
 insolent letters of the tyrannic factor has been often told, 
 best of all by Burns himself, whose character was, during 
 these twelve years, largely formed under influences partly 
 favourable, partly the reverse. At home the children con- 
 tinued to be trained up " in decency and order " by their 
 father, who, with two exceptions — Robert's fortnightly study 
 of French under Murdoch at Ayr, and some lessons in pen- 
 manship at Dalrymple — took upon himself the whole duty 
 of their education. This was conducted by candlelight in 
 the evenings when they had returned from their labour in 
 the fields, special attention being paid to arithmetic as a 
 secular, and exposition of the Scriptures as a religious basis. 
 To these lessons was added the stimulating effect of the 
 " good talk " in leisure hours with the few clever people of 
 the neighbourhood — Mrs Burns, though much occupied with 
 household matters, listening appreciatively — and the reading 
 aloud of some play of Shakespeare or other classic. Books 
 were William Burness' only luxury ; he never ranked a 
 love of them among the artificial wants he strove to dis- 
 courage, and his well-chosen stock, acquired by the scant 
 savings of the family or placed at their disposal by the 
 kindness of friends, was at starting the poet's greatest advan- 
 tage. His earliest favourites were the " Vision of Mirza " 
 and one of Addison's Hymns. Then followed the life of 
 Hannibal, lent by Murdoch, and the history of Sir William 
 Wallace, some years after borrowed from a village black- 
 smith. The first sent the boy strutting up and down the 
 room in an excess of martial enthusiasm that was far from 
 being one of the man's prevailing moods, breaking out 
 genuinely in only three of his later songs. The second, 
 doubtless the popular chap-book based on Blind Harry, 
 poured into his veins the " Scotch prejudice " to which he 
 owes so much of his hold over the somewhat self-sufficient 
 race of which he is at once the censor and the trumpeter. 
 Burns was born as Scott was born, before the age of the 
 shrivelling criticism-^" the spirit that says ' No ' " — that
 
 A SUMMARY OF HIS CAREER AND GENIUS. 1 1 
 
 has robbed us of (Joriolanus and Tell, and damped half the 
 fires of national fervour. " The greatest of the Plantage- 
 nets " was to him a bogie tyrant ; the firer of the Barns of 
 Ayr, a model of martyred chivalry ; and in singleness of 
 heart he chose a fine Sunday to worship in the Leglen 
 Wood, visiting the fabled haunts of his "heroic country- 
 man with as much devout enthusiasm as ever pilgrim did 
 the shrine of Loretto." Among other volumes, borrowed 
 or bought, on the shelves of Loan House were, besides good 
 manuals and grammars of English and French (in which 
 language he displayed remarkable proficiency), Mason's 
 Extracts, a collection of songs, Stackhouse's History of the 
 Bible, from which Burns picked up a fair amount of 
 ancient history, a set of Queen Anne letters, on the study 
 of which he began to write his own carefully and to keep 
 copies of them, the Spectator, Pope's Homer and after- 
 wards his other works, some of the novels of Kichardson 
 and Smollet, Ramsay, Hervey, with some plays of Shake- 
 speare and essays of Locke. To these were added at 
 Lochlea, Shenstone, Thomson, Fergusson, Mackenzie's " Man 
 of Feeling," Tristram Shandy — which he devoured at meals, 
 spoon in hand — with the Mirror, Lounger, &c, and later 
 Macpherson's " Ossian " and Milton. A good library for a 
 farm house even now, and, if scant as that of an author, 
 Burns had mastered it. He drew blood from everything 
 he read, e.g., the style of some of his letters is affected by 
 Sterne to a degree never enough remarked, that of others 
 equally by the English essayists. Above all, he was satu- 
 rated with the Bible and the Book of Songs, carrying them 
 with him for spare moments in the fields, and lingering over 
 them in his cold little room by night ; " carefully noting 
 the true, tender, sublime, or fustian," and so learning to be 
 a critic, while stirred bv emulation to become himself a 
 lyrist. His first verses were inspired by a calf love — inno- 
 cent prelude to many of various hues — for "Handsome 
 Nell," his partner in the labours of the harvest during his 
 fifteenth autumn, the tones of whose voice made his " heart 
 strings thrill like an (Eolian harp." Save the song, " I 
 dreamed I lay where flowers were springing," he wrote
 
 12 KOBEKT BURNS. 
 
 nothing more of consequence till six, and little till ten 
 years later. His circumstances were fatal to precocious 
 authorship. The father and sons were fighting bravely 
 through their eleven lean years of struggle, ending in 
 defeat ; and were, with both physical and moral bad results, 
 overwrought. Work on land, in the open air, is in itself 
 more favourable to mental activity than the routine drudgery 
 of a teacher or literary hack ; but the labour to which the 
 young Burnses were inevitably subjected was both excessive 
 and premature. The poet was always a good and dexter- 
 ous workman, " at the plough, scythe, or reap-hook he 
 feared no competitor : " in the later days at Ellisland we 
 have testimony to his being able at a push to " heave a 
 heavier stone " than any of his " hands." But these early 
 efforts were drawing on his capital and exhausting his 
 fund of strength. At the age of thirteen he threshed 
 the corn. 
 
 " The thresher's weary flinging tree 
 The lea lang day had wearied me." 
 
 At fifteen he was the principal labourer. The family kept 
 no servant, and for several years butcher-meat was unknown 
 in the house. Unceasing toil brought Burns to his sixteenth 
 year. His robust frame overtasked, his patience was over- 
 tried ; despite bursts of buoyancy and the vague ambition 
 which he pathetically compares to the groping of the blind 
 Cyclops, his temper was often exasperated. His shoulders were 
 bowed, and his nervous system received a fatal strain; hence 
 long, dull headaches, palpitations and sullen fits of hypochon- 
 dria, with lurid lights from " the passionate heart," darting at 
 intervals through the cloud. " MiXay^oXixoi an h <s<pohpa ops$u." 
 Prosperity has its temptations, but they are nothing to those 
 of the poetic temperament goaded by pain within, and chilled 
 by apathy without. From toils which he associates with 
 those of a galley slave, and the internal fire craving for 
 sympathy in a freer atmosphere than even that of his home, 
 there sprung the spirit of revolt which soon made headway, 
 and passed not only the bars of formalism, but the limits of 
 rational self-restraint.
 
 A SUMMARY OF HIS CAREER AXD GENIUS. 1 '.'» 
 
 At this period, despite an awkward shyness and a morbid 
 dread of ridicule, the poet's social disposition — "the hypo- 
 chondriac taint " he calls it, that made him fly solitude — 
 had led him to form acquaintance with companions in or 
 near Ayr, some of whom had superior advantages, contem- 
 plated not without envy. " They did not know," he bitterly 
 remarks, " enough of the world to insult the clouterly 
 appearance of his plough-boy carcase." Two years after 
 he had committed his first " sin of rhyme," Burns, if we 
 accept his own chronology, spent the summer months at 
 Kirkoswald, studying mensuration. Here he came in con- 
 tact with some of the riotous scenes of that smuggling coast, 
 took part in them, found himself " no enemy to social 
 life," and learned " to look unconcernedly on a large tavern 
 bill." Here also, when " the sun entered Virgo " (i.e., in 
 August) he encountered a premonition of his master spell 
 in " a charming fillette," who, living next door to the school, 
 set him " off at a tangent " from his trigonometry. 
 Nothing came of the affair at the time, but several years 
 later (1783) Burns renewed his acquaintance with the girl 
 (Peggy Thomson), and from a rough former draft rewrote 
 in her honour, "Now westlin' winds," etc. Following the 
 same authority (his own) as to date, we must assign to the 
 early winter of the same year an event by which the 
 serenity of the domestic life — one phase of which is repre- 
 sented in the " Cottar's Saturday Night," the other in the 
 " Twa Dogs" — was interrupted. This event was the poet's 
 persistence, directly against his father's will, in attending a 
 country dancing-school. The motive he assigns, a desire 
 to give his manners a " brush," seems innocent enough ; but 
 the action was typical of his rebellion against the straiter 
 rules of the Scotch moral creed, and is therefore of more 
 importance than at first appears. 
 
 It is admitted that, in reaction from the levities of later 
 Romanism, the reformed religion in the north was at first 
 stamped with an excessive austerity, and that, in after days, 
 the long fight of Presbyterian Calvinism with the Episco- 
 palian Hierarchy helped to perpetuate the spirit in which 
 Knox himself, though by no means so fanatical as many of
 
 14 ROBERT BURNS. 
 
 his followers, regarded a ball at Holyrood as " the dance of 
 the seven deadly sins." The overstrained moral code of 
 the Puritans, laughed out by the Eestoration, discarded as 
 visionary by the common sense of the Eevolution in England, 
 survived in Scotland in connection with the penances of the 
 Kirk, so familiar to the reader of Burns, and still lingers in 
 police regulations more socially inquisitorial than those of 
 any other civilized country. The attempt to "deal with" 
 every form of human frailty as a legal offence may be laud- 
 able in design; in practice it is apt to generate hypocrisy, 
 deceit, and even crime, as a means of escape from exposure. 
 But the stricter party of the Scotch Kirk, during the 
 eighteenth century, not content with publicly branding the 
 sins, set its face against the amusements of the people ; it 
 tried to keep them not only sober and chaste, but constantly 
 sombre, to close the theatres, to shut the barns, fine the 
 fiddlers, and set their melodies to psalms. Under the most 
 depressing circumstances, Nature will have her way. From 
 the gloom of a stern creed within, of inclement skies without, 
 the Scotch peasantry sought relief in vocal music, cultivated 
 the more eagerly that instrumental was banished from the 
 kirks, in whisky, and in dancing. The Reformation for two 
 centuries in our country stifled the other arts, but not that 
 of Eizzio. Music triumphed over the spirit of the creed of 
 Calvin, as it is now encroaching on the precepts of Penn. 
 The fire in the heart of the Scotch peasantry, unextinguished 
 by all the dry ashes of the Catechism, found vent in love 
 songs — many of those current before the coining of their 
 great minstrel, of worse than doubtful taste — in which they 
 are tenfold more prolific than the gayer French; in rural as- 
 signations, where passion too often set at nought the terrors 
 of the cutty-stool, and in the village " splore," for which 
 the dancing-school was a preparation. " This is," says Dr 
 Currie, in his liveliest passage, worth quoting as a comment 
 on many of our author's poems, " usually a barn in winter, 
 and the arena for the performers a clay floor. The dome 
 is lighted by candles stuck in one end of a cloven stick, 
 the other being thrust into the wall. Young men and
 
 A SUMMARY OF HIS CABEEB AND GENIUS. 1 5 
 
 women will walk many miles to these country schools, 
 and the instant the violin sounds, fatigue seems to vanish, 
 the toil-worn rustic becomes erect, his features brighten 
 with sympathy, every nerve seems to thrill with sensation, 
 and every artery to vibrate with life." Such was the scene 
 from which William Burness wished to keep back the poet, 
 and from which the poet would not be kept back. It is 
 a wise thing to multiply innocent pleasures, the worst 
 policy to restrict them. Unfortunately in seeking an in- 
 nocent pleasure, Burns was made guilty of a disobedience, 
 and resented it by a defiance inevitable to his nature. 
 In taking his first step to be the interpreter of a nation, 
 he had to cease to be a dutiful son. He broke the bonds 
 that would not stretch, and soon revelled in his freedom 
 as a wild colt in a meadow. From this crisis, he began 
 to find himself ; his virgin bashfulness was too rapidly 
 " brushed " away ; his native eloquence gushed forth like a 
 liberated stream ; in every society he found himself the 
 light of conversation and the leader of debate ; and in his 
 hours of leisure beyond the walls of his home, whether by 
 a dyke-side or in an inn parlour, was surrounded by admir- 
 ing or astonished groups • who confided to him their affairs 
 of the heart, and obtained his assistance in their wooing. 
 At this period, ere reaching "green eighteen," he himself 
 began to manifest a precocious " penchant a l'adorable moitie 
 du genre humain" — "My heart was completely tinder, and 
 was eternally lighted up by some goddess or other." Ac- 
 cording to Gilbert, Eobert " idealized his women perpetu- 
 ally:" but he was as fickle as Sterne, and through life found 
 it easier to adore a new mistress than to put on a new coat : 
 a versatility often characteristic of the poetic temperament. 
 
 HI. — Third Period, Lochlea, 1777 — 1784. (2EL 18-25.) 
 
 William Burness attempted to leave Mount Oliphant at the 
 end of a six years lease, i.e., after a residence of five and 
 a-half years, 1771 ; but, failing, remained five and a-half 
 years longer, at the expiration of which he contrived to
 
 1 U ROBERT BURNS. 
 
 reserve means and credit to secure the tenancy of Lochlea, 
 whither the family removed on Whitsunday 1777, and 
 where, for the first three years of their occupancy, they 
 seem to have fairly thriven. Of this space of time there 
 is little record: to its close belong the poet's letters to 
 Ellison Begbie — a young woman, understood to be the 
 Mary Morrison of his song, to whom he paid his addresses 
 with a view to marriage, but who, after seriously entertain- 
 ing them, to his grave discomfiture, rejected his suit. In 
 1780 the brothers established a Bachelors' Club, in which a 
 variety of social subjects were discussed, though under some 
 restrictions, with sufficient freedom and zest to stimulate the 
 ingenuity and sharpen the wits of the members. It appears 
 that Eobert, always ambitious of shining, prepared himself 
 beforehand for the debates. The next year of his life was 
 in more than one respect disastrous. Having been in the 
 habit of raising flax on a portion of his father's ground, it 
 occurred to him to go to Irvine to learn to dress it. For 
 some time he attacked his new trade with heart and hope, 
 and, if we may judge by the letter to his father of Dec. 
 1781, lived a strictly frugal and abstinent life: but as they 
 were giving a welcome carousal to the New- Year (1782), 
 the shop, in which he had combined with one of his mother's 
 relations, took fire, and Burns was left " like a true poet, 
 without a sixpence." Smarting under this loss, feeling himself 
 jilted at once by Ellison and by fortune, he went through 
 the usual despairs, and resorted to the too common consola- 
 tions. Meeting with others of the class of seafaring men 
 he had encountered at Kirkoswald, his eloquence, raised to a 
 feverish heat, shed a lustre over their wild thoughts and 
 ways. By one of those, a Mr Eichard Brown, whose 
 romantic adventures captivated his fancy, he was now 
 for the first time — by how many not the last were hard 
 to tell — led to " bound across the strid " of what is techni- 
 cally called virtue. We have here no space, had we in- 
 clination, to pry into the details of the story, nor the 
 continual repetitions of it, which marked and marred his 
 career. Home again with a troubled conscience, and a love
 
 A SUMMARY OF HIS CAREER AND GENU'S. 17 
 
 for company unworthy of him, he found in the Masonic 
 Lodge at Tarbolton an institution unhappily well-suited 
 to his weakness for being first in every circle. In the 
 festivals of that guild he could defy competition : the 
 brethren, justly proud of their new deputy-master, joined 
 with a right good will in the ballad of John Barleycorn, and 
 shouted till " the kebars sheuk " over the chorus of " The 
 Big-bellied Bottle." Nevertheless these years were not 
 barren. Before going to Irvine, Burns had written "Ye 
 Cessnock Banks " and " My Nannie : " he brought back 
 from it his early religious pieces, and the volume of 
 Fergusson which first fired him with the definite ambition 
 of being himself a poet. 
 
 Between 1781-83 were written the "Lament for Mailie," 
 " Winter : a Dirge," " Eemorse," and others in similar strain ; 
 also a number of songs, the best known being " The Eigs of 
 Barley " and " Green grow the rashes." These were ad- 
 dressed to various objects ; some former flames, as Kirk- 
 oswald Peggy, again flit across the horizon, others may have 
 been imaginary. One might as well undertake to trace all 
 the originals of Horace's or Herrick's fancy as those of 
 Burns', for, when he became famous, even married women 
 contended to have sat to him for their portraits. The 
 passion in these songs is more lively than intense, their 
 charm is in the field breeze that blows through them as 
 freshly as in the days of Chaucer. A love for the lower 
 forms of social life was the poet's besetting sin, — Nature 
 his healing power. He was fortunate in being placed amid 
 the scenes best suited to nourish a genius which fed on 
 the meadows and glades round the bends of the Ayr, as a 
 bee feeds on flowers, and had no affinity to mountain tops 
 on the one hand, or to cities on the other. Living in full 
 face of the Arran hills, he never names them. He takes 
 refuge from the ridges of Ben Goil and Ben Gnuiss among 
 the woods of Ballochmyle, and in the spirit which inspired 
 his "Mouse" and his "Daisy," turns out of his path, 
 fearing to " disturb the little songsters of the grove." 
 Similarly Chaucer, who travelled in Italy, names neither 
 
 B
 
 18 ROBERT BUHNS. 
 
 Alp nor Apennine. Each found his " cheer in the bright- 
 ness utterly of the glad sun." The gloom of Burns was 
 not by lonely tarn or " steep frowning summit," but in the 
 snow-drift that starves the cattle on the lowland moor, 
 and the winter wind that is like man's ingratitude. A 
 country life saved him as far as he was saved ; two seasons 
 of a city made it stale to him, and he perished in a county 
 town. With the sweetness of the fields came the benign 
 influences of Coila, to which he thus refers : — " My pas- 
 sions, when once lighted up, raged like so many devils, 
 till they got vent in rhyme, and then the conning over 
 my verses, like a spell, soothed all into quiet." Here the 
 lyrist of the last century anticipates the great mosaic- 
 worker of the present — 
 
 " But for the unquiet heart and brain 
 A use in measured language lies, 
 The sad mechanic exercise, 
 Like dull narcotics numbing pain." 
 
 In 1783 the poet, beginning to realise the chances of his 
 fame, commenced his first Common-Place Book, " Observa- 
 tions, hints, songs, scraps of poetry, &c " — it concludes 
 October 1785, with a warning against his own errors (set. 
 24-26). The second, begun April 9, 1787, ends August 
 1790 (ret. 28-31). They are both of considerable bio- 
 graphical and literary interest. 
 
 Meanwhile at the farm affairs were kept going only by 
 strict economy and hard labour, and when a dispute about 
 the terms of the lease resulted in an adverse decision it 
 broke the old man's heart. He died (Feb. 13, 1784, ?et. 
 63) full of sorrows and apprehensions for the gifted son, 
 who wrote for his tomb in Alloway the famous epitaph, and 
 afterwards applied to him the lines of Beattie — 
 
 " Is it for this fair virtue oft must strive 
 With disappointment, penury, and pain ? " 
 
 Eobert and Gilbert lingered at Lochlea for some time 
 longer, but, when the crash came, they were only able, by 
 claiming arrears of wages on their father's estate, to rescue 
 enough to start in joint-tenancy at Mossgiel, about a mile
 
 A SUMMARY OF HIS CAREER AND GENIUS. 19 
 
 from Mauchline, whither, about Whitsunday, they migrated 
 with their mother and the rest of the family. 
 
 IV. — Fourth Period, Mossgiel, 1784 — 1788. (jEL 25-29.) 
 
 The brothers entered on their new lease with brave hearts, 
 Eobert, in a resolute mood, calculating crops, attending 
 markets, and determined, " in spite of the world, the flesh, and 
 the devil, to be a wise man," but the results of bad seed the 
 first year, and a late harvest the second, " overset " his " wis- 
 dom." The family seemed to flit from one mound in Ayrshire 
 to another : their new abode also lay high, and the snow dur- 
 ing four severe winters was deep on its cold wet clay : conse- 
 quently the outcome was so scanty that they had to give up 
 part of their bargain, and surrender some of their stock ; 
 but they had a kind landlord, to whom they were probably 
 indebted for their ability to struggle on, and abandon the 
 idea of another migration. No one has moralised better on 
 " the uses of adversity " than Burns ; few so finely as when 
 he says that misfortunes " let us ken oursel' : " yet none 
 more prone, when the pinch came, to blame his evil star, 
 and to seek shelter from the world's censure and his own 
 under " overwhelming circumstances." We have, however, 
 the direct testimony of Gilbert to his steadfastness in one im- 
 portant respect — " His temperance and frugality were every- 
 thing that could be desired." The effect of prevalent mis- 
 conception on this point is visible, even in Mr Carlyle's, in 
 many respects, incomparable essay. The poet had at Kirk- 
 oswald and Irvine learned to drink, and he was all his life 
 liable to social excesses, but it is unfair to say that " his 
 character for sobriety was destroyed." 
 
 Most of his best work was done at Mossgiel, and in- 
 spired by the country around, or in Mauchline itself. This, 
 the most suggestive of his haunts, has suffered less than most 
 places from railway, or pit, or mine, or the importunity of pro- 
 fessional showmen. A new road has been made through the 
 quiet village, and a new steeple set in the midst of it without
 
 20 ROBERT BURNS. 
 
 doing much to mar its homeliness. The Poet, whose renown 
 beyond the Atlantic brought hither Nathaniel Hawthorne, still 
 haunts the streets. Our eyes may yet rest upon the Priory, 
 and on the Corse, where he found the girl, who was his fate, 
 hanging up clothes to dry. We have access to the crib in 
 the Back Causeway to which he brought her home, and to 
 the alehouse of Nanse Tinnock. Whence, through the 
 churchyard, by the graves of the twins and the Armours, of 
 Daddy Auld and his " black bonnet," — William Fisher, — of 
 the good Gavin and the ill-fated Margaret Kennedy, between 
 the site of Moodie's tent and the lunching booths of the 
 Holy Fair, we come to that of Johnny Dow's " Arms," with 
 its " roaring trade " and the windows, from which the lovers 
 beckoned across the lane. We pass on the other side to 
 Poosie Nansie's howff, where " the vera girdle rang " with 
 the wildest of vagrant revels, on which we can almost see 
 Burns interloping with Iris cronies Bichmond and Smith, or 
 " setting up " the Cowgate with " Common-sense " Mackenzie, 
 or loitering along the main with Lapraik and Kennedy. We 
 picture him taking the east road and coming over " the 
 drucken steps" to the race-course, where (in April 1784 or 
 '85, v. Vols. I. and IV.) he first met " the jewel " of the " six 
 proper young belles ;" and so back by the upland fields to 
 watch the gloamin' growing grey over the Galston moors ; 
 or the south to Catrine, where he was entertained and recog- 
 nised by Dugald Stewart ; or another to the Whitefoords at 
 Ballochmyle ; or another to Coilsfield, " the Castle o' Mont- 
 gomerie," whose banks and braes yet blossom with his name, 
 to call on his early patron, afterwards the Earl, Sir Hugh. 
 Lastly, we loiter down the Faile till it trickles into the 
 Ayr, by a grove more poetically hallowed than the fountain 
 of Vaucluse or Julie's bosque. There is no spot in Scotland 
 so created for a modern idyl, none leaves us with such 
 an impression of perfect peace as this, where the river, 
 babbling over a shelf of pebbles to the left, then hushed 
 through " birch and hawthorn," and Narcissus willows, mur- 
 muring on, heedless of the near and noisy world, keeps the 
 memory green of our minstrel and his Mary.
 
 A SUMMAEY OF His CAREER AXI) GENIU& 21 
 
 Bums' life during the years 1784-86 was mainly con- 
 cerned with three matters — a keen religious controversy, 
 the intimacy that resulted in his marriage, the full blaze 
 and swift recognition of his genius. 
 
 The poet, brought up like his countrymen in the Calvin- 
 istic theology, was by nature and circumstance soon led to 
 question and " puzzle " the tenets of his ancestors. Proud 
 of his polemic skill, and shining " in conversations between 
 sermons," he at Irvine, if not before, was familiarised 
 with "liberal opinions" in speculation in connection with 
 laxity in life ; he continued to hold them in better com- 
 pany. 
 
 Ayrshire had been, for some time, the headquarters of a 
 Theological Conservatism, often combined with Radical 
 Politics ; but, during this period, several of the pulpits were 
 occupied by men affected by the wider views prevailing in 
 the literary circles of the capital, where Polite Literature, 
 seldom on close terms with Fanaticism, was represented by 
 Robertson, and Blair, and Beattie, and Mackenzie. The 
 clergymen of the " New Licht," or Moderate party, were, 
 compared with their antagonists, men of " light and leading," 
 learning and manners. They read more, wrote better, and 
 studied their fellows from various points of view. Scholars 
 and gentlemen, personally without reproach, they believed 
 not only in good works, but occasionally in good cheer, made 
 allowances for sins of blood, and were inclined to " gently scan 
 their brother man, still gentler sister woman." The representa- 
 tives of the " Auld Licht " party, on the other hand, were more 
 potent in the pulpit. M'Kinlay and Moodie, — Black Jock 
 Russell and Peebles, Father Auld, and Steven " The Calf," 
 never shot over the heads of the people by references to Aris- 
 totle's Ethics or Cicero's Offices : they charmed the mob by 
 the half physical excitement of vehement words and vulgar 
 action : knotty points of faith, which their opponents were apt 
 to slur, they cleared at once " wi' rattlin' and wi' thumpin'," 
 and when patrons, like Glencairn, being men of culture, 
 began in their appointments to be influenced by the regard
 
 22 ROBERT BURNS. 
 
 of like for like, they raised against them the cry of 
 " Patronage " — 
 
 " Come join your counsels and your skills 
 To co we the lairds ; " 
 
 a cry, so well chosen in a democratic country that, despite 
 Bacon's " exceptis rebus divinis," despite Burns' comment — 
 
 " And get the brutes the power themsels 
 To choose their herds," 
 
 it has, after a century's fight, with results yet to be seen, 
 carried the day. Few criticisms on the poet have done 
 justice to his friends the Moderates. Liberal conservatives, 
 with excessive " Economy," as is their wont, have passed 
 the question by. The orators and pamphleteers of that off- 
 shoot of the Church, whose name is a masterpiece, almost a 
 miracle, of misnomenclature, have been left free to rail at 
 large at a body of men, on the whole, among the best of their 
 age. Maligned as " mundane," because they looked on the 
 round world as a place to live, not merely to die in ; and 
 held to be " coarse-minded " because they did not become 
 hysterical, the historian will give them the credit of helping 
 to keep the country sane. That these men appreciated, 
 esteemed, and invited Burns to their houses has of course 
 been lamented : even the philosopher and guide of John 
 Sterling says the poet learned " more than was good for 
 him " at the tables of the New Licht, but it is unjust 
 to weight them, on the ground of unauthenticated anec- 
 dotes, with the responsibility of his already formed opinions. 
 Accomplished Broad-Church clergymen may have pointed 
 some of the arrows in his quiver, but it was the indecorum 
 of his adversaries and loyalty to his friends that set them 
 flying. By all accounts his landlord, Gavin Hamilton, was of 
 the salt of the earth, upright, genial, "the puir man's friend," 
 himself in word and deed a gentleman; but he openly espoused 
 the liberal cause, and the Bev. Mr Auld, a person, says Cromek, 
 " of morose and malicious disposition," having had a feud with 
 Hamilton's father, sought every occasion of venting his spite 
 on the son, whose child he refused to christen, for the follow-
 
 A SUMMARY OF HIS CAREER AND GENIUS. 23 
 
 ing reasons : — Hamilton was seen on horseback and ordered 
 his gardener to dig a few potatoes (for which the gardener 
 was afterwards ecclesiastically dealt with) on the Lord's 
 Day, he was heard to whistle on a Fast Day, and said 
 " damn it " before Mr Auld's very face. High social posi- 
 tion, stainless life and benevolence were as nothing against 
 the fact that he played at cards, and on Sundays only went 
 once to church ; the straiter sect already regarded him 
 with venomous looks. Kobert Aitken, another staunch 
 friend whose acquaintance Burns made at the Castle, 
 and to whom he dedicated "The Cottar's Saturday Night," 
 on similar grounds, came in for his share of the same 
 narrow virulence. The poet, watching his opportunity, 
 found it on one of the frequent occasions when the practice 
 of those severe censors shamed their precept. Pecuniary 
 differences are touch-stones of religious profession, and two 
 shining Auld Licht divines, being at variance as to their 
 parochial bounds, abused each other, in open court, with more 
 than average theological indecency. 
 
 " Sic twa — O do I live to see't, 
 Sic famous twa should disagree, 
 An' names like villain, hypocrite, 
 
 Ilk ither ge'en, 
 While new-light herds with laughin' spite 
 
 Say neither^ lee'in." 
 
 In this wise, Burns struck from the shoulder, and seizing 
 on Pope's lacerating lines — 
 
 " Blockheads with reason wicked wits abhor, 
 But fool with fool is barbarous civil war," 
 
 launched at the Pharisees his " Twa Herds, or Holy Tulyie." 
 By this piece, towards the close of 1784, his reputation as a 
 satirist, next to that of a lyrist his title deed to fame, was 
 made at a stroke. No wonder the liberals, whose weakness 
 lay in lack of demagogic art, clapped their hands and drank 
 their claret, with added relish " upon that day " ! Here was 
 a man of the people, speaking for the people, and making 
 the people hear him, fighting their battle in a manner
 
 24 ROBERT BURNS. 
 
 hitherto unknown among their ranks. The first shot fired, 
 the guns of the battery rattled and rang, volley on volley. 
 " Holy Willie's Prayer," with the Epistles to Goudie, Simp- 
 son, and M'Math, "The Holy Fair," besides "The Jolly 
 Beggars " and the " Address to the Deil," inspired in part at 
 least by the same spirit, were written in 1785. To the next 
 year belong " the Ordination," the " Address to the Unco 
 Guid," " The Calf," and the " Dedication to Hamilton," — a 
 sheaf which some of the admirers of the poet's softer mood 
 would fain pluck out of his volume and cast like tares 
 into the oven. They fail to perceive that, for good or ill, 
 they represent as essential a phase of his genius as the 
 lighter characters of the Canterbury Tales do that of Chaucer. 
 Burns' religious satires are an inalienable part of his work ; 
 though, for some years after his Edinburgh success, the 
 fire which prompted them smouldered, it sends out continual 
 sparks in his letters, and three years later, on the prosecution 
 of his friend M'Gill, it blazed into the fierce blast of " The 
 Kirk's Alarm." 
 
 " Orthodox, orthodox, wha believe in John Knox, 
 Let me sound an alarm to your conscience ; 
 There's a heretic blast has been blawn in the West, 
 That what is no sense, must be nonsense." 
 
 A keen adversary and unscrupulous controversialist 
 admits that these lines, once sent abroad, cannot be sup- 
 pressed by Bowdlerism. " Leviathan is not so tamed." No, 
 nor can Michael's flaming sword be so blunted. It is hard 
 to say what the writer might not have done for religious 
 liberty in Scotland, had not the weight of his judgment been 
 lessened, as the cogency of Milton's views on Divorce, by 
 the fact that he was, in part at least, fighting for his own 
 hand. Speculative opinion has less to do with some aspects 
 of morality than is generally supposed ; but it was unfor- 
 tunate for the poet that when the Kirk-Session of Mauchline 
 met to look over their artillery they found, by his own con- 
 fession, a weak point in his armour. 
 
 No biography of Burns can be complete that does not
 
 A SUMMARY OF HIS CAREER AND GENIUS. 25 
 
 discuss with some detail the delicate matters connected with 
 his relation to the other sex; but, in the slight survey to 
 which we are confined, it must he enough to glance at the 
 main facts and draw an inference. Philosophical moralists 
 have, with considerable force, asserted that the root of all 
 evil is selfishness ; but in practice this takes two directions 
 so distinct that they mark two distinct types of evil, the 
 one exhibited in various forms of dishonesty, hypocrisy, 
 meanness, or fraud ; the other in incontinence of speech, of 
 diet, or in relations of sex. In the worst type, e.g., that of 
 Richardson's Lovelace, that of the deliberate seducer and 
 deserter, they are combined. The chaste commercial rogue, 
 who gives tithes of his plunder, is, as a rule, too tenderly 
 dealt with by the Church ; the man — unfairly not the 
 woman — who yields to every gust, is perhaps too tenderly 
 dealt with by the World. Burns, it must be admitted, was 
 in this respect emphatically " passion's slave," and yet a 
 nation ostentatiously proud of its morality wears him in 
 its " heart of hearts." He was more reckless in his loves 
 than Lord Byron, almost as much so as King David ; but he 
 was never treacherous, and, in contrast with the sickly 
 sentimentalist Eousseau, he never sought to shirk the 
 consequences of his misdeeds. When accordingly, in 
 November 1784, his " Dear bought Bess," the result of a 
 liaison during the last days of Lochlea, made her appearance, 
 she was hailed in " The Welcome " with a sincere affection, 
 brought up in the family and shared their fortunes. This 
 event brought Burns within the range of ecclesiastical 
 censure, which, considering that it was an established custom, 
 not to be waived out of respect even for the person of a poet, 
 he too keenly resented. Shortly before or after, he was 
 implicated in another affair with a more serious result. 
 It is dogmatism to pretend certainty as to the date of 
 his first meeting with his Jean, depending as it does 
 on the original presence or interpolation of a stanza in 
 the Epistle to Davie ; but only in the last month of 
 1785 must their intimacy have culminated. Mr Armour, 
 a well-to-do master mason, and strict " Auld Licht,"
 
 20 ROBERT BURNS. 
 
 who hated freedom of thought and speech when com- 
 bined with poverty, from the first, set himself against the 
 courtship as a prelude to an undesirable alliance. Burns 
 was accordingly driven to contract a clandestine marriage by 
 acknowledging the girl in writing as his wife ; a form still 
 valid. When, however, their relation was discovered, the 
 incensed parents, with a disregard of her honour which 
 forfeits their claim to our respect, persuaded her to destroy 
 her " lines " and repudiate her bargain. By this step, 
 assigned to April 13, 1786, and the transgressor's second 
 appearance, July 9, on the bad eminence of the stool of 
 repentance, with a view to obtain a certificate of bachelor- 
 ship, both parties — mistakenly as lawyers now maintain — 
 seem to have thought that the irregular alliance was 
 annulled. The poet gave vent to his outraged feelings in 
 "The Lament" and the last stanza of "The Daisy," and 
 finding himself out of friends and favour, holding that 
 " hungry ruin had him in the wind," gave up his share of 
 the Farm, resolved to seek refuge in exile, and accepted 
 a situation as bookkeeper to an estate in Jamaica. The 
 Armour's rejecting his overtures of reconciliation and threat- 
 ening him with legal proceedings, put spurs to his intent ; he 
 hurried on the publication of his poems, and with the pro- 
 ceeds bought a steerage passage in a ship to sail from 
 Greenock on the 1st September. 
 
 Burns expected a wife to go with him or to follow 
 him ; but it was not Jean. Nothing in his career is 
 so startling as the interlineation of his loves ; they played 
 about him like fire-flies ; he seldom remembered to be off 
 with the old before he was on with the new. Allured 
 by two kinds of attraction, those which were mainly sensual 
 seem scarcely to have interfered with others of a higher 
 strain. It is now undoubted that his white rose grew up 
 and bloomed in the midst of his passion-flowers. Of his 
 attachment to Mary Campbell, daughter of a Campbelton 
 sailor, and sometime nurse to the infant son of Gavin 
 Hamilton, he was always chary of speech. There is little 
 record of their intimacy previous to their betrothal on the
 
 A SUMMARY OF HIS CAREER AND GENIUS. 27 
 
 second Sunday, the 14th of May 1786, when, standing 
 one on either bank of the Faille, they dipped their hands 
 in the brook, and holding between them a Bible, — on the 
 two volumes of which half obliterated inscriptions still 
 remain, — they swore everlasting fidelity. Shortly after 
 she returned to her native town, where " Will you go to 
 the Indies, my Mary ? " and other songs were sent to her. 
 Having bespoken a place in Glasgow for Martinmas, she 
 went in the autumn to Greenock to attend a sick brother, 
 and caught from him a fever which proved fatal at some 
 date before October 12, when her lair was bought in 
 the West Kirkyard, now, on her account, the resort of 
 pilgrims. Mrs Begg's story of Burns receiving the news of 
 her death has been called in question ; but how deep the 
 buried love lay in his heart is known to every reader of his 
 verse. After flowing on in stillness for three years, it broke 
 forth as the inspiration of the most pathetic of his songs — 
 
 " Thou lingering star with lessening ray," 
 
 composed in the course of a windy October night, when 
 musino; and watching the skies about the corn-ricks at 
 Ellisland. Three years later, it may have been about the 
 same harvest time, even on the same anniversary, the re- 
 ceding past, with a throng of images, sad and sweet, again 
 swept over him, and bodied itself forth in the immortal 
 lyric — 
 " Ye banks and braes and streams around the Castle o' Montgomery," 
 
 which is the last we hear of Highland Mary. 
 
 Meanwhile Burns had arrived at the full consciousness 
 of being a poet, and, though speaking with almost unbe- 
 coming modesty of his rank, in comparison with Eamsay 
 and Fergusson, had, by his own statement, as high an 
 opinion of his work as he ever entertained. His fertility 
 during the years 1785-86, more especially in the period 
 between November 1785 and April 1786, has rarely been 
 equalled. Among the pieces conceived behind the plough, 
 and transcribed before he went to sleep in his garret over 
 the " but and ben " of the farm-house, in addition to
 
 28 ROBERT BURNS. 
 
 his anti-Calvinistic satires, and Dr Hornbrook, of more local 
 interest, were "The Twa Dogs," "The Author's Prayer," 
 "The Vision," and "The Dream," "Halloween," "The 
 Farmer's Address to his Mare," " The Cottar's Saturday 
 Night," The two Epistles to Davie and three to Lapraik, 
 the lines to a Mouse and to a Daisy, " Scotch Drink," "Man 
 was made to mourn," and "The Jolly Beggars." These, 
 with the exception of the last, along with some of his 
 most popular songs, were included in his first volume. 
 Preparations for publishing it at Kilmarnock began in 
 April; it appeared on July 31st under the auspices of 
 Hamilton, Aitken, and other of his friends. The result 
 was an almost instant success, if not a thorough apprecia- 
 tion. Of an edition of 600, at the end of the month only 
 41 copies remained unsold. This epitome of a genius, so 
 pronounced and so varied, expressing itself so tersely and 
 yet so clearly — for there was not a word in the volume 
 that any Scotch peasant who could read could fail to 
 understand — took its audience by storm, and set all the 
 shores of the West in a murmur of acclaim. It only 
 brought to the author £20 direct return, but it introduced 
 him to the literary world. Mrs Dunlop of Dunlop began 
 with him the correspondence which testifies to a nine years' 
 friendship. Dugald Stewart invited him to his house at 
 Catrine, where he met Lord Daer, and found his first ex- 
 perience of the aristocracy a very pleasant one. Somewhat 
 later H. Mackenzie gave him a favourable review in the 
 Lounger, extracts from which were copied into the London 
 papers. Of Stewart, Burns speaks at all times with affec- 
 tionate respect ; the philosopher bears as emphatic 
 testimony to the favourable impression made by the first 
 appearance of the poet, and to the high qualities of mind 
 which he exhibited in their frequent walks together about 
 the Braid Hills in the subsequent spring — to the inde- 
 pendence of his manners, a consciousness of worth devoid 
 of vanity, and the fluency, precision, and originality of his 
 speech. " He had a very strong sense of religion, and 
 expressed deep regret at the levity with which he had
 
 A SUMMARY OF HIS CAREER AND GENIUS. 29 
 
 heard it treated in some convivial meetings." "All the 
 faculties of his mind were equally vigorous." " From his 
 conversation I should have pronounced him fitted to excel 
 in whatever walk of ambition he had chosen to exert his 
 abilities. He was fond of remarking on character, shrewd, 
 and often sarcastic, but extravagant in praise of those he 
 loved. Dr Eobertson thought his prose, considering his 
 education, more remarkable than his verse." 
 
 From August till the middle of November, during which 
 time he had written "The Brigs of Ayr," "The Lass of 
 Ballochmyle," " Tarn Samson's Elegy," and other minor pieces, 
 preparations for the poet's departure were proceeding. On 
 the 26th of September he writes to his Montrose cousin 
 that it will not take place till after harvest ; but, a month 
 later, he is still bent on the Indies. Coming back over 
 Galston Moor from a visit to that excellent Moderate (his 
 friend, Dr Laurie of Loudon), he wrote " The gloomy night 
 is falling fast," ending " Farewell, the bonie banks of Ayr." 
 
 In the interval, incited by Mr Hamilton to venture on a 
 second edition, he was discouraged by the temerity of the 
 Kilmarnock printer ; but an enthusiastic letter, transmitted 
 by Laurie, from the blind poet, Dr Blacklock, and the pros- 
 pect of the support of the Earl of Glencairn, induced him to 
 stay his steps and try his fortune in the Scotch metropolis. 
 He who had sung "Freedom and whisky gang together," was 
 not to be an overseer of slaves, but an exciseman. He left 
 Mauchline on a pony on the 27th, and reached Edinburgh 
 on the 28 th November, with passports that promised him a 
 fair start, in the " pastures new," on which he now, in his 
 twenty-ninth year, broke ground. 
 
 V. — Fifth Period, Edinburgh, Nov. 1786 — May 1788. 
 
 (jEL 28-30.) 
 
 In the northern capital of these days there was more of 
 Auld Reekie, less of Modern Athens ; the iron-road had not 
 replaced the Nor-Loch, the main thoroughfare ran down from
 
 30 ROBERT BURNS. 
 
 the Castle to Holyrood, and the banks of the valley were 
 undisfigiired by domineering hotels or the College towers 
 which have roused Mr Ruskin's wrath. The first sight of a 
 city, moreover, is as attractive to a countryman, as the first 
 glimpse of the sea to an inlander. We can easily imagine 
 that the poet, attracted alike by the picturesque grandeur of 
 the place and its historical associations, spent the first days 
 after his arrival in wandering about the quaint old streets, 
 looking into shop windows, rambling up Arthur Seat, and 
 gazing over the Frith on the Lomonds. We can fancy him 
 taking off his hat at the threshold of Allan Ramsay's barber 
 shop, or seeking out the " narrow house " of Fergusson, in 
 Canongate Kirk, and kneeling to kiss the sod on which he, 
 at his own expense, erected the memorial to his neglected 
 predecessor. But if he kept apart for a time from society, 
 it was from choice not necessity ; armed with introductions 
 to Dr Blacklock and the Earl of Glencairn, the favour of Mr 
 Stewart, and that of his amiable critic, Mr Mackenzie, secured, 
 and the literary world of the place on tip-toe to see him, he 
 soon became acquainted with Drs Blair and Gregory, Mr Frazer 
 Tytler, Henry Erskine, Lord Monboddo (who had vaguely 
 guessed what Mr Darwin is generally held to have proved), 
 and his daughter, the fair theme of several of his minor 
 verses. In short, before a week was over, he found himself, 
 in his own words, suddenly " translated from the veriest 
 shades of life " to the centre of the most distinguished circles. 
 He was by the scholars of that brilliant time, by the bench 
 and the bar, by fashion and by beauty, welcomed, courted, 
 feasted, and admired. " The town," wrote Mrs Cockburn 
 towards the close of the year, " is at present all agog with 
 the ploughman poet. . . He has seen Duchess Gordon and 
 all the gay world. His favourite for looks and manners is 
 Bess Burnett, no bad judge indeed." It has been suggested 
 that the sudden change of life must have been prejudicial to 
 his health ; but no man was ever less spoiled by adulation. 
 
 When Burns first saw the mental and social aristocracy 
 of the land, and they saw him, they met on equal terms. 
 " In the whole strain of his bearing," we are told, " he mani-
 
 A SUMMARY OF HIS CAREER AND GENIUS. 
 
 3*1 
 
 festcd his belief that in the society of the most eminent men 
 of his nation he was exactly where he was entitled to be ; 
 hardly deigning to Hatter them by exhibiting a symptom of 
 being nattered." " I never saw a man," says Scott, "in 
 company with his superiors in station or information more 
 perfectly free from either the reality or the affectation of 
 embarrassment. His address to females was extremely 
 deferential, with a turn either to the pathetic or the 
 humorous, which engaged their attention particularly. . . . 
 He was much caressed in Edinburgh, but the efforts made 
 for his relief were extremely trifling." With all his essential 
 modesty, the poet must have felt a glow of triumph at the 
 impression made by his matchless conversational power, 
 according to Lockhart, who had the reports of auditors, 
 " the most remarkable thing about him." The Duchess of 
 Gordon said he was the only man who ever " carried her off 
 her feet ; " Eamsay of Ochtertyre, " I have been in the com- 
 pany of many men of genius, but never witnessed such 
 flashes of intellectual brightness as from him, the impulse of 
 his moment, sparks of celestial fire ; " and the brilliant 
 Maria Eiddell, the best friend of his later days, " I hesitate 
 not to affirm — and in vindication of my opinion I appeal to 
 all who had the advantage of personal acquaintance with 
 him — that poetry was actually not his forte . . . none have 
 ever outshone Burns in the charm — the sorcery I would 
 almost call it — of fascinating conversation. . . . The rapid 
 lightnings of his eye were always the harbingers of some 
 flash of genius. . . . His voice alone could improve upon 
 the magic of Ins eye." The poet went home from assem- 
 blages of learning, wit, and grace, where he had been posing 
 professors, arguing down lawyers, and turning the heads of 
 reigning beauties, to share with his friend Eichmond, then a 
 writer's apprentice, a crib in Baxter's Close, Lawnmarket, 
 for which they paid together three shillings a week. Not 
 imfrequently he dropped in by the way upon gatherings of 
 another sort, knots of boon companions met where the wine 
 went faster and the humour was more akin to that of the 
 Tarbolton Lodge. For the chief of these free-thoughted and
 
 3*2 II0BE11T BURNS. 
 
 loose-worded clubs, nicknamed that of the Crochallan 
 Fencibles, he afterwards compiled the collection of unconven- 
 tional songs* — some amusing, others only rough — known as 
 the " Merry Muses," to which he contributed a few pieces. 
 Like Chaucer, he owed half his power to the touch of 
 Bohemianism that demands now and then a taste of wild 
 life. The English poet did not meet his Host or Miller 
 among his fellow ambassadors, and the Scotch bard must 
 often have left the company of Drs Blair and Eobertson 
 with an irresistible impulse to have his fling among the 
 Eattlin' Willies of the capital, whose example possibly led 
 him to form other connections of a kind to be regretted. 
 But it is hard to see how this could have been prevented by 
 any interposition of his high-class friends, or how, despite 
 Scott's reproach, they could, at this stage, have done anything 
 for the pecuniary relief of a man at once so wayward and so 
 proud. They did him substantial service in facilitating the 
 publication of his poems, and taking measures to ensure their 
 success. Lord Glencairn introduced him to the publisher 
 Creech, and got the members of the Caledonian Hunt to take 
 100 copies of the second edition. It appeared, 21st April 
 1787, had nearly 3000 subscribers, and ultimately brought 
 the author about £500 ; a sum which enabled him, besides 
 handing over a handsome amount, £200, to his brother, to 
 undertake several excursions, and, when the time came, to 
 stock a new farm. This volume, containing most of the 
 pieces in the Kilmarnock impression, with others, as the 
 " Winter Night " (the sole important product of December 
 1786), was several times reprinted during his life. In the 
 spring, Burns entered into an agreement to aid the engraver 
 Johnson in his "Museum," to the six volumes of which — the 
 last published shortly after his death — he gave about 180 
 songs. In September 1792 he was invited by Mr George 
 Thomson to supply material for a similar work, the "Melodies 
 of Scotland." On this undertaking also, he entered with 
 alacrity, only stipulating that he should not be required to 
 
 * Burns kept this volume under lock and key, and it was only printed, 
 with doubtful propriety, for limited circulation, after his death.
 
 A SUMMARY OF HIS CAREER AND GENIUS. 33 
 
 write in classic English, and contributed in all about 100 
 songs, wholly original, or so recast from older models as to 
 make them really new. 
 
 The leisure of the last nine years of the poet's life, i.e., 
 from 1787 to 1796, was almost wholly devoted to these two 
 enterprises ; his other poetic performances being, with one 
 exception, insignificant. Nothing was said about money, 
 and his work was, in the one case entirely, in the other 
 nearly, gratuitous. On the publication of his first half 
 volume, Thomson, with a note of thanks, sent to Burns a 
 shawl for his wife, a picture by Allan representing the 
 " Cottar's Saturday Night," and £5. Such an acknowledge- 
 ment of a treasure " above rubies " has provoked inevitable 
 derision. It has been pleaded for Thomson that he had then 
 only received an instalment of a tenth part of the work, that 
 he was far from affluent, and that he put the whole of the 
 songs at the disposal of Dr Currie, when on the poet's death 
 that gentleman was about to edit an edition for the benefit 
 of his family. At all events, Burns indignantly stopped 
 any similar advance : he only forbears returning his corre- 
 spondent's " pecuniary parcel " because " it might savour of 
 affectation ; " if he hears a word more of such " debtor and 
 creditor traffic " he will " spurn the whole transaction ; " his 
 songs are " either below or above price." Whatever the 
 " motif " of this letter — a point which his inconsistency in 
 money matters, for he had not hesitated to dun Creech for 
 his due, and his frequent irony, leaves doubtful — he abode 
 by his determination never again to write for " cold unfeel- 
 ing ore." In 1795 when requested by the editor of a high- 
 class London newspaper to furnish weekly an article for the 
 " poetical department " at a remuneration of £5 2 a year, he 
 refused the offer. It is calculated that, including the profits 
 of the reissue of his poems in 1793, he had up to the date 
 of his death received for the literary labour of fifteen years 
 about £900 ; less than a third of the sum paid to Moore 
 for " Lallah Rooke," but a hundred times the outcome to 
 Milton of " Paradise Lost." Wisely, in any case, Burns 
 was never seduced by a popularity he feared to be 
 
 c
 
 34 ROBERT BUKNS. 
 
 evanescent, to think of literature as a means of livelihood. 
 He adopted, by anticipation, the advice of Sir Walter 
 Scott — never more apposite than now — " let your pen be 
 your pastime, your profession your anchor," and, with the 
 idea of an independence at the plough-tail foremost in 
 his mind, was already negotiating with Mr Patrick Miller 
 of Dalswinton for a tenancy of a farm on the banks 
 of the Nith. With a view to explore the ground, he on 
 May 5 th started on the Border tour, with his friend Ainslie 
 of the Crochallans, of most of which we have in his journal 
 a sufficient record. From other sources we learn that, on Ins 
 return, he arrived at Mossgiel on the 8th of June. "0 Eobbie," 
 his mother is said to have cried, as she met her son un- 
 announced at the farm-house door. Enough has been said — 
 sometimes rather rhapsodically — of an event so ready for rhe- 
 toric. The prodigal had gone into a far country and returned 
 with a laurel crown. In the old homestead all was sun- 
 shine, no one suspects maternal tenderness or scrutinises 
 fraternal praise; but the poet did not receive so graciously 
 the civilities of his "plebeian brethren," who, nine months 
 before, had taken the other side of the street, and were 
 ready to hound him into exile. The adulation of success 
 which follows on insolence to calamity is sure, on another 
 turn of the wheel, to be again reversed ; and Burns was all 
 through the blare and blaze manfully conscious that his 
 triumph was meteoric. 
 
 The old Armours were conspicuously deferential, and 
 got the return they deserved in his expression of disgust 
 at their " mean, servile compliance." With the daughter 
 it was different, and he flew, as Professor Wilson naively 
 expresses it, " too fervently to the arms of his Jean." After 
 hovering for a few days about Mauchline, he, driven by a 
 wandering impulse or lured by the haunts of his lost Mary, 
 rushed off on an expedition to the West Highlands, that has 
 been called mysterious, because we have no record of it, save 
 a few letters and an epigram composed at Inveraray, which 
 shows, as might have been expected, that he did not find
 
 A SUMMARY OF HIS CAREER AND GENIUS. 35 
 
 the atmosphere of the metropolis of the Argyles congenial. 
 After a month spent, on his return, in Ayrshire, we find 
 him, early in August, back in Edinburgh, where the fame 
 of his volume made him more a lion than ever in the 
 circles of his former friends, and opened to him others. 
 Unmoved by flattery or favour he, in one respect only, 
 betrayed a morbid self-consciousness. He was suspicious of 
 being stared at, intolerant of condescension, and too nervously 
 on his guard against the claims of learning or of rank. This 
 feeling appears in the " Winter Night " and passages of the 
 Common-place Book, in which he takes notes of the "charac- 
 ters and manners " as they rose around him. These pen and 
 ink sketches are, on the whole, conceived in a spirit of friendli- 
 ness, but they are also coloured by a cynical vein, and it is 
 hardly to be wondered at that when extracts — of course the 
 severest — began to be circulated people did not feel envious 
 of a place among them. There is little to add of the spring 
 and summer of this year save a few records of the poet's 
 impressionableness, generosity, and patriotic enthusiasm. In 
 January he writes to Hamilton that he has almost persuaded 
 a Lothian farmer's daughter to accompany him. In February 
 he applied for and obtained permission to erect the tomb- 
 stone over Fergusson. In March, answering Mrs Scott of 
 Wauchope, he wrote the famous Epistle, with the well-worn 
 lines beginning, " E'en then a wish, I mind its power," and 
 sent some grateful verses to Glencairn, which, as appears, he 
 did not obtain permission to publish. The memory of that 
 accomplished nobleman rests securely on the stanzas after- 
 wards inspired by the premature close (in 1791) of his 
 generous life, " The bridegroom may forget the bride," than 
 which there has been no finer tribute of genius to worth, 
 since Simonides and Pindar exalted the fame of the kings of 
 Syracuse. In April, in course of a Prologue for the benefit 
 of the veteran Scotch Roscius (Mr Wood), Burns, after refer- 
 ring to Hume, Eobertson, and Eeid, as glories of Caledonia, 
 perpetrated his worst criticism — 
 
 " Here Douglas forms wild Shakespeare into plan,"
 
 36 KOBEKT BURNS. 
 
 and in May, writing to Mr Tytler of Woodhouselee on the 
 " Vindication of Mary Stuart," his worst lines — 
 
 " Though something like moisture conglobes in my eye, 
 Let no one misdeem me disloyal." 
 
 On the 25th he started with the schoolmaster Nicol, 
 another Crochallan, on a three months' tour in the Eastern 
 Highlands, in the course of which he visited Queen Mary's 
 birth-room at Linlithgow, the tomb of Sir John the Graeme 
 at Falkirk, the Carron Works, — which he compared to the 
 mouth of the Pit, — Bannockburn, scrawling on the window 
 of the inn at Stirling the dangerous stanza spread abroad to 
 his harm. 
 
 " The injured Stuart line is gone," &c, 
 
 Strathallan, suggesting the lament, " Thickest night around 
 me dwelling," Dunkeld, Birnam Hill, Aberfeldy, and the 
 ducal residence at Blair, where he met Mr Graham 
 of Fintry, and gave the toast, " Athole's honest men, 
 and Athole's bonnie lasses." They passed through Rothie- 
 murchus and Aviemore by Strathspey to Findhorn and 
 Castle Cawdor, then over Culloden to Forres and Shake- 
 speare's witch muir. We next find the poet entertained 
 at Castle Gordon, — an event commemorated in some of his 
 most graceful English verses, — and hurried away by the 
 jealous impatience of his companion, then returning by 
 Aberdeen (where he met some of his relatives and Bishop 
 Skinner, son of the author of " Tullochgorum," which he 
 extravagantly pronounced the best of Scotch songs) : we 
 trace him through Montrose to Perth and up the Almond 
 Water, looking for the scene of " Bessie Bell and Mary 
 Gray," and so by Kinross and Queensferry to Edinburgh. 
 Ere the month was out he made, with Dr Adair, a fourth 
 excursion, the main point of interest in which is his residence 
 at Harvieston, and intimacy with Miss Margaret Chalmers, 
 to whom he in vain offered his hand. On the same occasion 
 he made the acquaintance of Mr Ramsay of Ochtertyre 
 on the Teith, knelt on Brace's grave in the Cathedral of 

 
 A SUMMARY OF HIS CAREER AND GENIUS. 3*i 
 
 Dunfermline, and then, " from grave to gay," having per- 
 suaded Adair to sit on the stool of repentance, administered 
 to him a parody of his own rebuke. At Clackmannan he 
 
 was knighted by an ancient lady with the sword of her 
 ancestor, the good King Bobert, and, nothing loath, responded 
 to her toast, " Hoolie uncos," i.e., " Awa' Whigs, awa'." 
 
 Burns refers to his Highland trip in particular as 
 " perfectly inspiring," but its only poetic outcome of much 
 consequence was " Macpherson's Lament," the death-song 
 of a freebooter (recalling that of Eegnar Lodbrog), on the 
 wild grandeur of which Mr Carlyle has eloquently dwelt. 
 The fact that these expeditions yielded so little direct 
 harvest may be explained in part by the business purpose of 
 the first, and the ill-adjusted companionship of the third ; 
 more by the prodigious productiveness of the two previous 
 years, and the social excitement of the six preceding months. 
 The soil on which rich crops grow must sometimes lie fallow. 
 Add that the spirit of poetry bloweth where it listeth, that 
 to a mind of emphatically spontaneous power the fact of 
 being expected to write was a bar to inspiration, that Burns, 
 unlike Scott, only took delight in fine scenery as a frame to 
 living interests, and we scarcely require to consider the 
 fatigues of travel in the days when a sturdy lexicographer's 
 journey to the Hebrides was a matter of more adventure 
 than is now that of a lady to the Eocky Mountains or the 
 Sandwich Isles. 
 
 Back in Edinburgh, the poet shifted to more comfort- 
 able quarters in St James' Square, where he lived with 
 Mr Cruikshank, whose sister is the Eosebud of his Muse. 
 The rest of the year was mainly devoted to negotiations 
 with Johnson, letters about the " Erebean fanatics," who 
 were persecuting Hamilton and M'Gill, and stray verses 
 addressed to Peggy Chalmers. On December 8, thrown 
 from a hackney coach, he sustained an injury serious enough 
 to lay him aside for six weeks, during which he expresses 
 despairing disgust of life, and describes himself as " the 
 sport, the miserable victim of rebellious pride, hypochondriac 
 imagination, agonising sensibility, and Bedlam passions."
 
 38 ROBERT BURNS. 
 
 Poetic natures are rarely stoical, and a man accustomed to 
 walk the fields in the morning, to blaze in society at night, 
 naturally chafes under confinement with a disabled limb. 
 Burns was besides beginning to smart from the fickleness — 
 none the less that he had anticipated it — of " Fortune be- 
 guiling." His day of " grace, acceptance, and delight " had 
 passed its noon. The town had had its fill of the prodigy, 
 and the sough of the Reminiscences made the doors of the 
 great move more slowly on their hinges. 
 
 The proud poet in later days, when the castle grew 
 cold, sought solace in the " howff," now he frequented the 
 Crochallans, or wandered about the crags. He had been 
 foiled in one love-suit, and was prosecuting another under 
 difficulties. Our space will only permit us to sum the 
 evidence bearing on this strange story. On December 
 7th, Burns, at the table of a common friend, met Mrs 
 M'Lehose, a lady whose husband had gone to the West 
 Indies and left her with limited means to bring up two 
 children in retirement in Potterow. Handsome, lively, 
 well read, of easy manners and a ready wit, a writer of verses, 
 sentimental and yet ardent, she was born in the same year 
 as Burns, and told him that she shared his dispositions, and 
 would have been his twin-brother had she been a man. 
 Two such beings were obviously made for one another, and 
 they lost no time in finding it out. The above-mentioned 
 accident having prevented their taking tea together, on the 
 following clay he received her condolences with rapture. If 
 he was, as lawyers maintain, at this time a married man, he did 
 not know it ; but she was aware that she was only a grass-widow, 
 and she was virtuous. Their correspondence must therefore 
 be conducted with discretion, and " friendship," not " love," 
 must be their watchword. How to reconcile the pretence 
 with the reality was the trouble. Let them take the names 
 of Clarinda and Sylvander, and exchange their compliments 
 with the pastoral innocence of shepherd and shepherdess 
 in the Golden Age. So it went on, letters flying to and fro, 
 like carrier pigeons, then greetings from windows, visits, 
 risks, recoilings, fresh assignations, reproaches and reconcili-
 
 A SUMMARY OF HIS CABEEB AND GENIUS. 39 
 
 ations, wearisome to us, alternately tantalising and alluring 
 to the mutually fascinated pair. It is perhaps impossible 
 to get at the absolute truth in this business, and if conjec- 
 ture errs, it ought to be on the side of charity. One point 
 has been now made plain, it was no case of mere philander- 
 ing. Beneath all Clarinda's verbiage there throbs the pulse 
 of a real passion, afraid of itself, and yet incapable of sur- 
 rendering its object. She knew that she was playing with 
 edge-tools, but she had confidence in the strength of her 
 principles to draw the line. Sylvander writes more like an 
 artist, never with so much apparent affectation as in many 
 of those letters — fustian and bombast they often are, but as 
 to their being falsetto is another matter. On all that Burns 
 wrote there is some stamp of the same strong mind ; but he 
 was capable of moulding his style on that of his correspond- 
 ents, and adapting his sentiments to theirs to such a degree 
 as often to contradict himself. When we compare his 
 letter of the 2nd March to Mrs M'Lehose with that of the 
 3rd to Ainslie, we are tempted to apply to the former his 
 own line, " Tis a' finesse in Bob Mossgiel." But this plastic 
 faculty, the actor's power, the weakness of over sympathetic 
 or electric natures, is wrongly confounded with deliberate 
 deceit ; it is an invariable accompaniment of dramatic 
 genius, which takes its colour from what it works in, " like 
 the dyer's hand." The poet's religious moods were as 
 genuine as those in which he led the chorus of Crochallan : 
 the former were elicited by contact with religious people ; 
 but he never even to them pretends to be orthodox ; he is 
 constantly fighting with Clarinda's Calvinism, and trying to 
 undermine her confessor, Kemp. It therefore by no means 
 follows that, in his offer to meet her " at the Throne of 
 Grace," he was playing the hypocrite : if he did so, it was 
 the worst thing he ever did. 
 
 Howbeit, this love-making was his main occupation, till, 
 in February, he had news from Mauchline which naturally 
 distressed and seems less naturally to have surprised him. 
 Jean was again about to become a mother, and this time her 
 father had turned her out of the house. Burns, of course,
 
 40 ROBERT BURNS. 
 
 rushed to the rescue, established her in the neighbourhood 
 
 9 O 
 
 with the comforts essential to her condition, and succeeded in 
 reconciling her to her mother ; but he was at first incapable 
 of shaking off the spell of the syren, and wrote to Clarinda 
 the somewhat heartless letter about the "farthing candle" 
 and "the meridian sun," — the former being the woman who 
 was little more than a month later to become his wife, and 
 to be through good and ill report the faithful and forbearing 
 helpmate of the remaining eight years of his life. On 
 February 25th he went to Dumfriesshire and took the farm 
 of Ellisland. "A poet's choice," said Allan Cunningham's 
 father, "Foregirth had better soil;" and perhaps the views 
 of the Nith had something to do with it. The lease was 
 signed March 1 3th, the day on which Jean's second pair of twins 
 are supposed to have made their appearance. They, however, 
 only survived a few weeks. On the 17th Burns returned 
 to Edinburgh, and on the 22nd had a farewell meeting with 
 his " divine poetess." This, says one narrator, " was the last 
 of the serio-comic episode of Clarinda." It is hardly so ; 
 the episode, more serious than comic, had an epilogue ; the 
 correspondence continued intermittently, and the renewal of 
 their intimacy, after more than three years of domestic life, 
 resulted in at least one immortal verse. 
 
 The poet left Edinburgh on the 24th, having arranged 
 with his publisher, and sent, as we have seen, a share of his 
 profits to Gilbert. He had also applied to Mr Graham for 
 a place in the Excise, the duties of which he hoped to com- 
 bine with those of a farmer in the same district. His name 
 being placed on the list, he was afterwards appointed to a 
 post of £50 (raised in course of time to £70) a year, which 
 he congratulates himself on having obtained without any 
 hanging on or mortifying solicitation. On the 26th he was in 
 Glasgow, on the 30th riding over the moors between Gallo- 
 way and Ayrshire. It has been conjectured that he may then 
 have come to the resolve to throw over his poetical grass- 
 widow and do his duty by the comparatively illiterate girl 
 who for him had given up everything. A letter to Miss 
 Chalmers, April 6th, is however our first distinct intimation of
 
 A SUMMARY OF HIS CAREER AND GENIUS- 41 
 
 this resolve. On the 28th he admits to his old friend James 
 Smith that he has made another irregular marriage. It 
 was afterwards (May 2nd) solemnised in the house of Gavin 
 Hamilton, as a Justice of the Peace, and on August 2nd 
 solemnly confirmed at the annual communion in Mauchline, 
 when both parties were reprimanded, expressed regret for 
 their conduct, and "Mr Burns," by way of fine, "gave a 
 guinea for the poor." Jean did not sign her name, so her 
 husband did it for her ; but only six weeks later he 
 " acknowledges her letter," so the non-signature must have 
 been due to nervousness. In frequent references to the 
 event (especially that about the Synod in his heart) the 
 poet takes too much credit for his conduct, but he always 
 adds that he expects to have no reason to regret it. " I can 
 fancy how, but I have never seen where, I could have made 
 it better," is his rather ungracious refrain. In a note to 
 Miss Chalmers on the 16th, he says that his wife had read 
 nothing but the Bible and his verses (in singing which he 
 often praises her voice), but that his marriage had taken 
 him "out of villainy." Clarinda, however, was of an opposite 
 opinion, and on the news wrote a furious letter, calling 
 Burns " a villain ;" an accusation to which, in a dignified 
 reply of March 1789, he refuses to plead guilty, being 
 " convinced of innocence, though conscious of folly." 
 There appears, we must confess, more of the latter than the 
 former in the whole extraordinary story, the sum of which 
 is that the poet had entangled himself with two women, and 
 married the one he loved least, but to whom he was far the 
 more deeply bound. 
 
 VI. — Sixth Period, Ellisland, July 1788 — October 1791. 
 
 {JSt 30-33.) 
 
 Burns left Edinburgh emphatically for good. His first 
 winter had been, like Byron's one brilliant London year, 
 over roses all the way; in the second he had to walk on 
 withered leaves. His old temptations had led him into 
 trouble, even threatened to harden his heart, and some of 
 his great friends were doing their best to corrupt his taste.
 
 42 ROBERT BURNS. 
 
 The criticism of the eighteenth century is by no means so 
 contemptible as it is the fashion to represent it ; the English 
 of Eobertson, even the Latinised style of Blair, was better 
 than the simpleton Anglo-Saxonism of recent antiquarians ; 
 but it was not the manner of writing proper to Burns, and 
 their square and rule were ill-adapted for the measurement 
 of his wood-notes. When a man adopts a style unnatural 
 to him, he adopts its most exaggerated or degenerate 
 forms; when the author of the "Jolly Beggars" tried to 
 mimic the verse of Pope, the result was a reproduction of 
 Hayley. When he expressed to Clarinda his belief that 
 " the soul is capable of inflammation," he reminds us not of 
 Steele but of the Della-Cruscans ; he deserves a place in 
 the " Loves of the Triangles," when he " conglobes a tear." 
 His metaphors are often laboured ; his allegories of "wisdom 
 dwelling with prudence," etc., are lame travesties of the 
 "Vision of Mirza." The dedications, acknowledgements, and 
 other letters of the period have the same taint. In writing 
 to Lords Buchan and Eglinton he is not at his ease, as he 
 would have been in conversation with them. It seems unneces- 
 sary to inform the one that he is incapable of mercenary 
 servility, and when he gratefully remembers the honour of a 
 suggestion from the other, which he inly ridiculed, we feel 
 how near affectation may approach to insincerity. Burns only 
 escaped the latter vice by timely rescue from an atmosphere 
 that was becoming unwholesome, and which no high and most 
 probably unsuitable alliance could have made otherwise. 
 Burns had all the " honest pride" of which he says too 
 much, and would stoop for neither smile nor favour, but to 
 humour the great people at their dances he wore a thin 
 mask, and painfully went through a minuet with hob-nailed 
 shoes. How bad the spoken criticism of his censors must 
 sometimes have been, we may judge by some of the speci- 
 mens which have been printed, e.g. : — Dr Gregory's rejection 
 of "The Lass of Ballochmyle," and his "swashing blows," 
 beating the last bit of life out of the poet's untimely wounded 
 hare ; Dr Moore's recommendation to avoid the use of the 
 Scotch dialect ; Dr Blair's refusal to allow " Tarn o' Shanter"
 
 A SUMMARY OF HIS CAREER AXD GENIUS. 43 
 
 to be printed for the benefit of his family as an appendix to 
 the remains of Michael Bruce; and George Thomson's sugges- 
 tion that "Welcome to your gory bed" be softened into 
 "Welcome to your honour's bed," are among the most 
 ludicrous in literature. True genius seldom wants advice; 
 but the habit of offering it is with some as inveterate as 
 that of gambling or drink. Fortunately Burns seldom 
 paid much heed to the cavils of men who "spun their thread 
 so fine that it was neither fit for warp nor woof," and though, 
 from good-nature, he sometimes permitted his verses to be 
 spoiled, on afterthought a better judgment generally restored 
 them. In his fragment of a Scotch Dunciad, "The Poet's 
 Progress," he calls critics "those cut-throat bandits on the 
 paths of fame," and his reception of Alison's "Essay on 
 Taste," proves that on occasion he could turn and bite the 
 biters. On perusing this politely dressed model of conclusive 
 irony, Stewart innocently remarks on the mastery of the 
 laws of association shown by the poet. 
 
 The lease of Ellisland ran from Whitsunday, but Burns 
 did not take possession till the middle of June. His time 
 till the end of autumn was occupied in getting ready the 
 farm, and rushing backward and forward over a distance 
 of forty-five miles, between Dumfriesshire and Mauchline 
 where his wife continued to reside. Present or absent, his 
 dominant feeling during this honeymoon, lengthened by 
 interruption, was that which inspires one of his most de- 
 servedly popular songs, "Of a' the airts the wind can blaw." 
 When alone he was a prey to many moods, for solitude 
 never suited him, and his first impressions of the Nithsdale 
 folk were unfavourable. " Nothing flourishes among them," 
 he exclaims, "but stupidity and canting; they have as much 
 idea of a rhinoceros as of a poet," and " their whisky is 
 rascally." Ere the month was over he had, however, opened 
 up friendly relations, only interrupted near the close of his 
 life, with the Eiddells of Glenriddell, and had written the 
 well-known verses in Friars' Carse Hermitage, conceived in 
 a spirit of Horatian content. About the same time he was 
 giving an appreciative study to Spenser, and to Dryden's
 
 44 ROBERT BURNS. 
 
 Georgics of Virgil, criticising amateur verses with which he 
 now began to be pestered, writing a remonstrance to the 
 London Star against the anti-Jacobite demonstrations at the 
 centenary of the " Glorious Revolution," and sending to 
 Blacklock his ideas of a model wife, whose " head is imma- 
 terial in comparison with her heart." 
 
 In the first week of December he brought Mrs Burns to 
 " the Isle," a steading a mile down the Nith, where they re- 
 mained for about seven months, till everything was ready to 
 enable them to move up to Ellisland. Now, if ever, were 
 the poet's halcyon days. He had to all appearance found a 
 quiet haven, a good landlord, a promising farm, and a loving 
 helpmate. He could look forward to rearing his own crops, 
 walking over the fields, or loitering by the river banks, en- 
 joying his own thoughts and setting his new words to old 
 tunes. Master of his surroundings, he hoped at last to be 
 master of himself : his elastic temper let him put by the 
 shadows of the past, and he brought into mid-winter the 
 spirit of the spring. His songs of this period are marked 
 by a more genuine buoyancy than either before or after. 
 Beginning with the defiant little lilt, " I hae a wife o' my 
 am," he quickly followed it by two of his most famous 
 lyrics, " Auld Lang Syne," in which he turned a tame 
 original into the national song of peaceful, as " Scots wha 
 hae " is of warlike, Scotland ; and " The Silver Tassie," be- 
 ginning, " Go fetch to me a pint of wine," a drinking song 
 with the aroma of Lovelace or Herrick. Burns had set be- 
 fore himself a model domestic life, and for a time maintained 
 it. He helped Mr Eiddell to establish a public library, 
 had family worship after his fashion, and went to church 
 for example, though he found Mr Kilpatrick rather 
 " drouthy." Respected by his servants, esteemed by his 
 neighbours, beloved at home, his ambition was to act up to 
 his verse, and " make a happy fireside clime for weans and 
 wife." 
 
 The new year 1789 opened brightly : on the first day he 
 wrote to Mrs Dunlop one of his longest and finest letters. 
 Soon afterwards an angry gust has recorded itself in the
 
 A SUMMARY OF HIS CAREER AND GENIUS. 45 
 
 outbreak of ferocity, " Dweller in yon dungeon dark," pro- 
 voked by his being turned out of a roadside inn, on a bitter 
 night, to make way for the pompous funeral cortege of Mrs 
 Oswald. Burns was a dangerous person to offend, and the 
 quarrelsome lads of the district did well to hold their peace 
 when he threatened to " hang them up in sang like potato- 
 bogles." He was a good disciplinarian, and, while generally 
 indulgent to his servants, came down heavily on dense 
 stupidity or obvious neglect. About Midsummer his delight 
 in chastising wrong-doers found vent in smiting the Philistines 
 with " The Kirk's Alarm," a ringing blast about which he 
 seems to have taken some trouble, one among numerous 
 comments on his theory of literary work. " I have no 
 great faith in the boastful pretensions to intuitive propriety 
 and unlaboured elegance. The rough material of fine 
 writing is certainly the gift of genius ; but I as firmly be- 
 lieve that the workmanship is the united effort of pains, 
 attention, and repeated trial." It would have been well 
 had this passage been impressed on the minds of his imita- 
 tors, of whom the first of too many crops had begun to 
 appear. " My success," he complains, " has encouraged such 
 a swarm of ill-spawned monsters to crawl into public note 
 under the title of Scotch poets that the very term Scotch 
 poetry borders on the burlesque." During the whole of 
 this period Burns was actively engaged on the farm, taking 
 his full share of hard work, and maintaining perfect sobriety ; 
 but he found leisure to write several songs, among them, 
 " John Anderson my Jo," and a number of letters from 
 which an anthologia of his wit, wisdom, and tenderness 
 might be constructed. The series addressed to his brother 
 William would be amusing were it not for its closing in 
 about a year with a record of the poor lad's death among 
 strangers. " Form good habits," and above all " learn taci- 
 turnity," is the refrain of advice which this comparatively com- 
 monplace member of the family must have found it as easy 
 as his monitor found it impossible to follow. Towards the 
 close of July the Excise appointment was conferred, and 
 shortly after the family left the Isle for Ellisland, where
 
 46 ROBERT BURNS. 
 
 (August 18) Francis Wallace, the second son, made liis 
 appearance, and about the same time Eobert, the eldest, 
 now three years old, was brought from Mauchline. The 
 few notable incidents of the succeeding months are familiar 
 in connection with the verses to which they gave rise. A 
 September meeting with Nicol and Masterton at Moffat was 
 the inspiration of " Willie brewed a peck o' maut ; " the 
 " mighty claret shed " at Friars' Carse, in October, of the 
 famous "Whistle." Mr Douglas seems to have made out 
 that Burns on that occasion was present only in spirit, not 
 in body ; but the fact that the verses must have been 
 written five days after " Thou lingering Star " has not 
 failed to evoke comment on the rapidly shifting moods of 
 the Borealis race, of which he was a consummate type. 
 
 Bound the dawn of 1790 clouds began to thicken. Ellis- 
 land was after all proving as profitless in the poet's hands 
 as Lochlea or Mossgiel. Whether it was owing to want of 
 skill — want of energy it was not — or a luckless choice of 
 soil and situation, he was, as a farmer, destined to one chagrin 
 after another, and had to fall back on his " second line of 
 defence," the Excise, a defence unfortunately exposed to 
 the attacks of enemies from within. There was undoubtedly 
 some irony in his choice of a profession, of which no one 
 was so sensible as himself. He refers to it fitfully in mock- 
 ing verse and serious prose, now fearing the " Parnassian 
 queans " will disdain him, now manfully asserting, " I 
 would rather have it said that my profession borrowed credit 
 from me than I from my profession ; " again complaining 
 that the extent of his ten parishes, compelling him to ride 
 some 200 miles a week, is a strain on his strength. Docu- 
 mentary evidence, especially that recently made public, 
 demonstrates that, during the seven years of his service, he dis- 
 charged his duty to the Crown admirably well, and under 
 trying circumstances with the utmost possible consideration 
 and humanity. The stale text " suaviter in modo, fortiter 
 in re " was never more apt. In dealing with poor old 
 women and other retailers on a small scale of " home- 
 brewed " he strained the law in their favour, and sometimes
 
 A SUMMARY OF HIS CAREER AND GENIUS. 47 
 
 gave them timely warning. On the other hand, he was so 
 severe on hardened offenders that in one year his decreet 
 perquisites reached the maximum known in the district. 
 The evil of his new business was that it led him to spend 
 so much of his time from home, and to mix so much in 
 questionable society. Towards Midsummer he was prone to 
 linger in Dumfries at the Globe Tavern, where a " guid 
 willie waught" was not the sole attraction. The land- 
 lady's niece, a certain Annie Park, was, we are told, thought 
 beautiful by the guests when they were in a state that made 
 them tolerant in matters of taste. With this Annie of " the 
 gowden locks," the poet contracted an intimacy that inspired 
 what he himself regarded as the best love song he ever com- 
 posed, " Yestreen I had a pint of wine," and resulted in the 
 birth (March 31, 1791) of his second Elizabeth. The 
 mother, being no more heard of, is supposed to have died. 
 The child was first sent to Mossgiel, and then brought to 
 Ellisland, to be nursed by the much enduring Jean along 
 with her third son, William Nicol, born just ten days later. 
 Burns had again broken loose : " the native hue of his re- 
 solution " was blurred over by the red fires of passion, when 
 in a defiant mood he threw off the stanzas beginning, " I 
 murder hate," and ending with a notable proof of his Biblical 
 knowledge. In other directions he was wasting his genius 
 on election ballads, on prologues and addresses for the local 
 theatre, and on furious prose execrations against the Puritans, 
 the Edinburgh police, and things in general. But his genuine 
 inspiration — though he complains of the Muse's visits being 
 " short and far between " — had not deserted him. July gave 
 birth to the elegy and epitaph, among the finest in the lan- 
 guage, on Mathew Henderson. In September Captain Grose, 
 an antiquarian Falstaff to whom he had been introduced at 
 Friars' Carse, (the subject of one of the poet's most good 
 humoured epigrams, and of the lines, " Hear Land o' Cakes 
 and Brither Scots "), having got from him three traditionary 
 stories of Alloway Kirk, recommended Burns to put them 
 into verse. The result was " Tarn o' Shanter " thrown off 
 in one day's walk along the Nith, in an ecstacy, as Mrs
 
 48 KOBEliT BURNS. 
 
 Burns narrates ; but matured into its published form dining 
 the three succeeding months. Of this period there are 
 extant several records of friends or strangers who came 
 to visit him ; among them the pleasant pastoral of Kamsay 
 of Ochtertyre with the quotation, " uxor Sabina qualis," 
 and that of two English gentlemen who found him 
 angling with a fox skin cap on his head, and a broadsword 
 hanging from his belt.* The next year is marked by 
 little of note, save three instances of the poet's generous 
 sympathy : — his interest in the publication of Bruce's poems, 
 his Ode for the coronation of James Thomson's monument 
 at Ednam, and his interposition in favour of the school- 
 master, Clarke, threatened with dismissal for severity to 
 his boobies — an interference which seems ultimately to 
 have been successful. During the summer Burns had 
 four disabling falls from his horse ; but he produced the 
 elegy on Miss Burnet, the lament for Glencairn, the Banks 
 of Doon, " Bonnie wee thing " in honour of Miss Davies, 
 and began to celebrate, under the name of Chloris, a Miss 
 Jean Lorimer, who from this date till the close of 1795 
 was his reigning beauty. He wrote besides several letters 
 and some Jacobite songs, the chief of which, " Farewell 
 thou fair day, thou green earth, and ye skies," was a 
 favourite of the poet Campbell. Currie says it is " a hymn 
 worthy of the palmy days of the Grecian muse." At mid- 
 summer, Burns had determined to leave his farm, and, the 
 roup of the stock having been effected in September, the 
 family flitted to the headquarters of the rest of Ins life, 
 Dumfries. 
 
 VII. — Period, Dumfries, 1791 — 1796. ;Et. 33-37. 
 
 a. The Wee Vennel {Bank Street), Oct. 1791— May 1793. 
 
 b. The Mill Vennel {Burns Street), May 1793— May 1796. 
 
 Poets have thriven among the hills, nowhere else could 
 Wordsworth, or amid the turmoil of a city, nowhere else 
 
 * Mr Carlyle does not credit this story, but it is fairly well authenti- 
 cated.
 
 A SUMMARY OF HIS CAEEEB AND GENIUS. 40 
 
 could Pope have found his inspiration; the atmosphere of a 
 county town is fatal to them. Dumfries, at the close of last 
 century, was by all accounts a bad type of its class : the 
 majority of its industrious inhabitants found relief from the 
 drudgery of their trades in the small gossip of their limited 
 society; the loungers went " black-guardin " through the 
 streets, or rioting in taverns. In this headquarter of scandal 
 and dissipation Burns' course was almost inevitably down- 
 wards. His whole history was a struggle between the 
 loftiest aspirations, the most refined humanities, and tempta- 
 tions which his will was seldom strong enough to resist. 
 During his last five years, his official duties compelled him 
 constantly to ride in all weathers over moor and vale in 
 search of illicit distilleries, and come into close contact with 
 their contents. His genius opened to him the doors of 
 castle and of cot ; in the latter he was exposed to rural 
 hospitality, in the former to the demands of the company 
 gathered to wonder at his wit and rejoice to find it flow freer 
 with the wine. " They would not thank me," he said of the 
 squires and lairds, " if I did not drink with them. I have 
 to give them a slice of my constitution." Thousands of 
 professing Christians, leading far worse lives, have found 
 shelter in obscurity ; but when a great man yields it is pro- 
 claimed on the house-tops and cried in the market. 
 
 The early records of Ms residence are full of forebodings. 
 His income was inadequate for his growing family, and he 
 began to have reason to complain of the coldness of patrons. 
 " The rock of independence," of which he was wont to talk, 
 was overhung with clouds lit by the meteors of French 
 Revolutionism. In Nov. 1791 he bitterly writes to Ainslie, 
 " My wife scolds me, my business torments me, and my sins 
 come staring me in the face." It is at this period that Clarinda 
 auain flashes with a vivid lustre across the scene. Their inter- 
 mittent correspondence thickened, and, towards the close of 
 November, he went to Edinburgh and spent a week mainly 
 in her company. To their farewell meeting, on the 6 th 
 December, there are several fervent allusions. From Dumfries, 
 on his return, we have on the 15th: "This is the sixth letter 
 
 D
 
 50 KOBEKT BUHNS. 
 
 that I have written since I left you, my ever beloved." 
 Shortly after he sends the verses, " Ae fond kiss and then 
 we sever," with the quatrain, 
 
 " Had we never loved sae kindly, 
 Had we never loved sae blindly, 
 Never met, or never parted, 
 We had ne'er been broken hearted," 
 
 which, quoted by Byron, admired by Carlyle and Mr Arnold, 
 is the quintessence of passionate regret. More than a year 
 elapsed during which Mrs M'Lehose had gone to the Indies, 
 and, finding her husband surrounded by a troop of small mulat- 
 toes, had come back again. Then more letters passed, the 
 final one preserved being from the poet, dated Castle Douglas, 
 25th June 1794, in which he professes to be perplexed as 
 to the manner in which he is to address her ; " the language 
 of friendship will not suffice," &c. Then he reflects on the 
 fickleness of fame ; " she does not blow her trump now as 
 she did." "Yet," he adds, "I am as proud as ever, and wish 
 in my grave to be stretched to my full length, that I may 
 occupy every inch of ground I have a right to." Here — not 
 in the rendezvous of March 1788 — closes the episode of 
 Clarinda, unless we bring together two later references that 
 originally lay far apart. One is from a letter of the poet to 
 Mary Peacock, the friend in whose house the lovers first met, 
 of date 6th December 1792. "This eventful day recalls to 
 my memory such a scene. Heaven and earth, when I 
 remember a far distant person." Then he gives the song 
 
 " Ance mair I hail thee thou gloomy December," 
 
 " Parting wi' Nancy, Oh, ne'er to meet mair." 
 
 The other is found in a leaf of an old woman's diary of 1831 
 on the same anniversary, " This day I can never forget. 
 Parted with Burns in the year 1791 (forty years ago) never 
 more to meet in this world. 0, may we meet in heaven ! " 
 Ms/gov jj xa.ru ddxgva. The writer survived till 1841, reaching 
 the age of 82.
 
 A SUMMARY OF HIS CAREER AND GENIUS. 51 
 
 In Burns' miscellaneous correspondence of this period 
 there is little of conspicuous interest. The early stage of his 
 intimacy with Maria (wife of Walter Eiddell of Woodley 
 Park), a brilliant West Indian of nineteen, at whose house he 
 was for two years a frequent guest, is marked by an intro- 
 duction of her book to Ins Edinburgh printer. In September 
 1792, acknowledging to Alexander Cunningham a diploma 
 conferred by the royal archers, he writes one of his half 
 dozen most remarkable letters, brimming with banter like 
 Falstaffs, then growing savage as Timon, in an attack on the 
 " religious nonsense," which he declares to be " of all the 
 most nonsensical," asking, " why has a religious turn of mind 
 always a tendency to narrow and illiberalise the heart," and 
 then putting the whole storm to rest by the exquisite verse 
 inspired by Miss Lyndsay Baillie, 
 
 " The very deil he couldna' scathe 
 
 Whatever wad belang thee ; 
 He'd look into thy bonie face 
 
 And say, ' I canna wrang thee 
 
 ) )3 
 
 In the same month the Thomson correspondence begins, 
 one of the poet's earliest contributions to their joint under- 
 taking being "Ye banks and braes and streams around." 
 The first volume was published in July 1793, and shortly 
 afterwards came the refusal of remuneration. In March we 
 have an interesting literary link in a letter to Miss Benson 
 of York, afterwards Mrs Basil Montague, Carlyle's ill-requited 
 patroness, and a request to the bailies of Dumfries to be 
 made a freeman of the town, the granting of which enabled 
 his sons to be well educated in the grammar school at small 
 expense. In April 1793 an exuberant humour overflows in 
 his last letter to his old friend Ainslie, signed Spunkie, with 
 a notable satire on pedants, who are advised to go about 
 with bundles of books bound to their backs. Towards the 
 close of the year he writes, to Mrs Dunlop, of Cowper's 'Task' 
 "a glorious poem, bating a few scraps of Calvinistic divinity, 
 it has the religion which ennobles man." 
 
 The subject of Burns's Religion might lead us into
 
 52 ROBERT BURNS. 
 
 deeps beyond the range of the Satires, and supply material 
 for a distinct chapter. His views, seldom clearly formu- 
 lated, are not always consistent ; within limits they vary 
 with varying moods : but they are in the main those of an 
 anxious sceptic, as opposed to either extreme of positive or 
 negative dogmatism. His prevailing reverence in treating 
 sacred subjects has been justly admired : but, while his light 
 words have been gathered up against him, the extent to 
 which he deliberately departed from the " Orthodoxy " of 
 the mass of his countrymen has been studiously slurred 
 over. Burns knew his Bible well, and made frequent use of 
 it; but we have no reason to believe that, after manhood, he 
 ever read it otherwise than, as a great modern critic has told 
 us to read it, " like any other book." " This letter," cries his 
 most recent biographer, "seems to savour of Socinianism." 
 The word, often used in Scotland to conjure up the devil of 
 intolerance, is equally applicable to almost all the leading- 
 writers of the eighteenth century ; the only conspicuous 
 exceptions being Cowper and Johnson. Burns was, as far 
 as he had realised to himself his own position, a Deist, and 
 held that the mission of Christ was to redeem man from 
 himself, rather than from any " wrath to come." " School- 
 divinity," he in mockery exclaims, " raves abroad on all the 
 winds." . . " On earth discord ! a gloomy heaven above, open- 
 ing her jealous gates to the nineteen thousandth part of the 
 tithe of mankind ! and below an inescapable and inexorable 
 hell, expanding its leviathan jaws for the vast residue of 
 mortals. doctrine, comfortable and healing to the weary 
 wounded soul of man." On points yet more radical he gives 
 an uncertain sound. E.g. "We know nothing, or next to 
 nothing, of the substance and structure of our souls. . . Are 
 we a piece of machinery, or do those workings argue some- 
 thing within us above the trodden clod ? I own myself 
 partial to such proofs of those awful and important realities, 
 a God that's made all tilings, man's immaterial and im- 
 mortal nature." ..." Can it be possible that when I resign 
 this feverish being I shall still find myself in conscious 
 existence ? ... If there is another life, 'tis only for the good.
 
 A SUMMARY OF HIS CAREEB AND GENIUS. '>'■'> 
 
 Would to God I as firmly believed it, as I ardently wish it." 
 . . . "All my fears and cares are of this world ; if there is 
 another, an honest man has nothing to fear from it. Every 
 fair, unprejudiced enquirer must in such degree be a sceptic. 
 As for immortality, we want data to go upon. One thing 
 frightens me much, that we are to live forever seems too 
 good news to be true." "If there be a life beyond the 
 grave, which I trust there is, and if there be a good God pre- 
 siding over nature, which I am sure there is, thou (Fergusson) 
 art now enjoying existence in a glorious world." 
 
 " ' Tell us ye dead, 
 Will none of you in pity disclose the secret 
 What 'tis you are and we must shortly be.' 
 
 A thousand times I have made this apostrophe to the de- 
 parted sons of men, but not one of them has ever thought 
 fit to answer the question. that some courteous ghost 
 would blab it out. It cannot be. You and I, my friend, 
 must make the experiment by ourselves, and for ourselves." 
 Stretching out his arms to these vast voids, crying aloud 
 in the wilderness, beating at the bars of the iron gates, 
 Burns had no care to pose as a protagonist about a disputed 
 text, or to ride the whirlwind of a tea-cup storm over an 
 antiquated ceremonial. His clear, strong mind — none 
 clearer or stronger of his age or nation — tore right through 
 those comparatively trivial counterscarps of discussion, and 
 battered about the citadel; raising the questions of the exist- 
 ence of a beneficent, omnipotent Being, and the hopes of a 
 future life. On the last he is tossed, like a ship at sea : on 
 the first he seems to find an anchor. His ethical standard 
 is, in prose and verse alike, explicit. " Whatever mitigates 
 the woes or increases the happiness of others, this is my 
 criterion of goodness, and whatever injures society at large, 
 or any individual in it" (in which category he is careful to 
 include the whole animal creation), " this is my measure of 
 iniquity." Again, " Of all the qualities we assign to the 
 author and director of Nature, by far the most enviable is 
 to be able to wipe away all tears from all eyes. What
 
 54 ROBERT BURNS. 
 
 sordid wretches are they who go to their magnificent mauso- 
 leums with hardly the consciousness of having made one 
 poor honest heart happy." Burns's Creed is that of Pope's 
 " Universal Prayer ; " his Religion is condensed in the 
 couplet — 
 
 " The heart benevolent and kind 
 The most resembles God." 
 
 His Millennium was no miraculous cataclysm, no late fulfil- 
 ment of the wonderful old dream of deliverance from Nero, 
 but the realisation of the slowly dawning golden age — 
 
 " When man to man the warld o'er 
 Shall brithers be for a' that." 
 
 The poet's literary activity during these years was, with the 
 exception of a few prologues and epigrams, restricted to his 
 songs, which he continued to pour forth as from a well of living 
 waters. He had planned a long poem on a legend of the Bruce, 
 but never found himself in a vein or at leisure to accomplish 
 it; fortunately so, had it led him to blank verse, in which he 
 always failed. To the years 1792, 1793, belong, among 
 others, the lyrics, "The Deil's awa' wi' the Exciseman," "0 saw 
 ye bonnie Leslie," " Gala Water," " Poortith Cauld," " Lord 
 Gregory," and " Scots wha hae," the last inspired in the course 
 of an excursion to Galloway with Mr Syme — a friendly stamp 
 collector, who occupied the ground floor of the house in Bank 
 Street. The following year gave birth to " The Minstrel of 
 Lincluden " expanded into " The Vision," beginning, " As I 
 stood by yon roofless tower " (for there are two poems of the 
 same name), " My Love is like a red, red Rose," " It was 
 a' for our rightful King,"*" which, if it be Burns', is his 
 noblest contribution to Jacobite minstrelsy, and about the 
 same date — passing from pole to pole of politics — the Ode on 
 Washington's birthday. In the interval, the family, increased 
 (November 21st, 1792) by the addition of a daughter (who 
 died in the autumn of 1795), had removed to their second 
 
 * This poem, with the exception of one verse in the ballad of Molly 
 Stewart, never seems to have been heard of before its appearance in 
 .Johnson's Museum.
 
 A SUMMARY OF HIS CAREER AND GENIUS. 55 
 
 and larger Dumfries residence, a self-contained house in the 
 Mill Vennel, in which were born the fourth son, James 
 Glencairn (1794), and the fifth, Maxwell, who came into the 
 world on the day and at the hour of his father's funeral 
 Meanwhile during these years the poet had twice got into 
 trouble, owing to an amiable indiscretion in the first in- 
 stance ; in the second to a misdemeanour. 
 
 Burns' politics are on the surface somewhat puzzling. He 
 was a Jacobite and a Jacobin, not in succession but simultane- 
 ously, and attempts have been made to reconcile the apparent 
 contradiction by asserting that he was not much in earnest 
 on either side. This view, based on a note to one of his songs, 
 " except when my passions were heated . . . my Jacobitism 
 was merely by way of vive la bagatelle" is adopted by 
 Scott ; and Alexander Smith denies the genuineness of both 
 political sentiments, saying the one sprung from his imagina- 
 tion, the other from his discontent. The poet's own apolo- 
 getic expression, however, loses its force when we remember 
 that most of his best work was due to passion; and his com- 
 mentators forget that Burns could only write well on matters 
 on which his heart was set. He had only contempt for the 
 squabbles and corruptions of a county election where 
 " lobster-coated-puppies " were ranged against well-to-do- 
 tradesmen, with their ragged regiments hooting at each other 
 across the street : hence his ballads, &c, on all local and 
 practical affairs might well be dispensed with. His arrows 
 only stuck when they came from a bow at full tension ; his 
 bullets only hit the mark when, as in the German fable, 
 they had been dipped in the huntsman's blood. No doubt 
 modern Jacobitism, like devotion to anything that is past, 
 must draw largely on the feelings, and the spirit of 
 Jacobinism is whetted by a sense of injustice. But Burns 
 has written too much and too well of both to permit his re- 
 gard for either to be set down to a love of " fine phrases." 
 Verses like these — 
 
 " Great Dundee who smiling victory led, 
 And fell a martyr in her arms."
 
 50 KOBERT BURNS. 
 
 " Bold Scrimgeour fellows, gallant Graham, 
 Auld Covenanters shiver ; 
 Forgive ! forgive ! much wronged Montrose 
 Now death and hell engulf thy foes ; " 
 
 those with the refrain, " There'll never be peace till Jamie 
 comes hame," and (if it was his), " Now a' is done that 
 man can do," are no more the outcome of shallow senti- 
 ment than " Let us pray that come it may," is of personal 
 pique. " Politics are not Poetry," said Goethe, and wrapped 
 in his own classic art, and the problems of all time, wrote at 
 his Meister and Xenien with the echoes of Jena about his 
 ears. But Goethe was a man apart ; his maxim expresses 
 only a half truth ; it may suffice for calm philosophers, or the 
 gilt gingerbread of sickly sentimentalism, but poets who are 
 men of like though fiercer passions than their race, the class 
 whose souls are " fiery particles," will be fervid politicians, 
 but of a peculiar, and as regards their immediate surround- 
 ings, perhaps a useless kind. It is of the essence of poetry 
 to attach itself to commanding Personalities, to Eomance and 
 to Ideals. The practical government of compromising parties 
 has not elicited a single verse worth reading. The poet 
 looks over the heads of Whig and Tory to legends of the 
 setting, or promises of the rising sun, he celebrates Arthur 
 and Barbarossa, or he heralds the millennium of Shelley, or he 
 falls, as Byron did before he enrolled among the Carbonari, 
 at the feet of a Napoleon. By dint of a sham audacity, even 
 the sanguinary charlatan who travestied the last, has enlisted 
 the homage of our greatest poetess. Over the house of Bruns- 
 wick it has never been found possible to be poetically 
 enthusiastic. The very countenances of the Georges were 
 enough to gorgonise the Muses. In all the arts they 
 deliberately patronised mediocrity and neglected genius. The 
 great minister of the first and second, Sir Eobert Walpole, 
 " the poet's foe," grew dunces faster than Pope could slay 
 them. The great minister of the third, the elder Pitt, was, 
 during the noblest part of his career, practically at war with 
 his sovereign, — the obstinate farmer whose policy had lost to 
 us one continent and embroiled us with another. The King
 
 A SUMMABY OF HIS CABEEB AND GENIUS. 57 
 
 was a more hopeless theme for song than his son, the fribble, 
 
 in training to become " the first gentleman in Europe." The 
 poet's letters, whether of defiance or apology, public or 
 private, to the Star newspaper or to Mrs Dunlop, are full of 
 hardly-suppressed disgust at the self-complacent " reign of 
 Heavenly Hanoverianism." No wonder his fancy reverted 
 to the Stuarts, whose names from that of their glory, the first 
 James, — the great King and good poet whose assassination 
 retarded for a hundred years the civilisation of his country, — 
 to that of their shame, the sixth, had been indissolubly linked 
 with minstrelsy and chivalrous adventure. The ill-starred 
 enterprizes of the exiled race, appealing at once to the 
 poetic sympathy with fallen greatness and the poetic 
 love of tradition, gave birth to the host of stirring or 
 pathetic ballads on which Burns fed. He grants that the 
 issue tried at Culloden was decided well, but it does not 
 hinder him from weeping with the Highland widow over her 
 slain sons ; he theoretically admits that " Sacred Freedom's 
 cause " was that of the Covenanters, but he passes over the 
 martyrs of Episcopacy to celebrate "our greatly injured 
 lovely Scottish Queen," and echo the charge of the Graeme 
 at Killiecrankie. 
 
 The same temperament which led him to dwell on com- 
 manding Personalities and Eomance in the past, also led him 
 to look with favour on the imposing figures and aspirations 
 that seemed, in the present, to hold out hopes for the future. 
 Various estimates have been made as to the extent to which 
 the revolution in English verse that marked the close of the 
 century was affected by French politics ; but there is no 
 doubt they had points of contact and affinity ; nor was it 
 possible that Burns should have remained callous to a move- 
 ment to which in his "green unknowing youth," even 
 Wordsworth designed to offer his aid. He settled in 
 Dumfries about the date of Mirabeau's death ; when the 
 most moderate liberals still looked with favour on the 
 uprising of a people against centuries of misrule. Somewhat 
 later Jemappes was still regarded as a triumph of defensive 
 warfare, and twelve months more elapsed before Dan ton had
 
 58 ROBERT BURNS. 
 
 flung down the head of a king as his gage, and Burke had 
 taken it up in his paroxysms against the regicides. It is 
 hard for us after ninety years of disenchanting history to 
 realize the fascination of "Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity," 
 before the reign of terror had shown the dangers of the first, 
 and experience the unreality of the second. Burns was not 
 slow to manifest and even to parade Ms sympathies. 
 Towards the close of February 1792, we are told that he 
 seized a smuggling craft, bought four of her guns * and sent 
 them as a present to the National Assembly, and that, on 
 their being intercepted, the incident, with others, as his 
 proposing the health of George Washington, at a banquet, 
 went against him. In any case, rumours got abroad that he 
 not only held but had freely expressed revolutionary opinions. 
 The Government of the day was nervous and alert, remember- 
 ing Wilkes, alarmed by Paine and the "Friends of the People," 
 they did not hesitate to employ spies, and were ready to 
 accept " delations " of " the suspect." The Board of Excise, 
 with or without instigation, ordered an inquiry to be made 
 into the conduct of their ganger : hearing of which he, 
 anticipating dismissal, sent off an excited letter to Mr 
 Graham, giving the lie direct to the allegations against 
 him. This was followed by another, January 1793, some- 
 what calmer in tone, but going into painful details of excul- 
 pation, and profuse in professions of loyalty to the " sacred 
 key-stone " of our constitution, the king. As far as pains 
 and penalties went the storm blew over, but hope of promo- 
 tion was at an end, and Burns felt that he had been through 
 the Valley of Humiliation, no salutary discipline for a soul 
 like his, and had to submit to an insolent reprimand. " Mr 
 Corbet," he writes, in a letter to his generous champion, 
 Erskine of Mar, " was instructed to enquire on the spot, and 
 to document me that my business was to act, not to think, 
 and that whatever might be men or measures it was for me 
 to be silent and obedient." Incredible as it may appear, 
 this ne plus ultra of Bumbledom has been recently defended 
 
 * This has been by some dogmatically denied, but the incident is 
 unlikely to have been invented.
 
 A SUMMARY OF HIS CAREER AND GENIUS. 59 
 
 on the ground that the poet, being " in the public employ," 
 had no right " to dabble in politics," i.e., he was to be de- 
 barred from expressing his regard for two republics, with 
 both of which we were at peace, because the Tories happened 
 to be then in power. Burns was bound, with all good citizens, 
 to abstain from seditious courses, but his office held, we take 
 it, " aut vitam aut culpam," could not bind him always to 
 agree with the Ministry, nor had he sold Ins soul and body, 
 or Ins liberty of speech, for £7 a-year. He ran the risk of 
 every candidate for patronage in offending his possible 
 patrons, but the censure of the Board was an impertinence, 
 and that he felt it to be so the noble close of the letter to 
 Erskine, in which we have the best account of the matter, 
 clearly demonstrates. After this business the poet's first 
 resolve was to hold his peace, " I jouk and let the jaw gie 
 o'er : " but he chafed under his chains, and sometimes made 
 a noise in rattling them. To use his own image, he felt 
 sore, like iEsop's lion under an ass's kick. During the 
 spring '93, the bitterness breaks out in occasional letters, 
 notably in his answer to the admonitions of the now respect- 
 able Nicol and the recently published Political Catechism — 
 addressed to Cunningham — items of which have naturally 
 attracted attention. The writer of this and the nearly con- 
 temporaneous lines, " You're welcome to despots, Dumouriez," 
 must have ceased to expect anything from Pitt or Dundas. 
 It is the clenching sarcasm of a man smarting under the 
 sense of neglect, and sick of hope deferred, whose fair- 
 weather friends were treating him as popular people treat 
 everyone under a cloud. Suspected politics, added to doubt- 
 ful religion, were too much to bear, and they looked black 
 upon him and fought shy of him. To be thought bad is 
 apt to make a man bad : to be excluded from the society of 
 equals is to be driven to that of inferiors. Fatigue and de- 
 spondency alternating with fits of restless irritation, Burns, 
 too much impressed with the maxim, " Better be the head 
 of the commonalty than the tail of the gentry," sought relief 
 among the lower ranks, where he found a shallow sympathy 
 and countenance in his now besetting sin. " Occasional
 
 GO ROBERT BURNS. 
 
 hard drinking," he writes to Mrs Dunlop, " is the devil to 
 me. Against this I have again and again bent my resolu- 
 tion, and have greatly succeeded. Taverns I have totally 
 abandoned : it is the private parties among the hard-drink- 
 ing gentlemen . . . that do me the mischief." On the 
 morning after this letter was written, when the Eev. Mr 
 M'Morline came to baptise his child, he found that Burns 
 had never been in bed, having sat up all night in his own 
 house, with some boon companions. 
 
 The next year, 1794, opened with a course of indulgence 
 that twice proved disastrous. On the first occasion, having 
 proposed a toast, "May our success in the war" (the early 
 stages of which he always condemned) "be equal to the 
 justice of our cause," in presence of a fire-eating officer, he 
 narrowly escaped being dragged into a duel. The name of 
 this "lobster" is preserved by the fact of his encounter with 
 the poet, to whom, when the French really became aggressive, 
 it fell to w T rite the most stirring of our challenges of defence. 
 "Does haughty Gaul invasion threat" will survive Captain 
 Dods. On the second occasion, in consequence of his joining 
 in a freak with other over-heated guests, coming from the 
 dinner-table to Maria Kiddell's drawing-room, he lost for a 
 time the esteem of her family, and, what was of more moment, 
 of herself. Kissing, which " goes by favour," should never 
 be public, and her indignation, aggravated, it may be, by a 
 latent sense of the disparity of their ranks, was propor- 
 tioned to her affection for the man to whose genius she has 
 left the finest contemporary tribute. Next morning the 
 poet, duly contrite, addressed the lady in cries of prose and 
 verse that might have melted a stone, but she remaining 
 obdurate, Burns, who could never brook repulse, suddenly 
 passed from apology to lampoon. This completed the aliena- 
 tion, and made him regarded as beyond the pale, a " mauvais 
 sujet," with whom there was no dealing. The quarrel was 
 ultimately made up, but not before his friend, the Laird 
 of Carse, unfortunately involved in it, had died and been 
 lamented in the elegy, " No more ye warblers of the wood." 
 The only remaining event of the year worth recording is a visit
 
 A SUMMARY OF HIS CAREER AND GENIUS. 6 1 
 
 from his old acquaintance, Josiah Walker, whose sententious 
 comments on the occasion afterwards roused the wrath of 
 Christopher North. Nor is there much in the next, but the 
 gathering of the clouds on the entrance to the Valley of the 
 Shadow. Care, remorse, and embarrassment had done 
 their work in undermining a strong constitution. " What 
 a transient business is life," he writes (January 1) to Mrs 
 Dunlop, "very lately I was a boy; but t'other day I was a 
 young man, and I already begin to feel the frigid pulse and 
 stiff joints of old age coining fast over my frame." Walking 
 with a friend who proposed to him to join a county ball, he 
 shook his head, saying, " that's all over now," and adding the 
 oft-quoted verse of Lady Grissel Baillie. His prevailing 
 sentiment was that of his own couplet, characterised as the 
 concentration of many night-thoughts — 
 
 " The pale moon is setting beyond the white wave 
 And Time is setting wi' me O." 
 
 Yet, ever and anon, his vitality re-asserted itself, and out of 
 the mirk there flashed the immortal democratic creed — 
 
 " Is there for honest poverty 
 That hangs his head and a' that?" 
 
 In March we have a glint of sunshine ; he was reconciled 
 to Maria, again received her letters, criticised her verses, and 
 took heart to make a last appeal to Mr Heron for promotion. 
 In September, the death of his daughter again broke his 
 spirit and accelerated the close. His hand shook, his pulse 
 and appetite failed, and he sunk into an almost uniform 
 gloom : but to the last it was lit with silver streaks. From 
 the very Castle of Despair he wrote, " Contented wi' little 
 and canty wi' mair : " over the dark surface of the rising 
 waters there ripples the music of the lines — 
 
 " Their groves o' sweet myrtle let foreign lands reckon, 
 While bright beaming summers exalt the perfume, 
 Far dearer to me yon lone glen o' green breckan, 
 With the burn stealing under the lang yellow broom." 
 
 In January 1796, the poet, on his return from a gathering 
 at the Globe, fell asleep in the open air and caught a chill,
 
 62 ROBERT BURNS. 
 
 developing into a rheumatic fever, with which he was during 
 the early months intermittently prostrate. On his partial 
 recovery, in April he wrote to Thomson, " I fear it will be 
 some time before I tune my lyre again. By Babel's streams 
 I have sat and wept. I have only known existence by the 
 pressure of sickness, and counted time by the repercussions 
 of pain. I close my eyes in misery, and open them without 
 hope. I look on the vernal day, and say with poor Fergus- 
 son — 
 
 " Say wherefore has an all-indulgent heaven 
 Life to the comfortless and wretched given." 
 
 May was a month of unusual brightness, but cutting east 
 winds went against him, and, though sometimes appearing in 
 the streets, he was so emaciated as hardly to be recognised. 
 His wife being from her condition unable to attend to him, 
 her place was supplied by the affectionate tenderness of 
 Jessie Lewars, who hovered about his couch, like the " little 
 fairy," who long afterwards ministered to the dying hours of 
 the matchless German lyrist, Heinrich Heine. To this girl, 
 the sister of a fellow exciseman, Burns addressed two of his 
 latest and sweetest songs with the stanzas — 
 
 " Here's a health to ane I lo'e dear, 
 Thou art sweet as the smile when fond lovers meet, 
 And sweet as their parting tear, Jessie." 
 
 • •••■••• 
 
 " O wert thou in the cauld blast 
 On yonder lea, on yonder lea, 
 My plaidie to the angry airt 
 I'd shelter thee, I'd shelter thee." 
 
 The poet himself was rapidly passing beyond the need of 
 shelter. On July 4th, he was sent for sea air to a watering- 
 place, Brow on the Solway, and there had a last meeting 
 with Mrs Biddell, saluting her with the question, " Well, 
 madam, have you any commands for the other world ?" He 
 spoke without fear of the approaching close, but expressed 
 anxiety for his wife and children, and the possible injury to 
 his fame from the publication of unguarded letters and
 
 A SUMMARY OF HIS CAREER AND GENIUS. 63 
 
 verses. " He lamented," we quote from the lady, " that he 
 had written many epigrams on persons against whom he en- 
 tertained no enmity, and many indifferent poetical pieces 
 which he feared would be thrust upon the world. . . . The 
 conversation was kept up with great evenness and animation 
 on his side. ... I had seldom seen Ms mind greater or 
 more collected." On the 10th, when his landlady wished to 
 let down the blinds against the dazzling of the sun, Burns 
 exclaimed, " let him shine, he will not shine long for me." 
 His peace of mind was unhappily distracted by the inade- 
 quacy of the allowance granted to officers on leave for illness, 
 and by a letter inopportunely arriving from a Dumfries 
 tradesman pressing for the payment of an account. This 
 drew forth two piteous appeals — one to Thomson, the other 
 to his cousin at Montrose — for the loan of small sums to 
 save him " from the horrors of a jail : " with the former he 
 enclosed his last lyrical fragment, "Fairest maid on Devon 
 Banks." The same day he addressed Mrs Dunlop complain- 
 ing of her long silence, she too having been influenced by 
 the "fama" of the preceding year. On the 14th, he 
 announced to Jean his arrival on the 18th. When 
 brought home he was so weak that he could not stand ; 
 but he was able to send to his father-in-law his last written 
 lines saying, " Do, for Heaven's sake, send Mrs Armour 
 here immediately." From the 19th to the end he was for 
 the most part speechless, " scarcely himsel' for half-an-hour 
 together," said Mrs Burns afterwards. At one time he was 
 found sitting in a corner of the room, and, on being put back 
 to bed, exclaimed, " Gilbert, Gilbert." Early on the 21st he 
 was in deep delirium, broken only by a few sentences, among 
 them a last flash of humour to an attendant volunteer, 
 " John, don't let the awkward squad fire over me." 
 
 The practice of lingering over the death-beds of great 
 men to peer and moralize is apt to be either foolish or im- 
 pertinent. The last utterances of Madame Eoland, Goethe, 
 or Byron may be memorable ; but we can draw no conclusion 
 as to their lives, or the truth of their views of life, from the 
 despairing agonies of Cowper, the celestial vision of Pope, or
 
 64 ROBERT BURNS. 
 
 the serene composure of Hume. The last moments of Burns 
 were stormy, as his life ; an execration on the agent who had 
 sent him the dunning account — and the mighty Spirit passed. 
 On the 25 th, his remains were carried through Dumfries 
 amid throngs of people asking, " Who will be our poet now ?" 
 and buried with local honours. Shortly after the turf had 
 been laid on the mortal vesture of the immortal power, a 
 young lady with an attendant climbed at nightfall over the 
 kirk-yard stile, and strewed the grave with laurel leaves. 
 It was Maria Eiddell who had forgotten his epigrams and still 
 adored his memory. Burns died poor, but scarcely in debt, 
 owing but a few pounds to his friendly landlord, whose only 
 fault with him was that he did not have enough of his com- 
 pany. A subscription started for Ms family soon raised for 
 their relief the sum of £700, which enabled them to pre- 
 serve intact his little library and tide over evil days. The 
 poet had a hard struggle for bread, but a tithe of the stones 
 of his monuments would have kept himself and his 
 in affluence through all their lives. Scotland has had 
 sweet singers since his death, one of them (Tannahill) 
 with almost as tuneful a voice in rendering the beauties of 
 external nature ; but only two great writers — Scott and 
 Carlyle. Neither combined his lurid and passionate force 
 with the power of musical expression. In these respects his 
 only heir was the future lord of English verse, the boy 
 who was about to leave the shadows of Lach-na-gair for the 
 groves of Newstead. 
 
 III. — Eetrospect and Summary. 
 
 If the purpose of these records of the poet has been in any 
 degree fulfilled, there is little need to ask further what 
 manner of man he was, or to add a sermon to the half- 
 triumphant, half -tragic text : triumphant in that it was given 
 him to mature his faculties and achieve enduring work, 
 tragic in that, thinking of his own often defeated struggle, he 
 wrote " There is not among the inartyrologies so rueful a
 
 A SUMMARY OF HIS CAREER AND GENIUS. 65 
 
 narrative." Eeticence is rarely, if ever, found in conjunction 
 with genius. Even Shakespeare "unlocked his heart" in the 
 sonnets, and Goethe in the " Dichtung und Wahrheit." But 
 Burns is garrulous to excess ; least of all great writers, less 
 than his nearest mate, Byron (who burns blue lights within 
 otherwise transparent windows), did he or could he hide him- 
 self. He parades " the secrets of his prison house," joins a 
 carnival unmasked, and with an approach to indelicacy throws 
 open his chamber door. " I was drunk last night, this 
 forenoon I was polygamic, this evening I am sick and sorry," 
 is the refrain, of his confession. Scotch to the core in his 
 perfervid heart, he wears it on his sleeve to be pecked at 
 by innumerable daws, and is, in this respect, — teste Thomas 
 Campbell, — "the most un-Scotch-like of Scotchmen." On the 
 other hand'he had all the ambition often unhappily charac- 
 teristic of his race. " Fate," he exclaims, " had cast my 
 station in the veriest shades of life, but never did a heart 
 pant more ardently than mine to be distinguished." His 
 youthful pride was, by his own account, apt to degenerate 
 into " envy." His career was haunted by a suspicion of 
 being patronised or insulted by rank or wealth, which 
 led him too willingly to associate with his inferiors and 
 to court the company of the wild " merry " rather than 
 the sober " grave." " Calculative creatures " he condemns 
 as inhumane ; for errors of impulse he has superabundant 
 charity ; he has " courted the acquaintance of blackguards, 
 and though disgraced by follies " has " often found among 
 them the noblest virtues." Burns' affection for the waifs and 
 strays of mankind, was the right side of the temperament 
 of which his own recklessness was the wrong. But his 
 practical sense, on occasion, asserted itself, in a manner worthy 
 of the canniest Scot, e.g., his refusal to stand surety for his 
 brother, his determination never to bring up his sons to any 
 learned profession, all his correspondence with Gilbert 
 and Creech. Burns is at his worst, where he is cautious, 
 almost cunning, as in some of the Clarinda letters, a few 
 relating to the Armours, and such passages as that on his 
 return from the West Highland tour where he talks of 
 
 E
 
 OG HUBERT BUKXS. 
 
 women, as a fowler might do of his game. " Miss — 
 new off in a tangent, like a mounting lark. But I am an 
 old hawk at the sport and wrote her such a cool deliberate 
 prudent reply as brought my bird from her aerial 
 towerings, pop down at my feet like Corporal Trim's 
 hat." Similarly in his toast of " Mrs Mac," at Dumfries 
 dinners, his want of reserve amounts almost to a want 
 of fine feeling, and justifies the censure that if woman, 
 as a cynic has said, constituted the poet's religion, he 
 ought to have dealt with it more reverently. Equally 
 difficult is it to condone some of his vindictive epigrams. 
 " Judex damnatur," who can ignore those aberrations of 
 " Ayrshire's tutelary saint." The rest of the tragedy, " half 
 within and half without," is the commonplace of moralizing 
 commentary — that of hot blood, weak will, and straitened 
 circumstances dragging down an eagle's flight. When the 
 devil's advocate has done his worst, " the dissonance is lost 
 in the music of a great man's name." Tried in many 
 ways he was never tempted to do or to think anything 
 mean. The theme of his prevailing sincerity has been ex- 
 hausted by a sharer of many of his mental, exempted from 
 his physical, faults, Mr Carlyle. The " finesse " of the poet's 
 flirtations is at least on the surface. His amiable over- 
 estimates were genuine to the core. His magnanimity 
 amounted to imprudence ; his gratitude to all who ever did 
 him kindness to idolatry. Generosity in almsgiving, a 
 virtue though an easy one of the rich, impossible to the 
 poor, was not accessible to Burns ; but he had the harder 
 virtue, rare in our scrambling world, of cordially recogniz- 
 ing and extolling the men whom he held to be his peers. 
 His anxiety to push the sale of other people's books, as 
 evinced in his letters to Duncan, Tait, and Creech about 
 Grose, Mylne, and Mrs Kiddell, is a reproach to an age 
 when poets are animated by the spirit of monopolists. If 
 he loved praise, he was lavish of it. His benevolence that 
 overflowed the living world was, despite his polygamic 
 heats, concentrated in the intense domesticity of a good 
 brother and son, husband and father. His works have been
 
 A SUMMARY OF HIS CAREEB AND GENIUS. U7 
 
 called A manual of Independence ; and that his homage 
 to the "Lord of the lion heart" is no word boast, is seen 
 in his horror of debt, and almost fanatical dread of obliga- 
 tion : they are also models of a charity which goes far to 
 cover his own, as he made it cover the sins of others. 
 Everyone who knew Burns well in private life seems to 
 have loved him ; but he owed none of his popularity to 
 complaisance. Nothing in his character is more con- 
 spicuous than the shining courage that feared neither 
 false man nor false God, his intolerance of the com- 
 promises and impatience of the shifts which are the re- 
 proaches of his nation. Yet no man was ever more proud 
 of his nationality. The excess of patriotism which led 
 Fergusson to assail the Union and detest Dr Johnson passed 
 on to Burns. Here and there his humour sees a little rant 
 in it, as when he writes to Lord Buchan, " Your much loved 
 Scotia about whom you make such a racket ; " but his pre- 
 vailing tone is that of his letter to Lord Eglinton, " I have 
 all those prejudices. . . . There is scarcely anything to 
 which I am so alive as the honour and welfare of old Scotia ; 
 and, as a poet, I have no higher enjoyment than singing her 
 sons and daughters." Hence, perhaps, the provincialism of 
 his themes, which Mr Arnold with his " damnable iteration " 
 of " Scotch drink, Scotch religion, and Scotch manners " per- 
 versely confounds with provincialism of thought.* Hence, 
 
 * V. Introduction to Ward's "English Poets," p. xli. After the novel 
 remark, "The real Burns is of course in his Scotch poems," Mr Arnold 
 proceeds, " Let us boldly say that of much of this poetry, a poetry dealing 
 perpetually with Scotch drink, Scotch religion, and Scotch manners, a 
 Scotchman's estimate is apt to be personal. A Scotchman is used to this 
 world of Scotch drink, Scotch religion, and Scotch manners ; he has a 
 tenderness for it ; he meets its poet half way. In this tender mood he 
 reads pieces like the Holy Fair or Halloween. But this world of Scotch 
 drink, Scotch religion, and Scotch manners is against a poet, not for him, 
 when it is not a partial countryman who reads him ; for in itself, it is not 
 a beautiful world, and no one can deny that it is of advantage to a poet to 
 deal with a beautiful world. Burns's world of Scotch drink, Scotch religion, 
 and Scotch manners, is often a harsh, a sordid, a repulsive world ; even the 
 world of his Cottar's Saturday Night is not a beautiful world." Thereon 
 follow some pages of supercilious patronage of the poet who was, it seems, 
 " a man of vigorous understanding, and (need I say ?) a master of language,"
 
 08 ROBERT BURNS. 
 
 rather than from his more Catholic qualities, the exagger- 
 ated homage that his countrymen have paid to his name. 
 The Continent champions the cosmopolite Byron, heavily 
 handicapped by his rank, against England ; Scotland has 
 thrown a shield over the errors of her most splendid 
 son, and, lance in rest, dares even her own pulpits to, 
 dethrone her " tutelary saint." Seldom has there been 
 a stranger or a more wholesome superstition, for on the 
 one hand Burns is the great censor of our besetting sins, 
 on the other he has lifted our best aspirations to a height 
 they never before attained. Puritans with a touch of poetry 
 have dwelt on the undoubted fact that he " purified " our 
 old songs. The commonplace criticism is correct, but so 
 inadequate as to leave the impression that he was an 
 inspired scavenger, whose function was to lengthen the 
 skirts of Scotland's "high-kilted Muse," and clip her 
 " raucle " tongue. His work was nobler, that of elevating and 
 intensifying our northern imagination. He has touched the 
 meanest animal shapes with Ithuriel's wand, and they have 
 sprung up " proudly eminent." His volumes owe their 
 popularity to their being an epitome of melodies, moods and 
 memories that had belonged for centuries to the national 
 life : but Burns has given them a new dignity, as well as a 
 deeper pathos, by combining an ideal element with the fullest 
 knowledge of common life and the shrewdest judgment on 
 it. He is the unconscious heir of Barbour, distilling the 
 spirit of the old poet's epic into a battle chant, and of 
 Dunbar, as the caustic satirist, the thistle as well as the rose 
 of his land. He is the conscious pupil of Eamsay, but he 
 leaves his master to make a social protest and lead a literary 
 revolt. Contrast the " Gentle Shepherd " with the " Jolly 
 Beggars" — the one is a court pastoral, like a minuet of the 
 ladies of Versailles on the sward of the Swiss village near 
 
 and mockery of his admirers. If the critic's knowledge of Burns may be 
 guaged by his belief that the Holy Fair is "met half way" in a mood of 
 " tenderness" for " Scotch religion," his criticism is harmless ; but in per- 
 petually playing with paradoxes Mr Arnold runs the risk of spoiling his 
 own "attic style" — the style of "a man of vigorous understanding, and 
 (need I say ?) a master of language."
 
 A SUMMARY OF HIS CAREER AND GENIUS. G9 
 
 the Trianon, the other is like the march of the Mcenads with 
 Theroigne de Mericourt. Over all this masterpiece is poured 
 " a flood of liquid harmony : " in the acme of the two-edged 
 satire, aimed alike at laws and law-breakers, the graceless 
 crew are raised above the level of gipsies, footpads, and 
 rogues, and made, like Titans, to launch their thunders of 
 rebellion against the world. Ramsay adds to the rough tunes 
 and words of the ballads the refinement of the wits who, in 
 the "Easy" and "Johnstone" Clubs, talked, over their cups, 
 of Prior and Pope, Addison and Gay. Burns inspires them 
 with a fervour that thrills the most wooden of his race. He 
 has purified " John Anderson, my Joe," and brought it from 
 the bothie to the " happy fireside clime : " but the following 
 he has glorified : — 
 
 1. Semple (seventeenth century) — rudely- — 
 
 " Should old acquaintance be forgot 
 
 And never thought upon, 
 The flames of love extinguished 
 
 And freely past and gone, 
 Is thy kind heart now grown so cold, 
 
 In that loving breast of thine, 
 That thou canst never once reflect 
 
 On old langsyne." 
 
 2. Ramsay (eighteenth century) — classically — 
 
 " Methinks around us on each bough 
 
 A thousand Cupids play, 
 While through the groves I walk with you 
 
 Each object makes me gay ; 
 Since your return the sun and moon 
 
 With brighter beams do shine, 
 Streams murmur soft notes while they run 
 
 As they did langsyne." 
 
 3. Burns — immortally — 
 
 " We twa ha'e run about the braes, 
 
 And pou'd the gowans fine, 
 But we've wandered mony a weary foot 
 
 Sin' auld langsyne. 
 We twa ha'e paidl'd in the burn 
 
 Frae morning sun till dine, 
 But seaSjbetween us braid ha'e roar'd 
 
 Sin' auld langsyne."
 
 70 ROBERT BURNS. 
 
 It is the humanity of this and the like that has made 
 Burns pass into the breath of our nostrils. His " voice is 
 on the rolling air;" his arrows in every Scottish heart from 
 California to Cathay. He fed on the past literature of his 
 country as Chaucer on the old fields of English thought, 
 and 
 
 " Still the elements o' sang 
 In formless jumble, richt and wrang, 
 Went floating in his brain." 
 
 But, though as compared with Douglas, Lyndesay, &c, his 
 great power was brevity, he brought forth an hundred-fold. 
 First of the poets of his nation he struck the chord where 
 Love and Passion and Reality meet. We had had enough of 
 mere sentiment, enough of mere sense, enough of mere 
 sensuality. He came to pass them through a harmonizing 
 alembic. To this solid manhood, to this white heat, to the 
 force of language which has made his words and phrases 
 be compared to cannon balls, add the variety that stretches 
 from " Scots wha hae " to " Mary in Heaven," from " Duncan 
 Gray " to " Auld Lang Syne," — a lyric distance only exceeded 
 by the greater dramatic distance between Falstaff and Ariel, 
 the Walpurgis Nacht and Iphigenia, — and we can under- 
 stand the tardy fit of enthusiasm in which William Pitt 
 compared Burns to Shakespeare. He who sings alike of 
 Agincourt and Philippi, of Snug the joiner, and the " bank 
 whereon the wild thyme blows," has doubtless no mate in 
 the region of " Scotch drink, Scotch manners, Scotch reli- 
 gion ; " but we have no such testimony to the cloud- 
 compelling social genius of Shakespeare as everywhere 
 meets us in regard to Burns. He walked among men as a 
 god of either region. He had that glamour or fascination 
 which, for want of a better word called electric, gave their 
 influence to Irving, Chalmers, and Wilson, who have left 
 little that is readable behind them. Carlyle alone among 
 his successors, — representing the mixture of German ideal- 
 ism, John Knox morality, and the morbid spirit of our sad 
 critical age — Carlyle alone among great Scotch writers,
 
 A SUMMARY OF HIS CAREEH AND GENIUS, 71 
 
 seems to have had this power: but his thunderous prose 
 wants the softness of his predecessor's verse. Swift, Gibbon, 
 Hume, and Burns are, in our island, the greatest literary 
 figures of the eighteenth ; as Scott, Wordsworth, Shelley, 
 and Byron are of the first half of the nineteenth century.
 
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