No More Learning

To Mrs. Riddel. Her caprice

CCLXXXIX. To the same. Her neglect and unkindness

CCXC. To John Syme, Esq. Mrs. Oswald, and "O wat ye wha's in yon town"

CCXCI. To Miss ----. Obscure allusions to a friend's death. His
personal and poetic fame

CCXCII. To Mr. Cunningham. Hypochondria. Requests consolation

CCXCIII. To the Earl of Glencairn. With his printed poems

CCXCIV. To Mr. Thomson. David Allan. "The banks of Cree"

CCXCV. To David M'Culloch, Esq. Arrangements for a trip in Galloway

CCXCVI. To Mrs. Dunlop. Threatened with flying gout. Ode on
Washington's birthday

CCXCVII. To Mr. James Johnson. Low spirits. The Museum. Balmerino's
dirk

CCXCVIII. To Mr. Thomson. Lines written in "Thomson's Collection of
songs"

CCXCIX. To the same. With "How can my poor heart be glad"

CCC. To the same. With "Ca' the yowes to the knowes"

CCCI. To the same. With "Sae flaxen were her ringlets. " Epigram to Dr.
Maxwell.

CCCII. To the same. The charms of Miss Lorimer. "O saw ye my dear, my
Phely," &c.

CCCIII. To the same. Ritson's Scottish Songs. Love and song

CCCIV. To the same. English songs. The air of "Ye banks and braes o'
bonnie Doon"

CCCV. To the same. With "O Philly, happy be the day," and "Contented
wi' little"

CCCVI. To the same. With "Canst thou leave me thus, my Katy"

CCCVII. To Peter Miller, jun. , Esq. Excise. Perry's offer to write for
the Morning Chronicle

CCCVIII. To Mr. Samuel Clarke, jun. A political and personal quarrel.
Regret

CCCIX. To Mr. Thomson. With "Now in her green mantle blithe nature
arrays"


1795.

CCCX. To Mr. Thomson. With "For a' that and a' that"

CCCXI. To the same. Abuse of Ecclefechan

CCCXII. To the same. With "O stay, sweet warbling woodlark, stay," and
"The groves of sweet myrtle"

CCCXIII. To the same. With "How cruel are the parents" and "Mark
yonder pomp of costly fashion"

CCCXIV. To the same. Praise of David Allan's "Cotter's Saturday Night"

CCCXV. To the same. With "This is no my ain Lassie. " Mrs. Riddel

CCCXVI. To Mr. Thomson. With "Forlorn, my love, no comfort near"

CCCXVII. To the same. With "Last May a braw wooer," and "Why tell thy
lover"

CCCXVIII. To Mrs. Riddel. A letter from the grave

CCCXIX. To the same. A letter of compliment. "Anacharsis' Travels"

CCCXX. To Miss Louisa Fontenelle. With a Prologue for her
benefit-night

CCCXXI. To Mrs. Dunlop. His family. Miss Fontenelle. Cowper's "Task"

CCCXXII. To Mr. Alexander Findlater. Excise schemes

CCCXXIII. To the Editor of the Morning Chronicle. Written for a
friend. A complaint

CCCXXIV. To Mr. Heron, of Heron. With two political ballads

CCCXXV. To Mrs. Dunlop. Thomson's Collection. Acting as Supervisor of
Excise

CCCXXVI. To the Right Hon. William Pitt. Address of the Scottish
Distillers

CCCXXVII. To the Provost, Bailies, and Town Council of Dumfries.
Request to be made a freeman of the town


1796.

CCCXXVIII. To Mrs. Riddel. "Anarcharsis' Travels. " The muses

CCCXXIX. To Mrs. Dunlop. His ill-health.

CCCXXX. To Mr. Thomson. Acknowledging his present to Mrs. Burns of a
worsted shawl

CCCXXXI. To the same. Ill-health. Mrs. Hyslop. Allan's etchings.
Cleghorn

CCCXXXII. To the same. "Here's a health to ane I loe dear"

CCCXXXIII. To the same. His anxiety to review his songs, asking for
copies

CCCXXXIV. To Mrs. Riddel. His increasing ill-health

CCCXXXV. To Mr. Clarke, acknowledging money and requesting the loan of
a further sum

CCCXXXVI. To Mr. James Johnson. The Scots Musical Museum. Request for
a copy of the collection

CCCXXXVII. To Mr. Cunningham. Illness and poverty, anticipation of
death

CCCXXXVIII. To Mr. Gilbert Burns. His ill-health and debts

CCCXXXIX. To Mr. James Armour. Entreating Mrs. Armour to come to her
daughter's confinement

CCCXL. To Mrs. Burns. Sea-bathing affords little relief

CCCXLI. To Mrs. Dunlop. Her friendship. A farewell

CCCXLII. To Mr. Thomson. Solicits the sum of five pounds. "Fairest
Maid on Devon Banks"

CCCXLIII. To Mr. James Burness. Soliciting the sum of ten pounds

CCCXLIV. To James Gracie, Esq. His rheumatism, &c. &c. --his loss of
appetite


Remarks on Scottish Songs and Ballads


The Border Tour


The Highland Tour


Burns's Assignment of his Works


Glossary




LIFE

OF

ROBERT BURNS.


Robert Burns, the chief of the peasant poets of Scotland, was born in
a little mud-walled cottage on the banks of Doon, near "Alloway's auld
haunted kirk," in the shire of Ayr, on the 25th day of January, 1759.
As a natural mark of the event, a sudden storm at the same moment
swept the land: the gabel-wall of the frail dwelling gave way, and the
babe-bard was hurried through a tempest of wind and sleet to the
shelter of a securer hovel. He was the eldest born of three sons and
three daughters; his father, William, who in his native
Kincardineshire wrote his name Burness, was bred a gardener, and
sought for work in the West; but coming from the lands of the noble
family of the Keiths, a suspicion accompanied him that he had been
out--as rebellion was softly called--in the forty-five: a suspicion
fatal to his hopes of rest and bread, in so loyal a district; and it
was only when the clergyman of his native parish certified his loyalty
that he was permitted to toil. This suspicion of Jacobitism, revived
by Burns himself, when he rose into fame, seems not to have influenced
either the feelings, or the tastes of Agnes Brown, a young woman on
the Doon, whom he wooed and married in December, 1757, when he was
thirty-six years old. To support her, he leased a small piece of
ground, which he converted into a nursery and garden, and to shelter
her, he raised with his own hands that humble abode where she gave
birth to her eldest son.

The elder Burns was a well-informed, silent, austere man, who endured
no idle gaiety, nor indecorous language: while he relaxed somewhat the
hard, stern creed of the Covenanting times, he enforced all the
work-day, as well as sabbath-day observances, which the Calvinistic
kirk requires, and scrupled at promiscuous dancing, as the staid of
our own day scruple at the waltz. His wife was of a milder mood: she
was blest with a singular fortitude of temper; was as devout of heart,
as she was calm of mind; and loved, while busied in her household
concerns, to sweeten the bitterer moments of life, by chanting the
songs and ballads of her country, of which her store was great. The
garden and nursery prospered so much, that he was induced to widen his
views, and by the help of his kind landlord, the laird of Doonholm,
and the more questionable aid of borrowed money, he entered upon a
neighbouring farm, named Mount Oliphant, extending to an hundred
acres. This was in 1765; but the land was hungry and sterile; the
seasons proved rainy and rough; the toil was certain, the reward
unsure; when to his sorrow, the laird of Doonholm--a generous
Ferguson,--died: the strict terms of the lease, as well as the rent,
were exacted by a harsh factor, and with his wife and children, he was
obliged, after a losing struggle of six years, to relinquish the farm,
and seek shelter on the grounds of Lochlea, some ten miles off, in the
parish of Tarbolton. When, in after-days, men's characters were in the
hands of his eldest son, the scoundrel factor sat for that lasting
portrait of insolence and wrong, in the "Twa Dogs. "

In this new farm William Burns seemed to strike root, and thrive. He
was strong of body and ardent of mind: every day brought increase of
vigour to his three sons, who, though very young, already put their
hands to the plough, the reap-hook, and the flail. But it seemed that
nothing which he undertook was decreed in the end to prosper: after
four seasons of prosperity a change ensued: the farm was far from
cheap; the gains under any lease were then so little, that the loss of
a few pounds was ruinous to a farmer: bad seed and wet seasons had
their usual influence: "The gloom of hermits and the moil of
galley-slaves," as the poet, alluding to those days, said, were
endured to no purpose; when, to crown all, a difference arose between
the landlord and the tenant, as to the terms of the lease; and the
early days of the poet, and the declining years of his father, were
harassed by disputes, in which sensitive minds are sure to suffer.

Amid these labours and disputes, the poet's father remembered the
worth of religious and moral instruction: he took part of this upon
himself. A week-day in Lochlea wore the sober looks of a Sunday: he
read the Bible and explained, as intelligent peasants are accustomed
to do, the sense, when dark or difficult; he loved to discuss the
spiritual meanings, and gaze on the mystical splendours of the
Revelations. He was aided in these labours, first, by the
schoolmaster of Alloway-mill, near the Doon; secondly, by John
Murdoch, student of divinity, who undertook to teach arithmetic,
grammar, French, and Latin, to the boys of Lochlea, and the sons of
five neighboring farmers. Murdoch, who was an enthusiast in learning,
much of a pedant, and such a judge of genius that he thought wit
should always be laughing, and poetry wear an eternal smile, performed
his task well: he found Robert to be quick in apprehension, and not
afraid to study when knowledge was the reward. He taught him to turn
verse into its natural prose order; to supply all the ellipses, and
not to desist till the sense was clear and plain: he also, in their
walks, told him the names of different objects both in Latin and
French; and though his knowledge of these languages never amounted to
much, he approached the grammar of the English tongue, through the
former, which was of material use to him, in his poetic compositions.
Burns was, even in those early days, a sort of enthusiast in all that
concerned the glory of Scotland; he used to fancy himself a soldier of
the days of the Wallace and the Bruce: loved to strut after the
bag-pipe and the drum, and read of the bloody struggles of his country
for freedom and existence, till "a Scottish prejudice," he says, "was
poured into my veins, which will boil there till the flood-gates of
life are shut in eternal rest.
"

In this mood of mind Burns was unconsciously approaching the land of
poesie. In addition to the histories of the Wallace and the Bruce, he
found, on the shelves of his neighbours, not only whole bodies of
divinity, and sermons without limit, but the works of some of the best
English, as well as Scottish poets, together with songs and ballads
innumerable. On these he loved to pore whenever a moment of leisure
came; nor was verse his sole favourite; he desired to drink knowledge
at any fountain, and Guthrie's Grammar, Dickson on Agriculture,
Addison's Spectator, Locke on the Human Understanding, and Taylor's
Scripture Doctrine of Original Sin, were as welcome to his heart as
Shakspeare, Milton, Pope, Thomson, and Young. There is a mystery in
the workings of genius: with these poets in his head and hand, we see
not that he has advanced one step in the way in which he was soon to
walk, "Highland Mary" and "Tam O' Shanter" sprang from other
inspirations.

Burns lifts up the veil himself, from the studies which made him a
poet. "In my boyish days," he says to Moore, "I owed much to an old
woman (Jenny Wilson) who resided in the family, remarkable for her
credulity and superstition. She had, I suppose, the largest collection
in the country of tales and songs, concerning devils, ghosts, fairies,
brownies, witches, warlocks, spunkies, kelpies, elf-candles,
dead-lights, wraiths, apparitions, cantraips, giants, enchanted
towers, dragons, and other trumpery. This cultivated the latent seeds
of poesie; but had so strong an effect upon my imagination that to
this hour, in my nocturnal rambles, I sometimes keep a look-out on
suspicious places. " Here we have the young poet taking lessons in the
classic lore of his native land: in the school of Janet Wilson he
profited largely; her tales gave a hue, all their own, to many noble
effusions. But her teaching was at the hearth-stone: when he was in
the fields, either driving a cart or walking to labour, he had ever in
his hand a collection of songs, such as any stall in the land could
supply him with; and over these he pored, ballad by ballad, and verse
by verse, noting the true, tender, and the natural sublime from
affectation and fustian. "To this," he said, "I am convinced that I
owe much of my critic craft, such as it is. " His mother, too,
unconsciously led him in the ways of the muse: she loved to recite or
sing to him a strange, but clever ballad, called "the Life and Age of
Man:" this strain of piety and imagination was in his mind when he
wrote "Man was made to Mourn. "

He found other teachers--of a tenderer nature and softer influence.
"You know," he says to Moore, "our country custom of coupling a man
and woman together as partners in the labours of harvest. In my
fifteenth autumn my partner was a bewitching creature, a year younger
than myself: she was in truth a bonnie, sweet, sonsie lass, and
unwittingly to herself, initiated me in that delicious passion, which,
in spite of acid disappointment, gin-horse prudence, and bookworm
philosophy, I hold to be the first of human joys. How she caught the
contagion I cannot tell; I never expressly said I loved her: indeed I
did not know myself why I liked so much to loiter behind with her,
when returning in the evenings from our labours; why the tones of her
voice made my heart strings thrill like an AEolian harp, and
particularly why my pulse beat such a furious ratan, when I looked and
fingered over her little hand, to pick out the cruel nettle-stings and
thistles. Among other love-inspiring qualities, she sang sweetly, and
it was her favourite reel to which I attempted to give an embodied
vehicle in rhyme; thus with me began love and verse. " This intercourse
with the fair part of the creation, was to his slumbering emotions, a
voice from heaven to call them into life and poetry.

From the school of traditionary lore and love, Burns now went to a
rougher academy. Lochlea, though not producing fine crops of corn, was
considered excellent for flax; and while the cultivation of this
commodity was committed to his father and his brother Gilbert, he was
sent to Irvine at Midsummer, 1781, to learn the trade of a
flax-dresser, under one Peacock, kinsman to his mother. Some time
before, he had spent a portion of a summer at a school in Kirkoswald,
learning mensuration and land-surveying, where he had mingled in
scenes of sociality with smugglers, and enjoyed the pleasure of a
silent walk, under the moon, with the young and the beautiful. At
Irvine he laboured by day to acquire a knowledge of his business, and
at night he associated with the gay and the thoughtless, with whom he
learnt to empty his glass, and indulge in free discourse on topics
forbidden at Lochlea. He had one small room for a lodging, for which
he gave a shilling a week: meat he seldom tasted, and his food
consisted chiefly of oatmeal and potatoes sent from his father's
house. In a letter to his father, written with great purity and
simplicity of style, he thus gives a picture of himself, mental and
bodily: "Honoured Sir, I have purposely delayed writing, in the hope
that I should have the pleasure of seeing you on new years' day, but
work comes so hard upon us that I do not choose to be absent on that
account. My health is nearly the same as when you were here, only my
sleep is a little sounder, and on the whole, I am rather better than
otherwise, though I mend by very slow degrees: the weakness of my
nerves had so debilitated my mind that I dare neither review past
wants nor look forward into futurity, for the least anxiety or
perturbation in my breast produces most unhappy effects on my whole
frame. Sometimes indeed, when for an hour or two my spirits are a
little lightened, I _glimmer_ a little into futurity; but my principal
and indeed my only pleasurable employment is looking backwards and
forwards in a moral and religious way. I am quite transported at the
thought that ere long, perhaps very soon, I shall bid an eternal adieu
to all the pains and uneasinesses, and disquietudes of this weary
life. As for the world, I despair of ever making a figure in it: I am
not formed for the bustle of the busy, nor the flutter of the gay. I
foresee that poverty and obscurity probably await me, and I am in some
measure prepared and daily preparing to meet them. I have but just
time and paper to return you my grateful thanks for the lessons of
virtue and piety you have given me, which were but too much neglected
at the time of giving them, but which, I hope, have been remembered
ere it is yet too late. " This remarkable letter was written in the
twenty-second year of his age; it alludes to the illness which seems
to have been the companion of his youth, a nervous headache, brought
on by constant toil and anxiety; and it speaks of the melancholy which
is the common attendant of genius, and its sensibilities, aggravated
by despair of distinction. The catastrophe which happened ere this
letter was well in his father's hand, accords ill with quotations from
the Bible, and hopes fixed in heaven:--"As we gave," he says, "a
welcome carousal to the new year, the shop took fire, and burnt to
ashes, and I was left, like a true poet, not worth a sixpence. "

This disaster was followed by one more grievous: his father was well
in years when he was married, and age and a constitution injured by
toil and disappointment, began to press him down, ere his sons had
grown up to man's estate. On all sides the clouds began to darken: the
farm was unprosperous: the speculations in flax failed; and the
landlord of Lochlea, raising a question upon the meaning of the lease,
concerning rotation of crop, pushed the matter to a lawsuit, alike
ruinous to a poor man either in its success or its failure. "After
three years tossing and whirling," says Burns, "in the vortex of
litigation, my father was just saved from the horrors of a jail by a
consumption, which, after two years' promises, kindly slept in and
carried him away to where the 'wicked cease from troubling and the
weary are at rest. ' His all went among the hell-hounds that prowl in
the kennel of justice. The finishing evil which brought up the rear of
this infernal file, was my constitutional melancholy being increased
to such a degree, that for three months I was in a state of mind
scarcely to be envied by the hopeless wretches who have got their
mittimus, 'Depart from me, ye cursed. '"

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.