No More Learning

'"

Robert Burns was now the head of his father's house. He gathered
together the little that law and misfortune had spared, and took the
farm of Mossgiel, near Mauchline, containing one hundred and eighteen
acres, at a rent of ninety pounds a year: his mother and sisters took
the domestic superintendence of home, barn, and byre; and he
associated his brother Gilbert in the labours of the land. It was made
a joint affair: the poet was young, willing, and vigorous, and
excelled in ploughing, sowing, reaping, mowing, and thrashing. His
wages were fixed at seven pounds per annum, and such for a time was
his care and frugality, that he never exceeded this small allowance.
He purchased books on farming, held conversations with the old and the
knowing; and said unto himself, "I shall be prudent and wise, and my
shadow shall increase in the land. " But it was not decreed that these
resolutions were to endure, and that he was to become a mighty
agriculturist in the west. Farmer Attention, as the proverb says, is a
good farmer, all the world over, and Burns was such by fits and by
starts. But he who writes an ode on the sheep he is about to shear, a
poem on the flower that he covers with the furrow, who sees visions on
his way to market, who makes rhymes on the horse he is about to yoke,
and a song on the girl who shows the whitest hands among his reapers,
has small chance of leading a market, or of being laird of the fields
he rents. The dreams of Burns were of the muses, and not of rising
markets, of golden locks rather than of yellow corn: he had other
faults. It is not known that William Burns was aware before his death
that his eldest son had sinned in rhyme; but we have Gilbert's
assurance, that his father went to the grave in ignorance of his son's
errors of a less venial kind--unwitting that he was soon to give a
two-fold proof of both in "Rob the Rhymer's Address to his Bastard
Child"--a poem less decorous than witty.

The dress and condition of Burns when he became a poet were not at all
poetical, in the minstrel meaning of the word. His clothes, coarse and
homely, were made from home-grown wool, shorn off his own sheeps'
backs, carded and spun at his own fireside, woven by the village
weaver, and, when not of natural hodden-gray, dyed a half-blue in the
village vat. They were shaped and sewed by the district tailor, who
usually wrought at the rate of a groat a day and his food; and as the
wool was coarse, so also was the workmanship. The linen which he wore
was home-grown, home-hackled, home-spun, home-woven, and
home-bleached, and, unless designed for Sunday use, was of coarse,
strong harn, to suit the tear and wear of barn and field. His shoes
came from rustic tanpits, for most farmers then prepared their own
leather; were armed, sole and heel, with heavy, broad-headed nails, to
endure the clod and the road: as hats were then little in use, save
among small lairds or country gentry, westland heads were commonly
covered with a coarse, broad, blue bonnet, with a stopple on its flat
crown, made in thousands at Kilmarnock, and known in all lands by the
name of scone bonnets. His plaid was a handsome red and white
check--for pride in poets, he said, was no sin--prepared of fine wool
with more than common care by the hands of his mother and sisters, and
woven with more skill than the village weaver was usually required to
exert. His dwelling was in keeping with his dress, a low, thatched
house, with a kitchen, a bedroom and closet, with floors of kneaded
clay, and ceilings of moorland turf: a few books on a shelf, thumbed
by many a thumb; a few hams drying above head in the smoke, which was
in no haste to get out at the roof--a wooden settle, some oak chairs,
chaff beds well covered with blankets, with a fire of peat and wood
burning at a distance from the gable wall, on the middle of the floor.
His food was as homely as his habitation, and consisted chiefly of
oatmeal-porridge, barley-broth, and potatoes, and milk. How the muse
happened to visit him in this clay biggin, take a fancy to a clouterly
peasant, and teach him strains of consummate beauty and elegance, must
ever be a matter of wonder to all those, and they are not few, who
hold that noble sentiments and heroic deeds are the exclusive portion
of the gently nursed and the far descended.

Of the earlier verses of Burns few are preserved: when composed, he
put them on paper, but the kept them to himself: though a poet at
sixteen, he seems not to have made even his brother his confidante
till he became a man, and his judgment had ripened. He, however, made
a little clasped paper book his treasurer, and under the head of
"Observations, Hints, Songs, and Scraps of Poetry," we find many a
wayward and impassioned verse, songs rising little above the humblest
country strain, or bursting into an elegance and a beauty worthy of
the highest of minstrels. The first words noted down are the stanzas
which he composed on his fair companion of the harvest-field, out of
whose hands he loved to remove the nettle-stings and the thistles: the
prettier song, beginning "Now westlin win's and slaughtering guns,"
written on the lass of Kirkoswald, with whom, instead of learning
mensuration, he chose to wander under the light of the moon: a strain
better still, inspired by the charms of a neighbouring maiden, of the
name of Annie Ronald; another, of equal merit, arising out of his
nocturnal adventures among the lasses of the west; and, finally, that
crowning glory of all his lyric compositions, "Green grow the rashes. "
This little clasped book, however, seems not to have been made his
confidante till his twenty-third or twenty-fourth year: he probably
admitted to its pages only the strains which he loved most, or such as
had taken a place in his memory: at whatever age it was commenced, he
had then begun to estimate his own character, and intimate his
fortunes, for he calls himself in its pages "a man who had little art
in making money, and still less in keeping it. "

We have not been told how welcome the incense of his songs rendered
him to the rustic maidens of Kyle: women are not apt to be won by the
charms of verse; they have little sympathy with dreamers on Parnassus,
and allow themselves to be influenced by something more substantial
than the roses and lilies of the muse. Burns had other claims to their
regard then those arising from poetic skill: he was tall, young,
good-looking, with dark, bright eyes, and words and wit at will: he
had a sarcastic sally for all lads who presumed to cross his path, and
a soft, persuasive word for all lasses on whom he fixed his fancy: nor
was this all--he was adventurous and bold in love trystes and love
excursions: long, rough roads, stormy nights, flooded rivers, and
lonesome places, were no letts to him; and when the dangers or labours
of the way were braved, he was alike skilful in eluding vigilant
aunts, wakerife mothers, and envious or suspicions sisters: for rivals
he had a blow as ready us he had a word, and was familiar with snug
stack-yards, broomy glens, and nooks of hawthorn and honeysuckle,
where maidens love to be wooed. This rendered him dearer to woman's
heart than all the lyric effusions of his fancy; and when we add to
such allurements, a warm, flowing, and persuasive eloquence, we need
not wonder that woman listened and was won; that one of the most
charming damsels of the West said, an hour with him in the dark was
worth a lifetime of light with any other body; or that the
accomplished and beautiful Duchess of Gordon declared, in a latter
day, that no man ever carried her so completely off her feet as Robert
Burns.

It is one of the delusions of the poet's critics and biographers, that
the sources of his inspiration are to be found in the great classic
poets of the land, with some of whom he had from his youth been
familiar: there is little or no trace of them in any of his
compositions. He read and wondered--he warmed his fancy at their
flame, he corrected his own natural taste by theirs, but he neither
copied nor imitated, and there are but two or three allusions to Young
and Shakspeare in all the range of his verse. He could not but feel
that he was the scholar of a different school, and that his thirst was
to be slaked at other fountains. The language in which those great
bards embodied their thoughts was unapproachable to an Ayrshire
peasant; it was to him as an almost foreign tongue: he had to think
and feel in the not ungraceful or inharmonious language of his own
vale, and then, in a manner, translate it into that of Pope or of
Thomson, with the additional difficulty of finding English words to
express the exact meaning of those of Scotland, which had chiefly been
retained because equivalents could not be found in the more elegant
and grammatical tongue. Such strains as those of the polished Pope or
the sublimer Milton were beyond his power, less from deficiency of
genius than from lack of language: he could, indeed, write English
with ease and fluency; but when he desired to be tender or
impassioned, to persuade or subdue, he had recourse to the Scottish,
and he found it sufficient.

The goddesses or the Dalilahs of the young poet's song were, like the
language in which he celebrated them, the produce of the district; not
dames high and exalted, but lasses of the barn and of the byre, who
had never been in higher company than that of shepherds or ploughmen,
or danced in a politer assembly than that of their fellow-peasants, on
a barn-floor, to the sound of the district fiddle. Nor even of these
did he choose the loveliest to lay out the wealth of his verse upon:
he has been accused, by his brother among others, of lavishing the
colours of his fancy on very ordinary faces. "He had always," says
Gilbert, "a jealousy of people who were richer than himself; his love,
therefore, seldom settled on persons of this description. When he
selected any one, out of the sovereignty of his good pleasure, to whom
he should pay his particular attention, she was instantly invested
with a sufficient stock of charms out of the plentiful stores of his
own imagination: and there was often a great dissimilitude between his
fair captivator, as she appeared to others and as she seemed when
invested with the attributes he gave her. " "My heart," he himself,
speaking of those days, observes, "was completely tinder, and was
eternally lighted up by some goddess or other. " Yet, it must be
acknowledged that sufficient room exists for believing that Burns and
his brethren of the West had very different notions of the captivating
and the beautiful; while they were moved by rosy checks and looks of
rustic health, he was moved, like a sculptor, by beauty of form or by
harmony of motion, and by expression, which lightened up ordinary
features and rendered them captivating. Such, I have been told, were
several of the lasses of the West, to whom, if he did not surrender
his heart, he rendered homage: and both elegance of form and beauty of
face were visible to all in those of whom he afterwards sang--the
Hamiltons and the Burnets of Edinburgh, and the Millers and M'Murdos
of the Nith.

The mind of Burns took now a wider range: he had sung of the maidens
of Kyle in strains not likely soon to die, and though not weary of the
softnesses of love, he desired to try his genius on matters of a
sterner kind--what those subjects were he tells us; they were homely
and at hand, of a native nature and of Scottish growth: places
celebrated in Roman story, vales made famous in Grecian song--hills of
vines and groves of myrtle had few charms for him. "I am hurt," thus
he writes in August, 1785, "to see other towns, rivers, woods, and
haughs of Scotland immortalized in song, while my dear native county,
the ancient Baillieries of Carrick, Kyle, and Cunningham, famous in
both ancient and modern times for a gallant and warlike race of
inhabitants--a county where civil and religious liberty have ever
found their first support and their asylum--a county, the birth-place
of many famous philosophers, soldiers, and statesmen, and the scene of
many great events recorded in history, particularly the actions of the
glorious Wallace--yet we have never had one Scotch poet of any
eminence to make the fertile banks of Irvine, the romantic woodlands
and sequestered scenes of Ayr. and the mountainous source and winding
sweep of the Doon, emulate Tay, Forth, Ettrick, and Tweed. This is a
complaint I would gladly remedy, but, alas! I am far unequal to the
task, both in genius and education. " To fill up with glowing verse the
outline which this sketch indicates, was to raise the long-laid spirit
of national song--to waken a strain to which the whole land would
yield response--a miracle unattempted--certainly unperformed--since
the days of the Gentle Shepherd. It is true that the tongue of the
muse had at no time been wholly silent; that now and then a burst of
sublime woe, like the song of "Mary, weep no more for me," and of
lasting merriment and humour, like that of "Tibbie Fowler," proved
that the fire of natural poesie smouldered, if it did not blaze; while
the social strains of the unfortunate Fergusson revived in the city,
if not in the field, the memory of him who sang the "Monk and the
Miller's wife. " But notwithstanding these and other productions of
equal merit, Scottish poesie, it must be owned, had lost much of its
original ecstasy and fervour, and that the boldest efforts of the
muse no more equalled the songs of Dunbar, of Douglas, of Lyndsay, and
of James the Fifth, than the sound of an artificial cascade resembles
the undying thunders of Corra.

To accomplish this required an acquaintance with man beyond what the
forge, the change-house, and the market-place of the village supplied;
a look further than the barn-yard and the furrowed field, and a
livelier knowledge and deeper feeling of history than, probably, Burns
ever possessed. To all ready and accessible sources of knowledge he
appears to have had recourse; he sought matter for his muse in the
meetings, religious as well as social, of the district--consorted with
staid matrons, grave plodding farmers--with those who preached as well
as those who listened--with sharp-tongued attorneys, who laid down the
law over a Mauchline gill--with country squires, whose wisdom was
great in the game-laws, and in contested elections--and with roving
smugglers, who at that time hung, as a cloud, on all the western coast
of Scotland. In the company of farmers and fellow-peasants, he
witnessed scenes which he loved to embody in verse, saw pictures of
peace and joy, now woven into the web of his song, and had a poetic
impulse given to him both by cottage devotion and cottage merriment.
If he was familiar with love and all its outgoings and incomings--had
met his lass in the midnight shade, or walked with her under the moon,
or braved a stormy night and a haunted road for her sake--he was as
well acquainted with the joys which belong to social intercourse, when
instruments of music speak to the feet, when the reek of punchbowls
gives a tongue to the staid and demure, and bridal festivity, and
harvest-homes, bid a whole valley lift up its voice and be glad. It is
more difficult to decide what poetic use he could make of his
intercourse with that loose and lawless class of men, who, from love
of gain, broke the laws and braved the police of their country: that
he found among smugglers, as he says, "men of noble virtues,
magnanimity, generosity, disinterested friendship, and modesty," is
easier to believe than that he escaped the contamination of their
sensual manners and prodigality. The people of Kyle regarded this
conduct with suspicion: they were not to be expected to know that when
Burns ranted and housed with smugglers, conversed with tinkers huddled
in a kiln, or listened to the riotous mirth of a batch of "randie
gangrel bodies" as they "toomed their powks and pawned their duds,"
for liquor in Poosie Nansie's, he was taking sketches for the future
entertainment and instruction of the world; they could not foresee
that from all this moral strength and poetic beauty would arise.

While meditating something better than a ballad to his mistress's
eyebrow, he did not neglect to lay out the little skill he had in
cultivating the grounds of Mossgiel. The prosperity in which he found
himself in the first and second seasons, induced him to hope that good
fortune had not yet forsaken him: a genial summer and a good market
seldom come together to the farmer, but at first they came to Burns;
and to show that he was worthy of them, he bought books on
agriculture, calculated rotation of crops, attended sales, held the
plough with diligence, used the scythe, the reap-hook, and the flail,
with skill, and the malicious even began to say that there was
something more in him than wild sallies of wit and foolish rhymes. But
the farm lay high, the bottom was wet, and in a third season,
indifferent seed and a wet harvest robbed him at once of half his
crop: he seems to have regarded this as an intimation from above, that
nothing which he undertook would prosper: and consoled himself with
joyous friends and with the society of the muse. The judgment cannot
be praised which selected a farm with a wet cold bottom, and sowed it
with unsound seed; but that man who despairs because a wet season robs
him of the fruits of the field, is unfit for the warfare of life,
where fortitude is as much required as by a general on a field of
battle, when the tide of success threatens to flow against him. The
poet seems to have believed, very early in life, that he was none of
the elect of Mammon; that he was too much of a genius ever to acquire
wealth by steady labour, or by, as he loved to call it, gin-horse
prudence, or grubbing industry.

And yet there were hours and days in which Burns, even when the rain
fell on his unhoused sheaves, did not wholly despair of himself: he
laboured, nay sometimes he slaved on his farm; and at intervals of
toil, sought to embellish his mind with such knowledge as might be
useful, should chance, the goddess who ruled his lot, drop him upon
some of the higher places of the land. He had, while he lived at
Tarbolton, united with some half-dozen young men, all sons of farmers
in that neighbourhood, in forming a club, of which the object was to
charm away a few evening hours in the week with agreeable chit-chat,
and the discussion of topics of economy or love. Of this little
society the poet was president, and the first question they were
called on to settle was this, "Suppose a young man bred a farmer, but
without any fortune, has it in his power to marry either of two women;
the one a girl of large fortune, but neither handsome in person, nor
agreeable in conversation, but who can manage the household affairs of
a farm well enough; the other of them, a girl every way agreeable in
person, conversation, and behaviour, but without any fortune, which of
them shall he choose? " This question was started by the poet, and once
every week the club were called to the consideration of matters
connected with rural life and industry: their expenses were limited to
threepence a week; and till the departure of Burns to the distant
Mossgiel, the club continued to live and thrive; on his removal it
lost the spirit which gave it birth, and was heard of no more; but its
aims and its usefulness were revived in Mauchline, where the poet was
induced to establish a society which only differed from the other in
spending the moderate fines arising from non-attendance, on books,
instead of liquor. Here, too, Burns was the president, and the members
were chiefly the sons of husbandmen, whom he found, he said, more
natural in their manners, and more agreeable than the self-sufficient
mechanics of villages and towns, who were ready to dispute on all
topics, and inclined to be convinced on none. This club had the
pleasure of subscribing for the first edition of the works of its
great associate. It has been questioned by his first biographer,
whether the refinement of mind, which follows the reading of books of
eloquence and delicacy,--the mental improvement resulting from such
calm discussions as the Tarbolton and Mauchline clubs indulged in, was
not injurious to men engaged in the barn and at the plough. A
well-ordered mind will be strengthened, as well as embellished, by
elegant knowledge, while over those naturally barren and ungenial all
that is refined or noble will pass as a sunny shower scuds over lumps
of granite, bringing neither warmth nor life.

In the account which the poet gives to Moore of his early poems, he
says little about his exquisite lyrics, and less about "The Death and
dying Words of Poor Mailie," or her "Elegy," the first of his poems
where the inspiration of the muse is visible; but he speaks with
exultation of the fame which those indecorous sallies, "Holy Willie's
Prayer" and "The Holy Tulzie" brought from some of the clergy, and the
people of Ayrshire. The west of Scotland is ever in the van, when
mutters either political or religious are agitated. Calvinism was
shaken, at this time, with a controversy among its professors, of
which it is enough to say, that while one party rigidly adhered to the
word and letter of the Confession of Faith, and preached up the palmy
and wholesome days of the Covenant, the other sought to soften the
harsher rules and observances of the kirk, and to bring moderation and
charity into its discipline as well as its councils. Both believed
themselves right, both were loud and hot, and personal,--bitter with a
bitterness only known in religious controversy. The poet sided with
the professors of the New Light, as the more tolerant were called, and
handled the professors of the Old Light, as the other party were
named, with the most unsparing severity. For this he had sufficient
cause:--he had experienced the mercilessness of kirk-discipline, when
his frailties caused him to visit the stool of repentance; and
moreover his friend Gavin Hamilton, a writer in Mauchline, had been
sharply censured by the same authorities, for daring to gallop on
Sundays. Moodie, of Riccarton, and Russel, of Kilmarnock, were the
first who tasted of the poet's wrath. They, though professors of the
Old Light, had quarrelled, and, it is added, fought: "The Holy
Tulzie," which recorded, gave at the same time wings to the scandal;
while for "Holy Willie," an elder of Mauchline, and an austere and
hollow pretender to righteousness, he reserved the fiercest of all his
lampoons. In "Holy Willie's Prayer," he lays a burning hand on the
terrible doctrine of predestination: this is a satire, daring,
personal, and profane. Willie claims praise in the singular,
acknowledges folly in the plural, and makes heaven accountable for his
sins! in a similar strain of undevout satire, he congratulates Goudie,
of Kilmarnock, on his Essays on Revealed Religion. These poems,
particularly the two latter, are the sharpest lampoons in the
language.

While drudging in the cause of the New Light controversialists, Burns
was not unconsciously strengthening his hands for worthier toils: the
applause which selfish divines bestowed on his witty, but graceless
effusions, could not be enough for one who knew how fleeting the fame
was which came from the heat of party disputes; nor was he insensible
that songs of a beauty unknown for a century to national poesy, had
been unregarded in the hue and cry which arose on account of "Holy
Willie's Prayer" and "The Holy Tulzie. " He hesitated to drink longer
out of the agitated puddle of Calvinistic controversy, he resolved to
slake his thirst at the pure well-springs of patriot feeling and
domestic love; and accordingly, in the last and best of his
controversial compositions, he rose out of the lower regions of
lampoon into the upper air of true poetry. "The Holy Fair," though
stained in one or two verses with personalities, exhibits a scene
glowing with character and incident and life: the aim of the poem is
not so much to satirize one or two Old Light divines, as to expose and
rebuke those almost indecent festivities, which in too many of the
western parishes accompanied the administration of the sacrament. In
the earlier days of the church, when men were staid and sincere, it
was, no doubt, an impressive sight to see rank succeeding rank, of the
old and the young, all calm and all devout, seated before the tent of
the preacher, in the sunny hours of June, listening to his eloquence,
or partaking of the mystic bread and wine; but in these our latter
days, when discipline is relaxed, along with the sedate and the pious
come swarms of the idle and the profligate, whom no eloquence can
edify and no solemn rite affect. On these, and such as these, the poet
has poured his satire; and since this desirable reprehension the Holy
Fairs, east as well as west, have become more decorous, if not more
devout.

His controversial sallies were accompanied, or followed, by a series
of poems which showed that national character and manners, as Lockhart
has truly and happily said, were once more in the hands of a national
poet. These compositions are both numerous and various: they record
the poet's own experience and emotions; they exhibit the highest moral
feeling, the purest patriotic sentiments, and a deep sympathy with the
fortunes, both here and hereafter of his fellow-men; they delineate
domestic manners, man's stern as well as social hours, and mingle the
serious with the joyous, the sarcastic with the solemn, the mournful
with the pathetic, the amiable with the gay, and all with an ease and
unaffected force and freedom known only to the genius of Shakspeare.
In "The Twa Dogs" he seeks to reconcile the labourer to his lot, and
intimates, by examples drawn from the hall as well as the cottage,
that happiness resides in the humblest abodes, and is even partial to
the clouted shoe. In "Scotch Drink" he excites man to love his
country, by precepts both heroic and social; and proves that while
wine and brandy are the tipple of slaves, whiskey and ale are the
drink of the free: sentiments of a similar kind distinguish his
"Earnest Cry and Prayer to the Scotch Representatives in the House of
Commons," each of whom he exhorts by name to defend the remaining
liberties and immunities of his country. A higher tone distinguishes
the "Address to the Deil:" he records all the names, and some of them
are strange ones; and all the acts, and some of them are as whimsical
as they are terrible, of this far kenned and noted personage; to these
he adds some of the fiend's doings as they stand in Scripture,
together with his own experiences; and concludes by a hope, as
unexpected as merciful and relenting, that Satan may not be exposed to
an eternity of torments. "The Dream" is a humorous sally, and may be
almost regarded as prophetic. The poet feigns himself present, in
slumber, at the Royal birth-day; and supposes that he addresses his
majesty, on his household matters as well as the affairs of the
nation. Some of the princes, it has been satirically hinted, behaved
afterwards in such a way as if they wished that the scripture of the
Burns should be fulfilled: in this strain, he has imitated the license
and equalled the wit of some of the elder Scottish Poets.

"The Vision" is wholly serious; it exhibits the poet in one of those
fits of despondency which the dull, who have no misgivings, never
know: he dwells with sarcastic bitterness on the opportunities which,
for the sake of song, he has neglected of becoming wealthy, and is
drawing a sad parallel between rags and riches, when the muse steps in
and cheer his despondency, by assuring him of undying fame.
"Halloween" is a strain of a more homely kind, recording the
superstitious beliefs, and no less superstitious doings of Old
Scotland, on that night, when witches and elves and evil spirits are
let loose among the children of men: it reaches far back into manners
and customs, and is a picture, curious and valuable. The tastes and
feelings of husbandmen inspired "The old Farmer's Address to his old
mare Maggie," which exhibits some pleasing recollections of his days
of courtship and hours of sociality. The calm, tranquil picture of
household happiness and devotion in "the Cotter's Saturday Night," has
induced Hogg, among others, to believe that it has less than usual of
the spirit of the poet, but it has all the spirit that was required;
the toil of the week has ceased, the labourer has returned to his
well-ordered home--his "cozie ingle and his clean hearth-stane,"--and
with his wife and children beside him, turns his thoughts to the
praise of that God to whom he owes all: this he performs with a
reverence and an awe, at once natural, national, and poetic. "The
Mouse" is a brief and happy and very moving poem: happy, for it
delineates, with wonderful truth and life, the agitation of the mouse
when the coulter broke into its abode; and moving, for the poet takes
the lesson of ruin to himself, and feels the present and dreads the
future. "The Mountain Daisy," once, more properly, called by Burns
"The Gowan," resembles "The Mouse" in incident and in moral, and is
equally happy, in language and conception. "The Lament" is a dark, and
all but tragic page, from the poet's own life. "Man was made to
Mourn'" takes the part of the humble and the homeless, against the
coldness and selfishness of the wealthy and the powerful, a favourite
topic of meditation with Burns. He refrained, for awhile, from making
"Death and Doctor Hernbook" public; a poem which deviates from the
offensiveness of personal satire, into a strain of humour, at once
airy and original.

His epistles in verse may be reckoned amongst his happiest
productions: they are written in all moods of mind, and are, by turns,
lively and sad; careless and serious;--now giving advice, then taking
it; laughing at learning, and lamenting its want; scoffing at
propriety and wealth, yet admitting, that without the one he cannot be
wise, nor wanting the other, independent. The Epistle to David Sillar
is the first of these compositions: the poet has no news to tell, and
no serious question to ask: he has only to communicate his own
emotions of joy, or of sorrow, and these he relates and discusses with
singular elegance as well as ease, twining, at the same time, into the
fabric of his composition, agreeable allusions to the taste and
affections of his correspondent. He seems to have rated the intellect
of Sillar as the highest among his rustic friends: he pays him more
deference, and addresses him in a higher vein than he observes to
others. The Epistles to Lapraik, to Smith, and to Rankine, are in a
more familiar, or social mood, and lift the veil from the darkness of
the poet's condition, and exhibit a mind of first-rate power, groping,
and that surely, its way to distinction, in spite of humility of
birth, obscurity of condition, and the coldness of the wealthy or the
titled. The epistles of other poets owe some of their fame to the rank
or the reputation of those to whom they are addressed; those of Burns
are written, one and all, to nameless and undistinguished men. Sillar
was a country schoolmaster, Lapraik a moorland laird, Smith a small
shop-keeper, and Rankine a farmer, who loved a gill and a joke. Yet
these men were the chief friends, the only literary associates of the
poet, during those early years, in which, with some exceptions, his
finest works were written.

Burns, while he was writing the poems, the chief of which we have
named, was a labouring husbandman on the little farm of Mossgiel, a
pursuit which affords but few leisure hours for either reading or
pondering; but to him the stubble-field was musing-ground, and the
walk behind the plough, a twilight saunter on Parnassus. As, with a
careful hand and a steady eye, he guided his horses, and saw an evenly
furrow turned up by the share, his thoughts were on other themes; he
was straying in haunted glens, when spirits have power--looking in
fancy on the lasses "skelping barefoot," in silks and in scarlets, to
a field-preaching--walking in imagination with the rosy widow, who on
Halloween ventured to dip her left sleeve in the burn, where three
lairds' lands met--making the "bottle clunk," with joyous smugglers,
on a lucky run of gin or brandy--or if his thoughts at all approached
his acts--he was moralizing on the daisy oppressed by the furrow which
his own ploughshare had turned. That his thoughts were thus wandering
we have his own testimony, with that of his brother Gilbert; and were
both wanting, the certainty that he composed the greater part of his
immortal poems in two years, from the summer of 1784 to the summer of
1786, would be evidence sufficient. The muse must have been strong
within him, when, in spite of the rains and sleets of the
"ever-dropping west"--when in defiance of the hot and sweaty brows
occasioned by reaping and thrashing--declining markets, and showery
harvests--the clamour of his laird for his rent, and the tradesman for
his account, he persevered in song, and sought solace in verse, when
all other solace was denied him.

The circumstances under which his principal poems were composed, have
been related: the "Lament of Mailie" found its origin in the
catastrophe of a pet ewe; the "Epistle to Sillar" was confided by the
poet to his brother while they were engaged in weeding the kale-yard;
the "Address to the Deil" was suggested by the many strange portraits
which belief or fear had drawn of Satan, and was repeated by the one
brother to the other, on the way with their carts to the kiln, for
lime; the "Cotter's Saturday Night" originated in the reverence with
which the worship of God was conducted in the family of the poet's
father, and in the solemn tone with which he desired his children to
compose themselves for praise and prayer; "the Mouse," and its moral
companion "the Daisy," were the offspring of the incidents which they
relate; and "Death and Doctor Hornbook" was conceived at a
freemason-meeting, where the hero of the piece had shown too much of
the pedant, and composed on his way home, after midnight, by the poet,
while his head was somewhat dizzy with drink. One of the most
remarkable of his compositions, the "Jolly Beggars," a drama, to which
nothing in the language of either the North or South can be compared,
and which was unknown till after the death of the author, was
suggested by a scene which he saw in a low ale-house, into which, on a
Saturday night, most of the sturdy beggars of the district had met to
sell their meal, pledge their superfluous rags, and drink their gains.
It may be added, that he loved to walk in solitary spots; that his
chief musing-ground was the banks of the Ayr; the season most
congenial to his fancy that of winter, when the winds were heard in
the leafless woods, and the voice of the swollen streams came from
vale and hill; and that he seldom composed a whole poem at once, but
satisfied with a few fervent verses, laid the subject aside, till the
muse summoned him to another exertion of fancy. In a little back
closet, still existing in the farm-house of Mossgiel, he committed
most of his poems to paper.

But while the poet rose, the farmer sank. It was not the cold clayey
bottom of his ground, nor the purchase of unsound seed-corn, not the
fluctuation in the markets alone, which injured him; neither was it
the taste for freemason socialities, nor a desire to join the mirth of
comrades, either of the sea or the shore: neither could it be wholly
imputed to his passionate following of the softer sex--indulgence in
the "illicit rove," or giving way to his eloquence at the feet of one
whom he loved and honoured; other farmers indulged in the one, or
suffered from the other, yet were prosperous. His want of success
arose from other causes; his heart was not with his task, save by fits
and starts: he felt he was designed for higher purposes than
ploughing, and harrowing, and sowing, and reaping: when the sun called
on him, after a shower, to come to the plough, or when the ripe corn
invited the sickle, or the ready market called for the measured grain,
the poet was under other spells, and was slow to avail himself of
those golden moments which come but once in the season. To this may be
added, a too superficial knowledge of the art of farming, and a want
of intimacy with the nature of the soil he was called to cultivate. He
could speak fluently of leas, and faughs, and fallows, of change of
seed and rotation of crops, but practical knowledge and application
were required, and in these Burns was deficient. The moderate gain
which those dark days of agriculture brought to the economical farmer,
was not obtained: the close, the all but niggardly care by which he
could win and keep his crown-piece,--gold was seldom in the farmer's
hand,--was either above or below the mind of the poet, and Mossgiel,
which, in the hands of an assiduous farmer, might have made a
reasonable return for labour, was unproductive, under one who had
little skill, less economy, and no taste for the task.

Other reasons for his failure have been assigned. It is to the credit
of the moral sentiments of the husbandmen of Scotland, that when one
of their class forgets what virtue requires, and dishonours, without
reparation, even the humblest of the maidens, he is not allowed to go
unpunished. No proceedings take place, perhaps one hard word is not
spoken; but he is regarded with loathing by the old and the devout; he
is looked on by all with cold and reproachful eyes--sorrow is foretold
as his lot, sure disaster as his fortune; and is these chance to
arrive, the only sympathy expressed is, "What better could he expect? "
Something of this sort befel Burns: he had already satisfied the kirk
in the matter of "Sonsie, smirking, dear-bought Bess," his daughter,
by one of his mother's maids; and now, to use his own words, he was
brought within point-blank of the heaviest metal of the kirk by a
similar folly. The fair transgressor, both for her fathers and her own
youth, had a large share of public sympathy. Jean Armour, for it is of
her I speak, was in her eighteenth year; with dark eyes, a handsome
foot, and a melodious tongue, she made her way to the poet's
heart--and, as their stations in life were equal, it seemed that they
had only to be satisfied themselves to render their union easy. But
her father, in addition to being a very devout man, was a zealot of
the Old Light; and Jean, dreading his resentment, was willing, while
she loved its unforgiven satirist, to love him in secret, in the hope
that the time would come when she might safely avow it: she admitted
the poet, therefore, to her company in lonesome places, and walks
beneath the moon, where they both forgot themselves, and were at last
obliged to own a private marriage as a protection from kirk censure.
The professors of the Old Light rejoiced, since it brought a scoffing
rhymer within reach of their hand; but her father felt a twofold
sorrow, because of the shame of a favourite daughter, and for having
committed the folly with one both loose in conduct and profane of
speech. He had cause to be angry, but his anger, through his zeal,
became tyrannous: in the exercise of what he called a father's power,
he compelled his child to renounce the poet as her husband and burn
the marriage-lines; for he regarded her marriage, without the kirk's
permission, with a man so utterly cast away, as a worse crime than her
folly. So blind is anger! She could renounce neither her husband nor
his offspring in a lawful way, and in spite of the destruction of the
marriage lines, and renouncing the name of wife, she was as much Mrs.
Burns as marriage could make her. No one concerned seemed to think so.
Burns, who loved her tenderly, went all but mad when she renounced
him: he gave up his share of Mossgiel to his brother, and roamed,
moody and idle, about the land, with no better aim in life than a
situation in one of our western sugar-isles, and a vague hope of
distinction as a poet.

How the distinction which he desired as a poet was to be obtained,
was, to a poor bard in a provincial place, a sore puzzle: there were
no enterprising booksellers in the western land, and it was not to be
expected that the printers of either Kilmarnock or Paisley had money
to expend on a speculation in rhyme: it is much to the honour of his
native county that the publication which he wished for was at last
made easy. The best of his poems, in his own handwriting, had found
their way into the hands of the Ballantynes, Hamiltons, Parkers, and
Mackenzies, and were much admired. Mrs. Stewart, of Stair and Afton, a
lady of distinction and taste, had made, accidentally, the
acquaintance both of Burns and some of his songs, and was ready to
befriend him; and so favourable was the impression on all hands, that
a subscription, sufficient to defray the outlay of paper and print,
was soon filled up--one hundred copies being subscribed for by the
Parkers alone. He soon arranged materials for a volume, and put them
into the hands of a printer in Kilmarnock, the Wee Johnnie of one of
his biting epigrams. Johnnie was startled at the unceremonious freedom
of most of the pieces, and asked the poet to compose one of modest
language and moral aim, to stand at the beginning, and excuse some of
those free ones which followed: Burns, whose "Twa Dogs" was then
incomplete, finished the poem at a sitting, and put it in the van,
much to his printer's satisfaction. If the "Jolly Beggars" was omitted
for any other cause than its freedom of sentiment and language, or
"Death and Doctor Hornbook" from any other feeling than that of being
too personal, the causes of their exclusion have remained a secret. It
is less easy to account for the emission of many songs of high merit
which he had among his papers: perhaps he thought those which he
selected were sufficient to test the taste of the public. Before he
printed the whole, he, with the consent of his brother, altered his
name from Burness to Burns, a change which, I am told, he in after
years regretted.

In the summer of the year 1786, the little volume, big with the hopes
and fortunes of the bard made its appearance: it was entitled simply,
"Poems, chiefly in the Scottish Dialect; by Robert Burns;" and
accompanied by a modest preface, saying, that he submitted his book to
his country with fear and with trembling, since it contained little of
the art of poesie, and at the best was but a voice given, rude, he
feared, and uncouth, to the loves, the hopes, and the fears of his own
bosom. Had a summer sun risen on a winter morning, it could not have
surprised the Lowlands of Scotland more than this Kilmarnock volume
surprised and delighted the people, one and all. The milkmaid sang his
songs, the ploughman repeated his poems; the old quoted both, and
ever the devout rejoiced that idle verse had at last mixed a tone of
morality with its mirth. The volume penetrated even into Nithsdale.
"Keep it out of the way of your children," said a Cameronian divine,
when he lent it to my father, "lest ye find them, as I found mine,
reading it on the Sabbath. " No wonder that such a volume made its way
to the hearts of a peasantry whose taste in poetry had been the marvel
of many writers: the poems were mostly on topics with which they were
familiar: the language was that of the fireside, raised above the
vulgarities of common life, by a purifying spirit of expression and
the exalting fervour of inspiration: and there was such a brilliant
and graceful mixture of the elegant and the homely, the lofty and the
low, the familiar and the elevated--such a rapid succession of scenes
which moved to tenderness or tears; or to subdued mirth or open
laughter--unlooked for allusions to scripture, or touches of sarcasm
and scandal--of superstitions to scare, and of humour to
delight--while through the whole was diffused, as the scent of flowers
through summer air, a moral meaning--a sentimental beauty, which
sweetened and sanctified all. The poet's expectations from this little
venture were humble: he hoped as much money from it as would pay for
his passage to the West Indies, where he proposed to enter into the
service of some of the Scottish settlers, and help to manage the
double mystery of sugar-making and slavery.

The hearty applause which I have recorded came chiefly from the
husbandman, the shepherd, and the mechanic: the approbation of the
magnates of the west, though not less-warm, was longer in coming. Mrs.
Stewart of Stair, indeed, commended the poems and cheered their
author: Dugald Stewart received his visits with pleasure, and wondered
at his vigour of conversation as much as at his muse: the door of the
house of Hamilton was open to him, where the table was ever spread,
and the hand ever ready to help: while the purses of the Ballantynes
and the Parkers were always as open to him as were the doors of their
houses. Those persons must be regarded as the real patrons of the
poet: the high names of the district are not to be found among those
who helped him with purse and patronage in 1786, that year of deep
distress and high distinction. The Montgomerys came with their praise
when his fame was up; the Kennedys and the Boswells were silent: and
though the Cunninghams gave effectual aid, it was when the muse was
crying with a loud voice before him, "Come all and see the man whom I
delight to honour. " It would be unjust as well as ungenerous not to
mention the name of Mrs. Dunlop among the poet's best and early
patrons: the distance at which she lived from Mossgiel had kept his
name from her till his poems appeared: but his works induced her to
desire his acquaintance, and she became his warmest and surest friend.

To say the truth, Burns endeavoured in every honourable way to obtain
the notice of those who had influence in the land: he copied out the
best of his unpublished poems in a fair hand, and inserting them in
his printed volume, presented it to those who seemed slow to buy: he
rewarded the notice of this one with a song--the attentions of that
one with a sally of encomiastic verse: he left psalms of his own
composing in the manse when he feasted with a divine: he enclosed
"Holy Willie's Prayer," with an injunction to be grave, to one who
loved mirth: he sent the "Holy Fair" to one whom he invited to drink a
gill out of a mutchkin stoup, at Mauchline market; and on accidentally
meeting with Lord Daer, he immediately commemorated the event in a
sally of verse, of a strain more free and yet as flattering as ever
flowed from the lips of a court bard. While musing over the names of
those on whom fortune had smiled, yet who had neglected to smile on
him, he remembered that he had met Miss Alexander, a young beauty of
the west, in the walks of Ballochmyle; and he recorded the impression
which this fair vision made on him in a song of unequalled elegance
and melody. He had met her in the woods in July, on the 18th of
November he sent her the song, and reminded her of the circumstance
from which it arose, in a letter which it is evident he had laboured
to render polished and complimentary. The young lady took no notice of
either the song or the poet, though willing, it is said, to hear of
both now:--this seems to have been the last attempt he made on the
taste or the sympathies of the gentry of his native district: for on
the very day following we find him busy in making arrangements for his
departure to Jamaica.

For this step Burns had more than sufficient reasons: the profits of
his volume amounted to little more than enough to waft him across the
Atlantic: Wee Johnnie, though the edition was all sold, refused to
risk another on speculation: his friends, both Ballantynes and
Parkers, volunteered to relieve the printer's anxieties, but the poet
declined their bounty, and gloomily indented himself in a ship about
to sail from Greenock, and called on his muse to take farewell of
Caledonia, in the last song he ever expected to measure in his native
land. That fine lyric, beginning "The gloomy night is gathering fast,"
was the offspring of these moments of regret and sorrow. His feelings
were not expressed in song alone: he remembered his mother and his
natural daughter, and made an assignment of all that pertained to him
at Mossgiel--and that was but little--and of all the advantage which a
cruel, unjust, and insulting law allowed in the proceeds of his poems,
for their support and behoof. This document was publicly read in the
presence of the poet, at the market-cross of Ayr, by his friend
William Chalmers, a notary public. Even this step was to Burns one of
danger: some ill-advised person had uncoupled the merciless pack of
the law at his heels, and he was obliged to shelter himself as he best
could, in woods, it is said, by day and in barns by night, till the
final hour of his departure came. That hour arrived, and his chest was
on the way to the ship, when a letter was put into his hand which
seemed to light him to brighter prospects.

Among the friends whom his merits had procured him was Dr. Laurie, a
district clergyman, who had taste enough to admire the deep
sensibilities as well as the humour of the poet, and the generosity to
make known both his works and his worth to the warm-hearted and
amiable Blacklock, who boldly proclaimed him a poet of the first rank,
and lamented that he was not in Edinburgh to publish another edition
of his poems. Burns was ever a man of impulse: he recalled his chest
from Greenock; he relinquished the situation he had accepted on the
estate of one Douglas; took a secret leave of his mother, and, without
an introduction to any one, and unknown personally to all, save to
Dugald Stewart, away he walked, through Glenap, to Edinburgh, full of
new hope and confiding in his genius. When he arrived, he scarcely
knew what to do: he hesitated to call on the professor; he refrained
from making himself known, as it has been supposed he did, to the
enthusiastic Blacklock; but, sitting down in an obscure lodging, he
sought out an obscure printer, recommended by a humble comrade from
Kyle, and began to negotiate for a new edition of the Poems of the
Ayrshire Ploughman. This was not the way to go about it: his barge had
well nigh been shipwrecked in the launch; and he might have lived to
regret the letter which hindered his voyage to Jamaica, had he not met
by chance in the street a gentleman of the west, of the name of
Dalzell, who introduced him to the Earl of Glencairn, a nobleman whose
classic education did not hurt his taste for Scottish poetry, and who
was not too proud to lend his helping hand to a rustic stranger of
such merit as Burns. Cunningham carried him to Creech, then the Murray
of Edinburgh, a shrewd man of business, who opened the poet's eyes to
his true interests: the first proposals, then all but issued, were put
in the fire, and new ones printed and diffused over the island. The
subscription was headed by half the noblemen of the north: the
Caledonian Hunt, through the interest of Glencairn, took six hundred
copies: duchesses and countesses swelled the list, and such a crowding
to write down names had not been witnessed since the signing of the
solemn league and covenant.

While the subscription-papers were filling and the new volume printing
on a paper and in a type worthy of such high patronage, Burns remained
in Edinburgh, where, for the winter season, he was a lion, and one of an
unwonted kind. Philosophers, historians, and scholars had shaken the
elegant coteries of the city with their wit, or enlightened them with
their learning, but they were all men who had been polished by polite
letters or by intercourse with high life, and there was a sameness in
their very dress as well as address, of which peers and peeresses had
become weary. They therefore welcomed this rustic candidate for the
honour of giving wings to their hours of lassitude and weariness, with a
welcome more than common; and when his approach was announced, the
polished circle looked for the advent of a lout from the plough, in
whose uncouth manners and embarrassed address they might find matter
both for mirth and wonder. But they met with a barbarian who was not at
all barbarous: as the poet met in Lord Daer feelings and sentiments as
natural as those of a ploughman, so they met in a ploughman manners
worthy of a lord: his air was easy and unperplexed: his address was
perfectly well-bred, and elegant in its simplicity: he felt neither
eclipsed by the titled nor struck dumb before the learned and the
eloquent, but took his station with the ease and grace of one born to
it. In the society of men alone he spoke out: he spared neither his wit,
his humour, nor his sarcasm--he seemed to say to all--"I am a man, and
you are no more; and why should I not act and speak like one? "--it was
remarked, however, that he had not learnt, or did not desire, to conceal
his emotions--that he commended with more rapture than was courteous,
and contradicted with more bluntness than was accounted polite. It was
thus with him in the company of men: when woman approached, his look
altered, his eye beamed milder; all that was stern in his nature
underwent a change, and he received them with deference, but with a
consciousness that he could win their attention as he had won that of
others, who differed, indeed, from them only in the texture of their
kirtles. This natural power of rendering himself acceptable to women had
been observed and envied by Sillar, one of the dearest of his early
comrades; and it stood him in good stead now, when he was the object to
whom the Duchess of Gordon, the loveliest as well as the wittiest of
women--directed her discourse. Burns, she afterwards said, won the
attention of the Edinburgh ladies by a deferential way of address--by an
ease and natural grace of manners, as new as it was unexpected--that he
told them the stories of some of his tenderest songs or liveliest poems
in a style quite magical--enriching his little narratives, which had one
and all the merit of being short, with personal incidents of humour or
of pathos.

In a party, when Dr. Blair and Professor Walker were present, Burns
related the circumstances under which he had composed his melancholy
song, "The gloomy night is gathering fast," in a way even more
touching than the verses: and in the company of the ruling beauties of
the time, he hesitated not to lift the veil from some of the tenderer
parts of his own history, and give them glimpses of the romance of
rustic life. A lady of birth--one of his must willing listeners--used,
I am told, to say, that she should never forget the tale which he
related of his affection for Mary Campbell, his Highland Mary, as he
loved to call her. She was fair, he said, and affectionate, and as
guileless as she was beautiful; and beautiful he thought her in a very
high degree. The first time he saw her was during one of his musing
walks in the woods of Montgomery Castle; and the first time he spoke
to her was during the merriment of a harvest-kirn. There were others
there who admired her, but he addressed her, and had the luck to win
her regard from them all. He soon found that she was the lass whom he
had long sought, but never before found--that her good looks were
surpassed by her good sense; and her good sense was equalled by her
discretion and modesty. He met her frequently: she saw by his looks
that he was sincere; she put full trust in his love, and used to
wander with him among the green knowes and stream-banks till the sun
went down and the moon rose, talking, dreaming of love and the golden
days which awaited them. He was poor, and she had only her half-year's
fee, for she was in the condition of a servant; but thoughts of gear
never darkened their dream: they resolved to wed, and exchanged vows
of constancy and love. They plighted their vows on the Sabbath to
render them more sacred--they made them by a burn, where they had
courted, that open nature might be a witness--they made them over an
open Bible, to show that they thought of God in this mutual act--and
when they had done they both took water in their hands, and scattered
it in the air, to intimate that as the stream was pure so were their
intentions. They parted when they did this, but they parted never to
meet more: she died in a burning fever, during a visit to her
relations to prepare for her marriage; and all that he had of her was
a lock of her long bright hair, and her Bible, which she exchanged for
his.

Even with the tales which he related of rustic love and adventure his
own story mingled; and ladies of rank heard, for the first time, that
in all that was romantic in the passion of love, and in all that was
chivalrous in sentiment, men of distinction, both by education and
birth, were at least equalled by the peasantry of the land. They
listened with interest, and inclined their feathers beside the bard,
to hear how love went on in the west, and in no case it ran quite
smooth. Sometimes young hearts were kept asunder by the sordid
feelings of parents, who could not be persuaded to bestow their
daughter, perhaps an only one, on a wooer who could not count penny
for penny, and number cow for cow: sometimes a mother desired her
daughter to look higher than to one of her station: for her beauty and
her education entitled her to match among the lairds, rather than the
tenants; and sometimes, the devotional tastes of both father and
mother, approving of personal looks and connexions, were averse to
see a daughter bestow her hand on one, whose language in religion was
indiscreet, and whose morals were suspected. Yet, neither the
vigilance of fathers, nor the suspicious care of aunts and mothers,
could succeed in keeping those asunder whose hearts were together; but
in these meetings circumspection and invention were necessary: all
fears were to be lulled by the seeming carelessness of the lass,--all
perils were to be met and braved by the spirit of the lad. His home,
perhaps, was at a distance, and he had wild woods to come through, and
deep streams to pass, before he could see the signal-light, now shown
and now withdrawn, at her window; he had to approach with a quick eye
and a wary foot, lest a father or a brother should see, and deter him:
he had sometimes to wish for a cloud upon the moon, whose light,
welcome to him on his way in the distance, was likely to betray him
when near; and he not unfrequently reckoned a wild night of wind and
rain as a blessing, since it helped to conceal his coming, and proved
to his mistress that he was ready to brave all for her sake. Of rivals
met and baffled; of half-willing and half-unconsenting maidens,
persuaded and won; of the light-hearted and the careless becoming
affectionate and tender; and the coy, the proud, and the satiric being
gained by "persuasive words, and more persuasive sighs," as dames had
been gained of old, he had tales enow.
The ladies listened, and smiled
at the tender narratives of the poet.

Of his appearance among the sons as well as the daughters of men, we
have the account of Dugald Stewart. "Burns," says the philosopher,
"came to Edinburgh early in the winter: the attentions which he
received from all ranks and descriptions of persons, were such as
would have turned any head but his own. He retained the same
simplicity of manners and appearance which had struck me so forcibly
when I first saw him in the country: his dress was suited to his
station; plain and unpretending, with sufficient attention to
neatness: he always wore boots, and, when on more than usual ceremony,
buckskin breeches. His manners were manly, simple, and independent;
strongly expressive of conscious genius and worth, but without any
indication of forwardness, arrogance, or vanity. He took his share in
conversation, but not more than belonged to him, and listened with
apparent deference on subjects where his want of education deprived
him of the means of information. If there had been a little more of
gentleness and accommodation in his temper, he would have been still
more interesting; but he had been accustomed to give law in the circle
of his ordinary acquaintance, and his dread of anything approaching to
meanness or servility, rendered his manner somewhat decided and hard.
Nothing perhaps was more remarkable among his various attainments,
than the fluency and precision and originality of language, when he
spoke in company; more particularly as he aimed at purity in his turn
of expression, and avoided more successfully than most Scotsmen, the
peculiarities of Scottish phraseology. From his conversation I should
have pronounced him to have been fitted to excel in whatever walk of
ambition he had chosen to exert his abilities. He was passionately
fond of the beauties of nature, and I recollect he once told me, when
I was admiring a distant prospect in one of our morning walks, that
the sight of so many smoking cottages gave a pleasure to his mind,
which none could understand who had not witnessed, like himself, the
happiness and worth which cottages contained. "

Such was the impression which Burns made at first on the fair, the
titled, and the learned of Edinburgh; an impression which, though
lessened by intimacy and closer examination on the part of the men,
remained unimpaired, on that of the softer sex, till his dying-day.
His company, during the season of balls and festivities, continued to
be courted by all who desired to be reckoned gay or polite. Cards of
invitation fell thick on him; he was not more welcome to the plumed
and jewelled groups, whom her fascinating Grace of Gordon gathered
about her, than he was to the grave divines and polished scholars, who
assembled in the rooms of Stewart, or Blair, or Robertson. The classic
socialities of Tytler, afterwards Lord Woodhouslee, or the elaborate
supper-tables of the whimsical Monboddo, whose guests imagined they
were entertained in the manner of Lucullus or of Cicero, were not
complete without the presence of the ploughman of Kyle; and the
feelings of the rustic poet, facing such companies, though of surprise
and delight at first, gradually subsided, he said, as he discerned,
that man differed from man only in the polish, and not in the grain.
But Edinburgh offered tables and entertainers of a less orderly and
staid character than those I have named--where the glass circulated
with greater rapidity; where the wit flowed more freely; and where
there were neither highbred ladies to charm conversation within the
bounds of modesty, nor serious philosophers, nor grave divines, to set
a limit to the license of speech, or the hours of enjoyment. To these
companions--and these were all of the better classes, the levities of
the rustic poet's wit and humour were as welcome us were the tenderest
of his narratives to the accomplished Duchess of Gordon and the
beautiful Miss Burnet of Monboddo; they raised a social roar not at
all classic, and demanded and provoked his sallies of wild humour, or
indecorous mirth, with as much delight as he had witnessed among the
lads of Kyle, when, at mill or forge, his humorous sallies abounded as
the ale flowed. In these enjoyments the rough, but learned William
Nicol, and the young and amiable Robert Ainslie shared: the name of
the poet was coupled with those of profane wits, free livers, and that
class of half-idle gentlemen who hang about the courts of law, or for
a season or two wear the livery of Mars, and handle cold iron.

Edinburgh had still another class of genteel convivialists, to whom
the poet was attracted by principles as well as by pleasure; these
were the relics of that once numerous body, the Jacobites, who still
loved to cherish the feelings of birth or education rather than of
judgment, and toasted the name of Stuart, when the last of the race
had renounced his pretensions to a throne, for the sake of peace and
the cross. Young men then, and high names were among them, annually
met on the pretender's birth-day, and sang songs in which the white
rose of Jacobitism flourished; toasted toasts announcing adherence to
the male line of the Bruce and the Stuart, and listened to the strains
of the laureate of the day, who prophesied, in drink, the dismissal of
the intrusive Hanoverian, by the right and might of the righteous and
disinherited line. Burns, who was descended from a northern race,
whoso father was suspected of having drawn the claymore in 1745, and
who loved the blood of the Keith-Marishalls, under whose banners his
ancestors had marched, readily united himself to a band in whose
sentiments, political and social, he was a sharer. He was received
with acclamation: the dignity of laureate was conferred upon him, and
his inauguration ode, in which he recalled the names and the deeds of
the Grahams, the Erskines, the Boyds, and the Gordons, was applauded
for its fire, as well as for its sentiments. Yet, though he ate and
drank and sang with Jacobites, he was only as far as sympathy and
poesie went, of their number: his reason renounced the principles and
the religion of the Stuart line; and though he shed a tear over their
fallen fortunes--though he sympathized with the brave and honourable
names that perished in their cause--though he cursed "the butcher,
Cumberland," and the bloody spirit which commanded the heads of the
good and the heroic to be stuck where they would affright the
passer-by, and pollute the air--he had no desire to see the splendid
fabric of constitutional freedom, which the united genius of all
parties had raised, thrown wantonly down. His Jacobitism influenced,
not his head, but his heart, and gave a mournful hue to many of his
lyric compositions.

Meanwhile his poems were passing through the press. Burns made a few
emendations of those published in the Kilmarnock edition, and he added
others which, as he expressed it, he had carded and spun, since he
passed Glenbuck. Some rather coarse lines were softened or omitted in
the "Twa Dogs;" others, from a change of his personal feelings, were
made in the "Vision:" "Death and Doctor Hornbook," excluded before,
was admitted now: the "Dream" was retained, in spite of the
remonstrances of Mrs. Stewart, of Stair, and Mrs. Dunlop; and the
"Brigs of Ayr," in compliment to his patrons in his native district,
and the "Address to Edinburgh," in honour of his titled and
distinguished friends in that metropolis, were printed for the first
time. He was unwilling to alter what he had once printed: his friends,
classic, titled, and rustic, found him stubborn and unpliable, in
matters of criticism; yet he was generally of a complimental mood: he
loaded the robe of Coila in the "Vision," with more scenes than it
could well contain, that he might include in the landscape, all the
country-seats of his friends, and he gave more than their share of
commendation to the Wallaces, out of respect to his friend Mrs.
Dunlop. Of the critics of Edinburgh he said, they spun the thread of
their criticisms so fine that it was unfit for either warp or weft;
and of its scholars, he said, they were never satisfied with any
Scottish poet, unless they could trace him in Horace. One morning at
Dr. Blair's breakfast-table, when the "Holy Fair" was the subject of
conversation, the reverend critic said, "Why should

'--Moody speel the holy door
With tidings of _salvation_? '

if you had said, with tidings of _damnation_, the satire would have
been the better and the bitterer. " "Excellent! " exclaimed the poet,
"the alteration is capital, and I hope you will honour me by allowing
me to say in a note at whose suggestion it was made. " Professor
Walker, who tells the anecdote, adds that Blair evaded, with equal
good humour and decision, this not very polite request; nor was this
the only slip which the poet made on this occasion: some one asked him
in which of the churches of Edinburgh he had received the highest
gratification: he named the High-church, but gave the preference over
all preachers to Robert Walker, the colleague and rival in eloquence
of Dr. Blair himself, and that in a tone so pointed and decisive as to
make all at the table stare and look embarrassed. The poet confessed
afterwards that he never reflected on his blunder without pain and
mortification. Blair probably had this in his mind, when, on reading
the poem beginning "When Guildford good our pilot stood," he
exclaimed, "Ah! the politics of Burns always smell of the smithy,"
meaning, that they were vulgar and common.

In April, the second or Edinburgh, edition was published: it was
widely purchased, and as warmly commended. The country had been
prepared for it by the generous and discriminating criticisms of Henry
Mackenzie, published in that popular periodical, "The Lounger," where
he says, "Burns possesses the spirit as well as the fancy of a poet;
that honest pride and independence of soul, which are sometimes the
muse's only dower, break forth on every occasion, in his works. " The
praise of the author of the "Man of Feeling" was not more felt by
Burns, than it was by the whole island: the harp of the north had not
been swept for centuries by a hand so forcible, and at the same time
so varied, that it awakened every tone, whether of joy or woe: the
language was that of rustic life; the scenes of the poems were the
dusty barn, the clay-floored reeky cottage, and the furrowed field;
and the characters were cowherds, ploughmen, and mechanics. The volume
was embellished by a head of the poet from the hand of the now
venerable Alexander Nasmith; and introduced by a dedication to the
noblemen and gentlemen of the Caledonian Hunt, in a style of vehement
independence, unknown hitherto in the history of subscriptions. The
whole work, verse, prose, and portrait, won public attention, and kept
it: and though some critics signified their displeasure at expressions
which bordered on profanity, and at a license of language which they
pronounced impure, by far the greater number united their praise to
the all but general voice; nay, some scrupled not to call him, from
his perfect ease and nature and variety, the Scottish Shakspeare. No
one rejoiced more in his success and his fame, than the matron of
Mossgiel.

Other matters than his poems and socialities claimed the attention of
Burns in Edinburgh. He had a hearty relish for the joyous genius of
Allan Ramsay; he traced out his residences, and rejoiced to think that
while he stood in the shop of his own bookseller, Creech, the same
floor had been trod by the feet of his great forerunner. He visited,
too, the lowly grave of the unfortunate Robert Fergusson; and it must
be recorded to the shame of the magistrates of Edinburgh, that they
allowed him to erect a headstone to his memory, and to the scandal of
Scotland, that in such a memorial he had not been anticipated. He
seems not to have regarded the graves of scholars or philosophers; and
he trod the pavements where the warlike princes and nobles had walked
without any emotion. He loved, however, to see places celebrated in
Scottish song, and fields where battles for the independence of his
country had been stricken; and, with money in his pocket which his
poems had produced, and with a letter from a witty but weak man, Lord
Buchan, instructing him to pull birks on the Yarrow, broom on the
Cowden-knowes, and not to neglect to admire the ruins of Drybrugh
Abbey, Burns set out on a border tour, accompanied by Robert Ainslie,
of Berrywell. As the poet had talked of returning to the plough, Dr.
Blair imagined that he was on his way back to the furrowed field, and
wrote him a handsome farewell, saying he was leaving Edinburgh with a
character which had survived many temptations; with a name which would
be placed with the Ramsays and the Fergussons, and with the hopes of
all, that, in a second volume, on which his fate as a poet would very
much depend, he might rise yet higher in merit and in fame. Burns, who
received this communication when laying his leg over the saddle to be
gone, is said to have muttered, "Ay, but a man's first book is
sometimes like his first babe, healthier and stronger than those which
follow. "

On the 6th of May, 1787, Burns reached Berrywell: he recorded of the
laird, that he was clear-headed, and of Miss Ainslie, that she was
amiable and handsome--of Dudgeon, the author of "The Maid that tends
the Goats," that he had penetration and modesty, and of the preacher,
Bowmaker, that he was a man of strong lungs and vigorous remark. On
crossing the Tweed at Coldstream he took off his hat, and kneeling
down, repeated aloud the two last verses of the "Cotter's Saturday
Night:" on returning, he drunk tea with Brydone, the traveller, a man,
he said, kind and benevolent: he cursed one Cole as an English
Hottentot, for having rooted out an ancient garden belonging to a
Romish ruin; and he wrote of Macdowal, of Caverton-mill, that by his
skill in rearing sheep, he sold his flocks, ewe and lamb, for a couple
of guineas each: that he washed his sheep before shearing--and by his
turnips improved sheep-husbandry; he added, that lands were generally
let at sixteen shillings the Scottish acre; the farmers rich, and,
compared to Ayrshire, their houses magnificent. On his way to Jedburgh
he visited an old gentleman in whose house was an arm-chair, once the
property of the author of "The Seasons;" he reverently examined the
relic, and could scarcely be persuaded to sit in it: he was a warm
admirer of Thomson.

In Jedburgh, Burns found much to interest him: the ruins of a splendid
cathedral, and of a strong castle--and, what was still more
attractive, an amiable young lady, very handsome, with "beautiful
hazel eyes, full of spirit, sparkling with delicious moisture," and
looks which betokened a high order of female mind. He gave her his
portrait, and entered this remembrance of her attractions among his
memoranda:--"My heart is thawed into melting pleasure, after being so
long frozen up in the Greenland bay of indifference, amid the noise
and nonsense of Edinburgh. I am afraid my bosom has nearly as much
tinder as ever. Jed, pure be thy streams, and hallowed thy sylvan
banks: sweet Isabella Lindsay, may peace dwell in thy bosom
uninterrupted, except by the tumultuous throbbings of rapturous love! "
With the freedom of Jedburgh, handsomely bestowed by the magistrates,
in his pocket, Burns made his way to Wauchope, the residence of Mrs.
Scott, who had welcomed him into the world as a poet in verses lively
and graceful: he found her, he said, "a lady of sense and taste, and
of a decision peculiar to female authors. " After dining with Sir
Alexander Don, who, he said, was a clever man, but far from a match
for his divine lady, a sister of his patron Glencairn, he spent an
hour among the beautiful ruins of Dryburgh Abbey; glanced on the
splendid remains of Melrose; passed, unconscious of the future, over
that ground on which have arisen the romantic towers of Abbotsford;
dined with certain of the Souters of Selkirk; and visited the old keep
of Thomas the Rhymer, and a dozen of the hills and streams celebrated
in song. Nor did he fail to pay his respects, after returning through
Dunse, to Sir James Hall, of Dunglass, and his lady, and was much
pleased with the scenery of their romantic place. He was now joined by
a gentleman of the name of Kerr, and crossing the Tweed a second time,
penetrated into England, as far as the ancient town of Newcastle,
where he smiled at a facetious Northumbrian, who at dinner caused the
beef to be eaten before the broth was served, in obedience to an
ancient injunction, lest the hungry Scotch should come and snatch it.
On his way back he saw, what proved to be prophetic of his own
fortune--the roup of an unfortunate farmer's stock: he took out his
journal, and wrote with a troubled brow, "Rigid economy, and decent
industry, do you preserve me from being the principal _dramatis
personae_, in such a scene of horror. " He extended his tour to
Carlisle, and from thence to the banks of the Nith, where he looked at
the farm of Ellisland, with the intention of trying once more his
fortune at the plough, should poetry and patronage fail him.

On his way through the West, Burns spent a few days with his mother at
Mossgiel: he had left her an unknown and an almost banished man: he
returned in fame and in sunshine, admired by all who aspired to be
thought tasteful or refined. He felt offended alike with the patrician
stateliness of Edinburgh and the plebeian servility of the husbandmen
of Ayrshire; and dreading the influence of the unlucky star which had
hitherto ruled his lot, he bought a pocket Milton, he said, for the
purpose of studying the intrepid independence and daring magnanimity,
and noble defiance of hardships, exhibited by Satan! In this mood he
reached Edinburgh--only to leave it again on three hurried excursions
into the Highlands. The route which he took and the sentiments which
the scenes awakened, are but faintly intimated in the memoranda which
he made. His first journey seems to have been performed in ill-humour;
at Stirling, his Jacobitism, provoked at seeing the ruined palace of
the Stuarts, broke out in some unloyal lines which he had the
indiscretion to write with a diamond on the window of a public inn. At
Carron, where he was refused a sight of the magnificent foundry, he
avenged himself in epigram. At Inverary he resented some real or
imaginary neglect on the part of his Grace of Argyll, by a stinging
lampoon; nor can he be said to have fairly regained his serenity of
temper, till he danced his wrath away with some Highland ladies at
Dumbarton.

His second excursion was made in the company of Dr. Adair, of
Harrowgate: the reluctant doors of Carron foundry were opened to him,
and he expressed his wonder at the blazing furnaces and broiling
labours of the place; he removed the disloyal lines from the window of
the inn at Stirling, and he paid a two days' visit to Ramsay of
Ochtertyre, a distinguished scholar, and discussed with him future
topics for the muse. "I have been in the company of many men of
genius," said Ramsay afterwards to Currie, "some of them poets, but
never witnessed such flashes of intellectual brightness as from
him--the impulse of the moment, sparks of celestial fire. " From the
Forth he went to the Devon, in the county of Clackmannan, where, for
the first time, he saw the beautiful Charlotte Hamilton, the sister of
his friend Gavin Hamilton, of Mauchline. "She is not only beautiful,"
he thus writes to her brother, "but lovely: her form is elegant, her
features not regular, but they have the smile of sweetness, and the
settled complacency of good nature in the highest degree. Her eyes are
fascinating; at once expressive of good sense, tenderness and a noble
mind. After the exercise of our riding to the Falls, Charlotte was
exactly Dr. Donne's mistress:--

"Her pure and eloquent blood
Spoke in her cheeks, and so distinctly wrought,
That one would almost say her body thought. "

Accompanied by this charming dame, he visited an old lady, Mrs. Bruce,
of Clackmannan, who, in the belief that she had the blood of the royal
Bruce in her veins, received the poet with something of princely
state, and, half in jest, conferred the honour of knighthood upon him,
with her ancestor's sword, saying, in true Jacobitical mood, that she
had a better right to do that than some folk had! In the same pleasing
company he visited the famous cataract on the Devon, called the
Cauldron Lian, and the Rumbling bridge, a single arch thrown, it is
said by the devil, over the Devon, at the height of a hundred feet in
the air. It was the complaint of his companions that Burns exhibited
no raptures, and poured out no unpremeditated verses at such
magnificent scenes. But he did not like to be tutored or prompted:
"Look, look! " exclaimed some one, as Carron foundry belched forth
flames--"look, Burns, look! good heavens, what a grand sight! --look! "
"I would not look--look, sir, at your bidding," said the bard, turning
away, "were it into the mouth of hell! " When he visited, at a future
time, the romantic Linn of Creehope, in Nithsdale, he looked silently
at its wonders, and showed none of the hoped-for rapture. "You do not
admire it, I fear," said a gentleman who accompanied him; "I could not
admire it more, sir," replied Burns, "if He who made it were to desire
me to do it. " There are other reasons for the silence of Burns amid
the scenes of the Devon: he was charmed into love by the sense and the
beauty of Charlotte Hamilton, and rendered her homage in that sweet
song, "The Banks of the Devon," and in a dozen letters written with
more than his usual care, elegance, and tenderness. But the lady was
neither to be won by verse nor by prose: she afterwards gave her hand
to Adair, the poet's companion, and, what was less meritorious, threw
his letters into the fire.

The third and last tour into the North was in company of Nicol of the
High-School of Edinburgh: on the fields of Bannockburn and
Falkirk--places of triumph and of woe to Scotland, he gave way to
patriotic impulses, and in these words he recorded them:--"Stirling,
August 20, 1787: this morning I knelt at the tomb of Sir John the
Graham, the gallant friend of the immortal Wallace; and two hours ago I
said a fervent prayer for old Caledonia, over the hole in a whinstone
where Robert the Bruce fixed his royal standard on the banks of
Bannockburn. " He then proceeded northward by Ochtertyre, the water of
Earn, the vale of Glen Almond, and the traditionary grave of Ossian. He
looked in at princely Taymouth; mused an hour or two among the Birks of
Aberfeldy; gazed from Birnam top; paused amid the wild grandeur of the
pass of Killiecrankie, at the stone which marks the spot where a second
patriot Graham fell, and spent a day at Blair, where he experienced the
graceful kindness of the Duke of Athol, and in a strain truly elegant,
petitioned him, in the name of Bruar Water, to hide the utter nakedness
of its otherwise picturesque banks, with plantations of birch and oak.
Quitting Blair he followed the course of the Spey, and passing, as he
told his brother, through a wild country, among cliffs gray with eternal
snows, and glens gloomy and savage, reached Findhorn in mist and
darkness; visited Castle Cawdor, where Macbeth murdered Duncan; hastened
through Inverness to Urquhart Castle, and the Falls of Fyers, and turned
southward to Kilravock, over the fatal moor of Culloden. He admired the
ladies of that classic region for their snooded ringlets, simple
elegance of dress, and expressive eyes: in Mrs. Rose, of Kilravock
Castle, he found that matronly grace and dignity which he owned he
loved; and in the Duke and Duchess of Gordon a renewal of that more than
kindness with which they had welcomed him in Edinburgh. But while he
admired the palace of Fochabers, and was charmed by the condescensions
of the noble proprietors, he forgot that he had left a companion at the
inn, too proud and captious to be pleased at favours showered on others:
he hastened back to the inn with an invitation and an apology: he found
the fiery pedant in a foaming rage, striding up and down the street,
cursing in Scotch and Latin the loitering postilions for not yoking the
horses, and hurrying him away. All apology and explanation was in vain,
and Burns, with a vexation which he sought not to conceal, took his seat
silently beside the irascible pedagogue, and returned to the South by
Broughty Castle, the banks of Endermay and Queensferry. He parted with
the Highlands in a kindly mood, and loved to recal the scenes and the
people, both in conversation and in song.

On his return to Edinburgh he had to bide the time of his bookseller
and the public: the impression of his poems, extending to two thousand
eight hundred copies, was sold widely: much of the money had to come
from a distance, and Burns lingered about the northern metropolis,
expecting a settlement with Creech, and with the hope that those who
dispensed his country's patronage might remember one who then, as now,
was reckoned an ornament to the land. But Creech, a parsimonious man,
was slow in his payments; the patronage of the country was swallowed
up in the sink of politics, and though noblemen smiled, and ladies of
rank nodded their jewelled heads in approbation of every new song he
sung and every witty sally he uttered, they reckoned any further
notice or care superfluous: the poet, an observant man, saw all this;
but hope was the cordial of his heart, he said, and he hoped and
lingered on. Too active a genius to remain idle, he addressed himself
to the twofold business of love and verse. Repulsed by the stately
Beauty of the Devon, he sought consolation in the society of one, as
fair, and infinitely more witty; and as an accident had for a time
deprived him of the use of one of his legs, he gave wings to hours of
pain, by writing a series of letters to this Edinburgh enchantress, in
which he signed himself Sylvander, and addressed her under the name of
Clarinda. In these compositions, which no one can regard as serious,
and which James Grahame the poet called "a romance of real Platonic
affection," amid much affectation both of language and sentiment, and
a desire to say fine and startling things, we can see the proud heart
of the poet throbbing in the dread of being neglected or forgotten by
his country. The love which he offers up at the altar of wit and
beauty, seems assumed and put on, for its rapture is artificial, and
its brilliancy that of an icicle: no woman was ever wooed and won in
that Malvolio way; and there is no doubt that Mrs. M'Lehose felt as
much offence as pleasure at this boisterous display of regard. In
aftertimes he loved to remember her:--when wine circulated, Mrs. Mac
was his favourite toast.

During this season he began his lyric contributions to the Musical
Museum of Johnson, a work which, amid many imperfections of taste and
arrangement, contains more of the true old music and genuine old songs
of Scotland, than any other collection with which I am acquainted.
Burns gathered oral airs, and fitted them with words of mirth or of
woe, of tenderness or of humour, with unexampled readiness and
felicity; he eked out old fragments and sobered down licentious
strains so much in the olden spirit and feeling, that the new cannot
be distinguished from the ancient; nay, he inserted lines and half
lines, with such skill and nicety, that antiquarians are perplexed to
settle which is genuine or which is simulated. Yet with all this he
abated not of the natural mirth or the racy humour of the lyric muse
of Scotland: he did not like her the less because she walked like some
of the maidens of her strains, high-kilted at times, and spoke with
the freedom of innocence. In these communications we observe how
little his border-jaunt among the fountains of ancient song
contributed either of sentiment or allusion, to his lyrics; and how
deeply his strains, whether of pity or of merriment, were coloured by
what he had seen, and heard, and felt in the Highlands. In truth, all
that lay beyond the Forth was an undiscovered land to him; while the
lowland districts were not only familiar to his mind and eye, but all
their more romantic vales and hills and streams were already musical
in songs of such excellence as induced him to dread failure rather
than hope triumph. Moreover, the Highlands teemed with jacobitical
feelings, and scenes hallowed by the blood or the sufferings of men
heroic, and perhaps misguided; and the poet, willingly yielding to an
impulse which was truly romantic, and believed by thousands to be
loyal, penned his songs on Drumossie, and Killiecrankie, as the
spirit of sorrow or of bitterness prevailed. Though accompanied,
during his northern excursions, by friends whose socialities and
conversation forbade deep thought, or even serious remark, it will be
seen by those who read his lyrics with care, that his wreath is
indebted for some of its fairest flowers to the Highlands.

The second winter of the poet's abode in Edinburgh had now arrived: it
opened, as might have been expected, with less rapturous welcomes and
with more of frosty civility than the first. It must be confessed,
that indulgence in prolonged socialities, and in company which, though
clever, could not be called select, contributed to this; nor must it
be forgotten that his love for the sweeter part of creation was now
and then carried beyond the limits of poetic respect, and the
delicacies of courtesy; tending to estrange the austere and to lessen
the admiration at first common to all. Other causes may be assigned
for this wane of popularity: he took no care to conceal his contempt
for all who depended on mere scholarship for eminence, and he had a
perilous knack in sketching with a sarcastic hand the characters of
the learned and the grave. Some indeed of the high literati of the
north--Home, the author of Douglas, was one of them--spoke of the poet
as a chance or an accident: and though they admitted that he was a
poet, yet he was not one of settled grandeur of soul, brightened by
study. Burns was probably aware of this; he takes occasion in some of
his letters to suggest, that the hour may be at hand when he shall be
accounted by scholars as a meteor, rather than a fixed light, and to
suspect that the praise bestowed on his genius was partly owing to the
humility of his condition. From his lingering so long about Edinburgh,
the nobility began to dread a second volume by subscription, the
learned to regard him as a fierce Theban, who resolved to carry all
the outworks to the temple of Fame without the labour of making
regular approaches; while a third party, and not the least numerous,
looked on him with distrust, as one who hovered between Jacobite and
Jacobin; who disliked the loyal-minded, and loved to lampoon the
reigning family. Besides, the marvel of the inspired ploughman had
begun to subside; the bright gloss of novelty was worn off, and his
fault lay in his unwillingness to see that he had made all the sport
which the Philistines expected, and was required to make room for some
"salvage" of the season, to paw, and roar, and shake the mane. The
doors of the titled, which at first opened spontaneous, like those in
Milton's heaven, were now unclosed for him with a tardy courtesy: he
was received with measured stateliness, and seldom requested to repeat
his visit. Of this changed aspect of things he complained to a friend:
but his real sorrows were mixed with those of the fancy:--he told Mrs.
Dunlop with what pangs of heart he was compelled to take shelter in a
corner, lest the rattling equipage of some gaping blockhead should
mangle him in the mire. In this land of titles and wealth such
querulous sensibilities must have been frequently offended.

Burns, who had talked lightly hitherto of resuming the plough, began
now to think seriously about it, for he saw it must come to that at
last. Miller, of Dalswinton, a gentleman of scientific acquirements,
and who has the merit of applying the impulse of steam to navigation,
had offered the poet the choice of his farms, on a fair estate which
he had purchased on the Nith: aided by a westland farmer, he selected
Ellisland, a beautiful spot, fit alike for the steps of ploughman or
poet. On intimating this to the magnates of Edinburgh, no one lamented
that a genius so bright and original should be driven to win his bread
with the sweat of his brow: no one, with an indignant eye, ventured to
tell those to whom the patronage of this magnificent empire was
confided, that they were misusing the sacred trust, and that posterity
would curse them for their coldness or neglect: neither did any of the
rich nobles, whose tables he had adorned by his wit, offer to enable
him to toil free of rent, in a land of which he was to be a permanent
ornament;--all were silent--all were cold--the Earl of Glencairn
alone, aided by Alexander Wood, a gentleman who merits praise oftener
than he is named, did the little that was done or attempted to be done
for him: nor was that little done on the peer's part without
solicitation:--"I wish to go into the excise;" thus he wrote to
Glencairn; "and I am told your lordship's interest will easily procure
me the grant from the commissioners: and your lordship's patronage and
goodness, which have already rescued me from obscurity, wretchedness,
and exile, emboldens me to ask that interest. You have likewise put it
in my power to save the little tie of home that sheltered an aged
mother, two brothers, and three sisters from destruction. I am ill
qualified to dog the heels of greatness with the impertinence of
solicitation, and tremble nearly as much at the thought of the cold
promise as the cold denial. " The farm and the excise exhibit the
poet's humble scheme of life: the money of the one, he thought, would
support the toil of the other, and in the fortunate management of
both, he looked for the rough abundance, if not the elegancies
suitable to a poet's condition.

While Scotland was disgraced by sordidly allowing her brightest genius
to descend to the plough and the excise, the poet hastened his
departure from a city which had witnessed both his triumph and his
shame: he bade farewell in a few well-chosen words to such of the
classic literati--the Blairs, the Stewarts, the Mackenzies, and the
Tytlers--as had welcomed the rustic bard and continued to countenance
him; while in softer accents he bade adieu to the Clarindas and
Chlorises of whose charms he had sung, and, having wrung a settlement
from Creech, he turned his steps towards Mossgiel and Mauchline. He
had several reasons, and all serious ones, for taking Ayrshire in his
way to the Nith: he desired to see his mother, his brothers and
sisters, who had partaken of his success, and were now raised from
pining penury to comparative affluence: he desired to see those who
had aided him in his early struggles into the upper air--perhaps
those, too, who had looked coldly on, and smiled at his outward
aspirations after fame or distinction; but more than all, he desired
to see one whom he once and still dearly loved, who had been a
sufferer for his sake, and whom he proposed to make mistress of his
fireside and the sharer of his fortunes. Even while whispering of love
to Charlotte Hamilton, on the banks of the Devon, or sighing out the
affected sentimentalities of platonic or pastoral love in the ear of
Clarinda, his thoughts wandered to her whom he had left bleaching her
webs among the daisies on Mauchline braes--she had still his heart,
and in spite of her own and her father's disclamation, she was his
wife. It was one of the delusions of this great poet, as well as of
those good people, the Armours, that the marriage had been dissolved
by the destruction of the marriage-lines, and that Robert Burns and
Jean Armour were as single as though they had neither vowed nor
written themselves man and wife. Be that as it may, the time was come
when all scruples and obstacles were to be removed which stood in the
way of their union: their hands were united by Gavin Hamilton,
according to law, in April, 1788: and even the Reverend Mr. Auld, so
mercilessly lampooned, smiled forgivingly as the poet satisfied a
church wisely scrupulous regarding the sacred ceremony of marriage.

Though Jean Armour was but a country lass of humble degree, she had
sense and intelligence, and personal charms sufficient not only to win
and fix the attentions of the poet, but to sanction the praise which
he showered on her in song. In a letter to Mrs. Dunlop, he thus
describes her: "The most placid good nature and sweetness of
disposition, a warm heart, gratefully devoted with all its powers to
love me; vigorous health and sprightly cheerfulness, set off to the
best advantage by a more than commonly handsome figure: these I think
in a woman may make a good wife, though she should never have read a
page but the Scriptures, nor have danced in a brighter assembly than
a penny-pay wedding. " To the accomplished Margaret Chalmers, of
Edinburgh, he adds, to complete the picture, "I have got the
handsomest figure, the sweetest temper, the soundest constitution, and
kindest heart in the country: a certain late publication of Scots'
poems she has perused very devoutly, and all the ballads in the land,
as she has the finest wood-note wild you ever heard. " With his young
wife, a punch bowl of Scottish marble, and an eight-day clock, both
presents from Mr. Armour, now reconciled to his eminent son-in-law,
with a new plough, and a beautiful heifer, given by Mrs. Dunlop, with
about four hundred pounds in his pocket, a resolution to toil, and a
hope of success, Burns made his appearance on the banks of the Nith,
and set up his staff at Ellisland. This farm, now a classic spot, is
about six miles up the river from Dumfries; it extends to upwards of a
hundred acres: the soil is kindly; the holmland portion of it loamy
and rich, and it has at command fine walks on the river side, and
views of the Friar's Carse, Cowehill, and Dalswinton. For a while the
poet had to hide his head in a smoky hovel; till a house to his fancy,
and offices for his cattle and his crops were built, his accommodation
was sufficiently humble; and his mind taking its hue from his
situation, infused a bitterness into the letters in which he first
made known to his western friends that he had fixed his abode in
Nithsdale. "I am here," said he, "at the very elbow of existence: the
only things to be found in perfection in this country are stupidity
and canting; prose they only know in graces and prayers, and the value
of these they estimate as they do their plaiden-webs, by the ell: as
for the muses, they have as much an idea of a rhinoceros as of a
poet. " "This is an undiscovered clime," he at another period exclaims,
"it is unknown to poetry, and prose never looked on it save in drink.
I sit by the fire, and listen to the hum of the spinning-wheel: I
hear, but cannot see it, for it is hidden in the smoke which eddies
round and round me before it seeks to escape by window and door. I
have no converse but with the ignorance which encloses me: No kenned
face but that of my old mare, Jenny Geddes--my life is dwindled down
to mere existence. "

When the poet's new house was built and plenished, and the atmosphere
of his mind began to clear, he found the land to be fruitful, and its
people intelligent and wise. In Riddel, of Friar's Carse, he found a
scholar and antiquarian; in Miller, of Dalswinton, a man conversant
with science as well as with the world; in M'Murdo, of Drumlanrig, a
generous and accomplished gentleman; and in John Syme, of Ryedale, a
man much after his own heart, and a lover of the wit and socialities
of polished life. Of these gentlemen Riddel, who was his neighbour,
was the favourite: a door was made in the march-fence which separated
Ellisland from Friar's Carse, that the poet might indulge in the
retirement of the Carse hermitage, a little lodge in the wood, as
romantic as it was beautiful, while a pathway was cut through the
dwarf oaks and birches which fringed the river bank, to enable the
poet to saunter and muse without lot or interruption. This attention
was rewarded by an inscription for the hermitage, written with
elegance as well as feeling, and which was the first fruits of his
fancy in this unpoetic land. In a happier strain he remembered Matthew
Henderson: this is one of the sweetest as well as happiest of his
poetic compositions. He heard of his friend's death, and called on
nature animate and inanimate, to lament the loss of one who held the
patent of his honours from God alone, and who loved all that was pure
and lovely and good. "The Whistle" is another of his Ellisland
compositions: the contest which he has recorded with such spirit and
humour took place almost at his door: the heroes were Fergusson, of
Craigdarroch, Sir Robert Laurie, of Maxwelltown, and Riddel, of the
Friar's Carse: the poet was present, and drank bottle and bottle about
with the best, and when all was done he seemed much disposed, as an
old servant at Friar's Carse remembered, to take up the victor.

Burns had become fully reconciled to Nithsdale, and was on the most
intimate terms with the muse when he produced Tam O' Shanter, the
crowning glory of all his poems. For this marvellous tale we are
indebted to something like accident: Francis Grose, the antiquary,
happened to visit Friar's Carse, and as he loved wine and wit, the
total want of imagination was no hinderance to his friendly
intercourse with the poet: "Alloway's auld haunted kirk" was
mentioned, and Grose said he would include it in his illustrations of
the antiquities of Scotland, if the bard of the Doon would write a
poem to accompany it. Burns consented, and before he left the table,
the various traditions which belonged to the ruin were passing through
his mind. One of these was of a farmer, who, on a night wild with
wind and rain, on passing the old kirk was startled by a light
glimmering inside the walls; on drawing near he saw a caldron hung
over a fire, in which the heads and limbs of children were simmering:
there was neither witch nor fiend to guard it, so he unhooked the
caldron, turned out the contents, and carried it home as a trophy. A
second tradition was of a man of Kyle, who, having been on a market
night detained late in Ayr, on crossing the old bridge of Doon, on his
way home, saw a light streaming through the gothic window of Alloway
kirk, and on riding near, beheld a batch of the district witches
dancing merrily round their master, the devil, who kept them "louping
and flinging" to the sound of a bagpipe. He knew several of the old
crones, and smiled at their gambols, for they were dancing in their
smocks: but one of them, and she happened to be young and rosy, had on
a smock shorter than those of her companions by two spans at least,
which so moved the farmer that he exclaimed, "Weel luppan, Maggie wi'
the short sark! " Satan stopped his music, the light was extinguished,
and out rushed the hags after the farmer, who made at the gallop for
the bridge of Doon, knowing that they could not cross a stream: he
escaped; but Maggie, who was foremost, seized his horse's tail at the
middle of the bridge, and pulled it off in her efforts to stay him.

This poem was the work of a single day: Burns walked out to his
favourite musing path, which runs towards the old tower of the Isle,
along Nithside, and was observed to walk hastily and mutter as he
went. His wife knew by these signs that he was engaged in composition,
and watched him from the window; at last wearying, and moreover
wondering at the unusual length of his meditations, she took her
children with her and went to meet him; but as he seemed not to see
her, she stept aside among the broom to allow him to pass, which he
did with a flushed brow and dropping eyes, reciting these lines
aloud:--

"Now Tam! O, Tum! had thae been queans,
A' plump and strapping in their teens,
Their sacks, instead o' creeshie flannen,
Been snaw-white seventeen hunder linen!
Thir breeks o' mine, my only pair,
That ance were plush, o' gude blue hair,
I wad hae gien them off my hurdies,
For ae blink o' the bonnie burdies! "

He embellished this wild tradition from fact as well as from fancy:
along the road which Tam came on that eventful night his memory
supplied circumstances which prepared him for the strange sight at the
kirk of Alloway. A poor chapman had perished, some winters before, in
the snow; a murdered child had been found by some early hunters; a
tippling farmer had fallen from his horse at the expense of his neck,
beside a "meikle stane"; and a melancholy old woman had hanged herself
at the bush aboon the well, as the poem relates: all these matters the
poet pressed into the service of the muse, and used them with a skill
which adorns rather than oppresses the legend. A pert lawyer from
Dumfries objected to the language as obscure: "Obscure, sir! " said
Burns; "you know not the language of that great master of your own
art--the devil. If you had a witch for your client you would not be
able to manage her defence! "

He wrote few poems after his marriage, but he composed many songs: the
sweet voice of Mrs. Burns and the craving of Johnson's Museum will in
some measure account for the number, but not for their variety, which
is truly wonderful. In the history of that mournful strain, "Mary in
Heaven," we read the story of many of his lyrics, for they generally
sprang from his personal feelings: no poet has put more of himself
into his poetry than Burns, "Robert, though ill of a cold," said his
wife, "had been busy all day--a day of September, 1789, with the
shearers in the field, and as he had got most of the corn into the
stack-yard, was in good spirits; but when twilight came he grew sad
about something, and could not rest: he wandered first up the
waterside, and then went into the stack-yard: I followed, and begged
him to come into the house, as he was ill, and the air was sharp and
cold. He said, 'Ay, ay,' but did not come: he threw himself down on
some loose sheaves, and lay looking at the sky, and particularly at a
large, bright star, which shone like another moon. At last, but that
was long after I had left him, he came home--the song was already
composed. " To the memory of Mary Campbell he dedicated that touching
ode; and he thus intimates the continuance of his early affection for
"The fair haired lass of the west," in a letter of that time to Mrs.
Dunlop. "If there is another life, it must be only for the just, the
benevolent, the amiable, and the humane. What a flattering idea, then,
is a world to come! There shall I, with speechless agony of rapture,
again recognise my lost, my ever dear Mary, whose bosom was fraught
with truth, honour, constancy, and love. " These melancholy words gave
way in their turn to others of a nature lively and humorous: "Tam
Glen," in which the thoughts flow as freely as the waters of the Nith,
on whose banks he wrote it; "Findlay," with its quiet vein of sly
simplicity; "Willie brewed a peck o' maut," the first of social, and
"She's fair and fause," the first of sarcastic songs, with "The deil's
awa wi' the Exciseman," are all productions of this period--a period
which had besides its own fears and its own forebodings.

For a while Burns seemed to prosper in his farm: he held the plough
with his own hand, he guided the harrows, he distributed the seed-corn
equally among the furrows, and he reaped the crop in its season, and
saw it safely covered in from the storms of winter with "thack and
rape;" his wife, too, superintended the dairy with a skill which she
had brought from Kyle, and as the harvest, for a season or two, was
abundant, and the dairy yielded butter and cheese for the market, it
seemed that "the luckless star" which ruled his lot had relented, and
now shone unboding and benignly. But much more is required than toil
of hand to make a successful farmer, nor will the attention bestowed
only by fits and starts, compensate for carelessness or oversight:
frugality, not in one thing but in all, is demanded, in small matters
as well as in great, while a careful mind and a vigilant eye must
superintend the labours of servants, and the whole system of in-door
and out-door economy. Now, during the three years which Burns stayed
in Ellisland, he neither wrought with that constant diligence which
farming demands, nor did he bestow upon it the unremitting attention
of eye and mind which such a farm required: besides his skill in
husbandry was but moderate--the rent, though of his own fixing, was
too high for him and for the times; the ground, though good, was not
so excellent as he might have had on the same estate--he employed more
servants than the number of acres demanded, and spread for them a
richer board than common: when we have said this we need not add the
expensive tastes induced by poetry, to keep readers from starting,
when they are told that Burns, at the close of the third year of
occupation, resigned his lease to the landlord, and bade farewell for
ever to the plough. He was not, however, quite desolate; he had for a
year or more been appointed on the excise, and had superintended a
district extending to ten large parishes, with applause; indeed, it
has been assigned as the chief reason for failure in his farm, that
when the plough or the sickle summoned him to the field, he was to be
found, either pursuing the defaulters of the revenue, among the
valleys of Dumfrieshire, or measuring out pastoral verse to the
beauties of the land. He retired to a house in the Bank-vennel of
Dumfries, and commenced a town-life: he commenced it with an empty
pocket, for Ellisland had swallowed up all the profits of his poems:
he had now neither a barn to produce meal nor barley, a barn-yard to
yield a fat hen, a field to which he could go at Martinmas for a mart,
nor a dairy to supply milk and cheese and butter to the table--he had,
in short, all to buy and little to buy with. He regarded it as a
compensation that he had no farm-rent to provide, no bankruptcies to
dread, no horse to keep, for his excise duties were now confined to
Dumfries, and that the burthen of a barren farm was removed from his
mind, and his muse at liberty to renew her unsolicited strains.

But from the day of his departure from "the barren" Ellisland, the
downward course of Burns may be dated. The cold neglect of his country
had driven him back indignantly to the plough, and he hoped to gain
from the furrowed field that independence which it was the duty of
Scotland to have provided: but he did not resume the plough with all
the advantages he possessed when he first forsook it: he had revelled
in the luxuries of polished life--his tastes had been rendered
expensive as well as pure: he had witnessed, and he hoped for the
pleasures of literary retirement, while the hands which had led
jewelled dames over scented carpets to supper tables leaded with
silver took hold of the hilts of the plough with more of reluctance
than good-will.