The house which had cost Burns so much toil in building, and which he did not enter till about the middle of the year 1789, was a humble enough abode. Only a large kitchen, in which the whole family, master and servants, took their meals together, a room to hold two beds, a closet to hold one, and a garret, coom-ceiled, for the female servants, this made the whole dwelling-house. "One of the windows looked southward down the holms; another opened on the river; and the house stood so near the lofty bank, that its afternoon shadow fell across the stream, on the opposite fields. The garden or kail-yard was a little way from the house. A pretty footpath led southward along the river side, another ran northward, affording fine views of the Nith, the woods of Friars Carse, and the grounds of Dalswinton. Half-way down the steep declivity, a fine clear cool spring supplied water to the household." Such was the first home which Burns found for himself and his wife, and the best they were ever destined to find. The months spent in the Isle, and the few that followed the settlement at Ellisland, were among the happiest of his life. Besides trying his best to set himself to farm-industry, he was otherwise bent on well-doing. He had, soon after his arrival in Ellisland, started (p. 103) a parish library, both for his own use and to spread a love of literature among his neighbours, the portioners and peasants of Dunscore. When he first took up house at Ellisland, he used every evening when he was at home, to gather his household for family worship, and, after the old Scottish custom, himself to offer up prayer in his own words. He was regular, if not constant, in his attendance at the parish church of Dunscore, in which a worthy minister, Mr. Kirkpatrick, officiated, whom he respected for his character, though he sometimes demurred to what seemed to him the too great sternness of his doctrine.

Burns and his wife had not been long settled in their newly-built farm-house, when prudence induced him to ask that he might be appointed Excise officer in the district in which he lived. This request Mr. Graham of Fintray, who had placed his name on the Excise list before he left Edinburgh, at once granted. The reasons that impelled Burns to this step were the increase of his family by the birth of a son in August, 1789, and the prospect that his second year's harvest would be a failure like the first. He often repeats that it was solely to make provision for his increasing family that he submitted to the degradation of—

Searching auld wives' barrels,— Och, hon! the day! That clarty barm should stain my laurels, But—what 'ill ye say? These movin things, ca'd wives and weans, Wad move the very hearts o' stanes.

That he felt keenly the slur that attached to the name of gauger is certain, but it is honourable to him that he resolved bravely to endure it for the sake of his family.

"I know not," he writes, "how the word exciseman, or the still (p. 104) 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 are things which have a wonderful power in blunting this kind of sensations. Fifty pounds a year for life, and a provision for widows and orphans, you will allow, is no bad settlement for a poet."

In announcing to Dr. Blacklock his new employment, he says,—

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.

* * * * *

Ye ken, ye ken That strang necessity supreme is 'Mang sons o' men. I hae a wife and twa wee laddies, They maun hae brose and brats o' duddies; Ye ken yoursels my heart right proud is, I need na vaunt, But I'll sned besoms, thraw saugh woodies, Before they want.

He would cut brooms and twist willow-ropes before his children should want. But perhaps, as the latest editor of Burns' poems observes, his best saying on the subject of the excisemanship was that word to Lady Glencairn, the mother of his patron, "I would much rather have it said that my profession borrowed credit from me, than that I borrowed it from my profession."

In these words we see something of the bitterness about his new (p. 105) employment, which often escaped from him, both in prose and verse. Nevertheless, having undertaken it, he set his face honestly to the work. He had to survey ten parishes, covering a tract of not less than fifty miles each way, and requiring him to ride two hundred miles a week. Smuggling was then common throughout Scotland, both in the shape of brewing and of selling beer and whiskey without licence. Burns took a serious yet humane view of his duty. To the regular smuggler he is said to have been severe; to the country folk, farmers or cotters, who sometimes transgressed, he tempered justice with mercy. Many stories are told of his leniency to these last. At Thornhill, on a fair day, he was seen to call at the door of a poor woman who for the day was doing a little illicit business on her own account. A nod and a movement of the forefinger brought the woman to the doorway. "Kate, are you mad? Don't you know that the supervisor and I will be in upon you in forty minutes?" Burns at once disappeared among the crowd, and the poor woman was saved a heavy fine. Another day the poet and a brother gauger entered a widow's house at Dunscore and seized a quantity of smuggled tobacco. "Jenny," said Burns, "I expected this would be the upshot. Here, Lewars, take note of the number of rolls as I count them. Now, Jock, did you ever hear an auld wife numbering her threads before check-reels were invented? Thou's ane, and thou's no ane, and thou's ane a'out—listen." As he handed out the rolls, and numbered them, old-wife fashion, he dropped every other roll into Jenny's lap. Lewars took the desired note with becoming gravity, and saw as though he saw not. Again, a woman who had been brewing, on seeing Burns coming with another exciseman, slipped out by the back door, leaving a servant and a little girl in the house. "Has (p. 106) there been ony brewing for the fair here the day?" "O no, sir, we hae nae licence for that," answered the servant maid. "That's no true," exclaimed the child; "the muckle black kist is fou' o' the bottles o' yill that my mither sat up a' nicht brewing for the fair."... "We are in a hurry just now," said Burns, "but when we return from the fair, we'll examine the muckle black kist." In acts like these, and in many another anecdote that might be given, is seen the genuine human-heartedness of the man, in strange contrast with the bitternesses which so often find vent in his letters. Ultimately, as we shall see, the exciseman's work told heavily against his farming, his poetry, and his habits of life. But it was some time before this became apparent. The solitary rides through the moors and dales that border Nithsdale gave him opportunities, if not for composing long poems, at any rate for crooning over those short songs in which mainly his genius now found vent. "The visits of the muses to me," he writes, "and I believe to most of their acquaintance, like the visits of good angels, are short and far between; but I meet them now and then as I jog through the hills of Nithsdale, just as I used to do on the banks of Ayr."

Take as a sample some of the varying moods he passed through in the summer and autumn of 1789. In the May-time of that year an incident occurs, which the poet thus describes:—"One morning lately, as I was out pretty early in the fields, sowing some grass-seeds, I heard the burst of a shot from a neighbouring plantation, and presently a poor little wounded hare came hirpling by me. You will guess my indignation at the inhuman fellow who could shoot a hare at this season, when all of them have young ones. Indeed there is something in the business of destroying, for our sport, individuals in the animal creation that (p. 107) do not injure us materially, which I could never reconcile to my ideas of virtue." The lad who fired the shot and roused the poet's indignation, was the son of a neighbouring farmer. Burns cursed him, and being near the Nith at the time, threatened to throw him into the river. He found, however, a more innocent vent for his feelings in the following lines:—

Inhuman man! curse on thy barbarous art, And blasted be thy murder-aiming eye! May never pity soothe thee with a sigh, Nor ever pleasure glad thy cruel heart!

Go live, poor wanderer of the wood and field, The bitter little that of life remains: No more the thickening brakes and verdant plains To thee shall home, or food, or pastime yield.

Seek, mangled wretch, some place of wonted rest, No more of rest, but now thy dying bed! The sheltering rushes whistling o'er thy head, The cold earth with thy bloody bosom prest.

Perhaps a mother's anguish adds its woe; The playful pair crowd fondly by thy side; Ah! helpless nurslings, who will now provide That life a mother only can bestow!

Oft as by winding Nith, I, musing, wait The sober eve, or hail the cheerful dawn, I'll miss thee sporting o'er the dewy lawn, And curse the ruffian's aim, and mourn thy hapless fate.

This, which is one of the best of the very few good poems which Burns composed in classical English, is no mere sentimental effusion, but expresses what in him was a real part of his nature—his tender feeling towards his lower fellow-creatures. The same feeling finds (p. 108) expression in the lines on The Mouse, The Auld Farmer's Address to his Mare, and The Winter Night, when, as he sits by his fireside, and hears the storm roaring without, he says,—

I thought me on the ourie cattle, Or silly sheep, wha bide this brattle O' wintry war. Or thro' the drift, deep-lairing, sprattle, Beneath a scaur. Ilk happing bird, wee helpless thing, That in the merry months o' spring, Delighted me to hear thee sing, What comes o' thee? Whare wilt then cow'r thy chittering wing, And close thy e'e?

Though for a time, influenced by the advice of critics, Burns had tried to compose some poems according to the approved models of book-English, we find him presently reverting to his own Doric, which he had lately too much abandoned, and writing in good broad Scotch his admirably humorous description of Captain Grose, an Antiquary, whom he had met at Friars Carse:—

Hear, Land o' Cakes, and brither Scots, Frae Maidenkirk to Johnnie Groats— If there's a hole in a' your coats, I rede you tent it: A chield's amang you, takin' notes, And, faith, he'll prent it.

By some auld, houlet-haunted biggin, Or kirk deserted by its riggin, It's ten to ane ye'll find him snug in Some eldritch part, Wi' deils, they say, Lord save's! colleaguin' At some black art.

It's tauld he was a sodger bred, (p. 109) And ane wad rather fa'n than fled; But now he's quat the spurtle-blade, And dog-skin wallet, And taen the—Antiquarian trade, I think they call it.

He has a fouth o' auld nick-nackets; Rusty airn caps, and jinglin' jackets, Wad haud the Lothians three in tackets, A towmont gude And parritch-pats and auld saut-backets, Before the Flood.

* * * * *

Forbye, he'll shape you aff fu' gleg The cut of Adam's philibeg; The knife that nicket Abel's craig He'll prove you fully, It was a faulding jocteleg Or lang-kail gullie.

The meeting with Captain Grose took place in the summer of 1789, and the stanzas just given were written probably about the same time. To the same date belongs his ballad called The Kirk's Alarm, in which he once more reverts to the defence of one of his old friends of the New Light school, who had got into the Church Courts, and was in jeopardy from the attacks of his more orthodox brethren. The ballad in itself has little merit, except as showing that Burns still clung to the same school of divines to which he had early attached himself. In September we find him writing in a more serious strain to Mrs. Dunlop, and suggesting thoughts which might console her in some affliction under which she was suffering. "... In vain would we reason and pretend to doubt. I have myself done so to a very daring pitch; but when I reflected that I was opposing the most ardent wishes, and (p. 110) the most darling hopes of good men, and flying in the face of all human belief, in all ages, I was shocked at my own conduct."

That same September Burns, with his friend Allan Masterton, crossed from Nithsdale to Annandale to visit their common friend Nicol, who was spending his vacation in Moffatdale. They met and spent a night in Nicol's lodging. It was a small thatched cottage, near Craigieburn—a place celebrated by Burns in one of his songs—and stands on the right-hand side as the traveller passes up Moffatdale to Yarrow, between the road and the river. Few pass that way now without having the cottage pointed out, as the place where the three merry comrades met that night.

"We had such a joyous meeting," Burns writes, "that Mr. Masterton and I agreed, each in our own way, that we should celebrate the business," and Burns's celebration of it was the famous bacchanalian song,—

O, Willie brewed a peck o' maut, And Bob and Allan cam to pree.

If bacchanalian songs are to be written at all, this certainly must be pronounced "The king amang them a'." But while no one can withhold admiration from the genius and inimitable humour of the song, still we read it with very mingled feelings, when we think that perhaps it may have helped some topers since Burns's day a little faster on the road to ruin. As for the three boon-companions themselves, just ten years after that night, Currie wrote, "These three honest fellows—all men of uncommon talents—are now all under the turf." And in 1821, John Struthers, a Scottish poet little known, but of great worth and some genius, thus recurs to Currie's words:— (p. 111) Nae mair in learning Willie toils, nor Allan wakes the melting lay, Nor Rab, wi' fancy-witching wiles, beguiles the hour o' dawning day; For tho' they were na very fou, that wicked wee drap in the e'e Has done its turn; untimely now the green grass waves o'er a' the three.

Willie brewed a Peck o' Maut was soon followed by another bacchanalian effusion, the ballad called The Whistle. Three lairds, all neighbours of Burns at Ellisland, met at Friars Carse on the 16th of October, 1789, to contend with each other in a drinking-bout. The prize was an ancient ebony whistle, said to have been brought to Scotland in the reign of James the Sixth by a Dane, who, after three days and three nights' contest in hard drinking, was overcome by Sir Robert Laurie, of Maxwelton, with whom the whistle remained as a trophy. It passed into the Riddell family, and now in Burns's time it was to be again contested for in the same rude orgie. Burns was appointed the bard to celebrate the contest. Much discussion has been carried on by his biographers as to whether Burns was present or not. Some maintain that he sat out the drinking-match, and shared the deep potations. Others, and among these his latest editor, Mr. Scott Douglas, maintain that he was not present that night in body, but only in spirit. Anyhow, the ballad remains a monument, if not of his genius, at least of his sympathy with that ancient but now happily exploded form of good fellowship.

This "mighty claret-shed at the Carse," and the ballad commemorative of it, belong to the 16th of October, 1789. It must have been within a few days of that merry-meeting that Burns fell into another and very different mood, which has recorded itself in an immortal lyric. It would seem that from the year 1786 onwards, a cloud of melancholy (p. 112) generally gathered over the poet's soul toward the end of each autumn. This October, as the anniversary of Highland Mary's death drew on, he was observed by his wife to "grow sad about something, and to wander solitary on the banks of Nith, and about his farmyard in the extremest agitation of mind nearly the whole night. He screened himself on the lee-side of a corn-stack from the cutting edge of the night wind, and lingered till approaching dawn wiped out the stars, one by one, from the firmament." Some more details Lockhart has added, said to have been received from Mrs. Burns, but these the latest editor regards as mythical. However this may be, it would appear that it was only after his wife had frequently entreated him, that he was persuaded to return to his home, where he sat down and wrote as they now stand, these pathetic lines:—

Thou lingering star, with lessening ray, That lovest to greet the early morn, Again thou usherest in the day My Mary from my soul was torn. O Mary! dear departed shade! Where is thy place of blissful rest? See'st thou thy lover lowly laid? Hear'st thou the groans that rend his breast?

That Burns should have expressed, in such rapid succession, the height of drunken revelry in Willie brewed a Peck o' Maut and in the ballad of The Whistle, and then the depth of despondent regret in the lines To Mary in Heaven, is highly characteristic of him. To have many moods belongs to the poetic nature, but no poet ever passed more rapidly than Burns from one pole of feeling to its very opposite. Such a poem as this last could not possibly have proceeded from any but the (p. 113) deepest and most genuine feeling. Once again, at the same season, three years later (1792), his thoughts went back to Highland Mary, and he poured forth his last sad wail for her in the simpler, not less touching song, beginning—

Ye banks, and braes, and streams around The castle o' Montgomery! Green be your woods, and fair your flowers, Your waters never drumlie; There simmer first unfauld her robes, And there the langest tarry; For there I took the last Fareweel O' my sweet Highland Mary.

It would seem as though these retrospects were always accompanied by special despondency. For, at the very time he composed this latter song, he wrote thus to his faithful friend, Mrs. Dunlop:—

"Alas! who would wish for many years? What is it but to drag existence until our joys gradually expire, and leave us in a night of misery, like the gloom which blots out the stars, one by one from the face of heaven, and leaves us without a ray of comfort in the howling waste?"

To fits of hypochondria and deep dejection he had, as he himself tells us, been subject from his earliest manhood, and he attributes to overtoil in boyhood this tendency which was probably a part of his natural temperament. To a disposition like his, raptures, exaltations, agonies came as naturally as a uniform neutral-tinted existence to more phlegmatic spirits. But we may be sure that every cause of self-reproach which his past life had stored up in his memory tended to keep him more and more familiar with the lower pole in that fluctuating scale.

Besides these several poems which mark the variety of moods which (p. 114) swept over him during the summer and autumn of 1789, there was also a continual succession of songs on the anvil in preparation for Johnson's Museum. This work of song-making, begun during his second winter in Edinburgh, was carried on with little intermission during all the Ellisland period. The songs were on all kinds of subjects, and of all degrees of excellence, but hardly one, even the most trivial, was without some small touch which could have come from no hand but that of Burns. Sometimes they were old songs with a stanza or two added. Oftener an old chorus or single line was taken up, and made the hint out of which a new and original song was woven. At other times they were entirely original both in subject and in expression, though cast in the form of the ancient minstrelsy. Among so many and so rapidly succeeding efforts, it was only now and then, when a happier moment of inspiration was granted him, that there came forth one song of supreme excellence, perfect alike in conception and in expression. The consummate song of this summer, 1789, was John Anderson my Jo, John, just as Auld Lang Syne and The Silver Tassie had been those of the former year.

During the remainder of the year 1789 Burns seems to have continued more or less in the mood of mind indicated by the lines To Mary in Heaven. He was suffering from nervous derangement, and this, as usual with him, made him despondent. This is the way in which he writes to Mrs. Dunlop on the 13th December, 1789:—

"I am groaning under the miseries of a diseased nervous system—a system, the state of which is most conducive to our happiness, or the most productive of our misery. For now near three weeks I have been so ill with a nervous headache, that I have been obliged for a time to give up my Excise-books, being scarce able to lift my head, much (p. 115) less to ride once a week over ten muir parishes. What is man?..."

And then he goes on to moralize in a half-believing, half-doubting kind of way, on the probability of a life to come, and ends by speaking of or rather apostrophizing Jesus Christ in a strain which would seem to savour of Socinianism. This letter he calls "a distracted scrawl which the writer dare scarcely read." And yet it appears to have been deliberately copied with some amplification from an entry in his last year's commonplace book. Even the few passages from his correspondence already given are enough to show that there was in Burns's letter-writing something strained and artificial. But such discoveries as this seem to reveal an extent of effort, and even of artifice, which one would hardly otherwise have guessed at.

In the same strain of harassment as the preceding extract, but pointing to another and more definite cause of it, is the following, written on the 20th December, 1789, to Provost Maxwell of Lochmaben:—

"My poor distracted mind is so torn, so jaded, so racked and bedevilled with the task of the superlatively damned, to make one guinea do the business of three, that I detest, abhor, and swoon at the very word business, though no less than four letters of my very short surname are in it." The rest of the letter goes off in a wild rollicking strain, inconsistent enough with his more serious thoughts. But the part of it above given points to a very real reason for his growing discontent with Ellisland.

By the beginning of 1790 the hopelessness of his farming prospects pressed on him still more heavily, and formed one ingredient in the mental depression with which he saw a new year dawn. Whether he did wisely in attempting the Excise business, who shall now say? In (p. 116) one respect it seemed a substantial gain. But this gain was accompanied by counterbalancing disadvantages. The new duties more and more withdrew him from the farm, which, in order to give it any chance of paying, required not only the aid of the master's hand, but the undivided oversight of the master's eye. In fact, farming to profit and Excise-work were incompatible, and a very few months' trial must have convinced Burns of this. But besides rendering regular farm industry impossible, the weekly absences from home, which his new duties entailed, had other evil consequences. They brought with them continual mental distraction, which forbade all sustained poetic effort, and laid him perilously open to indulgences which were sure to undermine regular habits and peace of mind. About this time (the beginning of 1790), we begin to hear of frequent visits to Dumfries on Excise business, and of protracted lingerings at a certain howff, place of resort, called the Globe Tavern, which boded no good. There were also intromissions with a certain company of players then resident in Dumfries, and writings of such prologues for their second-rate pieces, as many a penny-a-liner could have done to order as well. Political ballads, too, came from his pen, siding with this or that party in local elections, all which things as we read, we feel as if we saw some noble high-bred racer harnessed to a dust-cart.

His letters during the first half of 1790 betoken the same restless, unsatisfied spirit as those written towards the end of the previous year. Only we must be on our guard against interpreting his real state of mind too exclusively from his letters. For it seems to have been his habit when writing to his friends to take one mood of mind, (p. 117) which happened to be uppermost in him for the moment, and with which he knew that his correspondent sympathized, and to dwell on this so exclusively that for the moment it filled his whole mental horizon, and shut out every other thought. And not this only, which is the tendency of all ardent and impulsive natures, but we cannot altogether excuse Burns of at times half-consciously exaggerating these momentary moods, almost for certain stage effects which they produced. It is necessary, therefore, in estimating his real condition at any time, to set against the account, which he gives of himself in his letters, the evidence of other facts, such as the testimony of those who met him from time to time, and who have left some record of those interviews. This I shall now do for the first half of the year 1790, and shall place, over against his self-revelations, some observations which show how he at this time appeared to others.

An intelligent man named William Clark, who had served Burns as a ploughman at Ellisland during the winter half-year of 1789-90, survived till 1838, and in his old age gave this account of his former master: "Burns kept two men and two women servants, but he invariably when at home took his meals with his wife and family in the little parlour." Clark thought he was as good a manager of land as most of the farmers in the neighbourhood. The farm of Ellisland was moderately rented, and was susceptible of much improvement, had improvement been then in repute. Burns sometimes visited the neighbouring farmers, and they returned the compliment; but that way of spending time was not so common then as now. No one thought that the poet and his writings would be so much noticed afterwards. He kept nine or ten milch (p. 118) cows, some young cattle, four horses, and several pet sheep: of the latter he was very fond. During the winter and spring-time, when not engaged in Excise business, "he sometimes held the plough for an hour or two for him (W. Clark), and was a fair workman. During seed-time, Burns might be frequently seen at an early hour in the fields with his sowing sheet; but as he was often called away on business, he did not sow the whole of his grain."

This old man went on to describe Burns as a kindly and indulgent master, who spoke familiarly to his servants, both at home and a-field; quick-tempered, when anything put him out, but quickly pacified. Once only Clark saw him really angry, when one of the lasses had nearly choked one of the cows by giving her potatoes not cut small enough. Burns's looks, gestures, and voice were then terrible. Clark slunk out of the way, and when he returned, his master was quite calm again. When there was extra work to be done, he would give his servants a dram, but he was by no means over-flush in this way. During the six months of his service, Clark never once saw Burns intoxicated or incapable of managing his business. The poet, when at home, used to wear a broad blue bonnet, a long-tailed coat, drab or blue, corduroy breeches, dark blue stockings, with cootikens or gaiters. In cold weather he would have a plaid of black and white check wrapped round his shoulders. The same old man described Mrs. Burns as a good and prudent housewife, keeping everything neat and tidy, well liked by her servants, for whom she provided good and abundant fare. When they parted, Burns paid Clark his wages in full, gave him a written character, and a shilling for a fairing.

In the summer or autumn of the same year, the scholarly Ramsay of (p. 119) Ochtertyre in the course of a tour looked in on Burns, and here is the record of his visit which Ramsay gave in a letter to Currie. "Seeing him pass quickly near Closeburn, I said to my companion, 'That is Burns.' On coming to the inn the hostler told us he would be back in a few hours to grant permits; that where he met with anything seizable, he was no better than any other gauger; in everything else that he was perfectly a gentleman. After leaving a note to be delivered to him on his return, I proceeded to his house, being curious to see his Jean. I was much pleased with his 'uxor Sabina qualis,' and the poet's modest mansion, so unlike the habitation of ordinary rustics. In the evening he suddenly bounced in upon us, and said, as he entered, 'I come, to use the words of Shakespeare, stewed in haste.' In fact, he had ridden incredibly fast after receiving my note. We fell into conversation directly, and soon got into the mare magnum of poetry. He told me he had now gotten a subject for a drama, which he was to call Rob McQuechan's Elshin, from a popular story of Robert Bruce being defeated on the water of Cairn, when the heel of his boot having loosened in his flight, he applied to Robert MacQuechan to fit it, who, to make sure, ran his awl nine inches up the king's heel. We were now going on at a great rate, when Mr. Stewart popped in his head, which put a stop to our discourse, which had become very interesting. Yet in a little while it was resumed, and such was the force and versatility of the bard's genius, that he made the tears run down Mr. Stewart's cheeks, albeit unused to the poetic strain. From that time we met no more, and I was grieved at the reports of him afterwards. Poor Burns! we shall hardly ever see his like again. He was, in truth, a sort of comet in literature, irregular in its motions, which did (p. 120) no good, proportioned to the blaze of light it displayed."

It seems that during this autumn there came a momentary blink in Burns's clouded sky, a blink which alas never brightened into full sunshine. He had been but a year in the Excise employment, when, through the renewed kindness of Mr. Graham of Fintray, there seemed a near prospect of his being promoted to a supervisorship, which would have given him an income of 200l. a year. So probable at the time did it seem, that his friend Nicol wrote to Ainslie expressing some fears that the poet might turn his back on his old friends when to the pride of applauded genius was added the pride of office and income. This may have been ironical on Nicol's part, but he might have spared his irony on his friend, for the promotion never came.

But what had Burns been doing for the last year in poetic production? In this respect—the whole interval between the composition of the lines To Mary in Heaven, in October, 1789, and the autumn of the succeeding year, is almost a blank. Three electioneering ballads, besides a few trivial pieces, make up the whole. There is not a line written by him during this year which, if it were deleted from his works, would anyway impair his poetic fame. But this long barrenness was atoned for by a burst of inspiration which came on him, in the fall of 1790, and struck off at one heat the matchless Tale of Tam o' Shanter. It was to the meeting already noticed of Burns with Captain Grose, the antiquary, at Friars Carse, that we owe this wonderful poem. The poet and the antiquary suited each other exactly, and they soon became

Unco pack and thick thegither.

Burns asked his friend when he reached Ayrshire to make a drawing (p. 121) of Alloway kirk, and include it in his sketches, for it was dear to him because it was the resting-place of his father, and there he himself might some day lay his bones. To induce Grose to do this, Burns told him that Alloway kirk was the scene of many witch stories and weird sights. The antiquary replied, "Write you a poem on the scene, and I'll put in the verses with an engraving of the ruin." Burns having found a fitting day and hour, when "his barmy noddle was working prime," walked out to his favourite path down the western bank of the river.

The poem was the work of one day, of which Mrs. Burns retained a vivid recollection. Her husband had spent most of the day by the river side, and in the afternoon she joined him with her two children. He was busily engaged crooning to himsel; and Mrs. Burns, perceiving that her presence was an interruption, loitered behind with her little ones among the broom. Her attention was presently attracted by the strange and wild gesticulations of the bard, who was now seen at some distance, agonized with an ungovernable access of joy. He was reciting very loud, and with tears rolling down his cheeks, those animated verses which he had just conceived,—

Now Tam! O Tam! had thae been queans, A' plump and strappin' in their teens.'

"I wish ye had seen him," said his wife; "he was in such ecstasy that the tears were happing down his cheeks." These last words are given by Allan Cunningham, in addition to the above account, which Lockhart got from a manuscript journal of Cromek. The poet having committed the verses to writing on the top of his sod-dyke above the water, (p. 122) came into the house, and read them immediately in high triumph at the fireside.

Thus in the case of two of Burns's best poems, we have an account of the bard as he appeared in his hour of inspiration, not to any literary friend bent on pictorial effect, but from the plain narrative of his simple and admiring wife. Burns speaks of Tam o' Shanter as his first attempt at a tale in verse—unfortunately it was also his last. He himself regarded it as his master-piece of all his poems, and posterity has not, I believe, reversed the judgment.

In this, one of his happiest flights, Burns's imagination bore him from the vale of Nith back to the banks of Doon, and to the weird tales he had there heard in childhood, told by the winter firesides. The characters of the poem have been identified; that of Tam is taken from a farmer, Douglas Graham, who lived at the farm of Shanter, in the parish of Kirkoswald. He had a scolding wife, called Helen McTaggart, and the tombstones of both are pointed out in Kirkoswald kirkyard. Souter Johnnie is more uncertain, but is supposed, with some probability, to have been John Davidson, a shoemaker, who lies buried in the same place. Yet, from Burns's poem we would gather that this latter lived in Ayr. But these things matter little. From his experience of the smuggling farmers of Kirkoswald, among whom "he first became acquainted with scenes of swaggering and riot," and his remembrance of the tales that haunted the spot where he passed his childhood, combined with his knowledge of the peasantry, their habits and superstitions, Burns's imagination wove the inimitable tale.

After this, the best poetic offspring of the Ellisland period, Burns composed only a few short pieces during his tenancy of that farm. (p. 123) Among these, however, was one which cannot be passed over. In January, 1791, the Earl of Glencairn, who had been his first, and, it may be almost said, his only real friend and patron among the Scottish peerage, died at the early age of forty-two, just as he returned to Falmouth after a vain search for health abroad. Burns had always loved and honoured Lord Glencairn, as well he might,—although his lordship's gentleness had not always missed giving offence to the poet's sensitive and proud spirit. Yet on the whole he was the best patron whom Burns had found, or was ever to find among his countrymen. When then he heard of the earl's death, he mourned his loss as that of a true friend, and poured forth a fine lament, which concludes with the following well-known lines:—

The bridegroom may forget the bride, Was made his wedded wife yestreen; The monarch may forget the crown, That on his head an hour has been; The mother may forget the child, That smiles sae sweetly on her knee; But I'll remember thee, Glencairn, And a' that thou hast done for me.

Burns's elegies, except when they are comical, are not among his happiest efforts. Some of them are frigid and affected. But this was the genuine language of sincere grief. He afterwards showed the permanence of his affection by calling one of his boys James Glencairn.

A few songs make up the roll of the Ellisland productions during 1791. One only of these is noteworthy—that most popular song, The Banks o' Doon. His own words in sending it to a friend are these:—"March, 1791. While here I sit, sad and solitary, by the side of a fire, (p. 124) in a little country inn, and drying my wet clothes, in pops a poor fellow of a sodger, and tells me he is going to Ayr. By heavens! say I to myself, with a tide of good spirits, which the magic of that sound, 'Auld Toon o' Ayr,' conjured up, I will send my last song to Mr. Ballantine."

Then he gives the second and best version of the song, beginning thus—

Ye flowery banks o' bonnie Doon, How can ye blume sae fair? How can ye chant, ye little birds, And I sae fu' o' care!

The latest edition of Burns's works, by Mr. Scott Douglas, gives three different versions of this song. Any one who will compare these, will see the truth of that remark of the poet, in one of his letters to Dr. Moore, "I have no doubt that the knack, the aptitude to learn the Muses' trade is a gift bestowed by Him who forms the secret bias of the soul; but I as firmly believe that excellence in the profession is the fruit of industry, attention, labour, and pains; at least I am resolved to try my doctrine by the test of experience."

The second version was that which Burns wrought out by careful revision, from an earlier one. Compare, for instance, with the verse given above, the first verse as originally struck off,—

Sweet are the banks, the banks of Doon, The spreading flowers are fair, And everything is blythe and glad, But I am fu' of care.

And the other changes he made on the first draught are all in the (p. 125) way of improvement. It is painful to know, on the authority of Allan Cunningham, that he who composed this pure and perfect song, and many another such, sometimes chose to work in baser metal, and that song-ware of a lower kind escaped from his hands into the press, and could never afterwards be recalled.

* * * * *

When Burns told Dr. Moore that he was resolved to try by the test of experience the doctrine that good and permanent poetry could not be composed without industry and pains, he had in view other and wider plans of composition than any which he ever realized. He told Ramsay of Ochtertyre, as we have seen, that he had in view to render into poetry a tradition he had found of an adventure in humble life which Bruce met with during his wanderings. Whether he ever did more than think over the story of Rob McQuechan's Elshin, or into what poetic form he intended to cast it, we know not. As Sir Walter said, any poem he might have produced on this subject would certainly have wanted that tinge of chivalrous feeling which the manners of the age and the character of the king alike demanded. But with Burns's ardent admiration of Bruce, and that power of combining the most homely and humorous incidents with the pathetic and the sublime, which he displayed in Tam o' Shanter, we cannot but regret that he never had the leisure and freedom from care, which would have allowed him to try his hand on a subject so entirely to his mind.

Besides this, he had evidently, during his sojourn at Ellisland, meditated some large dramatic attempt. He wrote to one of his correspondents that he had set himself to study Shakespeare, and intended to master all the greatest dramatists, both of England (p. 126) and France, with a view to a dramatic effort of his own. If he had attempted it in pure English, we may venture to predict that he would have failed. But had he allowed himself that free use of the Scottish dialect of which he was the supreme master, especially if he had shaped the subject into a lyrical drama, no one can say what he might not have achieved. Many of his smaller poems show that he possessed the genuine dramatic vein. The Jolly Beggars, unpleasant as from its grossness it is, shows the presence of this vein in a very high degree, seeing that from materials so unpromising he could make so much. As Mr. Lockhart has said, "That extraordinary sketch, coupled with his later lyrics in a higher vein, is enough to show that in him we had a master capable of placing the musical drama on a level with the loftiest of our classical forms."

Regrets have been expressed that Burns, instead of addressing himself to these high poetic enterprises, which had certainly hovered before him, frittered away so much of his time in composing for musical collections a large number of songs, the very abundance of which must have lessened their quality. And yet it may be doubted whether this urgent demand for songs, made on him by Johnson and Thomson, was not the only literary call to which he would in his circumstances have responded. These calls could be met by sudden efforts, at leisure moments, when some occasional blink of momentary inspiration came over him. Great poems necessarily presuppose that the original inspiration is sustained by concentrated purpose and long-sustained effort; mental habits, which to a nature like Burns must have at all times been difficult, and which his circumstances during his later years rendered simply impossible. From the first he had seen that his farm would (p. 127) not pay, and each succeeding year confirmed him in this conviction. To escape what he calls "the crushing grip of poverty, which, alas! I fear, is less or more fatal to the worth and purity of the noblest souls," he had, within a year after entering Ellisland, recourse to Excise work. This he did from a stern sense of duty to his wife and family. It was, in fact, one of the most marked instances in which Burns, contrary to his too frequent habit, put pride in his pocket, and sacrificed inclination to duty. But that he had not accepted the yoke without some painful sense of degradation, is shown by the bitterness of many of his remarks, when in his correspondence he alludes to the subject. There were, however, times when he tried to take a brighter view of it, and to persuade himself, as he says in a letter to Lady Harriet Don, that "one advantage he had in this new business was the knowledge it gave him of the various shades of character in man—consequently assisting him in his trade as a poet." But, alas! whatever advantages in this way it might have brought, were counteracted tenfold by other circumstances that attended it. The continual calls of a responsible business, itself sufficient to occupy a man,—when divided with the oversight of his farm, overtasked his powers, and left him no leisure for poetic work, except from time to time crooning over a random song. Then the habits which his roving Excise life must have induced were, even to a soul less social than that of Burns, perilous in the extreme. The temptations he was in this way exposed to, Lockhart has drawn with a powerful hand. "From the castle to the cottage, every door flew open at his approach; and the old system of hospitality, then flourishing, rendered it difficult for the most soberly inclined guest to rise from any man's board (p. 128) in the same trim that he sat down to it. The farmer, if Burns was seen passing, left his reapers, and trotted by the side of Jenny Geddes, until he could persuade the bard that the day was hot enough to demand an extra libation. If he entered an inn at midnight, after all the inmates were in bed, the news of his arrival circulated from the cellar to the garret; and ere ten minutes had elapsed, the landlord and all his guests were assembled round the ingle; the largest punch-bowl was produced, and,—

Be ours to-night—who knows what comes to-morrow?

was the language of every eye in the circle that welcomed him. The highest gentry of the neighbourhood, when bent on special merriment, did not think the occasion complete unless the wit and eloquence of Burns were called in to enliven their carousals."

It can readily be imagined how distracting such a life must have been, how fatal to all mental concentration on high objects, not to speak of the habits, of which it was too sure to sow the seeds. The frequent visits to Dumfries, which his Excise work entailed, and the haunting of the Globe Tavern, already spoken of, led to consequences, which more than even deep potations, must have been fatal to his peace.

His stay at Ellisland is now hastening to a close. Before passing, however, from that, on the whole the best period of his life since manhood, one or two incidents of the spring of 1791 must be mentioned. In the February of that year Burns received from the Rev. Archibald Alison, Episcopalian clergyman in Edinburgh, a copy of his once famous, but now, I believe, forgotten, Essay on Taste, which contained (p. 129) the authorized exposition of that theory, so congenial to Scotch metaphysics, that objects seem beautiful to us only because our minds associate them with sensible objects which have previously given us pleasure. In his letter to the author, acknowledging the receipt of his book, Burns says, "I own, sir, at first glance, several of your propositions startle me as paradoxical: that the martial clangour of a trumpet had something in it vastly more grand, heroic, and sublime than the twingle-twangle of a Jew's-harp; that the delicate flexure of a rose-twig, when the half-blown flower is heavy with the tears of the dawn, was infinitely more beautiful and elegant than the upright stub of a burdock; and that from something innate and independent of all association of ideas—these I had set down as irrefragable orthodox truths until perusing your book shook my faith." These words so pierce this soap-bubble of the metaphysicians, that we can hardly read them without fancying that the poet meant them to be ironical. Dugald Steward expressed surprise that the unschooled Ayrshire ploughman should have formed "a distinct conception of the general principles of the doctrine of association;" on which Mr. Carlyle remarks, "We rather think that far subtler things than the doctrine of association had been of old familiar to him."

In looking over his letters at this time (1791), we are startled by a fierce outburst in one of them, apparently apropos of nothing. He had been recommending to the protection of an Edinburgh friend a schoolmaster, whom he thought unjustly persecuted, when all at once he breaks out: "God help the children of Dependence! Hated and persecuted by their enemies, and too often, alas! almost unexceptionally, received by their friends with disrespect and reproach, under the thin disguise of cold civility and humiliating advice. Oh to be a sturdy savage, (p. 130) stalking in the pride of his independence, amid the solitary wilds of his deserts, rather than in civilized life helplessly to tremble for a subsistence, precarious as the caprice of a fellow-creature! Every man has his virtues, and no man is without his failings; and curse on that privileged plain-speaking of friendship which, in the hour of my calamity, cannot reach forth the helping-hand without at the same time pointing out those failings, and apportioning them their share in procuring my present distress.... I do not want to be independent that I may sin, but I want to be independent in my sinning."

What may have been the cause of this ferocious explosion there is no explanation. Whether the real source of it may not have lain in certain facts which had occurred during the past spring, that must have rudely broken in on the peace at once of his conscience and his home, we cannot say. Certainly it does seem, as Chambers suggests, like one of those sudden outbursts of temper which fasten on some mere passing accident, because the real seat of it lies too deep for words. Some instances of the same temper we have already seen. This is a sample of a growing exasperation of spirit, which found expression from time to time till the close of his life.

Let us turn from this painful subject, to one of the only notices we get of him from a stranger's hand during the summer of 1791. Two English gentlemen, who were travelling, went to visit him; one of whom has left an amusing account of their reception. Calling at his house, they were told that the poet was by the river-side, and thither they went in search of him. On a rock that projected into the stream, they saw a man employed in angling, of a singular appearance. He had a cap of fox's skin on his head, a loose great coat fixed round him by a (p. 131) belt, from which depended an enormous Highland broadsword. It was Burns. He received them with great cordiality, and asked them to share his humble dinner—an invitation which they accepted. "On the table they found boiled beef, with vegetables and barley broth, after the manner of Scotland. After dinner the bard told them ingenuously that he had no wine, nothing better than Highland whiskey, a bottle of which he set on the board. He produced at the same time his punch-bowl, made of Inverary marble; and, mixing it with water and sugar, filled their glasses and invited them to drink. The travellers were in haste, and, besides, the flavour of the whiskey to their southern palates was scarcely tolerable; but the generous poet offered them his best, and his ardent hospitality they found impossible to resist. Burns was in his happiest mood, and the charm of his conversation was altogether fascinating. He ranged over a variety of topics, illuminating whatever he touched. He related the tales of his infancy and youth; he recited some of his gayest and some of his tenderest poems; in the wildest of his strains of mirth he threw in some touches of melancholy, and spread around him the electric emotions of his powerful mind. The Highland whiskey improved in its flavour; the marble bowl was again and again emptied and replenished; the guests of our poet forgot the flight of time and the dictates of prudence; at the hour of midnight they lost their way to Dumfries, and could scarcely distinguish it when assisted by the morning's dawn. There is much naivete in the way the English visitor narrates his experience of that 'nicht wi' Burns."

Mr. Carlyle, if we remember aright, has smiled incredulously at (p. 132) the story of the fox-skin cap, the belt, and the broadsword. But of the latter appendage this is not the only record. Burns himself mentions it as a frequent accompaniment of his when he went out by the river.

The punch-bowl here mentioned is the one which his father-in-law had wrought for him as a marriage-gift. It was, when Chambers wrote his biography of Burns, in the possession of Mr. Haistie, then M.P. for Paisley, who is said to have refused for it three hundred guineas—"a sum," says Chambers, "that would have set Burns on his legs for ever."

This is the last glimpse we get of the poet in his home at Ellisland till the end came. We have seen that he had long determined if possible to get rid of his farm. He had sunk in it all the proceeds that remained to him from the sale of the second edition of his poems, and for this the crops he had hitherto reaped had given no adequate return. Three years, however, were a short trial, and there was a good time coming for all farmers, when the war with France broke out, and raised the value of farm produce to a hitherto unknown amount. If Burns could but have waited for that!—but either he could not, or he would not wait. But the truth is, even if Burns ever had it in him to succeed as a farmer, that time was past when he came to Ellisland. Independence at the plough-tail, of which he often boasted, was no longer possible for him. He could no more work as he had done of yore. The habits contracted in Edinburgh had penetrated too deeply. Even if he had not been withdrawn from his farm by Excise duties, he could neither work continuously himself, nor make his servants work. "Faith," said a neighbouring farmer, "how could he miss but fail? (p. 133) He brought with him a bevy of servants from Ayrshire. The lasses did nothing but bake bread (that is, oat-cakes), and the lads sat by the fireside and ate it warm with ale." Burns meanwhile enjoying himself at the house of some jovial farmer or convivial laird. How could he miss but fail?

When he had resolved on giving up his farm, an arrangement was come to with the Laird of Dalswinton by which Burns was allowed to throw up his lease and sell off his crops. The sale took place in the last week in August (1791). Even at this day the auctioneer and the bottle always appear side by side, as Chambers observes; but then far more than now-a-days. After the roup, that is the sale, of his crop was over, Burns, in one of his letters, describes the scene that took place within and without his house. It was one which exceeded anything he had ever seen in drunken horrors. Mrs. Burns and her family fortunately were not there to witness it, having gone many weeks before to Ayrshire, probably to be out of the way of all the pain that accompanies the breaking up of a country home. When Burns gave up his lease, Mr. Miller, the landlord, sold Ellisland to a stranger, because the farm was an outlying one, inconveniently situated, on a different side of the river from the rest of his estate. It was in November or December that Burns sold off his farm-stock and implements of husbandry, and moved his family and furniture into the town of Dumfries, leaving at Ellisland no memorial of himself, as Allan Cunningham tells us, "but a putting-stone with which he loved to exercise his strength, and 300l. of his money, sunk beyond redemption in a speculation from which all had augured happiness."

It is not without deep regret that even now we think of Burns's (p. 134) departure from this beautiful spot. If there was any position on earth in which he could have been happy and fulfilled his genius, it would have been on such a farm—always providing that it could have given him the means of a comfortable livelihood, and that he himself could have guided his ways aright. That he might have had a fair opportunity, how often one has wished that he could have met some landlord who could have acted towards him, as the present Duke of Buccleuch did towards the Ettrick Shepherd in his later days, and have given a farm on which he could have sat rent-free. Such an act, one is apt to fancy, would have been honourable alike to giver and receiver. Indeed, a truly noble nature would have been only too grateful to find such an opportunity put in his way of employing a small part of his wealth for so good an end. But the notions of modern society, founded as they are so entirely on individual independence, for the most part preclude the doing and the receiving of such favours. And with this social feeling no man was ever more filled than Burns.



CHAPTER VI. (p. 135)

MIGRATION TO DUMFRIES.

A great change it must have been to pass from the pleasant holms and broomy banks of the Nith at Ellisland to a town home in the Wee Vennel of Dumfries. It was, moreover, a confession visible to the world of what Burns himself had long felt, that his endeavour to combine the actual and the ideal, his natural calling as a farmer with the exercise of his gift as a poet, had failed, and that henceforth he must submit to a round of toil, which, neither in itself nor in its surroundings, had anything to redeem it from commonplace drudgery. He must have felt from the time when he first became Exciseman, that he had parted company with all thought of steadily working out his ideal, and that whatever he might now do in that way must be by random snatches. To his proud spirit the name of gauger must have been gall and wormwood, and it is much to his credit that for the sake of his wife and children he was content to undergo what he often felt to be a social obloquy. It would have been well for him if this had been the only drawback to his new calling. Unfortunately the life into which it led him, exposed him to those very temptations which his nature was least able to withstand. If social indulgence and irregular habits had somewhat impaired his better resolves, and his power of poetic (p. 136) concentration, before he left Ellisland, Dumfries, and the society into which it threw him, did with increased rapidity the fatal work which had been already begun. His biographers, though with varying degrees of emphasis, on the whole agree, that from the time he settled in Dumfries, "his moral course was downwards."

The social condition of Dumfries at the time when Burns went to live in it was neither better nor worse than that of other provincial towns in Scotland. What that was, Dr. Chambers has depicted from his own youthful experience of just such another country town. The curse of such towns, he tells us, was that large numbers of their inhabitants were either half or wholly idle; either men living on competences, with nothing to do, or shopkeepers with their time but half employed; their only amusement to meet in taverns, soak, gossip, and make stupid personal jokes. "The weary waste of spirits and energy at those soaking evening meetings was deplorable. Insipid toasts, petty raillery, empty gabble about trivial occurrences, endless disputes on small questions of fact, these relieved now and then by a song,"—such Chambers describes as the items which made up provincial town life in his younger days. "A life," he says, "it was without progress or profit, or anything that tended to moral elevation." For such dull companies to get a spirit like Burns among them, to enliven them with his wit and eloquence, what a windfall it must have been! But for him to put his time and his powers at their disposal, how great the degradation! During the day, no doubt, he was employed busily enough in doing his duty as an Exciseman. This could now be done with less travelling than in the Ellisland days, and did not require him as formerly to keep a horse. When the day's work was over, his small (p. 137) house in the Wee Vennel, and the domestic hearth with the family ties gathered round it, were not enough for him. At Ellisland he had sung,—

To make a happy fire-side clime, For weans and wife, Is the true pathos and sublime Of human life.

But it is one thing to sing wisely, another to practise wisdom. Too frequently at nights Burns's love of sociality and excitement drove him forth to seek the companionship of neighbours and drouthy cronies, who gathered habitually at the Globe Tavern and other such haunts. From these he was always sure to meet a warm welcome, abundant appreciation, and even flattery, for to this he was not inaccessible, while their humble station did not jar in any way on his social prejudices, nor their mediocre talents interfere with his love of pre-eminence. In such companies Burns no doubt had the gratification of feeling that he was, what is proverbially called, cock of the walk. The desire to be so probably grew with that growing dislike to the rich and the titled, which was observed in him after he came to Dumfries. In earlier days we have seen that he did not shrink from the society of the greatest magnates, and when they showed him that deference which he thought his due, he even enjoyed it. But now so bitter had grown his scorn and dislike of the upper classes, that we are told that if any one named a lord, or alluded to a man of rank in his presence, he instantly "crushed the offender in an epigram, or insulted him by some sarcastic sally." In a letter written during his first year at Dumfries, this is the way he speaks of his daily occupations:—"Hurry of business, grinding the faces of the (p. 138) publican and the sinner on the merciless wheels of the Excise, making ballads, and then drinking and singing them; and over and above all, correcting the press of two different publications." But besides these duties by day, and the convivialities by night, there were other calls on his time and strength, to which Burns was by his reputation exposed. When those of the country gentry whom he still knew were in Dumfries for some hours, or when any party of strangers passing through the town, had an idle evening on their hands, it seems to have been their custom to summon Burns to assist them in spending it; and he was weak enough, on receiving the message, to leave his home and adjourn to the Globe, the George, or the King's Arms, there to drink with them late into the night, and waste his powers for their amusement. Verily, a Samson, as has been said, making sport for Philistines!

To one such invitation his impromptu answer was—

The king's most humble servant, I Can scarcely spare a minute; But I'll be with you by-and-by, Or else the devil's in it.

And this we may be sure was the spirit of many another reply to these ill-omened invitations. It would have been well if, on these occasions, the pride he boasted of had stood him in better stead, and repelled such unjustifiable intrusions. But in this, as in so many other respects, Burns was the most inconsistent of men.

From the time of his migration to Dumfries, it would appear that he was gradually dropped out of acquaintance by most of the Dumfriesshire lairds, as he had long been by the parochial and all other (p. 139) ministers. I have only conversed with one person who remembered in his boyhood to have seen Burns. He was the son of a Dumfriesshire baronet, the representative of the House of Redgauntlet. The poet was frequently in the neighbourhood of the baronet's country seat, but the old gentleman so highly disapproved of "Robbie Burns," that he forbade his sons to have anything to do with him. My informant, therefore, though he had often seen, had never spoken to the poet. When I conversed with him, his age was nigh four score years, and the one thing he remembered about Burns was "the blink of his black eye." This is probably but a sample of the feeling with which Burns was regarded by most of the country gentry around Dumfries. What were the various ingredients that made up their dislike of him, it is not easy now exactly to determine. Politics most likely had a good deal to do with it, for they were Tories and aristocrats, Burns was a Whig and something more. Though politics may have formed the chief, they were not probably the only element in their aversion. Yet though the majority of the county families turned their backs on him, there were some with which he still continued intimate.

These were either the few Whig magnates of the southern counties, whose political projects he supported by electioneering ballads, charged with all the powers of sarcasm he could wield; or those still fewer, whose literary tastes were strong enough to make them willing, for the sake of his genius, to tolerate both his radical politics and his irregular life. Among these latter was a younger brother of Burns's old friend, Glen Riddel, Mr. Walter Riddel, who with his wife had settled at a place four miles from Dumfries, formerly called Goldie-lea, but named after Mrs. Riddel's maiden name, Woodley (p. 140) Park. Mrs. Riddel was handsome, clever, witty, not without some tincture of letters, and some turn for verse-making. She and her husband welcomed the poet to Woodley Park, where for two years he was a constant and favourite guest. The lady's wit and literary taste found, it may be believed, no other so responsive spirit in all the south of Scotland. In the third year came a breach in their friendship, followed by a savage lampoon of Burns on the lady, because she did not at once accept his apology; then, a period of estrangement. After an interval, however, the Riddels forgave the insult, and were reconciled to the poet, and when the end came, Mrs. Riddel did her best to befriend him, and to do honour to his memory when he was gone.

It ought perhaps to have been mentioned before, that about the time of Burns's first settling at Dumfries, that is towards the close of 1791, he paid his last visit to Edinburgh. It was occasioned by the news that Clarinda was about to sail for the West Indies, in search of the husband who had forsaken her. Since Burns's marriage the silence between them seems to have been broken by only two letters to Clarinda from Ellisland. In the first of these he resents the name of "villain," with which she appears to have saluted him. In the second he admits that his past conduct had been wrong, but concludes by repeating his error and enclosing a song addressed to her in the most exaggerated strain of love. Now he rushed to Edinburgh to see her once more before she sailed. The interview was a brief and hurried one, and no record of it remains, except some letters and a few impassioned lyrics which about that time he addressed to her. The first letter is stiff and formal, as if to break the ice of long estrangement. The others are in the last strain of rapturous devotion—language (p. 141) which, if feigned, is the height of folly; if real, is worse. The lyrics are some of them strained and artificial. One, however, stands out from all the rest, as one of the most impassioned effusions that Burns ever poured forth. It contains that one consummate stanza in which Scott, Byron, and many more, saw concentrated "the essence of a thousand love-tales,"—

Had we never loved so kindly, Had we never loved so blindly; Never met, or never parted, We had ne'er been broken-hearted.

After a time Mrs. M'Lehose returned from the West Indies, but without having recovered her truant husband. On her return, one or two more letters Burns wrote to her in the old exaggerated strain—the last in June, 1794—after which Clarinda disappears from the scene.

Other Delilahs on a smaller scale Burns met with during his Dumfries sojourn, and to these he was ever and anon addressing songs of fancied love. By the attentions which the wayward husband was continually paying to ladies and others into whose society his wife could not accompany him, the patience of "bonny Jean," it may easily be conceived, must have been severely tried.

It would have been well, however, if stray flirtations and Platonic affections had been all that could be laid to his charge. But there is a darker story. The facts of it are told by Chambers in connexion with the earlier part of the Dumfries period, and need not be repeated here. Mrs. Burns is said to have been a marvel of long-suffering and forgivingness; but the way she bore those wrongs must have touched her husband's better nature, and pierced him to the quick. When his calmer moments came, that very mildness must have made him feel, as (p. 142) nothing else could, what self-reproach was, and what

Self-contempt bitterer to drink than blood.

To the pangs of that remorse have, I doubt not, been truly attributed those bitter outpourings of disgust with the world and with society, which are to be found in some of his letters, especially in those of his later years. Some samples of these outbreaks have been given, more might easily have been added. The injuries he may have received from the world and society, what were they compared with those which he could not help feeling that he had inflicted on himself? It is when a man's own conscience is against him that the world looks worst.

During the first year at Dumfries, Burns for the first time began to dabble in politics, which ere long landed him in serious trouble. Before this, though he had passed for a sort of Jacobite, he had been in reality a Whig. While he lived in Edinburgh he had consorted more with Whigs than with Tories, but yet he had not in any marked way committed himself as a partisan. The only exception to this were some expressions in his poetry favourable to the Stuarts, and his avowed dislike to the Brunswick dynasty. Yet, notwithstanding these, his Jacobitism was but skin deep. It was only with him, as with so many another Scot of that day, the expression of his discontent with the Union of 1707, and his sense of the national degradation that had followed it. When in song he sighed to see Jamie come hame, this was only a sentimental protest against the existing order of things. But by the time he came to Dumfries the day of Jacobitism was over, (p. 143) and the whole aspect of the political heavens seemed dark with coming change. The French Revolution was in full swing, and vibrations of it were felt in the remotest corners of Europe. These reached even to the dull provincial towns of Scotland, and roused the pot-house politicians with whom Burns consorted, at the Globe and other taverns, to unwonted excitement. Under this new stimulus, Burns's previous Jacobitism passed towards the opposite, but not very distant, extreme of Jacobinism. At these gatherings we may easily imagine that, with his native eloquence, his debating power, trained in the Tarbolton Club, and his ambition to shine as a public speaker, the voice of Burns would be the loudest and most vehement. Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, these were words which must have found an echo in his inmost heart. But it was not only the abstract rights of man, but the concrete wrongs of Scotland that would be there discussed. And wrongs no doubt there were, under which Scotland was suffering, ever since the Union had destroyed not only her nationality, but almost her political existence. The franchise had become very close—in the counties restricted to a few of the chief families—in the boroughs thrown into the hands of the Baillies, who were venal beyond conception. It was the day, too, of Henry Dundas. A prominent member of the Pitt administration, he ruled Scotland as an autocrat, and as the dispenser of all her patronage. A patriotic autocrat no doubt, loving his country, and providing well for those of her people whom he favoured—still an autocrat. The despotism of Dundas has been pictured, in colours we may well believe sufficiently strong, by Lord Cockburn and others bent on inditing the Epic of Whiggery, in which they and their friends should figure as heroes and martyrs. But whatever may be said against Dundas's regime, as a permanent (p. 144) system, it must be allowed that this was no time to remodel it when England was face to face with the French troubles. When the tempest is breaking over the ship, the captain may reasonably be excused for thinking that the moment would be ill chosen for renewing cordage or repairing timbers. Whatever may have been right in a time of quiet, it was not unnatural that the Pitt administration should postpone all thoughts of reform, till the vessel of the State had weathered the storm which was then upon her.

Besides his conviction as to public wrongs to be redressed, Burns had, he thought, personal grievances to complain of, which, as is so often seen, added fuel to his reforming zeal. His great powers, which he believed entitled him to a very different position, were unacknowledged and disregarded by the then dispensers of patronage. Once he had been an admirer of Pitt, latterly he could not bear the mention of his name. Of the ministry, Addington, we have seen, was fully alive to his merits, and pressed his claims on Pitt, who himself was quite awake to the charm of Burns's poetry. The Premier, it is said, "pushed the bottle on to Dundas, and did nothing,"—to Dundas, too practical and too prosaic to waste a thought on poets and poetry. Latterly this neglect of him by public men preyed on the spirit of Burns, and was seldom absent from his thoughts. It added force, no doubt, to the rapture with which he, like all the younger poets of the time, hailed the French Revolution, and the fancied dawn of that day, which would place plebeian genius and worth in those high places, whence titled emptiness and landed incapacity would be at length thrust ignominiously down.

Burns had not been more than three months in Dumfries, before he (p. 145) found an opportunity of testifying by deed his sympathy with the French Revolutionists. At that time the whole coast of the Solway swarmed with smuggling vessels, carrying on a contraband traffic, and manned by men of reckless character, like the Dirk Hatteraick of Guy Mannering. In 1792, a suspicious-looking brig appeared in the Solway, and Burns, with other excisemen, was set to watch her motions. She got into shallow water, when the gaugers, enforced by some dragoons, waded out to her, and Burns, sword in hand, was the first to board her. The captured brig "Rosamond," with all her arms and stores, was sold next day at Dumfries, and Burns became the purchaser of four of her guns. These he sent, with a letter, to the French Legislative Assembly, requesting them to accept the present as a mark of his admiration and sympathy. The guns with the letter never reached their destination. They were, however, intercepted by the Custom-House officers at Dover, and Burns at once became a suspected man in the eye of the Government. Lockhart, who tells this incident, connects with it the song, The Deil's awa' wi' the Exciseman, which Burns, he said, composed while waiting on the shore to watch the brig. But Mr. Scott Douglas doubts whether the song is referable to this occasion. However this may be, the folly of Burns's act can hardly be disputed. He was in the employ of Government, and had no right to express in this way his sympathy with a movement, which, he must have known, the Government, under whom he served, regarded, if not yet with open hostility, at least with jealous suspicion. Men who think it part of their personal right and public duty unreservedly to express, by word and deed, their views on politics, had better not seek employment in the public service. (p. 146) Burns having once drawn upon himself the suspicions of his superiors, all his words and actions were no doubt closely watched. It was found that he 'gat the Gazetteer,' a revolutionary print published in Edinburgh, which only the most extreme men patronized, and which after a few months' existence was suppressed by Government. As the year 1792 drew to a close, the political heaven, both at home and abroad, became ominously dark. In Paris the king was in prison, the Reign of Terror had begun, and innocent blood of loyalists flowed freely in the streets; the republic which had been established was threatening to propagate its principles in other countries by force of arms. In this country, what at the beginning of the year had been but suspicion of France, was now turned to avowed hostility, and war against the republic was on the eve of being declared. There were uneasy symptoms, too, at home. Tom Paine's Rights of Man and Age of Reason were spreading questionable doctrines and fomenting disaffection. Societies named Friends of the People were formed in Edinburgh and the chief towns of Scotland, to demand reform of the representation and other changes, which, made at such a time were believed by those in power to cover seditious aims. At such a crisis any government might be expected to see that all its officers, from the highest to the lowest, were well affected. But though the Reign of Terror had alarmed many others who had at first looked favourably on the Revolution in France, Burns's ardour in its cause was no whit abated. He even denounced the war on which the ministry had determined; he openly reviled the men in power; and went so far in his avowal of democracy that at a social meeting, he proposed as a toast, "Here's the last verse of the (p. 147) last chapter of the last Book of Kings." This would seem to be but one specimen of the freedom of political speech in which Burns at this time habitually indulged,—the truculent way in which he flaunted defiance in the face of authority. It would not have been surprising, if at any time the Government had ordered inquiry to be made into such conduct, much less in such a season of anxiety and distrust. That an inquiry was made is undoubted; but as to the result which followed it, there is uncertainty. Some have thought that the poet received from his superiors only a slight hint or caution to be more careful in future. Others believed, that the matter went so far that he was in serious danger of dismissal from his post; and that this was only averted by the timely interposition of some kind and powerful friends. That Burns himself took a serious view of it, and was sufficiently excited and alarmed, may be seen from two letters which he wrote, the one at the time of the occurrence, the other soon after it. It was thus that in December, 1792, he addressed Mr. Graham of Fintray, the same person whose good offices had at first obtained for the poet his appointment, and whose kindness never failed him while he lived:—

"Sir,—I have been surprised, confounded, and distracted by Mr. Mitchell, the collector, telling me that he has received an order from your Board, to inquire into my political conduct, and blaming me as a person disaffected to Government.

"Sir, you are a husband and a father. You know what you would feel to see the much-loved wife of your bosom, and your helpless, prattling little ones turned adrift into the world, degraded and disgraced from a situation in which they had been respectable and respected, and left almost without the necessary support of a miserable existence. (p. 148)

"Alas! sir, must I think that such soon will be my lot! and from the dark insinuations of hellish, groundless envy, too! I believe, sir, I may aver it, and in the sight of Omniscience, that I would not tell a deliberate falsehood, no, not though even worse horrors, if worse can be, than those I have mentioned, hung over my head; and I say, that the allegation, whatever villain has made it, is a lie! To the British Constitution, on revolution principles, next after my God, I am most devoutly attached. You, sir, have been much and generously my friend.—Heaven knows how warmly I have felt the obligation, and how gratefully I have thanked you. Fortune, sir, has made you powerful, and me impotent—has given you patronage, and me dependence. I would not, for my single self, call on your humanity; were such my insular, unconnected situation, I would despise the tear that now swells in my eye. I would brave misfortune—I could face ruin, for at the worst Death's thousand doors stand open; but the tender concerns that I have mentioned, the claims and ties that I see at this moment, and feel around me, how they unnerve courage and wither resolution! To your patronage, as a man of some genius, you have allowed me a claim; and your esteem, as an honest man, I know is my due. To these, sir, permit me to appeal; by these may I adjure you, to save me from that misery which threatens to overwhelm me, and which—with my latest breath I will say it—I have not deserved. R. B."

That this appeal was not without effect may be gathered from a letter on this same affair, which Burns addressed on the 13th April, 1793, to Mr. Erskine, of Mar, in which he says one of the supervisors-general, a Mr. Corbet, "was instructed to inquire on the spot, and to (p. 149) document me that my business was to act, not to think: and that, whatever might be men or measures, it was for me to be silent and obedient."

Much obloquy has been heaped upon the Excise Board—but on what grounds of justice I have never been able to discover—for the way in which they on this occasion dealt with Burns. The members of the Board were the servants of the Government, to which they were responsible for the conduct of all their subordinates. To have allowed any of their subordinates to set themselves up by word or deed in opposition to the Ministry, and especially at such a crisis, was inconsistent with the ideas of the time as to official duty. And when called on to act, it is hard to see how they could have done so with more leniency than by hinting to him the remonstrance which so alarmed and irritated the recipient of it. Whatever may be said of his alarm,—his irritation, if perhaps natural, was not reasonable. No man has a right to expect that, because he is a genius, he shall be absolved from those rules of conduct, either in private or in public life, which are held binding on his more commonplace brethren. About the time when he received this rebuke, he wrote to Mrs. Dunlop, "I have set, henceforth, a seal on my lips as to these unlucky politics." But neither his own resolve nor the remonstrance of the Excise Board seem to have weighed much with him. He continued at convivial parties to express his feelings freely, and at one of these, shortly after he had been rebuked by the Excise Board, when the health of William Pitt was drunk, he followed it by craving a bumper "to the health of a much better man—General Washington." And on a subsequent occasion, as we shall see, he brought himself into trouble by giving an injudicious toast. The (p. 150) repression brought to bear on Burns cannot have been very stringent when he was still free to sport such sentiments. The worst effect of the remonstrance he received seems to have been to irritate his temper, and to depress his spirits by the conviction, unfounded though it was, that all hope of promotion for him was over.

But amid all the troubles entailed on him by his conduct, domestic, social, and political, the chief refuge and solace which he found, was in exercising his gifts of song. All hope of his ever achieving a great poem, which called for sustained effort, was now over. Even poems descriptive of rustic life and characters, such as he had sketched in his Ayrshire days—for these he had now no longer either time or inclination. His busy and distracted life, however, left him leisure from time to time to give vent to his impulses, or to soothe his feelings by short arrow-flights of song. He found in his own experience the truth of those words of another poet,—

They can make who fail to find Short leisure even in busiest days, Moments to cast a look behind, And profit by those kindly rays, Which through the clouds will sometimes steal, And all the far-off past reveal.

Such breaks in the clouds he eagerly waited for, and turned every golden gleam to song.

It may be remembered that while Burns was in Edinburgh he became acquainted with James Johnson, who was engaged in collecting the Songs of Scotland in a work called the Musical Museum. He had at once thrown himself ardently into Johnson's undertaking, and put all his power of traditional knowledge, of criticism, and of original composition at Johnson's disposal. This he continued to do through (p. 151) all the Ellisland period, and more or less during his residence in Dumfries. To the Museum Burns from first to last gratuitously contributed not less than one hundred and eighty-four songs original, altered, or collected.

During the first year that Burns lived in Dumfries, in September, 1792, he received an invitation from Mr. George Thomson, to lend the aid of his lyrical genius to a collection of Scottish melodies, airs, and words, which a small band of musical amateurs in Edinburgh were then projecting. This collection was pitched to a higher key than the comparatively humble Museum. It was to be edited with more rigid care, the symphonies and accompaniments were to be supplied by the first musicians of Europe, and it was to be expurgated from all leaven of coarseness, and from whatever could offend the purest taste. To Thomson's proposal Burns at once replied, "As the request you make to me will positively add to my enjoyment in complying with it, I shall enter into your undertaking with all the small portion of abilities I have, strained to their utmost exertion by the impulse of enthusiasm....

"If you are for English verses, there is, on my part, an end of the matter. Whether in the simplicity of the ballad, or the pathos of the song, I can only hope to please myself in being allowed at least a sprinkling of our native tongue.... As to remuneration, you may think my songs either above or below price; for they shall be absolutely the one or the other. In the honest enthusiasm with which I embark in your undertaking, to talk of money, wages, fee, hire, &c., would be downright prostitution of soul."

In this spirit he entered on the enterprise which Thomson opened (p. 152) before him, and in this spirit he worked at it to the last, pouring forth song after song almost to his latest breath. Hardly less interesting than the songs themselves, which from time to time he sent to Thomson, were the letters with which he accompanied them. In these his judgment and critical power are as conspicuous, as his genius and his enthusiasm for the native melodies. For all who take interest in songs and in the laws which govern their movement, I know not where else they would find hints so valuable as in these occasional remarks on his own and others' songs, by the greatest lyric singer whom the modern world has seen.

The bard who furnished the English songs for this collection was a certain Dr. Wolcot, known as Peter Pindar. This poetizer, who seems to have been wholly devoid of genius, but to have possessed a certain talent for hitting the taste of the hour, was then held in high esteem; he has long since been forgotten. Even Burns speaks of him with much respect, "The very name of Peter Pindar is an acquisition to your work," he writes to Thomson. Well might Chambers say, "It is a humiliating thought that Peter Pindar was richly pensioned by the booksellers, while Burns, the true sweet singer, lived in comparative poverty." Hard measure has been dealt to Thomson for not having liberally remunerated Burns for the priceless treasures which he supplied to the Collection. Chambers and others, who have thoroughly examined the whole matter, have shown this censure to be undeserved. Thomson himself was by no means rich, and his work brought him nothing but outlay as long as Burns lived. Indeed once, in July, 1793, when Thomson had sent Burns some money in return for his songs, the bard thus replied:—

"I assure you, my dear sir, that you truly hurt me with your (p. 153) pecuniary parcel. It degrades me in my own eyes. However, to return it would savour of affectation; but, as to any more traffic of that debtor and creditor kind, I swear, by that honour which crowns the upright statue of Robert Burns's Integrity, on the least motion of it, I will indignantly spurn the by-pact transaction, and from that moment commence entire stranger to you. Burns's character for generosity of sentiment and independence of mind, will, I trust long outlive any of his wants which the cold, unfeeling ore can supply; at least I will take care that such a character he shall deserve."

This sentiment was no doubt inconsistent, and may be deemed Quixotic, when we remember that for his poems Burns was quite willing to accept all that Creech would offer. Yet one cannot but honour it. He felt that both Johnson and Thomson were enthusiasts, labouring to embalm in a permanent form their country's minstrelsy, and that they were doing this without any hope of profit. He too would bear his part in the noble work; if he had not in other respects done full justice to his great gifts, in this way he would repay some of the debt he owed to his country, by throwing into her national melodies the whole wealth and glory of his genius. And this he would do, "all for love and nothing for reward." And the continual effort to do this worthily was the chief relaxation and delight of those sad later years. When he died, he had contributed to Thomson's work sixty songs, but of these only six had then appeared, as only one half-volume of Thomson's work had then been published. Burns had given Thomson the copyright of all the sixty songs; but as soon as a posthumous edition of the poet's works was proposed, Thomson returned all the songs to the poet's family, to be included in the forthcoming edition, along with (p. 154) the interesting letters which had accompanied the songs. Thomson's collection was not completed till 1841, when the sixth and last volume of it appeared. It is affecting to know that Thomson himself, who was older than Burns by two years, survived him for more than five-and-fifty, and died in February, 1851, at the ripe old age of ninety-four.



CHAPTER VII. (p. 155)

LAST YEARS.

During those Dumfries years little is to be done by the biographer but to trace the several incidents in Burns's quarrel with the world, his growing exasperation, and the evil effects of it on his conduct and his fortunes. It is a painful record, but since it must be given, it shall be with as much brevity as is consistent with truth.

In July, 1793, Burns made an excursion into Galloway, accompanied by a Mr. Syme, who belonging, like himself, to the Excise, admired the poet, and agreed with his politics. Syme has preserved a record of this journey, and the main impression left by the perusal of it is the strange access of ill-temper which had come over Burns, who kept venting his spleen in epigrams on all whom he disliked, high and low. They visited Kenmure, where lived Mr. Gordon, the representative of the old Lords Kenmure. They passed thence over the muirs to Gatehouse, in a wild storm, during which Burns was silent and crooning to himself what, Syme says, was the first thought of Scots wha hae. They were engaged to go to St. Mary's Isle, the seat of the Earl of Selkirk, but Burns was in such a savage mood against all lords, that he was with difficulty persuaded to go thither, though Lord Selkirk was no Tory, but a Whig, like himself, and the father of his old friend, Lord (p. 156) Daer, by this time deceased, who had first convinced him that a lord might possibly be an honest and kind-hearted man. When they were once under the hospitable roof of St. Mary's Isle, the kindness with which they were received appeased the poet's bitterness. The Earl was benign, the young ladies were beautiful, and two of them sang Scottish songs charmingly. Urbani, an Italian musician who had edited Scotch music, was there, and sang many Scottish melodies, accompanying them with instrumental music. Burns recited some of his songs amid the deep silence that is most expressive of admiration. The evening passed very pleasantly, and the lion of the morning had, ere the evening was over, melted to a lamb.

Scots wha hae has been mentioned. Mr. Syme tells us that it was composed partly while Burns was riding in a storm between Gatehouse and Kenmure, and partly on the second morning after this when they were journeying from St. Mary's Isle to Dumfries. And Mr. Syme adds that next day the poet presented him with one copy of the poem for himself, and a second for Mr. Dalzell. Mr. Carlyle says, "This Dithyrambic was composed on horseback; in riding in the middle of tempests over the wildest Galloway moor, in company with a Mr. Syme, who, observing the poet's looks, forebore to speak—judiciously enough,—for a man composing Bruce's address might be unsafe to trifle with. Doubtless this stern hymn was singing itself, as he formed it, through the soul of Burns, but to the external ear it should be sung with the throat of the whirlwind."

Burns, however, in a letter to Mr. Thomson dated September, 1793, gives an account of the composition of his war-ode, which is difficult to reconcile with Mr. Syme's statement. "There is a tradition (p. 157) which I have met with in many places in Scotland," he writes, "that the old air, Hey, tuttie taitie was Robert Bruce's march at the battle of Bannockburn. This thought, in my yesternight's evening walk, warmed me to a pitch of enthusiasm on the theme of liberty and independence, which I threw into a kind of Scottish ode, fitted to the air, that one might suppose to be the gallant royal Scot's address to his heroic followers on that eventful morning." He adds, that "the accidental recollection of that glorious struggle for freedom, associated with the glowing ideas of some struggles of the same nature, not quite so ancient, roused my rhyming mania." So Bruce's Address owes its inspiration as much to Burns's sympathy with the French Republicans as to his Scottish patriotism. As to the intrinsic merit of the ode itself, Mr. Carlyle says, "So long as there is warm blood in the heart of Scotchmen or man, it will move in fierce thrills under this war-ode, the best, we believe, that was ever written by any pen." To this verdict every son of Scottish soil is, I suppose, bound to say, Amen. It ought not, however, to be concealed that there has been a very different estimate formed of it by judges sufficiently competent. I remember to have read somewhere of a conversation between Wordsworth and Mrs. Hemans, in which they both agreed that the famous ode was not much more than a commonplace piece of school-boy rhodomontade about liberty. Probably it does owe not a little of its power to the music to which it is sung, and to the associations which have gathered round it. The enthusiasm for French Revolution sentiments, which may have been in Burns's mind when composing it, has had nothing to do with the delight with which thousands since have sung and listened to it. The Poet, however, when he first (p. 158) conceived it was no doubt raging inwardly, like a lion, not only caged, but muzzled with the gag of his servitude to Government. But for this, what diatribes in favour of the Revolution might we not have had, and what pain must it have been to Burns to suppress these under the coercion of external authority. Partly to this feeling, as well as to other causes, may be ascribed such outbursts as the following, written to a female correspondent, immediately after his return from the Galloway tour:

"There is not among all the martyrologies that ever were penned, so rueful a narrative as the lives of the poets. In the comparative view of wretches, the criterion is not what they are doomed to suffer, but how they are formed to bear. Take a being of our kind, give him a stronger imagination, and a more delicate sensibility, which between them will ever engender a more ungovernable set of passions than are the usual lot of man; implant in him an irresistible impulse to some idle vagary, ... in short, send him adrift after some pursuit which shall eternally mislead him from the paths of lucre, and yet curse him with a keener relish than any man living for the pleasures that lucre can purchase; lastly, fill up the measure of his woes by bestowing on him a spurning sense of his own dignity—and you have created a wight nearly as miserable as a poet." This passage will recall to many the catalogue of sore evils to which poets are by their temperament exposed, which Wordsworth in his Leech-gatherer enumerates.

The fear that kills, And hope that is unwilling to be fed; Cold, pain, and labour, and all fleshly ills; And mighty poets in their misery dead.

In writing that poem Wordsworth had Burns among others prominently (p. 159) in his eye. What a commentary is the life of the more impulsive poet on the lines of his younger and more self-controlling brother! During those years of political unrest and of growing mental disquiet, his chief solace was, as I have said, to compose songs for Thomson's Collection, into which he poured a continual supply. Indeed it is wonderful how often he was able to escape from his own vexations into that serener atmosphere, and there to suit melodies and moods most alien to his own with fitting words.

Here in one of his letters to Thomson is the way he describes himself in the act of composition. "My way is—I consider the poetic sentiment correspondent to my idea of the musical expression; then choose my theme; begin one stanza; when that is composed, which is generally the most difficult part of the business, I walk out, sit down now and then, look out for objects in nature around me that are in unison and harmony with the cogitations of my fancy and workings of my bosom; humming every now and then the air with the verses I have framed. When I feel my Muse beginning to jade, I retire to the solitary fireside of my study, and there commit my effusions to paper; swinging at intervals on the hind legs of my elbow-chair, by way of calling forth my own critical strictures as my pen goes on." To this may be added what Allan Cunningham tells us. "While he lived in Dumfries he had three favourite walks; on the Dock-green by the river-side; among the ruins of Lincluden College; and towards the Martingdon-ford, on the north side of the Nith. This latter place was secluded, commanded a view of the distant hills, and the romantic towers of Lincluden, and afforded soft greensward banks to rest upon, within sight and (p. 160) sound of the stream. As soon as he was heard to hum to himself, his wife saw that he had something in his mind, and was prepared to see him snatch up his hat, and set silently off for his musing-ground. When by himself, and in the open air, his ideas arranged themselves in their natural order—words came at will, and he seldom returned without having finished a song.... When the verses were finished, he passed them through the ordeal of Mrs. Burns's voice, listened attentively when she sang; asked her if any of the words were difficult; and when one happened to be too rough, he readily found a smoother; but he never, save at the resolute entreaty of a scientific musician, sacrificed sense to sound. The autumn was his favourite season, and the twilight his favourite hour of study."

Regret has often been expressed that Burns spent so much time and thought on writing his songs, and, in this way, diverted his energies from higher aims. Sir Walter has said, "Notwithstanding the spirit of many of his lyrics, and the exquisite sweetness and simplicity of others, we cannot but deeply regret that so much of his time and talents was frittered away in compiling and composing for musical collections. There is sufficient evidence that even the genius of Burns could not support him in the monotonous task of writing love-verses, on heaving bosoms and sparkling eyes, and twisting them into such rhythmical forms as might suit the capricious evolutions of Scotch reels and strathspeys." Even if Burns, instead of continual song-writing during the last eight years of his life, had concentrated his strength on "his grand plan of a dramatic composition" on the subject of Bruce's adventures, it may be doubted whether he would have done so much to enrich his country's literature as he has done by the songs he composed. But considering how desultory his habits (p. 161) became, if Johnson and Thomson had not, as it were, set him a congenial task, he might not have produced anything at all during those years. There is, however, another aspect in which the continual composition of love-ditties must be regretted. The few genuine love-songs, straight from the heart, which he composed, such as Of a' the Airts, To Mary in Heaven, Ye Banks and Braes, can hardly be too highly prized. But there are many others, which arose from a lower and fictitious source of inspiration. He himself tells Thomson that when he wished to compose a love-song, his recipe was to put himself on a "regimen of admiring a beautiful woman." This was a dangerous regimen, and when it came to be often repeated, as it was, it cannot have tended to his peace of heart, or to the purity of his life.