did. Whether or not Jean actually asked him a few days later, when he

found her bleaching linen on the green, if he had yet found such a lass, the fact was that he had. From that moment until his death Jean lavished upon him a docile and much-enduring devotion which leaves nothing derogatory in the comparison. She was playing with fire and must have known it. The scandal of Betty Paton was still fresh; Burns was a notorious man, glorying in the reputation of village Lothario and writing verses to warn the Mauchline belles how devastating he was. Experience had convinced him that all women are sisters under the skin--a dangerous half-truth which made trouble for him when he met women of another social level. They may all be sisters under the skin, but not on it or outside it. The fascination exerted so successfully over girls of his own class was in fact disastrous training for subsequent encounters with ladies. A lady may yield to a lover like any peasant lass, but she expects some finesse in his approach. But in the summer and autumn of 1785 Burns seemed as likely to enter Edinburgh drawing-rooms as to enter Parliament. He was merely an unsuccessful tenant-farmer with a dangerous talent for writing satirical verse and a dangerous light in his eye when an attractive young woman was in sight.

Between the tradition of his first meeting with Jean in 1785 and the beginning of surviving references to the affair in February, 1786, its history is a blank. On the surface Jean’s experience merely repeated Betty Paton’s. She surrendered to Burns and in due course endured the consequences. Yet on Burns’s side the cases were not alike. However brazenly he may have begun his courtship he soon found that Jean roused deeper emotions than Betty ever had. His first extant reference to the affair, apart from verses in praise of Jean’s charms, was on February 17th, 1786, when he told John Richmond--who after a similar scrape had fled to Edinburgh--that he had important news ‘not of the most agreable’ with respect to himself. In other words, Jean had told him she was pregnant. Entirely on his own initiative Burns undertook to do the right thing he had successfully avoided, or been dissuaded from, doing for Betty Paton. Sometime in March he gave Jean, if not marriage lines, at least some written acknowledgement that she was or would be his wife. That he acted in a certain glow of self-righteousness is a fair deduction from the violence of his subsequent reaction. Rab Mossgiel, the village Lothario, had behaved like a man of honour and expected due recognition of his conduct.

The recognition he got was humiliating in the extreme. The details can be reconstructed only by inference from the result. Apparently Jean’s parents, suspecting her condition, began to question her. She produced Burns’s written pledge. A domestic storm burst, not so much because Jean was to bear Burns’s child as because he expected Jean to bear his name. To James Armour an illegitimate grandchild was preferable to such a son-in-law as Robert Burns. Jean meekly surrendered her lines to her father--throughout her life she was usually passive in the hands of male authority--and Armour carried the document to Burns’s patron and friend, Robert Aiken, whom he persuaded to cut out the names. Not the least extraordinary element in the affair is the apparent belief of a successful lawyer that a contract could be voided merely by mutilating the written evidence. Armour’s desire publicly to humiliate Burns was greater than his desire to protect his daughter. He succeeded admirably. In the same letter in which the poet told Gavin Hamilton that the document was mutilated he declared he ‘had not a hope or even a wish to make her mine after her damnable conduct’, yet amid his execrations he paused to invoke a blessing on his ‘poor once-dear misguided girl’. The letter was the first of a series of denunciations and repudiations of Jean much too loud and too shrill to be convincing. They suggest that Burns had to talk at the top of his voice to maintain the degree of indifference which he felt self-respect called for.

Perhaps nothing in Burns’s whole life more completely demonstrates the impossibility of judging him and the society in which he was reared by the standards of nineteenth-century middle-class respectability. When James Armour learned that the subscription for the Kilmarnock _Poems_ was a success he showed that, though unwilling that his daughter should bear Burns’s name, he was quite willing she should share Burns’s money. Accordingly he sued out a writ _in meditatione fugae_ to require Burns to guarantee the support of Jean’s expected child. The news reached Burns, probably from Jean herself, and he acted promptly. By formal deed of assignment he conveyed to Gilbert not only his share in Mossgiel, but also the entire proceeds of his forthcoming poems in consideration of Gilbert’s undertaking to provide for Betty Paton’s child. Burns had checkmated James Armour, and so doing had almost evened the honours for ungenerous conduct. By nineteenth-century standards his conduct was caddish, but by the same standards Armour could have done only one of two things--either expel his daughter from his home, or protect her technical good name by insisting upon marriage however distasteful the prospective son-in-law was. But even by his own standards Burns was acting ignobly. The man who had written

‘But devil take the lousy loon Denies the bairn he got Or leaves the merry lass he lov’d To wear a ragged coat,’

and who less than six weeks after the deed of assignment eloquently reproached John Richmond for neglecting his late mistress and future wife and her baby daughter, was allowing spite to degrade him below the standards of the class to which he belonged by birth, and much further below the standards he had consciously set for himself. This was not acting according to the example of Harley the Man of Feeling. If the episode stood by itself it might be easier to condone. Unfortunately it is merely the first conspicuous incident in a series which includes his remarks about Jean to Clarinda and Bob Ainslie, his neglect of Jenny Clow, his attack upon dead Mrs. Oswald of Auchencruive, and his lampoons of Maria Riddell, and which justifies Henley’s phrase that such things ‘roused the cad’ in Burns. Where women were concerned, it was always too easy for him to drop the thin cloak of acquired culture and revert to his peasanthood.

Alongside the Armour quarrel runs the mystery of Mary Campbell. Burns himself began the mystery by his curiously veiled allusions to the affair, but the real work of obfuscation was done by biographers who erected upon exiguous foundations of fact an ornate superstructure of legend.

The exact date at which Burns composed the ‘Jolly Beggars’ is uncertain--if it was really written after a slumming frolic with John Richmond it must have been in 1785--but the closing episode is either autobiography or prophecy. The Bard, whose sentiments in the closing chorus are definitely Burns’s own, is depicted with a doxy upon either arm. After the stormy spring and summer of 1786 Burns confessed to Robert Aiken that he had plunged into all sorts of riot, Mason meetings, and dissipation, to distract his mind from the humiliation of the Armour affair. What form his dissipation took may reasonably be guessed not only from Burns’s own temperament but from human nature in general. Yet nothing about his relation with Mary Campbell is free of doubt. All that can definitely be proved is that there was a servant-lass of that name to whom Burns apparently addressed certain lyrics and to whom he certainly gave a pair of Bibles bearing peculiar inscriptions. It is useless to rehearse the endless controversy between the romantics to whom Mary Campbell was a Lily Maid of Astolat and the realists to whom she was just another girl who couldn’t say no. But a few facts must be underscored. The critical analysis of the legend made with caustic humour by Henley in 1896 and subsequently elaborated by Professor Snyder has never been rebutted nor even answered. The scripture texts Burns wrote on the fly-leaves of that Bible are such as would have been chosen by a man to whom a frightened girl was appealing for protection and who was impulsively promising it on his word of honour as a man and a Mason. That he also sang Mary’s praises as ‘Highland Lassie’ and in another lyric asked--for poetic effect at least--if she would go to the Indies with him means little, if anything. The enthusiasts prefer to forget that during the same summer Burns said farewell to Eliza Miller in a lyric quite as fervid as any of those addressed to Mary.

Out of the mass of legend and conjecture the only solid facts which emerge are that during this spring of 1786 Burns was having some sort of a love affair with Mary; that she left Ayrshire in May, and that she died in the early autumn. Burns may have turned to her for consolation after the breach with Jean; the affairs may have been simultaneous. Most biographers incline to the sequel theory on the naïve assumption that love affairs, unlike electric batteries, are always mounted in series and never in parallel. In view of the social attitude of the Ayrshire peasantry the question of whether or not Mary was technically chaste is both metaphysical and irrelevant. Burns’s attitude toward the other sex was direct; perhaps the strongest argument for Mary’s chastity would be the complete lack of reference to her in his contemporary letters, were it not for his subsequent description of her as ‘as charming a girl as ever blessed a man with generous love’. Burns ordinarily meant such expressions in the most literal sense. Despite the evidence in the Bibles that he had tried again to do the right thing it is hard to believe that in retrospect Mary would have touched him any more deeply than Jenny Clow or Anne Park later did had it not been for her untimely death. She certainly meant little in May and June of 1786. In the same month in which he gave her the Bible he composed the long and bawdy ‘Court of Equity’; throughout the summer his letters to his intimates mingle execration, devotion, and regret for Jean Armour in precisely the same tones he had used in April. A man who had really found an adequate new love might be supposed to speak of the old one as Burns had spoken of Peggy Thomson in 1784. Resentment of the Armours’ conduct might explain the execration, but hardly the regret and certainly not the devotion. If Burns really intended to make a new start in Jamaica with Mary Campbell, it is strange indeed that he never hinted of it to his friends--unless we accept the tradition, reported at second hand from John Richmond, that Mary was a light-skirts whose character Richmond and some other friends exposed to the poet. In that case, he would have had good reason for silence.

When in October he summed up his situation in a long letter to Robert Aiken it was still Jean who was the cause of his secret wretchedness and who was the source of ‘the pang of disappointment, the sting of pride, with some wandering stabs of remorse’. The sole passage in the letter which Snyder thought might apply to Mary--‘I have seen something of the storm of mischief thickening over my folly-devoted head’--may now be interpreted as referring instead to the disconcerting reappearance of Betty Paton as a claimant for support. The sole evidence surviving from 1786, apart from Burns’s lyrics, is his sister’s story, told many years after his death, that one day in October he received a letter which he read with a look of agony and then crushed into his pocket as he silently left the house. Connecting this story with Burns’s later statement that ‘a malignant fever hurried my dear girl to her grave before I could even hear of her illness’, biographers have assumed that the painful letter bore the news of Mary’s death. But this, even granting perfect reliability to Isabella Begg’s memory, is pure assumption. Burns’s sole references to her were written from three to five years after the supposed event. With one exception they were intended for the mystification rather than the enlightenment of Robert Riddell and George Thomson. That exception is the composition of ‘Thou Lingering Star’ and the letter to Mrs. Dunlop which accompanied it--both of them written in a neurotic state close to complete nervous breakdown. The Highland Mary we know is the creation of biographers, and should be suffered to abide in the Never-Never Land of romance. The truth about the Burns of flesh and blood had better be sought in his relations with flesh and blood women.

In these relations there were three main degrees. The foremost group consists of women who profoundly stirred him, and on whom for a time at least he concentrated his intellect and his affections as well as his desires. In this group belong Jean Armour, Margaret Chalmers, Clarinda, and probably Maria Riddell. Next come the women who engaged his passing fancy, and for whom he felt some tenderness, but who did not influence him deeply or long. Among these are Betty Paton, Anne Park, Jean Lorimer, and Jessie Lewars. A woman who appealed to Burns on either of these bases need not have been his mistress; in fact, only three of those named ever yielded to him. But below these was a third group, represented by Meg Cameron and Jenny Clow, who were mistresses and nothing more--the mere conveniences of the moment. These last never roused even a momentary spark of poetry in their lover. Judged purely on the basis of literary by-product, Mary Campbell belongs in the second group, but not in the first. Even her most ardent champion might hesitate to assert that any lyric addressed to her is the equal of ‘Ae fond kiss’ or ‘Of a’ the airts’. Jessie Lewars and Jean Lorimer both inspired better songs than Mary ever did.

But Burns’s tenderness, even for the women who meant most to him, was often of a peculiar sort. Though he told Deborah Davies that ‘Woman is the blood-royal of life; let there be slight degrees of precedency among them, but let them all be sacred’, his practice was more accurately summarized in what he said about love in confiding to George Thomson his admiration for Jean Lorimer:

‘... I am a very Poet in my enthusiasm of the Passion.--The welfare & happiness of the beloved Object, is the _first & inviolate_ sentiment that pervades my soul; & whatever pleasures I might wish for, or whatever might be the raptures they would give me, yet, if they interfere & clash with that _first_ principle, it is having these pleasures at a dishonest price; & Justice forbids, & Generosity disdains the purchase!--As to the herd of the Sex, who are good for little or nothing else, I have made no such agreement with myself; but where the Parties are capable of, & the Passion is, the true Divinity of love--the man who can act otherwise than as I have laid down, is a Villain!--’

One fears that Burns remained on these chivalrous heights only when the woman was unattainable; should she yield to him, she would too readily take her place among ‘the herd of the Sex’. Certainly he freely discussed his loves not only among his male friends but with a patroness like Mrs. Dunlop. When, for instance, after his conquering hero’s return to Mauchline in June, 1787, the Armours bade him welcome and Jean succumbed once more, he lost no time in reporting the victory to Smith and Ainslie. To put it briefly, beneath the veneer of sentiment, beneath even the poetic response, Burns’s attitude towards women of his own age was the elemental possessiveness which regards sex primarily as a ribald jest. His sincerest tenderness belonged to no woman as deeply as it did to his children, however or wherever begotten.

Burns never revealed more truly his own feelings than in the ‘Poet’s Welcome to his Bastart Wean’ which hailed the birth of his eldest child, Betty Paton’s daughter. Its mixture of bawdry with affection, of rollicking defiance of the unco guid with exultant pride in paternity, may distress the tender-minded who prefer not to admit the existence in parental relations of even a sublimated carnality, but it is the very essence of Burns himself. His plainest expressions of his love for his children occur not in letters to women but in letters to his most intimate male friends, and often amid flagrant ribaldry. It was not to Mrs. Dunlop that he wrote that Jean’s first twins ‘awakened a thousand feelings that thrill, some with tender pleasure and some with foreboding anguish, thro’ my soul’; it was to Robert Muir, companion of his revels and recipient of broad jests. Robert Aiken was told that the feelings of a father outweighed in Burns all the sound reasoning and all the bitter memories that joined in urging him to carry through the Jamaica project. ‘God bless them, poor little dears!’ he exclaimed to John Richmond on reporting the birth of the twins. Such remarks to men before whom he had no motive for acting a part, are more convincing proof of real feelings than are the dissertations, garnished with quotations from James Thomson’s dramas, on parental anxieties in his letters to Mrs. Dunlop.

Especially notable is the letter he wrote to Bob Ainslie on August 1, 1787, in response to the latter’s announcement of the birth of an illegitimate son. Beginning, ‘Give you joy, give you joy, my dear brother!’ he goes on to say that he has ‘double health and spirits at the news’, and to welcome Ainslie to ‘the society, the venerable Society of Fathers’. There follow eight lines of the metrical version of Psalm 127, obviously quoted with as much sincerity as when he later used it, in quite different context, in writing to John M’Auley. He continues, ‘My ailing child is got better, and the Mother is certainly in for it again, and Peggy [Meg Cameron] will bring me a half Highlandman’, and announces his intention of getting a farm, bringing them all up in fear of the Lord and of a good oak stick, and of being the happiest man alive. Then the letter shifts to snatches of bawdy song, some quoted, others apparently impromptu. This primitive joy in paternity, this exultation over the mere fact of birth, whether the child was his own or another’s, was part of his heritage from the Scottish soil. The same spirit shows three years later in his reply to Mrs. Dunlop’s news that her widowed daughter Mrs. Henri had borne a posthumous son:

‘... I literally, _jumped for joy_--how could such a mercurial creature as a Poet, lumpishly keep his seat on the receipt of the best news from his best Friend--I seized my gilt-headed Wangee rod, an instrument indispensably necessary in my left hand in the moment of Inspiration & Rapture--and stride--stride--quick & quicker--out skipt I among the broomy banks of Nith to muse over my joy by retail.’

Nor did his paternal emotions dissipate themselves in rejoicings over birth. Testimony abounds of his devotion to his children, his concern over their proper education, his anxiety for their futures. James Gray on evening visits in Dumfries found him explaining poetry to the eldest boy and hearing him recite his lessons; Maria Riddell was impressed by his constant devotion to the children’s welfare. But towards their mothers, once the fancy had passed, he was indifferent. ‘I am very sorry for it, but what is done is done’, he said of Meg Cameron, and though Clarinda’s rebuke stung him into something like remorse for his treatment of Jenny Clow, even there his last thought was for his son: ‘I would have taken my boy from her long ago, but she would never consent.’ The one possible exception to his generalization was Jean Armour, but Jean’s later history belongs elsewhere, beside Clarinda’s.

In brief, Burns’s experience among women up to his departure for Edinburgh had made him the ‘magerfu’’ man Sentimental Tommy had longed to be. His love-making might involve him in tangles which he was neither astute nor callous enough to avoid, but he had found his attraction enhanced by his reputation as a dangerous man. He had learned the value of aggressiveness; he had not learned finesse. When he met ladies his lack sooner or later became painfully evident.

Among women of the upper classes he was at his best in association with those whose interest was motherly rather than actually or potentially amorous. Before going to Edinburgh he had charmed middle-aged Mrs. Stewart of Stair as well as mature Mrs. Lawrie, wife of the minister of Loudoun, and had begun with Mrs. Dunlop a correspondence which ended only on his deathbed. In its progress this friendship reveals much of what was best in his relations with women; in the estrangement which interrupted it it reveals also his shortcomings. Since, moreover, it is the only one of his friendships in which both sides of the correspondence have been preserved, no guess-work is required in tracing its rise and decline.

Frances Anna Wallace Dunlop belonged by both birth and marriage to the old landed gentry of Scotland, and claimed collateral descent from Sir William Wallace. In the autumn of 1786 her mind was ‘in a state which, had it long continued my only refuge would inevitably have been a mad-house or a grave; nothing interested or amused me; all around me served to probe a wound whose recent stab was mortal to my peace, and had already ruined my health and benumbed my senses.’ Grief at her husband’s recent death had something to do with it, but the chief wound was her eldest son’s extravagance and marital scandals. About the beginning of November a copy of the Kilmarnock _Poems_ reached her and her reading of them--significantly enough it was ‘The Cotter’s Saturday Night’ and other poems based on the genteel tradition of eighteenth-century poetry that won her admiration--roused her to fresh interest in life. ‘The poignancy of your expression’, as she put it, ‘soothed my soul.’ To one reading her letters without reference to her age she often sounds like a decrepit and almost dying woman. Actually when she began writing to Burns she was only fifty-six, and she outlived him by nineteen years. She opened the correspondence with an order for six copies of the poems; the flattered poet could scrape together only five, which he dispatched with a complimentary letter that included the news that he was planning a second edition in Edinburgh. Mrs. Dunlop immediately elected herself one of his chief advisers, and among other things suggested that in revising his poems he should avoid describing her great ancestor as ‘unhappy Wallace’ and should make the Twa Dogs sit down more decorously. Later she offered the two most inept of all the recorded plans for the poet’s future. In February, 1787, she proposed that he should use the proceeds of his Edinburgh subscription to buy a commission in the army. The man who wrote ‘I murder hate by field or flood’ and whose dislike for ‘the lobster-coated puppies’ of the army more than once got him into hot water would have cut a strange figure in any officers’ mess. On April 1, 1789, she suggested his applying for the newly established Professorship of Agriculture at Edinburgh University. The self-taught peasant would have cut a still stranger figure as the colleague of Robertson, Cullen, and Blair.

The history of the first few months of his friendship with Mrs. Dunlop reveals how far Burns was from understanding the finer points of etiquette. To begin with he ignored her suggestions for altering his poems. True, he could do nothing else. Her advice was merely typical of what genteel Scotland thought about his work. To accept all emendations would have reduced his poems to namby-pamby; to accept some and reject others would have doubly offended those whose criticism he ignored. But he should have explained this to Mrs. Dunlop, and did not. Her vexation at the discovery was intensified by an innocent blunder he made in arranging for the delivery of copies she had ordered for her stepmother, the dowager Lady Wallace of Craigie. The copies went instead to the estranged wife of her eldest son, also a Lady Wallace but regarded by her mother-in-law as the worst blemish the family tree had ever suffered.

Their relations were first put on a really cordial basis when Burns visited her at Dunlop House in July, 1787. Annoyance at his social blunders evaporated before the charm of his personality, and thereafter the correspondence on both sides took a new tone of affection and esteem. Her interest in Burns was generous and motherly. She plied him with good advice, which he generally ignored, and frequently added substantial help with both money and influence. Towards her Burns seems to have felt as many a man does towards his mother--she bored him but he loved her. She often accused him, no doubt justly, of not reading her letters. They were long, tedious, and wholly unpunctuated; he probably glanced over them when they arrived and then laid them aside for more careful reading at a leisure hour which never came. But though he seldom answered her questions he took her unreservedly into his confidence--or almost unreservedly. He never did more than hint about Clarinda, but he told her everything about Jean. In fact he must have told almost too much; it is hard otherwise to explain his embarrassment over breaking the news that he had finally married the girl who had borne him ‘twice twins in seventeen months’.

By the beginning of 1788 the friendship was so firmly established as to survive a most humiliating incident. When he visited Dunlop House on his way back from Edinburgh in February his reception was warm and flattering. Mrs. Dunlop’s unmarried daughters were agog with admiration. Miss Rachel was hard at work on a painting of his muse, Coila, as to whose appearance she sought the poet’s expert advice. Miss Keith discussed poetry with him and revealed the somewhat surprising fact that she had never read Gray. Before he left he had promised to lend the ladies his copy of Spenser, a recent gift from William Dunbar of Edinburgh. When a few days later he fulfilled his promise he added to the parcel a copy of Gray as a present for Miss Keith, only to learn that a plebeian poet must not presume too far. Mrs. Dunlop replied that she did not allow her daughter to receive presents from men who were not members of her own family, and proposed either to return the whole book or at most to permit Miss Keith to tear out the pages containing the poems she liked best. That Burns continued in friendship with Mrs. Dunlop after this rebuff is eloquent proof of the esteem in which he held her; he had lampooned others of the gentry for less.

Not that this was the only time when Mrs. Dunlop made him conscious of the difference in their ranks. Her occasional gift of a five-pound note, though usually tactfully designated as for some special purpose or occasion, always hurt his pride--the more so because he could not deny that he needed the money. He silently drew the line, however, when she proposed, in one of those fits of economy which sometimes afflict the well-to-do, that he help to sell some decorative fringe which she had been manufacturing. Over this as over others of his sins of omission she displayed an irritability more like a schoolgirl’s than a grandmother’s; most schoolgirlish in its evanescence. A thorough scolding which sounded like a total breach of relations would be countered by some new poems or new compliments from Burns, and her next letter would contain a five-pound note for the latest baby.

Though as Burns became more heavily burdened with labour and responsibility his letters grew shorter and fewer than at the peak of the correspondence during the summer of 1788, no serious rift appeared until December, 1792. When it came it was the result of Burns’s pride working in combination with his want of tact. Among the servants on Mrs. Dunlop’s estate was a milkmaid named Jenny Little, whom Burns’s success had inspired to burst into rime. Burns had already endured a good deal of her output, both from manuscripts sent to him by Mrs. Dunlop and from a pilgrimage of adoration which Jenny had made to Ellisland in 1790--an unsuccessful pilgrimage, for she had found the poet laid up with a broken arm and in no mood for entertaining an aspiring poetess. When Burns reached Dunlop in 1792 he found his patroness’s interest in her protégée still unshaken. With her assistance Jenny had recently printed her poems, and Mrs. Dunlop produced the volume with the request that Burns give his opinion of certain of the verses which she pointed out. He said, ‘Do I have to read all those?’ in a tone which she afterwards described as the equivalent of a slap in the face.

It was supreme tactlessness. Burns was bored and showed it. A more politic man would have waded through the verses however much his jaw might ache with suppressed yawns. But boredom was not the worst aspect of the incident from Burns’s point of view: his pride was wounded. Of all his patrons in the upper ranks of society Mrs. Dunlop alone had kept up her interest in him and had appeared to treat him as an equal. Now she unconsciously revealed that she saw no _essential_ difference between his writing and Jenny Little’s. To her he was after all merely a peasant poet with the accent on the adjective; the difference between him and Jenny Little was a difference in degree and not in kind. Both wrote in dialect; she failed to see that one wrote Scots poetry and the other Scots twaddle.

The incident illustrates once more what Maria Riddell meant when she described Burns as devoid in great measure of refinement and social graces. The abrupt and masterful manner, successful with the girls of his own original class, sooner or later annoyed other ladies besides the Duchess of Gordon. Mrs. Dunlop, however, did not allow her vexation to cause an immediate coolness; she contented herself with a lengthy silence followed by an explanation of her reasons for being offended. Yet when the real break came two years later Burns’s unbridled tongue and pen were again at fault. Mrs. Dunlop heartily disapproved of his sympathy with the French Revolution, and had warned him more than once to drop the subject in his letters. Inasmuch as four of her sons and one grandson were or had been in the army and two of her daughters were married to French royalist refugees, Burns should have known that her sympathies would be Tory. Yet in face of her warnings he wrote in January, 1794, the most outspoken of all his political remarks, describing Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette as a perjured blockhead and an unprincipled prostitute who had met their deserved fate at the hangman’s hands, and adding a guarded hope that revolutionary principles might have more scope in England. This time Mrs. Dunlop broke off the correspondence. Though Burns made two attempts during the next year to reopen it, she maintained dogged silence until his pathetic letter of farewell, written on his deathbed, at last broke down her reserve. Her letter of reconciliation was almost the last message which reached him before his death. For a century charitable biographers conjectured that the estrangement must have been due to the lady’s hearing reports that Burns was living an evil life in Dumfries. The recovery of the complete text of his letter of January, 1794, revealed the simple truth that the breach resulted from nothing more serious than a failure in tact. There, as always, his trouble came because he had not taken heed to his ways, that he offend not with his tongue.

The same trouble underlay his relations with other women of a rank above his own--Margaret Chalmers, Agnes M’Lehose, and Maria Riddell, though in different ways and different degrees. With Margaret Chalmers, indeed, he maintained for a couple of years the nearest approach he ever made to a non-flirtatious friendship with a woman of his own age, but of the three just named this clever daughter of a gentleman farmer in Ayrshire was the least removed in station from himself. Unfortunately, only Burns’s side of the correspondence survives, and that in fragments. Apparently it began, as usual, with love-making, but when Margaret gently put a stop to that--probably by telling Burns that she was already engaged to Lewis Hay, whom she married in 1788--their relation ripened into a genuine friendship which produced what Cromek rightly called some of the best letters Burns ever wrote. The poet took her unreservedly into his confidence about his troubles with Creech and his anxiety over his future, so that his three or four letters to her during the height of his correspondence with Clarinda come like a breath of bleak but pure air in that hothouse atmosphere. But the friendship ended, apparently through Burns’s neglect. Two years after her marriage he sent regards to her through another friend, and called himself a wretch for not writing her, but seemingly he could not write when he felt that his confidences might be shared with her husband. An estranged husband would not have mattered, as his flirtation with Agnes M’Lehose proved.

The Clarinda episode has more prominence in most accounts of Burns than it deserves. In its beginning and growth it was in fact quite untypical of the man--his one intensive effort to act a part not natural to him. Its development in this way was mainly the result of the accident which threw him back on letter-writing instead of speech in conducting his suit. Agnes M’Lehose when Burns met her was a plump young matron about his own age. Born Agnes Craig of Glasgow and a relative of one of the Lords of Session, she had married in romantic haste at the age of seventeen a young lawyer named James M’Lehose, and when Burns met her had already had eleven years of leisure to repent. Her husband, after abusing and neglecting her and getting into debt and disgrace, had at last been exiled by indignant relatives to Jamaica--that tropical refuge for Britons who had made their native climate too hot for them. His wife, trying to rear three sickly children on a microscopic annuity, had turned for consolation to literature and religion. In the latter she had espoused under the dynamic preaching of the Rev. John Kemp the strictest tenets of Calvinism; in the former she had familiarized herself with the most elegant authors of the day and had taken to versifying occasionally with the fluency and inaccuracy prevalent among women poets prior to Christina Rossetti and Emily Brontë. Like most of Edinburgh in 1787 she had been eager to meet Burns. When at last she did so at a tea-party given by her friend, Miss Erskine Nimmo, she and Burns became so visibly absorbed in each other as to rouse the amusement of the other guests. The poet’s experiences hitherto with young women of the upper classes had been disappointing. They were polite and attentive, but reserved. Here at last was an indubitable lady, and a young and attractive one at that, who displayed something like the enthusiastic attention he had been accustomed to receive from the belles of Mauchline. Before the tea was over Burns had accepted Mrs. M’Lehose’s invitation to a party of her own. If ever a woman threw herself at a man’s head Agnes M’Lehose did, and Burns was not the man to refuse such a challenge. A letter to Richard Brown in the early days of his infatuation leaves no doubt that he thought he had made a conquest; but he had reckoned without Clarinda’s Calvinism and her social traditions.

The affair might have spent itself in a passing flirtation had not chance, in the form of a drunken driver who overturned a coach and dislocated the poet’s knee, confined him to his room for several weeks. His note explaining and deploring his inability to attend the tea-party was answered by one offering sympathy and regret. Burns and Mrs. M’Lehose both wielded free-flowing pens; their correspondence rapidly gained momentum and fervour. By the third exchange of letters she felt it her duty to remind him that she was a married woman. The result may or may not have been what she intended. Assuring her that his intentions were strictly honourable Burns seized the opportunity to express far more ardent chivalry and devotion than he would probably have ventured on had she been free. In reply she suggested their writing under Arcadian pseudonyms--no doubt as evidence of the strictly Platonic nature of their sentiments; displayed her acquaintance with _The Spectator_ by calling herself Clarinda; and suggested Sylvander for Burns. Having thus safely wrapped their correspondence in asbestos they relaxed in a vapour-bath of emotion.

Less than three weeks after Burns’s accident he was assuring Clarinda that she was a gloriously amiable fine woman and was promising life-long devotion. But he was not admitting her as yet into his inner doubts and perplexities. Margaret Chalmers was the only woman who shared those. In fact both Sylvander and Clarinda seemed to have reserved their more intimate communications for personal speech. Apparently not until their long-deferred second meeting in January did Burns tell her about Jean and his children and Clarinda give him the whole tale of her unhappy marriage. She also sought in both speech and writing to convert him to Mr. Kemp’s particular brand of Calvinism. But here even at the height of his infatuation she failed. The most she got was a partial recantation of his liking for the heroic qualities of Milton’s Satan.

So long as communication was limited to pen and ink the affair for Burns was little more than a literary exercise. After they began to meet it became different and, in its effects on him, worse. Physical nearness could not fail to stir a man of his temperament. Soon their conversation was supplemented by caresses which Clarinda, however, managed to keep within bounds. As a result, Burns left these interviews with his blood at fever heat. A servant-girl named Jenny Clow, successor to the Meg Cameron of the previous winter, provided the consummation which Clarinda denied, and in due course added yet another to his growing list of paternal, legal, and emotional perplexities.

Clarinda was of course unaware of Jenny’s existence, but she soon had other reasons for being uncomfortable. Edinburgh was not a city in which a gentlewoman could be indiscreet and get away with it. More than a dozen years later Euphemia Boswell told Joseph Farington that Edinburgh’s chief drawback was that everybody knew all his neighbours’ affairs. The poet’s visits to the Potterrow were freely discussed. Lord Craig heard of them and was annoyed by his kinswoman’s indiscretion; the Rev. Mr. Kemp heard of them and felt it his duty to admonish his parishioner. When Clarinda confided these troubles to Burns they of course roused him to new fervours of knight-errantry. Moreover, other agitations were intensifying the emotional stress of the love affair. A great lady named Mrs. Stewart who was expected to help his Excise project chose to lecture him on the error of his ways; rumours were afloat that William Creech was insolvent; above all there was bad news from Mauchline. Jean’s parents had this time chosen the heavy melodramatic role and had bidden their erring daughter not to darken their doors again. She was being sheltered by friendly Mrs. Muir of Tarbolton Mill, but her future was black. In these circumstances it is unjust in the extreme to judge Burns’s conduct by the cool standards of sobriety and sanity. The man was in such a state of frenzy that he cannot be held accountable for his words nor even for all his actions.

What had begun as a flirtation and had continued, in part at least, as a piece of play-acting had by the middle of February become an imbroglio. Burns and Clarinda, both of them sentimentalists whose roused emotions were stronger than their reason, had gone so far that they could no longer regard their relations as simple friendship. By the time Burns set out on the 18th for Mauchline by way of Glasgow he had indulged in a perfect delirium of sentiment and rash vows. If he had not actually pledged himself to wait until James M’Lehose should be considerate enough to die and leave Clarinda free to marry Sylvander it at least appears that she expected him to wait. Meanwhile they were to write to each other every day.

The artificial and hothouse nature of the affair is fully demonstrated by the change which came over Burns’s letters as soon as removal from Edinburgh plunged him into the chilly air of everyday. The promise of a daily letter was the first to fail. Burns reached Glasgow on the evening of the 18th to find Richard Brown awaiting him at the Black Bull Inn in the company of young William Burns, who had ridden up from Mauchline with his brother’s horse. Before settling to a convivial evening Burns managed to dispatch a hurried note to Clarinda, but it was four days before he found time to write again. His next letter shows how effectively those four days had brought him back from a sentimental dream-world to crude reality. Doubtless William had brought the latest bulletins about Jean, but no hint of them was passed on to Clarinda. A feverish day of entertainment among the prosperous weavers of Paisley was followed by two days of more decorous pleasure at Dunlop House and then by another wild bout at Kilmarnock. The letter from Kilmarnock is devoted mainly to a broadly humorous account of his Paisley host’s troubles with a daughter who had been to boarding school, a son who wanted a latchkey, and himself who thought it better to re-marry than to burn. Not a word about Jean, scarcely a word about worthy Mrs. Dunlop and none about artistic Miss Rachel and poetic Miss Keith--in short, just such a letter as Burns might have written to Bob Ainslie or Alexander Cunningham, and in comparison with all the previous Clarinda correspondence as inappropriate as Falstaff in love.

But this letter jars on the reader only because it is wrong in its context. Two which he wrote after his arrival at Mauchline on the 23rd jar for a different reason. Only one of these, however, was to Clarinda. She had given him a couple of little shirts for Baby Robert, who was being cared for at Mossgiel. As soon as he had delivered these and seen his family, Burns set off to interview ‘a certain woman’ at Tarbolton Mill. ‘I am disgusted with her; I cannot endure her! I, while my heart smote me for the prophanity, tried to compare her with my Clarinda: ’twas setting the expiring glimmer of a farthing taper beside the cloudless glory of the meridian sun. Here was tasteless insipidity, vulgarity of soul, and mercenary fawning; there, polished good sense, heaven-born genius, and the most generous, the most delicate, the most tender Passion. I have done with her and she with me.’

Of the many things in Burns’s life which might better have been left unsaid or undone this letter might claim first place were it not for the one he wrote to Bob Ainslie ten days later. Here he describes his reconciliation with Jean. What makes this letter revolting is not so much its biological detail as the realization that the alleged events which Burns describes occurred less than a fortnight before Jean’s confinement. On March 3 she again bore her lover twins, who did not live even long enough to be baptized. Still worse, if it is true, is his assertion that he had sworn Jean ‘privately and solemnly never to attempt any claim on me as a husband, even though anybody should persuade her she had such a claim, which she has not, neither during my life nor after my death. She did all this like a good girl....’ Here, however, it is more than possible that he was talking brazenly for Ainslie’s edification; Henley’s doubt that Mrs. Armour could have been reconciled to her daughter without a promise of marriage seems well founded. Moreover the statement proves that by this time, whatever he may have thought in 1786, Burns realized that the destruction of the original marriage lines had not necessarily voided the contract.

Whatever he said or did at his first interview with Jean he must, before he returned to Edinburgh in March, have made up his mind that sooner or later he would acknowledge Jean as his wife. The letters to Clarinda during the remaining two weeks of his absence were noticeably lacking in fervour. They contained, however, more news about his personal affairs, especially the doubts and uncertainties that still kept him hesitating between farming and the Excise, than any of the earlier ones did. An unsolved mystery in his life is the nature of his relations with Clarinda during the fortnight he spent in Edinburgh in March. To the modern reader with full knowledge of the facts the fervour of his latest letters seems still more forced and artificial than before, but it may be questioned if this truth was equally obvious to Clarinda. Indeed their final meeting, at which Burns presented her with a pair of drinking-glasses, a poem, and an inscribed copy of Young’s ‘Night Thoughts’, clearly had enough romantic intensity to satisfy even Clarinda. Herein lies the mystery. The later developments prove that Burns had told her nothing of his reconciliation with Jean, yet Burns was not a man who could ordinarily act a part convincingly. This time he must have tried. The results, combined with anxiety over livelihood, are displayed in a letter of March 20, in which he told Richard Brown that worry over his lease, ‘racking shop accounts’ with Creech, ‘together with watching, fatigue, and a load of care almost too heavy for my shoulders, have in some degree actually fever’d me.... These eight days, I have been positively crazed.’

He returned to Mauchline on the 22d to receive his six weeks of Excise instructions, publicly to acknowledge Jean as his wife, and incidentally to compose a formula whereby to explain his action to his friends and patrons:

‘I had a long and much-loved fellow creature’s happiness or misery in my determination, and I durst not trifle with so important a deposite.’

This statement with only slight variations he used to half-a-dozen different correspondents. Whether he used it to Clarinda or not is uncertain; he may have entrusted Ainslie with the delicate task of breaking the news. However the news reached her, it quite naturally angered her. If Burns wrote it to her she destroyed the letter, and we know that he destroyed her reply calling him a Villain and accusing him of perfidious treachery. When he visited Edinburgh again in February, 1789, she refused to see him and told Ainslie that she intended to keep away from her windows while he was in town lest she catch a glimpse of him in the street.

In the fall of 1791, however, she had a chance to reopen the correspondence. Jenny Clow in June, 1788, had undertaken some sort of legal action against Burns and one purpose of his return to Edinburgh in the following February had been to settle with her. Whatever the nature of the settlement it had not helped much. When in 1791 Jenny somehow communicated with Clarinda, the latter found the girl ill, destitute, and friendless, in a miserable lodging. Clarinda’s discovery of the means whereby Sylvander had managed to keep his courtship on so lofty a plane must have been humiliating and disillusioning, but she was woman enough to turn her discovery to account. Her letter to Burns described Jenny’s condition briefly and effectively and suggested that there was a striking contrast between his practice and the high principles of generosity and humanity which he professed. She meant her letter to sting, and it did. Burns begged her to relieve Jenny’s immediate needs and promised personal action at the first opportunity. At this point Jenny vanishes from the record. What Burns did, whether Jenny lived or died, whether her son lived or died, if he lived what became of him--all these are questions without answers.

Meanwhile Clarinda had been attempting to re-establish her own life. Her husband had sought a reconciliation, and she was planning to join him in Jamaica. When Burns made his last visit to Edinburgh in November, 1791, her departure was already arranged. She was fully reconciled to Sylvander now, and for the first time their relationship revealed simple and genuine emotion. The Arcadian names vanished in the correspondence; she became ‘my dearest Nancy’ instead of Clarinda, and when Burns returned to Dumfries, fully convinced that he had said farewell forever, he produced the one really first-rate lyric Clarinda ever inspired--‘Ae Fond Kiss, and Then We Sever’.

The sequel was the last of the anti-climaxes which marked the affair. Clarinda reached Jamaica to find James M’Lehose’s disposition not sweetened by time, and a brood of mulatto children proved that he had not suffered by her absence. She returned to Scotland on the same ship which took her out. For some time after her return she did not communicate with Burns. When she did so it was in terms of cautious esteem which inspired him to so bombastic a reply that he shortly afterwards tried to disguise its date by describing a transcript of it as ‘the fustian rant of enthusiastic youth’. The first part of the description is accurate. For Burns the episode was closed, and closed, as it had opened, in posturing affectation of emotion. But Clarinda lived on it for the rest of her long life, exhibiting his letters to her friends after his death until some of them were worn to tatters. Her caution, however, equalled her vanity. After some of the letters had been surreptitiously transcribed and published in 1802 she went over the manuscripts, destroying the addresses, scoring out or clipping away proper names and erasing some of the more ardent love-making, and being reduced at last in senile old-age to selling some of them for a few shillings each. Sylvander’s was the happier fate after all.

Meanwhile, whatever bombast or adoration her husband was addressing to Clarinda, the ‘certain woman’ was lavishing on Burns the devotion he had wished for at his first meeting. Various stories are told of how and when he acknowledged Jean as his wife. The probability is that he never did so, in the sense of going through a formal marriage service. On April 28th he confided to James Smith that ‘Mrs. Burns’ was Jean’s ‘private designation’; a month later, in a letter to Ainslie, he avowed the title ‘to the World’. By Scots law, avowal in the presence of witnesses constituted a legal, though irregular, marriage; a peculiar letter to Smith at the end of June suggests that Burns even evaded this legal requirement:

‘I have waited on Mr. Auld about my Marriage affair, & stated that I was legally fined for an irregular marriage by a Justice of the Peace.--He says if I bring an attestation of this by the two witnesses, there shall be no more litigation about it.--As soon as this comes to hand, please write me in the way of familiar Epistle that, “Such things are.”’

In other words, he was asking Smith--who had not lived in Mauchline for two years--to testify, but not on oath, that Burns had acknowledged the marriage in his presence. Armed with Smith’s letter, and another, he then presented himself again before the minister, who overlooked the doubtful legality of the evidence as two years before he had allowed Burns’s doubtful status as a bachelor. On August 5th Burns and Jean made their formal appearance before the Kirk Session, avowed their marriage as of 1786, and were readmitted to the communion after ‘Mr. Burns gave a Guinea note for the behoof of the Poor.’

All this time Burns was alternating between Mauchline and Ellisland, to the detriment of his interests in each place. A man absent from his farm every other fortnight could scarcely expect work to go forward quickly, but there were no living accommodations for Jean and young Robert until in October a neighbour, moving into Dumfries for the winter, offered Burns the use of his house. But the periods of absence roused Burns once more to lyric fervour for Jean, and the man who six months earlier had pledged undying devotion to Clarinda composed ‘Of a’ the airts’ in tribute to his wife.

But it was the last song that can with complete certainty be connected with Jean. She sank before long to the status of a hard-working, child-bearing domestic fixture, losing her good looks--at first sight of her in 1790 John Syme concluded that Burns’s lyrics in her praise were poetic licence--but keeping her equable temper and her devotion to her husband. Of all the women who had loved Burns more or less, and whom he, more or less, had loved, she alone had to live with him. And yet she continued to love him, not weighing his merits, but pardoning his offences. She had things to pardon, though when he married her Burns thought he had shaken himself ‘loose of a very bad failing.’ Eighteen months after this announcement of reformation, Jean went home to Ayrshire for a visit, and her husband strayed into the arms of Anne Park at the Globe Inn. When the blonde barmaid in due course bore him a child, and died in doing it, Jean took in the little girl and reared her with ‘no distinction shown between that and the rest of their children.’ Maria Riddell, whose words are just quoted, added that Burns told her the story ‘with much sensibility’.

Burns could not take Jean into the society to which he was himself admitted, so she remained unnoticed at home, tending the children and keeping the house in slatternly Scots fashion, but with a sober Scots thrift which probably accounted for her husband’s living within his income and at last dying with little more than the debts incurred during his final illness. Burns seldom spoke of her in his last years, but when he did so it was ‘with a high tribute of respect and esteem’. Maria Riddell--perhaps a prejudiced witness--states that ‘he did not love her, but he was far from insensible to the indulgence and patience, “the meekness with which she bore her faculties” on many occasions very trying to the tempers of most individuals of our sex.’ One suspects, sometimes, that Burns would never have continued to love any woman after he had won her; that no matter who she was, he might still have summed up his marriage as he did to John Beugo:

‘Depend upon it, if you do not make some damned foolish choice, [marriage] will be a very great improvement on the Dish of Life.--I can speak from Experience, tho’ God knows my choice was random as Blind-man’s buff. I like the idea of an honest country Rake of my acquaintance, who, like myself, married lately.--Speaking to me of his late step, “L--d, man,” says he, “a body’s baith cheaper and better sair’t!”’--

Maria Riddell may have been one reason for Burns’s abrupt closure of the correspondence with Clarinda in 1793. After Clarinda had refused to continue it as an emotional communion he no longer needed it as an intellectual one. He had found a woman friend who surpassed Clarinda as much in intellect as she did in social position, and the only occasion on which he reopened communications with Agnes M’Lehose was during his subsequent estrangement from Mrs. Riddell--when he used the opportunity to send Clarinda copies of the crude lampoons he had composed upon Maria.

Walter Riddell, younger brother of Burns’s friend at Friars Carse, had compressed a good deal of experience into the first twenty-eight years of his life. After a short period in the army he had married an heiress who within a year made him a widower and the owner of an estate in Antigua. In 1790 he met at St. Kitts Maria Banks Woodley, youngest daughter of the governor of the Leeward Islands, and after a brief courtship married her when she still lacked two months of being eighteen. Though Maria’s mother was a native of St. Kitts, the girl had been born and educated in England and soon after their marriage the young couple returned there.

According to one interpretation of a letter from Francis Grose to Burns in January, 1791, they must have proceeded at once to an autumn visit at Friars Carse, where Grose was also a guest. Grose told Burns that ‘after the Scene between Mrs. Riddell Jun^r and your humble Servant, to which you was witness, it is impossible I can ever come under her Roof again.’ The letter also refers to the Governor--‘a spoilt Child with a Number of good Qualities’--whom its editor identifies as Walter Riddell, Mrs. Riddell Junior being Maria. But there was also an extremely senior Mrs. Riddell at Friars Carse, for Robert’s grandmother lived with him. Hence the Junior may equally well have been Mrs. Robert Riddell, and inasmuch as Maria had no roof of her own in Scotland until 1792, it is hard to see how any misconduct of hers could have shut Friars Carse to Grose.

If this was really Maria’s first meeting with Burns it was an inauspicious start. But the early stages of the friendship are obscure. The extant correspondence does not begin until February, 1792, and by that time Maria’s life was so truly invaluable to Burns that to lose her would leave a vacuum in his enjoyments that nothing could fill up. By this time, too, she was the mother of a daughter, born in England in August, 1791. Her husband was again in Dumfries, negotiating for an estate, and Maria had gone to Edinburgh with the double purpose of seeking expert medical advice and finding a printer for her narrative of her voyage to the West Indies. To this latter end Burns introduced her to his old friend Smellie in a letter which paid the highest compliments to her intellectual and literary accomplishments--if it can be called a high compliment to say that her verses ‘always correct, and often elegant’, were ‘very much beyond the common run of Lady Poetesses of the day’. The introduction resulted in a friendship between Smellie and Maria of which the written records, being more decorous than Burns’s own letters to the printer, were published by the latter’s biographer. Maria liked to collect curios, and her interest in Smellie might perhaps be thus explained. But the gruff and erudite printer’s continued interest in Maria is further evidence that she had brains as well as charm, though her letters are evidence enough.

In the spring of 1792 Walter Riddell purchased the estate of Goldielea near Dumfries, renamed it Woodley Park in Maria’s honour, and set up as a country gentleman. More accurately, he paid a small deposit on the purchase price without knowing how he would raise the main sum. Burns visited frequently at Woodley Park, though its master bored him. Walter Riddell apparently shared his brother’s convivial habits without his brother’s modicum of literary and intellectual interests, and the poet’s attitude towards him is more clearly shown by the almost total absence of Walter’s name from his letters to Walter’s wife than even by the crude epitaph which described the man as empty-headed and poisonous-hearted.

In letter-writing at least the friendship with Maria reached perihelion in the autumn of 1793. Walter was then in the West Indies, trying to raise money on his estate there, and Maria was living alone at Woodley Park with her books, her music, and two baby daughters. By this time Burns was ponderously flirtatious. Maria was the first and fairest of critics, the most amiable and most accomplished of her sex, and it was the final proof of his unhappy lot that when he was in love ‘Impossibility presents an impervious barrier to the proudest daring of Presumption, & poor I dare much sooner peep into the focus of Hell, than meet the eye of the goddess of my soul!’ At least one impassioned lyric which originally began ‘The last time I cam o’er the moor And passed Maria’s dwelling’ had been composed and submitted to the lady’s criticism accompanied by a postscript which transparently disclaimed personal application. In Walter’s absence, many of their meetings during this autumn were at the homes of mutual friends or at the little receptions which Maria held between the acts in her box at the theatre. These latter, however, were sometimes subject to interruptions. On at least one occasion Burns found an army officer--‘a lobster-coated puppy’--already in possession, and withdrew without even announcing himself. Maria chided him for his failure to appear and invited him formally to share her box at the next performance; he kept her supplied with all his latest lyrics, including those addressed to Clarinda.

It would be a mistake to take Burns’s impassioned avowals too seriously. Maria was a young and fascinating woman of the type which pleases men better than it does members of her own sex, and Burns thoroughly enjoyed her conversation. To the pleasures of intellectual intercourse her company added a subdued erotic stimulation which he expressed in the only language he knew. The very frankness of his remarks and Maria’s calm acceptance of them is proof that they were neither meant nor taken literally.

And then came the breach seemingly inevitable in Burns’s relations with every woman of higher station. Its details are still obscure. Even its exact date cannot be determined, though it must have been in Christmas week of 1793. The traditional story is that Burns was dining at Woodley Park and that the men’s talk over their wine somehow got round to the Rape of the Sabines. It was drunkenly agreed that on returning to the drawing-room the men should stage a burlesque of the episode. They did, and Burns, singling out his hostess as his prey, put too much ardour into the game. Mrs. Carswell interprets the thing as a deliberate rag on the part of the other men to get Burns to make a fool of himself. Such at any rate was the result. After a stormy scene during which some of the other ladies present tried to intercede for the poet he was ignominiously expelled. The next day he grovelled in contrition before the offended lady in the painfully humiliating ‘letter from Hell’. She refused to be placated and after two more abortive efforts on Burns’s part the breach between them was complete.

This accepted story leaves unexplained several important details. Foremost among them is the fact that in his apology Burns blames his host for constraining him to drink more than he wished to. Maria had told Smellie in November that Walter Riddell was in the West Indies and was not expected back until spring. On January 12th, when the breach with Burns had already occurred, she again mentioned her husband’s absence. If these letters were correctly printed by Smellie’s biographer, Walter Riddell could not have been the host; therefore the scene could not have occurred at Woodley Park. The alternative explanation is that it really happened at Friars Carse, with Robert and Elizabeth Riddell in the roles usually assigned to Walter and Maria. In this case Maria, hearing of Burns’s conduct, must have undertaken to discipline him.

Whatever the circumstances, Burns’s subsequent conduct was inexcusable. During the early spring of 1794 he wrote several epigrams on Maria which are utterly caddish, lacking alike in wit and decent feeling. One of them he even offered to a London newspaper, the editor of which had sense enough to reject it. He also wrote the long, dull, and vulgar parody of Pope which bears the title ‘Esopus to Maria’ and which attacks everything about Mrs. Riddell from her hair to her morals. This last was meant for the ‘quite private’ delectation of John Syme and one or two other intimates, but even if Burns had published it his conduct could not have appeared in much worse light. The epigrams and the ‘Monody on a Lady Famed for Her Caprice’ are enough in themselves to put it beyond condoning.

While Burns was thus exhibiting the worst side of his nature, his victims’ circumstances were changing. Walter Riddell had returned from the Indies without the money he had gone to raise, and in the course of the spring Woodley Park was repossessed by its former owner, Walter forfeiting his £1000 deposit on the purchase price as well as all that he had laid out in improvements. On April 21st Robert Riddell died, and Friars Carse was put on the market, the relations between the two families being so uncordial that Elizabeth Riddell refused any settlement which would leave her brother-in-law in possession of the estate. Walter and Maria attempted the usual expedient of impoverished gentry--a prolonged stay on the Continent--but found their way barred by the armies of the French Revolution. Accordingly after a few months in England they returned to the neighbourhood of Dumfries to resume life on a much reduced scale. They settled at Tinwald House, a tumble-down estate near Lochmaben, or rather Maria settled, for her husband was absent most of the time. In May, 1795, they moved again, this time to Halleaths, between Lochmaben and Lockerbie, where they remained until they left Scotland forever in 1797. How much Maria had heard of Burns’s conduct towards her no one but herself knew, and she never told. When Currie published some of the letters referring to the quarrel she affected complete ignorance of their relation to herself, though it is hard to believe that some kind friend had not shown them to her.

If Burns showed the worst side of his nature in the quarrel, Maria showed the best of hers in the reconciliation. Early in 1795 she made the first move by sending him a book she had heard he wished to read. He replied in a formal note in the third person which nevertheless welcomed the overture and opened the way for further intercourse. By the beginning of May he was writing in his old vein of flirtatious gaiety and even confiding to Maria about the mysterious Reid miniature of himself--mysterious because no one knows for whom he had it painted, nor why. The woman who quarrelled with Burns in 1794 may have been capricious, and have pushed her rigour further than was wise in dealing with a man of Burns’s temperament. After all, twenty-one is not infallible even when feminine and married. But the woman who reinstated Burns in her good graces in 1795, after his caddish attacks upon her, was certainly not petty.

The renewed friendship had not long to live. Shadows of another sort soon began to fall across it, for Burns’s health was breaking. A note written at the end of May to accompany the loan of the Reid miniature mentioned that he was so ill as scarcely to be able to hold pen to paper; a month later he feared that his health was gone forever. The autumn brought further affliction in the death of his little daughter, and it was to Maria that he uttered the only existing record of his grief: ‘That you, my friend, may never experience such a loss as mine, sincerely prays R B.’

And so, through bereavement, illness, and despair, the passionate, irritable poet and the vivacious young woman of the world drew towards their last meeting. The bleak little watering-place, the Brow Well on the Solway, was the scene. Maria’s health also was bad, and she evidently, like Burns, lacked the funds to take her to a better resort. On the 5th of July, 1796, she sent her carriage for Burns: not until she saw him did she realize how serious his condition was.

He was dying, and knew it. His overdriven heart, which had never wholly recovered from the strain of doing a man’s work on insufficient food at the age of fourteen, was giving out, and he was hastening his end according to the best medical advice in Dumfries. A doctor who thought that angina was ‘flying gout’ had ordered sea bathing, and the dying poet was plunging himself daily in the chilly waters of the Solway, as he had earlier in life sought to cure fainting-fits in a tub of cold water at his bedside. Maria was startled by the visible stamp of death on the features of the emaciated man who tottered from her carriage, and her concern was increased by his almost total inability to eat. But the presence of a young and attractive woman could still, as always, rouse Burns to his best efforts, and his talk might even have been gay--after his preliminary, ‘Well, Madam, have you any messages for the other world?’--had Maria been able to forget his haggard countenance long enough to reply in kind.

As it was, they had ‘a long and serious conversation about his present situation, and the approaching termination of all his earthly prospects.’ The man who had never lied about himself, to himself or others, now frankly faced the fact that he was dying. And the presence of a sympathetic and intelligent listener urged him on to speech about the matters nearest his heart. Two things perturbed him on the brink of the grave--anxiety for his family, and anxiety for his fame. His eldest son was not yet ten; there were three younger, and Jean was hourly expecting a fifth; at least two others needed a father’s help to lighten the stigma of illegitimacy. And as for his literary reputation--

‘He said he was well aware that his death would occasion some noise, and that every scrap of his writing would be revived against him to the injury of his future reputation: that letters and verses written with unguarded and improper freedom, and which he earnestly wished to have buried in oblivion, would be handed about by idle vanity or malevolence when no dread of his resentment would restrain them or prevent the censures of shrill-tongued malice or the insidious sarcasms of envy from pouring forth all their venom to blast his fame.’

Could Burns have looked into the future, the prospect would have deepened the pain in his harassed soul. His anxiety for his family would have been allayed, to be sure, but not even in his darkest hour could he have visualized the future of his personal and literary fame. He foresaw attacks of his enemies; he did not foresee the cowardice or treachery of his friends. He need not have worried about his trivial or unguarded writings, for time automatically washes away the sand and leaves the gold, if gold there be, and the publication of trifling letters cannot harm their writer if the pattern of his soul itself is not trifling. That spiritual descendants of Holy Willie should deplore his best and strongest work and shake their heads over passions of which their impotent pulses were incapable, that enemies eager for revenge and underlings eager for drink should lie about their relations with him--these things were to be expected. But that Bob Ainslie, turned pious, should exemplify his own piety by preserving and circulating Burns’s worst letters, that George Thomson should not only ignore his dying wishes but even, before his corpse was in the grave, rush into print with a distorted and melodramatic version of his last years which would set the tone of biographies for a century to come, that Gilbert should lack the courage to deny stories which he knew to be false--all this, and much more, was mercifully hidden from him. But it would have warmed his heart to know that the one intimate friend who would come before the world with a truthful account of his character, extenuating nothing, and setting nothing down in malice, was Maria Riddell, on whom he had made unforgivable attacks, and who nevertheless had forgiven him. The woman with whom the dying poet talked that day until the distant bulk of Criffel turned dark against the sunset, and the chill tide in which he had been ordered to bathe ebbed away from the dismal flats of the Solway, was to prove herself the most devoted friend of her sex he had ever had, Jean Armour always excepted.

V

LIVELIHOOD

To Burns in the vigour of his early manhood the question of livelihood seemed easily answered. He was a good enough ploughman to be assured of the porridge and the few shillings a week which a skilled labourer could earn on a Scottish farm. There was no degradation in such service. The labourers, like the hired help on New England farms, ate with the family and took whatever share in the conversation they were capable of. Moreover, anyone, whatever his rank, who was capable of ‘a sensible crack’ was sure of welcome in households which had either to provide their own entertainment or go without. Not even the prospect of dependent old age held any terrors. The tradition of the blue-gowns, or licensed beggars, still persisted in rural Scotland. An old man past work who could talk interestingly could count on a meal and a place by the fire at almost any farmer’s ingle. Burns seriously thought of this as a possible end of his own life. The expression of the idea in several poems might be dismissed as rhetoric had he not repeated it in the sober prose of his letters. He actually pictured himself as spending his manhood in labour, love-making, and poetry and his old age as a sort of Edie Ochiltree.

Such a vision of course was adolescent. To fulfil it a man must have no dependents. Burns seems to have imagined at first that if he could help to keep the home together until his brothers and sisters were able to establish themselves his responsibilities would end. The liberation of his poetic talent entailed among other things a shrinking from the burdens of marriage on narrow means. His rejected proposal to Alison Begbie had come before his realization of his poetic calling; his rejected offer to Jean Armour in 1786 was the result of sympathy for her condition and not of a desire to settle down. But he soon learned that he could not so simply escape responsibility. His children must be provided for somehow even if he did not marry their mothers. Despite the casualness with which he incurred paternity his parental feelings were strong. ‘_Vive l’amour et vive la bagatelle_’ sounded well as a motto until it was confronted by the actual problem of helpless lives which owed their existence to him. As a Man of Feeling he could not, even had he wished to, turn his back on them with Don Juan-like callousness. Besides, the law might have something to say in the matter--as Burns learned in the course of four suits or threatened suits by four different women within two years. Unless he chose to flee the country and repudiate his obligations he had to provide himself with settled livelihood.

For a man of his rank and education the possible choices open in 1786 were limited. He could continue as a farmer; he could attempt to support himself by writing, or he could seek a salaried position at home or in the colonies. Each alternative had its drawbacks. By the beginning of 1786 his reputation in the community was such that he could scarcely continue the partnership at Mossgiel, but he lacked the capital necessary for setting up independently elsewhere. The hope of any large financial returns from his poetry seemed too fantastic for consideration; he lacked the training for journalism or hackwork when Grub Street was crowded with penniless university men. There remained the chance of some salaried position. Yet even if he had been temperamentally fitted for a commercial job he was by this time too old. Merchants’ clerks began their apprenticeship as boys in their teens. Burns was twenty-seven. A post in the Excise Service might be feasible but was not easy to get. All government jobs went by favour, and despite the unpopularity of the service among the people at large the number of aspirants so far exceeded the available places that the endorsement of some influential person was almost essential. The same thing was true of India, where the East India Company’s monopoly gave patronage as large a part as it had in the government services. The United States, not yet united, were in economic chaos; Canada was undeveloped. There remained the West Indies, then at the height of a prosperity built on slave labour, where independent planters with Scottish connexions were numerous enough to make it possible for a Scotsman with the necessary introductions to secure some sort of work. The story of Burns’s struggle for livelihood is the story of his efforts in each of the four possibilities open to him.

The West Indian venture was the only one which never came to actual trial. The documents are lost which would settle the date at which Burns began seriously to consider emigration, but his mind was made up at the very beginning of 1786. Through friends in Ayrshire he obtained the offer of a position at thirty pounds a year as clerk and overseer on a Jamaica plantation. The story is still repeated that he published the Kilmarnock _Poems_ to pay his passage-money, but his own contemporary account of the matter is sufficient refutation. He had already arranged to go to Jamaica, his employer to pay his fare and deduct the sum from his first year’s salary, before he decided to print the poems. For Burns emigration was not only flight but almost a death sentence. He had some justification for his feeling. The West Indian climate helped to insure the financial success of a small minority of white immigrants by killing off most of their rivals. He published his poems because he wished, before saying farewell forever to Scotland, to leave behind some tangible memorial. When the publication proved so unexpectedly successful it immediately cancelled his flight.

Burns’s first extant reference to Jamaica is in a letter to John Arnot of Dalquhatswood, which was written in April, 1786, when the subscription for the _Poems_ was well under way. Negotiations were then almost complete: by June 12th Burns was able to announce that the ship was on her way home that was to take him out; on August 14th he explained that he was entering the employ of Charles Douglas of Port Antonio and all that remained to settle was the route by which he was to travel. In view of the time required for exchange of letters between Scotland and the West Indies it is certain that the correspondence with Douglas must have begun in the winter, before the Kilmarnock volume was planned and while a considerable part of it was still unwritten. As the troubles with the Armours thickened during the summer so did Burns’s references to his impending emigration. During July and the first part of August he was announcing that he had booked passage from Greenock to Savannah-la-Mar in the _Nancy_, sailing about September 1. Then returned Jamaicans advised him that the route was too roundabout, and when the captain of the _Nancy_ notified him that the ship was about to sail, Burns decided that the notice was too abrupt. The _Nancy_ sailed without him, and he transferred his booking to the _Bell_, which was to sail direct to Port Antonio at the end of September.

The truth was that he was already wavering. The enthusiastic reception of his poems, the interest which influential gentlemen began to take in his welfare, were changing his opinion of himself and his prospects in Scotland. Moreover, the Armours were calming down; friends had promised to help him should Jean’s father renew the effort to execute his warrant. Nevertheless he did not immediately abandon the Jamaica plan. Though the _Bell_ in her turn sailed without him, he still watched the shipping news as he collected his subscriptions and set his affairs in order. Jean’s twins, born on September 3rd, increased the need for settled livelihood, but increased also his reluctance to leave Scotland.

Most of his letters of the autumn of 1786 have perished. As late as October he was still talking of emigration, though he had again postponed it after actually packing his trunk and starting for Greenock at the end of September. He still feared, he told Robert Aiken, that ‘the consequences of his follies’ might banish him; in other words, Betty Paton was threatening to sue him. The Armour affair had already been compromised by dividing the responsibility for the care of the twins between the two families. When the extant correspondence resumes a month later, Jamaica had been discarded. By November 1st the poet had decided to try his luck in Edinburgh. For this reversal the Kilmarnock volume was directly responsible.

When Burns had begun in April to solicit subscriptions for a volume of his poems he had had no idea of making it a commercial success. The book was intended as a memento of himself--a souvenir for his friends and a final and unanswerable fling at his enemies. He probably hoped for no more material return than would cover the expenses of publication. Its success therefore was all the more intoxicating. Six hundred and twelve copies were printed, of which about half were subscribed for in advance, thanks mainly to Robert Aiken. When the book came out at the beginning of August it furnished the first literary sensation Ayrshire had ever known. The subscribers’ copies were passed from reader to reader, creating such a demand that the entire edition was sold within three months. When Mrs. Dunlop ordered six copies in mid-November only five were left. At the end of July Burns had been a fugitive with a warrant out against him, to escape which he was shifting from one friend’s house to another. Two weeks later he was a celebrity. His journeys through the country as he collected his subscriptions became a sort of royal progress. The fact that he was making a profit out of the book meant far less to him than the applause of all sorts and conditions of men. People of influence assured him that something could be done for him at home, though they were vague as to precisely what. After the printer’s bills were paid the volume showed a profit of more than £50, though forfeited deposits on passage money and a substantial payment to Betty Paton reduced his net gain to about twenty. But Burns still had no wish to write poetry for money. He considered that ‘downright Sodomy of Soul’. Poetry was his calling, but he refused to think of it as his livelihood.

Another man for other reasons doubted the commercial prospects of poetry. In spite of the handsome balance-sheet of the first edition, John Wilson, the Kilmarnock printer, declined to undertake a second without advance payment for all labour and materials. He felt that the first had glutted the market. His timidity helped to transform Burns from a local celebrity into a national figure. When friends in Mauchline and Ayr suggested republishing the poems in Edinburgh Burns thought it an attractive but impractical dream. But when copies of the book reached people of influence in the capital and they repeated the suggestion it wore a different look. By October the hope of a favourable reception in the city had come to Burns from at least three different sources. His friend, the Rev. George Lawrie of Loudoun, had sent a copy of the book to Thomas Blacklock, the blind poet; Blacklock had commended it warmly and had even promised--not so warmly--to bring it to the attention of Hugh Blair. The famous professor of rhetoric, Blacklock thought, was too refined in his taste to relish it. Another eminent professor was not so finicky. Dugald Stewart, whose country home was at Catrine a few miles from Mauchline, read and enjoyed the poems, invited the poet to dinner, and added his personal encouragement to the Edinburgh venture. Finally the book reached even the peerage.

On November 1st Alexander Dalziel, steward of the Earl of Glencairn’s estates, wrote that he had showed the poems to the Earl and that the Earl had expressed his pleasure in them and his desire to befriend their author. This approbation was heartening as Blacklock’s and even Dugald Stewart’s could not be. The Earl had a reputation for generosity and for keeping his word; he was one of the most popular and influential peers in Scotland and his endorsement would have weight with the people of wealth and fashion on whom the success of a subscription would have to depend. But the Earl had nothing to do with the abandonment of Jamaica. The same letter which brought the news of the Earl’s interest also brought Dalziel’s congratulations on Burns’s giving up his plans for leaving the country. What Glencairn really did was to confirm the poet in his determination to offer his poems to a larger audience.

Undoubtedly Burns realized before he went to Edinburgh that he was setting out on the old and painful quest of patronage--a quest which had broken the hearts of more poets than it had ever freed from penury. But it was still fame more than money that he looked for from his poems. He continued to hope for some means of modest livelihood independent of his writing; if his subscription brought a little capital to help him on his way, so much the better. When he reached Edinburgh he made no effort to appear more than he was; he even sought deliberately to appear less. He dressed as a plain young farmer, and finding that the metropolitan critics were praising his work as that of an unlettered ploughman who wrote from pure inspiration he did his best to act the part. When Robert Anderson pointed out in private conversation some evidence of extensive knowledge of other poets Burns readily admitted his indebtedness, but in public he would not permit his claims to pure inspiration to be challenged. If an unlettered bard was what his patrons wanted he would do his best to be one. Many times, however, his role was trying, especially when stupider people than himself condescended, and gave him good advice.

Undoubtedly there were matters in which he needed good advice, but he did not get it even from the patrons who did not condescend. Among all his new friends there was no one to take his part as Sir Walter Scott later took Southey’s in seeing that he got a fair contract with his publisher. Glencairn had been as good as his word in securing fashionable subscriptions. The Countess of Eglinton made the Earl subscribe ten guineas; the entire membership of the aristocratic Caledonian Hunt put down their names, but altered the first proposal that they give two guineas each to a mere subscription at the regular price. But Glencairn knew nothing about the business end of publishing. In introducing Burns to William Creech, his brother’s former tutor and the best-known publisher in the city, Glencairn no doubt felt that he had done his best. He had, up to that point, but at that point a good contract lawyer was needed. Unfortunately Henry Mackenzie and the other men of letters in the city still adhered to the convention of the writing gentleman who was supposed to disdain pecuniary rewards. A few years earlier, when David Hume was alive, Burns might have been secured better terms; a few years later under the leadership of Scott he would certainly have secured them. Burns’s perverse pride would not allow him to haggle over a contract which in any case offered more ready money than he had handled in all his previous life. What he needed and did not have was a hard-boiled business friend to do his haggling for him.

As it was, Creech made an agreement which left Burns to bear all the immediate risks and perhaps to receive a modest immediate profit, but which reserved the long-term earnings for the publisher alone. As was often the case with books published by subscription, the man whose name appeared on the title-page was not the publisher in the modern sense, but merely the author’s agent. He provided the facilities for collecting the subscriptions and distributing the books, but took none of the financial responsibility. The author received the entire payment for the subscribers’ copies, but out of these receipts had to pay the printer, the bookbinder, and also, presumably, the transportation charges on copies delivered out-of-town. Furthermore, the agents who distributed the books naturally expected to be paid. Hence Burns, wherever possible, enlisted his friends for this service--Alexander Pattison at Paisley, for instance, and Robert Muir at Kilmarnock--and when that was not feasible still sought to avoid the regular booksellers because they took ‘no less than the unconscionable, Jewish tax of 25 p^r Cent. by way of agency’.

The price to subscribers was set at the modest sum of five shillings, and close to three thousand subscriptions were obtained. Burns objected to printing the names of the subscribers--quite naturally, for the thirty-eight pages meant money out of his pocket merely to gratify the vanity of people yearning to see their names in print as patrons of literature--but was overborne by some friends whom he did not ‘chuse to thwart’. Professor Snyder calculates Burns’s utmost possible gross receipts from the subscription at £750. But after all charges were paid the net profit cannot have been more than half that sum. He told Mrs. Dunlop that he cleared about £540, but there, as in a similar statement to John Moore, he was reckoning in Creech’s payment of 100 guineas for the copyright.

That was the sum agreed on when, just as his book was ready for delivery, Burns decided, ‘by advice of friends’ to dispose of his copyright. Once more he had sought the advice of others, and once more they told him the wrong thing. In this instance, the person most at fault was Henry Mackenzie, to whom Burns and Creech referred the question. Mackenzie was a lawyer, and ought to have warned Burns against the absolute sale of his rights in a potentially valuable piece of property. Instead Mackenzie contented himself with naming one hundred guineas as his idea of a fair price. That was on April 17. Creech delayed his acceptance until the 23rd, on the pretence of waiting to hear if Cadell and Davies would buy a share for their London trade, but finally consented to ‘take the whole matter upon himself, that Mr. Burns might be at no uncertainty in the matter.’ Thereupon Creech left town, without either paying the money or giving his note for it. A few days later Burns himself started on his Border tour, still without any legal contract with Creech, but with his hands full for the time being with the task of arranging deliveries, collecting subscriptions, and paying the printer and the binder. Had not Peter Hill, then Creech’s chief clerk, taken a good part of the burden on himself, Burns would have been swamped under the worry of larger transactions than he had known in all his life before.

In August Burns returned to Edinburgh, but Creech was either again absent or again coy. Not until October 23 did the publisher at last set his hand to a note promising to pay the sum ‘on demand’. How soon Burns began to ask for payment is uncertain, but by January Creech had delayed and evaded so often that Burns ‘broke measures with [him], and ... wrote him a frosty keen letter. He replied in forms of chastisement’, promised payment on a set date--and broke his promise. To add to the poet’s anxiety, rumours were afloat. It was hinted that Creech was on the verge of bankruptcy; it was also hinted that he had cheated Burns by secretly printing additional copies of the _Poems_, which he sold for his own profit. Burns bewailed his own fate as a ‘poor, d-mned, incautious, duped, unfortunate fool’; two months later ‘that arch-rascal Creech’ was still making promises, and still reneguing. Not until May 30, more than seven months after he had agreed to pay ‘on demand’, did Creech at last part with his hundred guineas. And even then Burns’s troubles were not over. Still another visit to Edinburgh, at the end of February, 1789, was necessary before Creech paid over the final sums due the poet for subscription copies, so that at last he could report to Jean: ‘I have settled matters greatly to my satisfaction with Mr. Creech.--He is certainly not what he should be nor has he given me what I should have, but I am better than I expected.’

The estimate of Creech was temperate enough; indeed, it erred, like Burns’s statement to John Moore that Creech had ‘been amicable and fair’ with him, on the side of charity. It is easy to condone Mackenzie’s blunder and Creech’s sharp bargain on the ground that neither of them could guess the future value of the copyright, but it is impossible to excuse Creech’s postponements of the day of reckoning. Prompt settlement of accounts after the book was published would have sent Burns back to the country with his pockets comfortably lined and with some of the glowing enthusiasm of his first season in Edinburgh still undimmed. By his paltry delays Creech kept the poet in the city until the interest of his fashionable ‘patrons’ had waned, until all the pleasure of publication and fame had evaporated in bitterness and disgust, and until the mere necessities of living must have made considerable inroads on his irreplaceable capital.

Indeed one of the extraordinary facts about Burns’s life in Edinburgh is that he emerged from it without greater depletion of his capital. Contemporary report calls him dissipated. Yet somehow Burns managed to spend nearly a year and a half either in residence in Edinburgh or in journeying to and fro, and still came out with about four hundred and fifty pounds. So far as is known he had no income from July, 1786, when he assigned his rights in Mossgiel to Gilbert, until he reaped his harvest, such as it was, at Ellisland in the autumn of 1788. Even then he netted little, for the outgoing tenant exacted a price of £72 for the standing crops. However great his experience in the distracting ‘task of the superlatively Damn’d--making one guinea do the business of three’--his twenty pounds from the Kilmarnock volume cannot have lasted long, and if there were any gifts except the Earl of Eglinton’s ten guineas and the same sum from Patrick Miller he nowhere mentions them. If Burns dissipated heavily he managed somehow to do it without heavy expenditure, an art few people have ever learned.

The possibility that he received funds from Gilbert even after the deed of assignment must be ruled out. The flow of funds in fact was the other way. The supposedly careful and efficient Gilbert was in constant difficulties at Mossgiel. Robert sent him ten pounds from Edinburgh in the spring of 1787; during the following winter he authorized John Ballantine to pay over to Gilbert about thirty pounds of subscription money then in Ballantine’s hands. And this was only the beginning. The letter to Gavin Hamilton already quoted indicates that Gilbert was so far in arrears with his rent in March, 1788, that Hamilton wanted Burns to sign some sort of a note for him. This Burns refused to do, because he had already lent Gilbert £200--nearly half his receipts from the Edinburgh edition. Whether the previous payments were counted as part of this loan or not is uncertain; probably they were not, for after the poet’s death John Syme declared that Gilbert owed £300, though the legal accounting sets the figure at £200. It seems likely therefore that Gilbert regarded the earlier payments as gifts, and that the sum which Gilbert at last repaid to his brother’s family represented the final loan in 1788. As part of the interest on the loan Burns arranged that Gilbert should pay his mother an annuity of £5 a year and should continue to care for Betty Paton’s daughter. The result was that Gilbert made no cash payment during Burns’s life, and never was able to pay off the principal until he undertook to re-edit the _Poems_ in 1820. Burns had given most substantial proof of his loyalty to his family and in doing so had destroyed his only hope of success in his own venture at Ellisland.

Gilbert and his mother and sisters were not the whole of Burns’s responsibilities. His younger brother William was approaching manhood and turned naturally for support to the celebrity of the family. He appears to have been an amiable but ineffective youth. He had served at least part of an apprenticeship as a saddler, and in the autumn of 1787 Burns made some fruitless efforts to find him a job in Edinburgh. A year or so later William set out to look for employment and held jobs briefly in Longtown, in Newcastle, and finally in London, where he died of typhus and where his funeral was arranged by John Murdoch and paid for by Burns. Burns’s letters to this brother during his year of wandering consist in about equal proportion of exhortations to brace up and be a man and of enumerations of gifts--shoes and shirts and waistcoats and above all money. Burns’s position as family capitalist was no sinecure.

While he was struggling with Creech and trying to keep Mossgiel afloat, Burns was constantly harried by the problem of his own future. The only two possibilities he could see were a farm of his own or a post in the Excise, and for a long time there seemed little chance of achieving either. He had no intention of trying again for public aid through his writing. One subscription might be regarded as a public tribute; a repetition would look like begging. Besides, his common sense told him that a second subscription would have little hope of success unless it came at a long interval after the first and for work of a different character. He had not exhausted his talents, but he had exhausted his novelty. For the rest of his life he steadfastly refused to accept payment for anything he wrote and actually gave away poems which make up two-thirds of the bulk of his collected works. His sole payment for ‘Tam o’ Shanter’ was a dozen copies of the proof-sheets; his payment for Creech’s second edition in 1793--which included ‘Tam’ and a score of other new poems--was twenty presentation copies grudgingly allowed him. His fondness for making gestures of gallant but unwise generosity can hardly be better illustrated than by his dealings with Creech over this edition. The publisher wrote to him in 1791, proposing a reissue of the work and asking Burns to contribute some new poems to it, but without suggesting payment for them. Burns told Cunningham that he had taken a damned revenge of Creech by ignoring his letter. Yet a few months later he relented, and after reminding Creech that the new poems were his own absolute property, turned them over to him without asking any payment except the twenty gift copies. Such a gesture might have shamed some publishers, but Creech merely accepted it as his right. In the same spirit Burns hotly resented George Thomson’s payment of £5 for his contributions to the first number of the _Select Scotish Airs_, and Thomson, like Creech, felt no compunction at accepting the poet’s quixotic generosity.

On at least two occasions, moreover, Burns was offered pay for journalistic writing in party newspapers. The origin, extent, and duration of his relations with Peter Stuart of the London _Star_ are all obscure, but it is plain that Stuart as a zealous Whig tried to get Burns as a regular contributor. The poet refused. When he struck off a satirical skit he was willing to give it to Stuart, but the only pay he accepted was a free subscription to the paper. Thus he managed to acquire the reputation, injurious to his hopes in government employ, of being a partisan writer without any reward except notoriety. Again in 1794 Patrick Miller, Jr., his landlord’s son who had been put into Parliament at the age of twenty-one, persuaded James Perry of the London _Chronicle_ to offer Burns what for those days was a fair salary if he would come to London and devote his talents to the press. Again Burns refused. He realized well enough that the prosperity of a newspaper was often short-lived and he feared to jeopardize his children’s future by exchanging an assured though meagre income for the chances of the journalistic profession. Besides, the writer in a partisan paper in 1794 was risking jail as well as economic insecurity, as the sedition trials then in progress had proclaimed to all the kingdom.

But if he was not to support himself by writing how was he to support himself? That question hammered in his mind from the time he abandoned the Jamaica project until the early spring of 1788. Even before he went to Edinburgh he had thought of the Excise. But he found his Edinburgh patrons cold to all hints. These gentlemen reasoned simply. Burns was the ploughman poet: ergo, he should continue to plough. The only definite gesture made towards getting him government work was Mrs. Dunlop’s. She offered an introduction to Adam Smith in the hope that Smith might help him to a job in the customs, but the philosopher had left for London the day before Burns presented his letter. Moreover Smith no longer took an interest in much except his own health, and if Burns sought later to renew his application nothing came of it. His most favourable opportunity to cultivate the acquaintance of high officials was lost when he allowed William Nicol to drag him away from Blair Athole, where Robert Graham of Fintry, Commissioner of Excise, was one of the guests, and where Henry Dundas was shortly to appear.

Meanwhile an offer of another sort was being pressed upon him. He had been in Edinburgh only a few weeks when the prosperous and enthusiastic Patrick Miller sought his acquaintance. Miller, after a varied career, at sea and as a banker, had retired from business with a comfortable fortune and was devoting himself to miscellaneous experiments. He was the sort of capitalist who is a godsend to struggling inventors, for his enthusiastic imagination enabled him both to visualize the inventor’s aims and to overlook all the practical details and delays which intervene between a project and its fulfilment. His strongest enthusiasm at the moment was the improvement of navigation, but his interests also included agriculture. Not long before Burns came to Edinburgh Miller had bought the run-down estate of Dalswinton near Dumfries, and it was Ellisland, one of the farms on this estate, which he urged upon Burns.

The poet was afraid of it from the start, and for good reason. Miller, he said, was no judge of land, and what Miller thought was an advantageous offer might ruin his tenant. Had Burns been gifted with second-sight he could not have prophesied more accurately. Yet the difficulty he always found in saying ‘No’ to people whose intentions were friendly combined with his own inclinations to keep him from refusing Miller’s offer outright. Farming was the business he knew best, and a farmer’s life he held was the best of lives--if one could live by it--but Mount Oliphant, Lochlie, and Mossgiel had been a triple lesson on the fate of the tenant who undertook a lease without capital enough to stock a farm profitably. Even if the Dalswinton farm were all that Miller thought it, Burns doubted if his literary profits would suffice to give him a start. However, he agreed to look at Ellisland when he reached Dumfries at the end of his Border tour. When he did so he could scarcely have been in the mood for a really critical examination. The savage hospitality he had experienced for the past three weeks had left him jaded and depressed, and the annoyance of being greeted at Dumfries by Meg Cameron’s letter would not sharpen his critical faculties. Even so he could see at a glance that the soil was exhausted and would require long and careful nursing. In fact the only thing to be said for Miller’s offer was that, recognizing the run-down condition of the property, he was offering it at a low rental for the first three years. Fifty pounds per annum for a farm of more than a hundred acres contrasted favourably with the prices in East Lothian, where landlords were asking as much as thirty shillings an acre. Burns went home to Mossgiel without having made up his mind; if discussion with the cautious Gilbert contributed to any decision it was a negative one. Ellisland was too big a risk. He returned to Edinburgh in the fall with his mind made up. He would renew his efforts to secure an Excise commission and would bank the profits of his poems as a reserve fund for the education and security of his children.

But Miller was not easily discouraged. He had evidently decided that the poet as a tenant would be an asset to Dalswinton. Accordingly he urged Burns to go down again and have a more critical look at the place. A severe cold which confined him to the house enabled Burns again to evade committing himself and not long afterwards came the injury to his knee which laid him up for weeks and involved him in the Clarinda affair. But meanwhile his endeavours for an Excise commission were not prospering. Glencairn disapproved; Mrs. Dunlop disapproved; apparently everyone who might have exerted the necessary influence disapproved. In January Miss Nimmo sent him to a Mrs. Stewart who was supposed to have influence with the commissioners. The interview was not a success. Burns came away from it boiling with helpless rage. He had been questioned like a child about his most private affairs and Mrs. Stewart had further improved the occasion by rebuking him for the Jacobite sentiments he had scratched on the window of the inn at Stirling. If the quest for an Excise job was to expose him to this sort of thing Burns was ready to throw up the whole project.

Just when the matter appeared most hopeless his chance came from an unexpected quarter. The surgeon who had treated his injured knee was Alexander Wood, better known to his fellow-citizens as Lang Sandy Wood, who after a wild youth had become one of the most respectable characters, in both senses of that word, in Edinburgh. Wood learned of his patient’s desire and offered to do what Glencairn and the others had refused or evaded--to bring Burns’s case directly and personally before the Board. The result was that before he left Edinburgh Burns found himself, ‘without any mortifying solicitation’ on his own part, equipped with the official order for the six-weeks’ course of special instructions which would entitle him to an Excise commission. It came none too soon. One of the rules of the service was that no man could enter it who was in debt, who was more than thirty years old, or who had more than three children. Burns’s time for meeting these two latter qualifications was getting very short indeed.

But now that he saw an open road into the Excise Burns’s mind veered round. Farming after all was a more poetical occupation than ‘searching auld wives’ barrels’. Miller was still urging Ellisland upon him, and the possibility of failure there did not look so black when he knew that if he did fail he had the Excise to turn to. He agreed to revisit the farm. No doubt he told himself, as he told Clarinda, that he did so only out of courtesy to Miller, knowing that the Excise must be his lot. His judgement warned him that the farm would not do; his emotions swayed him in its favour. In an effort to strengthen his judgement he invited his old friend, John Tennant of Glenconner, to join the tour of inspection. Glenconner’s mind would not be biased by any poetic considerations. It did not occur to Burns that even the most experienced of farmers, looking at soil different from that he was accustomed to, could scarcely gauge its productivity rightly at the end of February. The rule-of-thumb farming which Glenconner and most of his contemporaries practised required the sight of growing crops for correct judgement. Tennant looked the place over and told Burns it was a bargain at Miller’s price. The opinion astonished the poet, but he failed to realize that it was merely a guess less accurate than the opinion he himself had formed on seeing the place the previous June. Burns frequently made mistakes, but his worst ones were made when he relied on other people’s judgement. In March he signed Miller’s lease and committed himself to three years of struggle and discouragement which swallowed all the capital which had not already been poured into the bottomless morass of Mossgiel.

Legend has it that Burns was offered his choice of two farms on the Dalswinton estate and selected Ellisland because of its more attractive location--‘a poet’s choice and not a farmer’s’. In fact Miller offered no choice, and in drawing up the lease employed all the usual legal technicalities with one or two additions of his own. The rent was to be £50 a year for the first three years and £70 thereafter, and Miller’s zeal for improvements was to have scope even while the tenant was in possession. The landlord reserved the right to take over the riverbank, a twenty-yard-wide belt along the Friars Carse boundary, and two acres of other land at his own choice to plant with trees. He agreed, however, to put money of his own into the place. It had not even a farmhouse when Burns signed the lease, and Miller undertook to provide adequate buildings. The contractor’s delay in constructing these caused further needless anxiety and actual loss to Burns.

After the die was cast all Burns’s earlier doubts about Ellisland and his own ability to handle it returned with redoubled force. His first move was to make sure of his Excise appointment by taking the necessary six weeks of special instructions from the officer at Mauchline, even though this delayed his settlement until mid-June. Inasmuch as these six weeks included also the emotional stress of the ending of the Clarinda romance and his acknowledgement of Jean as his wife, his nerves were overwrought when he finally reached his farm. The prospect there might have discouraged a more phlegmatic man. The farmhouse was not even started, and his only shelter was a leaky and chimneyless labourer’s hovel. The sparse growth of the crops planted by his predecessor confirmed the exhaustion of the soil, and he was confronted as never before with the need for executive skill. That aspect of his nature which led him to remark that somehow he could make himself pretty generally beloved yet never could get the art of commanding respect told heavily against him when he had both to keep his own labourers at work and to bully or cajole the contractor into finishing the farmhouse at the time agreed upon. When he was not present the farmhands lay down on the job; when he was present they found it altogether too easy to engage him in talk while the work suffered. The friendship he formed with Thomas Boyd, the contractor, led among other things to an acquaintance with Thomas Telford, the great engineer, but it did not lead to the speedy completion of his house. As late as March, 1789, he was still pleading with Boyd to get at least the shell of it finished. Moreover he was too sympathetic with his workmen. The margin of profit on such a farm was too small to permit indulgence in humanitarian sentiments, but Burns knew too much of the lives of the lower classes to have the necessary hardness. Two letters to the owner of the neighbouring farm with whom Burns had cooperated in digging a drain do credit to his feelings if not to his business capacity. The labourer who undertook the job at seventeen pence a rood had underestimated the time. In order to give him a fair wage for his labour Burns added three-pence a rood to the contract price for his share and asked the neighbour to do the same--with what result is not recorded.

But there was a still deeper psychological hindrance to success at Ellisland. Even had the soil been productive, even had he secured a foreman who could have kept his hands at work, the Burns who undertook Ellisland was not the Burns of Lochlie or even of Mossgiel. Though by no means setting up as a gentleman farmer, he had become conscious of having a position to maintain. Gilbert, he thought, might be able to take over Ellisland and succeed with it; ‘as he can with propriety do things that I _now_ cannot do.’ Physical debility was also to be reckoned with, for he must have got out of training during almost two years of exemption from regular labour, and his weakened heart would prevent his easily recovering his lost tone. But in fact his mind was filled with other matters and metres. That during his first summer he spent alternate fortnights with Jean in Mauchline was a temporary circumstance without relation to the success of the farm thereafter, but that his work for Johnson’s _Museum_ was filling his mind was a fact less easily discounted. In the middle of his first summer he had a fiddler with him for at least two days playing over a collection of Highland music in quest of lyric tunes for Johnson. It was a prelude to his greatest period of lyric creativeness, but it was not an augury of success in managing a poor farm on limited capital.

The first season’s harvest offered little encouragement. Wet weather and scanty labour made it difficult to salvage whatever thin crop the fields had produced. Before his lease was six months old Burns was confiding to his friends that he was uncertain of his farm’s doing well, but, as he told Ainslie, he had his Excise commission in his pocket and did not care three skips of a cur dog for the gambols of Fortune. The chance of obtaining the commission had made him willing to undertake the farm; possession added still another psychological handicap to its successful conduct. Embittered youthful memories of the humiliations of a tenant farmer had been reinforced by the development of his poetic vocation to clog whole-hearted effort. Now the existence of his commission held always open a door of escape from any threatened renewal of the old humiliation and thereby unconsciously slowed still further the endeavours which were his only safeguard. He was defeated at Ellisland before he began.

By the following spring he had begun to realize his defeat. The farm and his family, including William, were swallowing the remains of his capital so rapidly that it was doubtful if he could hold on without more income than the farm was likely to yield. It occurred to him that he might use his commission while he still held the farm. He had not thought of this at first. The usual procedure for a beginner was to be assigned to some district where a place was vacant, there to serve several months’ apprenticeship without pay. When pay commenced, it had until recently been at the rate of £35 a year, but about the time Burns obtained his commission the initial stipend was raised to £50. Looking about his own neighbourhood, Burns learned that the officer in charge of the rural parishes to the north of Dumfries was a certain Leonard Smith, who had recently inherited money and was not distinguishing himself by activity in the service. Burns decided to play politics.

His commission had been obtained through Robert Graham of Fintry, one of the chief Commissioners for Scotland. Fintry had expressed personal interest in the poet’s welfare in terms which must have soothed his bristling pride, for Burns had already addressed to him both a prose letter of thanks and a poetic epistle in imitation of Pope. Though Fintry never quite supplanted Lord Glencairn in Burns’s esteem, he in fact became the poet’s second patron and in the long run did more for him than even the Earl had done. Graham’s first favour had been the commission itself; his second was the appointment to active duty. Before his first harvest was over Burns coolly suggested that Smith might be relieved from duty without serious loss to himself and perhaps with a gain to the Service. On his visit to Edinburgh in February, 1789, Burns pressed the matter further. Graham promised to do what he could, but pointed out that it was clean against regulations to start a new man at full pay without a probationary period. Nevertheless he undertook to investigate Smith’s conduct and by midsummer had found cause for removing him, had given Burns the place, and had circumvented the rule against starting a new man at full duty and on full pay. For one who had always boasted his independence and had spoken scornfully of the political quest for favours, Burns had done a neat and successful job of wire-pulling.

Having once got his appointment, however, Burns had no intention of treating it as a sinecure. His district covered twelve sparsely-settled parishes and his tours of inspection required, to fulfil the letter of the law, that he ride two hundred miles a week in all weathers and all states of the uniformly bad roads. This meant that he could give little of his time and less of his strength to Ellisland. To provide for the farm he endeavoured to increase his dairy stock, which Jean could supervise in the intervals of having babies and managing her household. The cattle, too, might help in the slow task of rebuilding the worn-out acres.

But the strain of his new duties soon took physical toll. In the late fall of 1789, after less than two months of service, ‘a malignant squinancy and low fever’ laid him up for six weeks. His handwriting indicates that the illness was really serious; the letters written during convalescence are in a hand almost as weak and straggling as that of June and July, 1796. Nevertheless he had proved his qualifications for the job. An official report on various subordinate officers in the Excise bears after Burns’s name the notation ‘a poet--never tried--turns out well.’ He had moreover established friendly relations with his immediate superiors, Alexander Findlater, the Supervisor, and John Mitchell, the Collector, of the Dumfries district. With the latter, indeed, he was already on terms approaching intimacy, sending him gifts of new-laid eggs from Ellisland and accompanying them at least once with a poetic epistle so broadly humorous that no editor has ever printed it all. Both men testified to Burns’s fidelity by defending his character after his death and--what is far more significant--by reporting favourably on him during his life.

He was giving reason for favourable reports. His predecessor had been so slack that Burns was able to appear, at the first session of court after he began duty, with an impressive array of cases of tax evasion. In handling these he again displayed political astuteness. The minor offenders, mostly poor men who could ill afford a fine, he begged off with warnings or suspended sentences. This almost compelled the magistrates to fine the larger offenders for whom he refused to intercede, and inasmuch as Excise officers then, like American customs inspectors today, received a percentage of these penalties, Burns found his procedure remunerative in cash as well as in official credit. He soon discovered, though, that zeal had its drawbacks. Gentlemen of position, including some of the magistrates themselves, had their favourite smugglers or home-brewers, and when Burns caught one of these he started all the machinery of influence and political pressure so familiar to Americans during the prohibition era. Once he told Collector Mitchell, after a hard day’s riding in rounding up witnesses in a case, that he expected for his pains to be clapped in jail for annoying the friends of half the gentlemen in the county. The grosser temptations of bribery, however, did not touch him. The various legends, deriving from highly unreliable oral tradition, of his leniency with small offenders mean no more, even if literally true, than that Burns had learned the common sense of his profession. A customs inspector knows that his job is not to penalize every tourist who has failed to declare a dozen handkerchiefs but to catch the large-scale smuggler. The same was true of the laws Burns had to enforce, which imposed taxes on everything from whisky to candles. Not but what he made ordinary human distinctions between his public and his private capacities. William Lorimer, father of ‘Chloris’, was one of the poet’s intimate friends. He was also a bootlegger whose ways were, ‘like the grace of G--, past all comprehension’. Seemingly Lorimer maintained a moderate legal stock for inspection purposes, but once when he was absent and his wife drunk something slipped in the working of the gentlemen’s agreement, and Burns had to explain to Supervisor Findlater. Another time he helped, as revenue officer, in a series of raids on Dumfries haberdashers who had been selling smuggled French gloves. A few days later, as private citizen, he supplied Maria Riddell with similar gloves from a still unraided dealer’s stock. The problems and conditions of law enforcement are among the few immutables in human history.

After two years’ experience Burns reaffirmed that the Excise was after all the business for him. He added, ‘I find no difficulty in being an honest man in it; the work of itself, is easy; and it is a devilish different affair, managing money matters where I care not a damn whether the money is paid or not; from the long faces made to a haughty Laird or still more haughty Factor, when rents are demanded, and money, alas, not to be had!’ His position as tenant farmer was no longer an irritation; it was an obsession. Ellisland, he told Gilbert, had undone his enjoyment of himself. He looked forward with the same desperate hope as his father’s at Mount Oliphant to the ‘freedom in his lease’. The three-year period of the £50 rental ended in 1791. After that, if he chose to stay, Ellisland would cost £70 a year. Naturally, his discouragement and defeat on the farm had affected his relations with his landlord. Miller’s kindness, he said, had been just such another thing as Creech’s, and the fact that Mrs. Miller had failed to appreciate one of his poorer contributions to Johnson’s _Museum_ did not heighten his esteem for the family. He wanted no more to do with landlords or anything that belonged to them.

His only good luck at Ellisland came at the end. The surrender of the lease did not annoy Miller as Burns had expected, for a purchaser was in the market, and Miller was glad enough to dispose of the farm which the Nith separated from the rest of his estate. After sending Jean and the children to Mauchline, Burns held an auction of his standing crops and provided the lavish drinks expected by auction-goers. One result was that the exhilarated bidders ran up the prices nearly a guinea an acre beyond the market rates; another was that house and stable-yard were strewn with helplessly drunk and retching neighbours. The sale brought ready cash for the first time in two years, and Burns used some of it to clear up a variety of small debts, including the four pounds he owed his namesake, Robert Burn of Edinburgh, for erecting Fergusson’s tombstone. He also celebrated his manumission by a brief visit to Edinburgh to say farewell to Clarinda and to try to do something for sick and penniless Jenny Clow.

While things had been going so badly on the farm his position in the Excise had been improving. After less than a year and a half in his laborious rural division he had wangled a transfer to a vacant ‘footwalk’, the ‘3d, or Tobacco, Division’, in Dumfries. This meant lighter work, and enabled him to dispense with his horse--not too soon, for his poor worn-out mare had given him several nasty falls on the bad roads, bruising him severely and once breaking his arm. In town, though, he had small opportunity for increasing his income through fines and penalties as he had done in the rural division. When at the end of 1791 he moved his family into Dumfries the best quarters he could afford were a crowded and uncomfortable half-of-a-house in the Stinking Vennel, near the river. He was still receiving only the minimum salary of £50 a year, and though Jean said long afterwards that they did not come empty-handed into Dumfries not much cash can have remained after he had discharged his debts. As early as March, 1790, he had estimated that he would be lucky if he did not lose more than £100 out of an investment of little more than £200. Such anticipatory estimates are oftener under the mark than over it; one suspects that if Burns recovered as much as £50 of the money he had put into Ellisland, he was lucky.

By comparison, his prospects in the Excise were roseate. The Port Division in Dumfries, best paid of the subordinate posts, was vacant, and Burns lobbied for it with William Corbet, general supervisor of Excise, as he had done with Graham of Fintry for his first appointment. Corbet was an old friend of Mrs. Dunlop’s, and her intercession was effectively supplemented by a warm recommendation from Findlater, the local supervisor. Burns got the job early in 1792. The salary was £70 a year with various perquisites worth another £20. It scarcely represented luxurious living, but it was a better income than most Scottish schoolmasters or even ministers received in the eighteenth century, and though ‘Robin’s temper was not cold and frugal’ he managed to be fairly comfortable. After a year in the Stinking Vennel he moved to a better house in what was then called Mill Street and is now Burns Street--the last of his numerous abodes.

Even before he left Ellisland Burns’s name had been placed on the list of those eligible for promotion to the rank of Supervisor. This was the most laborious of the Excise posts, for the supervisors did most of the real work of collection and administration. They received salaries of from £200 to £400 a year, but their duties filled most of their waking hours. So long as he was merely Port Officer Burns had time and energy for reading and song-writing. He knew, however, that when in the course of seniority he became a supervisor most of this would cease. But he was already looking beyond. The next rank above Supervisor was Collector, and the collectors held well-paid sinecures. In theory at least supervisors were appointed by merit, but collectorships admittedly went by favour, and Burns began to cultivate political friendships which might in the future secure him the necessary influence.

Not that he had any intention of soldiering on his job and trusting to influence to lift him to a better one. He was taking an intelligent interest in his work and sought the attention of his superiors by his understanding of their business. Thus he had not been long in his Port Division before he wrote to Provost Staig of Dumfries pointing out that the town was losing revenue through failure to assess a tax on imported ale, and backed his statement with an estimate of the sums involved and some shrewd advice as to the best method of getting his chiefs to enforce their collection. A year or so later he pointed out to Robert Graham that one of the Dumfries divisions could be abolished and its duties distributed among the other officers without overburdening them. There cannot be many instances on record of a government employee’s informing his superiors that he was underworked. On this occasion at least Burns took an unusual way of drawing attention to himself. He was also once more suggesting his own advancement at the expense of another man, but admitted the fact and coupled his recommendation with a plea that if the change were made the present incumbent, burdened with an expensive family, be provided for elsewhere.

He would have been the last to claim that these suggestions were free of any ulterior motive beside the general one of making himself known as a thoughtful and efficient officer. He had other and more immediate purposes. Not long after showing Provost Staig the revenue possibilities of the ‘twa pennies’ tax on ale he had a petition to make to the Burgh Council. When he first visited Dumfries in 1787 he had been made an honorary burgess; he now wanted that nominal citizenship converted into a real one so far at least as concerned the local schools. The sons of burgesses were entitled to free tuition at Dumfries Academy, and the chance of getting his boys into a first-rate school was not to be neglected. His petition set forth in detail the help he had given to the local revenues. This may not have been the reason why the Council at once granted his application, but it certainly did not hamper it. Similarly his letters to Graham were frankly motivated by a desire to get a post as acting supervisor at the earliest possible moment and thereby to secure not only some small immediate increase in income but the experience and reputation which would count in his favour when a permanent position opened.

These were reasonable and legitimate efforts to gain prestige. He indulged in others more ticklish and, in the perspective of history, more futile. Burns lacked the right temperament for cultivating politicians, but he could not help trying. He was once introduced, for instance, to that very shady character, the Duke of Queensberry, whom previously he had rated with some justice as a complete scoundrel. At their meeting the Duke proved affable, and hearing that Burns had written a song about the notorious ‘Whistle’ drinking bout mentioned that he would like a copy. Burns sent it to him with a flattering letter, no doubt hoping that at some future date the Duke’s influence might be useful. There was nothing particularly dangerous in this, for the Duke’s rank made him a public character irrespective of what party was in power. But when Burns undertook to meddle in parliamentary contests he was playing with fire. He had of course no vote himself, but he wrote ballads in support of Whig candidates and continued to do so until a few months before his death. From the viewpoint of 1792 something might have been said for this as good strategy, regardless of the poet’s actual sympathies. Except for the brief Rockingham ministry at the end of the American War the Tories had been in power for nearly a generation and a reversal was overdue. When and if the Whigs came in a man who had supported them in their time of adversity would be entitled to special favours. Neither Burns nor anyone else in Britain could foresee Napoleon and realize that Pitt’s ministry, which had already been on the verge of disaster over the Regency Bill, would, thanks to the Frenchman, remain in office until after Burns and most of his parliamentary friends were in their graves. As things turned out, silence would have been the better part for Burns, but he had no gift for silence.

In the same year moreover in which Burns secured his Port Division the effects of the upheaval in France were stirring both Burns and Scotland. The cries of Liberty and Equality and Fraternity were echoed in the North and enlisted as in England a motley collection of supporters who ranged from poetic idealists, like Burns and Wordsworth, through professional agitators like Thomas Paine and Horne Tooke to unprincipled rabble. Burns’s first public gesture of sympathy with the French Revolution came as a by-product of the most exciting episode in his career as an Excise officer. In the early spring of 1792 a smuggling schooner named the _Rosamond_ was caught in the Solway. The ship was heavily armed and thanks to the active co-operation of the coastwise folks, who staved in all their rowboats to keep the Excise officers from using them, she landed her cargo. The _Rosamond_, however, remained aground on the tidal flats and when an armed force of dragoons and Excise officers--Burns among them--waded out to attack her the crew fled after scuttling the ship. Salvaged and towed into the Nith the _Rosamond_ with all her gear was confiscated and sold at auction. Her armament included four carronades which Burns bought for £4 and dispatched as a gift to the French Convention. Such at least is the traditional story, and every detail of it, except the actual dispatch of the carronades, is corroborated by documents found among the Abbotsford papers. The tradition continues that the guns never reached France, being seized by the customs officials at Dover; but here again confirmation is lacking. Legally there was nothing wrong in Burns’s action. France and England were still officially at peace, though their relations were steadily growing tenser. Nevertheless, from the practical viewpoint of a government employee with a dependent family it was a gesture of almost criminal recklessness. The government has never yet existed which looked benevolently upon manifestations of revolutionary sympathies among its servants, and before many months had passed Burns had good reason to be frightened.

The autumn of 1792 saw England ready to join the coalition against revolutionary France, though war was not declared until February 1, 1793. To the privileged classes in England the war had all the characteristics of a crusade except the obligation to take a personal share. The Revolution threatened the very foundations of the aristocratic social system, and the depth of the government’s fear is measured by the violence alike of official denunciations of France and of the suppression of dissenting opinion at home. Charges of sedition were pressed not only against avowed revolutionary sympathizers but against almost anyone who had advocated the slightest modification of the existing order. It was not surprising that Burns, always unguarded in speech and action, should face investigation of his conduct. The details of the charges and their outcome belong in another chapter. For a time Burns thought that all his hopes of advancement were blasted, but the storm soon blew over, and even before he advertised his loyalty by enlisting in the Dumfries Volunteers he had good reason to anticipate that promotion would come in due course.

But though he escaped the storm of persecution he did not escape the economic consequences of the war. It had the usual and inevitable results of tight money and rising prices; a wave of bankruptcies swept over Scotland; the monthly lists of failures in the _Scots Magazine_ increased from an average of half-a-dozen a month to forty-six in July, 1793, and among the victims was Burns’s friend, Walter Auld the saddler. The poet himself was not exempt. The war cut off the greater part of the import trade and with it much of the income and perquisites of Dumfries Port Division. Burns had just begun to extend his expenditures in keeping with his increased income. The carronades and his better house were only part of the expansion. He had backed a friend’s note and had to pay it when the friend defaulted; he had lent considerable sums to another friend, the schoolmaster at Moffat, who was engaged in a long-drawn-out wrangle with the Earl of Hopetoun, patron of the school; there were other smaller loans as well. Caught thus with ready cash exhausted, income reduced, and prices rising, Burns found himself once again in the grimly familiar position of being unable to pay his landlord. That the landlord was a gentleman and a personal friend who did not dun for his money made the situation more painful. In January, 1795, Burns had actually to borrow three guineas from his friend, William Stewart, in order to pay part of his rent. Nevertheless even in these hard times he managed occasional expenditures that came in the class of luxuries--a week’s tour in Galloway with John Syme, the restoration of a Jacobite relic in form of Lord Balmerino’s dirk, even a miniature portrait of himself. He and his family never lacked for the necessaries of life, and though he was somewhat in debt the accounting of his executors is proof that the amount never passed reasonable bounds.

As soon as the excitement over the sedition charges subsided his prospects in the Excise brightened steadily. Friends in Edinburgh were secretly trying to get him transferred to a more lucrative position, but even in Dumfries things looked hopeful. At the end of December, 1794, Supervisor Findlater fell ill, and Burns took over his duties. The work lasted three months or more, and though it is uncertain if Burns received any extra pay for his labour he at least gained valuable experience and competently handled his complex duties. The only adverse criticism of his conduct related to a technical irregularity in his final report, and this was the fault not of Burns himself but of one of his subordinates. The passage of each year brought him higher on the list of candidates for supervisor’s posts. Had he lived another year or two he would automatically have been appointed even if his Edinburgh friends had failed in their efforts to hasten the process.

The prospect of promotion was becoming very real--so real that during the very months when he was acting as supervisor Burns devoted some of his scanty leisure to composing a group of political ballads. Patrick Heron of Heron--the same Heron whose bank failure had once ruined half Ayrshire--was the Whig candidate in a by-election at Kirkcudbright. In return for the support of Burns’s pen Heron asked if he could do anything for the poet. Burns’s reply showed his mind at its coldest level of realism. Nothing could be done, he said, for two or three years, until he reached the head of the supervisors’ list. Then a political friend could be of service in getting him appointed in some agreeable part of the kingdom and of still more service in hastening his next step in rank. Collectorships went by favour, and the time he must spend in the drudgery of a supervisorship would therefore depend on the amount of influence his friends could exert. The letter is graphic proof of Burns’s open-eyed acceptance of the system in which he worked; it is also proof of his irrepressible lack of discretion. From the viewpoint of mere self-interest he would have done better to hold aloof from all political contests and, when the time came, to base his appeal for influence upon his standing as a poet instead of identifying himself with any party. But such calm calculation was not in his nature.

In any case his hopes were vain. His disease was gaining on him; he experienced sharp twinges of pain which he and his doctors called rheumatism, but which were probably angina pectoris. In June and again in December, 1795, he had serious illnesses which left him weak and shaken. In the face of his increasing weakness he had taken on additional labour by enlisting in a volunteer company organized in Dumfries in the early spring. The manual of arms and frequent drills were dangerous medicine for a diseased heart, and to this physical labour Burns added active participation in all the business affairs of the corps. His final breakdown could not in any circumstances have been long delayed, but the Dumfries Volunteers undoubtedly hastened it.

The winter of 1795-6 was a time of famine. Crops had been bad; trade was dislocated by the war. Nearly one-fourth of the inhabitants of Edinburgh were being fed by charity, and flour was so scarce that even those who could afford it were asked to ration themselves to one loaf of bread per capita a week. Conditions in the smaller towns were as bad or worse; there were serious food riots in Dumfries in February and March. With his health steadily declining Burns was exposed to constant worry for the welfare of his family. Excise officers who were unable over long periods to perform their duties because of illness were reduced to half-pay, and as matters stood in the spring of 1796 half-pay would have meant almost starvation for his children. That things did not come to this pass for Burns was due to the generosity of Adam Stobbie, who handled his work for him and refused compensation for the service. This relieved some of his immediate anxiety, but did little to answer the main question of what would become of Jean and the children if he died.

The problem of livelihood, never long absent from his mind, occupied it during his last weeks almost to the exclusion of other thoughts. The only prescriptions the doctors could offer in his illness involved expenditures he could not afford, and his enlistment in the Volunteers now returned to plague him. The tailor who had made his uniform began to dun for payment, and to the poet’s fevered imagination it seemed that his life was going to close as his father’s had, under the shadow of a debtors’ prison. He spent some of his last days of consciousness in writing frantic letters begging the friends to whom he had lent money to repay their loans and asking others like George Thomson and James Burness to advance him money. Thomson was the only one who gave grudgingly. The others willingly and promptly sent what he asked, but too late to lift the cloud from his dying mind. His last articulate words were an imprecation against the tailor who had threatened him, and he died without the comfort of knowing that his death would awaken the generosity he had never experienced in his life, and that the admirers of his poetry would make it possible for Jean to keep her home together and for his children to be decently educated and launched on respectable careers.

VI

SONG

Burns never wrote a ‘Prelude, or Growth of a Poet’s Mind’, and left only a few fragments of his projected satire on ‘The Poet’s Progress’. Yet his letters and journals, as well as the poems themselves, so definitely describe his moods and methods of composition that his poetic psychology can be studied almost as fully as Wordsworth’s own.

Conscious pleasure in poetry read or heard first came to him in boyhood through one of Addison’s hymns; mingled with martial and patriotic sentiment he found it also in ‘The History of Sir William Wallace’ and the Life of Hannibal. This latter, he said, ‘gave my young ideas such a turn that I used to strut in raptures up & down after the recruiting drum and bagpipe, and wish myself tall enough to be a soldier, while the story of Wallace poured a Scotish prejudice in my veins which will boil along there till the flood-gates of life shut in eternal rest.’ But this, like the similar thrills from all the odds and ends of English poetry and Scottish song which came his way, was commonplace boyish emotion. The need and desire to write poetry of his own did not awaken until his adolescent blood was warmed, in his ‘fifteenth autumn’, by the first consciousness of sexual attraction in the company of Nelly Kilpatrick.

‘I never expressly told her that I loved her.--Indeed I did not well know myself, why I liked so much to loiter behind with her, when returning in the evening from our labors; why the tones of her voice made my heartstrings thrill like an Eolian harp; and particularly, why my pulse beat such a furious ratann when I looked and fingered over her hand, to pick out the nettle-stings and thistles.--Among her other love-inspiring qualifications, she sung sweetly, and ’twas her favorite reel to which I attempted giving an embodied vehicle in rhyme.--I was not so presumtive as to imagine that I could make verses like printed ones, composed by men who had Greek and Latin; but my girl sung a song which was said to be composed by a small country laird’s son, on one of his father’s maids, with whom he was in love; and I saw no reason why I might not rhyme as well as he, for ... he had no more Scholarcraft than I had.’

‘Thus’, Burns summed up, with a juxtaposition of ideas never far separated in his mind, ‘with me began Love and Poesy.’ In all respects save one the episode was the commonest experience of calf-love. But that one difference was decisive. When a girl roused him to lyric fervour, Burns did not sit down and merely string his emotions together in rime. Another element went to make the song; an element that ultimately would mean more, poetically, to Burns than any girl--namely, a tune. His mind did not work from emotion directly to words; it worked from emotion to music, and the music brought the words which expressed its mood. Herein Burns was almost unique among modern poets. Fully to appreciate his lyrics one must hear them sung to the airs which evoked them. To read many of them in bare print is like reading the libretto of an opera. Even in his satires and epistles the process of composition was usually the same, though another man’s poem, instead of music, fired the train. Acquaintance with his models is almost as illuminating as acquaintance with his tunes.

His first effort at song-writing led to a conscious study of the poet’s craft. The elaborate criticism appended to ‘Handsome Nell’ when Burns copied the poem into his Commonplace Book is too obviously a bravura piece to merit consideration; more noteworthy is his account of how he studied his collection of English songs: ‘I pored over them, verse by verse; carefully noting the true tender or sublime from affectation and fustian.--I am convinced I owe much to this for my critic-craft such as it is.’ But these were _English_ songs, and their effect on his early work shows mainly in such things as ‘My father was a farmer’ and ‘Man was made to mourn’, which latter in the Commonplace Book is entitled, ‘A Song: Tune, Peggy Bawn’. Even his most doleful lines came to him in music.

But lugubrious notes were not the only ones. It was as inevitable that a young Scot should try his hand at metrical paraphrases of the Psalms as that a young Etonian of the same century should paraphrase Horace. The results in both cases are equally negligible. Youth has to repeat the stale patterns of its predecessors before it can find its own. It was much more important that ‘I murder hate by field or flood’ was written in the same way. This is an epigrammatic song in the Restoration manner, and as English in language as in style. But it was written to a Scottish air, ‘Gillicrankie’. The innate Scottish culture of the poet was beginning, as early as 1781, to assimilate and adapt the alien materials of Restoration England.

Though Burns failed to act on Richard Brown’s suggestion that he send some of his early verses to a magazine, the idea stuck. The yeasty stirrings of a still immature mind which had led him in 1780 to plague his friends with pompous discourses on Pride and Courage were slowly giving place to more personal thinking on topics which he better understood. His customary chronological vagueness in referring to his early manhood makes it uncertain whether he began his Commonplace Book before he discovered the poems of Robert Fergusson, or after. The internal evidence indicates the former. So does the elaborate title-page:

‘Observations, Hints, Songs, Scraps of Poetry, &c., by Robt. Burness; a man who had little art in making money, and still less in keeping it; but was, however, a man of some sense, a great deal of honesty, and unbounded good-will to every creature--rational or irrational. As he was but little indebted to scholastic education, and bred at a plough-tail, his performances must be strongly tinctured with his unpolished, rustic way of life; but, as I believe they are really _his own_, it may be some entertainment to a curious observer of human-nature to see how a ploughman thinks and feels under the pressure of Love, Ambition, Anxiety, Grief, with the like cares and passions, which, however diversified by the modes and manners of life, operate pretty much alike, I believe, in all the Species.

“There are numbers in the world who do not want sense to make a figure, so much as an opinion of their own abilities, to put them upon recording their observations, and allowing them the same importance which they do to those which appear in print.”--Shenstone.

“Pleasing when youth is long expir’d to trace, The forms our pencil, or our pen design’d. Such was our youthful air, and shape, and face! Such the soft image of our youthful mind.”

Ibidem.’

Burns was already conscious of something more in himself than there was in the average young peasant; as an escape from worries over his own health and the family’s future he was undertaking to leave a record of himself to edify some hypothetical future reader. Whatever tinge of humility there might be on his title-page was, like the pretence at third-person reporting, assumed. He meant to prove that a peasant youth shared the feelings of his betters and could rime and moralize to as good effect as they. But the title-page, the quotations from Shenstone, and the opening paragraph about Love all announce a programme he soon abandoned. When he began the book he was still thinking in the terms of his first letters about Pride and Courage; before he ended it he was thinking in poetry.

Though he might continue to assert that he rimed for fun, the fact was that from the day in April, 1783, when he commenced the Commonplace Book he was composing for publication, though not necessarily for print. His earliest verses were either the expression of a personal emotion, social _jeux d’esprit_, or conventional exercises in versification, with no purpose beyond the momentary and personal one; the ‘Observations, Scraps of Song, &c.’, were to be his legacy to the world. Not by chance did the Commonplace Book and its successor survive the general destruction of his private papers when he supposed himself on the eve of flight to Jamaica. Even though by that time the best of his verse had escaped the hazard of manuscript and was safely enshrined in the good black print of the Kilmarnock volume, he could not bring himself to destroy these records. It was well that he saved them. The Commonplace Book remains the sole record of what Burns was doing, intellectually and poetically, between April, 1783, and October, 1785. Commencing with self-conscious commentaries on life and on his own first efforts at writing, it reveals before its close his steady growth in artistic competence.

Not that it resembles the notebooks of Keats and Shelley, with their evidence of how poems grow in the poet’s mind. Burns’s poems stayed in his mind until they were mature. His poverty and his method of composing to music combined to prevent his committing half-formed ideas to paper. Paper was scarce and expensive; often in his early days he failed to write down his poems even when they were complete. Sometimes he forgot them entirely; sometimes he managed to reconstruct them long afterwards, as he did when he recalled ‘The Mauchline Wedding’ for Mrs. Dunlop’s amusement. One of the few poems composed on paper is the disastrous ‘Elegy on the Death of Sir James Hunter Blair’, which Burns drafted in his Border journal. Here he was working with an English verse-form for which no melody existed. It took him three different sittings painfully to wring out the first seven stanzas. Again in 1791 he reported that he had ‘these several months been hammering at an Elegy’ on Miss Burnet of Monboddo, but found elegy ‘so exhausted a subject that any new idea on the business is not to be expected’; the original manuscript of the ‘Lament for James Earl of Glencairn’ reveals similar struggles. When no tune sang itself in his head, composition was labour and the results were wooden. The ‘Lament’, with a more lyric stanza and with stronger personal feeling at its root, came nearer than the others to success, but even it cannot be ranked among the great elegies. Declining Cunningham’s suggestion of a theme, he once said, ‘I have two or three times in my life composed from the wish, rather than from the impulse, but I never succeeded to any purpose.’ In commemorating Lord Glencairn, wish and impulse combined, yet even here he did not wholly succeed because the tune was lacking.

Poetic expression with Burns was not, as with Wordsworth, the fruit of emotion recollected in tranquillity; it was the fruit of emotion expressing itself to music. Though as he grew older the emotion no longer needed to be so strongly personal as when he wrote his earliest songs, the dependence on music became correspondingly greater. How he composed in his later years he told George Thomson in the autumn of 1793:

‘Until I am compleat master of a tune, in my own singing (such as it is) I never can compose for it.--My way is: I consider the poetic Sentiment, correspondent to my idea of the musical expression; then chuse 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 & then, look out for objects in Nature around me that are in unison or harmony with the cogitations of my fancy & workings of my bosom; humming every now & 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, & 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.--

Seriously, this, at home, is almost invariably my way.--What damn’d Egotism!’

Though it would probably be impossible to overstress Robert Fergusson’s influence on Burns’s development, the elder poet’s primary service was to clarify and confirm ideas already present but as yet inarticulate in Burns’s mind. He knew what he liked, and what his own poetic impulses were; the discovery of Fergusson enabled him to define both his method and his objective. To realize how much he matured intellectually between the beginning of the Commonplace Book in 1783 and its conclusion in 1785, one need merely read the strutting, self-conscious, and essentially empty criticism of ‘expletive phrases’ of ‘too serious sentiment’, and ‘flimsy strain’ which he appended to ‘Handsome Nell’, or the pseudo-devotional passage about the grand end of human life being ‘to cultivate an intercourse with that Being to whom we owe life’. These things of 1783 are juvenilia. The following, written in September, 1785, is adult:

‘There is a certain irregularity in the Old Scotch Songs, a redundancy of syllables with respect to that exactness of accent and measure that the English Poetry requires, but which glides in, most melodiously with the respective tunes to which they are set. For instance, the fine old song of “The Mill Mill O,” to give it a plain prosaic reading, it halts prodigiously out of measure; on the other hand, the song set to the same tune in Bremner’s collection of Scotch Songs which begins “To Fanny fair could I impart,” &c., it is most exact measure, and yet, let them both be sung before a real critic, one above the biasses of prejudice, but a thorough Judge of Nature, how flat and spiritless will the last appear, how trite, and lamely methodical, compared with the wild-warbling cadence, the heart-moving melody of the first. This particularly is the case with all those airs which end with a hypermetrical syllable. There is a degree of wild irregularity in many of the compositions and fragments which are daily sung to them by my compeers, the common people--a certain happy arrangement of Old Scotch syllables, and yet, very frequently, nothing, not even _like_ rhyme, or sameness of jingle at the ends of the lines. This has made me sometimes imagine that perhaps, it might be possible for a Scotch Poet, with a nice, judicious ear, to set compositions to many of our most favorite airs ... independent of rhyme altogether....’

With nothing except mother-wit and a sure ear to guide him, Burns had reached conclusions regarding poetic rhythm at complete variance with the critical theories of his century and beyond the practice of even nineteenth-century orthodoxy. He had recognized that the real charm of folk-poetry lies in the fact that it is musical rather than regular. In an age when the essence of poetry was thought to abide in the accurately counted syllables of the heroic couplet such an opinion would have seemed not merely heresy but sheer insanity. Compared with it, Coleridge’s supposed innovation of hypermetrical syllables in _Christabel_ is timid conventionality. Blake alone among Burns’s contemporaries had bolder theories of rhythm, and his work, which the Scotsman never saw, had to wait more than half a century for recognition. Burns later expended much time and ink in trying to persuade George Thomson that a song could be poetry even if all its lines did not count up the same number of syllables, but he was never optimistic enough to offer that silly body a lyric which dispensed with rime.

So, too, in regard to the physiology and psychology of composition, Burns, before he ever published a line, had reached closer to fundamentals than an academician like Hugh Blair could ever go. Like Milton he had recognized from his own experience that there is in many poets a seasonal rhythm of creativeness. In himself it usually began in August, and continued for several months. That month, he said in his autobiography, was always a carnival in his bosom; in 1793 he told Thomson, ‘Autumn is my propitious season. I make more verses in it, than all the year else,’ and at the beginning of the next summer he repeated the assertion: ‘Now, & for six or seven months _I shall be quite in song_.’ In other words, it took all the scanty sunshine of the Scottish summer to bring him physically to that level of well-being at which creation was possible.

The psychology of composition, moreover, which he explained in prose in 1793 he had defined in poetry in the epistle to William Simpson of Ochiltree, composed in May, 1785, and published in the Kilmarnock volume. It is surprisingly like A. E. Housman’s, who recorded that some of his best poems came to him spontaneously while walking on Hampstead Heath and thinking of nothing in particular, after drinking a pint of beer at luncheon. Burns’s formula is precisely similar:

The Muse, nae Poet ever fand her, Till by himself he learn’d to wander Adown some trottin burn’s meander, An’ no think lang.

In these circumstances, when his emotional pressure was high enough, lines and stanzas would come unsought to his mind, and it was to this experience he referred when he repeatedly called himself ‘a Bard of Nature’s making’. Burns knew as well as Housman did that this spontaneous birth was only the beginning and not the end of composition. Gilbert reported the process without realizing its significance:

‘Robert often composed without any regular plan. When anything made a strong impression on his mind, so as to rouse it to any poetic exertion, he would give way to the impulse, and embody the thought in rhyme. If he hit on two or three stanzas to please him, he would then think of proper introductory, connecting, and concluding stanzas; hence the middle of a poem was often first produced.’

It suited with the role of inspired ploughman which Burns assumed among the Edinburgh gentry to give the impression that the finished poem also was spontaneous, but he knew better. His poetry was often born under the open sky, with the physical rhythm of his farm-work supplying the muscular accompaniment he later sought in strolls on the banks of Nith, but it was matured and revised by concentrated study of the implications of his theme. As the piper has to walk his measure, so Burns’s body moved to the rhythm of the tune which was in his mind, and the rhythm brought the words which expressed his mood.

It was only Scots music that saved Burns in the end from complete subjection to the false elegance of his century. Though he was better read than most of his ‘patrons’ ever realized, he had the self-educated man’s diffidence in the face of established reputations. His ear, so quick to distinguish ‘the true tender or sublime’ from ‘affectation or fustian’ in a lyric, failed him in the reading of more pretentious works. ‘The Cotter’s Saturday Night’ is shot full of verbal echoes of English poets; what is worse, it echoes their sentiments, in such a passage as Stanza X, to an extent which divorces the thought from all the realities of peasant life. He never acquired the degree of sophistication which would have enabled him to use the current English conventions freely and originally, yet he was too sophisticated to use old folk conventions when they were not reinforced by music. Thus he never--with the possible exception of ‘John Barleycorn’--wrote a serious ballad. His political verses, and above all such an uproarious parody as ‘The Ballad of Grizzel Grimme’, show that he had all the ballad conventions at his tongue’s end; he had collected numerous old ballad texts, of which Dr. Currie named more than a dozen to Sir Walter Scott, though without thinking it worth while to preserve them; yet he could employ the ballad only in satire or burlesque. Thanks to music, he was able in all seriousness to sing a song in the old folk style, but he could not tell a story.

Even his Scottish vocabulary was more literary and derivative than his contemporaries realized. It was not so much a direct transcript of Ayrshire speech as it was a generalized vernacular pieced together from Allan Ramsay, Robert Fergusson, and the anonymous folk lyrists and ballad writers. He was genuinely interested in the variations of dialect--on his Border tour, for instance, he jotted down definitions of local words which were new to him--but his poetic use of it was chiefly due to its pithiness, its humour, and, above all, its flexibility. This was what he had in mind when he admitted to Robert Anderson ‘the advantages he enjoyed ... from the _copia verborum_, the command of phraseology, which the knowledge and use of the English and Scottish dialects afforded him’. He habitually alternated between Scottish and English spellings of the same word, as the exigencies of rime and measure required, thereby achieving a more flexible expression than was possible in either dialect by itself. His vernacular writing, in short, was nearer to Lowell’s New England speech or Kipling’s Cockney than it was to Gawain Douglas’s or William Dunbar’s single-minded expression in his native tongue. Even Robert Fergusson’s dialect, with its strong infusion of Fifeshire elements, is closer than Burns’s to being a direct transcript from life.

In one sense the poems in the Kilmarnock volume which were written under Robert Fergusson’s influence are a divergence from Burns’s deepest impulses, even though his method of composing them was fundamentally the same as in his song-writing. Instead of a tune to which he could set his own words Fergusson supplied a pattern or a theme to be adapted to his own experience. The parallels between ‘The Plane-stanes and the Causey’ and ‘The Brigs of Ayr’, between ‘The Daft Days’ and ‘Hallowe’en’ or ‘The Holy Fair’, between ‘Caller Oysters’ and ‘Scotch Drink’ or ‘To a Haggis’ are too obvious and have been too often mentioned to need reiteration. Burns borrowed, but he did not copy; even borrowed phraseology he made his own. His imitations almost invariably surpassed their originals both in poetic fire and in the epigrammatic quality essential for quotability. Yet in these forms of verse he showed no inventiveness. His own phrase that Fergusson had roused him to _emulating_ vigour is literally true. That Fergusson’s impetus failed to sweep Burns on to discover similar themes of his own reveals him as after all on foreign ground. Nevertheless, by demonstrating that poetry could still be written in the vernacular, Fergusson had done inestimable service. Beyond that his influence brought Burns to a dead end. The unhappy young lawyer’s clerk had no music in his soul.

Allan Ramsay rather than Fergusson showed the way to the sort of poetry without musical setting in which Burns found his genuine freedom and inspiration. The imitations of Fergusson end with the lines ‘To a Haggis’, written in December, 1786; Ramsay supplied the models for the vernacular epistles which Burns never wholly ceased to write until a few months before his death. And between the poetic epistle as Burns wrote it and the dramatic monologue in which he also excelled there is little basic difference. The writer of a poetic epistle is usually dramatizing himself. Like the professional humorist, he assumes a role which is a projection or exaggeration of one phase of his own temperament, but which is not really himself as the working-day world knows him. For Burns to pass from such self-dramatization as marks the epistles to Lapraik, Simpson, Rankine, and Smith to the pure drama of ‘The Auld Farmer’ or even ‘Holy Willie’s Prayer’ involved merely an extension of imaginative scope and not a different technique.

To put it another way, Burns could either talk or he could sing. When he was not writing to music he was at his best only when he was speaking, either for himself as personified bard or humorous spectator, or as he identified his own personality with another’s. Nothing in the poems composed in 1786 more clearly shows his maturing artistic powers than does the dramatic character of ‘The Auld Farmer’ and ‘Holy Willie’ when contrasted with the lyrics of ‘The Jolly Beggars’, composed the year before. In these last, magnificent as they are, the reader can seldom forget that it is Burns who is speaking through the mouths of the vagabonds. The lyrics are only half dramatic, and perhaps it was realization of this that made the poet in 1793 tell George Thomson that none of the songs pleased him except the last--in which Burns himself is speaking as the ‘Bard of no regard’. In ‘Holy Willie’ and ‘The Auld Farmer’, on the other hand, the poet has identified himself with the character whom he is portraying as completely as Browning ever did with Fra Lippo Lippi or the Duke of Ferrara.

Less than adequate notice has been taken of the fact that Burns had mastered the art of the dramatic lyric and the dramatic monologue more than half a century before Browning gave the forms their names. His own statement that all his early lyrics had a personal basis has both led biographers on wild-goose chases after autobiographical elements in songs which possess none, and has been used to give false emphasis to many poems really based on personal experience. Such interpretations ignore the very foundation of creative art. That the impulse to write a lyric comes from personal emotion does not mean that the finished poem is literal history. Keats’s love for Fanny Brawne helped to make ‘The Eve of St. Agnes’ what it is, but not even Mr. Middleton Murry has been fatuous enough to call Madeline a portrait of Fanny. Rose Aylmer was not necessarily as perfect as Landor’s elegy upon her; William Douglas may have had no real intention of laying him down and dying for Annie Laurie. Yet the whole Highland Mary legend, for instance, rests on precisely this sort of treatment of a handful of Burns’s songs, in obstinate disregard of the plain fact that the woman who inspires a love-lyric no more needs to be herself a lyric woman than the model for the Victory of Samothrace needed to be a woman with wings. Everyone has recognized Burns’s unsuccess in his effort to dramatize himself for Clarinda’s benefit as the pure man of sentiment; his true achievement could be better understood by recognition of his success in dramatizing his real self in many of his best ‘personal’ poems. From the ‘Mary Morison’ of his youth to the ‘O wert thou in the cauld blast’ of his last illness, his best songs display not Burns himself but a dramatic projection of one aspect of his mind.

Commentators from Henry Mackenzie onward have regretted that Burns never carried out his plans for writing a drama. Yet his triumph in the dramatic monologue is the best reason for believing that the attempt would have failed. His numerous references to the drama and dramatic writing never so much as hint that Burns had grasped the elements of theatrical technique. For him a play was merely a vehicle for declamatory speeches and the expression of ‘sentiments’ which would make neat quotations; a cobbling together of purple patches and of scattered episodes supposed to depict ‘originality of character’. If it ever occurred to him that a good play is a unified structure in which a single impression is built up through a series of artfully contrived climaxes, he never put the idea on paper. But even had he understood the technique he had not the right psychological approach for dramatic writing, any more than Browning had. The true dramatist stands apart from his characters and develops them from without; the writer of dramatic monologues identifies himself for the moment with another individual and develops the character from within. The two temperaments are seldom united in one man, and Burns in turning away even from the pastoral drama which Mackenzie had urged him to undertake was once again instinctively following the bent of his own genius. In the light of what he accomplished in his chosen forms, Mackenzie’s suggestion was almost as inept as John Moore’s proposal that he try something like Virgil’s Eclogues.

Before he went to Edinburgh Burns had explored his own capacities, but had not yet realized more than half of them. Fergusson had shown him how to write satires and descriptions in the vernacular; Ramsay had revealed the possibilities of the poetic epistle. But his interest in the folk-songs of which the words and melodies haunted him, still seemed a rustic or even childish survival. So far as he knew, it was like taking nursery rimes seriously as poetry. Though he must have been aware that scholars of repute were beginning to collect old ballads, he had not yet discovered that they were turning also to the words and music of folk-songs. In this respect at least, his Edinburgh sojourn was of incalculable benefit. Apparently he never met David Herd, the greatest collector among his contemporaries, but he soon became acquainted with Herd’s published work and learned that even some university professors esteemed such things. Sending a couple of songs, ‘the composition of two Ayrshire Mechanics’, to the Rev. William Greenfield a few weeks after arriving in the city, he hailed that eloquent but incontinent clergyman as ‘Professor of the Belles lettres de la Nature’; in the following summer he told William Tytler that he had once a great many fragments of traditional literature, but as he had no idea that anybody cared for them, he had forgotten them. And his next remark showed that he already possessed the essential qualification of the collector: ‘I invariably hold it sacriledge to add anything of my own to help out with the shatter’d wrecks of these venerable old compositions; but they have many various readings.’ Yet not even then, not even though the singing of old melodies was one of the commonest amusements both in Edinburgh drawing rooms and at convivial meetings at taverns, did he realize immediately the task and the opportunity before him.

The convivial meetings at first meant much more to him than the drawing-rooms. The jolly gentlemen who made up the Crochallan Fencibles had probably as a group little interest in pure poetry, but they had a very lively interest in brisk songs. If the songs happened to be improper, that was no handicap among a club which included Charles Hay and William Smellie and Robert Cleghorn, and to whom Alexander Cunningham used to sing ‘charmingly’ one of the most indecent of Irish ditties. Burns’s memory was already well stored with such gems, and in this congenial company he added to his stock, enriched old songs with new stanzas of his own, and occasionally composed original verses of the same type, as he had often done at Mauchline. As a means of enhancing the pleasures of male company over a bowl of punch such song-writing amused him and delighted the Fencibles.

Not until after his Edinburgh _Poems_ were off the press did it begin to dawn upon him that he might also win new fame in the drawing-room and--what meant much more to him--do a patriotic service to Scotland. In the last weeks of April, 1787, he made the acquaintance of an engraver named James Johnson, who was just bringing out the first volume of a work which he called _The Scots Musical Museum_. Johnson was known to Smellie, Dunbar, and others of Burns’s friends, but he cannot have been in the inner circle of the Crochallans, or Burns would have met him sooner. He was almost illiterate--his picturesquely bad spelling is notable even for the eighteenth century--but he was an enthusiast for the collection and preservation of the traditional music and songs of his country. He had invented a process for printing music by stamping the notes on pewter plates instead of the steel or copper engraving then generally employed. Though the result was a mean and smudgy page, the process was much cheaper than the old one and encouraged Johnson to try his hand at publishing. His enthusiasm, however, far exceeded his knowledge. He had had difficulty in gathering the hundred songs which made up his first volume, and had even eked it out with a few English pieces. His meeting with Burns not only remade the _Museum_, but, poetically considered, was the most important event of the poet’s life in the capital.

Writing to Johnson on the eve of his Border tour Burns regretted that they had not met sooner: ‘I have met with few people whose company & conversation gave me more pleasure, because I have met with few whose sentiments are so congenial to my own.’ But though he contributed a song or two to the collection, the idea that he might take an active part in the work was still far from his mind. The fantastic Earl of Buchan, as early as February, had advised Burns to ‘fire [his] Muse at Scottish story and Scottish scene.’ Burns had replied, in language even more inflated than the Earl’s: ‘I wish for nothing more than to make a leisurely Pilgrimage through my native country; to sit & muse on those once hard-contended fields where Caledonia, rejoicing, saw her bloody lion borne through broken ranks to victory and fame; and catching the inspiration to pour the deathless Names in Song.’ Unfortunately, added the poet, he had instead to go back to working for his living. Nevertheless, the Border tour offered a chance to fulfil part of the Earl’s suggestion--according to Burns’s real tastes, if not the Earl’s. His greatest pleasures on the journey were not the civic receptions and the elaborate hospitality of the gentry, but the sight of Gala Water, Leader Haughs and Yarrow, the Bush aboon Traquair, Elibanks and Elibraes, and other spots celebrated in song. It made no difference whether the song was singable before ladies or before Crochallans, so long as it was Scottish, and old.

The Highland tours added so effectively to his stock that in 1793 he was able to say that he had made pilgrimages to every spot commemorated in Scottish song except Lochaber and the Braes of Ballenden. Presumably on his passages through Edinburgh in August and September he talked with Johnson, but not until late October, after his return from Ochtertyre, did he really begin to put his energies into the work. Johnson obviously had solicited his help, and the poet’s first move was to write to all his friends who possessed words or music which might be usable. Nor did he confine himself to his own circle of acquaintance. Learning to his chagrin that he had unwittingly passed near the home of the Rev. John Skinner without calling to pay his respects to the author of ‘Tullochgorum’ and ‘John o’ Badenyon’, he seized the opportunity given by receipt of a poetic epistle from Skinner to beg the venerable clergyman’s support for Johnson’s enterprise. He soon started also to fit words of his own to fine melodies which either lacked them or had unsuitable ones--at first with a personal motive, in order to publish the complimentary verses he had written to Margaret Chalmers and Charlotte Hamilton, but soon with no purpose except that of supplying his favourite music with words which could be sung. Moreover, he commenced to gather all available publications of Scottish songs and song music. How thoroughly he went into this search is revealed by his quiet remark to George Thomson five years later: ‘Let me have a list of your airs, with the first line of the verses you intend for them.... I say, the first line of the verses, because if they are verses that have appeared in any of our Collections of songs, I know them & can have recourse to them.’ He had in fact ranged so widely in the old song books that even yet his editors have been unable to identify the originals of some of the songs he altered and adapted for the _Museum_, and later on for Thomson’s _Select Collection_. But though in 1787 he realized better than Johnson did the magnitude of the task and the opportunity before them, he was still unaware of its true scope. He conjectured that there would be three volumes of a hundred songs each. The completed work filled six.

From October, 1787, onwards Burns was in fact though not in name the chief editor of the _Museum_. He collected words and music, wrote prefaces for the successive volumes, and helped to enlist the aid of a competent musician, Stephen Clarke, organist of the Episcopal chapel in Edinburgh, in harmonizing the airs. Johnson willingly submitted to the poet’s leadership, which he needed. The surviving correspondence shows Burns carrying on a struggle which nothing except his enthusiasm for the work could at times have made endurable. Johnson required constant supervision even in such elementary matters as spelling; Clarke’s carelessness and indolence were maddening. The work sold slowly and Johnson, under the pressure of other affairs, inclined to procrastinate. ‘Why,’ Burns asked in 1793, and the passage is typical of many, ‘did you not send me those tunes & verses that Clarke & you cannot make out? Let me have them as soon as possible, that, while he is at hand, I may settle the matter with him.’ Clarke, ‘with his usual indolence’, was worse. More than once he mislaid or lost whole sheafs of songs which had been entrusted to him. ‘“The Lochmaben harper”’, said the poet in 1795, ‘I fear I shall never recover; & it is a famous old song.--The rest are, I doubt, irrecoverable.--I think it hard that, after so much trouble in gathering these tunes, they should be lost in this trifling way.--Clarke has been shamefully careless.’ Yet Burns’s enthusiasm kept him going, however negligent or incompetent the partners on whom he had to depend. The time-table of the work is sufficient proof of his influence. Volume II, prepared while he was in Edinburgh, was ready six months after Volume I; the next two volumes, for which the poet’s contributions had to be made by correspondence, took two years each. Volume V was prepared while Burns was working also for George Thomson; it was four years on the stocks. The final volume, prepared by Johnson’s unaided efforts, took six years, even though he had still on hand a considerable quantity of Burns’s verse for which space had been lacking in the earlier numbers.

Burns’s preface to the second volume, published in February, 1788, in the very midst of the Clarinda imbroglio, shows how completely, in the fifteen months since his first arrival in Edinburgh, the poet had awakened to the literary importance of folk-song. ‘Ignorance and Prejudice’, he wrote, ‘may perhaps affect to sneer at the simplicity of the poetry or music of some of these pieces; but their having been for ages the favourites of Nature’s Judges--the Common People, was to the Editor a sufficient test of their merit....’ He was no longer apologetic for his interest in popular literature. If the highbrows could not appreciate it, so much the worse for the highbrows. He was determined, moreover, that no poet of the people should lack recognition if it were possible to give it. ‘Wherever the old words could be recovered, they have been preserved; both as generally suiting better the genius of the tunes, and to preserve the productions of those earlier Sons of the Scottish Muses, some of whose names deserved a better fate than has befallen them--“Buried ’mong the wreck of things which were.” Of our more modern Songs, the Editor has inserted the Authors’ names as far as he could ascertain them.’ The passage is almost a direct transcript, even to the hackneyed quotation from Blair’s _Grave_, of what Burns had written in the Commonplace Book two and a half years before, when he added that it had given him ‘many a heart-ake’ to reflect that the names of such glorious old Bards were clean forgotten. No more of them should be forgotten if he could do anything to prevent it. The ‘communal’ theory of ballad-composition still slumbered in Cloud-Cuckoo-Land; Burns was sure that somewhere at the source of every old song was an individual poet of like passions with himself, and such as he himself might still be but for the accident of print.

His one exception to the rule of publishing authors’ names was his own contributions. He told Mrs. Dunlop that the songs signed ‘R’, ‘B’, or ‘X’ were his own, and those signed ‘Z’ were old songs he had altered or enlarged. But no one can go through the volumes with this simple key and identify all of Burns’s contributions. His own negligence and Johnson’s omitted his initials from numerous songs unquestionably his own, and the verses signed ‘Z’ have puzzled the ingenuity of editors ever since. Burns admitted that ‘of a good many of them, little more than the Chorus is ancient; tho’ there is no reason for telling every body this piece of intelligence.’ Sometimes his own annotations or the survival of earlier texts show the extent of his contributions, ranging from eking out a too-brief song with an extra stanza of his own to composing a whole lyric to fit a fragment of traditional chorus. Public opinion unanimously credits Burns with ‘Auld Lang Syne’, yet he never claimed it. He declared that it ‘had never been in print, nor even in manuscript’, until he took it down from an old man’s singing. Three different times, for people as unlike as Mrs. Dunlop, Robert Riddell, and George Thomson, he wrote out the words without even an indirect claim to their authorship. Nevertheless, no trace of the song in anything like Burns’s form has ever been found in earlier records, and the public has refused to believe that a poem of such appeal could have been current without being noticed. On the other hand, every stanza of ‘A Red Red Rose’ has been traced to some older poem; yet Burns’s skill in selecting the one good image in a mass of commonplace and weaving his cento of borrowings into a single compact and vivid lyric makes the song his own, as _Macbeth_ is Shakespeare’s and not Holinshed’s.

In such lyrics as these and scores of others Burns had achieved a sort of dramatic impersonation which far surpassed even the best of his earlier monologues and dramatic lyrics. Guided always by the spirit of the music, he had so identified himself with the thoughts and feelings of the anonymous and half-articulate folk poets whose songs he was rescuing from oblivion that the most critical eye cannot be certain where their work ends and Burns’s begins. Again and again he took fragments of old work and not only reunited them into coherent wholes but gave the restored poem the lyric elevation its original author had felt but could not express. Emerson said that an institution was the lengthened shadow of a single man: Scottish song as the world knows it today is the lengthened shadow of Robert Burns. What he did not actually write is so coloured by his influence that it could not exist without him. With the exception of Lady Nairne’s, his was the last poetry written in the old folk tradition. The romantic sentimentality which tinges Burns’s songs at their weakest, overspreads many of Lady Nairne’s; Scott’s masterpiece, ‘Bonnie Dundee’, is glorious, but it is not a folk-song. Most of what has been written since 1800 is merely imitation Burns.

The _Museum_ was Burns’s opportunity to combine his poetic inclinations with his fervent patriotism. But it was more than that. By enlisting the poet’s help in his enterprise, Johnson unwittingly furnished him the means of sustaining his creative life amid his toil as farmer and Exciseman. After 1788 extended composition was probably impossible for Burns. He could scarcely hope to be revisited by the almost continuous excitement under which he wrote the greater part of his first volume, and without emotional excitement he could not create. He had plenty of leisure for writing during his Edinburgh days, but the urge was lacking. His whole sojourn there produced less poetry than a single month at the beginning of 1786. Removal to Ellisland, with all the strain of its ‘uncouth cares and anxieties’, brought his creativeness to a still lower ebb. Repeatedly he complained that the Muses had deserted him; during his first two years on the farm the ‘Lines in Friars Carse Hermitage’ were almost his only serious attempt at non-musical composition, and in the revision of the poem he wavered between versions in a manner wholly unlike the vigour of 1786. The frequency, indeed, with which he circulated both versions among his friends suggests at times a bankrupt’s clinging to the last relic of his prosperity. But thanks to the _Museum_ he had work to do which could be shaped to music as he followed his business, and be committed to paper in his snatches of free time.

Meanwhile, under Burns’s leadership, the whole plan of the _Museum_ had been altered. The original scheme had been merely to collect the existing songs. For this task--at least for all the songs that were printable--Johnson’s first estimate of two volumes was not a serious understatement. Burns, ransacking the collections of instrumental music, and stealing time from his farm work to listen to a fiddler playing over the pieces that had interested him, discovered, however, that Scottish music was teeming with good tunes to which no words had ever been set. The reels and strathspeys which fiddlers and pipers played as dance tunes had just as much lilting charm as the airs of traditional songs. His plan now was nothing more nor less than supplying words to every cottage melody which was capable of vocal interpretation. He was also making musical experiments in tempo, finding that gay tunes played in slow time might be transformed into ‘the very language of pathos’. The name ‘Museum’ was growing steadily more inappropriate; the work was becoming an experimental laboratory in both poetry and music. Probably Burns never fully defined, even to himself, the scope of the ambitious project he did not live to achieve, but the more than three hundred songs he left are evidence that if anyone could have achieved it, he could.

Not that all these songs are masterpieces. Burns had no illusions on that score. His contention was always that the music was the important thing, and that a good air might better have mediocre words than none at all. Nevertheless when he was composing Scottish words to tunes of his own choice the percentage of the commonplace was small and the range of themes extraordinarily large. The critics who read autobiography into every love poem pass lightly over the fact that in some of the best love lyrics, such as ‘Tam Glen’, ‘An’ O for ane-and-twenty, Tam’, and ‘Whistle and I’ll come to you, my lad’, the speaker is a woman, and that such wholly dramatic lyrics as ‘M’Pherson’s Farewell’ and ‘John Anderson’ have a more sustained intensity of emotion than the admittedly autobiographic ‘Ae fond kiss’. When Burns’s lyrics were commonplace it was usually because he was composing them to tunes not of his own choice; above all when such assigned composition demanded English words. Music which worked downward from the intellectual to the emotional centres could never give the same creative release as when the engagement of the emotions came first. Such was the case with the last of his major poetic projects--supplying lyrics for George Thomson’s _Select Collection of Scotish Airs_--but before turning to that work something must be said of the last and finest of the poems which he did not write to music.

‘Tam o’ Shanter’ is not only Burns’s greatest single poem but one of the finest short poetic narratives in all literature. It is the only one of Burns’s works of which it may truly be asserted that he opened a new field wherein he never had the chance to reveal the full range of his powers. In the satire and the epistle, as in the lyric, he had abundantly displayed both his strength and his limitations. In the versified folk-tale ‘Tam’ stands alone; it is, as he said, his ‘standard performance in the Poetical line’. Though he was doubtless right in concluding that it showed ‘a force of genius & a finishing polish that I despair of ever excelling’, he might in happier circumstances have equalled it. But here, as in the satires and epistles, his inspiration came from without, and the stimulus was never repeated.

The story of its composition is too familiar to need rehearsing in detail. In 1789 Francis Grose the antiquary arrived at Friars Carse in the course of a collecting tour. He had successfully published an elaborately illustrated work on the antiquities of England and Wales, and was now gathering material for a companion volume on Scotland. The fat and jovial captain, whose encyclopædic knowledge ranged from ancient arms and armour, costume, and ecclesiastical and military architecture, to the ribald slang of his day, was as unlike Sir Walter Scott’s bookish Jonathan Oldbuck as any man could well be. Beside his vast erudition and ardent spirit the amateurish antiquarianism of Robert Riddell faded away. Grose was one of the most stimulating men Burns ever met, and the friendship which sprang up between them had the double basis of community of interest and congeniality of spirit. Burns saw in Grose’s projected book an opportunity to glorify his own birthplace, and suggested that the ruins of Alloway Kirk were a good subject for an illustration. Grose, no doubt mentally comparing the scrubby little church with the glories of Melrose and Arbroath, hesitated. Alloway had neither grandeur of architecture nor richness of historical association. The latter, however, might be supplied. Burns had been telling some of the tales of the supernatural which he had heard in his boyhood, and Grose agreed to include the picture of Alloway if Burns would furnish a witch-legend to accompany it. Thus casually his greatest poem was born.

Burns’s qualifications for writing this tale of witchcraft were analogous to his qualifications for writing folk-songs. In each instance he belonged by education to a world where such things were no longer alive. But his childhood and youth had been spent among people to whom they were still real. Intellectually he had no more belief in witchcraft than Benjamin Franklin had, but he knew the minds of the people who did believe. Hence the blend of broad humour and real terror which makes the poem unique. To an Elizabethan audience there was nothing humorous about the witches in _Macbeth_; they were real beings inspiring fear and hatred. To Washington Irving or Charles Dickens a tale of the supernatural was purely an excursion into the Land of Make-Believe. It is only when a belief is fading but not yet dead that it can be handled with the mixture of humour and conviction which Burns used. Ghost stories suffered the same fate about a century later, as scepticism regarding personal immortality became more widely prevalent. And ‘Tam o’ Shanter’ is as perfect in structure as it is unique in tone. Custom cannot stale it. To read it or hear it read for the hundredth time is still to be swept along by the rush of the narrative and to realize more clearly the artistry which balances each increasingly wild episode with its introductory paragraph of humorous philosophizing. A few of its early readers, Mrs. Dunlop among them, thought the poem scandalously indecent; to the rest it was an artless effusion of the Heaven-taught ploughman. If any early reader realized that besides being a merry tale it was a consummate work of art the opinion was not committed to print. In 1791 literary art still connoted eighteenth-century ‘elegance’.

Could Burns have had more of the society of a man like Grose, had even young Walter Scott of Edinburgh, who in the intervals of his legal studies was already steeping himself in the ballads and legends of the Border, thought it worth while occasionally to ride as far as Dumfries to visit the man whom he had once seen in an Edinburgh drawing-room, the world might have more poems like ‘Tam o’ Shanter’. But there was no one in Dumfries to provide the necessary stimulus. Robert Riddell took much but had little to give; his sister-in-law Maria belonged too much to the world of fashion to have any enthusiasm for folk-tales; John Syme’s taste ran more to satirical epigrams than to narrative poetry. And these three represented the best intellectual companionship Dumfries had to offer. As for Edinburgh, the influences dominating the literary life of Scotland at the end of the century were better represented by George Thomson than by Francis Grose.

In September, 1792, Burns received a letter from a friend of Alexander Cunningham’s, asking aid in a poetical and musical venture. George Thomson, clerk to the Board of Trustees in Edinburgh, was two years the poet’s senior and possessed all the elegance of taste which Burns’s education had protected him from. Thomson enjoyed Scottish music in his ultra-refined way, but was irked by the crudity of the traditional songs. Baldly stated, his proposal was to collect a hundred of the best Scottish melodies, to get a professional musician to dress them in all the frills necessary for concert performance, and to provide them with tidy English lyrics which would disguise their provincial origin. In writing to Burns, however, he did not express himself so bluntly. After explaining that Ignaz Joseph Pleyel, ‘the most agreeable composer living’, had been engaged to arrange the music, he continued:

‘To render this work perfect, we are desirous to have the poetry improved wherever it seems unworthy of the music; and that it is so, in many instances, is allowed by everyone conversant with our musical collections. The editors of these seem in general to have depended on the music proving an excuse for the verses; and hence some charming melodies are united to mere nonsense and doggerel, while others are accompanied with rhymes so loose and indelicate as cannot be sung in decent company. To remove this reproach would be an easy task to the author of “The Cotter’s Saturday Night”.... It is superfluous to assure you that I have no intention to displace any of the sterling old Songs: those only will be removed which appear quite silly or absolutely indecent....’

The publication, in short, was to be a sort of Golden Treasury of Scots music, and Burns’s share in the work was to be ‘writing twenty or twenty-five songs, suitable to the particular melodies’ which Thomson selected. The editor said nothing, in this first letter, about his preference for English words.

No literary salesman ever received more enthusiastic response than Thomson got from Burns. The poet promised whole-hearted co-operation, but he had detected enough of Thomson’s temperament to make certain reservations. In order of importance they were these. His share in the work was to be a patriotic labour of love, and he would accept no compensation. For the time being at least his participation was to be anonymous--perhaps because he did not wish his official superiors to think he was neglecting his Excise duties; perhaps because he feared that Johnson might conclude that he was deserting the _Museum_. He was not to be asked to compose unless he could do so spontaneously, and Thomson was to have free editorial authority to take or reject his contributions. Finally, ‘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.’ English verses were precisely what Thomson _was_ for, ‘because the English becomes every year more and more the language of Scotland,’ but he hastened to disavow any wish to confine the poet to English--preferring to wait and argue it out later, poem by poem.

Greater enthusiasm, knowledge, and art were never enlisted under more incompetent leadership than in Burns’s alliance with Thomson. It did not take the poet long to discover that the elaborate plan which Thomson had outlined in his first letters was really as vague as an Edinburgh fog. The editor had not yet decided on the list of airs he intended to include; he had not succeeded in getting the co-operation of the English poetaster, John Wolcot (‘Peter Pindar’), to write English songs; Pleyel, who was supposed to be handling the music, soon departed on a visit to Germany and found his return route to Britain closed by the armies of the French and the Allies. James Beattie was to have been asked to furnish an introductory essay on Scottish song, but Beattie was old and ill and not really interested in the subject. In consequence of all this, Burns, who had begun on the understanding that he was to furnish only a few lyrics, shortly found himself saddled with the entire burden of the literary end of the work. Even so his position, though laborious, would not have been difficult had Thomson been merely muddle-headed. But as soon as the editor had furnished the list of the twenty-five airs he meant to include in the first number of his collection, and Burns had sent in his first group of lyrics, Thomson revealed himself as a literary tinker. He was constantly proposing amendments in phraseology--which always meant substituting banal English expressions for racy Scots ones. At times his niggling criticism was too much even for Burns’s enthusiasm and good nature. One letter, for instance, began with the abrupt outburst, ‘That unlucky song “O poortith cauld,” &c. must stand as it stands--I won’t put my hand to it again.’ In later years Thomson, to sustain his pose as whole-hearted admirer of all Burns’s work, carefully inked over that sentence in the manuscript. But he was guilty of worse than that. Burns, as always, was steeping himself in the rhythms of the airs to which he was composing; Thomson had to display his own musical knowledge by suggesting that the proffered song be set to another tune. The fact that to Burns the words and the tune were always inseparable never penetrated his mind.

Occasionally Burns came forward with a lyric written to an air not on Thomson’s list, and at such times the editor’s taste and tact were most fully displayed. For instance, Lady Elizabeth Heron, wife of Patrick Heron, from whom Burns hoped for political favours, had composed a little tune called ‘Banks of Cree’ and asked Burns to supply it with words. Burns told the lady he would like her permission to publish the song, and sent the words to Thomson, saying that ‘the air I fear is not worth your while,’ but evidently hoping that Thomson would ask for it. Thomson instead proposed setting the words to an air on his own list, ‘Young Jockey was the blithest lad’. Burns replied sharply: ‘My English song, “Here is the glen & here the bower” cannot go to this air; it was written on purpose for an original air composed by Mrs. Heron of Heron.’ But after the poet’s death Thomson erased the vetoing phrase and published the words to the tune, ‘The Flowers of Edinburgh’, thereby leaving Burns under the imputation of having lied to Lady Elizabeth in promising to publish her music.

Another time Burns found himself haunted by the old lilt of ‘Hey tutti taitie’, which a wholly unreliable tradition declared to have been Bruce’s march to Bannockburn. At the end of August, 1793, his impotent fury over the Edinburgh sedition trials, combined with his enthusiasm at the news of the French levy _en masse_ for the repulse of the Allied invasion, found an outlet in composing ‘Scots wha hae’ to this air. Historically the song is an anachronism. The ideas underlying it are those of Rousseau and Thomas Jefferson and not of the feudal Middle Ages; its very language is Scoticized English rather than the true vernacular--Sir James Murray pointed out, for instance, that in real Scots the opening phrase would be ‘Scots that has’. The song owes its enduring popularity largely to the perfect union of the words with the music they were composed to. But when Burns sent it to Thomson, that worthy thought the music vulgar, and suggested that lengthening the fourth line of each stanza would fit the words to another tune, ‘Lewis Gordon’, which he liked better. This time Burns yielded, accepted the silly changes, and thereafter circulated the song always in the weakened version. Thomson published it in this form after the poet’s death, but the appearance of the original version in Currie’s edition showed the music-loving public the immense superiority of Burns’s first thought. Thomson bowed to public opinion, and consigned his ‘improvements’ to the oblivion they deserved.

In most instances, however, the public had no chance of checking up on Thomson’s disregard of Burns’s wishes, and by destroying his own end of the correspondence, after furnishing Dr. Currie with some carefully edited extracts from it, the editor sought to cover up the extent of his nagging criticisms. Inasmuch as his vandalism stopped short of destroying Burns’s letters the ultimate publication of their complete texts exposed the nature of his fault-finding almost as clearly as if he had preserved his own originals. He nevertheless inked out a number of passages in which Burns was too outspoken in comment on his taste, or seemed to deny his claim to the copyright of the poet’s contributions. Thomson was intensely jealous of Johnson’s _Museum_, disliked Johnson personally, and resented Burns’s continuing to help the rival work. Again and again in the letters Burns would say that if a song did not suit, Thomson was to return it, and Burns would send it to the _Museum_. To keep the material out of Johnson’s hands, Thomson never definitely rejected anything. He carefully docketed the letter in which Burns said that he had given Johnson no permanent copyright in his songs, but inked over passages which indicated that Burns was contributing to the _Select Collection_ on precisely the same terms as to the _Museum_.

When Burns’s health was failing in the spring of 1796 Thomson sought to frighten him by a report that a pirated edition of the songs was being planned, and enclosed for the poet’s signature a legal document assigning him the whole copyright. Burns, ill though he was, and careless as he had always been of his literary property, refused to sign, and sent instead ‘a Certificate, which, though a little different from Mr McKnight’s model, I suppose will amply answer the purpose,’ adding that ‘when your Publication is finished, I intend publishing a Collection, on a cheap plan, of all the songs I have written for you, the Museum, &c.--at least of all the songs of which I wish to be called the Author.’ This was tantamount to telling Thomson that he had a claim on the first serial rights only, and though Thomson later published two different texts of what he alleged was Burns’s deed of assignment, he never produced the original holograph, and it was not preserved among his papers. In after years Thomson tried the same trick on Sir Walter Scott and Sir Alexander Boswell. He had succeeded in making Burns’s executors believe that he owned the copyrights and was generously waiving them for the benefit of the subscription edition, but Scott and Boswell were lawyers and saw to it that where their own work was concerned he got no more than the serial rights.

Burns ought to have treated Thomson as Beethoven did in 1813, when the editor demanded changes in the airs which the great musician had undertaken to harmonize:

‘I regret that I am unable to oblige you. I am not accustomed to tinker my compositions. I have never done so, being convinced that every partial modification alters the whole character of the composition. I am grieved that you are out of pocket through this, but you cannot lay the blame on me, for it was your business to make me more fully acquainted with the taste of your country and the meagre abilities of your performers.’

But such blunt truth-telling was more than Burns was ever capable of to a man who claimed taste and education. He said what he thought about his songs, but said it gently and deferentially, and left them in Thomson’s hand to be mangled or misapplied.

To go into such detail of Thomson’s misdoings would be pointless had he been merely a thick-headed and thick-skinned editor who failed to appreciate what Burns was doing for him. But Thomson was much more than that. He represented the whole Anglicizing tendency of the Scottish gentry and bourgeoisie who were seeking to destroy the language and individuality of their country. ‘Now let me declare off from your taste.--“Toddlin hame” is a song that to my taste is an exquisite production of genius.--That very Stanza you dislike

“My kimmer & I lay down to sleep”

is to me a piece of charming native humour.--What pleases me, as simple & naive, disgusts you as ludicrous & low.--’ So said Burns in one of the passages which Thomson tried to obliterate. But Thomson’s opinions were shared by most of his educated countrymen, including some of Burns’s most intimate friends. Where earlier criticism of the poet’s vernacular work had failed to break down his Scotticism by the very absurdity of such suggestions as imitating Virgil, Thomson tried to accomplish it by the more insidious means of minor verbal changes which individually seemed to amount to little but which in their cumulative effect would emasculate the poetry. It is generally recognized that Burns’s contributions to the _Select Collection_ include a much larger percentage of the conventional and the commonplace than does his work for the _Museum_; the marvel is that in the circumstances he achieved so much that was not second-rate. He was composing to order, frequently sending off by return of post the lines to a particular tune which Thomson had asked for, and his efforts were constantly hampered by his consciousness that certain themes and methods would never please the silly editor’s taste. It was no wonder that many times he had to induce a synthetic emotional thrill in himself--either by putting himself through a course of admiration for a handsome woman, or by the help of a bowl of punch--in order to be able to compose at all.

His power of poetic response to music and emotion nevertheless did not fail with his failing health. A few weeks before his death he asked Jessie Lewars, sister of one of his best friends among the Excise officers of Dumfries, to play him her favourite tune. She responded with the roguish little air, ‘The robin cam to the wren’s nest, and keekit in, and keekit in’. Burns, humming the tune to himself and altering the tempo, produced almost extemporaneously the beautiful ‘O wert thou in the cauld blast’. From his earliest lyric to his latest, music was the catalyst which transformed emotion into poetry. Yet for more than a century after his death the dominating influence of music on his art went almost unrecognized; and George Thomson, the man who of all others among Burns’s contemporaries had had the best opportunity to realize the nature and the power of his lyric expression, wrote an obituary which, besides inaugurating the legend of mental and moral deterioration in the last years at Dumfries, summed up its author’s appreciation of the wit, critical acumen, and real erudition of Burns’s letters by saying that probably the poet ‘was not qualified to fill a superior station’ to the humble one he held in the Excise. Of all the Holy Willies who eyed Burns askance during his life and after his death, he would probably, had he realized his true character, have despised Thomson most. The others were merely trying to blacken Burns’s own character. Thomson was trying to destroy the vitality of Scottish song.

VII

THE SCOT

Not merely in his struggle for livelihood and in the poetic art which immortalized him was Burns a Scot of the Scots. He was equally so in his religion, his politics, and, above all, his patriotism. Only in this last was he untypical of his generation. Yet such statements are misleadingly simple. All they can safely mean is that Burns, like all men in all ages, was influenced in thought and conduct by the environment in which he lived. Nevertheless, in a nation so small and self-contained as Scotland in the eighteenth century the pressure of environment was felt to a degree unrealized in larger and more cosmopolitan communities. In England during Burns’s manhood the social and literary worlds of Burke and Sheridan and Horace Walpole, of Cowper, of John Wesley, of Godwin, of Blake, touched each other only lightly and tangentially; in the rising generation of Wordsworth, Jane Austen, Lamb, and Byron the separations would be even wider. Scotland by comparison was all of a piece. Even her greatest philosophers, Adam Smith and David Hume, even the much-travelled and Anglophile Boswell, retained their national stamp.

Though in their final form Burns’s religious ideas differed little, if at all, from the sentimental ‘common sense’ deism of England and France, the process by which he reached them was Scottish. The rigidity of the doctrines to which he was subjected in his youth determined the vigour of his reaction from them. As David Hume would scarcely have been so militantly sceptical if he had been reared in a milder faith, so Burns might have been less sentimental. His earliest teachings, it is true, did not stress the more rigorous themes in Scottish Calvinism. The preaching of Dr. William Dalrymple of Ayr, whose church the Burnes family attended during the years at Alloway and Mount Oliphant, was notably mild and gentle; William Burnes’s own little ‘Manual of Religious Belief’, though it gave a reasonably orthodox definition of the Fall of Man, was silent on such doctrinal points as predestination and the Four-Fold State. Undoubtedly, therefore, the Old Light tenets of Daddy Auld of Mauchline made a deeper impression on Burns’s eighteen-year-old mind than they would have done had he been exposed to them from infancy. Yet Burns had encountered _The Man of Feeling_ before he left Mount Oliphant; the doctrines of sentiment and deism were in the air he breathed; his emotional nature would have brought him to them sooner or later, regardless of other stimuli. The most that can be attributed to Auld is a little hastening and intensifying of the process of revolt.

Despite his constant citing of Young’s exhortation, ‘On Reason build Resolve’, Burns’s approach to life and ideas was always emotional and not intellectual. When he described himself in 1786 as having little of divinity ‘except a pretty large portion of honour and an enthusiastic, incoherent Benevolence,’ his self-analysis had his customary accuracy. To him, as to the New England Unitarians and to a man like Mark Twain, escape from the orthodoxy of his youth had come as a relief and not as a loss. Calvinism had erected a system of thought as rigidly deductive as the science of geometry. Starting from certain ‘self-evident’ axioms like the omnipotence and omniscience of God, the fall of man, and the literal authority of the Scriptures, it had created a religious philosophy from which all emotion except fear had been removed. Through the sin of Adam all men had earned damnation, but the inscrutable mercy or caprice of God would choose a remnant minority for salvation--for His merit, not theirs. Human faith and human righteousness were filthy rags.

This cold determinism outraged Burns’s sense of fairness and justice, as it outraged Channing’s and Emerson’s and Holmes’s. It seemed to him that the New Lights were ‘squaring Religion by the rules of Common Sense, and attempting to give a decent character to Almighty God and a rational account of his proceedings with the Sons of Men.’ But in investing their deity with human benevolence and loving-kindness, the New Lights were also, again like the New England Unitarians, more or less unwittingly surrendering the supernatural sanctions of religion and assimilating their ideas to those of the Deists. God was the ‘Great First Cause, least understood’; Christ tended to sink from Godhead to merely an inspired human teacher; personal immortality became a pious hope instead of a divine promise. If man were indeed immortal, the surest passport to salvation was righteous living rather than adherence to a particular creed. And the guide to righteous living was the still small voice of conscience, the Moral Sense which Francis Hutcheson had taught was an innate human faculty.

In his attitude towards these doctrines, Burns was a man of his century and a Scot of his century. The rigidity of the Kirk, so unlike the comfortable looseness of Anglican theology, left him no place within its pale, even though he never openly severed his connexion. As a youth he had, along with most of his countrymen, read popular works of divinity like Boston’s _Four-Fold State_, Fisher’s _Marrow of Modern Divinity_, and Cole _On God’s Sovereignty_. In 1791, when his rural neighbours of the Monkland Friendly Society insisted on adding these and other books to their co-operative library, Burns obediently ordered them from Peter Hill, and lumped them all together as ‘damned trash’. Though he told James Candlish in 1787 that after having ‘in the pride of despising old women’s stories, ventured in “the daring path Spinoza trod”; ... experience of the weakness, not the strength, of human powers, made me glad to grasp at revealed religion,’ it was not the revelation of the Kirk. Not even his infatuation for Clarinda, though it made him momentarily qualify his admiration for Milton’s Satan, could compel him to bow the knee to Calvin. ‘Mine’, he told her when she undertook to preach orthodoxy to him, ‘is the Religion of the bosom.--I hate the very idea of controversial divinity; as I firmly believe, that every honest, upright man, of whatever sect, will be accepted of the Deity.--If your verses, as you seem to hint, contain censure, except you want an occasion to break with me, don’t send them.... “Reverence thyself” is a sacred maxim, and I wish to cherish it.’

His fullest statement approximating to orthodoxy was written to Mrs. Dunlop in 1789:

‘I have just heard Mr Kirkpatrick preach a sermon. He is a man famous for his benevolence, and I revere him; but from such ideas of my Creator, good Lord, deliver me! Religion ... is surely a simple business, as it equally concerns the ignorant and the learned, the poor and the rich. That there is an incomprehensible Great Being, to whom I owe my existence; and that He must be intimately acquainted with the operations and progress of the internal machinery, and consequent outward deportment, of this creature which He has made; these are, I think self-evident propositions. That there is a real and eternal distinction between virtue and vice, and, consequently, that I am an accountable creature; that from the seeming nature of the human mind, as well as from the evident imperfection, nay, positive injustice, in the administration of affairs both in the natural and moral worlds, there must be a retributive scene of justice beyond the grave; must, I think, be allowed by every one who will give himself a moment’s reflection. I will go farther, and affirm, that from the sublimity, excellence, and purity of His doctrine and precepts, unparalleled by all the aggregated wisdom and learning of many preceding ages, though, _to appearance_, He Himself was the obscurest and most illiterate of our species--therefore Jesus Christ was from God....’

Another time he told the same lady, ‘We can no more live without Religion, than we can live without air; but give me the Religion of Sentiment & Reason.--You know John Hildebroad’s famous epitaph--

“Here lies poor old John Hildebroad, Have mercy on his soul, Lord God, As he would do, were he Lord God, And thou wert poor John Hildebroad.”--

This speaks more to my heart, & has more of the genuine spirit of Religion in it, than is to be found in whole wagon-loads of Divinity.’ This was the same mood in which he had told Clarinda, ‘My creed is pretty nearly expressed in the last clause of Jamie Deans’s grace, an honest weaver in Ayrshire; “Lord, grant that we may lead a gude life! for a gude life maks a gude end; at least it helps weel!”’ Reason and Sentiment, but with the sentiment much more powerful than the reason, these were the dominant forces in Burns’s religious attitude.

Nevertheless Burns was more courageous than many of his contemporaries in accepting the logical consequences of belief in universal benevolence. No man knew more clearly the warfare between flesh and spirit, but he was convinced that both were the gifts of God. The lines which so shocked Wordsworth,

‘But yet the light that led astray Was light from Heaven’,

are his frankest summary of his experience. Whatever sufferings his passions had brought upon him, the passions in themselves were noble. Asceticism had no appeal for him. He took life as God made it, and saw that it was good.

Taken by themselves, his utterances to Clarinda and Mrs. Dunlop might not be above suspicion. Burns had every motive for wishing favourably to impress both women, and might have feigned an interest which he did not feel, or at least have overstated his belief and understated his doubts. But here, as in his feelings towards his children, what he said when he may have been on dress-parade is confirmed by his letters to his intimates. In 1788 he wrote to Robert Muir, then dying of tuberculosis:

‘... An honest man has nothing to fear.--If we lie down in the grave, the whole man a piece of broken machinery, to moulder with the clods of the valley--be it so; at least there is an end of pain, care, woes and wants: if that part of us called Mind, does survive the apparent destruction of the man--away with old-wife prejudices and tales!... A man, conscious of having acted an honest part among his fellow-creatures; even granting that he may have been the sport, at times, of passions and instincts; he goes to a great unknown Being who could have no other end in giving him existence but to make him happy; who gave him those passions and instincts, and well knows their force.’

In the same tone he said six years later to Alexander Cunningham that the two great pillars which bear us up, ‘amid the wreck of misfortune and misery’, are the ‘certain noble, stubborn something ... known by the names of courage, fortitude, magnanimity’ and ‘those feelings and sentiments which, however the sceptic may deny them or the enthusiast disfigure them, are yet, I am convinced, original and component parts of the human soul; those _senses of the mind_ ... which connect us with, and link us to, those awful obscure realities--an all-powerful and equally beneficient God, and a world to come, beyond death and the grave.’

The countryman of Francis Hutcheson could scarcely have indicated more clearly his obligations to the Glasgow philosopher. Burns’s ‘senses of the mind’ are merely Hutcheson’s Moral Sense a little expanded. Like Channing and Emerson, having rejected the authority of the church, and with it the supernatural sanctions of Christian doctrine, Burns fell back on the authority of intuition to support concepts which he was unwilling to abandon. The idea of the deity, and His relations with mankind, which is embodied in these passages, he never deviated from; what seemed to many of his readers shocking irreverence was aimed at intolerance and hypocrisy, and not at religion. But he was not able in all moods to convince himself of personal immortality.

At times he tried to argue himself into belief:

‘The most cordial believers in a Future State have ever been the Unfortunate.--This of itself; if God is Good, which is, I think, the most intuitive truth in Nature, ... is a very strong proof of the reality of its existence....’

and he went on to reason that since the ideas of ‘OUGHT, and OUGHT NOT’ are ‘first principles or component parts of the Human Mind’ and are synonymous in our thinking with virtue and vice, the soul _must_ be immortal because, ‘except our Existence _here_, have a reference to an Existence _hereafter_, Virtue & Vice are words without meaning.’ Thus he argued to Mrs. Dunlop, who had just told him that her daughter, Mrs. Henri, was widowed after a few months of marriage. But not long before he had said to Cunningham,

‘All my fears & cares are of this world: if there is another, an honest man has nothing to fear from it.--I hate a man that wishes to be a Deist, but I fear, every fair, unprejudiced Enquirer must in some degree be a Sceptic.--It is not that there are any very staggering arguments against the Immortality of Man; but, that like Electricity, Phlogiston, &c. the subject is so involved in darkness that we want Data to go upon.--One thing frightens me much: that we are to live forever, seems too good news to be true....’

An emotional man deprived of any authority except emotion on which he could rely, Burns’s religious views are of a piece with his politics and his patriotism. To get at the underlying emotions is to explain what appear to be glaring contradictions in thought. John Ramsay of Ochtertyre found Burns’s politics ‘abundantly motley’, for the poet managed to combine strong sympathy for the exiled House of Stuart with liberal if not republican views on contemporary affairs. To Ramsay this seemed like being simultaneously Catholic and Protestant, whereas it was only putting into words the unexpressed philosophy that had swayed the popular mind of Scotland for close on a century. Burns admired Lord Balmerino, noblest of the victims of the ’45; he also admired John Wilkes. Between a devoted Jacobite like Balmerino and a radical Whig like Wilkes, there was only one point in common: both were anti-Hanoverian. That one point reconciles Burns’s divergent opinions. The Stuarts embodied the ideal of Scotland as an independent nation; even though from the accession of James to the death of Anne they had governed Scotland from London they still commanded the loyalty of their old kingdom. But the Georges were, as Burns said, ‘an obscure, beef-witted, insolent race of foreigners whom a mere conjuncture of circumstances kickt up into prominence and power.’ His phrase summarizes in vigorous prose the spirit of the ribald satirical songs by which Scotland had avenged herself for the humiliations following the rebellions of 1715 and 1745. Burns was far from maintaining that the Stuarts were perfect, or that the Revolution of 1688 lacked justification; what he did maintain was that the Hanoverian system was not perfect either.

On the Fifth of November, 1788, Burns attended a special service of thanksgiving held at Dunscore Kirk to celebrate the centenary of the Revolution. The Rev. Mr. Kirkpatrick’s remarks about ‘the bloody and tyrannical House of Stuart’ sent the poet home to write an open letter to his friend David Ramsay, editor of the Edinburgh _Evening Courant_, in which he mingled unveiled satire with a sense of historical perspective hardly to be looked for in an ‘unlettered ploughman’. He went to church, he said, to give thanks for ‘the consequent blessings of the Glorious Revolution. To that auspicious event we owe no less than our liberties religious and civil--to it we are likewise indebted for the present Royal Family, the ruling features of whose administration have ever been, mildness to the subject, and tenderness of his rights.’ But, he continues, cannot we give thanks for our present blessings ‘without, at the same time, cursing a few ruined powerless exiles, who only harboured ideas, and made attempts, that most of us would have done, had we been in their situation?’ ‘Were the royal contemporaries of the Stuarts more mildly attentive to the rights of man? Might not the epithets of “bloody and tyrannical” be with at least equal justice, applied to the house of Tudor, of York, or any other of their predecessors?’ In short, the Stuarts were only fighting for prerogatives which former monarchs of England and contemporary monarchs of France enjoyed unchallenged, and the poet disclaims ability to determine whether their overthrow ‘was owing to the wisdom of leading individuals, or to the justling of party.’ And then comes the sting:

‘Man, Mr. Printer, is a strange, weak inconsistent being.--Who would believe, Sir, that in this our Augustan age of liberality and refinement, ... a certain people, under our national protection, should complain, not against a Monarch and a few favourite advisers, but against our whole legislative body, of the very same imposition and oppression, the Romish religion not excepted, and almost in the very same terms as our forefathers did against the family of Stuart! I will not, I cannot, enter into the merits of the cause; but I dare say, the American Congress, in 1776, will be allowed to have been as able and enlightened, and, a whole empire will say, as honest, as the English Convention in 1688; and that the fourth of July will be as sacred to their posterity as the fifth of November is to us.’

The concluding sentence of that peroration is paraphrased from a speech John Wilkes had delivered in the House of Commons ten years before. Manifestly Burns followed, closely and sympathetically, the utterances of the English radicals and reformers; it is well known that ‘A Man’s a Man’ is ‘two or three pretty good prose thoughts inverted into rhyme’ from the writings of a former Excise officer named Thomas Paine. Like most European liberals, Burns admired the leaders of the American Revolution--one of the toasts which gave offence in Dumfries is said to have been his proposal of the health of George Washington as ‘a better man’ than William Pitt--and his admiration would be intensified by obvious parallels between the grievances of the Americans and the Scots. His Jacobite sympathies were wholly emotional, and in part conditioned by the fact that the Jacobites had written all the good songs. One suspects that he would just as readily have taken the Catholic view of the Reformation if Scottish Catholics had embalmed their lost cause in poetry. When he looked at current affairs, his reason backed his feelings. Politically, Scotland had almost as much to complain of as the American colonies had had. In some respects, indeed, she had more. American towns had been free to manage their local affairs by a system of representative government; in Scotland the municipalities, like the country’s representation in Parliament, were self-perpetuating oligarchies. Burns, in common with thousands of men of higher rank, had no vote even in the government of his own burgh. Yet his dislike of the system and his contempt for most of its leaders would probably have expressed itself only in occasional satires had it not been for the outbreak of the French Revolution.

A movement for reform of both burgh and parliamentary government was under way in Scotland. George Dempster, one of the few men of independent mind among the Scottish representatives at Westminster, advocated such measures of reform as would allow ‘the industrious farmer and manufacturer [to] share at least in a privilege now engrossed by the great lord, the drunken laird, and the drunkener baillie.’ Country gentlemen of unimpeachable character took up the agitation, and Burns’s letters to men like William Robertson of Lude, John Francis Erskine of Mar, and Richard Oswald of Auchencruive, show that he looked to such leadership as the hope of the country. When his conduct was under inquiry Burns declared that he had, as a government employee, taken no active part, either personally or as an author, in the movement for reform, but that as a man he ‘would say that there existed a system of corruption between the Executive Power & the Representative part of the Legislature, which boded no good to our glorious Constitution; & which every patriotic Briton must wish to see amended.’

The early stages of the French Revolution roused the enthusiasm of the more liberal-minded men of all classes in Scotland. A dinner in Edinburgh to celebrate the second anniversary of the fall of the Bastille was attended by a group of university students which included John Allen, stepson of the poet’s friend Robert Cleghorn, by numerous country gentlemen like his friend Robert Riddell and his acquaintance Alexander Fergusson of Craigdarroch, and by Lord Daer. It seemed to men like Craigdarroch and Daer that the popular interest in the principles of the Revolution might be harnessed for the benefit of Scotland in speeding measures for burgh and parliamentary reform. Actually the brief alliance with French sympathizers delayed reform for forty years. All the vested interests of Great Britain rallied to support Burke’s condemnation of the revolutionary principles, and the counter-attack swept away every attempt to alter in the slightest degree the existing scheme of things.

The full weight of the counter-attack was not felt at once. Indeed, it was a Scotsman, James Mackintosh, who published the fullest and best-reasoned of the numerous replies to Burke. Besides seeking to confute Burke, Mackintosh tried to rally his countrymen to the cause of reform by citing their medieval reputation as lovers of liberty who would die rather than surrender their freedom. Certain passages in Mackintosh were probably as directly responsible for the composition of ‘Scots wha hae’ as _The Rights of Man_ was for ‘A Man’s a Man’. But as the Revolution swept on with increasing bloodshed to the execution of Louis XVI and as mobs in various parts of Scotland, including Edinburgh itself, celebrated King George’s birthday by burning Henry Dundas in effigy, the authorities became panicky. Scotland felt the heaviest force of their fright. Long latent memories of the ’45 revived at Whitehall, and to the dread of Scotland as a focal point for rebellion was added the practical detail that repressive measures could be better organized there than in England. England had a few constituencies, like London and Westminster, in which enough people were enfranchised to give a really popular vote, and a few members of Parliament whom neither fear nor bribes could silence. Scotland had neither. Hence the counter-revolutionary reign of terror struck first and hardest at Scotland.

Early in 1793 several leaders of the Friends of the People, a society organized to agitate for parliamentary reform, were arrested on charges of treason. Lord Daer was a member of the society, too, but the authorities, doubtless afraid that not even a packed jury could be trusted to convict the son of a popular earl, made no move to seize him. They contented themselves with lesser, but still conspicuous, victims, and before the series of trials--conducted with such disregard of justice as in Henry Cockburn’s opinion had not been seen in Britain since Jeffreys’s Bloody Assizes--was over Thomas Muir, Thomas Palmer, and several other reform leaders had been condemned to long terms of penal transportation. All opposition was crushed in Scotland for a generation. Henry Erskine, the one man who dared to raise his voice in defence of justice and common sense, paid for his temerity by being voted out of his office as Dean of the Faculty of Advocates. One of the last of Burns’s satirical ballads commemorates the event, in which a young man just admitted to the bar, Walter Scott by name, voted with the majority to punish Erskine for having the courage of his convictions.

Such was the background against which Burns undertook to display himself as a Friend of the People. He never, so far as can be learned, actually joined any of the reforming organizations, but it was not in Burns’s nature to conceal his opinions. From the time when he appeared in Edinburgh drawing-rooms wearing a waistcoat of Foxite blue and buff, and inscribed on a window-pane at Stirling verses about the successors to the Stuarts being ‘an idiot race, to honor lost’, he was marked as a character who would bear watching. The wonder is not so much that he came near to losing his job in the Excise as that he ever succeeded in getting it. If William Corbet and Graham of Fintry had not been the generous and friendly souls they were, the poet’s service career would have ended in 1793, and he might even have shared the fate of Muir and Palmer.

To note some of Burns’s words and deeds during 1791 and 1792, and realize that for every reckless phrase that reached paper there were doubtless a score uttered over the punchbowl, is to marvel at the poet’s escape. His phrase about the House of Hanover, already quoted, was written in the privacy of Robert Riddell’s library, but it is hard to believe that he did not say equally sharp things in more public places. His most intimate friends in Dumfries were avowed sympathizers with the Revolution. Dr. James Maxwell had witnessed the execution of the king, cherished the handkerchief he had dipped in the royal blood, and was well enough known to the authorities to have his revolutionary connexions violently denounced by Burke on the floor of the House of Commons. John Lewars was tainted with ‘D-m-cratic heresy’; Syme, after enrolling, like Burns, in the Dumfries Volunteers, became heartily disgusted with the whole wretched business; Maria Riddell was a parlour revolutionist who on her visits to London associated ‘with a very pleasant set of Sans-culottes’. Throughout 1792 Burns had let slip few opportunities of proclaiming his own sympathies. In the spring he bought the _Rosamond’s_ carronades and dispatched them as a present to the French Convention; in the autumn, when Maria Riddell asked him to suggest a programme for a benefit night in Dumfries theatre, he chose from the repertory of the local company Mrs. Centlivre’s _The Wonder: A Woman Keeps a Secret_ because it contained some platitudinous lines about British liberty which could be given political significance by well-timed applause. Either on this occasion or another the crowd carried the matter further than Burns had anticipated.

When ‘God Save the King’ was called for, a group in the pit which included some of Burns’s friends shouted for ‘Ça Ira’ instead. The ensuing clamour came to the verge of a free-for-all fight. In his defence Burns avowed that he never opened his lips ‘to hiss, or huzza, that, or any other Political tune whatever’ because he looked on himself ‘as far too obscure a man to have any weight in quelling a Riot; at the same time as a character of higher respectability, than to yell in the howlings of a rabble.’ In other words, by sitting still and not applauding the national anthem he made himself just as conspicuous as if he had joined in the call for ‘Ça Ira’. He was anything but the obscure individual he claimed to be, and it was apparently his public conduct on this occasion that led to his being reported to his superiors as a disaffected person.

Seemingly the idea that his opinions might get him into trouble had never occurred to Burns. The threat of an official investigation threw him into a humiliating panic, and must also have alarmed his friends in the higher ranks of the Excise. It is difficult otherwise to account for Supervisor Corbet’s coming in person to Dumfries to look into the charges. An accusation brought against a minor officer in the service was scarcely in ordinary routine a serious enough affair to call in one of the highest officials; the inference is that Corbet was rightly fearful of the results if Burns were investigated by an unfriendly agent. Accordingly the Supervisor examined the poet across a dinner-table in company with Findlater and Syme, and in that mellow atmosphere found no ground for the charges ‘save some witty sayings’. But even so, Corbet, in the name of the Board, had to admonish Burns--so the poet reported to Erskine of Mar--‘that _my_ business was to _act_, not to think; & that whatever might be Men or Measures, it was for me to be silent and obedient.’

The hair-splitting particularity of Burns’s defence of his conduct is in itself proof of the real basis of the charges against him. He revered the King, he declared, in his public capacity as ‘the sacred Keystone of our Royal Arch Constitution’, but George’s ‘private worth, it is altogether impossible that such a man as I can appreciate.’ (On the report of the King’s first admitted insanity in 1788 he had said, ‘I am not sure whether he is not a gainer, by how much a Madman is a more respectable character than a Fool.’) He had joined no party for revolution or reform; his contributions to the radical _Edinburgh Gazetteer_ had been only a couple of non-political verses. But he did not mention that in subscribing to the _Gazetteer_ he had urged its editor, William Johnston, to ‘lay bare, with undaunted heart & steady hand, that horrid mass of corruption called Politics & State-Craft!’ and to ‘dare to draw in their native colours these “Calm, thinking Villains whom no faith can fix”--whatever be the Shibboleth of their pretended Party.’ Oddly enough, the _Rosamond’s_ carronades had not been brought up against him. Hence he naturally did not mention them, but he took occasion to avow that though he had been an enthusiastic votary of France at the beginning, he had changed his sentiments since the Revolution had embarked on a career of bloodshed and military aggression.

Here Burns was making a Galileo recantation. On the same day on which he thus denied to Robert Graham that he any longer supported the Revolution he was using French in a letter to Mrs. Dunlop and adding that he hoped it was correct, for ‘much would it go against my soul, to mar anything belonging to that gallant people: though my real sentiments of them shall be confined alone to my letters to you.’ Despite her repeated warnings to drop the subject, he continued to talk about his devotion to Liberty, his friendship with Dr. Maxwell, and his approval of ‘the delivering over a perjured Blockhead & an unprincipled Prostitute to the hands of the hangman’ until the offended lady broke off the correspondence. Seething, as he had said of his feeling in 1788, with the impotent ‘madness of an enraged Scorpion shut up in a thumb-phial’, Burns had to express himself to someone. He had lied about his sentiments, and though the lie was to save his family rather than himself, its taste was bitter in his mouth. Nor was he helped by the realization that all Scotland was equally cowed and that if he had not made his recantation he would have shared the fate of four other citizens of Dumfries who were imprisoned for drinking seditious toasts. Once before he had challenged authority in the shape of the temporal power of the Kirk, and had come off not unscathed but undefeated. Now he had challenged much less openly the State, and had learned the difference in strength between a vital institution and a moribund one. The realization of defeat shook his self-confidence as nothing else had ever done, and helped to drive him to such unmanly conduct as that which followed his quarrel with Maria Riddell. He who had refused to sell his songs for money had sold his independence for bread. That it was his children’s bread and not his own might salve his conscience, but it could not heal his pride.

The Man of Feeling had bruised himself against a harsher reality than anything Harley had found in London or Bedlam; the idealist in politics had learned the substance of which politicians are made. Brimming with New Light theories about the Moral Sense, convinced by primitivists like Rousseau that ‘mankind are by nature benevolent creatures’ whom mere stress of hunger and poverty makes selfish, Burns had come naked to battle against the forces of alarmed conservatism and privilege. Like thousands of others he had taken seriously the slogans of ‘Liberty’ and ‘the Rights of Man’, and had seen in the French Revolution the signs that the world’s great age was beginning anew. His disillusionment went deeper than mere realization of his own unsafe position as a government employee. He was watching the ancient forces of selfishness and aggression capture the movement from which he had hoped so much. His enlistment in the Dumfries Volunteers was not wholly from dread of further jeopardizing his livelihood by holding aloof. He still believed in the principles of the Revolution, but that belief did not commit him to endorsement of its practices, and so, like many another pacifist, he found himself, still hating war, nevertheless engaged in supporting it.

Though he dared no longer give direct utterance to revolutionary sympathies, he could, and did, express his detestation of war in a song like ‘Logan Braes’, and couple the ideas of his generation with the patriotic tradition of medieval Scotland. The low estate of contemporary Scottish liberty threw into more glorious relief the traditions of Bannockburn and the lost cause of the Stuarts. His patriotism accepted without question the legend that ‘Hey tutti taitie’ had been Bruce’s battle-march, as it accepted the romantic interpretation of Mary Queen of Scots. Burns might call himself an unprejudiced inquirer and a sceptic, but his nature had no kinship with the cool remorseless scepticism of a man like David Hume. Hume’s was the keenest Scottish mind of his century; Burns, at least in the height of his rebellion against the Kirk, might have been expected to find the philosopher congenial. But Burns could endure destructive criticism only of things he hated. Hume did not confine his scepticism to religion, and when he brought his devastating intellect to bear on the romantic traditions of his country Burns turned away in anger. He might endorse Hume’s demolition of the supernatural sanctions of the church, but he was disquieted by the application of the same scepticism to the belief in immortality, and infuriated when it was turned upon Queen Mary. Hume was mentally akin to Voltaire and Samuel Butler; Burns to Rousseau and Dickens.

In repudiating Hume’s treatment of Mary, Burns was unconsciously illustrating the force of Johnson’s ruthless dictum, which even the loyal Sir Walter Scott could not wholly deny, that ‘a Scotchman must be a very sturdy moralist who does not love Scotland better than truth: He will always love it better than inquiry; and if falsehood flatters his vanity, will not be very diligent to detect it.’ Few men have lived more honest than Burns. He would not willingly lie, nor endorse a lie; but if offered choice between a romantic story which appealed to his patriotism and an unromantic one which did not, his choice was never in doubt. His own followers, in their hostility to anything like dispassionate investigation of the picturesque legends surrounding him, continue to illustrate the same attitude. Nor, indeed, have the Burnsians monopolized this aversion to inquiry. It remained for an Irishman and an American to set forth the true details of the life of Allan Ramsay, and for another American to write the only complete and scholarly study of Henry Mackenzie and his times.

Many Scotsmen besides Burns shared his passionate defence of Queen Mary; not so many shared his general patriotism. Here Burns, very Scot of very Scot, belonged to a generation which had passed, though he prepared the way for one to come. He had much in common with Claverhouse, Lochiel, or Fletcher of Saltoun; nothing in common with Bute, Wedderburn, or Henry Dundas. In so far as the patriotism of Sir John Sinclair sought the improvement of his country by collecting and tabulating her resources, Burns was with him, but when Sinclair tried to eradicate the national speech he struck at something Burns held precious. True, Burns was like his contemporaries in snatching at everything that seemed like proof that the Scots could equal or surpass the English at their own games. He applauded the _Mirror_ and the _Lounger_ because they looked like successful rivals of the _Tatler_ and _Spectator_; he admired Thomson and Beattie and Blair the more because even the English had to admit that these men wrote well in the southern tongue. But he deeply resented the willingness of his countrymen to sink their national identity in the Union.

‘Alas! have I often said to myself,’ he wrote to Mrs. Dunlop in 1790, ‘what are all the boasted advantages which my country reaps from the union, that can counterbalance the annihilation of her Independance, and even her very name! I often repeat that couplet of my favorite poet, Goldsmith--

“----States of native liberty possest, Tho’ very poor, may yet be very blest.”

Nothing can reconcile me to the common terms, “English ambassador, English court,” &c. And I am out of all patience to see that equivocal character, Hastings, impeached by “the Commons of England.” Tell me, my friend, is this weak prejudice?’

Men like Boswell and Sinclair would have answered without hesitation that it was. The Union had admitted Scotland to as much share as she could grasp of the wealth of the British Empire; commerce and industry were increasing year by year; the poor relation was beginning to live like the prosperous branch of the family. For such profits, the change of name from ‘Scotland’ to ‘North Britain’ seemed a small price. To those who shared in the new prosperity, the suggestion of a nationalist movement would have seemed rank folly or even downright treason. So long as the prosperity continued, indeed, the ‘practical men’ had the overwhelming majority of their countrymen with them. The emergence of Scottish nationalism as a political force to be reckoned with had to await the collapse of Scottish industry which followed the World War. With the loss of material prosperity, the Scots have begun to question the value of the system which transfers to Westminster the control of their local affairs. Scottish poverty and Scottish pride are seemingly interdependent. Removal of the one will make the nation more willing to swallow the other.

Even if Burns had shared the material prosperity resulting from the Union, instead of helping, as tenant of rack-rented land, to pay for it, his feelings would have been the same. In every fibre of his being he shared the spirit of those Scots who, in contradiction of every proverbial association of pawky caution with their race, have been among the greatest soldiers, explorers, and idealists of modern history. Montrose and Livingstone, Admiral Duncan and Mungo Park, expressed in action the national traits which he expressed in song. His calling, consciously accepted, was that of national poet; his other activities merely the ‘sweat, that the base machine might have its oil’. He refused payment for his songs, because the task of supplying words to national melodies was a patriotic service, embalming and treasuring up these relics of his country’s spirit to a life beyond life.

Without Burns’s share in the work of gathering old Jacobite songs, for instance, and composing new ones, it may be questioned if such a halo of romance would have surrounded, in the next generation, the Rebellions of 1715 and 1745; without that halo, Sir Walter Scott would have been less readily attracted to them; without Sir Walter, the romantic vision of Scottish history would never have conquered the world. No Scottish writer of the eighteenth century, except Burns, passed on the torch of national pride. Without him, the fact that Hume and Boswell were Scotsmen, that Thomson was born on Tweed instead of Thames, would mean no more to the ordinary reader than does the fact that Swift was born in Ireland or Wordsworth in Cumberland. Without him, Ramsay and Fergusson would be forgotten minor poets who wrote in a difficult and obsolete dialect. He gathered together in his own work all that was vital in the work of his predecessors, infused it with the fire of his own personality, and sent it out again to keep Scotland alive.

Burns came at the last moment when a national poet could succeed in his task. A few decades later, and the vernacular would have sunk too low for preservation. Even as it was, he could only embalm it and not renew it as poetic speech. Except for Lady Nairne’s, scarcely any vernacular poetry written in Scotland since 1800 deserves higher ranking than the _Barrack-Room Ballads_. As a poetic influence, Burns’s work was weak. As a national influence, its force is not yet spent. He revealed the richness and colour of Scottish life, and in revealing it gave direction and vitality to the long and noble line of novelists which began with Sir Walter Scott and John Galt, and continued through Stevenson to John Buchan and the late Neil Munro. Through these men the Scotland which was no longer, politically, a nation became more enduring than anything which depends on rulers and boundaries--a nation of the mind and heart, a home of lost causes, of impossible loyalties, of high romance and simple faith. It is not Scott’s kings and ladies and nobles who keep his books alive; it is people like Edie Ochiltree, Jeanie Deans, Meg Dods, and Dandie Dinmont--in other words, the characters who are part and parcel of the world which Burns depicted and glorified. Steenie Steenson, like Thrawn Janet and Tod Lapraik, carries on the great tradition of Tam o’ Shanter. Without Burns the Scottish novel as we know it would never have been; without the Scottish novel, the literature of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries would be as much the poorer as seventeenth-century poetry would be without the Cavaliers.

In tracing the continuing tradition of sentiment from Henry Mackenzie through Burns himself to ‘Ian Maclaren’ and Sir James Barrie, Professor Thompson made perforce a grave omission. The difference between the dynamic romanticism of England at the beginning of the last century--the romanticism of the young Wordsworth and of Shelley--and the insipid prettiness of the same movement in America at the same time, lies in the invigorating power of the French Revolution. By giving a fighting edge to romance, the Revolution raised it above mere fancifulness and sentimentality. His patriotism did the same thing for the influence of Burns. Without it he might today be only a minor Man of Feeling. Even as it is, he is neglected and misunderstood. The strength, the humour, the fighting edge are there, but few people care to find them.

He saved Scotland; himself he could not save. Five years after his death a group of admirers in Greenock organized a Burns Club, and Paisley and Kilmarnock quickly followed suit. The fashion spread through Scotland, and among Scotsmen in the rest of the English-speaking world, bringing in its train the erection of more, and worse, statues and monuments than have been reared to the memory of any other British individual with the possible exception of Albert, Prince Consort. Soon the movement acquired the characteristics of a minor religious cult, complete with ritual meals and a thriving traffic in relics, genuine or spurious, of its hero.

In itself this establishment as hero of a national cult might be harmless. After all, if any writer was to fill the role, Burns was the inevitable candidate, for he alone of the great Scottish writers was truly a man of the people. Not the existence of the cult, but the direction it took, is the tragedy of Burns. The sentimentality which lies, like the soft core of an over-ripe pear, at the heart of writers like ‘Ian Maclaren’, Sir James Barrie, and A. A. Milne, is widespread in Scotland. In the Burns cult this softness yearns to the answering softness of ‘The Cotter’s Saturday Night’, ‘To a Mouse’, and ‘To a Mountain Daisy’, extols its hero as the Bard of Humanity and Democracy, and rejoices in the bathos of Clarinda and Highland Mary. Meanwhile the ribald magnificence of ‘Holy Willie’ and ‘The Jolly Beggars’ is neglected, the homely realism of satires, epistles, and dramatic monologues goes unread. Worst of all, the splendid treasury of more than three hundred songs, Burns’s most truly patriotic work, lies almost untouched on the shelves. Radio and concert stage alike ignore them. And choice of the few that are known to the public at large runs true to the same form as with the longer poems. Probably a hundred people know ‘Sweet Afton’ for one who knows ‘M’Pherson’s Farewell’ or ‘Rantin’ Rovin’ Robin’.

The flattery of being a national hero would delight Burns. If his followers were only mealy-mouthed where he was outspoken, they would merely amuse him. He would not mind if they slobbered over his sins, for the unco guid were old acquaintance of his. But at the thought of his worshippers exalting his weakest work and ignoring his best, his very soul would scunner. The real Burns was not the dropper of tears over ploughed-under weeds but the man who brought in the neighbours for a kirn-night and kissed the lasses after every dance; the man who sat by farmers’ ingles and on ale-house benches listening to the racy earthy talk of his people and storing his mind with folk sayings and old songs. He was not ashamed of being a Scottish peasant, the heir of all the picturesque and frequently bawdy tradition of Scots folk literature. Neither was the man who wrote, ‘But yet the light that led astray Was light from Heaven’, ashamed of his human nature. But his worshippers are ashamed of the best part of his nature and his work. And nobody else reads him at all.

INDEX

Abbotsford, 227

_Aberdeen Almanac_, 45

Aberfoyle, 47

Adam, Alexander, 119

Addison, Joseph, 40, 234

_Adventures of John Cheap the Chapman, The_, 46

_Adventures of Telemachus_ (Fénelon), 51

‘Ae fond kiss,’ 149, 172, 264

Agriculture in Scotland, 10-16, 188

Agriculture, Professorship of, Edinburgh, 155

Aiken, Robert, 93-96, 98, 142, 144, 147, 193, 194

Ainslie, Robert, 65, 107, 110, 112-115, 144, 150, 151, 167, 168, 170, 173, 186, 214

Albert, Prince Consort, 306

Allen, John, 110, 291

Alloway, 11, 36-41, 48, 279

Alloway Kirk, 36, 266

Almack, William, 30

‘A Man’s a Man,’ 289, 292

American Colonies. _See_ United States

American Revolution, 70, 82, 225, 290

Anderson, Robert, 196, 247

Anne, Queen, 60, 287

‘An’ O for ane-and-twenty, Tam,’ 264

Antigua, 176

Arbroath, 266

Archers, Royal Company of, 108

Argyll, John, Duke of, 5

Armour, James, 77, 94, 139, 142-143, 150, 165, 192

Armour, Mrs. James, 168

Armour, Jean. _See_ Burns, Jean Armour

Army, Burns’s opinions of, 155, 179

Arnot, John, 191

Arran, 47

Athole, Jane Cathcart, Duchess of, 116-117

Athole, John, Duke of, 116-117

Auchencruive, 144

Auld Brig, Ayr, 31

_Auld Farmer’s New Year’s Morning Salutation, The_, 58, 249, 250

_Auld Lang Syne_, 260

Auld, Walter, 120, 228

Auld, William, 173, 279

Austen, Jane, 278

Aylmer, Rose, 250

Ayr, 195, 279

Ayr, Brigs of, 31

Ayr, Presbytery of, 92-93

Baker, --, 127

Ballads, 25-27, 38, 43-44, 246, 252, 259, 269

Ballantine, John, 61, 93-96, 202

Ballenden, Braes of, 256

Balmerino, Arthur Elphinstone, Baron, 229, 287

_Banks of Cree_, 271

Bannockburn, 48, 272, 300

Barncailzie, 125

_Barrack-Room Ballads_, 305

Barrie, Sir James Matthew, 305, 307

Bayard, 28

Beattie, James, 25, 29, 75, 104, 270, 302

Bede, 23

Beethoven, Ludwig von, 275

Begbie, Alison, 69-70, 189

Begg, Isabella Burns, 147

_Bell_, West-Indiaman, 192-193

Benson, Anna Dorothea, 132

Beugo, John, 175

Bible, 23

Black Bull Inn, Glasgow, 166

Blacklock, Thomas, 99, 195

Blair, Athole, 116-117, 207

Blair, Hugh, 29, 97, 104, 118, 155, 195, 244, 302

Blair, Sir James Hunter, 240

Blair, Robert, 259

Blake, William, 243, 278

Bloody Assizes, 293

Bolingbroke, Henry St. John, Viscount, 60

_Bonnie Dundee_, 261-262

Border tour, Burns’s, 113, 200, 208, 240, 247, 255

Boston, Thomas, 19, 37, 281

Boswell, Sir Alexander, 274

Boswell, Euphemia, 165

Boswell, James, 11, 29, 60, 91, 103, 107, 111, 129, 278, 302, 304

Boyd, Thomas, 120, 213

Brawne, Fanny, 250

Braxfield, Robert M’Queen, Lord, 102, 108, 129

Bremner, Robert, 242

_Brigs of Ayr, The_, 248

Broadsides, Scottish, 45

Brontë, Emily, 162

Brown, Richard, 80-83, 84, 89, 92, 137-138, 163, 166, 169, 237

Brown, Samuel, 56

Browning, Robert, 250, 251

Brow Well, 133, 184-187

Bruce, King Robert the, 272, 300

Brussels, 32

Buchan, David Stuart Erskine, Earl of, 100-101, 255

Buchan, John, 305

Burke, Edmund, 278, 292, 295

Burn, Robert, 221

Burnes, Agnes Broun (mother of the poet), 37-38, 44, 90, 135-136, 138-139, 203

Burnes, Robert (grandfather of the poet), 36

Burnes, Robert (uncle of the poet), 36, 60

Burnes, William (father of the poet), 8, 34, 35, 36-39, 41, 42-43, 48, 49-50, 55, 59, 62, 70, 71-73, 84, 85-88, 90, 279

Burness, James, 117, 232

Burnet, Elizabeth, of Manboddo, 240

Burns, Agnes (sister of the poet), 49

Burns, Elizabeth Paton (daughter of the poet), 74, 138-139, 143, 150, 203

Burns, Elizabeth Riddell (daughter of the poet), 183-184

Burns, Gilbert (brother of the poet), 11, 34, 37, 41, 48, 50, 55, 59, 63, 68, 73, 87, 88, 90, 95, 122, 138, 143, 186, 202-203, 208, 214, 220, 245

Burns, Isabella (sister of the poet). _See_ Begg, Isabella Burns

Burns, Jean Armour, 13, 83, 90, 91-92, 109, 110, 113, 114-115, 118, 126, 133, 136, 138, 139-144, 146-148, 150, 153, 156, 164, 165, 167-170, 172-176, 185, 187, 189, 192-193, 201, 212, 214, 217, 220, 221, 232, 233

Burns, John (brother of the poet), 88

Burns, Robert, _Poems_. See _Poems_, Burns’s

Burns, Robert, the poet, _passim_. Specific references are to be found in association with other persons, topics, or places.

Burns, Robert (son of the poet), 167, 174, 185

Burns, William (brother of the poet), 166, 203-204, 215

Burns, William Nicol (son of the poet), 119

Burns Clubs, 301, 306-308

Burton, Robert, 42

_Bush aboon Traquair, The_, 48, 255

Bute, John Stuart, Earl of, 5, 301

Butler, Samuel, 300

Byron, George Noel Gordon, Lord, 109, 278

Cadell and Davies, 199

Caedmon, 23

_Ça Ira_, 295-296

Caledonian Hunt, 99, 127, 197

_Caller Oysters_, 248

Calton Hill, 118

Calvin, John, 19

Calvinism, 5, 16-23, 66, 162, 163, 279-287

Cameron, Meg, 113, 118, 148, 151, 152, 165, 208

Campbell, Mary, 138, 144-149, 250, 307

Canada, 190

Candlish, James, 30, 62, 281

Cape Club, Edinburgh, 105

Caroline lyrics, 42

Carronades, Burns’s purchase of, 227, 295, 297

Carswell, Catherine, 84, 180

Catalan, 23

Catrine House, 96-97, 195

Cawdor Castle, 48

Centlivre, Susannah, 295

Chalmers, Margaret, 148, 160-161, 164, 256

Channing, William Eilery, 280, 285

Chapbooks, Scottish, 45-46

Chapman, George, 49, 75

Chatterton, Thomas, 62, 79

Chaucer, Geoffrey, 23, 42, 46

Chesterton, G. K., 66

Children, Burns’s feelings toward, 150-153

Chloris. _See_ Lorimer, Jean.

_Christabel_, 243

_Chronicle_, London, 134, 206

Clarinda. _See_ M’Lehose, Agnes.

Clarke, Samuel, 128

Clarke, Stephen, 257-258

Class-consciousness, Burns’s, 52-53

Claverhouse, John Graham of, Viscount Dundee, 301

Cleghorn, Robert, 109-111, 253, 291

Clint, Henry, 120

Clochnahill, 36

Clow, Jenny, 113, 118, 144, 146, 148, 152, 165, 170-171, 221

Clydesdale, 50

Cockburn, Alison, 43

Cockburn, Henry, 103, 108, 293

Cockney dialect, 30, 247

Coila, 157

Cole, Elisha, 281

Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 243

_Comical Sayings of Paddy from Cork, The_, 46

‘Coming thro’ the rye,’ 26

Commonplace Book, Burns’s, 236-239, 242-244, 259

Composition, Burns’s methods of, 241-246

Connaught, 81

Constable, Archibald, 106

Copyrights, Burns’s, 199-201, 274

Corbet, William, 129, 294, 296

Corri, Domenico, 28

_Cotter’s Saturday Night, The_, 58, 154, 246, 269, 307

_Court of Equity, The_, 111, 146

Court of Session, 86

Cowper, William, 278

Craig, Lord, 162, 165

Craigdarroch, 121

Crane, Ichabod, 39

Creech, William, 100, 105, 106, 161, 165, 169, 197-201, 204-205, 220

Criffel, 187

Crochallan Fencibles, 104-109, 253, 254, 255

Cromek, Robert Hartley, 161

Cullen, William, 155

Cunningham, Alexander, 107-109, 110, 112, 118, 125, 126, 133-134, 167, 205, 240, 253, 268, 285, 286

Currie, James, 125, 182, 246, 273

‘Cutty stool,’ 17

Daer, Basil William, Lord, 96, 131, 291, 293

_Daft Days, The_, 25, 248

Dalrymple, 51

Dalrymple, William, 279

Dalswinton, 114, 207-212

Dalyell, Sir John Graham, 124

Dalziel, Alexander, 98, 99, 195

Darien Expedition, 7

Davidson, Betty, 44, 136

Davies, Deborah Duff, 149

Deans, Jamie, 283

Deans, Jeanie, 305

_Death and Dr. Hornbook_, 39, 46, 83

Death, Burns’s, 133

Deists, 20, 22, 281, 286

Democracy, Scottish, 32-33

Dempster, George, 32, 290

Dickens, Charles, 65, 266, 300

Dinmont, Dandie, 305

Dods, --, 127-128

Dods, Meg, 305

Don, Lady Harriet, 61, 132

Doonholm, 36

Douglas and Heron Bank, 16, 70, 85, 230

Douglas, Charles, 192

Douglas, Gawain, 23, 247

Douglas, Lady Mary, 132

_Douglas, Tragedy of_, 21, 40

Douglas, William, 250

Dover, 227

Drama, Burns and the, 251-252

Drama, in Edinburgh, 21

Dramatic lyric, Burns’s use of, 250-251

Dramatic monologue, Burns’s use of, 250-251

Drummond, William, of Hawthornden, 23

Dryden, John, 42

Dumfries, 68, 110, 113, 118, 124-134, 152, 160, 171, 177, 208, 219, 221-233, 267, 294-297, 298

Dumfries Academy, 224

Dumfries Burgh Council, 224

Dumfries Public Library, 106

Dumfries Theatre, 179, 295-296

Dumfries Volunteers, 228, 231, 232, 295, 299

Dunbar, William (the poet), 23, 247

Dunbar, William (Edinburgh), 106, 157, 254

Duncan, Adam, 303

Dundas, Henry, 5, 101, 108, 116, 207, 292, 301

Dundas, Robert, 107, 108

Dunlop, Andrew, 82

Dunlop, Frances Anna Wallace, 61, 96, 101, 148, 150, 151, 152, 153-160, 167, 194, 199, 206, 209, 240, 260, 267, 282-283, 284, 286, 297-298, 302

Dunlop House, 156, 167

Dunlop, Keith, 157, 167

Dunlop, Rachel, 156, 167

Dunlop, Thomas, 154

Dunnottar, 36

Dunscore, 288

Dunse, 112, 113

Durham, 127

East India Company, 6, 190

East Lothian, 208

Easy Club, Edinburgh, 105

Eclogues, Virgil’s, 252

Edinburgh, 7-10, 75, 78, 94, 99-119, 124, 153, 162-172, 195-202, 209-210, 216, 221, 245, 252, 291-293, 294

Edinburgh High School, 116, 119

Edinburgh University, 8, 96

Eglinton, Archibald Montgomerie, Earl of, 197, 202

Eglinton, Countess of, 197

Eglinton Wood, 82

_Elegies_ (Shenstone), 57

_Elegy on the Death of Sir James Hunter Blair_, 240

_Elibanks and Elibraes_, 48, 255

Elizabethan lyrics, 42

Elliot, Jean, 43

Ellisland, 101, 110, 113-115, 119-122, 158, 174, 202, 203, 207-222, 262

Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 261, 280, 285

_Encyclopædia Britannica_, 105

_Epistle to John Rankine_, 77

Erskine, Andrew, 91, 99

Erskine, Henry, 108, 293

Erskine, John Francis, of Mar, 291, 297

_Esopus to Maria_, 181

_Evening Courant_, Edinburgh, 288

_Eve of St. Agnes, The_, 250

Excise, 55, 98, 101, 109, 115, 116, 129-130, 133, 165, 169, 170, 190, 206-207, 209-210, 212, 214-233, 262, 269, 277, 289, 294, 296

Faculty of Advocates, 293

Falstaff, 167

Farington, Joseph, 121, 165

Farming, Burns’s, 204, 210-222

Fénelon, François, 51

_Ferdinand Count Fathom_, 58

Fergusson, Alexander, of Craigdarroch, 121-122, 291

Fergusson, Robert, 25, 61, 75, 91, 104, 105, 134, 221, 237, 241-242, 247-248, 252, 304

Fergusson, William, 36, 50, 53

Ferrara, Duke of, 250

Fifeshire, 247

’Fifteen, Rebellion of, 36, 287, 304

Findlater, Alexander, 96, 129-130, 217, 219, 229, 296

Fisher, Edward, 281

Flax-dressing, Burns and, 71, 79-84

Fletcher, Andrew, of Saltoun, 301

_Flowers of Edinburgh, The_, 272

_Flowers of the Forest, The_, 43

Folk-songs, Scottish, 26-28, 38, 43-44, 75, 132, 252-263, 269

Fornicators’ Court, 112

’Forty-five, Rebellion of, 4, 7, 26, 46, 287, 292, 304

_Four-Fold State_ (Thomas Boston), 19, 37, 279, 281

Fox, Charles James, 294

Franklin, Benjamin, 22, 61, 100, 103, 266

Freemasonry, 67-68, 87, 99, 104, 144, 145, 297

French, Burns’s knowledge of, 51-52

French Convention, 227, 295

French Revolution, 51, 119, 128, 159-160, 182, 226-228, 270, 272, 290-299, 306

Friars Carse, 120, 176, 177, 181, 182, 212, 265

_Friars Carse Hermitage, Written in_, 262

Friends of the People, 293-294

_Gala Water_, 255

Galileo, 297

Galloway, Burns’s tour in, 229

Galloway, John Stewart, Earl of, 131

Galt, John, 305

_Gazetteer_, Edinburgh, 297

_Gentlemen’s Magazine_, 31

George III, 292, 296-297

_Geographical Grammar_ (Guthrie), 48

_Gillicrankie_, 237

Glasgow, 7, 83, 166

Glasgow University, 20, 30

Glenbervie, 36

Glencairn, Elizabeth M’Quire, Countess of, 132

Glencairn, James, Earl of, 95, 98-101, 107, 120, 195-197, 209, 210, 216, 240

Glenconner, 211

Globe Inn, Dumfries, 120, 174

_God Save the King_, 295-296

Godwin, William, 278

Goldielea, 122, 178

Goldsmith, Oliver, 31, 302

Gordon Castle, 117

Gordon, Jane, Duchess of, 117, 132, 159

Gow, Neil, 27

Graham, Dugal, 11, 45-46

Graham, Robert, of Fintry, 68, 111, 116, 207, 216, 223, 224, 294, 297

_Grave, The_ (Blair), 259

Gray, James, 124, 152

Gray, Thomas, 103, 157

Greenfield, William, 252

Greenock, 192-193, 306

Grieve, James, 85

_Grizzel Grimme, Ballad of_, 246

Grose, Francis, 121, 176-177, 265, 268

Guthrie, William, 48

_Guy Mannering_, 104

Halleaths, 182

_Hallowe’en_, 248

Hamilton, Charlotte, 256

Hamilton, Gavin, 72, 76, 78, 87-88, 90, 92-93, 142, 202

Hamilton, John, of Sundrum, 85-86

Hamilton, William, of Gilbertfield, 24, 45

_Hamlet_, 40

Hampstead Heath, 244

_Handsome Nell_, 236, 242

Hannibal, 45, 234

Hanover, House of, 4, 26, 287-289, 294

_Hardyknute_, 27, 43

Harry, Blind, 25, 45

Hastings, Warren, 5, 302

Hay, Charles (Lord Newton), 106-107, 108, 253

Hay, Lewis, 161

Health, Burns’s, 54, 83-84, 184-187, 217, 231-233

_Helenore_ (Alexander Ross), 24

Henley, William Ernest, 138, 144, 145, 168

Henri, Susan Dunlop, 152, 286

_Henry VIII_, 40

Henryson, Robert, 23

Herald’s Office, Edinburgh, 35

Herd, David, 27, 43, 110, 252

‘Here is the glen and here the bower,’ 272

Heron, Lady Elizabeth, 271-272

Heron, Patrick, of Heron, 16, 131, 230, 271

_Hey, Johnie Cope_, 26

_Hey tutti taitie_, 272, 300

Highland clans, suppression of, 4

_Highland Lassie_, 145

Highland Mary. _See_ Campbell, Mary

Highland tours, Burns’s, 116-118, 256

Hildebroad, John, 283

Hill, Peter, 106, 200, 281

_History of Sir William Wallace, The_, 234

_History of the Bible_ (Stackhouse), 48

Hogg, James, 102, 135

Holinshed, Raphael, 261

Holmes, Oliver Wendell, 19, 280

_Holy Fair, The_, 76, 248

_Holy Willie’s Prayer_, 46, 76, 111, 249, 250, 307

Home, John, 21, 28, 40, 42, 75

Homer, 49, 75

Hopetoun, James Hope, Earl of, 228

Horace, 236

Housman, A. E., 244-245

‘How are Thy servants blest’ (Addison), 40

Hume, David, 29, 31, 197, 278, 279, 300, 304

Humphry, James, 83

Hutcheson, Francis, 20, 22, 281, 285

Hyslop, William, 120

Immortality, Burns’s views on, 284-286

‘I murder hate,’ 82, 155, 237

India, 190

Inquisition, Spanish, 17

Irvine, 67, 71, 72, 79-84, 87, 88

Irving, Washington, 266

‘I’ve seen the smiling of Fortune beguiling,’ 43

Jacobitism, Burns’s, 209, 229, 287-290, 304

Jamaica, 93, 98, 147, 151, 162, 171, 172, 191-193, 206, 239

James I, of Scotland, 23

James VI, of Scotland, I of England, 3, 23, 287

Jefferson, Thomas, 272

Jeffrey, Francis, 29

Jeffreys, George, 293

_Jocky and Maggie’s Courtship_, 46

_John Anderson_, 26, 264

_John Barleycorn_, 246

_John o’ Badenyon_, 43, 256

Johnson, James, 120, 132, 214, 220, 254-264, 269, 273

Johnson, Samuel, 11, 24, 29, 31, 43, 102, 300

Johnston, William, 297

_Jolly Beggars, The_, 59, 111, 144, 249, 307

Journalism, Burns and, 205-206

_Junius_, 61

Kames, Henry Home, Lord, 102, 108, 129

Keats, John, 11, 35, 49, 75, 79, 239, 250

Kemp, John, 162, 164, 165

Kilmarnock, 76, 167, 193-194, 198, 306

Kilpatrick, Nellie, 63, 68, 82, 137, 234-235

King’s Arms, Dumfries, 120

Kinmonth, 36

Kipling, Rudyard, 247, 305

Kirk, Scottish, 16-23

Kirkcudbright, 125, 131, 230

Kirkoswald, 37, 55-60, 69, 72

Kirkpatrick, Joseph, 282, 288

Kiwanis Club, 104

Knox, John, 16, 19, 22

Lake District, 47

Lamb, Charles, 278

_Lament for James, Earl of Glencairn_, 240

Landor, Walter Savage, 250

Lapraik, John, 249

Lapraik, Tod, 305

Laurie, Annie, 250

Laurie, Sir Robert, 121-122

Lawrie, George, 99, 195

Lawrie, Mrs. George, 153

_Leader Haughs and Yarrow_, 255

Leeward Islands, 176

Lewars, Jessie, 130, 148, 149, 277

Lewars, John, 130, 295

_Lewis Gordon_, 272

Letters, Burns’s, 60-61

_Letters Moral and Entertaining_ (E. Rowe), 60

Linlithgow, 90

Lippo Lippi, Fra, 250

Lisbon, 9

Little, Jenny, 158-159

Livingstone, David, 303

Lochaber, 256

Lochiel, Donald Cameron of, 301

Lochlie, 62-63, 70, 72-73, 74, 84-88, 90, 138, 208, 214

Lochmaben, 182

_Lochmaben Harper, The_, 258

Locke, John, 22

Lockerbie, 182

Lockhart, John Gibson, 118

_Logan Braes_, 299

Lomond, Loch, 47

London, 204, 287, 293, 295

Longtown, 204

Lorimer, Jean, 148, 149, 219

Lorimer, William, 219

Loudoun, 99, 153, 195

Louis XVI, 160, 292, 294, 298

_Lounger, The_, 31, 302

Lowell, James Russell, 247

Loyal Natives Club, Dumfries, 126-127

M’Auley, John, 151

_Macbeth_, 261, 266

Mackenzie, Henry, 12, 31, 58, 60, 66, 75, 84, 93, 118, 125, 197, 199, 201, 251, 252, 301, 305

Mackenzie, John, 90-92, 99

Mackenzie, S. (Dumfries), 124

Mackintosh, James, 292

McKnight, --, 274

‘Maclaren, Ian.’ _See_ Watson, John

M’Lehose, Agnes, 70, 114, 125, 144, 148, 152, 153, 156, 160-172, 174, 176, 179, 209, 210, 212, 221, 251, 258, 281, 283, 284, 307

M’Lehose, James, 162, 166, 171, 172

M’Lure, David, 62, 70, 72, 85-88

M’Murdo, John, 111, 133

Macpherson, James, 27, 43

_M’Pherson’s Farewell_, 264, 307

Mallet, David, 30

_Man of Feeling, The_, 31, 35, 58, 60, 84, 144, 189, 279, 299, 306

_Man Was Made to Mourn_, 236

Manners, Burns’s, 102-104, 144, 153-157

_Manual of Religious Belief_ (William Burnes), 59, 279

Marie Antoinette, 160, 298

Marischal, George Keith, 10th Earl of, 36

Marriage, Burns’s, 168-176, 189

_Marrow of Modern Divinity, The_, 281

Marxism, 18

_Mary Morison_, 251

Mary, Queen of Scots, 300-301

Masons. _See_ Freemasonry

Massachusetts, 16, 20

Masson, Arthur, 40, 41-42, 58, 60

Mathieson, W. L., quoted, 18-19

Mauchline, 67, 75, 83, 89, 90, 93, 124, 138, 150, 165, 166, 170, 173, 174, 195, 212

_Mauchline Wedding, The_, 240

Maule, Ramsay, of Panmure, 127

Maxwell, James, 133, 294, 298

Maxwell, Robert, 111

Melrose, 266

_Merry Muses of Caledonia, The_, 111-112, 253-254

_Mill, Mill O, The_, 242

Mill Street, Dumfries, 133, 222

Millan, --, 30

Miller, Eliza, 13, 145

Miller, Patrick, 101, 114, 120, 133, 202, 207-212, 220

Miller, Mrs. Patrick, 220

Miller, Patrick, Jr., 206

Milne, A. A., 307

Milton, John, 42, 164, 244, 282

_Minstrel, The_ (Beattie), 25, 29

_Mirror, The_, 31, 302

Mississippi Bubble, 7

Mitchell, John, 111, 217, 218

Moderates. _See_ New Lights

Moffat, 228

Monboddo, James Burnet, Lord, 108

Monkland Friendly Society, 106, 281

_Monody on a Lady Famed for her Caprice_, 181-182

Montgomerie, Margaret, 103

Montrose, 117

Montrose, James Graham, Marquis of, 303

Moodie, Alexander, 76

Moore, John, 78, 104, 199, 201, 252

Morison, Mary, 68

Mossgiel, 13, 73-74, 87-88, 95, 138, 143, 167, 190, 202, 204, 208, 211, 214

Mound, Edinburgh, 8

Mount Oliphant, 34, 41, 48, 50, 54-56, 59, 61-62, 70, 72, 208, 220, 279

Muir, Robert, 150, 198, 284

Muir, Thomas, 293, 294

Muir, Mrs. William, 165

Mundell, James, 120

Munro, Neil, 305

Murdoch, John, 34-35, 39-43, 44, 47, 48, 49, 51-55, 57, 204

Murray, Sir James, 272

Murray, John, of Broughton, 4, 30

Murry, John Middleton, 250

Music, Scottish, 26-28, 40, 120-121

Music, influence on Burns, 236-237, 240-244, 246, 248

‘My father was a farmer,’ 236

‘My Love is like a red red rose,’ 26, 107, 261

Nairne, Margaret Mercer Elphinstone, Baroness, 261, 305

_Nancy_, West-Indiaman, 192

Napoleon, 7, 28, 225, 226

Nationalism, Scottish, 303

New Brig, Ayr, 31

Newcastle, 204

New England, 16-17, 247, 280

New Lights, 21-23, 66-67, 75-78, 95, 280-287, 299

Newton, Charles Hay, Lord. _See_ Hay

Nicol, William, 98, 112, 115-119, 207

_Night Thoughts_ (Young), 169

Nimmo, Erskine, 162, 209

Nith, River, 220, 226, 245

Niven, William, 56, 61, 63

Norval, Charles, 85

_Observations on the Scottish Dialect_ (Sinclair), 29-30

Ochiltree, 244

Ochiltree, Edie, 188, 305

Ochtertyre, 256, 287

‘Of a’ the airts,’ 149, 174

Oldbuck, Jonathan, 265

Old Lights, 21-23, 66-67, 75-78, 279-287

_On God’s Sovereignty_, 281

_On the Death of Lord President Dundas_, 107

‘O poortith cauld,’ 271

_Ordination, The_, 76

Orr, Thomas, 61

_Ossian_ (Macpherson), 27, 43

Oswald, James, 27

Oswald, Mary Ramsay, of Auchencruive, 144

Oswald, Richard, of Auchencruive, 291

‘O wat ye wha that lo’es me,’ 110

‘O wert thou in the cauld blast,’ 251, 277

Paine, Thomas, 226, 290

Paisley, 167, 198, 306

Palmer, Thomas Fyshe, 293, 294

_Pamela_, 58

_Pantheon, The_ (Tooke), 49

Park, Anne, 146, 148, 174

Park, Mungo, 303

Parliament, 3-4, 5-6, 289, 290-294, 295, 302

Parnell, Charles Stuart, 4

Paton, Elizabeth, 74, 76, 138-139, 140, 141, 143, 147, 148, 150, 193, 194, 203

Patriotism, Burns’s, 234, 278, 287-306

Patronage, Kirk, 22

Pattison, Alexander, 198

Peacock, --, 80, 83

_Peggy Bawn_, 236

Percy, Thomas, 25, 43

Perry, James, 206

_Philosophy of Natural History_ (Smellie), 105

‘Pindar, Peter.’ _See_ Wolcot, John

Pinkerton, John, 43

Pitt, William, 226, 290

_Plane-stanes and the Causey, The_, 248

Pleyel, Ignaz Joseph, 268, 270

_Poems_, Burns’s, Kilmarnock ed., 29, 82, 94, 98, 118, 139, 142, 154, 191, 193-196, 202, 239, 244, 247-249

_Poems_, Burns’s, 1st Edinburgh ed., 95, 98, 105, 106, 118, 127, 195-201, 203, 254

_Poems_, Burns’s, 2nd Edinburgh ed., 204-205

_Poems_, Burns’s, Gilbert Burns’s ed., 203

_Poet’s Progress, The_, 234

_Poet’s Welcome to his Bastart Wean, A_, 111, 150

Politics, Burns’s, 102, 131, 225-226, 230-231, 278, 287-299

Poosie Nansie, 57

Pope, Alexander, 42, 49, 60, 181, 216

Port Antonio, 192

Potterrow, Edinburgh, 165

_Prayer in the Prospect of Death_, 84

Preaching, Scottish, 19-20

_Prelude_ (Wordsworth), 234

Prestonpans, 26

Prior, Matthew, 42

Princes Street, Edinburgh, 8

Provençal, 23

_Psalms_, 40, 135, 151, 236

Puritanism, 16-17

Queensberry, William Douglas, Duke of, 225

Raeburn, Sir Henry, 107

Ramsay, Allan, 23-25, 75, 91, 104, 247, 248-249, 252, 301, 304

Ramsay, David, 288

Ramsay, John, 287

Rankine, Anne, 68

Rankine, John, 74, 77, 98, 249

_Rantin’ Rovin’ Robin_, 307

‘Rape of the Sabines, The,’ 122, 180-181

Reformation, Scottish, 23, 290

Regency Bill, 226

Reid, Alexander, 183, 229

Religion, 59

Religion, Burns’s, 278-287

_Reliques of Ancient English Poetry_ (Percy), 25, 43

Revolution of 1688, 288-289

Riccarton, 76

Richardson, Samuel, 58

Richmond, John, 13, 65, 89-90, 112, 141, 143, 144, 147, 151

Riddell, Elizabeth Kennedy (Mrs. Robert), 177, 181, 182

Riddell, Jean Fergusson, 177

Riddell, Maria Banks Woodley, 105, 110, 122-123, 125, 144, 148, 152, 175, 176-187, 219, 267, 295, 298

Riddell, Robert, 61, 96, 120-124, 148, 176, 181, 182, 260, 265, 267, 291, 294

Riddell, Walter, 122, 127, 176-177, 178, 181, 182

_Rights of Man, The_, 292, 299

Robertson, William, 22, 31, 155

Robertson, William, of Lude, 291

Rochester, 11

Rockingham, Charles Watson-Wentworth, Marquis of, 225

Rodger, Hugh, 55

_Rosamond_, schooner, 226-227, 295, 297

Ross, Alexander, 24

Rossetti, Christina, 162

Rotary Club, 104

Rousseau, Jean Jacques, 272, 299, 300

Rowe, Elizabeth, 60

Russell, John, 76

Ryedale, 126, 130

Sabbath, Scottish, 17, 92

St. Giles Cathedral, Edinburgh, 9

St. James’s Lodge, Tarbolton, 67-68, 91

St. Kitts, 176

St. Mary’s Isle, 131-132

Samothrace, Victory of, 250

Sanitation, 9-13

Satan, Milton’s, 164, 282

Savannah-la-Mar, 192

Schetki, Theodor, 28

_Schoolmistress, The_ (Shenstone), 57

Schools, Scottish, 38-42

_Scotch Drink_, 248

_Scotland and the Union_ (W. L. Mathieson), quoted, 18-19

Scots language, 23-31, 75

_Scots Magazine_, 31, 100, 228

_Scots Musical Museum, The_, 120-121, 214, 220, 254-264, 269, 273-274, 276

‘Scots wha hae,’ 272-273, 292, 300

Scott, Sir Walter, 6, 9, 44, 47, 65, 100, 104, 121, 135, 197, 246, 261, 265, 267, 274, 293, 300, 304, 305

Scottish National Gallery, 8

_Seasons, The_ (Thomson), 25, 57

Sedition trials, 272

_Select Collection of Scotish Airs_ (Thomson), 205, 257, 264, 268-277

Selkirk, Dunbar Douglas, Earl of, 96, 131-132, 293

Sentimentality, 58

_Sentimental Tommy_, 153

_Shadow of the Glen, The_ (Synge), 46

Shaftesbury, Anthony Ashley Cooper, Earl of, 22

Shakespeare, William, 11, 34-35, 42, 261

Sharpe, Charles Kirkpatrick, 102

Shaw, George Bernard, 65

Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 35, 239, 306

Shenstone, William, 57, 75, 238

Sheridan, Richard Brinsley, 278

Sheridan, Thomas, 29

Sidney, Sir Philip, 28

Sillar, David, 65, 89

Simpson, William, 244, 249

Sinclair, Sir John, 29-30, 301, 302

_Six Excellent New Songs_, 45

Skinner, John, 43, 256

Smellie, William, 103, 105-106, 110, 121, 177-178, 181, 253, 254

Smith, Adam, 31, 206, 278

Smith, James, 13, 89-90, 112, 150, 173, 249

Smith, Leonard, 215, 216

Smollett, Tobias, 58

Smuggling, 56

Snyder, Franklyn Bliss, 145, 147, 199

Solway, 184-187, 226

_Sorrows of Werther, The_, 115, 125

Souter Johnie, 97

South Sea Bubble, 7

Southey, Robert, 197

_Sow’s Tail to Geordie, The_, 26

_Spectator, The_, 31, 42, 164, 302

Spenser, Edmund, 42, 157

Spenserian stanza, 57

Spinoza, Baruch, 281

Stackhouse, Thomas, 48

Staig, David, 223, 224

_Star_, London, 205

Steenson, Steenie, 305

Sterne, Laurence, 42, 66

Stevenson, Robert Louis, 305

Stewart, Catherine Gordon, of Stair, 153

Stewart, Dugald, 61, 96-97, 98, 99, 118, 195

Stewart, Mrs. --, 165, 209

Stewart, William, 229

Stinking Vennel, Dumfries, 221, 222

Stirling, 209, 294

Stobbie, Adam, 130, 232

Stuart, House of, 4, 287-289, 294

Stuart, Peter, 205

Surgeoner, Jenny, 13, 143

_Sweet Afton_, 307

Swift, Jonathan, 60, 304

Syme, John, 57, 96, 109, 111, 125-134, 174, 181, 203, 229, 267, 295, 296

Synge, John Millington, 46

_Tam Glen_, 264

_Tam o’ Shanter_, 59, 121, 204, 264-268, 305

Tarbolton, 62-67, 89, 90, 124

Tarbolton Bachelors’ Club, 63-66, 88, 89

Tarbolton Mill, 165, 167

_Tatler, The_, 42, 302

Taylor, John, 100

_Tea-Table Miscellany_ (Ramsay), 25

Telford, Thomas, 127, 213

Tennant, John, 211

‘The last time I cam o’er the moor,’ 179

‘The robin cam to the wren’s nest,’ 277

Thompson, Harold William, 305

Thomson, George, 61, 109, 133-134, 148, 186, 205, 232, 241, 243, 244, 249, 256, 258, 260, 264, 268-277

Thomson, James, 25, 28, 31, 42, 57, 151, 302

Thomson, Peggy, 56, 59, 69, 146

‘Thou Lingering Star,’ 148

_Thrawn Janet_, 305

Tinwald House, 182

_Titus Andronicus_, 34-35

_To a Haggis_, 248

_To a Mountain Daisy_, 59, 307

_To a Mouse_, 307

_Toddlin hame_, 275

‘To Fanny fair could I impart,’ 242

Tooke, Andrew, 49

Tooke, John Horne, 226

Tories, 225-226

_Treatise on Solitude_ (Zimmermann), 125

Tudor, House of, 288

_Tullochgorum_, 43, 256

_Twa Dogs, The_, 154

_Twa Herds, The_, 76, 92-93

Twain, Mark, 65, 280

Tytler, William, 253

Union, Act of, 3, 6, 16, 23, 302-303

Unitarianism, 280

United States, 7, 29, 190, 218, 289, 290

Urbani, Pietro, 28

Versailles, 100

_Vicar of Wakefield, The_, 31

Virgil, 252, 276

Vocabulary, Burns’s, 247

Voltaire, 300

Wallace, Lady Antonia, of Craigie, 155

Wallace, Lady Eglintoune Maxwell, 155

_Wallace, Sir William, History of_ (Blind Harry), 25, 45

Wallace, Sir William, 82, 153, 154, 234

Walpole, Horace, 278

Wardlaw, Lady Elizabeth, 27, 42-43

Washington, George, 290

Watson, John, 305, 307

Wedderburn, Alexander, 301

Wesley, John, 14, 278

West Indies, 7

Westminster, 293

‘When Princes and Prelates,’ 111

Whigs, 102, 131, 225-226, 230-231, 287, 294

_Whistle, The_, 121-122, 225

‘Whistle and I’ll come to you, my lad,’ 264

Whitefoord, Sir John, 91, 99

Wig Club, Edinburgh, 104

Wigglesworth, Michael, 20

Wilkes, John, 287, 289

Wilson, John (‘Dr. Hornbook’), 39, 83

Wilson, John (Kilmarnock), 194

Wolcot, John, 270

Wolsey, Cardinal, 40

Women, Burns’s views on, 149-150

Women, education of, 37, 135-136

_Wonder: A Woman Keeps a Secret_, The, 295

Wood, Alexander, 210

Woodley Park, 122-123, 178-179, 180, 182

Wordsworth, William, 226, 234, 241, 278, 284, 304, 306

World War, 303

Young, Edward, 169, 279

‘Young Jocky was the blithest lad,’ 272

York, House of, 288

Zimmermann, Johann Georg von, 125

* * * * *

Transcriber’s note

Spelling within quotations has been retained as published. Minor punctuation errors have been changed without notice. The following Printer errors have been changed.

Page 8: “ridge which parallelled it” “ridge which paralleled it” Page 65: “described Tarbolton townfolk” “described Tarbolton townsfolk” Page 164: “was promising lifelong” “was promising life-long” Page 166: “The artificial and hot-house” “The artificial and hothouse” Page 180: “burlesque of the espisode” “burlesque of the episode” Page 249: “as the workingday world” “as the working-day world” Page 312: “Crane, Icabod” “Crane, Ichabod” Page 316: “Masons. _See_ Freemasons” “Masons. _See_ Freemasonry”

All other inconsistencies are as in the original.