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Last Years 153 CHAPTER VIIL Character, Poems, Songs 186 ROBERT BURNS CHAPTER I. YOUTH IN AYRSHIRE. Great men, great events, great epochs, it has been said, grow as we recede from them ; and the rate at which they grow in the estimation of men is in some sort a measure of their greatness. Tried by this standard, Bnrns must be great indeed ; for, during the eighty years that have passed since his death, men's interest in the man himself and their estimate of his genius have ,been steadily in- creasing. Each decade since he died has produced at least two biographies of him. When Mr. Carlyle wrote his well- known essay on Burns in 1828, he could already number six biographies of the Poet, which had been given to the world during the previous thirty years; and the interval between 1828 and the present day has added, in at least the same proportion, to their number. What it was in the man and in his circumstances that has attracted so much of the world's interest to Burns, I must make one more attempt to describe. If success were that which most secures men's sympathy. Burns would have won but little regard ; for in all but his 2 ROBERT BURXS. ' [chap. poetry his was a defeated life — sad and heart-depressing to contemplate beyond the lives even of most poets. Perhaps it may be the very fact that in him so much failure and shipwreck were combined with such splendid gifts, that has attracted to him so deep and compassionate interest. Let us review once more the facts of that life, and tell again its oft-told story. It was on the 25th of January, 1759, about two miles from the town of Ayr, in a clay-built cottage, reared by his father's own hands, that Robert Burns was born. The "auld clay bigging" which saw his birth still stands by the side of the road that leads from Ayr to the river and the bridge of Doon. Between the banks of that romantic stream and the cottage is seen the roofless ruin of "Allo- way's auld haunted kirk," which Tarn o' Shanter has made famous. His first welcome to the world was a rough one. As he himself says — " A blast o' Janwar' win' Blew hansel in on Robin." A few days after his birth, a storm blew down the gable of the cottage, and the poet and his mother were carried in the dark morning to the shelter of a neighbour's roof, under which they remained till their own home was re- paired. In after-years he would often say, "No wonder that one ushered into the world amid such a tempest should be the victim of stormy passions." " It is hard to be born in Scotland," says the brilliant Parisian. Burns had many hardships to endure, but he never reckoned this to be one of them. His father, William Burness or Burnes, for so he spelt his name, was a native not of Ayrshire, but of Kincardine- shire, where he had been reared on a farm belonging to the 7.] YOTTH IX AYRSHIRE. 3 forfeited estate of the noble but attainted bouse of Keith- Mariscbal. Forced to migrate thence at the age of nine- teen, he had travelled to Edinburgh, and finally settled in Ayrshire, and at the time when Robert, his eldest child, was born, he rented seven acres of land, near the Brig o' Doon, which he cultivated as a nursery-garden. He was a man of strict, even stubborn integrity, and of strong tem- per — a combination which, as his son remarks, does not usually lead to worldly success. But his chief character- istic was his deep-seated and thoughtful piety. A peasant- saint of the old Scottish stamp, he yet tempered the stern Calvinism of the West with the milder Arm inianism more common in his northern birthplace. Robert, who, amid all his after-errors, never ceased to revere his father's mem- ory, has left an immortal portrait of him in The Cotter's Saturday Nighty when he describes how " The saint, the father, and the husband prajs." William Burness was advanced in years before he mar- ried, and his wife, Agnes Brown, was much younger than himself. She is described as an Ayrshire lass, of humble birth, very sagacious, with bright eyes and intelligent looks, but not beautiful, of good manners and easy address. Like her husband, she was sincerely religious, but of a more equable temper, quick to perceive character, and with a memory stored with old traditions, songs, and ballads, which she told or sang to amuse her children. In his outer man the poet resembled his mother, but his great mental gifts, if inherited at all, must be traced to his father. Three places in Ayrshire, besides his birthplace, will al- ways be« remembered as the successive homes of Burns. These were Mount Oliphant, Lochlea (pronounced Lochly), and Mossgiel. 4 ROBERT BURNS. [chap. Mount Oliphant. — This was a small upland farm, about two miles from the Brig o' Doon, of a poor and hungry soil, belonging to Mr. Ferguson, of Doon-holm, who was also the landlord of William Burness' previous holding. Robert was in his seventh year when his father entered on this farm at Whitsuntide, 1766, and he had reached his eighteenth when the lease came to a close in 1YY7. All the years between these two dates were to the family of Burness one long sore battle with untoward cir- cumstances, ending in defeat. If the hardest toil and se- vere self - denial could have procured success, they would not have failed. It was this period of his life which Rob- ert afterwards described, as combining " the cheerless gloom of a hermit with the unceasing moil of galley-slave." The family did their best, but a niggard soil and bad seasons were too much for them. At length, on the death of his landlord, who had always dealt generously by him, Wil- liam Burness fell into the grip of a factor, whose tender mercies were hard. This man wrote letters which set the whole family in tears. The poet has not given his name, but he has preserved his portrait in colours which are indelible : " I've noticed, on our Laird's court-day, An' mony a time my heart's been wae, Poor tenant bodies, scant o' cash, How they maun thole a factor's snash ; He'll stamp an' threaten, curse and swear, He'll apprehend them, poind their gear. While they maun stan', wi aspect humble, And hear it a', an' fear an' tremble." In his autobiographical sketch the poet tells us that, " The farm proved a ruinous bargain. I was the eldest of seven children, and my father, worn out ])y early hard- i.J YOUTH IN AYRSHIRE. 5 ship, was unfit for labour. His spirit was soon irritated, but not easily broken. There was a freedom in the lease in two years more ; and to weather these two years we retrenched expenses, and toiled on." Robert and Gilbert, the two eldest, though still boys, had to do each a grown man's full work. Yet, for all their hardships, these Mount Oliphant days were not without alleviations. If poverty was at the door, there was warm family affection by the fireside. If the two sons had, long before manhood, to bear toil beyond their years, still they were living under their parents' roof, and those parents two of the wisest and best of Scotland's peasantry. Work was no doubt in- cessant, but education was not neglected — rather it was held one of the most sacred duties. When Robert was five years old, he had been sent to a school at Alloway Mill ; and when the family removed to Mount Oliphant, his fa- ther combined with four of his neighbours to hire a young teacher, who boarded among them, and taught their chil- dren for a small salary. This young teacher, whose name was Murdoch, has left an interesting description of his two young pupils, their parents, and the household life while he sojourned at Mount Oliphant. At that time Murdoch thought that Gilbert possessed a livelier imagina- tion, and was more of a wit than Robert. "All the mirth and liveliness," he says, " were with Gilbert. Robert's countenance at that time wore generally a grave and thoughtful look." Had their teacher been then told that one of his two pupils would become a great poet, he would have fixed on Gilbert. When he tried to teach them church music along with other rustic lads, they two lagged far behind the rest. Robert's voice especially was untune- able, and his ear so dull that it was with difficulty he could distinguish one tune from another. Yet this was he 6 ROBERT BURNS. [niAP. who was to bt'coiiie the greatest song-writer that Scotland — perhaps the world — has known. In other respects the mental training of the lads was of the most thorough kind. Murdoch taught them not only ,to read, but to parse, and to give the exact meaning of the words, to turn verse into the prose order, to supply ellipses, and to sub- stitute plain for poetic words and phrases. How many of our modern village schools even attempt as much I When Murdoch gave up, the father himself undertook the educa- tion of his children, and carried it on at night after work- hours were over. Of that father Murdoch speaks as by far the best man he ever knew. Tender and affectionate towards his children he describes him, seeking not to drive, but to lead them to the right, by appealing to their con- science and their better feelings, rather than to their fears. To his wife he was gentle and considerate in an unusual degree, always thinking of her ease and comfort ; and she repaid it with the utmost reverence. She was a careful and thrifty housewife ; but, whenever her domestic tasks allowed, she would return to hang with devout attention on the discourse that fell from her wise husband. Under that father's guidance knowledge was sought for as hid treasure, and this search was based on the old and rever- ential faith that increase of knowledge is increase of wis- dom and goodness. The readings of the household were wide, varied, and unceasing. Some one entering the house at meal-time found the whole family seated, each with a spoon in one hand and a book in the other. The books which Burns mentions as forming part of their reading at Mount Oliphant surprise us even now. Not only the or- dinary school-books and geographies, not only the tradi- tional life of Wallace, and other popular books of that sort, but The Spectator, odd plays of Shakespeare, Pope (his i.J YOUTH IN AYRSHIRE. 7 Homer included), Locke on the Human Understanding, Boyle's Lectures, Taylor's Scripture Doctrine of Original Sin, Allan Ramsay's works, formed the staple of their reading. Above all there was a collection of songs, of which Burns says, " This was my vade mecum. I pored over them driving my cart, or walking to labour, song by song, verse by verse ; carefully noting the true, tender, or sublime, from affectation and fustian. I am convinced 1 owe to this practice much of my critic-craft, such as it is 1" And he could not have learnt it in a better way. There are few countries in the world which could at that time have produced in humble life such a teacher as Murdoch and such a father as William Burness. It seems fitting, then, that a country which could rear such men among its peasantry should give birth to such a poet as Robert Burns to represent them. The books which fed his young intellect were devoured only during intervals snatch- ed from hard toil. That toil was no doubt excessive. And this early overstrain showed itself soon in the stoop of his shoulders, in nervous disorder about the heart, and in frequent fits of despondency. Yet perhaps too much has sometimes been made of these bodily hardships, as though Burns's boyhood had been one long misery. But the youth which grew up in so kindly an atmosphere of wis- dom and home affection, under the eye of such a father and mother, cannot be called unblest. Lender the pressure of toil and the entire want of so- ciety. Burns might have grown up the rude and clownish and unpopular lad that he has been pictured in his early teens. But in his fifteenth summer there came to him a new influence, which at one touch unlocked the springs of now emotions. This incident must be given in his own words : '' You know," he says, " our country custom of 8 ROBERT BURNS. [chap. coupling a man and woman together as partners in the la- bours of the harvest. In my fifteenth summer 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 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 disappointment, gin-horse prudence, and book -worm philosophy, I hold to be the first of human joys here below ! How she caught the contagion I cannot tell. . . . 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 heartstrings thrill like an ^olian harp ; and especially 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 love-inspiring qualities, she sung 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, composed by men who read Greek and Latin; but my girl sung a song which was said to be composed by a coantry 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 shear sheep and cast peats, his father living in the moor- lands, he had no more scholar-craft than myself. Thus with me began love and poetry." The song he then composed is entitled " Handsome Nell," and is the first he ever wrote. He himself speaks of it as very puerile and silly — a verdict which Chambers endorses, but in which I cannot agree. Simple and artless I.J YOUTH IN AYRSHIRE. 9 it no doubt is, but with a touch of that grace which be- speaks the true poet. Here is one verse which, for direct- ness of feeling and felicity of language, he hardly ever " She dresses aye sae clean and neat, Baith decent and genteel, And then there's something in her gait Gars ony dress look weel." " I composed it," says Burns, " in a wild enthusiasm of passion, and to this hour I never recollect it but my heart melts, my blood sallies at the remembrance." LocHLEA. — Escaped from the fangs of the factor, with some remnant of means, William Burness removed from Mount Oliphant to Lochlea, in the parish of Tarbolton (1777) ; an upland, undulating farm, on the north bank of the River Ayr, with a wide outlook, southward over the hills of Carrick, westward toward the Isle of Arran, Ailsa Craig, and down the Firth of Clyde, toward the Western Sea. This was the home of Burns and his family from his eighteenth till his twenty-fifth year. For a time the family life here was more comfortable than before, proba- bly because several of the children were now able to assist their parents in farm labour. " These seven years," says Gilbert Burns, ''brought small literary improvement to Robert" — but I can hardly believe this, when we remember that Lochlea saw the composition of The Death and Dying Words of Poor Mailie, and of My JVannie, 0, and one or two more of his most popular songs. It was during those days that Robert, then growing into manhood, first vent- ured to step beyond the range of his father's control, and to trust the promptings of his own social instincts and headlong passions. The first step in this direction was to go to a dancing-school, in a neighbouring village, that he 10 ROBERT BURNS. [chap. might there meet companions of either sex, and give his rustic manners " a brush," as he phrases it. The next step was taken when Burns resolved to spend his nine- teenth summer in Kirkoswald, to learn mensuration and surveying from the schoolmaster there, who was famous as a teacher of these things. Kirkoswald, on the Carrick coast, was a village full of smugglers and adventurers, in whose society Burns was introduced to scenes of what he calls "swaggering riot and roaring dissipation." It may readily be believed that, with his strong love of sociality aud excitement, he was an apt pupil in that school. Still the mensuration went on, till one day, when in the kail- yard behind the teacher's house, Burns met a young lass, who set his heart on fire, and put an end to mensuration. This incident is celebrated in the song beginning — " Now westlin winds and slaughtering guns Bring autumn's pleasant weather " — '' the ebullition," he calls it, " of that passion which ended the school business at Kirkoswald." From this time on for several years, love-making was his chief amusement, or rather his most serious business. His brother tells us that he was in the secret of half the love affairs of the parish of Tarbolton, and was never with- out at least one of his own. There was not a comely girl in Tarbolton on whom he did not compose a song, and then he made one which included them all. When he was thus inly moved, "the agitations of his mind and body," says Gilbert, " exceeded anything of the kind I ever knew in real life. He had always a particular jeal- ousy of people who were richer than .himself, or had more consequence. His love, therefore, rarely settled on persons of this description." The jealousy here noted, as extend- i] YOUTH IX AYRSHIRE. M ino- even to his loves, was one of the weakest points of the poet's character. Of the ditties of that time, most of which have been preserved, the best specimen is My Nan- nie, 0. This song, and the one entitled Mary Morison, render the whole scenery and sentiment of those rural meetings in a manner at once graphic and free from coarseness. Yet, truth to speak, it must be said that those gloamin' trysts, however they may touch the imagi- nation and lend themselves to song, do in reality lie at the root of much that degrades the life and habits of the Scottish peasantry. But those first three or four years at Lochlea, if not free from peril, were still with the poet times of innocence. His brother Gilbert, in the words of Chambers, " used to speak of his brother as at this period, to himself, a more admirable being than at any other. He recalled with de- light the days when they had to go with one or two com- panions to cut peats for the winter fuel ; because Robert was sure to enliven their toil with a rattling fire of witty remarks on men and things, mingled with the expressions of a genial, glowing heart, and the whole perfectly free from the taint which he afterwards acquired from his con- tact with the world. Not even in those volumes which afterwards charmed his country from end to end, did Gil- bert see his brother in so interesting a light as in these conversations in the bog, with only two or three noteless peasants for an audience." While Gilbert acknowledges that his brother's love- makings were at this time unceasing, he asserts that they were "governed by the strictest rules of virtue and mod- esty, from which he never deviated till he reached his twenty-third year." Tt was towards the close of his twen- ty-second that there occurs the record of his first serious B 12 ROBERT BURNS. [chap. desire to marry and settle in life. He had set his affec- tions on a young woman named Ellison Begbie, daughter of a small farmer, and at that time servant in a family on Cessnock Water, about two miles from Lochlea. She is said to have been not a beauty, but of unusual liveliness and grace of mind. Long afterwards, when he had seen much of the world, Burns spoke of this young woman as, of all those on whom he ever fixed his fickle affections, the one most likely to have made a pleasant partner for life. Four letters which he wrote to her are preserved, in which he expresses the most pure and honourable feelings in lan- guage which, if a little formal, is, for manliness and sim- plicity, a striking contrast to the bombast of some of his later epistles. Songs, too, he addressed to her — The Lass of Cessnock Banks, Bonnie Peggy Alison, and Mary Mori- son. The two former are inconsiderable ; the latter is one of those pure and beautiful love-lyrics, in the manner of the old ballads, which, as Hazlitt says, " take the deepest and most lasting hold on the mind." " Yestreen, when to the trembling string, The dance gaed thro' the lighted ha'. To thee my fancy took its wing, I sat, but neither heard nor saw : Tho' this was fair, and that was braw. And yon the toast of a' the town, I sigh'd, and said amang them a', ' Ye are na Mary Morison,' " " Oh, Mary, canst thou wreck his peace, Wha for thy sake wad gladly die; Or canst thou break that heart of his, Whase only faut is loving thee ? If love for love thou wilt na gie, At least be pity to me shown ; i] YOUTH IN AYRSHIRE. 13 A thought ungentle canna be The thought o' Mary Morison." In these lines the lyric genius of Burns was for the first time undeniably revealed. But neither letters nor love -songs prevailed. The young woman, for some reason untold, was deaf to his entreaties ; and the rejection of this his best affection fell on him with a malign influence, just as he was setting his face to learn a trade which he hoped would enable him to maintain a wife. Irvine was at that time a centre of the flax-dressing art, and as Robert and his brother raised flax on their farm, they hoped that if they could dress as well as grow flax, they might thereby double their profits. As he met with this heavy disappointment in love just as he was setting out for Irvine, he went thither down-hearted and depress- ed, at Midsummer, 1781. All who met him at that time were struck with his look of melancholy, and his mood)'' silence, from which he roused himself only when in pleas- ant female society, or when he- met with men of intelli- gence. But the persons of this sort whom he met in Ir- vine were probably few. More numerous were the smug- glers and rough-living adventurers with which that seaport town, as Kirkoswald, sw^armed. Among these he con- tracted, says Gilbert, " some acquaintance of a freer man- ner of thinking and living than he had been used to, whose society prepared him for ov^erleaping the bonds of rigid virtue which had hitherto restrained him." One companion, a sailor-lad of wild life and loose and irregu- lar habits, had a wonderful fascination for Burns, who ad- mired him for what he thought his independence and magnanimity. " He was," says Burns, " the only man I ever knew who was a greater fool than myself, where 14 HUBERT BURNS. [aiAr. woman was the presiding star; but he spoke of lawless love with levity, which hitherto I had regarded with hor- ror. Here his friendship did me a mischief y Another companion, older than himself, thinking that the religious views of Burns we^e too rigid and uncompro- mising, induced him to adopt "liTore liberal opinions," which in this case, as in so many others, meant more lax opinions. AVith his principles of belief, and his rules of conduct at once assailed and undermined, what chart or compass remained any more for a passionate being like Burns over the passion - swept sea of life that lay before him ? The migration to Irvine was to him the descent to Avernus, from which he never afterwards, in the actual conduct of life, however often in his hours of inspiration, escaped to breathe again the pure upper air. This brief but disastrous Irvine sojourn was brought to a sudden close. Burns was robbed by his partner in trade, his flax- dressing shop was burnt to the ground by fire during the carousal of a New -Year's morning, and himself, impaired in purse, in spirits, and in character, returned to Lochlea to find misfortunes thickening round his family, and his father on his death-bed. For the old man, his long strug- gle with scanty means, barren soil, and bad seasons, was now near its close. Consumption had set in. Early in 1784, when his last hour drew on, the father said that there was one of his children of whose future he could not think without fear. Robert, who was in the room, came up to his bedside and asked, " O father, is it me you mean f The old man said it was. Robert turned to the window, with tears streaming down his cheeks, and his bosom swelling, from the restraint he put on himself, al- most to bursting. The father had early perceived the gen- ius that was in his boy, and even in Mount Oliphant days I.] YOFTII IX AYRSHIRE. 15 had said to his .wife, *' Whoever Hves to see it, something extraordinary will come from that boy/' He had lived to see and admire his son's earliest poetic efforts. Bathe liad also noted the strong- passions, with the weak will, which might drive him on the shoals of life. MossGiEL. — Towards the close of 1783, Robert and his brother, seeing clearly the crash of family 'affairs which was impending, had taken on their own account a lease of the small farm of Mossgiel, about two or three miles dis- tant from Lochlea, in the parish of Mauchline. When their father died in February, 17S4, it was only by claim- ing the arrears of wages due to them, and ranking among their father's creditors, that they saved enough from the domestic wreck to stock their new farm. Thither they conveyed their widowed mother, and their younger broth- ers and sisters, in. March, 1784. Their new home was a bare, upland farm, 118 acres of cold clay soil, lying within a mile of Mauchline village. Burns entered on it with a firm resolution to be prudent, industrious, and thrifty. In his own words, " I read farming books, I calculated crops, I attended markets, and, in short, in spite of the devil, the world, and the flesh, I should have been a wise man ; but the first year, from unfortunately buying 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." Burns was in the beginning of his twenty- sixth year when he took up his abode at Mossgiel, where he remained for four years. Three things those years and that bare moorland farm witnessed — the wreck of his hopes as a farmer, the revelation of his genius as a poet, and the frailty of his character as a man. The result of the immoral habits and "liberal opinions" which he had 16 ROBERT BURNS. [chap. learnt at Irvine were soon apparent in that event of which he speaks in his Epistle to John Rankine with such unbe- coming levity. In the Chronological Edition of his works it is painful to read on one page the pathetic lines which he engraved on his father's headstone, and a few pages on, written almost at the same time, the epistle above alluded to, and other poems in the same strain, in which the de- fiant poet glories in his shame. It was well for the old man that he was laid in Alloway Kirkyard before these things befell. But the widowed mother had to bear the burden, and to receive in her home and bring up the child that should not have been born. When silence and shame would have most become him, Burns poured forth his feel- ings in ribald verses, and bitterly satirized the parish min- ister, who required him to undergo that public penance which the discipline of the Church at that time exacted. Whether this was a wise discipline or not, no blame at- tached to the minister, who merely carried out the rules which his Church enjoined. It was no proof of magna- Bimity in Burns to use his talent in reviling the minister, who had done nothing more than his duty. One can hardly doubt but that in his inmost heart he must have been visited with other and more penitential feelings than those unseemly verses express. But, as Lockhart has well observed, " his false pride recoiled from letting his jovial associates know how little he was able to drown the whis- pers of the still small voice ; and the fermenting bitterness of a mind ill at ease within himself escaped — as may be often traced in the history of satirists — in angry sarcasms against those who, whatever their private errors might be, had at least done him no wrong." Mr. Carlyle's comment on this crisis of his life is too weighty to be omitted here. " With principles assailed by evil example from without, I.] YOUTH IX AYRSHIRE. 1-7 by * passions raging like demons ' from within, he had lit- tle need of sceptical misgivings to whisper treason in the heat of the battle, or to cut off his retreat if he were al- ready defeated. He loses his feeling of innocence; his mind is at variance with itself; the old divinity no longer presides there ; but wild Desires and wild Repentance al- ternately oppress him. Ere long, too, he has committed himself before the world ; his character for sobriety, dear to a Scottish peasant as few corrupted worldlings can even conceive, is destroyed in the eyes of men ; and his only refuge consists in trying to disbelieve his guiltiness, and is but a refuge of lies. The blackest desperation gathers over him, broken only by the red lightnings of remorse." Amid this trouble it was but a poor vanity and misera- ble love of notoriety which could console itself with the thought — *' The mair they talk, I'm kent the better, E'en let them clash." Or was this not vanity at all, but the bitter irony of self- reproach ? This collision with the minister and Kirk Session of his parish, and the bitter feelings it engendered in his rebellious bosom, at once launched Burns into the troubled sea of re- ligious controversy that was at that time raging all around him. The clergy of the West were divided into two par- ties, known as the Auld Lights and the New Lights. Ayr- shire and the west of Scotland had long been the strong- hold of Presbyterianism and of the Covenanting spirit; and in Burns's day — a century and a half after the Cove- nant — a large number of the ministers still adhered to its principles, and preached the Puritan theology undiluted. These men were democratic in their ecclesiastical views, and stout protesters against Patronage, which has always 18 ROBERT BURNS. [ciiAr. been the bugbear of the sects in Scotland. As Burns ex- presses it, they did their best to stir up their flocks to " Join their counsel and their skills To cowe the lairds, An' get the brutes the power therasels To chuse their herds." All Burns's instincts would naturally have been on the side of those who wished to resist patronage and " to cowe the lairds," had not this his natural tendency been coun- teracted by a stronger bias drawing him in an opposite direction. The Auld Lights, though democrats in Church politics, were the upholders of that strict Church discipline under which he was smarting, and to this party belonged his own minister, who had brought that discipline to bear upon him. Burns, therefore, naturally threw himself into the arms of the opposite, or New Light party, who were more easy in their life and in their doctrine. This large and growing section of ministers were deeply imbued with rationalism, or, as they then called it, " common-sense," in the light of which they pared away from religion all that was mysterious and supernatural. Some of them were said to be Socinians or even pure Deists, most of them shone less in the pulpit than at the festive board. With such men a person in Burns's then state of mind would readily sympathize, and they received him with open arms. Nothing could have been more unfortunate than that in this crisis of his career he should have fallen into intimacy with those hard-headed but coarse -minded men. They were the first persons of any pretensions to scholarly ed- ucation with whom he had mingled freely. He amused them with the sallies of his wit and sarcasm, and astonish- ed them by his keon insight and vigorous powers of rea- i] YOUTH L\ AYRSHIRE, 19 soiling. They abetted those very tendencies in his nat- ure which required to be checke'd. Their countenance, as clergymen, would allay the scruples and misgivings he might otherwise have felt, and stimulate to still wilder recklessness whatever profanity he might be tempted to indulge in. When he had let loose his first shafts of sat- ire against their stricter brethren, those New Light minis- ters heartily applauded him ; and hounded him on to still more daring assaults. He had not only his own quarrel with his parish minister and the stricter clergy to revenge, but the quarrel also of his friend and landlord, Gavin Hamilton, a county lawyer, who had fallen under Church censure for neglect of Church ordinances, and had been debarred from the Communion. Burns espoused Gavin's cause with characteristic zeal, and let fly new arrows one affeer another from his satirical quiver. The first of these satires against the orthodox ministers was The Twa HerdSj or the Holy Tulzie^ written on a quarrel between two brother clergymen. Then followed in quick succession Holy Willie's Prayer, The Ordination, and The Holy Fair. His good mother and his brother were pained by these performances, and remonstrated against them. But Burns, though he generally gave ear to their counsel, in this instance turned a deaf ear to it, and listened to other advisers. The love of exercising his strong powers of satire and the applause of his boon-com- panions, lay and clerical, prevailed over the whispers of his own better nature and the advice of his truest friends. Whatever may be urged in defence of employing satire to lash hypocrisy, I cannot but think that those who have loved most what is best in Burns's poetry must have re- gretted that these poems were ever written. Some have commended them on the ground that they have exposed 20 ROBERT BURNS. [chap. religious pretence and Pharisaism. The good they may have done in this way is perhaps doubtful. But the harm they have done in Scotland is not doubtful, in that they have connected in the minds of the people so many coarse and even profane thoughts with objects which they had regarded till then with reverence. Even The Holy Fair^ the poem in this kind which is least offensive, turns on the abuses that then attended the celebration of the Holy Communion in rural parishes, and with great power por- trays those gatherings in their most mundane aspects. Yet, as Lockhart has well remarked, those things were part of the same religious system which produced the scenes which Burns has so beautifully described in The Cotter^s Saturday Night. Strange that the same mind, almost at the same moment, should have conceived two poems so different in spirit as The Cotter'' s Saturday Night and The Holy Fair ! I have dwelt thus long on these unpleasant satires that I may not have again to return to them. It is a more welcome task to turn to the other poems of the same pe- riod. Though Burns had entered on Mossgiel resolved to do his best as a farmer, he soon discovered that it was not in that way he was to attain success. The crops of 1784 and 1785 both failed, and their failure seems to have done something to drive him in on his own internal re- sources. He then for the first time seems to have awa- kened to the conviction that his destiny was to be a poet ; and he forthwith set himself, with more resolution than he ever showed before or after, to fulfil that mission. Hitherto he had complained that his life had been with- out an aim ; now he determined that it should be so no longer. The dawning hope began to gladden him that he might take his place among the bards of Scotland. I.] YOUTH IX AYRSHIKE. 21 wlio, themselves mostly unknown, have created that at- mosphere of minstrelsy which envelopes and glorifies their native country. This hope and aim is recorded in an entry of his commonplace book, of the probable date of August, 1784: " However I am pleased with the works of our Scotch poets, particularly the excellent Ramsay, and the still more excellent Fergusson, yet I am hurt to see other places of Scotland, their towns, rivers, woods, and haughs, immor- talized in such celebrated performances, while my dear native country — the ancient bailieries of Carrick, Kyle, and Cunningham, famous both in ancient and modern times for a gallant and warlike race of inhabitants — a country where civil, and particularly religious liberty, have ever found their first support, and their last asylum — a country, the birthplace of many famous philosophers, sol- diers, and statesmen, and the scene of many important events recorded in Scottish history, particularly a great many of the actions of the glorious Wallace, the saviour of his country — yet we have never had one Scotch poet of any eminence to make the fertile banks of Irvine, the romantic woodlands and sequestered scenes of Ayr, and the heathy mountainous source and winding sweep of Doon, emulate Tay, Forth, Ettrick, Tweed. This is a complaint I would gladly remedy ; but, alas ! I am far unequal to the task, both in native genius and in educa- tion. Obscure I am, obscure I must be, though no young poet nor young soldier's heart ever beat more fondly for fame than mine." Though the sentiment here expressed may seem com- monplace and the language hardly grammatical, yet 1,his extract clearly reveals the darling ambition that was now haunting the heart of Burns. It was the same wish 22 ROBERT BURNS. [chap. which he expressed better in rhyme at a later day in his Upistle to the Gude Wife of Wauchope House. "E'en then, a wish, I mind its power, A wish that to my latest hour Shall strongly heave my breast. That I for poor Auld Scotland's sake Some usefu' plan or beuk could make, Or sing a sang at least. The rough burr -thistle, spreading wide Amang the bearded bear, I turn'd the weeder-elips aside. An' spar'd the symbol dear." It was about his twenty-fifth year when he first con- ceived the hope that he might become a national poet. The failure of his first two harvests, 1784 and '85, in Mossgiel, may well have strengthened this desire, and changed it into a fixed purpose. If he was not to suc- ceed as a farmer, might he not find success in another em- ployment that was much more to his mind ? And this longing, so deeply cherished, he had, within less than two years from the time that the above entry in his diary was written, amply fulfilled. From the autumn of 1784 till May, 1786, the fountains of poetry were un- sealed within, and flowed forth in a continuous stream. That period, so prolific of poetry that none like it ever afterwards visited him, saw the production not only of the satirical poems already noticed, and of another m.orc genial satire, Death and Dr. Hornbook, but also of those characteristic epistles in which he reveals so much of his own character, and of those other descriptive poems in which he so wonderfully delineates the habits of the Scottish peasantry. Within from sixteen to eighteen months were com- I.J YOUTH IX AYRSHIRE. 23 posed, not only seven or eight long epistles to rhyme-com- posing brothers in the neighbourhood, David Sillar, John Lapraik, and others, but also, Halloween, To a Mouse, The Jolly Beggars, The Cotter'' s Saturday Night, Address to the Dell, The Auld Farmer s Address to his Auld Mare, The Vision, The Twa Dogs, The Mountain Daisy. The descriptive poems above named followed each other in rapid succession during that spring-time of liis genius, having been all composed, as the latest edition of his works shows, in a period of about six months, between November, 1785, and April, 1786. Perhaps there are none of Biirns's compositions which give the real man more naturally and unreservedly than his epistles. Writ- ten in the dialect he had learnt by his father's fireside, to friends in his own station, who shared his own tastes and feelings, they flow on in an easy stream of genial, bappy spirits, in which kindly humour, wit, love of the outward world, knowledge of men, are all beautifully intertwined into one strand of poetry, unlike anything else that has been seen before or since. The outward form of the verse and the style of diction are no doubt after the manner of his two forerunners whom he so much admired, Ramsay and Fergusson ; bat the play of soul and power of ex- pression, the natural grace with which they rise and fall, the vividness of every image, and transparent truthfulness of every sentiment, are all his own. If there is any ex- ception to be made to this estimate, it is in the grudge which here and there peeps out against those whom he thought greater favourites of fortune than himself and his correspondents. But taken as a whole, I know not any poetic epistles to be compared with them. They are just the letters in which one friend might unbosom himself to another without the least artifice or disii.'uise. And the 24 ROBERT BURNS. [chap. broad Doric is so pithy, so powerful, so aptly fitted to the thought, that not even Horace himself has surpassed it in *' curious felicity." Often when harvests were failing and the world going against him, he found his solace in pour- ing forth in rhyme his feelings to some trusted friend. As he says in one of these same epistles — " Leeze me on rhyme ! it's aye a treasure, My chief, amaist my only pleasure, At hame, a-fiel', at wark, at leisure, The Muse, poor hizzie ! Tho' rough an' raploch be her measure, She's seldom lazy." Of the poems founded on the customs of the peasantry, I shall speak in the sequel. The garret in which all the poems of this period were written is thus described by Chambers : " The farmhouse of Mossgiel, which still ex- ists almost unchanged since the days of the poet, is very small, consisting of only two rooms, a but and a ben, as they are called in Scotland. Over these, reached by a trap stair, is a small garret, in which Robert and his brother used to sleep. Thither, when he had returned from his day's work, the poet used to retire, and seat himself at a small deal table, lighted by a narrow sky- light in the roof, to transcribe the verses which he had composed in the fields. His favourite time for composi- tion was at the plough. Long years afterwards his sister, Mrs. Begg, used to tell how, when her brother had gone forth again to field-work, she would steal up to the garret and search the drawer of the deal table for the verses which Robert had newly transcribed." In which of the poems of this period his genius is most conspicuous it might not be easy to determine. But there can be little question about the justice of Lockhart's re- I.] YOUTH IN AYRSHIRE. 25 mark, that "TAe Cotter's Saturday Night is of all Burns's pieces the one whose exclusion from the collection would be mo^t injurious, if not to the genius of the poet, at least to the character of the man. In spite of many fee- ble lines, and some heavy stanzas, it appears to me that even his genius would suffer more in estimation by being contemplated in the absence of this poem, than of any other single poem he has left us." Certainly it is the one which has most endeared his name to the more thoughtful and earnest of his countrymen. Strange it is, not to say painful, to think that this poem, in which the simple and manly piety of his country is so finely touched, and the image of his own religious father so beautifully portrayed, should have come from the same hand which wrote nearly at the same time The Jolly Beggars, The Ordinfition, and The Holy Fair. During those two years at Mossgiel, from 1784 to 1786, when the times were hard, and the farm unproductive, Burns must indeed have found poetry to be, as he himself says, its own reward. A nature like his required some vent for itself, some excitement to relieve the pressure of dull farm drudgery, and this was at once his purest and noblest excitement. In two other more hazardous forms of excitement he was by temperament disposed to seek ref- uge. These were conviviality and love-making. In the former of these, Gilbert says that he indulged little, if at all, during his Mossgiel period. And this seems proved by his brother's assertion that during all that time Rob- ert's private expenditure never exceeded seven pounds a year. When he had dressed himself on this, and procured his other necessaries, the margin that remained for drink- ing must have been small indeed. But love-making — that had been with him, ever since he reached manhood, an \;.;- 26 ROBERT BURNS. [chap, ceasing employment. Even in his later teens he had, as his earliest songs show, given himself enthusiastically to those nocturnal meetings, which were then and are still customary among the peasantry of Scotland, and which at the best are full of perilous temptation. But ever since the time when, during his Irvine sojourn, he forsook the paths of innocence, there is nothing in any of his love-af- fairs which those who prize what was best in Burns would not willingly forget. If here we allude to two such inci- dents, it is because they are too intimately bound up with his life to be passed over in any account of it. Gilbert says that while " one generally reigned paramount in Rob- ert's affections, he was frequently encountering other at- tractions, which formed so many underplots in the drama of his lov^e." This is only too evident in those two loves which most closely touched his destiny at this time. From the time of his settlement at Mossgiel frequent allusions occur in his letters and poems to flirtations with the belles of the neighbouring village of Mauchline. Among all these Jean Armour, the daughter of a respect- able master-mason in that village, had the chief place in his aifections. All through 1785 their courtship had con- tinued, but early in 1786 a secret and irregular marriage, with a written acknowledgment of it, had to be effected. Then followed the fathers indignation that his daughter should be married to so wild and worthless a man as Burns ; compulsion of his daughter to give up Burns, and to destroy the document which vouched their marriage ; Burns's despair driving him to the verge of insanity ; the letting loose by the Armours of the terrors of the law against him ; his skulking for a time in concealment ; his resoi"? to emigrate to the West Indies, and become a slave-'""' .'■iver. All these things were passing in the s])nMg i] YOUTH IN AYRSHIRE. 21 raonths of 1786, and in September of the same year Jean Armour became the mother of twin children. It would be well if we might believe that the story of his betrothal to Highland Mary was, as Lockhart seems to have thought, previous to and independent of the incidents just mentioned. But the more recent investigations of Mr. Scott Douglas and Dr. Chambers have made it too painfully clear that it was almost at the very time when he was half distracted by Jean Armour's desertion of him, and while he was writing his broken-hearted Lament over her conduct, that there occurred, as an interlude, the epi- sode of Mary Campbell. This simple and sincere-hearted girl from Argyllshire was, Lockhart says, the object of by far the deepest passion Burns ever knew. And Lockhart g;ives at length the oft-told tale how, on the second Sun- day of May, 1*786, they met in a sequestered spot by the I'anks of the River Ayr, to spend one day of parting love ; how they stood, one on either side of a small brook, laved their hands in the stream, and, holding a Bible between them, vowed eternal fidelity to each other. They then parted, never again to meet. In October of the same year Mary came from Argyllshire, as far as Greenock, in the hope of meeting Burns, but she was there seized with a malignant fever which soon laid her in an early grave. The Bible, in two volumes, which Burns gave her on that parting day, has been recently recovered. On the first volume is inscribed, in Burns's hand, "And ye shall not swear by My Name falsely, I am the Lord. Levit. 19th chap. 12th verse ;" and on the second volume, " Thou ?halt not forswear thyself, but shalt perform unto the Lord thine oath. Matth. 5th chap. 33rd verse." But the names 'ords in sending it to a friend are these : — " March, 1791. ♦Vhile here I sit, sad and solitary, by the side of a fire, in a little country inn, and drying my wet clothes, in pops a poor fellow of a sodger, and tells me he is going to Ayr. By heavens ! say I to myself, with a tide of good spirits, which the magic of that sound, ' Auld Toon o' Ayr,' con- jured up, I will send my last song to Mr. Ballantine." Then he gives the second and best version of the song, beginning thus : *' Ye flowery banks o' bonnie Doon, How can ye blume sae fair ? How can ye chant, ye little birds, And I sae fu' o' care !" The latest edition of Burns's works, by Mr. Scott Doug- las, gives three different versions of this song. Any one 124 ROBERT BURNS. [chap. wlio will compare these, will see the truth of that remart of tne poet, in one of nis letters to Dr. Moore, " I have no doubt that the knack, the aptitude to learn the Muses trade is a gift bestowed by Him who forms the secret bias of the soul ; but I as firmly believe that excellence in the profession is the fruit of industr}^, attention, labour, and pains; at least I am resolved to try my doctrine by the test of experience." The second version was that which Burns wrought out by careful revision, from an earlier one. Compare, for in- stance, with the verse given above, the first verse as oriffJ- nally struck off : " Sweet are the banks, the banks of Doon, The spreading flowers are fair, And everything is blythe and glad. But I am fu' of care." And the other changes he made on the first draugbt are all in the way of improvement. It is painful to know, on the authority of Allan Cunningham, that he who com- posed this pure and perfect song, and many another sucn, sometimes chose to work in baser metal, and that song- ware of a lower kind escaped from his hands into the press, and could never afterwards be recalled. When Burns told Dr. Moore that he was resolved to try by the test of experience the doctrine that good and per- manent poetry could not be composed without industry and pains, he had in view other and wider plans of com- position than any which he ever realized. He told Ram- say of Ochtertyre, as we have seen, that he had in view to render into poetry a tradition he had found of an advent- ure in humble life which Bruce met with during bis war- derinirs. AVhether he ever did more than think over the v.] LIFE AT ELLISLAND. 125 story of Rob McQiiechan's Elshin, or into what poetic form he intended to cast it, we know not. As Sir Walter said, any poem he might have produced on this subject would certainly have wanted that tinge of chivalrous feeling which the manners of the age and the character of the king alike demanded. But with Burns's ardent admiration of Bruce, and that power of combining the most homely and humor- ous incidents with the pathetic and the sublime, which he displayed in Tam o' Shanter, we cannot but regret that he never had the leisure and freedom from care which would have allowed him to try his hand on a subject so entirely to his mind. ^ Besides this, he had evidently, during his sojourn at Ellis- land, meditated some large dramatic attempt. He wrote to one of his correspondents that he had set himself to study Shakespeare, and intended to master all the greatest drama- tists, both of England and France, with a view to a dramatic effort of his own. If he had attempted it in pure English, we may venture to predict that he would have failed. But had he allowed himself that free use of the Scottish dialect of which he was the supreme master, especially if he had shaped the subject into a lyrical drama, no one can say what he might not have achieved. Many of his smaller poems show that he possessed the genuine dramatic vein. The Jolly Beggars, unpleasant as from its grossness it is. shows the presence of this vein in a very high degree, see- ing that from materials so unpromising he could make so much. As Mr. Lockhart has said, "That extraordinary sketch, coupled with his later lyrics in a higher vein, is enough to show that in him we had a master capable of placing the musical drama on a level with the loftiest of our classical forms." Regrets have been expressed that Burns, instead of ad- 126 KOBERT BURNS. [chap. dressing himself to these high poetic enterprises, which had certainly hovered before him, frittered away so much of his time in composing for musical collections a large num- ber of songs, the very abundance of which must have les- sened their quality. And yet it may be doubted whether this urgent demand for songs, made on him by Johnson and Thomson, was not the only literary call to which he would in his circumstances have responded. These calls could be met, by sudden efforts, at leisure moments, when some, occasional blink of momentary inspiration came over him. JGreat poems necessarily presuppose that the orig- inal inspiration is sustained by concentrated purpose and long-sustained effort ; mental habits, which to a nature like Burns's must have at all times been difficult, and which his circumstances during his later years rendered simpl}^ im- possible. From the first he had seen that his farm would not pay, and each succeeding year confirmed him in this conviction. To escape what he calls "the crushing grip of poverty, which, alas ! I fear, is less or more fatal to the worth and purity of the noblest souls," he had, within a year after entering Ellisland, recourse to Excise work. This he did from a stern sense of duty to his wife and family. It was, in fact, one of the most marked instances in which Burns, contrary to his too frequent habit, put pride in his pocket, and sacrificed inclination to duty. But that he had not accepted the yoke without some painful sense of degradation, is shown by the bitterness of many of his re- marks, when in his correspondence he alludes to the sub- ject. There were, however, times when he tried to take a brighter view of it, and to persuade himself, as he says in a letter to Lady Harriet Don, that " one advantage he had in this new business was the knowledge it gave him of the various shades of character in man — consequently assisting v.] LIFE AT ELLISLAND. 127 him in his trade as a poet." But, alas ! whatever advan- tages in this way it might have brought, were counteracted tenfold by other circumstances that attended it. The con- tinual calls of a responsible business, itself sufficient to oc- cupy a man — when divided with the oversight of his farm, overtasked his powers, and left him no leisure for poetic work, except from time to time crooning over a random song. Then the habits which his roving Excise life must have induced were, even to a soul less social than that of Burns, perilous in the extreme. The temptations he was in this way exposed to, Lockhart has drawn with a power- ful hand. " From the castle to the cottage, every door flew open at his approach ; and the old system of hospital- ity, then flourishing, rendered it difficult for the most so- berly inclined guest to rise from any man's board in the same trim that he sat down to it. The farmer, if Burns was seen passing, left his reapers, and trotted by the side of Jenny Geddes, until he could persuade the bard that the day was hot enough to demand an extra libation. If he entered an inn at midnight, after all the inmates were in bed, the news of his arrival circulated from the cellar to the garret ; and ere ten minutes had elapsed, the landlord and all his guests were assembled round the ingle ; the largest punch-bowl was produced, and — - 'Be ours to-uight-— who knows what comes to-morrow?' was the language of every eye in the circle that welcomed him. The highest gentry of the neighbourhood, when bent on special merriment, did not think the occasion complete unless the wit and eloquence of Burns were called in to enliven their carousals." It can readily be imagined how distracting such a life must have been, how fatal to all mental concentration on i28 ROBERT BURNS. [chap. high objects, not to speak of the habits of which it was too sure to sow the seeds. The frequent visits to Dum- fries which his Excise work entailed, and the haunting of the Globe Tavern, already spoken of, led to consequences which, more than even deep potations, must have been fatal to his peace. His stay at Ellisland is now hastening to a close. Be- fore passing, how^ever, from that, on the whole the best period of his life since manhood, one or two incidents of the spring of 1791 must be mentioned. In the February of that year Burns received from the Rev. Archibald Alison, Episcopalian clergyman in Edinburgh, a copy of his once famous, but now, I believe, forgotten. Essay on Taste^ which contained the authorized exposition of that theory, so congenial to Scotch metaphysics, that objects seem beautiful to us only because our minds associate them with sensible objects which have previously given us pleasure. In his letter to the author, acknowledging the receipt of his book. Burns says, " I own, sir, at first glance, several of your propositions startle me as paradoxical : that the martial clangour of a trumpet had something in it vastly more grand, heroic, and sublime than the twingle- twangle of a Jew's-harp ; that the delicate flexure of a rose-twig, when the half-blown flow^er is heavy with the tears of the dawn, was infinitely more beautiful and elegant than the upright stub of a burdock ; and that from some- thing innate and independent of all association of ideas — these I had set down as irrefragable orthodox truths until perusing your book shook my faith." These words so pierce this soap-bubble of the metaphysicians, that we can hardly read them without fancying that the poet meant them to be ironical. Dugald Stewart expressed surprise that the unschooled Ayrshire ploughman should ha\c v.] LIFE AT ELLISLAND. 129 found "a distinct conception of the general principles of the doctrine of association ;" on which Mr. Carlyle re- marks, " We rather think that far subtler things than the doctrine of association had been of old familiar to him." In looking over his letters at this time (1791), we are startled by a fierce outburst in one of them, apparently apropos of nothing. He had been recommending to the protection of an Edinburgh friend a schoolmaster, whom he thought unjustly persecuted, when all at once he breaks out : " God help the children of Dependence ! Hated and persecuted by their enemies, and too often, alas ! almost unexceptionally, received by their friends with disrespect and reproach, under the thin disguise of cold civility and humiliating advice. Oh to be a sturdy savage, stalking in the pride of his independence, amid the solitary wilds of his deserts, rather than in civilized life helplessly to trem- ble for a subsistence, precarious as the caprice of a fellow- creature ! Every man has his virtues, and no man is with- out his failings ; and curse on that privileged plain-speak- ing of friendship which, in the hour of my calamity, can- not reach forth the helping-hand without at the same time pointing out those failings, and apportioning them their share in procuring my present distress. ... I do not want to be independent that I may sin, but I want to be inde- pendent in my sinning." What may have been the cause of this ferocious ex- plosion there is no explanation. Whether the real source of it may not have lain in certain facts which had occurred during the past spring, that must have rudely broken in on the peace at once of his conscience and his home, we cannot say. Certainly it does seem, as Chambers suggests, like one of those sudden outbursts of temper which fasten on some mere passing accident, because the real seat of it 1:S0 ROBERT BURNS. [chai-, lies tuo deep for words. Some instances of the same tem- per we have ah-eady seen. This is a sample of a growing exasperation of spirit, which found expression from time to time till the close of his life. Let us turn from this painful subject, to one of the only notices we get of him from a stranger's hand during the summer of 1791. Two English gentlemen, who were travelling, went to visit him ; one of whom has left an amusing account of their reception. Calling at his house, they were told that the poet was by the river side, and thither they went in search of him. On a rock that pro- jected into the stream, they saw a man employed in an- gling, of a singular appearance. He had a cap of fox's skin on his head, a loose great-coat fixed round him by a belt, from which depended an enormous Highland broad- sword. It was Burns. He received them with great cor- diality, and asked them to share his humble dinner — an invitation which they accepted. " On the table they found boiled beef, with vegetables and barley broth, after the manner of Scotland. After dinner the bard told them ingenuously that he had no wine, nothing better than Highland whiskey, a bottle of which he set on the board. He produced at the same time his punch-bowl, made of Inverary marble ; and, mixing it with water and sugar, filled their glasses and invited them to drink. The travel- lers w^ere in haste, and, besides, the flavour of the whiskey to their southern palates was scarcely tolerable ; but the generous poet offered them his best, and his ardent hospi- tality they found impossible to resist. Burns was in his happiest mood, and the charm of his conversation was al- together fascinating. He ranged over a variety of topics, illuminating whatever he touched. He related the tales of his infancy and youth ; he recited some of his gayest v.] LIFE AT ELLISLAXD. 131 and some of his tenderest poems ; in the wildest of his strains of mirth he threw in some touches of melancholy, and spread around him the electric emotions of his power- ful mind. The Highland whiskey improved in its flavour; the marble bowl was again and again emptied and replen- ished ; the guests of our poet forgot the flight of time and the dictates of prudence ; at the hour of midnight they lost their way to Dumfries, and could scarcely distinguish it when assisted by the morning's dawn. There is much naivete in the way the English visitor narrates his experi- ence of that ' nicht wi' Burns.' " Mr. Carlyle, if we remember aright, has smiled incred- ulously at the story of the fox-skin cap, the belt, and the broadsword. But of the latter appendage this is not the only record. Burns himself mentions it as a frequent ac- companim.ent of his when he went out by the river. The punch-bowl here mentioned is the one which his father-in-law had wrought for him as a marriage-gift. It was, when Chambers wrote his biography of Burns, in the possession of Mr. Haistie, then M.P. for Paisley, who is said to have refused for it three hundred guineas — "a sum," says Chambers, " that would have set Burns on his legs for ever." This is the last glimpse we get of the poet in his home at Ellisland till the end came. We have seen that he had long determined, if possible, to get rid of his farm. He had sunk in it all the proceeds that remained to him from the sale of the second edition of his poems, and for this the crops he had hitherto reaped had given no adequate return. Three years, however, were a short trial, and there was a good time coming for all farmers, when the war with France broke out, and raised the value of farm produce to a hitherto unknown amount. Tf Burns could 182 ROBERT BURNS. [chap. but have waited for that ! — but either he could not, or he would not wait. But the truth is, even if Burns ever had it in him to succeed as a farmer, that time was past when he came to Ellisland. Independence at the plough-tail, of which he often boasted, was no longer possible for him. He could no more work as he had done of yore. The habits contracted in Edinburgh had penetrated too deeply. Even if he had not been withdrawn from his farm by Ex- cise duties, he could neither work continuously himself, nor make his servants work. " Faith," said a neighbour- ing farmer, "how could he miss but fail? He brought with him a bevy of servants from Ayrshire. The lasses did nothing but bake bread (that is, oat-cakes), and the lads sat by the fireside and ate it warm with ale." Burns meanwhile enjoying himself at the house of some jovial farmer or convivial laird. How could he miss but fail ? When he had resolved on giving up his farm, an ar- rangement was come to with the Laird of Dalswinton by which Burns was allowed to throw up his lease and sell off his crops. Thesal^took place in the last week in August (1791). d^^H^his da^jte auctioneer and the bottle always appe^^Wfe Sy si^e^Pi©hambers observes ; but then far more than now-a-days. After the roup, that is the sale, of his crop was over, Burns, in one of his let- ters, describes the scene that took place within and with- out his house. It was one which exceeded anything he had ever seen in drunken horrors. Mrs. Burns and her family fortunately were not there to witness it, having gone many weeks before to Ayrshire, probably to be out of the way of all the pain that accompanies the breaking up of a country home. When Burns gave up his lease, Mr. Millar, the landlord, sold Ellisland to a stranger, be- cause the farm was an outlying one, inconveniently situ- v.] LIFE AT ELLISLA.\D. loo ated, ou a different side of the river from tlie rest of his estate. It was in November or December that Burns sold off his farm -stock and implements of husbandry, and moved his family and furniture into the town of Dura- fries, leaving at Ellisland no memorial of himself, as Allan Cunningham tells us, " but a putting-stone with which he loved to exercise his strength, and 300/. of his money, sunk beyond redemption in a speculation from which all had augured happiness." It is not without deep regret that even now we think of Burns's departure' from this beautiful spot. If there was any position on earth in which he could have been happy and fulfilled his genius, it would have been on such a farm — always providing that it could have given him the means of a comfortable livelihood, and that he himself could have guided his ways aright. That he might have had a fair opportunity, how often one has wished that he could have met some landlord who could have acted to- wards him, as the present Duke of Buccleuch did towards the Ettrick Shepherd in his later days, and have given a farm on which he could have sat rent-free. Such an act, one is apt to fancy, would have been honourable alike to giver and receiver. Indeed, a truly noble nature would have been only too grateful to find such an opportunity put in his way of employing a small part of his wealth for so good an end. But the notions of modern society, founded as they are so entirely on individual indepen- dence, for the most part preclude the doing and the re- ceiving of such favours. And with this social feeling no man was ever more filled than Burns. CHAPTER VI. MIGRATION TO DUMFRIES. A GREAT change it must have been to pass from the pleas- ant hohiis and broomy banks of the Nith at Ellisland to a town home in the Wee Vennel of Dumfries. It was, moreover, a confession visible to the world of what Burns himself had long felt, that his endeavour to combine the actual and the ideal, his natural calling as a farmer with the exercise of his gift as a poet, had failed, and that henceforth he must submit to a round of toil, which, nei- ther in itself nor in its surroundings, had anything to re- deem it from commonplace diudgery. He must have felt, from the time when he first became Exciseman, that he had parted company with all thought of steadily working out his ideal, and that whatever he might now do in that way must be by random snatches. To his proud spirit the name of ganger must have been gall and wormwood, and it is much to his credit that for the sake of his w'lie and children he was content to undergo what he often felt to be a social obloquy. It would have been well for him if this had been the only drawback to his new calling. Unfortunately the life into which it led him exposed him to those very temptations which his nature was least able to withstand. If social indulgence and irregular habits had somewhat impaired his better resolves, and his power of poetic concentration, before he left Ellisland, Dumfries, CHAP. VI. J >n(;RATI(>X TO DUMFRIES. i;{r. and the society into which it threw him, did with increased rapidity tlie fatal work which had been ah*eady begun. His biographers, though with varying degrees of emphasis, on the whole, agree that, from the time he settled in Dum- fries, "his moral course was downwards." The social condition of Dumfries at the time when Burns went to live in it was neither better nor worse than that of other provincial towns in Scotland. What that was, Dr. Chambers has depicted from his own youthful experience of just such another country town. The curse of such towns, he tells us, was that large numbers of their inhabitants were either half or wholly idle; either men living on competences, with nothing to do, or shopkeepers with their time but half employed ; their only amusement to meet in taverns, soak, gossip, and make stupid personal jokes. " The weary waste of spirits and energy at those soaking evening meetings was deplorable. Insipid toasts, petty raillery, euipty gabble about trivial occurrences, end- less disputes on small questions of fact, these relieved now and then by a song" — such Chambers describes as the items which made up provincial town life in his younger days. "A life," he says, "it was without progress or profit, or anything that tended to moral elevation." For such dull companies to get a spirit like Burns among them, to enliven them with his wit and eloquence, what a windfall it must have been ! But for him to put his time and his powers at their disposal, how great the degradation I During the day, no doubt, he was employed busily enough in doing his duty as an Excisemaft, This could now be done with less travelling than in the Ellisland days, and did not require him, as formerly, to keep a horse. When the day's work was over, his small house in the Wee VenneJ, and the domestic hearth with the family ties gath- 186 ROBERT BURNS. [chap. ercd round it, were not enougli for him. At Ellisland he had sung — " To make a happy fire-side clime, For weans and wife, Is the true pathos and sublime Of human life. ' But it is one thing to sing wisely, another to practise wisdom. Too frequently at nights Burns's love of sociali- ty and excitement drove him forth to seek the compan- ionship of neighbours and drouthy cronies, who gathered habitually at the Globe Tavern and other such haunts. From these he was always sure to meet a warm welcome, abundant appreciation, and even flattery, for to this he was not inaccessible ; while their humble station did not jar in any way on his social prejudices, nor their mediocre talents interfere with his love of pre-eminence. In such companies Burns no doubt had the gratification of feeling that he was, what is proverbially called, cock of the walk. The desire to be so probably grew with that growing dis- like to the rich and the titled, which was observed in him after he came to Dumfries. In earlier days we have seen that he did not shrink from the society of the greatest magnates,, and when they showed him that deference which he thought his due, he even enjoyed it. But now so bitter had grown his scorn and dislike of the upper classes, that we are told that if any one named a lord, or alluded to a man of rank in his presence, he instantly "crushed the offender in an epigram, or insulted him by some sarcastic sally." In a letter written during his first year at Dumfries, this is the way he speaks of his daily occupations : — " Hurry of business, grinding the faces of the publican and the sinner on the merciless wheels of the Excise,, makinsr ballads, and then drinkino- and sino^inoj VI. J MIGRATIOxN TO DUMFRIES. 137 them ; and over and above all, correcting the press of two different publications." But besides these duties by day and the convivialities by night, there were other calls on his time and strength, to which Burns was by his repu- tation exposed. When those of the country gentry whom he still knew were in Dumfries for some hours, or when any party of strangers passing through the town had an idle evening on their hands, it seems to have been their custom to summon Burns to assist them in spending it; and he was weak enough, on receiving the message, to leave his home and adjourn to the Globe, the George, or the King's Arms, there to drink with them late into the night, and waste his powers for their amusement. Verily, a Samson, as has been said, making sport for Philistines ! To one such invitation his impromptu answer was — " The king's most humble servant, I Can scarcely spare a minute ; But I'll be with you by-and-by, Or else the devil's in it." And this w^e may be sure was the spirit of many an- other reply to these ill-omened invitations. It would have been well if, on these occasions, the pride he boasted of had stood him in better stead, and repelled such unjustifi- able intrusions. But in this, as in so many other respects, Burns was the most inconsistent of men. From the time of his migration to Dumfries, it would appear that he was gradually dropped out of an acquaint- ance by most of the Dumfriesshire lairds, as he had long been by the parochial and all other ministers. I have only conversed with one person who remembered in his boyhood to have seen Burns. He was the son of a Dum- friesshire baronet, the representative of the House of Red- 7 138 ROBERT BURXS. [chap. gauntlet. The poet was frequently in the neighbourhood of the baronet's country seat, but the old gentleman so highly disapproved of "Robbie Burns," that he forbade liis sons to have anything to do with him. My inform- ant, therefore, though he had often seen, had never spoken to the poet. When I conversed with him, his age was nigh four -score years, and the one thing he remem- bered about Burns was " the blink of his black eye." This is probably but a sample of the feeling with which Burns was regarded by most of the country gentry around Dumfries. What were the various ingredients that made up their dislike of him it is not easy now exactly to de- termine. Politics most likely had a good deal .to do with it, for they were Tories and aristocrats, Burns was a Whig and something more. Though politics may have formed the chief, they were not probably the only element in their 9i^ersion. Yet though the majority of the county fami- lies turned their backs on him, there were some with which be still continued intimate. These were either the few Whig magnates of the south- ern counties, whose political projects he supported by elec- tioneering ballads, charged with all the powers of sarcasm he could Avield; or those still fewer, whose literary tastes were strong enough to make them willing, for the sake of his genius, to tolerate both his radical politics and his ir- regular life. Among these latter was a younger, brother of Burns's old friend. Glen Riddel, Mr. Walter Riddel, who with his wife had settled at a place four miles from Dum- fries, formerly called Goldie-lea, but named after Mrs. Rid- (^'el's maiden name, Woodley Park. Mrs. Riddel was hand- some, clever, witty, not without some tincture of letters, pnd some turn for verse -making. She and her husband v>'elcomed the poet to Woodh^y Park, where for two years VI.] MIGRATION TO DUMFRIES. 139 he was a constant and favourite guest. The lady's wit and literary taste found, it may be believed, no other so responsive spirit in all the south of Scotland. In the third year came a breach in their friendship, followed by a sav- age lampoon of Burns on the lady, because she did not at once accept his apology ; then a period of estrangement. After an interval, however, the Riddels forgave the insult, and were reconciled to the poet, and when the end came, Mrs. Riddel did her best to befriend him, and to do hon- our to his memory when he was gone. It ought perhaps to have been mentioned before, that about the time of Burns's first settling at Dumfries, that is towards the close of 1V91, he paid his last visit to Edin- burgh. It was occasioned by the news that Clarinda was about to sail for the West Indies, in search of the husband who had forsaken her. Since Burns's marriage the silence between them seems to have been broken by only two let- ters to Clarinda from Ellisland. In the first of these he resents the name of " villain," with which she appears to have saluted him. In the second he admits that his past conduct had been wrong, but concludes by repeating his error and enclosing a song addressed to her in the most exaggerated strain of love. Now he rushed to Edinburgh to see her once more before she sailed. The interview was a brief and hurried one, and no record of it remains, except some letters ?ind a few impassioned lyrics which about that time he ?iddressed to her. The first letter is stiff and formal, as if to break the ice of lono; estrano-e- ment. The others are in the last strain of rapturous de- votion — language which, if feigned, is the height of folly ; if real, is worse. The lyrics are some of them strained and artificial. One, however, stands out from all the rest, as one of the most impassioned effusions that Burns ever 140 ROBERT lURNS. [chap. poured forth. It contains that one consummate stanza in which Scott, Byron, and many more, saw concentrated " the essence of a thousand love-tales " — " Had we never loved so kindly, Had we never loved so blindly ; Never met, or never parted, We had ne'er been broken-hearted." After a time Mrs. M'Lehose returned from the West Indies, but without having recovered her truant husband. On her return, one or two more letters Burns wrote to her in the old exaggerated strain — the last in June, 1794 — af- ter which Clarinda disappears from the scene. Other Delilahs on a smaller scale Burns met with dur- ing his Dumfries sojourn, and to these he was ever and anon addressing songs of fancied love. By the attentions which the wayward husband was continually paying to ladies and others into whose society his wife could not accompany him, the patience of " bonny Jean," it may easily be conceived, must have been severely tried. It would have been well, however, if stray flirtations and Platonic affections had been all that could be laid to his charge. But there is a darker story. The facts of it are told by Chambers in connexion with the earlier part of the Dumfries period, and need not be repeated here. Mrs. Burns is said to have been a marvel of long-suffering and f orgivingness ; but the way she bore those wrongs must have touched her husband's better nature, and pierced him to the quick. When his calmer moments came, that very mildness must have made him feel, as nothing else could, what self-reproach was, and what " Self-contempt bitterer to drink than blood." To the pangs of that remorse have, I doubt not, been tru- vi.J MIGRATION TO DUMFKIE:;^. 141 ly attributed those bitter outpourings of disgust with the world and with society which are to be found in some of his letters, especially in those of his later years. Some samples of these outbreaks have been given ; more might easily have been added. The injuries he may have re- ceived from the world and society, what were they com- pared with those which he could not help feeling that he had inflicted on himself? It is when a man's own con- science is against him that the world looks worst. During the first year at Dumfries, Burns for the first time began to dabble in politics, which ere long landed him in serious trouble. Before this, though he had pass- ed for a sort of Jacobite, he had been in reality a Whig. While he lived in Edinburgh he had consorted more with Whigs than with Tories, but yet he had not in any marked way committed himself as a partisan. The only exception to this were some expressions in his poetry favourable to the Stuarts, and his avowed dislike to the Brunswick dy- nasty. Yet, notwithstanding these, his Jacobitism was but skin deep. It was only with him, as with so many anoth- er Scot of that day, the expression of his discontent with the Union of 1707, and his sense of the national degra- dation that had followed it. When in song he sighed to see Jamie come hame, this was only a sentimental protest against the existing order of things. But by the time he came to Dumfries the day of Jacobitism was over, and the whole aspect of the political heavens seemed dark with coming change. The French Revolution was in full swing, and vibrations of it were felt in the remotest corners of Europe. These reached even to the dull provincial towns of Scotland, and roused the pot-house politicians with whom Burns consorted, at the Globe and other taverns, to unwonted excitement. Under this nciw stimulus, Burns's ' 142 ROBERT BURNS. [chap. previous Jacobitisra passed towards the opposite, but not very distant, extreme of Jacobinism. At these gatherings we may easily imagine that, with his native eloquence, his debating power, trained in the Tarbolton Club, and his ambition to shine as a public speaker, the voice of Burns would be the loudest and most vehement. Liberty, Equal- ity, Fraternity, these were words which must have found an echo in his inmost heart. But it was not only the abstract rights of. man, but the concrete wrongs of Scot- land that would be there discussed. And wrongs no doubt there were, under which Scotland was suffering, ever since the Union had destroyed not only her national- ity, but almost her political existence. The franchise had become very close — in the counties restricted to a few of the chief families — in the boroughs thrown into the hands of the Baillies, who w^ere venal beyond conception. It was the day, too, of Henry Dundas. A prominent mem- ber of the Pitt administration, he ruled Scotland as an autocrat, and as the dispenser of all her patronage. A patriotic autocrat no doubt, loving his country, and pro- viding well for those of her people whom he favoured — still an autocrat. The despotism of Dundas has been pictured, in colours we may well believe sufficiently strong, by Lord Cockburn and others bent on inditing the Epic of Whiggery, in which they and their friends should fig- ure as heroes and martyrs. But whatever may be said against Dundas's regime as a permanent system, it must be allowed that this was no time to remodel it when Eng- land was face to face with the French troubles. When the tempest is breaking over the ship, the captain may reasonably be excused for thinking that the moment would be ill chosen for renewing cordage or repairing timbers. Whatever may have been right in a time of quiet, it was VI.] MIGRATION TO DUMFRIES. 143 not unuatiii'al that the Pitt administration sliould postpone all thoughts of reform, till the vessel of the State had weathered the storm which was then upon her. Besides his conviction as to public wrongs to be re- dressed, Burns had, he thought, personal grievances to complain of, which, as is so often seen, added fuel to his reforming zeal. His great powers, which he believed en- titled him to a very different position, were unacknowl- edged and disregarded by the then dispensers of patron- age. Once he had been an admirer of Pitt, latterly he could not bear the mention of his name. Of the ministry, Addington, we have seen, was fully alive to his merits, and pressed his claims on Pitt, who himself was quite awake to the charm of Burns's poetry. The Premier, it is said, " pushed the bottle on to Dundas, and did nothing " — to Dundas, too practical and too prosaic to waste a thought on poets and poetry. Latterly this neglect of him by public men preyed on the spirit of Burns, and was seldom absent from his thoughts. It added force, no doubt, to the rapture with which he, like all the younger poets of the time, hailed the French Revolution, and the fancied dawn of that day, which would place plebeian genius and worth in those high places, whence titled emptiness and landed incapacity would be at length thrust ignominiously down. , Burns had not been more than three months in Dum- fries, before he found an opportunity of testifying by deed his sympathy with the French Revolutionists. At that time the whole coast of the Solway swarmed with smug- gling vessels, carrying on a contraband traffic, and manned by men of reckless character, like the Dirk Hatteraick of Guy Mannering. In 1792, a suspicious-looking brig ap- peared in the Solway, and Burns, with other excisemen, 144 ROBERT BURXS. [chap. was set to watch licr motions. She got into shallow water, when the gangers, enforced by some dragoons, waded out to her, and Burns, sword in hand, was the first to board her. The captured brig " Rosamond," with all her arms and stores, was sold next day at Dumfries, and Burns became the purchaser of four of her guns. These he sent, with a letter, to the French Legislative Assem- bly, requesting them to accept the present as a mark of Ms admiration and sympathy. The guns with the letter never reached their destination. They were, however, intercepted by the Custom-house officers at Dover, and Burns at once became a suspected man in the eye of the Government. Lockhart, who tells this incident, connects with it the song, The DeiVs awa' wi' the Exciseman, which Burns, he said, composed while waiting on the shore to watch the brig. But Mr. Scott Douglas doubts whether the song is referable to this occasion. However this may be, the folly of Burns's act can hardly be disputed. He was in the employ of Government, and had no right to express in this way his sympathy with a movement which, he must have known, the Government, under whom he served, regarded, if not yet with open hostility, at least with jealous suspicion. Men who think it part of their personal right and public duty unreservedly to express, by word and deed, their views on politics, had better not seek employment in the public service. Burns having once drawn upon himself the suspicions of his superiors, all his words and actions were no doubt closely watched. It was found that he "gat the Gazetteer," a revolutionary print published in Edinburgh, which only the most extreme men patronized, and which after a few months' existence was suppressed by Government. As the year 1792 drew to a close, the political heaven, both at home and abroad, VI.] MIGRATION TO DUMFRIES. 145 became ominously dark. In Paris the king was in prison, the Reign of Terror had begun, and innocent blood of loyalists flowed freely in the streets ; the republic which had been established was threatening to propagate its principles in other countries by force of arras. In this country, what at the beginning of the year had been but suspicion of France, was now turned to avowed hostility, and war against the republic was on the eve of being declared. There were uneasy symptoms, too, at home. Tom Paine's Rights of Man and Age of Reason were spreading questionable doctrines and fomenting disaffec- tion. Societies named Friends of the People were formed in Edinburgh and the chief towns of Scotland, to demand reform of the representation and other changes, which, made at such a time, were believed by those in power to cover seditious aims. At such a crisis any government might be expected to see that all its officers, from the highest to the lowest, were well affected. But though the Reign of Terror had alarmed many others who had at first looked favourably on the Revolution in France, Burns's ardour in its cause was no whit abated. He even denounced the war on which the ministry had determined ; he openly reviled the men in power; and went so far in his avowal of democracy that at a social meeting, he pro- posed as a toast, " Here's the last verse of the last chapter of the last Book of Kings.'" This would seem to be but one specimen of the freedom of political speech in which Burns at this time habitually indulged — the truculent way in which he flaunted defiance in the face of authority. It would not have been surprising if at any time the Govern- ment had ordered inquiry to be made into such conduct, much less in such a season of anxiety and distrust. That an inquiry was made is undoubted ; but as to the result 1* 146 ROBERT BURXS. [chak which followed it, there is uncertainty. Some have thought that the poet received' from his superiors only a slight hint or caution to be more careful in future. Others believed, that the matter went so far that he was in serious danger of dismissal from his post; and that this was only averted by the timely interposition of some kind and powerful friends. That Burns himself took a serious view of it, and was sufficiently excited and alarmed, may be seen from two letters which he wrote, the one at the time of the occurrence, the other soon after it. It ■was thus that in December, 1792, he addressed Mr. Graham of Fintray, the same person whose good offices had at first obtained for the poet his appointment, and whose kind- ness never failed him while he lived : "Sir, — I have been surprised, confounded, and dis- tracted by Mr. Mitchell, the collector, telling me that he has received an order from your Board to inquire into my political conduct, and blaming me as a person disaffected to Government. " Sir, you are a husband and a father. You know what you would feel to see the much-loved wife of your bosom, and your helpless, prattling little ones turned adrift into the world, degraded and disgraced from a situation in which they had been respectable and respected, and left almost without the necessary support of a miserable ex- istence. "Alas ! sir, must I think that such soon will be my lot! and from the dark insinuations of hellish, groundless envy, too ! I believe, sir, I may aver it, and in the sight of Omniscience, that I would not tell a deliberate false- hood, no, not though even worse horrors, if w orse can be, than those I have mentioned, hung over my head ; and I VI.] MIGRATION TO DUMFRIES. 117 X say, that the allegation, whatever villain has made it, is a lie ! To the British Constitution, on revolution principles, next after my God, I am most devoutly attached. You, sir, have been much and generously my friend. — Heaven knows how warmly I have felt the obligation, and how gratefully I have thanked you. Fortune, sir, has made you powerful, and me impotent — has given you patronage, and me dependence. I would not, for my single self, call on your humanity ; were such my insular, unconnected situation, I would despise the tear that now swells in my eye. I would brave misfortune — I could face ruin, for at the worst Death's thousand doors stand open ; but — the tender concerns that I have mentioned, the claims and ties that I see at this moment, and feel around me, how they unnerve courage and wither resolution ! To your patronage, as a man of some genius, you have allowed me a claim ; and your esteem, as an honest man, I know is my due. To these, sir, permit me to appeal ; by these may I adjure you to save me from that misery which threatens to overwhelm me, and which — with my latest breath I will say it — I have not deserved. R. B." That this appeal was not without effect may be gathered from a letter on this same affair, which Burns addressed on the 13th April, 1793, to Mr. Erskine, of Mar, in which he says one of the supervisors-general, a Mr. Corbet, " was instructed to inquire on the spot, and to document me that my business was to act, not to think : and that, whatever might be men or measures, it was for me to be sile7it and obedient.''^ Much obloquy has been heaped upon the Excise Board —but on what grounds of justice I have never been able to discover — for the way in which they on this occasion 148 ROHERT liURNS. [chap. dealt with Burns. The members of the Board were the servants of the Government, to wliich they were responsi- ble for the conduct of all their subordinates. To have al- lowed any of their subordinates to set themselves up by word or deed in opposition to the Ministry, and especially at such a crisis, was inconsistent with the ideas of the time as to official duty. And when called on to act, it is hard to see how they could have done so with more leniency than by hinting to him the remonstrance which so alarmed and irritated the recipient of it. Whatever may be said of his alarm, his irritation, if perhaps natural, was not rea- sonable. No man has a right to expect that, because he is a genius, he shall be absolved from those rules of con- duct, either in private or in public life, which are held binding on his more commonplace brethren. About tlie time when he received this rebuke, he wrote to Mrs. Dun- lop, " I have set, henceforth, a seal on my lips as to these unlucky politics." But neither his own resolve nor the remonstrance of the Excise Board seem to have weighed much with him. He continued at convivial parties to ex- press his feelings freely ; and at one of these, shortly after he had been rebuked by the Excise Board, when the health of William Pitt was drunk, he followed it by craving a bumper " to the health of a much better man — General Washington." And on a subsequent occasion, as we shall see, he brought himself into trouble by giving an inju- dicious toast. The repression brought to bear on Burns cannot have been very stringent when he was still free to sport such sentiments. The worst effect of the remon- strance he received seems to have been to irritate his tem- per, and to depress his spirits by the conviction, unfounded though it was, that all hope of promotion for him was over. VI.] MIGRATiOX TO DUMFRIES. 149 But amid all the troubles entailed on him by his con- duct, domestic, social, and political, the chief refuge and solace which he found was in exercising his gifts of song. All hope of his ever achieving a great poem, which called for sustained effort, was now over. Even poems descrip- tive of rustic life and characters, such as he had sketched in his Ayrshire days — for these he had now no longer either time or inclination. His busy and distracted life, however, left him leisure from time to time to give vent to his impulses, or to soothe his feelings by short arrow- flights of song. He found in his own experience the truth of those words of another poet — " They can make who fail to find Short leisure even in busiest days, Moments to cast a look behind, And profit by those kindly rays *Which through the clouds will sometimes steal, And all the far-off past reveal." Such breaks in the clouds he eagerly waited for, and turned every golden gleam to song. It may be remembered that while Burns was in Edin- burgh he became acquainted with James Johnson, who was engaged in collecting the songs of Scotland in a work called the Musical Museum. He had at once thrown him- self ardently into Johnson's undertaking, and put all his power of traditional knowledge, of criticism, and of orig- inal composition at Johnson's disposal. This he continued to do through all the Ellisland period, and more or less during his residence in Dumfries. To the Museum Burns from first to last gratuitously contributed not less than one hundred and eighty -four songs, original, altered, or collected. Durino; the first vear that Burns lived in Dumfries, in 150 ROBERT BURNS. [chap. September, 1792, he reeeived an itivitatiuu from Mr. George Thomson to lend the aid of his lyrical genius to a collec- tion of Scottish melodies, airs, and words, which a small band of musical amateurs in Edinburgh were then project- ing. This collection was pitched to a higher key than the comparatively humble Museum. It was to be edited with more rigid care, the symphonies and accompaniments were to be supplied by the first musicians of Europe, and it was to be expurgated from all leaven of coarseness, and from whatever could offend the purest taste. To Thomson's proposal Burns at once replied, " As the request you make to me will positively add to my enjoyment in complying with it, I shall enter into your undertaking with all the small portion of abilities I have, strained to their utmost exertion by the impulse of enthusiasm. . . . " If you are for English verses, there is, on my part, an end of the matter. Whether in the simplicity of the bal- lad, or the pathos of the song, I can only hope to please myself in being allowed at least a sprinkling of our native tongue. ... As to remuneration, you may think my songs either above or below price ; for they shall be absolutely^ the one or the other. In the honest enthusiasm with which I embark in your undertaking, to talk of money, wages, fee, hire, &c., would be downright prostitution of soul." In this spirit he entered on the enterprise which Thom- son opened before him, and in this spii'it he worked at it to the last, pouring forth song after song almost to his latest breath. Hardly less interesting than the songs them- selves, which from time to time he sent to Thomson, were the letters with which he accompanied them. In these his judgment and critical power are as conspicuous as his gen- ius and his enthusiasm for the native melodies. For all who take interest in songs and in the laws which govern VI.] MIGRATION TO DUMFRIES. 151 their movement, I know not where else they would find hints so valuable as in these occasional remarks on his own and others' songs, by the greatest lyric singer whom the modern world has seen. The bard who furnished the English songs for this col- lection was a certain Dr. Wolcot, known as Peter Pindar. This poetizer, who seems to have been wholly devoid of genius, but to have possessed a certain talent for hitting the taste of the hour, was then held in high esteem ; he has long since been forgotten. Even Burns speaks of him with much respect. "The very name of Peter Pindar is an acquisition to your work," he writes to Thomson. Well might Chambers say, "It is a humiliating thought that Pe- ter Pindar was richly pensioned by the booksellers, while Burns, the true sweet singer, lived in comparative pov^er-* ty." Hard measure l^as been dealt to Thomson for not hav- ing liberally remunerated Burns for the priceless treasures which he supplied to the Collection. Chambers and oth- ers, who have thoroughly examined the whole matter, have shown this censure to be undeserved. Thomson himself was by no means rich, and his work brought him nothing but outlay as long as Burns lived. Indeed once, in July, 1*793, when Thomson had sent Burns some money in re- turn for his songs, the bard thus replied : " I assure you, my dear sir, that you truly hurt me with your pecuniary parcel. It degrades me in my own eyes. However, to return it would savour of affectation ; but, as to any more traffic of that debtor and creditor kind, I swear, by that honour which crowns the upright statue of Robert Burns's Integrity^ on the least motion of it, I will indignantly spurn the by-pact transaction, and from that moment commence entire stranger to you. Burns's character for generosity of sentiment and independence of 152 ROBERT BURNS. [chap vi. mind will, I trust, long outlive any of his wants which the cold, unfeeling ore can supply ; at least I will take care that such a character he shall deserve." This sentiment was no doubt inconsistent, and may be deemed Quixotic, when we remember that for his poems Burns was quite willing to accept all that Creech would offer. Yet one cannot but lion our it. He felt that both Johnson and Thomson were enthusiasts, labouring to em- balm in a permanent form their country's minstrelsy, and that they were doing this without any hope of profit. He too would bear his part in the noble work ; if he had not in other respects done full justice to his great gifts, in this way he would repay some of the debt he owed to his country, by throwing into her national melodies the whole wealth and glory of his genius. And this he would do, " all for love, and nothing for reward." And the con- tinual effort to do this worthily was the chief relaxation and delight of those sad later years. When he died, he had contributed to Thomson's work sixty songs, but of these only six had then appeared, as only one half-volume of Thomson's work had then been published. Burns had given Thomson the copyright of all the sixty songs ; but as soon as a posthumous edition of the poet's works was proposed, Thomson returned all the songs to the poet's family, to be included in the forthcoming edition, along with the interesting letters which had accompanied the songs. Thomson's collection was not completed till 1841, when the sixth and last volume of it appeared. It is affecting to know that Thomson himself, who was older than Burns by two years, survived him for more than five- and-fifty, and died in February, 1851, at the ripe old age of ninety-four. CHAPTER VII. LAST YEARS. During those Dumfries years little is to be done by the biographer but to trace the several incidents in Burns's quarrel with the world, his growling exasperation, and the evil effects of it on his conduct and his fortunes. It is a painful record, but since it must be given, it shall be with as much brevity as is consistent with truth. In July, 1793, Burns made an excursion into Galloway, accompanied by a Mr. Syme, who belonging, like himself, to the Excise, admired the poet, and agreed with his poli- tics. Syme has preserved a record of this journey, and the main impression left by the perusal of it is the strange access of ill-temper which had come over Burns, who kept venting his spleen in epigrams on all whom he disliked, high and low. They visited Kenmure, where lived Mr. Gordon, the representative of the old Lords Kenmure. They passed thence over the muirs to Gatehouse, in a wild storm, during which Burns was silent, and crooning to himself what, Syme says, was the first thought of Scots ivha hae. They were engaged to go to St. Mary's Isle, the seat of the Earl of Selkirk ; but Burns was in snch a savage mood against all lords, that he was with difficulty persuaded to go thither, though Lord Selkirk was no Tory, but a Whig, like himself, and the father of his old friend, Lord Daer, by this time deceased, who had first convinced .54 ROBERT BURxX^. LCHAP. liiiii that a lord might possibly be an honest and Kind- hearted man. When they were once under the hospitable roof of St. Mary's Isle, the kindness with which they were received appeased the poet's bitterness. The Earl was be- nign, the young ladies were beautiful, and two of them sang Scottish songs charmingly. Urbani, an ItaHan mu- sician who had edited Scotch music, was there, and sang many Scottish melodies, accompanying them with instru- mental music. Burns recited some of his songs amid the deep silence that is most expressive of admiration. The evening passed very pleasantly, and the lion of the morn- ing had, ere the evening was over, melted to a lamb. Scots wha hae has been mentioned. Mr. Syme tells us that it was composed partly while Burns was riding in a storm between Gatehouse and Kenrnure, and partly on the second morning after this, when they were journeying from St. Mary's Isle to Dumfries. And Mr. Syme adds that next day the poet presented him with one copy of the poem for himself, and a second for Mr. Dalzell. Mr. Carlyle says, '' This Dithyrambic was composed on horse- back ; in riding in the middle of tempests over the wild- est Galloway moor, in company with a Mr. Syme, who, observing the poet's looks, forbore to speak — judiciously enough — for a man composing Bruce's address might be unsafe to trifle with. Doubtless this stern hymn was singing itself, as he formed it, through the soul of Burns, but to the external ear it should be sung with the throat of the whirlwind," Burns, however, in a letter to Mr. Thomson, dated Sep- tember, 1793, gives an account of the composition of his war-ode, which is difficult to reconcile with Mr. Syme's statement. " There is a tradition which I have met with ill many places in Scotland," he writes, "that the old air, vir.] LAST YP:AR8. 155 Hey, tuttie taitie, was Robert Bruce's march at the battle of Bannockburn. This thought, in my yesternight's even- ing walk, warmed me to a pitch of enthusiasm on the theme of liberty and independence, which I threw into a kind of Scottish ode, fitted to the air, that one might sup- pose to be the gallant royal Scot's address to his heroic followers on that eventful morning." He adds that "the accidental recollection of that glorious struggle for free- dom, associated with the glowing ideas of some struggles of the same nature, not quite so ancient, roused my rhym- ing mania." So Bruce^s Address owes its inspiration as much to Burns's sympathy' with the French Republicans as to his Scottish patriotism. As to the intrinsic merit of the ode itself, Mr. Carlyle says, " So long as there is warm blood in the heart of Scotchmen or man, it will move in fierce thrills under this war-ode, the best, we believe, that was ever written by any pen." To this verdict every son of Scottish soil is, I suppose, bound to say Amen. It ought not, however, to be concealed that there has been a very different estimate formed of it by judges sufficiently compe- tent. I remember to have read somewhere of a conversa- tion between Wordsworth and Mrs. Hemans, in which they both agreed that the famous ode was not much more than a commonplace piece of school -boy rhodomontade about liberty. Probably it does owe not a little of its power to the music to which it is sung, and to the associations which have gathered round it. The enthusiasm for French Revolution sentiments, which may have been in Burns's mind when composing it, has had nothing to do with the delight with which thousands since have sung and listened to it. The poet, however, when he first conceived it, was no doubt raging inwardly, like a lion, not only caged, but muzzled with the o-ao- Qf \^[^ servitude to Government. 156 ROBERT BURNS. [chap. But for this, what diatribes in favour of the Revolution might we not have had, and what pain must it have been to Burns to suppress these under the coercion of exter- nal authority ! Partly to this feeling, as well as to other causes, may be ascribed such outbursts as the following, written to a female correspondent, immediately after his return from the Galloway tour : " There is not among all the martyrologies that ever were penned, so rueful a narrative as the lives of the poets. In the comparative view of wretches, the criterion is not what they are doomed to suffer, but how they are formed to bear. Take a being of our kind, give him a stronger imagination, and a more delicate sensibility, which between them will ever engender a more ungovernable set of passions than are the usual lot of man ; implant in him an irresistible impulse to some idle vagary, ... in short, send him adrift after some pursuit which shall eternally mislead him from the paths of lucre, and yet curse him with a keener relish than any man living for the pleasures that lucre can purchase ; lastly, fill up the measure of his woes by bestowing on him a spurning sense of his own dignity — and you have created a wight nearly as misera- ble as a poet." This passage will recall to many the cata- logue of sore evils to which poets are by their tempera- ment exposed, which Wordsworth in his Leech-gatherer enumerates. " The fear that kills, And hope that is unwilling to be fed ; Cold, pain, and labour, and all fleshly ills ; And mighty poets in their misery dead." In writing that poem Wordsworth had Burns among others prominently in his eye. What a commentary is the life of the inore impulsive poet on the lines of his vii.j LAST YEARS. 167 younger and more self-controlling* brother ! Daring those years of political unrest and of growing mental disquiet, his chief solace was, as I have said, to compose songs for Thomson's Collection, into which he poured a continual supply. Indeed it is wonderful how often he was able to escape from his own vexations into that serener atmosphere, and there to suit melodies and moods most alien to his own with fitting words. Here in one of his letters to Thomson is the way he de- scribes himself in the act of composition. " My way is — I consider the poetic sentiment correspondent to my idea of the musical expression ; then choose my theme ; begin one stanza ; when that is composed, which is generally the most difficult part of the business, I walk out, sit down now and then, look out for objects in nature around me that are in unison and harmony with the cogitations of my fancy and workings of my bosom ; humming every now and then the air with the verses I have framed. When I feel my Muse beginning to jade, I retire to the solitary fireside of my study, and there commit my effu- sions to paper; swinging at intervals on the hind legs of my elbow-chair, by way of calling forth my own critical strictures as my pen goes on." To this may be added what Allan Cunningham tells us. "AVhile he lived in Dumfries he had three favourite walks — on the Dock- green by the river-side ; among the ruins of Lincluden College; and towards the Martingdon-ford, on the north side of the Nith. This latter place was secluded, com- manded a view of the distant hills and the romantic tow- ers of Lincluden, and afforded soft greensward banks to rest upon, within sight and sound of the stream. As soon as he was heard to hum to himself, his wife saw that he had something in his mind, and was prepared to see him 158 K0I3EUT BUKNS. [chap. snatch up his hat, and set silently off for his nuising- ground. When by himself, and in the open air, his ideas arranged themselves in their natural order — words came at will, and he seldom returned without having finished a song. . . . When the verses were finished, he passed them through the ordeal of Mrs. Burns's voice, listened atten- tively when she sang ; asked her if any of the words were difficult ; and when one happened to be too rough, he read- ily found a smoother ; but he never, save at the resolute entreaty of a scientific musician, sacrificed sense to sound. The autumn was his favourite season, and the twilight his favourite hour of study." Regret has often been expressed that Burns spent so much time and thought on writing his songs, and, in this way, diverted his energies from higher aims. Sir Walter has said, "Notwithstanding the spirit of many of his lyrics, and the exquisite sweetness and simplicity of others, we cannot but deeply regret that so much of his time and talents was frittered away in compiling and composing for musical collections. There is sufficient evidence that even the genius of Burns could not support him in the monot- onous task of writing love-verses, on heaving bosoms and sparkling eyes, and twisting them into such rhythmical forms as might suit the capricious evolutions of Scotch reels and strathspeys." Even if Burns', instead of continual song-writing during the last eight years of his life, had concentrated his strength on " his grand plan of a dramat- ic composition " on the subject of Bruce's adventures, it may be doubted whether he would have done so much to enrich his country's literature as he has done by the songs he composed. But considering how desultory his habits became, if Johnson and Thomson had not, as it were, set him a congenial task, he might not have produced any- Ml.] LAST YEARS. in^ thing at all during' ttiose years. There is, howcwn', anoth- er aspect in which the continual composition of love-ditties must be regretted. The few genuine love-songs, straight from the heart, which he composed, such as Of a' the Airts, To Mart/ In Heaven, Ye Banks and Braes, can hard- ly be too highly prized. But there are many others^ which arose from a lower and fictitious source of inspira- tion. He himself tells Thomson that when he wished to compose a love-song, his recipe was to put himself on a " regimen of admiring a beautiful woman.*" This was a dangerous regimen, and when it came to be often repeated^ as it was. it cannot have tended to his peace of heart, or to the purity of his life. The first half of the year 1794 was a more than usually unhappy time with Burns. It was almost entirely song- less. Instead of poetry, we hear of political dissatisfaction, excessive drinking-bouts, quarrels, and self-reproach. This was the time when our country was at war with tlie French Republic — a war which Burns bitterly disliked, but his employment under Government forced him to set " a seal oU'his lips as to those unlucky politics." A regiment of soldiers was quartered in the town of Dumfries, and to Burns's eye the sight of their red coats was so offensive^ that he would not go down the plainstones lest he should meet " the epauletted puppies," who thronged the street; One of these epauletted puppies, whom he so disliked, found occasion to pull Burns up rather smartly. The poet, when in his cup% had in the hearing of a certain cap-^ tain proposed as a toast, '' May our success in the present war be equal to the justice of our cause." The soldier called him to account — a duel seemed imminent, and Burns had next day to write an apologetic letter, in order to avoid the risk of ruin. About the same time he was IGO ROBERT BURNS. [chap. involved, through intemperance, in another and more pain- ful quarrel. It has been already noticed that at Wood- ley Park he was a continual guest. With Mrs. Riddel, who was both beautiful and witty, he carried on a kind of poetic flirtation. Mr. Walter Riddel, the host, was wont to press his guests to deeper potations than were usual even in those hard-drinking days. One evening, when the guests had sat till they were inflamed with wine, they en- tered the drawing-room, and Burns in some way grossly insulted the fair hostess. Next day he wrote a letter of the most abject and extravagant penitence. This, how- ever, Mr. and Mrs. Riddel did not think flt to accept. Stung by this rebuff, Burns recoiled at once to the oppo- site extreme of feeling, and penned a grossly scurrilous monody on " a lady famed for her caprice." This he fol- lowed up by other lampoons, full of " coarse rancour against a lady who had showed him many kindnesses." The Laird of Friars Carse and his lady naturally sided with their relatives, and grew cold to their old friend of EUisland. While this coldness lasted, Mr. Riddel, of Friars Carse, died in the spring-time, and the poet, remembering his friend's worth and former kindness, wrote a sonnet over him — not one of his best or most natural perform- ances, yet showing the return of his better heart. During the same spring we hear of Burns going to the house of one of the neighbouring gentry, and dining there, not with the rest of the party, but, by his own choice, it would seem, with the housekeeper in her room, and joining the gentlemen in the dining-room after the ladies had retired. He was now, it seems, more disliked by ladies than by men — a change since those Edinburgh days, when the highest dames of the land had spoken so rapturously of the charm of liis conversation. Ml.] LAST YEARS. 161 Amid the gloom of this unhappy time (l791), Burns turned to his old Edinburgh friend, Alexander Cunning- ham, and poured forth this passionate and well-known complaint: — "Canst thou minister to a mind diseased? Canst thou speak peace and rest to a soul tossed on a sea of troubles, without one friendly star to guide her course, and dreading that the next surge may overwhelm her? Of late, a number of domestic vexations, and some pecun- iary share in the ruin of these cursed times — losses which, though trifling, were what I could ill bear — have so ir- ritated me, that my feelings at times could only be envied by a reprobate spirit listening to the sentence that dooms it to perdition. — Are you deep in the language of consola- tion? I have exhausted in reflection every topic of com- fort. A heart at ease would have been charmed with my sentiments and reasonings; but as to myself, I was like Judas Iscariot preaching the Gospel. . . . Still there are two great pillars that bear us up amid the wreck of mis- fortune and misery. The one is composed of a certain noble, stubborn something in man, known by the names of Courage, Fortitude, Magnanimity. The other is made up of those feelings and sentiments which, however the sceptic may deny them, or the enthusiast may disfigure them, are yet, I am convinced, original and component parts of the human soul, those senses of the mind — if I may be allowed the expression — which connect us with and link us to those awful obscure realities — an all-power- ful and equally beneficent God, and a world to come, be- yond death and the grave. The first gives the nerve of combat, while a ray of hope beams on the field : the last pours the balm of comfort into the wounds which time can never cure." This remarkable, or, as Lockhart calls it, noble letter, 8 162 ROBERT BURNS. [chap. was written on February 25, 1794. It was probably a few months later, perhaps in May of the same year, while Burns was still under this depression, that there occurred an affecting incident, which has been preserved by Lock- hart. Mr. David McCulloch, of Ardwell, told Lockhart, *' that he was seldom more grieved than wnen, riding into Dumfries one fine summer's evening, to attend a country ball, he saw Burns walking alone, on the shady side of the principal street of the town, while the opposite part was gay with successive groups of gentlemen and ladies, all drawn together for the festivities of the night, not one of whom seemed willing to recognize the poet. The horse- man dismounted and joined Burns, who, on his propos- ing to him to cross the street, said, ' Nay, nay, my young friend, that's all over now ;' and quoted, after a pause, some verses of Lady Grizzell Baillie's pathetic ballaC : *' ' His bonnet stood ance f u' fair on his brow, His auld ane looked better than mony ane's new ; But now he lets 't wear ony way it will hing, • And casts hirasell dowie upon the corn-bing. " ' 0, were we young, as we ance hae been, We suld hae been galloping down on yon green, And linking it owre the lily-white lea — And werena my heart light, I wad die.' " " It was little in Burns's character to let his feelings on certain subjects escape in this fashion. He immediately after citing these verses assumed the sprightliness of his most pleasing manner ; and taking his young friend home with him, entertained him very agreeably until the hour of the ball arrived, with a bowl of his usual potation, and Bonnie Jean's singing of some verses which he had recent- ly composed." Ml.] LAST YEARS. " 163 In June we find him expressing to Mrs. Dunlop the earliest hint that he felt his health declining. " I am afraid," he says, " that I am about to suffer for the follies of my youth. My medical friends threaten me with fly- ing gout ; but I trust they are mistaken." And again, a few months later, we find him, when writing to the same friend, recurring to the same apprehensions. Vexation and disappointment within, and excesses, if not continual, yet too frequent, from without, had for long been under- mining his naturally strong but nervously sensitive frame, and fhose symptoms were now making themselves felt, which were soon to lay him in an early grave. As the autumn drew on, his singing powers revived, and till the close of the year he kept pouring into Thomson a stream of songs, some of the highest stamp, and hardly one with- out a touch such as only the genuine singer can give. The letters, too, to Thomson, with which he accompanies his gifts, are full of suggestive thoughts on song, hints most precious to all who care for such matters. For the forgotten singers of his native land he is full of sympathy. " By the way," he writes to Thomson, "are you not vexed to think that those men of genius, for such they certainly were, who composed our fine Scottish lyrics, should be un- known ?" Many of the songs of that autumn were, as usual, love- ditties ; but when the poet could forget the lint-white locks of Chloris, of which kind of stuff there is more than enough, he would write as good songs on other and manlier subjects. Two of these, written, the one in November, 1794, the other in January, 1795, belong to the latter or- der, and are worthy of careful regard, not only for their excellence as songs, but also as illustrations of the poet's inood of mind at the time when he composed them. 104 . ROBERT BURNS. [chap. The first is this — " Contented wi' little, and cantie wi' mair, Whene'er I forgather wi' sorrow and care, I gie them a skelp as they're creepin' alang, Wi' a cog o' gude swats, and an auld Scottish sang. ' I whyles claw the elbow o' troublesome thought ; But man is a soger, and life is a faught : My mirth and gude humour are coin in my pouch. And my Freedom's my lairdship nae monarch dare touch. " A towmond o' trouble, should that be my fa', A night o' gude fellowship sowthers it a' ; When at the blythe end o' our journey at last, Wha the deil ever thinks o' the road he has past ? " Blind Chance, let her snapper and stoyte on her way ; Be't to me, be't frae me, e'en let the jade gae : Come Ease, or come Travail, come Pleasure or Pain, My warst word is — Welcome, and welcome again." This song gives Burns's idea of himself, and of his strug- gle with the world, when he could look on both from the placid, rather than the despondent side. He regarded it as a true picture of himself ; for, when a good miniature of him had been done, he wrote to Thomson that he wish- ed a vignette from it to be prefixed to this song, that, in his own words, " the portrait of my face and the picture of my mind may go down the stream of time together." Burns had more moods of mind than most men, and this was, we may hope, no unfrequent one with him. But if we would reach the truth, we probably ought to strike a balance between the spirit of this song and the dark moods depicted in some of those letters already quoted. The other song of the same time is the well-known A Man's a Man for a' that. This powerful song speaks out VII.] LAST YEARS. 165 in his best style a sentiment that through all his life had been dear to the heart of Burns. It has been quoted, they say, by Beranger in France, and by Goethe in Germany, and is the word which springs up in the mind of all for- eigners when they think of Burns. It was inspired, no doubt, by his keen sense of social oppression, quickened to white heat by influences that had lately come from France, and by what he had suffered for his sympathy with that cause. It has since become the watchword of all w^ho fancy that they have secured less, and others more, of this world's goods than their respective merit deserves. Strono-er words he never wrote. '&" " The rank is but the guinea's stamp, The man's the gowd for a' that." That is a word for all time. Yet perhaps it might have been wished that so noble a song had not been marred by any touch of social bitterness. A lord, no doubt, may be a " birkie " and a " coof," but may not a ploughman be so too ? This great song Burns wrote on the first day of 1795. Towards the end of 1794, and in the opening of 1795, the panic which had filled the land in 1792, from the do- ings of the French republicans, and their sympathizers in this country, began to abate ; and the blast of Government displeasure, which for a time had beaten heavily on Burns, seemed to have blown over. He writes to Mrs. Dunlop on the 29th of December, 1794, "My political sins seem to be forgiven me ;" and as a proof of it he mentions that dur- ing the illness of his superior officer, he had been appoint- ed to act as supervisor — a duty which he discharged for about two months. In the same letter he sends to that good lady his usual kindly greeting for the coming year, 16G ROBERT BURNS. [chap. and concludes thus : — " What a transient business is life ! Very lately I was a boy ; but t' other day I was a young man ; and I already begin to feel the rigid fibre and stiff- ening joints of old age coming fast o'er my frame. With all the follies of youth, and, I fear, a few vices of man- hood, still I congratulate myself on having had, in early days, religion strongly impressed on my mind." Burns al- ways keeps his most serious thoughts for this good lady. Herself religious, she no doubt tried to keep the truths of religion before the poet's mind. And he naturally was drawn out to reply in a tone more unreserved than when he wrote to most others. In February of the ensuing year, 1795, his duties as su- pervisor led him to what he describes as the " unfortunate, wicked little village " of Ecclefechan, in Annandale, The night after he arrived, there fell the heaviest snow-storm known in Scotland within living memory. When people awoke next morning they found the snow up to the win- dows of the second story of their houses. In the hollow of Campsie hills it lay to the depth of from eighty to a hundred feet, and it had not disappeared from the streets of Edinburgh on the king's birthday, the 4th of June. Storm-stayed at Ecclefechan, Burns indulged in deep po- tations and in song-writing. Probably he imputed to the place that with which his own conscience reproached him- self. Currie, who was a native of Ecclefechan, much of- fended, says, " The poet must have been tipsy indeed to abuse sweet Ecclefechan at this rate." It was also the birthplace of the poet's friend Nicol, and of a greater than he. On the 4th of December in the very year on which Burns visited it, Mr. Thomas Carlyle was born in that vil- lage. Shortly after his visit, the poet beat his brains to find a rhyme for Ecclefechan, and to twist it into a song. ml] last years. 16Y In Marcli of the same year we find him again joining in local politics, and writing electioneering ballads for Heron of Heron, the Whig candidate for the Stewartry of Kirk-' cudbright, against the nominee of the Earl of Galloway, against whom and his family Burns seems to have har- boured some peculiar enmity. Mr. Heron won the election, and Burns wrote to him about his own prospects : — " The moment I am appointed supervisor, in the common routine I may be nominated on the collectors' list ; and this is always a business of pure- ly political patronage. A collectorship varies much, from better than 200Z. to near 1000/. a year. A life of literary leisure, with a decent competency, is the summit of my wishes." The hope here expressed was not destined to be fulfilled. It required some years for its realization, and the years al- lotted to Burns were now nearly numbered. The prospect which he here dwells on may, however, have helped to lighten his mental gloom during the last year of his life. For one year of activity there certainly was, betw^een the time when the cloud of political displeasure against him disappeared towards the end of 1*794, and the time when his health finally gave way in the autumn of 1795, during which, to judge by his letters, ho indulged much less in outbursts of social discontent. One proof of this is seen in the following fact. In the spring of 1795, a volunteer corps was raised in Dumfries, to defend the country, while the regular army was engaged abroad, in war with France. Many of the Dumfries Whigs, and among them Burns's friends, Syme and Dr. Maxwell, enrolled themselves in the corps, in order to prove their loyalty and. patriotism, on which some suspicions had previously been cast. Burns too offered himself, and was received iuto the corps. Al- 168 ROBERT BURNF. [chap. Ian Cunningham remembered the appearance of the regi- ment, " their odd but not ungraceful dress ; white kersey- mere breeches and waistcoat ; short blue coat, faced with red ; and round hat, surmounted by a bearskin, like the helmets of the Horse Guards." He remembered the poet too, as he showed among them, " his very swarthy face, his ploughman stoop, his large dark eyes, and his awkward- ness in handling his arms." But if he could not handle his musket deftly, he could do what none else in that or any other corps could, he could sing a patriotic stave which thrilled the hearts not only of -his comrades, but every Briton from Land's End to Johnny Groat's. This is one of the verses : — "The kettle o' the kirk and state Perhaps a clout may fail in't ; But deil a foreign tinkler loun Shall ever ca' a nail in't. Our fathers' blude the kettle bought, And wha wad dare to spoil it ? By heavens ! the sacrilegious dog Shall fuel be to boil it ! By heavens ! the sacrilegious dog Shall fuel be to boil it !" This song flew throughout the land, hit the taste of the country-people everywhere, and is said to have done much to change the feelings of those who were disaffected. Much blame has been cast upon the Tory Ministry, then in power, for not having offered a pension to Burns. It was not, it is said, that they did not know of him, or that they disregarded his existence. For Mr. Addington, after- wards Lord Sidmouth, we have seen, deeply felt his gen- ius, acknowledged it in verse, and is said to have urged his claims upon the Government. Mr. l*itt, soon after the po- VII.] LAST YEARS. 16^» et's death, is reported to have said of Burns's poetry,' at the table of Lord Liverpool, " I can think of no verse since Shakespeare's that has so much the appearance of coming sweetly from nature." It is on Mr. Dundas, however, at that time one of the Ministry, and the autocrat of all Scot- tish affairs, that the heaviest weight of blame has fallen. But perhaps this is not altogether deserved. There is the greatest difference between a literary man, who holds his political opinions in private, but refrains from mingling in party politics, and one who zealously espouses one side, and employs his literary power in promoting it. He threw himself into every electioneering business with his whole heart, wrote, while he might have been better em- ployed, electioneering ballads of little merit, in which he lauded Whig men and theories, and lampooned, often scur- rilously, the supporters of Dundas. No doubt it would have been magnanimous in the men then in power to have overlooked all these things, and, condoning the politics, to have rewarded the poetry of Bums. And it were to be wished that such magnanimity were more common among public men. But we do not see it practised even at the present day, any more than it was in the time of Burns. During the first half of 1795 the poet had gone on with his accustomed duties, and, during the intervals of busi- ness, kept sending to Thomson the songs he from time to time composed. His professional prospects seemed at this time to be brightening, for about the middle of May, 1795, his staunch friend, Mr. Graham, of Fintray, would seem to have revived an earlier project of having him transferred to a post in Leith, with easy duty and an income of nearly 200/. a year. This project could not at the time be car- ried out; but that it should ha\<' Iteeii thought of proves 8* 170 ROBERT BURNS. [rHAP. that political offences of the past were beginning to be forgotten. During this same year there were symptoms that the respectable persons who had for some time frown- ed on him were willing to relent. A combination of causes, his politics, the Riddel quarrel, and his own many impru- dences, had kept him under a cloud. And this disfavour of the well-to-do had not increased his self-respect or made him more careful about the company he kept. Disgust with the world had made him reckless and defiant. But with the opening of 1*795, the Riddels were reconciled to him, and received him once more into their good graces; and others, their friends, probably followed their example. But the time was drawing near when the smiles or the frowns of the Dumfries magnates would be alike indiffer- ent to him. There has been more than enough of discus- sion among the biographers of Burns as to how far he really deteriorated in himself during those Dumfries years, as to the extent and the causes of the social discredit into which he fell, and as to the charge that he took to low company. His early biographers — Currie, Walker, Heron — drew the picture somewhat darkly ; Lockhart and Cun- ningham have endeavoured to lighten the depth of the shadows. Chambers has laboured to give the facts impar- tially, has faithfully placed the lights and the shadows side by side, and has summed up the whole subject in an ap- pendix on The Reputation of Burns in his Later Years, to which I would refer any who desire to see this pain- ful subject minutely handled. Whatever extenuations or excuses may be alleged, all must allow that his course in Dumfries was on the whole a downward one, and must concur, however reluctantly, in the conclusion at which l/ockhart, while decrying the severe judgments of Currie, Heron, and otliers, is forced by truth to come, that "the VII.] LAST YEARS. Ill untiraely death of Burns was, it is too probable, hastened by his own intemperances and imprudences." To inquire minutely, what was the extent of those intemperances, and what the nature of those imprudences, is a subject which can little profit any one, and on which one has no heart to enter. If the general statement of fact be true, the minute details are better left to the kindly oblivion, which, but for too prying curiosity, would by this time have over- taken them. Dissipated his life for some years certainly had been — deeply disreputable many asserted it to be. Others, how- ever, there were who took a more lenient view of him. Findlater, his superior in the Excise, used to assert that no officer under him was more regular in his public duties. Mr. Gray, then teacher of Dumfries school, has left it on record, that no parent he knew watched more carefully over his children's education — that he had often found the poet in his home explaining to his eldest boy passages of the English poets from Shakespeare to Gray, and that the benefit of the father's instructions was apparent in the excellence of the son's daily school performances. This brighter side of the picture, however, is not irreconcilable with that darker one. For Burns's whole character was a compound of the most discordant and contradictory el- ements. Dr. Chambers has well shown that he who at one hour was the douce sober Mr. Burns, in the next was changed to the maddest of Bacchanals : now he was glow- ing with the most generous sentiments, now sinking to the very opposite extreme. One of the last visits paid to him by any friend from a distance would seem to have been by Professor Walker, although the date of it is somewhat uncertain. Eight years had passed since the Professor had parted with M 172 HUBERT BURNS. [chap. Burns at Blair Castle, after the poet's happy visit there. In the account which the Professor has left of his two days' interview with Burns at Dumfries, there are traces of disappointment with the change which the intervening years had wrought. It has been alleged that prolonged residence in England had made the Professor fastidious, and more easily shocked with rusticity and coarseness. However this may be, he found Burns, as he thought, not improved, but more dictatorial, more free in his potations, more coarse and gross in his talk, than when he had for- merly known him. For some time past there had not been wanting symp- toms to show that the poet's strength was already past its prime. In June, 1794, he had, as we have seen, told Mrs. Dunlop that he had been in poor health, and was afraid he was beginning to suffer for the follies of his youth. His physicians threatened him, he said, with flying gout, but he trusted they were mistaken. In the spring of 1795, he said to one who called on him, that he was beginning to feel as if he were soon to be an old man. Still he went about all his usual employments. But during the latter part of that year his health seems to have suddenly de- clined. For some considerable time he was confined to a sick-bed. Dr. Currie, who was likely to be well informed, states that this illness lasted from October, 1795, till the following January. No details of his malady are given, and little more is known of his condition at this time, ex- cept what he himself has given in a letter to Mrs. Dunlop, and in a rhymed epistle to one of his brother Excisemen. At the close of the year he must have felt that, owing to his prolonged sickness, his funds were getting low. Else he would not have penned to his friend, Collector Mitchell, the following request : til] last years. 173 *' Friend of the Poet, tried and leal, Wha, wanting thee, might beg or steal ; Alake, alake, the meikle deil Wi' a' his witches Are at it, skelpin' ! jig and reel, In my poor pouches. " I modestly fu fain wad hint it. That one pound one, I sairly want it ; If wi' the hizzie down ye sent it, It would be kind ; And while my heart wi' life-blood dunted, I'd bear't in mind. ***** "postscript. " Ye've heard this while how I've been licket, And by fell death was nearly nicket : Grim loun ! he gat me by the fecket, And sair me sheuk ; But by gude luck I lap a wicket, And turn'd a neuk. " But by that health, I've got a share o't, And by that life, I'm promised mair o't, My heal and weel I'll take a care o't A tentier way : Then fareweel, folly, hide and hair o't. For ance and aye." It was, alas ! too late now to bid farewell to folly, even if he could have done so indeed. With the opening of the year 1796 he somewhat revived, and the prudent re- solve of his sickness disappeared with the first prospect of returning health. Chambers thus records a fact which the local tradition of Dumfries confirms : — " Early in the month of January, when his health was in the course of improvement. Burns tarried to a late hour at a jovial party in the Globe tavern. Before returning home, he unkickily 174 ROBERT BURNS. [chap. remained for some time in the open air, and, overpowered by the effects of the liquor he had drunk, fell asleep. . . . A fatal chill penetrated his bones ; he r^ched home with the seeds of a rheumatic fever already in possession of his weakened frame. In this little accident, and not in the pressure of poverty or disrepute, or wounded feelings or a broken heart, truly lay the determining cause of the sadly shortened days of our national poet." How long this new access of extreme illness confined him seems uncertain. Currie says for about a week; Chambers surmises a longer time. Mr. Scott Douglas says, that from the close of January till the month of April, he seems to have moved about with some hope of permanent improvement. But if he had such a hope, it was destined not to be fulfilled. Writing on the 31st of January, 1*796, to Mrs. Dunlop, the trusted friend of so many confidences, this is the account he gives of himself : " I have lately drunk deep of the cup of affliction. The autumn robbed me of my only daughter and darling child, and that at a distance, too, and so rapidly as to put it out of my power to pay the last duties to her. I had scarcely begun to recover from that shock, when I became myself the victim of a most severe rheumatic fever, and long the die spun doubtful ; until, after many weeks of a sick-bed, it seems to have turned up life, and I am beginning to crawl across my room, and once indeed have been before my own door in the street." In these words Burns would seem to have put his two attacks together, as though they were but one prolonged illness. It was about this time that, happening to meet a neigh- bour in the street, the poet talked with her seriously of his health, and said among other things this : " T find that a man may live like a fool, but he will scarcely die like vTi.] LAST YEARS. 1*75 one.'" As from time to time lie appeared on tlie street daring the early months of 1796, others of his old ac- quaintance were struck by the sight of a tall man of slov- enly appearance and sickly aspect, whom a second look showed to be Burns, and that he was dying. Yet in that February there were still some flutters of song, one of which Avas, Hey for the Lass lui'' a Tocher, written in an- swer to Thomson's beseeching inquiry if he was never to hear from him again. Another was a rhymed epistle, in which he answers the inquiries of the colonel of his Vol- unteer Corps after his health. From about the middle of April, Burns seldom left his room, and for a great part of each day was confined to bed. May came — a beautiful May — and it was hoped that its genial influences might revive him. But while young Jeffrey was writing, " It is the finest weather in the world — the whole country is covered with green and blos- soms ; and the sun shines perpetually through a light east wind," Burns was shivering at every breath of the breeze. At this crisis his faithful wife was laid aside, unable to at- tend him. But a young neighbour, Jessie Levvars, sister of a brother exciseman, came to their house, assisted in all household work, and ministered to the dying poet. She was at this time only a girl, but she lived to be a wife and mother, and to see an honoured old age. Whenever we think of the last days of the poet, it is well to remember one who did so much to smooth his dying pillow. Burns himself was deeply grateful, and his gratitude as usual found vent in song. But the old manner still clung to him. Even then he could not express his gratitude to his young benefactress without assuming the tone of a fancied lover. Two songs in this strain he addressed to Jessie Lewars. Of the second of these it is told, that one ne ROBERT BURNS. [chap. morning the poet said to her that if she would play to him any favourite tune for which she desired to have new words, he would do his best to meet her wish. She sat down at the piano, and played over several times the air of an old song beginning thus : " The robin cam to the wren's nest, And keekit in, and keekit in." As soon as Burns had taken in the melody, he set to, and in a few minutes composed these beautiful words, the second of the sono^s which he addressed to Jessie: " Oh ! wert thou in the cauld blast, On yonder lea, on yonder lea. My plaidie to the angry airt, I'd shelter thee, I'd shelter thee. Or did misfortune's bitter storms Around thee blaw, around thee blaw, Thy bield should be my bosom, To share it a', to share it a'. " Or were I in the wildest waste, Sae black and bare, sae black and bare, The desert were a paradise. If thou wert there, if thou wert there: Or were I monarch o' the globe, Wi' thee to reign, wi' thee to reign. The brightest jewel in my crown Wad be my queen, wad be my queen." Mendelssohn is said to have so much admired this song, that he composed for it what Chambers pronounces an air of exquisite pathos. June came, but brought no improvement, rather rapid decline of health. On the 4th of July (1796) he wrote to Johnson, " Many a merry meeting this publication (the vir] LAST YEARS. 177 Museum) has given us, and possibly it may give us more, though, alas I I fear it. This protracting, slow consuming illness will, I doubt much, my ever dear friend, arrest my sun before he has reached his middle career, and will turn over the poet to far more important concerns than study- ing the brilliancy of wit or the pathos of sentiment." On the day on which he wrote these words, he left Dumfries for a lonely place called Brow, on the Sol way shore, to try the effects of sea-bathing. He went alone, for his wife was unable to accompany him. While he was at Brow, his former friend, Mrs. Walter Riddel, to whom, after their estrangement, he had been reconciled, happened to be stay- ing, for the benefit of her health, in the neighbourhood. She asked Burns to dine with her, and sent her carriage to bring him to her house. This is part of the account she gives of that interview : " I was struck with his appearance on entering the room. The stamp of death was imprinted on his features. He seemed already touching the brink of eternity. His first salutation was, ' Well, madam, have you any commands for the other world V I replied that it seemed a doubtful case which of us should be there soonest, and that I hoped he would yet live to write my epitaph. He looked in my face with an air of great kindness, and expressed his concern at seeing me look so ill, with his accustomed sensibility. . . . We had a long and serious conversation about his present situation, and the approaching termination of all his earthly prospects. He spoke of his death without any of the ostentation of philosophy, but with firmness as well as feeling, as an event likely to happen very soon, and which gave him concern chiefly from leaving his four chil- dren so young and unprotected, and his wife hourly ex- pecting a fifth. He mentioned, with seeming pride and 178 ROBERT BURNS. [chap. satisfaction, the promising genius of his eldest son, and the flattering marks of approbation he had received from his teachers, and dwelt particularly on his hopes of that, boy's future conduct and merit. His anxiety for his fam- ily seemed to hang heavy on him, and the more perhaps from the reflection that he had not done them all the jus- tice he was so well qualified to do. Passing from this subject, he showed great concern about the care of his lit- erary fame, and particularly the publication of his post- humous works. He said he was well aware that his death would create some noise, and that every scrap of his writ- ing would be revived against him to the injury of his fut- ure reputation ; that his letters and verses written with unguarded and improper freedom, and which he earnest- ly wished to have buried in oblivion, would be handed about by idle vanity or malevolence, when no dread of his resentment would restrain them, or prevent the cen- sures of shrill-tongued malice, or the insidious sarcasms of envy, from pouring forth all their venom to blast his fame. " He lamented that he had written many epigrams on persons against whom he entertained no enmity, and whose characters he would be sorry to wound; and many indif- ferent poetical pieces, which he feared would now, with all their imperfections on their head, be thrust upon the world. On this account he deeply regretted having deferred to put his papers in a state of arrangement, as he was now inca- pable of the exertion. . . . The conversation," she adds, " was kept up with great evenness and animation on his side. I had seldom seen his mind greater or more collect- ed. There was frequently a considerable degree of vivacity in his sallies, and they would probably have had a greater share, had not the concern and dejection T could not dis- VII.] LAST YEARS. 179 guise damped the spirit of pleasantry he seemed not un- willino' to indulo'e. " We parted about sunset on the evening of that day (the 5th July, 1796); the next day I saw him again, and we parted to meet no more !" It is not wonderful that Burns should have felt some anxiety about the literary legacy he was leaving to man- kind. Not about his best poems; these, he must have known, would take care of themselves. Yet even among the poems which he had published with his name, were some " which dying " he well might " wish to blot." There lay among his papers letters too, and other " fallings from him," which he no doubt would have desired to suppress, but of which, if they have not all been made public, enough have appeared to justify his fears of that idle vanity, if not malevolence, which, after his death, would rake up every scrap he had written, uncaring how it might injure his good name, or affect future generations of his admirers. No poet perhaps has suffered more from the indiscriminate and unscrupulous curiosity of editors, catering too greedily for the public, than Burns has done. Besides anxieties of this kind, he, during those last days, had to bear another burden of care that pressed even more closely home. To pain of body, absence from his wife and children, and haunting anxiety on their account, was added the pressure of some small debts and the fear of want. By the rules of the Excise, his full salary would riot be allowed him during his illness; and though the Board agreed to continue Burns in his full pay, he never knew this in time to be comforted by it. With his small income diminished, how could he meet the increased expenditure caused by sickness ? We have seen how at the beginning of the year he had written to his friend Mitchell to ask the loan of a ISO JiOBERT BURNS. [chap. guinea. One or two letters, asking for the payment of some old debts due to him by a former companion, still remain. During his stay at Brow, on the 12th of July, he wrote to Thomson the following memorable letter : "After all my boasted independence, curst necessity compels me to implore you for five pounds. A cruel scoundrel of a haberdasher, to whom I owe an account, taking it into his head that I am dying, has commenced a process, and will infallibly put me into jail. Do, for God's sake, send that sum, and that by return of post. Forgive me this earnestness, but the horrors of a jail have made me half distracted. I do not ask all this gratuitous- ly ; for, upon returning health, I hereby promise and en- gage to furnish you with five pounds' worth of the neatest song-genius you have seen. I tried my hand on Rother- murchie this morning. The measure is so difficult that it is impossible to infuse much genius into the lines. They are on the other side. Forgive, forgive me !" And on the other side was written Burns's last song, beginning, " Fairest maid, on Devon banks." Was it native feeling, or inveterate habit, that made him that morning revert to the happier days he had seen on the banks of Devon, and sing a last song to one of the two beauties he had there admired ? Chambers thinks it was to Charlotte Hamilton ; the latest editor refers it to Peggy Chalmers. Thomson at once sent the sum asked for. He has been much, but not justly, blamed for not having sent a much larger sum, and indeed for not having repaid the poet for his songs long before. Against such charges it is enough to reply that when Thomson had formerly volunteered some money to Burns in return for his songs, the indig- nant poet told him that if he ever again thought of such a thing, their intercourse must thenceforth cease. And VII. j LAST YEARS. 181 for the smallness of the sum sent, it should be remembered that Thomson was himself a poor man, and had not at this time made anything- by his Collection of Songs, and never did make much beyond repayment of his large outlay. On the same day on which Burns wrote thus to Thom- son, he wrote another letter in much the same terms to his cousin, Mr. James Burnes, of Montrose, asking him to as- sist him with ten pounds, which was at once sent by his relative, who, though not a rich, was a generous - hearted man. There was still a third letter written on that 12th of July (1796) from Brow. Of Mrs. Dunlop, who had for some months ceased her correspondence with him, the poet takes this affecting farewell :— " I have written you so often, without receiving any answer, that I would not trouble you again but for the circumstances in which I am. An illness which has long hung about me, in all probability will speedily send me beyond that 'bourn whence no traveller returns.' Your friendship, with which for many years you honoured me, was a friendship dearest to my soul. Your conversation, and especially your correspondence, were at once highly entertaining and instructive. With what pleasure did I use to break up the seal i The remembrance yet adds one pulse more to my poor palpitating heart. Farewell !" On the 14th he wrote to his wife, saying that though the sea-bathing had eased his pains, it had not done anything to restore his health. The following anecdote of him at this time has been preserved: — "A night or two before Burns left Brow, he drank tea with Mrs. Craig, widow of the minister of Ruthwell. His altered appearance excited much silent sympathy ; and the evening being beautiful, and the sun shinino- brio-htlv throuo^h the casement. Miss 182 ROBERT BURNS. [chap. Craig (afterwards Mrs. llciiry Duncan) was afraid tlic light might be too much for him, and rose to let down the win- dow-blinds. Burns immediately guessed what she meant, and regarding the young lady with a look of great benig- nity, said, ' Thank you, my dear, for your kind attention ; but oh ! let him shine : he will not shine long for me.' " On the 18th July he left Brow, and returned to Dum- fries in a small spring -cart. When he alighted, the on- lookers saw that he was hardly able to stand, and observed that he walked with tottering steps to his door. Those who saw him enter his house, knew by his appearance that he would never again cross that threshold alive. When the news spread in Dumfries that Burns had re- turned from Brow and was dying, the whole town was deeply moved. Allan Cunningham, who was present, thus describes what he saw : — " The anxiety of the people, high and low, was very great. Wherever two or three were to- gether, their talk was of Burns, and of him alone. They spoke of his history, of his person, and of his works ; of his witty sayings, and sarcastic replies, and of his too ear- ly fate, with much enthusiasm, and sometimes with deep feeling. All that he had done, and all that they had hoped he would accomplish, were talked of. Half a doz- en of them stopped Dr. Maxwell in the street, and said, *How is Burns, sir?' He shook his head, saying, ' He cannot be worse,' and passed on to be subjected to similar inquiries farther up the way. I heard one of a group in- quire, with much simplicity, ' Who do you think will be our poet now V " During the three or four days between his return from Brow and the end, his mind, when not roused by conver- sation, wandered in delirium. Yet when friends drew near his bed, sallies of his old- wit would for a moment return. VII.] LAST YEARS. 183 To a brother volunteer who came to see him he said, with a smile, "John, don't let the awkward squad fire over me." His wife was unable to attend him ; and four helpless children wandered from room to room gazing on their unhappy parents. All the while, Jessie Lewars was min- istering to the helpless and to the dying one, and doing what kindness could do to relieve their suffering. On the fourth day after his return, the 21st of July, Burns sank into his last sleep. His children stood around his bed, and his eldest son remembered long afterwards all the cir- cumstances of that sad hour. The news that Burns was dead, sounded through all Scotland like a knell announcing a great national bereave- ment. Men woke up to feel the greatness of the gift which in him had been vouchsafed to their generation, and which had met, on the whole, with so poor a recep- tion. Self-reproach mingled with the universal sorrow, as men asked themselves whether they might not have done more to cherish and prolong that rarely gifted life. Of course there was a great public funeral, in which the men of Dumfries and the neighbourhood, high and low, appeared as mourners, and soldiers and volunteers with colours, mufiled drums, and arms reversed, not very appro- priately mingled in the procession. At the very time when they were laying her husband in his grave, Mrs. Burns gave birth to his posthumous son. He was called Maxwell, after the physician who attended his father, but he died in infancy. The spot where the poet was laid was in a corner of St. MichaeFs churchyard, and the grave remained for a time unmarked by any monument. After some years his wife placed over it a plain, unpretending stone, inscribed with his name and age, and with the names of his two boys, who were buried in the same place. Well 184 ROBERT BURNS. [chap. had it been, if he had been allowed to rest undisturbed in this grave where his family had laid him. But well-mean- ing, though ignorant, officiousness would not suffer it to be so. Nearly twenty years after the poet's death, a huge, cumbrous, unsightly mausoleum was, by public subscrip- tion, erected at a little distance from his original resting- place. This structure was adorned with an ungraceful fig- ure in marble, representing " The muse of Coila finding the poet at the plough, and throwing her inspiring mantle over him." To this was added a long, rambling epitaph in tawdry Latin, as though any inscription which scholars could devise could equal the simple name of Robert Burns. When the new structure was completed, on the 19th Sep- tember, 1815, his grave was opened, and men for a mo- ment gazed with awe on the form of Burns, seemingly as entire as on the day when first it was laid in the grave. But as soon as they began to raise it, the whole body crumbled to dust, leaving only the head and bones. These relics they bore to the mausoleum which had been pre- pared for their reception. But not even yet was the poet's dust to be allowed to rest in peace. When his widow died, in March, 1834, the mausoleum was opened, that she might be laid by her husband's side. Some cra- niologists of Dumfries were then permitted, in the name of so-called science, to desecrate his dust with their inhu- man outrage. At the dead of night, between the 31st of March and the 1st of April, these men laid their profane fingers on the skull of Burns, " tried their hats upon it, and found them all too little;" applied their compasses, registered the size of the so-called organs, and " satisfied themselves that Burns had capacity enough to compose Tarn o' Shanter, The Cotter^s Saturday Night, and To Mary in Heaven^ This done, they laid the head once Vii.j LAST YEARS. 185 again in the hallowed ground, where, let us hope, it will be disturbed no more. This mausoleum, unsightly though it is, has become a place of pilgrimage whither yearly crowds of travellers resort from the ends of the earth, to gaze on the resting-place of Scotland's peasant poet, and thence to pass to that other consecrated place within ruined Dry- burgh, where lies the dust of a kindred spirit by his own Tweed. 9 CHAPTER VIIL CHARACTER, POEMS, SONGS. If this narrative has in any way succeeded in giving the lights and the shadows of Burns's life, little comment need now be added. The reader will, it is hoped, gather from the brief record of facts here presented a better im- pression of the man as he was, in his strength and in his weakness, than from any attempt which might have been made to bring his various qualities together into a moral portrait. Those who wish to see a comment on his char- acter, at once wise and tender, should turn to Mr. Carlyle's famous essay on Burns. What estimate is to be formed of Burns — not as a poet, but as a man — is a question that will long be asked, and will be variously answered, according to the principles men hold, and the temperament they are of. Men of the world will regard him one way, worshippers of genius in anoth- er; and there are many whom the judgments of neither of these will satisfy. One thing is plain to every one ; it is the contradiction between the noble gifts he had and the actual life he lived, which make his career the painful tragedy it was. When, however, we look more closely into the original outfit of the man, we seem in some sort to see how this came to be. Given a being born into the world with a noble nature, CHAP.viii.] CHARACTER, rOEMS, S0XG8. 187 endowments of head and heart beyond any of his time, wide-ranging sympathies, intellectual force of the strongest man, sensibility as of the tenderest woman, possessed also by a keen sense of right and wrong which he had brought from a pure home — place all these high gifts on the one side, and over against them a lower nature, fierce and tur- bulent, filling him with wild passions which were hard to restrain and fatal to indulge — and between these two op- posing natures, a weak and irresolute will, which could over- hear the voice of conscience, but had no strength to obey it; launch such a man on such a world as this, and it is but too plain what the end will be. From earliest man- hood till the close, flesh and spirit were waging within him interminable war, and who shall say which had the victory ? Among his countrymen there are many who are so captivgjted with his brilliant gifts and his genial tem- perament, that they will not listen to any hint at the deep defects which marred them. Some would even go so far as to claim honour for him, not only as Scotland's greatest poet, but as one of the best men she has produced. Those who thus try to canonize Burns are no true friends to his memory. They do but challenge the counter-verdict, and force men to recall facts which, if they cannot forget, they would fain leave in silence. These moral defects it is ours to know ; it is not ours to judge him who had them. While some would claim for Burns a niche among Scot- land's saints, others would give him rank as one of her religious teachero. This claim, if not so absurd as the other, is hardly more tenable. The religion described by Burns in The Cotter^s Saturday Night is, it should be re- membered, his father's faith, not his own. The funda- mental truths of natural religion, faith in God and in im- • mortality, amid sore trials of heart, he no doubt clung to, KSf; liOBEKT liUKXS. [chap. and has forcibly expressed. But there is nothing in his poems or in his letters which goes beyond sincere deism — nothing which is in any way distinctively Christian. Even were his teaching of reHgion much fuller than it is, one essential thing is still wanting. Before men can accept any one as a religious teacher, they not unreason- ably expect that his practice should in some measure bear out his teaching. It was not as an authority on such matters that Burns ever regarded himself. In his Bard's Ejyitaph, composed ten years before his death, he took a far truer and humbler measure of himself than any of his critics or panegyrists have done : " The poor inhabitant below Was quick to learn and wise to know, And keenly felt the friendly glow And softer flame ; • But thoughtless folly laid him low, And stained his name. " Reader, attend ! whether thy soul Soars fancy's flight beyond the pole, Or darkling grubs this earthly hole. In low pursuit ; Know, prudent, cautious self-control Is wisdom's root." "A confession," says Wordsworth, "at once devout, poetr ical, and human — a history in the shape of a prophecy." Leaving the details of his personal story, and — " Each unquiet theme. Where gentlest judgments may misdeem," it is a great relief to turn to the bequest that he has left to the world in his poetry. How often has one been tempted to wish that we had known as little of the actual VIII.] C'HAKAOTEK, TOEMS, SOXC^S. ISO career of Burns as we do of the life of Shakespeare, or even of Homer, and had been left to read his mind and character only by the light of his works ! That poetry, though a fragmentary, is still a faithful transcript of what was best in the man ; and though his stream of song con- tains some sediment we could wish away, yet as a whole, how vividly, clearly, sunnily it flows ! how far the good preponderates over the evil ! What that good is must now be briefly said. To take his. earliest productions first, his poems as distinct from his songs. Almost all the best of these are, with the one notable exception of Tarn 0'' Shanter, contained in the Kilmarnock edition. A few pieces actually composed be- fore he went to Edinburgh were included in later editions, but after leaving Mossgiel he never seriously addressed himself to any form of poetry but song-writing. The Kil- marnock volume contains poems descriptive of peasant life and manners, epistles in verse generally to rhyming breth- ren, a few lyrics on personal feelings, or on incidents like those of the mouse and the daisy, and three songs. In these, the form, the metre, the style and language, even that which is known as Burns's peculiar stanza, all belong to the traditional forms of his country's poetry, and from earlier bards had been handed down to Burns by his two immediate forerunners, Ramsay and Fergusson. To these two he felt himself indebted, and for them he always ex- presses a somewhat exaggerated admiration. Nothing can more show Burns's inherent power than to compare his poems with even the best of those which he accepted as models. The old framework and metres which his coun- try supplied, he took ; asked no other, no better, and into those old bottles poured new wine of his own, and such wine ! What, then, is the peculiar flavour of this now po- 190 . ROBERT BURNS. [chap. etic wine of Burns's poetry 2 At the basis of all his pow- er lay absolute truthfulness, intense reality, truthfulness to the objects which he saw, truthfulness to himself as the seer of them. This is what Wordsworth recognized as Burns's leading characteristic. He who acknowledged few masters, owned Burns as his master in this respect when he speaks of him — " Whose light I hailed when first it shone, And showed my youth, How verse may build a princely throne * On humble truth." Here was a man, a son of toil, looking out on the world from his cottage, on society low and high, and on nature homely or beautiful, with the clearest eye, the most pierc- ing insight, and the warmest heart; touching life at a hundred points, seeing to the core all the sterling worth, nor less the pretence and hollowness of the men he met, the humour, the drollery, the pathos, and the sorrow of human existence ; and expressing what he saw, not in the stock' phrases of books, but in his own vernacular, the lan- guage of his fireside, with a directness, a force, a vitality that tingled to the finger tips, and forced the phrases of his peasant dialect into literature, and made them for ever classical. Large sympathy, generous enthusiasm, reckless abandonment, fierce indignation, melting compassion, rare flashes of moral insight, all are there. Everywhere you see the strong intellect made alive, and driven home to the mark, by the fervid heart behind it. And if the sight of the world's inequalities, and some natural repining at his own obscure lot, mingled from the beginning, as has been said, " some bitterness of earthly spleen and passion with the workings of his inspiration, and if these in the end ate viii.] CHARACTER, POEMS, SONGS. 191 deep into the great heart tliey had long tormented," who that has not known his experience may venture too strong- ly to condemn him ? This prevailing truthfulness of nature and of vision manifested itself in many ways. 'First. In the strength of it, he interpreted the lives, thoughts, feelings, manners of the Scottish peasantry to whom he belonged, as they had never been interpreted before, and never can be again. Take the poem which stands first in the Kilmarnock edi- tion. The Cotter's Dog and the Laird's Dog are, as has been often said, for all their moralizing, true dogs in all their ways. Yet through these, while not ceasing to be dogs, the poet represents the whole contrast between the Cotters' lives, and their Lairds'. This old controversy, which is ever new, between rich and poor, has never been set forth with more humour and power. No doubt it is done from the peasant's point of view. The virtues and hardships of the poor have full justice done to them ; the prosperity of the rich, with its accompanying follies and faults, is not spared, perhaps it is exaggerated. The whole is represented with an inimitably graphic hand, and just when the caustic wit is beginning to get too biting, the edge of it is turned by a touch of kindlier humour. The poor dog speaks of " Some gentle master, Wha, aiblins thrang a-parliamentin. For Britain's guid his saul indentin — " Then Caesar, the rich man's dog, replies — " Haith, lad, ye little ken about it : For Britain's guid ! — guid faith ! I doubt it. Say rather, gaun as Premiers lead him, An' saying aye or no 's they bid him : 192 KOBERT BURNS. [chap. At operas an' plays parading, Mortgaging, gambling, masquerading : Or, may be, in a frolic daft. To Hague or Calais takes a waft, To make a tour an' tak a whirl, To learn hon ton^ an' see the worl'. " Then, at Vienna or Versailles, I He rives his father's auld entails ; Or by Madrid he takes the rout. To thrum guitars and fecht wi' nowt. ***** For Britain's guid ! for her destruction ! Wi' dissipation, feud an' faction." Then exclaims Luath, the poor man's dog — " Hech, man ! dear sirs ! is that the gate They waste sae mony a braw estate ! Are we sae foughten and harass'd For gear to gang that gate at last ?" And yet he allows, that for all that " Thae frank, rantin', ramblin' billies, Fient haet o' them's ill-hearted fellows." " Mark the power of that one word, ' nowt,' " said the late Thomas Aird. " If the poet had said that om' young fellows went to Spain to fight with bulls, there would have been some dignity in the thing, but think of his going all that way 'to fecht wi' nowt.' It was felt at once to be ridiculous. That one word conveyed at once a statement of the folly, and a sarcastic rebuke of the folly." Or turn to the poem of Halloween. Here he has sketched the Ayrshire peasantry as they appeared in their hours of merriment — painted with a few vivid strokes a dozen distinct pictures of country lads and lasses, sires and Till.] CHARACTER, POEMS, SONGS. 193 dames, and at the same time preserved for ever the re- membrance of antique customs and superstitious observ- ances, which even in Burns's day were beginning to fade, and have now all but disappeared. Or again, take The auld Farmer's New-year-morning Salutation to his auld Mare. In this homely, but most kindly humorous poem, you have the whole toiling life of a ploughman and his horse, done off in two or three touches, and the elements of what may seem a common- place, but was to Burns a most vivid, experience, are made to live for ever. For a piece of good graphic Scotch, see how he describes the sturdy old mare in the plough set- ting her face to the furzy braes. " Thou never braing't, an' fetch't, and fliskit, But thy auld tail thou wad hae whiskit, An' spread abreed thy weel-fill'd brisket, Wi' pith an' pow'r, Till spritty knowes wad rair't and riskit, An' slypet owre." To paraphrase this, " Thou didst never fret, or plunge and kick, but thou wouldest have whisked thy old tail, and spread abroad thy large chest, with pith and power, till hillocks, where the earth was filled with tough-rooted plants, would have given forth a cracking sound, and the clods fallen gently over." The latter part of this para- phrase is taken from Chambers. What pure English words could have rendered these things as compactly and graphically ? Of The Cotter s Saturday Night it is hardly needful to speak. As a work of art, it is by no means at Burns's highest level. The metre was not native to him. It con- tains some lines that are feeble, whole stanzas that are 9* 194 ROBERT BURNS. [chap. heavy. But as Lockbart has said, in words already quoted, there is none of his poems that does such justice to the better nature that was originally in him. It shows how. Burns could reverence the old national piety, however lit- tle he may have been able to practise it. It is the more valuable for this, that it is almost the only poem in which either of our two great national poets has described Scot- tish character on the side of that grave, deep, though un- demonstrative reverence, which has been an intrinsic ele- ment in it. No wonder the peasantry of Scotland have loved Burns as perhaps never people loved a poet. He not only sym- pathized with the wants, the trials, the joys and sorrows of their obscure lot, but he interpreted these to them- selves, and interpreted them to others, and this too in their own language, made musical and glorified by genius. He made the poorest ploughman proud of his station and his toil, since Robbie Burns had shared and had sung them. He awoke a sympathy for them in many a heart that oth- erwise would never have known it. In looking up to him, the Scottish people have seen an impersonation of them- selves on a large scale — of themselves, both in their virtues and in their vices. Secondly. Burns in his poetry was not only the inter- preter of Scotland's peasantry, he was the restorer of her nationality. When he appeared, the spirit of Scotland was at a low ebb. The fatigue that foljowed a century of religious strife, the extinction of her Parliament, the stern suppression of the Jacobite risings, the removal of all sym- bols of her royalty and nationality, had all but quenched the ancient spirit. Englishmen despised Scotchmen, and Scotchmen seemed ashamed of themselves and of their country. A race of literary men had sprung up in Edin- VIII.] CHARACTER, POEMS, SONGS. 195 burgh who, as to national feeling, were entirely colourless, Scotchmen in nothing except their dwelling-place. The thing they most dreaded was to be convicted of a Scotti- cism. Among these learned cosmopolitans in walked Burns, who with the instinct of genius chose for his sub- ject that Scottish life which they ignored, and for his vehicle that vernacular which they despised, and who, touching the springs of long-forgotten emotions, brought back on the hearts of his countrymen a tide of patriotic feeling to which they had long been strangers. At first it was only his native Ayrshire he hoped to illustrate ; to shed upon the streams of Ayr and Doon the power of Yarrow, and Teviot, and Tweed. But his patri- otism was not merely local ; the traditions of Wallace haunted him like a passion, the wanderings of Bruce he hoped to dramatize. His well-known words about the Thistle have been already quoted. They express what was one of his strongest aspirations. And though he ac- complished but a small part of what he once hoped to do, yet we owe it to him first of all that " the old kingdom " has not wholly sunk into a province. If Scotchmen to- day love and cherish their country with a pride unknown to their ancestors of the last century, if strangers of all countries look on Scotland as a land of romance, this we owe in great measure to Burns, who first turned the tide, which Scott afterwards carried to full flood. All that Scotland had done and suffered, her romantic history, the manhood of her people, the beauty of her scenery, would have disappeared in modern commonplace and manufact- uring ugliness, if she had been left without her two " sa- cred poets." Thirdly. Burns's sympathies and thoughts were not confined to class nor country ; they had something more 196 ROBERT BURNS. [chap. catholic in them, they reached to universal man. Few as were his opportunities of knowing the characters of states- men and politicians, yet with what " random shots o' countra wit " did he hit off the public men of his time ! In his address to King George III. on his birthday, how gay yet caustic is the satire, how trenchant his stroke ! The elder and the younger Pitt, " yon ill-tongued tinkler Charlie Fox," as he irreverently calls him — if Burns had sat for years in Parliament, he could scarcely have known them better. Every one of the Scottish M.P.'s of the time, from — to- and — 'That slee auld-farran chiel Dundas" That glib-gabbit Highland baron The Laird o' Graham," Erskine a spunkie Norlan billie," — he has touched their characters as truly as if they had all been his own familiars. But of his intuitive knowledge of men of all ranks there is no need to speak, for every line he writes attests it. Of his fetches of moral wisdom something has already been said. He would not have been a Scotchman, if he had not been a moralizer; but then his moralizings are not platitudes, but truths winged with wit and wisdom. He had, as we have seen, his limi- tations — his bias to overvalue one order of qualities, and to disparage others. Some pleading of his own cause and that of men of his own temperament, some disparagement of the severer, less-impulsive virtues, it is easy to discern in him. Yet, allowing all this, what flashes of moral in- sight, piercing to the quick ! what random sayings flung forth, that have become proverbs in all lands — " mottoes of the heart !" viii.l CHARACTER, POEMS, SONGS. 197 ^^ Such are — \ ^ " wad some Power the giftie gie us, To see oursel as ithers see us : 1/ It wad frae mony a blunder free us, An' foolish notion ;" Or the much-quoted — q \ "Facts are chiels that winna ding .y' And downa be disputed ;" Or- " The heart ay's the part ay That makes us right or wrang." Who on the text, "He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone," ever preached such a sermon as Burns in his Address to the unco Guid? and in his epistle of advice to a young- friend, what wisdom ! what in- cisive aphorisms ! In passages like these scattered through- out his writings, and in some single poems, he has passed beyond all bonds of place and nationality, and spoken home to the universal human heart. And here we may note that in that awakening to the sense of human brotherhood, the oneness of human nature, which began towards the end of last century, and which found utterance through Cowper first of the English poets, there has been no voice in literature, then or since, which has proclaimed it more tellingly than Burns. And then his humanity was not confined to man, it overflowed to his lower fellow-creatures. His lines about the pet ewe, the worn-out mare, the field-mouse, the wounded hare, have long been household words. In this tenderness to- wards animals we see another point of likeness between him and Cowper. Fourthly. For all aspects of the natural world he has the same clear eye, the same open heart that he has for man. His love of nature is intense, but very simple and 198 ROBERT BURNS. [chap. direct, no subtilizings, nor refinings about it, nor any of that nature -worship which soon after his time came in. Quite unconsciously, as a child might, he goes into the outward world for refreshment, for enjoyment, for sym- pathy. Everywhere in his poetry, nature comes in, not so much as a being independent of man, but as the back- ground of his pictures of life and human character. How true his perceptions of her features are, how pure and transparent the feeling she awakens in him! Take only two examples. Here is the well-known way he describes the burn in his Halloioeen — " Whyles owre a linn the burnie plays, As thro' the glen it wimpl't ; Whyles round a rocky scaur it strays, Whyles in a wiel it dimpl't ; Whyles glitter'd to the nightly rays, Wi' bickerin', dancin' dazzle ; Whyles cookit underneath the braes. Below the spreading hazel, Unseen that night." Was ever burn so naturally, yet picturesquely described ? The next verse can hardly be omitted — " Amang the brachens on the brae, Between her an' the moon, The deil, or else an outler quey. Gat up an' gae a croon : Poor Lcezie's heart maist lap the hool ; Near lav'rock height she jumpit ; But raiss'd a fit, an' in the pool Out-owre the lugs she plumpit, Wi' a plunge that night." " Maist lap the hool," what condensation in that Scotch phrase ! The hool is the pod of a pea — poor Lizzie's heart almost leapt out of its encasing sheath. VIII.] CHARACTEK, POEMS, SONGS. VJ'J Or look at this other picture : " Upon a simmer Sunday morn, When Nature's face is fair, I walked forth to view the corn, And snuff the caller air. The risiii' sun owre Galston muirs Wi' glorious light was gUntin ; The hares Avere hirplin down the furrs, The lav'rocks they were chantin Fu' sweet that day." I have noted only some of the excellences of Burns's poetry, which far outnumber its blemishes. Of these last it is unnecessary to speak ; they are too obvious, and what- ever is gross, readers can of themselves pass by. Burns's most considerable poems, as distinct from his songs, were almost all written before he went to Edin- burgh. There is, how^ever, one memorable exception. Tam o' Shanter, as we have seen, belongs to EUisland days. Most of his earlier poems were entirely realistic, a tran- script of the men and women and scenes he had seen and known, only lifted a very little off the earth, only very slightly idealized. But in Tmn o' Shanter lie had let loose his powers upon the materials of past experiences, and out of them he shaped a tale which was a pure imag- inative creation. In no other instance, except perhaps in The Jolly Beggars, had he done tliis ; and in that cantata, if the genius is equal, the materials are so coarse, and the sentiment so gross, as to make it, for all its dramatic pow- er, decidedly offensive. It is strange what very opposite judgments have been formed of the intrinsic merit of Tam o' Shanter. Mr. Carlyle thinks that it might have been written "all but quite as well by a man, who, in place of genius, had only possessed talent; that it is not so much a 200 ROBERT BURNS. [chap. poem, as a piece of sparkling rhetoric ; the heart of the story still lies hard and dead." On the other hand, Sir Walter Scott has recorded this verdict : " In the inimita- ble tale of Tarn o' Shanter, Burns has left us sufficient evi- dence of his abilities to combine the ludicrous with the awful and even the horrible. No poet, with the exception of Shakespeare, ever possessed the power of exciting the most varied and discordant emotions with such rapid tran- sitions. His humorous description of death in the poem on Dr. Hornbrook, borders on the terrific ; and the witches' dance in the Kirk of Alloway is at once ludicrous and hor- rible." Sir AValter, I believe, is right, and the world has sided with him in his judgment about Tarn o' Shanter. Nowhere in British literature, out of Shakespeare, is there to be found so much of the power of which Scott speaks — that of combining in rapid transition almost contradic- tory emotions — if we except perhaps one of Scott's own highest creations, the tale of Wandering AVillie, in Red- gauntlet. On the songs of Burns a volume might be written, but a few sentences must here suffice. It is in his songs that his soul comes out fullest, freest, brightest ; it is as a song- writer that his fame has spread widest, and will longest last. Mr. Carlyle, not in his essay, which does full justice to Burns's songs, but in some more recent work, has said something like this, " Our Scottish son of thunder had, for want of a better, to pour his lightning through the narrow cranny of Scottish song — the narrowest cranny ever vouchsafed to any son of thunder." The narrowest, it may be, but the most effective, if a man desires to come close to his fellow-men, soul to soul. Of all forms of lit- erature the genuine song is the most penetrating, and the most to ])c remembered ; and in this kind Burns is the su- VIII.] CUARACTEK, POEMS, SONGS. 201 prciiic master. To make him this, two things combined. First, there was the great background of national melody and antique verse, coming down to him from remote ages, and sounding through his heart from childhood. He was cradled in a very atmosphere of melody, else he never could have sung so well. No one knew better than he did, or would have owned more feelingly, how much he owed to the old forgotten song-writers of his country, dead for ages before he lived, and lying in their unknown graves all Scotland over. From his boyhood he had studied ea- gerly the old tunes, and the old words where there were such, that had come down to him from the past, treasured every scrap of antique air and verse, conned and crooned them over till he had them by heart. This was the one form of literature that he had entirely mastered. And from the first he had laid it down as a rule, that the one way to catch the inspiration, and rise to the true fervour of song, was, as he phrased it, " to soivth the tune over and over," till the words came spontaneously. The words of his own songs were inspired by pre-existing tunes, not composed first, and set to music afterwards. But all this love and study of the ancient songs and outward melody would have gone for nothing, but for the second element, that is the inward melody born in the poet's deepest heart, which received into itself the whole body of national song; and then when it had passed through his soul, sent it forth ennobled and glorified by his own genius. That which fitted him to do this was the peculiar inten- sity of his nature, the fervid heart, the trembling sensibil- ity, the headlong passion, all thrilling through an intellect strong and keen beyond that of other men. How myste- rious to reflect that the same qualities on their emotional side made him the great songster of the world, and on 2(12 KOBERT BURNS. [chai'. their practical side drove liim to ruin ! The first word which Burns composed was a song in praise of his partner on the harvest-rig ; the last utterance he breathed in verse was also a song — a faint remembrance of some former affection. Between these two he composed from two to three hundred. It might be wished, perhaps, that he had written fewer, especially fewer love songs ; never composed under pressure, and only when his heart was so full he could not help singing. This is the condition on which alone the highest order of songs is born. Probably from thirty to forty songs of Burns could be named which come up to this highest standard. No other Scottish song-writ- ci* could show above four or five of the same quality. Of his songs one main characteristic is that their subjects, the substance they lay hold of, belongs to what is most per- manent in humanity, those primary affections, those per- manent relations of life which cannot change while man's nature is what it is. In this they are wholly unlike those songs which seize on the changing aspects of society. As the phases of social life change, these are forgotten. But no time can superannuate the subjects which Burns has sung; they are rooted in the primary strata, which are steadfast. Then, as the subjects are primary, so the feel- ing with which Burns regards them is primary too — that is, he gives us the first spontaneous gush — the first throb of his heart, and that a most strong, simple, manly heart. The feeling is not turned over in the reflective faculty, and there artistically shaped — not subtilized and refined away till it has lost its power and freshness; but given at first hand, as it comes warm from within. When he is at his best, you seem to hear the whole song warbling through his spirit, naturally as a bird's. The whole subject is wrapped in an element of music, till it is penetrated and VIII.] CHAKACTEK, POEMS, SONGS. 203 transfigured by it. No one else has so much of the native lilt in him. When his mind was at the white heat, it is wonderful how quickly he struck off some of his most per- fect songs. And yet he could, when it was required, go back upon them, and retouch them line by line, as we saw him doing in Ve Banks and Braes. In the best of them the outward form is as perfect as the inward music is all- pervading, and the two are in complete harmony. To mention a few instances in which he has given their ultimate and consummate expression to fundamental hu- man emotions, four songs may be mentioned, in each of v/hich a different phase of love has been rendered for all time — " Of a' the airts the wind can blaw," " Ye flowery banks o' bonnie Doon," " Go fetch to me a pint o' wine ;" and that other, in which the calm depth of long-wedded and happy love utters itself, so blithely yet pathetically — "John Anderson, my Jo, John." Then for comic humour of courtship, there is — " Duncan Gray cam here to woo." For that contented spirit which, while feeling life's trou- bles, yet keeps '' aye a heart aboon them a','' we have — " Contented wi' little, and cantie wi' mair." For friendship rooted in the past, there is — " Should auld acquaintance be forgot," eren if we credit antiquity with some of the verses. For wild and reckless daring, mingled with a dash of O 204 EGBERT BURNS. [chap, finer feeling, there is Macpherson's Farewell. For patri- otic heroism — " Scots wha hae wi' Wallace bled ;" and for personal independence, and sturdy, if self-assert- ing, manhood — " A man's a man for a' that." These are but a few of the many permanent emotions to which Burns has given such consumnjate expression, as will stand for all time. In no mention of his songs should that be forgotten which is so greatly to the honour of Burns. He was em- phatically the purifier of Scottish song. There are some poems he has left, there are also a few among his songs, which we could wish that he had never written. But we who inherit Scottish song as he left it, can hardly imagine how much he did to purify and elevate our national melo- dies. To see what he has done in this way, we have but to compare Burns's songs with the collection of Scottish songs published by David Herd, in 1769, a few years be- fore Burns appeared. A genuine poet, who knew well what he spoke of, the late Thomas Aird, has said, " Those old Scottish melodies, sweet and strong though they were, strong and sweet, were, all the more for their very strength and sweetness, a moral plague, from the indecent words to which many of them had long been set. How was the plague to'be stayed? All the preachers in the land could not divorce the grossness from the music. The only way was to put something better in its stead. This inestimable something better Burns gave us." So purified and ennobled by Burns, these songs embody human emotion in its most condensed and sweetest es- sence. They appeal to all ranks, they touch all ages, they viii.J CHARACTER, POEMS, SONGS. 20r, cheer toil -worn men under every clime. 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