This was certainly a period of ageing activity in Burns's life. It seemed as if there had been a conspiracy of fate and circumstance to herald the birth of his poems with the wildest convulsions of labour and travail. The parish of Tarbolton became the stage of a play that had all the makings of a farce and all the elements of a tragedy. There were endless complications and daily developments, all deepening the dramatic intensity without disturbing the unity. We watch with breathless interest, dumbly wondering what the end will be. It is tragedy, comedy, melodrama, and burlesque all in one.

Driven almost to madness by the faithlessness of Jean Armour, he rends himself in a whirlwind of passion, and seeks sympathy and solace in the love of Mary Campbell. What a situation for a novelist! This is just how the story-teller would have made his jilted hero act; sent him with bleeding heart to seek consolation in a new love. For novelists make a study of the vagaries of love, and know that hearts are caught in the rebound.

Most of the biographers of Burns are agreed that this Highland lassie was the object of by far the deepest passion he ever knew. They may be right. Death stepped in before disillusion, and she was never other than the adored Mary of that rapturous meeting when the white hawthorn-blossom no purer was than their love. Thus was his love for Mary Campbell ever a holy and spiritual devotion. Auguste Angellier says: 'This was the purest, the most lasting, and by far the noblest of his loves. Above all the others, many of which were more passionate, this one stands out with the chasteness of a lily. There is a complete contrast between his love for Jean and his love for Mary. In the one case all the epithets are material; here they are all moral. The praises are borrowed, not from the graces of the body, but from the features of the soul. The words which occur again and again are those of honour, of purity, of goodness. The idea of seeing her again some day was never absent from his mind. Every time he thought of eternity, of a future life, of reunions in some unknown state, it was to her that his heart went out. The love of that second Sunday of May was ever present. It was the love which led Burns to the most elevated sphere to which he ever attained; it was the inspiration of his most spiritual efforts. This sweet, blue-eyed Highland lassie was his Beatrice, and waved to him from the gates of heaven.'

We know little about Mary Campbell from the poet himself; and though much has been ferreted out about her by a host of snappers-up of unconsidered trifles, this episode in his life is still involved in mystery. It is pleasant to reflect that his reticence here has kept at least one love passage in his life sacred and holy. Is not mystery half the charm and beauty of love? Yet, in spite of his silence, or probably because of it, details have been raked up from time to time, some grey and colourless fossil-remains of what was once fresh and living fact. From Burns himself we know that the lovers took a tender farewell in a sequestered spot by the banks of the Ayr, and parted never to meet again. All the romance and tragedy are there, and what need we more? We are not even certain as to either the place or the date of her death. Mrs. Begg, the poet's sister, knew little or nothing about Mary Campbell. She remembered, however, a letter being handed in to him after the work of the season was over. 'He went to the window to open and read it, and she was struck by the look of agony which was the consequence. He went out without uttering a word.' What he felt he expressed afterwards in song—song that has become the language of bereaved and broken hearts for all time. The widowed lover knows 'the dear departed shade,' but he may not have heard of Mary Campbell.

It was in May that Burns and Highland Mary had parted; in June he wrote to a friend about ungrateful Armour, confessing that he still loved her to distraction, though he would not tell her so. But all his letters about this time are wild and rebellious. He raves in a tempest of passion, and cools himself again, perhaps in the composition of a song or poem. Just about the time this letter was written, his poems were already in the press. His proposal for publishing had met with so hearty a reception, that success financially was to a certain extent assured, and the printing had been put into the hand of John Wilson, Kilmarnock. Even yet his pen was busy. He wrote often in a gay and lively style, almost, it would seem, in a struggle to keep himself from sinking into melancholy, 'singing to keep his courage up.' His gaiety was 'the madness of an intoxicated criminal under the hands of the executioner.' A Bard's Epitaph, however, among the many pieces of this season, is earnest and serious enough to disarm hostile criticism; and his loose and flippant productions are read leniently in the light of this pathetic confession. It is a self-revelation truly, but it is honest, straightforward, and manly. There is nothing plaintive or mawkish about it.

We next find Burns flying from home to escape legal measures that Jean Armour's father was instituting against him. He was in hiding at Kilmarnock to be out of the way of legal diligence, and it was in such circumstances that he saw his poems through the press. Surely never before in the history of literature had book burst from such a medley of misfortunes into so sudden and certain fame. Born in tumult, it vindicated its volcanic birth, and took the hearts of men by storm. Burns says little about those months of labour and bitterness. We know that he had then nearly as high an idea of himself and his works as he had in later life; he had watched every means of information as to how much ground he occupied as a man and a poet, and was sure his poems would meet with some applause. He had subscriptions for about three hundred and fifty, and he got six hundred copies printed, pocketing, after all expenses were paid, nearly twenty pounds. With nine guineas of this sum he bespoke a passage in the first ship that was to sail for the West Indies. 'I had for some time,' he says, 'been skulking from covert to covert under all the terrors of a jail, as some ill-advised, ungrateful people had uncoupled the merciless, legal pack at my heels. I had taken the last farewell of my friends; my chest was on the road to Greenock; I had composed the song The Gloomy Night is Gathering Fast, which was to be the last effort of my muse in Caledonia, when a letter from Dr. Blacklock to a friend of mine overthrew all my schemes, by rousing my poetic ambition. The doctor belonged to a class of critics, for whose applause I had not even dared to hope. His idea that I would meet with every encouragement for a second edition fired me so much, that away I posted to Edinburgh, without a single acquaintance in town, or a single letter of recommendation in my pocket.'

It was towards the end of July that the poems were published, and they met with a success that must have been gratifying to those friends who had stood by the poet in his hour of adversity, and done what they could to ensure subscriptions. In spite of the fact that Burns certainly looked upon himself as possessed of some poetic abilities, the reception the little volume met with, and the impression it at once made, must have exceeded his wildest anticipations. Even yet, however, he did not relinquish the idea of going to America. On the other hand, as we have seen, the first use he made of the money which publication had brought him, was to secure a berth in a vessel bound for Jamaica. But he was still compelled by the dramatic uncertainty of circumstance. The day of sailing was postponed, else had he certainly left his native land. It was only after Jean Armour had become the mother of twin children that there was any hint of diffidence about sailing. In a letter to Robert Aitken, written in October, he says: 'All these reasons urge me to go abroad, and to all these reasons I have one answer—the feelings of a father. That in the present mood I am in overbalances everything that can be laid in the scale against it.'

His friends, too, after the success of his poems, were beginning to be doubtful about the wisdom of his going abroad, and were doing what they could to secure for him a place in the Excise. For his fame had gone beyond the bounds of his native county, and others than people in his own station had recognised his genius. Mrs. Dunlop of Dunlop was one of the first to seek the poet's acquaintance, and she became an almost lifelong friend; through his poems he renewed acquaintance with Mrs. Stewart of Stair. He was 'roosed' by Craigen-Gillan; Dugald Stewart, the celebrated metaphysician, and one of the best-known names in the learned and literary circles of Edinburgh, who happened to be spending his vacation at Catrine, not very far from Mossgiel, invited the poet to dine with him, and on that occasion he 'dinnered wi' a laird'—Lord Daer. Then came the appreciative letter from Dr. Blacklock to the Rev. George Lawrie of Loudon, already mentioned. Even this letter might not have proved strong enough to detain him in Scotland, had it not been that he was disappointed of a second edition of his poems in Kilmarnock. Other encouragement came from Edinburgh in a very favourable criticism of his poems in the Edinburgh Magazine. This, taken along with Dr. Blacklock's suggestion about 'a second edition more numerous than the former,' led the poet to believe that his work would be taken up by any of the Edinburgh publishers. The feelings of a father also urged him to remain in Scotland; and at length—probably in November—the thought of exile was abandoned. It was with very different feelings, we may be sure, that he contemplated setting out from Mossgiel to sojourn for a season in Edinburgh—a name that had ever been associated in his mind with the best traditions of learning and literature in Scotland.



CHAPTER V

THE EDINBURGH EDITION

Edinburgh towards the close of last century was a very different place from Edinburgh of the present day. It was then to a certain extent the hub of Scottish society; the centre of learning and literature; the winter rendezvous of not a few of the nobility and gentry of Scotland. For in those days it had its society and its season; county families had not altogether abandoned the custom of keeping their houses in town. All roads did not then lead to London as they do now, when Edinburgh is a capital in little more than name, and its prestige has become a tradition. A century ago Edinburgh had all the glamour and fascination of the capital of a no mean country; to-day it is but the historical capital invested with the glamour and fascination of a departed glory. The very names of those whom Burns met on his first visit to Edinburgh are part of the history of the nation. In the University there were at that time, representative of the learning of the age, Dugald Stewart, Dr. Blair, and Dr. Robertson. David Hume was but recently dead, and the lustre of his name remained. His great friend, Adam Smith, author of The Wealth of Nations, was still living; while Henry Mackenzie, The Man of Feeling, the most popular writer of his day, was editing The Lounger; and Dr. Blacklock, the blind poet, was also a name of authority in the world of letters. Nor was the Bar, whose magnates have ever figured in the front rank of Edinburgh society, eclipsed by the literary luminaries of the University. Lord Monboddo has left a name, which his countrymen are not likely to forget. He was an accomplished, though eccentric character, whose classical bent was in the direction of Epicurean parties. His great desire was to revive the traditions of the elegant suppers of classical times. Not only were music and painting employed to this end, but the tables were wreathed with flowers, the odour of incense pervaded the room; the wines were of the choicest, served from decanters of Grecian design. But, perhaps, the chief attraction to Burns in the midst of all this super-refinement was the presence of 'the heavenly Miss Burnet,' daughter of Lord Monboddo. 'There has not been anything nearly like her,' he wrote to his friend Chalmers, 'in all the combinations of beauty and grace and goodness the great Creator has formed since Milton's Eve in the first day of her existence.' The Hon. Henry Erskine was another well-known name, not only in legal circles, but as well in fashionable society. His genial and sunny nature made him so great a favourite in his profession, that having been elected Dean of the Faculty of Advocates in 1786, he was unanimously re-elected every year till 1796, when he was victorious over Dundas of Arniston, who had been brought forward in opposition to him. The leader of fashion was the celebrated Duchess of Gordon, who was never absent from a public place, and 'the later the hour so much the better.' Her amusements—her life, we might say—were dancing, cards, and company. With such a leader, the season to the very select and elegant society of Edinburgh was certain to be a time of brilliance and gaiety; while its very exclusiveness, and the fact that it affected or reflected the literary life of the University and the Bar, would make it all the more ready to lionise a man like Burns when the opportunity came.

The members of the middle class caught their tone from the upper ranks, and took their nightly sederunts and morning headaches as privileges they dared aristocratic exclusiveness to deny them. Douce citizens, merchants, respectable tradesmen, well-to-do lawyers, forgathered when the labours of the day were done to spend a few hours in some snug back-parlour, where mine host granted them the privileges and privacy of a club. Such social beings as these, met to discuss punch, law, and literature, were no less likely than their aristocratic neighbours to receive Burns with open arms, and once he was in their midst to prolong their sittings in his honour. Nor was Burns, if he found them honest and hearty fellows, the man to say them nay. He was eminently a social and sociable being, and in company such as theirs he could unbend himself as he might not do in the houses of punctilious society. The etiquette of that howff of the Crochallan Fencibles in the Anchor Close or of Johnnie Dowie's tavern in Libberton's Wynd was not the etiquette of drawing-rooms; and the poet was free to enliven the hours with a rattling fire of witty remarks on men and things as he had been wont to do on the bog at Lochlea, with only a few noteless peasants for audience.

Burns entered Edinburgh on November 28, 1786. He had spent the night after leaving Mossgiel at the farm of Covington Mains, where the kind-hearted host, Mr. Prentice, had all the farmers of the parish gathered to meet him. This is of interest as showing the popularity Burns's poems had already won; while the eagerness of those farmers to see and know the man after they had read his poems proves most strikingly how straight the poet had gone to the hearts of his readers. They had recognised the voice of a human being, and heard it gladly. This gathering was convincing testimony, if such were needed, of the truthfulness and sincerity of his writings. No doubt Burns, with his great force of understanding, appreciated the welcome of those brother-farmers, and valued it above the adulation he afterwards received in Edinburgh. The Kilmarnock Edition was but a few months old, yet here was a gathering of hard-working men, who had read his poems, we may be sure, from cover to cover, and now they were eager to thank him who had sung the joys and sorrows of their workaday lives. Of course there was a great banquet, and night wore into morning before the company dispersed. They had seen the poet face to face, and the man was greater than his poems.

Next morning he resumed his journey, breakfasting at Carnwath, and reaching Edinburgh in the evening. He had come, as he tells us, without a letter of introduction in his pocket, and he took up his abode with John Richmond in Baxter's Close, off the Lawnmarket. He had known Richmond when he was a clerk with Gavin Hamilton, and had kept up a correspondence with him ever since he had left Mauchline. The lodging was a humble enough one, the rent being only three shillings a week; but here Burns lodged all the time he was in Edinburgh, and it was hither he returned from visiting the houses of the rich and great, to share a bed with his friend and companion of many a merry meeting at Mauchline.

It would be vain to attempt to describe Burns's feelings during those first few days in Edinburgh. He had never before been in a larger town than Kilmarnock or Ayr; and now he walked the streets of Scotland's capital, to him full of history and instinct with the associations of centuries. This was really the heart of Scotland, the home of heroes who fought and fell for their country, 'the abode of kings of other years.' His sentimental attachment to Jacobitism became more pronounced as he looked on Holyrood. For Burns, a representative of the strength and weakness of his countrymen, was no less representative of Scotland's sons in his chivalrous pity for the fate of Queen Mary and his romantic loyalty to the gallant Prince Charlie. His poetical espousal of the cause of the luckless Stuarts was purely a matter of sentiment, a kind of pious pity that had little to do with reason; and in this he was typical of his countrymen even of the present day, who are loyal to the house of Stuart in song, and in life are loyal subjects of their Queen.

We are told, and we can well believe that for the first few days of his stay he wandered about, looking down from Arthur's Seat, gazing at the Castle, or contemplating the windows of the booksellers' shops. We know that he made a special pilgrimage to the grave of Fergusson, and that in a letter, dated February 6, 1787, he applied to the honourable bailies of Canongate, Edinburgh, for permission 'to lay a simple stone over his revered ashes'; which petition was duly considered and graciously granted. The stone was afterwards erected, with the simple inscription, 'Here lies Robert Fergusson, Poet. Born September 5th, 1751; died 16th October, 1774.

No sculptured marble here, nor pompous lay, "No storied urn nor animated bust"; This simple stone directs pale Scotia's way To pour her sorrow o'er her poet's dust.'

On the reverse side is recorded the fact that the stone was erected by Robert Burns, and that the ground was to remain for ever sacred to the memory of Robert Fergusson.

It is related, too, that he visited Ramsay's house, and that he bared his head when he entered. Burns over and over again, both in prose and verse, turned to these two names with a kind of fetich worship, that it is difficult to understand. He must have known that, as a poet, he was immeasurably superior to both. It may have been that their writings first opened his eyes to the possibilities of the Scots tongue in lyrical and descriptive poetry; and there was something also which appealed to him in the wretched life of Fergusson.

'O thou, my elder brother in misfortune, By far my elder brother in the Muses.'

His elder brother indeed by some six years! But there is more of reverence than sound judgment in his estimate of either Ramsay or Fergusson.

Burns, however, had come to Edinburgh with a fixed purpose in view, and it would not do to waste his time mooning about the streets. On December 7 we find him writing to Gavin Hamilton, half seriously, half jokingly: 'I am in a fair way of becoming as eminent as Thomas a Kempis or John Bunyan, and you may expect henceforth to see my birthday inserted among the wonderful events in the Poor Robins' and Aberdeen Almanacs along with the Black Monday and the Battle of Bothwell Bridge. My Lord Glencairn and the Dean of Faculty, Mr. H. Erskine, have taken me under their wing, and by all probability I shall soon be the tenth worthy and the eighth wise man of the world. Through my lord's influence it is inserted in the records of the Caledonian Hunt that they universally one and all subscribe for the second edition.'

This letter shows that Burns had already been taken up, as the phrase goes, by the elite of Edinburgh; and it shows also and quite as clearly in the tone of quiet banter, that he was little likely to lose his head by the notice taken of him. To the Earl of Glencairn, mentioned in it, he had been introduced probably by Mr. Dalrymple of Orangefield, whom he knew both as a brother-mason and a brother-poet. The Earl had already seen the Kilmarnock Edition of the poems, and now he not only introduced Burns to William Creech, the leading publisher in Edinburgh, but he got the members of the Caledonian Hunt to become subscribers for a second edition of the poems. To Erskine he had been introduced at a meeting of the Canongate Kilwinning Lodge of Freemasons; and assuredly there was no man living more likely to exert himself in the interests of a genius like Burns.

Two days after this letter to Gavin Hamilton there appeared in The Lounger Mackenzie's appreciative notice of the Kilmarnock Edition. This notice has become historical, and at the time of its appearance it must have been peculiarly gratifying to Burns. He had remarked before, in reference to the letter from Dr. Blacklock, that the doctor belonged to a class of critics for whose applause he had not even dared to hope. Now his work was criticised most favourably by the one who was regarded as the highest authority on literature in Scotland. If a writer was praised in The Lounger, his fame was assured. He went into the world with the hall-mark of Henry Mackenzie; and what more was needed? The oracle had spoken, and his decision was final. His pronouncement would be echoed and re-echoed from end to end of the country. And this great critic claimed no special indulgence for Burns on the plea of his mean birth or poor education. He saw in this heaven-taught ploughman a genius of no ordinary rank, a man who possessed the spirit as well as the fancy of a great poet. He was a poet, and it mattered not whether he had been born a peasant or a peer. 'His poetry, considered abstractedly and without the apologies arising from his situation, seems to me fully entitled to command our feelings and obtain our applause.... The power of genius is not less admirable in tracing the manners, than in painting the passions or in drawing the scenery of nature. That intuitive glance with which a writer like Shakspeare discerns the character of men, with which he catches the many changing hues of life, forms a sort of problem in the science of mind, of which it is easier to see the truth than assign the cause.'

But Mackenzie did more than praise. He pointed out the fact that the author had had a terrible struggle with poverty all the days of his life, and made an appeal to his country 'to stretch out her hand and retain the native poet whose wood-notes wild possessed so much excellence.' There seems little doubt that the concluding words of this notice led Burns for the first time to hope and believe that, through some influential patron, he might be placed in a position to face the future without a fear, and to cultivate poetry at his leisure. There is no mistaking the meaning of Mackenzie's words, and he had evidently used them with the conviction that something would be done for Burns. Unfortunately, he was mistaken; the poet, at first misled, was slowly disillusioned and somewhat embittered. 'To repair the wrongs of suffering or neglected merit; to call forth genius from the obscurity where it had pined indignant, and place it where it may profit or delight the world—these are exertions which give to wealth an enviable superiority, to greatness and to patronage a laudable pride.'

To Burns, at the time, such a criticism as this must have been all the more pleasing, inasmuch as it was the verdict of a man whose best-known work had been one of the poet's favourite books. We can easily imagine that, under the patronage of Lord Glencairn and Henry Erskine, and after Mackenzie's generous recognition of his genius, the doors of the best houses in Edinburgh would be open to him. His letter to John Ballantine, Ayr, written a few days after this criticism appeared, shows in what circles the poet was then moving. 'I have been introduced to a good many of the noblesse, but my avowed patrons and patronesses are, the Duchess of Gordon, the Countess of Glencairn with my Lord and Lady Betty, the Dean of Faculty, Sir John Whitefoord. I have likewise warm friends among the literati; Professors Stewart, Blair, and Mr. Mackenzie, The Man of Feeling.... I am nearly agreed with Creech to print my book, and I suppose I will begin on Monday.... Dugald Stewart and some of my learned friends put me in a periodical called The Lounger, a copy of which I here enclose you. I was, Sir, when I was first honoured with your notice, too obscure; now I tremble lest I should be ruined by being dragged too suddenly into the glare of learned and polite observation.'

Burns was now indeed the lion of Edinburgh. It must have been a great change for a man to have come straight from the stilts of the plough to be dined and toasted by such men as Lord Glencairn, Lord Monboddo, and the Hon. Henry Erskine; to be feted and flattered by the Duchess of Gordon, the Countess of Glencairn, and Lady Betty Cunningham; to count amongst his friends Mr. Mackenzie and Professors Stewart and Blair. It would have been little wonder if his head had been turned by the patronage of the nobility, the deference and attention of the literary and learned coteries of Edinburgh. But Burns was too sensible to be carried away by the adulation of a season. A man of his keenness of penetration and clearness of insight would appreciate the praise of the world at its proper value. He bore himself with becoming dignity, taking his place in refined society as one who had a right there, without showing himself either conceitedly aggressive or meanly servile. He took his part in conversation, but no more than his part, and expressed himself with freedom and decision. His conversation, in fact, astonished the literati even more than his poems had done. Perhaps they had expected some uncouth individual who would stammer crop-and-weather commonplaces in a rugged vernacular, or, worse still, in ungrammatical English; but here was one who held his own with them in speculative discussion, speaking not only with the eloquence of a poet, but with the readiness, clearness, and fluency of a man of letters. His pure English diction astonished them, but his acuteness of reasoning, his intuitive knowledge of men and the world, was altogether beyond their comprehension. All they had got by years of laborious study this man appeared to have as a natural gift. In repartee, even, he could more than hold his own with them, and in the presence of ladies could turn a compliment with the best. 'It needs no effort of imagination,' says Lockhart, 'to conceive what the sensations of an isolated set of scholars (almost all either clergymen or professors) must have been in the presence of this big-boned, black-browed, brawny stranger, who, having forced his way among them from the plough-tail at a single stride, manifested in the whole strain of his bearing and conversation a most thorough conviction that in the society of the most eminent men of his nation he was exactly where he was entitled to be.' It was a new world to Burns, yet he walked about as if he were of old familiar with its ways; he conducted himself in society like one to the manner born.

All who have left written evidence of Burns's visit to Edinburgh are agreed that he conducted himself with manliness and dignity, and all have left record of the powerful impression his conversation made on them. His poems were wonderful; himself was greater than his poems, a giant in intellect. A ploughman who actually dared to have formed a distinct conception of the doctrine of association was a miracle before which schools and scholars were dumb. 'Nothing, perhaps,' Dugald Stewart wrote, 'was more remarkable among his various attainments than the fluency, precision, and originality of his language when he spoke in company; more particularly as he aimed at purity in his turn of expression, and avoided more successfully than most Scotchmen the peculiarities of Scottish phraseology.'

And Professor Stewart goes further than this when he speaks of the soundness and sanity of Burns's nature. 'The attentions he received during his stay in town from all ranks and descriptions of persons, were such as would have turned any head but his own. He retained the same simplicity of manner and appearance which had struck me so forcibly when I first saw him in the country; nor did he seem to feel any additional self-importance from the number and rank of his new acquaintance. His dress was perfectly suited to his station, plain and unpretentious, with a sufficient attention to neatness.' Principal Robertson has left it on record, that he had scarcely ever met with any man whose conversation displayed greater vigour than that of Burns. Walter Scott, a youth of some sixteen years at the time, met Burns at the house of Dr. Adam Ferguson, and was particularly struck with his poetic eye, 'which literally glowed when he spoke with feeling or interest,' and with his forcible conversation. 'Among the men who were the most learned of their time and country, he expressed himself with perfect firmness, but without the least intrusive forwardness; and when he differed in opinion, he did not hesitate to express it firmly, and at the same time with modesty.... I never saw a man in company more perfectly free from either the reality or the affectation of embarrassment.' To these may be added the testimony of Dr. Walker, who gives, perhaps, the most complete and convincing picture of the man at this time. He insists on the same outstanding characteristics in Burns, his innate dignity, his unaffected demeanour in company, and brilliancy in conversation. In no part of his manner, we read, was there the slightest degree of affectation, and no one could have guessed from his behaviour or conversation, that he had been for some months the favourite of all the fashionable circles of a metropolis. 'In conversation he was powerful. His conceptions and expression were of corresponding vigour, and on all subjects were as remote as possible from commonplace.'

But whilst ladies of rank and fashion were deluging this Ayrshire ploughman with invitations, and vying one with another in their patronage and worship, the mind of the poet was no less busy registering impressions of every new experience. If the learned men of Edinburgh set themselves to study the character of a genius who upset all their cherished theories of birth and education, and to chronicle his sayings and doings, Burns at the same time was studying them, gauging their powers intuitively, telling their limitations at a glance. For he must measure every man he met, and himself with him. His standard was always the same; every brain was weighed against his own; but with Burns this was never more than a comparison of capacities. He took his stand, not by what work he had done, but by what he felt he was capable of doing. And that is not, and cannot be, the way of the world. In all his letters at this time we see him studying himself in the circles of fashion and learning. He could look on Robert Burns, as he were another person, brought from the plough and set down in a world of wealth and refinement, of learning and wit and beauty. He saw the dangers that beset him, and the temptations to which he was exposed; he recognised that something more than his poetic abilities was needed to explain his sudden popularity. He was the vogue, the favourite of a season; but public favour was capricious, and next year the doors of the great might be closed against him; while patrician dames who had schemed for his smiles might glance at him with indifferent eyes as at a dismissed servant once high in favour. His letter to Mrs. Dunlop, dated January 15, may be taken as a just, deliberate, and clear expression of his views of himself and society at this time. The letter is so quietly dignified that we may quote at some length. 'You are afraid I shall grow intoxicated with my prosperity as a poet. Alas! madam, I know myself and the world too well. I do not mean any airs of affected modesty; I am willing to believe that my abilities deserve some notice, but in a most enlightened, informed age and nation, where poetry is and has been the study of men of the first natural genius, aided with all the powers of polite learning, polite books, and polite company—to be dragged forth to the full glare of learned and polite observation, with all my imperfections of awkward rusticity and crude and unpolished ideas on my head—I assure you, madam, I do not dissemble when I tell you I tremble for the consequences. The novelty of a poet in my obscure situation, without any of those advantages that are reckoned necessary for that character, at least at this time of day, has raised a partial tide of public notice which has borne me to a height where I am absolutely, feelingly certain my abilities are inadequate to support me; and too surely do I see that time when the same tide will leave me and recede, perhaps as far below the mark of truth. I do not say this in the ridiculous affectation of self-abasement and modesty. I have studied myself, and know what ground I occupy; and however a friend or the world may differ from me in that particular, I stand for my own opinion in silent resolve, with all the tenaciousness of property. I mention this to you once for all to disburden my mind, and I do not wish to hear or say more about it. But—

"When proud fortune's ebbing tide recedes,"

you will bear me witness that when my bubble of fame was at the highest, I stood unintoxicated with the inebriating cup in my hand, looking forward with rueful resolve to the hastening time when the blow of calamity should dash it to the ground with all the eagerness of vengeful triumph.'

In a letter to Dr. Moore he harps on the same string, for he sees clearly enough that though his abilities as a poet are worthy of recognition, it is the novelty of his position and the strangeness of the life he has pictured in his poems that have brought him into polite notice. The field of his poetry, rather than the poetry itself, is the wonder in the eyes of stately society. To the Rev. Mr. Lawrie of Loudon he writes in a similar strain, and speaks even more emphatically. From all his letters, indeed, at this time we gather that he saw that novelty had much to do with his present eclat; that the tide of popularity would recede, and leave him at his leisure to descend to his former situation; and, above all, that he was prepared for this, come when it would.

All this time he had been busy correcting the proofs of his poems; and now that he was already assured the edition would be a success, he began to think seriously of the future and of settling down again as farmer. The appellation of Scottish Bard, he confessed to Mrs. Dunlop, was his highest pride; to continue to deserve it, his most exalted ambition. He had no dearer aim than to be able to make 'leisurely pilgrimages through Caledonia, to sit on the fields of her battles, to wander on the romantic banks of her rivers, and to muse by the stately towers or venerable ruins, once the honoured abodes of her heroes.' But that was a Utopian dream; he had dallied long enough with life, and now it was time he should be in earnest. 'I have a fond, an aged mother to care for; and some other bosom ties perhaps equally tender.'

Perhaps, had Burns received before he left Edinburgh the L500 which Creech ultimately paid him for the Edinburgh Edition, he might have gone straight to a farm in the south country, and taken up what he considered the serious business of life. He himself, about this time, estimated that he would clear nearly L300 by authorship, and with that sum he intended to return to farming. Mr. Miller of Dalswinton had expressed a wish to have Burns as tenant of one of his farms, and the poet had been already approached on the subject. We also gather from almost every letter written just before the publication of his poems, that he contemplated an immediate return 'to his shades.' However, when the Edinburgh Edition came out, April 21, 1787, the poet found that it would be a considerable time before the whole profits accruing from publication could be paid over to him. Indeed, there was certainly an unnecessary delay on Creech's part in making a settlement. The first instalment of profits was not sufficient for leasing and stocking a farm; and during the months that elapsed before the whole profits were in his hands, Burns made several tours through the Borders and Highlands of Scotland. This was certainly one of his dearest aims; but these tours were undertaken somewhat under compulsion, and we doubt not he would much more gladly have gone straight back to farm-life, and kept these leisurely pilgrimages to a more convenient season. One is not in a mood for dreaming on battlefields, or wandering in a reverie by romantic rivers, when the future is unsettled and life is for the time being without an aim. There is something of mystery and melancholy hanging about these peregrinations, and the cause, it seems to us, is not far to seek. These months are months of waiting and wearying; he is unsettled, oftentimes moody and despondent; his bursts of gaiety appear forced, and his muse is well-nigh barren. In the circumstances, no doubt it was the best thing he could do, to gratify his long-cherished desire of seeing these places in his native country, whose names were enshrined in song or story. But how much more pleasant—and more profitable both to the poet himself and the country he loved—had these journeys been made under more favourable conditions!

The past also as much as the future weighed on the poet's mind. His days had been so fully occupied in Edinburgh that he had little leisure to think on some dark and dramatic episodes of Mauchline and Kilmarnock; but now in his wanderings he has time not only to think but to brood; and we may be sure the face of Bonnie Jean haunted him in dreams, and that his heart heard again and again the plaintive voices of little children. In several of his letters now we detect a tone of bitterness, in which we suspect there is more of remorse than of resentment with the world. He certainly was disappointed that Creech could not pay him in full, but he must have been gratified with the reception his poems had got. The list of subscribers ran to thirty-eight pages, and was representative of every class in Scotland. In the words of Cunningham: 'All that coterie influence and individual exertion—all that the noblest and humblest could do, was done to aid in giving it a kind reception. Creech, too, had announced it through the booksellers of the land, and it was soon diffused over the country, over the colonies, and wherever the language was spoken. The literary men of the South seemed even to fly to a height beyond those of the North. Some hesitated not to call him the Northern Shakspeare.'

This surely was a great achievement for one who, a few months previously, had been skulking from covert to covert to escape the terrors of a jail. He had hardly dared to hope for the commendation of the Edinburgh critics, yet he had been received by the best society of the capital; his genius had been recognised by the highest literary authorities of Scotland; and now the second edition of his poems was published under auspices that gave it the character of a national book.

If the poems this volume contained established fully and finally the reputation of the poet, the subscription list was a no less substantial proof of a generous and enthusiastic appreciation of his genius on the part of his countrymen. And that Burns must have recognised. A man of his sound common sense could not have expected more.



CHAPTER VI

BURNS'S TOURS

The Edinburgh Edition having now been published, there was no reason for the poet to prolong his stay in the city. It was only after being disappointed of a second Kilmarnock Edition of his poems that he had come to try his fortunes in the capital; and now that his hopes of a fuller edition and a wider field had been realised, the purpose of his visit was accomplished, and there was no need to fritter his time away in idleness.

In a letter to Lord Buchan, Burns had doubted the prudence of a penniless poet faring forth to see the sights of his native land. But circumstances have changed. With the assured prospect of the financial success of his second venture, he felt himself in a position to gratify the dearest wish of his heart and to fire his muse at Scottish story and Scottish scenes. Moreover, as has been said, it would be some time before Creech could come to a final settlement of accounts with the poet, and he may have deemed that the interval would be profitably spent in travel. His travelling companion on his first tour was a Mr. Robert Ainslie, a young gentleman of good education and some natural ability, with whom he left Edinburgh on the 5th May, a fortnight after the publication of his poems. We are told that the poet, just before he mounted his horse, received a letter from Dr. Blair, which, having partly read, he crumpled up and angrily thrust into his pocket. A perusal of the letter will explain, if it does not go far to justify, the poet's irritation. It is a sleek, superior production, with the tone of a temperance tract, and the stilted diction of a dominie. The doctor is in it one of those well-meaning, meddlesome men, lavish of academic advice. Burns resented moral prescriptions at all times—more especially from one whose knowledge of men was severely scholastic; and we can well imagine that he quitted Edinburgh in no amiable mood.

From Edinburgh the two journeyed by the Lammermuirs to Berrywell, near Duns, where the Ainslie family lived. On the Sunday he attended church with the Ainslies, where the minister, Dr. Bowmaker, preached a sermon against obstinate sinners. 'I am found out,' the poet remarked, 'wherever I go.' From Duns they proceeded to Coldstream, where, having crossed the Tweed, Burns first set foot on English ground. Here it was that, with bared head, he knelt and prayed for a blessing on Scotland, reciting with the deepest devotion the two concluding verses of The Cotter's Saturday Night.

The next place visited was Kelso, where they admired the old abbey, and went to see Roxburgh Castle, thence to Jedburgh, where he met a Miss Hope and a Miss Lindsay, the latter of whom 'thawed his heart into melting pleasure after being so long frozen up in the Greenland Bay of indifference amid the noise and nonsense of Edinburgh.' When he left this romantic city his thoughts were not of the honour its citizens had done him, but of Jed's crystal stream and sylvan banks, and, above all, of Miss Lindsay, who brings him to the verge of verse. Thereafter he visited Kelso, Melrose, and Selkirk, and after spending about three weeks seeing all that was to be seen in this beautiful country-side, he set off with a Mr. Ker and a Mr. Hood on a visit to England. In this visit he went as far as Newcastle, returning by way of Hexham and Carlisle. After spending a day here he proceeded to Annan, and thence to Dumfries. Whilst in the Nithsdale district he took the opportunity of visiting Dalswinton and inspecting the unoccupied farms; but he did not immediately close with Mr. Miller's generous offer of a four-nineteen years' lease on his own terms. From Nithsdale he turned again to his native Ayrshire, arriving at Mossgiel in the beginning of June, after an absence from home of six eventful months.

We can hardly imagine what this home-coming would be like. The Burnses were typical Scots in their undemonstrative ways; but this was a great occasion, and tradition has it that his mother allowed her feeling so far to overcome her natural reticence that she met him at the threshold with the exclamation, 'O Robert!' He had left home almost unknown, and had returned with a name that was known and honoured from end to end of his native land. He had left in the direst poverty, and haunted with the terrors of a jail, now he came back with his fortune assured; if not actually rich, at least with more money due to him than the family had ever dreamed of possessing. The mother's excess of feeling on such an occasion as this may be easily understood and excused.

Of this Border tour Burns kept a scrappy journal, but he was more concerned in jotting down the names and characteristics of those with whom he forgathered than of letting himself out in snatches of song. He makes shrewd remarks by the way on farms and farming, on the washing and shearing of sheep, but the only verse he attempted was his Epistle to Creech. He who had longed to sit and muse on 'those once hard-contested fields' did not go out of his way to look on Ancrum Moor or Philiphaugh, nor do we read of him musing pensive in Yarrow.

However, we are not to regard these days as altogether barren. The poet was gathering impressions which would come forth in song at some future time. 'Neither the fine scenery nor the lovely women,' Cunningham regrets, 'produced any serious effect on his muse.' This is a rash statement. Poets do not sow and reap at the same time—not even Burns. If his friends were disappointed at what they considered the sterility of his muse on this occasion, the fault did not lie with the poet, but with their absurd expectations. It may be as well to point out here that the greatest harm Edinburgh did to Burns was that it gathered round him a number of impatient and injudicious admirers who could not understand that poetry was not to be forced. The burst of poetry that practically filled the Kilmarnock Edition came after a seven years' growth of inspiration; but after his first visit to Edinburgh he was never allowed to rest. It was expected that he should write whenever a subject was suggested, or burst into verse at the first glimpse of a lovely landscape. Every friend was ready with advice as to how and what he should write, and quite as ready, the poet unfortunately knew, to criticise afterwards. The poetry of the Mossgiel period had come from him spontaneously. He had flung off impressions in verse fearlessly, without pausing to consider how his work would be appreciated by this one or denounced by that; and was true to himself. Now he knew that every verse he wrote would be read by many eyes, studied by many minds; some would scent heresy, others would spot Jacobitism, or worse, freedom; some would suspect his morality, others would deplore his Scots tongue; all would criticise favourably or adversely his poetic expression. It has to be kept in mind, too, that Burns at this time was in no mood for writing poetry. His mind was not at ease; and after his long spell of inspiration and the fatiguing distractions of Edinburgh, it was hardly to be wondered at that brain and body were alike in need of rest. The most natural rest would have been a return direct to the labours of the farm. That, however, was denied him, and the period of his journeyings was little else than a season of unsettlement and suspense.

Burns only stayed a few days at home, and then set off on a tour to the West Highlands, a tour of which we know little or nothing. Perhaps this was merely a pilgrimage to the grave of Highland Mary. We do not know, and need not curiously inquire. Burns, as has been already remarked, kept sacred his love for this generous-hearted maiden, hidden away in his own heart, and the whole story is a beautiful mystery. We do know that before he left he visited the Armours, and was disgusted with the changed attitude of the family towards himself. 'If anything had been wanting,' he wrote to Mr. James Smith, 'to disgust me completely at Armour's family, their mean, servile compliance would have done it.' To his friend, William Nicol, he wrote in the same strain. 'I never, my friend, thought mankind very capable of anything generous; but the stateliness of the patricians in Edinburgh, and the servility of my plebeian brethren (who perhaps formerly eyed me askance) since I returned home, have nearly put me out of conceit altogether with my species.'

This shows Burns in no very enviable frame of mind; but the cause is obvious. He is as yet unsettled in life, and now that he has met again his Bonnie Jean, and seen his children, he is more than ever dissatisfied with aimless roving. 'I have yet fixed on nothing with respect to the serious business of life. I am just as usual a rhyming, mason-making, raking, aimless, idle fellow. However, I shall somewhere have a farm soon. I was going to say a wife too, but that must never be my blessed lot.'

To his own folks he was nothing but kindness, ready to share with them his uttermost farthing, and to have them share in the glory that was his; but he was at enmity with himself, and at war with the world. Like Hamlet, who felt keenly, but was incapable of action, he saw that 'the times were out of joint'; circumstances were too strong for him. Almost the only record we have of this tour is a vicious epigram on what he considered the flunkeyism of Inveraray. Nor are we in the least astonished to hear that on the homeward route he spent a night in dancing and boisterous revel, ushering in the day with a kind of burlesque of pagan sun-worship. This was simply a reaction from his gloom and despondency; he sought to forget himself in reckless conviviality.

About the end of July we find him back again in Mauchline, and on the 25th May he set out on a Highland tour along with his friend William Nicol, one of the masters of the High School. Of this man Dr. Currie remarks that he rose by the strength of his talents, and fell by the strength of his passions. Burns was perfectly well aware of the passionate and quarrelsome nature of the man. He compared himself with such a companion to one travelling with a loaded blunderbuss at full-cock; and in his epigrammatic way he said of him to Mr. Walker, 'His mind is like his body; he has a confounded, strong, in-kneed sort of a soul.' The man, however, had some good qualities. He had a warm heart; never forgot the friends of his early years, and he hated vehemently low jealousy and cunning. These were qualities that would appeal strongly to Burns, and on account of which much would be forgiven. Still we cannot think that the poet was happy in his companion; nor was he yet happy in himself. Otherwise the Highland tour might have been more interesting, certainly much more profitable to the poet in its results, than it actually proved.

In his diary of this tour, as in his diary of the Border tour, there is much more of shrewd remark on men and things than of poetical jottings. The fact is, poetry is not to be collected in jottings, nor is inspiration to be culled in catalogue cuttings; and if many of his friends were again disappointed in the immediate poetical results of this holiday, it only shows how little they understood the comings and goings of inspiration. Those, however, who read his notes and reflections carefully and intelligently are bound to notice how much more than a mere verse-maker Burns was. This was the journal of a man of strong, sound sense and keen observation. It has also to be recognised that Burns was at his weakest when he attempted to describe scenery for mere scenery's sake. His gift did not lie that way. His landscapes, rich in colour and deftly drawn though they be, are always the mere backgrounds of his pictures. They are impressionistic sketches, the setting and the complement of something of human interest in incident or feeling.

The poet and his companion set out in a postchaise, journeying by Linlithgow and Falkirk to Stirling. They visited 'a dirty, ugly place called Borrowstounness,' where he turned from the town to look across the Forth to Dunfermline and the fertile coast of Fife; Carron Iron Works, and the field of Bannockburn. They were shown the hole where Bruce set his standard, and the sight fired the patriotic ardour of the poet till he saw in imagination the two armies again in the thick of battle. After visiting the castle at Stirling, he left Nicol for a day, and paid a visit to Mrs. Chalmers of Harvieston. 'Go to see Caudron Linn and Rumbling Brig and Deil's Mill.' That is all he has to say of the scenery; but in a letter to Gavin Hamilton he has much more to tell of Grace Chalmers and Charlotte, 'who is not only beautiful but lovely.'

From Stirling the tourists proceeded northwards by Crieff and Glenalmond to Taymouth; thence, keeping by the banks of the river, to Aberfeldy, whose birks he immortalised in song. Here he had the good fortune to meet Niel Gow and to hear him playing. 'A short, stout-built, honest, Highland figure,' the poet describes him, 'with his greyish hair shed on his honest, social brow—an interesting face, marking strong sense, kind open-heartedness mixed with unmistaking simplicity.'

By the Tummel they rode to Blair, going by Fascally and visiting—both those sentimental Jacobites—'the gallant Lord Dundee's stone,' in the Pass of Killiecrankie. At Blair he met his friend Mr. Walker, who has left an account of the poet's visit; while the two days which Burns spent here, he has declared, were among the happiest days of his life.

'My curiosity,' Walker wrote, 'was great to see how he would conduct himself in company so different from what he had been accustomed to. His manner was unembarrassed, plain, and firm. He appeared to have complete reliance on his own native good sense for directing his behaviour. He seemed at once to perceive and appreciate what was due to the company and to himself, and never to forget a proper respect for the separate species of dignity belonging to each. He did not arrogate conversation, but when led into it he spoke with ease, propriety, and manliness. He tried to exert his abilities, because he knew it was ability alone gave him a title to be there.'

Burns certainly enjoyed his stay, and would, at the family's earnest solicitation, have stayed longer, had the irascible and unreasonable Nicol allowed it. Here it was he met Mr. Graham of Fintry, and if he had stayed a day or two longer he would have met Dundas, a man whose patronage might have done much to help the future fortunes of the poet. After leaving Blair, he visited, at the Duke's advice, the Falls of Bruar, and a few days afterwards he wrote from Inverness to Mr. Walker enclosing his verses, The Humble Petition of Bruar Water to the Noble Duke of Athole.

Leaving Blair, they continued their journey northwards towards Inverness, viewing on the way the Falls of Foyers,—soon to be lost to Scotland,—which the poet celebrated in a fragment of verse. Of course two such Jacobites had to see Culloden Moor; then they came through Nairn and Elgin, crossed the Spey at Fochabers, and Burns dined at Gordon Castle, the seat of the lively Duchess of Gordon, whom he had met in Edinburgh. Here again he was received with marked respect, and treated with the same Highland hospitality that had so charmed him at Blair; and here also the pleasure of the whole party was spoilt by the ill-natured jealousy of Nicol. That fiery dominie, imagining that he was slighted by Burns, who seemed to prefer the fine society of the Duchess and her friends to his amiable companionship, ordered the horses to be put to the carriage, and determined to set off alone. As the spiteful fellow would listen to no reason, Burns had e'en to accompany him, though much against his will. He sent his apologies to Her Grace in a song in praise of Castle Gordon.

From Fochabers they drove to Banff, and thence to Aberdeen. In this city he was introduced to the Rev. John Skinner, a son of the author of Tullochgorum, and was exceedingly disappointed when he learned that on his journey he had been quite near to the father's parsonage, and had not called on the old man. Mr. Skinner himself regretted this, when he learned the fact from his son, as keenly as Burns did; but the incident led to a correspondence between the two poets. From Aberdeen he came south by Stonehaven, where he 'met his relations,' and Montrose to Dundee. Hence the journey was continued through Perth, Kinross, and Queensferry, and so back to Edinburgh, 16th September 1787.

His letter to his brother from Edinburgh is more meagre even than his journal, being simply a catalogue of the places visited. 'Warm as I was from Ossian's country,' he remarks, 'what cared I for fishing towns or fertile carses?' Yet although the journal reads now and again like a railway time-table, we come across references which give proof of the poet's abounding interest in the locality of Scottish Song; and it was probably the case, as Professor Blackie writes, that 'such a lover of the pure Scottish Muse could not fail when wandering from glen to glen to pick up fragments of traditional song, which, without his sympathetic touch, would probably have been lost.'

Burns's wanderings were not yet, however, at an end. Probably he had expected on his return to Edinburgh some settlement with Creech, and was disappointed. Perhaps he was eager to revisit some places or people—Peggy Chalmers, no doubt—without being hampered in his movements by such a companion as Nicol. Anyhow, we find him setting out again on a tour through Clackmannan and Perthshire with his friend Dr. Adair, a warm but somewhat injudicious admirer of the poet's genius. It was probably about the beginning of October that the two left Edinburgh, going round by Stirling to Harvieston, where they remained about ten days, and made excursions to the various parts of the surrounding scenery. The Caldron Linn and Rumbling Bridge were revisited, and they went to see Castle Campbell, the ancient seat of the family of Argyle. 'I am surprised,' the doctor ingenuously remarks, 'that none of these scenes should have called forth an exertion of Burns's muse. But I doubt if he had much taste for the picturesque.' One wonders whether Dr. Adair had actually read the published poems. What a picture it must have been to see the party dragging Burns about, pointing out the best views, and then breathlessly waiting for a torrent of verse. The verses came afterwards, but they were addressed, not to the Ochils or the Devon, but to Peggy Chalmers.

From Harvieston he went to Ochtertyre on the Teith to visit Mr. Ramsay, a reputed lover of Scottish literature; and thence he proceeded to Ochtertyre in Strathearn, in order to visit Sir William Murray.

In a letter to Dr. Currie, Mr. Ramsay speaks thus of Burns on this visit: 'I have been in the company of many men of genius, some of them poets, but never witnessed such flashes of intellectual brightness, the impulse of the moment, sparks of celestial fire! I never was more delighted, therefore, than with his company for two days' tete-a-tete.' Of his residence with Sir William Murray he has left two poetical souvenirs, one On Scaring some Water Fowl in Loch Turit, and the other, a love song, Blithe, Blithe, and Merry was She, in honour of Miss Euphemia Murray, the flower of Strathearn.

Returning to Harvieston, he went back with Dr. Adair to Edinburgh, by Kinross and Queensferry. At Dunfermline he visited the ruined abbey, where, kneeling, he kissed the stone above Bruce's grave.

It was on this tour, too, that he visited at Clackmannan an old Scottish lady, who claimed to be a lineal descendant of the family of Robert the Bruce. She conferred knighthood on the poet with the great double-handed sword of that monarch, and is said to have delighted him with the toast she gave after dinner, 'Hooi Uncos,' which means literally, 'Away Strangers,' and politically much more.

The year 1787 was now drawing to a close, and Burns was still waiting for a settlement with Creech. He could not understand why he was kept hanging on from month to month. This was a way of doing business quite new to him, and after being put off again and again he at last began to suspect that there was something wrong. He doubted Creech's solvency; doubted even his honesty. More than ever was he eager to be settled in life, and he fretted under commercial delays he could not understand. On the first day of his return to Edinburgh he had written to Mr. Miller of Dalswinton, telling him of his ambitions, and making an offer to rent one of his farms. We know that he visited Dalswinton once or twice, but returned to Edinburgh. His only comfort at this time was the work he had begun in collecting Scottish songs for Johnson's Museum; touching up old ones and writing new ones to old airs. This with Burns was altogether a labour of love. The idea of writing a song with a view to money-making was abhorrent to him. 'He entered into the views of Johnson,' writes Chambers, 'with an industry and earnestness which despised all money considerations, and which money could not have purchased'; while Allan Cunningham marvels at the number of songs Burns was able to write at a time when a sort of civil war was going on between him and Creech. Another reason for staying through the winter in Edinburgh Burns may have had in the hope that through the influence of his aristocratic friends some office of profit, and not unworthy his genius, might have been found for him. Places of profit and honour were at the disposal of many who might have helped him had they so wished. But Burns was not now the favourite he had been when he first came to Edinburgh. The ploughman-poet was no longer a novelty; and, moreover, Burns had the pride of his class, and clung to his early friends. It is not possible for a man to be the boon-companion of peasants and the associate of peers. Had he dissociated himself altogether from his past life, the doors of the nobility might have been still held open to him; and no doubt the cushioned ease of a sinecure's office would have been had for the asking. But in that case he would have lost his manhood, and we should have lost a poet. Burns would not have turned his back on his fellows for the most lucrative office in the kingdom; that, he would have considered as selling his soul to the devil. Yet, on the other hand, what could any of these men do for a poet who was 'owre blate to seek, owre proud to snool'? Burns waited on in the expectation that those who had the power would take it upon themselves to do something for him. Perhaps he credited them with a sense and a generosity they could not lay claim to; though had one of them taken the initiative in this matter, he would have honoured himself in honouring Burns, and endeared his name to the hearts of his countrymen for all time. But such offices are created and kept open for political sycophants, who can importune with years of prostituted service. They are for those who advocate the opinions of others; certainly not for the man who dares to speak fearlessly his own mind, and to assert the privileges and prerogatives of his manhood. The children's bread is not to be thrown to the dogs. Burns asked for nothing, and got nothing. The Excise commission which he applied for, and graduated for, was granted. The work was laborious, the remuneration small, and gauger was a name of contempt.

But whilst waiting on in the hope of something 'turning up,' he was still working busily for Johnson's Museum, and still trying to bring Creech to make a settlement. At last, however, out of all patience with his publisher, and recognising the futility of his hopes of preferment, he had resolved early in December to leave Edinburgh, when he was compelled to stay against his will. A double accident befell him; he was introduced to a Mrs. Maclehose, and three days afterwards, through the carelessness of a drunken coachman, he was thrown from a carriage, and had his knee severely bruised. The latter was an accident that kept him confined to his room for a time, and from which he quickly recovered; but the meeting with Mrs. Maclehose was a serious matter, and for both, most unfortunate in its results.

It was while he was 'on the rack of his present agony' that the Sylvander-Clarinda correspondence was begun and continued. That much may be said in excuse for Burns. A man, especially one with the passion and sensitiveness of a poet, cannot be expected to write in all sanity when he is racked by the pain of an injured limb. Certainly the poet does not show up in a pleasant light in this absurd interchange of gasping epistles; nor does Mrs. Maclehose. 'I like the idea of Arcadian names in a commerce of this kind,' he unguardedly admits. The most obvious comment that occurs to the mind of the reader is that they ought never to have been written. It is a pity they were written; more than a pity they were ever published. It seems a terrible thing that, merely to gratify the morbid curiosity of the world, the very love-letters of a man of genius should be made public. Is there nothing sacred in the lives of our great men? 'Did I imagine,' Burns remarked to Mrs. Basil Montagu in Dumfries, 'that one half of the letters which I have written would be published when I die, I would this moment recall them and burn them without redemption.'

After all, what was gained by publishing this correspondence? It adds literally nothing to our knowledge of the poet. He could have, and has, given more of himself in a verse than he gives in the whole series of letters signed Sylvander. Occasionally he is natural in them, but rarely. 'I shall certainly be ashamed of scrawling whole sheets of incoherence.' We trust he was. The letters are false in sentiment, stilted in diction, artificial in morality. We have a picture of the poet all through trying to batter himself into a passion he does not feel, into love of an accomplished and intellectual woman; while in his heart's core is registered the image of Jean Armour, the mother of his children. He shows his paces before Clarinda and tears passion to tatters in inflated prose; he poses as a stylist, a moralist, a religious enthusiast, a poet, a man of the world, and now and again accidentally he assumes the face and figure of Robert Burns. We read and wonder if this be really the same man who wrote in his journal, 'The whining cant of love, except in real passion and by a masterly hand, is to me as insufferable as the preaching cant of old father Smeaton, Whig minister at Kilmaurs. Darts, flames, cupids, love graces and all that farrago are just ... a senseless rabble.'

Clarinda comes out of the correspondence better than Sylvander. Her letters are more natural and vastly more clever. She grieves to hear of his accident, and sympathises with him in his suffering; were she his sister she would call and see him. He is too romantic in his style of address, and must remember she is a married woman. Would he wait like Jacob seven years for a wife? And perhaps be disappointed! She is not unhappy: religion has been her balm for every woe. She had read his autobiography as Desdemona listened to the narration of Othello, but she was pained because of his hatred of Calvinism; he must study it seriously. She could well believe him when he said that no woman could love as ardently as himself. The only woman for him would be one qualified for the companion, the friend, and the mistress. The last might gain Sylvander, but the others alone could keep him. She admires him for his continued fondness for Jean, who perhaps does not possess his tenderest, faithfulest friendship. How could that bonnie lassie refuse him after such proofs of love? But he must not rave; he must limit himself to friendship. The evening of their third meeting was one of the most exquisite she had ever experienced. Only he must now know she has faults. She means well, but is liable to become the victim of her sensibility. She too now prefers the religion of the bosom. She cannot deny his power over her: would he pay another evening visit on Saturday?

When the poet is leaving Edinburgh, Clarinda is heartbroken. 'Oh, let the scenes of nature remind you of Clarinda! In winter, remember the dark shades of her fate; in summer, the warmth of her friendship; in autumn, her glowing wishes to bestow plenty on all; and let spring animate you with hopes that your friend may yet surmount the wintry blasts of life, and revive to taste a spring-time of happiness. At all events, Sylvander, the storms of life will quickly pass, and one unbounded spring encircle all. Love, there, is not a crime. I charge you to meet me there, O God! I must lay down my pen.'

Poor Clarinda! Well for her peace of mind that the poet was leaving her; well for Burns, also, that he was leaving Clarinda and Edinburgh. Only one thing remained for both to do, and it had been wise, to burn their letters. Would that Clarinda had been as much alive to her own good name, and the poet's fair fame, as Peggy Chalmers, who did not preserve her letters from Burns!

It was February 1788 before Burns could settle with Creech; and, after discharging all expenses, he found a balance in his favour of about five hundred pounds. To Gilbert, who was in sore need of the money, he advanced one hundred and eighty pounds, as his contribution to the support of their mother. With what remained of the money he leased from Mr. Miller of Dalswinton the farm of Ellisland, on which he entered at Whitsunday 1788.



CHAPTER VII

ELLISLAND

When Burns turned his back on Edinburgh in February 1788, and set his face resolutely towards his native county and the work that awaited him, he left the city a happier and healthier man than he had been all the months of his sojourn in it. The times of aimless roving, and of still more demoralising hanging on in the hope of something being done for him, were at an end; he looked to the future with self-reliance. His vain hopes of preferment were already 'thrown behind and far away,' and he saw clearly that by the labour of his own hands he had to live, independent of the dispensations of patronage, and trusting no longer to the accidents of fortune. 'The thoughts of a home,' to quote Cunningham's words, 'of a settled purpose in life, gave him a silent gladness of heart such as he had never before known.'

Burns, though he had hoped and was disappointed, left the city not so much with bitterness as with contempt. If he had been received on this second visit with punctilious politeness, more ceremoniously than cordially, it was just as he had himself expected. Gossip, too, had been busy while he was absent, and his sayings and doings had been bruited abroad. His worst fault was that he was a shrewd observer of men, and drew, in a memorandum book he kept, pen-portraits of the people he met. 'Dr Blair is merely an astonishing proof of what industry and application can do. Natural parts like his are frequently to be met with; his vanity is proverbially known among his acquaintance.' The Lord Advocate he pictured in a verse:

'He clenched his pamphlets in his fist, He quoted and he hinted, Till in a declamation-mist, His argument he tint it. He gap'd for't, he grap'd for't, He fand it was awa, man; But what his common sense came short, He eked it out wi' law, man.'

Had pen-portraits, such as these, been merely caricatures, they might have been forgiven; but, unfortunately, they were convincing likenesses, therefore libels. We doubt not, as Cunningham tells us, that the literati of Edinburgh were not displeased when such a man left them; they could never feel at their ease so long as he was in their midst. 'Nor were the titled part of the community without their share in this silent rejoicing; his presence was a reproach to them. The illustrious of his native land, from whom he had looked for patronage, had proved that they had the carcass of greatness, but wanted the soul; they subscribed for his poems, and looked on their generosity "as an alms could keep a god alive." He turned his back on Edinburgh, and from that time forward scarcely counted that man his friend who spoke of titled persons in his presence.'

It was with feelings of relief, also, that Burns left the super-scholarly litterateurs; 'white curd of asses' milk,' he called them; gentlemen who reminded him of some spinsters in his country who 'spin their thread so fine that it is neither fit for weft nor woof.' To such men, recognising only the culture of schools, a genius like Burns was a puzzle, easier dismissed than solved. Burns saw them, in all their tinsel of academic tradition, through and through.

Coming from Edinburgh to the quiet home-life of Mossgiel was like coming out of the vitiated atmosphere of a ballroom into the pure and bracing air of early morning. Away from the fever of city life, he only gradually comes back to sanity and health. The artificialities and affectations of polite society are not to be thrown off in a day's time. Hardly had he arrived at Mauchline before he penned a letter to Clarinda, that simply staggers the reader with the shameless and heartless way in which it speaks of Jean Armour. 'I am dissatisfied with her—I cannot endure her! I, while my heart smote me for the profanity, tried to compare her with my Clarinda. 'Twas setting the expiring glimmer of a farthing taper beside the cloudless glory of the meridian sun. Here was tasteless insipidity, vulgarity of soul, and mercenary fawning; there, polished good sense, heaven-born genius, and the most generous, the most delicate, the most tender passion. I have done with her, and she with me.'

Poor Jean! Think of her too confiding and trustful love written down mercenary fawning! But this was not Burns. The whole letter is false and vulgar. Perhaps he thought to please his Clarinda by the comparison; she had little womanly feeling if she felt flattered. Let us believe, for her own sake, that she was disgusted. His letter to Ainslie, ten days later, is something very different, though even yet he gives no hint of acknowledging Jean as his wife. 'Jean I found banished like a martyr—forlorn, destitute, and friendless—all for the good old cause. I have reconciled her to her fate; I have reconciled her to her mother; I have taken her a room; I have taken her to my arms; I have given her a guinea, and I have embraced her till she rejoiced with joy unspeakable and full of glory.'

This is flippant in tone, but something more manly in sentiment; Burns was coming to his senses. On 13th June, twin girls were born to Jean, but they only lived a few days. On the same day their father wrote from Ellisland to Mrs. Dunlop a letter, in which we see the real Burns, true to the best feelings of his nature, and true to his sorely-tried and long-suffering wife. 'This is the second day, my honoured friend, that I have been on my farm. A solitary inmate of an old smoky spence, far from every object I love, or by whom I am beloved; nor any acquaintance older than yesterday, except Jenny Geddes, the old mare I ride on; while uncouth cares and novel plans hourly insult my awkward ignorance and bashful inexperience.... Your surmise, madam, is just; I am, indeed, a husband.... You are right that a bachelor state would have ensured me more friends; but, from a cause you will easily guess, conscious peace in the enjoyment of my own mind, and unmistrusting confidence in approaching my God, would seldom have been of the number. I found a once much-loved and still much-loved female, literally and truly cast out to the mercy of the naked elements; but I enabled her to purchase a shelter,—there is no sporting with a fellow-creature's happiness or misery.'

It was not till August that the marriage was ratified by the Church, when Robert Burns and Jean Armour were rebuked for their acknowledged irregularity, and admonished 'to adhere faithfully to one another, as man and wife, all the days of their life.'

This was the only fit and proper ending of Burns's acquaintance with Jean Armour. As an honourable man, he could not have done otherwise than he did. To have deserted her now, and married another, even admitting he was legally free to do so, which is doubtful, would have been the act of an abandoned wretch, and certainly have wrought ruin in the moral and spiritual life of the poet. In taking Jean as his wedded wife, he acted not only honourably, but wisely; and wisdom and prudence were not always distinguishing qualities of Robert Burns.

Some months had to elapse, however, before the wife could join her husband at Ellisland. The first thing he had to do when he entered on his lease was to rebuild the dwelling-house, he himself lodging in the meanwhile in the smoky spence which he mentions in his letter to Mrs. Dunlop. In the progress of the building he not only took a lively interest, but actually worked with his own hands as a labourer, and gloried in his strength: 'he beat all for a dour lift.' But it was some time before he could settle down to the necessarily monotonous work of farming. 'My late scenes of idleness and dissipation,' he confessed to Dunbar, 'have enervated my mind to a considerable degree.' He was restless and rebellious at times, and we are not surprised to find the sudden settling down from gaiety and travel to the home-life of a farmer marked by bursts of impatience, irritation, and discontent. The only steadying influence was the thought of his wife and children, and the responsibility of a husband and a father. He grew despondent occasionally, and would gladly have been at rest, but a wife and children bound him to struggle with the stream. His melancholy blinded him even to the good qualities of his neighbours. The only things he saw in perfection were stupidity and canting. 'Prose they only know in graces, prayers, etc., and the value of these they estimate, as they do their plaiding webs, by the ell. As for the Muses, they have as much an idea of a rhinoceros as of a poet.' He was, in fact, ungracious towards his neighbours, not that they were boorish or uninformed folk, but simply because, though living at Ellisland in body, his mind was in Ayrshire with his darling Jean, and he was looking to the future when he should have a home and a wife of his own. His eyes would ever wander to the west, and he sang, to cheer him in his loneliness, a song of love to his Bonnie Jean:

'Of a' the airts the wind can blaw, I dearly lo'e the west; For there the bonnie lassie lives, The lassie I lo'e best.'

It was not till the beginning of December that he was in a position to bring his wife and children to Ellisland; and this event brought him into kindlier relations with his fellow-farmers. His neighbours gathered to bid his wife welcome; and drank to the roof-tree of the house of Burns. The poet, now that he had made his home amongst them, was regarded as one of themselves; while Burns, on his part, having at last got his wife and children beside him, was in a healthier frame of mind and more charitably disposed towards those who had come to give them a welcome. That he was now as one settled in life with something worthy to live for, we have ample proof in his letter written to Mrs. Dunlop on the first day of the New Year. It is discursive, yet philosophical and reflective, and its whole tone is that of a man who looks on the world round about him with a kindly charity, and looks to the future with faith and trust. Life passed very sweetly and peacefully with the poet and his family for a time here. The farm, it would appear, was none of the best,—Mr. Cunningham told him he had made a poet's not a farmer's choice,—but Burns was hopeful and worked hard. Yet the labour of the farm was not to be his life-work. Even while waiting impatiently the coming of his wife, he had been contributing to Johnson's Museum, and he fondly imagined that he was going to be farmer, poet, and exciseman all in one. Some have regretted his appointment to the Excise at this time, and attributed to his frequent absences from home his failure as a farmer. They may be right. But what was the poet to do? He knew by bitter experience how precarious the business of farming was, and thought that a certain salary, even though small, would always stand between his family and absolute want. 'I know not,' he wrote to Ainslie, 'how the word exciseman, or, still more opprobrious, gauger, will sound in your ears. I too have seen the day when my auditory nerves would have felt very delicately on this subject; but a wife and children have a wonderful power in blunting these kind of sensations. Fifty pounds a year for life and a pension for widows and orphans, you will allow, is no bad settlement for a poet.' And to Blacklock he wrote in verse:

'But what d'ye think, my trusty fier, I'm turned a gauger—Peace be here! Parnassian queans, I fear, I fear, Ye'll now disdain me! And then my fifty pounds a year Will little gain me.

I hae a wife and twa wee laddies, They maun hae brose and brats o' duddies; Ye ken yoursel's my heart right proud is— I needna vaunt, But I'll sned besoms—thraw saugh woodies, Before they want.

But to conclude my silly rhyme (I'm scant o' verse, and scant o' time), To make a happy fireside clime To weans and wife, That's the true pathos and sublime Of human life.'

This was nobly said; and the poet spoke from the heart.

Not content with being gauger, farmer, and poet, Burns took a lively interest in everything affecting the welfare of the parish and the well-being of its inhabitants. For this was no poet of the study, holding himself aloof from the affairs of the world, and fearing the contamination of his kind. Burns was alive all-round, and always acted his part in the world as a husband and father; as a citizen and a man. He made himself the poet of humanity, because he himself was so intensely human, and joyed and sorrowed with his fellows. At this time he established a library in Dunscore, and himself undertook the whole management,—drawing out rules, purchasing books, acting for a time as secretary, treasurer, and committee all in one. Among the volumes he ordered were several of his old favourites, The Spectator, The Man of Feeling, and The Lounger; and we know that there was on the shelves even a folio Hebrew Concordance.

A favourite walk of the poet's while he stayed here was along Nithside, where he often wandered to take a 'gloamin' shot at the Muses.' Here, after a fall of rain, Cunningham records, the poet loved to walk, listening to the roar of the river, or watching it bursting impetuously from the groves of Friar's Carse. 'Thither he walked in his sterner moods, when the world and its ways touched his spirit; and the elder peasants of the vale still show the point at which he used to pause and look on the red and agitated stream.'

In spite of his multifarious duties, he was now more than ever determined to make his name as a poet. To Dr. Moore he wrote (4th January 1789): 'The character and employment of a poet were formerly my pleasure, but now my pride.... Poesy I am determined to prosecute with all my vigour. Nature has given very few, if any, of the profession the talents of shining in every species of composition. I shall try (for until trial it is impossible to know) whether she has qualified me to shine in any one.'

It was inevitable that one whose district as an exciseman reached far and wide could not regularly attend to ploughing, sowing, and reaping, and the farm was very often left to the care of servants. Dr. Currie appears to count it as a reproach that his farm no longer occupied the principal part of his care or his thoughts. Yet it could not have been otherwise. Burns after having undertaken a duty would attend to it religiously, and we know that he pursued his work throughout his ten parishes diligently, faithfully, and with unvarying punctuality. Others have bemoaned that those frequent Excise excursions led the poet into temptation, that he was being continually assailed by the sin that so easily beset him. Let it be admitted frankly that the temptations to social excess were great; is it not all the more creditable to Burns that he did not sink under those temptations and become the besotted wreck conventional biography has attempted to make him? If those who raise this plaint mean to insinuate that Burns became a confirmed toper, then they are assuredly wrong; if they be only drawing attention to the fact that drinking was too common in Scotland at that time, then they are attacking not the poet but the social customs of his day. It would be easy if we were to accept 'the general impression of the place,' and go by the tale of gossip, to show that Burns was demoralised by his duties as a gauger, and sank into a state of maudlin intemperance. But ascertained fact and the testimony of unimpeachable authority are at variance with the voice of gossip. 'So much the worse for fact,' biography would seem to have said, and gaily sped on the work of defamation. We only require to forget Allan Cunningham's Personal Sketch of the Poet, the letters from Mr. Findlater and Mr. Gray, and to close our eyes to the excellence of the poetry of this period, in order to see Burns on the downgrade, and to preach grand moral lessons from the text of a wasted life.

But, after all, 'facts are chiels that winna ding,' and we must take them into account, however they may baulk us of grand opportunities of plashing in watery sentiment. Speaking of the poet's biographers, Mr. Findlater remarks that they have tried to outdo one another in heaping obloquy on his name; they have made his convivial habits, habitual drunkenness; his wit and humour, impiety; his social talents, neglect of duty; and have accused him of every vice. Then he gives his testimony: 'My connection with Robert Burns commenced immediately after his admission into the Excise, and continued to the hour of his death. In all that time the superintendence of his behaviour as an officer of the revenue was a branch of my especial province; and it may be supposed I would not be an inattentive observer of the general conduct of a man and a poet so celebrated by his countrymen. In the former capacity, so far from its being impossible for him to discharge the duties of his office with that regularity which is almost indispensable, as is palpably assumed by one of his biographers, and insinuated, not very obscurely even, by Dr. Currie, he was exemplary in his attention as an Excise officer, and was even jealous of the least imputation on his vigilance.'

But a glance at the poems and songs of this period would be a sufficient vindication of the poet's good name. There are considerably over a hundred songs and poems written during his stay at Ellisland, many of them of his finest. The third volume of Johnson's Museum, published in February 1790, contained no fewer than forty songs by Burns. Among the Ellisland songs were such as, Ye Banks and Braes o' Bonnie Doon, Auld Lang Syne, Willie brewed a Peck o' Maut, To Mary in Heaven, Of a' the Airts the Wind can blaw, My Love she's but a Lassie yet, Tam Glen, John Anderson my Jo, songs that have become the property of the world. Of the last-named song, Angellier remarks that the imagination of the poet must have indeed explored every situation of love to have led him to that which he in his own experience could not have known. Even the song Willie brewed a Peck o' Maut, the first of bacchanalian ditties, is the work of a man of sane mind and healthy appetite. It is not of the diseased imagination of drunken genius. But the greatest poem of this period, and one of Burns's biggest achievements, is Tam o' Shanter. This poem was written in answer to a request of Captain Grose that the poet would provide a witch story to be printed along with a drawing of Alloway Kirk, and was first published in Grose's Antiquities of Scotland. We have been treated by several biographers to a private view of the poet, with wild gesticulations, agonising in the composition of this poem; but where his wife did not venture to intrude, we surely need not seek to desecrate. 'I stept aside with the bairns among the broom,' says Bonnie Jean; not, we should imagine, to leave room for aliens and strangers. He has been again burlesqued for us rending himself in rhyme, and stretched on straw groaning elegiacs to Mary in heaven. All this is mere sensationalism provided for illiterate readers. We have the poem, and its excellence sufficeth.

It is worthy of note that in Tam o' Shanter, as well as in To Mary in Heaven, the poet goes back to his earlier years in Ayrshire. They are posthumous products of the inspiration which gave us the Kilmarnock Edition. I am not inclined to agree with Carlyle in his estimate of Tam o' Shanter. It is not the composition of a man of great talent, but of a man of transcendent poetical genius. The story itself is a conception of genius, and in the narration the genius is unquestionable. It is a panorama of pictures so vivid and powerful that the characters and scenes are fixed indelibly on the mind, and abide with us a cherished literary possession. After reading the poem, the words are recalled without conscious effort of memory, but as the only possible embodiment of the mental impressions retained. Short as the poem is, there is in it character, humour, pathos, satire, indignation, tenderness, fun, frolic, diablerie, almost every human feeling. I have heard Burns in the writing of this poem likened to a composer at an organ improvising a piece of music in which, before he has done, he has used every stop and touched every note on the keyboard. Even the weakest lines of the piece, which mark a dramatic pause in the rapid narration, have a distinctive beauty and are the most frequently quoted lines of the poem. In artistic word-painting and graphic phrasing Burns is here at his best. His description of the horrible is worthy of Shakspeare; and it is questionable if even the imagination of that master ever conceived anything more awful than the scene and circumstance of the infernal orgies of those witches and warlocks. What Zolaesque realism there is! In the line, 'The grey hairs yet stack to the heft,' all the gruesomeness of murder is compressed into a distich. Yet the horrible details are controlled and unified in the powerful imagination of the poet. We believe Dr. Blacklock was right in thinking that this poem, though Burns had never written another syllable, would have made him a high reputation. Certainly it was not the work of a man daily dazing his faculties with drink; no more was that exquisite lyric To Mary in Heaven. Another poem of this period deserving special mention is The Whistle, not merely because of its dramatic force and lyrical beauty, but because it gives a true picture of the drinking customs of the time. And again I dare assert that this is not the work of a mind enfeebled or debased by drink. It is a bit of simple, direct, sincere narration, humanly healthy in tone; the ideas are clear and consecutive, and the language fitting. It is not so that drunken genius expresses itself. The language of a poetical mind enfeebled by alcohol or opium is frequently mystic and musical; it never deals with the realities and responsibilities of life, but in a witchery of words winds and meanders through the realms of reverie and dream. It may be sweet and sensuous; it is rarely narrative or simple; never direct nor forcible.