(l;iss T 1 1 Book .C'* PRESENTED BY - J ffc^tll //itl^Ce^v ' THE LIFE AND CORRESPONDENCE OF ROBERT BURNS. BY ALLAN CUNNINGHAM. LONDON: JAMES COCHRANE & CO., 1836. Gift. MR. HUTCHESON 25 C'05 *- * THE LIFE OF ROBERT BURNS. PART I :— AYRSHIRE. The national poetry of Scotland, like her thistle, is the offspring of the soil. To the poems of our first James, the strains of forgotten minstrels, or the inspiration of shepherds and husbandmen, its origin has been ascribed. Where "proof cannot be procured, we must be content with conjecture : classic or foreign lore can claim no share in the inspiration which comes from nature's free grace and liberality. From whatever source our poetry has sprung, it wears the character and bears the image of the north : the learned and the ignorant have felt alike its tenderness and humour, dignity and ardour ; and both have united in claiming, as its brightest orna- ment, the poetry of Him of whose life and works I am now about to write. This, however, has already been done with so much affection by Currie, care by Walker, and manliness .by Lockhart — the genius, the manners, and fortunes of Burns have been dis- cussed so fully by critics of all classes, and writers of all ranks, that little remains for a new adventurer in B - . THE LIFE OF ROBERT BURNS. the realms of biography, save to extract from thel works of others a clear and judicious narrative. But, I like the artist who founds a statue out of old rnate-l rials, he has to reproduce them in a new shape, touch I them with the light of other feeling, and inform [ them with fresh spirit and sentiment. Robert Burns, eldest son of William Burness andl Agnes Brown his wife, was born 25th January, 1759, in a clay-built cottage, raised by his father's own hands, on the banks of the Doon, in the district | of Kyle, and county of Ayr. The season was un- gentle and rough, the walls weak and new : — some days after his birth a wind arose which crushed the frail structure, and the unconscious Poet was car- ried unharmed to the shelter of a neighbouring house. He loved to allude, when he grew up, to this circumstance ; and ironically to claim some com- miseration for the stormy passions of one ushered into the world by a tempest. This rude edifice is now an alehouse, and belongs to the shoemakers of Ayr : the recess in the wall, where the bed stood in which he was born, is pointed out to inquiring guests : the sagacious landlord remembers, too, as he brings in the ale, that he has seen and conversed with Burns, and ventures to relate traits of his person and man- ners. There is nothing very picturesque about the cottage or its surrounding grounds : the admirers of the Muses' haunts will see little to call romantic in low meadows, flat enclosures, and long lines of public road. Yet the district, now emphatically called " The Land of Burns," has many attractions. There are fair streams, beautiful glens, rich pastures, picturesque patches of old natural wood ; and, if we THE LIFE OF ROBERT BURNS. O may trust proverbial rhyme, " Kyle for a man" is a boast of old standing. The birth of the illus- trious Poet has caused the vaunt to be renewed in our own days. The mother of Burns was a native of the county of Ayr ; her birth was humble, and her personal at- tractions moderate ; yet, in all other respects, she was a remarkable woman. She was blessed with singu- lar equanimity of temper ; her religious feeling was deep and constant ; she loved a well-regulated house- hold ; and it was frequently her pleasure to give wings to the weary hours of a chequered life by chaunting old songs and ballads, of which she had a large store. In her looks she resembled her eldest son ; her eyes were bright and intelligent ; her per- ception of character, quick and keen. She lived till January 14th, 1820, rejoiced in the fame of the Poet, and partook of the fruits of his genius. His father was from another district. He was the son of a farmer in Kincardineshire, and born in the year 1721, on the lands of the noble family of Keith Marischall. The retainer, like his chief, fell into misfortunes ; his household was scattered, and William Burness. with a small knowledge of farm- ing, and a large stock of speculative theology, was obliged to leave his native place, in search of better fortune, at the age of nineteen. He has been heard to relate with what bitter feelings he bade farewell to his younger brother, on the top of a lonely hill, and turned his face toward the border. His first resting-place was Edinburgh, where he obtained a slight knowledge of gardening : thence he went into Ayrshire, and procured employment first from Craw- ls 2 4 THE LIFE OF ROBERT BURNS. ford of Doonside, and secondly in the double ca- pacity of steward and gardener, from Ferguson of Doonholm. Imagining now that he Irad established a resting-place, he took a wife, December, 1757, leased a small patch of land for a nursery, and raised that frail shealing, the catastrophe of which has already been related. During his residence with the laird of Doonholm, a rumour was circulated that William Burness had fought for our old line of princes in the late re- bellion — the fatal 1745. His austere and somewhat stately manners caused him to be looked on as a man who had a secret in reserve, which he desired to con- ceal ; and, as a report of that kind was not calcu- lated for his good, he procured a contradiction from the hand of the clergyman of his native parish, ac- quitting him of all participation in the late " wicked rebellion. " I mention this, inasmuch as the Poet, speaking of his forefathers, says, " they followed boldly where their leaders led," and hints that they suffered in the cause which crushed the fortunes of their chief. Gilbert Burns, a sensible man, but no poet, imagined he read in his brother's words an imputation on the family loyalty, and hastened to contradict it, long after his father had gone where the loyal or rebellious alike find peace. He con- sidered his father's religious turn of mind, and the certificate of his parish minister as decisive : and so they are, as far as regards William Burness ; but the Keiths Marischall were forfeited before he was born, and the Poet plainly alludes to earlier matters than the affair of the " Forty-five."— " My ances- tors," he says, " rented lands of the noble Keiths THE LIFE OF ROBERT BURNS. O Marischall, and had the honour of sharing their fate. I mention this circumstance, because it threw my father on the world at large." Here he means that the misfortunes of the fathers were felt by the chil- dren ; he was accurate in all things else, and it is probable he related what his father told him. The feelings of the Poet were very early coloured with Jacobitism. Though William Burness sought only at first to add the profits of a small stewardship to those of a little garden or nursery, and toiled along with his wife to secure food and clothing, his increasing fa- mily induced him to extend his views ; and he accordingly ventured to lease Mount Oliphant, a neighbouring farm of a hundred acres, and entered upon it in 1765, when Robert was between six and seven years old. The elder Burns seems to have been but an indifferent judge of land : in a district where much fine ground is in cultivation, he sat down on a sterile and hungry spot, which no labour could render fruitful. He had commenced, too, on borrowed money ; the seasons as well as the soil, proved churlish ; and Ferguson his friend dying, " a stern factor," says Robert, " whose threatening letters set us all in tears," interposed ; and he was compelled, after a six years' struggle, to relinquish the lease. This harshness was re- membered in other days : the factor sat for that living portrait of insolence and wrong in the " Twa Dogs." How easily may -endless infamy be pur- chased ! From this inhospitable spot William Burness removed his household to Lochlea, a larger and O THE LIFE OF ROBERT BURNS. better farm, some ten miles oiF, in the parish of Tarbolton. Here he seemed at once to strike root and prosper. He was still strong in body, ardent in mind, and unsubdued in spirit. Every day, too, was bringing vigour to his sons, who, though mere boys, took more than their proper share of toil ; while his wife superintended, with care and success, the whole system of in-door economy. But it seemed as if fortune had determined that nought he set his heart on should prosper. For four years, indeed, seasons were favourable, and markets good ; but, in the fifth year, there ensued a change. It was in vain that he laboured with head and hand, and resolved to be economical and saving. In vain Robert held the plough with the dexterity of a man by day, and thrashed and prepared corn for seed or for sale, evening and morning, before the sun rose and after it set. " The gloom of hermits, and the unceasing moil of galley slaves," were endured to no purpose ; and, to crown all, a difference arose between the tenant and his landlord, as to terms of lease and ro- tation of crop. The farmer, a stern man, self-willed as well as devoutly honest, admitted but of one in- terpretation to ambiguous words. The proprietor, accustomed to give law rather than receive it, ex- plained them to his own advantage ; and the de- clining years of this good man, and the early years of his eminent son, were embittered by disputes, in which sensitive natures suffer and worldly ones thrive. Amid all these toils and trials, William Burness remembered the worth of religious instruction, and the usefulness of education in the rearing of his children, The former task he took upon himself, THE LITE OF ROBERT BURNS. / and, in a little manual of devotion still extant, sought to soften the rigour of the Calvinistic creed into the gentler Arminian. He set, too, the example which he taught. He abstained from all profane swearing and vain discourse, and shunned all approach to levity of conversation or behaviour. A week-day in his house wore the sobriety of a Sunday ; nor did he fail in performing family worship in a way which enabled his son to give the world that fine picture of domestic devotion, the " Cotter's Saturday Night." The depressing cares of the world, and a conscious- ness, perhaps, that he was fighting a losing battle, brought an almost habitual gloom to his brow. He had nothing to cheer him but a sense of having done his duty. The education of his sons he con- fided to other hands. At first he sent Robert to a small school at Alloway Miln, within a mile of the place of his birth ; but the master was removed to a be tter situation, and his place was supplied by John Murdoch, a candidate for the honours of the church, who undertook, at a moderate salary, to teach the boys of Lochlea, and the children of five other neighbouring farmers, reading, writing, arith- metic, grammar, and Latin. He was a young man. a good scholar, and an enthusiastic instructor, with a moderate knowledge of human nature, and a competent share of pedantry. He made himself ac- ceptable to the elder Burness by engaging in con- versations on speculative theology, and in lend- ing his learning to aid the other's sagacity and penetration ; and he rendered himself welcome to Robert by bringing him knowledge of any kind — by giving him books — telling him about eminent o THE LIFE OF ROBERT BURNS. men— and teaching him the art — which he was not slow in learning — of opening up fresh sources of information for himself. Of the progress which Robert made in knowledge, his teacher has given us a very clear account. In reading, writing, and arithmetic, he excelled all boys of his own age, and took rank above several who were his seniors. The New Testament, the Bible, the English Grammar, and Mason's collection of verse and prose, laid the foundation of devotion and knowledge. As soon as he was capable of under- standing composition, Murdoch taught him to turn verse into its natural prose order ; sometimes to sub- stitute synonymous expressions for poetical words, and to supply all the ellipses. By these means he perceived when his pupil knew the meaning of his author, and thus sought to instruct him in the proper arrangement of words, as well as variety of expression. For some two years and a half, Robert continued to receive the instructions of his excellent teacher under his father's roof. On Murdoch's no- mination to the Grammar School of Ayr, his pupil did not forsake him, but took lodgings with him ; and, during the ordinary school hours, walks in the evening, and other moments of leisure, he sought to master the grammar, in order to take upon himself the task of instructing his brothers and sisters at home. Under the same kind instructor he strove to obtain some knowledge of French. " When walk- ing together, and even at meals," says Murdoch, "T was constantly telling him the names of different objects, as they presented themselves, in French, so that he was hourly laying in a stock of words, and THE LIFE OF ROBERT BURNS. 9 sometimes little phrases. In short, he took such pleasure in learning, and I in teaching, that it was difficult to say which of the two was most zealous in the business ; and about the end of our second week of study of the French, we began to read a little of the Adventures of Telemachus, in Fenelon's own words." All the French which the young Poet picked up, during one fortnight's course of instruc- tion, could not be much ; the coming of harvest called him to more laborious duties ; nor did he, save for a passing hour or so, ever seriously resume his studies in Telemachus. Of these early and interesting days, during which the future man was seen, like fruit shaping amid the unfolded bloom, we have a picture drawn by the Poet's own hand, and touched off in his own vivid manner. — " At seven years of age I was by no means a favourite with any body. I was a good deal noted for a retentive memory, a stubborn sturdy something in my disposition, and an enthusiastic idiot piety — I say, idiot piety, because I was then but a child. Though it cost the schoolmaster some thrashings, I made an excellent English scholar ; and, by the time I was ten or eleven years of age, I was a critic in substantives, verbs, and particles. The earliest composition that I recollect taking pleasure in, was the Vision of Mirza, and a hymn of Addison's, beginning, " How are thy servants blest, O Lord !" I particularly remember one half- stanza, which was music to my ear — " For though on dreadful whirls we hung, High on the broken wave." 10 THE LIFE OF ROBERT BURNS. I met with these in Mason's English collection, one of my school-books. The first two hooks I ever read in private, and which gave me more pleasure than any two I have read since, were the Life of Hannibal, and the History of the Acts and Deeds of Sir William Wallace. Hannibal gave my young ideas such a turn, that I used to strut in raptures up and down after the recruiting drum and bagpipe, and wish myself tall enough to be a soldier ; while the story of Wallace poured a Scottish prejudice into my veins, which will boil along there till the floodgates of life shut in eternal rest." The education of Burns was not over when the school-doors were shut. The peasantry of Scotland turn their cottages into schools ; and when a father takes his arm-chair by the evening fire, he seldom neglects to communicate to his children whatever knowledge he possesses himself. Nor is this know- ledge very limited ; it extends, generally, to the his- tory of Europe, and to the literature of the island ; but more particularly to the divinity, the poetry, and what may be called, the traditionary history of Scot- land. An intelligent peasant is intimate with all those skirmishes, sieges, combats, and quarrels, do- mestic or national, of which public writers take no account. Genealogies of the chief families are quite familiar to him. He has by heart, too, whole vo- lumes of songs and ballads ; nay, long poems some- times abide in his recollection ; nor will he think his knowledge much, unless he knows a little about the lives and actions of the men who have done most honour to Scotland. In addition to what he has on his memory, we may mention what he has on the THE LIFE OF ROBERT BURNS. 11 shelf. A common husbandman is frequently master of a little library : history, divinity, and poetry, but most so the latter, compose his collection. Milton and Young are favourites ; the flowery Me- ditations of Hervey, the religious romance of the Pil- grim's Progress, are seldom absent ; while of Scot- tish books, Ramsay, Thomson, Fergusson, and now Burns, together with songs and ballad-books innu- merable, are all huddled together, soiled with smoke, and frail and tattered by frequent use. The house- hold of William Burness was an example of what I have described ; and there is some truth in the as- sertion, that in true knowledge the Poet was, at nine- teen, a better scholar than nine-tenths of our young gentlemen when they leave school for the college. Let us look into this a little more closely ; nor can we see with a clearer light than what Burns himself has afforded us. — " What I knew of ancient story/' he observes, " was gathered from Salmon and Guthrie's Geographical Grammars ; and the ideas I had formed of modern manners, of literature and criticism, I got from the Spectator. These, with Pope's Works, some plays of Shakspeare, Tul], and Dickson on Agriculture, the Heathen Pantheon, Locke on the Human Understanding, Stackhouse's History of the Bible, Justice's British Gardener's Dictionary, Boyle's Lectures, Allan Ramsay's Works, Taylor's Scripture Doctrine of Original Sin, A Select Collection of English Songs, and Hervey's Meditations, had formed the whole of my reading." But when to these we add Young's Night Thoughts, which his own poems prove him to have admired, we cannot see that we have advanced far 12 THE LIFE OF ROBERT BURNS. on the way in which he walked, when he disciplined himself for the service of the Scottish muse. In truth, none of the works we have enumerated, save the poems of Allan Ramsay, could be of farther use to him than to fill his mind with information, and shew him what others had done. The " Address to the Deil," " Highland Mary/' and " Tarn o' Shan- ter" are the fruit of far different studies. Burns had, in truth, a secret school of study, in which he set up other models for imitation than Pope or Hervey. — " In my infant and boyish days," he observes to Doctor Moore, " I owed much to an old woman who resided in the family (Jenny Wilson by name), remarkable for her ignorance, cre- dulity, and superstition. She had, I suppose, the largest collection in the country of tales and songs concerning devils, ghosts, fairies, brownies, witches, warlocks, spunkies, kelpies, elf-candles, dead-lights, wraiths, apparitions, cantraips, giants, enchanted towers, dragons, and other trumpery. This culti- vated the latent seeds of poesie ; but had so strong an effect upon my imagination that to this hour in my nocturnal rambles I sometimes keep a look-out in suspicious places." Here we have the Poet tak- ing lessons in the classic lore of his native land and profiting largely ; yet, to please a scholar like his correspondent, he calls his instructress an ignorant old woman, and her stories idle trumpery. Let the name of Jenny Wilson be reverenced by all lovers of the northern muse ; her tales gave colour and cha- racter to many fine effusions. The supernatural in these legends was corrected and modified by the natural which his growing sense saw in human life, THE LIFE OF ROBERT BURNS. 13 and found in the songs of his native land. — " The collection of songs," he says, " was my vade-me- cum. I pored over them, driving my^cart or walk- ing to labour, song by song, verse by verse, care- fully noting the true tender or sublime, from affecta- tion and fustian. I am convinced I owe to this practice much of my critic craft, such as it is." He is rarely if ever wrong in his remarks on the songs of Scotland. They had, in no remote day, the ad- vantages of the schooling which in these early hours he gave his fancy and understanding. He had not yet completed these unconscious studies. In his farther progress his mother was his instructress. Her rectitude of heart, and the fine example of her husband, made an impression too strong to be ever effaced from the mind of her son. This was strengthened by the songs and ballads which she commonly chaunted ; they all wore a moral hue. The ballad which she loved most to sing, or her son to hear, is one called " The Life and Age of Man." It is a work of imagination and piety, full of quaintness and nature ; it compares the various periods of man's life to the months of the year ; and the parallel is both ingenious and poetic. — " I had an old grand-uncle," says Burns, " with whom my mother lived a while in her girlish years : the good old man, for such he was, was long blind ere he died, during which time his highest enjoy- ment was to sit down and cry, while my mother would sing the simple old song of * the Life and Age of Man.' ' ; The mother of the Poet, on being ques- tioned respecting it by Cromek, some years before her death, repeated the ballad word for word, saying 14 THE LIFE OF ROBERT BURNS. it was one of the many nursery songs of her mother, and that she first heard and learned it from her se- venty years before. The noble poem of " Man was made to Mourn, " bears a close resemblance to this old strain, both in language and sentiment. It taught Burns the art, which too few learn, of adding a moral aim to his verse ; and though he rose in song to the highest pitch of moral pathos and sublimity, he took his first lesson from this now neglected ballad. In all his letters and memoranda, we see him continually pointing to the rustic productions with which he was in youth familiar, and thus afford- ing us in some measure the means of knowing how little of his excellence is reflected from others, and how much we owe to his own inspiration. A student in art first studies the works of earlier masters ; as he advances, living figures are placed before him, that he may see nature with his own eyes. Burns, who knew nothing of academic rules, pursued a similar course in poetry. He had become acquainted with limb and lineament of the muse, as she had been seen by others : he could learn no more from the dead, and now had recourse to the living : he had hitherto looked on in silence ; it was now time to speak. Beauty first gave utter- ance to his crowding thoughts ; with him love and poetry were coevals. " You know," he says, in his communication to Moore, " our country cus- tom of coupling a man and woman together as partners in the labours of harvest. In my fifteenth autumn, my partner was a bewitching creature, a year younger than myself. My scarcity of English denies me the power of doing her justice in that THE LIIE OF ROBERT BURNS. 15 language; but you know the Scottish idiom, ' she was a bonnie sweet sonsie lass/ In short, she alto- gether, unwittingly to herself, initiated me in that delicious passion, which, in spite of acid disappoint- ment, gin-horse prudence, and bookworm philo- sophy, I hold to be the first of huihan joys, our dearest blessing here below ! How she caught the contagion I cannot tell. You medical people talk much of infection from breathing the same air, the touch, &c. ; but I never expressly said I loved her. Indeed, I did not know myself why I liked so much to loiter behind with her, when returning in the evening from our labours — why the tones of her voice made my heart-strings thrill like an Eolian harp — and particularly why my pulse beat such a furious ratan when I looked and fingered over her little hand to pick out the cruel nettle stings and thistles. Among her other love-inspiring qualities, she sang sweetly ; and it was her favourite reel to which I attempted giving an embodied vehicle in rhyme. I was not so presumptuous as to imagine that I could make verses like printed ones, com- posed by men who had Greek and Latin ; but my girl sung a song which was said to be composed by a country laird's son on one of his father's maids with whom he was in love : and I saw no reason why I might not rhyme as well as he — for, excepting that he could smear sheep and cast peats, his father living in the moorlands, he had no more scholar craft than myself. Thus with me began love and poetry." This intercourse with the softer and gen- tler part of the creation — this feeling in the presence of youth and loveliness, and desire to give voice to 16 THE LIFE OF ROBERT BURNS. his passion in song — were, to his slumbering emo- tions, what the voice in scripture was, among the " dry bones of the valley," calling them into life and action. It is true that his brother looked upon some of the ladies of these early verses as so many moving broomsticks on which fancy hung her gar- lands. They seemed otherwise to the Poet, He saw charms in them which prosaic spirits failed to see. We would take the word of the muse in such matters against a whole battalion of men, " Who, darkling, grub this earthly hole In low pursuit." Having given, as he said, his " heart a heeze" among those soft companions, the Poet, like the picker of samphire on the beetling cliff, proceeded to seek farther knowledge in a perilous place — viz. among the young and the heedless — " the ram-stam squad, who zigzag on," without any settled aim or a wish ungratified. He offended his father, by giving his " manners a brush" at a country dancing- school. The good man had no sincere dislike, as some Calvinists have, to this accomplishment ; still he tolerated rather than approved of it ; he did not imagine that religion took to the barn-floor, " And reel'd and set, and cross'd, and cleeket ;" cracking her thumbs and distorting, as Milton says, her " clergy climbs," to the sound of a fiddle ; danc- ing, in short, he shook his head at, though he did not frown. The Poet felt, therefore, that in this he had approached at least to disobedience — a circumstance which he regrets in after-life, and regards as the first step from the paths of strictness and sobriety. " The will-o'-wisp meteors of thoughtless whim" began THE LIFE OF ROBERT BURNS. J .' he says, to be almost the sole lights of his way ; yet early-ingrained piety preserved his innocence, though it could not keep him from folly. " The great mis- fortune of my life," he wisely observes, " was to want an aim. The only two openings by which I could enter the temple of fortune was the gate of niggardly economy, or the path of little chicaning bargain- making. The first is so contracted an aperture, I never could squeeze myself into it ; the last I always hated — there was contamination in the very entrance. Thus abandoned of aim or view in life, with a strong appetite for sociability, as well from native hila- rity as from a pride of observation and remark — a constitutional melancholy or hypochondriasm that made me fly solitude : add to these incentives to social life my reputation for bookish knowledge, a certain wild logical talent, and a strength of thought something like the rudiments of good sense ; and it will not seem surprising that I was generally a wel- come guest where I visited ; or any great wonder that where two or three met together, there was I among them. Another circumstance in my life, which made some alteration in my mind and man- ners, was, that I spent my nineteenth summer on a smuggling coast, a good distance from home, at a noted school, to learn mensuration, surveying, dial- ling, &c, in which I made pretty good progress. But I made greater progress in the knowledge of mankind. The contraband trade was at that time very successful, and it sometimes happened to me to fall in with those who carried it on. Scenes of swaggering riot and roaring dissipation were till this time new to me ; but I was no enemy to social VOL. I. C 18 THE LIFE OF ROBERT BURNS. life. Here, though I learnt to fill my glass and to mix without fear in a drunken squabble, yet I went on with a high hand with my geometry till the sun entered Virgo — a month which is always a carnival in my bosom — when a charming fllette, who lived next door to the school, upset my trigonometry, and set me off at a tangent from the sphere of my studies." Nature, in all this, was pursuing her own plan in the education of Burns. The melancholy of which he complains was a portion of his genius ; the invi- sible object to which he was impelled was poetry. No one can fail to perceive, in the scenes which he describes as dear to his heart and fancy, the very materials over which his muse afterwards breathed life and inspiration ; and no one can fail to feel, that all this time he had been walking in the path of the muse without knowing it. He complains that he was unfitted with an aim. He looked around, and saw no outlet for his am- bition. Farming he failed to find the same as it is in Virgil — elegance united with toil. The high places of the land were occupied, and no one could hope to ascend save the titled or the wealthy. The church he could not reach without an expensive education, or patronage less attainable still. Law held out temptation to talent, but not to talent with- out money, while the army opened its glittering files to him who could purchase a commission, or had, in the words of the divine, , , A beauteous sister or convenient wife," to smooth the way to preferment. With a con- sciousness of genius, and a desire of distinction, lie stood motionless, like a stranded vessel whose sails THE LIFE OF ROBERT BURNS, 19 are still set, her colours flying, and the mariners aboard. He had now and then a sort of vague inti- mation from his own heart that he was a poet ; but the polished and stately versification of English poetry alarmed and dismayed him : he had sung to himself a song or two, and stood with his hand on the plough, and his heart with the muse. The strength which he could not himself discover was not likely to be found out by others. It is thus we find him spoken of by his good old kind preceptor : — " Gilbert," says Murdoch, " always appeared to me to possess a more lively imagination, and to be more of the wit than Robert. I attempted to teach them a little church music. Robert's ear, in parti- cular, was remarkably dull, and his voice untune- able. It was long before I could get him to distinguish one tune from another. Robert's coun- tenance was generally grave, and expressive of a serious, contemplative, and thoughtful mind. Gil- bert's face said — ff Mirth, with thee I mean to live ;" and, certainly, if any person who knew the two boys had been asked which of them was most likely to court the muses, he would surely never have guessed that Robert had a propensity of that kind." The simple schoolmaster had perhaps paid court to some small heritor's daughter, and dressed his face in smiles for the task ; he accordingly thought that the Muse was to be wooed and won in the same Malvolio way, and never imagined that the face in- spired with contemplation and melancholy could be dear to her heart. While the boy was thus rising into the man, and c2 20 THE LIFE OF ROBERT BURNS. the mind was expanding with the body, both were in danger of being crushed, as the daisy was, in the Poet's own immortal strains, beneath the weight of the furrow. The whole life of his father was a con- tinued contest with fortune. Burns saw, as he grew up, to what those days of labour and nights of anxiety would lead, and set himself, with heart and hand, to lighten the one and alleviate the other. At the plough, scythe, and reaping-hook he feared no com- petitor, and so set all fears of want in his own per- son at defiance : he felt but for his father. All this is touchingly described by Gilbert. " My brother, at the age of thirteen, assisted in thrashing the crop of corn, and, at fifteen, was the principal labourer on the farm ; for we had no hired servant, male or female. The anguish of mind we felt, at our tender years, under these straits and difficulties, was very great. To think of our father growing old — for he was now above fifty, broken down with the long- continued fatigues of his life, with a wife and five other children, and in a declining state of circum- stances — these reflections produced in my brother's mind and mine, sensations of the deepest distress. At this time he was almost constantly afflicted in the evening with a dull head-ache, which, at a future period of his life, was exchanged for a palpitation of the heart, and a threatening of fainting and suffoca- tion in his bed in the night-time/' The elder Burness, while in the Lothians, had paid attention to gardening ; but he could not bring much agricul- tural knowledge from his native county. His toil was incessant ; but it was of the body, not of the brain. More is required in farming than mere THE LIFE 01 ROBERT BURNS. 21 animal vigour and dexterity of hand. A skilful farmer may be called a learned man ; — to work ac- cording to the season, and in the spirit of the soil : to anticipate sunshine, and be prepared for storms : to calculate chances and consequences : suit de- mands at home, and fit markets abroad, require what not many fully possess. I know not how much of this knowledge William Burness possessed. He was. however, fertile in ex- pedients : when he found that his farm was unpro- ductive in corn, he thought the soil suitable for flax, and resolved himself to raise the commodity, while to the Poet he allotted the task of manufacturing it for the market. To accomplish this, it was necessary that he should be instructed in flax-dressing : ac- cordingly, at Midsummer, ITS 1 . Robert went to Irvine, where he wrought under the eye of one Peacock, kinsman to his mother. His mode of life was frugal enough. " He possessed,*' says Currie. ;f a single room for his lodging, rented, perhaps, at the rate of a shilling a week. He passed his days in constant labour as a flax-dresser, and his food con- sisted chiefly of oatmeal sent to him from his father's family/' A picture of his situation and feelings is luckily preserved of his own drawing : the simplicity of the expression, and pure English of the style, are not its highest qualities. He thus wrote to his father: " Honoured Sir : — I have purposely delayed writing, in the hope that I should have the pleasure of seeing you on new-year's day : but work comes so hard upon us that I do not choose to be absent on that account. My health is nearly the same as when you were here, only my sleep is a little sounder, and on 22 THE LIFE OF ROBERT BURNS. the whole I am rather better than otherwise, though I mend by very slow degrees. The weakness of my nerves has so debilitated my mind that I dare neither review past wants, nor look forward into futurity : for the least anxiety or perturbation in my breast produces most unhappy effects on my whole frame. Sometimes, indeed, when for an hour or two my spirits are a little lightened, I glimmer a little into futurity ; but my principal, and indeed my only pleasurable employment is looking backwards and forwards in a moral and religious way. I am quite transported at the thought that ere long, perhaps very soon, I /shall bid an eternal adieu to all the pains, and uneasinesses, and disquietudes of this weary life ; for I assure you I am heartily tired of it : and, if I do not very much deceive myself, I could contentedly and gladly resign it. " As for this world," he continues, " I despair of ever making a figure in it. I am not formed for the bustle of the busy, nor the flutter of the gay. I shall never again be capable of entering into such scenes. Indeed, I am altogether unconcerned at the thoughts of this life. I foresee that poverty and obscurity probably await me, and I am in some measure pre- pared, and daily preparing, to meet them. I have but just time and paper to return you my grateful thanks for the lessons of virtue and piety you have given me, which were too much neglected at the time of giving them, but which I hope have been remembered e*e it is yet too late." This letter is dated December 27, 1781. No one can mistake the cause of his melancholy : obscure toil and an undis- tinguished lot on earth, directed his thoughts in THE LIFE OF ROBERT BURNS. 23 despair to another world, where the righteous " shall hunger no more, neither thirst any more ; neither shall the sun light on them, nor any heat." To plough, and sow, and reap were poetic labours, compared with the dusty toil of a flax-dresser : with the lark for his companion, and the green fields around him, his spirits rose, and he looked on himself as forming a part of creation : but when he sat down to the brake and the heckle, his spirits sank, and his dreams of ambition vanished. Flax-dressing, in the poet's estimation, seemed any thing but the way to wealth and fame : the de- sponding tone of his letter was no good augury ; the catastrophe of the business is not quite in keeping with quotations from Scripture and hopes in heaven. " Partly through whim," said the bard to Moore, " and partly that I wished to set about doing some- thing in life, I joined a flax-dresser in Irvine to learn his trade. This was an unlucky affair : as we were giving a welcome carousal to the new year, the shop took fire and burnt to ashes, and I was left like a true poet, not worth a sixpence." This disaster was followed by one much more grievous. " The clouds oL misfortune," says Burns, " were gathering fast round my father's head. After three years tossing and whirling in the vortex of litigation, he was just saved from the horrors of a jail by a consumption, which after two years promises, kindly stept in and carried him away to where the * wicked cease from troubling, and the weary are at rest.' His all went among the hell-hounds that prowl in the kennel of justice. The finishing evil that brought up the rear of this infernal file was my constitutional melancholy 24 THE LIFE OF ROBERT BURNS. being increased to such a degree, that for three months I was in a state of mind scarcely to be envied by the hopeless wretches who have got their mit- timus — ■< Depart from me, ye accursed V " The intel- ligence, rectitude, and piety of William Burness were an honour to the class to which he belonged : his eminent son acknowledged, when his own inter- course with the world entitled his opinions to respect, that he had met with few who understood men, their manners and their ways, equal to his father : " but stubborn, ungainly integrity, and headlong, un- governable irascibility," he added, " are disqualifying circumstances in the paths of fortune." " I remem- ber William Burness well," said the venerable Mrs. Hunter, daughter to Ferguson of Doonholm ; " there was something very gentlemanly in his manners and appearance : unfortunately for him my father died early, the estate passed into other hands, and was managed by a factor, who it is said had no liking for the family of Mount Oliphant." Robert and his brother were afflicted, but did not despair ; they collected together the little property which law and misfortune had spared, and, in the year 1784, took the farm of Mossgiel, near Mauchline, consisting of 118 acres, at an annual rent of ninety pounds. Their mother superintended the dairy and the household, while the Poet and Gilbert undertook for the rest. " It was," observes the latter, " a joint concern among us : every member of the family was allowed wages for the labour performed ; my brother's allowance and mine was seven pounds per annum, and his expenses never in any year exceeded his slender income. His temperance and frugality THE LIFE OF ROBERT BURNS. 2o were every thing that could be wished." It is pleasing to contemplate a picture such as this. We are now about to enter into the regions of romance. " I began," says Burns, " to be known in the neighbourhood as a maker of rhymes." The course of his life hitherto has shewn that his true vocation was neither the plough nor the heckle. He acquired, indeed, the common knowledge of a hus- bandman ; but that was all he knew or cared to know of the matter. " Farmer Attention," says the proverb, "is a good farmer all the world over :" and Burns was attentive as far as ploughing, sowing, harrowing, reaping, stacking, thrashing, winnowing, and selling went ; he did all this by a sort of mecha- nical impulse, but success in farming demands more. The farmer should know what is doing in his way in the world around ; he must learn to anticipate de- mand, and, in short, to time every thing. But he who pens an ode on his sheep when he should be driving them forth to pasture — who stops his plough in the half- drawn furrow, to rhyme about the flowers which he buries — who sees visions on his way from market, and makes rhymes on them — who writes an ode on the horse he is about to yoke, and a ballad on the girl who shews the whitest hands and brightest eyes among his reapers — has no chance of ever grow- ing opulent, or of purchasing the field on which he toils. The bard amidst his ripening corn, or walk- ing through his field of grass and clover, beholds on all sides images of pathos or of beauty, connects them with moral influences, and lifts himself to hea- ven : a grosser mortal sees only so many acres of promising corn or fattening grass, connects them 26 THE LIFE OF ROBERT BURNS. with rising markets and increasing gain, and, in- stead of rising, descends into " Mammons filthy delve." That poetic feelings and fancies such as these passed frequently over the mind of Burns in his early days, we have his own assurance ; while labour held his body, poetry seized his spirit, and, unconsciously to himself, asserted her right and triumphed in her victory. Some obey the call of learning and become poets ; others fall, they know not how, into the company of the muse, and break out into numbers. Love was the voice which called up the poet in Burns ; his Par- nassus was the stubble-field, and his inspirer that fair-haired girl from whose hands he picked the thistle-stings, and delighted to walk with when but some fifteen years old. The song which he made in her praise he noted down in a little book, entitled " Observations, Hints, Songs, Scraps of Poetry, by Robert Burness ; a man who had little art in making money, and still less in keeping it." " I composed the song," he said, long afterwards, "in a wild enthusiasm of passion, and I never recollect it but my heart melts and my blood sallies." The passion which he felt failed to find its way into the verse ; there is some nature, but no inspiration : — „ " My Nelly's looks are blythe and sweet, And what is best of a' — Her reputation is complete, And fair without a flaw. She dresses ay sae clean and neat, Both decent and genteel ; And then there's something in her gait Gars ony dress look weel." These lines give little indication of future strength ; his vigour of thought increased with his stature ; THE LIFE OF ROEERT BURNS. 27 before he was a year older, the language of his muse was more manly and bold : — " I dreamed I lay where flowers were springing, Gaily in the sunny beam, Listening to the wild birds singing By a falling crystal stream ; Straight the sky grew black and daring, Thro' the woods the whirlwinds rave, Trees, with aged arms, are warring, O'er the swelling drumlie wave." Few of the early verses of Burns are preserved ; some he himself destroyed, others were composed, but not, perhaps, committed to paper ; while it is likely that not a few are entirely lost. In his nineteenth summer, the leisure season of the farmer, while studying mensuration at a school on the sea- coast, he met with the Peggy of one of his earliest songs. " Stepping into the garden." he says, " one charm- ing noon to take the sun's altitude, there I met my angel — " Like Proserpine gathering flowers, . Herself a fairer flower." It was in vain to think of doing any more good at school. The remaining week I staid, I did nothing but craze the faculties of my soul about her, or steal out to meet her ; and the two last nights of my stay in. the country, had sleep been a mortal sin, the image of this modest and innocent girl had kept me guiltless/' On his return home the harvest was commenced. To the fair lass of Kirkoswald he dedi- cated the first fruits of his fancy, in a strain of equal freedom and respect, beginning — *' Now wastlin' winds and slaught'ring guns Bring autumn's pleasant weather ; The moorcock springs on whirring wings Amang the blooming heather; Now waving grain wide o'er the plain Delights the weary farmer, And the moon shines bright when I rove at night To muse upon my charmer." 28 THE LIFE OF ROBERT BURKS. In a still richer strain he celebrates his nocturnal adventures with another of the fair ones of the west. Burns could now write as readily as he could speak, and pour the passion which kindled up his veins into his compositions. It is thus he sings of Annie — S( I hae been blythe wi' comrades dear, I hae been merry drinkin' ; I hae been joyfu' gatherin 5 gear, I hae been happy thinkin' ; But a' the pleasures e'er I saw, Tho' three times doubled fairly, That happy night was worth them a' Amang the rigs o' barley." He who could write such lines as these had little to learn from the muse ; and yet he soon surpassed them in liquid ease of expression, and happy ori- ginality of sentiment. It is one of the delusions of his biographers, that the sources of his inspiration are to be sought in English poetry ; but, save an image from Young, and a word or so from Shak- speare, there is no trace of them in all his composi- tions. Burns read the English poets no doubt with wonder and delight : but he felt he was not of their school ; the language of life with him was wholly different ; the English language is, to a Scottish pea- sant, much the same as a foreign tongue ; it was not without reason that Murray, the oriental scholar, declared that the English of Milton was less easy to learn than the Latin of Virgil. Any one conversant with our northern lyrics will know what school of verse Burns imitated when he sang of Nannie— a lass who dwelt nigh the banks of Lugar : — " Behind yon hills where Lugar flows, 'Mang moors an' mosses many, O ; The wintry sun the day has closed And I'll awa' to Nannie, O. THE LIFE OF ROBERT BURNS. 29 " Her face is fair, her heart is true, As spotless as she's bonnie, O ; The opening gowan, wat wi' dew, Xae purer is than Nannie, O." Such was the language in which the Poet ad- dressed the rustic damsels of Kyle ; ladies are not very apt to be won by verse, let it be ever so ele- gant, they set down the person who adorns them with the lilies and the roses of imagination as a dreamer, and look around for more substantial com- fort. Waller's praise made Sacharissa smile — and smile only ; and another lady of equal beauty saw in Lord Byron a pale-faced lad, lame of a foot, and married a man who could leap a five-barred gate ; yet Burns was, or imagined himself, beloved ; he wrote from his own immediate emotions ; his muse was no visionary dweller by an imaginary fountain, but a substantial " Fresh young landart lass," whose charms had touched his fancy. Xor was he one of those who look high and muse on dames nursed in velvet laps, and fed with golden spoons. " He had always," says Gilbert, " a particular jealousy of peo- ple who were richer than himself; his love, there- fore, rarely settled on persons of this description. When he selected any one out of the sovereignty of his good pleasure to whom he should pay his par- ticular attention, she was instantly invested with a sufficient stock of charms out of the plentiful stores of his own imagination ; and there was often a great dissimilitude between his fair captivator as she ap- peared to others, and as she seemed when invested with the attributes he gave her." His own words partly confirm the account of Gilbert. " My heart 30 THE LIFE OF ROBERT BURNS. was completely tinder, and was eternally lighted up by some goddess or other ; and, as in every other war- fare of this world, my fortune was various, some- times I was received with favour, and sometimes mortified with repulse. " That his love was some- times repulsed, we have the assurance of a poem, now lost, in which, like Cowley, he had recorded his labours in the way of affection ; when doors were closed against him, or the Annie or Nannie of the hour failed in their promises, he added another verse to the ballad, the o'erword of which was, " So I'll to my Latin again." If he sought consolation in studying the Latin rudiments when jilted, his disappointments in that way could not be many, for his knowledge of the language was small. In his twenty-fourth year his skill in verse enabled him to add the crowning glory to his lyric compositions ; who the lady was that inspired it we are not told, but she must have been more than commonly beau- tiful, or more than usually kind : as the concluding compliment might have been too much for one, he has wisely bestowed it on the whole sex ; the praise of other poets fades away before it ; f « There's nought but care on every han', In every hour that passes, O ! What signifies the life o' man An' 'twere na for the lasses, O ! ** Auld nature swears the lovely dears Her noblest work she classes, O ! Her 'prentice han' she tried on man, An' then she made the lasses, O !" One of those heroines was servant in the house- hold of General Stewart, of Stair and Afton ; Burns during a visit with David Sillar, left, it is said, one of his songs which was soon chaunted THE LIFE OF ROBERT BURNS. 31 in bower and hall, and attracted the notice of Mrs. Stewart, a lady both beautiful and accomplished, who sent for the Poet on his next visit, and by her remarks and praise confirmed his inclination for lyric verse. He afterwards alluded to these interviews in a conversation with Anna Stewart of Afton, and said he should never forget with what trepidation of heart he entered the parlour and approached her mother : this early notice was also present to his mind in copying some of his later pieces of poetry : he addresses them — the original is now before me — to " Mrs. General Stewart of Afton, one of his first and kindest patronesses." The progress which Burns made in the more se- rious kind of verse during this lyrical fit was not at all so brilliant ; his attempts have more of the language of poetry than of its simple force and true dignity. There are passages, indeed, of great truth and vigour, but no continued strain either to rival his after flights, or compare with the unity and finished excellence of " My Nannie, O," and " Green grow the Rashes." He had prepared himself, how- ever, for those more prolonged efforts ; nature had endowed him with fine sensibility of heart and grandeur of soul ; he had made himself familiar with nature, animate and inanimate ; with the gentleness of spring, the beauty of summer, the magnificence of autumn, and the stormy sublimity of winter ; nor was he less so with rural man, and his passions and pursuits. Though indulging in no sustained flights, he had now and then sudden bursts in which his feelings over-mastered all restraint. The following stanza, written in his twenty-fourth year, shows he 32 THE LIFE OF ROBERT BURNS. had read Young, and felt the resemblance which the season of winter bore to his own clouded fortunes : — " The sweeping blast, the sky o'ercast, The joyless winter day, Let others fear, to me more dear Than all the pride of May ; The tempest's howl, it soothes my soul, My griefs it seems to join ; The leafless trees my fancy please, Their fate resembles mine." " There is scarcely any earthly object," says x Burns, " gives me more — I do not know that I should call it pleasure — but something which exalts me, something which enraptures me — than to walk in the sheltered side of a wood or a high plantation, in a cloudy winter day, and hear the stormy wind howling among the trees, and raving over the plain. It is my best season for devotion : my mind is rapt up in a kind of enthusiasm to Him who, in the pom- pous language of the Hebrew bard, ' walks on the wings of the wdnd.' " In another mood he wrote what he called " a wild rhapsody, miserably deficient in versification, but full of the sentiment of my heart." This ditty wants harmony and vivid force of expres- sion : but it breathes of the old ballad : '.' My father was a farmer, Upon the Carrick border, And carefully he bred me up In decency and order: He bade me act a manly part, Though I had ne'er a farthing, For without an honest manly heart No man was worth regarding." In one of his desponding fits, when he " looked back on prospects drear," or beheld the future dark- ening, he wrote that Prayer in which some have seen nothing but sentiments of contrition and submis- siveness, and others a desire to lay on the Creator THE LIFE OF ROBERT BURNS. 33 the blame of the follies with which he charges him- self. I have heard his enemies quote the following verse with an air of triumph : — *« Thou knowest that Thou hast formed me With passions wild and strong, And, listening to their witching voice, Has often led me wrong." Poetry had now become with Burns a darling pursuit : he had no settled plan of study, for he com- posed at the .plough, at the harrow, and with the reaping-hook in his hand, and usually had half-a- dozen or more poems in progress, taking them up as the momentary tone of his mind suited the senti- ment of the verse, and laying them down as he grew careless or became fatigued. None of the verses of those days are in existence, save the " Death of Poor Mailie," a performance remarkable for genuine simplicity of expression ; and " John Barleycorn," a clever imitation of the old ballads of that name, a favourite subject with the minstrels of Caledonia. His mode of composition was singular : when he hit off a happy verse in a random fit of inspiration, he sought for a subject suitable to its tone of lan- guage and feeling, and then completed the poem. This shows a mind full of the elements of poetry. " My passions," he said, " 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." When Burns succeeded in evoking the demon of passion by the spell of verse, he had leisure, or at least peace, for a time ; but he could not be idle : he turned his attention to prose. His boyish feelings had been touched, he tells us, on reading the Vision VOL. I. D 34 THE LIFE OF ROBERT BURNS. of Mirza, and many passages in the Bible ; he had read too with attention a collection of letters by the wits of Queen Anne's reign. This improved his taste ; and as he grew up, and correspondence was forced upon him by business or by friendship, he was pleased to see that he. could express himself with fluency and ease. He thought so well of those performances that he made copies of them, and, in moments of leisure or vanity sought and found satisfaction in comparing them with the composi- tions of his companions. He observed, he said, his own superiority. Nay, he says he carried the whim so far, that though he had not three farthings' worth of business in the world, yet almost every post brought him as many letters as if he had been a plodding son of the day-book and ledger. He now extended his reading to the Spectator, the Man of Feeling, Tristram Shandy, Count Fathom, and Pamela : he studied as well as read them, and en- deavoured to form a prose style uniting strength and purity. There are passages of genuine ease and unaffected simplicity in his early as well as his later letters ; yet there is too much of a premeditated air, and a too obvious desire of showing what fine, bold, vigorous things he could say. No one, how- ever, can peruse his prose of those days without wonder ; it shows a natural vigour of mind and a talent for observation : there are out-flashings, too, of a fiery impetuosity of spirit worthy of a genius cultivated as well as lofty, and passages of great elegance and feeling. In his common-place book, his rhymes are accom- panied with explanations in prose, and, as he com- menced these insertions in April 1783, he has afforded THE LIFE OF ROBERT BURNS. 35 us the means of measuring the extent of his acquire- ments in early life. He seemed not unconscious that he could say something worth the world's at- tention. — As he was but little indebted, he said, to scholastic education, and bred at a plough-tail, his performances must be strongly tinctured with his unpolished, rustic way of life ; but it may be some entertainment to a curious observer of human nature, to see how a ploughman thinks and feels under the pressure of love, ambition, anxiety, grief, with the like cares and passions, w T hich, however diversified by the modes and manners of life, operate pretty much alike on all the species. In these compositions we may continually trace thoughts and images, which growing taste and in- creasing vigour enabled him afterwards to beautify and expand. The following passage suggested the fine stanza on happy love in the " Cotter's Saturday Xight :" — " Notwithstanding all that has been said against love, respecting the folly and wickedness it leads a young inexperienced mind into, still I think it in a great measure deserves the highest encomiums that have been passed upon it. If any thing on earth deserves the name of rapture or transport, it is the feelings of green eighteen, in the company of the mistress of his heart, when she repays him with an equal return of affection." In the same strain he traces, elsewhere, the con- nexion between love, music, and poetry, and points out as a fine touch in nature, that passage in a modern love composition — ' ' As toward her cot he jogged along, Her name was frequent in his song/' D 2 36 THE LIFE OF ROBERT BURNS. " For my own part," he observes, " I never had the least thought or inclination of turning poet till I once got heartily in love, and then rhyme and song were, in a manner, the spontaneous language of my heart." No one has accounted more happily for the passionate eloquence of his songs than he has done himself. That he extended his views, and desired, after having sung of the maidens of Carrick and Kyle, to celebrate their streams and hills, and statesmen and heroes, we have evidence enough in other parts of his works. — " I am hurt," he thus writes, August 1785, " to see the other towns, rivers, woods, haughs, &c. of Scotland immortalized in song, while my dear native country, the ancient bailieries of Carrick, Kyle, and Cunningham, famous, both in ancient and modern times, for a gallant and w r arlike race of in- habitants—a country w r here civil, and particularly religious liberty, have ever found their first support and their last asylum — a country, the birth-place of many famous philosophers, soldiers and statesmen, and the scene of many important events recorded in history, particularly a great many of the actions of the glorious Wallace — yet we have never had one Scotch poet of any eminence to make the fertile banks of Irvine, the romantic woodlands and seques- tered scenes of Ayr, and the heathy, mountainous source and winding sweep of the Doon, emulate Tay, Forth, Ettrick, and Tweed. This is a com- plaint I would gladly remedy ; but, alas ! I am far unequal to the task both in genius and education." No one ever remedied an evil of this kind with such decision and effect. The Ayr, the Doon, the Irvine, THE LIFE OF ROBERT BURNS. 37 and the Lugar are now flowing in light, nor have their heroes and their patriots been forgotten. In another passage he acquaints us with the models his muse set up for imitation ; the date is September 1785. — " There is a noble sublimity, a heart-melting tenderness, in some of our ancient ballads, which shew them to be the work of a masterly hand, and it has often given me many a heart-ache to reflect that such glorious old bards — bards who very probably owed all their talents to native genius, yet have de- scribed the exploits of heroes, the pangs of disap- pointment, and the meltings of love, with such fine strokes of nature — that their very names — O, how mortifying to a bard's vanity ! — are now 6 buried among the wreck of things which were.' O, ye illus- trious names unknown ! who could feel so strongly and describe so well, the last, the meanest of the muses' train — one who, though far inferior to your nights, yet eyes your path, and, with trembling wing, would sometimes soar after you ; a poor rustic bard unknown pays this sympathetic pang to your me- mory. Some of you tell us, with all the charms of verse, that you have been unfortunate in the world, unfortunate in love : he, too, has felt the loss of his little fortune, the loss of friends, and, worse than all, the loss of the woman he loved. Like you, all his consolation was his muse ; she taught him in rustic measures to complain : happy could he have done it with your strength of imagination and flow of verse ! May the turf lie lightly on your bones, and may you now enjoy that solace and rest, which the world rarely gives to the heart tuned to all the feelings of poesie and love !" Much of the man and the poet is 38 THE LIFE OF ROBERT BURNS. visible in this remarkable passage ; it prepares us for his approaching sun-burst of poetry, which lightened more than Carrick and Kyle. Those who imagine Burns to have been only a rhyming, raving youth, who sauntered on the banks of streams, in lonely glens, and by castles grey, musing on the moon, and woman, and other incon- stant things, do him injustice ; a letter in 1783 to his cousin, James Burness, writer in Montrose, shews something of the world around him. — " This country, till of late, was flourishing incredibly in the manufacture of silk, lawn, and carpet-weaving; and we are still carrying on a good deal in that way, but much reduced from what it was. We had also a fine trade in the shoe way, but now entirely ruined, and hundreds driven to a starving condition on ac- count of it. Farming is also at a very low ebb with us. Our lands, generally speaking, are mountainous and barren ; and our landholders, full of ideas of farming, gathered from England and the Lothian s, and other rich soils in Scotland, make no allowance for the odds in the quality of land, and consequently stretch as much beyond what in the event we will be found able to pay. We are also much at a loss for want of proper methods in our improvements of farming. Necessity compels us to leave our old schemes, and few of us have opportunities of being well informed on new ones. In short, my dear Sir, since the unfortunate beginning of this American war, and its still more unfortunate conclusion, this country has been, and still is decaying very fast." Here the poet is sunk, and the observing farmer rises: in the same letter he touches on a theme THE LIFE OF ROBERT BURNS. 39 which had its influence on his own character and habits — at least he imagined so. ts There is a great trade of smuggling carried on along our coasts, which, how r ever destructive to the interests of the kingdom at large, certainly enriches this corner of it, but too often at the expense of our morals. However, it enables individuals to make, at least for a time, a splendid appearance ; but for- tune, as is usual with her when she is uncommonly lavish of her favours, is generally even with them at the last ; and happy were it for numbers of them if she w T ould leave them no worse than when she found them." At the period to which this refers, many farmers on the sea-coast were engaged in the contraband trade : their horses and servants were frequently employed in disposing, before the dawn, of importations made during the cloud of night ; and though Burns, perhaps, took no part in the traffic, he associated with those who carried it on, and seemed to think that insight into new w r ays of life and hu- man character more than recompensed him for the risk he ran. It is dangerous for a bare hand to pluck a lily from among nettles ; men of few vir- tues and many follies are unsafe companions. " I have often observed," he says, " in the course of my experience of human life, that every man, even the worst, has something good about him, though very often nothing else than a happy tem- perament of constitution inclining him to this or that virtue. For this reason no man can say in what degree any other person besides himself can be with strict justice called wicked. Let any of the strictest character for regularity of conduct among 40 THE LIFE OF ROBERT BURNS. us examine impartially how many vices he has never been guilty of, not from any care or vigilance, but for want of opportunity ; and how many of the weaknesses of mankind he has escaped, because he was out of the line of such temptation. I say, any man who can thus think, will scan the failings, nay, the faults and crimes, of mankind around him, with a brother's eye. I have often courted the acquaintance of that part of mankind commonly known by the ordinary phrase of blackguards, sometimes further than was consistent with the safety of my character. Those who, by thoughtless prodigality or headstrong passions, have been driven to ruin, though disgraced by follies, I have yet found among them, in not a few instances, some of the noblest virtues, magnani- mity, generosity, disinterested friendship, and even modesty." All this is true ; but men of evil deeds, are not, till they have purified themselves, fit com- panions for the young and the inflammable. There is no human being so depraved as to be without something which connects him with the sympathies of life. Dirk Hatteraick, before he hung himself, made out a balanced account to his owners, shewing that, though he had cut throats and drowned bant- lings as a smuggler, he could reckon with the house of Middleburgh for every stiver. It is more pleas- ing to perceive, in the Poet's early prose, sentiments similar to those which he afterwards more poeti- cally expressed in his u Address to the Rigidly Righteous." " Then gently scan your brother man, Still gentler sister woman; Tho' they may gang a kennin wrang, To step aside is human. THE LIFE OF ROBERT BURNS. 41 One point must still be greatly dark, The reason why they do it ; And just as lamely can ye mark How far, perhaps, they rue it." The people of Kyle were slow in appreciating this philosophy. When they saw him hand-and-glove with roving smugglers, or sitting with loose com- rades, who scorned the decencies of life, or looking seriously at a horde of gypsies huddled together in a kiln, or musing among " randie, gangrel bodies" in Posie Nancies, they could not know that, like a painter, he was studying character, and making sketches for future pictures of life and .manners : they saw nothing but danger to himself from such society. And here lies the secret of the complaint he has recorded against the world in his twenty- fourth year. — " I don't well know what is the reason of it, but, somehow or other, though I am pretty generally beloved, yet I never could find the art of commanding respect. I imagine it is owing to my being deficient in what Sterne calls the unders trap- ping virtue of discretion." No doubt of it. The sober and sedate saw that he respected not himself ; they loved him for his manliness of character, and eloquence, and independence ; but they grieved for a weakness out of which they could not see that strength and moral beauty would come. The glory of his poetry was purchased at a price too dear for himself. " In Irvine," says Gil- bert, " he had contracted some acquaintance of a freer manner of thinking, whose society prepared him for overleaping the bounds of rigid virtue, which had hitherto restrained him." — " The principal thing which gave my mind a turn," says Burns to Dr. 42 THE LIFE OF ROBERT BURNS. Moore, " was a friendship I formed with a young fellow, a very noble character, but a hapless child of misfortune. He was the son of a simple mechanic ; but a great man, taking him under his patronage, gave him a genteel education, with a view of bettering his situation in life. The patron dying, just as he was ready to launch out into the world, he went to sea in despair. His mind was fraught with inde- pendence, magnanimity, and every manly virtue. I loved and admired him to a degree of enthusiasm, and, of course, strove to imitate him ; in some measure I succeeded. I had pride before ; but he taught it to flow in proper channels. His knowledge of the world was vastly superior to mine, and I was all attention to learn. He was the only man I ever saw who was a greater fool than myself where woman was the presiding star ; but he spoke of illicit love with the levity of a sailor, which hitherto I had re- garded with horror. Here his friendship did me a mischief." Richard Brown, to whom this refers, survived the storms which threatened shipwreck to his youth, and lived and died respected. When spoken to on the subject, he exclaimed, " Illicit* love ! levity of a sailor ! The Poet had nothing to learn that way when I saw him first." That Burns talked and thought too freely and in- discreetly in his early years, we have evidence in verse. In his memorandum-book there are entries which, amid all their spirit and graphic beauty, contain levities of expression which may be tolerated when the wine is flowing and the table in a roar, but which look not so becoming on the sober page which re- flection has sanctioned. In May, 1785, he wrote the THE LIFE OF ROBERT BURNS. 43 lively chaunt called " Robin, " in which he gives an account of his birth. '« There was a lad was born in Kyle, But whatna day o' whatna style I doubt its hardly worth our while To be so nice wi' Robin. " The gossip keekit in his loof, Quo' she wha lives will see the proof This waly boy will be nae coof— I think we'll ca' him Robin. «« But sure as three times three make nine, I see, by ilka score and line, This chap will dearly love our kin', So leeze me on thee, Robin." In these lines he approaches the border-land between modesty and impropriety — we must quote no farther, nor seek to shew the Poet in still merrier moods. Burns, in all respects, arose from the people : he worked his way out of the dark- ness, drudgery and vulgarities of rustic life, and, in spite of poverty, pain, and disappointment, emerged into the light of heaven. He was surrounded by coarse and boisterous companions, who were fit for admiring the ruder sallies of his wit, but incapable ' of understanding those touches of moral pathos and exquisite sensibility with which his sharpest things are accompanied. They perceived but the thorns of the rose — they felt not its fine odour. The spirit of poesie led him, in much peril, through the pro- saic wilderness around, and prepared him for assert- ing his right to one of the highest places in the land of song. As the elder Burness was now dead, the Poet had to exercise his own judgment in the affairs of Moss- giel : at first all seemed to prosper. — " I had en- tered," he says, " upon this farm with a full resolu- 44 THE LIFE OF ROBERT BURNS. tion — « Come, go to, I will be wise ;' I read farming books ; I calculated crops ; I attended markets ; and, in short, in spite of the devil, the world and the flesh, I believe I should have been a wise man ; but the first year, from unfortunately buying bad seed, the second from a late harvest, we lost half our crops. This overset all my wisdom, and I returned, 'like the dog to his vomit, and the sow that was washed, to her wallowing in the mire.'" — " The farm of Moss- giel," says Gilbert, " lies very high, and mostly on a cold, wet bottom. The first four years that we were on the farm were very frosty, and the spring was very late. Our crops, in consequence, were very unprofitable, and, notwithstanding our utmost dili- gence and economy, we found ourselves obliged to give up our bargain, with the loss of a considerable portion of our original stock." The judgment could not be great which selected a farm that lay high, on a cold, wet bottom, and purchased bad seed-corn. That Burns put his hand to the plough and laboured incessantly, there can be no doubt — but an unset- tled head gives the hands much to do : when he put pen to paper, all thoughts of crops and cattle vanished ; he only noted down ends of verse and fragments of song : his copy of Small's Treatise on Ploughs is now before me ; not one remark appears on the margins ; but on the title-page is written " Robert Burns, Poet." He had now decided on his vocation. This study of song, love of reading, wanderings in woods, nocturnal excursions in matters of love and choice of companions, who had seen much and had much to tell, was, unconsciously to himself, forcing THE LIFE OF ROBERT BURNS. 45 Burns upon the regions of poesie. To these may be added the establishment of a club, in which subjects of a moral or domestic nature were discussed. The Tarbolton club consisted of some half-dozen young lads, sons of farmers ; the Poet who planned it was the ruling star ; the place of meeting was a small public-house in the village ; the sum expended by each was not to exceed three-pence, and with the humble cheer which this could bring, they were, when the debate was concluded, to toast their lasses and the continuance of friendship. Here he found a vent for his own notions, and as the club met regularly and continued for years, he disciplined himself into something of a debater, and acquired a readiness and fluency of language ; he was never at a loss for thoughts. Burns drew up the regulations. — " As the great end of human society," says the exordium, " is to become wiser and better, this ought, therefore, to be the principal view of every man in every station of life. But as experience has taught us, that such studies as inform the head and mend the heart, when long continued, are apt to exhaust the faculties of the mind, it has been found proper to relieve and unbend the mind by some employment or another that may be agreeable enough to keep its powers in exercise, but, at the same time, not so serious as to exhaust them. But, superadded to this, by far the greater part of mankind are under the necessity of earning the sustenance of human life by the labour of their bodies, whereby not only the faculties of the mind, but the sinews and nerves of the body, are so fatigued that it is absolutely necessary to have re- 46 THE LIFE OF ROBERT BURNS. course to some amusement or diversion, to relieve the wearied man worn down with the necessary labours of life." The first meeting was held on Halloween, in the year 1780. Burns was president, and the question of debate was, " Suppose a young man, bred a farmer, but without any fortune, has it in his power to marry either of two women, the one a girl of large fortune, but neither handsome in per- son nor agreeable in conversation, but who can manage the household affairs of a farm well enough ; the other of them, a girl every way agreeable in per- son, conversation, and behaviour, but without any fortune: which of them shall he choose?" Other questions of a similar tendency were discussed, and many matters regarding domestic duties and social obligations were considered. This rustic institution united the means of instruction with happiness ; but, on the removal of the poet from Lochlea, it lost the spirit which gave it life, and dissensions arising, the club was scattered, and the records, much of them in Burns' han•> this, that the Poet naturally fell into the ranks of those who allowed greater liberty of speech, and a wider longitude of morals. Perhaps the chiefs of the Old Light association would have regarded little an attack in prose, as to such missiles they were accustomed ; but their new enemy assaulted them with a weapon against which the armour of dulness was no defence. He attacked and vanquished them with witty verse, much to the joy of the children of the New Light, and greatly to the amusement of the country. Of the effect of these satiric attacks, the Poet himself gives an account to Moore : — " The first of my poetic offspring which saw the light was a burlesque lamen- tation on a quarrel between two reverend Calvinists, both of them dramatis per sonce in my " Holy Fair." I had a notion myself that the piece had some merit : but to prevent the worst, I gave a copy of it to a friend who was very fond of such things, and told him that I could not guess who was the author of it, but that I thought it pretty clever. With a certain description of the clergy, as well as laity, it met with a roar of applause. ' Holy Willie's Prayer' next made its appearance, and alarmed the kirk-session so much, that they held several meetings to look over their spiritual artillery — if haply any of it might be pointed against profane rhymers." This is almost all that the Poet says of his satiric labours in aid of the New Light. The poem to which he first alludes is called " The Holy Tuilzie," and relates the bicker- ing and battling which arose between Moodie, mi- nister of Riccarton, and Russel, minister of Kilmar- nock — both children of the Old Light. The poetic 54 THE LIFE OF ROBERT BURNS. merit of the piece is small ; the personalities marked and strong. " The Ordination" succeeded, and is in a better vein. There is uncommon freedom of language and happiness of expression in almost every verse. The crowning satire of the whole is " Holy Willie's Prayer," a daring work, personal, poetical, and profane. The hero of the piece was a west-country pretender to superlative godliness ! one of the Old Light faction ; an elder of the kirk — a man with many failings, who made himself busy in searching for faults in the flock. Burns first signalized him in an epitaph, in which he con- signs him to reprobation, and then warns the devil that to lay his " nine-tailed cat" on such a con- temptible delinquent would be little to his own credit. Then he makes Willie honestly confess his own backslidings, and explain predestination in a way that causes us to shudder as well as to smile : — (l O Thou, wha in the heavens dost dwell, For reasons best kent to thysel, Sends ane to heaven and ten to hell, A' for thy glory ; And no for either good or ill They've done afore thee." He next bethinks him of his own glory and errors ; the latter, it is quite plain, he considers but as spots in the sun — specks in the cup of the cowslip. He claims praise in the singular, and acknowledges folly in the plural : — "And sometimes, too, with worldly trust Vile self gets in, But Thou remembers we are dust, Defiled in sin." Nor can Burns be said to have overlooked his own interest ; he compliments Hamilton of Mossgiel as one — THE LIFE OF ROBERT BURNS. 55 " Who has so many taking arts, O'er great and sma", Frae God's ain priests the people's hearts He wiles awa." In a similar strain of poetry and wit, he, in another poem of the same period, congratulates Goudie of Kilmarnock on his work respecting revealed reli- gion. The reasoning and the learning of the essay- ist are slumbering with all forgotten things ; but the verses they called into life are not fated soon to die : " O Goudie, terror of the Whigs, Dread of black coats and reverend wigs, Sour Bigotry on her last legs Girning looks back, Wishing the ten Egyptian plagues Would seize ye quick.'' In after-life, the Poet seemed little inclined to remember the verses he composed on this ridiculous controversy ; and I have heard that he was un- willing to talk about the subject. Perhaps he felt that he had launched the burning darts of verse against men of blameless lives, and honesty, and learning ; that his muse had wasted some of her time on a barren and profitless topic, and had sung less from her own heart than for the gratification of others. Of all these poems, he admitted but the " Ordination'' into his works, willing, it would seem, to let the rest die with the controversy which occasioned them. The Xew Light professors seemed to care little what sort of weapon they em- ployed : the verse of Burns has two edges like a Highland sword, and Presbyterianism suffered as well as the Old Light. It is almost incredible that venerable clergymen applauded those profane sal- lies, learned them by heart, carried copies in their 56 THE LIFE OF ROBERT BURNS. pockets, and quoted and recited them till they grew popular, and were on every lip. Even " Holy Willie's Prayer" was countenanced by the New Light pas- tors. Among the Poet's papers was found an epistle to the Rev. John MacMath, enclosing a copy of the Prayer which he had requested ; the date of this communication, 17th September, 1785, fixes the season of this western dispute, It seems, however, to approach the close ; the Poet is grown weary of his work, as well he might : " My musie, tired with many a sonnet, On gown and band and douce black bonnet, Is grown right eerie now she's done it, Lest they should blame her, And rouse their holy thunder on it, And anathem her." Burns, during this drudgery, was strengthening his hands for higher and purer duties. 1 1 labouring to accommodate his thoughts, and «f Riving the words to gar them clink" in unison with the technicalities of mystical con- troversy, he was acquiring an almost audacious vigour of expression, and a ready skill in handling subjects either of fact or of fancy. It is true that he learned to speak profanely, but then this was in the service of the kirk ; he learned something more when he dined with drunken lawyers, and grew tipsy among godly priests. The muse of Kyle helped to extinguish the Old Light, but she left predestination where she found it. A Mauchline mason said to the Poet, when he read him " Holy Willie's Prayer," " It's a' very weel and very witty, and I have laughed that shouldna have laughed ; but ye'll no hinder me from thinking that Providence THE LIFE OF r6£ERT BURNS. 57 kend weel what he was doing when he made man — foresaw the upshot — wha was to be good and wha was to be bad ; and knowing this, and making man a fallible creature still, looks as like predestination as ought I ever heard of." These satiric rhymes established the fame of Burns in his native place : his company was now courted by country lairds, village lawyers, and parish school- masters, and by all persons who had education above common, or kept some state in their households. He was always welcome to Gavin Hamilton and his family : equally so to Robert Aikin, a worthy writer in Ayr; and now he became so to all who had any relish for wit or any soul for poetry. He was at once the companion of the grave and of the giddy ; now dining with the minister and a douce friend or two at the manse ; then presiding in a Mason meet- ing, chaunting songs, and pushing about the punch with the " brethren of the mystic level," or com- muning on the severity of the excise laws with a 11 blackguard smuggler," or some highland envoy from the dominions of Ferintosh, whose " cousin did as good as keep a small still." When he appeared in company he was expected to say something clever or shrewd ; he was pointed out at church and at market, and peasant spoke of him to peasant as a wild, witty lad, who lived at Mossgiel, and had all the humour of Ramsay, and more than the spirit of Fergusson. It is humiliating to think that works which Burns seemed willing to forget brought him first into notice. Some of the most exquisite lyrics ever said or sung failed to do for him what " The Holy Tuilzie"' and 58 THE LIFE ai ROBERT BURNS. " The Ordination" accomplished at once: and there can be no question that " Holy Willie's Prayer" and the " Epistle to Goudie" prepared the minds of the people around him for admiring his " Halloween" and his " Cotter's Saturday Night." In truth, poetry, which only embodies sentiments and feelings common to our nature, cannot compete in the race of immediate fame with verse appealing to our passions and our prejudices, and glowing with the heat of a passing dispute. Time settles and explains all. The true Florimel is found to be of delicate flesh and blood, breathing of loveliness and attraction, and adorned by nature ; while the false Florimel is discovered to be a thing of shreds and patches, with jewels of glass, and an artificial complexion. Nature and truth finally triumph, and to nature and truth Burns accordingly returned. He left the agitated puddles of mysticism to drink at the pure springs with the muse of love, and joy, and patriotism. Of the person and manners of the Poet, at this important period of his life, we have various accounts ; but the portraits, though differing in pos- ture as w T ell as in light and shade, all express the same sentiment. He was now grown up to man's estate, and had taken his station as such in society ; he was the head, too, of his father's house, and though his expences were regulated upon a system of close economy, his bargains as a farmer, controlled by his brother Gilbert, and his demeanour at the fireside under the mild influence of his mother, he had in all other matters his own will. He has recorded much of himself at this period both in verse and prose, nor can this be set down to egotism : from all the world, THE LIFE OF ROBERT BURNS. 59 save the little community of Kyle, he was com- pletely shut out, and he turned his eyes on himself, and wrote down his own hopes and aspirations. He has even recorded his stature in rhyme : — < f O ! why the deuce should I repine, Or be an ill foreboder ? I'm twenty-three, and five feet nine — I'll go and be a sodger." His large dark expressive eyes ; his swarthy visage ; his "broad brow, shaded with black waving hair; his melancholy look, and his well-knit frame, vigorous and active — all united to draw men's eyes upon him. He affected, too, a certain oddity of dress and manner. He was clever in controversy ; but obstinate, and even fierce, when contradicted, as most men are who have built up their opini- ons for themselves. He used with much taste the common pithy saws and happy sayings of his country, and invigorated his eloquence by apt quotations from old songs or ballads. He courted controversy, and it was to this period that Mur- doch, the accomplished mechanic, referred, when he told me that he once heard Burns haranguing his fellow-peasants on religion at the door of a change- house, and so unacceptable were his remarks that some old men hissed him away. Nor must it be supposed that, even when listened to, he was always victorious. — " Burns, sir," said one of his old oppo- nents, " was a 'cute chield and a witty, but he didna half like to have my harrow coming owre his new- fangled notions." The early companions of the Poet were men above the common mark. Smith, to whom he ad- dresses some of his finest poetic epistles, was a per- 60 THE LIFE OF ROBERT BURNS. son of taste and sagacity ; David Sillar, a good scholar, and something of a poet ; Ranken, an out- spoken, ready-witted man, and a little of a scoffer; Lapraik lived at a distance — he had written at least one song worthy of notice. Hamilton was open- hearted and open-handed, and of a good family ; Aikin seems to have abounded in good sense and good feeling; Bailantyne was much of a gentle- man ; Parker, kind and generous ; Mackenzie, of Irvine, a skilful surgeon and a good scholar, who introduced the Poet to Dugald Stewart, Whitefoord, Erskine, and Blair ; — but his chief comrade and confidant was his brother Gilbert, who at an early age distinguished himself for sense and discernment. " Gilbert," says Mackenzie, " partook more of the manner and appearance of the father, and Robert of the mother. In the first interview I had with him at Lochlea, he was frank, modest, well informed, and communicative. The Poet seemed distant, suspi- cious, and without any wish to interest or please. He kept himself very silent in a dark corner of the room, and before he took any part in conversation, I frequently observed him scrutinizing me, while I conversed with his father and his brother. From the period of which I speak, I took a lively interest in Robert Burns. Even then his conversation was rich in well chosen figures, animated and energetic. Indeed, I have always thought that no person could have a just idea of the extent of Burns' talents, who had not heard him converse. His dis- crimination of character was greatly beyond that of any person I ever knew, and I have often ob- served to him that it seemed to be intuitive. I THE LIFE OF ROBERT BURNS. 61 seldom ever knew him make a false estimate of character, when he formed the opinion from his own observation." The sketch drawn by Sillar is of another kind : — " Robert Burns was some time in the parish of Tar- bolton, prior to my acquaintance with him. His social disposition easily procured him acquaintance ; but a certain satirical seasoning with which he and all poetical geniuses are in some degree influenced, while it set the rustic circle in a roar, was not unac- companied with suspicious fear. I recollect hearing his neighbours observe he had a great deal to say for himself, and that they suspected his principles. He wore the only tied hair in the parish ; and in the church his plaid, which was of a particular colour (I think fillemot), he wrapped in a peculiar manner round his shoulders. These surmises and his ex- terior made me solicitous of his acquaintance. I was introduced by Gilbert not only to his brother, but to the whole of that family, where, in a short time, I became a frequent, and, I believe, not un- welcome visitant. After the commencement of my acquaintance with the bard, we frequently met upon Sundays at church; when, between sermons, instead of going with our friends or lasses to the inn, we often took a walk in the fields. In these walks, I have often been struck with his facility in addressing the fair sex ; and many times when I have been bashfully anxious how to express myself, he would have entered into conversation with them with the greatest ease and freedom ; and it was generally a death-blow to our conversation, however agreeable, to meet a female acquaintance. Some of the few 62 THE LIFE OF ROBERT BURNS. opportunities of a noontide walk that a country life allows her laborious sons, he spent on the banks of the river, or in the woods in the neighbourhood of Stair. Some book or other he always carried and read when not otherwise employed ; it was likewise his custom to read at table." A third hand completes the sketch :« — " Though Burns," says Professor Walker, " was still unknown as a Poet, he already numbered several clergymen among his acquaintance : one of these communicated to me a circumstance which conveyed more forcibly than many words, an idea of the impression made upon his mind by the powers of the Poet. This gentleman had repeatedly met Burns in company, when the acuteness and originality displayed by the latter, the depth of his discernment, the force of his expressions, and the authoritative energy of his understanding, had created in the former a sense of his power, of the extent of which he was uncon- scious till revealed to him by accident. The second time that he appeared in the pulpit, he came with an assured and tranquil mind ; and though a few per- sons of education were present, he advanced some length in the service, with his confidence and self- possession unimpaired. But when he observed Burns who was of a different parish, unexpectedly enter the church, he was instantly affected with a tremour and embarrassment which apprized him of the impres- sion his mind, unknown to itself, had previously received." Authorities such as these confute the inconsiderate assertions of Heron, respecting the " opening cha- racter" of the Poet. We have no proof that he THE LIFE OF ROBERT BURNS. 63 became discontented in early life with the humble labours to which he saw himself confined, and with the poor subsistence he was able to earn by them — that he could not help looking upon the rich and great whom he saw around, with an emotion between envy and contempt, as if something had still whis- pered to his heart that there was injustice in the external inequality between his fate and theirs. The early injuries of fortune oppressed him at times ; but, till he was thirty years' old, his spirit was buoy- ant and unbroken, and he looked with an unclouded brow on the world around him. In "the Holy Fair," the Poet, accidentally or pur- posely, rose out of the lower regions of personal in- vective into the purer air of true poetry, and gave us a picture of singular breadth and beauty. The aim of the poem is chiefly to reprehend, by means of wit and humour, those almost indecent festivities which, in many western parishes, accompany the administration of the sacrament. Instead of preach- ing to the staid and the pious under the roof of the kirk, the scene is transferred to the open church- yard, where a tent or pulpit is erected for the preachers ; while, all around, the j^eople of the parish seat themselves on graves or grave-stones, decor- ously to look and listen. In the earlier days of the church, when men were more in earnest, * there is no doubt that a scene such as this in the open air was attended with nothing of an objectionable nature ; nay, at present, the thoughtful and the serious con- template it as something edifying and impressive ; but with the pious and the orderly come swarms of the idle and the profligate ; bevies of lads and lasses 64 THE LIFE OF ROBERT BURNS. keep moving about in search of better seats or finer points of view, and tiring, or affecting to tire, of the sermon, which is sometimes of the longest, retire to a neighbouring change-house, or to the open door of an ale-booth, where, as they empty the glass, they may hear the voice of the preacher. There is no doubt that these " Holy Fairs," as they were scofnngly called, afforded scenes more than justifying serious as well as sarcastic reproof. In the poem, Burns here and there shews he had been reading other poets. His allegorical personages are partly copied from Fergusson, and the hares that hirpled down the furs did the same for Montgomery. "The farcical scene the Poet there describes," says Gilbert, " was often a favourite field for his observation, and most of the incidents he mentions had actually passed before his eyes." Burns now openly took upon himself the name of Poet ; he not only wrote it in his books, but wrought it into his rhymes, and began to entertain hopes of distinction in the realms of song. But nothing, perhaps, marks the character of the man more than the alteration which he made in his own name. He had little relish for by-gone things ; there are few gazings back at periods of honour or of woes in all' his strains. The name he had hitherto borne was of old standing, the Poet sat in judgment upon it, con- cluded that it had a barbarous sound, and threw away Burness — a name two syllables long, and seven centuries old, and adopted that of Burns in its stead. Had his father been alive, this might not have happened. On the 20th of March, 1786, he says to one of his Correspondents : — " I hope some THE LIFE OF ROBERT BURNS. 65 time before we hear the gouk, to have the pleasure of seeing you at Kilmarnock, when I intend having a gill between us in a mutchkin stoup, which will be a great comfort and consolation to, dear Sir, your humble servant, Robert Burness. , ' — This is the latest time that I find his original name in his own hand-writing ; it is plain that, up to this period, he imagined he had achieved nothing under that of his father deserving to live. On the 20th of April he wrote his name " Burns" in a letter enclosing, to his friend Kennedy, that beautiful poem the " Moun- tain Daisy," headed " The Gowan." This was with the Poet a season of changes. Burns commenced emblazoning his altered name with all that is bright and lasting in verse. From the day that he entered upon Mossgiel with the resolution of becoming rich, till the dark hour on which he quitted it, reduced well nigh to beggary, he continued to pour forth poem after poem, and song succeeding song, with a variety and rapidity truly wonderful. His best poems are the offspring of those four unfortunate years, and the history of each has something in it of the curious or the romantic. " The Death and dying words of Poor Mailie," and, better still, " Poor Mailie's Elegy," suggested to him probably by " The Ewie wi' the crooked horn ' of Skinner, were written before the death of his father — at least the former was. The Poet had, it seems, bought a ewe with two lambs from a neigh- bour, and tethered her in a field at Lochlea. " He and I," says Gilbert, " were going out with our teams, and our two younger brothers to drive for us, at mid-day, when Hugh Wilson, a curious-looking VOL. i. f 66 THE LIFE OF ROBERT BURNS. awkward boy, clad in plaiding, came to us with much anxiety in his face, with the information that the ewe had entangled herself in the tether, and was lying in the ditch." The " Elegy" has much of the Poet's latter free- dom and force. He had caressed this four-footed favourite till she followed at his heels like a dog: — " Through a' the town she trotted by him, A lang half mile she could descry him, Wi' kindly bleat, when she did spy him, She ran wi' speed ; A friend mair faithfu' ne'er came nigh him. Than Mailie dead." One of the rejected verses ought to be remem- bered in Kyle, were it but for the honour done to the lambs of Fairlee : — " She was nae get o' runted rams, Wi' woo like goats, an' legs like trams, She was the flower o' Fairlee lambs, Of famous breed ; Now Robin greetin chews the hams O' Mailie dead." The image in the two last lines is out of harmony with the sentiment of the poem ; and Burns, whose taste was born with him, omitted the verse in con- sequence. The " Epistle to David Sillar" was written some time in the summer of 1784. Burns was in the habit of composing verse at the plough or the har- rows : — he turned it over in his mind for several days, and when he had polished it to his satisfac- tion, or found a moment's leisure, he committed it to paper. Gilbert relates that he was weeding with Robert in the kaleyard, when he repeated the principal part of the Epistle. The first idea of his becoming an author was then started. " I was much THE LIFE OF ROBERT BURNS. 67 pleased,'' says his brother, " with the Epistle, and said to him that I was of opinion it would bear being printed, and that it would be well received by people of taste : that I thought it at least equal, if not superior, to many of Allan Ramsay's epistles, and that the merit of these, and much other Scotch poetry, seemed to consist principally in the knack of the expression ; but here there was a train of interesting sentiment, and the Scotticism of the language scarcely seemed affected, but appeared to be the natural language of the poet ; that, besides, there was certainly some novelty in a poet pointing out the consolations that were in store for him when he should go a-begging. Robert seemed pleased with my criticism, and we talked of sending it to some magazine." If we credit the accuracy of the verse, and the memory of Gilbert, the Poet was, in 1784, ac- quainted with Jean Armour, and had become her ad- mirer and lover. But it is more likely that the verse in which her name occurs was added afterwards, un- less we believe that he had made an inroad among the " Mauchline belles," almost as soon as he went to Mossgiel. His Epistles are of high merit. They are perhaps the finest compositions of the kind in the language — airy, elegant, and philosophic — with more nature than Prior's Epistle to " Fletwood Shepherd," and equal power of illustration. He had already begun to take those serious looks at human life of which his poems are full ; nor did he fail to perceive how unequally the gifts of fortune, as well as those of genius, are divided. f 2 68 THE LIFE OF ROBERT BURNS. << Its hardly in a body's power To keep at times from being sour, To see how things are shared ; How best o' chiels are whiles in want, While coofs on countless thousands rant, Andkenna how to wair't." He lived long enough to think more deeply and more darkly on this topic. At present the world was brightening before him — the mist seemed rolling away from his path, and he felt disposed to enjoy life without murmuring. The epistolary form was a favourite way with Burns of giving air to his opinions and feelings ; when he had doubts of fame — was o'ermastered with his passions — or disgusted with " The tricks of knaves and fash of fools.'' he lifted the pen and indited an epistle to a friend, and poured out the loves, the cares, the sorrows, the joys, the hopes, and fears of the passing moment. It is truly wonderful with what ease and felicity — nay, with what elegance, he twines the garlands of his fancy round a barren topic. Much of his history may be sought for in these compositions. In his Epistle to Smith, he alludes to his Poems : in- timates that he had thoughts of printing them, pre- tends to take alarm at the sight of moths revelling on the pages of authors : — " Far seen in Greek, deep men of letters," and philosophically exclaims as well as poetically — << Then farewell hopes of laurel boughs To garland my poetic brows : Henceforth I'll rove where busy ploughs Are whistling thrang. And teach the lonely heights and howes ]\ly rustic sang." Burns takes a loftier view of the matter in his epistle to Lapraik, written on the first of April, THE LIFE OF ROBERT BURNS. 69 17S5. He intimates that he is no poet in the high acceptation of the word ; but a rhymer, who deals in homely words, and has no pretence to learning. He pulls himself down, but he refuses to let any one else up ; he prefers a spark of nature's fire to all the artificial heat of education, and speaks con- temptuously of " critic folk," and learned judges. " What's a' your jargon o' your schools, Your Latin names for horns and stools ? If honest Nature made you fools What sairs your grammars ? Ye'd better ta'en up spades and shools, Or knappin-hammers. " A set o' dull, conceited hashes, Confuse their brains in College classes, They gang in stirks, and come out asses, Plain truth to speak : And syne they think to climb Parnassus By dint o' Greek." In a second epistle to the same person, Burns claims for " the ragged followers of the Nine" a life of immortal light, and presents to their contemplation the sordid sons of Mammon suffering under the transmigration of souls. *< Though here they scrape, and squeeze, and growl, Their worthless neivefu' of a soul May in some future carcase howl, The forest's fright : Or in some day-detesting owl May shun the light."' In a poetic letter to another of his companions while exulting in the idea of making the rivers and rivulets of Kyle flow bright in future song, he lets us into the secret of his own mode of musing : — »« The Muse, nae poet ever fand her, Till by himsel' he learned to wander Adown some trotting burn's meander, An' no think lang ! O ! sweet to stray, an' pensive ponder A heartfelt sang !" 70 THE LIFE OF ROBERT BURNS. Of these poems we are informed that the first epistle to John Lapraik was written in consequence of a clever song which that indifferent rhymer had made under the inspiration of adversity. The epistle to Ranken carries its own explanation with it : we may allow it to remain half concealed in the thin mist of allegory. The epistle to Smith is per- haps the very best of all these compositions : the singular ease of the verse ; the moral dignity of one passage ; the wit and humour of a second ; the ele- gance of compliment in a third ; and the life which animates the whole, must he felt by the most ordi- nary mind. One of the verses was frequent on the lips of Byron during the darkening down of his own day : " When ance life's day draws near the gloamin, Then farewell vacant, careless roamin, And farewell cheerful tankards foamin, An' social noise ; And farewell, dear deluding woman, The joy of joys." In the winter of 1785, Burns composed his " Ad- dress to the Deil." His sable majesty is familiar to the imagination of every Scottish peasant, and there are few wild glens in which he has not been heard or seen. The Satan of Milton was a favourite with the Poet ; he admired his fortitude in enduring what could not be remedied, and pitied a noble and exalted mind in ruins. This feeling he united to the traditions of shepherds and husbandmen, and treated the Evil Spirit with much of the respect due to fallen royalty. " It was, I think," says Gilbert, " in the winter, as we were going together with carts for coal to the family fire, and I could* yet point out the particular spot^ that the author first THE LIFE OF ROBERT BURNS. 71 repeated to me the 'Address to the Deil.' " That Burns was now acquainted with Jean Armour # the variations of this poem sufficiently prove : — " Lang syne, in Eden's happy scene, When strappin' Adam's days were green, And Eve was like my bonny Jean, My dearest part, A dancing, sweet, young, handsome quean, Wi : guileless heart." The evil spirit of religious controversy was now fairly out of him : he makes no allusions, though the temptation was great, to the clergy, but treats the subject with natural truth and vigour. All northern natures sympathize in the following fine stanza : — " I've heard my reverend graunie say In lanely glens ye like to stray, Or where auld ruined castles gray Xod to the moon, Ye fright the nightly wanderer's way Wi' eldritch croon.'" There is something of serious jocularity in the verse which expresses the Poet's fears and hopes of futurity : — (< An' now auld Cloots, I ken yere thinkin' A certain Bardie's rantin', drinkin', Some luckless hour will send him linkin' To your black pit ; But faith ! he'll turn a corner, jinkin", And cheat you yet." In the contemplated repentance of Satan, Burns seems to hint at universal redemption — a finishing touch of fine and unexpected tenderness. The " Halloween" is a happy mixture of the dra- matic and the descriptive, and bears the impress of the manners, customs, and superstitions of the people. We see the scene, and are made familiar with the actors ; we not only see them busied in the mys- 72 THE LIFE OF ROBERT BURNS. teries of the night, but we hear their remarks ; nor can we refrain from accompanying them on their solitary and perilous errands to " winnow wechts of naething, sow hemp-seed, pull kale-stocks, eat ap- ples at the glass ;" or, more romantic still, " wet the left sleeve of the shirt where three lairds' lands meet at a burn." The whole poem hovers between the serious and the ludicrous : in delineating the super- stitious beliefs and mysterious acts of the evening, Burns keeps his own opinion to himself. The scene is laid in the last night of harvest, as the name implies, at a husbandman's fireside, whose corn is gathered into the stack-yard and the barn ; and the hands which aided in the labour are met — " To burn their nits, and pou their stocks, An' haud their Halloween." They seem not unaware that while they are merry, or looking into futurity, fairies are dancing on Cassi- lis-Downans, and witches are mounted on their "rag- weed nags/' hurrying to some wild rendezvous, or concerting with the author of mischief fresh woes for man. It is the most equal of all the Poet's com- positions. A singular poem, and in its nature personal, was also the offspring of the same year. This is " Death and Doctor Hornbook." The hero of the piece was John Wilson, schoolmaster of the parish of Tar- bolton : a person of blameless life, fond of argument, opinionative, and obstinate. At a mason-meeting, it seems he provoked the Poet by questioning some of his positions in a speech stuffed with Latin phrases and allusions to pharmacy. The future satire dawned on Burns at the moment, for he exclaimed B THE LIFE OF ROBERT BURNS. 73 twice, " Sit down, Doctor Hornbook!" On his way home he seated himself on the parapet of a bridge near " Willie's Mill, 5 ' and in the moonlight began to reflect on what had passed. It then occurred to him that Wilson had added to the moderate income of his school the profit arising from the sale of a few common medicines ; this suggested an interview with " Death," and all the ironical commendations of the Dominie which followed. He composed the poem on his perilous seat, and when he had done, fell asleep ; he was awakened by the rising sun, and, on going home, committed it to paper. It exhibits a singular union of fancy and humour ; the attention is arrested at once by the ludicrous difficulty felt in counting the horns of the moon, and we expect something to happen when his shadowy majesty comes upon the stage, relates his experience in " nicking the thread and choking the breath," and laments how his scythe and dart are rendered useless by the skill of Dr. Hornbook. On the appearance of the poem, Wilson found the laugh of Kyle too much for him — " The weans held out their fingers laughin'." So he removed to Glasgow^ where he engaged with success in other pursuits. He lives, but loves no one the better, it is averred, for naming the name of the Poet, or making any allusion to the poem. Burns repeated the satire to his brother during the afternoon of the day on which it was composed. " I was holding the plough," said Gilbert, " and Robert was letting w r ater off the field beside me." The patriotic feelings of the Bard were touched when he took up the song of " Scotch Drink" against 74 THE LIFE OF ROBERT BURNS. the government of the day, and uttered his " Earnest cry and prayer to the Scottish representatives in the House of Commons. " Yet bitter as he sometimes is, and overflowing with humorous satire, these poems abound with natural and noble images ; nay, he scolds himself into a pleasant mood, and scatters praise on the " chosen Five-and-Forty," with much skill and discrimination. His praise of whiskey is strangely mingled with sadness : " Food fills the wame and keeps us livin' ; Though life's a gift no worth receivin' When heavy dragged wi' pine an' grievin', But, oil'd by thee, The wheels o' life gae down hill scrievin', Wi' rattlin' glee. " Thou clears the head o' doited Lear, Thou cheers the heart o' droopin' Care, Thou strings the nerves o' Labour sair, At's weary toil; Thou even brightens dark Despair Wi' gloomy smile." A country forge with a blazing fire, an anxious blacksmith, and a welding heat, will rise to the fancy readily on reading these inimitable stanzas : — " W T hen Vulcan gies his bellows breath, And ploughmen gather wi' their graith, O rare to see thee fizz and freath I' the luggit caup, Then Bur new in comes on like death At every chap. «' Nae mercy then for aim or steel, The brawnie, bainie ploughman chiel Brings hard owrehip, wi' sturdy wheel, The strong forehammer, Till block an' study ring an' reel Wi' dinsome clamour." Nor are there wanting stanzas of a more solemn kind to bring trembling to our mirth. The Scotsman THE LIFE OF ROBERT BURNS. 75 dying on a battle-field with the sound of victory in his ear, is a noble picture : — " Nae cauld faint-hearted doubtings tease him, Death comes !— \\i fearless eye he sees him, Wi' bloody hand a welcome gies him, An' when he fa's His latest draught o' breathin' lea'es him In faint huzzas." He steps at once from the serious to the comic : his description of Mither Scotland sitting on her moun- tain throne, her diadem a little awry, her eyes reeling, and the heather below becoming moist during her prolonged libations, is equally humorous and ir- reverent. Those w r ho may suspect that all this singing about liquor arose from a love of it, will be glad to hear that when Nanse Tinnoch was told how Burns proposed to toast the Scotch members in her house " nine times a week," she exclaimed, " Him drink in my house ! I hardly ken the colour o' his coin/' The year 1785 was a harvest season of verse with Burns. Some of his poems he hesitated for a while to make public ; others he copied, and scattered amongst his friends. Of these one of the most re- markable is " The Jolly Beggars." This drama, which I cannot help considering the most varied and characteristic of the Poet's works, was unknown, save to some west country acquaintances, till after his death, when it came unexpectedly out. The opening seems uttered by another muse than Coila — the sound is of the elder days of verse ; but the moment the curtain draws up and shews the actors, the spirit of Burns appears kindling and animating all. It is impossible to deny his presence ; — 76 THE LIFE OF ROBERT BURNS. " First neist the fire in auld red rags Ane sat, weel braced wi' mealy bags, And knapsack a' in order; His doxy lay within his arm, Wi* usquebae an' blankets warm, She blinkit on her sodger. tl And aye he gied the tosie drab The tither skelpin kiss, While she held up her greedy gab Just like an amous dish, Ilk smack still, did crack still, Like to a cadger's whup, While staggering and swaggering He roared this ditty up." The scene of this rustic drama lies in Mauchline, and the actors are strolling vagrants, who having acquired meal and money by begging, pilfering, and sleight-of-hand, assemble in Posie Nansie's to " toom their pocks and pawn their duds," and " Gie ae night's discharge to care," over the gill-stoup and the quaigh. They hold a sort of Beggars' Saturday-night — sing songs, utter sentiments, and lay down the loose laws of the various classes they represent. The characters are numerous. The maimed soldier, who bore scars both for Scotland and for love ; and his doxy, warm with blankets and usquebaugh, who in her youth forsook the sword for the sake of the church, but returned to the drum when age brought reflection. The merry-andrew, who would venture his neck for liquor, who held love to be the half of his craft, and yet was a fool still ; — the highland dame who had lightened many a purse — been ducked in many a well : who, with a countryman, had laid the land under contribution from Tweed to Spey, and was only hindered from making a foray farther south by the interposition of the " waefu' woodie !" The pigmy scraper wi' his fiddle ; — the sturdy tinker, THE LIFE OF ROBERT BURNS. 77 who had " travelled round all Christian ground" in his vocation, and swore by all was swearing worth whenever he was moved ; — and, last of all, the " wight of Homer's craft," who, though lame of a foot, had three wives, and could allure the people round him in crowds when he sung of love and country revelry. All these, and more, sing, and shout, and talk and act in character ! and unite in giving effect to the chorus of a song which claims, for the jovial ragged ring, exemp- tion from the cares which weigh down the sedate and the orderly, and a happiness which refuses to wait on the train-attended carriage, or on the sober bed of matrimony. The curtain drops as they all shout, " A fig for those by law protected, Liberty's a glorious feast, Courts for cowards were erected, Churches built to please the priest." There is nothing in the language which, for life and character, approaches this singular " Cantata." The Beggar's Opera is a burial compared to it ; it bears some resemblance to the Wallenstein's Camp of Schiller, as translated by Lord Francis Egerton ; the same variety, and the same licence of action and speech distinguish both, The origin of the Cantata is worth relating. Mauchline ale and Mauchline maidens frequently brought the Poet from Mossgiel, which lies but some half-a-mile distant. He frequented the public-house of John Dow on those occasions, in the immediate vicinity of the scene of " The Jolly Beggars." The house of Posie Nansie, alias Agnes Gibson, stands opposite nearly to the church-yard gate. One night 78 THE LIFE OF ROBERT BURNS. it happened that James Smith of Mauchline, and Burns, on their way up the street, heard the sound of " meikle fun and jokin' " in Nansie's hostelry, and saw lights streaming from the fractured windows. On entering, they found a company of wandering mendicants enjoying themselves over the dear Keil- bagie. They were welcomed with cheers,_ entered into the humours of the scene, called for more liquor, and the noise and fun grew fast and furious. Burns paid much attention to an old soldier with a " wooden arm and leg," whose drollery was unbounded. In a few days he rough- wrote the Cantata, and shewed it amongst his friends. He gave the only copy now known to be in existence to David Woodburn ; it was lately in the hands of Thomas Stewart, of Greenock. It is probable that the Poet found it an easier task to delineate the characters and indite the songs of the Cantata than to endow the " Mouse " and the " Daisy " with sentiments of terror and of pity. A common ploughman would have stamped his tacketed shoe upon the one, saying " down, vermin!" or helped the furrow over upon the other, pronouncing it a weed. With far other feelings the ploughman of Mossgiel saw the ruin of the one, and the destruc- tion of the other. " The verses to the Mouse and the Mountain Daisy," says Gilbert, " were com- posed on the occasions, and while the author was holding the plough. I could point out the particu- lar spot where each was composed. Holding the plough was a favourite situation with Robert for poetic compositions, and some of his best verses were produced while he was at that exercise. Se- 1 THE LIFE OF ROBERT BURNS. 79 veral of the poems were written for the purpose of brin