ROBERT BURNS

(1759-1796)

Contents

The Poetry of Robert Burns

ROBERT BURNS: A BRIEF INTRODUCTION

THE COMPLETE POEMS

The Poems

LIST OF POEMS IN CHRONOLOGICAL ORDER

LIST OF POEMS IN ALPHABETICAL ORDER

Glossary of Scots Words

The Letters

THE LETTERS OF ROBERT BURNS

The Biographies

LIFE OF ROBERT BURNS by Thomas Carlyle

THE REAL ROBERT BURNS by J. L. Hughes

ROBERT BURNS by John Campbell Shairp

BRIEF LIFE OF ROBERT BURNS by Allan Cunningham

(c) Delphi Classics 2013

Version 1

ROBERT BURNS

By Delphi Classics, 2013

NOTE

When reading poetry on an eReader, it is advisable to use a small font size, which will allow the lines of poetry to display correctly.

The Poetry of Robert Burns

Alloway, Ayrshire — Burns’ birthplace

Another view of the birthplace, which now serves as a museum

Burns’ cottage in 1910

The room in which the great poet was born

ROBERT BURNS: A BRIEF INTRODUCTION

Widely regarded as the national poet of Scotland, Robert Burns (1759-1796) is celebrated worldwide as a pioneer of the Romantic movement and one of the most gifted poets the world has ever produced. Best known for having written in the Scots dialect, his work has transcended national boundaries, establishing a worldwide audience and an everlasting fame.

Burns was born in Alloway, South Ayrshire, the eldest of the seven children of William Burnes, a self-educated tenant farmer from Dunnottar, and Agnes Broun, the daughter of a tenant farmer from Kirkoswald, South Ayrshire. The young Burns had little regular schooling and received much of his education from his father, who taught his children reading, writing, arithmetic, geography and history. After a few years of home education, Burns was sent to Dalrymple Parish School during the summer of 1772, before returning at harvest time to full-time farm labouring until 1773, when he was sent to lodge with Murdoch for three weeks to study grammar, French and Latin.

Aged 15, Burns was the principal labourer at Mount Oliphant. During the harvest of 1774, he was assisted by Nelly Kilpatrick, who inspired him to write his first poem, O, Once I Lov’d A Bonnie Lass. In the summer of 1775, Burns was sent to finish his education with a tutor at Kirkoswald, where he met Peggy Thompson, to whom he wrote two songs, Now Westlin’ Winds and I Dream’d I Lay.

Despite his ability as a farmer, William Burnes was consistently unfortunate, often compelled to move his large family from farm to farm without ever being able to improve their circumstances. At Whitsun, 1777, he removed his large family from the unfavourable conditions of Mount Oliphant to the 130-acre farm at Lochlea, near Tarbolton, where they stayed until the father’s death in 1784.

Burns continued to write poems and songs and began a commonplace book in 1783, while his father fought a legal dispute with his landlord. The case went to the Court of Session and Burnes was upheld in January 1784, a fortnight before he died. Robert made an ineffectual struggle to keep on the farm, but after this failure he moved to the farm at Mossgiel, near Mauchline, which he struggled to work on for the next four years. During the summer of 1784, Burns came to know a group of girls known collectively as The Belles of Mauchline, one of whom was Jean Armour, the daughter of a stonemason from Mauchline.

Burns’ many romantic involvements with women have been well documented over the years, with his first child being born to his mother’s servant, Elizabeth Paton, while he was embarking on a relationship with Jean Armour, who became pregnant with twins in March 1786. Burns signed a paper attesting his marriage to Jean, but her parents sent her to live with her uncle in Paisley to avoid the disgrace. Although Armour’s father initially forbade their marriage, they were eventually wed in 1788. In time, Armour bore Burns nine children, only three of whom survived infancy.

In the meantime, Burns was in financial difficulties due to his lack of success in farming, so, to make enough money to support a family, he took up a friend’s offer of work in Jamaica at a salary of PS30 per annum, as a bookkeeper on a slave plantation. At about the same time, Burns fell in love with Mary Campbell, whom he had seen in church while he was still living in Tarbolton. She was born near Dunoon and had lived in Campbeltown before moving to work in Ayrshire. The poet dedicated some of his most celebrated poems to this beauty, including The Highland Lassie O, Highland Mary and To Mary in Heaven. Although some historians now believe that Burns and Mary planned to elope together to Jamaica, she shortly left her work in Ayrshire, to sail home to her parents in Campbeltown. Sadly, she died of typhus in October, 1786.

As Burns lacked the funds to pay for his passage to the West Indies, Gavin Hamilton suggested that he should publish his poems by subscription, providing money for the journey. On 3 April, Burns sent proposals for publishing his Scotch Poems to John Wilson, a local printer in Kilmarnock, who published them on 14 April 1786, on the same day that Jean Armour’s father tore up the paper in which Burns attested his marriage to Jean.

On 31 July 1786, John Wilson published the volume of works by Robert Burns, Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish dialect. Now known as the Kilmarnock volume, the collection sold for three shillings and contained much of Burn’s greatest poems, including The Twa Dogs; Address to the Deil; Halloween; The Cotter’s Saturday Night; To a Mouse; Epitaph for James Smith and To a Mountain Daisy. The success of the book was immediate and Burns was suddenly famous across the country.

Burns postponed his planned emigration to Jamaica and was at Mossgiel when he learnt that Jean Armour had given birth to twins. On 4 September, Thomas Blacklock wrote a letter expressing admiration for the poetry in the Kilmarnock volume, and suggested an enlarged second edition. Burns later recalled:

“I had taken the last farewell of my few friends, my chest was on the road to Greenock; I had composed the last song I should ever measure in Scotland - ‘The Gloomy night is gathering fast’ - when a letter from Dr Blacklock to a friend of mine overthrew all my schemes, by opening new prospects to my poetic ambition. The Doctor belonged to a set of critics for whose applause I had not dared to hope. His opinion that I would meet with encouragement in Edinburgh for a second edition, fired me so much, that away I posted for that city, without a single acquaintance, or a single letter of introduction.”

On 14 December, William Creech issued subscription bills for the first Edinburgh edition of Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish dialect, which was published on 17 April 1787. Within a week Burns had sold his copyright to Creech for 100 guineas. In Edinburgh, he was received as an equal by the city’s men of letters and was a guest at aristocratic gatherings, where he was recorded as bearing himself with unaffected dignity. It was here that he encountered, and made a lasting impression on, the 16-year-old Walter Scott, who described him later with great admiration:

“His person was strong and robust; his manners rustic, not clownish, a sort of dignified plainness and simplicity which received part of its effect perhaps from knowledge of his extraordinary talents. His features are presented in Mr Nasmyth’s picture but to me it conveys the idea that they are diminished, as if seen in perspective. I think his countenance was more massive than it looks in any of the portraits … there was a strong expression of shrewdness in all his lineaments; the eye alone, I think, indicated the poetical character and temperament. It was large, and of a dark cast, and literally glowed when he spoke with feeling or interest. I never saw such another eye in a human head, though I have seen the most distinguished men of my time.”

The new edition of poems brought Burns PS400 and won the poet much renown. While staying in the city, Burns embarked on a relationship with the separated Agnes “Nancy” McLehose, with whom he exchanged passionate letters under pseudonyms. When it became clear that Nancy would not be easily seduced into a physical relationship, Burns moved on to Nancy‘s domestic servant, who bore him a son, Robert Burns Clow, in 1788. The poet also had an affair with a servant girl called Margaret “May” Cameron. His relationship with Nancy concluded in 1791 with a final meeting in Edinburgh, before she set sail for Jamaica to meet her estranged husband. Before she left, Burns sent her the manuscript of Ae Fond Kiss, one of his most beautiful poems, as a farewell gift.

In Edinburgh, early 1787, Burns met James Johnson, a struggling music engraver and music seller, with a love of old Scots songs and a determination to preserve them. Burns shared this interest and became an enthusiastic contributor to The Scots Musical Museum. The first volume was published in 1787 and included three songs by Burns. He contributed 40 songs to Volume II and he resulted in being responsible for a third of the 600 songs in the whole collection, as well as making a considerable editorial contribution. The final volume was published in 1803.

On his return to Ayrshire in February 1788, Burns resumed his relationship with Jean Armour and took a lease on the farm of Ellisland, near Dumfries, but trained as a Gauger or exciseman, in case farming continued to prove unsuccessful. He was appointed to duties in Customs and Excise in 1789 and eventually gave up the farm in 1791. Meanwhile, in November 1790, he had written Tam O’ Shanter, a supernatural and humorous ballad, which would later become his most famous work.

After giving up his farm he removed to Dumfries. It was at this time he was requested to write lyrics for The Melodies of Scotland and so responded by contributing over 100 songs. He made major contributions to George Thomson’s A Select Collection of Original Scottish Airs for the Voice as well as to James Johnson’s The Scots Musical Museum. These volumes established his reputation and secured his immortal fame, placing him in the front rank of lyric poets.

At this time, Burns’ prospects were better than they had ever been; but he had become bitter at times and had alienated many of his best friends by freely expressing sympathy with the French Revolution and the unpopular advocates of reform in Scotland. As his health began to deteriorate, he began to age prematurely and fell into fits of depression. Some sources alleged that his tendency to drink large amounts of alcohol aggravated his long-standing rheumatic heart condition. In the winter of 1795, Burns died suddenly, following a dental extraction, at the age of 37. The funeral took place on Monday 25 July 1796, on the same day that his son Maxwell was born. He was at first buried in the far corner of St. Michael’s Churchyard in Dumfries, but his body was later moved to its final location in the same cemetery, the Burns Mausoleum, in September 1815. The body of his widow Jean Armour was buried beside him in 1834.

In a comparatively short life, Burns left behind a large corpus of over 550 poems, which have since influenced writers, as well as everyday people, from across the world. As testament to his enduring popularity, Burns suppers are held annually on the poet’s birthday, 25 January, which has become traditionally known as Burns Night. These evenings are commonly celebrated in Scotland, Northern Ireland, Burns Clubs, Scottish Societies and in countless other households worldwide. The first suppers were held in Ayrshire at the end of the 18th century by Robert Burns’ friends on the anniversary of his death, 21 July, and they have been a regular occurrence ever since. Burns suppers usually include haggis, Scotch whisky and the recitation of Burns’ poetry, particularly his apposite Address to a Haggis.

The style of Burns’ poetry is marked by spontaneity, directness and sincerity, ranging from sensitive depth to entertaining humour. Burns’ writings often draw upon a substantial knowledge of Classical, Biblical and English literature, as well as the Scottish Makar tradition. The themes of his poems include republicanism, Radicalism - as revealed in Scots Wha Hae, Scottish patriotism, anticlericalism, class inequalities, gender roles, poverty and sexuality. Serving as a major inspiration of Romantic poets such as William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Percy Bysshe Shelley, Burns also popularised the use of Scots dialect in poetry, influencing the works of Allan Ramsay and Robert Fergusson. Now, Burns is regarded as a world poet, his works holding an almost sacred importance for the people of Scotland and an unquestioned respect from all admirer’s of fine literature.

A depiction of the Burns family in the birthplace museum

The famous portrait of Burns by Alexander Nasmyth, 1787

The original title page of the Kilmarnock Edition

The now famous meeting of Robert Burns (left) and a young Sir Walter Scott (centre left), painted by Charles Hardie, 1893

THE COMPLETE POEMS

POEMS GROUPED BY YEARS

Juvenile Poems (1773-1779)

1780

1781

1783

1784

1785

1786

1787

1788

1789

1790

1791

1792

1793

1794

1795

Final Poems (1796)

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

Juvenile Poems (1773-1779)

1.

Handsome Nell (Song)

Tune— “I am a man unmarried.”

O ONCE I lov’d a bonie lass,

Ay, and I love her still;

And whilst that virtue warms my breast,

I’ll love my handsome Nell.

As bonie lasses I hae seen, 5

And mony full as braw;

But, for a modest gracefu’ mein,

The like I never saw.

A bonie lass, I will confess,

Is pleasant to the e’e; 10

But, without some better qualities,

She’s no a lass for me.

But Nelly’s looks are blythe and sweet,

And what is best of a’,

Her reputation is complete, 15

And fair without a flaw.

She dresses aye sae clean and neat,

Both decent and genteel;

And then there’s something in her gait

Gars ony dress look weel. 20

A gaudy dress and gentle air

May slightly touch the heart;

But it’s innocence and modesty

That polishes the dart.

‘Tis this in Nelly pleases me, 25

‘Tis this enchants my soul;

For absolutely in my breast

She reigns without control.

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

2.

O Tibbie, I hae seen the day (Song)

Tune— “Invercauld’s Reel, or Strathspey.”

Chor. — O Tibbie, I hae seen the day,

Ye wadna been sae shy;

For laik o’ gear ye lightly me,

But, trowth, I care na by.

YESTREEN I met you on the moor, 5

Ye spak na, but gaed by like stour;

Ye geck at me because I’m poor,

But fient a hair care I.

O Tibbie, I hae seen the day, &c.

When coming hame on Sunday last, 10

Upon the road as I cam past,

Ye snufft and ga’e your head a cast —

But trowth I care’t na by.

O Tibbie, I hae seen the day, &c.

I doubt na, lass, but ye may think, 15

Because ye hae the name o’ clink,

That ye can please me at a wink,

Whene’er ye like to try.

O Tibbie, I hae seen the day, &c.

But sorrow tak’ him that’s sae mean, 20

Altho’ his pouch o’ coin were clean,

Wha follows ony saucy quean,

That looks sae proud and high.

O Tibbie, I hae seen the day, &c.

Altho’ a lad were e’er sae smart, 25

If that he want the yellow dirt,

Ye’ll cast your head anither airt,

And answer him fu’ dry.

O Tibbie, I hae seen the day, &c.

But, if he hae the name o’ gear, 30

Ye’ll fasten to him like a brier,

Tho’ hardly he, for sense or lear,

Be better than the kye.

O Tibbie, I hae seen the day, &c.

But, Tibbie, lass, tak’ my advice: 35

Your daddie’s gear maks you sae nice;

The deil a ane wad speir your price,

Were ye as poor as I.

O Tibbie, I hae seen the day, &c.

There lives a lass beside yon park, 40

I’d rather hae her in her sark,

Than you wi’ a’ your thousand mark;

That gars you look sae high.

O Tibbie, I hae seen the day, &c.

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

3.

I dream’d I lay (Song)

I DREAM’D I lay where flowers were springing

Gaily in the sunny beam;

List’ning to the wild birds singing,

By a falling crystal stream:

Straight the sky grew black and daring; 5

Thro’ the woods the whirlwinds rave;

Tress with aged arms were warring,

O’er the swelling drumlie wave.

Such was my life’s deceitful morning,

Such the pleasures I enjoyed: 10

But lang or noon, loud tempests storming

A’ my flowery bliss destroy’d.

Tho’ fickle fortune has deceiv’d me —

She promis’d fair, and perform’d but ill,

Of mony a joy and hope bereav’d me — 15

I bear a heart shall support me still.

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

4.

In the Character of a Ruined Farmer (Song)

Tune— “Go from my window, Love, do.”

THE SUN he is sunk in the west,

All creatures retired to rest,

While here I sit, all sore beset,

With sorrow, grief, and woe:

And it’s O, fickle Fortune, O! 5

The prosperous man is asleep,

Nor hears how the whirlwinds sweep;

But Misery and I must watch

The surly tempest blow:

And it’s O, fickle Fortune, O! 10

There lies the dear partner of my breast;

Her cares for a moment at rest:

Must I see thee, my youthful pride,

Thus brought so very low!

And it’s O, fickle Fortune, O! 15

There lie my sweet babies in her arms;

No anxious fear their little hearts alarms;

But for their sake my heart does ache,

With many a bitter throe:

And it’s O, fickle Fortune, O! 20

I once was by Fortune carest:

I once could relieve the distrest:

Now life’s poor support, hardly earn’d

My fate will scarce bestow:

And it’s O, fickle Fortune, O! 25

No comfort, no comfort I have!

How welcome to me were the grave!

But then my wife and children dear —

O, wither would they go!

And it’s O, fickle Fortune, O! 30

O whither, O whither shall I turn!

All friendless, forsaken, forlorn!

For, in this world, Rest or Peace

I never more shall know!

And it’s O, fickle Fortune, O! 35

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

5.

Tragic Fragment — All villain as I am

ALL villain as I am — a damned wretch,

A hardened, stubborn, unrepenting villain,

Still my heart melts at human wretchedness;

And with sincere but unavailing sighs

I view the helpless children of distress: 5

With tears indignant I behold the oppressor

Rejoicing in the honest man’s destruction,

Whose unsubmitting heart was all his crime. —

Ev’n you, ye hapless crew! I pity you;

Ye, whom the seeming good think sin to pity; 10

Ye poor, despised, abandoned vagabonds,

Whom Vice, as usual, has turn’d o’er to ruin.

Oh! but for friends and interposing Heaven,

I had been driven forth like you forlorn,

The most detested, worthless wretch among you! 15

O injured God! Thy goodness has endow’d me

With talents passing most of my compeers,

Which I in just proportion have abused —

As far surpassing other common villains

As Thou in natural parts has given me more. 20

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

6.

The Tarbolton Lasses

IF ye gae up to yon hill-tap,

Ye’ll there see bonie Peggy;

She kens her father is a laird,

And she forsooth’s a leddy.

There Sophy tight, a lassie bright, 5

Besides a handsome fortune:

Wha canna win her in a night,

Has little art in courtin’.

Gae down by Faile, and taste the ale,

And tak a look o’ Mysie; 10

She’s dour and din, a deil within,

But aiblins she may please ye.

If she be shy, her sister try,

Ye’ll maybe fancy Jenny;

If ye’ll dispense wi’ want o’ sense — 15

She kens hersel she’s bonie.

As ye gae up by yon hillside,

Speir in for bonie Bessy;

She’ll gie ye a beck, and bid ye light,

And handsomely address ye. 20

There’s few sae bonie, nane sae guid,

In a’ King George’ dominion;

If ye should doubt the truth o’ this —

It’s Bessy’s ain opinion!

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

7.

Ah, woe is me, my Mother dear

Paraphrase of Jeremiah, 15th Chap., 10th verse.

AH, woe is me, my mother dear!

A man of strife ye’ve born me:

For sair contention I maun bear;

They hate, revile, and scorn me.

I ne’er could lend on bill or band, 5

That five per cent. might blest me;

And borrowing, on the tither hand,

The deil a ane wad trust me.

Yet I, a coin-denied wight,

By Fortune quite discarded; 10

Ye see how I am, day and night,

By lad and lass blackguarded!

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

8.

Montgomerie’s Peggy (Song)

Tune— “Galla Water.”

ALTHO’ my bed were in yon muir,

Amang the heather, in my plaidie;

Yet happy, happy would I be,

Had I my dear Montgomerie’s Peggy.

When o’er the hill beat surly storms, 5

And winter nights were dark and rainy;

I’d seek some dell, and in my arms

I’d shelter dear Montgomerie’s Peggy.

Were I a baron proud and high,

And horse and servants waiting ready; 10

Then a’ ‘twad gie o’ joy to me, —

The sharin’t with Montgomerie’s Peggy.

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

9.

The Ploughman’s Life

AS I was a-wand’ring ae morning in spring,

I heard a young ploughman sae sweetly to sing;

And as he was singin’, thir words he did say, —

There’s nae life like the ploughman’s in the month o’ sweet May.

The lav’rock in the morning she’ll rise frae her nest, 5

And mount i’ the air wi’ the dew on her breast,

And wi’ the merry ploughman she’ll whistle and sing,

And at night she’ll return to her nest back again.

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

1780

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

10.

The Ronalds of the Bennals

IN Tarbolton, ye ken, there are proper young men,

And proper young lasses and a’, man;

But ken ye the Ronalds that live in the Bennals,

They carry the gree frae them a’, man.

Their father’s laird, and weel he can spare’t, 5

Braid money to tocher them a’, man;

To proper young men, he’ll clink in the hand

Gowd guineas a hunder or twa, man.

There’s ane they ca’ Jean, I’ll warrant ye’ve seen

As bonie a lass or as braw, man; 10

But for sense and guid taste she’ll vie wi’ the best,

And a conduct that beautifies a’, man.

The charms o’ the min’, the langer they shine,

The mair admiration they draw, man;

While peaches and cherries, and roses and lilies, 15

They fade and they wither awa, man,

If ye be for Miss Jean, tak this frae a frien’,

A hint o’ a rival or twa, man;

The Laird o’ Blackbyre wad gang through the fire,

If that wad entice her awa, man. 20

The Laird o’ Braehead has been on his speed,

For mair than a towmond or twa, man;

The Laird o’ the Ford will straught on a board,

If he canna get her at a’, man.

Then Anna comes in, the pride o’ her kin, 25

The boast of our bachelors a’, man:

Sae sonsy and sweet, sae fully complete,

She steals our affections awa, man.

If I should detail the pick and the wale

O’ lasses that live here awa, man, 30

The fau’t wad be mine if they didna shine

The sweetest and best o’ them a’, man.

I lo’e her mysel, but darena weel tell,

My poverty keeps me in awe, man;

For making o’ rhymes, and working at times, 35

Does little or naething at a’, man.

Yet I wadna choose to let her refuse,

Nor hae’t in her power to say na, man:

For though I be poor, unnoticed, obscure,

My stomach’s as proud as them a’, man. 40

Though I canna ride in weel-booted pride,

And flee o’er the hills like a craw, man,

I can haud up my head wi’ the best o’ the breed,

Though fluttering ever so braw, man.

My coat and my vest, they are Scotch o’ the best, 45

O’ pairs o’ guid breeks I hae twa, man;

And stockings and pumps to put on my stumps,

And ne’er a wrang steek in them a’, man.

My sarks they are few, but five o’ them new,

Twal’ hundred, as white as the snaw, man, 50

A ten-shillings hat, a Holland cravat;

There are no mony poets sae braw, man.

I never had frien’s weel stockit in means,

To leave me a hundred or twa, man;

Nae weel-tocher’d aunts, to wait on their drants, 55

And wish them in hell for it a’, man.

I never was cannie for hoarding o’ money,

Or claughtin’t together at a’, man;

I’ve little to spend, and naething to lend,

But deevil a shilling I awe, man. 60

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

11.

Here’s to thy health, my bonie lass (Song)

Tune— “Laggan Burn.”

HERE’S to thy health, my bonie lass,

Gude nicht and joy be wi’ thee;

I’ll come nae mair to thy bower-door,

To tell thee that I lo’e thee.

O dinna think, my pretty pink, 5

But I can live without thee:

I vow and swear I dinna care,

How lang ye look about ye.

Thou’rt aye sae free informing me,

Thou hast nae mind to marry; 10

I’ll be as free informing thee,

Nae time hae I to tarry:

I ken thy frien’s try ilka means

Frae wedlock to delay thee;

Depending on some higher chance, 15

But fortune may betray thee.

I ken they scorn my low estate,

But that does never grieve me;

For I’m as free as any he;

Sma’ siller will relieve me. 20

I’ll count my health my greatest wealth,

Sae lang as I’ll enjoy it;

I’ll fear nae scant, I’ll bode nae want,

As lang’s I get employment.

But far off fowls hae feathers fair, 25

And, aye until ye try them,

Tho’ they seem fair, still have a care;

They may prove waur than I am.

But at twal’ at night, when the moon shines bright,

My dear, I’ll come and see thee; 30

For the man that loves his mistress weel,

Nae travel makes him weary.

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

12.

The Lass of Cessnock Banks (Song)

A Song of Similes

Tune— “If he be a Butcher neat and trim.”

ON Cessnock banks a lassie dwells;

Could I describe her shape and mein;

Our lasses a’ she far excels,

An’ she has twa sparkling roguish een.

She’s sweeter than the morning dawn, 5

When rising Phoebus first is seen,

And dew-drops twinkle o’er the lawn;

An’ she has twa sparkling roguish een.

She’s stately like yon youthful ash,

That grows the cowslip braes between, 10

And drinks the stream with vigour fresh;

An’ she has twa sparkling roguish een.

She’s spotless like the flow’ring thorn,

With flow’rs so white and leaves so green,

When purest in the dewy morn; 15

An’ she has twa sparkling roguish een.

Her looks are like the vernal May,

When ev’ning Phoebus shines serene,

While birds rejoice on every spray;

An’ she has twa sparkling roguish een. 20

Her hair is like the curling mist,

That climbs the mountain-sides at e’en,

When flow’r-reviving rains are past;

An’ she has twa sparkling roguish een.

Her forehead’s like the show’ry bow, 25

When gleaming sunbeams intervene

And gild the distant mountain’s brow;

An’ she has twa sparkling roguish een.

Her cheeks are like yon crimson gem,

The pride of all the flowery scene, 30

Just opening on its thorny stem;

An’ she has twa sparkling roguish een.

Her bosom’s like the nightly snow,

When pale the morning rises keen,

While hid the murm’ring streamlets flow; 35

An’ she has twa sparkling roguish een.

Her lips are like yon cherries ripe,

That sunny walls from Boreas screen;

They tempt the taste and charm the sight;

An’ she has twa sparkling roguish een. 40

Her teeth are like a flock of sheep,

With fleeces newly washen clean,

That slowly mount the rising steep;

An’ she has twa sparkling roguish een.

Her breath is like the fragrant breeze, 45

That gently stirs the blossom’d bean,

When Phoebus sinks behind the seas;

An’ she has twa sparkling roguish een.

Her voice is like the ev’ning thrush,

That sings on Cessnock banks unseen, 50

While his mate sits nestling in the bush;

An’ she has twa sparkling roguish een.

But it’s not her air, her form, her face,

Tho’ matching beauty’s fabled queen;

‘Tis the mind that shines in ev’ry grace, 55

An’ chiefly in her roguish een.

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

13.

Bonie Peggy Alison (Song)

Tune— “The Braes o’ Balquhidder.”

Chor. — And I’ll kiss thee yet, yet,

And I’ll kiss thee o’er again:

And I’ll kiss thee yet, yet,

My bonie Peggy Alison.

ILK care and fear, when thou art near 5

I evermair defy them, O!

Young kings upon their hansel throne

Are no sae blest as I am, O!

And I’ll kiss thee yet, yet, &c.

When in my arms, wi’ a’ thy charms, 10

I clasp my countless treasure, O!

I seek nae mair o’ Heaven to share

Than sic a moment’s pleasure, O!

And I’ll kiss thee yet, yet, &c.

And by thy een sae bonie blue, 15

I swear I’m thine for ever, O!

And on thy lips I seal my vow,

And break it shall I never, O!

And I’ll kiss thee yet, yet, &c.

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

14.

Mary Morison (Song)

Tune— “Bide ye yet.”

O MARY, at thy window be,

It is the wish’d, the trysted hour!

Those smiles and glances let me see,

That make the miser’s treasure poor:

How blythely was I bide the stour, 5

A weary slave frae sun to sun,

Could I the rich reward secure,

The lovely Mary Morison.

Yestreen, when to the trembling string

The dance gaed thro’ the lighted ha’, 10

To thee my fancy took its wing,

I sat, but neither heard nor saw:

Tho’ this was fair, and that was braw,

And yon the toast of a’ the town,

I sigh’d, and said among them a’, 15

“Ye are na Mary Morison.”

Oh, Mary, canst thou wreck his peace,

Wha for thy sake wad gladly die?

Or canst thou break that heart of his,

Whase only faut is loving thee? 20

If love for love thou wilt na gie,

At least be pity to me shown;

A thought ungentle canna be

The thought o’ Mary Morison.

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

1781

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

15.

Winter: A Dirge

THE WINTRY west extends his blast,

And hail and rain does blaw;

Or the stormy north sends driving forth

The blinding sleet and snaw:

While, tumbling brown, the burn comes down, 5

And roars frae bank to brae;

And bird and beast in covert rest,

And pass the heartless day.

“The sweeping blast, the sky o’ercast,”

The joyless winter day 10

Let others fear, to me more dear

Than all the pride of May:

The tempest’s howl, it soothes my soul,

My griefs it seems to join;

The leafless trees my fancy please, 15

Their fate resembles mine!

Thou Power Supreme, whose mighty scheme

These woes of mine fulfil,

Here firm I rest; they must be best,

Because they are Thy will! 20

Then all I want — O do Thou grant

This one request of mine! —

Since to enjoy Thou dost deny,

Assist me to resign.

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

16.

A Prayer under the Pressure of Violent Anguish

O THOU Great Being! what Thou art,

Surpasses me to know;

Yet sure I am, that known to Thee

Are all Thy works below.

Thy creature here before Thee stands, 5

All wretched and distrest;

Yet sure those ills that wring my soul

Obey Thy high behest.

Sure, Thou, Almighty, canst not act

From cruelty or wrath! 10

O, free my weary eyes from tears,

Or close them fast in death!

But, if I must afflicted be,

To suit some wise design,

Then man my soul with firm resolves, 15

To bear and not repine!

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

17.

Paraphrase of the First Psalm

THE MAN, in life wherever plac’d,

Hath happiness in store,

Who walks not in the wicked’s way,

Nor learns their guilty lore!

Nor from the seat of scornful pride 5

Casts forth his eyes abroad,

But with humility and awe

Still walks before his God.

That man shall flourish like the trees,

Which by the streamlets grow; 10

The fruitful top is spread on high,

And firm the root below.

But he whose blossom buds in guilt

Shall to the ground be cast,

And, like the rootless stubble, tost 15

Before the sweeping blast.

For why? that God the good adore,

Hath giv’n them peace and rest,

But hath decreed that wicked men

Shall ne’er be truly blest. 20

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

18.

The First Six Verses of the Ninetieth Psalm versified

O THOU, the first, the greatest friend

Of all the human race!

Whose strong right hand has ever been

Their stay and dwelling place!

Before the mountains heav’d their heads 5

Beneath Thy forming hand,

Before this ponderous globe itself

Arose at Thy command;

That Pow’r which rais’d and still upholds

This universal frame, 10

From countless, unbeginning time

Was ever still the same.

Those mighty periods of years

Which seem to us so vast,

Appear no more before Thy sight 15

Than yesterday that’s past.

Thou giv’st the word: Thy creature, man,

Is to existence brought;

Again Thou say’st, “Ye sons of men,

Return ye into nought!” 20

Thou layest them, with all their cares,

In everlasting sleep;

As with a flood Thou tak’st them off

With overwhelming sweep.

They flourish like the morning flow’r, 25

In beauty’s pride array’d;

But long ere night cut down it lies

All wither’d and decay’d.

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

19.

A Prayer in the Prospect of Death

O THOU unknown, Almighty Cause

Of all my hope and fear!

In whose dread presence, ere an hour,

Perhaps I must appear!

If I have wander’d in those paths 5

Of life I ought to shun,

As something, loudly, in my breast,

Remonstrates I have done;

Thou know’st that Thou hast formed me

With passions wild and strong; 10

And list’ning to their witching voice

Has often led me wrong.

Where human weakness has come short,

Or frailty stept aside,

Do Thou, All-Good-for such Thou art — 15

In shades of darkness hide.

Where with intention I have err’d,

No other plea I have,

But, Thou art good; and Goodness still

Delighteth to forgive. 20

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

20.

Stanzas, on the same Occasion

WHY am I loth to leave this earthly scene?

Have I so found it full of pleasing charms?

Some drops of joy with draughts of ill between —

Some gleams of sunshine ‘mid renewing storms,

Is it departing pangs my soul alarms? 5

Or death’s unlovely, dreary, dark abode?

For guilt, for guilt, my terrors are in arms:

I tremble to approach an angry God,

And justly smart beneath His sin-avenging rod.

Fain would I say, “Forgive my foul offence,” 10

Fain promise never more to disobey;

But, should my Author health again dispense,

Again I might desert fair virtue’s way;

Again in folly’s part might go astray;

Again exalt the brute and sink the man; 15

Then how should I for heavenly mercy pray

Who act so counter heavenly mercy’s plan?

Who sin so oft have mourn’d, yet to temptation ran?

O Thou, great Governor of all below!

If I may dare a lifted eye to Thee, 20

Thy nod can make the tempest cease to blow,

Or still the tumult of the raging sea:

With that controlling pow’r assist ev’n me,

Those headlong furious passions to confine,

For all unfit I feel my pow’rs to be, 25

To rule their torrent in th’ allowed line;

O, aid me with Thy help, Omnipotence Divine!

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

21.

Fickle Fortune: A Fragment

THOUGH fickle Fortune has deceived me,

She pormis’d fair and perform’d but ill;

Of mistress, friends, and wealth bereav’d me,

Yet I bear a heart shall support me still.

I’ll act with prudence as far ‘s I’m able, 5

But if success I must never find,

Then come misfortune, I bid thee welcome,

I’ll meet thee with an undaunted mind.

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

22.

Raging Fortune: A Fragment (Song)

O RAGING Fortune’s withering blast

Has laid my leaf full low, O!

O raging Fortune’s withering blast

Has laid my leaf full low, O!

My stem was fair, my bud was green, 5

My blossom sweet did blow, O!

The dew fell fresh, the sun rose mild,

And made my branches grow, O!

But luckless Fortune’s northern storms

Laid a’ my blossoms low, O! 10

But luckless Fortune’s northern storms

Laid a’ my blossoms low, O!

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

23.

I’ll go and be a Sodger

O WHY the deuce should I repine,

And be an ill foreboder?

I’m twenty-three, and five feet nine,

I’ll go and be a sodger!

I gat some gear wi’ mickle care, 5

I held it weel thegither;

But now it’s gane, and something mair —

I’ll go and be a sodger!

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

24.

No Churchman am I (Song)

Tune— “Prepare, my dear Brethren, to the tavern let’s fly.”

NO churchman am I for to rail and to write,

No statesman nor soldier to plot or to fight,

No sly man of business contriving a snare,

For a big-belly’d bottle’s the whole of my care.

The peer I don’t envy, I give him his bow; 5

I scorn not the peasant, though ever so low;

But a club of good fellows, like those that are here,

And a bottle like this, are my glory and care.

Here passes the squire on his brother-his horse;

There centum per centum, the cit with his purse; 10

But see you the Crown how it waves in the air?

There a big-belly’d bottle still eases my care.

The wife of my bosom, alas! she did die;

for sweet consolation to church I did fly;

I found that old Solomon proved it fair, 15

That a big-belly’d bottle’s a cure for all care.

I once was persuaded a venture to make;

A letter inform’d me that all was to wreck;

But the pursy old landlord just waddl’d upstairs,

With a glorious bottle that ended my cares. 20

“Life’s cares they are comforts” — a maxim laid down

By the Bard, what d’ye call him, that wore the black gown;

And faith I agree with th’ old prig to a hair,

For a big-belly’d bottle’s a heav’n of a care.

A STANZA ADDED IN A MASON LODGE

Then fill up a bumper and make it o’erflow, 25

And honours masonic prepare for to throw;

May ev’ry true Brother of the Compass and Square

Have a big-belly’d bottle when harass’d with care.

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

25.

My Father was a Farmer: A Ballad

Tune— “The weaver and his shuttle, O.”

MY father was a farmer upon the Carrick border, O,

And carefully he bred me in decency and order, O;

He bade me act a manly part, though I had ne’er a farthing, O;

For without an honest manly heart, no man was worth regarding, O.

Then out into the world my course I did determine, O; 5

Tho’ to be rich was not my wish, yet to be great was charming, O;

My talents they were not the worst, nor yet my education, O:

Resolv’d was I at least to try to mend my situation, O.

In many a way, and vain essay, I courted Fortune’s favour, O;

Some cause unseen still stept between, to frustrate each endeavour, O; 10

Sometimes by foes I was o’erpower’d, sometimes by friends forsaken, O;

And when my hope was at the top, I still was worst mistaken, O.

Then sore harass’d and tir’d at last, with Fortune’s vain delusion, O,

I dropt my schemes, like idle dreams, and came to this conclusion, O;

The past was bad, and the future hid, its good or ill untried, O; 15

But the present hour was in my pow’r, and so I would enjoy it, O.

No help, nor hope, nor view had I, nor person to befriend me, O;

So I must toil, and sweat, and moil, and labour to sustain me, O;

To plough and sow, to reap and mow, my father bred me early, O;

For one, he said, to labour bred, was a match for Fortune fairly, O. 20

Thus all obscure, unknown, and poor, thro’ life I’m doom’d to wander, O,

Till down my weary bones I lay in everlasting slumber, O:

No view nor care, but shun whate’er might breed me pain or sorrow, O;

I live to-day as well’s I may, regardless of to-morrow, O.

But cheerful still, I am as well as a monarch in his palace, O, 25

Tho’ Fortune’s frown still hunts me down, with all her wonted malice, O:

I make indeed my daily bread, but ne’er can make it farther, O:

But as daily bread is all I need, I do not much regard her, O.

When sometimes by my labour, I earn a little money, O,

Some unforeseen misfortune comes gen’rally upon me, O; 30

Mischance, mistake, or by neglect, or my goodnatur’d folly, O:

But come what will, I’ve sworn it still, I’ll ne’er be melancholy, O.

All you who follow wealth and power with unremitting ardour, O,

The more in this you look for bliss, you leave your view the farther, O:

Had you the wealth Potosi boasts, or nations to adore you, O, 35

A cheerful honest-hearted clown I will prefer before you, O.

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

26.

John Barleycorn: A Ballad

THERE was three kings into the east,

Three kings both great and high,

And they hae sworn a solemn oath

John Barleycorn should die.

They took a plough and plough’d him down, 5

Put clods upon his head,

And they hae sworn a solemn oath

John Barleycorn was dead.

But the cheerful Spring came kindly on,

And show’rs began to fall; 10

John Barleycorn got up again,

And sore surpris’d them all.

The sultry suns of Summer came,

And he grew thick and strong;

His head weel arm’d wi’ pointed spears, 15

That no one should him wrong.

The sober Autumn enter’d mild,

When he grew wan and pale;

His bending joints and drooping head

Show’d he began to fail. 20

His colour sicken’d more and more,

He faded into age;

And then his enemies began

To show their deadly rage.

They’ve taen a weapon, long and sharp, 25

And cut him by the knee;

Then tied him fast upon a cart,

Like a rogue for forgerie.

They laid him down upon his back,

And cudgell’d him full sore; 30

They hung him up before the storm,

And turned him o’er and o’er.

They filled up a darksome pit

With water to the brim;

They heaved in John Barleycorn, 35

There let him sink or swim.

They laid him out upon the floor,

To work him farther woe;

And still, as signs of life appear’d,

They toss’d him to and fro. 40

They wasted, o’er a scorching flame,

The marrow of his bones;

But a miller us’d him worst of all,

For he crush’d him between two stones.

And they hae taen his very heart’s blood, 45

And drank it round and round;

And still the more and more they drank,

Their joy did more abound.

John Barleycorn was a hero bold,

Of noble enterprise; 50

For if you do but taste his blood,

‘Twill make your courage rise.

‘Twill make a man forget his woe;

‘Twill heighten all his joy;

‘Twill make the widow’s heart to sing, 55

Tho’ the tear were in her eye.

Then let us toast John Barleycorn,

Each man a glass in hand;

And may his great posterity

Ne’er fail in old Scotland! 60

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

1783

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

27.

The Death and Dying Words of Poor Mailie

An Unco Mournfu’ Tale

AS Mailie, an’ her lambs thegither,

Was ae day nibbling on the tether,

Upon her cloot she coost a hitch,

An’ owre she warsl’d in the ditch:

There, groaning, dying, she did lie, 5

When Hughoc he cam doytin by.

Wi’ glowrin een, and lifted han’s

Poor Hughoc like a statue stan’s;

He saw her days were near-hand ended,

But, wae’s my heart! he could na mend it! 10

He gaped wide, but naething spak,

At langth poor Mailie silence brak.

“O thou, whase lamentable face

Appears to mourn my woefu’ case!

My dying words attentive hear, 15

An’ bear them to my Master dear.

“Tell him, if e’er again he keep

As muckle gear as buy a sheep —

O, bid him never tie them mair,

Wi’ wicked strings o’ hemp or hair! 20

But ca’ them out to park or hill,

An’ let them wander at their will:

So may his flock increase, an’ grow

To scores o’ lambs, an’ packs o’ woo’!

“Tell him, he was a Master kin’, 25

An’ aye was guid to me an’ mine;

An’ now my dying charge I gie him,

My helpless lambs, I trust them wi’ him.

“O, bid him save their harmless lives,

Frae dogs, an’ tods, an’ butcher’s knives! 30

But gie them guid cow-milk their fill,

Till they be fit to fend themsel’;

An’ tent them duly, e’en an’ morn,

Wi’ taets o’ hay an’ ripps o’ corn.

“An’ may they never learn the gaets, 35

Of ither vile, wanrestfu’ pets —

To slink thro’ slaps, an’ reave an’ steal

At stacks o’ pease, or stocks o’ kail!

So may they, like their great forbears,

For mony a year come thro the shears: 40

So wives will gie them bits o’ bread,

An’ bairns greet for them when they’re dead.

“My poor toop-lamb, my son an’ heir,

O, bid him breed him up wi’ care!

An’ if he live to be a beast, 45

To pit some havins in his breast!

“An’ warn him — what I winna name —

To stay content wi’ yowes at hame;

An’ no to rin an’ wear his cloots,

Like ither menseless, graceless brutes. 50

“An’ neist, my yowie, silly thing,

Gude keep thee frae a tether string!

O, may thou ne’er forgather up,

Wi’ ony blastit, moorland toop;

But aye keep mind to moop an’ mell, 55

Wi’ sheep o’ credit like thysel’!

“And now, my bairns, wi’ my last breath,

I lea’e my blessin wi’ you baith:

An’ when you think upo’ your mither,

Mind to be kind to ane anither. 60

“Now, honest Hughoc, dinna fail,

To tell my master a’ my tale;

An’ bid him burn this cursed tether,

An’ for thy pains thou’se get my blather.”

This said, poor Mailie turn’d her head, 65

And clos’d her een amang the dead!

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

28.

Poor Mailie’s Elegy

LAMENT in rhyme, lament in prose,

Wi’ saut tears trickling down your nose;

Our bardie’s fate is at a close,

Past a’ remead!

The last, sad cape-stane o’ his woes; 5

Poor Mailie’s dead!

It’s no the loss o’ warl’s gear,

That could sae bitter draw the tear,

Or mak our bardie, dowie, wear

The mourning weed: 10

He’s lost a friend an’ neebor dear

In Mailie dead.

Thro’ a’ the town she trotted by him;

A lang half-mile she could descry him;

Wi’ kindly bleat, when she did spy him, 15

She ran wi’ speed:

A friend mair faithfu’ ne’er cam nigh him,

Than Mailie dead.

I wat she was a sheep o’ sense,

An’ could behave hersel’ wi’ mense: 20

I’ll say’t, she never brak a fence,

Thro’ thievish greed.

Our bardie, lanely, keeps the spence

Sin’ Mailie’s dead.

Or, if he wanders up the howe, 25

Her living image in her yowe

Comes bleating till him, owre the knowe,

For bits o’ bread;

An’ down the briny pearls rowe

For Mailie dead. 30

She was nae get o’ moorland tips,

Wi’ tauted ket, an’ hairy hips;

For her forbears were brought in ships,

Frae ‘yont the Tweed.

A bonier fleesh ne’er cross’d the clips 35

Than Mailie’s dead.

Wae worth the man wha first did shape

That vile, wanchancie thing — a raip!

It maks guid fellows girn an’ gape,

Wi’ chokin dread; 40

An’ Robin’s bonnet wave wi’ crape

For Mailie dead.

O, a’ ye bards on bonie Doon!

An’ wha on Ayr your chanters tune!

Come, join the melancholious croon 45

O’ Robin’s reed!

His heart will never get aboon —

His Mailie’s dead!

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

29.

The Rigs o’ Barley (Song)

Tune— “Corn Rigs are bonie.”

IT was upon a Lammas night,

When corn rigs are bonie,

Beneath the moon’s unclouded light,

I held awa to Annie;

The time flew by, wi’ tentless heed, 5

Till, ‘tween the late and early,

Wi’ sma’ persuasion she agreed

To see me thro’ the barley.

Corn rigs, an’ barley rigs,

An’ corn rigs are bonie: 10

I’ll ne’er forget that happy night,

Amang the rigs wi’ Annie.

The sky was blue, the wind was still,

The moon was shining clearly;

I set her down, wi’ right good will, 15

Amang the rigs o’ barley:

I ken’t her heart was a’ my ain;

I lov’d her most sincerely;

I kiss’d her owre and owre again,

Amang the rigs o’ barley. 20

Corn rigs, an’ barley rigs, &c.

I lock’d her in my fond embrace;

Her heart was beating rarely:

My blessings on that happy place,

Amang the rigs o’ barley! 25

But by the moon and stars so bright,

That shone that hour so clearly!

She aye shall bless that happy night

Amang the rigs o’ barley.

Corn rigs, an’ barley rigs, &c. 30

I hae been blythe wi’ comrades dear;

I hae been merry drinking;

I hae been joyfu’ gath’rin gear;

I hae been happy thinking:

But a’ the pleasures e’er I saw, 35

Tho’ three times doubl’d fairly,

That happy night was worth them a’,

Amang the rigs o’ barley.

Corn rigs, an’ barley rigs, &c.

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

30.

Composed in August (Song)

Tune— “I had a horse, I had nae mair.”

NOW westlin winds and slaught’ring guns

Bring Autumn’s pleasant weather;

The moorcock springs on whirring wings

Amang the blooming heather:

Now waving grain, wide o’er the plain, 5

Delights the weary farmer;

And the moon shines bright, when I rove at night,

To muse upon my charmer.

The partridge loves the fruitful fells,

The plover loves the mountains; 10

The woodcock haunts the lonely dells,

The soaring hern the fountains:

Thro’ lofty groves the cushat roves,

The path of man to shun it;

The hazel bush o’erhangs the thrush, 15

The spreading thorn the linnet.

Thus ev’ry kind their pleasure find,

The savage and the tender;

Some social join, and leagues combine,

Some solitary wander: 20

Avaunt, away! the cruel sway,

Tyrannic man’s dominion;

The sportsman’s joy, the murd’ring cry,

The flutt’ring, gory pinion!

But, Peggy dear, the ev’ning’s clear, 25

Thick flies the skimming swallow,

The sky is blue, the fields in view,

All fading-green and yellow:

Come let us stray our gladsome way,

And view the charms of Nature; 30

The rustling corn, the fruited thorn,

And ev’ry happy creature.

We’ll gently walk, and sweetly talk,

Till the silent moon shine clearly;

I’ll grasp thy waist, and, fondly prest, 35

Swear how I love thee dearly:

Not vernal show’rs to budding flow’rs,

Not Autumn to the farmer,

So dear can be as thou to me,

My fair, my lovely charmer! 40

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

31.

My Nanie, O! (Song)

Tune— “My Nanie, O.”

BEHIND yon hills where Lugar flows,

‘Mang moors an’ mosses many, O,

The wintry sun the day has clos’d,

And I’ll awa to Nanie, O.

The westlin wind blaws loud an’ shill; 5

The night’s baith mirk and rainy, O;

But I’ll get my plaid an’ out I’ll steal,

An’ owre the hill to Nanie, O.

My Nanie’s charming, sweet, an’ young;

Nae artfu’ wiles to win ye, O: 10

May ill befa’ the flattering tongue

That wad beguile my Nanie, O.

Her face is fair, her heart is true;

As spotless as she’s bonie, O:

The op’ning gowan, wat wi’ dew, 15

Nae purer is than Nanie, O.

A country lad is my degree,

An’ few there be that ken me, O;

But what care I how few they be,

I’m welcome aye to Nanie, O. 20

My riches a’s my penny-fee,

An’ I maun guide it cannie, O;

But warl’s gear ne’er troubles me,

My thoughts are a’ my Nanie, O.

Our auld guidman delights to view 25

His sheep an’ kye thrive bonie, O;

But I’m as blythe that hands his pleugh,

An’ has nae care but Nanie, O.

Come weel, come woe, I care na by;

I’ll tak what Heav’n will sen’ me, O: 30

Nae ither care in life have I,

But live, an’ love my Nanie, O.

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

32.

Green Grow the Rashes (Song)

A Fragment

Chor. — Green grow the rashes, O;

Green grow the rashes, O;

The sweetest hours that e’er I spend,

Are spent amang the lasses, O.

THERE’S nought but care on ev’ry han’, 5

In ev’ry hour that passes, O:

What signifies the life o’ man,

An’ ‘twere na for the lasses, O.

Green grow, &c.

The war’ly race may riches chase, 10

An’ riches still may fly them, O;

An’ tho’ at last they catch them fast,

Their hearts can ne’er enjoy them, O.

Green grow, &c.

But gie me a cannie hour at e’en, 15

My arms about my dearie, O;

An’ war’ly cares, an’ war’ly men,

May a’ gae tapsalteerie, O!

Green grow, &c.

For you sae douce, ye sneer at this; 20

Ye’re nought but senseless asses, O:

The wisest man the warl’ e’er saw,

He dearly lov’d the lasses, O.

Green grow, &c.

Auld Nature swears, the lovely dears 25

Her noblest work she classes, O:

Her prentice han’ she try’d on man,

An’ then she made the lasses, O.

Green grow, &c.

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

33.

Indeed will I, quo’ Findlay (Song)

Tune— “Lass, an I come near thee.”

“WHA is that at my bower-door?”

“O wha is it but Findlay!”

“Then gae your gate, ye’se nae be here:”

“Indeed maun I,” quo’ Findlay;

“What mak’ ye, sae like a thief?” 5

“O come and see,” quo’ Findlay;

“Before the morn ye’ll work mischief:”

“Indeed will I,” quo’ Findlay.

“Gif I rise and let you in” —

“Let me in,” quo’ Findlay; 10

“Ye’ll keep me waukin wi’ your din;”

“Indeed will I,” quo’ Findlay;

“In my bower if ye should stay” —

“Let me stay,” quo’ Findlay;

“I fear ye’ll bide till break o’ day;” 15

“Indeed will I,” quo’ Findlay.

“Here this night if ye remain” —

“I’ll remain,” quo’ Findlay;

“I dread ye’ll learn the gate again;”

“Indeed will I,” quo’ Findlay. 20

“What may pass within this bower” —

“Let it pass,” quo’ Findlay;

“Ye maun conceal till your last hour:”

“Indeed will I,” quo’ Findlay.

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

1784

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

34.

Remorse: A Fragment

OF all the numerous ills that hurt our peace,

That press the soul, or wring the mind with anguish

Beyond comparison the worst are those

By our own folly, or our guilt brought on:

In ev’ry other circumstance, the mind 5

Has this to say, “It was no deed of mine:”

But, when to all the evil of misfortune

This sting is added, “Blame thy foolish self!”

Or worser far, the pangs of keen remorse,

The torturing, gnawing consciousness of guilt — 10

Of guilt, perhaps, when we’ve involved others,

The young, the innocent, who fondly lov’d us;

Nay more, that very love their cause of ruin!

O burning hell! in all thy store of torments

There’s not a keener lash! 15

Lives there a man so firm, who, while his heart

Feels all the bitter horrors of his crime,

Can reason down its agonizing throbs;

And, after proper purpose of amendment,

Can firmly force his jarring thoughts to peace? 20

O happy, happy, enviable man!

O glorious magnanimity of soul!

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

35.

Epitaph on William Hood, Senior

HERE Souter Hood in death does sleep;

To hell if he’s gane thither,

Satan, gie him thy gear to keep;

He’ll haud it weel thegither.

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

36.

Epitaph on James Grieve

HERE lies Boghead amang the dead

In hopes to get salvation;

But if such as he in Heav’n may be,

Then welcome, hail! damnation.

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

37.

Epitaph on William Muir

AN HONEST man here lies at rest

As e’er God with his image blest;

The friend of man, the friend of truth,

The friend of age, and guide of youth:

Few hearts like his, with virtue warm’d, 5

Few heads with knowledge so informed:

If there’s another world, he lives in bliss;

If there is none, he made the best of this.

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

38.

Epitaph on my Ever Honoured Father

O YE whose cheek the tear of pity stains,

Draw near with pious rev’rence, and attend!

Here lie the loving husband’s dear remains,

The tender father, and the gen’rous friend;

The pitying heart that felt for human woe, 5

The dauntless heart that fear’d no human pride;

The friend of man-to vice alone a foe;

For “ev’n his failings lean’d to virtue’s side.”

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

39.

Ballad on the American War

Tune— “Killiecrankie.”

WHEN Guilford good our pilot stood

An’ did our hellim thraw, man,

Ae night, at tea, began a plea,

Within America, man:

Then up they gat the maskin-pat, 5

And in the sea did jaw, man;

An’ did nae less, in full congress,

Than quite refuse our law, man.

Then thro’ the lakes Montgomery takes,

I wat he was na slaw, man; 10

Down Lowrie’s Burn he took a turn,

And Carleton did ca’, man:

But yet, whatreck, he, at Quebec,

Montgomery-like did fa’, man,

Wi’ sword in hand, before his band, 15

Amang his en’mies a’, man.

Poor Tammy Gage within a cage

Was kept at Boston-ha’, man;

Till Willie Howe took o’er the knowe

For Philadelphia, man; 20

Wi’ sword an’ gun he thought a sin

Guid Christian bluid to draw, man;

But at New York, wi’ knife an’ fork,

Sir-Loin he hacked sma’, man.

Burgoyne gaed up, like spur an’ whip, 25

Till Fraser brave did fa’, man;

Then lost his way, ae misty day,

In Saratoga shaw, man.

Cornwallis fought as lang’s he dought,

An’ did the Buckskins claw, man; 30

But Clinton’s glaive frae rust to save,

He hung it to the wa’, man.

Then Montague, an’ Guilford too,

Began to fear, a fa’, man;

And Sackville dour, wha stood the stour, 35

The German chief to thraw, man:

For Paddy Burke, like ony Turk,

Nae mercy had at a’, man;

An’ Charlie Fox threw by the box,

An’ lows’d his tinkler jaw, man. 40

Then Rockingham took up the game,

Till death did on him ca’, man;

When Shelburne meek held up his cheek,

Conform to gospel law, man:

Saint Stephen’s boys, wi’ jarring noise, 45

They did his measures thraw, man;

For North an’ Fox united stocks,

An’ bore him to the wa’, man.

Then clubs an’ hearts were Charlie’s cartes,

He swept the stakes awa’, man, 50

Till the diamond’s ace, of Indian race,

Led him a sair faux pas, man:

The Saxon lads, wi’ loud placads,

On Chatham’s boy did ca’, man;

An’ Scotland drew her pipe an’ blew, 55

“Up, Willie, waur them a’, man!”

Behind the throne then Granville’s gone,

A secret word or twa, man;

While slee Dundas arous’d the class

Be-north the Roman wa’, man: 60

An’ Chatham’s wraith, in heav’nly graith,

(Inspired bardies saw, man),

Wi’ kindling eyes, cry’d, “Willie, rise!

Would I hae fear’d them a’, man?”

But, word an’ blow, North, Fox, and Co. 65

Gowff’d Willie like a ba’, man;

Till Suthron raise, an’ coost their claise

Behind him in a raw, man:

An’ Caledon threw by the drone,

An’ did her whittle draw, man; 70

An’ swoor fu’ rude, thro’ dirt an’ bluid,

To mak it guid in law, man.

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

40.

Reply to an Announcement by J. Rankine

On His Writing to the Poet, That a Girl in That Part of the Country Was with Child to Him.

I AM a keeper of the law

In some sma’ points, altho’ not a’;

Some people tell me gin I fa’,

Ae way or ither,

The breaking of ae point, tho’ sma’, 5

Breaks a’ thegither.

I hae been in for’t ance or twice,

And winna say o’er far for thrice;

Yet never met wi’ that surprise

That broke my rest; 10

But now a rumour’s like to rise —

A whaup’s i’ the nest!

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

41.

Epistle to John Rankine

Enclosing Some Poems

O ROUGH, rude, ready-witted Rankine,

The wale o’ cocks for fun an’ drinkin!

There’s mony godly folks are thinkin,

Your dreams and tricks

Will send you, Korah-like, a-sinkin 5

Straught to auld Nick’s.

Ye hae saw mony cracks an’ cants,

And in your wicked, drucken rants,

Ye mak a devil o’ the saunts,

An’ fill them fou; 10

And then their failings, flaws, an’ wants,

Are a’ seen thro’.

Hypocrisy, in mercy spare it!

That holy robe, O dinna tear it!

Spare’t for their sakes, wha aften wear it — 15

The lads in black;

But your curst wit, when it comes near it,

Rives’t aff their back.

Think, wicked Sinner, wha ye’re skaithing:

It’s just the Blue-gown badge an’ claithing 20

O’ saunts; tak that, ye lea’e them naething

To ken them by

Frae ony unregenerate heathen,

Like you or I.

I’ve sent you here some rhyming ware, 25

A’ that I bargain’d for, an’ mair;

Sae, when ye hae an hour to spare,

I will expect,

Yon sang ye’ll sen’t, wi’ cannie care,

And no neglect. 30

Tho’ faith, sma’ heart hae I to sing!

My muse dow scarcely spread her wing;

I’ve play’d mysel a bonie spring,

An’ danc’d my fill!

I’d better gaen an’ sair’t the king, 35

At Bunker’s Hill.

‘Twas ae night lately, in my fun,

I gaed a rovin’ wi’ the gun,

An’ brought a paitrick to the grun’ —

A bonie hen; 40

And, as the twilight was begun,

Thought nane wad ken.

The poor, wee thing was little hurt;

I straikit it a wee for sport,

Ne’er thinkin they wad fash me for’t; 45

But, Deil-ma-care!

Somebody tells the poacher-court

The hale affair.

Some auld, us’d hands had taen a note,

That sic a hen had got a shot; 50

I was suspected for the plot;

I scorn’d to lie;

So gat the whissle o’ my groat,

An’ pay’t the fee.

But by my gun, o’ guns the wale, 55

An’ by my pouther an’ my hail,

An’ by my hen, an’ by her tail,

I vow an’ swear!

The game shall pay, o’er muir an’ dale,

For this, niest year. 60

As soon’s the clockin-time is by,

An’ the wee pouts begun to cry,

Lord, I’se hae sporting by an’ by

For my gowd guinea,

Tho’ I should herd the buckskin kye 65

For’t in Virginia.

Trowth, they had muckle for to blame!

‘Twas neither broken wing nor limb,

But twa-three draps about the wame,

Scarce thro’ the feathers; 70

An’ baith a yellow George to claim,

An’ thole their blethers!

It pits me aye as mad’s a hare;

So I can rhyme nor write nae mair;

But pennyworths again is fair, 75

When time’s expedient:

Meanwhile I am, respected Sir,

Your most obedient.

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

42.

A Poet’s Welcome to his Love-Begotten Daughter

The First Instance That Entitled Him to the Venerable Appellation of Father

THOU’S welcome, wean; mishanter fa’ me,

If thoughts o’ thee, or yet thy mamie,

Shall ever daunton me or awe me,

My bonie lady,

Or if I blush when thou shalt ca’ me 5

Tyta or daddie.

Tho’ now they ca’ me fornicator,

An’ tease my name in kintry clatter,

The mair they talk, I’m kent the better,

E’en let them clash; 10

An auld wife’s tongue’s a feckless matter

To gie ane fash.

Welcome! my bonie, sweet, wee dochter,

Tho’ ye come here a wee unsought for,

And tho’ your comin’ I hae fought for, 15

Baith kirk and queir;

Yet, by my faith, ye’re no unwrought for,

That I shall swear!

Wee image o’ my bonie Betty,

As fatherly I kiss and daut thee, 20

As dear, and near my heart I set thee

Wi’ as gude will

As a’ the priests had seen me get thee

That’s out o’ h — ll.

Sweet fruit o’ mony a merry dint, 25

My funny toil is now a’ tint,

Sin’ thou came to the warl’ asklent,

Which fools may scoff at;

In my last plack thy part’s be in’t

The better ha’f o’t. 30

Tho’ I should be the waur bestead,

Thou’s be as braw and bienly clad,

And thy young years as nicely bred

Wi’ education,

As ony brat o’ wedlock’s bed, 35

In a’ thy station.

Lord grant that thou may aye inherit

Thy mither’s person, grace, an’ merit,

An’ thy poor, worthless daddy’s spirit,

Without his failins, 40

‘Twill please me mair to see thee heir it,

Than stockit mailens.

For if thou be what I wad hae thee,

And tak the counsel I shall gie thee,

I’ll never rue my trouble wi’ thee, 45

The cost nor shame o’t,

But be a loving father to thee,

And brag the name o’t.

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

43.

O Leave Novels! (Song)

O LEAVE novels, ye Mauchline belles,

Ye’re safer at your spinning-wheel;

Such witching books are baited hooks

For rakish rooks, like Rob Mossgiel;

Your fine Tom Jones and Grandisons, 5

They make your youthful fancies reel;

They heat your brains, and fire your veins,

And then you’re prey for Rob Mossgiel.

Beware a tongue that’s smoothly hung,

A heart that warmly seems to feel; 10

That feeling heart but acts a part —

‘Tis rakish art in Rob Mossgiel.

The frank address, the soft caress,

Are worse than poisoned darts of steel;

The frank address, and politesse, 15

Are all finesse in Rob Mossgiel.

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

44.

The Mauchline Lady: A Fragment

Tune— “I had a horse, I had nae mair.”

WHEN first I came to Stewart Kyle,

My mind it was na steady;

Where’er I gaed, where’er I rade,

A mistress still I had aye.

But when I came roun’ by Mauchline toun, 5

Not dreadin anybody,

My heart was caught, before I thought,

And by a Mauchline lady.

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

45.

My Girl she’s Airy: A Fragment

Tune— “Black Jock.”

MY girl she’s airy, she’s buxom and gay;

Her breath is as sweet as the blossoms in May;

A touch of her lips it ravishes quite:

She’s always good natur’d, good humour’d, and free;

She dances, she glances, she smiles upon me; 5

I never am happy when out of her sight.

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

46.

The Belles of Mauchline

IN Mauchline there dwells six proper young belles,

The pride of the place and its neighbourhood a’;

Their carriage and dress, a stranger would guess,

In Lon’on or Paris, they’d gotten it a’.

Miss Miller is fine, Miss Markland’s divine, 5

Miss Smith she has wit, and Miss Betty is braw:

There’s beauty and fortune to get wi’ Miss Morton,

But Armour’s the jewel for me o’ them a’.

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

47.

Epitaph on a Noisy Polemic

BELOW thir stanes lie Jamie’s banes;

O Death, it’s my opinion,

Thou ne’er took such a bleth’rin bitch

Into thy dark dominion!

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

48.

Epitaph on a Henpecked Squire

AS father Adam first was fool’d,

(A case that’s still too common,)

Here lies man a woman ruled,

The devil ruled the woman.

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

49.

Epigram on the said Occasion

O DEATH, had’st thou but spar’d his life,

Whom we this day lament,

We freely wad exchanged the wife,

And a’ been weel content.

Ev’n as he is, cauld in his graff, 5

The swap we yet will do’t;

Tak thou the carlin’s carcase aff,

Thou’se get the saul o’boot.

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

50.

Another on the said Occasion

ONE Queen Artemisia, as old stories tell,

When deprived of her husband she loved so well,

In respect for the love and affection he show’d her,

She reduc’d him to dust and she drank up the powder.

But Queen Netherplace, of a diff’rent complexion, 5

When called on to order the fun’ral direction,

Would have eat her dead lord, on a slender pretence,

Not to show her respect, but — to save the expense!

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

51.

On Tam the Chapman

AS Tam the chapman on a day,

Wi’Death forgather’d by the way,

Weel pleas’d, he greets a wight so famous,

And Death was nae less pleas’d wi’ Thomas,

Wha cheerfully lays down his pack, 5

And there blaws up a hearty crack:

His social, friendly, honest heart

Sae tickled Death, they could na part;

Sae, after viewing knives and garters,

Death taks him hame to gie him quarters. 10

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

52.

Epitaph on John Rankine

AE day, as Death, that gruesome carl,

Was driving to the tither warl’

A mixtie-maxtie motley squad,

And mony a guilt-bespotted lad —

Black gowns of each denomination, 5

And thieves of every rank and station,

From him that wears the star and garter,

To him that wintles in a halter:

Ashamed himself to see the wretches,

He mutters, glowrin at the bitches, 10

“By G — d I’ll not be seen behint them,

Nor ‘mang the sp’ritual core present them,

Without, at least, ae honest man,

To grace this d — d infernal clan!”

By Adamhill a glance he threw, 15

“L — d G — d!” quoth he, “I have it now;

There’s just the man I want, i’ faith!”

And quickly stoppit Rankine’s breath.

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

53.

Lines on the Author’s Death

Written with the Supposed View of Being Handed to Rankine after the Poet’s Interment

HE who of Rankine sang, lies stiff and dead,

And a green grassy hillock hides his head;

Alas! alas! a devilish change indeed.

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

54.

Man was made to Mourn: A Dirge

WHEN chill November’s surly blast

Made fields and forests bare,

One ev’ning, as I wander’d forth

Along the banks of Ayr,

I spied a man, whose aged step 5

Seem’d weary, worn with care;

His face furrow’d o’er with years,

And hoary was his hair.

“Young stranger, whither wand’rest thou?”

Began the rev’rend sage; 10

“Does thirst of wealth thy step constrain,

Or youthful pleasure’s rage?

Or haply, prest with cares and woes,

Too soon thou hast began

To wander forth, with me to mourn 15

The miseries of man.

“The sun that overhangs yon moors,

Out-spreading far and wide,

Where hundreds labour to support

A haughty lordling’s pride; — 20

I’ve seen yon weary winter-sun

Twice forty times return;

And ev’ry time has added proofs,

That man was made to mourn.

“O man! while in thy early years, 25

How prodigal of time!

Mis-spending all thy precious hours —

Thy glorious, youthful prime!

Alternate follies take the sway;

Licentious passions burn; 30

Which tenfold force gives Nature’s law.

That man was made to mourn.

“Look not alone on youthful prime,

Or manhood’s active might;

Man then is useful to his kind, 35

Supported in his right:

But see him on the edge of life,

With cares and sorrows worn;

Then Age and Want — oh! ill-match’d pair —

Shew man was made to mourn. 40

“A few seem favourites of fate,

In pleasure’s lap carest;

Yet, think not all the rich and great

Are likewise truly blest:

But oh! what crowds in ev’ry land, 45

All wretched and forlorn,

Thro’ weary life this lesson learn,

That man was made to mourn.

“Many and sharp the num’rous ills

Inwoven with our frame! 50

More pointed still we make ourselves,

Regret, remorse, and shame!

And man, whose heav’n-erected face

The smiles of love adorn, —

Man’s inhumanity to man 55

Makes countless thousands mourn!

“See yonder poor, o’erlabour’d wight,

So abject, mean, and vile,

Who begs a brother of the earth

To give him leave to toil; 60

And see his lordly fellow-worm

The poor petition spurn,

Unmindful, tho’ a weeping wife

And helpless offspring mourn.

“If I’m design’d yon lordling’s slave, 65

By Nature’s law design’d,

Why was an independent wish

E’er planted in my mind?

If not, why am I subject to

His cruelty, or scorn? 70

Or why has man the will and pow’r

To make his fellow mourn?

“Yet, let not this too much, my son,

Disturb thy youthful breast:

This partial view of human-kind 75

Is surely not the last!

The poor, oppressed, honest man

Had never, sure, been born,

Had there not been some recompense

To comfort those that mourn! 80

“O Death! the poor man’s dearest friend,

The kindest and the best!

Welcome the hour my aged limbs

Are laid with thee at rest!

The great, the wealthy fear thy blow 85

From pomp and pleasure torn;

But, oh! a blest relief for those

That weary-laden mourn!”

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

55.

The Twa Herds; or, The Holy Tulyie

An Unco Mournfu’ Tale

“Blockheads with reason wicked wits abhor,

But fool with fool is barbarous civil war,” — POPE.

O A’ ye pious godly flocks,

Weel fed on pastures orthodox,

Wha now will keep you frae the fox,

Or worrying tykes?

Or wha will tent the waifs an’ crocks, 5

About the dykes?

The twa best herds in a’ the wast,

The e’er ga’e gospel horn a blast

These five an’ twenty simmers past —

Oh, dool to tell! 10

Hae had a bitter black out-cast

Atween themsel’.

O, Moddie, man, an’ wordy Russell,

How could you raise so vile a bustle;

Ye’ll see how New-Light herds will whistle, 15

An’ think it fine!

The L—‘s cause ne’er gat sic a twistle,

Sin’ I hae min’.

O, sirs! whae’er wad hae expeckit

Your duty ye wad sae negleckit, 20

Ye wha were ne’er by lairds respeckit

To wear the plaid;

But by the brutes themselves eleckit,

To be their guide.

What flock wi’ Moodie’s flock could rank? — 25

Sae hale and hearty every shank!

Nae poison’d soor Arminian stank

He let them taste;

Frae Calvin’s well, aye clear, drank, —

O, sic a feast! 30

The thummart, willcat, brock, an’ tod,

Weel kend his voice thro’ a’ the wood,

He smell’d their ilka hole an’ road,

Baith out an in;

An’ weel he lik’d to shed their bluid, 35

An’ sell their skin.

What herd like Russell tell’d his tale;

His voice was heard thro’ muir and dale,

He kenn’d the L—‘s sheep, ilka tail,

Owre a’ the height; 40

An’ saw gin they were sick or hale,

At the first sight.

He fine a mangy sheep could scrub,

Or nobly fling the gospel club,

And New-Light herds could nicely drub 45

Or pay their skin;

Could shake them o’er the burning dub,

Or heave them in.

Sic twa-O! do I live to see’t? —

Sic famous twa should disagree’t, 50

And names, like “villain,” “hypocrite,”

Ilk ither gi’en,

While New-Light herds, wi’ laughin spite,

Say neither’s liein!

A’ ye wha tent the gospel fauld, 55

There’s Duncan deep, an’ Peebles shaul,

But chiefly thou, apostle Auld,

We trust in thee,

That thou wilt work them, het an’ cauld,

Till they agree. 60

Consider, sirs, how we’re beset;

There’s scarce a new herd that we get,

But comes frae ‘mang that cursed set,

I winna name;

I hope frae heav’n to see them yet 65

In fiery flame.

Dalrymple has been lang our fae,

M’Gill has wrought us meikle wae,

An’ that curs’d rascal ca’d M’Quhae,

And baith the Shaws, 70

That aft hae made us black an’ blae,

Wi’ vengefu’ paws.

Auld Wodrow lang has hatch’d mischief;

We thought aye death wad bring relief;

But he has gotten, to our grief, 75

Ane to succeed him,

A chield wha’ soundly buff our beef;

I meikle dread him.

And mony a ane that I could tell,

Wha fain wad openly rebel, 80

Forby turn-coats amang oursel’,

There’s Smith for ane;

I doubt he’s but a grey nick quill,

An’ that ye’ll fin’.

O! a’ ye flocks o’er a, the hills, 85

By mosses, meadows, moors, and fells,

Come, join your counsel and your skills

To cowe the lairds,

An’ get the brutes the power themsel’s

To choose their herds. 90

Then Orthodoxy yet may prance,

An’ Learning in a woody dance,

An’ that fell cur ca’d Common Sense,

That bites sae sair,

Be banished o’er the sea to France: 95

Let him bark there.

Then Shaw’s an’ D’rymple’s eloquence,

M’Gill’s close nervous excellence

M’Quhae’s pathetic manly sense,

An’ guid M’Math, 100

Wi’ Smith, wha thro’ the heart can glance,

May a’ pack aff.

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

1785

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

56.

Epistle to Davie, A Brother Poet

January

WHILE winds frae aff Ben-Lomond blaw,

An’ bar the doors wi’ driving snaw,

An’ hing us owre the ingle,

I set me down to pass the time,

An’ spin a verse or twa o’ rhyme, 5

In hamely, westlin jingle.

While frosty winds blaw in the drift,

Ben to the chimla lug,

I grudge a wee the great-folk’s gift,

That live sae bien an’ snug: 10

I tent less, and want less

Their roomy fire-side;

But hanker, and canker,

To see their cursed pride.

It’s hardly in a body’s pow’r 15

To keep, at times, frae being sour,

To see how things are shar’d;

How best o’ chiels are whiles in want,

While coofs on countless thousands rant,

And ken na how to wair’t; 20

But, Davie, lad, ne’er fash your head,

Tho’ we hae little gear;

We’re fit to win our daily bread,

As lang’s we’re hale and fier:

“Mair spier na, nor fear na,” 25

Auld age ne’er mind a feg;

The last o’t, the warst o’t

Is only but to beg.

To lie in kilns and barns at e’en,

When banes are craz’d, and bluid is thin, 30

Is doubtless, great distress!

Yet then content could make us blest;

Ev’n then, sometimes, we’d snatch a taste

Of truest happiness.

The honest heart that’s free frae a’ 35

Intended fraud or guile,

However Fortune kick the ba’,

Has aye some cause to smile;

An’ mind still, you’ll find still,

A comfort this nae sma’; 40

Nae mair then we’ll care then,

Nae farther can we fa’.

What tho’, like commoners of air,

We wander out, we know not where,

But either house or hal’, 45

Yet nature’s charms, the hills and woods,

The sweeping vales, and foaming floods,

Are free alike to all.

In days when daisies deck the ground,

And blackbirds whistle clear, 50

With honest joy our hearts will bound,

To see the coming year:

On braes when we please, then,

We’ll sit an’ sowth a tune;

Syne rhyme till’t we’ll time till’t, 55

An’ sing’t when we hae done.

It’s no in titles nor in rank;

It’s no in wealth like Lon’on bank,

To purchase peace and rest:

It’s no in makin’ muckle, mair; 60

It’s no in books, it’s no in lear,

To make us truly blest:

If happiness hae not her seat

An’ centre in the breast,

We may be wise, or rich, or great, 65

But never can be blest;

Nae treasures, nor pleasures

Could make us happy lang;

The heart aye’s the part aye

That makes us right or wrang. 70

Think ye, that sic as you and I,

Wha drudge an’ drive thro’ wet and dry,

Wi’ never ceasing toil;

Think ye, are we less blest than they,

Wha scarcely tent us in their way, 75

As hardly worth their while?

Alas! how aft in haughty mood,

God’s creatures they oppress!

Or else, neglecting a’ that’s guid,

They riot in excess! 80

Baith careless and fearless

Of either heaven or hell;

Esteeming and deeming

It’s a’ an idle tale!

Then let us cheerfu’ acquiesce, 85

Nor make our scanty pleasures less,

By pining at our state:

And, even should misfortunes come,

I, here wha sit, hae met wi’ some —

An’s thankfu’ for them yet. 90

They gie the wit of age to youth;

They let us ken oursel’;

They make us see the naked truth,

The real guid and ill:

Tho’ losses an’ crosses 95

Be lessons right severe,

There’s wit there, ye’ll get there,

Ye’ll find nae other where.

But tent me, Davie, ace o’ hearts!

(To say aught less wad wrang the cartes, 100

And flatt’ry I detest)

This life has joys for you and I;

An’ joys that riches ne’er could buy,

An’ joys the very best.

There’s a’ the pleasures o’ the heart, 105

The lover an’ the frien’;

Ye hae your Meg, your dearest part,

And I my darling Jean!

It warms me, it charms me,

To mention but her name: 110

It heats me, it beets me,

An’ sets me a’ on flame!

O all ye Pow’rs who rule above!

O Thou whose very self art love!

Thou know’st my words sincere! 115

The life-blood streaming thro’ my heart,

Or my more dear immortal part,

Is not more fondly dear!

When heart-corroding care and grief

Deprive my soul of rest, 120

Her dear idea brings relief,

And solace to my breast.

Thou Being, All-seeing,

O hear my fervent pray’r;

Still take her, and make her 125

Thy most peculiar care!

All hail! ye tender feelings dear!

The smile of love, the friendly tear,

The sympathetic glow!

Long since, this world’s thorny ways 130

Had number’d out my weary days,

Had it not been for you!

Fate still has blest me with a friend,

In ev’ry care and ill;

And oft a more endearing band — 135

A tie more tender still.

It lightens, it brightens

The tenebrific scene,

To meet with, and greet with

My Davie, or my Jean! 140

O, how that name inspires my style!

The words come skelpin, rank an’ file,

Amaist before I ken!

The ready measure rins as fine,

As Phoebus an’ the famous Nine 145

Were glowrin owre my pen.

My spaviet Pegasus will limp,

Till ance he’s fairly het;

And then he’ll hilch, and stilt, an’ jimp,

And rin an unco fit: 150

But least then the beast then

Should rue this hasty ride,

I’ll light now, and dight now

His sweaty, wizen’d hide.

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

57.

Holy Willie’s Prayer

“And send the godly in a pet to pray.” — POPE.

ARGUMENT. — Holy Willie was a rather oldish bachelor elder, in the parish of Mauchline, and much and justly famed for that polemical chattering, which ends in tippling orthodoxy, and for that spiritualized bawdry which refines to liquorish devotion. In a sessional process with a gentleman in Mauchline — a Mr.Gavin Hamilton — Holy Willie and his priest, Father Auld, after full hearing in the presbytery of Ayr, came off but second best; owing partly to the oratorical powers of Mr. Robert Aiken, Mr. Hamilton’s counsel; but chiefly to Mr. Hamilton’s being one of the most irreproachable and truly respectable characters in the county. On losing the process, the muse overheard him [Holy Willie] at his devotions, as follows: —

O THOU, who in the heavens does dwell,

Who, as it pleases best Thysel’,

Sends ane to heaven an’ ten to hell,

A’ for Thy glory,

And no for ony gude or ill 5

They’ve done afore Thee!

I bless and praise Thy matchless might,

When thousands Thou hast left in night,

That I am here afore Thy sight,

For gifts an’ grace 10

A burning and a shining light

To a’ this place.

What was I, or my generation,

That I should get sic exaltation,

I wha deserve most just damnation 15

For broken laws,

Five thousand years ere my creation,

Thro’ Adam’s cause?

When frae my mither’s womb I fell,

Thou might hae plunged me in hell, 20

To gnash my gums, to weep and wail,

In burnin lakes,

Where damned devils roar and yell,

Chain’d to their stakes.

Yet I am here a chosen sample, 25

To show thy grace is great and ample;

I’m here a pillar o’ Thy temple,

Strong as a rock,

A guide, a buckler, and example,

To a’ Thy flock. 30

O L — d, Thou kens what zeal I bear,

When drinkers drink, an’ swearers swear,

An’ singin there, an’ dancin here,

Wi’ great and sma’;

For I am keepit by Thy fear 35

Free frae them a’.

But yet, O L — d! confess I must,

At times I’m fash’d wi’ fleshly lust:

An’ sometimes, too, in wardly trust,

Vile self gets in: 40

But Thou remembers we are dust,

Defil’d wi’ sin.

O L — d! yestreen, Thou kens, wi’ Meg —

Thy pardon I sincerely beg,

O! may’t ne’er be a livin plague 45

To my dishonour,

An’ I’ll ne’er lift a lawless leg

Again upon her.

Besides, I farther maun allow,

Wi’ Leezie’s lass, three times I trow — 50

But L — d, that Friday I was fou,

When I cam near her;

Or else, Thou kens, Thy servant true

Wad never steer her.

Maybe Thou lets this fleshly thorn 55

Buffet Thy servant e’en and morn,

Lest he owre proud and high shou’d turn,

That he’s sae gifted:

If sae, Thy han’ maun e’en be borne,

Until Thou lift it. 60

L — d, bless Thy chosen in this place,

For here Thou hast a chosen race:

But G — d confound their stubborn face,

An’ blast their name,

Wha bring Thy elders to disgrace 65

An’ public shame.

L — d, mind Gaw’n Hamilton’s deserts;

He drinks, an’ swears, an’ plays at cartes,

Yet has sae mony takin arts,

Wi’ great and sma’, 70

Frae G — d’s ain priest the people’s hearts

He steals awa.

An’ when we chasten’d him therefor,

Thou kens how he bred sic a splore,

An’ set the warld in a roar 75

O’ laughing at us; —

Curse Thou his basket and his store,

Kail an’ potatoes.

L — d, hear my earnest cry and pray’r,

Against that Presbyt’ry o’ Ayr; 80

Thy strong right hand, L — d, make it bare

Upo’ their heads;

L — d visit them, an’ dinna spare,

For their misdeeds.

O L — d, my G — d! that glib-tongu’d Aiken, 85

My vera heart and flesh are quakin,

To think how we stood sweatin’, shakin,

An’ p—‘d wi’ dread,

While he, wi’ hingin lip an’ snakin,

Held up his head. 90

L — d, in Thy day o’ vengeance try him,

L — d, visit them wha did employ him,

And pass not in Thy mercy by ‘em,

Nor hear their pray’r,

But for Thy people’s sake, destroy ‘em, 95

An’ dinna spare.

But, L — d, remember me an’ mine

Wi’ mercies temp’ral an’ divine,

That I for grace an’ gear may shine,

Excell’d by nane, 100

And a’ the glory shall be thine,

Amen, Amen!

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

58.

Epitaph on Holy Willie

HERE Holy Willie’s sair worn clay

Taks up its last abode;

His saul has ta’en some other way,

I fear, the left-hand road.

Stop! there he is, as sure’s a gun, 5

Poor, silly body, see him;

Nae wonder he’s as black’s the grun,

Observe wha’s standing wi’ him.

Your brunstane devilship, I see,

Has got him there before ye; 10

But haud your nine-tail cat a wee,

Till ance you’ve heard my story.

Your pity I will not implore,

For pity ye have nane;

Justice, alas! has gi’en him o’er, 15

And mercy’s day is gane.

But hear me, Sir, deil as ye are,

Look something to your credit;

A coof like him wad stain your name,

If it were kent ye did it. 20

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

59.

Death and Dr. Hornbook

A True Story

SOME books are lies frae end to end,

And some great lies were never penn’d:

Ev’n ministers they hae been kenn’d,

In holy rapture,

A rousing whid at times to vend, 5

And nail’t wi’ Scripture.

But this that I am gaun to tell,

Which lately on a night befell,

Is just as true’s the Deil’s in hell

Or Dublin city: 10

That e’er he nearer comes oursel’

‘S a muckle pity.

The clachan yill had made me canty,

I was na fou, but just had plenty;

I stacher’d whiles, but yet too tent aye 15

To free the ditches;

An’ hillocks, stanes, an’ bushes, kenn’d eye

Frae ghaists an’ witches.

The rising moon began to glowre

The distant Cumnock hills out-owre: 20

To count her horns, wi’ a my pow’r,

I set mysel’;

But whether she had three or four,

I cou’d na tell.

I was come round about the hill, 25

An’ todlin down on Willie’s mill,

Setting my staff wi’ a’ my skill,

To keep me sicker;

Tho’ leeward whiles, against my will,

I took a bicker. 30

I there wi’ Something did forgather,

That pat me in an eerie swither;

An’ awfu’ scythe, out-owre ae shouther,

Clear-dangling, hang;

A three-tae’d leister on the ither 35

Lay, large an’ lang.

Its stature seem’d lang Scotch ells twa,

The queerest shape that e’er I saw,

For fient a wame it had ava;

And then its shanks, 40

They were as thin, as sharp an’ sma’

As cheeks o’ branks.

“Guid-een,” quo’ I; “Friend! hae ye been mawin,

When ither folk are busy sawin!”

I seem’d to make a kind o’ stan’ 45

But naething spak;

At length, says I, “Friend! whare ye gaun?

Will ye go back?”

It spak right howe,— “My name is Death,

But be na fley’d.” — Quoth I, “Guid faith, 50

Ye’re maybe come to stap my breath;

But tent me, billie;

I red ye weel, tak care o’ skaith

See, there’s a gully!”

“Gudeman,” quo’ he, “put up your whittle, 55

I’m no designed to try its mettle;

But if I did, I wad be kittle

To be mislear’d;

I wad na mind it, no that spittle

Out-owre my beard.” 60

“Weel, weel!” says I, “a bargain be’t;

Come, gie’s your hand, an’ sae we’re gree’t;

We’ll ease our shanks an tak a seat —

Come, gie’s your news;

This while ye hae been mony a gate, 65

At mony a house.”

“Ay, ay!” quo’ he, an’ shook his head,

“It’s e’en a lang, lang time indeed

Sin’ I began to nick the thread,

An’ choke the breath: 70

Folk maun do something for their bread,

An’ sae maun Death.

“Sax thousand years are near-hand fled

Sin’ I was to the butching bred,

An’ mony a scheme in vain’s been laid, 75

To stap or scar me;

Till ane Hornbook’s ta’en up the trade,

And faith! he’ll waur me.

“Ye ken Hornbook i’ the clachan,

Deil mak his king’s-hood in spleuchan! 80

He’s grown sae weel acquaint wi’ Buchan

And ither chaps,

The weans haud out their fingers laughin,

An’ pouk my hips.

“See, here’s a scythe, an’ there’s dart, 85

They hae pierc’d mony a gallant heart;

But Doctor Hornbook, wi’ his art

An’ cursed skill,

Has made them baith no worth a f — t,

D — n’d haet they’ll kill! 90

“‘Twas but yestreen, nae farther gane,

I threw a noble throw at ane;

Wi’ less, I’m sure, I’ve hundreds slain;

But deil-ma-care,

It just play’d dirl on the bane, 95

But did nae mair.

“Hornbook was by, wi’ ready art,

An’ had sae fortify’d the part,

That when I looked to my dart,

It was sae blunt, 100

Fient haet o’t wad hae pierc’d the heart

Of a kail-runt.

“I drew my scythe in sic a fury,

I near-hand cowpit wi’ my hurry,

But yet the bauld Apothecary 105

Withstood the shock;

I might as weel hae tried a quarry

O’ hard whin rock.

“Ev’n them he canna get attended,

Altho’ their face he ne’er had kend it, 110

Just –- in a kail-blade, an’ sent it,

As soon’s he smells ‘t,

Baith their disease, and what will mend it,

At once he tells ‘t.

“And then, a’ doctor’s saws an’ whittles, 115

Of a’ dimensions, shapes, an’ mettles,

A’ kind o’ boxes, mugs, an’ bottles,

He’s sure to hae;

Their Latin names as fast he rattles

As A B C. 120

“Calces o’ fossils, earths, and trees;

True sal-marinum o’ the seas;

The farina of beans an’ pease,

He has’t in plenty;

Aqua-fontis, what you please, 125

He can content ye.

“Forbye some new, uncommon weapons,

Urinus spiritus of capons;

Or mite-horn shavings, filings, scrapings,

Distill’d per se; 130

Sal-alkali o’ midge-tail clippings,

And mony mae.”

“Waes me for Johnie Ged’s-Hole now,”

Quoth I, “if that thae news be true!

His braw calf-ward whare gowans grew, 135

Sae white and bonie,

Nae doubt they’ll rive it wi’ the plew;

They’ll ruin Johnie!”

The creature grain’d an eldritch laugh,

And says “Ye needna yoke the pleugh, 140

Kirkyards will soon be till’d eneugh,

Tak ye nae fear:

They’ll be trench’d wi’ mony a sheugh,

In twa-three year.

“Whare I kill’d ane, a fair strae-death, 145

By loss o’ blood or want of breath

This night I’m free to tak my aith,

That Hornbook’s skill

Has clad a score i’ their last claith,

By drap an’ pill. 150

“An honest wabster to his trade,

Whase wife’s twa nieves were scarce weel-bred

Gat tippence-worth to mend her head,

When it was sair;

The wife slade cannie to her bed, 155

But ne’er spak mair.

“A country laird had ta’en the batts,

Or some curmurring in his guts,

His only son for Hornbook sets,

An’ pays him well: 160

The lad, for twa guid gimmer-pets,

Was laird himsel’.

“A bonie lass — ye kend her name —

Some ill-brewn drink had hov’d her wame;

She trusts hersel’, to hide the shame, 165

In Hornbook’s care;

Horn sent her aff to her lang hame,

To hide it there.

“That’s just a swatch o’ Hornbook’s way;

Thus goes he on from day to day, 170

Thus does he poison, kill, an’ slay,

An’s weel paid for’t;

Yet stops me o’ my lawfu’ prey,

Wi’ his d — n’d dirt:

“But, hark! I’ll tell you of a plot, 175

Tho’ dinna ye be speakin o’t;

I’ll nail the self-conceited sot,

As dead’s a herrin;

Neist time we meet, I’ll wad a groat,

He gets his fairin!” 180

But just as he began to tell,

The auld kirk-hammer strak the bell

Some wee short hour ayont the twal’,

Which rais’d us baith:

I took the way that pleas’d mysel’, 185

And sae did Death.

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

60.

Epistle on J. Lapraik

An Old Scottish Bard. — April 1, 1785

WHILE briers an’ woodbines budding green,

An’ paitricks scraichin loud at e’en,

An’ morning poussie whiddin seen,

Inspire my muse,

This freedom, in an unknown frien’, 5

I pray excuse.

On Fasten-e’en we had a rockin,

To ca’ the crack and weave our stockin;

And there was muckle fun and jokin,

Ye need na doubt; 10

At length we had a hearty yokin

At sang about.

There was ae sang, amang the rest,

Aboon them a’ it pleas’d me best,

That some kind husband had addrest 15

To some sweet wife;

It thirl’d the heart-strings thro’ the breast,

A’ to the life.

I’ve scarce heard ought describ’d sae weel,

What gen’rous, manly bosoms feel; 20

Thought I “Can this be Pope, or Steele,

Or Beattie’s wark?”

They tauld me ‘twas an odd kind chiel

About Muirkirk.

It pat me fidgin-fain to hear’t, 25

An’ sae about him there I speir’t;

Then a’ that kent him round declar’d

He had ingine;

That nane excell’d it, few cam near’t,

It was sae fine: 30

That, set him to a pint of ale,

An’ either douce or merry tale,

Or rhymes an’ sangs he’d made himsel,

Or witty catches —

‘Tween Inverness an’ Teviotdale, 35

He had few matches.

Then up I gat, an’ swoor an aith,

Tho’ I should pawn my pleugh an’ graith,

Or die a cadger pownie’s death,

At some dyke-back, 40

A pint an’ gill I’d gie them baith,

To hear your crack.

But, first an’ foremost, I should tell,

Amaist as soon as I could spell,

I to the crambo-jingle fell; 45

Tho’ rude an’ rough —

Yet crooning to a body’s sel’

Does weel eneugh.

I am nae poet, in a sense;

But just a rhymer like by chance, 50

An’ hae to learning nae pretence;

Yet, what the matter?

Whene’er my muse does on me glance,

I jingle at her.

Your critic-folk may cock their nose, 55

And say, “How can you e’er propose,

You wha ken hardly verse frae prose,

To mak a sang?”

But, by your leaves, my learned foes,

Ye’re maybe wrang. 60

What’s a’ your jargon o’ your schools —

Your Latin names for horns an’ stools?

If honest Nature made you fools,

What sairs your grammars?

Ye’d better taen up spades and shools, 65

Or knappin-hammers.

A set o’ dull, conceited hashes

Confuse their brains in college classes!

They gang in stirks, and come out asses,

Plain truth to speak; 70

An’ syne they think to climb Parnassus

By dint o’ Greek!

Gie me ae spark o’ nature’s fire,

That’s a’ the learning I desire;

Then tho’ I drudge thro’ dub an’ mire 75

At pleugh or cart,

My muse, tho’ hamely in attire,

May touch the heart.

O for a spunk o’ Allan’s glee,

Or Fergusson’s the bauld an’ slee, 80

Or bright Lapraik’s, my friend to be,

If I can hit it!

That would be lear eneugh for me,

If I could get it.

Now, sir, if ye hae friends enow, 85

Tho’ real friends, I b’lieve, are few;

Yet, if your catalogue be fu’,

I’se no insist:

But, gif ye want ae friend that’s true,

I’m on your list. 90

I winna blaw about mysel,

As ill I like my fauts to tell;

But friends, an’ folk that wish me well,

They sometimes roose me;

Tho’ I maun own, as mony still 95

As far abuse me.

There’s ae wee faut they whiles lay to me,

I like the lasses — Gude forgie me!

For mony a plack they wheedle frae me

At dance or fair; 100

Maybe some ither thing they gie me,

They weel can spare.

But Mauchline Race, or Mauchline Fair,

I should be proud to meet you there;

We’se gie ae night’s discharge to care, 105

If we forgather;

An’ hae a swap o’ rhymin-ware

Wi’ ane anither.

The four-gill chap, we’se gar him clatter,

An’ kirsen him wi’ reekin water; 110

Syne we’ll sit down an’ tak our whitter,

To cheer our heart;

An’ faith, we’se be acquainted better

Before we part.

Awa ye selfish, war’ly race, 115

Wha think that havins, sense, an’ grace,

Ev’n love an’ friendship should give place

To catch-the-plack!

I dinna like to see your face,

Nor hear your crack. 120

But ye whom social pleasure charms

Whose hearts the tide of kindness warms,

Who hold your being on the terms,

“Each aid the others,”

Come to my bowl, come to my arms, 125

My friends, my brothers!

But, to conclude my lang epistle,

As my auld pen’s worn to the gristle,

Twa lines frae you wad gar me fissle,

Who am, most fervent, 130

While I can either sing or whistle,

Your friend and servant.

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

61.

Second Epistle to J. Lapraik

April 21, 1785

WHILE new-ca’d kye rowte at the stake

An’ pownies reek in pleugh or braik,

This hour on e’enin’s edge I take,

To own I’m debtor

To honest-hearted, auld Lapraik, 5

For his kind letter.

Forjesket sair, with weary legs,

Rattlin the corn out-owre the rigs,

Or dealing thro’ amang the naigs

Their ten-hours’ bite, 10

My awkart Muse sair pleads and begs

I would na write.

The tapetless, ramfeezl’d hizzie,

She’s saft at best an’ something lazy:

Quo’ she, “Ye ken we’ve been sae busy 15

This month an’ mair,

That trowth, my head is grown right dizzie,

An’ something sair.”

Her dowff excuses pat me mad;

“Conscience,” says I, “ye thowless jade! 20

I’ll write, an’ that a hearty blaud,

This vera night;

So dinna ye affront your trade,

But rhyme it right.

“Shall bauld Lapraik, the king o’ hearts, 25

Tho’ mankind were a pack o’ cartes,

Roose you sae weel for your deserts,

In terms sae friendly;

Yet ye’ll neglect to shaw your parts

An’ thank him kindly?” 30

Sae I gat paper in a blink,

An’ down gaed stumpie in the ink:

Quoth I, “Before I sleep a wink,

I vow I’ll close it;

An’ if ye winna mak it clink, 35

By Jove, I’ll prose it!”

Sae I’ve begun to scrawl, but whether

In rhyme, or prose, or baith thegither;

Or some hotch-potch that’s rightly neither,

Let time mak proof; 40

But I shall scribble down some blether

Just clean aff-loof.

My worthy friend, ne’er grudge an’ carp,

Tho’ fortune use you hard an’ sharp;

Come, kittle up your moorland harp 45

Wi’ gleesome touch!

Ne’er mind how Fortune waft and warp;

She’s but a bitch.

She ‘s gien me mony a jirt an’ fleg,

Sin’ I could striddle owre a rig; 50

But, by the L — d, tho’ I should beg

Wi’ lyart pow,

I’ll laugh an’ sing, an’ shake my leg,

As lang’s I dow!

Now comes the sax-an’-twentieth simmer 55

I’ve seen the bud upon the timmer,

Still persecuted by the limmer

Frae year to year;

But yet, despite the kittle kimmer,

I, Rob, am here. 60

Do ye envy the city gent,

Behint a kist to lie an’ sklent;

Or pursue-proud, big wi’ cent. per cent.

An’ muckle wame,

In some bit brugh to represent 65

A bailie’s name?

Or is’t the paughty, feudal thane,

Wi’ ruffl’d sark an’ glancing cane,

Wha thinks himsel nae sheep-shank bane,

But lordly stalks; 70

While caps and bonnets aff are taen,

As by he walks?

“O Thou wha gies us each guid gift!

Gie me o’ wit an’ sense a lift,

Then turn me, if thou please, adrift, 75

Thro’ Scotland wide;

Wi’ cits nor lairds I wadna shift,

In a’ their pride!”

Were this the charter of our state,

“On pain o’ hell be rich an’ great,” 80

Damnation then would be our fate,

Beyond remead;

But, thanks to heaven, that’s no the gate

We learn our creed.

For thus the royal mandate ran, 85

When first the human race began;

“The social, friendly, honest man,

Whate’er he be —

‘Tis he fulfils great Nature’s plan,

And none but he.” 90

O mandate glorious and divine!

The ragged followers o’ the Nine,

Poor, thoughtless devils! yet may shine

In glorious light,

While sordid sons o’ Mammon’s line 95

Are dark as night!

Tho’ here they scrape, an’ squeeze, an’ growl,

Their worthless nievefu’ of a soul

May in some future carcase howl,

The forest’s fright; 100

Or in some day-detesting owl

May shun the light.

Then may Lapraik and Burns arise,

To reach their native, kindred skies,

And sing their pleasures, hopes an’ joys, 105

In some mild sphere;

Still closer knit in friendship’s ties,

Each passing year!

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

62.

Epistle to William Simson

Schoolmaster, Ochiltree. — May, 1785

I GAT your letter, winsome Willie;

Wi’ gratefu’ heart I thank you brawlie;

Tho’ I maun say’t, I wad be silly,

And unco vain,

Should I believe, my coaxin billie 5

Your flatterin strain.

But I’se believe ye kindly meant it:

I sud be laith to think ye hinted

Ironic satire, sidelins sklented

On my poor Musie; 10

Tho’ in sic phraisin terms ye’ve penn’d it,

I scarce excuse ye.

My senses wad be in a creel,

Should I but dare a hope to speel

Wi’ Allan, or wi’ Gilbertfield, 15

The braes o’ fame;

Or Fergusson, the writer-chiel,

A deathless name.

(O Fergusson! thy glorious parts

Ill suited law’s dry, musty arts! 20

My curse upon your whunstane hearts,

Ye E’nbrugh gentry!

The tithe o’ what ye waste at cartes

Wad stow’d his pantry!)

Yet when a tale comes i’ my head, 25

Or lassies gie my heart a screed —

As whiles they’re like to be my dead,

(O sad disease!)

I kittle up my rustic reed;

It gies me ease. 30

Auld Coila now may fidge fu’ fain,

She’s gotten poets o’ her ain;

Chiels wha their chanters winna hain,

But tune their lays,

Till echoes a’ resound again 35

Her weel-sung praise.

Nae poet thought her worth his while,

To set her name in measur’d style;

She lay like some unkenn’d-of-isle

Beside New Holland, 40

Or whare wild-meeting oceans boil

Besouth Magellan.

Ramsay an’ famous Fergusson

Gied Forth an’ Tay a lift aboon;

Yarrow an’ Tweed, to monie a tune, 45

Owre Scotland rings;

While Irwin, Lugar, Ayr, an’ Doon

Naebody sings.

Th’ Illissus, Tiber, Thames, an’ Seine,

Glide sweet in monie a tunefu’ line: 50

But Willie, set your fit to mine,

An’ cock your crest;

We’ll gar our streams an’ burnies shine

Up wi’ the best!

We’ll sing auld Coila’s plains an’ fells, 55

Her moors red-brown wi’ heather bells,

Her banks an’ braes, her dens and dells,

Whare glorious Wallace

Aft bure the gree, as story tells,

Frae Suthron billies. 60

At Wallace’ name, what Scottish blood

But boils up in a spring-tide flood!

Oft have our fearless fathers strode

By Wallace’ side,

Still pressing onward, red-wat-shod, 65

Or glorious died!

O, sweet are Coila’s haughs an’ woods,

When lintwhites chant amang the buds,

And jinkin hares, in amorous whids,

Their loves enjoy; 70

While thro’ the braes the cushat croods

With wailfu’ cry!

Ev’n winter bleak has charms to me,

When winds rave thro’ the naked tree;

Or frosts on hills of Ochiltree 75

Are hoary gray;

Or blinding drifts wild-furious flee,

Dark’ning the day!

O Nature! a’ thy shews an’ forms

To feeling, pensive hearts hae charms! 80

Whether the summer kindly warms,

Wi’ life an light;

Or winter howls, in gusty storms,

The lang, dark night!

The muse, nae poet ever fand her, 85

Till by himsel he learn’d to wander,

Adown some trottin burn’s meander,

An’ no think lang:

O sweet to stray, an’ pensive ponder

A heart-felt sang! 90

The war’ly race may drudge an’ drive,

Hog-shouther, jundie, stretch, an’ strive;

Let me fair Nature’s face descrive,

And I, wi’ pleasure,

Shall let the busy, grumbling hive 95

Bum owre their treasure.

Fareweel, “my rhyme-composing” brither!

We’ve been owre lang unkenn’d to ither:

Now let us lay our heads thegither,

In love fraternal: 100

May envy wallop in a tether,

Black fiend, infernal!

While Highlandmen hate tools an’ taxes;

While moorlan’s herds like guid, fat braxies;

While terra firma, on her axis, 105

Diurnal turns;

Count on a friend, in faith an’ practice,

In Robert Burns.

POSTCRIPT

MY memory’s no worth a preen;

I had amaist forgotten clean, 110

Ye bade me write you what they mean

By this “new-light,”

‘Bout which our herds sae aft hae been

Maist like to fight.

In days when mankind were but callans 115

At grammar, logic, an’ sic talents,

They took nae pains their speech to balance,

Or rules to gie;

But spak their thoughts in plain, braid lallans,

Like you or me. 120

In thae auld times, they thought the moon,

Just like a sark, or pair o’ shoon,

Wore by degrees, till her last roon

Gaed past their viewin;

An’ shortly after she was done 125

They gat a new ane.

This passed for certain, undisputed;

It ne’er cam i’ their heads to doubt it,

Till chiels gat up an’ wad confute it,

An’ ca’d it wrang; 130

An’ muckle din there was about it,

Baith loud an’ lang.

Some herds, weel learn’d upo’ the beuk,

Wad threap auld folk the thing misteuk;

For ‘twas the auld moon turn’d a neuk 135

An’ out of’ sight,

An’ backlins-comin to the leuk

She grew mair bright.

This was deny’d, it was affirm’d;

The herds and hissels were alarm’d 140

The rev’rend gray-beards rav’d an’ storm’d,

That beardless laddies

Should think they better wer inform’d,

Than their auld daddies.

Frae less to mair, it gaed to sticks; 145

Frae words an’ aiths to clours an’ nicks;

An monie a fallow gat his licks,

Wi’ hearty crunt;

An’ some, to learn them for their tricks,

Were hang’d an’ brunt. 150

This game was play’d in mony lands,

An’ auld-light caddies bure sic hands,

That faith, the youngsters took the sands

Wi’ nimble shanks;

Till lairds forbad, by strict commands, 155

Sic bluidy pranks.

But new-light herds gat sic a cowe,

Folk thought them ruin’d stick-an-stowe;

Till now, amaist on ev’ry knowe

Ye’ll find ane plac’d; 160

An’ some their new-light fair avow,

Just quite barefac’d.

Nae doubt the auld-light flocks are bleatin;

Their zealous herds are vex’d an’ sweatin;

Mysel’, I’ve even seen them greetin 165

Wi’ girnin spite,

To hear the moon sae sadly lied on

By word an’ write.

But shortly they will cowe the louns!

Some auld-light herds in neebor touns 170

Are mind’t, in things they ca’ balloons,

To tak a flight;

An’ stay ae month amang the moons

An’ see them right.

Guid observation they will gie them; 175

An’ when the auld moon’s gaun to lea’e them,

The hindmaist shaird, they’ll fetch it wi’ them

Just i’ their pouch;

An’ when the new-light billies see them,

I think they’ll crouch! 180

Sae, ye observe that a’ this clatter

Is naething but a “moonshine matter”;

But tho’ dull prose-folk Latin splatter

In logic tulyie,

I hope we bardies ken some better 185

Than mind sic brulyie.

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

63.

One Night as I did Wander

Tune— “John Anderson, my jo.”

ONE night as I did wander,

When corn begins to shoot,

I sat me down to ponder

Upon an auld tree root;

Auld Ayr ran by before me, 5

And bicker’d to the seas;

A cushat crooded o’er me,

That echoed through the braes

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

64.

My Jean! (Fragment of a Song)

Tune— “The Northern Lass.”

THO’ cruel fate should bid us part,

Far as the pole and line,

Her dear idea round my heart,

Should tenderly entwine.

Tho’ mountains, rise, and deserts howl, 5

And oceans roar between;

Yet, dearer than my deathless soul,

I still would love my Jean.

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

65.

Rantin, Rovin Robin (Song)

Tune— “Daintie Davie.”

THERE was a lad was born in Kyle,

But whatna day o’ whatna style,

I doubt it’s hardly worth the while

To be sae nice wi’ Robin.

Chor. — Robin was a rovin’ boy, 5

Rantin’, rovin’, rantin’, rovin’,

Robin was a rovin’ boy,

Rantin’, rovin’, Robin!

Our monarch’s hindmost year but ane

Was five-and-twenty days begun, 10

‘Twas then a blast o’ Janwar’ win’

Blew hansel in on Robin.

Robin was, &c.

The gossip keekit in his loof,

Quo’ scho, “Wha lives will see the proof, 15

This waly boy will be nae coof:

I think we’ll ca’ him Robin.”

Robin was, &c.

“He’ll hae misfortunes great an’ sma’,

But aye a heart aboon them a’, 20

He’ll be a credit till us a’ —

We’ll a’ be proud o’ Robin.”

Robin was, &c.

“But sure as three times three mak nine,

I see by ilka score and line, 25

This chap will dearly like our kin’,

So leeze me on thee! Robin.”

Robin was, &c.

“Guid faith,” quo’, scho, “I doubt you gar

The bonie lasses lie aspar; 30

But twenty fauts ye may hae waur

So blessins on thee! Robin.”

Robin was, &c.

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

66.

Elegy on the Death of Robert Ruisseaux

NOW Robin lies in his last lair,

He’ll gabble rhyme, nor sing nae mair;

Cauld poverty, wi’ hungry stare,

Nae mair shall fear him;

Nor anxious fear, nor cankert care, 5

E’er mair come near him.

To tell the truth, they seldom fash’d him,

Except the moment that they crush’d him;

For sune as chance or fate had hush’d ‘em

Tho’ e’er sae short. 10

Then wi’ a rhyme or sang he lash’d ‘em,

And thought it sport.

Tho’he was bred to kintra-wark,

And counted was baith wight and stark,

Yet that was never Robin’s mark 15

To mak a man;

But tell him, he was learn’d and clark,

Ye roos’d him then!

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

67.

Epistle to John Goldie, in Kilmarnock

Author of the Gospel Recovered. — August, 1785

O GOWDIE, terror o’ the whigs,

Dread o’ blackcoats and rev’rend wigs!

Sour Bigotry, on her last legs,

Girns an’ looks back,

Wishing the ten Egyptian plagues 5

May seize you quick.

Poor gapin’, glowrin’ Superstition!

Wae’s me, she’s in a sad condition:

Fye: bring Black Jock, her state physician,

To see her water; 10

Alas, there’s ground for great suspicion

She’ll ne’er get better.

Enthusiasm’s past redemption,

Gane in a gallopin’ consumption:

Not a’ her quacks, wi’ a’ their gumption, 15

Can ever mend her;

Her feeble pulse gies strong presumption,

She’ll soon surrender.

Auld Orthodoxy lang did grapple,

For every hole to get a stapple; 20

But now she fetches at the thrapple,

An’ fights for breath;

Haste, gie her name up in the chapel,

Near unto death.

It’s you an’ Taylor are the chief 25

To blame for a’ this black mischief;

But, could the L — d’s ain folk get leave,

A toom tar barrel

An’ twa red peats wad bring relief,

And end the quarrel. 30

For me, my skill’s but very sma’,

An’ skill in prose I’ve nane ava’;

But quietlins-wise, between us twa,

Weel may you speed!

And tho’ they sud your sair misca’, 35

Ne’er fash your head.

E’en swinge the dogs, and thresh them sicker!

The mair they squeel aye chap the thicker;

And still ‘mang hands a hearty bicker

O’ something stout; 40

It gars an owthor’s pulse beat quicker,

And helps his wit.

There’s naething like the honest nappy;

Whare’ll ye e’er see men sae happy,

Or women sonsie, saft an’ sappy, 45

‘Tween morn and morn,

As them wha like to taste the drappie,

In glass or horn?

I’ve seen me dazed upon a time,

I scarce could wink or see a styme; 50

Just ae half-mutchkin does me prime, —

Ought less is little —

Then back I rattle on the rhyme,

As gleg’s a whittle.

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

68.

The Holy Fair

A robe of seeming truth and trust

Hid crafty Observation;

And secret hung, with poison’d crust,

The dirk of Defamation:

A mask that like the gorget show’d,

Dye-varying on the pigeon;

And for a mantle large and broad,

He wrapt him in Religion.

HYPOCRISY-A-LA-MODE

UPON a simmer Sunday morn

When Nature’s face is fair,

I walked forth to view the corn,

An’ snuff the caller air.

The rising sun owre Galston muirs 5

Wi’ glorious light was glintin;

The hares were hirplin down the furrs,

The lav’rocks they were chantin

Fu’ sweet that day.

As lightsomely I glowr’d abroad, 10

To see a scene sae gay,

Three hizzies, early at the road,

Cam skelpin up the way.

Twa had manteeles o” dolefu’ black,

But ane wi’ lyart lining; 15

The third, that gaed a wee a-back,

Was in the fashion shining

Fu’ gay that day.

The twa appear’d like sisters twin,

In feature, form, an’ claes; 20

Their visage wither’d, lang an’ thin,

An’ sour as only slaes:

The third cam up, hap-stap-an’-lowp,

As light as ony lambie,

An’ wi’a curchie low did stoop, 25

As soon as e’er she saw me,

Fu’ kind that day.

Wi’ bonnet aff, quoth I, “Sweet lass,

I think ye seem to ken me;

I’m sure I’ve seen that bonie face 30

But yet I canna name ye.”

Quo’ she, an’ laughin as she spak,

An’ taks me by the han’s,

“Ye, for my sake, hae gien the feck

Of a’ the ten comman’s 35

A screed some day.”

“My name is Fun — your cronie dear,

The nearest friend ye hae;

An’ this is Superstitution here,

An’ that’s Hypocrisy. 40

I’m gaun to Mauchline Holy Fair,

To spend an hour in daffin:

Gin ye’ll go there, yon runkl’d pair,

We will get famous laughin

At them this day.” 45

Quoth I, “Wi’ a’ my heart, I’ll do’t;

I’ll get my Sunday’s sark on,

An’ meet you on the holy spot;

Faith, we’se hae fine remarkin!”

Then I gaed hame at crowdie-time, 50

An’ soon I made me ready;

For roads were clad, frae side to side,

Wi’ mony a weary body

In droves that day.

Here farmers gash, in ridin graith, 55

Gaed hoddin by their cotters;

There swankies young, in braw braid-claith,

Are springing owre the gutters.

The lasses, skelpin barefit, thrang,

In silks an’ scarlets glitter; 60

Wi’ sweet-milk cheese, in mony a whang,

An’ farls, bak’d wi’ butter,

Fu’ crump that day.

When by the plate we set our nose,

Weel heaped up wi’ ha’pence, 65

A greedy glowr black-bonnet throws,

An’ we maun draw our tippence.

Then in we go to see the show:

On ev’ry side they’re gath’rin;

Some carrying dails, some chairs an’ stools, 70

An’ some are busy bleth’rin

Right loud that day.

Here stands a shed to fend the show’rs,

An’ screen our countra gentry;

There “Racer Jess, an’ twa-three whores, 75

Are blinkin at the entry.

Here sits a raw o’ tittlin jads,

Wi’ heaving breast an’ bare neck;

An’ there a batch o’ wabster lads,

Blackguarding frae Kilmarnock, 80

For fun this day.

Here, some are thinkin on their sins,

An’ some upo’ their claes;

Ane curses feet that fyl’d his shins,

Anither sighs an’ prays: 85

On this hand sits a chosen swatch,

Wi’ screwed-up, grace-proud faces;

On that a set o’ chaps, at watch,

Thrang winkin on the lasses

To chairs that day. 90

O happy is that man, an’ blest!

Nae wonder that it pride him!

Whase ain dear lass, that he likes best,

Comes clinkin down beside him!

Wi’ arms repos’d on the chair back, 95

He sweetly does compose him;

Which, by degrees, slips round her neck,

An’s loof upon her bosom,

Unkend that day.

Now a’ the congregation o’er 100

Is silent expectation;

For Moodie speels the holy door,

Wi’ tidings o’ damnation:

Should Hornie, as in ancient days,

‘Mang sons o’ God present him, 105

The vera sight o’ Moodie’s face,

To ‘s ain het hame had sent him

Wi’ fright that day.

Hear how he clears the point o’ faith

Wi’ rattlin and wi’ thumpin! 110

Now meekly calm, now wild in wrath,

He’s stampin, an’ he’s jumpin!

His lengthen’d chin, his turned-up snout,

His eldritch squeel an’ gestures,

O how they fire the heart devout, 115

Like cantharidian plaisters

On sic a day!

But hark! the tent has chang’d its voice,

There’s peace an’ rest nae langer;

For a’ the real judges rise, 120

They canna sit for anger,

Smith opens out his cauld harangues,

On practice and on morals;

An’ aff the godly pour in thrangs,

To gie the jars an’ barrels 125

A lift that day.

What signifies his barren shine,

Of moral powers an’ reason?

His English style, an’ gesture fine

Are a’ clean out o’ season. 130

Like Socrates or Antonine,

Or some auld pagan heathen,

The moral man he does define,

But ne’er a word o’ faith in

That’s right that day. 135

In guid time comes an antidote

Against sic poison’d nostrum;

For Peebles, frae the water-fit,

Ascends the holy rostrum:

See, up he’s got, the word o’ God, 140

An’ meek an’ mim has view’d it,

While Common-sense has taen the road,

An’ aff, an’ up the Cowgate

Fast, fast that day.

Wee Miller neist the guard relieves, 145

An’ Orthodoxy raibles,

Tho’ in his heart he weel believes,

An’ thinks it auld wives’ fables:

But faith! the birkie wants a manse,

So, cannilie he hums them; 150

Altho’ his carnal wit an’ sense

Like hafflins-wise o’ercomes him

At times that day.

Now, butt an’ ben, the change-house fills,

Wi’ yill-caup commentators; 155

Here ‘s cryin out for bakes and gills,

An’ there the pint-stowp clatters;

While thick an’ thrang, an’ loud an’ lang,

Wi’ logic an’ wi’ scripture,

They raise a din, that in the end 160

Is like to breed a rupture

O’ wrath that day.

Leeze me on drink! it gies us mair

Than either school or college;

It kindles wit, it waukens lear, 165

It pangs us fou o’ knowledge:

Be’t whisky-gill or penny wheep,

Or ony stronger potion,

It never fails, or drinkin deep,

To kittle up our notion, 170

By night or day.

The lads an’ lasses, blythely bent

To mind baith saul an’ body,

Sit round the table, weel content,

An’ steer about the toddy: 175

On this ane’s dress, an’ that ane’s leuk,

They’re makin observations;

While some are cozie i’ the neuk,

An’ forming assignations

To meet some day. 180

But now the L—‘s ain trumpet touts,

Till a’ the hills are rairin,

And echoes back return the shouts;

Black Russell is na sparin:

His piercin words, like Highlan’ swords, 185

Divide the joints an’ marrow;

His talk o’ Hell, whare devils dwell,

Our vera “sauls does harrow”

Wi’ fright that day!

A vast, unbottom’d, boundless pit, 190

Fill’d fou o’ lowin brunstane,

Whase raging flame, an’ scorching heat,

Wad melt the hardest whun-stane!

The half-asleep start up wi’ fear,

An’ think they hear it roarin; 195

When presently it does appear,

‘Twas but some neibor snorin

Asleep that day.

‘Twad be owre lang a tale to tell,

How mony stories past; 200

An’ how they crouded to the yill,

When they were a’ dismist;

How drink gaed round, in cogs an’ caups,

Amang the furms an’ benches;

An’ cheese an’ bread, frae women’s laps, 205

Was dealt about in lunches

An’ dawds that day.

In comes a gawsie, gash guidwife,

An’ sits down by the fire,

Syne draws her kebbuck an’ her knife; 210

The lasses they are shyer:

The auld guidmen, about the grace

Frae side to side they bother;

Till some ane by his bonnet lays,

An’ gies them’t like a tether, 215

Fu’ lang that day.

Waesucks! for him that gets nae lass,

Or lasses that hae naething!

Sma’ need has he to say a grace,

Or melvie his braw claithing! 220

O wives, be mindfu’ ance yoursel’

How bonie lads ye wanted;

An’ dinna for a kebbuck-heel

Let lasses be affronted

On sic a day! 225

Now Clinkumbell, wi’ rattlin tow,

Begins to jow an’ croon;

Some swagger hame the best they dow,

Some wait the afternoon.

At slaps the billies halt a blink, 230

Till lasses strip their shoon:

Wi’ faith an’ hope, an’ love an’ drink,

They’re a’ in famous tune

For crack that day.

How mony hearts this day converts 235

O’ sinners and o’ lasses!

Their hearts o’ stane, gin night, are gane

As saft as ony flesh is:

There’s some are fou o’ love divine;

There’s some are fou o’ brandy; 240

An’ mony jobs that day begin,

May end in houghmagandie

Some ither day.

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

69.

Third Epistle to J. Lapraik

GUID speed and furder to you, Johnie,

Guid health, hale han’s, an’ weather bonie;

Now, when ye’re nickin down fu’ cannie

The staff o’ bread,

May ye ne’er want a stoup o’ bran’y 5

To clear your head.

May Boreas never thresh your rigs,

Nor kick your rickles aff their legs,

Sendin the stuff o’er muirs an’ haggs

Like drivin wrack; 10

But may the tapmost grain that wags

Come to the sack.

I’m bizzie, too, an’ skelpin at it,

But bitter, daudin showers hae wat it;

Sae my auld stumpie pen I gat it 15

Wi’ muckle wark,

An’ took my jocteleg an whatt it,

Like ony clark.

It’s now twa month that I’m your debtor,

For your braw, nameless, dateless letter, 20

Abusin me for harsh ill-nature

On holy men,

While deil a hair yoursel’ ye’re better,

But mair profane.

But let the kirk-folk ring their bells, 25

Let’s sing about our noble sel’s:

We’ll cry nae jads frae heathen hills

To help, or roose us;

But browster wives an’ whisky stills,

They are the muses. 30

Your friendship, Sir, I winna quat it,

An’ if ye mak’ objections at it,

Then hand in neive some day we’ll knot it,

An’ witness take,

An’ when wi’ usquabae we’ve wat it 35

It winna break.

But if the beast an’ branks be spar’d

Till kye be gaun without the herd,

And a’ the vittel in the yard,

An’ theekit right, 40

I mean your ingle-side to guard

Ae winter night.

Then muse-inspirin’ aqua-vitae

Shall make us baith sae blythe and witty,

Till ye forget ye’re auld an’ gatty, 45

An’ be as canty

As ye were nine years less than thretty —

Sweet ane an’ twenty!

But stooks are cowpit wi’ the blast,

And now the sinn keeks in the west, 50

Then I maun rin amang the rest,

An’ quat my chanter;

Sae I subscribe myself’ in haste,

Yours, Rab the Ranter.

Sept. 13, 1785.

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

70.

Epistle to the Rev. John M’Math

Inclosing a Copy of “Holy Willie’s Prayer,” Which He Had Requested, Sept. 17, 1785

WHILE at the stook the shearers cow’r

To shun the bitter blaudin’ show’r,

Or in gulravage rinnin scowr

To pass the time,

To you I dedicate the hour 5

In idle rhyme.

My musie, tir’d wi’ mony a sonnet

On gown, an’ ban’, an’ douse black bonnet,

Is grown right eerie now she’s done it,

Lest they should blame her, 10

An’ rouse their holy thunder on it

An anathem her.

I own ‘twas rash, an’ rather hardy,

That I, a simple, country bardie,

Should meddle wi’ a pack sae sturdy, 15

Wha, if they ken me,

Can easy, wi’ a single wordie,

Lowse hell upon me.

But I gae mad at their grimaces,

Their sighin, cantin, grace-proud faces, 20

Their three-mile prayers, an’ half-mile graces,

Their raxin conscience,

Whase greed, revenge, an’ pride disgraces

Waur nor their nonsense.

There’s Gaw’n, misca’d waur than a beast, 25

Wha has mair honour in his breast

Than mony scores as guid’s the priest

Wha sae abus’d him:

And may a bard no crack his jest

What way they’ve us’d him? 30

See him, the poor man’s friend in need,

The gentleman in word an’ deed —

An’ shall his fame an’ honour bleed

By worthless, skellums,

An’ not a muse erect her head 35

To cowe the blellums?

O Pope, had I thy satire’s darts

To gie the rascals their deserts,

I’d rip their rotten, hollow hearts,

An’ tell aloud 40

Their jugglin hocus-pocus arts

To cheat the crowd.

God knows, I’m no the thing I should be,

Nor am I even the thing I could be,

But twenty times I rather would be 45

An atheist clean,

Than under gospel colours hid be

Just for a screen.

An honest man may like a glass,

An honest man may like a lass, 50

But mean revenge, an’ malice fause

He’ll still disdain,

An’ then cry zeal for gospel laws,

Like some we ken.

They take religion in their mouth; 55

They talk o’ mercy, grace, an’ truth,

For what? — to gie their malice skouth

On some puir wight,

An’ hunt him down, owre right and ruth,

To ruin straight. 60

All hail, Religion! maid divine!

Pardon a muse sae mean as mine,

Who in her rough imperfect line

Thus daurs to name thee;

To stigmatise false friends of thine 65

Can ne’er defame thee.

Tho’ blotch’t and foul wi’ mony a stain,

An’ far unworthy of thy train,

With trembling voice I tune my strain,

To join with those 70

Who boldly dare thy cause maintain

In spite of foes:

In spite o’ crowds, in spite o’ mobs,

In spite o’ undermining jobs,

In spite o’ dark banditti stabs 75

At worth an’ merit,

By scoundrels, even wi’ holy robes,

But hellish spirit.

O Ayr! my dear, my native ground,

Within thy presbyterial bound 80

A candid liberal band is found

Of public teachers,

As men, as Christians too, renown’d,

An’ manly preachers.

Sir, in that circle you are nam’d; 85

Sir, in that circle you are fam’d;

An’ some, by whom your doctrine’s blam’d

(Which gies you honour)

Even, sir, by them your heart’s esteem’d,

An’ winning manner. 90

Pardon this freedom I have ta’en,

An’ if impertinent I’ve been,

Impute it not, good Sir, in ane

Whase heart ne’er wrang’d ye,

But to his utmost would befriend 95

Ought that belang’d ye.

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

71.

Second Epistle to Davie

A Brother Poet

AULD NEIBOUR,

I’m three times doubly o’er your debtor,

For your auld-farrant, frien’ly letter;

Tho’ I maun say’t I doubt ye flatter,

Ye speak sae fair;

For my puir, silly, rhymin clatter 5

Some less maun sair.

Hale be your heart, hale be your fiddle,

Lang may your elbuck jink diddle,

To cheer you thro’ the weary widdle

O’ war’ly cares; 10

Till barins’ barins kindly cuddle

Your auld grey hairs.

But Davie, lad, I’m red ye’re glaikit;

I’m tauld the muse ye hae negleckit;

An, gif it’s sae, ye sud by lickit 15

Until ye fyke;

Sic haun’s as you sud ne’er be faikit,

Be hain’t wha like.

For me, I’m on Parnassus’ brink,

Rivin the words to gar them clink; 20

Whiles dazed wi’ love, whiles dazed wi’ drink,

Wi’ jads or masons;

An’ whiles, but aye owre late, I think

Braw sober lessons.

Of a’ the thoughtless sons o’ man, 25

Commen’ to me the bardie clan;

Except it be some idle plan

O’ rhymin clink,

The devil haet, — that I sud ban —

They ever think. 30

Nae thought, nae view, nae scheme o’ livin,

Nae cares to gie us joy or grievin,

But just the pouchie put the neive in,

An’ while ought’s there,

Then, hiltie, skiltie, we gae scrievin’, 35

An’ fash nae mair.

Leeze me on rhyme! it’s aye a treasure,

My chief, amaist my only pleasure;

At hame, a-fiel’, at wark, or leisure,

The Muse, poor hizzie! 40

Tho’ rough an’ raploch be her measure,

She’s seldom lazy.

Haud to the Muse, my daintie Davie:

The warl’ may play you mony a shavie;

But for the Muse, she’ll never leave ye, 45

Tho’ e’er sae puir,

Na, even tho’ limpin wi’ the spavie

Frae door tae door.

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

72.

Young Peggy Blooms (Song)

Tune— “Loch Eroch-side.”

YOUNG Peggy blooms our boniest lass,

Her blush is like the morning,

The rosy dawn, the springing grass,

With early gems adorning.

Her eyes outshine the radiant beams 5

That gild the passing shower,

And glitter o’er the crystal streams,

And cheer each fresh’ning flower.

Her lips, more than the cherries bright,

A richer dye has graced them; 10

They charm th’ admiring gazer’s sight,

And sweetly tempt to taste them;

Her smile is as the evening mild,

When feather’d pairs are courting,

And little lambkins wanton wild, 15

In playful bands disporting.

Were Fortune lovely Peggy’s foe,

Such sweetness would relent her;

As blooming spring unbends the brow

Of surly, savage Winter. 20

Detraction’s eye no aim can gain,

Her winning pow’rs to lessen;

And fretful Envy grins in vain

The poison’d tooth to fasten.

Ye Pow’rs of Honour, Love, and Truth, 25

From ev’ry ill defend her!

Inspire the highly-favour’d youth

The destinies intend her:

Still fan the sweet connubial flame

Responsive in each bosom; 30

And bless the dear parental name

With many a filial blossom.

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

73.

Farewell to Ballochmyle (Song)

Tune— “Miss Forbes’s farewell to Banff.”

THE CATRINE woods were yellow seen,

The flowers decay’d on Catrine lee,

Nae lav’rock sang on hillock green,

But nature sicken’d on the e’e.

Thro’ faded groves Maria sang, 5

Hersel’ in beauty’s bloom the while;

And aye the wild-wood ehoes rang,

Fareweel the braes o’ Ballochmyle!

Low in your wintry beds, ye flowers,

Again ye’ll flourish fresh and fair; 10

Ye birdies dumb, in with’ring bowers,

Again ye’ll charm the vocal air.

But here, alas! for me nae mair

Shall birdie charm, or floweret smile;

Fareweel the bonie banks of Ayr, 15

Fareweel, fareweel! sweet Ballochmyle!

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

74.

Her Flwoing Locks (Fragment of a Song)

HER flowing locks, the raven’s wing,

Adown her neck and bosom hing;

How sweet unto that breast to cling,

And round that neck entwine her!

Her lips are roses wat wi’ dew, 5

O’ what a feast her bonie mou’!

Her cheeks a mair celestial hue,

A crimson still diviner!

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

75.

Halloween

The following poem will, by many readers, be well enough understood; but for the sake of those who are unacquainted with the manners and traditions of the country where the scene is cast, notes are added to give some account of the principal charms and spells of that night, so big with prophecy to the peasantry in the west of Scotland. The passion of prying into futurity makes a striking part of the history of human nature in its rude state, in all ages and nations; and it may be some entertainment to a philosophic mind, if any such honour the author with a perusal, to see the remains of it among the more unenlightened in our own. — R. B.

Yes! let the rich deride, the proud disdain,

The simple pleasure of the lowly train;

To me more dear, congenial to my heart,

One native charm, than all the gloss of art. — GOLDSMITH.

UPON that night, when fairies light

On Cassilis Downans dance,

Or owre the lays, in splendid blaze,

On sprightly coursers prance;

Or for Colean the rout is ta’en, 5

Beneath the moon’s pale beams;

There, up the Cove, to stray an’ rove,

Amang the rocks and streams

To sport that night;

Amang the bonie winding banks, 10

Where Doon rins, wimplin, clear;

Where Bruce ance rul’d the martial ranks,

An’ shook his Carrick spear;

Some merry, friendly, countra-folks

Together did convene, 15

To burn their nits, an’ pou their stocks,

An’ haud their Halloween

Fu’ blythe that night.

The lasses feat, an’ cleanly neat,

Mair braw than when they’re fine; 20

Their faces blythe, fu’ sweetly kythe,

Hearts leal, an’ warm, an’ kin’:

The lads sae trig, wi’ wooer-babs

Weel-knotted on their garten;

Some unco blate, an’ some wi’ gabs 25

Gar lasses’ hearts gang startin

Whiles fast at night.

Then, first an’ foremost, thro’ the kail,

Their stocks maun a’ be sought ance;

They steek their een, and grape an’ wale 30

For muckle anes, an’ straught anes.

Poor hav’rel Will fell aff the drift,

An’ wandered thro’ the bow-kail,

An’ pou’t for want o’ better shift

A runt was like a sow-tail 35

Sae bow’t that night.

Then, straught or crooked, yird or nane,

They roar an’ cry a’ throu’ther;

The vera wee-things, toddlin, rin,

Wi’ stocks out owre their shouther: 40

An’ gif the custock’s sweet or sour,

Wi’ joctelegs they taste them;

Syne coziely, aboon the door,

Wi’ cannie care, they’ve plac’d them

To lie that night. 45

The lassies staw frae ‘mang them a’,

To pou their stalks o’ corn;

But Rab slips out, an’ jinks about,

Behint the muckle thorn:

He grippit Nelly hard and fast: 50

Loud skirl’d a’ the lasses;

But her tap-pickle maist was lost,

Whan kiutlin in the fause-house

Wi’ him that night.

The auld guid-wife’s weel-hoordit nits 55

Are round an’ round dividend,

An’ mony lads an’ lasses’ fates

Are there that night decided:

Some kindle couthie side by side,

And burn thegither trimly; 60

Some start awa wi’ saucy pride,

An’ jump out owre the chimlie

Fu’ high that night.

Jean slips in twa, wi’ tentie e’e;

Wha ‘twas, she wadna tell; 65

But this is Jock, an’ this is me,

She says in to hersel’:

He bleez’d owre her, an’ she owre him,

As they wad never mair part:

Till fuff! he started up the lum, 70

An’ Jean had e’en a sair heart

To see’t that night.

Poor Willie, wi’ his bow-kail runt,

Was brunt wi’ primsie Mallie;

An’ Mary, nae doubt, took the drunt, 75

To be compar’d to Willie:

Mall’s nit lap out, wi’ pridefu’ fling,

An’ her ain fit, it brunt it;

While Willie lap, and swore by jing,

‘Twas just the way he wanted 80

To be that night.

Nell had the fause-house in her min’,

She pits hersel an’ Rob in;

In loving bleeze they sweetly join,

Till white in ase they’re sobbin: 85

Nell’s heart was dancin at the view;

She whisper’d Rob to leuk for’t:

Rob, stownlins, prie’d her bonie mou’,

Fu’ cozie in the neuk for’t,

Unseen that night. 90

But Merran sat behint their backs,

Her thoughts on Andrew Bell:

She lea’es them gashin at their cracks,

An’ slips out-by hersel’;

She thro’ the yard the nearest taks, 95

An’ for the kiln she goes then,

An’ darklins grapit for the bauks,

And in the blue-clue throws then,

Right fear’t that night.

An’ ay she win’t, an’ ay she swat — 100

I wat she made nae jaukin;

Till something held within the pat,

Good L — d! but she was quaukin!

But whether ‘twas the deil himsel,

Or whether ‘twas a bauk-en’, 105

Or whether it was Andrew Bell,

She did na wait on talkin

To spier that night.

Wee Jenny to her graunie says,

“Will ye go wi’ me, graunie? 110

I’ll eat the apple at the glass,

I gat frae uncle Johnie:”

She fuff’t her pipe wi’ sic a lunt,

In wrath she was sae vap’rin,

She notic’t na an aizle brunt 115

Her braw, new, worset apron

Out thro’ that night.

“Ye little skelpie-limmer’s face!

I daur you try sic sportin,

As seek the foul thief ony place, 120

For him to spae your fortune:

Nae doubt but ye may get a sight!

Great cause ye hae to fear it;

For mony a ane has gotten a fright,

An’ liv’d an’ died deleerit, 125

On sic a night.

“Ae hairst afore the Sherra-moor,

I mind’t as weel’s yestreen —

I was a gilpey then, I’m sure

I was na past fyfteen: 130

The simmer had been cauld an’ wat,

An’ stuff was unco green;

An’ eye a rantin kirn we gat,

An’ just on Halloween

It fell that night. 135

“Our stibble-rig was Rab M’Graen,

A clever, sturdy fallow;

His sin gat Eppie Sim wi’ wean,

That lived in Achmacalla:

He gat hemp-seed, I mind it weel, 140

An’he made unco light o’t;

But mony a day was by himsel’,

He was sae sairly frighted

That vera night.”

Then up gat fechtin Jamie Fleck, 145

An’ he swoor by his conscience,

That he could saw hemp-seed a peck;

For it was a’ but nonsense:

The auld guidman raught down the pock,

An’ out a handfu’ gied him; 150

Syne bad him slip frae’ mang the folk,

Sometime when nae ane see’d him,

An’ try’t that night.

He marches thro’ amang the stacks,

Tho’ he was something sturtin; 155

The graip he for a harrow taks,

An’ haurls at his curpin:

And ev’ry now an’ then, he says,

“Hemp-seed I saw thee,

An’ her that is to be my lass 160

Come after me, an’ draw thee

As fast this night.”

He wistl’d up Lord Lennox’ March

To keep his courage cherry;

Altho’ his hair began to arch, 165

He was sae fley’d an’ eerie:

Till presently he hears a squeak,

An’ then a grane an’ gruntle;

He by his shouther gae a keek,

An’ tumbled wi’ a wintle 170

Out-owre that night.

He roar’d a horrid murder-shout,

In dreadfu’ desperation!

An’ young an’ auld come rinnin out,

An’ hear the sad narration: 175

He swoor ‘twas hilchin Jean M’Craw,

Or crouchie Merran Humphie —

Till stop! she trotted thro’ them a’;

And wha was it but grumphie

Asteer that night! 180

Meg fain wad to the barn gaen,

To winn three wechts o’ naething;

But for to meet the deil her lane,

She pat but little faith in:

She gies the herd a pickle nits, 185

An’ twa red cheekit apples,

To watch, while for the barn she sets,

In hopes to see Tam Kipples

That vera night.

She turns the key wi’ cannie thraw, 190

An’owre the threshold ventures;

But first on Sawnie gies a ca’,

Syne baudly in she enters:

A ratton rattl’d up the wa’,

An’ she cry’d Lord preserve her! 195

An’ ran thro’ midden-hole an’ a’,

An’ pray’d wi’ zeal and fervour,

Fu’ fast that night.

They hoy’t out Will, wi’ sair advice;

They hecht him some fine braw ane; 200

It chanc’d the stack he faddom’t thrice

Was timmer-propt for thrawin:

He taks a swirlie auld moss-oak

For some black, grousome carlin;

An’ loot a winze, an’ drew a stroke, 205

Till skin in blypes cam haurlin

Aff’s nieves that night.

A wanton widow Leezie was,

As cantie as a kittlen;

But och! that night, amang the shaws, 210

She gat a fearfu’ settlin!

She thro’ the whins, an’ by the cairn,

An’ owre the hill gaed scrievin;

Whare three lairds’ lan’s met at a burn,

To dip her left sark-sleeve in, 215

Was bent that night.

Whiles owre a linn the burnie plays,

As thro’ the glen it wimpl’t;

Whiles round a rocky scar it strays,

Whiles in a wiel it dimpl’t; 220

Whiles glitter’d to the nightly rays,

Wi’ bickerin’, dancin’ dazzle;

Whiles cookit undeneath the braes,

Below the spreading hazel

Unseen that night. 225

Amang the brachens, on the brae,

Between her an’ the moon,

The deil, or else an outler quey,

Gat up an’ ga’e a croon:

Poor Leezie’s heart maist lap the hool; 230

Near lav’rock-height she jumpit,

But mist a fit, an’ in the pool

Out-owre the lugs she plumpit,

Wi’ a plunge that night.

In order, on the clean hearth-stane, 235

The luggies three are ranged;

An’ ev’ry time great care is ta’en

To see them duly changed:

Auld uncle John, wha wedlock’s joys

Sin’ Mar’s-year did desire, 240

Because he gat the toom dish thrice,

He heav’d them on the fire

In wrath that night.

Wi’ merry sangs, an’ friendly cracks,

I wat they did na weary; 245

And unco tales, an’ funnie jokes —

Their sports were cheap an’ cheery:

Till butter’d sowens, wi’ fragrant lunt,

Set a’ their gabs a-steerin;

Syne, wi’ a social glass o’ strunt, 250

They parted aff careerin

Fu’ blythe that night.

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

76.

To a Mouse

WEE, sleekit, cow’rin, tim’rous beastie,

O, what a panic’s in thy breastie!

Thou need na start awa sae hasty,

Wi’ bickering brattle!

I wad be laith to rin an’ chase thee, 5

Wi’ murd’ring pattle!

I’m truly sorry man’s dominion,

Has broken nature’s social union,

An’ justifies that ill opinion,

Which makes thee startle 10

At me, thy poor, earth-born companion,

An’ fellow-mortal!

I doubt na, whiles, but thou may thieve;

What then? poor beastie, thou maun live!

A daimen icker in a thrave 15

‘S a sma’ request;

I’ll get a blessin wi’ the lave,

An’ never miss’t!

Thy wee bit housie, too, in ruin!

It’s silly wa’s the win’s are strewin! 20

An’ naething, now, to big a new ane,

O’ foggage green!

An’ bleak December’s winds ensuin,

Baith snell an’ keen!

Thou saw the fields laid bare an’ waste, 25

An’ weary winter comin fast,

An’ cozie here, beneath the blast,

Thou thought to dwell —

Till crash! the cruel coulter past

Out thro’ thy cell. 30

That wee bit heap o’ leaves an’ stibble,

Has cost thee mony a weary nibble!

Now thou’s turn’d out, for a’ thy trouble,

But house or hald,

To thole the winter’s sleety dribble, 35

An’ cranreuch cauld!

But, Mousie, thou art no thy lane,

In proving foresight may be vain;

The best-laid schemes o’ mice an’ men

Gang aft agley, 40

An’lea’e us nought but grief an’ pain,

For promis’d joy!

Still thou art blest, compar’d wi’ me

The present only toucheth thee:

But, Och! I backward cast my e’e. 45

On prospects drear!

An’ forward, tho’ I canna see,

I guess an’ fear!

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

77.

Epitaph on John Dove, Innkeeper

HERE lies Johnie Pigeon;

What was his religion?

Whae’er desires to ken,

To some other warl’

Maun follow the carl, 5

For here Johnie Pigeon had nane!

Strong ale was ablution,

Small beer persecution,

A dram was memento mori;

But a full-flowing bowl 10

Was the saving his soul,

And port was celestial glory.

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

78.

Epitaph for James Smith

LAMENT him, Mauchline husbands a’,

He aften did assist ye;

For had ye staid hale weeks awa,

Your wives they ne’er had miss’d ye.

Ye Mauchline bairns, as on ye press 5

To school in bands thegither,

O tread ye lightly on his grass, —

Perhaps he was your father!

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

79.

Adam Armour’s Prayer

GUDE pity me, because I’m little!

For though I am an elf o’ mettle,

An’ can, like ony wabster’s shuttle,

Jink there or here,

Yet, scarce as lang’s a gude kail-whittle, 5

I’m unco queer.

An’ now Thou kens our waefu’ case;

For Geordie’s jurr we’re in disgrace,

Because we stang’d her through the place,

An’ hurt her spleuchan; 10

For whilk we daurna show our face

Within the clachan.

An’ now we’re dern’d in dens and hollows,

And hunted, as was William Wallace,

Wi’ constables-thae blackguard fallows, 15

An’ sodgers baith;

But Gude preserve us frae the gallows,

That shamefu’ death!

Auld grim black-bearded Geordie’s sel’ —

O shake him owre the mouth o’ hell! 20

There let him hing, an’ roar, an’ yell

Wi’ hideous din,

And if he offers to rebel,

Then heave him in.

When Death comes in wi’ glimmerin blink, 25

An’ tips auld drucken Nanse the wink,

May Sautan gie her doup a clink

Within his yett,

An’ fill her up wi’ brimstone drink,

Red-reekin het. 30

Though Jock an’ hav’rel Jean are merry —

Some devil seize them in a hurry,

An’ waft them in th’ infernal wherry

Straught through the lake,

An’ gie their hides a noble curry 35

Wi’ oil of aik!

As for the jurr-puir worthless body!

She’s got mischief enough already;

Wi’ stanged hips, and buttocks bluidy

She’s suffer’d sair; 40

But, may she wintle in a woody,

If she wh-e mair!

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

80.

The Jolly Beggars: A Cantata

A Cantata

Recitativo

WHEN lyart leaves bestrow the yird,

Or wavering like the bauckie-bird,

Bedim cauld Boreas’ blast;

When hailstanes drive wi’ bitter skyte,

And infant frosts begin to bite, 5

In hoary cranreuch drest;

Ae night at e’en a merry core

O’ randie, gangrel bodies,

In Poosie-Nansie’s held the splore,

To drink their orra duddies; 10

Wi’ quaffing an’ laughing,

They ranted an’ they sang,

Wi’ jumping an’ thumping,

The vera girdle rang,

First, neist the fire, in auld red rags, 15

Ane sat, weel brac’d wi’ mealy bags,

And knapsack a’ in order;

His doxy lay within his arm;

Wi’ usquebae an’ blankets warm

She blinkit on her sodger; 20

An’ aye he gies the tozie drab

The tither skelpin’ kiss,

While she held up her greedy gab,

Just like an aumous dish;

Ilk smack still, did crack still, 25

Just like a cadger’s whip;

Then staggering an’ swaggering

He roar’d this ditty up —

Air

Tune— “Soldier’s Joy.”

I am a son of Mars who have been in many wars,

And show my cuts and scars wherever I come; 30

This here was for a wench, and that other in a trench,

When welcoming the French at the sound of the drum.

Lal de daudle, &c.

My ‘prenticeship I past where my leader breath’d his last,

When the bloody die was cast on the heights of Abram: 35

And I served out my trade when the gallant game was play’d,

And the Morro low was laid at the sound of the drum.

I lastly was with Curtis among the floating batt’ries,

And there I left for witness an arm and a limb;

Yet let my country need me, with Elliot to head me, 40

I’d clatter on my stumps at the sound of a drum.

And now tho’ I must beg, with a wooden arm and leg,

And many a tatter’d rag hanging over my bum,

I’m as happy with my wallet, my bottle, and my callet,

As when I used in scarlet to follow a drum. 45

What tho’ with hoary locks, I must stand the winter shocks,

Beneath the woods and rocks oftentimes for a home,

When the t’other bag I sell, and the t’other bottle tell,

I could meet a troop of hell, at the sound of a drum.

Recitativo

He ended; and the kebars sheuk, 50

Aboon the chorus roar;

While frighted rattons backward leuk,

An’ seek the benmost bore:

A fairy fiddler frae the neuk,

He skirl’d out, encore! 55

But up arose the martial chuck,

An’ laid the loud uproar.

Air

Tune— “Sodger Laddie.”

I once was a maid, tho’ I cannot tell when,

And still my delight is in proper young men;

Some one of a troop of dragoons was my daddie, 60

No wonder I’m fond of a sodger laddie,

Sing, lal de lal, &c.

The first of my loves was a swaggering blade,

To rattle the thundering drum was his trade;

His leg was so tight, and his cheek was so ruddy, 65

Transported I was with my sodger laddie.

But the godly old chaplain left him in the lurch;

The sword I forsook for the sake of the church:

He ventur’d the soul, and I risked the body,

‘Twas then I proved false to my sodger laddie. 70

Full soon I grew sick of my sanctified sot,

The regiment at large for a husband I got;

From the gilded spontoon to the fife I was ready,

I asked no more but a sodger laddie.

But the peace it reduc’d me to beg in despair, 75

Till I met old boy in a Cunningham fair,

His rags regimental, they flutter’d so gaudy,

My heart it rejoic’d at a sodger laddie.

And now I have liv’d — I know not how long,

And still I can join in a cup and a song; 80

But whilst with both hands I can hold the glass steady,

Here’s to thee, my hero, my sodger laddie.

Recitativo

Poor Merry-Andrew, in the neuk,

Sat guzzling wi’ a tinkler-hizzie;

They mind’t na wha the chorus teuk, 85

Between themselves they were sae busy:

At length, wi’ drink an’ courting dizzy,

He stoiter’d up an’ made a face;

Then turn’d an’ laid a smack on Grizzie,

Syne tun’d his pipes wi’ grave grimace. 90

Air

Tune— “Auld Sir Symon.”

Sir Wisdom’s a fool when he’s fou;

Sir Knave is a fool in a session;

He’s there but a ‘prentice I trow,

But I am a fool by profession.

My grannie she bought me a beuk, 95

An’ I held awa to the school;

I fear I my talent misteuk,

But what will ye hae of a fool?

For drink I would venture my neck;

A hizzie’s the half of my craft; 100

But what could ye other expect

Of ane that’s avowedly daft?

I ance was tied up like a stirk,

For civilly swearing and quaffin;

I ance was abus’d i’ the kirk, 105

For towsing a lass i’ my daffin.

Poor Andrew that tumbles for sport,

Let naebody name wi’ a jeer;

There’s even, I’m tauld, i’ the Court

A tumbler ca’d the Premier. 110

Observ’d ye yon reverend lad

Mak faces to tickle the mob;

He rails at our mountebank squad, —

It’s rivalship just i’ the job.

And now my conclusion I’ll tell, 115

For faith I’m confoundedly dry;

The chiel that’s a fool for himsel’,

Guid L — d! he’s far dafter than I.

Recitativo

Then niest outspak a raucle carlin,

Wha kent fu’ weel to cleek the sterlin; 120

For mony a pursie she had hooked,

An’ had in mony a well been douked;

Her love had been a Highland laddie,

But weary fa’ the waefu’ woodie!

Wi’ sighs an’ sobs she thus began 125

To wail her braw John Highlandman.

Air

Tune— “O, an ye were dead, Guidman.”

A Highland lad my love was born,

The Lalland laws he held in scorn;

But he still was faithfu’ to his clan,

My gallant, braw John Highlandman. 130

Chorus

Sing hey my braw John Highlandman!

Sing ho my braw John Highlandman!

There’s not a lad in a’ the lan’

Was match for my John Highlandman.

With his philibeg an’ tartan plaid, 135

An’ guid claymore down by his side,

The ladies’ hearts he did trepan,

My gallant, braw John Highlandman.

Sing hey, &c.

We ranged a’ from Tweed to Spey, 140

An’ liv’d like lords an’ ladies gay;

For a Lalland face he feared none, —

My gallant, braw John Highlandman.

Sing hey, &c.

They banish’d him beyond the sea. 145

But ere the bud was on the tree,

Adown my cheeks the pearls ran,

Embracing my John Highlandman.

Sing hey, &c.

But, och! they catch’d him at the last, 150

And bound him in a dungeon fast:

My curse upon them every one,

They’ve hang’d my braw John Highlandman!

Sing hey, &c.

And now a widow, I must mourn 155

The pleasures that will ne’er return:

The comfort but a hearty can,

When I think on John Highlandman.

Sing hey, &c.

Recitativo

A pigmy scraper wi’ his fiddle, 160

Wha us’d at trystes an’ fairs to driddle.

Her strappin limb and gausy middle

(He reach’d nae higher)

Had hol’d his heartie like a riddle,

An’ blawn’t on fire. 165

Wi’ hand on hainch, and upward e’e,

He croon’d his gamut, one, two, three,

Then in an arioso key,

The wee Apoll

Set off wi’ allegretto glee 170

His giga solo.

Air

Tune— “Whistle owre the lave o’t.”

Let me ryke up to dight that tear,

An’ go wi’ me an’ be my dear;

An’ then your every care an’ fear

May whistle owre the lave o’t. 175

Chorus

I am a fiddler to my trade,

An’ a’ the tunes that e’er I played,

The sweetest still to wife or maid,

Was whistle owre the lave o’t.

At kirns an’ weddins we’se be there, 180

An’ O sae nicely’s we will fare!

We’ll bowse about till Daddie Care

Sing whistle owre the lave o’t.

I am, &c.

Sae merrily’s the banes we’ll pyke, 185

An’ sun oursel’s about the dyke;

An’ at our leisure, when ye like,

We’ll whistle owre the lave o’t.

I am, &c.

But bless me wi’ your heav’n o’ charms, 190

An’ while I kittle hair on thairms,

Hunger, cauld, an’ a’ sic harms,

May whistle owre the lave o’t.

I am, &c.

Recitativo

Her charms had struck a sturdy caird, 195

As weel as poor gut-scraper;

He taks the fiddler by the beard,

An’ draws a roosty rapier —

He swoor, by a’ was swearing worth,

To speet him like a pliver, 200

Unless he would from that time forth

Relinquish her for ever.

Wi’ ghastly e’e poor tweedle-dee

Upon his hunkers bended,

An’ pray’d for grace wi’ ruefu’ face, 205

An’ so the quarrel ended.

But tho’ his little heart did grieve

When round the tinkler prest her,

He feign’d to snirtle in his sleeve,

When thus the caird address’d her: 210

Air

Tune— “Clout the Cauldron.”

My bonie lass, I work in brass,

A tinkler is my station:

I’ve travell’d round all Christian ground

In this my occupation;

I’ve taen the gold, an’ been enrolled 215

In many a noble squadron;

But vain they search’d when off I march’d

To go an’ clout the cauldron.

I’ve taen the gold, &c.

Despise that shrimp, that wither’d imp, 220

With a’ his noise an’ cap’rin;

An’ take a share with those that bear

The budget and the apron!

And by that stowp! my faith an’ houp,

And by that dear Kilbaigie, 225

If e’er ye want, or meet wi’ scant,

May I ne’er weet my craigie.

And by that stowp, &c.

Recitativo

The caird prevail’d — th’ unblushing fair

In his embraces sunk; 230

Partly wi’ love o’ercome sae sair,

An’ partly she was drunk:

Sir Violino, with an air

That show’d a man o’ spunk,

Wish’d unison between the pair, 235

An’ made the bottle clunk

To their health that night.

But hurchin Cupid shot a shaft,

That play’d a dame a shavie —

The fiddler rak’d her, fore and aft, 240

Behint the chicken cavie.

Her lord, a wight of Homer’s craft,

Tho’ limpin wi’ the spavie,

He hirpl’d up, an’ lap like daft,

An’ shor’d them Dainty Davie 245

O’ boot that night.

He was a care-defying blade

As ever Bacchus listed!

Tho’ Fortune sair upon him laid,

His heart, she ever miss’d it. 250

He had no wish but — to be glad,

Nor want but — when he thirsted;

He hated nought but — to be sad,

An’ thus the muse suggested

His sang that night. 255

Air

Tune— “For a’ that, an’ a’ that.”

I am a Bard of no regard,

Wi’ gentle folks an’ a’ that;

But Homer-like, the glowrin byke,

Frae town to town I draw that.

Chorus

For a’ that, an’ a’ that, 260

An’ twice as muckle’s a’ that;

I’ve lost but ane, I’ve twa behin’,

I’ve wife eneugh for a’ that.

I never drank the Muses’ stank,

Castalia’s burn, an’ a’ that; 265

But there it streams an’ richly reams,

My Helicon I ca’ that.

For a’ that, &c.

Great love Idbear to a’ the fair,

Their humble slave an’ a’ that; 270

But lordly will, I hold it still

A mortal sin to thraw that.

For a’ that, &c.

In raptures sweet, this hour we meet,

Wi’ mutual love an’ a’ that; 275

But for how lang the flie may stang,

Let inclination law that.

For a’ that, &c.

Their tricks an’ craft hae put me daft,

They’ve taen me in, an’ a’ that; 280

But clear your decks, and here’s— “The Sex!”

I like the jads for a’ that.

Chorus

For a’ that, an’ a’ that,

An’ twice as muckle’s a’ that;

My dearest bluid, to do them guid, 285

They’re welcome till’t for a’ that.

Recitativo

So sang the bard — and Nansie’s wa’s

Shook with a thunder of applause,

Re-echo’d from each mouth!

They toom’d their pocks, they pawn’d their duds, 290

They scarcely left to co’er their fuds,

To quench their lowin drouth:

Then owre again, the jovial thrang

The poet did request

To lowse his pack an’ wale a sang, 295

A ballad o’ the best;

He rising, rejoicing,

Between his twa Deborahs,

Looks round him, an’ found them

Impatient for the chorus. 300

Air

Tune— “Jolly Mortals, fill your Glasses.”

See the smoking bowl before us,

Mark our jovial ragged ring!

Round and round take up the chorus,

And in raptures let us sing —

Chorus

A fig for those by law protected! 305

Liberty’s a glorious feast!

Courts for cowards were erected,

Churches built to please the priest.

What is title, what is treasure,

What is reputation’s care? 310

If we lead a life of pleasure,

‘Tis no matter how or where!

A fig for, &c.

With the ready trick and fable,

Round we wander all the day; 315

And at night in barn or stable,

Hug our doxies on the hay.

A fig for, &c.

Does the train-attended carriage

Thro’ the country lighter rove? 320

Does the sober bed of marriage

Witness brighter scenes of love?

A fig for, &c.

Life is al a variorum,

We regard not how it goes; 325

Let them cant about decorum,

Who have character to lose.

A fig for, &c.

Here’s to budgets, bags and wallets!

Here’s to all the wandering train. 330

Here’s our ragged brats and callets,

One and all cry out, Amen!

Chorus

A fig for those by law protected!

Liberty’s a glorious feast!

Courts for cowards were erected, 335

Churches built to please the priest.

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

81.

For a’ that (Song)

Tune— “For a’ that.”

THO’ women’s minds, like winter winds,

May shift, and turn, an’ a’ that,

The noblest breast adores them maist —

A consequence I draw that.

Chorus

For a’ that, an’ a’ that, 5

And twice as meikle’s a’ that;

The bonie lass that I loe best

She’ll be my ain for a’ that.

Great love I bear to a’ the fair,

Their humble slave, an’ a’ that; 10

But lordly will, I hold it still

A mortal sin to thraw that.

For a’ that, &c.

But there is ane aboon the lave,

Has wit, and sense, an’ a’ that; 15

A bonie lass, I like her best,

And wha a crime dare ca’ that?

For a’ that, &c.

In rapture sweet this hour we meet,

Wi’ mutual love an’ a’ that, 20

But for how lang the flie may stang,

Let inclination law that.

For a’ that, &c.

Their tricks an’ craft hae put me daft.

They’ve taen me in, an’ a’ that; 25

But clear your decks, and here’s— “The Sex!”

I like the jads for a’ that.

For a’ that, &c.

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

82.

Kissing my Katie (Song)

Tune— “The bob o’ Dumblane.”

O MERRY hae I been teethin’ a heckle,

An’ merry hae I been shapin’ a spoon;

O merry hae I been cloutin’ a kettle,

An’ kissin’ my Katie when a’ was done.

O a’ the lang day I ca’ at my hammer, 5

An’ a’ the lang day I whistle and sing;

O a’ the lang night I cuddle my kimmer,

An’ a’ the lang night as happy’s a king.

Bitter in dool I lickit my winnins

O’ marrying Bess, to gie her a slave: 10

Blest be the hour she cool’d in her linnens,

And blythe be the bird that sings on her grave!

Come to my arms, my Katie, my Katie;

O come to my arms and kiss me again!

Drucken or sober, here’s to thee, Katie! 15

An’ blest be the day I did it again.

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

83.

The Cotter’s Saturday Night

Inscribed to R. Aiken, Esq.

“Let not Ambition mock their useful toil,

Their homely joys, and destiny obscure;

Nor Grandeur hear, with a disdainful smile,

The short and simple annals of the Poor.

GRAY.

MY lov’d, my honour’d, much respected friend!

No mercenary bard his homage pays;

With honest pride, I scorn each selfish end,

My dearest meed, a friend’s esteem and praise:

To you I sing, in simple Scottish lays, 5

The lowly train in life’s sequester’d scene,

The native feelings strong, the guileless ways,

What Aiken in a cottage would have been;

Ah! tho’ his worth unknown, far happier there I ween!

November chill blaws loud wi’ angry sugh; 10

The short’ning winter-day is near a close;

The miry beasts retreating frae the pleugh;

The black’ning trains o’ craws to their repose:

The toil-worn Cotter frae his labour goes, —

This night his weekly moil is at an end, 15

Collects his spades, his mattocks, and his hoes,

Hoping the morn in ease and rest to spend,

And weary, o’er the moor, his course does hameward bend.

At length his lonely cot appears in view,

Beneath the shelter of an aged tree; 20

Th’ expectant wee-things, toddlin, stacher through

To meet their dead, wi’ flichterin noise and glee.

His wee bit ingle, blinkin bonilie,

His clean hearth-stane, his thrifty wifie’s smile,

The lisping infant, prattling on his knee, 25

Does a’ his weary kiaugh and care beguile,

And makes him quite forget his labour and his toil.

Belyve, the elder bairns come drapping in,

At service out, amang the farmers roun’;

Some ca’ the pleugh, some herd, some tentie rin 30

A cannie errand to a neibor town:

Their eldest hope, their Jenny, woman-grown,

In youthfu’ bloom-love sparkling in her e’e —

Comes hame, perhaps to shew a braw new gown,

Or deposite her sair-won penny-fee, 35

To help her parents dear, if they in hardship be.

With joy unfeign’d, brothers and sisters meet,

And each for other’s weelfare kindly speirs:

The social hours, swift-wing’d, unnotic’d fleet:

Each tells the uncos that he sees or hears. 40

The parents, partial, eye their hopeful years;

Anticipation forward points the view;

The mother, wi’ her needle and her shears,

Gars auld claes look amaist as weel’s the new;

The father mixes a’ wi’ admonition due. 45

Their master’s and their mistress’ command,

The younkers a’ are warned to obey;

And mind their labours wi’ an eydent hand,

And ne’er, tho’ out o’ sight, to jauk or play;

“And O! be sure to fear the Lord alway, 50

And mind your duty, duly, morn and night;

Lest in temptation’s path ye gang astray,

Implore His counsel and assisting might:

They never sought in vain that sought the Lord aright.”

But hark! a rap comes gently to the door; 55

Jenny, wha kens the meaning o’ the same,

Tells how a neibor lad came o’er the moor,

To do some errands, and convoy her hame.

The wily mother sees the conscious flame

Sparkle in Jenny’s e’e, and flush her cheek; 60

With heart-struck anxious care, enquires his name,

While Jenny hafflins is afraid to speak;

Weel-pleased the mother hears, it’s nae wild, worthless rake.

Wi’ kindly welcome, Jenny brings him ben;

A strappin youth, he takes the mother’s eye; 65

Blythe Jenny sees the visit’s no ill ta’en;

The father cracks of horses, pleughs, and kye.

The youngster’s artless heart o’erflows wi’ joy,

But blate an’ laithfu’, scarce can weel behave;

The mother, wi’ a woman’s wiles, can spy 70

What makes the youth sae bashfu’ and sae grave,

Weel-pleas’d to think her bairn’s respected like the lave.

O happy love! where love like this is found:

O heart-felt raptures! bliss beyond compare!

I’ve paced much this weary, mortal round, 75

And sage experience bids me this declare, —

“If Heaven a draught of heavenly pleasure spare —

One cordial in this melancholy vale,

‘Tis when a youthful, loving, modest pair

In other’sarms, breathe out the tender tale, 80

Beneath the milk-white thorn that scents the evening gale.”

Is there, in human form, that bears a heart,

A wretch! a villain! lost to love and truth!

That can, with studied, sly, ensnaring art,

Betray sweet Jenny’s unsuspecting youth? 85

Curse on his perjur’d arts! dissembling smooth!

Are honour, virtue, conscience, all exil’d?

Is there no pity, no relenting ruth,

Points to the parents fondling o’er their child?

Then paints the ruin’d maid, and their distraction wild? 90

But now the supper crowns their simple board,

The halesome parritch, chief of Scotia’s food;

The sowp their only hawkie does afford,

That, ‘yont the hallan snugly chows her cood:

The dame brings forth, in complimental mood, 95

To grace the lad, her weel-hain’d kebbuck, fell;

And aft he’s prest, and aft he ca’s it guid:

The frugal wifie, garrulous, will tell

How t’was a towmond auld, sin’ lint was i’ the bell.

The cheerfu’ supper done, wi’ serious face, 100

They, round the ingle, form a circle wide;

The sire turns o’er, with patriarchal grace,

The big ha’bible, ance his father’s pride:

His bonnet rev’rently is laid aside,

His lyart haffets wearing thin and bare; 105

Those strains that once did sweet in Zion glide,

He wales a portion with judicious care;

And “Let us worship God!” he says with solemn air.

They chant their artless notes in simple guise,

They tune their hearts, by far the noblest aim; 110

Perhaps Dundee’s wild-warbling measures rise;

Or plaintive Martyrs, worthy of the name;

Or noble Elgin beets the heaven-ward flame;

The sweetest far of Scotia’s holy lays:

Compar’d with these, Italian trills are tame; 115

The tickl’d ears no heart-felt raptures raise;

Nae unison hae they with our Creator’s praise.

The priest-like father reads the sacred page,

How Abram was the friend of God on high;

Or Moses bade eternal warfare wage 120

With Amalek’s ungracious progeny;

Or how the royal bard did groaning lie

Beneath the stroke of Heaven’s avenging ire;

Or Job’s pathetic plaint, and wailing cry;

Or rapt Isaiah’s wild, seraphic fire; 125

Or other holy seers that tune the sacred lyre.

Perhaps the Christian volume is the theme,

How guiltless blood for guilty man was shed;

How He, who bore in Heaven the second name,

Had not on earth whereon to lay His head: 130

How His first followers and servants sped;

The precepts sage they wrote to many a land:

How he, who lone in Patmos banished,

Saw in the sun a mighty angel stand,

And heard great Bab’lon’s doom pronounc’d by Heaven’s command. 135

Then, kneeling down to Heaven’s Eternal King,

The saint, the father, and the husband prays:

Hope “springs exulting on triumphant wing,”

That thus they all shall meet in future days,

There, ever bask in uncreated rays, 140

No more to sigh, or shed the bitter tear,

Together hymning their Creator’s praise,

In such society, yet still more dear;

While circling Time moves round in an eternal sphere

Compar’d with this, how poor Religion’s pride, 145

In all the pomp of method, and of art;

When men display to congregations wide

Devotion’s ev’ry grace, except the heart!

The Power, incens’d, the pageant will desert,

The pompous strain, the sacerdotal stole; 150

But haply, in some cottage far apart,

May hear, well-pleas’d, the language of the soul;

And in His Book of Life the inmates poor enroll.

Then homeward all take off their sev’ral way;

The youngling cottagers retire to rest: 155

The parent-pair their secret homage pay,

And proffer up to Heaven the warm request,

That he who stills the raven’s clam’rous nest,

And decks the lily fair in flow’ry pride,

Would, in the way His wisdom sees the best, 160

For them and for their little ones provide;

But chiefly, in their hearts with grace divine preside.

From scenes like these, old Scotia’s grandeur springs,

That makes her lov’d at home, rever’d abroad:

Princes and lords are but the breath of kings, 165

“An honest man’s the noblest work of God;”

And certes, in fair virtue’s heavenly road,

The cottage leaves the palace far behind;

What is a lordling’s pomp? a cumbrous load,

Disguising oft the wretch of human kind, 170

Studied in arts of hell, in wickedness refin’d!

O Scotia! my dear, my native soil!

For whom my warmest wish to Heaven is sent,

Long may thy hardy sons of rustic toil

Be blest with health, and peace, and sweet content! 175

And O! may Heaven their simple lives prevent

From luxury’s contagion, weak and vile!

Then howe’er crowns and coronets be rent,

A virtuous populace may rise the while,

And stand a wall of fire around their much-lov’d isle. 180

O Thou! who pour’d the patriotic tide,

That stream’d thro’ Wallace’s undaunted heart,

Who dar’d to nobly stem tyrannic pride,

Or nobly die, the second glorious part:

(The patriot’s God peculiarly thou art, 185

His friend, inspirer, guardian, and reward!)

O never, never Scotia’s realm desert;

But still the patriot, and the patriot-bard

In bright succession raise, her ornament and guard!

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

84.

Address to the Deil

“O Prince! O chief of many throned Pow’rs

That led th’ embattl’d Seraphim to war— “

MILTON.

O THOU! whatever title suit thee —

Auld Hornie, Satan, Nick, or Clootie,

Wha in yon cavern grim an’ sootie,

Clos’d under hatches,

Spairges about the brunstane cootie, 5

To scaud poor wretches!

Hear me, auld Hangie, for a wee,

An’ let poor damned bodies be;

I’m sure sma’ pleasure it can gie,

Ev’n to a deil, 10

To skelp an’ scaud poor dogs like me,

An’ hear us squeel!

Great is thy pow’r an’ great thy fame;

Far ken’d an’ noted is thy name;

An’ tho’ yon lowin’ heuch’s thy hame, 15

Thou travels far;

An’ faith! thou’s neither lag nor lame,

Nor blate, nor scaur.

Whiles, ranging like a roarin lion,

For prey, a’ holes and corners tryin; 20

Whiles, on the strong-wind’d tempest flyin,

Tirlin the kirks;

Whiles, in the human bosom pryin,

Unseen thou lurks.

I’ve heard my rev’rend graunie say, 25

In lanely glens ye like to stray;

Or where auld ruin’d castles grey

Nod to the moon,

Ye fright the nightly wand’rer’s way,

Wi’ eldritch croon. 30

When twilight did my graunie summon,

To say her pray’rs, douse, honest woman!

Aft’yont the dyke she’s heard you bummin,

Wi’ eerie drone;

Or, rustlin, thro’ the boortrees comin, 35

Wi’ heavy groan.

Ae dreary, windy, winter night,

The stars shot down wi’ sklentin light,

Wi’ you, mysel’ I gat a fright,

Ayont the lough; 40

Ye, like a rash-buss, stood in sight,

Wi’ wavin’ sough.

The cudgel in my nieve did shake,

Each brist’ld hair stood like a stake,

When wi’ an eldritch, stoor “quaick, quaick,” 45

Amang the springs,

Awa ye squatter’d like a drake,

On whistlin’ wings.

Let warlocks grim, an’ wither’d hags,

Tell how wi’ you, on ragweed nags, 50

They skim the muirs an’ dizzy crags,

Wi’ wicked speed;

And in kirk-yards renew their leagues,

Owre howkit dead.

Thence countra wives, wi’ toil and pain, 55

May plunge an’ plunge the kirn in vain;

For oh! the yellow treasure’s ta’en

By witchin’ skill;

An’ dawtit, twal-pint hawkie’s gane

As yell’s the bill. 60

Thence mystic knots mak great abuse

On young guidmen, fond, keen an’ crouse,

When the best wark-lume i’ the house,

By cantrip wit,

Is instant made no worth a louse, 65

Just at the bit.

When thowes dissolve the snawy hoord,

An’ float the jinglin’ icy boord,

Then water-kelpies haunt the foord,

By your direction, 70

And ‘nighted trav’llers are allur’d

To their destruction.

And aft your moss-traversin Spunkies

Decoy the wight that late an’ drunk is:

The bleezin, curst, mischievous monkies 75

Delude his eyes,

Till in some miry slough he sunk is,

Ne’er mair to rise.

When masons’ mystic word an’ grip

In storms an’ tempests raise you up, 80

Some cock or cat your rage maun stop,

Or, strange to tell!

The youngest brither ye wad whip

Aff straught to hell.

Lang syne in Eden’s bonie yard, 85

When youthfu’ lovers first were pair’d,

An’ all the soul of love they shar’d,

The raptur’d hour,

Sweet on the fragrant flow’ry swaird,

In shady bower; 90

Then you, ye auld, snick-drawing dog!

Ye cam to Paradise incog,

An’ play’d on man a cursed brogue,

(Black be your fa’!)

An’ gied the infant warld a shog, 95

‘Maist rui’d a’.

D’ye mind that day when in a bizz

Wi’ reekit duds, an’ reestit gizz,

Ye did present your smoutie phiz

‘Mang better folk, 100

An’ sklented on the man of Uzz

Your spitefu’ joke?

An’ how ye gat him i’ your thrall,

An’ brak him out o’ house an hal’,

While scabs and botches did him gall, 105

Wi’ bitter claw;

An’ lows’d his ill-tongu’d wicked scaul’,

Was warst ava?

But a’ your doings to rehearse,

Your wily snares an’ fechtin fierce, 110

Sin’ that day Michael did you pierce,

Down to this time,

Wad ding a Lallan tounge, or Erse,

In prose or rhyme.

An’ now, auld Cloots, I ken ye’re thinkin, 115

A certain bardie’s rantin, drinkin,

Some luckless hour will send him linkin

To your black pit;

But faith! he’ll turn a corner jinkin,

An’ cheat you yet. 120

But fare-you-weel, auld Nickie-ben!

O wad ye tak a thought an’ men’!

Ye aiblins might-I dinna ken —

Stil hae a stake

I’m wae to think up’ yon den, 125

Ev’n for your sake!

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

85.

Scotch Drink

Gie him strong drink until he wink,

That’s sinking in despair;

An’ liquor guid to fire his bluid,

That’s prest wi’ grief and care:

There let him bouse, an’ deep carouse,

Wi’ bumpers flowing o’er,

Till he forgets his loves or debts,

An’ minds his griefs no more.

SOLOMON’S PROVERBS, xxxi. 6, 7.

LET other poets raise a fracas

“Bout vines, an’ wines, an’ drucken Bacchus,

An’ crabbit names an’stories wrack us,

An’ grate our lug:

I sing the juice Scotch bear can mak us, 5

In glass or jug.

O thou, my muse! guid auld Scotch drink!

Whether thro’ wimplin worms thou jink,

Or, richly brown, ream owre the brink,

In glorious faem, 10

Inspire me, till I lisp an’ wink,

To sing thy name!

Let husky wheat the haughs adorn,

An’ aits set up their awnie horn,

An’ pease and beans, at e’en or morn, 15

Perfume the plain:

Leeze me on thee, John Barleycorn,

Thou king o’ grain!

On thee aft Scotland chows her cood,

In souple scones, the wale o’food! 20

Or tumblin in the boiling flood

Wi’ kail an’ beef;

But when thou pours thy strong heart’s blood,

There thou shines chief.

Food fills the wame, an’ keeps us leevin; 25

Tho’ life’s a gift no worth receivin,

When heavy-dragg’d wi’ pine an’ grievin;

But, oil’d by thee,

The wheels o’ life gae down-hill, scrievin,

Wi’ rattlin glee. 30

Thou clears the head o’doited Lear;

Thou cheers ahe heart o’ drooping Care;

Thou strings the nerves o’ Labour sair,

At’s weary toil;

Though even brightens dark Despair 35

Wi’ gloomy smile.

Aft, clad in massy siller weed,

Wi’ gentles thou erects thy head;

Yet, humbly kind in time o’ need,

The poor man’s wine; 40

His weep drap parritch, or his bread,

Thou kitchens fine.

Thou art the life o’ public haunts;

But thee, what were our fairs and rants?

Ev’n godly meetings o’ the saunts, 45

By thee inspired,

When gaping they besiege the tents,

Are doubly fir’d.

That merry night we get the corn in,

O sweetly, then, thou reams the horn in! 50

Or reekin on a New-year mornin

In cog or bicker,

An’ just a wee drap sp’ritual burn in,

An’ gusty sucker!

When Vulcan gies his bellows breath, 55

An’ ploughmen gather wi’ their graith,

O rare! to see thee fizz an freath

I’ th’ luggit caup!

Then Burnewin comes on like death

At every chap. 60

Nae mercy then, for airn or steel;

The brawnie, banie, ploughman chiel,

Brings hard owrehip, wi’ sturdy wheel,

The strong forehammer,

Till block an’ studdie ring an reel, 65

Wi’ dinsome clamour.

When skirling weanies see the light,

Though maks the gossips clatter bright,

How fumblin’ cuiffs their dearies slight;

Wae worth the name! 70

Nae howdie gets a social night,

Or plack frae them.

When neibors anger at a plea,

An’ just as wud as wud can be,

How easy can the barley brie 75

Cement the quarrel!

It’s aye the cheapest lawyer’s fee,

To taste the barrel.

Alake! that e’er my muse has reason,

To wyte her countrymen wi’ treason! 80

But mony daily weet their weason

Wi’ liquors nice,

An’ hardly, in a winter season,

E’er Spier her price.

Wae worth that brandy, burnin trash! 85

Fell source o’ mony a pain an’ brash!

Twins mony a poor, doylt, drucken hash,

O’ half his days;

An’ sends, beside, auld Scotland’s cash

To her warst faes. 90

Ye Scots, wha wish auld Scotland well!

Ye chief, to you my tale I tell,

Poor, plackless devils like mysel’!

It sets you ill,

Wi’ bitter, dearthfu’ wines to mell, 95

Or foreign gill.

May gravels round his blather wrench,

An’ gouts torment him, inch by inch,

What twists his gruntle wi’ a glunch

O’ sour disdain, 100

Out owre a glass o’ whisky-punch

Wi’ honest men!

O Whisky! soul o’ plays and pranks!

Accept a bardie’s gratfu’ thanks!

When wanting thee, what tuneless cranks 105

Are my poor verses!

Thou comes — they rattle in their ranks,

At ither’s a — s!

Thee, Ferintosh! O sadly lost!

Scotland lament frae coast to coast! 110

Now colic grips, an’ barkin hoast

May kill us a’;

For loyal Forbes’ charter’d boast

Is ta’en awa?

Thae curst horse-leeches o’ the’ Excise, 115

Wha mak the whisky stells their prize!

Haud up thy han’, Deil! ance, twice, thrice!

There, seize the blinkers!

An’ bake them up in brunstane pies

For poor d — n’d drinkers. 120

Fortune! if thou’ll but gie me still

Hale breeks, a scone, an’ whisky gill,

An’ rowth o’ rhyme to rave at will,

Tak a’ the rest,

An’ deal’t about as thy blind skill 125

Directs thee best.

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

1786

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

86.

The Auld Farmer’s New-Year-Morning Salutation to his Auld Mare, Maggie

On giving her the accustomed ripp of corn to hansel in the New Year.

A GUID New-year I wish thee, Maggie!

Hae, there’s a ripp to thy auld baggie:

Tho’ thou’s howe-backit now, an’ knaggie,

I’ve seen the day

Thou could hae gaen like ony staggie, 5

Out-owre the lay.

Tho’ now thou’s dowie, stiff, an’ crazy,

An’ thy auld hide as white’s a daisie,

I’ve seen thee dappl’t, sleek an’ glaizie,

A bonie gray: 10

He should been tight that daur’t to raize thee,

Ance in a day.

Thou ance was i’ the foremost rank,

A filly buirdly, steeve, an’ swank;

An’ set weel down a shapely shank, 15

As e’er tread yird;

An’ could hae flown out-owre a stank,

Like ony bird.

It’s now some nine-an’-twenty year,

Sin’ thou was my guid-father’s mear; 20

He gied me thee, o’ tocher clear,

An’ fifty mark;

Tho’ it was sma’, ‘twas weel-won gear,

An’ thou was stark.

When first I gaed to woo my Jenny, 25

Ye then was trotting wi’ your minnie:

Tho’ ye was trickie, slee, an’ funnie,

Ye ne’er was donsie;

But hamely, tawie, quiet, an’ cannie,

An’ unco sonsie. 30

That day, ye pranc’d wi’ muckle pride,

When ye bure hame my bonie bride:

An’ sweet an’ gracefu’ she did ride,

Wi’ maiden air!

Kyle-Stewart I could bragged wide 35

For sic a pair.

Tho’ now ye dow but hoyte and hobble,

An’ wintle like a saumont coble,

That day, ye was a jinker noble,

For heels an’ win’! 40

An’ ran them till they a’ did wauble,

Far, far, behin’!

When thou an’ I were young an’ skeigh,

An’ stable-meals at fairs were dreigh,

How thou wad prance, and snore, an’ skreigh 45

An’ tak the road!

Town’s-bodies ran, an’ stood abeigh,

An’ ca’t thee mad.

When thou was corn’t, an’ I was mellow,

We took the road aye like a swallow: 50

At brooses thou had ne’er a fellow,

For pith an’ speed;

But ev’ry tail thou pay’t them hollow,

Whare’er thou gaed.

The sma’, droop-rumpl’t, hunter cattle 55

Might aiblins waur’t thee for a brattle;

But sax Scotch mile, thou try’t their mettle,

An’ gar’t them whaizle:

Nae whip nor spur, but just a wattle

O’ saugh or hazel. 60

Thou was a noble fittie-lan’,

As e’er in tug or tow was drawn!

Aft thee an’ I, in aught hours’ gaun,

In guid March-weather,

Hae turn’d sax rood beside our han’, 65

For days thegither.

Thou never braing’t, an’ fetch’t, an’ fliskit;

But thy auld tail thou wad hae whiskit,

An’ spread abreed thy weel-fill’d brisket,

Wi’ pith an’ power; 70

Till sprittie knowes wad rair’t an’ riskit

An’ slypet owre.

When frosts lay lang, an’ snaws were deep,

An’ threaten’d labour back to keep,

I gied thy cog a wee bit heap 75

Aboon the timmer:

I ken’d my Maggie wad na sleep,

For that, or simmer.

In cart or car thou never reestit;

The steyest brae thou wad hae fac’t it; 80

Thou never lap, an’ sten’t, and breastit,

Then stood to blaw;

But just thy step a wee thing hastit,

Thou snoov’t awa.

My pleugh is now thy bairn-time a’, 85

Four gallant brutes as e’er did draw;

Forbye sax mae I’ve sell’t awa,

That thou hast nurst:

They drew me thretteen pund an’ twa,

The vera warst. 90

Mony a sair daurk we twa hae wrought,

An’ wi’ the weary warl’ fought!

An’ mony an anxious day, I thought

We wad be beat!

Yet here to crazy age we’re brought, 95

Wi’ something yet.

An’ think na’, my auld trusty servan’,

That now perhaps thou’s less deservin,

An’ thy auld days may end in starvin;

For my last fow, 100

A heapit stimpart, I’ll reserve ane

Laid by for you.

We’ve worn to crazy years thegither;

We’ll toyte about wi’ ane anither;

Wi’ tentie care I’ll flit thy tether 105

To some hain’d rig,

Whare ye may nobly rax your leather,

Wi’ sma’ fatigue.

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

87.

The Twa Dogs

A TALE

‘TWAS in that place o’ Scotland’s isle,

That bears the name o’ auld King Coil,

Upon a bonie day in June,

When wearin’ thro’ the afternoon,

Twa dogs, that were na thrang at hame, 5

Forgather’d ance upon a time.

The first I’ll name, they ca’d him Caesar,

Was keepit for His Honor’s pleasure:

His hair, his size, his mouth, his lugs,

Shew’d he was nane o’ Scotland’s dogs; 10

But whalpit some place far abroad,

Whare sailors gang to fish for cod.

His locked, letter’d, braw brass collar

Shew’d him the gentleman an’ scholar;

But though he was o’ high degree, 15

The fient a pride, nae pride had he;

But wad hae spent an hour caressin,

Ev’n wi’ al tinkler-gipsy’s messin:

At kirk or market, mill or smiddie,

Nae tawted tyke, tho’ e’er sae duddie, 20

But he wad stan’t, as glad to see him,

An’ stroan’t on stanes an’ hillocks wi’ him.

The tither was a ploughman’s collie —

A rhyming, ranting, raving billie,

Wha for his friend an’ comrade had him, 25

And in freak had Luath ca’d him,

After some dog in Highland Sang,

Was made lang syne, — Lord knows how lang.

He was a gash an’ faithfu’ tyke,

As ever lap a sheugh or dyke. 30

His honest, sonsie, baws’nt face

Aye gat him friends in ilka place;

His breast was white, his touzie back

Weel clad wi’ coat o’ glossy black;

His gawsie tail, wi’ upward curl, 35

Hung owre his hurdie’s wi’ a swirl.

Nae doubt but they were fain o’ ither,

And unco pack an’ thick thegither;

Wi’ social nose whiles snuff’d an’ snowkit;

Whiles mice an’ moudieworts they howkit; 40

Whiles scour’d awa’ in lang excursion,

An’ worry’d ither in diversion;

Until wi’ daffin’ weary grown

Upon a knowe they set them down.

An’ there began a lang digression. 45

About the “lords o’ the creation.”

CAESAR

I’ve aften wonder’d, honest Luath,

What sort o’ life poor dogs like you have;

An’ when the gentry’s life I saw,

What way poor bodies liv’d ava. 50

Our laird gets in his racked rents,

His coals, his kane, an’ a’ his stents:

He rises when he likes himsel’;

His flunkies answer at the bell;

He ca’s his coach; he ca’s his horse; 55

He draws a bonie silken purse,

As lang’s my tail, where, thro’ the steeks,

The yellow letter’d Geordie keeks.

Frae morn to e’en, it’s nought but toiling

At baking, roasting, frying, boiling; 60

An’ tho’ the gentry first are stechin,

Yet ev’n the ha’ folk fill their pechan

Wi’ sauce, ragouts, an’ sic like trashtrie,

That’s little short o’ downright wastrie.

Our whipper-in, wee, blasted wonner, 65

Poor, worthless elf, it eats a dinner,

Better than ony tenant-man

His Honour has in a’ the lan’:

An’ what poor cot-folk pit their painch in,

I own it’s past my comprehension. 70

LUATH

Trowth, C&aesar, whiles they’re fash’t eneugh:

A cottar howkin in a sheugh,

Wi’ dirty stanes biggin a dyke,

Baring a quarry, an’ sic like;

Himsel’, a wife, he thus sustains, 75

A smytrie o’ wee duddie weans,

An’ nought but his han’-daurk, to keep

Them right an’ tight in thack an’ rape.

An’ when they meet wi’ sair disasters,

Like loss o’ health or want o’ masters, 80

Ye maist wad think, a wee touch langer,

An’ they maun starve o’ cauld an’ hunger:

But how it comes, I never kent yet,

They’re maistly wonderfu’ contented;

An’ buirdly chiels, an’ clever hizzies, 85

Are bred in sic a way as this is.

CAESAR

But then to see how ye’re negleckit,

How huff’d, an’ cuff’d, an’ disrespeckit!

Lord man, our gentry care as little

For delvers, ditchers, an’ sic cattle; 90

They gang as saucy by poor folk,

As I wad by a stinkin brock.

I’ve notic’d, on our laird’s court-day, —

An’ mony a time my heart’s been wae, —

Poor tenant bodies, scant o’cash, 95

How they maun thole a factor’s snash;

He’ll stamp an’ threaten, curse an’ swear

He’ll apprehend them, poind their gear;

While they maun stan’, wi’ aspect humble,

An’ hear it a’, an’ fear an’ tremble! 100

I see how folk live that hae riches;

But surely poor-folk maun be wretches!

LUATH

They’re no sae wretched’s ane wad think.

Tho’ constantly on poortith’s brink,

They’re sae accustom’d wi’ the sight, 105

The view o’t gives them little fright.

Then chance and fortune are sae guided,

They’re aye in less or mair provided:

An’ tho’ fatigued wi’ close employment,

A blink o’ rest’s a sweet enjoyment. 110

The dearest comfort o’ their lives,

Their grushie weans an’ faithfu’ wives;

The prattling things are just their pride,

That sweetens a’ their fire-side.

An’ whiles twalpennie worth o’ nappy 115

Can mak the bodies unco happy:

They lay aside their private cares,

To mind the Kirk and State affairs;

They’ll talk o’ patronage an’ priests,

Wi’ kindling fury i’ their breasts, 120

Or tell what new taxation’s comin,

An’ ferlie at the folk in Lon’on.

As bleak-fac’d Hallowmass returns,

They get the jovial, rantin kirns,

When rural life, of ev’ry station, 125

Unite in common recreation;

Love blinks, Wit slaps, an’ social Mirth

Forgets there’s Care upo’ the earth.

That merry day the year begins,

They bar the door on frosty win’s; 130

The nappy reeks wi’ mantling ream,

An’ sheds a heart-inspiring steam;

The luntin pipe, an’ sneeshin mill,

Are handed round wi’ right guid will;

The cantie auld folks crackin crouse, 135

The young anes rantin thro’ the house —

My heart has been sae fain to see them,

That I for joy hae barkit wi’ them.

Still it’s owre true that ye hae said,

Sic game is now owre aften play’d; 140

There’s mony a creditable stock

O’ decent, honest, fawsont folk,

Are riven out baith root an’ branch,

Some rascal’s pridefu’ greed to quench,

Wha thinks to knit himsel the faster 145

In favour wi’ some gentle master,

Wha, aiblins, thrang a parliamentin,

For Britain’s guid his saul indentin —

CAESAR

Haith, lad, ye little ken about it:

For Britain’s guid! guid faith! I doubt it. 150

Say rather, gaun as Premiers lead him:

An’ saying ay or no’s they bid him:

At operas an’ plays parading,

Mortgaging, gambling, masquerading:

Or maybe, in a frolic daft, 155

To Hague or Calais takes a waft,

To mak a tour an’ tak a whirl,

To learn bon ton, an’ see the worl’.

There, at Vienna, or Versailles,

He rives his father’s auld entails; 160

Or by Madrid he takes the rout,

To thrum guitars an’ fecht wi’ nowt;

Or down Italian vista startles,

Wh-re-hunting amang groves o’ myrtles:

Then bowses drumlie German-water, 165

To mak himsel look fair an’ fatter,

An’ clear the consequential sorrows,

Love-gifts of Carnival signoras.

For Britain’s guid! for her destruction!

Wi’ dissipation, feud, an’ faction. 170

LUATH

Hech, man! dear sirs! is that the gate

They waste sae mony a braw estate!

Are we sae foughten an’ harass’d

For gear to gang that gate at last?

O would they stay aback frae courts, 175

An’ please themsels wi’ country sports,

It wad for ev’ry ane be better,

The laird, the tenant, an’ the cotter!

For thae frank, rantin, ramblin billies,

Feint haet o’ them’s ill-hearted fellows; 180

Except for breakin o’ their timmer,

Or speakin lightly o’ their limmer,

Or shootin of a hare or moor-cock,

The ne’er-a-bit they’re ill to poor folk,

But will ye tell me, Master C&aesar, 185

Sure great folk’s life’s a life o’ pleasure?

Nae cauld nor hunger e’er can steer them,

The very thought o’t need na fear them.

CAESAR

L — d, man, were ye but whiles whare I am,

The gentles, ye wad ne’er envy them! 190

It’s true, they need na starve or sweat,

Thro’ winter’s cauld, or simmer’s heat:

They’ve nae sair wark to craze their banes,

An’ fill auld age wi’ grips an’ granes:

But human bodies are sic fools, 195

For a’ their colleges an’ schools,

That when nae real ills perplex them,

They mak enow themsel’s to vex them;

An’ aye the less they hae to sturt them,

In like proportion, less will hurt them. 200

A country fellow at the pleugh,

His acre’s till’d, he’s right eneugh;

A country girl at her wheel,

Her dizzen’s dune, she’s unco weel;

But gentlemen, an’ ladies warst, 205

Wi’ ev’n-down want o’ wark are curst.

They loiter, lounging, lank an’ lazy;

Tho’ deil-haet ails them, yet uneasy;

Their days insipid, dull, an’ tasteless;

Their nights unquiet, lang, an’ restless. 210

An’ev’n their sports, their balls an’ races,

Their galloping through public places,

There’s sic parade, sic pomp, an’ art,

The joy can scarcely reach the heart.

The men cast out in party-matches, 215

Then sowther a’ in deep debauches.

Ae night they’re mad wi’ drink an’ whoring,

Niest day their life is past enduring.

The ladies arm-in-arm in clusters,

As great an’ gracious a’ as sisters; 220

But hear their absent thoughts o’ ither,

They’re a’ run-deils an’ jads thegither.

Whiles, owre the wee bit cup an’ platie,

They sip the scandal-potion pretty;

Or lee-lang nights, wi’ crabbit leuks 225

Pore owre the devil’s pictur’d beuks;

Stake on a chance a farmer’s stackyard,

An’ cheat like ony unhanged blackguard.

There’s some exceptions, man an’ woman;

But this is gentry’s life in common. 230

By this, the sun was out of sight,

An’ darker gloamin brought the night;

The bum-clock humm’d wi’ lazy drone;

The kye stood rowtin i’ the loan;

When up they gat an’ shook their lugs, 235

Rejoic’d they werena men but dogs;

An’ each took aff his several way,

Resolv’d to meet some ither day.

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

88.

The Author’s Earnest Cry and Prayer

To the Right Honourable and Honourable Scotch Representatives in the House of Commons.

Dearest of distillation! last and best –-

–- How art thou lost! –-

PARODY ON MILTON.

YE Irish lords, ye knights an’ squires,

Wha represent our brughs an’ shires,

An’ doucely manage our affairs

In parliament,

To you a simple poet’s pray’rs 5

Are humbly sent.

Alas! my roupit Muse is hearse!

Your Honours’ hearts wi’ grief ‘twad pierce,

To see her sittin on her arse

Low i’ the dust, 10

And scriechinh out prosaic verse,

An like to brust!

Tell them wha hae the chief direction,

Scotland an’ me’s in great affliction,

E’er sin’ they laid that curst restriction 15

On aqua-vit&ae;

An’ rouse them up to strong conviction,

An’ move their pity.

Stand forth an’ tell yon Premier youth

The honest, open, naked truth: 20

Tell him o’ mine an’ Scotland’s drouth,

His servants humble:

The muckle deevil blaw you south

If ye dissemble!

Does ony great man glunch an’ gloom? 25

Speak out, an’ never fash your thumb!

Let posts an’ pensions sink or soom

Wi’ them wha grant them;

If honestly they canna come,

Far better want them. 30

In gath’rin votes you were na slack;

Now stand as tightly by your tack:

Ne’er claw your lug, an’ fidge your back,

An’ hum an’ haw;

But raise your arm, an’ tell your crack 35

Before them a’.

Paint Scotland greetin owre her thrissle;

Her mutchkin stowp as toom’s a whissle;

An’ d — mn’d excisemen in a bussle,

Seizin a stell, 40

Triumphant crushin’t like a mussel,

Or limpet shell!

Then, on the tither hand present her —

A blackguard smuggler right behint her,

An’ cheek-for-chow, a chuffie vintner 45

Colleaguing join,

Picking her pouch as bare as winter

Of a’ kind coin.

Is there, that bears the name o’ Scot,

But feels his heart’s bluid rising hot, 50

To see his poor auld mither’s pot

Thus dung in staves,

An’ plunder’d o’ her hindmost groat

By gallows knaves?

Alas! I’m but a nameless wight, 55

Trode i’ the mire out o’ sight?

But could I like Montgomeries fight,

Or gab like Boswell,

There’s some sark-necks I wad draw tight,

An’ tie some hose well. 60

God bless your Honours! can ye see’t —

The kind, auld cantie carlin greet,

An’ no get warmly to your feet,

An’ gar them hear it,

An’ tell them wi’a patriot-heat 65

Ye winna bear it?

Some o’ you nicely ken the laws,

To round the period an’ pause,

An’ with rhetoric clause on clause

To mak harangues; 70

Then echo thro’ Saint Stephen’s wa’s

Auld Scotland’s wrangs.

Dempster, a true blue Scot I’se warran’;

Thee, aith-detesting, chaste Kilkerran;

An’ that glib-gabbit Highland baron, 75

The Laird o’ Graham;

An’ ane, a chap that’s damn’d aulfarran’,

Dundas his name:

Erskine, a spunkie Norland billie;

True Campbells, Frederick and Ilay; 80

An’ Livistone, the bauld Sir Willie;

An’ mony ithers,

Whom auld Demosthenes or Tully

Might own for brithers.

See sodger Hugh, my watchman stented, 85

If poets e’er are represented;

I ken if that your sword were wanted,

Ye’d lend a hand;

But when there’s ought to say anent it,

Ye’re at a stand. 90

Arouse, my boys! exert your mettle,

To get auld Scotland back her kettle;

Or faith! I’ll wad my new pleugh-pettle,

Ye’ll see’t or lang,

She’ll teach you, wi’ a reekin whittle, 95

Anither sang.

This while she’s been in crankous mood,

Her lost Militia fir’d her bluid;

(Deil na they never mair do guid,

Play’d her that pliskie!) 100

An’ now she’s like to rin red-wud

About her whisky.

An’ Lord! if ance they pit her till’t,

Her tartan petticoat she’ll kilt,

An’durk an’ pistol at her belt, 105

She’ll tak the streets,

An’ rin her whittle to the hilt,

I’ the first she meets!

For God sake, sirs! then speak her fair,

An’ straik her cannie wi’ the hair, 110

An’ to the muckle house repair,

Wi’ instant speed,

An’ strive, wi’ a’ your wit an’ lear,

To get remead.

Yon ill-tongu’d tinkler, Charlie Fox, 115

May taunt you wi’ his jeers and mocks;

But gie him’t het, my hearty cocks!

E’en cowe the cadie!

An’ send him to his dicing box

An’ sportin’ lady. 120

Tell you guid bluid o’ auld Boconnock’s,

I’ll be his debt twa mashlum bonnocks,

An’ drink his health in auld Nance Tinnock’s

Nine times a-week,

If he some scheme, like tea an’ winnocks, 125

Was kindly seek.

Could he some commutation broach,

I’ll pledge my aith in guid braid Scotch,

He needna fear their foul reproach

Nor erudition, 130

Yon mixtie-maxtie, queer hotch-potch,

The Coalition.

Auld Scotland has a raucle tongue;

She’s just a devil wi’ a rung;

An’ if she promise auld or young 135

To tak their part,

Tho’ by the neck she should be strung,

She’ll no desert.

And now, ye chosen Five-and-Forty,

May still you mither’s heart support ye; 140

Then, tho’a minister grow dorty,

An’ kick your place,

Ye’ll snap your gingers, poor an’ hearty,

Before his face.

God bless your Honours, a’ your days, 145

Wi’ sowps o’ kail and brats o’ claise,

In spite o’ a’ the thievish kaes,

That haunt St. Jamie’s!

Your humble poet sings an’ prays,

While Rab his name is. 150

POSTSCRIPT

LET half-starv’d slaves in warmer skies

See future wines, rich-clust’ring, rise;

Their lot auld Scotland ne’re envies,

But, blythe and frisky,

She eyes her freeborn, martial boys 155

Tak aff their whisky.

What tho’ their Phoebus kinder warms,

While fragrance blooms and beauty charms,

When wretches range, in famish’d swarms,

The scented groves; 160

Or, hounded forth, dishonour arms

In hungry droves!

Their gun’s a burden on their shouther;

They downa bide the stink o’ powther;

Their bauldest thought’s a hank’ring swither 165

To stan’ or rin,

Till skelp — a shot — they’re aff, a’throw’ther,

To save their skin.

But bring a Scotchman frae his hill,

Clap in his cheek a Highland gill, 170

Say, such is royal George’s will,

An’ there’s the foe!

He has nae thought but how to kill

Twa at a blow.

Nae cauld, faint-hearted doubtings tease him; 175

Death comes, wi’ fearless eye he sees him;

Wi’bluidy hand a welcome gies him;

An’ when he fa’s,

His latest draught o’ breathin lea’es him

In faint huzzas. 180

Sages their solemn een may steek,

An’ raise a philosophic reek,

An’ physically causes seek,

In clime an’ season;

But tell me whisky’s name in Greek 185

I’ll tell the reason.

Scotland, my auld, respected mither!

Tho’ whiles ye moistify your leather,

Till, whare ye sit on craps o’ heather,

Ye tine your dam; 190

Freedom an’ whisky gang thegither!

Take aff your dram!

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

89.

The Ordination

“For sense they little owe to frugal Heav’n —

To please the mob, they hide the little giv’n.”

KILMARNOCK wabsters, fidge an’ claw,

An’ pour your creeshie nations;

An’ ye wha leather rax an’ draw,

Of a’ denominations;

Swith to the Ligh Kirk, ane an’ a’ 5

An’ there tak up your stations;

Then aff to Begbie’s in a raw,

An’ pour divine libations

For joy this day.

Curst Common-sense, that imp o’ hell, 10

Cam in wi’ Maggie Lauder;

But Oliphant aft made her yell,

An’ Russell sair misca’d her:

This day Mackinlay taks the flail,

An’ he’s the boy will blaud her! 15

He’ll clap a shangan on her tail,

An’ set the bairns to daud her

Wi’ dirt this day.

Mak haste an’ turn King David owre,

And lilt wi’ holy clangor; 20

O’ double verse come gie us four,

An’ skirl up the Bangor:

This day the kirk kicks up a stoure;

Nae mair the knaves shall wrang her,

For Heresy is in her pow’r, 25

And gloriously she’ll whang her

Wi’ pith this day.

Come, let a proper text be read,

An’ touch it aff wi’ vigour,

How graceless Ham leugh at his dad, 30

Which made Canaan a nigger;

Or Phineas drove the murdering blade,

Wi’ whore-abhorring rigour;

Or Zipporah, the scauldin jad,

Was like a bluidy tiger 35

I’ th’ inn that day.

There, try his mettle on the creed,

An’ bind him down wi’ caution,

That stipend is a carnal weed

He taks by for the fashion; 40

And gie him o’er the flock, to feed,

And punish each transgression;

Especial, rams that cross the breed,

Gie them sufficient threshin;

Spare them nae day. 45

Now, auld Kilmarnock, cock thy tail,

An’ toss thy horns fu’ canty;

Nae mair thou’lt rowt out-owre the dale,

Because thy pasture’s scanty;

For lapfu’s large o’ gospel kail 50

Shall fill thy crib in plenty,

An’ runts o’ grace the pick an’ wale,

No gi’en by way o’ dainty,

But ilka day.

Nae mair by Babel’s streams we’ll weep, 55

To think upon our Zion;

And hing our fiddles up to sleep,

Like baby-clouts a-dryin!

Come, screw the pegs wi’ tunefu’ cheep,

And o’er the thairms be tryin; 60

Oh, rare to see our elbucks wheep,

And a’ like lamb-tails flyin

Fu’ fast this day.

Lang, Patronage, with rod o’ airn,

Has shor’d the Kirk’s undoin; 65

As lately Fenwick, sair forfairn,

Has proven to its ruin:

Our patron, honest man! Glencairn,

He saw mischief was brewin;

An’ like a godly, elect bairn, 70

He’s waled us out a true ane,

And sound, this day.

Now Robertson harangue nae mair,

But steek your gab for ever;

Or try the wicked town of Ayr, 75

For there they’ll think you clever;

Or, nae reflection on your lear,

Ye may commence a shaver;

Or to the Netherton repair,

An’ turn a carpet weaver 80

Aff-hand this day.

Mu’trie and you were just a match,

We never had sic twa drones;

Auld Hornie did the Laigh Kirk watch,

Just like a winkin baudrons, 85

And aye he catch’d the tither wretch,

To fry them in his caudrons;

But now his Honour maun detach,

Wi’ a’ his brimstone squadrons,

Fast, fast this day. 90

See, see auld Orthodoxy’s faes

She’s swingein thro’ the city!

Hark, how the nine-tail’d cat she plays!

I vow it’s unco pretty:

There, Learning, with his Greekish face, 95

Grunts out some Latin ditty;

And Common-sense is gaun, she says,

To mak to Jamie Beattie

Her plaint this day.

But there’s Morality himsel’, 100

Embracing all opinions;

Hear, how he gies the tither yell,

Between his twa companions!

See, how she peels the skin an’ fell,

As ane were peelin onions! 105

Now there, they’re packed aff to hell,

An’ banish’d our dominions,

Henceforth this day.

O happy day! rejoice, rejoice!

Come bouse about the porter! 110

Morality’s demure decoys

Shall here nae mair find quarter:

Mackinlay, Russell, are the boys

That heresy can torture;

They’ll gie her on a rape a hoyse, 115

And cowe her measure shorter

By th’ head some day.

Come, bring the tither mutchkin in,

And here’s — for a conclusion —

To ev’ry New Light mother’s son, 120

From this time forth, Confusion!

If mair they deave us wi’ their din,

Or Patronage intrusion,

We’ll light a spunk, and ev’ry skin,

We’ll rin them aff in fusion 125

Like oil, some day.

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

90.

Epistle to James Smith

“Friendship, mysterious cement of the soul!

Sweet’ner of Life, and solder of Society!

I owe thee much — — ” BLAIR.

DEAR SMITH, the slee’st, pawkie thief,

That e’er attempted stealth or rief!

Ye surely hae some warlock-brief

Owre human hearts;

For ne’er a bosom yet was prief 5

Against your arts.

For me, I swear by sun an’ moon,

An’ ev’ry star that blinks aboon,

Ye’ve cost me twenty pair o’ shoon,

Just gaun to see you; 10

An’ ev’ry ither pair that’s done,

Mair taen I’m wi’ you.

That auld, capricious carlin, Nature,

To mak amends for scrimpit stature,

She’s turn’d you off, a human creature 15

On her first plan,

And in her freaks, on ev’ry feature

She’s wrote the Man.

Just now I’ve ta’en the fit o’ rhyme,

My barmie noddle’s working prime. 20

My fancy yerkit up sublime,

Wi’ hasty summon;

Hae ye a leisure-moment’s time

To hear what’s comin?

Some rhyme a neibor’s name to lash; 25

Some rhyme (vain thought!) for needfu’ cash;

Some rhyme to court the countra clash,

An’ raise a din;

For me, an aim I never fash;

I rhyme for fun. 30

The star that rules my luckless lot,

Has fated me the russet coat,

An’ damn’d my fortune to the groat;

But, in requit,

Has blest me with a random-shot 35

O’countra wit.

This while my notion’s taen a sklent,

To try my fate in guid, black prent;

But still the mair I’m that way bent,

Something cries “Hooklie!” 40

I red you, honest man, tak tent?

Ye’ll shaw your folly;

“There’s ither poets, much your betters,

Far seen in Greek, deep men o’ letters,

Hae thought they had ensur’d their debtors, 45

A’ future ages;

Now moths deform, in shapeless tatters,

Their unknown pages.”

Then farewell hopes of laurel-boughs,

To garland my poetic brows! 50

Henceforth I’ll rove where busy ploughs

Are whistlin’ thrang,

An’ teach the lanely heights an’ howes

My rustic sang.

I’ll wander on, wi’ tentless heed 55

How never-halting moments speed,

Till fate shall snap the brittle thread;

Then, all unknown,

I’ll lay me with th’ inglorious dead

Forgot and gone! 60

But why o’ death being a tale?

Just now we’re living sound and hale;

Then top and maintop crowd the sail,

Heave Care o’er-side!

And large, before Enjoyment’s gale, 65

Let’s tak the tide.

This life, sae far’s I understand,

Is a’ enchanted fairy-land,

Where Pleasure is the magic-wand,

That, wielded right, 70

Maks hours like minutes, hand in hand,

Dance by fu’ light.

The magic-wand then let us wield;

For ance that five-an’-forty’s speel’d,

See, crazy, weary, joyless eild, 75

Wi’ wrinkl’d face,

Comes hostin, hirplin owre the field,

We’ creepin pace.

When ance life’s day draws near the gloamin,

Then fareweel vacant, careless roamin; 80

An’ fareweel cheerfu’ tankards foamin,

An’ social noise:

An’ fareweel dear, deluding woman,

The Joy of joys!

O Life! how pleasant, in thy morning, 85

Young Fancy’s rays the hills adorning!

Cold-pausing Caution’s lesson scorning,

We frisk away,

Like school-boys, at th’ expected warning,

To joy an’ play. 90

We wander there, we wander here,

We eye the rose upon the brier,

Unmindful that the thorn is near,

Among the leaves;

And tho’ the puny wound appear, 95

Short while it grieves.

Some, lucky, find a flow’ry spot,

For which they never toil’d nor swat;

They drink the sweet and eat the fat,

But care or pain; 100

And haply eye the barren hut

With high disdain.

With steady aim, some Fortune chase;

Keen hope does ev’ry sinew brace;

Thro’ fair, thro’ foul, they urge the race, 105

An’ seize the prey:

Then cannie, in some cozie place,

They close the day.

And others, like your humble servan’,

Poor wights! nae rules nor roads observin, 110

To right or left eternal swervin,

They zig-zag on;

Till, curst with age, obscure an’ starvin,

They aften groan.

Alas! what bitter toil an’ straining — 115

But truce with peevish, poor complaining!

Is fortune’s fickle Luna waning?

E’n let her gang!

Beneath what light she has remaining,

Let’s sing our sang. 120

My pen I here fling to the door,

And kneel, ye Pow’rs! and warm implore,

“Tho’ I should wander Terra o’er,

In all her climes,

Grant me but this, I ask no more, 125

Aye rowth o’ rhymes.

“Gie dreepin roasts to countra lairds,

Till icicles hing frae their beards;

Gie fine braw claes to fine life-guards,

And maids of honour; 130

An’ yill an’ whisky gie to cairds,

Until they sconner.

“A title, Dempster merits it;

A garter gie to Willie Pitt;

Gie wealth to some be-ledger’d cit, 135

In cent. per cent.;

But give me real, sterling wit,

And I’m content.

“While ye are pleas’d to keep me hale,

I’ll sit down o’er my scanty meal, 140

Be’t water-brose or muslin-kail,

Wi’ cheerfu’ face,

As lang’s the Muses dinna fail

To say the grace.”

An anxious e’e I never throws 145

Behint my lug, or by my nose;

I jouk beneath Misfortune’s blows

As weel’s I may;

Sworn foe to sorrow, care, and prose,

I rhyme away. 150

O ye douce folk that live by rule,

Grave, tideless-blooded, calm an’cool,

Compar’d wi’ you — O fool! fool! fool!

How much unlike!

Your hearts are just a standing pool, 155

Your lives, a dyke!

Nae hair-brain’d, sentimental traces

In your unletter’d, nameless faces!

In arioso trills and graces

Ye never stray; 160

But gravissimo, solemn basses

Ye hum away.

Ye are sae grave, nae doubt ye’re wise;

Nae ferly tho’ ye do despise

The hairum-scairum, ram-stam boys, 165

The rattling squad:

I see ye upward cast your eyes —

Ye ken the road!

Whilst I — but I shall haud me there,

Wi’ you I’ll scarce gang ony where — 170

Then, Jamie, I shall say nae mair,

But quat my sang,

Content wi’ you to mak a pair.

Whare’er I gang.

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

91.

The Vision

Duan First

THE SUN had clos’d the winter day,

The curless quat their roarin play,

And hunger’d maukin taen her way,

To kail-yards green,

While faithless snaws ilk step betray 5

Whare she has been.

The thresher’s weary flingin-tree,

The lee-lang day had tired me;

And when the day had clos’d his e’e,

Far i’ the west, 10

Ben i’ the spence, right pensivelie,

I gaed to rest.

There, lanely by the ingle-cheek,

I sat and ey’d the spewing reek,

That fill’d, wi’ hoast-provoking smeek, 15

The auld clay biggin;

An’ heard the restless rattons squeak

About the riggin.

All in this mottie, misty clime,

I backward mus’d on wasted time, 20

How I had spent my youthfu’ prime,

An’ done nae thing,

But stringing blethers up in rhyme,

For fools to sing.

Had I to guid advice but harkit, 25

I might, by this, hae led a market,

Or strutted in a bank and clarkit

My cash-account;

While here, half-mad, half-fed, half-sarkit.

Is a’ th’ amount. 30

I started, mutt’ring, “blockhead! coof!”

And heav’d on high my waukit loof,

To swear by a’ yon starry roof,

Or some rash aith,

That I henceforth wad be rhyme-proof 35

Till my last breath —

When click! the string the snick did draw;

An’ jee! the door gaed to the wa’;

An’ by my ingle-lowe I saw,

Now bleezin bright, 40

A tight, outlandish hizzie, braw,

Come full in sight.

Ye need na doubt, I held my whisht;

The infant aith, half-form’d, was crusht

I glowr’d as eerie’s I’d been dusht 45

In some wild glen;

When sweet, like honest Worth, she blusht,

An’ stepped ben.

Green, slender, leaf-clad holly-boughs

Were twisted, gracefu’, round her brows; 50

I took her for some Scottish Muse,

By that same token;

And come to stop those reckless vows,

Would soon been broken.

A “hair-brain’d, sentimental trace” 55

Was strongly marked in her face;

A wildly-witty, rustic grace

Shone full upon her;

Her eye, ev’n turn’d on empty space,

Beam’d keen with honour. 60

Down flow’d her robe, a tartan sheen,

Till half a leg was scrimply seen;

An’ such a leg! my bonie Jean

Could only peer it;

Sae straught, sae taper, tight an’ clean — 65

Nane else came near it.

Her mantle large, of greenish hue,

My gazing wonder chiefly drew:

Deep lights and shades, bold-mingling, threw

A lustre grand; 70

And seem’d, to my astonish’d view,

A well-known land.

Here, rivers in the sea were lost;

There, mountains to the skies were toss’t:

Here, tumbling billows mark’d the coast, 75

With surging foam;

There, distant shone Art’s lofty boast,

The lordly dome.

Here, Doon pour’d down his far-fetch’d floods;

There, well-fed Irwine stately thuds: 80

Auld hermit Ayr staw thro’ his woods,

On to the shore;

And many a lesser torrent scuds,

With seeming roar.

Low, in a sandy valley spread, 85

An ancient borough rear’d her head;

Still, as in Scottish story read,

She boasts a race

To ev’ry nobler virtue bred,

And polish’d grace. 90

By stately tow’r, or palace fair,

Or ruins pendent in the air,

Bold stems of heroes, here and there,

I could discern;

Some seem’d to muse, some seem’d to dare, 95

With feature stern.

My heart did glowing transport feel,

To see a race heroic wheel,

And brandish round the deep-dyed steel,

In sturdy blows; 100

While, back-recoiling, seem’d to reel

Their Suthron foes.

His Country’s Saviour, mark him well!

Bold Richardton’s heroic swell,;

The chief, on Sark who glorious fell, 105

In high command;

And he whom ruthless fates expel

His native land.

There, where a sceptr’d Pictish shade

Stalk’d round his ashes lowly laid, 110

I mark’d a martial race, pourtray’d

In colours strong:

Bold, soldier-featur’d, undismay’d,

They strode along.

Thro’ many a wild, romantic grove, 115

Near many a hermit-fancied cove

(Fit haunts for friendship or for love,

In musing mood),

An aged Judge, I saw him rove,

Dispensing good. 120

With deep-struck, reverential awe,

The learned Sire and Son I saw:

To Nature’s God, and Nature’s law,

They gave their lore;

This, all its source and end to draw, 125

That, to adore.

Brydon’s brave ward I well could spy,

Beneath old Scotia’s smiling eye:

Who call’d on Fame, low standing by,

To hand him on, 130

Where many a patriot-name on high,

And hero shone.

DUAN SECOND

With musing-deep, astonish’d stare,

I view’d the heavenly-seeming Fair;

A whispering throb did witness bear 135

Of kindred sweet,

When with an elder sister’s air

She did me greet.

“All hail! my own inspired bard!

In me thy native Muse regard; 140

Nor longer mourn thy fate is hard,

Thus poorly low;

I come to give thee such reward,

As we bestow!

“Know, the great genius of this land 145

Has many a light aerial band,

Who, all beneath his high command,

Harmoniously,

As arts or arms they understand,

Their labours ply. 150

“They Scotia’s race among them share:

Some fire the soldier on to dare;

Some rouse the patriot up to bare

Corruption’s heart:

Some teach the bard — a darling care — 155

The tuneful art.

“‘Mong swelling floods of reeking gore,

They, ardent, kindling spirits pour;

Or, ‘mid the venal senate’s roar,

They, sightless, stand, 160

To mend the honest patriot-lore,

And grace the hand.

“And when the bard, or hoary sage,

Charm or instruct the future age,

They bind the wild poetric rage 165

In energy,

Or point the inconclusive page

Full on the eye.

“Hence, Fullarton, the brave and young;

Hence, Dempster’s zeal-inspired tongue; 170

Hence, sweet, harmonious Beattie sung

His ‘Minstrel lays’;

Or tore, with noble ardour stung,

The sceptic’s bays.

“To lower orders are assign’d 175

The humbler ranks of human-kind,

The rustic bard, the lab’ring hind,

The artisan;

All choose, as various they’re inclin’d,

The various man. 180

“When yellow waves the heavy grain,

The threat’ning storm some strongly rein;

Some teach to meliorate the plain

With tillage-skill;

And some instruct the shepherd-train, 185

Blythe o’er the hill.

“Some hint the lover’s harmless wile;

Some grace the maiden’s artless smile;

Some soothe the lab’rer’s weary toil

For humble gains, 190

And make his cottage-scenes beguile

His cares and pains.

“Some, bounded to a district-space

Explore at large man’s infant race,

To mark the embryotic trace 195

Of rustic bard;

And careful note each opening grace,

A guide and guard.

“Of these am I — Coila my name:

And this district as mine I claim, 200

Where once the Campbells, chiefs of fame,

Held ruling power:

I mark’d thy embryo-tuneful flame,

Thy natal hour.

“With future hope I oft would gaze 205

Fond, on thy little early ways,

Thy rudely, caroll’d, chiming phrase,

In uncouth rhymes;

Fir’d at the simple, artless lays

Of other times. 210

“I saw thee seek the sounding shore,

Delighted with the dashing roar;

Or when the North his fleecy store

Drove thro’ the sky,

I saw grim Nature’s visage hoar 215

Struck thy young eye.

“Or when the deep green-mantled earth

Warm cherish’d ev’ry floweret’s birth,

And joy and music pouring forth

In ev’ry grove; 220

I saw thee eye the general mirth

With boundless love.

“When ripen’d fields and azure skies

Call’d forth the reapers’ rustling noise,

I saw thee leave their ev’ning joys, 225

And lonely stalk,

To vent thy bosom’s swelling rise,

In pensive walk.

“When youthful love, warm-blushing, strong,

Keen-shivering, shot thy nerves along, 230

Those accents grateful to thy tongue,

Th’ adored Name,

I taught thee how to pour in song,

To soothe thy flame.

“I saw thy pulse’s maddening play, 235

Wild send thee Pleasure’s devious way,

Misled by Fancy’s meteor-ray,

By passion driven;

But yet the light that led astray

Was light from Heaven. 240

“I taught thy manners-painting strains,

The loves, the ways of simple swains,

Till now, o’er all my wide domains

Thy fame extends;

And some, the pride of Coila’s plains, 245

Become thy friends.

“Thou canst not learn, nor I can show,

To paint with Thomson’s landscape glow;

Or wake the bosom-melting throe,

With Shenstone’s art; 250

Or pour, with Gray, the moving flow

Warm on the heart.

“Yet, all beneath th’ unrivall’d rose,

T e lowly daisy sweetly blows;

Tho’ large the forest’s monarch throws 255

His army shade,

Yet green the juicy hawthorn grows,

Adown the glade.

“Then never murmur nor repine;

Strive in thy humble sphere to shine; 260

And trust me, not Potosi’s mine,

Nor king’s regard,

Can give a bliss o’ermatching thine,

A rustic bard.

“To give my counsels all in one, 265

Thy tuneful flame still careful fan:

Preserve the dignity of Man,

With soul erect;

And trust the Universal Plan

Will all protect. 270

“And wear thou this” — she solemn said,

And bound the holly round my head:

The polish’d leaves and berries red

Did rustling play;

And, like a passing thought, she fled 275

In light away.

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

92.

Suppressed Stanzas of “The Vision”

After 18th stanza of the text (at “His native land”): —

WITH secret throes I marked that earth,

That cottage, witness of my birth;

And near I saw, bold issuing forth

In youthful pride,

A Lindsay race of noble worth, 5

Famed far and wide.

Where, hid behind a spreading wood,

An ancient Pict-built mansion stood,

I spied, among an angel brood,

A female pair; 10

Sweet shone their high maternal blood,

And father’s air.

An ancient tower to memory brought

How Dettingen’s bold hero fought;

Still, far from sinking into nought, 15

It owns a lord

Who far in western climates fought,

With trusty sword.

Among the rest I well could spy

One gallant, graceful, martial boy, 20

The soldier sparkled in his eye,

A diamond water.

I blest that noble badge with joy,

That owned me frater.

After 20th stanza of the text (at “Dispensing good”): —

Near by arose a mansion fine 25

The seat of many a muse divine;

Not rustic muses such as mine,

With holly crown’d,

But th’ ancient, tuneful, laurell’d Nine,

From classic ground. 30

I mourn’d the card that Fortune dealt,

To see where bonie Whitefoords dwelt;

But other prospects made me melt,

That village near;

There Nature, Friendship, Love, I felt, 35

Fond-mingling, dear!

Hail! Nature’s pang, more strong than death!

Warm Friendship’s glow, like kindling wrath!

Love, dearer than the parting breath

Of dying friend! 40

Not ev’n with life’s wild devious path,

Your force shall end!

The Power that gave the soft alarms

In blooming Whitefoord’s rosy charms,

Still threats the tiny, feather’d arms, 45

The barbed dart,

While lovely Wilhelmina warms

The coldest heart.

After 21st stanza of the text (at “That, to adore”): —

Where Lugar leaves his moorland plaid,

Where lately Want was idly laid, 50

I marked busy, bustling Trade,

In fervid flame,

Beneath a Patroness’ aid,

Of noble name.

Wild, countless hills I could survey, 55

And countless flocks as wild as they;

But other scenes did charms display,

That better please,

Where polish’d manners dwell with Gray,

In rural ease. 60

Where Cessnock pours with gurgling sound;

And Irwine, marking out the bound,

Enamour’d of the scenes around,

Slow runs his race,

A name I doubly honour’d found, 65

With knightly grace.

Brydon’s brave ward, I saw him stand,

Fame humbly offering her hand,

And near, his kinsman’s rustic band,

With one accord, 70

Lamenting their late blessed land

Must change its lord.

The owner of a pleasant spot,

Near and sandy wilds, I last did note;

A heart too warm, a pulse too hot 75

At times, o’erran:

But large in ev’ry feature wrote,

Appear’d the Man.

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

93.

The Rantin Dog, the Daddie o’t

Tune— “Whare’ll our guidman lie.”

O WHA my babie-clouts will buy?

O wha will tent me when I cry?

Wha will kiss me where I lie?

The rantin’ dog, the daddie o’t.

O wha will own he did the faut? 5

O wha will buy the groanin maut?

O wha will tell me how to ca’t?

The rantin’ dog, the daddie o’t.

When I mount the creepie-chair,

Wha will sit beside me there? 10

Gie me Rob, I’ll seek nae mair,

The rantin’ dog, the daddie o’t.

Wha will crack to me my lane?

Wha will mak me fidgin’ fain?

Wha will kiss me o’er again? 15

The rantin’ dog, the daddie o’t.

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

94.

Here’s his Health in Water

Tune— “The Job of Journey-work.”

ALTHO’ my back be at the wa’,

And tho’ he be the fautor;

Altho’ my back be at the wa’,

Yet, here’s his health in water.

O wae gae by his wanton sides, 5

Sae brawlie’s he could flatter;

Till for his sake I’m slighted sair,

And dree the kintra clatter:

But tho’ my back be at the wa’,

And tho’ he be the fautor; 10

But tho’ my back be at the wa’,

Yet here’s his health in water!

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

95.

Address to the Unco Guid

My Son, these maxims make a rule,

An’ lump them aye thegither;

The Rigid Righteous is a fool,

The Rigid Wise anither:

The cleanest corn that ere was dight

May hae some pyles o’ caff in;

So ne’er a fellow-creature slight

For random fits o’ daffin.

SOLOMON. — Eccles. ch. vii. verse 16.

O YE wha are sae guid yoursel’,

Sae pious and sae holy,

Ye’ve nought to do but mark and tell

Your neibours’ fauts and folly!

Whase life is like a weel-gaun mill, 5

Supplied wi’ store o’ water;

The heaped happer’s ebbing still,

An’ still the clap plays clatter.

Hear me, ye venerable core,

As counsel for poor mortals 10

That frequent pass douce Wisdom’s door

For glaikit Folly’s portals:

I, for their thoughtless, careless sakes,

Would here propone defences —

Their donsie tricks, their black mistakes, 15

Their failings and mischances.

Ye see your state wi’ theirs compared,

And shudder at the niffer;

But cast a moment’s fair regard,

What maks the mighty differ; 20

Discount what scant occasion gave,

That purity ye pride in;

And (what’s aft mair than a’ the lave),

Your better art o’ hidin.

Think, when your castigated pulse 25

Gies now and then a wallop!

What ragings must his veins convulse,

That still eternal gallop!

Wi’ wind and tide fair i’ your tail,

Right on ye scud your sea-way; 30

But in the teeth o’ baith to sail,

It maks a unco lee-way.

See Social Life and Glee sit down,

All joyous and unthinking,

Till, quite transmugrified, they’re grown 35

Debauchery and Drinking:

O would they stay to calculate

Th’ eternal consequences;

Or your more dreaded hell to state,

Damnation of expenses! 40

Ye high, exalted, virtuous dames,

Tied up in godly laces,

Before ye gie poor Frailty names,

Suppose a change o’ cases;

A dear-lov’d lad, convenience snug, 45

A treach’rous inclination —

But let me whisper i’ your lug,

Ye’re aiblins nae temptation.

Then gently scan your brother man,

Still gentler sister woman; 50

Tho’ they may gang a kennin wrang,

To step aside is human:

One point must still be greatly dark, —

The moving Why they do it;

And just as lamely can ye mark, 55

How far perhaps they rue it.

Who made the heart, ‘tis He alone

Decidedly can try us;

He knows each chord, its various tone,

Each spring, its various bias: 60

Then at the balance let’s be mute,

We never can adjust it;

What’s done we partly may compute,

But know not what’s resisted.

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

96.

The Inventory

In answer to a mandate by the Surveyor of the Taxes

SIR, as your mandate did request,

I send you here a faithfu’ list,

O’ gudes an’ gear, an’ a’ my graith,

To which I’m clear to gi’e my aith.

Imprimis, then, for carriage cattle, 5

I hae four brutes o’ gallant mettle,

As ever drew afore a pettle.

My hand-afore ‘s a guid auld has-been,

An’ wight an’ wilfu’ a’ his days been:

My hand-ahin ‘s a weel gaun fillie, 10

That aft has borne me hame frae Killie.

An’ your auld borough mony a time

In days when riding was nae crime.

But ance, when in my wooing pride

I, like a blockhead, boost to ride, 15

The wilfu’ creature sae I pat to,

(L — d pardon a’ my sins, an’ that too!)

I play’d my fillie sic a shavie,

She’s a’ bedevil’d wi’ the spavie.

My furr-ahin ‘s a wordy beast, 20

As e’er in tug or tow was traced.

The fourth’s a Highland Donald hastle,

A d — n’d red-wud Kilburnie blastie!

Foreby a cowt, o’ cowts the wale,

As ever ran afore a tail: 25

Gin he be spar’d to be a beast,

He’ll draw me fifteen pund at least.

Wheel-carriages I ha’e but few,

Three carts, an’ twa are feckly new;

An auld wheelbarrow, mair for token, 30

Ae leg an’ baith the trams are broken;

I made a poker o’ the spin’le,

An’ my auld mither brunt the trin’le.

For men, I’ve three mischievous boys,

Run-deils for ranting an’ for noise; 35

A gaudsman ane, a thrasher t’ other:

Wee Davock hauds the nowt in fother.

I rule them as I ought, discreetly,

An’ aften labour them completely;

An’ aye on Sundays duly, nightly, 40

I on the Questions targe them tightly;

Till, faith! wee Davock’s grown sae gleg,

Tho’ scarcely langer than your leg,

He’ll screed you aff Effectual Calling,

As fast as ony in the dwalling. 45

I’ve nane in female servant station,

(L — d keep me aye frae a’ temptation!)

I hae nae wife-and thay my bliss is,

An’ ye have laid nae tax on misses;

An’ then, if kirk folks dinna clutch me, 50

I ken the deevils darena touch me.

Wi’ weans I’m mair than weel contented,

Heav’n sent me ane mae than I wanted!

My sonsie, smirking, dear-bought Bess,

She stares the daddy in her face, 55

Enough of ought ye like but grace;

But her, my bonie, sweet wee lady,

I’ve paid enough for her already;

An’ gin ye tax her or her mither,

By the L — d, ye’se get them a’ thegither! 60

And now, remember, Mr. Aiken,

Nae kind of licence out I’m takin:

Frae this time forth, I do declare

I’se ne’er ride horse nor hizzie mair;

Thro’ dirt and dub for life I’ll paidle, 65

Ere I sae dear pay for a saddle;

My travel a’ on foot I’ll shank it,

I’ve sturdy bearers, Gude the thankit!

The kirk and you may tak you that,

It puts but little in your pat; 70

Sae dinna put me in your beuk,

Nor for my ten white shillings leuk.

This list, wi’ my ain hand I wrote it,

The day and date as under noted;

Then know all ye whom it concerns, 75

Subscripsi huic, ROBERT BURNS.

MOSSGIEL, February 22, 1786.

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

97.

To John Kennedy, Dumfries House

NOW, Kennedy, if foot or horse

E’er bring you in by Mauchlin corse,

(Lord, man, there’s lasses there wad force

A hermit’s fancy;

An’ down the gate in faith they’re worse, 5

An’ mair unchancy).

But as I’m sayin, please step to Dow’s,

An’ taste sic gear as Johnie brews,

Till some bit callan bring me news

That ye are there; 10

An’ if we dinna hae a bouze,

I’se ne’er drink mair.

It’s no I like to sit an’ swallow,

Then like a swine to puke an’ wallow;

But gie me just a true good fallow, 15

Wi’ right ingine,

And spunkie ance to mak us mellow,

An’ then we’ll shine.

Now if ye’re ane o’ warl’s folk,

Wha rate the wearer by the cloak, 20

An’ sklent on poverty their joke,

Wi’ bitter sneer,

Wi’ you nae friendship I will troke,

Nor cheap nor dear.

But if, as I’m informed weel, 25

Ye hate as ill’s the very deil

The flinty heart that canna feel —

Come, sir, here’s to you!

Hae, there’s my haun’, I wiss you weel,

An’ gude be wi’ you.

ROBT. BURNESS.

MOSSGIEL, 3rd March, 1786. 30

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

98.

To Mr. M’Adam, of Craigen-Gillan

In answer to an obliging Letter he sent in the commencement of my poetic career.

SIR, o’er a gill I gat your card,

I trow it made me proud;

“See wha taks notice o’ the bard!”

I lap and cried fu’ loud.

Now deil-ma-care about their jaw, 5

The senseless, gawky million;

I’ll cock my nose abune them a’,

I’m roos’d by Craigen-Gillan!

‘Twas noble, sir; ‘twas like yourself’,

To grant your high protection: 10

A great man’s smile ye ken fu’ well

Is aye a blest infection.

Tho’, by his banes wha in a tub

Match’d Macedonian Sandy!

On my ain legs thro’ dirt and dub, 15

I independent stand aye, —

And when those legs to gude, warm kail,

Wi’ welcome canna bear me,

A lee dyke-side, a sybow-tail,

An’ barley-scone shall cheer me. 20

Heaven spare you lang to kiss the breath

O’ mony flow’ry simmers!

An’ bless your bonie lasses baith,

I’m tauld they’re loosome kimmers!

An’ God bless young Dunaskin’s laird, 25

The blossom of our gentry!

An’ may he wear and auld man’s beard,

A credit to his country.

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

99.

To a Louse

HA! whaur ye gaun, ye crowlin ferlie?

Your impudence protects you sairly;

I canna say but ye strunt rarely,

Owre gauze and lace;

Tho’, faith! I fear ye dine but sparely 5

On sic a place.

Ye ugly, creepin, blastit wonner,

Detested, shunn’d by saunt an’ sinner,

How daur ye set your fit upon her —

Sae fine a lady? 10

Gae somewhere else and seek your dinner

On some poor body.

Swith! in some beggar’s haffet squattle;

There ye may creep, and sprawl, and sprattle,

Wi’ ither kindred, jumping cattle, 15

In shoals and nations;

Whaur horn nor bane ne’er daur unsettle

Your thick plantations.

Now haud you there, ye’re out o’ sight,

Below the fatt’rels, snug and tight; 20

Na, faith ye yet! ye’ll no be right,

Till ye’ve got on it —

The verra tapmost, tow’rin height

O’ Miss’ bonnet.

My sooth! right bauld ye set your nose out, 25

As plump an’ grey as ony groset:

O for some rank, mercurial rozet,

Or fell, red smeddum,

I’d gie you sic a hearty dose o’t,

Wad dress your droddum. 30

I wad na been surpris’d to spy

You on an auld wife’s flainen toy;

Or aiblins some bit dubbie boy,

On’s wyliecoat;

But Miss’ fine Lunardi! fye! 35

How daur ye do’t?

O Jeany, dinna toss your head,

An’ set your beauties a’ abread!

Ye little ken what cursed speed

The blastie’s makin: 40

Thae winks an’ finger-ends, I dread,

Are notice takin.

O wad some Power the giftie gie us

To see oursels as ithers see us!

It wad frae mony a blunder free us, 45

An’ foolish notion:

What airs in dress an’ gait wad lea’e us,

An’ ev’n devotion!

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

100.

Inscribed on a Work of Hannah More’s

Presented to the Author by a Lady.

THOU flatt’ring mark of friendship kind,

Still may thy pages call to mind

The dear, the beauteous donor;

Tho’ sweetly female ev’ry part,

Yet such a head, and more the heart 5

Does both the sexes honour:

She show’d her taste refin’d and just,

When she selected thee;

Yet deviating, own I must,

For sae approving me: 10

But kind still I’ll mind still

The giver in the gift;

I’ll bless her, an’ wiss her

A Friend aboon the lift.

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

101.

Composed in Spring (Song)

Tune— “Jockey’s Grey Breeks.”

AGAIN rejoicing Nature sees

Her robe assume its vernal hues:

Her leafy locks wave in the breeze,

All freshly steep’d in morning dews.

Chorus. — And maun I still on Menie doat, 5

And bear the scorn that’s in her e’e?

For it’s jet, jet black, an’ it’s like a hawk,

An’ it winna let a body be.

In vain to me the cowslips blaw,

In vain to me the vi’lets spring; 10

In vain to me in glen or shaw,

The mavis and the lintwhite sing.

And maun I still, &c.

The merry ploughboy cheers his team,

Wi’ joy the tentie seedsman stalks; 15

But life to me’s a weary dream,

A dream of ane that never wauks.

And maun I still, &c.

The wanton coot the water skims,

Amang the reeds the ducklings cry, 20

The stately swan majestic swims,

And ev’ry thing is blest but I.

And maun I still, &c.

The sheep-herd steeks his faulding slap,

And o’er the moorlands whistles shill: 25

Wi’ wild, unequal, wand’ring step,

I meet him on the dewy hill.

And maun I still, &c.

And when the lark, ‘tween light and dark,

Blythe waukens by the daisy’s side, 30

And mounts and sings on flittering wings,

A woe-worn ghaist I hameward glide.

And maun I still, &c.

Come winter, with thine angry howl,

And raging, bend the naked tree; 35

Thy gloom will soothe my cheerless soul,

When nature all is sad like me!

And maun I still, &c.

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

102.

To a Mountain Daisy

On turning down with the Plough, in April, 1786.

WEE, modest crimson-tipped flow’r,

Thou’s met me in an evil hour;

For I maun crush amang the stoure

Thy slender stem:

To spare thee now is past my pow’r, 5

Thou bonie gem.

Alas! it’s no thy neibor sweet,

The bonie lark, companion meet,

Bending thee ‘mang the dewy weet,

Wi’ spreckl’d breast! 10

When upward-springing, blythe, to greet

The purpling east.

Cauld blew the bitter-biting north

Upon thy early, humble birth;

Yet cheerfully thou glinted forth 15

Amid the storm,

Scarce rear’d above the parent-earth

Thy tender form.

The flaunting flow’rs our gardens yield,

High shelt’ring woods and wa’s maun shield; 20

But thou, beneath the random bield

O’ clod or stane,

Adorns the histie stibble field,

Unseen, alane.

There, in thy scanty mantle clad, 25

Thy snawie bosom sun-ward spread,

Thou lifts thy unassuming head

In humble guise;

But now the share uptears thy bed,

And low thou lies! 30

Such is the fate of artless maid,

Sweet flow’ret of the rural shade!

By love’s simplicity betray’d,

And guileless trust;

Till she, like thee, all soil’d, is laid 35

Low i’ the dust.

Such is the fate of simple bard,

On life’s rough ocean luckless starr’d!

Unskilful he to note the card

Of prudent lore, 40

Till billows rage, and gales blow hard,

And whelm him o’er!

Such fate to suffering worth is giv’n,

Who long with wants and woes has striv’n,

By human pride or cunning driv’n 45

To mis’ry’s brink;

Till wrench’d of ev’ry stay but Heav’n,

He, ruin’d, sink!

Ev’n thou who mourn’st the Daisy’s fate,

That fate is thine — no distant date; 50

Stern Ruin’s plough-share drives elate,

Full on thy bloom,

Till crush’d beneath the furrow’s weight,

Shall be thy doom!

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

103.

To Ruin

ALL hail! inexorable lord!

At whose destruction-breathing word,

The mightiest empires fall!

Thy cruel, woe-delighted train,

The ministers of grief and pain, 5

A sullen welcome, all!

With stern-resolv’d, despairing eye,

I see each aimed dart;

For one has cut my dearest tie,

And quivers in my heart. 10

Then low’ring, and pouring,

The storm no more I dread;

Tho’ thick’ning, and black’ning,

Round my devoted head.

And thou grim Pow’r by life abhorr’d, 15

While life a pleasure can afford,

Oh! hear a wretch’s pray’r!

Nor more I shrink appall’d, afraid;

I court, I beg thy friendly aid,

To close this scene of care! 20

When shall my soul, in silent peace,

Resign life’s joyless day —

My weary heart is throbbing cease,

Cold mould’ring in the clay?

No fear more, no tear more, 25

To stain my lifeless face,

Enclasped, and grasped,

Within thy cold embrace!

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

104.

The Lament

Occasioned by the unfortunate issue of a Friend’s Amour.

“Alas! how oft does goodness would itself,

And sweet affection prove the spring of woe!”

HOME.

O THOU pale orb that silent shines

While care-untroubled mortals sleep!

Thou seest a wretch who inly pines.

And wanders here to wail and weep!

With woe I nightly vigils keep, 5

Beneath thy wan, unwarming beam;

And mourn, in lamentation deep,

How life and love are all a dream!

I joyless view thy rays adorn

The faintly-marked, distant hill; 10

I joyless view thy trembling horn,

Reflected in the gurgling rill:

My fondly-fluttering heart, be still!

Thou busy pow’r, remembrance, cease!

Ah! must the agonizing thrill 15

For ever bar returning peace!

No idly-feign’d, poetic pains,

My sad, love-lorn lamentings claim:

No shepherd’s pipe — Arcadian strains;

No fabled tortures, quaint and tame. 20

The plighted faith, the mutual flame,

The oft-attested pow’rs above,

The promis’d father’s tender name;

These were the pledges of my love!

Encircled in her clasping arms, 25

How have the raptur’d moments flown!

How have I wish’d for fortune’s charms,

For her dear sake, and her’s alone!

And, must I think it! is she gone,

My secret heart’s exulting boast? 30

And does she heedless hear my groan?

And is she ever, ever lost?

Oh! can she bear so base a heart,

So lost to honour, lost to truth,

As from the fondest lover part, 35

The plighted husband of her youth?

Alas! life’s path may be unsmooth!

Her way may lie thro’ rough distress!

Then, who her pangs and pains will soothe

Her sorrows share, and make them less? 40

Ye winged hours that o’er us pass’d,

Enraptur’d more, the more enjoy’d,

Your dear remembrance in my breast

My fondly-treasur’d thoughts employ’d:

That breast, how dreary now, and void, 45

For her too scanty once of room!

Ev’n ev’ry ray of hope destroy’d,

And not a wish to gild the gloom!

The morn, that warns th’ approaching day,

Awakes me up to toil and woe; 50

I see the hours in long array,

That I must suffer, lingering, slow:

Full many a pang, and many a throe,

Keen recollection’s direful train,

Must wring my soul, were Phoebus, low, 55

Shall kiss the distant western main.

And when my nightly couch I try,

Sore harass’d out with care and grief,

My toil-beat nerves, and tear-worn eye,

Keep watchings with the nightly thief: 60

Or if I slumber, fancy, chief,

Reigns, haggard-wild, in sore affright:

Ev’n day, all-bitter, brings relief

From such a horror-breathing night.

O thou bright queen, who o’er th’ expanse 65

Now highest reign’st, with boundless sway

Oft has thy silent-marking glance

Observ’d us, fondly-wand’ring, stray!

The time, unheeded, sped away,

While love’s luxurious pulse beat high, 70

Beneath thy silver-gleaming ray,

To mark the mutual-kindling eye.

Oh! scenes in strong remembrance set!

Scenes, never, never to return!

Scenes, if in stupor I forget, 75

Again I feel, again I burn!

From ev’ry joy and pleasure torn,

Life’s weary vale I’ll wander thro’;

And hopeless, comfortless, I’ll mourn

A faithless woman’s broken vow! 80

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

105.

Despondency: An Ode

OPPRESS’D with grief, oppress’d with care,

A burden more than I can bear,

I set me down and sigh;

O life! thou art a galling load,

Along a rough, a weary road, 5

To wretches such as I!

Dim backward as I cast my view,

What sick’ning scenes appear!

What sorrows yet may pierce me through,

Too justly I may fear! 10

Still caring, despairing,

Must be my bitter doom;

My woes here shall close ne’er

But with the closing tomb!

Happy! ye sons of busy life, 15

Who, equal to the bustling strife,

No other view regard!

Ev’n when the wished end’s denied,

Yet while the busy means are plied,

They bring their own reward: 20

Whilst I, a hope-abandon’d wight,

Unfitted with an aim,

Meet ev’ry sad returning night,

And joyless morn the same!

You, bustling, and justling, 25

Forget each grief and pain;

I, listless, yet restless,

Find ev’ry prospect vain.

How blest the solitary’s lot,

Who, all-forgetting, all forgot, 30

Within his humble cell,

The cavern, wild with tangling roots,

Sits o’er his newly gather’d fruits,

Beside his crystal well!

Or haply, to his ev’ning thought, 35

By unfrequented stream,

The ways of men are distant brought,

A faint, collected dream;

While praising, and raising

His thoughts to heav’n on high, 40

As wand’ring, meand’ring,

He views the solemn sky.

Than I, no lonely hermit plac’d

Where never human footstep trac’d,

Less fit to play the part, 45

The lucky moment to improve,

And just to stop, and just to move,

With self-respecting art:

But ah! those pleasures, loves, and joys,

Which I too keenly taste, 50

The solitary can despise,

Can want, and yet be blest!

He needs not, he heeds not,

Or human love or hate;

Whilst I here must cry here 55

At perfidy ingrate!

O, enviable, early days,

When dancing thoughtless pleasure’s maze,

To care, to guilt unknown!

How ill exchang’d for riper times, 60

To feel the follies, or the crimes,

Of others, or my own!

Ye tiny elves that guiltless sport,

Like linnets in the bush,

Ye little know the ills ye court, 65

When manhood is your wish!

The losses, the crosses,

That active man engage;

The fears all, the tears all,

Of dim declining age! 70

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

106.

To Gavin Hamilton, Esq., Mauchline, recommending a Boy

Recommending a Boy.

Mossgaville, May 3, 1786.

I HOLD it, sir, my bounden duty

To warn you how that Master Tootie,

Alias, Laird M’Gaun,

Was here to hire yon lad away

‘Bout whom ye spak the tither day, 5

An’ wad hae don’t aff han’;

But lest he learn the callan tricks —

An’ faith I muckle doubt him —

Like scrapin out auld Crummie’s nicks,

An’ tellin lies about them; 10

As lieve then, I’d have then

Your clerkship he should sair,

If sae be ye may be

Not fitted otherwhere.

Altho’ I say’t, he’s gleg enough, 15

An’ ‘bout a house that’s rude an’ rough,

The boy might learn to swear;

But then, wi’ you, he’ll be sae taught,

An’ get sic fair example straught,

I hae na ony fear. 20

Ye’ll catechise him, every quirk,

An’ shore him weel wi’ hell;

An’ gar him follow to the kirk —

Aye when ye gang yoursel.

If ye then maun be then 25

Frae hame this comin’ Friday,

Then please, sir, to lea’e, sir,

The orders wi’ your lady.

My word of honour I hae gi’en,

In Paisley John’s, that night at e’en, 30

To meet the warld’s worm;

To try to get the twa to gree,

An’ name the airles an’ the fee,

In legal mode an’ form:

I ken he weel a snick can draw, 35

When simple bodies let him:

An’ if a Devil be at a’,

In faith he’s sure to get him.

To phrase you and praise you,.

Ye ken your Laureat scorns: 40

The pray’r still you share still

Of grateful MINSTREL BURNS.

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

107.

Versified Reply to an Invitation

SIR,

Yours this moment I unseal,

And faith I’m gay and hearty!

To tell the truth and shame the deil,

I am as fou as Bartie:

But Foorsday, sir, my promise leal, 5

Expect me o’ your partie,

If on a beastie I can speel,

Or hurl in a cartie.

YOURS,

ROBERT BURNS.

MAUCHLIN, Monday night, 10 o’clock.

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

108.

Will ye go to the Indies, my Mary? (Song)

Tune— “Will ye go to the Ewe-Bughts, Marion.”

WILL ye go to the Indies, my Mary,

And leave auld Scotia’s shore?

Will ye go to the Indies, my Mary,

Across th’ Atlantic roar?

O sweet grows the lime and the orange, 5

And the apple on the pine;

But a’ the charms o’ the Indies

Can never equal thine.

I hae sworn by the Heavens to my Mary,

I hae sworn by the Heavens to be true; 10

And sae may the Heavens forget me,

When I forget my vow!

O plight me your faith, my Mary,

And plight me your lily-white hand;

O plight me your faith, my Mary, 15

Before I leave Scotia’s strand.

We hae plighted our troth, my Mary,

In mutual affection to join;

And curst be the cause that shall part us!

The hour and the moment o’ time! 20

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

109.

My Highland Lassie, O

Tune— “The deuks dang o’er my daddy”

NAE gentle dames, tho’ e’er sae fair,

Shall ever be my muse’s care:

Their titles a’ arc empty show;

Gie me my Highland lassie, O.

Chorus. — Within the glen sae bushy, O, 5

Aboon the plain sae rashy, O,

I set me down wi’ right guid will,

To sing my Highland lassie, O.

O were yon hills and vallies mine,

Yon palace and yon gardens fine! 10

The world then the love should know

I bear my Highland Lassie, O.

But fickle fortune frowns on me,

And I maun cross the raging sea!

But while my crimson currents flow, 15

I’ll love my Highland lassie, O.

Altho’ thro’ foreign climes I range,

I know her heart will never change,

For her bosom burns with honour’s glow,

My faithful Highland lassie, O. 20

For her I’ll dare the billow’s roar,

For her I’ll trace a distant shore,

That Indian wealth may lustre throw

Around my Highland lassie, O.

She has my heart, she has my hand, 25

By secret troth and honour’s band!

Till the mortal stroke shall lay me low,

I’m thine, my Highland lassie, O.

Farewell the glen sae bushy, O!

Farewell the plain sae rashy, O! 30

To other lands I now must go,

To sing my Highland lassie, O.

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

110.

Epistle to a Young Friend

May — , 1786.

I LANG hae thought, my youthfu’ friend,

A something to have sent you,

Tho’ it should serve nae ither end

Than just a kind memento:

But how the subject-theme may gang, 5

Let time and chance determine;

Perhaps it may turn out a sang:

Perhaps turn out a sermon.

Ye’ll try the world soon, my lad;

And, Andrew dear, believe me, 10

Ye’ll find mankind an unco squad,

And muckle they may grieve ye:

For care and trouble set your thought,

Ev’n when your end’s attained;

And a’ your views may come to nought, 15

Where ev’ry nerve is strained.

I’ll no say, men are villains a’;

The real, harden’d wicked,

Wha hae nae check but human law,

Are to a few restricked; 20

But, Och! mankind are unco weak,

An’ little to be trusted;

If self the wavering balance shake,

It’s rarely right adjusted!

Yet they wha fa’ in fortune’s strife, 25

Their fate we shouldna censure;

For still, th’ important end of life

They equally may answer;

A man may hae an honest heart,

Tho’ poortith hourly stare him; 30

A man may tak a neibor’s part,

Yet hae nae cash to spare him.

Aye free, aff-han’, your story tell,

When wi’ a bosom crony;

But still keep something to yoursel’, 35

Ye scarcely tell to ony:

Conceal yoursel’ as weel’s ye can

Frae critical dissection;

But keek thro’ ev’ry other man,

Wi’ sharpen’d, sly inspection. 40

The sacred lowe o’ weel-plac’d love,

Luxuriantly indulge it;

But never tempt th’ illicit rove,

Tho’ naething should divulge it:

I waive the quantum o’ the sin, 45

The hazard of concealing;

But, Och! it hardens a’ within,

And petrifies the feeling!

To catch dame Fortune’s golden smile,

Assiduous wait upon her; 50

And gather gear by ev’ry wile

That’s justified by honour;

Not for to hide it in a hedge,

Nor for a train attendant;

But for the glorious privilege 55

Of being independent.

The fear o’ hell’s a hangman’s whip,

To haud the wretch in order;

But where ye feel your honour grip,

Let that aye be your border; 60

Its slightest touches, instant pause —

Debar a’ side-pretences;

And resolutely keep its laws,

Uncaring consequences.

The great Creator to revere, 65

Must sure become the creature;

But still the preaching cant forbear,

And ev’n the rigid feature:

Yet ne’er with wits profane to range,

Be complaisance extended; 70

An atheist-laugh’s a poor exchange

For Deity offended!

When ranting round in pleasure’s ring,

Religion may be blinded;

Or if she gie a random sting, 75

It may be little minded;

But when on life we’re tempest driv’n —

A conscience but a canker —

A correspondence fix’d wi’ Heav’n,

Is sure a noble anchor! 80

Adieu, dear, amiable youth!

Your heart can ne’er be wanting!

May prudence, fortitude, and truth,

Erect your brow undaunting!

In ploughman phrase, “God send you speed,” 85

Still daily to grow wiser;

And may ye better reck the rede,

Then ever did th’ adviser!

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

111.

Address to Beelzebub

To the Right Honourable the Earl of Breadalbane, President of the Right Honourable and Honourable the Highland Society, which met on the 23rd of May last at the Shakespeare, Covent Garden, to concert ways and means to frustrate the designs of five hundred Highlanders, who, as the Society were informed by Mr. M’Kenzie of Applecross, were so audacious as to attempt an escape from their lawful lords and masters whose property they were, by emigrating from the lands of Mr. Macdonald of Glengary to the wilds of Canada, in search of that fantastic thing — LIBERTY.

LONG life, my Lord, an’ health be yours,

Unskaithed by hunger’d Highland boors;

Lord grant me nae duddie, desperate beggar,

Wi’ dirk, claymore, and rusty trigger,

May twin auld Scotland o’ a life 5

She likes — as butchers like a knife.

Faith you and Applecross were right

To keep the Highland hounds in sight:

I doubt na! they wad bid nae better,

Than let them ance out owre the water, 10

Then up among thae lakes and seas,

They’ll mak what rules and laws they please:

Some daring Hancocke, or a Franklin,

May set their Highland bluid a-ranklin;

Some Washington again may head them, 15

Or some Montgomery, fearless, lead them,

Till (God knows what may be effected

When by such heads and hearts directed),

Poor dunghill sons of dirt and mire

May to Patrician rights aspire! 20

Nae sage North now, nor sager Sackville,

To watch and premier o’er the pack vile, —

An’ whare will ye get Howes and Clintons

To bring them to a right repentance —

To cowe the rebel generation, 25

An’ save the honour o’ the nation?

They, an’ be d — d! what right hae they

To meat, or sleep, or light o’ day?

Far less — to riches, pow’r, or freedom,

But what your lordship likes to gie them? 30

But hear, my lord! Glengarry, hear!

Your hand’s owre light to them, I fear;

Your factors, grieves, trustees, and bailies,

I canna say but they do gaylies;

They lay aside a’ tender mercies, 35

An’ tirl the hallions to the birses;

Yet while they’re only poind’t and herriet,

They’ll keep their stubborn Highland spirit:

But smash them! crash them a’ to spails,

An’ rot the dyvors i’ the jails! 40

The young dogs, swinge them to the labour;

Let wark an’ hunger mak them sober!

The hizzies, if they’re aughtlins fawsont,

Let them in Drury-lane be lesson’d!

An’ if the wives an’ dirty brats 45

Come thiggin at your doors an’ yetts,

Flaffin wi’ duds, an’ grey wi’ beas’,

Frightin away your ducks an’ geese;

Get out a horsewhip or a jowler,

The langest thong, the fiercest growler, 50

An’ gar the tatter’d gypsies pack

Wi’ a’ their bastards on their back!

Go on, my Lord! I lang to meet you,

An’ in my house at hame to greet you;

Wi’ common lords ye shanna mingle, 55

The benmost neuk beside the ingle,

At my right han’ assigned your seat,

‘Tween Herod’s hip an’ Polycrate:

Or (if you on your station tarrow),

Between Almagro and Pizarro, 60

A seat, I’m sure ye’re well deservin’t;

An’ till ye come — your humble servant,

BEELZEBUB.

June 1st, Anno Mundi 5790.

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

112.

A Dream

Thoughts, words, and deeds, the Statute blames with reason;

But surely Dreams were ne’er indicted Treason.

On reading, in the public papers, the Laureate’s Ode, with the other parade of June 4th, 1786, the Author was no sooner dropt asleep, than he imagined himself transported to the Birth-day Levee: and, in his dreaming fancy, made the following Address:

GUID-MORNIN’ to our Majesty!

May Heaven augment your blisses

On ev’ry new birth-day ye see,

A humble poet wishes.

My bardship here, at your Levee 5

On sic a day as this is,

Is sure an uncouth sight to see,

Amang thae birth-day dresses

Sae fine this day.

I see ye’re complimented thrang, 10

By mony a lord an’ lady;

“God save the King” ‘s a cuckoo sang

That’s unco easy said aye:

The poets, too, a venal gang,

Wi’ rhymes weel-turn’d an’ ready, 15

Wad gar you trow ye ne’er do wrang,

But aye unerring steady,

On sic a day.

For me! before a monarch’s face

Ev’n there I winna flatter; 20

For neither pension, post, nor place,

Am I your humble debtor:

So, nae reflection on your Grace,

Your Kingship to bespatter;

There’s mony waur been o’ the race, 25

And aiblins ane been better

Than you this day.

‘Tis very true, my sovereign King,

My skill may weel be doubted;

But facts are chiels that winna ding, 30

An’ downa be disputed:

Your royal nest, beneath your wing,

Is e’en right reft and clouted,

And now the third part o’ the string,

An’ less, will gang aboot it 35

Than did ae day.

Far be’t frae me that I aspire

To blame your legislation,

Or say, ye wisdom want, or fire,

To rule this mighty nation: 40

But faith! I muckle doubt, my sire,

Ye’ve trusted ministration

To chaps wha in barn or byre

Wad better fill’d their station

Than courts yon day. 45

And now ye’ve gien auld Britain peace,

Her broken shins to plaister,

Your sair taxation does her fleece,

Till she has scarce a tester:

For me, thank God, my life’s a lease, 50

Nae bargain wearin’ faster,

Or, faith! I fear, that, wi’ the geese,

I shortly boost to pasture

I’ the craft some day.

I’m no mistrusting Willie Pitt, 55

When taxes he enlarges,

(An’ Will’s a true guid fallow’s get,

A name not envy spairges),

That he intends to pay your debt,

An’ lessen a’ your charges; 60

But, God-sake! let nae saving fit

Abridge your bonie barges

An’boats this day.

Adieu, my Liege; may freedom geck

Beneath your high protection; 65

An’ may ye rax Corruption’s neck,

And gie her for dissection!

But since I’m here, I’ll no neglect,

In loyal, true affection,

To pay your Queen, wi’ due respect, 70

May fealty an’ subjection

This great birth-day.

Hail, Majesty most Excellent!

While nobles strive to please ye,

Will ye accept a compliment, 75

A simple poet gies ye?

Thae bonie bairntime, Heav’n has lent,

Still higher may they heeze ye

In bliss, till fate some day is sent

For ever to release ye 80

Frae care that day.

For you, young Potentate o’Wales,

I tell your highness fairly,

Down Pleasure’s stream, wi’ swelling sails,

I’m tauld ye’re driving rarely; 85

But some day ye may gnaw your nails,

An’ curse your folly sairly,

That e’er ye brak Diana’s pales,

Or rattl’d dice wi’ Charlie

By night or day. 90

Yet aft a ragged cowt’s been known,

To mak a noble aiver;

So, ye may doucely fill the throne,

For a’their clish-ma-claver:

There, him at Agincourt wha shone, 95

Few better were or braver:

And yet, wi’ funny, queer Sir John,

He was an unco shaver

For mony a day.

For you, right rev’rend Osnaburg, 100

Nane sets the lawn-sleeve sweeter,

Altho’ a ribbon at your lug

Wad been a dress completer:

As ye disown yon paughty dog,

That bears the keys of Peter, 105

Then swith! an’ get a wife to hug,

Or trowth, ye’ll stain the mitre

Some luckless day!

Young, royal Tarry-breeks, I learn,

Ye’ve lately come athwart her — 110

A glorious galley, stem and stern,

Weel rigg’d for Venus’ barter;

But first hang out, that she’ll discern,

Your hymeneal charter;

Then heave aboard your grapple airn, 115

An’ large upon her quarter,

Come full that day.

Ye, lastly, bonie blossoms a’,

Ye royal lasses dainty,

Heav’n mak you guid as well as braw, 120

An’ gie you lads a-plenty!

But sneer na British boys awa!

For kings are unco scant aye,

An’ German gentles are but sma’,

They’re better just than want aye 125

On ony day.

Gad bless you a’! consider now,

Ye’re unco muckle dautit;

But ere the course o’ life be through,

It may be bitter sautit: 130

An’ I hae seen their coggie fou,

That yet hae tarrow’t at it.

But or the day was done, I trow,

The laggen they hae clautit

Fu’ clean that day. 135

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

113.

A Dedication to Gavin Hamilton, Esq.

To Gavin Hamilton, Esq.

EXPECT na, sir, in this narration,

A fleechin, fleth’rin Dedication,

To roose you up, an’ ca’ you guid,

An’ sprung o’ great an’ noble bluid,

Because ye’re surnam’d like His Grace — 5

Perhaps related to the race:

Then, when I’m tir’d-and sae are ye,

Wi’ mony a fulsome, sinfu’ lie,

Set up a face how I stop short,

For fear your modesty be hurt. 10

This may do — maun do, sir, wi’ them wha

Maun please the great folk for a wamefou;

For me! sae laigh I need na bow,

For, Lord be thankit, I can plough;

And when I downa yoke a naig, 15

Then, Lord be thankit, I can beg;

Sae I shall say — an’ that’s nae flatt’rin —

It’s just sic Poet an’ sic Patron.

The Poet, some guid angel help him,

Or else, I fear, some ill ane skelp him! 20

He may do weel for a’ he’s done yet,

But only — he’s no just begun yet.

The Patron (sir, ye maun forgie me;

I winna lie, come what will o’ me),

On ev’ry hand it will allow’d be, 25

He’s just — nae better than he should be.

I readily and freely grant,

He downa see a poor man want;

What’s no his ain, he winna tak it;

What ance he says, he winna break it; 30

Ought he can lend he’ll no refus’t,

Till aft his guidness is abus’d;

And rascals whiles that do him wrang,

Ev’n that, he does na mind it lang;

As master, landlord, husband, father, 35

He does na fail his part in either.

But then, nae thanks to him for a’that;

Nae godly symptom ye can ca’ that;

It’s naething but a milder feature

Of our poor, sinfu’ corrupt nature: 40

Ye’ll get the best o’ moral works,

‘Mang black Gentoos, and pagan Turks,

Or hunters wild on Ponotaxi,

Wha never heard of orthodoxy.

That he’s the poor man’s friend in need, 45

The gentleman in word and deed,

It’s no thro’ terror of damnation;

It’s just a carnal inclination.

Morality, thou deadly bane,

Thy tens o’ thousands thou hast slain! 50

Vain is his hope, whase stay an’ trust is

In moral mercy, truth, and justice!

No — stretch a point to catch a plack:

Abuse a brother to his back;

Steal through the winnock frae a whore, 55

But point the rake that taks the door;

Be to the poor like ony whunstane,

And haud their noses to the grunstane;

Ply ev’ry art o’ legal thieving;

No matter — stick to sound believing. 60

Learn three-mile pray’rs, an’ half-mile graces,

Wi’ weel-spread looves, an’ lang, wry faces;

Grunt up a solemn, lengthen’d groan,

And damn a’ parties but your own;

I’ll warrant they ye’re nae deceiver, 65

A steady, sturdy, staunch believer.

O ye wha leave the springs o’ Calvin,

For gumlie dubs of your ain delvin!

Ye sons of Heresy and Error,

Ye’ll some day squeel in quaking terror, 70

When Vengeance draws the sword in wrath.

And in the fire throws the sheath;

When Ruin, with his sweeping besom,

Just frets till Heav’n commission gies him;

While o’er the harp pale Misery moans, 75

And strikes the ever-deep’ning tones,

Still louder shrieks, and heavier groans!

Your pardon, sir, for this digression:

I maist forgat my Dedication;

But when divinity comes ‘cross me, 80

My readers still are sure to lose me.

So, sir, you see ‘twas nae daft vapour;

But I maturely thought it proper,

When a’ my works I did review,

To dedicate them, sir, to you: 85

Because (ye need na tak it ill),

I thought them something like yoursel’.

Then patronize them wi’ your favor,

And your petitioner shall ever –-

I had amaist said, ever pray, 90

But that’s a word I need na say;

For prayin, I hae little skill o’t,

I’m baith dead-sweer, an’ wretched ill o’t;

But I’se repeat each poor man’s pray’r,

That kens or hears about you, sir. –- 95

“May ne’er Misfortune’s gowling bark,

Howl thro’ the dwelling o’ the clerk!

May ne’er his genrous, honest heart,

For that same gen’rous spirit smart!

May Kennedy’s far-honour’d name 100

Lang beet his hymeneal flame,

Till Hamiltons, at least a dizzen,

Are frae their nuptial labours risen:

Five bonie lasses round their table,

And sev’n braw fellows, stout an’ able, 105

To serve their king an’ country weel,

By word, or pen, or pointed steel!

May health and peace, with mutual rays,

Shine on the ev’ning o’ his days;

Till his wee, curlie John’s ier-oe, 110

When ebbing life nae mair shall flow,

The last, sad, mournful rites bestow!”

I will not wind a lang conclusion,

With complimentary effusion;

But, whilst your wishes and endeavours 115

Are blest with Fortune’s smiles and favours,

I am, dear sir, with zeal most fervent,

Your much indebted, humble servant.

But if (which Pow’rs above prevent)

That iron-hearted carl, Want, 120

Attended, in his grim advances,

By sad mistakes, and black mischances,

While hopes, and joys, and pleasures fly him,

Make you as poor a dog as I am,

Your humble servant then no more; 125

For who would humbly serve the poor?

But, by a poor man’s hopes in Heav’n!

While recollection’s pow’r is giv’n —

If, in the vale of humble life,

The victim sad of fortune’s strife, 130

I, thro’ the tender-gushing tear,

Should recognise my master dear;

If friendless, low, we meet together,

Then, sir, your hand — my Friend and Brother!

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

114.

Versified Note to Dr. Mackenzie, Mauchline

FRIDAY first’s the day appointed

By the Right Worshipful anointed,

To hold our grand procession;

To get a blad o’ Johnie’s morals,

And taste a swatch o’ Manson’s barrels 5

I’ the way of our profession.

The Master and the Brotherhood

Would a’ be glad to see you;

For me I would be mair than proud

To share the mercies wi’ you. 10

If Death, then, wi’ skaith, then,

Some mortal heart is hechtin,

Inform him, and storm him,

That Saturday you’ll fecht him.

ROBERT BURNS.

Mossgiel, An. M. 5790.

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

115.

The Farewell to the Brethren of St. James’s Lodge, Tarbolton

To the Brethren of St. James’s Lodge, Tarbolton.

Tune— “Guidnight, and joy be wi’ you a’.”

ADIEU! a heart-warm fond adieu;

Dear brothers of the mystic tie!

Ye favoured, enlighten’d few,

Companions of my social joy;

Tho’ I to foreign lands must hie, 5

Pursuing Fortune’s slidd’ry ba’;

With melting heart, and brimful eye,

I’ll mind you still, tho’ far awa.

Oft have I met your social band,

And spent the cheerful, festive night; 10

Oft, honour’d with supreme command,

Presided o’er the sons of light:

And by that hieroglyphic bright,

Which none but Craftsmen ever saw

Strong Mem’ry on my heart shall write 15

Those happy scenes, when far awa.

May Freedom, Harmony, and Love,

Unite you in the grand Design,

Beneath th’ Omniscient Eye above,

The glorious Architect Divine, 20

That you may keep th’ unerring line,

Still rising by the plummet’s law,

Till Order bright completely shine,

Shall be my pray’r when far awa.

And you, farewell! whose merits claim 25

Justly that highest badge to wear:

Heav’n bless your honour’d noble name,

To Masonry and Scotia dear!

A last request permit me here, —

When yearly ye assemble a’, 30

One round, I ask it with a tear,

To him, the Bard that’s far awa.

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

116.

On a Scotch Bard, gone to the West Indies

Gone to the West Indies

A’ YE wha live by sowps o’ drink,

A’ ye wha live by crambo-clink,

A’ ye wha live and never think,

Come, mourn wi’ me!

Our billie ‘s gien us a’ a jink, 5

An’ owre the sea!

Lament him a’ ye rantin core,

Wha dearly like a random splore;

Nae mair he’ll join the merry roar;

In social key; 10

For now he’s taen anither shore.

An’ owre the sea!

The bonie lasses weel may wiss him,

And in their dear petitions place him:

The widows, wives, an’ a’ may bless him 15

Wi’ tearfu’ e’e;

For weel I wat they’ll sairly miss him

That’s owre the sea!

O Fortune, they hae room to grumble!

Hadst thou taen aff some drowsy bummle, 20

Wha can do nought but fyke an’ fumble,

‘Twad been nae plea;

But he was gleg as ony wumble,

That’s owre the sea!

Auld, cantie Kyle may weepers wear, 25

An’ stain them wi’ the saut, saut tear;

‘Twill mak her poor auld heart, I fear,

In flinders flee:

He was her Laureat mony a year,

That’s owre the sea! 30

He saw Misfortune’s cauld nor-west

Lang mustering up a bitter blast;

A jillet brak his heart at last,

Ill may she be!

So, took a berth afore the mast, 35

An’ owre the sea.

To tremble under Fortune’s cummock,

On a scarce a bellyfu’ o’ drummock,

Wi’ his proud, independent stomach,

Could ill agree; 40

So, row’t his hurdies in a hammock,

An’ owre the sea.

He ne’er was gien to great misguidin,

Yet coin his pouches wad na bide in;

Wi’ him it ne’er was under hiding; 45

He dealt it free:

The Muse was a’ that he took pride in,

That’s owre the sea.

Jamaica bodies, use him weel,

An’ hap him in cozie biel: 50

Ye’ll find him aye a dainty chiel,

An’ fou o’ glee:

He wad na wrang’d the vera deil,

That’s owre the sea.

Farewell, my rhyme-composing billie! 55

Your native soil was right ill-willie;

But may ye flourish like a lily,

Now bonilie!

I’ll toast you in my hindmost gillie,

Tho’ owre the sea! 60

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

117.

Farewell to Eliza (Song)

Tune— “Gilderoy.”

FROM thee, Eliza, I must go,

And from my native shore;

The cruel fates between us throw

A boundless ocean’s roar:

But boundless oceans, roaring wide, 5

Between my love and me,

They never, never can divide

My heart and soul from thee.

Farewell, farewell, Eliza dear,

The maid that I adore! 10

A boding voice is in mine ear,

We part to meet no more!

But the latest throb that leaves my heart,

While Death stands victor by, —

That throb, Eliza, is thy part, 15

And thine that latest sigh!

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

118.

A Bard’s Epitaph

IS there a whim-inspired fool,

Owre fast for thought, owre hot for rule,

Owre blate to seek, owre proud to snool,

Let him draw near;

And owre this grassy heap sing dool, 5

And drap a tear.

Is there a bard of rustic song,

Who, noteless, steals the crowds among,

That weekly this area throng,

O, pass not by! 10

But, with a frater-feeling strong,

Here, heave a sigh.

Is there a man, whose judgment clear

Can others teach the course to steer,

Yet runs, himself, life’s mad career, 15

Wild as the wave,

Here pause — and, thro’ the starting tear,

Survey this grave.

The poor inhabitant below

Was quick to learn the wise to know, 20

And keenly felt the friendly glow,

And softer flame;

But thoughtless follies laid him low,

And stain’d his name!

Reader, attend! whether thy soul 25

Soars fancy’s flights beyond the pole,

Or darkling grubs this earthly hole,

In low pursuit:

Know, prudent, cautious, self-control

Is wisdom’s root. 30

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

119.

Epitaph for Robert Aiken, Esq.

KNOW thou, O stranger to the fame

Of this much lov’d, much honoured name!

(For none that knew him need be told)

A warmer heart death ne’er made cold.

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

120.

Epitaph for Gavin Hamilton, Esq.

THE POOR man weeps — here Gavin sleeps,

Whom canting wretches blam’d;

But with such as he, where’er he be,

May I be sav’d or d — d!

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

121.

Epitaph on “Wee Johnnie”

Hic Jacet wee Johnie.

WHOE’ER thou art, O reader, know

That Death has murder’d Johnie;

An’ here his body lies fu’ low;

For saul he ne’er had ony.

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

122.

The Lass o’ Ballochmyle

Tune— “Ettrick Banks.”

‘TWAS even — the dewy fields were green,

On every blade the pearls hang;

The zephyr wanton’d round the bean,

And bore its fragrant sweets alang:

In ev’ry glen the mavis sang, 5

All nature list’ning seem’d the while,

Except where greenwood echoes rang,

Amang the braes o’ Ballochmyle.

With careless step I onward stray’d,

My heart rejoic’d in nature’s joy, 10

When, musing in a lonely glade,

A maiden fair I chanc’d to spy:

Her look was like the morning’s eye,

Her air like nature’s vernal smile:

Perfection whisper’d, passing by, 15

“Behold the lass o’ Ballochmyle!””

Fair is the morn in flowery May,

And sweet is night in autumn mild;

When roving thro’ the garden gay,

Or wand’ring in the lonely wild: 20

But woman, nature’s darling child!

There all her charms she does compile;

Even there her other works are foil’d

By the bonie lass o’ Ballochmyle.

O, had she been a country maid, 25

And I the happy country swain,

Tho’ shelter’d in the lowest shed

That ever rose on Scotland’s plain!

Thro’ weary winter’s wind and rain,

With joy, with rapture, I would toil; 30

And nightly to my bosom strain

The bonie lass o’ Ballochmyle.

Then pride might climb the slipp’ry steep,

Where frame and honours lofty shine;

And thirst of gold might tempt the deep, 35

Or downward seek the Indian mine:

Give me the cot below the pine,

To tend the flocks or till the soil;

And ev’ry day have joys divine

With the bonie lass o’ Ballochmyle. 40

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

123.

Lines to an Old Sweetheart

ONCE fondly lov’d, and still remember’d dear,

Sweet early object of my youthful vows,

Accept this mark of friendship, warm, sincere,

Friendship! ‘tis all cold duty now allows.

And when you read the simple artless rhymes, 5

One friendly sigh for him — he asks no more,

Who, distant, burns in flaming torrid climes,

Or haply lies beneath th’ Atlantic roar.

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

124.

Motto prefixed to the Author’s first Publication

THE SIMPLE Bard, unbroke by rules of art,

He pours the wild effusions of the heart;

And if inspir’d ‘tis Nature’s pow’rs inspire;

Her’s all the melting thrill, and her’s the kindling fire.

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

125.

Lines to Mr. John Kennedy

FAREWELL, dear friend! may guid luck hit you,

And ‘mang her favourites admit you:

If e’er Detraction shore to smit you,

May nane believe him,

And ony deil that thinks to get you, 5

Good Lord, deceive him!

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

126.

Lines written on a Bank-note

WAE worth thy power, thou cursed leaf!

Fell source o’ a’ my woe and grief!

For lack o’ thee I’ve lost my lass!

For lack o’ thee I scrimp my glass!

I see the children of affliction 5

Unaided, through thy curst restriction:

I’ve seen the oppressor’s cruel smile

Amid his hapless victim’s spoil;

And for thy potence vainly wished,

To crush the villain in the dust: 10

For lack o’ thee, I leave this much-lov’d shore,

Never, perhaps, to greet old Scotland more.

R. B.

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

127.

Stanzas on Naething

Extempore Epistle to Gavin Hamilton, Esq.

TO you, sir, this summons I’ve sent,

Pray, whip till the pownie is freathing;

But if you demand what I want,

I honestly answer you — naething.

Ne’er scorn a poor Poet like me, 5

For idly just living and breathing,

While people of every degree

Are busy employed about — naething.

Poor Centum-per-centum may fast,

And grumble his hurdies their claithing, 10

He’ll find, when the balance is cast,

He’s gane to the devil for — naething.

The courtier cringes and bows,

Ambition has likewise its plaything;

A coronet beams on his brows; 15

And what is a coronet — naething.

Some quarrel the Presbyter gown,

Some quarrel Episcopal graithing;

But every good fellow will own

Their quarrel is a’ about — naething. 20

The lover may sparkle and glow,

Approaching his bonie bit gay thing:

But marriage will soon let him know

He’s gotten — a buskit up naething.

The Poet may jingle and rhyme, 25

In hopes of a laureate wreathing,

And when he has wasted his time,

He’s kindly rewarded wi’ — naething.

The thundering bully may rage,

And swagger and swear like a heathen; 30

But collar him fast, I’ll engage,

You’ll find that his courage is — naething.

Last night wi’ a feminine whig —

A Poet she couldna put faith in;

But soon we grew lovingly big, 35

I taught her, her terrors were naething.

Her whigship was wonderful pleased,

But charmingly tickled wi’ ae thing,

Her fingers I lovingly squeezed,

And kissed her, and promised her — naething. 40

The priest anathemas may threat —

Predicament, sir, that we’re baith in;

But when honour’s reveille is beat,

The holy artillery’s naething.

And now I must mount on the wave — 45

My voyage perhaps there is death in;

But what is a watery grave?

The drowning a Poet is naething.

And now, as grim death’s in my thought,

To you, sir, I make this bequeathing; 50

My service as long as ye’ve ought,

And my friendship, by God, when ye’ve naething.

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

128.

The Farewell

The valiant, in himself, what can he suffer?

Or what does he regard his single woes?

But when, alas! he multiplies himself,

To dearer serves, to the lov’d tender fair,

To those whose bliss, whose beings hang upon him,

To helpless children, — then, Oh then, he feels

The point of misery festering in his heart,

And weakly weeps his fortunes like a coward:

Such, such am I! — undone!

THOMSON’S Edward and Eleanora.

FAREWELL, old Scotia’s bleak domains,

Far dearer than the torrid plains,

Where rich ananas blow!

Farewell, a mother’s blessing dear!

A borther’s sigh! a sister’s tear! 5

My Jean’s heart-rending throe!

Farewell, my Bess! tho’ thou’rt bereft

Of my paternal care.

A faithful brother I have left,

My part in him thou’lt share! 10

Adieu, too, to you too,

My Smith, my bosom frien’;

When kindly you mind me,

O then befriend my Jean!

What bursting anguish tears my heart; 15

From thee, my Jeany, must I part!

Thou, weeping, answ’rest— “No!”

Alas! misfortune stares my face,

And points to ruin and disgrace,

I for thy sake must go! 20

Thee, Hamilton, and Aiken dear,

A grateful, warm adieu:

I, with a much-indebted tear,

Shall still remember you!

All hail then, the gale then, 25

Wafts me from thee, dear shore!

It rustles, and whistles

I’ll never see thee more!

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

129.

The Calf

To the Rev. JAMES STEVEN, on his text, MALACHI, ch. iv. vers. 2. “And ye shall go forth, and grow up, as Calves of the stall.”

RIGHT, sir! your text I’ll prove it true,

Tho’ heretics may laugh;

For instance, there’s yourself just now,

God knows, an unco calf.

And should some patron be so kind, 5

As bless you wi’ a kirk,

I doubt na, sir but then we’ll find,

Ye’re still as great a stirk.

But, if the lover’s raptur’d hour,

Shall ever be your lot, 10

Forbid it, ev’ry heavenly Power,

You e’er should be a stot!

Tho’ when some kind connubial dear

Your but-and-ben adorns,

The like has been that you may wear 15

A noble head of horns.

And, in your lug, most reverend James,

To hear you roar and rowt,

Few men o’ sense will doubt your claims

To rank amang the nowt. 20

And when ye’re number’d wi’ the dead,

Below a grassy hillock,

With justice they may mark your head —

“Here lies a famous bullock!”

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

130.

Nature’s Law: A Poem

Humbly inscribed to Gavin Hamilton, Esq.

“Great Nature spoke: observant man obey’d” — POPE.

LET other heroes boast their scars,

The marks of sturt and strife:

And other poets sing of wars,

The plagues of human life:

Shame fa’ the fun, wi’ sword and gun 5

To slap mankind like lumber!

I sing his name, and nobler fame,

Wha multiplies our number.

Great Nature spoke, with air benign,

“Go on, ye human race; 10

This lower world I you resign;

Be fruitful and increase.

The liquid fire of strong desire

I’ve pour’d it in each bosom;

Here, on this had, does Mankind stand, 15

And there is Beauty’s blossom.”

The Hero of these artless strains,

A lowly bard was he,

Who sung his rhymes in Coila’s plains,

With meikle mirth an’glee; 20

Kind Nature’s care had given his share

Large, of the flaming current;

And, all devout, he never sought

To stem the sacred torrent.

He felt the powerful, high behest 25

Thrill, vital, thro’ and thro’;

And sought a correspondent breast,

To give obedience due:

Propitious Powers screen’d the young flow’rs,

From mildews of abortion; 30

And low! the bard — a great reward —

Has got a double portion!

Auld cantie Coil may count the day,

As annual it returns,

The third of Libra’s equal sway, 35

That gave another Burns,

With future rhymes, an’ other times,

To emulate his sire:

To sing auld Coil in nobler style

With more poetic fire. 40

Ye Powers of peace, and peaceful song,

Look down with gracious eyes;

And bless auld Coila, large and long,

With multiplying joys;

Lang may she stand to prop the land, 45

The flow’r of ancient nations;

And Burnses spring, her fame to sing,

To endless generations!

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

131.

Willie Chalmers (Song)

Mr. Chalmers, a gentleman in Ayrshire, a particular friend of mine, asked me to write a poetic epistle to a young lady, his Dulcinea. I had seen her, but was scarcely acquainted with her, and wrote as follows: —

WI’ braw new branks in mickle pride,

And eke a braw new brechan,

My Pegasus I’m got astride,

And up Parnassus pechin;

Whiles owre a bush wi’ donwward crush, 5

The doited beastie stammers;

Then up he gets, and off he sets,

For sake o’ Willie Chalmers.

I doubt na, lass, that weel ken’d name

May cost a pair o’ blushes; 10

I am nae stranger to your fame,

Nor his warm urged wishes.

Your bonie face sae mild and sweet,

His honest heart enamours,

And faith ye’ll no be lost a whit, 15

Tho’ wair’d on Willie Chalmers.

Auld Truth hersel’ might swear yer’e fair,

And Honour safely back her;

And Modesty assume your air,

And ne’er a ane mistak her: 20

And sic twa love-inspiring een

Might fire even holy palmers;

Nae wonder then they’ve fatal been

To honest Willie Chalmers.

I doubt na fortune may you shore 25

Some mim-mou’d pouther’d priestie,

Fu’ lifted up wi’ Hebrew lore,

And band upon his breastie:

But oh! what signifies to you

His lexicons and grammars; 30

The feeling heart’s the royal blue,

And that’s wi’ Willie Chalmers.

Some gapin’, glowrin’ countra laird

May warsle for your favour;

May claw his lug, and straik his beard, 35

And hoast up some palaver:

My bonie maid, before ye wed

Sic clumsy-witted hammers,

Seek Heaven for help, and barefit skelp

Awa wi’ Willie Chalmers. 40

Forgive the Bard! my fond regard

For ane that shares my bosom,

Inspires my Muse to gie ‘m his dues

For deil a hair I roose him.

May powers aboon unite you soon, 45

And fructify your amours, —

And every year come in mair dear

To you and Willie Chalmers.

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

132.

Reply to a Trimming Epistle, received from a Tailor

WHAT ails ye now, ye lousie bitch

To thresh my back at sic a pitch?

Losh, man! hae mercy wi’ your natch,

Your bodkin’s bauld;

I didna suffer half sae much 5

Frae Daddie Auld.

What tho’ at times, when I grow crouse,

I gie their wames a random pouse,

Is that enough for you to souse

Your servant sae? 10

Gae mind your seam, ye prick-the-louse,

An’ jag-the-flea!

King David, o’ poetic brief,

Wrocht ‘mang the lasses sic mischief

As filled his after-life wi’ grief, 15

An’ bluidy rants,

An’ yet he’s rank’d amang the chief

O’ lang-syne saunts.

And maybe, Tam, for a’ my cants,

My wicked rhymes, an’ drucken rants, 20

I’ll gie auld cloven’s Clootie’s haunts

An unco slip yet,

An’ snugly sit amang the saunts,

At Davie’s hip yet!

But, fegs! the session says I maun 25

Gae fa’ upo’ anither plan

Than garrin lasses coup the cran,

Clean heels ower body,

An’ sairly thole their mother’s ban

Afore the howdy. 30

This leads me on to tell for sport,

How I did wi’ the Session sort;

Auld Clinkum, at the inner port,

Cried three times, “Robin!

Come hither lad, and answer for’t, 35

Ye’re blam’d for jobbin!”

Wi’ pinch I put a Sunday’s face on,

An’ snoov’d awa before the Session:

I made an open, fair confession —

I scorn’t to lee, 40

An’ syne Mess John, beyond expression,

Fell foul o’ me.

A fornicator-loun he call’d me,

An’ said my faut frae bliss expell’d me;

I own’d the tale was true he tell’d me, 45

“But, what the matter?

(Quo’ I) I fear unless ye geld me,

I’ll ne’er be better!”

“Geld you! (quo’ he) an’ what for no?

If that your right hand, leg or toe 50

Should ever prove your sp’ritual foe,

You should remember

To cut it aff — an’ what for no

Your dearest member?”

“Na, na, (quo’ I,) I’m no for that, 55

Gelding’s nae better than ‘tis ca’t;

I’d rather suffer for my faut

A hearty flewit,

As sair owre hip as ye can draw’t,

Tho’ I should rue it. 60

“Or, gin ye like to end the bother,

To please us a’ — I’ve just ae ither —

When next wi’ yon lass I forgather,

Whate’er betide it,

I’ll frankly gie her ‘t a’ thegither, 65

An’ let her guide it.”

But, sir, this pleas’d them warst of a’,

An’ therefore, Tam, when that I saw,

I said “Gude night,” an’ cam’ awa’,

An’ left the Session; 70

I saw they were resolved a’

On my oppression.

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

133.

The Brigs of Ayr

A Poem

Inscribed to JOHN BALLANTINE, Esq., Ayr.

THE SIMPLE Bard, rough at the rustic plough,

Learning his tuneful trade from ev’ry bough;

The chanting linnet, or the mellow thrush,

Hailing the setting sun, sweet, in the green thorn bush;

The soaring lark, the perching red-breast shrill, 5

Or deep-ton’d plovers grey, wild-whistling o’er the hill;

Shall he — nurst in the peasant’s lowly shed,

To hardy independence bravely bred,

By early poverty to hardship steel’d.

And train’d to arms in stern Misfortune’s field — 10

Shall he be guilty of their hireling crimes,

The servile, mercenary Swiss of rhymes?

Or labour hard the panegyric close,

With all the venal soul of dedicating prose?

No! though his artless strains he rudely sings, 15

And throws his hand uncouthly o’er the strings,

He glows with all the spirit of the Bard,

Fame, honest fame, his great, his dear reward.

Still, if some patron’s gen’rous care he trace,

Skill’d in the secret, to bestow with grace; 20

When Ballantine befriends his humble name,

And hands the rustic stranger up to fame,

With heartfelt throes his grateful bosom swells,

The godlike bliss, to give, alone excels.

–- –- –-

‘Twas when the stacks get on their winter hap, 25

And thack and rape secure the toil-won crap;

Potatoe-bings are snugged up frae skaith

O’ coming Winter’s biting, frosty breath;

The bees, rejoicing o’er their summer toils,

Unnumber’d buds an’ flow’rs’ delicious spoils, 30

Seal’d up with frugal care in massive waxen piles,

Are doom’d by Man, that tyrant o’er the weak,

The death o’ devils, smoor’d wi’ brimstone reek:

The thundering guns are heard on ev’ry side,

The wounded coveys, reeling, scatter wide; 35

The feather’d field-mates, bound by Nature’s tie,

Sires, mothers, children, in one carnage lie:

(What warm, poetic heart but inly bleeds,

And execrates man’s savage, ruthless deeds!)

Nae mair the flow’r in field or meadow springs, 40

Nae mair the grove with airy concert rings,

Except perhaps the Robin’s whistling glee,

Proud o’ the height o’ some bit half-lang tree:

The hoary morns precede the sunny days,

Mild, calm, serene, wide spreads the noontide blaze, 45

While thick the gosamour waves wanton in the rays.

‘Twas in that season, when a simple Bard,

Unknown and poor-simplicity’s reward! —

Ae night, within the ancient brugh of Ayr,

By whim inspir’d, or haply prest wi’ care, 50

He left his bed, and took his wayward route,

And down by Simpson’s wheel’d the left about:

(Whether impell’d by all-directing Fate,

To witness what I after shall narrate;

Or whether, rapt in meditation high, 55

He wander’d out, he knew not where or why:)

The drowsy Dungeon-clock had number’d two, and Wallace Tower had sworn the fact was true:

The tide-swoln firth, with sullen-sounding roar,

Through the still night dash’d hoarse along the shore.

All else was hush’d as Nature’s closed e’e; 60

The silent moon shone high o’er tower and tree;

The chilly frost, beneath the silver beam,

Crept, gently-crusting, o’er the glittering stream —

When, lo! on either hand the list’ning Bard,

The clanging sugh of whistling wings is heard; 65

Two dusky forms dart through the midnight air;

Swift as the gos drives on the wheeling hare;

Ane on th’ Auld Brig his airy shape uprears,

The other flutters o’er the rising piers:

Our warlock Rhymer instantly dexcried 70

The Sprites that owre the Brigs of Ayr preside.

(That Bards are second-sighted is nae joke,

And ken the lingo of the sp’ritual folk;

Fays, Spunkies, Kelpies, a’, they can explain them,

And even the very deils they brawly ken them). 75

“Auld Brig” appear’d of ancient Pictish race,

The very wrinkles Gothic in his face;

He seem’d as he wi’ Time had warstl’d lang,

Yet, teughly doure, he bade an unco bang.

“New Brig” was buskit in a braw new coat, 80

That he, at Lon’on, frae ane Adams got;

In ‘s hand five taper staves as smooth ‘s a bead,

Wi’ virls and whirlygigums at the head.

The Goth was stalking round with anxious search,

Spying the time-worn flaws in every arch; 85

It chanc’d his new-come neibor took his e’e,

And e’en a vexed and angry heart had he!

Wi’ thieveless sneer to see his modish mien,

He, down the water, gies him this guid-e’en: —

AULD BRIG

“I doubt na, frien’, ye’ll think ye’re nae sheepshank, 90

Ance ye were streekit owre frae bank to bank!

But gin ye be a brig as auld as me —

Tho’ faith, that date, I doubt, ye’ll never see —

There’ll be, if that day come, I’ll wad a boddle,

Some fewer whigmaleeries in your noddle.” 95

NEW BRIG

“Auld Vandal! ye but show your little mense,

Just much about it wi’ your scanty sense:

Will your poor, narrow foot-path of a street,

Where twa wheel-barrows tremble when they meet,

Your ruin’d, formless bulk o’ stane and lime, 100

Compare wi’ bonie brigs o’ modern time?

There’s men of taste wou’d tak the Ducat stream,

Tho’ they should cast the very sark and swim,

E’er they would grate their feelings wi’ the view

O’ sic an ugly, Gothic hulk as you.” 105

AULD BRIG

“Conceited gowk! puff’d up wi’ windy pride!

This mony a year I’ve stood the flood an’ tide;

And tho’ wi’ crazy eild I’m sair forfairn,

I’ll be a brig when ye’re a shapeless cairn!

As yet ye little ken about the matter, 110

But twa-three winters will inform ye better.

When heavy, dark, continued, a’-day rains,

Wi’ deepening deluges o’erflow the plains;

When from the hills where springs the brawling Coil,

Or stately Lugar’s mossy fountains boil; 115

Or where the Greenock winds his moorland course.

Or haunted Garpal draws his feeble source,

Aroused by blustering winds an’ spotting thowes,

In mony a torrent down the snaw-broo rowes;

While crashing ice, borne on the rolling spate, 120

Sweeps dams, an’ mills, an’ brigs, a’ to the gate;

And from Glenbuck, down to the Ratton-key,

Auld Ayr is just one lengthen’d, tumbling sea —

Then down ye’ll hurl, (deil nor ye never rise!)

And dash the gumlie jaups up to the pouring skies! 125

A lesson sadly teaching, to your cost,

That Architecture’s noble art is lost!”

NEW BRIG

“Fine architecture, trowth, I needs must say’t o’t,

The L — d be thankit that we’ve tint the gate o’t!

Gaunt, ghastly, ghaist-alluring edifices, 130

Hanging with threat’ning jut, like precipices;

O’er-arching, mouldy, gloom-inspiring coves,

Supporting roofs, fantastic, stony groves;

Windows and doors in nameless sculptures drest

With order, symmetry, or taste unblest; 135

Forms like some bedlam Statuary’s dream,

The craz’d creations of misguided whim;

Forms might be worshipp’d on the bended knee,

And still the second dread command be free;

Their likeness is not found on earth, in air, or sea! 140

Mansions that would disgrace the building taste

Of any mason reptile, bird or beast:

Fit only for a doited monkish race,

Or frosty maids forsworn the dear embrace,

Or cuifs of later times, wha held the notion, 145

That sullen gloom was sterling, true devotion:

Fancies that our guid Brugh denies protection,

And soon may they expire, unblest wi’ resurrection!”

AULD BRIG

“O ye, my dear-remember’d, ancient yealings,

Were ye but here to share my wounded feelings! 150

Ye worthy Proveses, an’ mony a Bailie,

Wha in the paths o’ righteousness did toil aye;

Ye dainty Deacons, and ye douce Conveners,

To whom our moderns are but causey-cleaners

Ye godly Councils, wha hae blest this town; 155

ye godly Brethren o’ the sacred gown,

Wha meekly gie your hurdies to the smiters;

And (what would now be strange), ye godly Writers;

A’ ye douce folk I’ve borne aboon the broo,

Were ye but here, what would ye say or do? 160

How would your spirits groan in deep vexation,

To see each melancholy alteration;

And, agonising, curse the time and place

When ye begat the base degen’rate race!

Nae langer rev’rend men, their country’s glory, 165

In plain braid Scots hold forth a plain braid story;

Nae langer thrifty citizens, an’ douce,

Meet owre a pint, or in the Council-house;

But staumrel, corky-headed, graceless Gentry,

The herryment and ruin of the country; 170

Men, three-parts made by tailors and by barbers,

Wha waste your weel-hain’d gear on d—‘d new brigs and harbours!”

NEW BRIG

“Now haud you there! for faith ye’ve said enough,

And muckle mair than ye can mak to through.

As for your Priesthood, I shall say but little, 175

Corbies and Clergy are a shot right kittle:

But, under favour o’ your langer beard,

Abuse o’ Magistrates might weel be spar’d;

To liken them to your auld-warld squad,

I must needs say, comparisons are odd. 180

In Ayr, wag-wits nae mair can hae a handle

To mouth ‘a Citizen,’ a term o’ scandal;

Nae mair the Council waddles down the street,

In all the pomp of ignorant conceit;

Men wha grew wise priggin owre hops and raisins, 185

Or gather’d lib’ral views in Bonds and Seisins:

If haply Knowledge, on a random tramp,

Had shor’d them with a glimmer of his lamp,

And would to Common-sense for once betray’d them,

Plain, dull Stupidity stept kindly in to aid them.” 190

What farther clish-ma-claver aight been said,

What bloody wars, if Sprites had blood to shed,

No man can tell; but, all before their sight,

A fairy train appear’d in order bright;

Adown the glittering stream they featly danc’d; 195

Bright to the moon their various dresses glanc’d:

They footed o’er the wat’ry glass so neat,

The infant ice scarce bent beneath their feet:

While arts of Minstrelsy among them rung,

And soul-ennobling Bards heroic ditties sung. 200

O had M’Lauchlan, thairm-inspiring sage,

Been there to hear this heavenly band engage,

When thro’ his dear strathspeys they bore with Highland rage;

Or when they struck old Scotia’s melting airs,

The lover’s raptured joys or bleeding cares; 205

How would his Highland lug been nobler fir’d,

And ev’n his matchless hand with finer touch inspir’d!

No guess could tell what instrument appear’d,

But all the soul of Music’s self was heard;

Harmonious concert rung in every part, 210

While simple melody pour’d moving on the heart.

The Genius of the Stream in front appears,

A venerable Chief advanc’d in years;

His hoary head with water-lilies crown’d,

His manly leg with garter-tangle bound. 215

Next came the loveliest pair in all the ring,

Sweet female Beauty hand in hand with Spring;

Then, crown’d with flow’ry hay, came Rural Joy,

And Summer, with his fervid-beaming eye;

All-cheering Plenty, with her flowing horn, 220

Led yellow Autumn wreath’d with nodding corn;

Then Winter’s time-bleach’d locks did hoary show,

By Hospitality with cloudless brow:

Next followed Courage with his martial stride,

From where the Feal wild-woody coverts hide; 225

Benevolence, with mild, benignant air,

A female form, came from the tow’rs of Stair;

Learning and Worth in equal measures trode,

From simple Catrine, their long-lov’d abode:

Last, white-rob’d Peace, crown’d with a hazel wreath, 230

To rustic Agriculture did bequeath

The broken, iron instruments of death:

At sight of whom our Sprites forgat their kindling wrath.

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

134.

The Night was Still (Fragment of a Song)

THE NIGHT was still, and o’er the hill

The moon shone on the castle wa’;

The mavis sang, while dew-drops hang

Around her on the castle wa’;

Sae merrily they danced the ring 5

Frae eenin’ till the cock did craw;

And aye the o’erword o’ the spring

Was “Irvine’s bairns are bonie a’.”

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

135.

Epigram on Rough Roads

I’M now arrived — thanks to the gods! —

Thro’ pathways rough and muddy,

A certain sign that makin roads

Is no this people’s study:

Altho’ Im not wi’ Scripture cram’d, 5

I’m sure the Bible says

That heedless sinners shall be damn’d,

Unless they mend their ways.

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

136.

Prayer — O Thou Dread Power

Lying at a reverend friend’s house one night, the author left the following verses in the room where he slept: —

O THOU dread Power, who reign’st above,

I know thou wilt me hear,

When for this scene of peace and love,

I make this prayer sincere.

The hoary Sire — the mortal stroke, 5

Long, long be pleas’d to spare;

To bless this little filial flock,

And show what good men are.

She, who her lovely offspring eyes

With tender hopes and fears, 10

O bless her with a mother’s joys,

But spare a mother’s tears!

Their hope, their stay, their darling youth.

In manhood’s dawning blush,

Bless him, Thou God of love and truth, 15

Up to a parent’s wish.

The beauteous, seraph sister-band —

With earnest tears I pray —

Thou know’st the snares on ev’ry hand,

Guide Thou their steps alway. 20

When, soon or late, they reach that coast,

O’er Life’s rough ocean driven,

May they rejoice, no wand’rer lost,

A family in Heaven!

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

137.

Farewell to the Banks of Ayr (Song)

Tune— “Roslin Castle.”

“I composed this song as I conveyed my chest so far on my road to Greenock, where I was to embark in a few days for Jamaica. I meant it as my farewell dirge to my native land.” — R. B.

THE GLOOMY night is gath’ring fast,

Loud roars the wild, inconstant blast,

Yon murky cloud is foul with rain,

I see it driving o’er the plain;

The hunter now has left the moor. 5

The scatt’red coveys meet secure;

While here I wander, prest with care,

Along the lonely banks of Ayr.

The Autumn mourns her rip’ning corn

By early Winter’s ravage torn; 10

Across her placid, azure sky,

She sees the scowling tempest fly:

Chill runs my blood to hear it rave;

I think upon the stormy wave,

Where many a danger I must dare, 15

Far from the bonie banks of Ayr.

‘Tis not the surging billow’s roar,

‘Tis not that fatal, deadly shore;

Tho’ death in ev’ry shape appear,

The wretched have no more to fear: 20

But round my heart the ties are bound,

That heart transpierc’d with many a wound;

These bleed afresh, those ties I tear,

To leave the bonie banks of Ayr.

Farewell, old Coila’s hills and dales, 25

Her healthy moors and winding vales;

The scenes where wretched Fancy roves,

Pursuing past, unhappy loves!

Farewell, my friends! farewell, my foes!

My peace with these, my love with those: 30

The bursting tears my heart declare —

Farewell, the bonie banks of Ayr!

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

138.

Address to the Toothache

MY curse upon your venom’d stang,

That shoots my tortur’d gums alang,

An’ thro’ my lug gies mony a twang,

Wi’ gnawing vengeance,

Tearing my nerves wi’ bitter pang, 5

Like racking engines!

When fevers burn, or argues freezes,

Rheumatics gnaw, or colics squeezes,

Our neibor’s sympathy can ease us,

Wi’ pitying moan; 10

But thee — thou hell o’ a’ diseases —

They mock our groan.

Adown my beard the slavers trickle

I throw the wee stools o’er the mickle,

While round the fire the giglets keckle, 15

To see me loup,

While, raving mad, I wish a heckle

Were in their doup!

In a’ the numerous human dools,

Ill hairsts, daft bargains, cutty stools, 20

Or worthy frien’s rak’d i’ the mools, —

Sad sight to see!

The tricks o’ knaves, or fash o’fools,

Thou bear’st the gree!

Where’er that place be priests ca’ hell, 25

Where a’ the tones o’ misery yell,

An’ ranked plagues their numbers tell,

In dreadfu’ raw,

Thou, TOOTHACHE, surely bear’st the bell,

Amang them a’! 30

O thou grim, mischief-making chiel,

That gars the notes o’ discord squeel,

Till daft mankind aft dance a reel

In gore, a shoe-thick,

Gie a’ the faes o’ SCOTLAND’S weal 35

A townmond’s toothache!

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

139.

Lines on Meeting with Lord Daer

THIS wot ye all whom it concerns,

I, Rhymer Robin, alias Burns,

October twenty-third,

A ne’er-to-be-forgotten day,

Sae far I sprackl’d up the brae, 5

I dinner’d wi’ a Lord.

I’ve been at drucken writers’ feasts,

Nay, been bitch-fou ‘mang godly priests —

Wi’ rev’rence be it spoken! —

I’ve even join’d the honour’d jorum, 10

When mighty Squireships of the quorum,

Their hydra drouth did sloken.

But wi’ a Lord! — stand out my shin,

A Lord — a Peer — an Earl’s son!

Up higher yet, my bonnet 15

An’ sic a Lord! — lang Scoth ells twa,

Our Peerage he o’erlooks them a’,

As I look o’er my sonnet.

But O for Hogarth’s magic pow’r!

To show Sir Bardie’s willyart glow’r, 20

An’ how he star’d and stammer’d,

When, goavin, as if led wi’ branks,

An’ stumpin on his ploughman shanks,

He in the parlour hammer’d.

I sidying shelter’d in a nook, 25

An’ at his Lordship steal’t a look,

Like some portentous omen;

Except good sense and social glee,

An’ (what surpris’d me) modesty,

I marked nought uncommon. 30

I watch’d the symptoms o’ the Great,

The gentle pride, the lordly state,

The arrogant assuming;

The fient a pride, nae pride had he,

Nor sauce, nor state, that I could see, 35

Mair than an honest ploughman.

Then from his Lordship I shall learn,

Henceforth to meet with unconcern

One rank as weel’s another;

Nae honest, worthy man need care 40

To meet with noble youthful Daer,

For he but meets a brother.

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

140.

Masonic Song — Ye Sons of Old Killie

Tune— “Shawn-boy,” or “Over the water to Charlie.”

YE sons of old Killie, assembled by Willie,

To follow the noble vocation;

Your thrifty old mother has scarce such another

To sit in that honoured station.

I’ve little to say, but only to pray, 5

As praying’s the ton of your fashion;

A prayer from thee Muse you well may excuse

‘Tis seldom her favourite passion.

Ye powers who preside o’er the wind, and the tide,

Who marked each element’s border; 10

Who formed this frame with beneficent aim,

Whose sovereign statute is order: —

Within this dear mansion, may wayward Contention

Or withered Envy ne’er enter;

May secrecy round be the mystical bound, 15

And brotherly Love be the centre!

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

141.

Tam Samson’s Elegy

“An honest man’s the noblest work of God” — POPE.

When this worthy old sportman went out, last muirfowl season, he supposed it was to be, in Ossian’s phrase, “the last of his fields,” and expressed an ardent wish to die and be buried in the muirs. On this hint the author composed his elegy and epitaph. — R. B., 1787.

HAS auld Kilmarnock seen the deil?

Or great Mackinlay thrawn his heel?

Or Robertson again grown weel,

To preach an’ read?

“Na’ waur than a’! cries ilka chiel, 5

“Tam Samson’s dead!”

Kilmarnock lang may grunt an’ grane,

An’ sigh, an’ sab, an’ greet her lane,

An’ cleed her bairns, man, wife, an’ wean,

In mourning weed; 10

To Death she’s dearly pay’d the kane —

Tam Samson’s dead!

The Brethren, o’ the mystic level

May hing their head in woefu’ bevel,

While by their nose the tears will revel, 15

Like ony bead;

Death’s gien the Lodge an unco devel;

Tam Samson’s dead!

When Winter muffles up his cloak,

And binds the mire like a rock; 20

When to the loughs the curlers flock,

Wi’ gleesome speed,

Wha will they station at the “cock?”

Tam Samson’s dead!

When Winter muffles up his cloak, 25

He was the king o’ a’ the core,

To guard, or draw, or wick a bore,

Or up the rink like Jehu roar,

In time o’ need;

But now he lags on Death’s “hog-score” — 30

Tam Samson’s dead!

Now safe the stately sawmont sail,

And trouts bedropp’d wi’ crimson hail,

And eels, weel-ken’d for souple tail,

And geds for greed, 35

Since, dark in Death’s fish-creel, we wail

Tam Samson’s dead!

Rejoice, ye birring paitricks a’;

Ye cootie muircocks, crousely craw;

Ye maukins, cock your fud fu’ braw 40

Withouten dread;

Your mortal fae is now awa;

Tam Samson’s dead!

That woefu’ morn be ever mourn’d,

Saw him in shooting graith adorn’d, 45

While pointers round impatient burn’d,

Frae couples free’d;

But och! he gaed and ne’er return’d!

Tam Samson’s dead!

In vain auld age his body batters, 50

In vain the gout his ancles fetters,

In vain the burns cam down like waters,

An acre braid!

Now ev’ry auld wife, greetin, clatters

“Tam Samson’s dead!” 55

Owre mony a weary hag he limpit,

An’ aye the tither shot he thumpit,

Till coward Death behind him jumpit,

Wi’ deadly feid;

Now he proclaims wi’ tout o’ trumpet, 60

“Tam Samson’s dead!”

When at his heart he felt the dagger,

He reel’d his wonted bottle-swagger,

But yet he drew the mortal trigger,

Wi’ weel-aimed heed; 65

“L — d, five!” he cry’d, an’ owre did stagger —

Tam Samson’s dead!

Ilk hoary hunter mourn’d a brither;

Ilk sportsman youth bemoan’d a father;

Yon auld gray stane, amang the heather, 70

Marks out his head;

Whare Burns has wrote, in rhyming blether,

“Tam Samson’s dead!”

There, low he lies, in lasting rest;

Perhaps upon his mould’ring breast 75

Some spitefu’ muirfowl bigs her nest

To hatch an’ breed:

Alas! nae mair he’ll them molest!

Tam Samson’s dead!

When August winds the heather wave, 80

And sportsmen wander by yon grave,

Three volleys let his memory crave,

O’ pouther an’ lead,

Till Echo answer frae her cave,

“Tam Samson’s dead!” 85

Heav’n rest his saul whare’er he be!

Is th’ wish o’ mony mae than me:

He had twa fauts, or maybe three,

Yet what remead?

Ae social, honest man want we: 90

Tam Samson’s dead!

THE EPITAPH

Tam Samson’s weel-worn clay here lies

Ye canting zealots, spare him!

If honest worth in Heaven rise,

Ye’ll mend or ye win near him. 95

PER CONTRA

Go, Fame, an’ canter like a filly

Thro’ a’ the streets an’ neuks o’ Killie;

Tell ev’ry social honest billie

To cease his grievin’;

For, yet unskaithed by Death’s gleg gullie. 100

Tam Samson’s leevin’!

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

142.

Epistle to Major Logan

HAIL, thairm-inspirin’, rattlin’ Willie!

Tho’ fortune’s road be rough an’ hilly

To every fiddling, rhyming billie,

We never heed,

But take it like the unback’d filly, 5

Proud o’ her speed.

When, idly goavin’, whiles we saunter,

Yirr! fancy barks, awa we canter,

Up hill, down brae, till some mischanter,

Some black bog-hole, 10

Arrests us; then the scathe an’ banter

We’re forced to thole.

Hale be your heart! hale be your fiddle!

Lang may your elbuck jink and diddle,

To cheer you through the weary widdle 15

O’ this wild warl’.

Until you on a crummock driddle,

A grey hair’d carl.

Come wealth, come poortith, late or soon,

Heaven send your heart-strings aye in tune, 20

And screw your temper-pins aboon

A fifth or mair

The melancholious, lazy croon

O’ cankrie care.

May still your life from day to day, 25

Nae “lente largo” in the play,

But “allegretto forte” gay,

Harmonious flow,

A sweeping, kindling, bauld strathspey —

Encore! Bravo! 30

A blessing on the cheery gang

Wha dearly like a jig or sang,

An’ never think o’ right an’ wrang

By square an’ rule,

But, as the clegs o’ feeling stang, 35

Are wise or fool.

My hand-waled curse keep hard in chase

The harpy, hoodock, purse-proud race,

Wha count on poortith as disgrace;

Their tuneless hearts, 40

May fireside discords jar a base

To a’ their parts.

But come, your hand, my careless brither,

I’ th’ ither warl’, if there’s anither,

An’ that there is, I’ve little swither 45

About the matter;

We, cheek for chow, shall jog thegither,

I’se ne’er bid better.

We’ve faults and failings — granted clearly,

We’re frail backsliding mortals merely, 50

Eve’s bonie squad, priests wyte them sheerly

For our grand fa’;

But still, but still, I like them dearly —

God bless them a’!

Ochone for poor Castalian drinkers, 55

When they fa’ foul o’ earthly jinkers!

The witching, curs’d, delicious blinkers

Hae put me hyte,

And gart me weet my waukrife winkers,

Wi’ girnin’spite. 60

By by yon moon! — and that’s high swearin —

An’ every star within my hearin!

An’ by her een wha was a dear ane!

I’ll ne’er forget;

I hope to gie the jads a clearin 65

In fair play yet.

My loss I mourn, but not repent it;

I’ll seek my pursie whare I tint it;

Ance to the Indies I were wonted,

Some cantraip hour 70

By some sweet elf I’ll yet be dinted;

Then vive l’amour!

Faites mes baissemains respectueuses,

To sentimental sister Susie,

And honest Lucky; no to roose you, 75

Ye may be proud,

That sic a couple Fate allows ye,

To grace your blood.

Nae mair at present can I measure,

An’ trowth my rhymin ware’s nae treasure; 80

But when in Ayr, some half-hour’s leisure,

Be’t light, be’t dark,

Sir Bard will do himself the pleasure

To call at Park.

ROBERT BURNS.

Mossgiel, 30th October, 1786.

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

143.

Fragment on Sensibility

RUSTICITY’S ungainly form

May cloud the highest mind;

But when the heart is nobly warm,

The good excuse will find.

Propriety’s cold, cautious rules 5

Warm fervour may o’erlook:

But spare poor sensibility

Th’ ungentle, harsh rebuke.

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

144.

A Winter Night

“Poor naked wretches, wheresoe’er you are,

That bide the pelting of this pitiless storm!

How shall your houseless heads, and unfed sides,

Your loop’d and window’d raggedness, defend you

From seasons such as these?” — SHAKESPEARE.

WHEN biting Boreas, fell and dour,

Sharp shivers thro’ the leafless bow’r;

When Phoebus gies a short-liv’d glow’r,

Far south the lift,

Dim-dark’ning thro’ the flaky show’r, 5

Or whirling drift:

Ae night the storm the steeples rocked,

Poor Labour sweet in sleep was locked,

While burns, wi’ snawy wreaths up-choked,

Wild-eddying swirl; 10

Or, thro’ the mining outlet bocked,

Down headlong hurl:

List’ning the doors an’ winnocks rattle,

I thought me on the ourie cattle,

Or silly sheep, wha bide this brattle 15

O’ winter war,

And thro’ the drift, deep-lairing, sprattle

Beneath a scar.

Ilk happing bird, — wee, helpless thing!

That, in the merry months o’ spring, 20

Delighted me to hear thee sing,

What comes o’ thee?

Whare wilt thou cow’r thy chittering wing,

An’ close thy e’e?

Ev’n you, on murdering errands toil’d, 25

Lone from your savage homes exil’d,

The blood-stain’d roost, and sheep-cote spoil’d

My heart forgets,

While pityless the tempest wild

Sore on you beats! 30

Now Phoebe in her midnight reign,

Dark-muff’d, view’d the dreary plain;

Still crowding thoughts, a pensive train,

Rose in my soul,

When on my ear this plantive strain, 35

Slow, solemn, stole: —

“Blow, blow, ye winds, with heavier gust!

And freeze, thou bitter-biting frost!

Descend, ye chilly, smothering snows!

Not all your rage, as now united, shows 40

More hard unkindness unrelenting,

Vengeful malice unrepenting.

Than heaven-illumin’d Man on brother Man bestows!

“See stern Oppression’s iron grip,

Or mad Ambition’s gory hand, 45

Sending, like blood-hounds from the slip,

Woe, Want, and Murder o’er a land!

Ev’n in the peaceful rural vale,

Truth, weeping, tells the mournful tale,

How pamper’d Luxury, Flatt’ry by her side, 50

The parasite empoisoning her ear,

With all the servile wretches in the rear,

Looks o’er proud Property, extended wide;

And eyes the simple, rustic hind,

Whose toil upholds the glitt’ring show — 55

A creature of another kind,

Some coarser substance, unrefin’d —

Plac’d for her lordly use thus far, thus vile, below!

“Where, where is Love’s fond, tender throe,

With lordly Honour’s lofty brow, 60

The pow’rs you proudly own?

Is there, beneath Love’s noble name,

Can harbour, dark, the selfish aim,

To bless himself alone?

Mark maiden-innocence a prey 65

To love-pretending snares:

This boasted Honour turns away,

Shunning soft Pity’s rising sway,

Regardless of the tears and unavailing pray’rs!

Perhaps this hour, in Misery’s squalid nest, 70

She strains your infant to her joyless breast,

And with a mother’s fears shrinks at the rocking blast!

“Oh ye! who, sunk in beds of down,

Feel not a want but what yourselves create,

Think, for a moment, on his wretched fate, 75

Whom friends and fortune quite disown!

Ill-satisfy’d keen nature’s clamorous call,

Stretch’d on his straw, he lays himself to sleep;

While through the ragged roof and chinky wall,

Chill, o’er his slumbers, piles the drifty heap! 80

Think on the dungeon’s grim confine,

Where Guilt and poor Misfortune pine!

Guilt, erring man, relenting view,

But shall thy legal rage pursue

The wretch, already crushed low 85

By cruel Fortune’s undeserved blow?

Affliction’s sons are brothers in distress;

A brother to relieve, how exquisite the bliss!”

I heard nae mair, for Chanticleer

Shook off the pouthery snaw, 90

And hail’d the morning with a cheer,

A cottage-rousing craw.

But deep this truth impress’d my mind —

Thro’ all His works abroad,

The heart benevolent and kind 95

The most resembles God.

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

145.

Yon Wild Mossy Mountains (Song)

YON wild mossy mountains sae lofty and wide,

That nurse in their bosom the youth o’ the Clyde,

Where the grouse lead their coveys thro’ the heather to feed,

And the shepherd tends his flock as he pipes on his reed.

Not Gowrie’s rich valley, nor Forth’s sunny shores, 5

To me hae the charms o’yon wild, mossy moors;

For there, by a lanely, sequestered stream,

Besides a sweet lassie, my thought and my dream.

Amang thae wild mountains shall still be my path,

Ilk stream foaming down its ain green, narrow strath; 10

For there, wi’ my lassie, the day lang I rove,

While o’er us unheeded flie the swift hours o’love.

She is not the fairest, altho’ she is fair;

O’ nice education but sma’ is her share;

Her parentage humble as humble can be; 15

But I lo’e the dear lassie because she lo’es me.

To Beauty what man but maun yield him a prize,

In her armour of glances, and blushes, and sighs?

And when wit and refinement hae polish’d her darts,

They dazzle our een, as they flie to our hearts. 20

But kindness, sweet kindness, in the fond-sparkling e’e,

Has lustre outshining the diamond to me;

And the heart beating love as I’m clasp’d in her arms,

O, these are my lassie’s all-conquering charms!

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

146.

Address to Edinburgh

EDINA! Scotia’s darling seat!

All hail thy palaces and tow’rs,

Where once, beneath a Monarch’s feet,

Sat Legislation’s sov’reign pow’rs:

From marking wildly scatt’red flow’rs, 5

As on the banks of Ayr I stray’d,

And singing, lone, the lingering hours,

I shelter in they honour’d shade.

Here Wealth still swells the golden tide,

As busy Trade his labours plies; 10

There Architecture’s noble pride

Bids elegance and splendour rise:

Here Justice, from her native skies,

High wields her balance and her rod;

There Learning, with his eagle eyes, 15

Seeks Science in her coy abode.

Thy sons, Edina, social, kind,

With open arms the stranger hail;

Their views enlarg’d, their liberal mind,

Above the narrow, rural vale: 20

Attentive still to Sorrow’s wail,

Or modest Merit’s silent claim;

And never may their sources fail!

And never Envy blot their name!

Thy daughters bright thy walks adorn, 25

Gay as the gilded summer sky,

Sweet as the dewy, milk-white thorn,

Dear as the raptur’d thrill of joy!

Fair Burnet strikes th’ adoring eye,

Heaven’s beauties on my fancy shine; 30

I see the Sire of Love on high,

And own His work indeed divine!

There, watching high the least alarms,

Thy rough, rude fortress gleams afar;

Like some bold veteran, grey in arms, 35

And mark’d with many a seamy scar:

The pond’rous wall and massy bar,

Grim-rising o’er the rugged rock,

Have oft withstood assailing war,

And oft repell’d th’ invader’s shock. 40

With awe-struck thought, and pitying tears,

I view that noble, stately Dome,

Where Scotia’s kings of other years,

Fam’d heroes! had their royal home:

Alas, how chang’d the times to come! 45

Their royal name low in the dust!

Their hapless race wild-wand’ring roam!

Tho’ rigid Law cries out “‘twas just!”

Wild beats my heart to trace your steps,

Whose ancestors, in days of yore, 50

Thro’ hostile ranks and ruin’d gaps

Old Scotia’s bloody lion bore:

Ev’n I who sing in rustic lore,

Haply my sires have left their shed,

And fac’d grim Danger’s loudest roar, 55

Bold-following where your fathers led!

Edina! Scotia’s darling seat!

All hail thy palaces and tow’rs;

Where once, beneath a Monarch’s feet,

Sat Legislation’s sovereign pow’rs: 60

From marking wildly-scatt’red flow’rs,

As on the banks of Ayr I stray’d,

And singing, lone, the ling’ring hours,

I shelter in thy honour’d shade.

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

147.

Address to a Haggis

FAIR fa’ your honest, sonsie face,

Great chieftain o’ the pudding-race!

Aboon them a’ ye tak your place,

Painch, tripe, or thairm:

Weel are ye wordy o’a grace 5

As lang’s my arm.

The groaning trencher there ye fill,

Your hurdies like a distant hill,

Your pin was help to mend a mill

In time o’need, 10

While thro’ your pores the dews distil

Like amber bead.

His knife see rustic Labour dight,

An’ cut you up wi’ ready sleight,

Trenching your gushing entrails bright, 15

Like ony ditch;

And then, O what a glorious sight,

Warm-reekin’, rich!

Then, horn for horn, they stretch an’ strive:

Deil tak the hindmost! on they drive, 20

Till a’ their weel-swall’d kytes belyve

Are bent like drums;

Then auld Guidman, maist like to rive,

Bethankit! hums.

Is there that owre his French ragout 25

Or olio that wad staw a sow,

Or fricassee wad make her spew

Wi’ perfect sconner,

Looks down wi’ sneering, scornfu’ view

On sic a dinner? 30

Poor devil! see him owre his trash,

As feckles as wither’d rash,

His spindle shank, a guid whip-lash;

His nieve a nit;

Thro’ blody flood or field to dash, 35

O how unfit!

But mark the Rustic, haggis-fed,

The trembling earth resounds his tread.

Clap in his walie nieve a blade,

He’ll mak it whissle; 40

An’ legs an’ arms, an’ hands will sned,

Like taps o’ trissle.

Ye Pow’rs, wha mak mankind your care,

And dish them out their bill o’ fare,

Auld Scotland wants nae skinking ware 45

That jaups in luggies;

But, if ye wish her gratefu’ prayer

Gie her a haggis!

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

1787

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

148.

To Miss Logan, with Beattie’s Poems

AGAIN the silent wheels of time

Their annual round have driven,

And you, tho’ scarce in maiden prime,

Are so much nearer Heaven.

No gifts have I from Indian coasts 5

The infant year to hail;

I send you more than India boasts,

In Edwin’s simple tale.

Our sex with guile, and faithless love,

Is charg’d, perhaps too true; 10

But may, dear maid, each lover prove

An Edwin still to you.

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

149.

Mr. William Smellie: A Sketch

SHREWD Willie Smellie to Crochallan came;

The old cock’d hat, the grey surtout the same;

His bristling beard just rising in its might,

‘Twas four long nights and days to shaving night:

His uncomb’d grizzly locks, wild staring, thatch’d 5

A head for thought profound and clear, unmatch’d;

Yet tho’ his caustic wit was biting-rude,

His heart was warm, benevolent, and good.

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

150.

Rattlin, Roarin Willie (Song)

AS I cam by Crochallan,

I cannilie keekit ben;

Rattlin’, roarin’ Willie

Was sittin at yon boord-en’;

Sittin at yon boord-en, 5

And amang gude companie;

Rattlin’, roarin’ Willie,

You’re welcome hame to me!

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

151.

Bonie Dundee: A Fragment (Song)

MY blessin’s upon thy sweet wee lippie!

My blessin’s upon thy e’e-brie!

Thy smiles are sae like my blythe sodger laddie,

Thou’s aye the dearer, and dearer to me!

But I’ll big a bow’r on yon bonie banks, 5

Whare Tay rins wimplin’ by sae clear;

An’ I’ll cleed thee in the tartan sae fine,

And mak thee a man like thy daddie dear.

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

152.

Extempore in the Court of Session

Tune— “Killiercrankie.”

LORD ADVOCATE

HE clenched his pamphlet in his fist,

He quoted and he hinted,

Till, in a declamation-mist,

His argument he tint it:

He gaped for’t, he graped for’t, 5

He fand it was awa, man;

But what his common sense came short,

He eked out wi’ law, man.

MR. ERSKINE

Collected, Harry stood awee,

Then open’d out his arm, man; 10

His Lordship sat wi’ ruefu’ e’e,

And ey’d the gathering storm, man:

Like wind-driven hail it did assail’

Or torrents owre a lin, man:

The BENCH sae wise, lift up their eyes, 15

Half-wauken’d wi’ the din, man.

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

153.

Inscription for the Headstone of Fergusson the Poet

NO sculptured marble here, nor pompous lay,

“No storied urn nor animated bust;”

This simple stone directs pale Scotia’s way,

To pour her sorrows o’er the Poet’s dust.

ADDITIONAL STANZAS

She mourns, sweet tuneful youth, thy hapless fate; 5

Tho’ all the powers of song thy fancy fired,

Yet Luxury and Wealth lay by in state,

And, thankless, starv’d what they so much admired.

This tribute, with a tear, now gives

A brother Bard-he can no more bestow: 10

But dear to fame thy Song immortal lives,

A nobler monument than Art can shew.

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

154.

Lines Inscribed under Fergusson’s Portrait

CURSE on ungrateful man, that can be pleased,

And yet can starve the author of the pleasure.

O thou, my elder brother in misfortune,

By far my elder brother in the Muses,

With tears I pity thy unhappy fate! 5

Why is the Bard unpitied by the world,

Yet has so keen a relish of its pleasures?

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

155.

Epistle to Mrs. Scott of Wauchope House

Gudewife of Wauchope-House, Roxburghshire.

GUDEWIFE,

I MIND it weel in early date,

When I was bardless, young, and blate,

An’ first could thresh the barn,

Or haud a yokin’ at the pleugh;

An, tho’ forfoughten sair eneugh, 5

Yet unco proud to learn:

When first amang the yellow corn

A man I reckon’d was,

An’ wi’ the lave ilk merry morn

Could rank my rig and lass, 10

Still shearing, and clearing

The tither stooked raw,

Wi’ claivers, an’ haivers,

Wearing the day awa.

E’en then, a wish, (I mind its pow’r), 15

A wish that to my latest hour

Shall strongly heave my breast,

That I for poor auld Scotland’s sake

Some usefu’ plan or book could make,

Or sing a sang at least. 20

The rough burr-thistle, spreading wide

Amang the bearded bear,

I turn’d the weeder-clips aside,

An’ spar’d the symbol dear:

No nation, no station, 25

My envy e’er could raise;

A Scot still, but blot still,

I knew nae higher praise.

But still the elements o’ sang,

In formless jumble, right an’ wrang, 30

Wild floated in my brain;

‘Till on that har’st I said before,

May partner in the merry core,

She rous’d the forming strain;

I see her yet, the sonsie quean, 35

That lighted up my jingle,

Her witching smile, her pawky een

That gart my heart-strings tingle;

I fired, inspired,

At every kindling keek, 40

But bashing, and dashing,

I feared aye to speak.

Health to the sex! ilk guid chiel says:

Wi’ merry dance in winter days,

An’ we to share in common; 45

The gust o’ joy, the balm of woe,

The saul o’ life, the heaven below,

Is rapture-giving woman.

Ye surly sumphs, who hate the name,

Be mindfu’ o’ your mither; 50

She, honest woman, may think shame

That ye’re connected with her:

Ye’re wae men, ye’re nae men

That slight the lovely dears;

To shame ye, disclaim ye, 55

Ilk honest birkie swears.

For you, no bred to barn and byre,

Wha sweetly tune the Scottish lyre,

Thanks to you for your line:

The marled plaid ye kindly spare, 60

By me should gratefully be ware;

‘Twad please me to the nine.

I’d be mair vauntie o’ my hap,

Douce hingin owre my curple,

Than ony ermine ever lap, 65

Or proud imperial purple.

Farewell then, lang hale then,

An’ plenty be your fa;

May losses and crosses

Ne’er at your hallan ca’!

R. BURNS.

March, 1787 70

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

156.

Verses inscribed under a Noble Earl’s Picture

WHOSE is that noble, dauntless brow?

And whose that eye of fire?

And whose that generous princely mien,

E’en rooted foes admire?

Stranger! to justly show that brow, 5

And mark that eye of fire,

Would take His hand, whose vernal tints

His other works admire.

Bright as a cloudless summer sun,

With stately port he moves; 10

His guardian Seraph eyes with awe

The noble Ward he loves.

Among the illustrious Scottish sons

That chief thou may’st discern,

Mark Scotia’s fond-returning eye, — 15

It dwells upon Glencairn.

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

157.

Prologue, spoken by Mr. Woods at Edinburgh

Spoken by Mr. Woods on his benefit-night, Monday, 16th April, 1787.

WHEN, by a generous Public’s kind acclaim,

That dearest meed is granted — honest fame;

Waen here your favour is the actor’s lot,

Nor even the man in private life forgot;

What breast so dead to heavenly Virtue’s glow, 5

But heaves impassion’d with the grateful throe?

Poor is the task to please a barb’rous throng,

It needs no Siddons’ powers in Southern’s song;

But here an ancient nation, fam’d afar,

For genius, learning high, as great in war. 10

Hail, CALEDONIA, name for ever dear!

Before whose sons I’m honour’d to appear?

Where every science, every nobler art,

That can inform the mind or mend the heart,

Is known; as grateful nations oft have found, 15

Far as the rude barbarian marks the bound.

Philosophy, no idle pedant dream,

Here holds her search by heaven-taught Reason’s beam;

Here History paints with elegance and force

The tide of Empire’s fluctuating course; 20

Here Douglas forms wild Shakespeare into plan,

And Harley rouses all the God in man.

When well-form’d taste and sparkling wit unite

With manly lore, or female beauty bright,

(Beauty, where faultless symmetry and grace 25

Can only charm us in the second place),

Witness my heart, how oft with panting fear,

As on this night, I’ve met these judges here!

But still the hope Experience taught to live,

Equal to judge — you’re candid to forgive. 30

No hundred-headed riot here we meet,

With decency and law beneath his feet;

Nor Insolence assumes fair Freedom’s name:

Like CALEDONIANS, you applaud or blame.

O Thou, dread Power! whose empire-giving hand 35

Has oft been stretch’d to shield the honour’d land!

Strong may she glow with all her ancient fire;

May every son be worthy of his sire;

Firm may she rise, with generous disdain

At Tyranny’s, or direr Pleasure’s chain; 40

Still Self-dependent in her native shore,

Bold may she brave grim Danger’s loudest roar,

Till Fate the curtain drop on worlds to be no more.

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

158.

The Bonie Moor-hen (Song)

THE HEATHER was blooming, the meadows were mawn,

Our lads gaed a-hunting ae day at the dawn,

O’er moors and o’er mosses and mony a glen,

At length they discover’d a bonie moor-hen.

Chorus. — I rede you, beware at the hunting, young men, 5

I rede you, beware at the hunting, young men;

Take some on the wing, and some as they spring,

But cannily steal on a bonie moor-hen.

Sweet-brushing the dew from the brown heather bells

Her colours betray’d her on yon mossy fells; 10

Her plumage outlustr’d the pride o’ the spring

And O! as she wanton’d sae gay on the wing.

I rede you, &c.

Auld Phoebus himself, as he peep’d o’er the hill,

In spite at her plumage he tried his skill; 15

He levell’d his rays where she bask’d on the brae —

His rays were outshone, and but mark’d where she lay.

I rede you,&c.

They hunted the valley, they hunted the hill,

The best of our lads wi’ the best o’ their skill; 20

But still as the fairest she sat in their sight,

Then, whirr! she was over, a mile at a flight.

I rede you, &c.

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

159.

My Lord a-Hunting he is gane (Song)

Chorus. — MY lady’s gown, there’s gairs upon’t,

And gowden flowers sae rare upon’t;

But Jenny’s jimps and jirkinet,

My lord thinks meikle mair upon’t.

My lord a-hunting he is gone, 5

But hounds or hawks wi’ him are nane;

By Colin’s cottage lies his game,

If Colin’s Jenny be at hame.

My lady’s gown, &c.

My lady’s white, my lady’s red, 10

And kith and kin o’ Cassillis’ blude;

But her ten-pund lands o’ tocher gude;

Were a’ the charms his lordship lo’ed.

My lady’s gown, &c.

Out o’er yon muir, out o’er yon moss, 15

Whare gor-cocks thro’ the heather pass,

There wons auld Colin’s bonie lass,

A lily in a wilderness.

My lady’s gown, &c.

Sae sweetly move her genty limbs, 20

Like music notes o’lovers’ hymns:

The diamond-dew in her een sae blue,

Where laughing love sae wanton swims.

My lady’s gown, &c.

My lady’s dink, my lady’s drest, 25

The flower and fancy o’ the west;

But the lassie than a man lo’es best,

O that’s the lass to mak him blest.

My lady’s gown, &c.

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

160.

Epigram at RoslinInn

MY blessings on ye, honest wife!

I ne’er was here before;

Ye’ve wealth o’ gear for spoon and knife —

Heart could not wish for more.

Heav’n keep you clear o’ sturt and strife, 5

Till far ayont fourscore,

And while I toddle on thro’ life,

I’ll ne’er gae by your door!

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

161.

Epigram Addressed to an Artist

DEAR –- — , I’ll gie ye some advice,

You’ll tak it no uncivil:

You shouldna paint at angels mair,

But try and paint the devil.

To paint an Angel’s kittle wark, 5

Wi’ Nick, there’s little danger:

You’ll easy draw a lang-kent face,

But no sae weel a stranger. — R. B.

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

162.

The Bookworms

THROUGH and through th’ inspir’d leaves,

Ye maggots, make your windings;

But O respect his lordship’s taste,

And spare his golden bindings.

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

163.

On Elphinstone’s Translation of Martial’s Epigrams

O THOU whom Poetry abhors,

Whom Prose has turned out of doors,

Heard’st thou yon groan? — proceed no further,

‘Twas laurel’d Martial calling murther.

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

164.

A Bottle and Friend (Song)

“There’s nane that’s blest of human kind,

But the cheerful and the gay, man,

Fal, la, la,” &c.

HERE’S a bottle and an honest friend!

What wad ye wish for mair, man?

Wha kens, before his life may end,

What his share may be o’ care, man?

Then catch the moments as they fly, 5

And use them as ye ought, man:

Believe me, happiness is shy,

And comes not aye when sought, man.

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

165.

Lines Written under the Picture of Miss Burns

CEASE, ye prudes, your envious railing,

Lovely Burns has charms — confess:

True it is, she had one failing,

Had a woman ever less?

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

166.

Epitaph for William Nicol, High School, Edinburgh

YE maggots, feed on Nicol’s brain,

For few sic feasts you’ve gotten;

And fix your claws in Nicol’s heart,

For deil a bit o’t’s rotten.

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

167.

Epitaph for Mr. William Michie, Schoolmaster

Schoolmaster of Cleish Parish, Fifeshire.

HERE lie Willie Michie’s banes;

O Satan, when ye tak him,

Gie him the schulin o’ your weans,

For clever deils he’ll mak them!

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

168.

Boat Song — Hey, Ca’ Thro’

UP wi’ the carls o’ Dysart,

And the lads o’ Buckhaven,

And the kimmers o’ Largo,

And the lasses o’ Leven.

Chorus. — Hey, ca’ thro’, ca’ thro’, 5

For we hae muckle ado.

Hey, ca’ thro’, ca’ thro’,

For we hae muckle ado;

We hae tales to tell,

An’ we hae sangs to sing; 10

We hae pennies tae spend,

An’ we hae pints to bring.

Hey, ca’ thro’, &c.

We’ll live a’ our days,

And them that comes behin’, 15

Let them do the like,

An’ spend the gear they win.

Hey, ca’ thro’, &c.

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

169.

Address to Wm. Tytler, Esq., of Woodhouselee

With an Impression of the Author’s Portrait.

REVERED defender of beauteous Stuart,

Of Stuart, a name once respected;

A name, which to love was the mark of a true heart,

But now ‘tis despis’d and neglected.

Tho’ something like moisture conglobes in my eye, 5

Let no one misdeem me disloyal;

A poor friendless wand’rer may well claim a sigh,

Still more if that wand’rer were royal.

My fathers that name have rever’d on a throne:

My fathers have fallen to right it; 10

Those fathers would spurn their degenerate son,

That name should he scoffingly slight it.

Still in prayers for King George I most heartily join,

The Queen, and the rest of the gentry:

Be they wise, be they foolish, is nothing of mine; 15

Their title’s avow’d by my country.

But why of that epocha make such a fuss,

That gave us th’ Electoral stem?

If bringing them over was lucky for us,

I’m sure ‘twas as lucky for them. 20

But, loyalty, truce! we’re on dangerous ground;

Who knows how the fashions may alter?

The doctrine, to-day, that is loyalty sound,

To-morrow may bring us a halter!

I send you a trifle, a head of a bard, 25

A trifle scarce worthy your care;

But accept it, good Sir, as a mark of regard,

Sincere as a saint’s dying prayer.

Now life’s chilly evening dim shades on your eye,

And ushers the long dreary night: 30

But you, like the star that athwart gilds the sky,

Your course to the latest is bright.

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

170.

Epigram to Miss Ainslie in Church

Who was looking up the text during sermon.

FAIR maid, you need not take the hint,

Nor idle texts pursue:

‘Twas guilty sinners that he meant,

Not Angels such as you.

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

171.

Burlesque Lament fo Wm. Creech’s Absence

AULD chuckie Reekie’s sair distrest,

Down droops her ance weel burnish’d crest,

Nae joy her bonie buskit nest

Can yield ava,

Her darling bird that she lo’es best — 5

Willie’s awa!

O Willie was a witty wight,

And had o’ things an unco’ sleight,

Auld Reekie aye he keepit tight,

And trig an’ braw: 10

But now they’ll busk her like a fright, —

Willie’s awa!

The stiffest o’ them a’ he bow’d,

The bauldest o’ them a’ he cow’d;

They durst nae mair than he allow’d, 15

That was a law:

We’ve lost a birkie weel worth gowd;

Willie’s awa!

Now gawkies, tawpies, gowks and fools,

Frae colleges and boarding schools, 20

May sprout like simmer puddock-stools

In glen or shaw;

He wha could brush them down to mools —

Willie’s awa!

The brethren o’ the Commerce-chaumer 25

May mourn their loss wi’ doolfu’ clamour;

He was a dictionar and grammar

Among them a’;

I fear they’ll now mak mony a stammer;

Willie’s awa! 30

Nae mair we see his levee door

Philosophers and poets pour,

And toothy critics by the score,

In bloody raw!

The adjutant o’ a’ the core — 35

Willie’s awa!

Now worthy Gregory’s Latin face,

Tytler’s and Greenfield’s modest grace;

Mackenzie, Stewart, such a brace

As Rome ne’er saw; 40

They a’ maun meet some ither place,

Willie’s awa!

Poor Burns ev’n Scotch Drink canna quicken,

He cheeps like some bewilder’d chicken

Scar’d frae it’s minnie and the cleckin, 45

By hoodie-craw;

Grieg’s gien his heart an unco kickin,

Willie’s awa!

Now ev’ry sour-mou’d girnin blellum,

And Calvin’s folk, are fit to fell him; 50

Ilk self-conceited critic skellum

His quill may draw;

He wha could brawlie ward their bellum —

Willie’s awa!

Up wimpling stately Tweed I’ve sped, 55

And Eden scenes on crystal Jed,

And Ettrick banks, now roaring red,

While tempests blaw;

But every joy and pleasure’s fled,

Willie’s awa! 60

May I be Slander’s common speech;

A text for Infamy to preach;

And lastly, streekit out to bleach

In winter snaw;

When I forget thee, Willie Creech, 65

Tho’ far awa!

May never wicked Fortune touzle him!

May never wicked men bamboozle him!

Until a pow as auld’s Methusalem

He canty claw! 70

Then to the blessed new Jerusalem,

Fleet wing awa!

Chronological List of Poems

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172.

Note to Mr. Renton of Lamerton

YOUR billet, Sir, I grant receipt;

Wi’ you I’ll canter ony gate,

Tho’ ‘twere a trip to yon blue warl’,

Whare birkies march on burning marl:

Then, Sir, God willing, I’ll attend ye, 5

And to his goodness I commend ye.

R. BURNS

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

173.

Elegy on Stella

The following poem is the work of some hapless son of the Muses who deserved a better fate. There is a great deal of “The voice of Cona” in his solitary, mournful notes; and had the sentiments been clothed in Shenstone’s language, they would have been no discredit even to that elegant poet. — R. B.

STRAIT is the spot and green the sod

From whence my sorrows flow;

And soundly sleeps the ever dear

Inhabitant below.

Pardon my transport, gentle shade, 5

While o’er the turf I bow;

Thy earthy house is circumscrib’d,

And solitary now.

Not one poor stone to tell thy name,

Or make thy virtues known: 10

But what avails to me-to thee,

The sculpture of a stone?

I’ll sit me down upon this turf,

And wipe the rising tear:

The chill blast passes swiftly by, 15

And flits around thy bier.

Dark is the dwelling of the Dead,

And sad their house of rest:

Low lies the head, by Death’s cold arms

In awful fold embrac’d. 20

I saw the grim Avenger stand

Incessant by thy side;

Unseen by thee, his deadly breath

Thy lingering frame destroy’d.

Pale grew the roses on thy cheek, 25

And wither’d was thy bloom,

Till the slow poison brought thy youth

Untimely to the tomb.

Thus wasted are the ranks of men —

Youth, Health, and Beauty fall; 30

The ruthless ruin spreads around,

And overwhelms us all.

Behold where, round thy narrow house,

The graves unnumber’d lie;

The multitude that sleep below 35

Existed but to die.

Some, with the tottering steps of Age,

Trod down the darksome way;

And some, in youth’s lamented prime,

Like thee were torn away: 40

Yet these, however hard their fate,

Their native earth receives;

Amid their weeping friends they died,

And fill their fathers’ graves.

From thy lov’d friends, when first thy heart 45

Was taught by Heav’n to glow,

Far, far remov’d, the ruthless stroke

Surpris’d and laid thee low.

At the last limits of our isle,

Wash’d by the western wave, 50

Touch’d by thy face, a thoughtful bard

Sits lonely by thy grave.

Pensive he eyes, before him spread

The deep, outstretch’d and vast;

His mourning notes are borne away 55

Along the rapid blast.

And while, amid the silent Dead

Thy hapless fate he mourns,

His own long sorrows freshly bleed,

And all his grief returns: 60

Like thee, cut off in early youth,

And flower of beauty’s pride,

His friend, his first and only joy,

His much lov’d Stella, died.

Him, too, the stern impulse of Fate 65

Resistless bears along;

And the same rapid tide shall whelm

The Poet and the Song.

The tear of pity which he sheds,

He asks not to receive; 70

Let but his poor remains be laid

Obscurely in the grave.

His grief-worn heart, with truest joy,

Shall meet he welcome shock:

His airy harp shall lie unstrung, 75

And silent on the rock.

O, my dear maid, my Stella, when

Shall this sick period close,

And lead the solitary bard

To his belov’d repose? 80

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

174.

The Bard at Inverary

WHOE’ER he be that sojourns here,

I pity much his case,

Unless he comes to wait upon

The Lord their God, His Grace.

There’s naething here but Highland pride, 5

And Highland scab and hunger:

If Providence has sent me here,

‘Twas surely in his anger.

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

175.

Epigram to Miss Jean Scott

O HAD each Scot of ancient times

Been, Jeanie Scott, as thou art;

The bravest heart on English ground

Had yielded like a coward.

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

176.

On the Death of John M’Leod, Esq.

Brother to a young Lady, a particular friend of the Author’s.

SAD thy tale, thou idle page,

And rueful thy alarms:

Death tears the brother of her love

From Isabella’s arms.

Sweetly deckt with pearly dew 5

The morning rose may blow;

But cold successive noontide blasts

May lay its beauties low.

Fair on Isabella’s morn

The sun propitious smil’d; 10

But, long ere noon, succeeding clouds

Succeeding hopes beguil’d.

Fate oft tears the bosom chords

That Nature finest strung;

So Isabella’s heart was form’d, 15

And so that heart was wrung.

Dread Omnipotence alone

Can heal the wound he gave —

Can point the brimful grief-worn eyes

To scenes beyond the grave. 20

Virtue’s blossoms there shall blow,

And fear no withering blast;

There Isabella’s spotless worth

Shall happy be at last.

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

177.

Elegy on the Death of Sir James Hunter Blair

THE LAMP of day, with-ill presaging glare,

Dim, cloudy, sank beneath the western wave;

Th’ inconstant blast howl’d thro’ the dark’ning air,

And hollow whistled in the rocky cave.

Lone as I wander’d by each cliff and dell, 5

Once the lov’d haunts of Scotia’s royal train;

Or mus’d where limpid streams, once hallow’d well,

Or mould’ring ruins mark the sacred fane.

Th’ increasing blast roar’d round the beetling rocks,

The clouds swift-wing’d flew o’er the starry sky, 10

The groaning trees untimely shed their locks,

And shooting meteors caught the startled eye.

The paly moon rose in the livid east.

And ‘mong the cliffs disclos’d a stately form

In weeds of woe, that frantic beat her breast, 15

And mix’d her wailings with the raving storm

Wild to my heart the filial pulses glow,

‘Twas Caledonia’s trophied shield I view’d:

Her form majestic droop’d in pensive woe,

The lightning of her eye in tears imbued. 20

Revers’d that spear, redoubtable in war,

Reclined that banner, erst in fields unfurl’d,

That like a deathful meteor gleam’d afar,

And brav’d the mighty monarchs of the world.

“My patriot son fills an untimely grave!” 25

With accents wild and lifted arms — she cried;

“Low lies the hand oft was stretch’d to save,

Low lies the heart that swell’d with honest pride.

“A weeping country joins a widow’s tear;

The helpless poor mix with the orphan’s cry; 30

The drooping arts surround their patron’s bier;

And grateful science heaves the heartfelt sigh!

“I saw my sons resume their ancient fire;

I saw fair Freedom’s blossoms richly blow:

But ah! how hope is born but to expire! 35

Relentless fate has laid their guardian low.

“My patriot falls: but shall he lie unsung,

While empty greatness saves a worthless name?

No; every muse shall join her tuneful tongue,

And future ages hear his growing fame. 40

“And I will join a mother’s tender cares,

Thro’ future times to make his virtues last;

That distant years may boast of other Blairs!” —

She said, and vanish’d with the sweeping blast.

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

178.

Impromptu on Carron Iron Works

WE cam na here to view your warks,

In hopes to be mair wise,

But only, lest we gang to hell,

It may be nae surprise:

But when we tirl’d at your door 5

Your porter dought na hear us;

Sae may, shou’d we to Hell’s yetts come,

Your billy Satan sair us!

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

179.

To Miss Ferrier, enclosing Elegy on Sir J. H. Blair

Enclosing the Elegy on Sir J. H. Blair.

NAE heathen name shall I prefix,

Frae Pindus or Parnassus;

Auld Reekie dings them a’ to sticks,

For rhyme-inspiring lasses.

Jove’s tunefu’ dochters three times three 5

Made Homer deep their debtor;

But, gien the body half an e’e,

Nine Ferriers wad done better!

Last day my mind was in a bog,

Down George’s Street I stoited; 10

A creeping cauld prosaic fog

My very sense doited.

Do what I dought to set her free,

My saul lay in the mire;

Ye turned a neuk — I saw your e’e — 15

She took the wing like fire!

The mournfu’ sang I here enclose,

In gratitude I send you,

And pray, in rhyme as weel as prose,

A’ gude things may attend you! 20

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

180.

Written by Somebody on the Window of an Inn at Stirling

Of an Inn at Stirling, on seeing the Royal Palace in ruin.

HERE Stuarts once in glory reigned,

And laws for Scotland’s weal ordained;

But now unroof’d their palace stands,

Their sceptre’s sway’d by other hands;

Fallen indeed, and to the earth 5

Whence groveling reptiles take their birth.

The injured Stuart line is gone,

A race outlandish fills their throne;

An idiot race, to honour lost;

Who know them best despise them most. 10

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

181.

Reply to the Threat of a Censorious Critic

My imprudent lines were answered, very petulantly, by somebody, I believe, a Rev. Mr. Hamilton. In a MS., where I met the answer, I wrote below: —

WITH Esop’s lion, Burns says: Sore I feel

Each other’s scorn, but damn that ass’ heel!

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

182.

The Libeller’s Self-reproof

RASH mortal, and slanderous poet, thy name

Shall no longer appear in the records of Fame;

Dost not know that old Mansfield, who writes like the Bible,

Says, the more ‘tis a truth, sir, the more ‘tis a libel!

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

183.

Verses Written with a Pencil at the Inn at Kenmore

Over the Chimney-piece in the Parlour of the Inn at Kenmore, Taymouth.

ADMIRING Nature in her wildest grace,

These northern scenes with weary feet I trace;

O’er many a winding dale and painful steep,

Th’ abodes of covey’d grouse and timid sheep,

My savage journey, curious, I pursue, 5

Till fam’d Breadalbane opens to my view. —

The meeting cliffs each deep-sunk glen divides,

The woods wild scatter’d, clothe their ample sides;

Th’ outstretching lake, imbosomed ‘mong the hills,

The eye with wonder and amazement fills; 10

The Tay meand’ring sweet in infant pride,

The palace rising on his verdant side,

The lawns wood-fring’d in Nature’s native taste,

The hillocks dropt in Nature’s careless haste,

The arches striding o’er the new-born stream, 15

The village glittering in the noontide beam —

Poetic ardours in my bosom swell,

Lone wand’ring by the hermit’s mossy cell;

The sweeping theatre of hanging woods,

Th’ incessant roar of headlong tumbling floods — 20

Here Poesy might wake her heav’n-taught lyre,

And look through Nature with creative fire;

Here, to the wrongs of Fate half reconcil’d,

Misfortunes lighten’d steps might wander wild;

And Disappointment, in these lonely bounds, 25

Find balm to soothe her bitter, rankling wounds:

Here heart-struck Grief might heav’nward stretch her scan,

And injur’d Worth forget and pardon man.

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

184.

The Birks of Aberfeldy (Song)

Tune— “The Birks of Abergeldie.”

Chorus. — Bonie lassie, will ye go,

Will ye go, will ye go,

Bonie lassie, will ye go

To the birks of Aberfeldy!

NOW Simmer blinks on flowery braes, 5

And o’er the crystal streamlets plays;

Come let us spend the lightsome days,

In the birks of Aberfeldy.

Bonie lassie, &c.

While o’er their heads the hazels hing, 10

The little birdies blythely sing,

Or lightly flit on wanton wing,

In the birks of Aberfeldy.

Bonie lassie, &c.

The braes ascend like lofty wa’s, 15

The foaming stream deep-roaring fa’s,

O’erhung wi’ fragrant spreading shaws —

The birks of Aberfeldy.

Bonie lassie, &c.

The hoary cliffs are crown’d wi’ flowers, 20

White o’er the linns the burnie pours,

And rising, weets wi’ misty showers

The birks of Aberfeldy.

Bonie lassie, &c.

Let Fortune’s gifts at randoe flee, 25

They ne’er shall draw a wish frae me;

Supremely blest wi’ love and thee,

In the birks of Aberfeldy.

Bonie lassie, &c.

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

185.

The Humble Petition of Bruar Water

To the noble Duke of Athole.

MY lord, I know your noble ear

Woe ne’er assails in vain;

Embolden’d thus, I beg you’ll hear

Your humble slave complain,

How saucy Phoebus’ scorching beams, 5

In flaming summer-pride,

Dry-withering, waste my foamy streams,

And drink my crystal tide.

The lightly-jumping, glowrin’ trouts,

That thro’ my waters play, 10

If, in their random, wanton spouts,

They near the margin stray;

If, hapless chance! they linger lang,

I’m scorching up so shallow,

They’re left the whitening stanes amang, 15

In gasping death to wallow.

Last day I grat wi’ spite and teen,

As poet Burns came by.

That, to a bard, I should be seen

Wi’ half my channel dry; 20

A panegyric rhyme, I ween,

Ev’n as I was, he shor’d me;

But had I in my glory been,

He, kneeling, wad ador’d me.

Here, foaming down the skelvy rocks, 25

In twisting strength I rin;

There, high my boiling torrent smokes,

Wild-roaring o’er a linn:

Enjoying each large spring and well,

As Nature gave them me, 30

I am, altho’ I say’t mysel’,

Worth gaun a mile to see.

Would then my noble master please

To grant my highest wishes,

He’ll shade my banks wi’ tow’ring trees, 35

And bonie spreading bushes.

Delighted doubly then, my lord,

You’ll wander on my banks,

And listen mony a grateful bird

Return you tuneful thanks. 40

The sober lav’rock, warbling wild,

Shall to the skies aspire;

The gowdspink, Music’s gayest child,

Shall sweetly join the choir;

The blackbird strong, the lintwhite clear, 45

The mavis mild and mellow;

The robin pensive Autumn cheer,

In all her locks of yellow.

This, too, a covert shall ensure,

To shield them from the storm; 50

And coward maukin sleep secure,

Low in her grassy form:

Here shall the shepherd make his seat,

To weave his crown of flow’rs;

Or find a shelt’ring, safe retreat, 55

From prone-descending show’rs.

And here, by sweet, endearing stealth,

Shall meet the loving pair,

Despising worlds, with all their wealth,

As empty idle care; 60

The flow’rs shall vie in all their charms,

The hour of heav’n to grace;

And birks extend their fragrant arms

To screen the dear embrace.

Here haply too, at vernal dawn, 65

Some musing bard may stray,

And eye the smoking, dewy lawn,

And misty mountain grey;

Or, by the reaper’s nightly beam,

Mild-chequering thro’ the trees, 70

Rave to my darkly dashing stream,

Hoarse-swelling on the breeze.

Let lofty firs, and ashes cool,

My lowly banks o’erspread,

And view, deep-bending in the pool, 75

Their shadow’s wat’ry bed:

Let fragrant birks, in woodbines drest,

My craggy cliffs adorn;

And, for the little songster’s nest,

The close embow’ring thorn. 80

So may old Scotia’s darling hope,

Your little angel band

Spring, like their fathers, up to prop

Their honour’d native land!

So may, thro’ Albion’s farthest ken, 85

To social-flowing glasses,

The grace be— “Athole’s honest men,

And Athole’s bonie lasses!”

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

186.

Lines on the Fall of Fyers

Near Loch-Ness.

Written with a Pencil on the Spot.

AMONG the heathy hills and ragged woods

The roaring Fyers pours his mossy floods;

Till full he dashes on the rocky mounds,

Where, thro’ a shapeless breach, his stream resounds.

As high in air the bursting torrents flow, 5

As deep recoiling surges foam below,

Prone down the rock the whitening sheet descends,

And viewles Echo’s ear, astonished, rends.

Dim-seen, through rising mists and ceaseless show’rs,

The hoary cavern, wide surrounding lours: 10

Still thro’ the gap the struggling river toils,

And still, below, the horrid cauldron boils —

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

187.

Epigram on Parting with a kind Host in the Highlands

WHEN Death’s dark stream I ferry o’er,

(A time that surely shall come,)

In Heav’n itself I’ll ask no more,

Than just a Highland welcome.

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

188.

Strathallan’s Lament (Song)

THICKEST night, o’erhang my dwelling!

Howling tempests, o’er me rave!

Turbid torrents, wintry swelling,

Roaring by my lonely cave!

Crystal streamlets gently flowing, 5

Busy haunts of base mankind,

Western breezes softly blowing,

Suit not my distracted mind.

In the cause of Right engaged,

Wrongs injurious to redress, 10

Honour’s war we strongly waged,

But the Heavens denied success.

Ruin’s wheel has driven o’er us,

Not a hope that dare attend,

The wide world is all before us — 15

But a world without a friend.

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

189.

Verses on Castle Gordon

STREAMS that glide in orient plains,

Never bound by Winter’s chains;

Glowing here on golden sands,

There immix’d with foulest stains

From Tyranny’s empurpled hands; 5

These, their richly gleaming waves,

I leave to tyrants and their slaves;

Give me the stream that sweetly laves

The banks by Castle Gordon.

Spicy forests, ever gray, 10

Shading from the burning ray

Hapless wretches sold to toil;

Or the ruthless native’s way,

Bent on slaughter, blood, and spoil:

Woods that ever verdant wave, 15

I leave the tyrant and the slave;

Give me the groves that lofty brave

The storms by Castle Gordon.

Wildly here, without control,

Nature reigns and rules the whole; 20

In that sober pensive mood,

Dearest to the feeling soul,

She plants the forest, pours the flood:

Life’s poor day I’ll musing rave

And find at night a sheltering cave, 25

Where waters flow and wild woods wave,

By bonie Castle Gordon.

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

190.

Lady Onlie, Honest Luckie (Song)

Tune— “The Ruffian’s Rant.”

A’ THE lads o’ Thorniebank,

When they gae to the shore o’ Bucky,

They’ll step in an’ tak a pint

Wi’ Lady Onlie, honest Lucky.

Chorus. — Lady Onlie, honest Lucky, 5

Brews gude ale at shore o’ Bucky;

I wish her sale for her gude ale,

The best on a’ the shore o’ Bucky.

Her house sae bien, her curch sae clean

I wat she is a daintie chuckie; 10

And cheery blinks the ingle-gleed

O’ Lady Onlie, honest Lucky!

Lady Onlie, &c.

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

191.

Theniel Menzies’ Bonie Mary (Song)

Air— “The Ruffian’s Rant,” or “Roy’s Wife.”

IN comin by the brig o’ Dye,

At Darlet we a blink did tarry;

As day was dawnin in the sky,

We drank a health to bonie Mary.

Chorus. — Theniel Menzies’ bonie Mary, 5

Theniel Menzies’ bonie Mary,

Charlie Grigor tint his plaidie,

Kissin’ Theniel’s bonie Mary.

Her een sae bright, her brow sae white,

Her haffet locks as brown’s a berry; 10

And aye they dimpl’t wi’ a smile,

The rosy cheeks o’ bonie Mary.

Theniel Menzies’ bonie Mary, &c.

We lap a’ danc’d the lee-lang day,

Till piper lads were wae and weary; 15

But Charlie gat the spring to pay

For kissin Theniel’s bonie Mary.

Theniel Menzies’ bonie Mary, &c.

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

192.

The Bonie Lass of Albany (Song)

Tune— “Mary’s Dream.”

MY heart is wae, and unco wae,

To think upon the raging sea,

That roars between her gardens green

An’ the bonie Lass of Albany.

This lovely maid’s of royal blood 5

That ruled Albion’s kingdoms three,

But oh, alas! for her bonie face,

They’ve wrang’d the Lass of Albany.

In the rolling tide of spreading Clyde

There sits an isle of high degree, 10

And a town of fame whose princely name

Should grace the Lass of Albany.

But there’s a youth, a witless youth,

That fills the place where she should be;

We’ll send him o’er to his native shore, 15

And bring our ain sweet Albany.

Alas the day, and woe the day,

A false usurper wan the gree,

Who now commands the towers and lands —

The royal right of Albany. 20

We’ll daily pray, we’ll nightly pray,

On bended knees most fervently,

The time may come, with pipe an’ drum

We’ll welcome hame fair Albany.

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

193.

On Scaring some Water-Fowl in Lock Turit

A wild scene among the Hills of Oughtertyre.

“This was the production of a solitary forenoon’s walk from Oughtertyre House. I lived there, the guest of Sir William Murray, for two or three weeks, and was much flattered by my hospitable reception. What a pity that the mere emotions of gratitude are so impotent in this world. ‘Tis lucky that, as we are told, they will be of some avail in the world to come.” — R. B., Glenriddell MSS.

WHY, ye tenants of the lake,

For me your wat’ry haunt forsake?

Tell me, fellow-creatures, why

At my presence thus you fly?

Why disturb your social joys, 5

Parent, filial, kindred ties? —

Common friend to you and me,

yature’s gifts to all are free:

Peaceful keep your dimpling wave,

Busy feed, or wanton lave; 10

Or, beneath the sheltering rock,

Bide the surging billow’s shock.

Conscious, blushing for our race,

Soon, too soon, your fears I trace,

Man, your proud, usurping foe, 15

Would be lord of all below:

Plumes himself in freedom’s pride,

Tyrant stern to all beside.

The eagle, from the cliffy brow,

Marking you his prey below, 20

In his breast no pity dwells,

Strong necessity compels:

But Man, to whom alone is giv’n

A ray direct from pitying Heav’n,

Glories in his heart humane — 25

And creatures for his pleasure slain!

In these savage, liquid plains,

Only known to wand’ring swains,

Where the mossy riv’let strays,

Far from human haunts and ways; 30

All on Nature you depend,

And life’s poor season peaceful spend.

Or, if man’s superior might

Dare invade your native right,

On the lofty ether borne, 35

Man with all his pow’rs you scorn;

Swiftly seek, on clanging wings,

Other lakes and other springs;

And the foe you cannot brave,

Scorn at least to be his slave. 40

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

194.

Blythe was She (Song)

Tune— “Andro and his Cutty Gun.”

Chorus. — Blythe, blythe and merry was she,

Blythe was she but and ben;

Blythe by the banks of Earn,

And blythe in Glenturit glen.

BY Oughtertyre grows the aik, 5

On Yarrow banks the birken shaw;

But Phemie was a bonier lass

Than braes o’ Yarrow ever saw.

Blythe, blythe, &c.

Her looks were like a flow’r in May, 10

Her smile was like a simmer morn:

She tripped by the banks o’ Earn,

As light’s a bird upon a thorn.

Blythe, blythe, &c.

Her bonie face it was as meek 15

As ony lamb upon a lea;

The evening sun was ne’er sae sweet,

As was the blink o’ Phemie’s e’e.

Blythe, blythe, &c.

The Highland hills I’ve wander’d wide, 20

And o’er the Lawlands I hae been;

But Phemie was the blythest lass

That ever trod the dewy green.

Blythe, blythe, &c.

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

195.

A Rose-bud by my Early Walk (Song)

A ROSE-BUD by my early walk,

Adown a corn-enclosed bawk,

Sae gently bent its thorny stalk,

All on a dewy morning.

Ere twice the shades o’ dawn are fled, 5

In a’ its crimson glory spread,

And drooping rich the dewy head,

It scents the early morning.

Within the bush her covert nest

A little linnet fondly prest; 10

The dew sat chilly on her breast,

Sae early in the morning.

She soon shall see her tender brood,

The pride, the pleasure o’ the wood,

Amang the fresh green leaves bedew’d, 15

Awake the early morning.

So thou, dear bird, young Jeany fair,

On trembling string or vocal air,

Shall sweetly pay the tender care

That tents thy early morning. 20

So thou, sweet Rose-bud, young and gay,

Shalt beauteous blaze upon the day,

And bless the parent’s evening ray

That watch’d thy early morning.

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

196.

Epitaph for Mr. W. Cruickshank

HONEST Will to Heaven’s away

And mony shall lament him;

His fau’ts they a’ in Latin lay,

In English nane e’er kent them.

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

197.

The Banks of the Devon (Song)

Tune— “Bhanarach dhonn a’ chruidh.”

HOW pleasant the banks of the clear winding Devon,

With green spreading bushes and flow’rs blooming fair!

But the boniest flow’r on the banks of the Devon

Was once a sweet bud on the braes of the Ayr.

Mild be the sun on this sweet blushing flower, 5

In the gay rosy morn, as it bathes in the dew;

And gentle the fall of the soft vernal shower,

That steals on the evening each leaf to renew!

O spare the dear blossom, ye orient breezes,

With chill hoary wing as ye usher the dawn; 10

And far be thou distant, thou reptile that seizes

The verdure and pride of the garden or lawn!

Let Bourbon exult in his gay gilded lilies,

And England triumphant display her proud rose:

A fairer than either adorns the green valleys, 15

Where Devon, sweet Devon, meandering flows.

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

198.

Braving Angry Winer’s Storms (Song)

Tune— “Neil Gow’s Lament for Abercairny.”

WHERE, braving angry winter’s storms,

The lofty Ochils rise,

Far in their shade my Peggy’s charms

First blest my wondering eyes;

As one who by some savage stream 5

A lonely gem surveys,

Astonish’d, doubly marks it beam

With art’s most polish’d blaze.

Blest be the wild, sequester’d shade,

And blest the day and hour, 10

Where Peggy’s charms I first survey’d,

When first I felt their pow’r!

The tyrant Death, with grim control,

May seize my fleeting breath;

But tearing Peggy from my soul 15

Must be a stronger death.

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

199.

My Peggy’s Charms (Song)

Tune— “Tha a’ chailleach ir mo dheigh.”

MY Peggy’s face, my Peggy’s form,

The frost of hermit Age might warm;

My Peggy’s worth, my Peggy’s mind,

Might charm the first of human kind.

I love my Peggy’s angel air, 5

Her face so truly heavenly fair,

Her native grace, so void of art,

But I adore my Peggy’s heart.

The lily’s hue, the rose’s dye,

The kindling lustre of an eye; 10

Who but owns their magic sway!

Who but knows they all decay!

The tender thrill, the pitying tear,

The generous purpose nobly dear,

The gentle look that rage disarms — 15

These are all Immortal charms.

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

200.

The Young Highland Rover (Song)

Tune— “Morag.”

LOUD blaw the frosty breezes,

The snaws the mountains cover;

Like winter on me seizes,

Since my young Highland rover

Far wanders nations over. 5

Where’er he go, where’er he stray,

May heaven be his warden;

Return him safe to fair Strathspey,

And bonie Castle-Gordon!

The trees, now naked groaning, 10

Shall soon wi’ leaves be hinging,

The birdies dowie moaning,

Shall a’ be blythely singing,

And every flower be springing;

Sae I’ll rejoice the lee-lang day, 15

When by his mighty Warden

My youth’s return’d to fair Strathspey,

And bonie Castle-Gordon.

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

201.

Birthday Ode for 31st December, 1787

AFAR the illustrious Exile roams,

Whom kingdoms on this day should hail;

An inmate in the casual shed,

On transient pity’s bounty fed,

Haunted by busy memory’s bitter tale! 5

Beasts of the forest have their savage homes,

But He, who should imperial purple wear,

Owns not the lap of earth where rests his royal head!

His wretched refuge, dark despair,

While ravening wrongs and woes pursue, 10

And distant far the faithful few

Who would his sorrows share.

False flatterer, Hope, away!

Nor think to lure us as in days of yore:

We solemnize this sorrowing natal day, 15

To prove our loyal truth-we can no more,

And owning Heaven’s mysterious sway,

Submissive, low adore.

Ye honored, mighty Dead,

Who nobly perished in the glorious cause, 20

Your King, your Country, and her laws,

From great DUNDEE, who smiling Victory led,

And fell a Martyr in her arms,

(What breast of northern ice but warms!)

To bold BALMERINO’S undying name, 25

Whose soul of fire, lighted at Heaven’s high flame,

Deserves the proudest wreath departed heroes claim:

Nor unrevenged your fate shall lie,

It only lags, the fatal hour,

Your blood shall, with incessant cry, 30

Awake at last, th’ unsparing Power;

As from the cliff, with thundering course,

The snowy ruin smokes along

With doubling speed and gathering force,

Till deep it, crushing, whelms the cottage in the vale; 35

So Vengeance’ arm, ensanguin’d, strong,

Shall with resistless might assail,

Usurping Brunswick’s pride shall lay,

And STEWART’S wrongs and yours, with tenfold weight repay.

PERDITION, baleful child of night! 40

Rise and revenge the injured right

Of STEWART’S royal race:

Lead on the unmuzzled hounds of hell,

Till all the frighted echoes tell

The blood-notes of the chase! 45

Full on the quarry point their view,

Full on the base usurping crew,

The tools of faction, and the nation’s curse!

Hark how the cry grows on the wind;

They leave the lagging gale behind, 50

Their savage fury, pitiless, they pour;

With murdering eyes already they devour;

See Brunswick spent, a wretched prey,

His life one poor despairing day,

Where each avenging hour still ushers in a worse! 55

Such havock, howling all abroad,

Their utter ruin bring,

The base apostates to their God,

Or rebels to their King.

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

202.

On the Death of Robert Dundas, Esq., of Arniston

Late Lord President of the Court of Session.

LONE on the bleaky hills the straying flocks

Shun the fierce storms among the sheltering rocks;

Down from the rivulets, red with dashing rains,

The gathering floods burst o’er the distant plains;

Beneath the blast the leafless forests groan; 5

The hollow caves return a hollow moan.

Ye hills, ye plains, ye forests, and ye caves,

Ye howling winds, and wintry swelling waves!

Unheard, unseen, by human ear or eye,

Sad to your sympathetic glooms I fly; 10

Where, to the whistling blast and water’s roar,

Pale Scotia’s recent wound I may deplore.

O heavy loss, thy country ill could bear!

A loss these evil days can ne’er repair!

Justice, the high vicegerent of her God, 15

Her doubtful balance eyed, and sway’d her rod:

Hearing the tidings of the fatal blow,

She sank, abandon’d to the wildest woe.

Wrongs, injuries, from many a darksome den,

Now, gay in hope, explore the paths of men: 20

See from his cavern grim Oppression rise,

And throw on Poverty his cruel eyes;

Keen on the helpless victim see him fly,

And stifle, dark, the feebly-bursting cry:

Mark Ruffian Violence, distained with crimes, 25

Rousing elate in these degenerate times,

View unsuspecting Innocence a prey,

As guileful Fraud points out the erring way:

While subtle Litigation’s pliant tongue

The life-blood equal sucks of Right and Wrong: 30

Hark, injur’d Want recounts th’ unlisten’d tale,

And much-wrong’d Mis’ry pours the unpitied wail!

Ye dark waste hills, ye brown unsightly plains,

Congenial scenes, ye soothe my mournful strains:

Ye tempests, rage! ye turbid torrents, roll! 35

Ye suit the joyless tenor of my soul.

Life’s social haunts and pleasures I resign;

Be nameless wilds and lonely wanderings mine,

To mourn the woes my country must endure —

That would degenerate ages cannot cure. 40

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

203.

Sylvander to Clarinda

Extempore Reply to Verses addressed to the Author by a Lady, under the signature of “Clarinda” and entitled, On Burns saying he ‘had nothing else to do.’

WHEN dear Clarinda, matchless fair,

First struck Sylvander’s raptur’d view,

He gaz’d, he listened to despair,

Alas! ‘twas all he dared to do.

Love, from Clarinda’s heavenly eyes, 5

Transfixed his bosom thro’ and thro’;

But still in Friendships’ guarded guise,

For more the demon fear’d to do.

That heart, already more than lost,

The imp beleaguer’d all perdue; 10

For frowning Honour kept his post —

To meet that frown, he shrunk to do.

His pangs the Bard refused to own,

Tho’ half he wish’d Clarinda knew;

But Anguish wrung the unweeting groan — 15

Who blames what frantic Pain must do?

That heart, where motley follies blend,

Was sternly still to Honour true:

To prove Clarinda’s fondest friend,

Was what a lover sure might do. 20

The Muse his ready quill employed,

No nearer bliss he could pursue;

That bliss Clarinda cold deny’d —

“Send word by Charles how you do!”

The chill behest disarm’d his muse, 25

Till passion all impatient grew:

He wrote, and hinted for excuse,

‘Twas, ‘cause “he’d nothing else to do.”

But by those hopes I have above!

And by those faults I dearly rue! 30

The deed, the boldest mark of love,

For thee that deed I dare uo do!

O could the Fates but name the price

Would bless me with your charms and you!

With frantic joy I’d pay it thrice, 35

If human art and power could do!

Then take, Clarinda, friendship’s hand,

(Friendship, at least, I may avow;)

And lay no more your chill command, —

I’ll write whatever I’ve to do.

SYLVANDER. 40

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

1788

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

204.

Love in the Guise of Friendship (Song)

YOUR friendship much can make me blest,

O why that bliss destroy!

Why urge the only, one request

You know I will deny!

Your thought, if Love must harbour there, 5

Conceal it in that thought;

Nor cause me from my bosom tear

The very friend I sought.

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

205.

Go on, Sweet Bird, and Soothe my Care (Song)

FOR thee is laughing Nature gay,

For thee she pours the vernal day;

For me in vain is Nature drest,

While Joy’s a stranger to my breast.

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

206.

Clarina, Mistress of my Soul (Song)

CLARINDA, mistres of my soul,

The measur’d time is run!

The wretch beneath the dreary pole

So marks his latest sun.

To what dark cave of frozen night 5

Shall poor Sylvander hie;

Depriv’d of thee, his life and light,

The sun of all his joy?

We part — but by these precious drops,

That fill thy lovely eyes, 10

No other light shall guide my steps,

Till thy bright beams arise!

She, the fair sun of all her sex,

Has blest my glorious day;

And shall a glimmering planet fix 15

My worship to its ray?

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

207.

I’m O’er Young to Marry yet (Song)

Chorus. — I’m o’er young, I’m o’er young,

I’m o’er young to marry yet;

I’m o’er young, ‘twad be a sin

To tak me frae my mammy yet.

I AM my mammny’s ae bairn, 5

Wi’ unco folk I weary, sir;

And lying in a man’s bed,

I’m fley’d it mak me eerie, sir.

I’m o’er young, &c.

My mammie coft me a new gown, 10

The kirk maun hae the gracing o’t;

Were I to lie wi’ you, kind Sir,

I’m feared ye’d spoil the lacing o’t.

I’m o’er young, &c.

Hallowmass is come and gane, 15

The nights are lang in winter, sir,

And you an’ I in ae bed,

In trowth, I dare na venture, sir.

I’m o’er young, &c.

Fu’ loud an’ shill the frosty wind 20

Blaws thro’ the leafless timmer, sir;

But if ye come this gate again;

I’ll aulder be gin simmer, sir.

I’m o’er young, &c.

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

208.

To the Weaver’s gin ye go (Song)

MY heart was ance as blithe and free

As simmer days were lang;

But a bonie, westlin weaver lad

Has gart me change my sang.

Chorus. — To the weaver’s gin ye go, fair maids, 5

To the weaver’s gin ye go;

I rede you right, gang ne’er at night,

To the weaver’s gin ye go.

My mither sent me to the town,

To warp a plaiden wab; 10

But the weary, weary warpin o’t

Has gart me sigh and sab.

To the weaver’s, &c.

A bonie, westlin weaver lad

Sat working at his loom; 15

He took my heart as wi’ a net,

In every knot and thrum.

To the weaver’s, &c.

I sat beside my warpin-wheel,

And aye I ca’d it roun’; 20

But every shot and evey knock,

My heart it gae a stoun.

To the weaver’s, &c.

The moon was sinking in the west,

Wi’ visage pale and wan, 25

As my bonie, westlin weaver lad

Convoy’d me thro’ the glen.

To the weaver’s, &c.

But what was said, or what was done,

Shame fa’ me gin I tell; 30

But Oh! I fear the kintra soon

Will ken as weel’s myself!

To the weaver’s, &c.

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

209.

M’Pherson’s Farewell (Song)

Tune— “M’Pherson’s Rant.”

FAREWELL, ye dungeons dark and strong,

The wretch’s destinie!

M’Pherson’s time will not be long

On yonder gallows-tree.

Chorus. — Sae rantingly, sae wantonly, 5

Sae dauntingly gaed he;

He play’d a spring, and danc’d it round,

Below the gallows-tree.

O, what is death but parting breath?

On many a bloody plain 10

I’ve dared his face, and in this place

I scorn him yet again!

Sae rantingly, &c.

Untie these bands from off my hands,

And bring me to my sword; 15

And there’s no a man in all Scotland

But I’ll brave him at a word.

Sae rantingly, &c.

I’ve liv’d a life of sturt and strife;

I die by treacherie: 20

It burns my heart I must depart,

And not avenged be.

Sae rantingly, &c.

Now farewell light, thou sunshine bright,

And all beneath the sky! 25

May coward shame distain his name,

The wretch that dares not die!

Sae rantingly, &c.

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

210.

Stay my Charmer (Song)

Tune— “An gille dubh ciar-dhubh.”

STAY my charmer, can you leave me?

Cruel, cruel to deceive me;

Well you know how much you grieve me;

Cruel charmer, can you go!

Cruel charmer, can you go! 5

By my love so ill-requited,

By the faith you fondly plighted,

By the pangs of lovers slighted,

Do not, do not liave me so!

Do not, do not leave me so! 10

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

211.

My Hoggie (Song)

WHAT will I do gin my Hoggie die?

My joy, my pride, my Hoggie!

My only beast, I had nae mae,

And vow but I was vogie!

The lee-lang night we watch’d the fauld, 5

Me and my faithfu’ doggie;

We heard nocht but the roaring linn,

Amang the braes sae scroggie.

But the houlet cry’d frau the castle wa’,

The blitter frae the boggie; 10

The tod reply’d upon the hill,

I trembled for my Hoggie.

When day did daw, and cocks did craw,

The morning it was foggie;

An unco tyke, lap o’er the dyke, 15

And maist has kill’d my Hoggie!

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

212.

Raving Winds Around her Blowing (Song)

Tune— “M’Grigor of Roro’s Lament.”

I composed these verses on Miss Isabella M’Leod of Raza, alluding to her feelings on the death of her sister, and the still more melancholy death of her sister’s husband, the late Earl of Loudoun, who shot himself out of sheer heart-break at some mortifications he suffered, owing to the deranged state of his finances. — R. B., 1791.

RAVING winds around her blowing,

Yellow leaves the woodlands strowing,

By a river hoarsely roaring,

Isabella stray’d deploring —

“Farewell, hours that late did measure 5

Sunshine days of joy and pleasure;

Hail, thou gloomy night of sorrow,

Cheerless night that knows no morrow!

“O’er the past too fondly wandering,

On the hopeless future pondering; 10

Chilly grief my life-blood freezes,

Fell despair my fancy seizes.

“Life, thou soul of every blessing,

Load to misery most distressing,

Gladly how wouldlI resign thee, 15

And to dark oblivion join thee!”

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

213.

Up in the Morning Early (Song)

CAULD blaws the wind frae east to west,

The drift is driving sairly;

Sae loud and shill’s I hear the blast —

I’m sure it’s winter fairly.

Chorus. — Up in the morning’s no for me, 5

Up in the morning early;

When a’ the hills are covered wi’ snaw,

I’m sure it’s winter fairly.

The birds sit chittering in the thorn,

A’ day they fare but sparely; 10

And lang’s the night frae e’en to morn —

I’m sure it’s winter fairly.

Up in the morning’s, &c.

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

214.

How Long and Dreary is the Night (Song)

HOW long and dreary is the night,

When I am frae my dearie!

I sleepless lie frae e’en to morn,

Tho’ I were ne’er so weary:

I sleepless lie frae e’en to morn, 5

Tho’ I were ne’er sae weary!

When I think on the happy days

I spent wi’ you my dearie:

And now what lands between us lie,

How can I be but eerie! 10

And now what lands between us lie,

How can I be but eerie!

How slow ye move, ye heavy hours,

As ye were wae and weary!

It was na sae ye glinted by, 15

When I was wi’ my dearie!

It was na sae ye glinted by,

When I was wi’ my dearie!

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

215.

Hey, the Dusty Miller (Song)

HEY, the dusty Miller,

And his dusty coat,

He will win a shilling,

Or he spend a groat:

Dusty was the coat, 5

Dusty was the colour,

Dusty was the kiss

That I gat frae the Miller.

Hey, the dusty Miller,

And his dusty sack; 10

Leeze me on the calling

Fills the dusty peck:

Fills the dusty peck,

Brings the dusty siller;

I wad gie my coatie 15

For the dusty Miller.

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

216.

Duncan Davison (Song)

THERE was a lass, they ca’d her Meg,

And she held o’er the moors to spin;

There was a lad that follow’d her,

They ca’d him Duncan Davison.

The moor was dreigh, and Meg was skeigh, 5

Her favour Duncan could na win;

For wi’ the rock she wad him knock,

And aye she shook the temper-pin.

As o’er the moor they lightly foor,

A burn was clear, a glen was green, 10

Upon the banks they eas’d their shanks,

And aye she set the wheel between:

But Duncan swoor a haly aith,

That Meg should be a bride the morn;

Then Meg took up her spinning-graith, 15

And flang them a’ out o’er the burn.

We will big a wee, wee house,

And we will live like king and queen;

Sae blythe and merry’s we will be,

When ye set by the wheel at e’en. 20

A man may drink, and no be drunk;

A man may fight, and no be slain;

A man may kiss a bonie lass,

And aye be welcome back again!

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

217.

The Lad they ca’ Jumpin John (Song)

HER daddie forbad, her minnie forbad

Forbidden she wadna be:

She wadna trow’t the browst she brew’d,

Wad taste sae bitterlie.

Chorus. — The lang lad they ca’Jumpin John 5

Beguil’d the bonie lassie,

The lang lad they ca’Jumpin John

Beguil’d the bonie lassie.

A cow and a cauf, a yowe and a hauf,

And thretty gude shillin’s and three; 10

A vera gude tocher, a cotter-man’s dochter,

The lass wi’ the bonie black e’e.

The lang lad, &c.

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

218.

Talk of him that’s Far Awa (Song)

MUSING on the roaring ocean,

Which divides my love and me;

Wearying heav’n in warm devotion,

For his weal where’er he be.

Hope and Fear’s alternate billow 5

Yielding late to Nature’s law,

Whispering spirits round my pillow,

Talk of him that’s far awa.

Ye whom sorrow never wounded,

Ye who never shed a tear, 10

Care-untroubled, joy-surrounded,

Gaudy day to you is dear.

Gentle night, do thou befriend me,

Downy sleep, the curtain draw;

Spirits kind, again attend me, 15

Talk of him that’s far awa!

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

219.

To Daunton Me (Song)

THE BLUDE-RED rose at Yule may blaw,

The simmer lilies bloom in snaw,

The frost may freeze the deepest sea;

But an auld man shall never daunton me.

Refrain. — To daunton me, to daunton me, 5

And auld man shall never daunton me.

To daunton me, and me sae young,

Wi’ his fause heart and flatt’ring tongue,

That is the thing you shall never see,

For an auld man shall never daunton me. 10

To daunton me, &c.

For a’ his meal and a’ his maut,

For a’ his fresh beef and his saut,

For a’ his gold and white monie,

And auld men shall never daunton me. 15

To daunton me, &c.

His gear may buy him kye and yowes,

His gear may buy him glens and knowes;

But me he shall not buy nor fee,

For an auld man shall never daunton me. 20

To daunton me, &c.

He hirples twa fauld as he dow,

Wi’ his teethless gab and his auld beld pow,

And the rain rains down frae his red blear’d e’e;

That auld man shall never daunton me. 25

To daunton me, &c.

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

220.

The Winter it is Past (Song)

THE WINTER it is past, and the summer comes at last

And the small birds, they sing on ev’ry tree;

Now ev’ry thing is glad, while I am very sad,

Since my true love is parted from me.

The rose upon the breer, by the waters running clear, 5

May have charms for the linnet or the bee;

Their little loves are blest, and their little hearts at rest,

But my true love is parted from me.

Chronological List of Poems

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221.

The Bonie Lad that’s Far Awa (Song)

O HOW can I be blythe and glad,

Or how can I gang brisk and braw,

When the bonie lad that I lo’e best

Is o’er the hills and far awa!

It’s no the frosty winter wind, 5

It’s no the driving drift and snaw;

But aye the tear comes in my e’e,

To think on him that’s far awa.

My father pat me frae his door,

My friends they hae disown’d me a’; 10

But I hae ane will tak my part,

The bonie lad that’s far awa.

A pair o’ glooves he bought to me,

And silken snoods he gae me twa;

And I will wear them for his sake, 15

The bonie lad that’s far awa.

O weary Winter soon will pass,

And Spring will cleed the birken shaw;

And my young babie will be born,

And he’ll be hame that’s far awa. 20

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

222.

Verses to Clarinda, with Drinking Glasses

Sent with a Pair of Wine-Glasses.

FAIR Empress of the Poet’s soul,

And Queen of Poetesses;

Clarinda, take this little boon,

This humble pair of glasses:

And fill them up with generous juice, 5

As generous as your mind;

And pledge them to the generous toast,

“The whole of human kind!”

“To those who love us!” second fill;

But not to those whom we love; 10

Lest we love those who love not us —

A third— “To thee and me, Love!”

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

223.

The Chevalier’s Lament (Song)

Air— “Captain O’Kean.”

THE SMALL birds rejoice in the green leaves returning,

The murmuring streamlet winds clear thro’ the vale;

The primroses blow in the dews of the morning,

And wild scatter’d cowslips bedeck the green dale:

But what can give pleasure, or what can seem fair, 5

When the lingering moments are numbered by care?

No birds sweetly singing, nor flow’rs gaily springing,

Can soothe the sad bosom of joyless despair.

The deed that I dared, could it merit their malice?

A king and a father to place on his throne! 10

His right are these hills, and his right are these valleys,

Where the wild beasts find shelter, tho’ I can find none!

But ‘tis not my suff’rings, thus wretched, forlorn,

My brave gallant friends, ‘tis your ruin I mourn;

Your faith proved so loyal in hot bloody trial, — 15

Alas! I can make it no better return!

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

224.

Epistle to Hugh Parker

IN this strange land, this uncouth clime,

A land unknown to prose or rhyme;

Where words ne’er cross’t the Muse’s heckles,

Nor limpit in poetic shackles:

A land that Prose did never view it, 5

Except when drunk he stacher’t thro’ it;

Here, ambush’d by the chimla cheek,

Hid in an atmosphere of reek,

I hear a wheel thrum i’ the neuk,

I hear it — for in vain I leuk. 10

The red peat gleams, a fiery kernel,

Enhusked by a fog infernal:

Here, for my wonted rhyming raptures,

I sit and count my sins by chapters;

For life and spunk like ither Christians, 15

I’m dwindled down to mere existence,

Wi’ nae converse but Gallowa’ bodies,

Wi’ nae kenn’d face but Jenny Geddes,

Jenny, my Pegasean pride!

Dowie she saunters down Nithside, 20

And aye a westlin leuk she throws,

While tears hap o’er her auld brown nose!

Was it for this, wi’ cannie care,

Thou bure the Bard through many a shire?

At howes, or hillocks never stumbled, 25

And late or early never grumbled? —

O had I power like inclination,

I’d heeze thee up a constellation,

To canter with the Sagitarre,

Or loup the ecliptic like a bar; 30

Or turn the pole like any arrow;

Or, when auld Phoebus bids good-morrow,

Down the zodiac urge the race,

And cast dirt on his godship’s face;

For I could lay my bread and kail 35

He’d ne’er cast saut upo’ thy tail. —

Wi’ a’ this care and a’ this grief,

And sma’, sma’ prospect of relief,

And nought but peat reek i’ my head,

How can I write what ye can read? — 40

Tarbolton, twenty-fourth o’ June,

Ye’ll find me in a better tune;

But till we meet and weet our whistle,

Tak this excuse for nae epistle.

ROBERT BURNS.

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

225.

Of a’ the Airts the Wind can Blaw (Song)

Tune— “Miss Admiral Gordon’s Strathspey.”

OF a’ the airts the wind can blaw,

I dearly like the west,

For there the bonie lassie lives,

The lassie I lo’e best:

There’s wild-woods grow, and rivers row, 5

And mony a hill between:

But day and night my fancys’ flight

Is ever wi’ my Jean.

I see her in the dewy flowers,

I see her sweet and fair: 10

I hear her in the tunefu’ birds,

I hear her charm the air:

There’s not a bonie flower that springs,

By fountain, shaw, or green;

There’s not a bonie bird that sings, 15

But minds me o’ my Jean.

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

226.

I hae a Wife o’ my Ain (Song)

I HAE a wife of my ain,

I’ll partake wi’ naebody;

I’ll take Cuckold frae nane,

I’ll gie Cuckold to naebody.

I hae a penny to spend, 5

There — thanks to naebody!

I hae naething to lend,

I’ll borrow frae naebody.

I am naebody’s lord,

I’ll be slave to naebody; 10

I hae a gude braid sword,

I’ll tak dunts frae naebody.

I’ll be merry and free,

I’ll be sad for naebody;

Naebody cares for me, 15

I care for naebody.

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

227.

Verses on Friars’ Carse Hermitage (First Version)

GLENRIDDEL HERMITAGE, June 28th, 1788.

THOU whom chance may hither lead,

Be thou clad in russet weed,

Be thou deckt in silken stole,

Grave these maxims on thy soul.

Life is but a day at most, 5

Sprung from night, in darkness lost:

Hope not sunshine every hour,

Fear not clouds will always lour.

Happiness is but a name,

Make content and ease thy aim, 10

Ambition is a meteor-gleam;

Fame, an idle restless dream;

Peace, the tend’rest flow’r of spring;

Pleasures, insects on the wing;

Those that sip the dew alone — 15

Make the butterflies thy own;

Those that would the bloom devour —

Crush the locusts, save the flower.

For the future be prepar’d,

Guard wherever thou can’st guard; 20

But thy utmost duly done,

Welcome what thou can’st not shun.

Follies past, give thou to air,

Make their consequence thy care:

Keep the name of Man in mind, 25

And dishonour not thy kind.

Reverence with lowly heart

Him, whose wondrous work thou art;

Keep His Goodness still in view,

Thy trust, and thy example, too. 30

Stranger, go! Heaven be thy guide!

Quod the Beadsman of Nidside.

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

228.

To Alex. Cunningham, Esq., Writer, Edinburgh

ELLISLAND, NITHSDALE, July 27th, 1788.

MY godlike friend — nay, do not stare,

You think the phrase is odd-like;

But “God is love,” the saints declare,

Then surely thou art godlike.

And is thy ardour still the same? 5

And kindled still at ANNA?

Others may boast a partial flame,

But thou art a volcano!

Ev’n Wedlock asks not love beyond

Death’s tie-dissolving portal; 10

But thou, omnipotently fond,

May’st promise love immortal!

Thy wounds such healing powers defy,

Such symptoms dire attend them,

That last great antihectic try — 15

MARRIAGE perhaps may mend them.

Sweet Anna has an air-a grace,

Divine, magnetic, touching:

She talks, she charms-but who can trace

The process of bewitching?

20

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

229.

Anna, thy Charms (Song)

ANNA, thy charms my bosom fire,

And waste my soul with care;

But ah! how bootless to admire,

When fated to despair!

Yet in thy presence, lovely Fair, 5

To hope may be forgiven;

For sure ‘twere impious to despair

So much in sight of heaven.

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

230.

The Fete Champetre

Tune— “Killiecrankie.”

O WHA will to Saint Stephen’s House,

To do our errands there, man?

O wha will to Saint Stephen’s House

O’ th’ merry lads of Ayr, man?

Or will we send a man o’ law? 5

Or will we send a sodger?

Or him wha led o’er Scotland a’

The meikle Ursa-Major?

Come, will ye court a noble lord,

Or buy a score o’lairds, man? 10

For worth and honour pawn their word,

Their vote shall be Glencaird’s, man.

Ane gies them coin, ane gies them wine,

Anither gies them clatter:

Annbank, wha guessed the ladies’ taste, 15

He gies a Fete Champetre.

When Love and Beauty heard the news,

The gay green woods amang, man;

Where, gathering flowers, and busking bowers,

They heard the blackbird’s sang, man: 20

A vow, they sealed it with a kiss,

Sir Politics to fetter;

As their’s alone, the patent bliss,

To hold a Fete Champetre.

Then mounted Mirth, on gleesome wing 25

O’er hill and dale she flew, man;

Ilk wimpling burn, ilk crystal spring,

Ilk glen and shaw she knew, man:

She summon’d every social sprite,

That sports by wood or water, 30

On th’ bonie banks of Ayr to meet,

And keep this Fete Champetre.

Cauld Boreas, wi’ his boisterous crew,

Were bound to stakes like kye, man,

And Cynthia’s car, o’ silver fu’, 35

Clamb up the starry sky, man:

Reflected beams dwell in the streams,

Or down the current shatter;

The western breeze steals thro’the trees,

To view this Fete Champetre. 40

How many a robe sae gaily floats!

What sparkling jewels glance, man!

To Harmony’s enchanting notes,

As moves the mazy dance, man.

The echoing wood, the winding flood, 45

Like Paradise did glitter,

When angels met, at Adam’s yett,

To hold their Fete Champetre.

When Politics came there, to mix

And make his ether-stane, man! 50

He circled round the magic ground,

But entrance found he nane, man:

He blush’d for shame, he quat his name,

Forswore it, every letter,

Wi’ humble prayer to join and share 55

This festive Fete Champetre.

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

231.

Epistle to Robert Graham, Esq., of Fintry

Requesting a Favour

WHEN Nature her great master-piece design’d,

And fram’d her last, best work, the human mind,

Her eye intent on all the mazy plan,

She form’d of various parts the various Man.

Then first she calls the useful many forth; 5

Plain plodding Industry, and sober Worth:

Thence peasants, farmers, native sons of earth,

And merchandise’ whole genus take their birth:

Each prudent cit a warm existence finds,

And all mechanics’ many-apron’d kinds. 10

Some other rarer sorts are wanted yet,

The lead and buoy are needful to the net:

The caput mortuum of gross desires

Makes a material for mere knights and squires;

The martial phosphorus is taught to flow, 15

She kneads the lumpish philosophic dough,

Then marks th’ unyielding mass with grave designs,

Law, physic, politics, and deep divines;

Last, she sublimes th’ Aurora of the poles,

The flashing elements of female souls. 20

The order’d system fair before her stood,

Nature, well pleas’d, pronounc’d it very good;

But ere she gave creating labour o’er,

Half-jest, she tried one curious labour more.

Some spumy, fiery, ignis fatuus matter, 25

Such as the slightest breath of air might scatter;

With arch-alacrity and conscious glee,

(Nature may have her whim as well as we,

Her Hogarth-art perhaps she meant to show it),

She forms the thing and christens it — a Poet: 30

Creature, tho’ oft the prey of care and sorrow,

When blest to-day, unmindful of to-morrow;

A being form’d t’ amuse his graver friends,

Admir’d and prais’d-and there the homage ends;

A mortal quite unfit for Fortune’s strife, 35

Yet oft the sport of all the ills of life;

Prone to enjoy each pleasure riches give,

Yet haply wanting wherewithal to live;

Longing to wipe each tear, to heal each groan,

Yet frequent all unheeded in his own. 40

But honest Nature is not quite a Turk,

She laugh’d at first, then felt for her poor work:

Pitying the propless climber of mankind,

She cast about a standard tree to find;

And, to support his helpless woodbine state, 45

Attach’d him to the generous, truly great:

A title, and the only one I claim,

To lay strong hold for help on bounteous Graham.

Pity the tuneful Muses’ hapless train,

Weak, timid landsmen on life’s stormy main! 50

Their hearts no selfish stern absorbent stuff,

That never gives — tho’ humbly takes enough;

The little fate allows, they share as soon,

Unlike sage proverb’d Wisdom’s hard-wrung boon:

The world were blest did bliss on them depend, 55

Ah, that “the friendly e’er should want a friend!”

Let Prudence number o’er each sturdy son,

Who life and wisdom at one race begun,

Who feel by reason and who give by rule,

(Instinct’s a brute, and sentiment a fool!) 60

Who make poor “will do” wait upon “I should” —

We own they’re prudent, but who feels they’re good?

Ye wise ones hence! ye hurt the social eye!

God’s image rudely etch’d on base alloy!

But come ye who the godlike pleasure know, 65

Heaven’s attribute distinguished — to bestow!

Whose arms of love would grasp the human race:

Come thou who giv’st with all a courtier’s grace;

FRIEND OF MY LIFE, true patron of my rhymes!

Prop of my dearest hopes for future times. 70

Why shrinks my soul half blushing, half afraid,

Backward, abash’d to ask thy friendly aid?

I know my need, I know thy giving hand,

I crave thy friendship at thy kind command;

But there are such who court the tuneful Nine — 75

Heavens! should the branded character be mine!

Whose verse in manhood’s pride sublimely flows,

Yet vilest reptiles in their begging prose.

Mark, how their lofty independent spirit

Soars on the spurning wing of injured merit! 80

Seek not the proofs in private life to find

Pity the best of words should be but wind!

So, to heaven’s gates the lark’s shrill song ascends,

But grovelling on the earth the carol ends.

In all the clam’rous cry of starving want, 85

They dun Benevolence with shameless front;

Oblige them, patronise their tinsel lays —

They persecute you all your future days!

Ere my poor soul such deep damnation stain,

My horny fist assume the plough again, 90

The pie-bald jacket let me patch once more,

On eighteenpence a week I’ve liv’d before.

Tho’, thanks to Heaven, I dare even that last shift,

I trust, meantime, my boon is in thy gift:

That, plac’d by thee upon the wish’d-for height, 95

Where, man and nature fairer in her sight,

My Muse may imp her wing for some sublimer flight.

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

232.

The Day Returns (Song)

Tune— “Seventh of November.”

THE DAY returns, my bosom burns,

The blissful day we twa did meet:

Tho’ winter wild in tempest toil’d,

Ne’er summer-sun was half sae sweet.

Than a’ the pride that loads the tide, 5

And crosses o’er the sultry line;

Than kingly robes, than crowns and globes,

Heav’n gave me more — it made thee mine!

While day and night can bring delight,

Or Nature aught of pleasure give; 10

While joys above my mind can move,

For thee, and thee alone, I live.

When that grim foe of life below

Comes in between to make us part,

The iron hand that breaks our band, 15

It breaks my bliss — it breaks my heart!

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

233.

O were I on Parnassus Hill (Song)

Tune— “My love is lost to me.”

O, WERE I on Parnassus hill,

Or had o’ Helicon my fill,

That I might catch poetic skill,

To sing how dear I love thee!

But Nith maun be my Muse’s well, 5

My Muse maun be thy bonie sel’,

On Corsincon I’ll glowr and spell,

And write how dear I love thee.

Then come, sweet Muse, inspire my lay!

For a’ the lee-lang simmer’s day 10

I couldna sing, I couldna say,

How much, how dear, I love thee,

I see thee dancing o’er the green,

Thy waist sae jimp, thy limbs sae clean,

Thy tempting lips, thy roguish een — 15

By Heaven and Earth I love thee!

By night, by day, a-field, at hame,

The thoughts o’ thee my breast inflame:

And aye I muse and sing thy name —

I only live to love thee. 20

Tho’ I were doom’d to wander on,

Beyond the sea, beyond the sun,

Till my last weary sand was run;

Till then — and then I love thee!

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

234.

A Mother’s Lament for her Son’s Death

For the Death of Her Son.

FATE gave the word, the arrow sped,

And pierc’d my darling’s heart;

And with him all the joys are fled

Life can to me impart.

By cruel hands the sapling drops, 5

In dust dishonour’d laid;

So fell the pride of all my hopes,

My age’s future shade.

The mother-linnet in the brake

Bewails her ravish’d young; 10

So I, for my lost darling’s sake,

Lament the live-day long.

Death, oft I’ve feared thy fatal blow.

Now, fond, I bare my breast;

O, do thou kindly lay me low 15

With him I love, at rest!

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

235.

The Fall of the Leaf (Song)

THE LAZY mist hangs from the brow of the hill,

Concealing the course of the dark-winding rill;

How languid the scenes, late so sprightly, appear!

As Autumn to Winter resigns the pale year.

The forests are leafless, the meadows are brown, 5

And all the gay foppery of summer is flown:

Apart let me wander, apart let me muse,

How quick Time is flying, how keen Fate pursues!

How long I have liv’d — but how much liv’d in vain,

How little of life’s scanty span may remain, 10

What aspects old Time in his progress has worn,

What ties cruel Fate, in my bosom has torn.

How foolish, or worse, till our summit is gain’d!

And downward, how weaken’d, how darken’d, how pain’d!

Life is not worth having with all it can give — 15

For something beyond it poor man sure must live.

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

236.

I Reign in Jeanie’s Bosom (Song)

LOUIS, what reck I by thee,

Or Geordie on his ocean?

Dyvor, beggar louns to me,

I reign in Jeanie’s bosom!

Let her crown my love her law, 5

And in her breast enthrone me,

Kings and nations — swith awa’!

Reif randies, I disown ye!

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

237.

It is na, Jean, thy Bonie Face (Song)

IT is na, Jean, thy bonie face,

Nor shape that I admire;

Altho’ thy beauty and thy grace

Might weel awauk desire.

Something, in ilka part o’ thee, 5

To praise, to love, I find,

But dear as is thy form to me,

Still dearer is thy mind.

Nae mair ungenerous wish I hae,

Nor stronger in my breast, 10

Than, if I canna make thee sae,

At least to see thee blest.

Content am I, if heaven shall give

But happiness, to thee;

And as wi’ thee I’d wish to live, 15

For thee I’d bear to die.

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

238.

Auld Lang Syne (Song)

SHOULD auld acquaintance be forgot,

And never brought to mind?

Should auld acquaintance be forgot,

And auld lang syne!

Chorus. — For auld lang syne, my dear, 5

For auld lang syne.

We’ll tak a cup o’ kindness yet,

For auld lang syne.

And surely ye’ll be your pint stowp!

And surely I’ll be mine! 10

And we’ll tak a cup o’kindness yet,

For auld lang syne.

For auld, &c.

We twa hae run about the braes,

And pou’d the gowans fine; 15

But we’ve wander’d mony a weary fit,

Sin’ auld lang syne.

For auld, &c.

We twa hae paidl’d in the burn,

Frae morning sun till dine; 20

But seas between us braid hae roar’d

Sin’ auld lang syne.

For auld, &c.

And there’s a hand, my trusty fere!

And gie’s a hand o’ thine! 25

And we’ll tak a right gude-willie waught,

For auld lang syne.

For auld, &c.

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

239.

My Bonie Mary (Song)

GO, fetch to me a pint o’ wine,

And fill it in a silver tassie;

That I may drink before I go,

A service to my bonie lassie.

The boat rocks at the pier o’ Leith; 5

Fu’ loud the wind blaws frae the Ferry;

The ship rides by the Berwick-law,

And I maun leave my bonie Mary.

The trumpets sound, the banners fly,

The glittering spears are ranked ready: 10

The shouts o’ war are heard afar,

The battle closes deep and bloody;

It’s not the roar o’ sea or shore,

Wad mak me langer wish to tarry!

Nor shouts o’ war that’s heard afar — 15

It’s leaving thee, my bonie Mary!

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

240.

Verses on a Parting Kiss

HUMID seal of soft affections,

Tenderest pledge of future bliss,

Dearest tie of young connections,

Love’s first snowdrop, virgin kiss!

Speaking silence, dumb confession, 5

Passion’s birth, and infant’s play,

Dove-like fondness, chaste concession,

Glowing dawn of future day!

Sorrowing joy, Adieu’s last action,

(Lingering lips must now disjoin), 10

What words can ever speak affection

So thrilling and sincere as thine!

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

241.

Written in Friars’ Carse Hermitage (Second Version)

THOU whom chance may hither lead,

Be thou clad in russet weed,

Be thou deckt in silken stole,

Grave these counsels on thy soul.

Life is but a day at most, 5

Sprung from night, — in darkness lost;

Hope not sunshine ev’ry hour,

Fear not clouds will always lour.

As Youth and Love with sprightly dance,

Beneath thy morning star advance, 10

Pleasure with her siren air

May delude the thoughtless pair;

Let Prudence bless Enjoyment’s cup,

Then raptur’d sip, and sip it up.

As thy day grows warm and high, 15

Life’s meridian flaming nigh,

Dost thou spurn the humble vale?

Life’s proud summits wouldst thou scale?

Check thy climbing step, elate,

Evils lurk in felon wait: 20

Dangers, eagle-pinioned, bold,

Soar around each cliffy hold!

While cheerful Peace, with linnet song,

Chants the lowly dells among.

As the shades of ev’ning close, 25

Beck’ning thee to long repose;

As life itself becomes disease,

Seek the chimney-nook of ease;

There ruminate with sober thought,

On all thou’st seen, and heard, and wrought, 30

And teach the sportive younkers round,

Saws of experience, sage and sound:

Say, man’s true, genuine estimate,

The grand criterion of his fate,

Is not, — Arth thou high or low? 35

Did thy fortune ebb or flow?

Did many talents gild thy span?

Or frugal Nature grudge thee one?

Tell them, and press it on their mind,

As thou thyself must shortly find, 40

The smile or frown of awful Heav’n,

To virtue or to Vice is giv’n,

Say, to be just, and kind, and wise —

There solid self-enjoyment lies;

That foolish, selfish, faithless ways 45

Lead to be wretched, vile, and base.

Thus resign’d and quiet, creep

To the bed of lasting sleep, —

Sleep, whence thou shalt ne’er awake,

Night, where dawn shall never break, 50

Till future life, future no more,

To light and joy the good restore,

To light and joy unknown before.

Stranger, go! Heav’n be thy guide!

Quod the Beadsman of Nithside. 55

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

242.

The Poet’s Progress

A Poem In Embryo

THOU, Nature, partial Nature, I arraign;

Of thy caprice maternal I complain.

The peopled fold thy kindly care have found,

The horned bull, tremendous, spurns the ground;

The lordly lion has enough and more, 5

The forest trembles at his very roar;

Thou giv’st the ass his hide, the snail his shell,

The puny wasp, victorious, guards his cell.

Thy minions, kings defend, controul devour,

In all th’ omnipotence of rule and power: 10

Foxes and statesmen subtle wiles ensure;

The cit and polecat stink, and are secure:

Toads with their poison, doctors with their drug,

The priest and hedgehog, in their robes, are snug:

E’en silly women have defensive arts, 15

Their eyes, their tongues — and nameless other parts.

But O thou cruel stepmother and hard,

To thy poor fenceless, naked child, the Bard!

A thing unteachable in worldly skill,

And half an idiot too, more helpless still: 20

No heels to bear him from the op’ning dun,

No claws to dig, his hated sight to shun:

No horns, but those by luckless Hymen worn,

And those, alas! not Amalthea’s horn:

No nerves olfact’ry, true to Mammon’s foot, 25

Or grunting, grub sagacious, evil’s root:

The silly sheep that wanders wild astray,

Is not more friendless, is not more a prey;

Vampyre-booksellers drain him to the heart,

And viper-critics cureless venom dart. 30

Critics! appll’d I venture on the name,

Those cut-throat bandits in the paths of fame,

Bloody dissectors, worse than ten Monroes,

He hacks to teach, they mangle to expose:

By blockhead’s daring into madness stung, 35

His heart by wanton, causeless malice wrung,

His well-won ways-than life itself more dear —

By miscreants torn who ne’er one sprig must wear;

Foil’d, bleeding, tortur’d in th’ unequal strife,

The hapless Poet flounces on through life, 40

Till, fled each hope that once his bosom fired,

And fled each Muse that glorious once inspir’d,

Low-sunk in squalid, unprotected age,

Dead even resentment for his injur’d page,

He heeds no more the ruthless critics’ rage. 45

So by some hedge the generous steed deceas’d,

For half-starv’d, snarling curs a dainty feast;

By toil and famine worn to skin and bone,

Lies, senseless of each tugging bitch’s son.

A little upright, pert, tart, tripping wight, 50

And still his precious self his dear delight;

Who loves his own smart shadow in the streets,

Better than e’er the fairest she he meets;

Much specious lore, but little understood,

(Veneering oft outshines the solid wood), 55

His solid sense, by inches you must tell,

But mete his cunning by the Scottish ell!

A man of fashion too, he made his tour,

Learn’d “vive la bagatelle et vive l’amour;”

So travell’d monkeys their grimace improve, 60

Polish their grin-nay, sigh for ladies’ love!

His meddling vanity, a busy fiend,

Still making work his selfish craft must mend.

* Crochallan came,

The old cock’d hat, the brown surtout — the same; 65

His grisly beard just bristling in its might —

‘Twas four long nights and days from shaving-night;

His uncomb’d, hoary locks, wild-staring, thatch’d

A head, for thought profound and clear, unmatch’d;

Yet, tho’ his caustic wit was biting-rude, 70

His heart was warm, benevolent and good.

O Dulness, portion of the truly blest!

Calm, shelter’d haven of eternal rest!

Thy sons ne’er madden in the fierce extremes

Of Fortune’s polar frost, or torrid beams; 75

If mantling high she fills the golden cup,

With sober, selfish ease they sip it up;

Conscious the bounteous meed they well deserve,

They only wonder “some folks” do not starve!

The grave, sage hern thus easy picks his frog, 80

And thinks the mallard a sad worthless dog.

When disappointment snaps the thread of Hope,

When, thro’ disastrous night, they darkling grope,

With deaf endurance sluggishly they bear,

And just conclude that “fools are Fortune’s care:” 85

So, heavy, passive to the tempest’s shocks,

Strong on the sign-post stands the stupid ox.

Not so the idle Muses’ mad-cap train,

Not such the workings of their moon-struck brain;

In equanimity they never dwell, 90

By turns in soaring heaven, or vaulted hell!

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

243.

Elegy on the Year 1788

FOR lords or kings I dinna mourn,

E’en let them die-for that they’re born:

But oh! prodigious to reflec’!

A Towmont, sirs, is gane to wreck!

O Eighty-eight, in thy sma’ space, 5

What dire events hae taken place!

Of what enjoyments thou hast reft us!

In what a pickle thou has left us!

The Spanish empire’s tint a head,

And my auld teethless, Bawtie’s dead: 10

The tulyie’s teugh ‘tween Pitt and Fox,

And ‘tween our Maggie’s twa wee cocks;

The tane is game, a bluidy devil,

But to the hen-birds unco civil;

The tither’s something dour o’ treadin, 15

But better stuff ne’er claw’d a middin.

Ye ministers, come mount the poupit,

An’ cry till ye be hearse an’ roupit,

For Eighty-eight, he wished you weel,

An’ gied ye a’ baith gear an’ meal; 20

E’en monc a plack, and mony a peck,

Ye ken yoursels, for little feck!

Ye bonie lasses, dight your e’en,

For some o’ you hae tint a frien’;

In Eighty-eight, ye ken, was taen, 25

What ye’ll ne’er hae to gie again.

Observe the very nowt an’ sheep,

How dowff an’ daviely they creep;

Nay, even the yirth itsel’ does cry,

For E’nburgh wells are grutten dry. 30

O Eighty-nine, thou’s but a bairn,

An’ no owre auld, I hope, to learn!

Thou beardless boy, I pray tak care,

Thou now hast got thy Daddy’s chair;

Nae handcuff’d, mizl’d, hap-shackl’d Regent, 35

But, like himsel, a full free agent,

Be sure ye follow out the plan

Nae waur than he did, honest man!

As muckle better as you can.

January, 1, 1789.

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

244.

The Henpecked Husband

Chorus. — Robin shure in hairst,

I shure wi’ him.

Fient a heuk had I,

Yet I stack by him.

I GAED up to Dunse, 5

To warp a wab o’ plaiden,

At his daddie’s yett,

Wha met me but Robin:

Robin shure, &c.

Was na Robin bauld, 10

Tho’ I was a cotter,

Play’d me sic a trick,

An’ me the El’er’s dochter!

Robin shure, &c.

Robin promis’d me 15

A’ my winter vittle;

Fient haet he had but three

Guse-feathers and a whittle!

Robin shure, &c.

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

245.

Versicles on Sign-Posts

CURS’D be the man, the poorest wretch in life,

The crouching vassal to a tyrant wife!

Who has no will but by her high permission,

Who has not sixpence but in her possession;

Who must to he, his dear friend’s secrets tell, 5

Who dreads a curtain lecture worse than hell.

Were such the wife had fallen to my part,

I’d break her spirit or I’d break her heart;

I’d charm her with the magic of a switch,

I’d kiss her maids, and kick the perverse b –- h. 10

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

1789

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

246.

Robin Shure in Hairst (Song)

HIS face with smile eternal drest,

Just like the Landlord’s to his Guest’s,

High as they hang with creaking din,

To index out the Country Inn.

He looked just as your sign-post Lions do, 5

With aspect fierce, and quite as harmless too.

–- –- –-

A head, pure, sinless quite of brain and soul,

The very image of a barber’s Poll;

It shews a human face, and wears a wig,

And looks, when well preserv’d, amazing big. 10

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

247.

Ode, Sacred to the Memory of Mrs. Oswald of Auchencruive

DWELLER in yon dungeon dark,

Hangman of creation! mark,

Who in widow-weeds appears,

Laden with unhonour’d years,

Noosing with care a bursting purse, 5

Baited with many a deadly curse?

STROPHE

View the wither’d Beldam’s face;

Can thy keen inspection trace

Aught of Humanity’s sweet, melting grace?

Note that eye, ‘tis rheum o’erflows; 10

Pity’s flood there never rose,

See these hands ne’er stretched to save,

Hands that took, but never gave:

Keeper of Mammon’s iron chest,

Lo, there she goes, unpitied and unblest, 15

She goes, but not to realms of everlasting rest!

ANTISTROPHE

Plunderer of Armies! lift thine eyes,

(A while forbear, ye torturing fiends;)

Seest thou whose step, unwilling, hither bends?

No fallen angel, hurl’d from upper skies; 20

‘Tis thy trusty quondam Mate,

Doom’d to share thy fiery fate;

She, tardy, hell-ward plies.

EPODE

And are they of no more avail,

Ten thousand glittering pounds a-year? 25

In other worlds can Mammon fail,

Omnipotent as he is here!

O, bitter mockery of the pompous bier,

While down the wretched Vital Part is driven!

The cave-lodged Beggar,with a conscience clear, 30

Expires in rags, unknown, and goes to Heaven.

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

248.

Pegasus at Wanlockhead

WITH Pegasus upon a day,

Apollo, weary flying,

Through frosty hills the journey lay,

On foot the way was plying.

Poor slipshod giddy Pegasus 5

Was but a sorry walker;

To Vulcan then Apollo goes,

To get a frosty caulker.

Obliging Vulcan fell to work,

Threw by his coat and bonnet, 10

And did Sol’s business in a crack;

Sol paid him with a sonnet.

Ye Vulcan’s sons of Wanlockhead,

Pity my sad disaster;

My Pegasus is poorly shod, 15

I’ll pay you like my master.

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

249.

Sappho Redivivus: A Fragment

BY all I lov’d, neglected and forgot,

No friendly face e’er lights my squalid cot;

Shunn’d, hated, wrong’d, unpitied, unredrest,

The mock’d quotation of the scorner’s jest!

Ev’n the poor support of my wretched life, 5

Snatched by the violence of legal strife.

Oft grateful for my very daily bread

To those my family’s once large bounty fed;

A welcome inmate at their homely fare,

My griefs, my woes, my sighs, my tears they share: 10

(Their vulgar souls unlike the souls refin’d,

The fashioned marble of the polished mind).

In vain would Prudence, with decorous sneer,

Point out a censuring world, and bid me fear;

Above the world, on wings of Love, I rise — 15

I know its worst, and can that worst despise;

Let Prudence’ direst bodements on me fall,

M[ontgomer]y, rich reward, o’erpays them all!

Mild zephyrs waft thee to life’s farthest shore,

Nor think of me and my distress more, — 20

Falsehood accurst! No! still I beg a place,

Still near thy heart some little, little trace:

For that dear trace the world I would resign:

O let me live, and die, and think it mine!

“I burn, I burn, as when thro’ ripen’d corn 25

By driving winds the crackling flames are borne;”

Now raving-wild, I curse that fatal night,

Then bless the hour that charm’d my guilty sight:

In vain the laws their feeble force oppose,

Chain’d at Love’s feet, they groan, his vanquish’d foes. 30

In vain Religion meets my shrinking eye,

I dare not combat, but I turn and fly:

Conscience in vain upbraids th’ unhallow’d fire,

Love grasps her scorpions — stifled they expire!

Reason drops headlong from his sacred throne, 35

Your dear idea reigns, and reigns alone;

Each thought intoxicated homage yields,

And riots wanton in forbidden fields.

By all on high adoring mortals know!

By all the conscious villain fears below! 40

By your dear self! — the last great oath I swear,

Not life, nor soul, were ever half so dear!

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

250.

She’s Fair and Fause (Song)

SHE’S fair and fause that causes my smart,

I lo’ed her meikle and lang;

She’s broken her vow, she’s broken my heart,

And I may e’en gae hang.

A coof cam in wi’ routh o’ gear, 5

And I hae tint my dearest dear;

But Woman is but warld’s gear,

Sae let the bonie lass gang.

Whae’er ye be that woman love,

To this be never blind; 10

Nae ferlie ‘tis tho’ fickle she prove,

A woman has’t by kind.

O Woman lovely, Woman fair!

An angel form’s faun to thy share,

‘Twad been o’er meikle to gi’en thee mair — 15

I mean an angel mind.

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

251.

Impromptu Lines to Captain Riddell

On Returning a Newspaper.

YOUR News and Review, sir.

I’ve read through and through, sir,

With little admiring or blaming;

The Papers are barren

Of home-news or foreign, 5

No murders or rapes worth the naming.

Our friends, the Reviewers,

Those chippers and hewers,

Are judges of mortar and stone, sir;

But of meet or unmeet, 10

In a fabric complete,

I’ll boldly pronounce they are none, sir;

My goose-quill too rude is

To tell all your goodness

Bestow’d on your servant, the Poet; 15

Would to God I had one

Like a beam of the sun,

And then all the world, sir, should know it!

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

252.

Lines to John M’Murdo of Drumlanrig

Sent with some of the Author’s Poems.

O COULD I give thee India’s wealth,

As I this trifle send;

Because thy joy in both would be

To share them with a friend.

But golden sands did never grace 5

The Heliconian stream;

Then take what gold could never buy —

An honest bard’s esteem.

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

253.

Rhyming Reply to a Note from Captain Riddell

DEAR SIR, at ony time or tide,

I’d rather sit wi’ you than ride,

Though ‘twere wi’ royal Geordie:

And trowth, your kindness, soon and late,

Aft gars me to mysel’ look blate — 5

The Lord in Heav’n reward ye!

R. BURNS.

ELLISLAND.

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

254.

Caledonia: A Ballad

Tune— “Caledonian Hunts’ Delight” of Mr. Gow.

THERE was once a day, but old Time wasythen young,

That brave Caledonia, the chief of her line,

From some of your northern deities sprung,

(Who knows not that brave Caledonia’s divine?)

From Tweed to the Orcades was her domain, 5

To hunt, or to pasture, or do what she would:

Her heav’nly relations there fixed her reign,

And pledg’d her their godheads to warrant it good.

A lambkin in peace, but a lion in war,

The pride of her kindred, the heroine grew: 10

Her grandsire, old Odin, triumphantly swore, —

“Whoe’er shall provoke thee, th’ encounter shall rue!”

With tillage or pasture at times she would sport,

To feed her fair flocks by her green rustling corn;

But chiefly the woods were her fav’rite resort, 15

Her darling amusement, the hounds and the horn.

Long quiet she reigned; till thitherward steers

A flight of bold eagles from Adria’s strand:

Repeated, successive, for many long years,

They darken’d the air, and they plunder’d the land: 20

Their pounces were murder, and terror their cry,

They’d conquer’d and ruin’d a world beside;

She took to her hills, and her arrows let fly,

The daring invaders they fled or they died.

The Cameleon-Savage disturb’d her repose, 25

With tumult, disquiet, rebellion, and strife;

Provok’d beyond bearing, at last she arose,

And robb’d him at once of his hopes and his life:

The Anglian lion, the terror of France,

Oft prowling, ensanguin’d the Tweed’s silver flood; 30

But, taught by the bright Caledonian lance,

He learned to fear in his own native wood.

The fell Harpy-raven took wing from the north,

The scourge of the seas, and the dread of the shore;

The wild Scandinavian boar issued forth 35

To wanton in carnage and wallow in gore:

O’er countries and kingdoms their fury prevail’d,

No arts could appease them, no arms could repel;

But brave Caledonia in vain they assail’d,

As Largs well can witness, and Loncartie tell. 40

Thus bold, independent, unconquer’d, and free,

Her bright course of glory for ever shall run:

For brave Caledonia immortal must be;

I’ll prove it from Euclid as clear as the sun:

Rectangle-triangle, the figure we’ll chuse: 45

The upright is Chance, and old Time is the base;

But brave Caledonia’s the hypothenuse;

Then, ergo, she’ll match them, and match them always.

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

255.

Verses to Miss Cruickshank

A very Young Lady

Written on the Blank Leaf of a Book, presented to her by the Author.

BEAUTEOUS Rosebud, young and gay,

Blooming in thy early May,

Never may’st thou, lovely flower,

Chilly shrink in sleety shower!

Never Boreas’ hoary path, 5

Never Eurus’ pois’nous breath,

Never baleful stellar lights,

Taint thee with untimely blights!

Never, never reptile thief

Riot on thy virgin leaf! 10

Nor even Sol too fiercely view

Thy bosom blushing still with dew!

May’st thou long, sweet crimson gem,

Richly deck thy native stem;

Till some ev’ning, sober, calm, 15

Dropping dews, and breathing balm,

While all around the woodland rings,

And ev’ry bird thy requiem sings;

Thou, amid the dirgeful sound,

Shed thy dying honours round, 20

And resign to parent Earth

The loveliest form she e’er gave birth.

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

256.

Beware o’ Bonie Ann (Song)

YE gallants bright, I rede you right,

Beware o’ bonie Ann;

Her comely face sae fu’ o’ grace,

Your heart she will trepan:

Her een sae bright, like stars by night, 5

Her skin sae like the swan;

Sae jimply lac’d her genty waist,

That sweetly ye might span.

Youth, Grace, and Love attendant move,

And pleasure leads the van: 10

In a’ their charms, and conquering arms,

They wait on bonie Ann.

The captive bands may chain the hands,

But love enslaves the man:

Ye gallants braw, I rede you a’, 15

Beware o’ bonie Ann!

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

257.

Ode on the Departed Regency Bill

(March, 1789)

DAUGHTER of Chaos’ doting years,

Nurse of ten thousand hopes and fears,

Whether thy airy, insubstantial shade

(The rights of sepulture now duly paid)

Spread abroad its hideous form 5

On the roaring civil storm,

Deafening din and warring rage

Factions wild with factions wage;

Or under-ground, deep-sunk, profound,

Among the demons of the earth, 10

With groans that make the mountains shake,

Thou mourn thy ill-starr’d, blighted birth;

Or in the uncreated Void,

Where seeds of future being fight,

With lessen’d step thou wander wide, 15

To greet thy Mother — Ancient Night.

And as each jarring, monster-mass is past,

Fond recollect what once thou wast:

In manner due, beneath this sacred oak,

Hear, Spirit, hear! thy presence I invoke! 20

By a Monarch’s heaven-struck fate,

By a disunited State,

By a generous Prince’s wrongs.

By a Senate’s strife of tongues,

By a Premier’s sullen pride, 25

Louring on the changing tide;

By dread Thurlow’s powers to awe

Rhetoric, blasphemy and law;

By the turbulent ocean —

A Nation’s commotion, 30

By the harlot-caresses

Of borough addresses,

By days few and evil,

(Thy portion, poor devil!)

By Power, Wealth, and Show, 35

(The Gods by men adored,)

By nameless Poverty,

(Their hell abhorred,)

By all they hope, by all they fear,

Hear! and appear! 40

Stare not on me, thou ghastly Power!

Nor, grim with chained defiance, lour:

No Babel-structure would I build

Where, order exil’d from his native sway,

Confusion may the REGENT-sceptre wield, 45

While all would rule and none obey:

Go, to the world of man relate

The story of thy sad, eventful fate;

And call presumptuous Hope to hear

And bid him check his blind career; 50

And tell the sore-prest sons of Care,

Never, never to despair!

Paint Charles’ speed on wings of fire,

The object of his fond desire,

Beyond his boldest hopes, at hand: 55

Paint all the triumph of the Portland Band;

Mark how they lift the joy-exulting voice,

And how their num’rous creditors rejoice;

But just as hopes to warm enjoyment rise,

Cry CONVALESCENCE! and the vision flies. 60

Then next pourtray a dark’ning twilight gloom,

Eclipsing sad a gay, rejoicing morn,

While proud Ambition to th’ untimely tomb

By gnashing, grim, despairing fiends is borne:

Paint ruin, in the shape of high D[undas] 65

Gaping with giddy terror o’er the brow;

In vain he struggles, the fates behind him press,

And clam’rous hell yawns for her prey below:

How fallen That, whose pride late scaled the skies!

And This, like Lucifer, no more to rise! 70

Again pronounce the powerful word;

See Day, triumphant from the night, restored.

Then know this truth, ye Sons of Men!

(Thus ends thy moral tale,)

Your darkest terrors may be vain, 75

Your brightest hopes may fail.

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

258.

Epistle to James Tennant of Glenconner

AULD comrade dear, and brither sinner,

How’s a’ the folk about Glenconner?

How do you this blae eastlin wind,

That’s like to blaw a body blind?

For me, my faculties are frozen, 5

My dearest member nearly dozen’d.

I’ve sent you here, by Johnie Simson,

Twa sage philosophers to glimpse on;

Smith, wi’ his sympathetic feeling,

An’ Reid, to common sense appealing. 10

Philosophers have fought and wrangled,

An’ meikle Greek an’ Latin mangled,

Till wi’ their logic-jargon tir’d,

And in the depth of science mir’d,

To common sense they now appeal, 15

What wives and wabsters see and feel.

But, hark ye, friend! I charge you strictly,

Peruse them, an’ return them quickly:

For now I’m grown sae cursed douce

I pray and ponder butt the house; 20

My shins, my lane, I there sit roastin’,

Perusing Bunyan, Brown, an’ Boston,

Till by an’ by, if I haud on,

I’ll grunt a real gospel-groan:

Already I begin to try it, 25

To cast my e’en up like a pyet,

When by the gun she tumbles o’er

Flutt’ring an’ gasping in her gore:

Sae shortly you shall see me bright,

A burning an’ a shining light. 30

My heart-warm love to guid auld Glen,

The ace an’ wale of honest men:

When bending down wi’ auld grey hairs

Beneath the load of years and cares,

May He who made him still support him, 35

An’ views beyond the grave comfort him;

His worthy fam’ly far and near,

God bless them a’ wi’ grace and gear!

My auld schoolfellow, Preacher Willie,

The manly tar, my mason-billie, 40

And Auchenbay, I wish him joy,

If he’s a parent, lass or boy,

May he be dad, and Meg the mither,

Just five-and-forty years thegither!

And no forgetting wabster Charlie, 45

I’m tauld he offers very fairly.

An’ Lord, remember singing Sannock,

Wi’ hale breeks, saxpence, an’ a bannock!

And next, my auld acquaintance, Nancy,

Since she is fitted to her fancy, 50

An’ her kind stars hae airted till her

gA guid chiel wi’ a pickle siller.

My kindest, best respects, I sen’ it,

To cousin Kate, an’ sister Janet:

Tell them, frae me, wi’ chiels be cautious, 55

For, faith, they’ll aiblins fin’ them fashious;

To grant a heart is fairly civil,

But to grant a maidenhead’s the devil.

An’ lastly, Jamie, for yoursel,

May guardian angels tak a spell, 60

An’ steer you seven miles south o’ hell:

But first, before you see heaven’s glory,

May ye get mony a merry story,

Mony a laugh, and mony a drink,

And aye eneugh o’ needfu’ clink. 65

Now fare ye weel, an’ joy be wi’ you:

For my sake, this I beg it o’ you,

Assist poor Simson a’ ye can,

Ye’ll fin; him just an honest man;

Sae I conclude, and quat my chanter, 70

Your’s, saint or sinner,

ROB THE RANTER.

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

259.

A New Psalm for the Chapel of Kilmarnock

On the Thanksgiving-Day for His Majesty’s Recovery.

O SING a new song to the Lord,

Make, all and every one,

A joyful noise, even for the King

His restoration.

The sons of Belial in the land 5

Did set their heads together;

Come, let us sweep them off, said they,

Like an o’erflowing river.

They set their heads together, I say,

They set their heads together; 10

On right, on left, on every hand,

We saw none to deliver.

Thou madest strong two chosen ones

To quell the Wicked’s pride;

That Young Man, great in Issachar, 15

The burden-bearing tribe.

And him, among the Princes chief

In our Jerusalem,

The judge that’s mighty in thy law,

The man that fears thy name. 20

Yet they, even they, with all their strength,

Began to faint and fail:

Even as two howling, ravenous wolves

To dogs do turn their tail.

Th’ ungodly o’er the just prevail’d, 25

For so thou hadst appointed;

That thou might’st greater glory give

Unto thine own anointed.

And now thou hast restored our State,

Pity our Kirk also; 30

For she by tribulations

Is now brought very low.

Consume that high-place, Patronage,

From off thy holy hill;

And in thy fury burn the book — 35

Even of that man M’Gill.

Now hear our prayer, accept our song,

And fight thy chosen’s battle:

We seek but little, Lord, from thee,

Thou kens we get as little. 40

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

260.

Sketch in Verse, inscribed to the Right Hon. C. J. Fox

Inscribed to the Right Hon. C. J. Fox.

HOW wisdom and Folly meet, mix, and unite,

How Virtue and Vice blend their black and their white,

How Genius, th’ illustrious father of fiction,

Confounds rule and law, reconciles contradiction,

I sing: If these mortals, the critics, should bustle, 5

I care not, not I — let the Critics go whistle!

But now for a Patron whose name and whose glory,

At once may illustrate and honour my story.

Thou first of our orators, first of our wits;

Yet whose parts and acquirements seem just lucky hits; 10

With knowledge so vast, and with judgment so strong,

No man with the half of ‘em e’er could go wrong;

With passions so potent, and fancies so bright,

No man with the half of ‘em e’er could go right;

A sorry, poor, misbegot son of the Muses, 15

For using thy name, offers fifty excuses.

Good L — d, what is Man! for as simple he looks,

Do but try to develop his hooks and his crooks;

With his depths and his shallows, his good and his evil,

All in all he’s a problem must puzzle the devil. 20

On his one ruling passion Sir Pope hugely labours,

That, like th’ old Hebrew walking-switch, eats up its neighbours:

Mankind are his show-box — a friend, would you know him?

Pull the string, Ruling Passion the picture will show him,

What pity, in rearing so beauteous a system, 25

One trifling particular, Truth, should have miss’d him;

For, spite of his fine theoretic positions,

Mankind is a science defies definitions.

Some sort all our qualities each to its tribe,

And think human nature they truly describe; 30

Have you found this, or t’other? There’s more in the wind;

As by one drunken fellow his comrades you’ll find.

But such is the flaw, or the depth of the plan,

In the make of that wonderful creature called Man,

No two virtues, whatever relation they claim. 35

Nor even two different shades of the same,

Though like as was ever twin brother to brother,

Possessing the one shall imply you’ve the other.

But truce with abstraction, and truce with a Muse

Whose rhymes you’ll perhaps, Sir, ne’er deign to peruse: 40

Will you leave your justings, your jars, and your quarrels,

Contending with Billy for proud-nodding laurels?

My much-honour’d Patron, believe your poor poet,

Your courage, much more than your prudence, you show it:

In vain with Squire Billy for laurels you struggle: 45

He’ll have them by fair trade, if not, he will smuggle:

Not cabinets even of kings would conceal ‘em,

He’d up the back stairs, and by G — , he would steal ‘em,

Then feats like Squire Billy’s you ne’er can achieve ‘em;

It is not, out-do him — the task is, out-thieve him! 50

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

261.

The Wounded Hare

INHUMAN man! curse on thy barb’rous art,

And blasted be thy murder-aiming eye;

May never pity soothe thee with a sigh,

Nor ever pleasure glad thy cruel heart!

Go live, poor wand’rer of the wood and field! 5

The bitter little that of life remains:

No more the thickening brakes and verdant plains

To thee a home, or food, or pastime yield.

Seek, mangled wretch, some place of wonted rest,

No more of rest, but now thy dying bed! 10

The sheltering rushes whistling o’er thy head,

The cold earth with thy bloody bosom prest.

Perhaps a mother’s anguish adds its woe;

The playful pair crowd fondly by thy side;

Ah! helpless nurslings, who will now provide 15

That life a mother only can bestow!

Oft as by winding Nith I, musing, wait

The sober eve, or hail the cheerful dawn,

I’ll miss thee sporting o’er the dewy lawn,

And curse the ruffian’s aim, and mourn thy hapless fate. 20

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

262.

Delia: An Ode

“To the Editor of The Star. — Mr. Printer — If the productions of a simple ploughman can merit a place in the same paper with Sylvester Otway, and the other favourites of the Muses who illuminate the Star with the lustre of genius, your insertion of the enclosed trifle will be succeeded by future communications from — Yours, &c., R. BURNS.

Ellisland, near Dumfries, 18th May, 1789.”

FAIR the face of orient day,

Fair the tints of op’ning rose;

But fairer still my Delia dawns,

More lovely far her beauty shows.

Sweet the lark’s wild warbled lay, 5

Sweet the tinkling rill to hear;

But, Delia, more delightful still,

Steal thine accents on mine ear.

The flower-enamour’d busy bee

The rosy banquet loves to sip; 10

Sweet the streamlet’s limpid lapse

To the sun-brown’d Arab’s lip.

But, Delia, on thy balmy lips

Let me, no vagrant insect, rove;

O let me steal one liquid kiss, 15

For Oh! my soul is parch’d with love.

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

263.

The Gardener wi’ his Paidle (Song)

Tune— “The Gardener’s March.”

WHEN rosy May comes in wi’ flowers,

To deck her gay, green-spreading bowers,

Then busy, busy are his hours,

The Gard’ner wi’ his paidle.

The crystal waters gently fa’, 5

The merry bards are lovers a’,

The scented breezes round him blaw —

The Gard’ner wi’ his paidle.

When purple morning starts the hare

To steal upon her early fare; 10

Then thro’ the dews he maun repair —

The Gard’ner wi’ his paidle.

When day, expiring in the west,

The curtain draws o’ Nature’s rest,

He flies to her arms he lo’es the best, 15

The Gard’ner wi’ his paidle.

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

264.

On a Bank of Flowers (Song)

ON a bank of flowers, in a summer day,

For summer lightly drest,

The youthful, blooming Nelly lay,

With love and sleep opprest;

When Willie, wand’ring thro’ the wood, 5

Who for her favour oft had sued;

He gaz’d, he wish’d

He fear’d, he blush’d,

And trembled where he stood.

Her closed eyes, like weapons sheath’d, 10

Were seal’d in soft repose;

Her lip, still as she fragrant breath’d,

It richer dyed the rose;

The springing lilies, sweetly prest,

Wild-wanton kissed her rival breast; 15

He gaz’d, he wish’d,

He mear’d, he blush’d,

His bosom ill at rest.

Her robes, light-waving in the breeze,

Her tender limbs embrace; 20

Her lovely form, her native ease,

All harmony and grace;

Tumultuous tides his pulses roll,

A faltering, ardent kiss he stole;

He gaz’d, he wish’d, 25

He fear’d, he blush’d,

And sigh’d his very soul.

As flies the partridge from the brake,

On fear-inspired wings,

So Nelly, starting, half-awake, 30

Away affrighted springs;

But Willie follow’d-as he should,

He overtook her in the wood;

He vow’d, he pray’d,

He found the maid 35

Forgiving all, and good.

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

265.

Young Jockie was the Blythest Lad (Song)

YOUNG Jockie was the blythest lad,

In a’ our town or here awa;

Fu’ blythe he whistled at the gaud,

Fu’ lightly danc’d he in the ha’.

He roos’d my een sae bonie blue, 5

He roos’d my waist sae genty sma’;

An’ aye my heart cam to my mou’,

When ne’er a body heard or saw.

My Jockie toils upon the plain,

Thro’ wind and weet, thro’ frost and snaw: 10

And o’er the lea I leuk fu’ fain,

When Jockie’s owsen hameward ca’.

An’ aye the night comes round again,

When in his arms he taks me a’;

An’ aye he vows he’ll be my ain, 15

As lang’s he has a breath to draw.

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

266.

The Banks of Nith (Song)

THE THAMES flows proudly to the sea,

Where royal cities stately stand;

But sweeter flows the Nith to me,

Where Comyns ance had high command.

When shall I see that honour’d land, 5

That winding stream I love so dear!

Must wayward Fortune’s adverse hand

For ever, ever keep me here!

How lovely, Nith, thy fruitful vales,

Where bounding hawthorns gaily bloom; 10

And sweetly spread thy sloping dales,

Where lambkins wanton through the broom.

Tho’ wandering now must be my doom,

Far from thy bonie banks and braes,

May there my latest hours consume, 15

Amang the friends of early days!

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

267.

Jamie, Come Try Me (Song)

Chorus. — Jamie, come try me,

Jamie, come try me,

If thou would win my love,

Jamie, come try me.

IF thou should ask my love, 5

Could I deny thee?

If thou would win my love,

Jamie, come try me!

Jamie, come try me, &c.

If thou should kiss me, love, 10

Wha could espy thee?

If thou wad be my love,

Jamie, come try me!

Jamie, come try me, &c.

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

268.

I Love my Love in Secret (Song)

MY Sandy gied to me a ring,

Was a’ beset wi’ diamonds fine;

But I gied him a far better thing,

I gied my heart in pledge o’ his ring.

Chorus. — My Sandy O, my Sandy O, 5

My bonie, bonie Sandy O;

Tho’ the love that I owe

To thee I dare na show,

Yet I love my love in secret, my Sandy O.

My Sandy brak a piece o’ gowd, 10

While down his cheeks the saut tears row’d;

He took a hauf, and gied it to me,

And I’ll keep it till the hour I die.

My Sand O, &c.

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

269.

Sweet Tibbie Dunbar (Song)

O WILT thou go wi’ me, sweet Tibbie Dunbar?

O wilt thou go wi’ me, sweet Tibbie Dunbar?

Wilt thou ride on a horse, or be drawn in a car,

Or walk by my side, O sweet Tibbie Dunbar?

I care na thy daddie, his lands and his money, 5

I care na thy kin, sae high and sae lordly;

But sae that thou’lt hae me for better for waur,

And come in thy coatie, sweet Tibbie Dunbar.

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

270.

The Captain’s Lady (Song)

Chorus. — O mount and go, mount and make you ready,

O mount and go, and be the Captain’s lady.

WHEN the drums do beat, and the cannons rattle,

Thou shalt sit in state, and see thy love in battle:

When the drums do beat, and the cannons rattle, 5

Thou shalt sit in state, and see thy love in battle.

O mount and go, &c.

When the vanquish’d foe sues for peace and quiet,

To the shades we’ll go, and in love enjoy it:

When the vanquish’d foe sues for peace and quiet, 10

To the shades we’ll go, and in love enjoy it.

O mount and go, &c.

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

271.

John Anderson, My Jo (Song)

JOHN ANDERSON, my jo, John,

When we were first acquent;

Your locks were like the raven,

Your bonie brow was brent;

But now your brow is beld, John, 5

Your locks are like the snaw;

But blessings on your frosty pow,

John Anderson, my jo.

John Anderson, my jo, John,

We clamb the hill thegither; 10

And mony a cantie day, John,

We’ve had wi’ ane anither:

Now we maun totter down, John,

And hand in hand we’ll go,

And sleep thegither at the foot, 15

John Anderson, my jo.

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

272.

My Love she’s but a Lassie yet (Song)

MY love, she’s but a lassie yet,

My love, she’s but a lassie yet;

We’ll let her stand a year or twa,

She’ll no be half sae saucy yet;

I rue the day I sought her, O! 5

I rue the day I sought her, O!

Wha gets her needs na say she’s woo’d,

But he may say he’s bought her, O.

Come, draw a drap o’ the best o’t yet,

Come, draw a drap o’ the best o’t yet, 10

Gae seek for pleasure whare you will,

But here I never miss’d it yet,

We’re a’ dry wi’ drinkin o’t,

We’re a’ dry wi’ drinkin o’t;

The minister kiss’d the fiddler’s wife; 15

He could na preach for thinkin o’t.

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

273.

Tam Glen (Song)

MY heart is a-breaking, dear Tittie,

Some counsel unto me come len’,

To anger them a’ is a pity,

But what will I do wi’ Tam Glen?

I’m thinking, wi’ sic a braw fellow, 5

In poortith I might mak a fen;

What care I in riches to wallow,

If I maunna marry Tam Glen!

There’s Lowrie the Laird o’ Dumeller —

“Gude day to you, brute!” he comes ben: 10

He brags and he blaws o’ his siller,

But when will he dance like Tam Glen!

My minnie does constantly deave me,

And bids me beware o’ young men;

They flatter, she says, to deceive me, 15

But wha can think sae o’ Tam Glen!

My daddie says, gin I’ll forsake him,

He’d gie me gude hunder marks ten;

But, if it’s ordain’d I maun take him,

O wha will I get but Tam Glen! 20

Yestreen at the Valentine’s dealing,

My heart to my mou’ gied a sten’;

For thrice I drew ane without failing,

And thrice it was written “Tam Glen”!

The last Halloween I was waukin 25

My droukit sark-sleeve, as ye ken,

His likeness came up the house staukin,

And the very grey breeks o’ Tam Glen!

Come, counsel, dear Tittie, don’t tarry;

I’ll gie ye my bonie black hen, 30

Gif ye will advise me to marry

The lad I lo’e dearly, Tam Glen.

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

274.

Carle, an’ the King come (Song)

Chorus. — Carle, an the King come,

Carle, an the King come,

Thou shalt dance and I will sing,

Carle, an the King come.

AN SOMEBODY were come again, 5

Then somebody maun cross the main,

And every man shall hae his ain,

Carle, an the King come.

Carle, an the King come, &c.

I trow we swapped for the worse, 10

We gae the boot and better horse;

And that we’ll tell them at the cross,

Carle, an the King come.

Carle, an the King come, &c.

Coggie, an the King come, 15

Coggie, an the King come,

I’se be fou, and thou’se be toom

Coggie, an the King come.

Coggie, an the King come, &c.

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

275.

The Laddie’s dear sel’ (Song)

THERE’S a youth in this city, it were a great pity

That he from our lassies should wander awa’;

For he’s bonie and braw, weel-favor’d witha’,

An’ his hair has a natural buckle an’ a’.

His coat is the hue o’ his bonnet sae blue, 5

His fecket is white as the new-driven snaw;

His hose they are blae, and his shoon like the slae,

And his clear siller buckles, they dazzle us a’.

For beauty and fortune the laddie’s been courtin;

Weel-featur’d, weel-tocher’d, weel-mounted an’ braw; 10

But chiefly the siller that gars him gang till her,

The penny’s the jewel that beautifies a’.

There’s Meg wi’ the mailen that fain wad a haen him,

And Susie, wha’s daddie was laird o’ the Ha’;

There’s lang-tocher’d Nancy maist fetters his fancy, 15

But the laddie’s dear sel’, he loes dearest of a’.

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

276.

Whistle o’er the lave o’t (Song)

FIRST when Maggie was my care,

Heav’n, I thought, was in her air,

Now we’re married-speir nae mair,

But whistle o’er the lave o’t!

Meg was meek, and Meg was mild, 5

Sweet and harmless as a child —

Wiser men than me’s beguil’d;

Whistle o’er the lave o’t!

How we live, my Meg and me,

How we love, and how we gree, 10

I care na by how few may see —

Whistle o’er the lave o’t!

Wha I wish were maggot’s meat,

Dish’d up in her winding-sheet,

I could write-but Meg maun see’t — 15

Whistle o’er the lave o’t!

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

277.

My Eppie Adair (Song)

Chorus. — An’ O my Eppie, my jewel, my Eppie,

Wha wad na be happy wi’ Eppie Adair?

BY love, and by beauty, by law, and by duty,

I swear to be true to my Eppie Adair!

By love, and by beauty, by law, and by duty, 5

I swear to be true to my Eppie Adair!

And O my Eppie, &c.

A’ pleasure exile me, dishonour defile me,

If e’er I beguile ye, my Eppie Adair!

A’ pleasure exile me, dishonour defile me, 10

If e’er I beguile thee, my Eppie Adair!

And O my Eppie, &c.

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

278.

On the late Captain Grose’s Peregrinations

Peregrinations thro’ Scotland, collecting the Antiquities of that Kingdom

HEAR, Land o’ Cakes, and brither Scots,

Frae Maidenkirk to Johnie Groat’s; —

If there’s a hole in a’ your coats,

I rede you tent it:

A chield’s amang you takin notes, 5

And, faith, he’ll prent it:

If in your bounds ye chance to light

Upon a fine, fat fodgel wight,

O’ stature short, but genius bright,

That’s he, mark weel; 10

And wow! he has an unco sleight

O’ cauk and keel.

By some auld, houlet-haunted biggin,

Or kirk deserted by its riggin,

It’s ten to ane ye’ll find him snug in 15

Some eldritch part,

Wi’ deils, they say, L — d save’s! colleaguin

At some black art.

Ilk ghaist that haunts auld ha’ or chaumer,

Ye gipsy-gang that deal in glamour, 20

And you, deep-read in hell’s black grammar,

Warlocks and witches,

Ye’ll quake at his conjuring hammer,

Ye midnight bitches.

It’s tauld he was a sodger bred, 25

And ane wad rather fa’n than fled;

But now he’s quat the spurtle-blade,

And dog-skin wallet,

And taen the — Antiquarian trade,

I think they call it. 30

He has a fouth o’ auld nick-nackets:

Rusty airn caps and jinglin jackets,

Wad haud the Lothians three in tackets,

A towmont gude;

And parritch-pats and auld saut-backets, 35

Before the flood.

Of Eve’s first fire he has a cinder;

Auld Tubalcain’s fire-shool and fender;

That which distinguished the gender

O’ Balaam’s ass: 40

A broomstick o’ the witch of Endor,

Weel shod wi’ brass.

Forbye, he’ll shape you aff fu’ gleg

The cut of Adam’s philibeg;

The knife that nickit Abel’s craig 45

He’ll prove you fully,

It was a faulding jocteleg,

Or lang-kail gullie.

But wad ye see him in his glee,

For meikle glee and fun has he, 50

Then set him down, and twa or three

Gude fellows wi’ him:

And port, O port! shine thou a wee,

And THEN ye’ll see him!

Now, by the Pow’rs o’ verse and prose! 55

Thou art a dainty chield, O Grose! —

Whae’er o’ thee shall ill suppose,

They sair misca’ thee;

I’d take the rascal by the nose,

Wad say, “Shame fa’ thee!” 60

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

279.

Epigram on Francis Grose the Antiquary

THE DEVIL got notice that Grose was a-dying

So whip! at the summons, old Satan came flying;

But when he approached where poor Francis lay moaning,

And saw each bed-post with its burthen a-groaning,

Astonish’d, confounded, cries Satan— “By G — , 5

I’ll want him, ere I take such a damnable load!”

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

280.

The Kirk of Scotland’s Alarm: A Ballad

A Ballad.

Tune— “Come rouse, Brother Sportsman!”

ORTHODOX! orthodox, who believe in John Knox,

Let me sound an alarm to your conscience:

A heretic blast has been blown in the West,

That what is no sense must be nonsense,

Orthodox! That what is no sense must be nonsense. 5

Doctor Mac! Doctor Mac, you should streek on a rack,

To strike evil-doers wi’ terror:

To join Faith and Sense, upon any pretence,

Was heretic, damnable error,

Doctor Mac! ‘Twas heretic, damnable error. 10

Town of Ayr! town of Ayr, it was mad, I declare,

To meddle wi’ mischief a-brewing,

Provost John is still deaf to the Church’s relief,

And Orator Bob is its ruin,

Town of Ayr! Yes, Orator Bob is its ruin. 15

D’rymple mild! D’rymple mild, tho’ your heart’s like a child,

And your life like the new-driven snaw,

Yet that winna save you, auld Satan must have you,

For preaching that three’s ane an’ twa,

D’rymple mild! For preaching that three’s ane an’ twa. 20

Rumble John! rumble John, mount the steps with a groan,

Cry the book is with heresy cramm’d;

Then out wi’ your ladle, deal brimstone like aidle,

And roar ev’ry note of the D—‘d.

Rumble John! And roar ev’ry note of the D—‘d. 25

Simper James! simper James, leave your fair Killie dames,

There’s a holier chase in your view:

I’ll lay on your head, that the pack you’ll soon lead,

For puppies like you there’s but few,

Simper James! For puppies like you there’s but few. 30

Singet Sawnie! singet Sawnie, are ye huirdin the penny,

Unconscious what evils await?

With a jump, yell, and howl, alarm ev’ry soul,

For the foul thief is just at your gate.

Singet Sawnie! For the foul thief is just at your gate. 35

Poet Willie! poet Willie, gie the Doctor a volley,

Wi’ your “Liberty’s Chain” and your wit;

O’er Pegasus’ side ye ne’er laid a stride,

Ye but smelt, man, the place where he sh-t.

Poet Willie! Ye but smelt man, the place where he sh-t. 40

Barr Steenie! Barr Steenie, what mean ye, what mean ye?

If ye meddle nae mair wi’ the matter,

Ye may hae some pretence to havins and sense,

Wi’ people that ken ye nae better,

Barr Steenie! Wi’people that ken ye nae better. 45

Jamie Goose! Jamie Goose, ye made but toom roose,

In hunting the wicked Lieutenant;

But the Doctor’s your mark, for the Lord’s holy ark,

He has cooper’d an’ ca’d a wrang pin in’t,

Jamie Goose! He has cooper’d an’ ca’d a wrang pin in’t. 50

Davie Bluster! Davie Bluster, for a saint ye do muster,

The core is no nice o’ recruits;

Yet to worth let’s be just, royal blood ye might boast,

If the Ass were the king o’ the brutes,

Davie Bluster! If the Ass were the king o’ the brutes. 55

Cessnock-side! Cessnock-side, wi’ your turkey-cock pride

Of manhood but sma’ is your share:

Ye’ve the figure, ‘tis true, ev’n your foes will allow,

And your friends they dare grant you nae mair,

Cessnock-side! And your friends they dare grant you nae mair. 60

Muirland Jock! muirland Jock, when the L — d makes a rock,

To crush common-sense for her sins;

If ill-manners were wit, there’s no mortal so fit

To confound the poor Doctor at ance,

Muirland Jock! To confound the poor Doctor at ance. 65

Andro Gowk! Andro Gowk, ye may slander the Book,

An’ the Book nought the waur, let me tell ye;

Tho’ ye’re rich, an’ look big, yet, lay by hat an’ wig,

An’ ye’ll hae a calf’s-had o’ sma’ value,

Andro Gowk! Ye’ll hae a calf’s head o’ sma value. 70

Daddy Auld! daddy Auld, there’a a tod in the fauld,

A tod meikle waur than the clerk;

Tho’ ye do little skaith, ye’ll be in at the death,

For gif ye canna bite, ye may bark,

Daddy Auld! Gif ye canna bite, ye may bark. 75

Holy Will! holy Will, there was wit in your skull,

When ye pilfer’d the alms o’ the poor;

The timmer is scant when ye’re taen for a saunt,

Wha should swing in a rape for an hour,

Holy Will! Ye should swing in a rape for an hour. 80

Calvin’s sons! Calvin’s sons, seize your spiritual guns,

Ammunition you never can need;

Your hearts are the stuff will be powder enough,

And your skulls are a storehouse o’ lead,

Calvin’s sons! Your skulls are a storehouse o’ lead. 85

Poet Burns! poet Burns, wi” your priest-skelpin turns,

Why desert ye your auld native shire?

Your muse is a gipsy, yet were she e’en tipsy,

She could ca’us nae waur than we are,

Poet Burns! She could ca’us nae waur than we are. 90

PRESENTATION STANZAS TO CORRESPONDENTS

Factor John! Factor John, whom the Lord made alone,

And ne’er made anither, thy peer,

Thy poor servant, the Bard, in respectful regard,

He presents thee this token sincere,

Factor John! He presents thee this token sincere. 95

Afton’s Laird! Afton’s Laird, when your pen can be spared,

A copy of this I bequeath,

On the same sicker score as I mention’d before,

To that trusty auld worthy, Clackleith,

Afton’s Laird! To that trusty auld worthy, Clackleith. 100

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

281.

Sonnet to R. Graham, Esq., on Receiving a Favour

10 Aug., 1789.

Addressed to ROBERT GRAHAM, Esq. of Fintry.

I CALL no Goddess to inspire my strains,

A fabled Muse may suit a bard that feigns:

Friend of my life! my ardent spirit burns,

And all the tribute of my heart returns,

For boons accorded, goodness ever new, 5

The gifts still dearer, as the giver you.

Thou orb of day! thou other paler light!

And all ye many sparkling stars of night!

If aught that giver from my mind efface,

If I that giver’s bounty e’er disgrace, 10

Then roll to me along your wand’rig spheres,

Only to number out a villain’s years!

I lay my hand upon my swelling breast,

And grateful would, but cannot speak the rest.

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

282.

Extemporaneous Effusion on being appointed to an Excise Division

On being appointed to an Excise division.

SEARCHING auld wives’ barrels,

Ochon the day!

That clarty barm should stain my laurels:

But — what’ll ye say?

These movin’ things ca’d wives an’ weans, 5

Wad move the very hearts o’ stanes!

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

283.

Willie brew’d a Peck o’ Maut (Song)

O WILLIE brew’d a peck o’ maut,

And Rob and Allen cam to see;

Three blyther hearts, that lee-lang night,

Ye wadna found in Christendie.

Chorus. — We are na fou, we’re nae that fou, 5

But just a drappie in our ee;

The cock may craw, the day may daw

And aye we’ll taste the barley bree.

Here are we met, three merry boys,

Three merry boys I trow are we; 10

And mony a night we’ve merry been,

And mony mae we hope to be!

We are na fou, &c.

It is the moon, I ken her horn,

That’s blinkin’ in the lift sae hie; 15

She shines sae bright to wyle us hame,

But, by my sooth, she’ll wait a wee!

We are na fou, &c.

Wha first shall rise to gang awa,

A cuckold, coward loun is he! 20

Wha first beside his chair shall fa’,

He is the King amang us three.

We are na fou, &c.

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

284.

Ca’ the Yowes to the Knowes (older set) (Song)

Chorus. — Ca’ the yowes to the knowes,

Ca’ them where the heather grows,

Ca’ them where the burnie rowes,

My bonie dearie

AS I gaed down the water-side, 5

There I met my shepherd lad:

He row’d me sweetly in his plaid,

And he ca’d me his dearie.

Ca’ the yowes, &c.

Will ye gang down the water-side, 10

And see the waves sae sweetly glide

Beneath the hazels spreading wide,

The moon it shines fu’ clearly.

Ca’ the yowes, &c.

Ye sall get gowns and ribbons meet, 15

Cauf-leather shoon upon your feet,

And in my arms ye’se lie and sleep,

An’ ye sall be my dearie.

Ca’ the yowes, &c.

If ye’ll but stand to what ye’ve said, 20

I’se gang wi’ thee, my shepherd lad,

And ye may row me in your plaid,

And I sall be your dearie.

Ca’ the yowes, &c.

While waters wimple to the sea, 25

While day blinks in the lift sae hie,

Till clay-cauld death sall blin’ my e’e,

Ye sall be my dearie.

Ca’ the yowes, &c.

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

285.

I Gaed a Waefu’ Gate Yestreen (Song)

I GAED a waefu’ gate yestreen,

A gate, I fear, I’ll dearly rue;

I gat my death frae twa sweet een,

Twa lovely een o’bonie blue.

‘Twas not her golden ringlets bright, 5

Her lips like roses wat wi’ dew,

Her heaving bosom, lily-white —

It was her een sae bonie blue.

She talk’d, she smil’d, my heart she wyl’d;

She charm’d my soul I wist na how; 10

And aye the stound, the deadly wound,

Cam frae her een so bonie blue.

But “spare to speak, and spare to speed;”

She’ll aiblins listen to my vow:

Should she refuse, I’ll lay my dead 15

To her twa een sae bonie blue.

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

286.

Highland Harry back again (Song)

MY Harry was a gallant gay,

Fu’ stately strade he on the plain;

But now he’s banish’d far away,

I’ll never see him back again.

Chorus. — O for him back again! 5

O for him back again!

I wad gie a’ Knockhaspie’s land

For Highland Harry back again.

When a’ the lave gae to their bed,

I wander dowie up the glen; 10

I set me down and greet my fill,

And aye I wish him back again.

O for him, &c.

O were some villains hangit high,

And ilka body had their ain! 15

Then I might see the joyfu’ sight,

My Highland Harry back again.

O for him, &c.

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

287.

The Battle of Sherramuir (Song)

Tune— “The Cameronian Rant.”

“O CAM ye here the fight to shun,

Or herd the sheep wi’ me, man?

Or were ye at the Sherra-moor,

Or did the battle see, man?”

I saw the battle, sair and teugh, 5

And reekin-red ran mony a sheugh;

My heart, for fear, gaed sough for sough,

To hear the thuds, and see the cluds

O’ clans frae woods, in tartan duds,

Wha glaum’d at kingdoms three, man. 10

La, la, la, la, &c.

The red-coat lads, wi’ black cockauds,

To meet them were na slaw, man;

They rush’d and push’d, and blude outgush’d

And mony a bouk did fa’, man: 15

The great Argyle led on his files,

I wat they glanced twenty miles;

They hough’d the clans like nine-pin kyles,

They hack’d and hash’d, while braid-swords, clash’d,

And thro’ they dash’d, and hew’d and smash’d, 20

Till fey men died awa, man.

La, la, la, la, &c.

But had ye seen the philibegs,

And skyrin tartan trews, man;

When in the teeth they dar’d our Whigs, 25

And covenant True-blues, man:

In lines extended lang and large,

When baiginets o’erpower’d the targe,

And thousands hasten’d to the charge;

Wi’ Highland wrath they frae the sheath 30

Drew blades o’ death, till, out o’ breath,

They fled like frighted dows, man!

La, la, la, la, &c.

“O how deil, Tam, can that be true?

The chase gaed frae the north, man; 35

I saw mysel, they did pursue,

The horsemen back to Forth, man;

And at Dunblane, in my ain sight,

They took the brig wi’ a’ their might,

And straught to Stirling wing’d their flight; 40

But, cursed lot! the gates were shut;

And mony a huntit poor red-coat,

For fear amaist did swarf, man!”

La, la, la, la, &c.

My sister Kate cam up the gate 45

Wi’ crowdie unto me, man;

She swoor she saw some rebels run

To Perth unto Dundee, man;

Their left-hand general had nae skill;

The Angus lads had nae gude will 50

That day their neibors’ blude to spill;

For fear, for foes, that they should lose

Their cogs o’ brose; they scar’d at blows,

And hameward fast did flee, man.

La, la, la, la, &c. 55

They’ve lost some gallant gentlemen,

Amang the Highland clans, man!

I fear my Lord Panmure is slain,

Or fallen in Whiggish hands, man,

Now wad ye sing this double fight, 60

Some fell for wrang, and some for right;

But mony bade the world gude-night;

Say, pell and mell, wi’ muskets’ knell

How Tories fell, and Whigs to hell

Flew off in frighted bands, man! 65

La, la, la, la, &c.

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

288.

The Braes o’ Killiecrankie (Song)

WHERE hae ye been sae braw, lad?

Whare hae ye been sae brankie, O?

Whare hae ye been sae braw, lad?

Cam ye by Killiecrankie, O?

Chorus. — An ye had been whare I hae been, 5

Ye wad na been sae cantie, O;

An ye had seen what I hae seen,

I’ the Braes o’ Killiecrankie, O.

I faught at land, I faught at sea,

At hame I faught my Auntie, O; 10

But I met the devil an’ Dundee,

On the Braes o’ Killiecrankie, O.

An ye had been, &c.

The bauld Pitcur fell in a furr,

An’ Clavers gat a clankie, O; 15

Or I had fed an Athole gled,

On the Braes o’ Killiecrankie, O.

An ye had been, &c.

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

289.

Awa’, Whigs, Awa’ (Song)

Chorus. — Awa’ Whigs, awa’!

Awa’ Whigs, awa’!

Ye’re but a pack o’ traitor louns,

Ye’ll do nae gude at a’.

OUR thrissles flourish’d fresh and fair, 5

And bonie bloom’d our roses;

But Whigs cam’ like a frost in June,

An’ wither’d a’ our posies.

Awa’ Whigs, &c.

Our ancient crown’s fa’en in the dust — 10

Deil blin’ them wi’ the stoure o’t!

An’ write their names in his black beuk,

Wha gae the Whigs the power o’t.

Awa’ Whigs, &c.

Our sad decay in church and state 15

Surpasses my descriving:

The Whigs cam’ o’er us for a curse,

An’ we hae done wi’ thriving.

Awa’ Whigs, &c.

Grim vengeance lang has taen a nap, 20

But we may see him wauken:

Gude help the day when royal heads

Are hunted like a maukin!

Awa’ Whigs, &c.

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

290.

A Waukrife Minnie (Song)

WHARE are you gaun, my bonie lass,

Whare are you gaun, my hinnie?

She answered me right saucilie,

“An errand for my minnie.”

O whare live ye, my bonie lass, 5

O whare live ye, my hinnie?

“By yon burnside, gin ye maun ken,

In a wee house wi’ my minnie.”

But I foor up the glen at e’en.

To see my bonie lassie; 10

And lang before the grey morn cam,

She was na hauf sae saucie.

O weary fa’ the waukrife cock,

And the foumart lay his crawin!

He wauken’d the auld wife frae her sleep, 15

A wee blink or the dawin.

An angry wife I wat she raise,

And o’er the bed she brocht her;

And wi’ a meikle hazel rung

She made her a weel-pay’d dochter. 20

O fare thee weel, my bonie lass,

O fare thee well, my hinnie!

Thou art a gay an’ a bonnie lass,

But thou has a waukrife minnie.

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

291.

The Captive Ribband (Song)

Tune— “Robaidh dona gorach.”

DEAR Myra, the captive ribband’s mine,

‘Twas all my faithful love could gain;

And would you ask me to resign

The sole reward that crowns my pain?

Go, bid the hero who has run 5

Thro’ fields of death to gather fame,

Go, bid him lay his laurels down,

And all his well-earn’d praise disclaim.

The ribband shall its freedom lose —

Lose all the bliss it had with you, 10

And share the fate I would impose

On thee, wert thou my captive too.

It shall upon my bosom live,

Or clasp me in a close embrace;

And at its fortune if you grieve, 15

Retrieve its doom, and take its place.

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

292.

Farewell to the Highlands (Song)

Tune— “Failte na Miosg.”

FAREWELL to the Highlands, farewell to the North,

The birth-place of Valour, the country of Worth;

Wherever I wander, wherever I rove,

The hills of the Highlands for ever I love.

Chorus. — My heart’s in the Highlands, my heart is not here, 5

My heart’s in the Highlands, a-chasing the deer;

Chasing the wild-deer, and following the roe,

My heart’s in the Highlands, wherever I go.

Farewell to the mountains, high-cover’d with snow,

Farewell to the straths and green vallies below; 10

Farewell to the forests and wild-hanging woods,

Farewell to the torrents and loud-pouring floods.

My heart’s in the Highlands, &c.

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

293.

The Whistle: A Ballad

I SING of a Whistle, a Whistle of worth,

I sing of a Whistle, the pride of the North.

Was brought to the court of our good Scottish King,

And long with this Whistle all Scotland shall ring.

Old Loda, still rueing the arm of Fingal, 5

The god of the bottle sends down from his hall —

“The Whistle’s your challenge, to Scotland get o’er,

And drink them to hell, Sir! or ne’er see me more!”

Old poets have sung, and old chronicles tell,

What champions ventur’d, what champions fell: 10

The son of great Loda was conqueror still,

And blew on the Whistle their requiem shrill.

Till Robert, the lord of the Cairn and the Scaur,

Unmatch’d at the bottle, unconquer’d in war,

He drank his poor god-ship as deep as the sea; 15

No tide of the Baltic e’er drunker than he.

Thus Robert, victorious, the trophy has gain’d;

Which now in his house has for ages remain’d;

Till three noble chieftains, and all of his blood,

The jovial contest again have renew’d. 20

Three joyous good fellows, with hearts clear of flaw

Craigdarroch, so famous for with, worth, and law;

And trusty Glenriddel, so skill’d in old coins;

And gallant Sir Robert, deep-read in old wines.

Craigdarroch began, with a tongue smooth as oil, 25

Desiring Downrightly to yield up the spoil;

Or else he would muster the heads of the clan,

And once more, in claret, try which was the man.

“By the gods of the ancients!” Downrightly replies,

“Before I surrender so glorious a prize, 30

I’ll conjure the ghost of the great Rorie More,

And bumper his horn with him twenty times o’er.”

Sir Robert, a soldier, no speech would pretend,

But he ne’er turn’d his back on his foe, or his friend;

Said, “Toss down the Whistle, the prize of the field,” 35

And, knee-deep in claret, he’d die ere he’d yield.

To the board of Glenriddel our heroes repair,

So noted for drowning of sorrow and care;

But, for wine and for welcome, not more known to fame,

Than the sense, wit, and taste, of a sweet lovely dame. 40

A bard was selected to witness the fray,

And tell future ages the feats of the day;

A Bard who detested all sadness and spleen,

And wish’d that Parnassus a vineyard had been.

The dinner being over, the claret they ply, 45

And ev’ry new cork is a new spring of joy;

In the bands of old friendship and kindred so set,

And the bands grew the tighter the more they were wet.

Gay Pleasure ran riot as bumpers ran o’er:

Bright Phoebus ne’er witness’d so joyous a core, 50

And vow’d that to leave them he was quite forlorn,

Till Cynthia hinted he’d see them next morn.

Six bottles a-piece had well wore out the night,

When gallant Sir Robert, to finish the fight,

Turn’d o’er in one bumper a bottle of red, 55

And swore ‘twas the way that their ancestor did.

Then worthy Glenriddel, so cautious and sage,

No longer the warfare ungodly would wage;

A high Ruling Elder to wallow in wine;

He left the foul business to folks less divine. 60

The gallant Sir Robert fought hard to the end;

But who can with Fate and quart bumpers contend!

Though Fate said, a hero should perish in light;

So uprose bright Phoebus-and down fell the knight.

Next uprose our Bard, like a prophet in drink: — 65

“Craigdarroch, thou’lt soar when creation shall sink!

But if thou would flourish immortal in rhyme,

Come — one bottle more — and have at the sublime!

“Thy line, that have struggled for freedom with Bruce,

Shall heroes and patriots ever produce: 70

So thine be the laurel, and mine be the bay;

The field thou hast won, by yon bright god of day!”

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

294.

To Mary in Heaven (Song)

THOU ling’ring star, with lessening ray,

That lov’st to greet the early morn,

Again thou usher’st in the day

My Mary from my soul was torn.

O Mary! dear departed shade! 5

Where is thy place of blissful rest?

See’st thou thy lover lowly laid?

Hear’st thou the groans that rend his breast?

That sacred hour can I forget,

Can I forget the hallow’d grove, 10

Where, by the winding Ayr, we met,

To live one day of parting love!

Eternity will not efface

Those records dear of transports past,

Thy image at our last embrace, 15

Ah! little thought we ‘twas our last!

Ayr, gurgling, kiss’d his pebbled shore,

O’erhung with wild-woods, thickening green;

The fragrant birch and hawthorn hoar,

‘Twin’d amorous round the raptur’d scene: 20

The flowers sprang wanton to be prest,

The birds sang love on every spray;

Till too, too soon, the glowing west,

Proclaim’d the speed of winged day.

Still o’er these scenes my mem’ry wakes, 25

And fondly broods with miser-care;

Time but th’ impression stronger makes,

As streams their channels deeper wear,

My Mary! dear departed shade!

Where is thy blissful place of rest? 30

See’st thou thy lover lowly laid?

Hear’st thou the groans that rend his breast?

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

295.

Epistle to Dr. Blacklock

ELLISLAND, 21st Oct., 1789.

WOW, but your letter made me vauntie!

And are ye hale, and weel and cantie?

I ken’d it still, your wee bit jauntie

Wad bring ye to:

Lord send you aye as weel’s I want ye! 5

And then ye’ll do.

The ill-thief blaw the Heron south!

And never drink be near his drouth!

He tauld myself by word o’ mouth,

He’d tak my letter; 10

I lippen’d to the chiel in trouth,

And bade nae better.

But aiblins, honest Master Heron

Had, at the time, some dainty fair one

To ware this theologic care on, 15

And holy study;

And tired o’ sauls to waste his lear on,

E’en tried the body.

But what d’ye think, my trusty fere,

I’m turned a gauger — Peace be here! 20

Parnassian queans, I fear, I fear,

Ye’ll now disdain me!

And then my fifty pounds a year

Will little gain me.

Ye glaikit, gleesome, dainty damies, 25

Wha, by Castalia’s wimplin streamies,

Lowp, sing, and lave your pretty limbies,

Ye ken, ye ken,

That strang necessity supreme is

‘Mang sons o’ men. 30

I hae a wife and twa wee laddies;

They maun hae brose and brats o’ duddies;

Ye ken yoursels my heart right proud is —

I need na vaunt

But I’ll sned besoms, thraw saugh woodies, 35

Before they want.

Lord help me thro’ this warld o’ care!

I’m weary sick o’t late and air!

Not but I hae a richer share

Than mony ithers; 40

But why should ae man better fare,

And a’ men brithers?

Come, Firm Resolve, take thou the van,

Thou stalk o’ carl-hemp in man!

And let us mind, faint heart ne’er wan 45

A lady fair:

Wha does the utmost that he can,

Will whiles do mair.

But to conclude my silly rhyme

(I’m scant o’ verse and scant o’ time), 50

To make a happy fireside clime

To weans and wife,

That’s the true pathos and sublime

Of human life.

My compliments to sister Beckie, 55

And eke the same to honest Lucky;

I wat she is a daintie chuckie,

As e’er tread clay;

And gratefully, my gude auld cockie,

I’m yours for aye.

ROBERT BURNS. 60

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

296.

The Five Carlins: An Election Ballad

An Election Ballad.

Tune— “Chevy Chase.”

THERE was five Carlins in the South,

They fell upon a scheme,

To send a lad to London town,

To bring them tidings hame.

Nor only bring them tidings hame, 5

But do their errands there,

And aiblins gowd and honor baith

Might be that laddie’s share.

There was Maggy by the banks o’ Nith,

A dame wi’ pride eneugh; 10

And Marjory o’ the mony Lochs,

A Carlin auld and teugh.

And blinkin Bess of Annandale,

That dwelt near Solway-side;

And whisky Jean, that took her gill, 15

In Galloway sae wide.

And auld black Joan frae Crichton Peel,

O’ gipsy kith an’ kin;

Five wighter Carlins were na found

The South countrie within. 20

To send a lad to London town,

They met upon a day;

And mony a knight, and mony a laird,

This errand fain wad gae.

O mony a knight, and mony a laird, 25

This errand fain wad gae;

But nae ane could their fancy please,

O ne’er a ane but twae.

The first ane was a belted Knight,

Bred of a Border band; 30

And he wad gae to London town,

Might nae man him withstand.

And he wad do their errands weel,

And meikle he wad say;

And ilka ane about the court 35

Wad bid to him gude-day.

The neist cam in a Soger youth,

Who spak wi’ modest grace,

And he wad gae to London town,

If sae their pleasure was. 40

He wad na hecht them courtly gifts,

Nor meikle speech pretend;

But he wad hecht an honest heart,

Wad ne’er desert his friend.

Now, wham to chuse, and wham refuse, 45

At strife thir Carlins fell;

For some had Gentlefolks to please,

And some wad please themsel’.

Then out spak mim-mou’d Meg o’ Nith,

And she spak up wi’ pride, 50

And she wad send the Soger youth,

Whatever might betide.

For the auld Gudeman o’ London court

She didna care a pin;

But she wad send the Soger youth, 55

To greet his eldest son.

Then up sprang Bess o’ Annandale,

And a deadly aith she’s ta’en,

That she wad vote the Border Knight,

Though she should vote her lane. 60

“For far-off fowls hae feathers fair,

And fools o’ change are fain;

But I hae tried the Border Knight,

And I’ll try him yet again.”

Says black Joan frae Crichton Peel, 65

A Carlin stoor and grim.

“The auld Gudeman or young Gudeman,

For me may sink or swim;

For fools will prate o’ right or wrang,

While knaves laugh them to scorn; 70

But the Soger’s friends hae blawn the best,

So he shall bear the horn.”

Then whisky Jean spak owre her drink,

“Ye weel ken, kimmers a’,

The auld gudeman o’ London court, 75

His back’s been at the wa’;

“And mony a friend that kiss’d his caup

Is now a fremit wight;

But it’s ne’er be said o’ whisky Jean —

We’ll send the Border Knight.” 80

Then slow raise Marjory o’ the Lochs,

And wrinkled was her brow,

Her ancient weed was russet gray,

Her auld Scots bluid was true;

“There’s some great folk set light by me, 85

I set as light by them;

But I will send to London town

Wham I like best at hame.”

Sae how this mighty plea may end,

Nae mortal wight can tell; 90

God grant the King and ilka man

May look weel to himsel.

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

297.

Election Ballad for Westerha’

Tune— “Up and waur them a’, Willie.”

THE LADDIES by the banks o’ Nith

Wad trust his Grace wi a’, Jamie;

But he’ll sair them, as he sair’d the King —

Turn tail and rin awa’, Jamie.

Chorus. — Up and waur them a’, Jamie, 5

Up and waur them a’;

The Johnstones hae the guidin o’t,

Ye turncoat Whigs, awa’!

The day he stude his country’s friend,

Or gied her faes a claw, Jamie, 10

Or frae puir man a blessin wan,

That day the Duke ne’er saw, Jamie.

Up and waur them, &c.

But wha is he, his country’s boast?

Like him there is na twa, Jamie; 15

There’s no a callent tents the kye,

But kens o’ Westerha’, Jamie.

Up and waur them, &c.

To end the wark, here’s Whistlebirk,

Lang may his whistle blaw, Jamie; 20

And Maxwell true, o’ sterling blue;

And we’ll be Johnstones a’, Jamie.

Up and waur them, &c.

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

298.

Prologue spoken at the Theatre of Dumfries

On New Year’s Day Evening, 1790.

NO song nor dance I bring from yon great city,

That queens it o’er our taste — the more’s the pity:

Tho’ by the bye, abroad why will you roam?

Good sense and taste are natives here at home:

But not for panegyric I appear, 5

I come to wish you all a good New Year!

Old Father Time deputes me here before ye,

Not for to preach, but tell his simple story:

The sage, grave Ancient cough’d, and bade me say,

“You’re one year older this important day,” 10

If wiser too — he hinted some suggestion,

But ‘twould be rude, you know, to ask the question;

And with a would-be roguish leer and wink,

Said— “Sutherland, in one word, bid them Think!”

Ye sprightly youths, quite flush with hope and spirit, 15

Who think to storm the world by dint of merit,

To you the dotard has a deal to say,

In his sly, dry, sententious, proverb way!

He bids you mind, amid your thoughtless rattle,

That the first blow is ever half the battle; 20

That tho’ some by the skirt may try to snatch him,

Yet by the foreclock is the hold to catch him;

That whether doing, suffering, or forbearing,

You may do miracles by persevering.

Last, tho’ not least in love, ye youthful fair, 25

Angelic forms, high Heaven’s peculiar care!

To you old Bald-pate smoothes his wrinkled brow,

And humbly begs you’ll mind the important-Now!

To crown your happiness he asks your leave,

And offers, bliss to give and to receive. 30

For our sincere, tho’ haply weak endeavours,

With grateful pride we own your many favours;

And howsoe’er our tongues may ill reveal it,

Believe our glowing bosoms truly feel it.

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

1790

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

299.

Sketch — New Year’s Day, 1790

To Mrs. Dunlop.

THIS day, Time winds th’ exhausted chain;

To run the twelvemonth’s length again:

I see, the old bald-pated fellow,

With ardent eyes, complexion sallow,

Adjust the unimpair’d machine, 5

To wheel the equal, dull routine.

The absent lover, minor heir,

In vain assail him with their prayer;

Deaf as my friend, he sees them press,

Nor makes the hour one moment less, 10

Will you (the Major’s with the hounds,

The happy tenants share his rounds;

Coila’s fair Rachel’s care to-day,

And blooming Keith’s engaged with Gray)

From housewife cares a minute borrow, 15

(That grandchild’s cap will do to-morrow,)

And join with me a-moralizing;

This day’s propitious to be wise in.

First, what did yesternight deliver?

“Another year has gone for ever.” 20

And what is this day’s strong suggestion?

“The passing moment’s all we rest on!”

Rest on — for what? what do we here?

Or why regard the passing year?

Will Time, amus’d with proverb’d lore, 25

Add to our date one minute more?

A few days may — a few years must —

Repose us in the silent dust.

Then, is it wise to damp our bliss?

Yes — all such reasonings are amiss! 30

The voice of Nature loudly cries,

And many a message from the skies,

That something in us never dies:

That on his frail, uncertain state,

Hang matters of eternal weight: 35

That future life in worlds unknown

Must take its hue from this alone;

Whether as heavenly glory bright,

Or dark as Misery’s woeful night.

Since then, my honour’d first of friends, 40

On this poor being all depends,

Let us th’ important now employ,

And live as those who never die.

Tho’ you, with days and honours crown’d,

Witness that filial circle round, 45

(A sight life’s sorrows to repulse,

A sight pale Envy to convulse),

Others now claim your chief regard;

Yourself, you wait your bright reward.

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

300.

Scots Prologue for Mr. Sutherland

On his Benefit-Night, at the Theatre, Dumfries.

WHAT needs this din about the town o’ Lon’on,

How this new play an’ that new sang is comin?

Why is outlandish stuff sae meikle courted?

Does nonsense mend, like brandy, when imported?

Is there nae poet, burning keen for fame, 5

Will try to gie us sangs and plays at hame?

For Comedy abroad he need to toil,

A fool and knave are plants of every soil;

Nor need he hunt as far as Rome or Greece,

To gather matter for a serious piece; 10

There’s themes enow in Caledonian story,

Would shew the Tragic Muse in a’ her glory. —

Is there no daring Bard will rise and tell

How glorious Wallace stood, how hapless fell?

Where are the Muses fled that could produce 15

A drama worthy o’ the name o’ Bruce?

How here, even here, he first unsheath’d the sword

‘Gainst mighty England and her guilty Lord;

And after mony a bloody, deathless doing,

Wrench’d his dear country from the jaws of Ruin! 20

O for a Shakespeare, or an Otway scene,

To draw the lovely, hapless Scottish Queen!

Vain all th’ omnipotence of female charms

‘Gainst headlong, ruthless, mad Rebellion’s arms:

She fell, but fell with spirit truly Roman, 25

To glut that direst foe — a vengeful woman;

A woman, (tho’ the phrase may seem uncivil,)

As able and as wicked as the Devil!

One Douglas lives in Home’s immortal page,

But Douglasses were heroes every age: 30

And tho’ your fathers, prodigal of life,

A Douglas followed to the martial strife,

Perhaps, if bowls row right, and Right succeeds,

Ye yet may follow where a Douglas leads!

As ye hae generous done, if a’ the land 35

Would take the Muses’ servants by the hand;

Not only hear, but patronize, befriend them,

And where he justly can commend, commend them;

And aiblins when they winna stand the test,

Wink hard, and say The folks hae done their best! 40

Would a’ the land do this, then I’ll be caition,

Ye’ll soon hae Poets o’ the Scottish nation

Will gar Fame blaw until her trumpet crack,

And warsle Time, an’ lay him on his back!

For us and for our Stage, should ony spier, 45

“Whase aught thae chiels maks a’ this bustle here?”

My best leg foremost, I’ll set up my brow —

We have the honour to belong to you!

We’re your ain bairns, e’en guide us as ye like,

But like good mithers shore before ye strike; 50

And gratefu’ still, I trust ye’ll ever find us,

For gen’rous patronage, and meikle kindness

We’ve got frae a’ professions, sets and ranks:

God help us! we’re but poor — ye’se get but thanks.

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

301.

Lines to a Gentleman who sent a Newspaper

Who had sent the Poet a Newspaper, and offered to continue it free of Expense.

KIND Sir, I’ve read your paper through,

And faith, to me, ‘twas really new!

How guessed ye, Sir, what maist I wanted?

This mony a day I’ve grain’d and gaunted,

To ken what French mischief was brewin; 5

Or what the drumlie Dutch were doin;

That vile doup-skelper, Emperor Joseph,

If Venus yet had got his nose off;

Or how the collieshangie works

Atween the Russians and the Turks, 10

Or if the Swede, before he halt,

Would play anither Charles the twalt;

If Denmark, any body spak o’t;

Or Poland, wha had now the tack o’t:

How cut-throat Prussian blades were hingin; 15

How libbet Italy was singin;

If Spaniard, Portuguese, or Swiss,

Were sayin’ or takin’ aught amiss;

Or how our merry lads at hame,

In Britain’s court kept up the game; 20

How royal George, the Lord leuk o’er him!

Was managing St. Stephen’s quorum;

If sleekit Chatham Will was livin,

Or glaikit Charlie got his nieve in;

How daddie Burke the plea was cookin, 25

If Warren Hasting’s neck was yeukin;

How cesses, stents, and fees were rax’d.

Or if bare a –- yet were tax’d;

The news o’ princes, dukes, and earls,

Pimps, sharpers, bawds, and opera-girls; 30

If that daft buckie, Geordie Wales,

Was threshing still at hizzies’ tails;

Or if he was grown oughtlins douser,

And no a perfect kintra cooser:

A’ this and mair I never heard of; 35

And, but for you, I might despair’d of.

So, gratefu’, back your news I send you,

And pray a’ gude things may attend you.

ELLISLAND, Monday Morning, 1790.

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

302.

Elegy on Willie Nicol’s Mare

PEG NICHOLSON was a good bay mare,

As ever trod on airn;

But now she’s floating down the Nith,

And past the mouth o’ Cairn.

Peg Nicholson was a good bay mare, 5

An’ rode thro’ thick and thin;

But now she’s floating down the Nith,

And wanting even the skin.

Peg Nicholson was a good bay mare,

And ance she bore a priest; 10

But now she’s floating down the Nith,

For Solway fish a feast.

Peg Nicholson was a good bay mare,

An’ the priest he rode her sair;

And much oppress’d and bruis’d she was, 15

As priest-rid cattle are, — &c. &c.

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

303.

The Gowden Locks of Anna (Song)

YESTREEN I had a pint o’ wine,

A place where body saw na;

Yestreen lay on this breast o’ mine

The gowden locks of Anna.

The hungry Jew in wilderness, 5

Rejoicing o’er his manna,

Was naething to my hinny bliss

Upon the lips of Anna.

Ye monarchs, take the East and West

Frae Indus to Savannah; 10

Gie me, within my straining grasp,

The melting form of Anna:

There I’ll despise Imperial charms,

An Empress or Sultana,

While dying raptures in her arms 15

I give and take wi’ Anna!

Awa, thou flaunting God of Day!

Awa, thou pale Diana!

Ilk Star, gae hide thy twinkling ray,

When I’m to meet my Anna! 20

Come, in thy raven plumage, Night,

(Sun, Moon, and Stars, withdrawn a’;)

And bring an angel-pen to write

My transports with my Anna!

POSTSCRIPT

The Kirk an’ State may join an’ tell, 25

To do sic things I maunna:

The Kirk an’ State may gae to hell,

And I’ll gae to my Anna.

She is the sunshine o’ my e’e,

To live but her I canna; 30

Had I on earth but wishes three,

The first should be my Anna.

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

304.

I Murder hate (Song)

I MURDER hate by flood or field,

Tho’ glory’s name may screen us;

In wars at home I’ll spend my blood —

Life-giving wars of Venus.

The deities that I adore 5

Are social Peace and Plenty;

I’m better pleas’d to make one more,

Than be the death of twenty.

I would not die like Socrates,

For all the fuss of Plato; 10

Nor would I with Leonidas,

Nor yet would I with Cato:

The zealots of the Church and State

Shall ne’er my mortal foes be;

But let me have bold Zimri’s fate, 15

Within the arms of Cozbi!

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

305.

Gudewife, count the lawin (Song)

GANE is the day, and mirk’s the night,

But we’ll ne’er stray for faut o’ light;

Gude ale and bratdy’s stars and moon,

And blue-red wine’s the risin’ sun.

Chorus. — Then gudewife, count the lawin, 5

The lawin, the lawin,

Then gudewife, count the lawin,

And bring a coggie mair.

There’s wealth and ease for gentlemen,

And simple folk maun fecht and fen’; 10

But here we’re a’ in ae accord,

For ilka man that’s drunk’s a lord.

Then gudewife, &c.

My coggie is a haly pool

That heals the wounds o’ care and dool; 15

And Pleasure is a wanton trout,

An ye drink it a’, ye’ll find him out.

Then gudewife, &c.

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

306.

Election Ballad at close of Contest for representing the Dumfries Burghs, 1790

At the close of the contest for representing the Dumfries Burghs, 1790.

Addressed to R. GRAHAM, Esq. of Fintry.

FINTRY, my stay in wordly strife,

Friend o’ my muse, friend o’ my life,

Are ye as idle’s I am?

Come then, wi’ uncouth kintra fleg,

O’er Pegasus I’ll fling my leg, 5

And ye shall see me try him.

But where shall I go rin a ride,

That I may splatter nane beside?

I wad na be uncivil:

In manhood’s various paths and ways 10

There’s aye some doytin’ body strays,

And I ride like the devil.

Thus I break aff wi’ a’ my birr,

And down yon dark, deep alley spur,

Where Theologics daunder: 15

Alas! curst wi’ eternal fogs,

And damn’d in everlasting bogs,

As sure’s the creed I’ll blunder!

I’ll stain a band, or jaup a gown,

Or rin my reckless, guilty crown 20

Against the haly door:

Sair do I rue my luckless fate,

When, as the Muse an’ Deil wad hae’t,

I rade that road before.

Suppose I take a spurt, and mix 25

Amang the wilds o’ Politics —

Electors and elected,

Where dogs at Court (sad sons of bitches!)

Septennially a madness touches,

Till all the land’s infected. 30

All hail! Drumlanrig’s haughty Grace,

Discarded remnant of a race

Once godlike-great in story;

Thy forbears’ virtues all contrasted,

The very name of Douglas blasted, 35

Thine that inverted glory!

Hate, envy, oft the Douglas bore,

But thou hast superadded more,

And sunk them in contempt;

Follies and crimes have stain’d the name, 40

But, Queensberry, thine the virgin claim,

From aught that’s good exempt!

I’ll sing the zeal Drumlanrig bears,

Who left the all-important cares

Of princes, and their darlings: 45

And, bent on winning borough touns,

Came shaking hands wi’ wabster-loons,

And kissing barefit carlins.

Combustion thro’ our boroughs rode,

Whistling his roaring pack abroad 50

Of mad unmuzzled lions;

As Queensberry blue and buff unfurl’d,

And Westerha’ and Hopetoun hurled

To every Whig defiance.

But cautious Queensberry left the war, 55

Th’ unmanner’d dust might soil his star,

Besides, he hated bleeding:

But left behind him heroes bright,

Heroes in C&aesarean fight,

Or Ciceronian pleading. 60

O for a throat like huge Mons-Meg,

To muster o’er each ardent Whig

Beneath Drumlanrig’s banners;

Heroes and heroines commix,

All in the field of politics, 65

To win immortal honours.

M’Murdo and his lovely spouse,

(Th’ enamour’d laurels kiss her brows!)

Led on the Loves and Graces:

She won each gaping burgess’ heart, 70

While he, sub rosa, played his part

Amang their wives and lasses.

Craigdarroch led a light-arm’d core,

Tropes, metaphors, and figures pour,

Like Hecla streaming thunder: 75

Glenriddel, skill’d in rusty coins,

Blew up each Tory’s dark designs,

And bared the treason under.

In either wing two champions fought;

Redoubted Staig, who set at nought 80

The wildest savage Tory;

And Welsh who ne’er yet flinch’d his ground,

High-wav’d his magnum-bonum round

With Cyclopeian fury.

Miller brought up th’ artillery ranks, 85

The many-pounders of the Banks,

Resistless desolation!

While Maxwelton, that baron bold,

‘Mid Lawson’s port entrench’d his hold,

And threaten’d worse damnation. 90

To these what Tory hosts oppos’d

With these what Tory warriors clos’d

Surpasses my descriving;

Squadrons, extended long and large,

With furious speed rush to the charge, 95

Like furious devils driving.

What verse can sing, what prose narrate,

The butcher deeds of bloody Fate,

Amid this mighty tulyie!

Grim Horror girn’d, pale Terror roar’d, 100

As Murder at his thrapple shor’d,

And Hell mix’d in the brulyie.

As Highland craigs by thunder cleft,

When lightnings fire the stormy lift,

Hurl down with crashing rattle; 105

As flames among a hundred woods,

As headlong foam from a hundred floods,

Such is the rage of Battle.

The stubborn Tories dare to die;

As soon the rooted oaks would fly 110

Before th’ approaching fellers:

The Whigs come on like Ocean’s roar,

When all his wintry billows pour

Against the Buchan Bullers.

Lo, from the shades of Death’s deep night, 115

Departed Whigs enjoy the fight,

And think on former daring:

The muffled murtherer of Charles

The Magna Charter flag unfurls,

All deadly gules its bearing. 120

Nor wanting ghosts of Tory fame;

Bold Scrimgeour follows gallant Graham;

Auld Covenanters shiver —

Forgive! forgive! much-wrong’d Montrose!

Now Death and Hell engulph thy foes, 125

Thou liv’st on high for ever.

Still o’er the field the combat burns,

The Tories, Whigs, give way by turns;

But Fate the word has spoken:

For woman’s wit and strength o’man, 130

Alas! can do but what they can;

The Tory ranks are broken.

O that my een were flowing burns!

My voice, a lioness that mourns

Her darling cubs’ undoing! 135

That I might greet, that I might cry,

While Tories fall, while Tories fly,

And furious Whigs pursuing!

What Whig but melts for good Sir James,

Dear to his country, by the names, 140

Friend, Patron, Benefactor!

Not Pulteney’s wealth can Pulteney save;

And Hopetoun falls, the generous, brave;

And Stewart, bold as Hector.

Thou, Pitt, shalt rue this overthrow, 145

And Thurlow growl a curse of woe,

And Melville melt in wailing:

Now Fox and Sheridan rejoice,

And Burke shall sing, “O Prince, arise!

Thy power is all-prevailing!” 150

For your poor friend, the Bard, afar

He only hears and sees the war,

A cool spectator purely!

So, when the storm the forest rends,

The robin in the hedge descends, 155

And sober chirps securely.

Now, for my friends’ and brethren’s sakes,

And for my dear-lov’d Land o’ Cakes,

I pray with holy fire:

Lord, send a rough-shod troop o’ Hell 160

O’er a’ wad Scotland buy or sell,

To grind them in the mire!

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

307.

Elegy on Captain Matthew Henderson

A Gentleman who held the Patent for his Honours immediately from Almighty God.

“Should the poor be flattered?” — Shakespeare.

O DEATH! thou tyrant fell and bloody!

The meikle devil wi’ a woodie

Haurl thee hame to his black smiddie,

O’er hurcheon hides,

And like stock-fish come o’er his studdie 5

Wi’ thy auld sides!

He’s gane, he’s gane! he’s frae us torn,

The ae best fellow e’er was born!

Thee, Matthew, Nature’s sel’ shall mourn,

By wood and wild, 10

Where haply, Pity strays forlorn,

Frae man exil’d.

Ye hills, near neighbours o’ the starns,

That proudly cock your cresting cairns!

Ye cliffs, the haunts of sailing earns, 15

Where Echo slumbers!

Come join, ye Nature’s sturdiest bairns,

My wailing numbers!

Mourn, ilka grove the cushat kens!

Ye haz’ly shaws and briery dens! 20

Ye burnies, wimplin’ down your glens,

Wi’ toddlin din,

Or foaming, strang, wi’ hasty stens,

Frae lin to lin.

Mourn, little harebells o’er the lea; 25

Ye stately foxgloves, fair to see;

Ye woodbines hanging bonilie,

In scented bow’rs;

Ye roses on your thorny tree,

The first o’ flow’rs. 30

At dawn, when ev’ry grassy blade

Droops with a diamond at his head,

At ev’n, when beans their fragrance shed,

I’ th’ rustling gale,

Ye maukins, whiddin thro’ the glade, 35

Come join my wail.

Mourn, ye wee songsters o’ the wood;

Ye grouse that crap the heather bud;

Ye curlews, calling thro’ a clud;

Ye whistling plover; 40

And mourn, we whirring paitrick brood;

He’s gane for ever!

Mourn, sooty coots, and speckled teals;

Ye fisher herons, watching eels;

Ye duck and drake, wi’ airy wheels 45

Circling the lake;

Ye bitterns, till the quagmire reels,

Rair for his sake.

Mourn, clam’ring craiks at close o’ day,

‘Mang fields o’ flow’ring clover gay; 50

And when ye wing your annual way

Frae our claud shore,

Tell thae far warlds wha lies in clay,

Wham we deplore.

Ye houlets, frae your ivy bow’r 55

In some auld tree, or eldritch tow’r,

What time the moon, wi’ silent glow’r,

Sets up her horn,

Wail thro’ the dreary midnight hour,

Till waukrife morn! 60

O rivers, forests, hills, and plains!

Oft have ye heard my canty strains;

But now, what else for me remains

But tales of woe;

And frae my een the drapping rains 65

Maun ever flow.

Mourn, Spring, thou darling of the year!

Ilk cowslip cup shall kep a tear:

Thou, Simmer, while each corny spear

Shoots up its head, 70

Thy gay, green, flow’ry tresses shear,

For him that’s dead!

Thou, Autumn, wi’ thy yellow hair,

In grief thy sallow mantle tear!

Thou, Winter, hurling thro’ the air 75

The roaring blast,

Wide o’er the naked world declare

The worth we’ve lost!

Mourn him, thou Sun, great source of light!

Mourn, Empress of the silent night! 80

And you, ye twinkling starnies bright,

My Matthew mourn!

For through your orbs he’s ta’en his flight,

Ne’er to return.

O Henderson! the man! the brother! 85

And art thou gone, and gone for ever!

And hast thou crost that unknown river,

Life’s dreary bound!

Like thee, where shall I find another,

The world around! 90

Go to your sculptur’d tombs, ye Great,

In a’ the tinsel trash o’ state!

But by thy honest turf I’ll wait,

Thou man of worth!

And weep the ae best fellow’s fate 95

E’er lay in earth.

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

308.

The Epitaph on Captain Matthew Henderson

STOP, passenger! my story’s brief,

And truth I shall relate, man;

I tell nae common tale o’ grief,

For Matthew was a great man.

If thou uncommon merit hast, 5

Yet spurn’d at Fortune’s door, man;

A look of pity hither cast,

For Matthew was a poor man.

If thou a noble sodger art,

That passest by this grave, man; 10

There moulders here a gallant heart,

For Matthew was a brave man.

If thou on men, their works and ways,

Canst throw uncommon light, man;

Here lies wha weel had won thy praise, 15

For Matthew was a bright man.

If thou, at Friendship’s sacred ca’,

Wad life itself resign, man:

Thy sympathetic tear maun fa’,

For Matthew was a kind man. 20

If thou art staunch, without a stain,

Like the unchanging blue, man;

This was a kinsman o’ thy ain,

For Matthew was a true man.

If thou hast wit, and fun, and fire, 25

And ne’er guid wine did fear, man;

This was thy billie, dam, and sire,

For Matthew was a queer man.

If ony whiggish, whingin’ sot,

To blame poor Matthew dare, man; 30

May dool and sorrow be his lot,

For Matthew was a rare man.

But now, his radiant course is run,

For Matthew’s was a bright one!

His soul was like the glorious sun, 35

A matchless, Heavenly light, man.

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

309.

Verses on Captain Grose

Written on an Envelope, enclosing a Letter to Him.

KEN ye aught o’ Captain Grose? — Igo, and ago,

If he’s amang his friends or foes? — Iram, coram, dago.

Is he to Abra’m’s bosom gane? — Igo, and ago,

Or haudin Sarah by the wame? — Iram, coram dago.

Is he south or is he north? — Igo, and ago, 5

Or drowned in the river Forth? — Iram, coram dago.

Is he slain by Hielan’ bodies? — Igo, and ago,

And eaten like a wether haggis? — Iram, coram, dago.

Where’er he be, the Lord be near him! — Igo, and ago,

As for the deil, he daur na steer him. — Iram, coram, dago. 10

But please transmit th’ enclosed letter, — Igo, and ago,

Which will oblige your humble debtor. — Iram, coram, dago.

So may ye hae auld stanes in store, — Igo, and ago,

The very stanes that Adam bore. — Iram, coram, dago,

So may ye get in glad possession, — Igo, and ago, 15

The coins o’ Satan’s coronation! — Iram coram dago.

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

310.

Tam o’ Shanter: A Tale

A Tale.

“Of Brownyis and of Bogillis full is this Buke.”

GAWIN DOUGLAS.

Tam O’Shanter by Abraham Cooper

WHEN chapman billies leave the street,

And drouthy neibors, neibors, meet;

As market days are wearing late,

And folk begin to tak the gate,

While we sit bousing at the nappy, 5

An’ getting fou and unco happy,

We think na on the lang Scots miles,

The mosses, waters, slaps and stiles,

That lie between us and our hame,

Where sits our sulky, sullen dame, 10

Gathering her brows like gathering storm,

Nursing her wrath to keep it warm.

This truth fand honest TAM O’ SHANTER,

As he frae Ayr ae night did canter:

(Auld Ayr, wham ne’er a town surpasses, 15

For honest men and bonie lasses).

O Tam! had’st thou but been sae wise,

As taen thy ain wife Kate’s advice!

She tauld thee weel thou was a skellum,

A blethering, blustering, drunken blellum; 20

That frae November till October,

Ae market-day thou was na sober;

That ilka melder wi’ the Miller,

Thou sat as lang as thou had siller;

That ev’ry naig was ca’d a shoe on 25

The Smith and thee gat roarin’ fou on;

That at the L — d’s house, ev’n on Sunday,

Thou drank wi’ Kirkton Jean till Monday,

She prophesied that late or soon,

Thou wad be found, deep drown’d in Doon, 30

Or catch’d wi’ warlocks in the mirk,

By Alloway’s auld, haunted kirk.

Ah, gentle dames! it gars me greet,

To think how mony counsels sweet,

How mony lengthen’d, sage advices, 35

The husband frae the wife despises!

But to our tale: — Ae market night,

Tam had got planted unco right,

Fast by an ingle, bleezing finely,

Wi reaming sAats, that drank divinely; 40

And at his elbow, Souter Johnie,

His ancient, trusty, drougthy crony:

Tam lo’ed him like a very brither;

They had been fou for weeks thegither.

The night drave on wi’ sangs an’ clatter; 45

And aye the ale was growing better:

The Landlady and Tam grew gracious,

Wi’ favours secret, sweet, and precious:

The Souter tauld his queerest stories;

The Landlord’s laugh was ready chorus: 50

The storm without might rair and rustle,

Tam did na mind the storm a whistle.

Care, mad to see a man sae happy,

E’en drown’d himsel amang the nappy.

As bees flee hame wi’ lades o’ treasure, 55

The minutes wing’d their way wi’ pleasure:

Kings may be blest, but Tam was glorious,

O’er a’ the ills o’ life victorious!

But pleasures are like poppies spread,

You seize the flow’r, its bloom is shed; 60

Or like the snow falls in the river,

A moment white — then melts for ever;

Or like the Borealis race,

That flit ere you can point their place;

Or like the Rainbow’s lovely form 65

Evanishing amid the storm. —

Nae man can tether Time nor Tide,

The hour approaches Tam maun ride;

That hour, o’ night’s black arch the keystane,

That dreary hour he mounts his beast in; 70

And sic a night he taks the road in,

As ne’er poor sinner was abroad in.

The wind blew as ‘twad blawn its last;

The rattling showers rose on the blast;

The speedy gleams the darkness swallow’d; 75

Loud, deep, and lang, the thunder bellow’d:

That night, a child might understand,

The deil had business on his hand.

Weel-mounted on his grey mare, Meg,

A better never lifted leg, 80

Tam skelpit on thro’ dub and mire,

Despising wind, and rain, and fire;

Whiles holding fast his gude blue bonnet,

Whiles crooning o’er some auld Scots sonnet,

Whiles glow’rin round wi’ prudent cares, 85

Lest bogles catch him unawares;

Kirk-Alloway was drawing nigh,

Where ghaists and houlets nightly cry.

By this time he was cross the ford,

Where in the snaw the chapman smoor’d; 90

And past the birks and meikle stane,

Where drunken Charlie brak’s neck-bane;

And thro’ the whins, and by the cairn,

Where hunters fand the murder’d bairn;

And near the thorn, aboon the well, 95

Where Mungo’s mither hang’d hersel’.

Before him Doon pours all his floods,

The doubling storm roars thro’ the woods,

The lightnings flash from pole to pole,

Near and more near the thunders roll, 100

When, glimmering thro’ the groaning trees,

Kirk-Alloway seem’d in a bleeze,

Thro’ ilka bore the beams were glancing,

And loud resounded mirth and dancing.

Inspiring bold John Barleycorn! 105

What dangers thou canst make us scorn!

Wi’ tippenny, we fear nae evil;

Wi’ usquabae, we’ll face the devil!

The swats sae ream’d in Tammie’s noddle,

Fair play, he car’d na deils a boddle, 110

But Maggie stood, right sair astonish’d,

Till, by the heel and hand admonish’d,

She ventur’d forward on the light;

And, wow! Tam saw an unco sight!

Warlocks and witches in a dance: 115

Nae cotillon, brent new frae France,

But hornpipes, jigs, strathspeys, and reels,

Put life and mettle in their heels.

A winnock-bunker in the east,

There sat auld Nick, in shape o’ beast; 120

A towzie tyke, black, grim, and large,

To gie them music was his charge:

He screw’d the pipes and gart them skirl,

Till roof and rafters a’ did dirl. —

Coffins stood round, like open presses, 125

That shaw’d the Dead in their last dresses;

And (by some devilish cantraip sleight)

Each in its cauld hand held a light.

By which heroic Tam was able

To note upon the haly table, 130

A murderer’s banes, in gibbet-airns;

Twa span-lang, wee, unchristened bairns;

A thief, new-cutted frae a rape,

Wi’ his last gasp his gabudid gape;

Five tomahawks, wi’ blude red-rusted: 135

Five scimitars, wi’ murder crusted;

A garter which a babe had strangled:

A knife, a father’s throat had mangled.

Whom his ain son of life bereft,

The grey-hairs yet stack to the heft; 140

Wi’ mair of horrible and awfu’,

Which even to name wad be unlawfu’.

As Tammie glowr’d, amaz’d, and curious,

The mirth and fun grew fast and furious;

The Piper loud and louder blew, 145

The dancers quick and quicker flew,

The reel’d, they set, they cross’d, they cleekit,

Till ilka carlin swat and reekit,

And coost her duddies to the wark,

And linkit at it in her sark! 150

Now Tam, O Tam! had they been queans,

A’ plump and strapping in their teens!

Their sarks, instead o’ creeshie flainen,

Been snaw-white seventeen hunder linen! —

Thir breeks o’ mine, my only pair, 155

That ance were plush o’ guid blue hair,

I wad hae gien them off my hurdies,

For ae blink o’ the bonie burdies!

But wither’d beldams, auld and droll,

Rigwoodie hags wad spean a foal, 160

Louping an’ flinging on a crummock.

I wonder did na turn thy stomach.

But Tam kent what was what fu’ brawlie:

There was ae winsome wench and waulie

That night enlisted in the core, 165

Lang after ken’d on Carrick shore;

(For mony a beast to dead she shot,

And perish’d mony a bonie boat,

And shook baith meikle corn and bear,

And kept the country-side in fear); 170

Her cutty sark, o’ Paisley harn,

That while a lassie she had worn,

In longitude tho’ sorely scanty,

It was her best, and she was vauntie.

Ah! little ken’d thy reverend grannie, 175

That sark she coft for her wee Nannie,

Wi twa pund Scots (‘twas a’ her riches),

Wad ever grac’d a dance of witches!

But here my Muse her wing maun cour,

Sic flights are far beyond her power; 180

To sing how Nannie lap and flang,

(A souple jade she was and strang),

And how Tam stood, like ane bewithc’d,

And thought his very een enrich’d:

Even Satan glowr’d, and fidg’d fu’ fain, 185

And hotch’d and blew wi’ might and main:

Till first ae caper, syne anither,

Tam tint his reason a thegither,

And roars out, “Weel done, Cutty-sark!”

And in an instant all was dark: 190

And scarcely had he Maggie rallied.

When out the hellish legion sallied.

As bees bizz out wi’ angry fyke,

When plundering herds assail their byke;

As open pussie’s mortal foes, 195

When, pop! she starts before their nose;

As eager runs the market-crowd,

When “Catch the thief!” resounds aloud;

So Maggie runs, the witches follow,

Wi’ mony an eldritch skreich and hollow. 200

Ah, Tam! Ah, Tam! thou’ll get thy fairin!

In hell, they’ll roast thee like a herrin!

In vain thy Kate awaits thy comin!

Kate soon will be a woefu’ woman!

Now, do thy speedy-utmost, Meg, 205

And win the key-stone o’ the brig;

There, at them thou thy tail may toss,

A running stream they dare na cross.

But ere the keystane she could make,

The fient a tail she had to shake! 210

For Nannie, far before the rest,

Hard upon noble Maggie prest,

And flew at Tam wi’ furious ettle;

But little wist she Maggie’s mettle!

Ae spring brought off her master hale, 215

But left behind her ain grey tail:

The carlin claught her by the rump,

And left poor Maggie scarce a stump.

Now, wha this tale o’ truth shall read,

Ilk man and mother’s son, take heed: 220

Whene’er to Drink you are inclin’d,

Or Cutty-sarks rin in your mind,

Think ye may buy the joys o’er dear;

Remember Tam o’ Shanter’s mare.

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

311.

On the Birth of a Posthumous Child

Born in peculiar circumstances of family distress.

SWEET flow’ret, pledge o’ meikle love,

And ward o’ mony a prayer,

What heart o’ stane wad thou na move,

Sae helpless, sweet, and fair?

November hirples o’er the lea, 5

Chill, on thy lovely form:

And gane, alas! the shelt’ring tree,

Should shield thee frae the storm.

May He who gives the rain to pour,

And wings the blast to blaw, 10

Protect thee frae the driving show’r,

The bitter frost and snaw.

May He, the friend o’ Woe and Want,

Who heals life’s various stounds,

Protect and guard the mother plant, 15

And heal her cruel wounds.

But late she flourish’d, rooted fast,

Fair in the summer morn,

Now feebly bends she in the blast,

Unshelter’d and forlorn. 20

Blest be thy bloom, thou lovely gem,

Unscath’d by ruffian hand!

And from thee many a parent stem

Arise to deck our land!

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

312.

Elegy on the late Miss Burnet of Monboddo

LIFE ne’er exulted in so rich a prize,

As Burnet, lovely from her native skies;

Nor envious death so triumph’d in a blow,

As that which laid th’ accomplish’d Burnet low.

Thy form and mind, sweet maid, can I forget? 5

In richest ore the brightest jewel set!

In thee, high Heaven above was truest shown,

As by His noblest work the Godhead best is known.

In vain ye flaunt in summer’s pride, ye groves;

Thou crystal streamlet with thy flowery shore, 10

Ye woodland choir that chaunt your idle loves,

Ye cease to charm; Eliza is no more.

Ye healthy wastes, immix’d with reedy fens;

Ye mossy streams, with sedge and rushes stor’d:

Ye rugged cliffs, o’erhanging dreary glens, 15

To you I fly — ye with my soul accord.

Princes, whose cumb’rous pride was all their worth,

Shall venal lays their pompous exit hail,

And thou, sweet Excellence! forsake our earth,

And not a Muse with honest grief bewail? 20

We saw thee shine in youth and beauty’s pride,

And Virtue’s light, that beams beyond the spheres;

But, like the sun eclips’d at morning tide,

Thou left us darkling in a world of tears.

The parent’s heart that nestled fond in thee, 25

That heart how sunk, a prey to grief and care;

So deckt the woodbine sweet yon aged tree;

So, from it ravish’d, leaves it bleak and bare.

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

1791

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

313.

Lament of Mary, Queen of Scots

NOW Nature hangs her mantle green

On every blooming tree,

And spreads her sheets o’ daisies white

Out o’er the grassy lea;

Now Phoebus cheers the crystal streams, 5

And glads the azure skies;

But nought can glad the weary wight

That fast in durance lies.

Now laverocks wake the merry morn

Aloft on dewy wing; 10

The merle, in his noontide bow’r,

Makes woodland echoes ring;

The mavis wild wi’ mony a note,

Sings drowsy day to rest:

In love and freedom they rejoice, 15

Wi’ care nor thrall opprest.

Now blooms the lily by the bank,

The primrose down the brae;

The hawthorn’s budding in the glen,

And milk-white is the slae: 20

The meanest hind in fair Scotland

May rove their sweets amang;

But I, the Queen of a’ Scotland,

Maun lie in prison strang.

I was the Queen o’ bonie France, 25

Where happy I hae been;

Fu’ lightly raise I in the morn,

As blythe lay down at e’en:

And I’m the sov’reign of Scotland,

And mony a traitor there; 30

Yet here I lie in foreign bands,

And never-ending care.

But as for thee, thou false woman,

My sister and my fae,

Grim Vengeance yet shall whet a sword 35

That thro’ thy soul shall gae;

The weeping blood in woman’s breast

Was never known to thee;

Nor th’ balm that draps on wounds of woe

Frae woman’s pitying e’e. 40

My son! my son! may kinder stars

Upon thy fortune shine;

And may those pleasures gild thy reign,

That ne’er wad blink on mine!

God keep thee frae thy mother’s faes, 45

Or turn their hearts to thee:

And where thou meet’st thy mother’s friend,

Remember him for me!

O! soon, to me, may Summer suns

Nae mair light up the morn! 50

Nae mair to me the Autumn winds

Wave o’er the yellow corn?

And, in the narrow house of death,

Let Winter round me rave;

And the next flow’rs that deck the Spring, 55

Bloom on my peaceful grave!

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

314.

There’ll never be Peace till Jamie comes hame (Song)

BY yon Castle wa’, at the close of the day,

I heard a man sing, tho’ his head it was grey:

And as he was singing, the tears doon came, —

There’ll never be peace till Jamie comes hame.

The Church is in ruins, the State is in jars, 5

Delusions, oppressions, and murderous wars,

We dare na weel say’t, but we ken wha’s to blame, —

There’ll never be peace till Jamie comes hame.

My seven braw sons for Jamie drew sword,

But now I greet round their green beds in the yerd; 10

It brak the sweet heart o’ my faithful and dame, —

There’ll never be peace till Jamie comes hame.

Now life is a burden that bows me down,

Sin’ I tint my bairns, and he tint his crown;

But till my last moments my words are the same, — 15

There’ll never be peace till Jamie comes hame.

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

315.

Out over the Forth (Song)

OUT over the Forth, I look to the North;

But what is the north and its Highlands to me?

The south nor the east gie ease to my breast,

The far foreign land, or the wide rolling sea.

But I look to the west when I gae to rest, 5

That happy my dreams and my slumbers may be;

For far in the west lives he I loe best,

The man that is dear to my babie and me.

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

316.

The Banks o’ Doon (First Version) (Song)

First Version

SWEET are the banks — the banks o’ Doon,

The spreading flowers are fair,

And everything is blythe and glad,

But I am fu’ o’ care.

Thou’ll break my heart, thou bonie bird, 5

That sings upon the bough;

Thou minds me o’ the happy days

When my fause Luve was true:

Thou’ll break my heart, thou bonie bird,

That sings beside thy mate; 10

For sae I sat, and sae I sang,

And wist na o’ my fate.

Aft hae I rov’d by bonie Doon,

To see the woodbine twine;

And ilka birds sang o’ its Luve, 15

And sae did I o’ mine:

Wi’ lightsome heart I pu’d a rose,

Upon its thorny tree;

But my fause Luver staw my rose

And left the thorn wi’ me: 20

Wi’ lightsome heart I pu’d a rose,

Upon a morn in June;

And sae I flourished on the morn,

And sae was pu’d or noon!

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

317.

The Banks o’ Doon (Second Version) (Song)

Second Version

YE flowery banks o’ bonie Doon,

How can ye blume sae fair?

How can ye chant, ye little birds,

And I sae fu’ o care!

Thou’ll break my heart, thou bonie bird, 5

That sings upon the bough!

Thou minds me o’ the happy days

When my fause Luve was true.

Thou’ll break my heart, thou bonie bird,

That sings beside thy mate; 10

For sae I sat, and sae I sang,

And wist na o’ my fate.

Aft hae I rov’d by bonie Doon,

To see the woodbine twine;

And ilka bird sang o’ its Luve, 15

And sae did I o’ mine.

Wi’ lightsome heart I pu’d a rose,

Upon its thorny tree;

But my fause Luver staw my rose,

And left the thorn wi’ me. 20

Wi’ lightsome heart I pu’d a rose,

Upon a morn in June;

And sae I flourished on the morn,

And sae was pu’d or noon.

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

318.

The Banks o’ Doon (Third Version) (Song)

Third Version

YE banks and braes o’ bonie Doon,

How can ye bloom sae fresh and fair?

How can ye chant, ye little birds,

And I sae weary fu’ o’ care!

Thou’ll break my heart, thou warbling bird, 5

That wantons thro’ the flowering thorn:

Thou minds me o’ departed joys,

Departed never to return.

Aft hae I rov’d by Bonie Doon,

To see the rose and woodbine twine: 10

And ilka bird sang o’ its Luve,

And fondly sae did I o’ mine;

Wi’ lightsome heart I pu’d a rose,

Fu’ sweet upon its thorny tree!

And may fause Luver staw my rose, 15

But ah! he left the thorn wi’ me.

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

319.

Lament for James, Earl of Glencairn

THE WIND blew hollow frae the hills,

By fits the sun’s departing beam

Look’d on the fading yellow woods,

That wav’d o’er Lugar’s winding stream:

Beneath a craigy steep, a Bard, 5

Laden with years and meikle pain,

In loud lament bewail’d his lord,

Whom Death had all untimely ta’en.

He lean’d him to an ancient aik,

Whose trunk was mould’ring down with years; 10

His locks were bleached white with time,

His hoary cheek was wet wi’ tears!

And as he touch’d his trembling harp,

And as he tun’d his doleful sang,

The winds, lamenting thro’ their caves, 15

To Echo bore the notes alang.

“Ye scatter’d birds that faintly sing,

The reliques o’ the vernal queir!

Ye woods that shed on a’ the winds

The honours of the aged year! 20

A few short months, and glad and gay,

Again ye’ll charm the ear and e’e;

But nocht in all-revolving time

Can gladness bring again to me.

“I am a bending aged tree, 25

That long has stood the wind and rain;

But now has come a cruel blast,

And my last hald of earth is gane;

Nae leaf o’ mine shall greet the spring,

Nae simmer sun exalt my bloom; 30

But I maun lie before the storm,

And ithers plant them in my room.

“I’ve seen sae mony changefu’ years,

On earth I am a stranger grown:

I wander in the ways of men, 35

Alike unknowing, and unknown:

Unheard, unpitied, unreliev’d,

I bear alane my lade o’ care,

For silent, low, on beds of dust,

Lie a’ that would my sorrows share. 40

“And last, (the sum of a’ my griefs!)

My noble master lies in clay;

The flow’r amang our barons bold,

His country’s pride, his country’s stay:

In weary being now I pine, 45

For a’ the life of life is dead,

And hope has left may aged ken,

On forward wing for ever fled.

“Awake thy last sad voice, my harp!

The voice of woe and wild despair! 50

Awake, resound thy latest lay,

Then sleep in silence evermair!

And thou, my last, best, only, friend,

That fillest an untimely tomb,

Accept this tribute from the Bard 55

Thou brought from Fortune’s mirkest gloom.

“In Poverty’s low barren vale,

Thick mists obscure involv’d me round;

Though oft I turn’d the wistful eye,

Nae ray of fame was to be found: 60

Thou found’st me, like the morning sun

That melts the fogs in limpid air,

The friendless bard and rustic song

Became alike thy fostering care.

“O! why has worth so short a date, 65

While villains ripen grey with time?

Must thou, the noble, gen’rous, great,

Fall in bold manhood’s hardy prim

Why did I live to see that day —

A day to me so full of woe? 70

O! had I met the mortal shaft

That laid my benefactor low!

“The bridegroom may forget the bride

Was made his wedded wife yestreen;

The monarch may forget the crown 75

That on his head an hour has been;

The mother may forget the child

That smiles sae sweetly on her knee;

But I’ll remember thee, Glencairn,

And a’ that thou hast done for me!” 80

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

320.

Lines to Sir John Whitefoord, Bart

With the Lament on the Death of the Earl of Glencairn

THOU, who thy honour as thy God rever’st,

Who, save thy mind’s reproach, nought earthly fear’st,

To thee this votive offering I impart,

The tearful tribute of a broken heart.

The Friend thou valued’st, I, the Patron lov’d; 5

His worth, his honour, all the world approved:

We’ll mourn till we too go as he has gone,

And tread the shadowy path to that dark world unknown.

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

321.

Craigieburn Wood (Song)

SWEET closes the ev’ning on Craigieburn Wood,

And blythely awaukens the morrow;

But the pride o’ the spring in the Craigieburn Wood

Can yield to me nothing but sorrow.

Chorus. — Beyond thee, dearie, beyond thee, dearie, 5

And O to be lying beyond thee!

O sweetly, soundly, weel may he sleep

That’s laid in the bed beyond thee!

I see the spreading leaves and flowers,

I hear the wild birds singing; 10

But pleasure they hae nane for me,

While care my heart is wringing.

Beyond thee, &c.

I can na tell, I maun na tell,

I daur na for your anger; 15

But secret love will break my heart,

If I conceal it langer.

Beyond thee, &c.

I see thee gracefu’, straight and tall,

I see thee sweet and bonie; 20

But oh, what will my torment be,

If thou refuse thy Johnie!

Beyond thee, &c.

To see thee in another’s arms,

In love to lie and languish, 25

‘Twad be my dead, that will be seen,

My heart wad burst wi’ anguish.

Beyond thee, &c.

But Jeanie, say thou wilt be mine,

Say thou lo’es nane before me; 30

And a’ may days o’ life to come

I’ll gratefully adore thee,

Beyond thee, &c.

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

322.

The Bonie Wee Thing (Song)

Chorus. — Bonie wee thing, cannie wee thing,

Lovely wee thing, wert thou mine,

I wad wear thee in my bosom,

Lest my jewel it should tine.

WISHFULLY I look and languish 5

In that bonie face o’ thine,

And my heart it stounds wi’ anguish,

Lest my wee thing be na mine.

Bonie wee thing, &c.

Wit, and Grace, and Love, and Beauty, 10

In ae constellation shine;

To adore thee is my duty,

Goddess o’ this soul o’ mine!

Bonie wee thing, &c.

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

323.

Epigram on Miss Davies

On being asked why she had been formed so little, and Mrs. A –- so big.

ASK why God made the gem so small?

And why so huge the granite? —

Because God meant mankind should set

That higher value on it.

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

324.

The Charms of Lovely Davies (Song)

Tune— “Miss Muir.”

O HOW shall I, unskilfu’, try

The poet’s occupation?

The tunefu’ powers, in happy hours,

That whisper inspiration;

Even they maun dare an effort mair 5

Than aught they ever gave us,

Ere they rehearse, in equal verse,

The charms o’ lovely Davies.

Each eye it cheers when she appears,

Like Phoebus in the morning, 10

When past the shower, and every flower

The garden is adorning:

As the wretch looks o’er Siberia’s shore,

When winter-bound the wave is;

Sae droops our heart, when we maun part 15

Frae charming, lovely Davies.

Her smile’s a gift frae ‘boon the lift,

That maks us mair than princes;

A sceptred hand, a king’s command,

Is in her darting glances; 20

The man in arms ‘gainst female charms

Even he her willing slave is,

He hugs his chain, and owns the reign

Of conquering, lovely Davies.

My Muse, to dream of such a theme, 25

Her feeble powers surrender:

The eagle’s gaze alone surveys

The sun’s meridian splendour.

I wad in vain essay the strain,

The deed too daring brave is; 30

I’ll drap the lyre, and mute admire

The charms o’ lovely Davies.

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

325.

What can a Young Lassie do wi’ an Auld Man? (Song)

WHAT can a young lassie, what shall a young lassie,

What can a young lassie do wi’ an auld man?

Bad luck on the penny that tempted my minnie

To sell her puir Jenny for siller an’ lan’.

Bad luck on the penny that tempted my minnie 5

To sell her puir Jenny for siller an’ lan’!

He’s always compleenin’ frae mornin’ to e’enin’,

He hoasts and he hirples the weary day lang;

He’s doylt and he’s dozin, his blude it is frozen, —

O dreary’s the night wi’ a crazy auld man! 10

He’s doylt and he’s dozin, his blude it is frozen,

O dreary’s the night wi’ a crazy auld man.

He hums and he hankers, he frets and he cankers,

I never can please him do a’ that I can;

He’s peevish an’ jealous o’ a’ the young fellows, — 15

O dool on the day I met wi’ an auld man!

He’s peevish an’ jealous o’ a’ the young fellows,

O dool on the day I met wi’ an auld man.

My auld auntie Katie upon me taks pity,

I’ll do my endeavour to follow her plan; 20

I’ll cross him an’ wrack him, until I heartbreak him

And then his auld brass will buy me a new pan,

I’ll cross him an’ wrack him, until I heartbreak him,

And then his auld brass will buy me a new pan.

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

326.

The Posie (Song)

O LUVE will venture in where it daur na weel be seen,

O luve will venture in where wisdom ance has been;

But I will doun yon river rove, amang the wood sae green,

And a’ to pu’ a Posie to my ain dear May.

The primrose I will pu’, the firstling o’ the year, 5

And I will pu’ the pink, the emblem o’ my dear;

For she’s the pink o’ womankind, and blooms without a peer,

And a’ to be a Posie to my ain dear May.

I’ll pu’ the budding rose, when Phoebus peeps in view,

For it’s like a baumy kiss o’ her sweet, bonie mou; 10

The hyacinth’s for constancy wi’ its unchanging blue,

And a’ to be a Posie to my ain dear May.

The lily it is pure, and the lily it is fair,

And in her lovely bosom I’ll place the lily there;

The daisy’s for simplicity and unaffected air, 15

And a’ to be a Posie to my ain dear May.

The hawthorn I will pu’, wi’ its locks o’ siller gray,

Where, like an aged man, it stands at break o’ day;

But the songster’s nest within the bush I winna tak away

And a’ to be a Posie to my ain dear May. 20

The woodbine I will pu’, when the e’ening star is near,

And the diamond draps o’ dew shall be her een sae clear;

The violet’s for modesty, which weel she fa’s to wear,

And a’ to be a Posie to my ain dear May.

I’ll tie the Posie round wi’ the silken band o’ luve, 25

And I’ll place it in her breast, and I’ll swear by a’ above,

That to my latest draught o’ life the band shall ne’er remove,

And this will be a Posie to my ain dear May.

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

327.

On Glenriddell’s Fox breaking his chain: A Fragment

A Fragment, 1791.

THOU, Liberty, thou art my theme;

Not such as idle poets dream,

Who trick thee up a heathen goddess

That a fantastic cap and rod has;

Such stale conceits are poor and silly; 5

I paint thee out, a Highland filly,

A sturdy, stubborn, handsome dapple,

As sleek’s a mouse, as round’s an apple,

That when thou pleasest canst do wonders;

But when thy luckless rider blunders, 10

Or if thy fancy should demur there,

Wilt break thy neck ere thou go further.

These things premised, I sing a Fox,

Was caught among his native rocks,

And to a dirty kennel chained, 15

How he his liberty regained.

Glenriddell! Whig without a stain,

A Whig in principle and grain,

Could’st thou enslave a free-born creature,

A native denizen of Nature? 20

How could’st thou, with a heart so good,

(A better ne’er was sluiced with blood!)

Nail a poor devil to a tree,

That ne’er did harm to thine or thee?

The staunchest Whig Glenriddell was, 25

Quite frantic in his country’s cause;

And oft was Reynard’s prison passing,

And with his brother-Whigs canvassing

The Rights of Men, the Powers of Women,

With all the dignity of Freemen. 30

Sir Reynard daily heard debates

Of Princes’, Kings’, and Nations’ fates,

With many rueful, bloody stories

Of Tyrants, Jacobites, and Tories:

From liberty how angels fell, 35

That now are galley-slaves in hell;

How Nimrod first the trade began

Of binding Slavery’s chains on Man;

How fell Semiramis — G — d d-mn her!

Did first, with sacrilegious hammer, 40

(All ills till then were trivial matters)

For Man dethron’d forge hen-peck fetters;

How Xerxes, that abandoned Tory,

Thought cutting throats was reaping glory,

Until the stubborn Whigs of Sparta 45

Taught him great Nature’s Magna Charta;

How mighty Rome her fiat hurl’d

Resistless o’er a bowing world,

And, kinder than they did desire,

Polish’d mankind with sword and fire; 50

With much, too tedious to relate,

Of ancient and of modern date,

But ending still, how Billy Pitt

(Unlucky boy!) with wicked wit,

Has gagg’d old Britain, drain’d her coffer, 55

As butchers bind and bleed a heifer,

Thus wily Reynard by degrees,

In kennel listening at his ease,

Suck’d in a mighty stock of knowledge,

As much as some folks at a College; 60

Knew Britain’s rights and constitution,

Her aggrandisement, diminution,

How fortune wrought us good from evil;

Let no man, then, despise the Devil,

As who should say, ‘I never can need him,’ 65

Since we to scoundrels owe our freedom.

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

328.

Poem on Pastoral Poetry

HAIL, Poesie! thou Nymph reserv’d!

In chase o’ thee, what crowds hae swerv’d

Frae common sense, or sunk enerv’d

‘Mang heaps o’ clavers:

And och! o’er aft thy joes hae starv’d, 5

‘Mid a’ thy favours!

Say, Lassie, why, thy train amang,

While loud the trump’s heroic clang,

And sock or buskin skelp alang

To death or marriage; 10

Scarce ane has tried the shepherd-sang

But wi’ miscarriage?

In Homer’s craft Jock Milton thrives;

Eschylus’ pen Will Shakespeare drives;

Wee Pope, the knurlin’, till him rives 15

Horatian fame;

In thy sweet sang, Barbauld, survives

Even Sappho’s flame.

But thee, Theocritus, wha matches?

They’re no herd’s ballats, Maro’s catches; 20

Squire Pope but busks his skinklin’ patches

O’ heathen tatters:

I pass by hunders, nameless wretches,

That ape their betters.

In this braw age o’ wit and lear, 25

Will nane the Shepherd’s whistle mair

Blaw sweetly in its native air,

And rural grace;

And, wi’ the far-fam’d Grecian, share

A rival place? 30

Yes! there is ane; a Scottish callan!

There’s ane; come forrit, honest Allan!

Thou need na jouk behint the hallan,

A chiel sae clever;

The teeth o’ time may gnaw Tantallan, 35

But thou’s for ever.

Thou paints auld Nature to the nines,

In thy sweet Caledonian lines;

Nae gowden stream thro’ myrtle twines,

Where Philomel, 40

While nightly breezes sweep the vines,

Her griefs will tell!

In gowany glens thy burnie strays,

Where bonie lasses bleach their claes,

Or trots by hazelly shaws and braes, 45

Wi’ hawthorns gray,

Where blackbirds join the shepherd’s lays,

At close o’ day.

Thy rural loves are Nature’s sel’;

Nae bombast spates o’ nonsense swell; 50

Nae snap conceits, but that sweet spell

O’ witchin love,

That charm that can the strongest quell,

The sternest move.

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

329.

Verses on the destruction of the Woods near Drumlanrig

AS on the banks o’ wandering Nith,

Ae smiling simmer morn I stray’d,

And traced its bonie howes and haughs,

Where linties sang and lammies play’d,

I sat me down upon a craig, 5

And drank my fill o’ fancy’s dream,

When from the eddying deep below,

Up rose the genius of the stream.

Dark, like the frowning rock, his brow,

And troubled, like his wintry wave, 10

And deep, as sughs the boding wind

Amang his caves, the sigh he gave —

“And come ye here, my son,” he cried,

“To wander in my birken shade?

To muse some favourite Scottish theme, 15

Or sing some favourite Scottish maid?

“There was a time, it’s nae lang syne,

Ye might hae seen me in my pride,

When a’ my banks sae bravely saw

Their woody pictures in my tide; 20

When hanging beech and spreading elm

Shaded my stream sae clear and cool:

And stately oaks their twisted arms

Threw broad and dark across the pool;

“When, glinting thro’ the trees, appear’d 25

The wee white cot aboon the mill,

And peacefu’ rose its ingle reek,

That, slowly curling, clamb the hill.

But now the cot is bare and cauld,

Its leafy bield for ever gane, 30

And scarce a stinted birk is left

To shiver in the blast its lane.”

“Alas!” quoth I, “what ruefu’ chance

Has twin’d ye o’ your stately trees?

Has laid your rocky bosom bare — 35

Has stripped the cleeding o’ your braes?

Was it the bitter eastern blast,

That scatters blight in early spring?

Or was’t the wil’fire scorch’d their boughs,

Or canker-worm wi’ secret sting?” 40

“Nae eastlin blast,” the sprite replied;

“It blaws na here sae fierce and fell,

And on my dry and halesome banks

Nae canker-worms get leave to dwell:

Man! cruel man!” the genius sighed — 45

As through the cliffs he sank him down —

“The worm that gnaw’d my bonie trees,

That reptile wears a ducal crown.”

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

330.

The Gallant Weaver (Song)

WHERE Cart rins rowin’ to the sea,

By mony a flower and spreading tree,

There lives a lad, the lad for me,

He is a gallant Weaver.

O, I had wooers aught or nine, 5

They gied me rings and ribbons fine;

And I was fear’d my heart wad tine,

And I gied it to the Weaver.

My daddie sign’d my tocher-band,

To gie the lad that has the land, 10

But to my heart I’ll add my hand,

And give it to the Weaver.

While birds rejoice in leafy bowers,

While bees delight in opening flowers,

While corn grows green in summer showers, 15

I love my gallant Weaver.

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

331.

Epigram at Brownhill Inn

AT Brownhill we always get dainty good cheer,

And plenty of bacon each day in the year;

We’ve a’ thing that’s nice, and mostly in season,

But why always Bacon — come, tell me a reason?

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

332.

You’re welcome, Willie Stewart (Song)

Chorus. — You’re welcome, Willie Stewart,

You’re welcome, Willie Stewart,

There’s ne’er a flower that blooms in May,

That’s half sae welcome’s thou art!

COME, bumpers high, express your joy, 5

The bowl we maun renew it,

The tappet hen, gae bring her ben,

To welcome Willie Stewart,

You’re welcome, Willie Stewart, &c.

May foes be strang, and friends be slack 10

Ilk action, may he rue it,

May woman on him turn her back

That wrangs thee, Willie Stewart,

You’re welcome, Willie Stewart, &c.

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

333.

Lovely Polly Stewart (Song)

Chorus. — O lovely Polly Stewart,

O charming Polly Stewart,

There’s ne’er a flower that blooms in May,

That’s half so fair as thou art!

THE FLOWER it blaws, it fades, it fa’s, 5

And art can ne’er renew it;

But worth and truth, eternal youth

Will gie to Polly Stewart,

O lovely Polly Stewart, &c.

May he whase arms shall fauld thy charms 10

Possess a leal and true heart!

To him be given to ken the heaven

He grasps in Polly Stewart!

O lovely Polly Stewart, &c.

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

334.

Damon and Sylvia (Fragment of a Song)

Tune— “The Tither Morn.”

YON wandering rill that marks the hill,

And glances o’er the brae, Sir,

Slides by a bower, where mony a flower

Sheds fragrance on the day, Sir;

There Damon lay, with Sylvia gay, 5

To love they thought no crime, Sir,

The wild birds sang, the echoes rang,

While Damon’s heart beat time, Sir.

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

335.

Johnie lad, Cock up your Beaver (Fragment of a Song)

WHEN first my brave Johnie lad came to this town,

He had a blue bonnet that wanted the crown;

But now he has gotten a hat and a feather,

Hey, brave Johnie lad, cock up your beaver!

Cock up your beaver, and cock it fu’ sprush, 5

We’ll over the border, and gie them a brush;

There’s somebody there we’ll teach better behaviour,

Hey, brave Johnie lad, cock up your beaver!

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

336.

My Eppie Macnab (Song)

O SAW ye my dearie, my Eppie Macnab?

O saw ye my dearie, my Eppie Macnab?

She’s down in the yard, she’s kissin the laird,

She winna come hame to her ain Jock Rab.

O come thy ways to me, my Eppie Macnab; 5

O come thy ways to me, my Eppie Macnab;

Whate’er thou hast dune, be it late, be it sune,

Thou’s welcome again to thy ain Jock Rab.

What says she, my dearie, my Eppie Macnab?

What says she, my dearie, my Eppie Macnab? 10

She let’s thee to wit that she has thee forgot,

And for ever disowns thee, her ain Jock Rab.

O had I ne’er seen thee, my Eppie Macnab!

O had I ne’er seen thee, my Eppie Macnab!

As light as the air, and as fause as thou’s fair, 15

Thou’s broken the heart o’ thy ain Jock Rab.

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

337.

Altho’ he has left me (Fragment of a Song)

ALTHO’ he has left me for greed o’ the siller,

I dinna envy him the gains he can win;

I rather wad bear a’ the lade o’ my sorrow,

Than ever hae acted sae faithless to him.

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

338.

My Tocher’s the Jewel (Song)

O MEIKLE thinks my luve o’ my beauty,

And meikle thinks my luve o’ my kin;

But little thinks my luve I ken brawlie

My tocher’s the jewel has charms for him.

It’s a’ for the apple he’ll nourish the tree, 5

It’s a’ for the hinny he’ll cherish the bee,

My laddie’s sae meikle in luve wi’ the siller,

He canna hae luve to spare for me.

Your proffer o’ luve’s an airle-penny,

My tocher’s the bargain ye wad buy; 10

But an ye be crafty, I am cunnin’,

Sae ye wi anither your fortune may try.

Ye’re like to the timmer o’ yon rotten wood,

Ye’re like to the bark o’ yon rotten tree,

Ye’ll slip frae me like a knotless thread, 15

And ye’ll crack your credit wi’ mae nor me.

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

339.

O for ane an’ twenty, Tam (Song)

Chorus. — An’ O for ane an’ twenty, Tam!

And hey, sweet ane an’ twenty, Tam!

I’ll learn my kin a rattlin’ sang,

An’ I saw ane an’ twenty, Tam.

THEY snool me sair, and haud me down, 5

An’ gar me look like bluntie, Tam;

But three short years will soon wheel roun’,

An’ then comes ane an’ twenty, Tam.

An’ O for, &c.

A glieb o’ lan’, a claut o’ gear, 10

Was left me by my auntie, Tam;

At kith or kin I need na spier,

An I saw ane an’ twenty, Tam.

An’ O for, &c.

They’ll hae me wed a wealthy coof, 15

Tho’ I mysel’ hae plenty, Tam;

But, hear’st thou laddie! there’s my loof,

I’m thine at ane an’ twenty, Tam!

An’ O for, &c.

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

340.

Thou Fair Eliza (Song)

TURN again, thou fair Eliza!

Ae kind blink before we part;

Rue on thy despairing lover,

Can’st thou break his faithfu’ heart?

Turn again, thou fair Eliza! 5

If to love thy heart denies,

Oh, in pity hide the sentence

Under friendship’s kind disguise!

Thee, sweet maid, hae I offended?

My offence is loving thee; 10

Can’st thou wreck his peace for ever,

Wha for thine would gladly die?

While the life beats in my bosom,

Thou shalt mix in ilka throe:

Turn again, thou lovely maiden, 15

Ae sweet smile on me bestow.

Not the bee upon the blossom,

In the pride o’ sinny noon;

Not the little sporting fairy,

All beneath the simmer moon; 20

Not the Minstrel in the moment

Fancy lightens in his e’e,

Kens the pleasure, feels the rapture,

That thy presence gies to me.

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

341.

My Bonie Bell (Song)

THE SMILING Spring comes in rejoicing,

And surly Winter grimly flies;

Now crystal clear are the falling waters,

And bonie blue are the sunny skies.

Fresh o’er the mountains breaks forth the morning, 5

The ev’ning gilds the ocean’s swell;

All creatures joy in the sun’s returning,

And I rejoice in my bonie Bell.

The flowery Spring leads sunny Summer,

The yellow Autumn presses near; 10

Then in his turn comes gloomy Winter,

Till smiling Spring again appear:

Thus seasons dancing, life advancing,

Old Time and Nature their changes tell;

But never ranging, still unchanging, 15

I adore my bonie Bell.

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

342.

Sweet Afton (Song)

FLOW gently, sweet Afton! amang thy green braes,

Flow gently, I’ll sing thee a song in thy praise;

My Mary’s asleep by thy murmuring stream,

Flow gently, sweet Afton, disturb not her dream.

Thou stockdove whose echo resounds thro’ the glen, 5

Ye wild whistling blackbirds in yon thorny den,

Thou green-crested lapwing thy screaming forbear,

I charge you, disturb not my slumbering Fair.

How lofty, sweet Afton, thy neighbouring hills,

Far mark’d with the courses of clear, winding rills; 10

There daily I wander as noon rises high,

My flocks and my Mary’s sweet cot in my eye.

How pleasant thy banks and green valleys below,

Where, wild in the woodlands, the primroses blow;

There oft, as mild Ev’ning weeps over the lea, 15

The sweet-scented birk shades my Mary and me.

Thy crystal stream, Afton, how lovely it glides,

And winds by the cot where my Mary resides;

How wanton thy waters her snowy feet lave,

As, gathering sweet flowerets, she stems thy clear wave. 20

Flow gently, sweet Afton, amang thy green braes,

Flow gently, sweet river, the theme of my lays;

My Mary’s asleep by thy murmuring stream,

Flow gently, sweet Afton, disturb not her dream.

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

343.

Address to the shade of Thomson

On Crowning His Bust at Ednam, Roxburghshire, with a Wreath of Bays.

WHILE virgin Spring by Eden’s flood,

Unfolds her tender mantle green,

Or pranks the sod in frolic mood,

Or tunes Eolian strains between.

While Summer, with a matron grace, 5

Retreats to Dryburgh’s cooling shade,

Yet oft, delighted, stops to trace

The progress of the spiky blade.

While Autumn, benefactor kind,

By Tweed erects his aged head, 10

And sees, with self-approving mind,

Each creature on his bounty fed.

While maniac Winter rages o’er

The hills whence classic Yarrow flows,

Rousing the turbid torrent’s roar, 15

Or sweeping, wild, a waste of snows.

So long, sweet Poet of the year!

Shall bloom that wreath thou well hast won;

While Scotia, with exulting tear,

Proclaims that THOMSON was her son. 20

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

344.

Nithdale’s Welcome Hame (Song)

THE NOBLE Maxwells and their powers

Are coming o’er the border,

And they’ll gae big Terreagles’ towers

And set them a’ in order.

And they declare Terreagles fair, 5

For their abode they choose it;

There’s no a heart in a’ the land

But’s lighter at the news o’t.

Tho’ stars in skies may disappear,

And angry tempests gather; 10

The happy hour may soon be near

That brings us pleasant weather:

The weary night o’ care and grief

May hae a joyfu’ morrow;

so dawning day has brought relief, 15

Fareweel our night o’ sorrow.

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

345.

Frae the friends and land I love (Song)

Tune— “Carron Side.”

FRAE the friends and land I love,

Driv’n by Fortune’s felly spite;

Frae my best belov’d I rove,

Never mair to taste delight:

Never mair maun hope to find 5

Ease frae toil, relief frae care;

When Remembrance wracks the mind,

Pleasures but unveil despair.

Brightest climes shall mirk appear,

Desert ilka blooming shore, 10

Till the Fates, nae mair severe,

Friendship, love, and peace restore,

Till Revenge, wi’ laurel’d head,

Bring our banished hame again;

And ilk loyal, bonie lad 15

Cross the seas, and win his ain.

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

346.

Such a parcel of Rogues in a Nation (Song)

FAREWEEL to a’ our Scottish fame,

Fareweel our ancient glory;

Fareweel ev’n to the Scottish name,

Sae fam’d in martial story.

Now Sark rins over Solway sands, 5

An’ Tweed rins to the ocean,

To mark where England’s province stands —

Such a parcel of rogues in a nation!

What force or guile could not subdue,

Thro’ many warlike ages, 10

Is wrought now by a coward few,

For hireling traitor’s wages.

The English stell we could disdain,

Secure in valour’s station;

But English gold has been our bane — 15

Such a parcel of rogues in a nation!

O would, or I had seen the day

That Treason thus could sell us,

My auld grey head had lien in clay,

Wi’ Bruce and loyal Wallace! 20

But pith and power, till my last hour,

I’ll mak this declaration;

We’re bought and sold for English gold —

Such a parcel of rogues in a nation!

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

347.

Ye Jacobites by Name (Song)

YE Jacobites by name, give an ear, give an ear,

Ye Jacobites by name, give an ear,

Ye Jacobites by name,

Your fautes I will proclaim,

Your doctrines I maun blame, you shall hear. 5

What is Right, and What is Wrang, by the law, by the law?

What is Right and what is Wrang by the law?

What is Right, and what is Wrang?

A short sword, and a lang,

A weak arm and a strang, for to draw. 10

What makes heroic strife, famed afar, famed afar?

What makes heroic strife famed afar?

What makes heroic strife?

To whet th’ assassin’s knife,

Or hunt a Parent’s life, wi’ bluidy war? 15

Then let your schemes alone, in the state, in the state,

Then let your schemes alone in the state.

Then let your schemes alone,

Adore the rising sun,

And leave a man undone, to his fate. 20

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

348.

I hae been at Crookieden (Song)

I HAE been at Crookieden,

My bonie laddie, Highland laddie,

Viewing Willie and his men,

My bonie laddie, Highland laddie.

There our foes that burnt and slew, 5

My bonie laddie, Highland laddie,

There, at last, they gat their due,

My bonie laddie, Highland laddie.

Satan sits in his black neuk,

My bonie laddie, Highland laddie, 10

Breaking sticks to roast the Duke,

My bonie laddie, Highland laddie,

The bloody monster gae a yell,

My bonie laddie, Highland laddie.

And loud the laugh gied round a’ hell 15

My bonie laddie, Highland laddie.

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

349.

Kenmure’s on and awa, Willie (Song)

O KENMURE’S on and awa, Willie,

O Kenmure’s on and awa:

An’ Kenmure’s lord’s the bravest lord

That ever Galloway saw.

Success to Kenmure’s band, Willie! 5

Success to Kenmure’s band!

There’s no a heart that fears a Whig,

That rides by kenmure’s hand.

Here’s Kenmure’s health in wine, Willie!

Here’s Kenmure’s health in wine! 10

There’s ne’er a coward o’ Kenmure’s blude,

Nor yet o’ Gordon’s line.

O Kenmure’s lads are men, Willie,

O Kenmure’s lads are men;

Their hearts and swords are metal true, 15

And that their foes shall ken.

They’ll live or die wi’ fame, Willie;

They’ll live or die wi’ fame;

But sune, wi’ sounding victorie,

May Kenmure’s lord come hame! 20

Here’s him that’s far awa, Willie!

Here’s him that’s far awa!

And here’s the flower that I loe best,

The rose that’s like the snaw.

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

350.

Epistle to John Maxwell, Esq., of Terraughty

On His Birthday.

HEALTH to the Maxwell’s veteran Chief!

Health, aye unsour’d by care or grief:

Inspir’d, I turn’d Fate’s sibyl leaf,

This natal morn,

I see thy life is stuff o’ prief, 5

Scarce quite half-worn.

This day thou metes threescore eleven,

And I can tell that bounteous Heaven

(The second-sight, ye ken, is given

To ilka Poet) 10

On thee a tack o’ seven times seven

Will yet bestow it.

If envious buckies view wi’ sorrow

Thy lengthen’d days on this blest morrow,

May Desolation’s lang-teeth’d harrow, 15

Nine miles an hour,

Rake them, like Sodom and Gomorrah,

In brunstane stour.

But for thy friends, and they are mony,

Baith honest men, and lassies bonie, 20

May couthie Fortune, kind and cannie,

In social glee,

Wi’ mornings blythe, and e’enings funny,

Bless them and thee!

Fareweel, auld birkie! Lord be near ye, 25

And then the deil, he daurna steer ye:

Your friends aye love, your faes aye fear ye;

For me, shame fa’ me,

If neist my heart I dinna wear ye,

While Burns they ca’ me. 30

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

351.

Second Epistle to Robert Graham, Esq., of Fintry

5th October 1791.

LATE crippl’d of an arm, and now a leg,

About to beg a pass for leave to beg;

Dull, listless, teas’d, dejected, and deprest

(Nature is adverse to a cripple’s rest);

Will generous Graham list to his Poet’s wail? 5

(It soothes poor Misery, hearkening to her tale)

And hear him curse the light he first survey’d,

And doubly curse the luckless rhyming trade?

Thou, Nature! partial Nature, I arraign;

Of thy caprice maternal I complain; 10

The lion and the bull thy care have found,

One shakes the forests, and one spurns the ground;

Thou giv’st the ass his hide, the snail his shell;

Th’ envenom’d wasp, victorious, guards his cell;

Thy minions kings defend, control, devour, 15

In all th’ omnipotence of rule and power;

Foxes and statesmen subtile wiles ensure;

The cit and polecat stink, and are secure;

Toads with their poison, doctors with their drug,

The priest and hedgehog in their robes, are snug; 20

Ev’n silly woman has her warlike arts,

Her tongue and eyes — her dreaded spear and darts.

But Oh! thou bitter step-mother and hard,

To thy poor, fenceless, naked child — the Bard!

A thing unteachable in world’s skill, 25

And half an idiot too, more helpless still:

No heels to bear him from the op’ning dun;

No claws to dig, his hated sight to shun;

No horns, but those by luckless Hymen worn,

And those, alas! not, Amalthea’s horn: 30

No nerves olfact’ry, Mammon’s trusty cur,

Clad in rich Dulness’ comfortable fur;

In naked feeling, and in aching pride,

He bears th’ unbroken blast from ev’ry side:

Vampyre booksellers drain him to the heart, 35

And scorpion critics cureless venom dart.

Critics — appall’d, I venture on the name;

Those cut-throat bandits in the paths of fame:

Bloody dissectors, worse than ten Monroes;

He hacks to teach, they mangle to expose: 40

His heart by causeless wanton malice wrung,

By blockheads’ daring into madness stung;

His well-won bays, than life itself more dear,

By miscreants torn, who ne’er one sprig must wear;

Foil’d, bleeding, tortur’d in th’ unequal strife, 45

The hapless Poet flounders on thro’ life:

Till, fled each hope that once his bosom fir’d,

And fled each muse that glorious once inspir’d,

Low sunk in squalid, unprotected age,

Dead even resentment for his injur’d page, 50

He heeds or feels no more the ruthless critic’s rage!

So, by some hedge, the gen’rous steed deceas’d,

For half-starv’d snarling curs a dainty feast;

By toil and famine wore to skin and bone,

Lies, senseless of each tugging bitch’s son. 55

O Dulness! portion of the truly blest!

Calm shelter’d haven of eternal rest!

Thy sons ne’er madden in the fierce extremes

Of Fortune’s polar frost, or torrid beams.

If mantling high she fills the golden cup, 60

With sober selfish ease they sip it up;

Conscious the bounteous meed they well deserve,

They only wonder “some folks” do not starve.

The grave sage hern thus easy picks his frog,

And thinks the mallard a sad worthless dog. 65

When disappointments snaps the clue of hope,

And thro’ disastrous night they darkling grope,

With deaf endurance sluggishly they bear,

And just conclude that “fools are fortune’s care.”

So, heavy, passive to the tempest’s shocks, 70

Strong on the sign-post stands the stupid ox.

Not so the idle Muses’ mad-cap train,

Not such the workings of their moon-struck brain;

In equanimity they never dwell,

By turns in soaring heav’n, or vaulted hell. 75

I dread thee, Fate, relentless and severe,

With all a poet’s, husband’s, father’s fear!

Already one strong hold of hope is lost —

Glencairn, the truly noble, lies in dust

(Fled, like the sun eclips’d as noon appears, 80

And left us darkling in a world of tears);

O! hear my ardent, grateful, selfish pray’r!

Fintry, my other stay, long bless and spare!

Thro’ a long life his hopes and wishes crown,

And bright in cloudless skies his sun go down! 85

May bliss domestic smooth his private path;

Give energy to life; and soothe his latest breath,

With many a filial tear circling the bed of death!

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

352.

The Song of Death

Tune— “Oran an aoig.”

Scene — A Field of Battle — Time of the day, evening — The wounded and dying of the victorious army are supposed to join in the following song.

FAREWELL, thou fair day, thou green earth, and ye skies,

Now gay with the broad setting sun;

Farewell, loves and friendships, ye dear tender ties,

Our race of existence is run!

Thou grim King of Terrors; thou Life’s gloomy foe! 5

Go, frighten the coward and slave;

Go, teach them to tremble, fell tyrant! but know

No terrors hast thou to the brave!

Thou strik’st the dull peasant — he sinks in the dark,

Nor saves e’en the wreck of a name; 10

Thou strik’st the young hero — a glorious mark;

He falls in the blaze of his fame!

In the field of proud honour — our swords in our hands,

Our King and our country to save;

While victory shines on Life’s last ebbing sands, — 15

O! who would not die with the brave!

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

353.

Poem on Sensibility

SENSIBILITY, how charming,

Dearest Nancy, thou canst tell;

But distress, with horrors arming,

Thou alas! hast known too well!

Fairest flower, behold the lily 5

Blooming in the sunny ray:

Let the blast sweep o’er the valley,

See it prostrate in the clay.

Hear the wood lark charm the forest,

Telling o’er his little joys; 10

But alas! a prey the surest

To each pirate of the skies.

Dearly bought the hidden treasure

Finer feelings can bestow:

Chords that vibrate sweetest pleasure 15

Thrill the deepest notes of woe.

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

354.

Epigram — The Toad-eater

OF Lordly acquaintance you boast,

And the Dukes that you dined wi’ yestreen,

Yet an insect’s an insect at most,

Tho’ it crawl on the curl of a Queen!

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

355.

Epigram — Divine Service at Lamington

AS cauld a wind as ever blew,

A cauld kirk, an in’t but few:

As cauld a minister’s e’er spak;

Ye’se a’ be het e’er I come back.

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

356.

Epigram — The Keekin Glass

HOW daur ye ca’ me “Howlet-face”?

Ye blear-e’ed, withered spectre!

Ye only spied the keekin-glass,

An’ there ye saw your picture.

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

357.

A Grace before Dinner

O THOU who kindly dost provide

For every creature’s want!

We bless Thee, God of Nature wide,

For all Thy goodness lent:

And if it please Thee, Heavenly Guide, 5

May never worse be sent;

But, whether granted, or denied,

Lord, bless us with content. Amen!

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

358.

A Grace after Dinner

O THOU, in whom we live and move —

Who made the sea and shore;

Thy goodness constantly we prove,

And grateful would adore;

And, if it please Thee, Power above! 5

Still grant us, with such store,

The friend we trust, the fair we love —

And we desire no more. Amen!

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

359.

O May, thy Morn (Song)

O MAY, thy morn was ne’er so sweet

As the mirk night o’ December!

For sparkling was the rosy wine,

And private was the chamber:

And dear was she I dare na name, 5

But I will aye remember:

And dear was she I dare na name,

But I will aye remember.

And here’s to them that, like oursel,

Can push about the jorum! 10

And here’s to them that wish us weel,

May a’ that’s guid watch o’er ‘em!

And here’s to them, we dare na tell,

The dearest o’ the quorum!

And here’s to them, we dare na tell, 15

The dearest o’ the quorum.

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

360.

Ae fond Kiss (Song)

Tune— “Rory Dall’s Port.”

AE fond kiss, and then we sever;

Ae fareweel, alas, for ever!

Deep in heart-wrung tears I’ll pledge thee,

Warring sighs and groans I’ll wage thee.

Who shall say that Fortune grieves him, 5

While the star of hope she leaves him?

Me, nae cheerful twinkle lights me;

Dark despair around benights me.

I’ll ne’er blame my partial fancy,

Naething could resist my Nancy: 10

But to see her was to love her;

Love but her, and love for ever.

Had we never lov’d sae kindly,

Had we never lov’d sae blindly,

Never met — or never parted, 15

We had ne’er been broken-hearted.

Fare-thee-weel, thou first and fairest!

Fare-thee-weel, thou best and dearest!

Thine be ilka joy and treasure,

Peace, Enjoyment, Love and Pleasure! 20

Ae fond kiss, and then we sever!

Ae fareweel alas, for ever!

Deep in heart-wrung tears I’ll pledge thee,

Warring sighs and groans I’ll wage thee.

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

361.

Behold the Hour, the Boat, arrive (Song)

BEHOLD the hour, the boat, arrive!

My dearest Nancy, O fareweel!

Severed frae thee, can I survive,

Frae thee whom I hae lov’d sae weel?

Endless and deep shall be my grief; 5

Nae ray of comfort shall I see,

But this most precious, dear belief,

That thou wilt still remember me!

Alang the solitary shore

Where flitting sea-fowl round me cry, 10

Across the rolling, dashing roar,

I’ll westward turn my wishful eye.

“Happy thou Indian grove,” I’ll say,

“Where now my Nancy’s path shall be!

While thro’ your sweets she holds her way, 15

O tell me, does she muse on me?”

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

362.

Thou Gloomy December (Song)

ANCE mair I hail thee, thou gloomy December!

Ance mair I hail thee wi’ sorrow and care;

Sad was the parting thou makes me remember —

Parting wi’ Nancy, oh, ne’er to meet mair!

Fond lovers’ parting is sweet, painful pleasure, 5

Hope beaming mild on the soft parting hour;

But the dire feeling, O farewell for ever!

Anguish unmingled, and agony pure!

Wild as the winter now tearing the forest,

Till the last leaf o’ the summer is flown; 10

Such is the tempest has shaken my bosom,

Till my last hope and last comfort is gone.

Still as I hail thee, thou gloomy December,

Still shall I hail thee wi’ sorrow and care;

For sad was the parting thou makes me remember, 15

Parting wi’ Nancy, oh, ne’er to meet mair.

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

363.

My Native Land sae far awa (Song)

O SAD and heavy, should I part,

But for her sake, sae far awa;

Unknowing what my way may thwart,

My native land sae far awa.

Thou that of a’ things Maker art, 5

That formed this Fair sae far awa,

Gie body strength, then I’ll ne’er start

At this my way sae far awa.

How true is love to pure desert!

Like mine for her sae far awa; 10

And nocht can heal my bosom’s smart,

While, oh, she is sae far awa!

Nane other love, nane other dart,

I feel but her’s sae far awa;

But fairer never touch’d a heart 15

Than her’s, the Fair, sae far awa.

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

1792

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

364.

I do confess thou art sae fair (Song)

Alteration of an Old Poem.

I DO confess thou art sae fair,

I was been o’er the lugs in luve,

Had I na found the slightest prayer

That lips could speak thy heart could muve.

I do confess thee sweet, but find 5

Thou art so thriftless o’ thy sweets,

Thy favours are the silly wind

That kisses ilka thing it meets.

See yonder rosebud, rich in dew,

Amang its native briers sae coy; 10

How sune it tines its scent and hue,

When pu’d and worn a common toy.

Sic fate ere lang shall thee betide,

Tho’ thou may gaily bloom awhile;

And sune thou shalt be thrown aside, 15

Like ony common weed and vile.

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

365.

Lines on Fergusson, the Poet

ILL-FATED genius! Heaven-taught Fergusson!

What heart that feels and will not yield a tear,

To think Life’s sun did set e’er well begun

To shed its influence on thy bright career.

O why should truest Worth and Genius pine 5

Beneath the iron grasp of Want and Woe,

While titled knaves and idiot-Greatness shine

In all the splendour Fortune can bestow?

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

366.

The weary Pund o’ Tow (Song)

Chorus. — The weary pund, the weary pund,

The weary pund o’ tow;

I think my wife will end her life,

Before she spin her tow.

I BOUGHT my wife a stane o’ lint, 5

As gude as e’er did grow,

And a’ that she has made o’ that

Is ae puir pund o’ tow.

The weary pund, &c.

There sat a bottle in a bole, 10

Beyont the ingle low;

And aye she took the tither souk,

To drouk the stourie tow.

The weary pund, &c.

Quoth I, For shame, ye dirty dame, 15

Gae spin your tap o’ tow!

She took the rock, and wi’ a knock,

She brak it o’er my pow.

The weary pund, &c.

At last her feet — I sang to see’t! 20

Gaed foremost o’er the knowe,

And or I wad anither jad,

I’ll wallop in a tow.

The weary pund, &c.

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

367.

When she cam ben she bobbed (Song)

O WHEN she cam’ ben she bobbed fu’ law,

O when she cam’ ben she bobbed fu’ law,

And when she cam’ ben, she kiss’d Cockpen,

And syne denied she did it at a’.

And was na Cockpen right saucy witha’? 5

And was na Cockpen right saucy witha’?

In leaving the daughter of a lord,

And kissin’ a collier lassie an’ a’!

O never look down, my lassie, at a’,

O never look down, my lassie, at a’, 10

Thy lips are as sweet, and thy figure complete,

As the finest dame in castle or ha’.

Tho’ thou has nae silk, and holland sae sma’,

Tho’ thou has nae silk, and holland sae sma’,

Thy coat and thy sark are thy ain handiwark, 15

And lady Jean was never sae braw.

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

368.

Scroggam, my dearie (Song)

THERE was a wife wonn’d in Cockpen,

Scroggam;

She brew’d gude ale for gentlemen;

Sing auld Cowl lay ye down by me,

Scroggam, my dearie, ruffum. 5

The gudewife’s dochter fell in a fever,

Scroggam;

The priest o’ the parish he fell in anither;

Sing auld Cowl lay ye down by me,

Scroggam, my dearie, ruffum. 10

They laid the twa i’ the bed thegither,

Scroggam;

That the heat o’ the tane might cool the tither;

Sing auld Cowl, lay ye down by me,

Scroggam, my dearie, ruffum. 15

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

369.

My Collier Laddie (Song)

WHARE live ye, my bonie lass?

And tell me what they ca’ ye;

My name, she says, is mistress Jean,

And I follow the Collier laddie.

My name, she says, &c. 5

See you not yon hills and dales

The sun shines on sae brawlie;

They a’ are mine, and they shall be thine,

Gin ye’ll leave your Collier laddie.

They a’ are mine, &c. 10

Ye shall gang in gay attire,

Weel buskit up sae gaudy;

And ane to wait on every hand,

Gin ye’ll leave your Collier laddie.

And ane to wait, &c. 15

Tho’ ye had a’ the sun shines on,

And the earth conceals sae lowly,

I wad turn my back on you and it a’,

And embrace my Collier laddie.

I wad turn my back, &c. 20

I can win my five pennies in a day,

An’ spen’t at night fu’ brawlie:

And make my bed in the collier’s neuk,

And lie down wi’ my Collier laddie.

And make my bed, &c. 25

Love for love is the bargain for me,

Tho’ the wee cot-house should haud me;

And the warld before me to win my bread,

And fair fa’ my Collier laddie!

And the warld before me, &c. 30

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

370.

Sic a Wife as Willie had (Song)

WILLIE WASTLE dwalt on Tweed,

The spot they ca’d it Linkumdoddie;

Willie was a wabster gude,

Could stown a clue wi’ ony body:

He had a wife was dour and din, 5

O Tinkler Maidgie was her mither;

Sic a wife as Willie had,

I wad na gie a button for her!

She has an e’e, she has but ane,

The cat has twa the very colour; 10

Five rusty teeth, forbye a stump,

A clapper tongue wad deave a miller:

A whiskin beard about her mou’,

Her nose and chin they threaten ither;

Sic a wife as Willie had, 15

I wadna gie a button for her!

She’s bow-hough’d, she’s hein-shin’d,

Ae limpin leg a hand-breed shorter;

She’s twisted right, she’s twisted left,

To balance fair in ilka quarter: 20

She has a lump upon her breast,

The twin o’ that upon her shouther;

Sic a wife as Willie had,

I wadna gie a button for her!

Auld baudrons by the ingle sits, 25

An’ wi’ her loof her face a-washin;

But Willie’s wife is nae sae trig,

She dights her grunzie wi’ a hushion;

Her walie nieves like midden-creels,

Her face wad fyle the Logan Water; 30

Sic a wife as Willie had,

I wadna gie a button for her!

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

371.

Lady Mary Ann (Song)

O LADY Mary Ann looks o’er the Castle wa’,

She saw three bonie boys playing at the ba’,

The youngest he was the flower amang them a’,

My bonie laddie’s young, but he’s growin’ yet.

O father, O father, an ye think it fit, 5

We’ll send him a year to the college yet,

We’ll sew a green ribbon round about his hat,

And that will let them ken he’s to marry yet.

Lady Mary Ann was a flower in the dew,

Sweet was its smell and bonie was its hue, 10

And the longer it blossom’d the sweeter it grew,

For the lily in the bud will be bonier yet.

Young Charlie Cochran was the sprout of an aik,

Bonie and bloomin’ and straught was its make,

The sun took delight to shine for its sake, 15

And it will be the brag o’ the forest yet.

The simmer is gane when the leaves they were green,

And the days are awa’ that we hae seen,

But far better days I trust will come again;

For my bonie laddie’s young, but he’s growin’ yet. 20

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

372.

Kellyburn Braes (Song)

THERE lived a carl in Kellyburn Braes,

Hey, and the rue grows bonie wi’ thyme;

And he had a wife was the plague of his days,

And the thyme it is wither’d, and rue is in prime.

Ae day as the carl gaed up the lang glen, 5

Hey, and the rue grows bonie wi’ thyme;

He met with the Devil, says, “How do you fen?”

And the thyme it is wither’d, and rue is in prime.

I’ve got a bad wife, sir, that’s a’ my complaint,

Hey, and the rue grows bonie wi’ thyme; 10

“For, savin your presence, to her ye’re a saint,”

And the thyme it is wither’d, and rue is in prime.

It’s neither your stot nor your staig I shall crave,

Hey, and the rue grows bonie wi’ thyme;

“But gie me your wife, man, for her I must have,” 15

And the thyme it is wither’d, and rue is in prime.

“O welcome most kindly!” the blythe carl said,

Hey, and the rue grows bonie wi’ thyme;

“But if ye can match her ye’re waur than ye’re ca’d,”

And the thyme it is wither’d, and rue is in prime. 20

The Devil has got the auld wife on his back,

Hey, and the rue grows bonie wi’ thyme;

And, like a poor pedlar, he’s carried his pack,

And the thyme it is wither’d, and rue is in prime.

He’s carried her hame to his ain hallan door, 25

Hey, and the rue grows bonie wi’ thyme;

Syne bade her gae in, for a b — , and a w — ,

And the thyme it is wither’d, and rue is in prime.

Then straight he makes fifty, the pick o’ his band,

Hey, and the rue grows bonie wi’ thyme: 30

Turn out on her guard in the clap o’ a hand,

And the thyme it is wither’d, and rue is in prime.

The carlin gaed thro’ them like ony wud bear,

Hey, and the rue grows bonie wi’ thyme;

Whae’er she gat hands on cam near her nae mair, 35

And the thyme it is wither’d, and rue is in prime.

A reekit wee deevil looks over the wa’,

Hey, and the rue grows bonie wi’ thyme;

“O help, maister, help, or she’ll ruin us a’!”

And the thyme it is wither’d, and rue is in prime. 40

The Devil he swore by the edge o’ his knife,

Hey, and the rue grows bonie wi’ thyme;

He pitied the man that was tied to a wife,

And the thyme it is wither’d, and rue is in prime.

The Devil he swore by the kirk and the bell, 45

Hey, and the rue grows bonie wi’ thyme;

He was not in wedlock, thank Heav’n, but in hell,

And the thyme it is wither’d, and rue is in prime.

Then Satan has travell’d again wi’ his pack,

Hey, and the rue grows bonie wi’ thyme; 50

And to her auld husband he’s carried her back,

And the thyme it is wither’d, and rue is in prime.

I hae been a Devil the feck o’ my life,

Hey, and the rue grows bonie wi’ thyme;

“But ne’er was in hell till I met wi’ a wife,” 55

And the thyme it is wither’d, and rue is in prime.

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

373.

The Slave’s Lament (Song)

IT was in sweet Senegal that my foes did me enthral,

For the lands of Virginia, — ginia, O:

Torn from that lovely shore, and must never see it more;

And alas! I am weary, weary O:

Torn from that lovely shore, and must never see it more; 5

And alas! I am weary, weary O.

All on that charming coast is no bitter snow and frost,

Like the lands of Virginia, — ginia, O:

There streams for ever flow, and there flowers for ever blow,

And alas! I am weary, weary O: 10

There streams for ever flow, and there flowers for ever blow,

And alas! I am weary, weary O:

The burden I must bear, while the cruel scourge I fear,

In the lands of Virginia, — ginia, O;

And I think on friends most dear, with the bitter, bitter tear, 15

And alas! I am weary, weary O:

And I think on friends most dear, with the bitter, bitter tear,

And alas! I am weary, weary O:

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

374.

O can ye Labour Lea? (Song)

Chorus — O can ye labour lea, young man,

O can ye labour lea?

It fee nor bountith shall us twine

Gin ye can labour lea.

I FEE’D a man at Michaelmas, 5

Wi’ airle pennies three;

But a’ the faut I had to him,

He could na labour lea,

O can ye labour lea, &c.

O clappin’s gude in Febarwar, 10

An’ kissin’s sweet in May;

But my delight’s the ploughman lad,

That weel can labour lea,

O can ye labour lea, &c.

O kissin is the key o’ luve, 15

And clappin’ is the lock;

An’ makin’ o’s the best thing yet,

That e’er a young thing gat.

O can ye labour lea, &c.

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

375.

The Deuks dang o’er my Daddie (Song)

THE BAIRNS gat out wi’ an unco shout,

The deuks dang o’er my daddie, O!

The fien-ma-care, quo’ the feirrie auld wife,

He was but a paidlin’ body, O!

He paidles out, and he paidles in, 5

An’ he paidles late and early, O!

This seven lang years I hae lien by his side,

An’ he is but a fusionless carlie, O.

O haud your tongue, my feirrie auld wife,

O haud your tongue, now Nansie, O: 10

I’ve seen the day, and sae hae ye,

Ye wad na ben sae donsie, O.

I’ve seen the day ye butter’d my brose,

And cuddl’d me late and early, O;

But downa-do’s come o’er me now, 15

And oh, I find it sairly, O!

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

376.

The Deil’s awa wi’ the Exciseman (Song)

THE DEIL cam fiddlin’ thro’ the town,

And danc’d awa wi’ th’ Exciseman,

And ilka wife cries, “Auld Mahoun,

I wish you luck o’ the prize, man.”

Chorus. — The deil’s awa, the deil’s awa, 5

The deil’s awa wi’ the Exciseman,

He’s danc’d awa, he’s danc’d awa,

He’s danc’d awa wi’ the Exciseman.

We’ll mak our maut, and we’ll brew our drink,

We’ll laugh, sing, and rejoice, man, 10

And mony braw thanks to the meikle black deil,

That danc’d awa wi’ th’ Exciseman.

The deil’s awa, &c.

There’s threesome reels, there’s foursome reels,

There’s hornpipes and strathspeys, man, 15

But the ae best dance ere came to the land

Was the deil’s awa wi’ the Exciseman.

The deil’s awa, &c.

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

377.

The Country Lass (Song)

IN simmer, when the hay was mawn,

And corn wav’d green in ilka field,

While claver blooms white o’er the lea

And roses blaw in ilka beild!

Blythe Bessie in the milking shiel, 5

Says— “I’ll be wed, come o’t what will”:

Out spake a dame in wrinkled eild;

“O’ gude advisement comes nae ill.

“It’s ye hae wooers mony ane,

And lassie, ye’re but young ye ken; 10

Then wait a wee, and cannie wale

A routhie butt, a routhie ben;

There’s Johnie o’ the Buskie-glen,

Fu’ is his barn, fu’ is his byre;

Take this frae me, my bonie hen, 15

It’s plenty beets the luver’s fire.”

“For Johnie o’ the Buskie-glen,

I dinna care a single flie;

He lo’es sae weel his craps and kye,

He has nae love to spare for me; 20

But blythe’s the blink o’ Robie’s e’e,

And weel I wat he lo’es me dear:

Ae blink o’ him I wad na gie

For Buskie-glen and a’ his gear.”

“O thoughtless lassie, life’s a faught; 25

The canniest gate, the strife is sair;

But aye fu’-han’t is fechtin’ best,

A hungry care’s an unco care:

But some will spend and some will spare,

An’ wilfu’ folk maun hae their will; 30

Syne as ye brew, my maiden fair,

Keep mind that ye maun drink the yill.”

“O gear will buy me rigs o’ land,

And gear will buy me sheep and kye;

But the tender heart o’ leesome love, 35

The gowd and siller canna buy;

We may be poor — Robie and I —

Light is the burden love lays on;

Content and love brings peace and joy —

What mair hae Queens upon a throne?” 40

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

378.

Bessy and her Spinnin Wheel (Song)

O LEEZE me on my spinnin’ wheel,

And leeze me on my rock and reel;

Frae tap to tae that cleeds me bien,

And haps me biel and warm at e’en;

I’ll set me down and sing and spin, 5

While laigh descends the simmer sun,

Blest wi’ content, and milk and meal,

O leeze me on my spinnin’ wheel.

On ilka hand the burnies trot,

And meet below my theekit cot; 10

The scented birk and hawthorn white,

Across the pool their arms unite,

Alike to screen the birdie’s nest,

And little fishes’ caller rest;

The sun blinks kindly in the beil’, 15

Where blythe I turn my spinnin’ wheel.

On lofty aiks the cushats wail,

And Echo cons the doolfu’ tale;

The lintwhites in the hazel braes,

Delighted, rival ither’s lays; 20

The craik amang the claver hay,

The pairtrick whirring o’er the ley,

The swallow jinkin’ round my shiel,

Amuse me at my spinnin’ wheel.

Wi’ sma’ to sell, and less to buy, 25

Aboon distress, below envy,

O wha wad leave this humble state,

For a’ the pride of a’ the great?

Amid their flairing, idle toys,

Amid their cumbrous, dinsome joys, 30

Can they the peace and pleasure feel

Of Bessy at her spinnin’ wheel?

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

379.

Love for love (Fragment of a Song)

ITHERS seek they ken na what,

Features, carriage, and a’ that;

Gie me love in her I court,

Love to love maks a’ the sport.

Let love sparkle in her e’e; 5

Let her lo’e nae man but me;

That’s the tocher-gude I prize,

There the luver’s treasure lies.

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

380.

Saw ye Bonie Lesley (Song)

O SAW ye bonie Lesley,

As she gaed o’er the Border?

She’s gane, like Alexander,

To spread her conquests farther.

To see her is to love her, 5

And love but her for ever;

For Nature made her what she is,

And never made anither!

Thou art a queen, fair Lesley,

Thy subjects, we before thee; 10

Thou art divine, fair Lesley,

The hearts o’ men adore thee.

The deil he could na scaith thee,

Or aught that wad belang thee;

He’d look into thy bonie face, 15

And say— “I canna wrang thee!”

The Powers aboon will tent thee,

Misfortune sha’na steer thee;

Thou’rt like themselves sae lovely,

That ill they’ll ne’er let near thee. 20

Return again, fair Lesley,

Return to Caledonie!

That we may brag we hae a lass

There’s nane again sae bonie.

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

381.

No cold approach (Fragment of a Song)

NO cold approach, no altered mien,

Just what would make suspicion start;

No pause the dire extremes between,

He made me blest — and broke my heart.

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

382.

I’ll meet thee on the Lea Rig (Song)

WHEN o’er the hill the eastern star

Tells bughtin time is near, my jo,

And owsen frae the furrow’d field

Return sae dowf and weary O;

Down by the burn, where birken buds 5

Wi’ dew are hangin clear, my jo,

I’ll meet thee on the lea-rig,

My ain kind Dearie O.

At midnight hour, in mirkest glen,

I’d rove, and ne’er be eerie, O, 10

If thro’ that glen I gaed to thee,

My ain kind Dearie O;

Altho’ the night were ne’er sae wild,

And I were ne’er sae weary O,

I’ll meet thee on the lea-rig, 15

My ain kind Dearie O.

The hunter lo’es the morning sun;

To rouse the mountain deer, my jo;

At noon the fisher seeks the glen

Adown the burn to steer, my jo: 20

Gie me the hour o’ gloamin’ grey,

It maks my heart sae cheery O,

To meet thee on the lea-rig,

My ain kind Dearie O.

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

383.

My Wife’s a winsome wee thing (Song)

Air— “My Wife’s a Wanton Wee Thing.”

Chorus. — She is a winsome wee thing,

She is a handsome wee thing,

She is a lo’esome wee thing,

This dear wee wife o’ mine.

I NEVER saw a fairer, 5

I never lo’ed a dearer,

And neist my heart I’ll wear her,

For fear my jewel tine,

She is a winsome, &c.

The warld’s wrack we share o’t; 10

The warstle and the care o’t;

Wi’ her I’ll blythely bear it,

And think my lot divine.

She is a winsome, &c.

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

384.

Highland Mary (Song)

Tune— “Katherine Ogie.”

YE banks, and braes, and streams around

The castle o’ Montgomery!

Green be your woods, and fair your flowers,

Your waters never drumlie:

There Simmer first unfauld her robes, 5

And there the langest tarry;

For there I took the last Farewell

O’ my sweet Highland Mary.

How sweetly bloom’d the gay, green birk,

How rich the hawthorn’s blossom, 10

As underneath their fragrant shade,

I clasp’d her to my bosom!

The golden Hours on angel wings,

Flew o’er me and my Dearie;

For dear to me, as light and life, 15

Was my sweet Highland Mary.

Wi’ mony a vow, and lock’d embrace,

Our parting was fu’ tender;

And, pledging aft to meet again,

We tore oursels asunder; 20

But oh! fell Death’s untimely frost,

That nipt my Flower sae early!

Now green’s the sod, and cauld’s the clay

That wraps my Highland Mary!

O pale, pale now, those rosy lips, 25

I aft hae kiss’d sae fondly!

And clos’d for aye, the sparkling glance

That dwalt on me sae kindly!

And mouldering now in silent dust,

That heart that lo’ed me dearly! 30

But still within my bosom’s core

Shall live my Highland Mary.

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

385.

Auld Rob Morris (Song)

THERE’S Auld Rob Morris that wons in yon glen,

He’s the King o’ gude fellows, and wale o’ auld men;

He has gowd in his coffers, he has owsen and kine,

And ae bonie lass, his dautie and mine.

She’s fresh as the morning, the fairest in May; 5

She’s sweet as the ev’ning amang the new hay;

As blythe and as artless as the lambs on the lea,

And dear to my heart as the light to my e’e.

But oh! she’s an Heiress, auld Robin’s a laird,

And my daddie has nought but a cot-house and yard; 10

A wooer like me maunna hope to come speed,

The wounds I must hide that will soon be my dead.

The day comes to me, but delight brings me nane;

The night comes to me, but my rest it is gane;

I wander my lane like a night-troubled ghaist, 15

And I sigh as my heart it wad burst in my breast.

O had she but been of a lower degree,

I then might hae hop’d she wad smil’d upon me!

O how past descriving had then been my bliss,

As now my distraction nae words can express. 20

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

386.

The Rights of Women — Spoken by Miss Fontenelle

An Occasional Address.

Spoken by Miss Fontenelle on her benefit night, November 26, 1792.

WHILE Europe’s eye is fix’d on mighty things,

The fate of Empires and the fall of Kings;

While quacks of State must each produce his plan,

And even children lisp the Rights of Man;

Amid this mighty fuss just let me mention, 5

The Rights of Woman merit some attention.

First, in the Sexes’ intermix’d connection,

One sacred Right of Woman is, protection. —

The tender flower that lifts its head, elate,

Helpless, must fall before the blasts of Fate, 10

Sunk on the earth, defac’d its lovely form,

Unless your shelter ward th’ impending storm.

Our second Right — but needless here is caution,

To keep that right inviolate’s the fashion;

Each man of sense has it so full before him, 15

He’d die before he’d wrong it—‘tis decorum. —

There was, indeed, in far less polish’d days,

A time, when rough rude man had naughty ways,

Would swagger, swear, get drunk, kick up a riot,

Nay even thus invade a Lady’s quiet. 20

Now, thank our stars! those Gothic times are fled;

Now, well-bred men — and you are all well-bred —

Most justly think (and we are much the gainers)

Such conduct neither spirit, wit, nor manners.

For Right the third, our last, our best, our dearest, 25

That right to fluttering female hearts the nearest;

Which even the Rights of Kings, in low prostration,

Most humbly own—‘tis dear, dear admiration!

In that blest sphere alone we live and move;

There taste that life of life — immortal love. 30

Smiles, glances, sighs, tears, fits, flirtations, airs;

‘Gainst such an host what flinty savage dares,

When awful Beauty joins with all her charms —

Who is so rash as rise in rebel arms?

But truce with kings, and truce with constitutions, 35

With bloody armaments and revolutions;

Let Majesty your first attention summon,

Ah! ca ira! THE MAJESTY OF WOMAN!

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

387.

Epigram on Miss Fontenelle

SWEET naivete of feature,

Simple, wild, enchanting elf,

Not to thee, but thanks to Nature,

Thou art acting but thyself.

Wert thou awkward, stiff, affected, 5

Spurning Nature, torturing art;

Loves and Graces all rejected,

Then indeed thou’d’st act a part.

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

388.

Extempore on some commemorations of Thomson

DOST thou not rise, indignant shade,

And smile wi’ spurning scorn,

When they wha wad hae starved thy life,

Thy senseless turf adorn?

Helpless, alane, thou clamb the brae, 5

Wi’ meikle honest toil,

And claught th’ unfading garland there —

Thy sair-worn, rightful spoil.

And wear it thou! and call aloud

This axiom undoubted — 10

Would thou hae Nobles’ patronage?

First learn to live without it!

To whom hae much, more shall be given,

Is every Great man’s faith;

But he, the helpless, needful wretch, 15

Shall lose the mite he hath.

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

389.

Duncan Gray (Song)

DUNCAN GRAY cam’ here to woo,

Ha, ha, the wooing o’t,

On blythe Yule-night when we were fou,

Ha, ha, the wooing o’t,

Maggie coost her head fu’ heigh, 5

Look’d asklent and unco skeigh,

Gart poor Duncan stand abeigh;

Ha, ha, the wooing o’t.

Duncan fleech’d and Duncan pray’d;

Ha, ha, the wooing o’t, 10

Meg was deaf as Ailsa Craig,

Ha, ha, the wooing o’t:

Duncan sigh’d baith out and in,

Grat his e’en baith blear’t an’ blin’,

Spak o’ lowpin o’er a linn; 15

Ha, ha, the wooing o’t.

Time and Chance are but a tide,

Ha, ha, the wooing o’t,

Slighted love is sair to bide,

Ha, ha, the wooing o’t: 20

Shall I like a fool, quoth he,

For a haughty hizzie die?

She may gae to — France for me!

Ha, ha, the wooing o’t.

How it comes let doctors tell, 25

Ha, ha, the wooing o’t;

Meg grew sick, as he grew hale,

Ha, ha, the wooing o’t.

Something in her bosom wrings,

For relief a sigh she brings: 30

And oh! her een they spak sic things!

Ha, ha, the wooing o’t.

Duncan was a lad o’ grace,

Ha, ha, the wooing o’t:

Maggie’s was a piteous case, 35

Ha, ha, the wooing o’t:

Duncan could na be her death,

Swelling Pity smoor’d his wrath;

Now they’re crouse and canty baith,

Ha, ha, the wooing o’t. 40

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

390.

A Health to them that’s awa (Song)

HERE’S a health to them that’s awa,

Here’s a health to them that’s awa;

And wha winna wish gude luck to our cause,

May never gude luck be their fa’!

It’s gude to be merry and wise, 5

It’s gude to be honest and true;

It’s gude to support Caledonia’s cause,

And bide by the buff and the blue.

Here’s a health to them that’s awa,

Here’s a health to them that’s awa, 10

Here’s a health to Charlie the chief o’ the clan,

Altho’ that his band be but sma’!

May Liberty meet wi’ success!

May Prudence protect her frae evil!

May tyrants and tyranny tine i’ the mist, 15

And wander their way to the devil!

Here’s a health to them that’s awa,

Here’s a health to them that’s awa;

Here’s a health to Tammie, the Norlan’ laddie,

That lives at the lug o’ the law! 20

Here’s freedom to them that wad read,

Here’s freedom to them that wad write,

There’s nane ever fear’d that the truth should be heard,

But they whom the truth would indite.

Here’s a Health to them that’s awa, 25

An’ here’s to them that’s awa!

Here’s to Maitland and Wycombe, let wha doesna like ‘em

Be built in a hole in the wa’;

Here’s timmer that’s red at the heart

Here’s fruit that is sound at the core; 30

And may he be that wad turn the buff and blue coat

Be turn’d to the back o’ the door.

Here’s a health to them that’s awa,

Here’s a health to them that’s awa;

Here’s chieftain M’Leod, a chieftain worth gowd, 35

Tho’ bred amang mountains o’ snaw;

Here’s friends on baith sides o’ the firth,

And friends on baith sides o’ the Tweed;

And wha wad betray old Albion’s right,

May they never eat of her bread! 40

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

391.

A Tippling Ballad — When Princes and Prelates, etc.

On the Duke of Brunswick’s Breaking up his Camp, and the defeat of the Austrians, by Dumourier, November 1792.

WHEN Princes and Prelates,

And hot-headed zealots,

A’ Europe had set in a low, a low,

The poor man lies down,

Nor envies a crown, 5

And comforts himself as he dow, as he dow,

And comforts himself as he dow.

The black-headed eagle,

As keen as a beagle,

He hunted o’er height and o’er howe, 10

In the braes o’ Gemappe,

He fell in a trap,

E’en let him come out as he dow, dow, dow,

E’en let him come out as he dow.

*

But truce with commotions, 15

And new-fangled notions,

A bumper, I trust you’ll allow;

Here’s George our good king,

And Charlotte his queen,

And lang may they ring as they dow, dow, dow, 20

And lang may they ring as they dow.

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

1793

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

392.

Poortith cauld and restless love (Song)

Tune— “Cauld Kail in Aberdeen.”

O POORTITH cauld, and restless love,

Ye wrack my peace between ye;

Yet poortith a’ I could forgive,

An ‘twere na for my Jeanie.

Chorus. — O why should Fate sic pleasure have, 5

Life’s dearest bands untwining?

Or why sae sweet a flower as love

Depend on Fortune’s shining?

The warld’s wealth, when I think on,

It’s pride and a’ the lave o’t; 10

O fie on silly coward man,

That he should be the slave o’t!

O why, &c.

Her e’en, sae bonie blue, betray

How she repays my passion; 15

But prudence is her o’erword aye,

She talks o’ rank and fashion.

O why, &c.

O wha can prudence think upon,

And sic a lassie by him? 20

O wha can prudence think upon,

And sae in love as I am?

O why, &c.

How blest the simple cotter’s fate!

He woos his artless dearie; 25

The silly bogles, wealth and state,

Can never make him eerie,

O why, &c.

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

393.

Epigram on Politics

IN Politics if thou would’st mix,

And mean thy fortunes be;

Bear this in mind, be deaf and blind,

Let great folk hear and see.

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

394.

Braw Lads o’ Gala Water (Song)

BRAW, braw lads on Yarrow-braes,

They rove amang the blooming heather;

But Yarrow braes, nor Ettrick shaws

Can match the lads o’ Galla Water.

But there is ane, a secret ane, 5

Aboon them a’ I loe him better;

And I’ll be his, and he’ll be mine,

The bonie lad o’ Galla Water.

Altho’ his daddie was nae laird,

And tho’ I hae nae meikle tocher, 10

Yet rich in kindest, truest love,

We’ll tent our flocks by Galla Water.

It ne’er was wealth, it ne’er was wealth,

That coft contentment, peace, or pleasure;

The bands and bliss o’ mutual love, 15

O that’s the chiefest warld’s treasure.

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

395.

Sonnet on the Author’s Birthday

On hearing a Thrush sing in his Morning Walk.

SING on, sweet thrush, upon the leafless bough,

Sing on, sweet bird, I listen to thy strain,

See aged Winter, ‘mid his surly reign,

At thy blythe carol, clears his furrowed brow.

So in lone Poverty’s dominion drear, 5

Sits meek Content with light, unanxious heart;

Welcomes the rapid moments, bids them part,

Nor asks if they bring ought to hope or fear.

I thank thee, Author of this opening day!

Thou whose bright sun now gilds yon orient skies! 10

Riches denied, thy boon was purer joys —

What wealth could never give nor take away!

Yet come, thou child of poverty and care,

The mite high heav’n bestow’d, that mite with thee I’ll share.

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

396.

Wandering Willie (Song)

First Version

HERE awa, there awa, wandering Willie,

Now tired with wandering, haud awa hame;

Come to my bosom, my ae only dearie,

And tell me thou bring’st me my Willie the same.

Loud blew the cauld winter winds at our parting; 5

It was na the blast brought the tear in my e’e:

Now welcome the Simmer, and welcome my Willie,

The Simmer to Nature, my Willie to me.

Ye hurricanes rest in the cave o’your slumbers,

O how your wild horrors a lover alarms! 10

Awaken ye breezes, row gently ye billows,

And waft my dear laddie ance mair to my arms.

But if he’s forgotten his faithfullest Nannie,

O still flow between us, thou wide roaring main;

May I never see it, may I never trow it, 15

But, dying, believe that my Willie’s my ain!

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

397.

Wandering Willie (Revised Version) (Song)

Revised Version

HERE awa, there awa, wandering Willie,

Here awa, there awa, haud awa hame;

Come to my bosom, my ain only dearie,

Tell me thou bring’st me my Willie the same.

Winter winds blew loud and cauld at our parting, 5

Fears for my Willie brought tears in my e’e,

Welcome nowhSimmer, and welcome, my Willie,

The Simmer to Nature, my Willie to me!

Rest, ye wild storms, in the cave of your slumbers,

How your dread howling a lover alarms! 10

Wauken, ye breezes, row gently, ye billows,

And waft my dear laddie ance mair to my arms.

But oh, if he’s faithless, and minds na his Nannie,

Flow still between us, thou wide roaring main!

May I never see it, may I never trow it, 15

But, dying, believe that my Willie’s my ain!

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

398.

Lord Gregory: A Ballad

O MIRK, mirk is this midnight hour,

And loud the tempest’s roar;

A waefu’ wanderer seeks thy tower,

Lord Gregory, ope thy door.

An exile frae her father’s ha’, 5

And a’ for loving thee;

At least some pity on me shaw,

If love it may na be.

Lord Gregory, mind’st thou not the grove

By bonie Irwine side, 10

Where first I own’d that virgin love

I lang, lang had denied.

How aften didst thou pledge and vow

Thou wad for aye be mine!

And my fond heart, itsel’ sae true, 15

It ne’er mistrusted thine.

Hard is thy heart, Lord Gregory,

And flinty is thy breast:

Thou bolt of Heaven that flashest by,

O, wilt thou bring me rest! 20

Ye mustering thunders from above,

Your willing victim see;

But spare and pardon my fause Love,

His wrangs to Heaven and me.

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

399.

Open the door to me, oh (Song)

OH, open the door, some pity to shew,

Oh, open the door to me, oh,

Tho’ thou hast been false, I’ll ever prove true,

Oh, open the door to me, oh.

Cauld is the blast upon my pale cheek, 5

But caulder thy love for me, oh:

The frost that freezes the life at my heart,

Is nought to my pains frae thee, oh.

The wan Moon is setting beyond the white wave,

And Time is setting with me, oh: 10

False friends, false love, farewell! for mair

I’ll ne’er trouble them, nor thee, oh.

She has open’d the door, she has open’d it wide,

She sees the pale corse on the plain, oh:

“My true love!” she cried, and sank down by his side, 15

Never to rise again, oh.

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

400.

Lovely young Jessie (Song)

TRUE hearted was he, the sad swain o’ the Yarrow,

And fair are the maids on the banks of the Ayr;

But by the sweet side o’ the Nith’s winding river,

Are lovers as faithful, and maidens as fair:

To equal young JESSIE seek Scotland all over; 5

To equal young JESSIE you seek it in vain,

Grace, beauty, and elegance, fetter her lover,

And maidenly modesty fixes the chain.

O, fresh is the rose in the gay, dewy morning,

And sweet is the lily, at evening close; 10

But in the fair presence o’ lovely young Jessie,

Unseen is the lily, unheeded the rose.

Love sits in her smile, a wizard ensnaring;

Enthron’d in her een he delivers his law:

And still to her charms SHE alone is a stranger; 15

Her modest demeanour’s the jewel of a’.

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

401.

Meg o’ the Mill (Song)

O KEN ye what Meg o’ the Mill has gotten,

An’ ken ye what Meg o’ the Mill has gotten?

She gotten a coof wi’ a claut o’ siller,

And broken the heart o’ the barley Miller.

The Miller was strappin, the Miller was ruddy; 5

A heart like a lord, and a hue like a lady;

The laird was a widdifu’, bleerit knurl;

She’s left the gude fellow, and taen the churl.

The Miller he hecht her a heart leal and loving,

The lair did address her wi’ matter mair moving, 10

A fine pacing-horse wi’ a clear chained bridle,

A whip by her side, and a bonie side-saddle.

O wae on the siller, it is sae prevailin’,

And wae on the love that is fixed on a mailen!

A tocher’s nae word in a true lover’s parle, 15

But gie me my love, and a fig for the warl’!

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

402.

Meg o’ the Mill (Another Version) (Song)

Another Version

O KEN ye what Meg o’ the Mill has gotten,

An’ ken ye what Meg o’ the Mill has gotten?

A braw new naig wi’ the tail o’ a rottan,

And that’s what Meg o’ the Mill has gotten.

O ken ye what Meg o’ the Mill lo’es dearly, 5

An’ ken ye what Meg o’ the Mill lo’es dearly?

A dram o’ gude strunt in the morning early,

And that’s what Meg o’ the Mill lo’es dearly.

O ken ye how Meg o’ the Mill was married,

An’ ken ye how Meg o’ the Mill was married? 10

The priest he was oxter’d, the clark he was carried,

And that’s how Meg o’ the Mill was married.

O ken ye how Meg o’ the Mill was bedded,

An’ ken ye how Meg o’ the Mill was bedded?

The groom gat sae fou’, he fell awald beside it, 15

And that’s how Meg o’ the Mill was bedded.

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

403.

The Soldier’s Return: A Ballad

Air— “The Mill, mill, O.”

WHEN wild war’s deadly blast was blawn,

And gentle peace returning,

Wi’ mony a sweet babe fatherless,

And mony a widow mourning;

I left the lines and tented field, 5

Where lang I’d been a lodger,

My humble knapsack a’ my wealth,

A poor and honest sodger.

A leal, light heart was in my breast,

My hand unstain’d wi’ plunder; 10

And for fair Scotia hame again,

I cheery on did wander:

I thought upon the banks o’ Coil,

I thought upon my Nancy,

I thought upon the witching smile 15

That caught my youthful fancy.

At length I reach’d the bonie glen,

Where early life I sported;

I pass’d the mill and trysting thorn,

Where Nancy aft I courted: 20

Wha spied I but my ain dear maid,

Down by her mother’s dwelling!

And turn’d me round to hide the flood

That in my een was swelling.

Wi’ alter’d voice, quoth I, “Sweet lass, 25

Sweet as yon hawthorn’s blossom,

O! happy, happy may he be,

That’s dearest to thy bosom:

My purse is light, I’ve far to gang,

And fain would be thy lodger; 30

I’ve serv’d my king and country lang —

Take pity on a sodger.”

Sae wistfully she gaz’d on me,

And lovelier was than ever;

Quo’ she, “A sodger ance I lo’ed, 35

Forget him shall I never:

Our humble cot, and hamely fare,

Ye freely shall partake it;

That gallant badge-the dear cockade,

Ye’re welcome for the sake o’t.” 40

She gaz’d — she redden’d like a rose —

Syne pale like only lily;

She sank within my arms, and cried,

“Art thou my ain dear Willie?”

“By him who made yon sun and sky! 45

By whom true love’s regarded,

I am the man; and thus may still

True lovers be rewarded.

“The wars are o’er, and I’m come hame,

And find thee still true-hearted; 50

Tho’ poor in gear, we’re rich in love,

And mair we’se ne’er be parted.”

Quo’ she, “My grandsire left me gowd,

A mailen plenish’d fairly;

And come, my faithfu’ sodger lad, 55

Thou’rt welcome to it dearly!”

For gold the merchant ploughs the main,

The farmer ploughs the manor;

But glory is the sodger’s prize,

The sodger’s wealth is honor: 60

The brave poor sodger ne’er despise,

Nor count him as a stranger;

Remember he’s his country’s stay,

In day and hour of danger.

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

404.

Epigram — The True Loyal Natives

Versicles, A.D. 1793

YE true “Loyal Natives” attend to my song

In uproar and riot rejoice the night long;

From Envy and Hatred your corps is exempt,

But where is your shield from the darts of Contempt!

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

405.

Epigram — Commissary Goldie’s Brains

LORD, to account who dares thee call,

Or e’er dispute thy pleasure?

Else why, within so thick a wall,

Enclose so poor a treasure?

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

406.

Lines Inscribed in a Lady’s Pocket Almanack

GRANT me, indulgent Heaven, that I may live,

To see the miscreants feel the pains they give;

Deal Freedom’s sacred treasures free as air,

Till Slave and Despot be but things that were.

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

407.

Epigram — Thanks for a National Victory

YE hypocrites! are these your pranks?

To murder men and give God thanks!

Desist, for shame! — proceed no further;

God won’t accept your thanks for MURTHER!

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

408.

Commemoration of Rodney’s Victory

INSTEAD of a Song, boy’s, I’ll give you a Toast;

Here’s to the memory of those on the twelfth that we lost! —

That we lost, did I say? — nay, by Heav’n, that we found;

For their fame it will last while the world goes round.

The next in succession I’ll give you’s THE KING! 5

Whoe’er would betray him, on high may he swing!

And here’s the grand fabric, our free CONSTITUTION,

As built on the base of our great Revolution!

And longer with Politics not to be cramm’d,

Be ANARCHY curs’d, and TYRANNY damn’d! 10

And who would to LIBERTY e’er prove disloyal,

May his son be a hangman — and he his first trial!

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

409.

Epigram — The Raptures of Folly

THOU greybeard, old Wisdom! may boast of thy treasures;

Give me with young Folly to live;

I grant thee thy calm-blooded, time-settled pleasures,

But Folly has raptures to give.

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

410.

Epigram — Kirk and State Excisemen

YE men of wit and wealth, why all this sneering

‘Gainst poor Excisemen? Give the cause a hearing:

What are your Landlord’s rent-rolls? — Taxing ledgers!

What Premiers? — What ev’n Monarchs? — Mighty Gaugers!

Nay, what are Priests? (those seeming godly wise-men,) 5

What are they, pray, but Spiritual Excisemen!

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

411.

Extempore Reply to an Invitation

THE KING’S most humble servant, I

Can scarcely spare a minute;

But I’ll be wi’ you by an’ by;

Or else the Deil’s be in it.

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

412.

A Grace after Meat

LORD, we thank, and thee adore,

For temporal gifts we little merit;

At present we will ask no more —

Let William Hislop give the spirit.

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

413.

Grace before and after Meat

O LORD, when hunger pinches sore,

Do thou stand us in stead,

And send us, from thy bounteous store,

A tup or wether head! Amen.

–- –-

O Lord, since we have feasted thus, 5

Which we so little merit,

Let Meg now take away the flesh,

And Jock bring in the spirit! Amen.

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

414.

Impromptu on Dumourier’s Desertion of the French Republican Army

YOU’RE welcome to Despots, Dumourier;

You’re welcome to Despots, Dumourier:

How does Dampiere do?

Ay, and Bournonville too?

Why did they not come along with you, Dumourier? 5

I will fight France with you, Dumourier;

I will fight France with you, Dumourier;

I will fight France with you,

I will take my chance with you;

By my soul, I’ll dance with you, Dumourier. 10

Then let us fight about, Dumourier;

Then let us fight about, Dumourier;

Then let us fight about,

Till Freedom’s spark be out,

Then we’ll be d — d, no doubt, Dumourier. 15

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

415.

The last time I cam o’er the Moor (Song)

THE LAST time I came o’er the moor,

And left Maria’s dwelling,

What throes, what tortures passing cure,

Were in my bosom swelling:

Condemn’d to see my rival’s reign, 5

While I in secret languish;

To feel a fire in every vein,

Yet dare not speak my anguish.

Love’s veriest wretch, despairing, I

Fain, fain, my crime would cover; 10

Th’ unweeting groan, the bursting sigh,

Betray the guilty lover.

I know my doom must be despair,

Thou wilt nor canst relieve me;

But oh, Maria, hear my prayer, 15

For Pity’s sake forgive me!

The music of thy tongue I heard,

Nor wist while it enslav’d me;

I saw thine eyes, yet nothing fear’d,

Till fear no more had sav’d me: 20

The unwary sailor thus, aghast,

The wheeling torrent viewing,

‘Mid circling horrors yields at last

To overwhelming ruin.

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

416.

Logan Braes (Song)

Tune— “Logan Water.”

O LOGAN, sweetly didst thou glide,

That day I was my Willie’s bride,

And years sin syne hae o’er us run,

Like Logan to the simmer sun:

But now thy flowery banks appear 5

Like drumlie Winter, dark and drear,

While my dear lad maun face his faes,

Far, far frae me and Logan braes.

Again the merry month of May

Has made our hills and valleys gay; 10

The birds rejoice in leafy bowers,

The bees hum round the breathing flowers;

Blythe Morning lifts his rosy eye,

And Evening’s tears are tears o’ joy:

My soul, delightless a’ surveys, 15

While Willie’s far frae Logan braes.

Within yon milk-white hawthorn bush,

Amang her nestlings sits the thrush:

Her faithfu’ mate will share her toil,

Or wi’ his song her cares beguile; 20

But I wi’ my sweet nurslings here,

Nae mate to help, nae mate to cheer,

Pass widow’d nights and joyless days,

While Willie’s far frae Logan braes.

O wae be to you, Men o’ State, 25

That brethren rouse to deadly hate!

As ye make mony a fond heart mourn,

Sae may it on your heads return!

How can your flinty hearts enjoy

The widow’s tear, the orphan’s cry? 30

But soon may peace bring happy days,

And Willie hame to Logan braes!

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

417.

Blythe hae I been on yon hill (Song)

Tune— “The Quaker’s Wife.”

BLYTHE hae I been on yon hill,

As the lambs before me;

Careless ilka thought and free,

As the breeze flew o’er me;

Now nae langer sport and play, 5

Mirth or sang can please me;

LESLEY is sae fair and coy,

Care and anguish seize me.

Heavy, heavy is the task,

Hopeless love declaring; 10

Trembling, I dow nocht but glow’r,

Sighing, dumb despairing!

If she winna ease the thraws

In my bosom swelling,

Underneath the grass-green sod, 15

Soon maun be my dwelling.

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

418.

O were my love you lilac fair (Song)

Air— “Hughie Graham.”

O WERE my love yon Lilac fair,

Wi’ purple blossoms to the Spring,

And I, a bird to shelter there,

When wearied on my little wing!

How I wad mourn when it was torn 5

By Autumn wild, and Winter rude!

But I wad sing on wanton wing,

When youthfu’ May its bloom renew’d.

O gin my love were yon red rose,

That grows upon the castle wa’; 10

And I myself a drap o’ dew,

Into her bonie breast to fa’!

O there, beyond expression blest,

I’d feast on beauty a’ the night;

Seal’d on her silk-saft faulds to rest, 15

Till fley’d awa by Phoebus’ light!

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

419.

Bonie Jean: A Ballad

To its ain tune.

THERE was a lass, and she was fair,

At kirk or market to be seen;

When a’ our fairest maids were met,

The fairest maid was bonie Jean.

And aye she wrought her mammie’s wark, 5

And aye she sang sae merrilie;

The blythest bird upon the bush

Had ne’er a lighter heart than she.

But hawks will rob the tender joys

That bless the little lintwhite’s nest; 10

And frost will blight the fairest flowers,

And love will break the soundest rest.

Young Robie was the brawest lad,

The flower and pride of a’ the glen;

And he had owsen, sheep, and kye, 15

And wanton naigies nine or ten.

He gaed wi’ Jeanie to the tryste,

He danc’d wi’ Jeanie on the down;

And, lang ere witless Jeanie wist,

Her heart was tint, her peace was stown! 20

As in the bosom of the stream,

The moon-beam dwells at dewy e’en;

So trembling, pure, was tender love

Within the breast of bonie Jean.

And now she works her mammie’s wark, 25

And aye she sighs wi’ care and pain;

Yet wist na what her ail might be,

Or what wad make her weel again.

But did na Jeanie’s heart loup light,

And didna joy blink in her e’e, 30

As Robie tauld a tale o’ love

Ae e’ening on the lily lea?

The sun was sinking in the west,

The birds sang sweet in ilka grove;

His cheek to hers he fondly laid, 35

And whisper’d thus his tale o’ love:

“O Jeanie fair, I lo’e thee dear;

O canst thou think to fancy me,

Or wilt thou leave thy mammie’s cot,

And learn to tent the farms wi’ me? 40

“At barn or byre thou shalt na drudge,

Or naething else to trouble thee;

But stray amang the heather-bells,

And tent the waving corn wi’ me.”

Now what could artless Jeanie do? 45

She had nae will to say him na:

At length she blush’d a sweet consent,

And love was aye between them twa.

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

420.

Lines of John M’Murdo, Esq.

BLEST be M’Murdo to his latest day!

No envious cloud o’ercast his evening ray;

No wrinkle, furrow’d by the hand of care,

Nor ever sorrow add one silver hair!

O may no son the father’s honour stain, 5

Nor ever daughter give the mother pain!

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

421.

Epitaph on a Lap-dog

Named Echo

IN wood and wild, ye warbling throng,

Your heavy loss deplore;

Now, half extinct your powers of song,

Sweet Echo is no more.

Ye jarring, screeching things around, 5

Scream your discordant joys;

Now, half your din of tuneless sound

With Echo silent lies.

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

422.

Epigrams against the Earl of Galloway

WHAT dost thou in that mansion fair?

Flit, Galloway, and find

Some narrow, dirty, dungeon cave,

The picture of thy mind.

–- —

No Stewart art thou, Galloway, 5

The Stewarts ‘ll were brave;

Besides, the Stewarts were but fools,

Not one of them a knave.

Bright ran thy line, O Galloway,

Thro’ many a far-fam’d sire! 10

So ran the far-famed Roman way,

And ended in a mire.

–- —

Spare me thy vengeance, Galloway!

In quiet let me live:

I ask no kindness at thy hand, 15

For thou hast none to give.

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

423.

Epigram on the Laird of Laggan

WHEN Morine, deceas’d, to the Devil went down,

‘Twas nothing would serve him but Satan’s own crown;

“Thy fool’s head,” quoth Satan, “that crown shall wear never,

I grant thou’rt as wicked, but not quite so clever.”

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

424.

Phillis the Fair (Song)

Tune— “Robin Adair.”

WHILE larks, with little wing,

Fann’d the pure air,

Tasting the breathing Spring,

Forth I did fare:

Gay the sun’s golden eye 5

Peep’d o’er the mountains high;

Such thy morn! did I cry,

Phillis the fair.

In each bird’s careless song,

Glad I did share; 10

While yon wild-flowers among,

Chance led me there!

Sweet to the op’ning day,

Rosebuds bent the dewy spray;

Such thy bloom! did I say, 15

Phillis the fair.

Down in a shady walk,

Doves cooing were;

I mark’d the cruel hawk

Caught in a snare: 20

So kind may fortune be,

Such make his destiny,

He who would injure thee,

Phillis the fair.

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

425.

Had I a cave (Song)

Tune— “Robin Adair.”

HAD I a cave on some wild distant shore,

Where the winds howl to the wave’s dashing roar:

There would I weep my woes,

There seek my lost repose,

Till grief my eyes should close, 5

Ne’er to wake more!

Falsest of womankind, can’st thou declare

All thy fond, plighted vows fleeting as air!

To thy new lover hie,

Laugh o’er thy perjury; 10

Then in thy bosom try

What peace is there!

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

426.

By Allan Stream (Song)

BY Allan stream I chanc’d to rove,

While Phoebus sank beyond Benledi;

The winds are whispering thro’ the grove,

The yellow corn was waving ready:

I listen’d to a lover’s sang, 5

An’ thought on youthfu’ pleasures mony;

And aye the wild-wood echoes rang —

“O, dearly do I love thee, Annie!

“O, happy be the woodbine bower,

Nae nightly bogle make it eerie; 10

Nor ever sorrow stain the hour,

The place and time I met my Dearie!

Her head upon my throbbing breast,

She, sinking, said, ‘I’m thine for ever!’

While mony a kiss the seal imprest — 15

The sacred vow we ne’er should sever.”

The haunt o’ Spring’s the primrose-brae,

The Summer joys the flocks to follow;

How cheery thro’ her short’ning day,

Is Autumn in her weeds o’ yellow; 20

But can they melt the glowing heart,

Or chain the soul in speechless pleasure?

Or thro’ each nerve the rapture dart,

Like meeting her, our bosom’s treasure?

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

427.

Whistle and I’ll come to you (Song)

Chorus. — O WHISTLE, an’ I’ll come to ye, my lad,

O whistle, an’ I’ll come to ye, my lad,

Tho’ father an’ mother an’ a’ should gae mad,

O whistle, an’ I’ll come to ye, my lad.

But warily tent when ye come to court me, 5

And come nae unless the back-yett be a-jee;

Syne up the back-stile, and let naebody see,

And come as ye were na comin’ to me,

And come as ye were na comin’ to me.

O whistle an’ I’ll come, &c. 10

At kirk, or at market, whene’er ye meet me,

Gang by me as tho’ that ye car’d na a flie;

But steal me a blink o’ your bonie black e’e,

Yet look as ye were na lookin’ to me,

Yet look as ye were na lookin’ to me. 15

O whistle an’ I’ll come, &c.

Aye vow and protest that ye care na for me,

And whiles ye may lightly my beauty a-wee;

But court na anither, tho’ jokin’ ye be,

For fear that she wile your fancy frae me, 20

For fear that she wile your fancy frae me.

O whistle an’ I’ll come, &c.

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

428.

Phillis the Queen o’ the fair (Song)

Tune— “The Muckin o’ Geordie’s Byre.”

ADOWN winding Nith I did wander,

To mark the sweet flowers as they spring;

Adown winding Nith I did wander,

Of Phillis to muse and to sing.

Chorus. — Awa’ wi’ your belles and your beauties, 5

They never wi’ her can compare,

Whaever has met wi’ my Phillis,

Has met wi’ the queen o’ the fair.

The daisy amus’d my fond fancy,

So artless, so simple, so wild; 10

Thou emblem, said I, o’ my Phillis —

For she is Simplicity’s child.

Awa’ wi’ your belles, &c.

The rose-bud’s the blush o’ my charmer,

Her sweet balmy lip when ‘tis prest: 15

How fair and how pure is the lily!

But fairer and purer her breast.

Awa’ wi’ your belles, &c.

Yon knot of gay flowers in the arbour,

They ne’er wi’ my Phillis can vie: 20

Her breath is the breath of the woodbine,

Its dew-drop o’ diamond her eye.

Awa’ wi’ your belles, &c.

Her voice is the song o’ the morning,

That wakes thro’ the green-spreading grove 25

When Phoebus peeps over the mountains,

On music, and pleasure, and love.

Awa’ wi’ your belles, &c.

But beauty, how frail and how fleeting!

The bloom of a fine summer’s day; 30

While worth in the mind o’ my Phillis,

Will flourish without a decay.

Awa’ wi’ your belles, &c.

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

429.

Come let me take thee to my breast (Song)

COME, let me take thee to my breast,

And pledge we ne’er shall sunder;

And I shall spurn as vilest dust

The world’s wealth and grandeur:

And do I hear my Jeanie own 5

That equal transports move her?

I ask for dearest life alone,

That I may live to love her.

Thus, in my arms, wi’ a’ her charms,

I clasp my countless treasure; 10

I’ll seek nae main o’ Heav’n to share,

Tha sic a moment’s pleasure:

And by thy e’en sae bonie blue,

I swear I’m thine for ever!

And on thy lips I seal my vow, 15

And break it shall I never.

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

430.

Dainty Davie (Song)

NOW rosy May comes in wi’ flowers,

To deck her gay, green-spreading bowers;

And now comes in the happy hours,

To wander wi’ my Davie.

Chorus. — Meet me on the warlock knowe, 5

Dainty Davie, Dainty Davie;

There I’ll spend the day wi’ you,

My ain dear Dainty Davie.

The crystal waters round us fa’,

The merry birds are lovers a’, 10

The scented breezes round us blaw,

A wandering wi’ my Davie.

Meet me on, &c.

As purple morning starts the hare,

To steal upon her early fare, 15

Then thro’ the dews I will repair,

To meet my faithfu’ Davie.

Meet me on, &c.

When day, expiring in the west,

The curtain draws o’ Nature’s rest, 20

I flee to his arms I loe’ the best,

And that’s my ain dear Davie.

Meet me on, &c.

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

431.

Robert Bruce’s March to Bannockburn (Song)

SCOTS, wha hae wi’ WALLACE bled,

Scots, wham BRUCE has aften led,

Welcome to your gory bed,

Or to Victorie!

Now’s the day, and now’s the hour; 5

See the front o’ battle lour;

See approach proud EDWARD’S power —

Chains and Slaverie!

Wha will be a traitor knave?

Wha can fill a coward’s grave? 10

Wha sae base as be a Slave?

Let him turn and flee!

Wha, for Scotland’s King and Law,

Freedom’s sword will strongly draw,

FREE-MAN stand, or FREE-MAN fa’, 15

Let him on wi’ me!

By Oppression’s woes and pains!

By your Sons in servile chains!

We will drain our dearest veins,

But they shall be free! 20

Lay the proud Usurpers low!

Tyrants fall in every foe!

LIBERTY’S in every blow! —

Let us Do or Die!

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

432.

Behold the hour, etc. (Second Version) (Song)

BEHOLD the hour, the boat arrive;

Thou goest, the darling of my heart;

Sever’d from thee, can I survive,

But Fate has will’d and we must part.

I’ll often greet the surging swell, 5

Yon distant Isle will often hail:

“E’en here I took the last farewell;

There, latest mark’d her vanish’d sail.”

Along the solitary shore,

While flitting sea-fowl round me cry, 10

Across the rolling, dashing roar,

I’ll westward turn my wistful eye:

“Happy thou Indian grove,” I’ll say,

“Where now my Nancy’s path may be!

While thro’ thy sweets she loves to stray, 15

O tell me, does she muse on me!”

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

433.

Down the Burn, Davie love (Song)

AS down the burn they took their way,

And thro’ the flowery dale;

His cheek to hers he aft did lay,

And love was aye the tale:

With “Mary, when shall we return, 5

Sic pleasure to renew?”

Quoth Mary— “Love, I like the burn,

And aye shall follow you.”

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

434.

Thou hast left me ever, jamie (Song)

Tune— “Fee him, father, fee him.”

THOU hast left me ever, Jamie,

Thou hast left me ever;

Thou has left me ever, Jamie,

Thou hast left me ever:

Aften hast thou vow’d that Death 5

Only should us sever;

Now thou’st left thy lass for aye —

I maun see thee never, Jamie,

I’ll see thee never.

Thou hast me forsaken, Jamie, 10

Thou hast me forsaken;

Thou hast me forsaken, Jamie,

Thou hast me forsaken;

Thou canst love another jo,

While my heart is breaking; 15

Soon my weary een I’ll close,

Never mair to waken, Jamie,

Never mair to waken!

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

435.

Where are the Joys I have met (Song)

Tune— “Saw ye my father.”

WHERE are the joys I have met in the morning,

That danc’d to the lark’s early song?

Where is the peace that awaited my wand’ring,

At evening the wild-woods among?

No more a winding the course of yon river, 5

And marking sweet flowerets so fair,

No more I trace the light footsteps of Pleasure,

But Sorrow and sad-sighing Care.

Is it that Summer’s forsaken our valleys,

And grim, surly Winter is near? 10

No, no, the bees humming round the gay roses

Proclaim it the pride of the year.

Fain would I hide what I fear to discover,

Yet long, long, too well have I known;

All that has caused this wreck in my bosom, 15

Is Jenny, fair Jenny alone.

Time cannot aid me, my griefs are immortal,

Nor Hope dare a comfort bestow:

Come then, enamour’d and fond of my anguish,

Enjoyment I’ll seek in my woe. 20

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

436.

Deluded swain, the pleasure (Song)

Tune— “The Collier’s Dochter.”

DELUDED swain, the pleasure

The fickle Fair can give thee,

Is but a fairy treasure,

Thy hopes will soon deceive thee:

The billows on the ocean, 5

The breezes idly roaming,

The cloud’s uncertain motion,

They are but types of Woman.

O art thou not asham’d

To doat upon a feature? 10

If Man thou wouldst be nam’d,

Despise the silly creature.

Go, find an honest fellow,

Good claret set before thee,

Hold on till thou art mellow, 15

And then to bed in glory!

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

437.

Thine am I, my faithful Fair (Song)

Tune— “The Quaker’s Wife.”

THINE am I, my faithful Fair,

Thine, my lovely Nancy;

Ev’ry pulse along my veins,

Ev’ry roving fancy.

To thy bosom lay my heart, 5

There to throb and languish;

Tho’ despair had wrung its core,

That would heal its anguish.

Take away those rosy lips,

Rich with balmy treasure; 10

Turn away thine eyes of love,

Lest I die with pleasure!

What is life when wanting Love?

Night without a morning:

Love’s the cloudless summer sun, 15

Nature gay adorning.

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

438.

Impromptu on Mrs. Riddell’s Birthday

4th November 1793.

OLD Winter, with his frosty beard,

Thus once to Jove his prayer preferred:

“What have I done of all the year,

To bear this hated doom severe?

My cheerless suns no pleasure know; 5

Night’s horrid car drags, dreary slow;

My dismal months no joys are crowning,

But spleeny English hanging, drowning.

“Now Jove, for once be mighty civil.

To counterbalance all this evil; 10

Give me, and I’ve no more to say,

Give me Maria’s natal day!

That brilliant gift shall so enrich me,

Spring, Summer, Autumn, cannot match me.”

“‘Tis done!” says Jove; so ends my story, 15

And Winter once rejoiced in glory.

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

439.

My Spouse Nancy (Song)

Tune— “My Jo Janet.”

“HUSBAND, husband, cease your strife,

Nor longer idly rave, Sir;

Tho’ I am your wedded wife

Yet I am not your slave, Sir.”

“One of two must still obey, 5

Nancy, Nancy;

Is it Man or Woman, say,

My spouse Nancy?’

“If ‘tis still the lordly word,

Service and obedience; 10

I’ll desert my sov’reign lord,

And so, good bye, allegiance!”

“Sad shall I be, so bereft,

Nancy, Nancy;

Yet I’ll try to make a shift, 15

My spouse Nancy.”

“My poor heart, then break it must,

My last hour I am near it:

When you lay me in the dust,

Think how you will bear it.” 20

“I will hope and trust in Heaven,

Nancy, Nancy;

Strength to bear it will be given,

My spouse Nancy.”

“Well, Sir, from the silent dead, 25

Still I’ll try to daunt you;

Ever round your midnight bed

Horrid sprites shall haunt you!”

“I’ll wed another like my dear

Nancy, Nancy; 30

Then all hell will fly for fear,

My spouse Nancy.”

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

440.

Address spoken by Miss Fontenelle

Spoken by Miss Fontenelle on her Benefit Night, December 4th, 1793, at the Theatre, Dumfries.

STILL anxious to secure your partial favour,

And not less anxious, sure, this night, than ever,

A Prologue, Epilogue, or some such matter,

‘Twould vamp my bill, said I, if nothing better;

So sought a poet, roosted near the skies, 5

Told him I came to feast my curious eyes;

Said, nothing like his works was ever printed;

And last, my prologue-business slily hinted.

“Ma’am, let me tell you,” quoth my man of rhymes,

“I know your bent — these are no laughing times: 10

Can you — but, Miss, I own I have my fears —

Dissolve in pause, and sentimental tears;

With laden sighs, and solemn-rounded sentence,

Rouse from his sluggish slumbers, fell Repentance;

Paint Vengeance as he takes his horrid stand, 15

Waving on high the desolating brand,

Calling the storms to bear him o’er a guilty land?”

I could no more — askance the creature eyeing,

“D’ye think,” said I, “this face was made for crying?

I’ll laugh, that’s poz — nay more, the world shall know it; 20

And so, your servant! gloomy Master Poet!”

Firm as my creed, Sirs, ‘tis my fix’d belief,

That Misery’s another word for Grief:

I also think — so may I be a bride!

That so much laughter, so much life enjoy’d. 25

Thou man of crazy care and ceaseless sigh,

Still under bleak Misfortune’s blasting eye;

Doom’d to that sorest task of man alive —

To make three guineas do the work of five:

Laugh in Misfortune’s face — the beldam witch! 30

Say, you’ll be merry, tho’ you can’t be rich.

Thou other man of care, the wretch in love,

Who long with jiltish airs and arts hast strove;

Who, as the boughs all temptingly project,

Measur’st in desperate thought — a rope — thy neck — 35

Or, where the beetling cliff o’erhangs the deep,

Peerest to meditate the healing leap:

Would’st thou be cur’d, thou silly, moping elf?

Laugh at her follies — laugh e’en at thyself:

Learn to despise those frowns now so terrific, 40

And love a kinder — that’s your grand specific.

To sum up all, be merry, I advise;

And as we’re merry, may we still be wise.

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

441.

Complimentary Epigram to Mrs. Riddell

“PRAISE Woman still,” his lordship roars,

“Deserv’d or not, no matter?”

But thee, whom all my soul adores,

Ev’n Flattery cannot flatter:

Maria, all my thought and dream, 5

Inspires my vocal shell;

The more I praise my lovely theme,

The more the truth I tell.

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

1794

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

442.

Remorseful Apology

THE FRIEND whom, wild from Wisdom’s way,

The fumes of wine infuriate send,

(Not moony madness more astray)

Who but deplores that hapless friend?

Mine was th’ insensate frenzied part, 5

Ah! why should I such scenes outlive?

Scenes so abhorrent to my heart! —

‘Tis thine to pity and forgive.

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

443.

Wilt thou be my Dearie (Song)

Tune— “The Sutor’s Dochter.”

WILT thou be my Dearie?

When Sorrow wring thy gentle heart,

O wilt thou let me cheer thee!

By the treasure of my soul,

That’s the love I bear thee: 5

I swear and vow that only thou

Shall ever be my Dearie!

Only thou, I swear and vow,

Shall ever be my Dearie!

Lassie, say thou lo’es me; 10

Or, if thou wilt na be my ain,

O say na thou’lt refuse me!

If it winna, canna be,

Thou for thine may choose me,

Let me, lassie, quickly die, 15

Still trusting that thou lo’es me!

Lassie, let me quickly die,

Still trusting that thou lo’es me!

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

444.

A Fiddler in the North (Song)

Tune— “The King o’ France he rade a race.”

AMANG the trees, where humming bees,

At buds and flowers were hinging, O,

Auld Caledon drew out her drone,

And to her pipe was singing, O:

‘Twas Pibroch, Sang, Strathspeys, and Reels, 5

She dirl’d them aff fu’ clearly, O:

When there cam’ a yell o’ foreign squeels,

That dang her tapsalteerie, O.

Their capon craws an’ queer “ha, ha’s,”

They made our lugs grow eerie, O; 10

The hungry bike did scrape and fyke,

Till we were wae and weary, O:

But a royal ghaist, wha ance was cas’d,

A prisoner, aughteen year awa’,

He fir’d a Fiddler in the North, 15

That dang them tapsalteerie, O.

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

445.

The Minstel at Lincluden

Tune— “Cumnock Psalms.”

AS I stood by yon roofless tower,

Where the wa’flow’r scents the dery air,

Where the howlet mourns in her ivy bower,

And tells the midnight moon her care.

Chorus. — A lassie all alone, was making her moan, 5

Lamenting our lads beyond the sea:

In the bluidy wars they fa’, and our honour’s gane an’ a’,

And broken-hearted we maun die.

The winds were laid, the air was till,

The stars they shot along the sky; 10

The tod was howling on the hill,

And the distant-echoing glens reply.

A lassie all alone, &c.

The burn, adown its hazelly path,

Was rushing by the ruin’d wa’, 15

Hasting to join the sweeping Nith,

Whase roarings seem’d to rise and fa’.

A lassie all alone, &c.

The cauld blae North was streaming forth

Her lights, wi’ hissing, eerie din, 20

Athort the lift they start and shift,

Like Fortune’s favours, tint as win.

A lassie all alone, &c.

Now, looking over firth and fauld,

Her horn the pale-faced Cynthia rear’d, 25

When lo! in form of Minstrel auld,

A stern and stalwart ghaist appear’d.

A lassie all alone, &c.

And frae his harp sic strains did flow,

Might rous’d the slumbering Dead to hear; 30

But oh, it was a tale of woe,

As ever met a Briton’s ear!

A lassie all alone, &c.

He sang wi’ joy his former day,

He, weeping, wail’d his latter times; 35

But what he said-it was nae play,

I winna venture’t in my rhymes.

A lassie all alone, &c.

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

446.

A Vision

AS I stood by yon roofless tower,

Where the wa’flower scents the dewy air,

Where the howlet mourns in her ivy bower,

And tells the midnight moon her care.

The winds were laid, the air was still, 5

The stars they shot alang the sky;

The fox was howling on the hill,

And the distant echoing glens reply.

The stream, adown its hazelly path,

Was rushing by the ruin’d wa’s, 10

Hasting to join the sweeping Nith,

Whase distant roaring swells and fa’s.

The cauld blae North was streaming forth

Her lights, wi’ hissing, eerie din;

Athwart the lift they start and shift, 15

Like Fortune’s favors, tint as win.

By heedless chance I turn’d mine eyes,

And, by the moonbeam, shook to see

A stern and stalwart ghaist arise,

Attir’d as Minstrels wont to be. 20

Had I a statue been o’ stane,

His daring look had daunted me;

And on his bonnet grav’d was plain,

The sacred posy— “LIBERTIE!”

And frae his harp sic strains did flow, 25

Might rous’d the slumb’ring Dead to hear;

But oh, it was a tale of woe,

As ever met a Briton’s ear!

He sang wi’ joy his former day,

He, weeping, wailed his latter times; 30

But what he said — it was nae play,

I winna venture’t in my rhymes.

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

447.

A red, red Rose (Song)

O MY Luve’s like a red, red rose,

That’s newly sprung in June:

O my Luve’s like the melodie,

That’s sweetly play’d in tune.

As fair art thou, my bonie lass, 5

So deep in luve am I;

And I will luve thee still, my dear,

Till a’ the seas gang dry.

Till a’ the seas gang dry, my dear,

And the rocks melt wi’ the sun; 10

And I will luve thee still, my dear,

While the sands o’ life shall run.

And fare-thee-weel, my only Luve!

And fare-thee-weel, a while!

And I will come again, my Luve, 15

Tho’ ‘twere ten thousand mile!

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

448.

Young Jamie, pride of a’ the plain (Song)

Tune— “The Carlin of the Glen.”

YOUNG JAMIE, pride of a’ the plain,

Sae gallant and sae gay a swain,

Thro’ a’ our lasses he did rove,

And reign’d resistless King of Love.

But now, wi’ sighs and starting tears, 5

He strays amang the woods and breirs;

Or in the glens and rocky caves,

His sad complaining dowie raves: —

“I wha sae late did range and rove,

And chang’d with every moon my love, 10

I little thought the time was near,

Repentance I should buy sae dear.

“The slighted maids my torments see,

And laugh at a’ the pangs I dree;

While she, my cruel, scornful Fair, 15

Forbids me e’er to see her mair.”

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

449.

The Flowery banks of Cree (Song)

HERE is the glen, and here the bower

All underneath the birchen shade;

The village-bell has told the hour,

O what can stay my lovely maid?

‘Tis not Maria’s whispering call; 5

‘Tis but the balmy breathing gale,

Mixt with some warbler’s dying fall,

The dewy star of eve to hail.

It is Maria’s voice I hear;

So calls the woodlark in the grove, 10

His little, faithful mate to cheer;

At once ‘tis music and ‘tis love.

And art thou come! and art thou true!

O welcome dear to love and me!

And let us all our vows renew, 15

Along the flowery banks of Cree.

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

450.

Monody on a Lady, famed for her Caprice

On a lady famed for her Caprice.

HOW cold is that bosom which folly once fired,

How pale is that cheek where the rouge lately glisten’d;

How silent that tongue which the echoes oft tired,

How dull is that ear which to flatt’ry so listen’d!

If sorrow and anguish their exit await, 5

From friendship and dearest affection remov’d;

How doubly severer, Maria, thy fate,

Thou diedst unwept, as thou livedst unlov’d.

Loves, Graces, and Virtues, I call not on you;

So shy, grave, and distant, ye shed not a tear: 10

But come, all ye offspring of Folly so true,

And flowers let us cull for Maria’s cold bier.

We’ll search through the garden for each silly flower,

We’ll roam thro’ the forest for each idle weed;

But chiefly the nettle, so typical, shower, 15

For none e’er approach’d her but rued the rash deed.

We’ll sculpture the marble, we’ll measure the lay;

Here Vanity strums on her idiot lyre;

There keen Indignation shall dart on his prey,

Which spurning Contempt shall redeem from his ire. 20

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

451.

Epitaph on the same

HERE lies, now a prey to insulting neglect,

What once was a butterfly, gay in life’s beam:

Want only of wisdom denied her respect,

Want only of goodness denied her esteem.

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

452.

Epigram pinned to Mrs. Riddell’s carriage

IF you rattle along like your Mistress’ tongue,

Your speed will outrival the dart;

But a fly for your load, you’ll break down on the road,

If your stuff be as rotten’s her heart.

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

453.

Epitaph for Mr. Walter Riddell

SIC a reptile was Wat, sic a miscreant slave,

That the worms ev’n d — d him when laid in his grave;

“In his flesh there’s a famine,” a starved reptile cries,

“And his heart is rank poison!” another replies.

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

454.

Epistle from Esopus to Maria

FROM those drear solitudes and frowsy cells,

Where Infamy with sad Repentance dwells;

Where turnkeys make the jealous portal fast,

And deal from iron hands the spare repast;

Where truant ‘prentices, yet young in sin, 5

Blush at the curious stranger peeping in;

Where strumpets, relics of the drunken roar,

Resolve to drink, nay, half, to whore, no more;

Where tiny thieves not destin’d yet to swing,

Beat hemp for others, riper for the string: 10

From these dire scenes my wretched lines I date,

To tell Maria her Esopus’ fate.

“Alas! I feel I am no actor here!”

‘Tis real hangmen real scourges bear!

Prepare Maria, for a horrid tale 15

Will turn thy very rouge to deadly pale;

Will make thy hair, tho’ erst from gipsy poll’d,

By barber woven, and by barber sold,

Though twisted smooth with Harry’s nicest care,

Like hoary bristles to erect and stare. 20

The hero of the mimic scene, no more

I start in Hamlet, in Othello roar;

Or, haughty Chieftain, ‘mid the din of arms

In Highland Bonnet, woo Malvina’s charms;

While sans-culottes stoop up the mountain high, 25

And steal from me Maria’s prying eye.

Blest Highland bonnet! once my proudest dress,

Now prouder still, Maria’s temples press;

I see her wave thy towering plumes afar,

And call each coxcomb to the wordy war: 30

I see her face the first of Ireland’s sons,

And even out-Irish his Hibernian bronze;

The crafty Colonel leaves the tartan’d lines,

For other wars, where he a hero shines:

The hopeful youth, in Scottish senate bred, 35

Who owns a Bushby’s heart without the head,

Comes ‘mid a string of coxcombs, to display

That veni, vidi, vici, is his way:

The shrinking Bard adown the alley skulks,

And dreads a meeting worse than Woolwich hulks: 40

Though there, his heresies in Church and State

Might well award him Muir and Palmer’s fate:

Still she undaunted reels and rattles on,

And dares the public like a noontide sun.

What scandal called Maria’s jaunty stagger 45

The ricket reeling of a crooked swagger?

Whose spleen (e’en worse than Burns’ venom, when

He dips in gall unmix’d his eager pen,

And pours his vengeance in the burning line,) —

Who christen’d thus Maria’s lyre-divine 50

The idiot strum of Vanity bemus’d,

And even the abuse of Poesy abus’d? —

Who called her verse a Parish Workhouse, made

For motley foundling Fancies, stolen or strayed?

A Workhouse! ah, that sound awakes my woes, 55

And pillows on the thorn my rack’d repose!

In durance vile here must I wake and weep,

And all my frowsy couch in sorrow steep;

That straw where many a rogue has lain of yore,

And vermin’d gipsies litter’d heretofore. 60

Why, Lonsdale, thus thy wrath on vagrants pour?

Must earth no rascal save thyself endure?

Must thou alone in guilt immortal swell,

And make a vast monopoly of hell?

Thou know’st the Virtues cannot hate thee worse; 65

The Vices also, must they club their curse?

Or must no tiny sin to others fall,

Because thy guilt’s supreme enough for all?

Maria, send me too thy griefs and cares;

In all of thee sure thy Esopus shares. 70

As thou at all mankind the flag unfurls,

Who on my fair one Satire’s vengeance hurls —

Who calls thee, pert, affected, vain coquette,

A wit in folly, and a fool in wit!

Who says that fool alone is not thy due, 75

And quotes thy treacheries to prove it true!

Our force united on thy foes we’ll turn,

And dare the war with all of woman born:

For who can write and speak as thou and I?

My periods that deciphering defy, 80

And thy still matchless tongue that conquers all reply!

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

455.

Epitaph on a noted coxcomb

Capt. Wm. Roddirk, of Corbiston.

LIGHT lay the earth on Billy’s breast,

His chicken heart so tender;

But build a castle on his head,

His scull will prop it under.

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

456.

Epitaph on Captain Lascelles

WHEN Lascelles thought fit from this world to depart,

Some friends warmly thought of embalming his heart;

A bystander whispers— “Pray don’t make so much o’t,

The subject is poison, no reptile will touch it.”

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

457.

Epitaph on Wm. Graham, Esq., of Mossknowe

“STOP thief!” dame Nature call’d to Death,

As Willy drew his latest breath;

How shall I make a fool again?

My choicest model thou hast ta’en.

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

458.

Epitaph on John Busby, Esq., Tinwald Downs

HERE lies John Bushby — honest man,

Cheat him, Devil — if you can!

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

459.

Sonnet on the Death of Robert Riddell

Of Glenriddell and Friars’ Carse.

NO more, ye warblers of the wood! no more;

Nor pour your descant grating on my soul;

Thou young-eyed Spring! gay in thy verdant stole,

More welcome were to me grim Winter’s wildest roar.

How can ye charm, ye flowers, with all your dyes? 5

Ye blow upon the sod that wraps my friend!

How can I to the tuneful strain attend?

That strain flows round the untimely tomb where Riddell lies.

Yes, pour, ye warblers! pour the notes of woe,

And soothe the Virtues weeping o’er his bier: 10

The man of worth — and hath not left his peer!

Is in his “narrow house,” for ever darkly low.

Thee, Spring! again with joy shall others greet;

Me, memory of my loss will only meet.

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

460.

The Lovely Lass o’ Inverness (Song)

THE LOVELY lass o’ Inverness,

Nae joy nor pleasure can she see;

For, e’en to morn she cries, alas!

And aye the saut tear blin’s her e’e.

“Drumossie moor, Drumossie day — 5

A waefu’ day it was to me!

For there I lost my father dear,

My father dear, and brethren three.

“Their winding-sheet the bluidy clay,

Their graves are growin’ green to see; 10

And by them lies the dearest lad

That ever blest a woman’s e’e!

“Now wae to thee, thou cruel lord,

A bluidy man I trow thou be;

For mony a heart thou has made sair, 15

That ne’er did wrang to thine or thee!”

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

461.

Charlie, he’s my Darling (Song)

‘TWAS on a Monday morning,

Right early in the year,

That Charlie came to our town,

The young Chevalier.

Chorus. — An’ Charlie, he’s my darling, 5

My darling, my darling,

Charlie, he’s my darling,

The young Chevalier.

As he was walking up the street,

The city for to view, 10

O there he spied a bonie lass

The window looking through,

An’ Charlie, &c.

Sae light’s he jumped up the stair,

And tirl’d at the pin; 15

And wha sae ready as hersel’

To let the laddie in.

An’ Charlie, &c.

He set his Jenny on his knee,

All in his Highland dress; 20

For brawly weel he ken’d the way

To please a bonie lass.

An’ Charlie, &c.

It’s up yon heathery mountain,

An’ down yon scroggie glen, 25

We daur na gang a milking,

For Charlie and his men,

An’ Charlie, &c.

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

462.

The Bannocks o’ Bear Meal (Song)

Chorus — Bannocks o’ bear meal,

Bannocks o’ barley,

Here’s to the Highlandman’s

Bannocks o’ barley!

WHA, in a brulyie, will 5

First cry a parley?

Never the lads wi’ the

Bannocks o’ barley,

Bannocks o’ bear meal, &c.

Wha, in his wae days, 10

Were loyal to Charlie?

Wha but the lads wi’ the

Bannocks o’ barley!

Bannocks o’ bear meal, &c.

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

463.

The Highland Balou (Song)

HEE balou, my sweet wee Donald,

Picture o’ the great Clanronald;

Brawlie kens our wanton Chief

Wha gat my young Highland thief.

Leeze me on thy bonie craigie, 5

An’ thou live, thou’ll steal a naigie,

Travel the country thro’ and thro’,

And bring hame a Carlisle cow.

Thro’ the Lawlands, o’er the Border,

Weel, my babie, may thou furder! 10

Herry the louns o’ the laigh Countrie,

Syne to the Highlands hame to me.

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

464.

The Highland Widow’s Lament

OH I am come to the low Countrie,

Ochon, Ochon, Ochrie!

Without a penny in my purse,

To buy a meal to me.

It was na sae in the Highland hills, 5

Ochon, Ochon, Ochrie!

Nae woman in the Country wide,

Sae happy was as me.

For then I had a score o’kye,

Ochon, Ochon, Ochrie! 10

Feeding on you hill sae high,

And giving milk to me.

And there I had three score o’yowes,

Ochon, Ochon, Ochrie!

Skipping on yon bonie knowes, 15

And casting woo’ to me.

I was the happiest of a’ the Clan,

Sair, sair, may I repine;

For Donald was the brawest man,

And Donald he was mine. 20

Till Charlie Stewart cam at last,

Sae far to set us free;

My Donald’s arm was wanted then,

For Scotland and for me.

Their waefu’ fate what need I tell, 25

Right to the wrang did yield;

My Donald and his Country fell,

Upon Culloden field.

Oh I am come to the low Countrie,

Ochon, Ochon, Ochrie! 30

Nae woman in the warld wide,

Sae wretched now as me.

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

465.

It was a’ for our rightfu’ King (Song)

IT was a’ for our rightfu’ King

We left fair Scotland’s strand;

It was a’ for our rightfu’ King

We e’er saw Irish land, my dear,

We e’er saw Irish land. 5

Now a’ is done that men can do,

And a’ is done in vain;

My Love and Native Land fareweel,

For I maun cross the main, my dear,

For I maun cross the main. 10

He turn’d him right and round about,

Upon the Irish shore;

And gae his bridle reins a shake,

With adieu for evermore, my dear,

And adieu for evermore. 15

The soger frae the wars returns,

The sailor frae the main;

But I hae parted frae my Love,

Never to meet again, my dear,

Never to meet again. 20

When day is gane, and night is come,

And a’ folk bound to sleep;

I think on him that’s far awa,

The lee-lang night, and weep, my dear,

The lee-lang night, and weep. 25

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

466.

Ode for General Washington’s Birthday

NO Spartan tube, no Attic shell,

No lyre AEolian I awake;

‘Tis liberty’s bold note I swell,

Thy harp, Columbia, let me take!

See gathering thousands, while I sing, 5

A broken chain exulting bring,

And dash it in a tyrant’s face,

And dare him to his very beard,

And tell him he no more is feared —

No more the despot of Columbia’s race! 10

A tyrant’s proudest insults brav’d,

They shout — a People freed! They hail an Empire saved.

Where is man’s god-like form?

Where is that brow erect and bold —

That eye that can unmov’d behold 15

The wildest rage, the loudest storm

That e’er created fury dared to raise?

Avaunt! thou caitiff, servile, base,

That tremblest at a despot’s nod,

Yet, crouching under the iron rod, 20

Canst laud the hand that struck th’ insulting blow!

Art thou of man’s Imperial line?

Dost boast that countenance divine?

Each skulking feature answers, No!

But come, ye sons of Liberty, 25

Columbia’s offspring, brave as free,

In danger’s hour still flaming in the van,

Ye know, and dare maintain, the Royalty of Man!

Alfred! on thy starry throne,

Surrounded by the tuneful choir, 30

The bards that erst have struck the patriot lyre,

And rous’d the freeborn Briton’s soul of fire,

No more thy England own!

Dare injured nations form the great design,

To make detested tyrants bleed? 35

Thy England execrates the glorious deed!

Beneath her hostile banners waving,

Every pang of honour braving,

England in thunder calls, “The tyrant’s cause is mine!”

That hour accurst how did the fiends rejoice 40

And hell, thro’ all her confines, raise the exulting voice,

That hour which saw the generous English name

Linkt with such damned deeds of everlasting shame!

Thee, Caledonia! thy wild heaths among,

Fam’d for the martial deed, the heaven-taught song, 45

To thee I turn with swimming eyes;

Where is that soul of Freedom fled?

Immingled with the mighty dead,

Beneath that hallow’d turf where Wallace lies

Hear it not, WALLACE! in thy bed of death. 50

Ye babbling winds! in silence sweep,

Disturb not ye the hero’s sleep,

Nor give the coward secret breath!

Is this the ancient Caledonian form,

Firm as the rock, resistless as the storm? 55

Show me that eye which shot immortal hate,

Blasting the despot’s proudest bearing;

Show me that arm which, nerv’d with thundering fate,

Crush’d Usurpation’s boldest daring! —

Dark-quench’d as yonder sinking star, 60

No more that glance lightens afar;

That palsied arm no more whirls on the waste of war.

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

467.

Inscription to Miss Graham of Fintry

HERE, where the Scottish Muse immortal lives,

In sacred strains and tuneful numbers joined,

Accept the gift; though humble he who gives,

Rich is the tribute of the grateful mind.

So may no ruffian-feeling in my breast, 5

Discordant, jar thy bosom-chords among;

But Peace attune thy gentle soul to rest,

Or Love, ecstatic, wake his seraph song,

Or Pity’s notes, in luxury of tears,

As modest Want the tale of woe reveals; 10

While conscious Virtue all the strains endears,

And heaven-born Piety her sanction seals.

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

468.

On the Seas and far away (Song)

Tune— “O’er the hills and far away.”

HOW can my poor heart be glad,

When absent from my sailor lad;

How can I the thought forego —

He’s on the seas to meet the foe?

Let me wander, let me rove, 5

Still my heart is with my love;

Nightly dreams, and thoughts by day,

Are with him that’s far away.

Chorus. — On the seas and far away,

On stormy seas and far away; 10

Nightly dreams and thoughts by day,

Are aye with him that’s far away.

When in summer noon I faint,

As weary flocks around me pant,

Haply in this scorching sun, 15

My sailor’s thund’ring at his gun;

Bullets, spare my only joy!

Bullets, spare my darling boy!

Fate, do with me what you may,

Spare but him that’s far away, 20

On the seas and far away,

On stormy seas and far away;

Fate, do with me what you may,

Spare but him that’s far away.

At the starless, midnight hour 25

When Winter rules with boundless power,

As the storms the forests tear,

And thunders rend the howling air,

Listening to the doubling roar,

Surging on the rocky shore, 30

All I can — I weep and pray

For his weal that’s far away,

On the seas and far away,

On stormy seas and far away;

All I can — I weep and pray, 35

For his weal that’s far away.

Peace, thy olive wand extend,

And bid wild War his ravage end,

Man with brother Man to meet,

And as a brother kindly greet; 40

Then may heav’n with prosperous gales,

Fill my sailor’s welcome sails;

To my arms their charge convey,

My dear lad that’s far away.

On the seas and far away, 45

On stormy seas and far away;

To my arms their charge convey,

My dear lad that’s far away.

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

469.

Ca’ the Yowes to the Knowes (Song)

Second Version

Chorus. — Ca’the yowes to the knowes,

Ca’ them where the heather grows,

Ca’ them where the burnie rowes,

My bonie Dearie.

HARK the mavis’ e’ening sang, 5

Sounding Clouden’s woods amang;

Then a-faulding let us gang,

My bonie Dearie.

Ca’ the yowes, &c.

We’ll gae down by Clouden side, 10

Thro’ the hazels, spreading wide,

O’er the waves that sweetly glide,

To the moon sae clearly.

Ca’ the yowes, &c.

Yonder Clouden’s silent towers, 15

Where, at moonshine’s midnight hours,

O’er the dewy-bending flowers,

Fairies dance sae cheery.

Ca’ the yowes, &c.

Ghaist nor bogle shalt thou fear, 20

Thou’rt to Love and Heav’n sae dear,

Nocht of ill may come thee near;

My bonie Dearie.

Ca’ the yowes, &c.

Fair and lovely as thou art, 25

Thou hast stown my very heart;

I can die — but canna part,

My bonie Dearie.

Ca’ the yowes, &c.

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

470.

She says she loes me best of a’ (Song)

Tune— “Oonagh’s Waterfall.”

SAE flaxen were her ringlets,

Her eyebrows of a darker hue,

Bewitchingly o’er-arching

Twa laughing e’en o’ lovely blue;

Her smiling, sae wyling. 5

Wad make a wretch forget his woe;

What pleasure, what treasure,

Unto these rosy lips to grow!

Such was my Chloris’ bonie face,

When first that bonie face I saw; 10

And aye my Chloris’ dearest charm —

She says, she lo’es me best of a’.

Like harmony her motion,

Her pretty ankle is a spy,

Betraying fair proportion, 15

Wad make a saint forget the sky:

Sae warming, sae charming,

Her faultless form and gracefu’ air;

Ilk feature — auld Nature

Declar’d that she could do nae mair: 20

Hers are the willing chains o’ love,

By conquering Beauty’s sovereign law;

And still my Chloris’ dearest charm —

She says, she lo’es me best of a’.

Let others love the city, 25

And gaudy show, at sunny noon;

Gie me the lonely valley,

The dewy eve and rising moon,

Fair beaming, and streaming,

Her silver light the boughs amang; 30

While falling; recalling,

The amorous thrush concludes his sang;

There, dearest Chloris, wilt thou rove,

By wimpling burn and leafy shaw,

And hear my vows o’ truth and love, 35

And say, thou lo’es me best of a’.

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

471.

Epigram on Jessy Staig’s recovery

On Miss Jessy Staig’s recovery.

MAXWELL, if merit here you crave,

That merit I deny;

You save fair Jessie from the grave! —

An Angel could not die!

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

472.

To the beautiful Miss Eliza J –- n, on her principles of Liberty and Eqality

On her Principles of Liberty and Equality.

HOW, Liberty! girl, can it be by thee nam’d?

Equality too! hussey, art not asham’d?

Free and Equal indeed, while mankind thou enchainest,

And over their hearts a proud Despot so reignest.

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

473.

On Chloris requesting a sprig of blossom’d thorn

Requesting me to give her a Spring of Blossomed Thorn.

FROM the white-blossom’d sloe my dear Chloris requested

A sprig, her fair breast to adorn:

No, by Heavens! I exclaim’d, let me perish, if ever

I plant in that bosom a thorn!

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

474.

On seeing Mrs. Kemble in Yarico

KEMBLE, thou cur’st my unbelief

For Moses and his rod;

At Yarico’s sweet nor of grief

The rock with tears had flow’d.

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

475.

Epigram on a Country Laird (Cardoness)

not quite so wise as Solomon.

BLESS Jesus Christ, O Cardonessp,

With grateful, lifted eyes,

Who taught that not the soul alone,

But body too shall rise;

For had He said “the soul alone 5

From death I will deliver,”

Alas, alas! O Cardoness,

Then hadst thou lain for ever.

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

476.

Epigram on the same Laird’s Country Seat

Belonging to the same Laird.

WE grant they’re thine, those beauties all,

So lovely in our eye;

Keep them, thou eunuch, Cardoness,

For others to enjoy!

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

477.

Epigram on Dr. Babington’s looks

is expressed in the Rev. Dr. Babington’s very looks.

THAT there is a falsehood in his looks,

I must and will deny:

They tell their Master is a knave,

And sure they do not lie.

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

478.

Epigram on a Suicide

EARTH’D up, here lies an imp o’ hell,

Planted by Satan’s dibble;

Poor silly wretch, he’s damned himsel’,

To save the Lord the trouble.

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

479.

Epigram on a Swearing Coxcomb

HERE cursing, swearing Burton lies,

A buck, a beau, or “Dem my eyes!”

Who in his life did little good,

And his last words were “Dem my blood!”

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

480.

Epigram on an Innkeeper (“The Marquis”)

HERE lies a mock Marquis, whose titles were shamm’d,

If ever he rise, it will be to be damn’d.

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

481.

Epigram on Andrew Turner

IN se’enteen hunder’n forty-nine,

The deil gat stuff to mak a swine,

An’ coost it in a corner;

But wilily he chang’d his plan,

An’ shap’d it something like a man, 5

An’ ca’d it Andrew Turner.

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

482.

Pretty Peg, my dearie (Song)

AS I gaed up by yon gate-end,

When day was waxin’ weary,

Wha did I meet come down the street,

But pretty Peg, my dearie!

Her air sae sweet, an’ shape complete, 5

Wi’ nae proportion wanting,

The Queen of Love did never move

Wi’ motion mair enchanting.

Wi’ linked hands we took the sands,

Adown yon winding river; 10

Oh, that sweet hour and shady bower,

Forget it shall I never!

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

483.

Esteem for Chloris

AH, Chloris, since it may not be,

That thou of love wilt hear;

If from the lover thou maun flee,

Yet let the friend be dear.

Altho’ I love my Chloris mair 5

Than ever tongue could tell;

My passion I will ne’er declare —

I’ll say, I wish thee well.

Tho’ a’ my daily care thou art,

And a’ my nightly dream, 10

I’ll hide the struggle in my heart,

And say it is esteem.

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

484.

Saw you my dear, my Philly (Song)

Tune— “When she cam’ ben she bobbit.”

O SAW ye my Dear, my Philly?

O saw ye my Dear, my Philly,

She’s down i’ the grove, she’s wi’ a new Love,

She winna come hame to her Willy.

What says she my dear, my Philly? 5

What says she my dear, my Philly?

She lets thee to wit she has thee forgot,

And forever disowns thee, her Willy.

O had I ne’er seen thee, my Philly!

O had I ne’er seen thee, my Philly! 10

As light as the air, and fause as thou’s fair,

Thou’s broken the heart o’ thy Willy.

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

485.

How lang and dreary is the night (Song)

HOW lang and dreary is the night

When I am frae my Dearie;

I restless lie frae e’en to morn

Though I were ne’er sae weary.

Chorus. — For oh, her lanely nights are lang! 5

And oh, her dreams are eerie;

And oh, her window’d heart is sair,

That’s absent frae her Dearie!

When I think on the lightsome days

I spent wi’ thee, my Dearie; 10

And now what seas between us roar,

How can I be but eerie?

For oh, &c.

How slow ye move, ye heavy hours;

The joyless day how dreary: 15

It was na sae ye glinted by,

When I was wi’ my Dearie!

For oh, &c.

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

486.

Inconstancy in love (Song)

Tune— “Duncan Gray.”

LET not Woman e’er complain

Of inconstancy in love;

Let not Woman e’er complain

Fickle Man is apt to rove:

Look abroad thro’ Nature’s range, 5

Nature’s mighty Law is change,

Ladies, would it not seem strange

Man should then a monster prove!

Mark the winds, and mark the skies,

Ocean’s ebb, and ocean’s flow, 10

Sun and moon but set to rise,

Round and round the seasons go.

Why then ask of silly Man

To oppose great Nature’s plan?

We’ll be constant while we can — 15

You can be no more, you know.

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

487.

The Lover’s Morning Salute to his Mistress

Tune— “Deil tak the wars.”

SLEEP’ST thou, or wak’st thou, fairest creature?

Rosy morn now lifts his eye,

Numbering ilka bud which Nature

Waters wi’ the tears o’ joy.

Now, to the streaming fountain, 5

Or up the heathy mountain,

The hart, hind, and roe, freely, wildly-wanton stray;

In twining hazel bowers,

Its lay the linnet pours,

The laverock to the sky 10

Ascends, wi’ sangs o’ joy,

While the sun and thou arise to bless the day.

Phoebus gilding the brow of morning,

Banishes ilk darksome shade,

Nature, gladdening and adorning; 15

Such to me my lovely maid.

When frae my Chloris parted,

Sad, cheerless, broken-hearted,

The night’s gloomy shades, cloudy, dark, o’ercast my sky:

But when she charms my sight, 20

In pride of Beauty’s light —

When thro’ my very heart

Her burning glories dart;

‘Tis then—‘tis then I wake to life and joy!

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

488.

The Winter of Life (Song)

BUT lately seen in gladsome green,

The woods rejoic’d the day,

Thro’ gentle showers, the laughing flowers

In double pride were gay:

But now our joys are fled 5

On winter blasts awa;

Yet maiden May, in rich array,

Again shall bring them a’.

But my white pow, nae kindly thowe

Shall melt the snaws of Age; 10

My trunk of eild, but buss or beild,

Sinks in Time’s wintry rage.

Oh, Age has weary days,

And nights o’ sleepless pain:

Thou golden time, o’ Youthfu’ prime, 15

Why comes thou not again!

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

489.

Behold, my love, how green the groves (Song)

Tune— “My lodging is on the cold ground.”

BEHOLD, my love, how green the groves,

The primrose banks how fair;

The balmy gales awake the flowers,

And wave thy flowing hair.

The lav’rock shuns the palace gay, 5

And o’er the cottage sings:

For Nature smiles as sweet, I ween,

To Shepherds as to Kings.

Let minstrels sweep the skilfu’ string,

In lordly lighted ha’: 10

The Shepherd stops his simple reed,

Blythe in the birken shaw.

The Princely revel may survey

Our rustic dance wi’ scorn;

But are their hearts as light as ours, 15

Beneath the milk-white thorn!

The shepherd, in the flowery glen;

In shepherd’s phrase, will woo:

The courtier tells a finer tale,

But is his heart as true! 20

These wild-wood flowers I’ve pu’d, to deck

That spotless breast o’ thine:

The courtiers’ gems may witness love,

But, ‘tis na love like mine.

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

490.

The charming month of May (Song)

Tune— “Daintie Davie.”

IT was the charming month of May,

When all the flow’rs were fresh and gay.

One morning, by the break of day,

The youthful, charming Chloe —

From peaceful slumber she arose, 5

Girt on her mantle and her hose,

And o’er the flow’ry mead she goes —

The youthful, charming Chloe.

Chorus. — Lovely was she by the dawn,

Youthful Chloe, charming Chloe, 10

Tripping o’er the pearly lawn,

The youthful, charming Chloe.

The feather’d people you might see

Perch’d all around on every tree,

In notes of sweetest melody 15

They hail the charming Chloe;

Till, painting gay the eastern skies,

The glorious sun began to rise,

Outrival’d by the radiant eyes

Of youthful, charming Chloe. 20

Lovely was she, &c.

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

491.

Lassie wi’ the Lint-white Locks (Song)

Tune— “Rothiemurchie’s Rant.”

Chorus. — Lassie wi’the lint-white locks,

Bonie lassie, artless lassie,

Wilt thou wi’ me tent the flocks,

Wilt thou be my Dearie, O?

NOW Nature cleeds the flowery lea, 5

And a’ is young and sweet like thee,

O wilt thou share its joys wi’ me,

And say thou’lt be my Dearie, O.

Lassie wi’ the, &c.

The primrose bank, the wimpling burn, 10

The cuckoo on the milk-white thorn,

The wanton lambs at early morn,

Shall welcome thee, my Dearie, O.

Lassie wi’ the, &c.

And when the welcome simmer shower 15

Has cheer’d ilk drooping little flower,

We’ll to the breathing woodbine bower,

At sultry noon, my Dearie, O.

Lassie wi’ the, &c.

When Cynthia lights, wi’ silver ray, 20

The weary shearer’s hameward way,

Thro’ yellow waving fields we’ll stray,

And talk o’ love, my Dearie, O.

Lassie wi’ the, &c.

And when the howling wintry blast 25

Disturbs my Lassie’s midnight rest,

Enclasped to my faithfu’ breast,

I’ll comfort thee, my Dearie, O.

Lassie wi’ the, &c.

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

492.

Dialogue Song — Philly and Willy

Tune— “The Sow’s tail to Geordie.”

He. O PHILLY, happy be that day,

When roving thro’ the gather’d hay,

My youthfu’ heart was stown away,

And by thy charms, my Philly.

She. O Willy, aye I bless the grove 5

Where first I own’d my maiden love,

Whilst thou did pledge the Powers above,

To be my ain dear Willy.

Both. For a’ the joys that gowd can gie,

I dinna care a single flie; 10

The { lad lass } I love’s the { lad lass } for me,

And that’s my ain dear { Willy. Philly. }

He. As songsters of the early year,

Are ilka day mair sweet to hear,

So ilka day to me mair dear 15

And charming is my Philly.

She. As on the brier the budding rose,

Still richer breathes and fairer blows,

So in my tender bosom grows

The love I bear my Willy. 20

Both. For a’ the joys, &c.

He. The milder sun and bluer sky

That crown my harvest cares wi’ joy,

Were ne’er sae welcome to my eye

As is a sight o’ Philly. 25

She. The little swallow’s wanton wing,

Tho’ wafting o’er the flowery Spring,

Did ne’er to me sic tidings bring,

As meeting o’ my Willy.

Both. For a’ the joys, &c. 30

He. The bee that thro’ the sunny hour

Sips nectar in the op’ning flower,

Compar’d wi’ my delight is poor,

Upon the lips o’ Philly.

She. The woodbine in the dewy weet, 35

When ev’ning shades in silence meet,

Is nocht sae fragrant or sae sweet

As is a kiss o’ Willy.

Both. For a’ the joys, &c.

He. Let fortune’s wheel at random rin, 40

And fools may tine and knaves may win;

My thoughts are a’ bound up in ane,

And that’s my ain dear Philly.

She. What’s a’ the joys that gowd can gie?

I dinna care a single flie; 45

The lad I love’s the lad for me,

And that’s my ain dear Willy.

Both. For a’ the joys, &c.

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

493.

Contented wi’ little, and cantie wi’ mair (Song)

Tune— “Lumps o’ Puddin’.”

CONTENTED wi’ little, and cantie wi’ mair,

Whene’er I forgather wi’ Sorrow and Care,

I gie them a skelp as they’re creeping alang,

Wi’ a cog o’ gude swats and an auld Scottish sang.

Chorus. — Contented wi’ little, &c. 5

I whiles claw the elbow o’ troublesome thought;

But Man is a soger, and Life is a faught;

My mirth and gude humour are coin in my pouch,

And my Freedom’s my Lairdship nae monarch dare touch.

Contented wi’ little, &c. 10

A townmond o’ trouble, should that be may fa’,

A night o’ gude fellowship sowthers it a’:

When at the blythe end o’ our journey at last,

Wha the deil ever thinks o’ the road he has past?

Contented wi’ little, &c. 15

Blind Chance, let her snapper and stoyte on her way;

Be’t to me, be’t frae me, e’en let the jade gae:

Come Ease, or come Travail, come Pleasure or Pain,

My warst word is: “Welcome, and welcome again!”

Contented wi’ little, &c. 20

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

494.

Farewell thou stream that winding flows (Song)

Air— “Nansie’s to the greenwood gane.”

FAREWELL, thou stream that winding flows

Around Eliza’s dwelling;

O mem’ry! spare the cruel thoes

Within my bosom swelling.

Condemn’d to drag a hopeless chain 5

And yet in secret languish;

To feel a fire in every vein,

Nor dare disclose my anguish.

Love’s veriest wretch, unseen, unknown,

I fain my griefs would cover; 10

The bursting sigh, th’ unweeting groan,

Betray the hapless lover.

I know thou doom’st me to despair,

Nor wilt, nor canst relieve me;

But, O Eliza, hear one prayer — 15

For pity’s sake forgive me!

The music of thy voice I heard,

Nor wist while it enslav’d me;

I saw thine eyes, yet nothing fear’d,

Till fears no more had sav’d me: 20

Th’ unwary sailor thus, aghast

The wheeling torrent viewing,

‘Mid circling horrors sinks at last,

In overwhelming ruin.

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

495.

Canst thou leave me thus, my Katie (Song)

Tune— “Roy’s Wife.”

Chorus — Canst thou leave me thus, my Katie?

Canst thou leave me thus, my Katie?

Well thou know’st my aching heart,

And canst thou leave me thus, for pity?

IS this thy plighted, fond regard, 5

Thus cruelly to part, my Katie?

Is this thy faithful swain’s reward —

An aching, broken heart, my Katie!

Canst thou leave me, &c.

Farewell! and ne’er such sorrows tear 10

That finkle heart of thine, my Katie!

Thou maysn find those will love thee dear,

But not a love like mine, my Katie,

Canst thou leave me, &c.

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

496.

My Nanie’s awa (Song)

Tune— “There’ll never be peace till Jamie comes hame.”

NOW in her green mantle blythe Nature arrays,

And listens the lambkins that bleat o’er her braes;

While birds warble welcomes in ilka green shaw,

But to me it’s delightless — my Nanie’s awa.

The snawdrap and primrose our woodlands adorn, 5

And violetes bathe in the weet o’ the morn;

They pain my sad bosom, sae sweetly they blaw,

They mind me o’ Nanie — and Nanie’s awa.

Thou lav’rock that springs frae the dews of the lawn,

The shepherd to warn o’ the grey-breaking dawn, 10

And thou mellow mavis that hails the night-fa’,

Give over for pity — my Nanie’s awa.

Come Autumn, sae pensive, in yellow and grey,

And soothe me wi’ tidings o’ Nature’s decay:

The dark, dreary Winter, and wild-driving snaw 15

Alane can delight me — now Nanie’s awa.

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

497.

The Tear-drop— “Wae is my heart” (Song)

WAE is my heart, and the tear’s in my e’e;

Lang, lang has Joy been a stranger to me:

Forsaken and friendless, my burden I bear,

And the sweet voice o’ Pity ne’er sounds in my ear.

Love thou hast pleasures, and deep hae I luv’d; 5

Love, thou hast sorrows, and sair hae I pruv’d;

But this bruised heart that now bleeds in my breast,

I can feel, by its throbbings, will soon be at rest.

Oh, if I were — where happy I hae been —

Down by yon stream, and yon bonie castle-green; 10

For there he is wand’ring and musing on me,

Wha wad soon dry the tear-drop that clings to my e’e.

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

498.

For the sake o’ Somebody (Song)

MY heart is sair — I dare na tell,

My heart is sair for Somebody;

I could wake a winter night

For the sake o’ Somebody.

O-hon! for Somebody! 5

O-hey! for Somebody!

I could range the world around,

For the sake o’ Somebody.

Ye Powers that smile on virtuous love,

O, sweetly smile on Somebody! 10

Frae ilka danger keep him free,

And send me safe my Somebody!

O-hon! for Somebody!

O-hey! for Somebody!

I wad do — what wad I not? 15

For the sake o’ Somebody.

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

1795

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

499.

A Man’s a Man for a’ that (Song)

Tune— “For a’ that.”

IS there for honest Poverty

That hings his head, an’ a’ that;

The coward slave-we pass him by,

We dare be poor for a’ that!

For a’ that, an’ a’ that. 5

Our toils obscure an’ a’ that,

The rank is but the guinea’s stamp,

The Man’s the gowd for a’ that.

What though on hamely fare we dine,

Wear hoddin grey, an’ a that; 10

Gie fools their silks, and knaves their wine;

A Man’s a Man for a’ that:

For a’ that, and a’ that,

Their tinsel show, an’ a’ that;

The honest man, tho’ e’er sae poor, 15

Is king o’ men for a’ that.

Ye see yon birkie, ca’d a lord,

Wha struts, an’ stares, an’ a’ that;

Tho’ hundreds worship at his word,

He’s but a coof for a’ that: 20

For a’ that, an’ a’ that,

His ribband, star, an’ a’ that:

The man o’ independent mind

He looks an’ laughs at a’ that.

A prince can mak a belted knight, 25

A marquis, duke, an’ a’ that;

But an honest man’s abon his might,

Gude faith, he maunna fa’ that!

For a’ that, an’ a’ that,

Their dignities an’ a’ that; 30

The pith o’ sense, an’ pride o’ worth,

Are higher rank than a’ that.

Then let us pray that come it may,

(As come it will for a’ that,)

That Sense and Worth, o’er a’ the earth, 35

Shall bear the gree, an’ a’ that.

For a’ that, an’ a’ that,

It’s coming yet for a’ that,

That Man to Man, the world o’er,

Shall brothers be for a’ that. 40

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

500.

Craigieburn Wood (Second Version) (Song)

SWEET fa’s the eve on Craigieburn,

And blythe awakes the morrow;

But a’ the pride o’ Spring’s return

Can yield me nocht but sorrow.

I see the flowers and spreading trees, 5

I hear the wild birds singing;

But what a weary wight can please,

And Care his bosom wringing!

Fain, fain would I my griefs impart,

Yet dare na for your anger; 10

But secret love will break my heart,

If I conceal it langer.

If thou refuse to pity me,

If thou shalt love another,

When yon green leaves fade frae the tree, 15

Around my grave they’ll wither.

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

501.

The Solemn League and Covenant

Versicles of 1795

THE SOLEMN League and Covenant

Now brings a smile, now brings a tear;

But sacred Freedom, too, was theirs:

If thou’rt a slave, indulge thy sneer.

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

502.

Lines to John Syme, Esq., with a dozen of Porter

Lines sent with a Present of a Dozen of Porter.

O HAD the malt thy strength of mind,

Or hops the flavour of thy wit,

‘Twere drink for first of human kind,

A gift that e’en for Syme were fit.

JERUSALEM TAVERN, DUMFRIES.

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503.

inscription on Mr. Syme’s crystal goblet

THERE’S Death in the cup, so beware!

Nay, more — there is danger in touching;

But who can avoid the fell snare,

The man and his wine’s so bewitching!

Chronological List of Poems

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504.

Apology to Mr. Syme for not dining with him

NO more of your guests, be they titled or not,

And cookery the first in the nation;

Who is proof to thy personal converse and wit,

Is proof to all other temptation.

Chronological List of Poems

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505.

Epitaph for Mr. Gabriel Richardson, Brewer

HERE Brewer Gabriel’s fire’s extinct,

And empty all his barrels:

He’s blest — if, as he brew’d, he drink,

In upright, honest morals.

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

506.

Epigram on Mr. James Gracie

GRACIE, thou art a man of worth,

O be thou Dean for ever!

May he be d — d to hell henceforth,

Who fauts thy weight or measure!

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

507.

Bonie Peg-a-Ramsay (Song)

CAULD is the e’enin blast,

O’ Boreas o’er the pool,

An’ dawin’ it is dreary,

When birks are bare at Yule.

Cauld blaws the e’enin blast, 5

When bitter bites the frost,

And, in the mirk and dreary drift,

The hills and glens are lost:

Ne’er sae murky blew the night

That drifted o’er the hill, 10

But bonie Peg-a-Ramsay

Gat grist to her mill.

Chronological List of Poems

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508.

Inscription at Friars’ Carse Hermitage

To the Memory of Robert Riddell.

TO Riddell, much lamented man,

This ivied cot was dear;

Wandr’er, dost value matchless worth?

This ivied cot revere.

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

509.

There was a Bonie Lass (Fragment of a Song)

THERE was a bonie lass, and a bonie, bonie lass,

And she lo’ed her bonie laddie dear;

Till War’s loud alarms tore her laddie frae her arms,

Wi’ mony a sigh and tear.

Over sea, over shore, where the cannons loudly roar, 5

He still was a stranger to fear;

And nocht could him quail, or his bosom assail,

But the bonie lass he lo’ed sae dear.

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

510.

Wee Willie Gray (Fragment of a Song)

Tune— “Wee Totum Fogg.”

WEE Willie Gray, and his leather wallet,

Peel a willow wand to be him boots and jacket;

The rose upon the breir will be him trews an’ doublet,

The rose upon the breir will be him trews an’ doublet,

Wee Willie Gray, and his leather wallet, 5

Twice a lily-flower will be him sark and cravat;

Feathers of a flee wad feather up his bonnet,

Feathers of a flee wad feather up his bonnet.

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

511.

O aye my wife she dang me (Song)

Chorus — O aye my wife she dang me,

An’ aft my wife she bang’d me,

If ye gie a woman a’ her will,

Gude faith! she’ll soon o’er-gang ye.

ON peace an’ rest my mind was bent, 5

And, fool I was! I married;

But never honest man’s intent

Sane cursedly miscarried.

O aye my wife, &c.

Some sairie comfort at the last, 10

When a’ thir days are done, man,

My pains o’ hell on earth is past,

I’m sure o’ bliss aboon, man,

O aye my wife, &c.

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

512.

Guid ale keeps the heart aboon (Song)

Chorus — O gude ale comes and gude ale goes;

Gude ale gars me sell my hose,

Sell my hose, and pawn my shoon —

Gude ale keeps my heart aboon!

I HAD sax owsen in a pleugh, 5

And they drew a’ weel eneugh:

I sell’d them a’ just ane by ane —

Gude ale keeps the heart aboon!

O gude ale comes, &c.

Gude ale hauds me bare and busy, 10

Gars me moop wi’ the servant hizzie,

Stand i’ the stool when I hae done —

Gude ale keeps the heart aboon!

O gude ale comes, &c.

Chronological List of Poems

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513.

Steer her up and haud her gaun (Song)

O STEER her up, an’ haud her gaun,

Her mither’s at the mill, jo;

An’ gin she winna tak a man,

E’en let her tak her will, jo.

First shore her wi’ a gentle kiss, 5

And ca’ anither gill, jo;

An’ gin she tak the thing amiss,

E’en let her flyte her fill, jo.

O steer her up, an’ be na blate,

An’ gin she tak it ill, jo, 10

Then leave the lassie till her fate,

And time nae langer spill, jo:

Ne’er break your heart for ae rebute,

But think upon it still, jo:

That gin the lassie winna do’t, 15

Ye’ll find anither will, jo.

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

514.

The Lass o’ Ecclefechan (Song)

Tune— “Jack o’ Latin.”

GAT ye me, O gat ye me,

O gat ye me wi’ naething?

Rock an reel, and spinning wheel,

A mickle quarter basin:

Bye attour my Gutcher has 5

A heich house and a laich ane,

A’ forbye my bonie sel,

The toss o’ Ecclefechan.

O haud your tongue now, Lucky Lang,

O haud your tongue and jauner 10

I held the gate till you I met,

Syne I began to wander:

I tint my whistle and my sang,

I tint my peace and pleasure;

But your green graff, now Lucky Lang, 15

Wad airt me to my treasure.

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

515.

O let me in this ae night (Song)

O LASSIE, are ye sleepin yet,

Or are ye waukin, I wad wit?

For Love has bound me hand an’ fit,

And I would fain be in, jo.

Chorus. — O let me in this ae night, 5

This ae, ae, ae night;

O let me in this ae night,

I’ll no come back again, jo!

O hear’st thou not the wind an’ weet?

Nae star blinks thro’ the driving sleet; 10

Tak pity on my weary feet,

And shield me frae the rain, jo.

O let me in, &c.

The bitter blast that round me blaws,

Unheeded howls, unheeded fa’s; 15

The cauldness o’ thy heart’s the cause

Of a’ my care and pine, jo.

O let me in, &c.

HER ANSWER

O tell na me o’ wind an’ rain,

Upbraid na me wi’ cauld disdain, 20

Gae back the gate ye cam again,

I winna let ye in, jo.

Chorus. — I tell you now this ae night,

This ae, ae, ae night;

And ance for a’ this ae night, 25

I winna let ye in, jo.

The snellest blast, at mirkest hours,

That round the pathless wand’rer pours

Is nocht to what poor she endures,

That’s trusted faithless man, jo. 30

I tell you now, &c.

The sweetest flower that deck’d the mead,

Now trodden like the vilest weed —

Let simple maid the lesson read

The weird may be her ain, jo. 35

I tell you now, &c.

The bird that charm’d his summer day,

Is now the cruel Fowler’s prey;

Let witless, trusting, Woman say

How aft her fate’s the same, jo! 40

I tell you now, &c.

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

516.

I’ll aye ca’ in by yon town (Song)

Air— “I’ll gang nae mair to yon toun.”

Chorus — I’ll aye ca’ in by yon town,

And by yon garden-green again;

I’ll aye ca’ in by yon town,

And see my bonie Jean again.

THERE’S nane sall ken, there’s nane can guess 5

What brings me back the gate again,

But she, my fairest faithfu’ lass,

And stownlins we sall meet again.

I’ll aye ca’ in, &c.

She’ll wander by the aiken tree, 10

When trystin time draws near again;

And when her lovely form I see,

O haith! she’s doubly dear again.

I’ll aye ca’ in, &c.

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

517.

O wat ye wha’s in yon town (Song)

Tune— “I’ll gang nae mair to yon toun.”

Chorus — O wat ye wha’s in yon town,

Ye see the e’enin sun upon,

The dearest maid’s in yon town,

That e’ening sun is shining on.

NOW haply down yon gay green shaw, 5

She wanders by yon spreading tree;

How blest ye flowers that round her blaw,

Ye catch the glances o’ her e’e!

O wat ye wha’s, &c.

How blest ye birds that round her sing, 10

And welcome in the blooming year;

And doubly welcome be the Spring,

The season to my Jeanie dear.

O wat ye wha’s, &c.

The sun blinks blythe on yon town, 15

Among the broomy braes sae green;

But my delight in yon town,

And dearest pleasure, is my Jean.

O wat ye wha’s, &c.

Without my Fair, not a’ the charms 20

O’ Paradise could yield me joy;

But give me Jeanie in my arms

And welcome Lapland’s dreary sky!

O wat ye wha’s, &c.

My cave wad be a lover’s bower, 25

Tho’ raging Winter rent the air;

And she a lovely little flower,

That I wad tent and shelter there.

O wat ye wha’s, &c.

O sweet is she in yon town, 30

The sinkin, sun’s gane down upon;

A fairer than’s in yon town,

His setting beam ne’er shone upon.

O wat ye wha’s, &c.

If angry Fate is sworn my foe, 35

And suff’ring I am doom’d to bear;

I careless quit aught else below,

But spare, O spare me Jeanie dear.

O wat ye wha’s, &c.

For while life’s dearest blood is warm, 40

Ae thought frae her shall ne’er depart,

And she, as fairest is her form,

She has the truest, kindest heart.

O wat ye wha’s, &c.

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

518.

Ballad on Mr. Heron’s Election — No. 1

Ballads on Mr. Heron’s Election, 1795.

WHOM will you send to London town,

To Parliament and a’ that?

Or wha in a’ the country round

The best deserves to fa’ that?

For a’ that, and a’ that, 5

Thro’ Galloway and a’ that,

Where is the Laird or belted Knight

The best deserves to fa’ that?

Wha sees Kerroughtree’s open yett,

(And wha is’t never saw that?) 10

Wha ever wi’ Kerroughtree met,

And has a doubt of a’ that?

For a’ that, and a’ that,

Here’s Heron yet for a’ that!

The independent patriot, 15

The honest man, and a’ that.

Tho’ wit and worth, in either sex,

Saint Mary’s Isle can shaw that,

Wi’ Dukes and Lords let Selkirk mix,

And weel does Selkirk fa’ that. 20

For a’ that, and a’ that,

Here’s Heron yet for a’ that!

The independent commoner

Shall be the man for a’ that.

But why should we to Nobles jouk, 25

And is’t against the law, that?

For why, a Lord may be a gowk,

Wi’ ribband, star and a’ that,

For a’ that, and a’ that,

Here’s Heron yet for a’ that! 30

A Lord may be a lousy loun,

Wi’ ribband, star and a’ that.

A beardless boy comes o’er the hills,

Wi’ uncle’s purse and a’ that;

But we’ll hae ane frae mang oursels, 35

A man we ken, and a’ that.

For a’ that, and a’ that,

Here’s Heron yet for a’ that!

For we’re not to be bought and sold,

Like naigs, and nowt, and a’ that. 40

Then let us drink — The Stewartry,

Kerroughtree’s laird, and a’ that,

Our representative to be,

For weel he’s worthy a’ that.

For a’ that, and a’ that, 45

Here’s Heron yet for a’ that!

A House of Commons such as he,

They wad be blest that saw that.

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

519.

Ballad on Mr. Heron’s Election — No. 2

Tune— “Fy, let us a’ to the Bridal.”

FY, let us a’ to Kirkcudbright,

For there will be bickerin’ there;

For Murray’s light horse are to muster,

And O how the heroes will swear!

And there will be Murray, Commander, 5

And Gordon, the battle to win;

Like brothers they’ll stand by each other,

Sae knit in alliance and kin.

And there will be black-nebbit Johnie,

The tongue o’ the trump to them a’; 10

An he get na Hell for his haddin’,

The Deil gets na justice ava.

And there will be Kempleton’s birkie,

A boy no sae black at the bane;

But as to his fine Nabob fortune, 15

We’ll e’en let the subject alane.

And there will be Wigton’s new Sheriff;

Dame Justice fu’ brawly has sped,

She’s gotten the heart of a Bushby,

But, Lord! what’s become o’ the head? 20

And there will be Cardoness, Esquire,

Sae mighty in Cardoness’ eyes;

A wight that will weather damnation,

The Devil the prey will despise.

And there will be Douglasses doughty, 25

New christening towns far and near;

Abjuring their democrat doings,

By kissin’ the –- o’ a Peer:

And there will be folk frae Saint Mary’s

A house o’ great merit and note; 30

The deil ane but honours them highly —

The deil ane will gie them his vote!

And there will be Kenmure sae gen’rous,

Whose honour is proof to the storm,

To save them from stark reprobation, 35

He lent them his name in the Firm.

And there will be lads o’ the gospel,

Muirhead wha’s as gude as he’s true;

And there will be Buittle’s Apostle,

Wha’s mair o’ the black than the blue. 40

And there will be Logan M’Dowall,

Sculdudd’ry an’ he will be there,

And also the Wild Scot o’ Galloway,

Sogering, gunpowder Blair.

But we winna mention Redcastle, 45

The body, e’en let him escape!

He’d venture the gallows for siller,

An ‘twere na the cost o’ the rape.

But where is the Doggerbank hero,

That made “Hogan Mogan” to skulk? 50

Poor Keith’s gane to hell to be fuel,

The auld rotten wreck of a Hulk.

And where is our King’s Lord Lieutenant,

Sae fam’d for his gratefu’ return?

The birkie is gettin’ his Questions 55

To say in Saint Stephen’s the morn.

But mark ye! there’s trusty Kerroughtree,

Whose honor was ever his law;

If the Virtues were pack’d in a parcel,

His worth might be sample for a’; 60

And strang an’ respectfu’s his backing,

The maist o’ the lairds wi’ him stand;

Nae gipsy-like nominal barons,

Wha’s property’s paper — not land.

And there, frae the Niddisdale borders, 65

The Maxwells will gather in droves,

Teugh Jockie, staunch Geordie, an’ Wellwood,

That griens for the fishes and loaves;

And there will be Heron, the Major,

Wha’ll ne’er be forgot in the Greys; 70

Our flatt’ry we’ll keep for some other,

HIM, only it’s justice to praise.

And there will be maiden Kilkerran,

And also Barskimming’s gude Knight,

And there will be roarin Birtwhistle, 75

Yet luckily roars i’ the right.

And there’ll be Stamp Office Johnie,

(Tak tent how ye purchase a dram!)

And there will be gay Cassencarry,

And there’ll be gleg Colonel Tam. 80

And there’ll be wealthy young Richard,

Dame Fortune should hing by the neck,

For prodigal, thriftless bestowing —

His merit had won him respect.

And there will be rich brother Nabobs, 85

(Tho’ Nabobs, yet men not the worst,)

And there will be Collieston’s whiskers,

And Quintin — a lad o’ the first.

Then hey! the chaste Interest o’ Broughton

And hey! for the blessin’s ‘twill bring; 90

It may send Balmaghie to the Commons,

In Sodom ‘twould make him a king;

And hey! for the sanctified Murray,

Our land wha wi’ chapels has stor’d;

He founder’d his horse among harlots, 95

But gied the auld naig to the Lord.

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

520.

Ballad on Mr. Heron’s Election — No. 3

John Bushby’s Lamentation.

Tune— “Babes in the Wood.”

‘TWAS in the seventeen hunder year

O’ grace, and ninety-five,

That year I was the wae’est man

Of ony man alive.

In March the three-an’-twentieth morn, 5

The sun raise clear an’ bright;

But oh! I was a waefu’ man,

Ere to-fa’ o’ the night.

Yerl Galloway lang did rule this land,

Wi’ equal right and fame, 10

And thereto was his kinsmen join’d,

The Murray’s noble name.

Yerl Galloway’s man o’ men was I,

And chief o’ Broughton’s host;

So twa blind beggars, on a string, 15

The faithfu’ tyke will trust.

But now Yerl Galloway’s sceptre’s broke,

And Broughton’s wi’ the slain,

And I my ancient craft may try,

Sin’ honesty is gane. 20

‘Twas by the banks o’ bonie Dee,

Beside Kirkcudbright’s towers,

The Stewart and the Murray there,

Did muster a’ their powers.

Then Murray on the auld grey yaud, 25

Wi’ winged spurs did ride,

That auld grey yaud a’ Nidsdale rade,

He staw upon Nidside.

And there had na been the Yerl himsel,

O there had been nae play; 30

But Garlies was to London gane,

And sae the kye might stray.

And there was Balmaghie, I ween,

In front rank he wad shine;

But Balmaghie had better been 35

Drinkin’ Madeira wine.

And frae Glenkens cam to our aid

A chief o’ doughty deed;

In case that worth should wanted be,

O’ Kenmure we had need. 40

And by our banners march’d Muirhead,

And Buittle was na slack;

Whase haly priesthood nane could stain,

For wha could dye the black?

And there was grave squire Cardoness, 45

Look’d on till a’ was done;

Sae in the tower o’ Cardoness

A howlet sits at noon.

And there led I the Bushby clan,

My gamesome billie, Will, 50

And my son Maitland, wise as brave,

My footsteps follow’d still.

The Douglas and the Heron’s name,

We set nought to their score;

The Douglas and the Heron’s name, 55

Had felt our weight before.

But Douglasses o’ weight had we,

The pair o’ lusty lairds,

For building cot-houses sae fam’d,

And christenin’ kail-yards. 60

And there Redcastle drew his sword,

That ne’er was stain’d wi’ gore,

Save on a wand’rer lame and blind,

To drive him frae his door.

And last cam creepin’ Collieston, 65

Was mair in fear than wrath;

Ae knave was constant in his mind —

To keep that knave frae scaith.

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

521.

Inscription for an Alter of Independence

At Kerroughtree, the Seat of Mr. Heron.

THOU of an independent mind,

With soul resolv’d, with soul resign’d;

Prepar’d Power’s proudest frown to brave,

Who wilt not be, nor have a slave;

Virtue alone who dost revere, 5

Thy own reproach alone dost fear —

Approach this shrine, and worship here.

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

522.

The Cardin o’t, the Spinning o’t (Song)

I COFT a stane o’ haslock woo’,

To mak a wab to Johnie o’t;

For Johnie is my only jo,

I loe him best of onie yet.

Chorus. — The cardin’ o’t, the spinnin’ o’t, 5

The warpin’ o’t, the winnin’ o’t;

When ilka ell cost me a groat,

The tailor staw the lynin’ o’t.

For tho’ his locks be lyart grey,

And tho’ his brow be beld aboon, 10

Yet I hae seen him on a day,

The pride of a’ the parishen.

The cardin o’t, &c.

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

523.

The Cooper o’ Cuddy (Song)

Tune— “Bab at the bowster.”

Chorus — We’ll hide the Cooper behint the door,

Behint the door, behint the door,

We’ll hide the Cooper behint the door,

And cover him under a mawn, O.

THE COOPER o’ Cuddy came here awa, 5

He ca’d the girrs out o’er us a’;

An’ our gudewife has gotten a ca’,

That’s anger’d the silly gudeman O.

We’ll hide the Cooper, &c.

He sought them out, he sought them in, 10

Wi’ deil hae her! an’, deil hae him!

But the body he was sae doited and blin’,

He wist na where he was gaun O.

We’ll hide the Cooper, &c.

They cooper’d at e’en, they cooper’d at morn, 15

Till our gudeman has gotten the scorn;

On ilka brow she’s planted a horn,

And swears that there they sall stan’ O.

We’ll hide the Cooper, &c.

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

524.

The lass that made the bed to me (Song)

WHEN Januar’ wind was blawing cauld,

As to the north I took my way,

The mirksome night did me enfauld,

I knew na where to lodge till day:

By my gude luck a maid I met, 5

Just in the middle o’ my care,

And kindly she did me invite

To walk into a chamber fair.

I bow’d fu’ low unto this maid,

And thank’d her for her courtesie; 10

I bow’d fu’ low unto this maid,

An’ bade her make a bed to me;

She made the bed baith large and wide,

Wi’ twa white hands she spread it doun;

She put the cup to her rosy lips, 15

And drank— “Young man, now sleep ye soun’.”

Chorus. — The bonie lass made the bed to me,

The braw lass made the bed to me,

I’ll ne’er forget till the day I die,

The lass that made the bed to me. 20

She snatch’d the candle in her hand,

And frae my chamber went wi’ speed;

But I call’d her quickly back again,

To lay some mair below my head:

A cod she laid below my head, 25

And served me with due respect,

And, to salute her wi’ a kiss,

I put my arms about her neck.

The bonie lass, &c.

“Haud aff your hands, young man!” she said, 30

“And dinna sae uncivil be;

Gif ye hae ony luve for me,

O wrang na my virginitie.”

Her hair was like the links o’ gowd,

Her teeth were like the ivorie, 35

Her cheeks like lilies dipt in wine,

The lass that made the bed to me:

The bonie lass, &c.

Her bosom was the driven snaw,

Twa drifted heaps sae fair to see; 40

Her limbs the polish’d marble stane,

The lass that made the bed to me.

I kiss’d her o’er and o’er again,

And aye she wist na what to say:

I laid her ‘tween me and the wa’; 45

The lassie thocht na lang till day.

The bonie lass, &c.

Upon the morrow when we raise,

I thank’d her for her courtesie;

But aye she blush’d and aye she sigh’d, 50

And said, “Alas, ye’ve ruin’d me.”

I claps’d her waist, and kiss’d her syne,

While the tear stood twinkling in her e’e;

I said, my lassie, dinna cry.

For ye aye shall make the bed to me. 55

The bonie lass, &c.

She took her mither’s holland sheets,

An’ made them a’ in sarks to me;

Blythe and merry may she be,

The lass that made the bed to me. 60

Chorus. — The bonie lass made the bed to me,

The braw lass made the bed to me.

I’ll ne’er forget till the day I die,

The lass that made the bed to me.

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

525.

Had I the wyte, she bade me (Song)

HAD I the wyte, had I the wyte,

Had I the wyte? she bade me;

She watch’d me by the hie-gate side,

And up the loan she shaw’d me.

And when I wadna venture in, 5

A coward loon she ca’d me:

Had Kirk an’ State been in the gate,

I’d lighted when she bade me.

Sae craftilie she took me ben,

And bade me mak nae clatter; 10

“For our ramgunshoch, glum gudeman

Is o’er ayont the water.”

Whae’er shall say I wanted grace,

When I did kiss and dawte her,

Let him be planted in my place, 15

Syne say, I was the fautor.

Could I for shame, could I for shame,

Could I for shame refus’d her;

And wadna manhood been to blame,

Had I unkindly used her! 20

He claw’d her wi’ the ripplin-kame,

And blae and bluidy bruis’d her;

When sic a husband was frae hame,

What wife but wad excus’d her!

I dighted aye her e’en sae blue, 25

An’ bann’d the cruel randy,

And weel I wat, her willin’ mou

Was sweet as sugar-candie.

At gloamin-shot, it was I wot,

I lighted on the Monday; 30

But I cam thro’ the Tyseday’s dew,

To wanton Willie’s brandy.

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

526.

The Dumfries Volunteers (Song)

Tune— “Push about the Jorum.”

DOES haughty Gaul invasion threat?

Then let the louns beware, Sir;

There’s wooden walls upon our seas,

And volunteers on shore, Sir:

The Nith shall run to Corsincon, 5

And Criffel sink in Solway,

Ere we permit a Foreign Foe

On British ground to rally!

We’ll ne’er permit a Foreign Foe

On British ground to rally! 10

O let us not, like snarling curs,

In wrangling be divided,

Till, slap! come in an unco loun,

And wi’ a rung decide it!

Be Britain still to Britain true, 15

Amang ourselves united;

For never but by British hands

Maun British wrangs be righted!

No! never but by British hands

Shall British wrangs be righted! 20

The Kettle o’ the Kirk and State,

Perhaps a clout may fail in’t;

But deil a foreign tinkler loun

Shall ever ca’a nail in’t.

Our father’s blude the Kettle bought, 25

And wha wad dare to spoil it;

By Heav’ns! the sacrilegious dog

Shall fuel be to boil it!

By Heav’ns! the sacrilegious dog

Shall fuel be to boil it! 30

The wretch that would a tyrant own,

And the wretch, his true-born brother,

Who would set the Mob aboon the Throne,

May they be damn’d together!

Who will not sing “God save the King,” 35

Shall hang as high’s the steeple;

But while we sing “God save the King,”

We’ll ne’er forget THE PEOPLE!

But while we sing “God save the King,”

We’ll ne’er forget THE PEOPLE! 40

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

527.

Address to the Woodlark (Song)

Tune— “Loch Erroch Side.”

O STAY, sweet warbling woodlark, stay,

Nor quit for me the trembling spray,

A hapless lover courts thy lay,

Thy soothing, fond complaining.

Again, again that tender part, 5

That I may catch thy melting art;

For surely that wad touch her heart

Wha kills me wi’ disdaining.

Say, was thy little mate unkind,

And heard thee as the careless wind? 10

Oh, nocht but love and sorrow join’d,

Sic notes o’ woe could wauken!

Thou tells o’ never-ending care;

O’speechless grief, and dark despair:

For pity’s sake, sweet bird, nae mair! 15

Or my poor heart is broken.

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

528.

On Chloris being ill (Song)

Tune— “Aye wauken O.”

Chorus — Long, long the night,

Heavy comes the morrow

While my soul’s delight

Is on her bed of sorrow.

CAN I cease to care? 5

Can I cease to languish,

While my darling Fair

Is on the couch of anguish?

Long, long, &c.

Ev’ry hope is fled, 10

Ev’ry fear is terror,

Slumber ev’n I dread,

Ev’ry dream is horror.

Long, long, &c.

Hear me, Powers Divine! 15

Oh, in pity, hear me!

Take aught else of mine,

But my Chloris spare me!

Long, long, &c.

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

529.

How cruel are the parents (Song)

Altered from an old English song.

Tune— “John Anderson, my jo.”

HOW cruel are the parents

Who riches only prize,

And to the wealthy booby

Poor Woman sacrifice!

Meanwhile, the hapless Daughter 5

Has but a choice of strife;

To shun a tyrant Father’s hate —

Become a wretched Wife.

The ravening hawk pursuing,

The trembling dove thus flies, 10

To shun impelling ruin,

Awhile her pinions tries;

Till, of escape despairing,

No shelter or retreat,

She trusts the ruthless Falconer, 15

And drops beneath his feet.

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

530.

Yonder pomp of costly fashion (Song)

Air— “Deil tak the wars.”

MARK yonder pomp of costly fashion

Round the wealthy, titled bride:

But when compar’d with real passion,

Poor is all that princely pride.

Mark yonder, &c. (four lines repeated). 5

What are the showy treasures,

What are the noisy pleasures?

The gay, gaudy glare of vanity and art:

The polish’d jewels’ blaze

May draw the wond’ring gaze; 10

And courtly grandeur bright

The fancy may delight,

But never, never can come near the heart.

But did you see my dearest Chloris,

In simplicity’s array; 15

Lovely as yonder sweet opening flower is,

Shrinking from the gaze of day,

But did you see, &c.

O then, the heart alarming,

And all resistless charming, 20

In Love’s delightful fetters she chains the willing soul!

Ambition would disown

The world’s imperial crown,

Ev’n Avarice would deny,

His worshipp’d deity, 25

And feel thro’ every vein Love’s raptures roll.

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

531.

Twas na her bonie blue e’e (Song)

Tune— “Laddie, lie near me.”

‘TWAS na her bonie blue e’e was my ruin,

Fair tho’ she be, that was ne’er my undoin’;

‘Twas the dear smile when nae body did mind us,

‘Twas the bewitching, sweet, stown glance o’ kindness:

‘Twas the bewitching, sweet, stown glance o’ kindness. 5

Sair do I fear that to hope is denied me,

Sair do I fear that despair maun abide me,

But tho’ fell fortune should fate us to sever,

Queen shall she be in my bosom for ever:

Queen shall she be in my bosom for ever. 10

Chloris, I’m thine wi’ a passion sincerest,

And thou hast plighted me love o’ the dearest!

And thou’rt the angel that never can alter,

Sooner the sun in his motion would falter:

Sooner the sun in his motion would falter. 15

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

532.

Their groves o’ sweet myrtle (Song)

Tune— “Humours of Glen.”

THEIR groves o’ sweet myrtle let Foreign Lands reckon,

Where bright-beaming summers exalt the perfume;

Far dearer to me yon lone glen o’ green breckan,

Wi’ the burn stealing under the lang, yellow broom.

Far dearer to me are yon humble broom bowers 5

Where the blue-bell and gowan lurk, lowly, unseen;

For there, lightly tripping, among the wild flowers,

A-list’ning the linnet, aft wanders my Jean.

Tho’ rich is the breeze in their gay, sunny valleys,

And cauld Caledonia’s blast on the wave; 10

Their sweet-scented woodlands that skirt the proud palace,

What are they? — the haunt of the Tyrant and Slave.

The Slave’s spicy forests, and gold-bubbling fountains,

The brave Caledonian views wi’ disdain;

He wanders as free as the winds of his mountains, 15

Save Love’s willing fetters — the chains of his Jean.

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

533.

Forlorn, my love, no comfort here (Song)

Air— “Let me in this ae night.”

FORLORN, my Love, no comfort near,

Far, far from thee, I wander here;

Far, far from thee, the fate severe,

At which I most repine, Love.

Chorus. — O wert thou, Love, but near me! 5

But near, near, near me,

How kindly thou wouldst cheer me,

And mingle sighs with mine, Love.

Around me scowls a wintry sky,

Blasting each bud of hope and joy; 10

And shelter, shade, nor home have I;

Save in these arms of thine, Love.

O wert thou, &c.

Cold, alter’d friendship’s cruel part,

To poison Fortune’s ruthless dart — 15

Let me not break thy faithful heart,

And say that fate is mine, Love.

O wert thou, &c.

But, dreary tho’ the moments fleet,

O let me think we yet shall meet; 20

That only ray of solace sweet,

Can on thy Chloris shine, Love!

O wert thou, &c.

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

534.

Why tell the lover (Fragment of a Song)

Tune— “Caledonian Hunt’s delight.”

WHY, why tell thy lover

Bliss he never must enjoy”?

Why, why undeceive him,

And give all his hopes the lie?

O why, while fancy, raptur’d slumbers, 5

“Chloris, Chloris” all the theme,

Why, why would’st thou, cruel —

Wake thy lover from his dream?

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

535.

The Braw Wooer (Song)

Tune— “The Lothian Lassie.”

LAST May, a braw wooer cam doun the lang glen,

And sair wi’ his love he did deave me;

I said, there was naething I hated like men —

The deuce gae wi’m, to believe me, believe me;

The deuce gae wi’m to believe me. 5

He spak o’ the darts in my bonie black e’en,

And vow’d for my love he was diein,

I said, he might die when he liked for Jean —

The Lord forgie me for liein, for liein;

The Lord forgie me for liein! 10

A weel-stocked mailen, himsel’ for the laird,

And marriage aff-hand, were his proffers;

I never loot on that I kenn’d it, or car’d;

But thought I might hae waur offers, waur offers;

But thought I might hae waur offers. 15

But what wad ye think? — in a fortnight or less —

The deil tak his taste to gae near her!

He up the Gate-slack to my black cousin, Bess —

Guess ye how, the jad! I could bear her, could bear her;

Guess ye how, the jad! I could bear her. 20

But a’ the niest week, as I petted wi’ care,

I gaed to the tryst o’ Dalgarnock;

But wha but my fine fickle wooer was there,

I glowr’d as I’d seen a warlock, a warlock,

I glowr’d as I’d seen a warlock. 25

But owre my left shouther I gae him a blink,

Lest neibours might say I was saucy;

My wooer he caper’d as he’d been in drink,

And vow’d I was his dear lassie, dear lassie,

And vow’d I was his dear lassie. 30

I spier’d for my cousin fu’ couthy and sweet,

Gin she had recover’d her hearin’,

And how her new shoon fit her auld schachl’t feet,

But heavens! how he fell a swearin, a swearin,

But heavens! how he fell a swearin. 35

He begged, for gudesake, I wad be his wife,

Or else I wad kill him wi’ sorrow;

So e’en to preserve the poor body in life,

I think I maun wed him to-morrow, to-morrow;

I think I maun wed him to-morrow. 40

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

536.

This is no my ain lassie (Song)

Tune— “This is no my house.”

Chorus — This is no my ain lassie,

Fair tho, the lassie be;

Weel ken I my ain lassie,

Kind love is in her e’re.

I SEE a form, I see a face, 5

Ye weel may wi’ the fairest place;

It wants, to me, the witching grace,

The kind love that’s in her e’e.

This is no my ain, &c.

She’s bonie, blooming, straight, and tall, 10

And lang has had my heart in thrall;

And aye it charms my very saul,

The kind love that’s in her e’e.

This is no my ain, &c.

A thief sae pawkie is my Jean, 15

To steal a blink, by a’ unseen;

But gleg as light are lover’s een,

When kind love is in her e’e.

This is no my ain, &c.

It may escape the courtly sparks, 20

It may escape the learned clerks;

But well the watching lover marks

The kind love that’s in her eye.

This is no my ain, &c.

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

537.

O bonie was yon rosy Brier (Song)

O BONIE was yon rosy brier,

That blooms sae far frae haunt o’ man;

And bonie she, and ah, how dear!

It shaded frae the e’enin sun.

Yon rosebuds in the morning dew, 5

How pure, amang the leaves sae green;

But purer was the lover’s vow

They witness’d in their shade yestreen.

All in its rude and prickly bower,

That crimson rose, how sweet and fair; 10

But love is far a sweeter flower,

Amid life’s thorny path o’ care.

The pathless, wild and wimpling burn,

Wi’ Chloris in my arms, be mine;

And I the warld nor wish nor scorn, 15

Its joys and griefs alike resign.

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

538.

Now Spring has clad the grove in green (Song)

NOW spring has clad the grove in green,

And strew’d the lea wi’ flowers;

The furrow’d, waving corn is seen

Rejoice in fostering showers.

While ilka thing in nature join 5

Their sorrows to forego,

O why thus all alone are mine

The weary steps o’ woe!

The trout in yonder wimpling burn

That glides, a silver dart, 10

And, safe beneath the shady thorn,

Defies the angler’s art —

My life was ance that careless stream,

That wanton trout was I;

But Love, wi’ unrelenting beam, 15

Has scorch’d my fountains dry.

That little floweret’s peaceful lot,

In yonder cliff that grows,

Which, save the linnet’s flight, I wot,

Nae ruder visit knows, 20

Was mine, till Love has o’er me past,

And blighted a’ my bloom;

And now, beneath the withering blast,

My youth and joy consume.

The waken’d lav’rock warbling springs, 25

And climbs the early sky,

Winnowing blythe his dewy wings

In morning’s rosy eye;

As little reck’d I sorrow’s power,

Until the flowery snare 30

O’witching Love, in luckless hour,

Made me the thrall o’ care.

O had my fate been Greenland snows,

Or Afric’s burning zone,

Wi’man and nature leagued my foes, 35

So Peggy ne’er I’d known!

The wretch whose doom is “Hope nae mair”

What tongue his woes can tell;

Within whase bosom, save Despair,

Nae kinder spirits dwell. 40

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

539.

O that’s the lassie o’ my heart (Song)

Tune— “Morag.”

O WAT ye wha that lo’es me

And has my heart a-keeping?

O sweet is she that lo’es me,

As dews o’ summer weeping,

In tears the rosebuds steeping! 5

Chorus. — O that’s the lassie o’ my heart,

My lassie ever dearer;

O she’s the queen o’ womankind,

And ne’er a ane to peer her.

If thou shalt meet a lassie, 10

In grace and beauty charming,

That e’en thy chosen lassie,

Erewhile thy breast sae warming,

Had ne’er sic powers alarming;

O that’s the lassie, &c. 15

If thou hadst heard her talking,

And thy attention’s plighted,

That ilka body talking,

But her, by thee is slighted,

And thou art all delighted; 20

O that’s the lassie, &c.

If thou hast met this Fair One,

When frae her thou hast parted,

If every other Fair One

But her, thou hast deserted, 25

And thou art broken-hearted,

O that’s the lassie o’ my heart,

My lassie ever dearer;

O that’s the queen o’ womankind,

And ne’er a ane to peer her. 30

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

540.

Inscription to Chloris

Written on the blank leaf of a copy of the last edition of my poems, presented to the Lady whom, in so many fictitious reveries of passion, but with the most ardent sentiments of real friendship, I have so often sung under the name of— “Chloris.”

‘TIS Friendship’s pledge, my young, fair Friend,

Nor thou the gift refuse,

Nor with unwilling ear attend

The moralising Muse.

Since thou, in all thy youth and charms, 5

Must bid the world adieu,

(A world ‘gainst Peace in constant arms)

To join the Friendly Few.

Since, thy gay morn of life o’ercast,

Chill came the tempest’s lour; 10

(And ne’er Misfortune’s eastern blast

Did nip a fairer flower.)

Since life’s gay scenes must charm no more,

Still much is left behind,

Still nobler wealth hast thou in store — 15

The comforts of the mind!

Thine is the self-approving glow,

Of conscious Honour’s part;

And (dearest gift of Heaven below)

Thine Friendship’s truest heart. 20

The joys refin’d of Sense and Taste,

With every Muse to rove:

And doubly were the Poet blest,

These joys could he improve.

R.B.

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

541.

Leezie Lindsay (Fragment of a Song)

WILL ye go to the Hielands, Leezie Lindsay,

Will ye go to the Hielands wi’ me?

Will ye go to the Hielands, Leezie Lindsay,

My pride and my darling to be.

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

542.

The Wren’s Nest (Fragment of a Song)

THE ROBIN to the Wren’s nest

Cam keekin’ in, cam keekin’ in;

O weel’s me on your auld pow,

Wad ye be in, wad ye be in?

Thou’s ne’er get leave to lie without, 5

And I within, and I within,

Sae lang’s I hae an auld clout

To rowe ye in, to rowe ye in.

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

543.

News, lassies, news (Song)

THERE’S news, lassies, news,

Gude news I’ve to tell!

There’s a boatfu’ o’ lads

Come to our town to sell.

Chorus. — The wean wants a cradle, 5

And the cradle wants a cod:

I’ll no gang to my bed,

Until I get a nod.

Father, quo’ she, Mither, quo she,

Do what you can, 10

I’ll no gang to my bed,

Until I get a man.

The wean, &c.

I hae as gude a craft rig

As made o’yird and stane; 15

And waly fa’ the ley-crap,

For I maun till’d again.

The wean, &c.

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

544.

Crowdie ever mair (Song)

O THAT I had ne’er been married,

I wad never had nae care,

Now I’ve gotten wife an’ weans,

An’ they cry “Crowdie” evermair.

Chorus. — Ance crowdie, twice crowdie, 5

Three times crowdie in a day

Gin ye crowdie ony mair,

Ye’ll crowdie a’ my meal away.

Waefu’ Want and Hunger fley me,

Glowrin’ by the hallan en’; 10

Sair I fecht them at the door,

But aye I’m eerie they come ben.

Ance crowdie, &c.

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

545.

Mally’s meek, Mally’s sweet (Song)

Chorus — Mally’s meek, Mally’s sweet,

Mally’s modest and discreet;

Mally’s rare, Mally’s fair,

Mally’s every way complete.

AS I was walking up the street, 5

A barefit maid I chanc’d to meet;

But O the road was very hard

For that fair maiden’s tender feet.

Mally’s meek, &c.

It were mair meet that those fine feet 10

Were weel laced up in silken shoon;

An’ ‘twere more fit that she should sit

Within yon chariot gilt aboon,

Mally’s meek, &c.

Her yellow hair, beyond compare, 15

Comes trinklin down her swan-like neck,

And her two eyes, like stars in skies,

Would keep a sinking ship frae wreck,

Mally’s meek, &c.

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

546.

Jockie’s taen the parting Kiss (Song)

Air— “Bonie lass tak a man.”

JOCKEY’S taen the parting kiss,

O’er the mountains he is gane,

And with him is a’ my bliss,

Nought but griefs with me remain,

Spare my Love, ye winds that blaw, 5

Plashy sleets and beating rain!

Spare my Love, thou feath’ry snaw,

Drifting o’er the frozen plain!

When the shades of evening creep

O’er the day’s fair, gladsome e’e, 10

Sound and safely may he sleep,

Sweetly blythe his waukening be.

He will think on her he loves,

Fondly he’ll repeat her name;

For where’er he distant roves, 15

Jockey’s heart is still the same.

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

547.

Verses to Collector Mitchell

FRIEND of the Poet, tried and leal,

Wha, wanting thee, might beg or steal;

Alake, alake, the meikle deil

Wi’ a’ his witches

Are at it skelpin jig and reel, 5

In my poor pouches?

I modestly fu’ fain wad hint it,

That One-pound-one, I sairly want it;

If wi’ the hizzie down ye sent it,

It would be kind; 10

And while my heart wi’ life-blood dunted,

I’d bear’t in mind.

So may the Auld year gang out moanin’

To see the New come laden, groanin’,

Wi’ double plenty o’er the loanin’, 15

To thee and thine:

Domestic peace and comforts crownin’

The hale design.

POSTSCRIPT

Ye’ve heard this while how I’ve been lickit,

And by fell Death was nearly nickit; 20

Grim loon! he got me by the fecket,

And sair me sheuk;

But by gude luck I lap a wicket,

And turn’d a neuk.

But by that health, I’ve got a share o’t, 25

But by that life, I’m promis’d mair o’t,

My hale and wee, I’ll tak a care o’t,

A tentier way;

Then farewell folly, hide and hair o’t,

For ance and aye! 30

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

Final Poems (1796)

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

548.

The Dean of Faculty: A new Ballad

A NEW BALLAD

Tune— “The Dragon of Wantley.”

DIRE was the hate at old Harlaw,

That Scot to Scot did carry;

And dire the discord Langside saw

For beauteous, hapless Mary:

But Scot to Scot ne’er met so hot, 5

Or were more in fury seen, Sir,

Than ‘twixt Hal and Bob for the famous job,

Who should be the Faculty’s Dean, Sir.

This Hal for genius, wit and lore,

Among the first was number’d; 10

But pious Bob, ‘mid learning’s store,

Commandment the tenth remember’d:

Yet simple Bob the victory got,

And wan his heart’s desire,

Which shews that heaven can boil the pot, 15

Tho’ the devil piss in the fire.

Squire Hal, besides, had in this case

Pretensions rather brassy;

For talents, to deserve a place,

Are qualifications saucy. 20

So their worships of the Faculty,

Quite sick of merit’s rudeness,

Chose one who should owe it all, d’ye see,

To their gratis grace and goodness.

As once on Pisgah purg’d was the sight 25

Of a son of Circumcision,

So may be, on this Pisgah height,

Bob’s purblind mental vision —

Nay, Bobby’s mouth may be opened yet,

Till for eloquence you hail him, 30

And swear that he has the angel met

That met the ass of Balaam.

In your heretic sins may you live and die,

Ye heretic Eight-and-Tairty!

But accept, ye sublime Majority, 35

My congratulations hearty.

With your honours, as with a certain king,

In your servants this is striking,

The more incapacity they bring,

The more they’re to your liking. 40

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

549.

Epistle to Colonel de Peyster

MY honor’d Colonel, deep I feel

Your interest in the Poet’s weal;

Ah! now sma’ heart hae I to speel

The steep Parnassus,

Surrounded thus by bolus pill, 5

And potion glasses.

O what a canty world were it,

Would pain and care and sickness spare it;

And Fortune favour worth and merit

As they deserve; 10

And aye rowth o’ roast-beef and claret,

Syne, wha wad starve?

Dame Life, tho’ fiction out may trick her,

And in paste gems and frippery deck her;

Oh! flickering, feeble, and unsicker 15

I’ve found her still,

Aye wavering like the willow-wicker,

‘Tween good and ill.

Then that curst carmagnole, auld Satan,

Watches like baudrons by a ratton 20

Our sinfu’ saul to get a claut on,

Wi’felon ire;

Syne, whip! his tail ye’ll ne’er cast saut on,

He’s aff like fire.

Ah Nick! ah Nick! it is na fair, 25

First showing us the tempting ware,

Bright wines, and bonie lasses rare,

To put us daft

Syne weave, unseen, thy spider snare

O hell’s damned waft. 30

Poor Man, the flie, aft bizzes by,

And aft, as chance he comes thee nigh,

Thy damn’d auld elbow yeuks wi’joy

And hellish pleasure!

Already in thy fancy’s eye, 35

Thy sicker treasure.

Soon, heels o’er gowdie, in he gangs,

And, like a sheep-head on a tangs,

Thy girning laugh enjoys his pangs,

And murdering wrestle, 40

As, dangling in the wind, he hangs,

A gibbet’s tassel.

But lest you think I am uncivil

To plague you with this draunting drivel,

Abjuring a’ intentions evil, 45

I quat my pen,

The Lord preserve us frae the devil!

Amen! Amen!

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

550.

A Lass wi’ a Tocher (Song)

Tune— “Ballinamona Ora.”

AWA’ wi’ your witchcraft o’ Beauty’s alarms,

The slender bit Beauty you grasp in your arms,

O, gie me the lass that has acres o’ charms,

O, gie me the lass wi’ the weel-stockit farms.

Chorus. — Then hey, for a lass wi’ a tocher, 5

Then hey, for a lass wi’ a tocher;

Then hey, for a lass wi’ a tocher;

The nice yellow guineas for me.

Your Beauty’s a flower in the morning that blows,

And withers the faster, the faster it grows: 10

But the rapturous charm o’ the bonie green knowes,

Ilk spring they’re new deckit wi’ bonie white yowes.

Then hey, for a lass, &c.

And e’en when this Beauty your bosom hath blest

The brightest o’ Beauty may cloy when possess’d; 15

But the sweet, yellow darlings wi’ Geordie impress’d,

The langer ye hae them, the mair they’re carest.

Then hey, for a lass, &c.

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

551.

Ballad on Mr. Heron’s Election — No. 4

The Trogger.

Tune— “Buy Broom Besoms.”

WHA will buy my troggin, fine election ware,

Broken trade o’ Broughton, a’ in high repair?

Chorus. — Buy braw troggin frae the banks o’ Dee;

Wha wants troggin let him come to me.

There’s a noble Earl’s fame and high renown, 5

For an auld sang — it’s thought the gudes were stown —

Buy braw troggin, &c.

Here’s the worth o’ Broughton in a needle’s e’e;

Here’s a reputation tint by Balmaghie.

Buy braw troggin, &c. 10

Here’s its stuff and lining, Cardoness’ head,

Fine for a soger, a’ the wale o’ lead.

Buy braw troggin, &c.

Here’s a little wadset, Buittle’s scrap o’ truth,

Pawn’d in a gin-shop, quenching holy drouth. 15

Buy braw troggin, &c.

Here’s an honest conscience might a prince adorn;

Frae the downs o’ Tinwald, so was never worn.

Buy braw troggin, &c.

Here’s armorial bearings frae the manse o’ Urr; 20

The crest, a sour crab-apple, rotten at the core.

Buy braw troggin, &c.

Here’s the worth and wisdom Collieston can boast;

By a thievish midge they had been nearly lost.

Buy braw troggin, &c. 25

Here is Satan’s picture, like a bizzard gled,

Pouncing poor Redcastle, sprawlin’ like a taed.

Buy braw troggin, &c.

Here’s the font where Douglas stane and mortar names;

Lately used at Caily christening Murray’s crimes. 30

Buy braw troggin, &c.

Here is Murray’s fragments o’ the ten commands;

Gifted by black Jock to get them aff his hands.

Buy braw troggin, &c.

Saw ye e’er sic troggin? if to buy ye’re slack, 35

Hornie’s turnin chapman — he’ll buy a’ the pack.

Buy braw troggin, &c.

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

552.

Complimentary versicles to Jessie Lewars

THE TOAST

FILL me with the rosy wine,

Call a toast, a toast divine:

Giveth me Poet’s darling flame,

Lovely Jessie be her name;

Then thou mayest freely boast, 5

Thou hast given a peerless toast.

THE MENAGERIE

Talk not to me of savages,

From Afric’s burning sun;

No savage e’er could rend my heart,

As Jessie, thou hast done: 10

But Jessie’s lovely hand in mine,

A mutual faith to plight,

Not even to view the heavenly choir,

Would be so blest a sight.

JESSIE’S ILLNESS

Say, sages, what’s the charm on earth 15

Can turn Death’s dart aside!

It is not purity and worth,

Else Jessie had not died.

ON HER RECOVERY

But rarely seen since Nature’s birth,

The natives of the sky; 20

Yet still one seraph’s left on earth,

For Jessie did not die.

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

553.

O lay thy loof in mine, lass (Song)

Chorus — O lay thy loof in mine, lass,

In mine, lass, in mine, lass;

And swear on thy white hand, lass,

That thou wilt be my ain.

A SLAVE to Love’s unbounded sway, 5

He aft has wrought me meikle wae;

But now he is my deadly fae,

Unless thou be my ain.

O lay thy loof, &c.

There’s mony a lass has broke my rest, 10

That for a blink I hae lo’ed best;

But thou art Queen within my breast,

For ever to remain.

O lay thy loof, &c.

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

554.

A Health to ane I loe dear (Song)

Chorus — Here’s a health to ane I loe dear,

Here’s a health to ane I loe dear;

Thou art sweet as the smile when fond lovers meet,

And soft as their parting tear — Jessy.

ALTHO’ thou maun never be mine, 5

Altho’ even hope is denied;

‘Tis sweeter for thee despairing,

Than ought in the world beside — Jessy.

Here’s a health, &c.

I mourn thro’ the gay, gaudy day, 10

As hopeless I muse on thy charms;

But welcome the dream o’ sweet slumber,

For then I am lockt in thine arms — Jessy.

Here’s a health, &c.

I guess by the dear angel smile, 15

I guess by the love-rolling e’e;

But why urge the tender confession,

‘Gainst Fortune’s fell, cruel decree? — Jessy.

Here’s a health, &c.

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

555.

O wert thou in the cauld blast (Song)

O WERT thou in the cauld blast,

On yonder lea, on yonder lea,

My plaidie to the angry airt,

I’d shelter thee, I’d shelter thee;

Or did Misfortune’s bitter storms 5

Around thee blaw, around thee blaw,

Thy bield should be my bosom,

To share it a’, to share it a’.

Or were I in the wildest waste,

Sae black and bare, sae black and bare, 10

The desert were a Paradise,

If thou wert there, if thou wert there;

Or were I Monarch o’ the globe,

Wi’ thee to reign, wi’ thee to reign,

The brightest jewel in my Crown 15

Wad be my Queen, wad be my Queen.

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

556.

Inscription to Jessie Lewars

On a copy of the Scots Musical Museum, in four volumes, presented to her by Burns.

THINE be the volumes, Jessy fair,

And with them take the Poet’s prayer,

That Fate may, in her fairest page,

With ev’ry kindliest, best presage

Of future bliss, enroll thy name: 5

With native worth and spotless fame,

And wakeful caution, still aware

Of ill — but chief, Man’s felon snare;

All blameless joys on earth we find,

And all the treasures of the mind — 10

These be thy guardian and reward;

So prays thy faithful friend, the Bard.

DUMFRIES, June 26, 1769.

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

557.

Fairest Maid on Devon‘s Banks (Song)

Tune— “Rothiemurchie.”

Chorus — Fairest maid on Devon banks,

Crystal Devon, winding Devon,

Wilt thou lay that frown aside,

And smile as thou wert wont to do?

FULL well thou know’st I love thee dear, 5

Couldst thou to malice lend an ear!

O did not Love exclaim: “Forbear,

Nor use a faithful lover so.”

Fairest maid, &c.

Then come, thou fairest of the fair, 10

Those wonted smiles, O let me share;

And by thy beauteous self I swear,

No love but thine my heart shall know.

Fairest maid, &c.

Chronological List of Poems

Alphabetical List of Poems

The Poems

Mauchline Parish Church stands on the site of St Michael’s Church, dating back to the thirteenth century. In June 1786, Burns appeared before the Session and admitted his responsibility for Jean Armour’s pregnancy. He had to appear in Church on three occasions to receive public rebuke. Two years later, they both appeared again before the Session and it was agreed that their marriage would be finally regularised. Burns made peace with the Church by giving a guinea note for the relief of the poor.

Jean Armour, painted by John Alexander Gilfillan, 1822

LIST OF POEMS IN CHRONOLOGICAL ORDER

Juvenile Poems (1773-1779)

Handsome Nell (Song)

O Tibbie, I hae seen the day (Song)

I dream’d I lay (Song)

In the Character of a Ruined Farmer (Song)

Tragic Fragment — All villain as I am

The Tarbolton Lasses

Ah, woe is me, my Mother dear

Montgomerie’s Peggy (Song)

The Ploughman’s Life

1780

The Ronalds of the Bennals

Here’s to thy health, my bonie lass (Song)

The Lass of Cessnock Banks (Song)

Bonie Peggy Alison (Song)

Mary Morison (Song)

1781

Winter: A Dirge

A Prayer under the Pressure of Violent Anguish

Paraphrase of the First Psalm

The First Six Verses of the Ninetieth Psalm versified

A Prayer in the Prospect of Death

Stanzas, on the same Occasion

Fickle Fortune: A Fragment

Raging Fortune: A Fragment (Song)

I’ll go and be a Sodger

No Churchman am I (Song)

My Father was a Farmer: A Ballad

John Barleycorn: A Ballad

1783

The Death and Dying Words of Poor Mailie

Poor Mailie’s Elegy

The Rigs o’ Barley (Song)

Composed in August (Song)

My Nanie, O! (Song)

Green Grow the Rashes (Song)

Indeed will I, quo’ Findlay (Song)

1784

Remorse: A Fragment

Epitaph on William Hood, Senior

Epitaph on James Grieve

Epitaph on William Muir

Epitaph on my Ever Honoured Father

Ballad on the American War

Reply to an Announcement by J. Rankine

Epistle to John Rankine

A Poet’s Welcome to his Love-Begotten Daughter

O Leave Novels! (Song)

The Mauchline Lady: A Fragment

My Girl she’s Airy: A Fragment

The Belles of Mauchline

Epitaph on a Noisy Polemic

Epitaph on a Henpecked Squire

Epigram on the said Occasion

Another on the said Occasion

On Tam the Chapman

Epitaph on John Rankine

Lines on the Author’s Death

Man was made to Mourn: A Dirge

The Twa Herds; or, The Holy Tulyie

1785

Epistle to Davie, A Brother Poet

Holy Willie’s Prayer

Epitaph on Holy Willie

Death and Dr. Hornbook

Epistle on J. Lapraik

Second Epistle to J. Lapraik

Epistle to William Simson

One Night as I did Wander

My Jean! (Fragment of a Song)

Rantin, Rovin Robin (Song)

Elegy on the Death of Robert Ruisseaux

Epistle to John Goldie, in Kilmarnock

The Holy Fair

Third Epistle to J. Lapraik

Epistle to the Rev. John M’Math

Second Epistle to Davie

Young Peggy Blooms (Song)

Farewell to Ballochmyle (Song)

Her Flwoing Locks (Fragment of a Song)

Halloween

To a Mouse

Epitaph on John Dove, Innkeeper

Epitaph for James Smith

Adam Armour’s Prayer

The Jolly Beggars: A Cantata

For a’ that (Song)

Kissing my Katie (Song)

The Cotter’s Saturday Night

Address to the Deil

Scotch Drink

1786

The Auld Farmer’s New-Year-Morning Salutation to his Auld Mare, Maggie

The Twa Dogs

The Author’s Earnest Cry and Prayer

The Ordination

Epistle to James Smith

The Vision

Suppressed Stanzas of “The Vision”

The Rantin Dog, the Daddie o’t

Here’s his Health in Water

Address to the Unco Guid

The Inventory

To John Kennedy, Dumfries House

To Mr. M’Adam, of Craigen-Gillan

To a Louse

Inscribed on a Work of Hannah More’s

Composed in Spring (Song)

To a Mountain Daisy

To Ruin

The Lament

Despondency: An Ode

To Gavin Hamilton, Esq., Mauchline, recommending a Boy

Versified Reply to an Invitation

Will ye go to the Indies, my Mary? (Song)

My Highland Lassie, O

Epistle to a Young Friend

Address to Beelzebub

A Dream

A Dedication to Gavin Hamilton, Esq.

Versified Note to Dr. Mackenzie, Mauchline

The Farewell to the Brethren of St. James’s Lodge, Tarbolton

On a Scotch Bard, gone to the West Indies

Farewell to Eliza (Song)

A Bard’s Epitaph

Epitaph for Robert Aiken, Esq.

Epitaph for Gavin Hamilton, Esq.

Epitaph on “Wee Johnnie”

The Lass o’ Ballochmyle

Lines to an Old Sweetheart

Motto prefixed to the Author’s first Publication

Lines to Mr. John Kennedy

Lines written on a Bank-note

Stanzas on Naething

The Farewell

The Calf

Nature’s Law: A Poem

Willie Chalmers (Song)

Reply to a Trimming Epistle, received from a Tailor

The Brigs of Ayr

The Night was Still (Fragment of a Song)

Epigram on Rough Roads

Prayer — O Thou Dread Power

Farewell to the Banks of Ayr (Song)

Address to the Toothache

Lines on Meeting with Lord Daer

Masonic Song — Ye Sons of Old Killie

Tam Samson’s Elegy

Epistle to Major Logan

Fragment on Sensibility

A Winter Night

Yon Wild Mossy Mountains (Song)

Address to Edinburgh

Address to a Haggis

1787

To Miss Logan, with Beattie’s Poems

Mr. William Smellie: A Sketch

Rattlin, Roarin Willie (Song)

Bonie Dundee: A Fragment (Song)

Extempore in the Court of Session

Inscription for the Headstone of Fergusson the Poet

Lines Inscribed under Fergusson’s Portrait

Epistle to Mrs. Scott of Wauchope House

Verses inscribed under a Noble Earl’s Picture

Prologue, spoken by Mr. Woods at Edinburgh

The Bonie Moor-hen (Song)

My Lord a-Hunting he is gane (Song)

Epigram at RoslinInn

Epigram Addressed to an Artist

The Bookworms

On Elphinstone’s Translation of Martial’s Epigrams

A Bottle and Friend (Song)

Lines Written under the Picture of Miss Burns

Epitaph for William Nicol, High School, Edinburgh

Epitaph for Mr. William Michie, Schoolmaster

Boat Song — Hey, Ca’ Thro’

Address to Wm. Tytler, Esq., of Woodhouselee

Epigram to Miss Ainslie in Church

Burlesque Lament fo Wm. Creech’s Absence

Note to Mr. Renton of Lamerton

Elegy on Stella

The Bard at Inverary

Epigram to Miss Jean Scott

On the Death of John M’Leod, Esq.

Elegy on the Death of Sir James Hunter Blair

Impromptu on Carron Iron Works

To Miss Ferrier, enclosing Elegy on Sir J. H. Blair

Written by Somebody on the Window of an Inn at Stirling

Reply to the Threat of a Censorious Critic

The Libeller’s Self-reproof

Verses Written with a Pencil at the Inn at Kenmore

The Birks of Aberfeldy (Song)

The Humble Petition of Bruar Water

Lines on the Fall of Fyers

Epigram on Parting with a kind Host in the Highlands

Strathallan’s Lament (Song)

Verses on Castle Gordon

Lady Onlie, Honest Luckie (Song)

Theniel Menzies’ Bonie Mary (Song)

The Bonie Lass of Albany (Song)

On Scaring some Water-Fowl in Lock Turit

Blythe was She (Song)

A Rose-bud by my Early Walk (Song)

Epitaph for Mr. W. Cruickshank

The Banks of the Devon (Song)

Braving Angry Winer’s Storms (Song)

My Peggy’s Charms (Song)

The Young Highland Rover (Song)

Birthday Ode for 31st December, 1787

On the Death of Robert Dundas, Esq., of Arniston

Sylvander to Clarinda

1788

Love in the Guise of Friendship (Song)

Go on, Sweet Bird, and Soothe my Care (Song)

Clarina, Mistress of my Soul (Song)

I’m O’er Young to Marry yet (Song)

To the Weaver’s gin ye go (Song)

M’Pherson’s Farewell (Song)

Stay my Charmer (Song)

My Hoggie (Song)

Raving Winds Around her Blowing (Song)

Up in the Morning Early (Song)

How Long and Dreary is the Night (Song)

Hey, the Dusty Miller (Song)

Duncan Davison (Song)

The Lad they ca’ Jumpin John (Song)

Talk of him that’s Far Awa (Song)

To Daunton Me (Song)

The Winter it is Past (Song)

The Bonie Lad that’s Far Awa (Song)

Verses to Clarinda, with Drinking Glasses

The Chevalier’s Lament (Song)

Epistle to Hugh Parker

Of a’ the Airts the Wind can Blaw (Song)

I hae a Wife o’ my Ain (Song)

Verses on Friars’ Carse Hermitage (First Version)

To Alex. Cunningham, Esq., Writer, Edinburgh

Anna, thy Charms (Song)

The Fete Champetre

Epistle to Robert Graham, Esq., of Fintry

The Day Returns (Song)

O were I on Parnassus Hill (Song)

A Mother’s Lament for her Son’s Death

The Fall of the Leaf (Song)

I Reign in Jeanie’s Bosom (Song)

It is na, Jean, thy Bonie Face (Song)

Auld Lang Syne (Song)

My Bonie Mary (Song)

Verses on a Parting Kiss

Written in Friars’ Carse Hermitage (Second Version)

The Poet’s Progress

Elegy on the Year 1788

The Henpecked Husband

Versicles on Sign-Posts

1789

Robin Shure in Hairst (Song)

Ode, Sacred to the Memory of Mrs. Oswald of Auchencruive

Pegasus at Wanlockhead

Sappho Redivivus: A Fragment

She’s Fair and Fause (Song)

Impromptu Lines to Captain Riddell

Lines to John M’Murdo of Drumlanrig

Rhyming Reply to a Note from Captain Riddell

Caledonia: A Ballad

Verses to Miss Cruickshank

Beware o’ Bonie Ann (Song)

Ode on the Departed Regency Bill

Epistle to James Tennant of Glenconner

A New Psalm for the Chapel of Kilmarnock

Sketch in Verse, inscribed to the Right Hon. C. J. Fox

The Wounded Hare

Delia: An Ode

The Gardener wi’ his Paidle (Song)

On a Bank of Flowers (Song)

Young Jockie was the Blythest Lad (Song)

The Banks of Nith (Song)

Jamie, Come Try Me (Song)

I Love my Love in Secret (Song)

Sweet Tibbie Dunbar (Song)

The Captain’s Lady (Song)

John Anderson, My Jo (Song)

My Love she’s but a Lassie yet (Song)

Tam Glen (Song)

Carle, an’ the King come (Song)

The Laddie’s dear sel’ (Song)

Whistle o’er the lave o’t (Song)

My Eppie Adair (Song)

On the late Captain Grose’s Peregrinations

Epigram on Francis Grose the Antiquary

The Kirk of Scotland’s Alarm: A Ballad

Sonnet to R. Graham, Esq., on Receiving a Favour

Extemporaneous Effusion on being appointed to an Excise Division

Willie brew’d a Peck o’ Maut (Song)

Ca’ the Yowes to the Knowes (older set) (Song)

I Gaed a Waefu’ Gate Yestreen (Song)

Highland Harry back again (Song)

The Battle of Sherramuir (Song)

The Braes o’ Killiecrankie (Song)

Awa’, Whigs, Awa’ (Song)

A Waukrife Minnie (Song)

The Captive Ribband (Song)

Farewell to the Highlands (Song)

The Whistle: A Ballad

To Mary in Heaven (Song)

Epistle to Dr. Blacklock

The Five Carlins: An Election Ballad

Election Ballad for Westerha’

Prologue spoken at the Theatre of Dumfries

1790

Sketch — New Year’s Day, 1790

Scots Prologue for Mr. Sutherland

Lines to a Gentleman who sent a Newspaper

Elegy on Willie Nicol’s Mare

The Gowden Locks of Anna (Song)

I Murder hate (Song)

Gudewife, count the lawin (Song)

Election Ballad at close of Contest for representing the Dumfries Burghs, 1790

Elegy on Captain Matthew Henderson

The Epitaph on Captain Matthew Henderson

Verses on Captain Grose

Tam o’ Shanter: A Tale

On the Birth of a Posthumous Child

Elegy on the late Miss Burnet of Monboddo

1791

Lament of Mary, Queen of Scots

There’ll never be Peace till Jamie comes hame (Song)

Out over the Forth (Song)

The Banks o’ Doon (First Version) (Song)

The Banks o’ Doon (Second Version) (Song)

The Banks o’ Doon (Third Version) (Song)

Lament for James, Earl of Glencairn

Lines to Sir John Whitefoord, Bart

Craigieburn Wood (Song)

The Bonie Wee Thing (Song)

Epigram on Miss Davies

The Charms of Lovely Davies (Song)

What can a Young Lassie do wi’ an Auld Man? (Song)

The Posie (Song)

On Glenriddell’s Fox breaking his chain: A Fragment

Poem on Pastoral Poetry

Verses on the destruction of the Woods near Drumlanrig

The Gallant Weaver (Song)

Epigram at Brownhill Inn

You’re welcome, Willie Stewart (Song)

Lovely Polly Stewart (Song)

Damon and Sylvia (Fragment of a Song)

Johnie lad, Cock up your Beaver (Fragment of a Song)

My Eppie Macnab (Song)

Altho’ he has left me (Fragment of a Song)

My Tocher’s the Jewel (Song)

O for ane an’ twenty, Tam (Song)

Thou Fair Eliza (Song)

My Bonie Bell (Song)

Sweet Afton (Song)

Address to the shade of Thomson

Nithdale’s Welcome Hame (Song)

Frae the friends and land I love (Song)

Such a parcel of Rogues in a Nation (Song)

Ye Jacobites by Name (Song)

I hae been at Crookieden (Song)

Kenmure’s on and awa, Willie (Song)

Epistle to John Maxwell, Esq., of Terraughty

Second Epistle to Robert Graham, Esq., of Fintry

The Song of Death

Poem on Sensibility

Epigram — The Toad-eater

Epigram — Divine Service at Lamington

Epigram — The Keekin Glass

A Grace before Dinner

A Grace after Dinner

O May, thy Morn (Song)

Ae fond Kiss (Song)

Behold the Hour, the Boat, arrive (Song)

Thou Gloomy December (Song)

My Native Land sae far awa (Song)

1792

I do confess thou art sae fair (Song)

Lines on Fergusson, the Poet

The weary Pund o’ Tow (Song)

When she cam ben she bobbed (Song)

Scroggam, my dearie (Song)

My Collier Laddie (Song)

Sic a Wife as Willie had (Song)

Lady Mary Ann (Song)

Kellyburn Braes (Song)

The Slave’s Lament (Song)

O can ye Labour Lea? (Song)

The Deuks dang o’er my Daddie (Song)

The Deil’s awa wi’ the Exciseman (Song)

The Country Lass (Song)

Bessy and her Spinnin Wheel (Song)

Love for love (Fragment of a Song)

Saw ye Bonie Lesley (Song)

No cold approach (Fragment of a Song)

I’ll meet thee on the Lea Rig (Song)

My Wife’s a winsome wee thing (Song)

Highland Mary (Song)

Auld Rob Morris (Song)

The Rights of Women — Spoken by Miss Fontenelle

Epigram on Miss Fontenelle

Extempore on some commemorations of Thomson

Duncan Gray (Song)

A Health to them that’s awa (Song)

A Tippling Ballad — When Princes and Prelates, etc.

1793

Poortith cauld and restless love (Song)

Epigram on Politics

Braw Lads o’ Gala Water (Song)

Sonnet on the Author’s Birthday

Wandering Willie (Song)

Wandering Willie (Revised Version) (Song)

Lord Gregory: A Ballad

Open the door to me, oh (Song)

Lovely young Jessie (Song)

Meg o’ the Mill (Song)

Meg o’ the Mill (Another Version) (Song)

The Soldier’s Return: A Ballad

Epigram — The True Loyal Natives

Epigram — Commissary Goldie’s Brains

Lines Inscribed in a Lady’s Pocket Almanack

Epigram — Thanks for a National Victory

Commemoration of Rodney’s Victory

Epigram — The Raptures of Folly

Epigram — Kirk and State Excisemen

Extempore Reply to an Invitation

A Grace after Meat

Grace before and after Meat

Impromptu on Dumourier’s Desertion of the French Republican Army

The last time I cam o’er the Moor (Song)

Logan Braes (Song)

Blythe hae I been on yon hill (Song)

O were my love you lilac fair (Song)

Bonie Jean: A Ballad

Lines of John M’Murdo, Esq.

Epitaph on a Lap-dog

Epigrams against the Earl of Galloway

Epigram on the Laird of Laggan

Phillis the Fair (Song)

Had I a cave (Song)

By Allan Stream (Song)

Whistle and I’ll come to you (Song)

Phillis the Queen o’ the fair (Song)

Come let me take thee to my breast (Song)

Dainty Davie (Song)

Robert Bruce’s March to Bannockburn (Song)

Behold the hour, etc. (Second Version) (Song)

Down the Burn, Davie love (Song)

Thou hast left me ever, jamie (Song)

Where are the Joys I have met (Song)

Deluded swain, the pleasure (Song)

Thine am I, my faithful Fair (Song)

Impromptu on Mrs. Riddell’s Birthday

My Spouse Nancy (Song)

Address spoken by Miss Fontenelle

Complimentary Epigram to Mrs. Riddell

1794

Remorseful Apology

Wilt thou be my Dearie (Song)

A Fiddler in the North (Song)

The Minstel at Lincluden

A Vision

A red, red Rose (Song)

Young Jamie, pride of a’ the plain (Song)

The Flowery banks of Cree (Song)

Monody on a Lady, famed for her Caprice

Epitaph on the same

Epigram pinned to Mrs. Riddell’s carriage

Epitaph for Mr. Walter Riddell

Epistle from Esopus to Maria

Epitaph on a noted coxcomb

Epitaph on Captain Lascelles

Epitaph on Wm. Graham, Esq., of Mossknowe

Epitaph on John Busby, Esq., Tinwald Downs

Sonnet on the Death of Robert Riddell

The Lovely Lass o’ Inverness (Song)

Charlie, he’s my Darling (Song)

The Bannocks o’ Bear Meal (Song)

The Highland Balou (Song)

The Highland Widow’s Lament

It was a’ for our rightfu’ King (Song)

Ode for General Washington’s Birthday

Inscription to Miss Graham of Fintry

On the Seas and far away (Song)

Ca’ the Yowes to the Knowes (Song)

She says she loes me best of a’ (Song)

Epigram on Jessy Staig’s recovery

To the beautiful Miss Eliza J –- n, on her principles of Liberty and Eqality

On Chloris requesting a sprig of blossom’d thorn

On seeing Mrs. Kemble in Yarico

Epigram on a Country Laird (Cardoness)

Epigram on the same Laird’s Country Seat

Epigram on Dr. Babington’s looks

Epigram on a Suicide

Epigram on a Swearing Coxcomb

Epigram on an Innkeeper (“The Marquis”)

Epigram on Andrew Turner

Pretty Peg, my dearie (Song)

Esteem for Chloris

Saw you my dear, my Philly (Song)

How lang and dreary is the night (Song)

Inconstancy in love (Song)

The Lover’s Morning Salute to his Mistress

The Winter of Life (Song)

Behold, my love, how green the groves (Song)

The charming month of May (Song)

Lassie wi’ the Lint-white Locks (Song)

Dialogue Song — Philly and Willy

Contented wi’ little, and cantie wi’ mair (Song)

Farewell thou stream that winding flows (Song)

Canst thou leave me thus, my Katie (Song)

My Nanie’s awa (Song)

The Tear-drop— “Wae is my heart” (Song)

For the sake o’ Somebody (Song)

1795

A Man’s a Man for a’ that (Song)

Craigieburn Wood (Second Version) (Song)

The Solemn League and Covenant

Lines to John Syme, Esq., with a dozen of Porter

inscription on Mr. Syme’s crystal goblet

Apology to Mr. Syme for not dining with him

Epitaph for Mr. Gabriel Richardson, Brewer

Epigram on Mr. James Gracie

Bonie Peg-a-Ramsay (Song)

Inscription at Friars’ Carse Hermitage

There was a Bonie Lass (Fragment of a Song)

Wee Willie Gray (Fragment of a Song)

O aye my wife she dang me (Song)

Guid ale keeps the heart aboon (Song)

Steer her up and haud her gaun (Song)

The Lass o’ Ecclefechan (Song)

O let me in this ae night (Song)

I’ll aye ca’ in by yon town (Song)

O wat ye wha’s in yon town (Song)

Ballad on Mr. Heron’s Election — No. 1

Ballad on Mr. Heron’s Election — No. 2

Ballad on Mr. Heron’s Election — No. 3

Inscription for an Alter of Independence

The Cardin o’t, the Spinning o’t (Song)

The Cooper o’ Cuddy (Song)

The lass that made the bed to me (Song)

Had I the wyte, she bade me (Song)

The Dumfries Volunteers (Song)

Address to the Woodlark (Song)

On Chloris being ill (Song)

How cruel are the parents (Song)

Yonder pomp of costly fashion (Song)

Twas na her bonie blue e’e (Song)

Their groves o’ sweet myrtle (Song)

Forlorn, my love, no comfort here (Song)

Why tell the lover (Fragment of a Song)

The Braw Wooer (Song)

This is no my ain lassie (Song)

O bonie was yon rosy Brier (Song)

Now Spring has clad the grove in green (Song)

O that’s the lassie o’ my heart (Song)

Inscription to Chloris

Leezie Lindsay (Fragment of a Song)

The Wren’s Nest (Fragment of a Song)

News, lassies, news (Song)

Crowdie ever mair (Song)

Mally’s meek, Mally’s sweet (Song)

Jockie’s taen the parting Kiss (Song)

Verses to Collector Mitchell

Final Poems (1796)

The Dean of Faculty: A new Ballad

Epistle to Colonel de Peyster

A Lass wi’ a Tocher (Song)

Ballad on Mr. Heron’s Election — No. 4

Complimentary versicles to Jessie Lewars

O lay thy loof in mine, lass (Song)

A Health to ane I loe dear (Song)

O wert thou in the cauld blast (Song)

Inscription to Jessie Lewars

Fairest Maid on Devon’s Banks (Song)

A Victorian etching of the great poet

LIST OF POEMS IN ALPHABETICAL ORDER

A-D E-H I-L M-O P-S T-V W-Z

A Bard’s Epitaph

A Bottle and Friend (Song)

A Dedication to Gavin Hamilton, Esq.

A Dream

A Fiddler in the North (Song)

A Grace after Dinner

A Grace after Meat

A Grace before Dinner

A Health to ane I loe dear (Song)

A Health to them that’s awa (Song)

A Lass wi’ a Tocher (Song)

A Man’s a Man for a’ that (Song)

A Mother’s Lament for her Son’s Death

A New Psalm for the Chapel of Kilmarnock

A Poet’s Welcome to his Love-Begotten Daughter

A Prayer in the Prospect of Death

A Prayer under the Pressure of Violent Anguish

A red, red Rose (Song)

A Rose-bud by my Early Walk (Song)

A Tippling Ballad — When Princes and Prelates, etc.

A Vision

A Waukrife Minnie (Song)

A Winter Night

Adam Armour’s Prayer

Address spoken by Miss Fontenelle

Address to a Haggis

Address to Beelzebub

Address to Edinburgh

Address to the Deil

Address to the shade of Thomson

Address to the Toothache

Address to the Unco Guid

Address to the Woodlark (Song)

Address to Wm. Tytler, Esq., of Woodhouselee

Ae fond Kiss (Song)

Ah, woe is me, my Mother dear

Altho’ he has left me (Fragment of a Song)

Anna, thy Charms (Song)

Another on the said Occasion

Apology to Mr. Syme for not dining with him

Auld Lang Syne (Song)

Auld Rob Morris (Song)

Awa’, Whigs, Awa’ (Song)

Ballad on Mr. Heron’s Election — No. 1

Ballad on Mr. Heron’s Election — No. 2

Ballad on Mr. Heron’s Election — No. 3

Ballad on Mr. Heron’s Election — No. 4

Ballad on the American War

Behold the hour, etc. (Second Version) (Song)

Behold the Hour, the Boat, arrive (Song)

Behold, my love, how green the groves (Song)

Bessy and her Spinnin Wheel (Song)

Beware o’ Bonie Ann (Song)

Birthday Ode for 31st December, 1787

Blythe hae I been on yon hill (Song)

Blythe was She (Song)

Boat Song — Hey, Ca’ Thro’

Bonie Dundee: A Fragment (Song)

Bonie Jean: A Ballad

Bonie Peg-a-Ramsay (Song)

Bonie Peggy Alison (Song)

Braving Angry Winer’s Storms (Song)

Braw Lads o’ Gala Water (Song)

Burlesque Lament fo Wm. Creech’s Absence

By Allan Stream (Song)

Ca’ the Yowes to the Knowes (older set) (Song)

Ca’ the Yowes to the Knowes (Song)

Caledonia: A Ballad

Canst thou leave me thus, my Katie (Song)

Carle, an’ the King come (Song)

Charlie, he’s my Darling (Song)

Clarina, Mistress of my Soul (Song)

Come let me take thee to my breast (Song)

Commemoration of Rodney’s Victory

Complimentary Epigram to Mrs. Riddell

Complimentary versicles to Jessie Lewars

Composed in August (Song)

Composed in Spring (Song)

Contented wi’ little, and cantie wi’ mair (Song)

Craigieburn Wood (Second Version) (Song)

Craigieburn Wood (Song)

Crowdie ever mair (Song)

Dainty Davie (Song)

Damon and Sylvia (Fragment of a Song)

Death and Dr. Hornbook

Delia: An Ode

Deluded swain, the pleasure (Song)

Despondency: An Ode

Dialogue Song — Philly and Willy

Down the Burn, Davie love (Song)

Duncan Davison (Song)

Duncan Gray (Song)

Election Ballad at close of Contest for representing the Dumfries Burghs, 1790

Election Ballad for Westerha’

Elegy on Captain Matthew Henderson

Elegy on Stella

Elegy on the Death of Robert Ruisseaux

Elegy on the Death of Sir James Hunter Blair

Elegy on the late Miss Burnet of Monboddo

Elegy on the Year 1788

Elegy on Willie Nicol’s Mare

Epigram — Commissary Goldie’s Brains

Epigram — Divine Service at Lamington

Epigram — Kirk and State Excisemen

Epigram — Thanks for a National Victory

Epigram — The Keekin Glass

Epigram — The Raptures of Folly

Epigram — The Toad-eater

Epigram — The True Loyal Natives

Epigram Addressed to an Artist

Epigram at Brownhill Inn

Epigram at RoslinInn

Epigram on a Country Laird (Cardoness)

Epigram on a Suicide

Epigram on a Swearing Coxcomb

Epigram on an Innkeeper (“The Marquis”)

Epigram on Andrew Turner

Epigram on Dr. Babington’s looks

Epigram on Francis Grose the Antiquary

Epigram on Jessy Staig’s recovery

Epigram on Miss Davies

Epigram on Miss Fontenelle

Epigram on Mr. James Gracie

Epigram on Parting with a kind Host in the Highlands

Epigram on Politics

Epigram on Rough Roads

Epigram on the Laird of Laggan

Epigram on the said Occasion

Epigram on the same Laird’s Country Seat

Epigram pinned to Mrs. Riddell’s carriage

Epigram to Miss Ainslie in Church

Epigram to Miss Jean Scott

Epigrams against the Earl of Galloway

Epistle from Esopus to Maria

Epistle on J. Lapraik

Epistle to a Young Friend

Epistle to Colonel de Peyster

Epistle to Davie, A Brother Poet

Epistle to Dr. Blacklock

Epistle to Hugh Parker

Epistle to James Smith

Epistle to James Tennant of Glenconner

Epistle to John Goldie, in Kilmarnock

Epistle to John Maxwell, Esq., of Terraughty

Epistle to John Rankine

Epistle to Major Logan

Epistle to Mrs. Scott of Wauchope House

Epistle to Robert Graham, Esq., of Fintry

Epistle to the Rev. John M’Math

Epistle to William Simson

Epitaph for Gavin Hamilton, Esq.

Epitaph for James Smith

Epitaph for Mr. Gabriel Richardson, Brewer

Epitaph for Mr. W. Cruickshank

Epitaph for Mr. Walter Riddell

Epitaph for Mr. William Michie, Schoolmaster

Epitaph for Robert Aiken, Esq.

Epitaph for William Nicol, High School, Edinburgh

Epitaph on “Wee Johnnie”

Epitaph on a Henpecked Squire

Epitaph on a Lap-dog

Epitaph on a Noisy Polemic

Epitaph on a noted coxcomb

Epitaph on Captain Lascelles

Epitaph on Holy Willie

Epitaph on James Grieve

Epitaph on John Busby, Esq., Tinwald Downs

Epitaph on John Dove, Innkeeper

Epitaph on John Rankine

Epitaph on my Ever Honoured Father

Epitaph on the same

Epitaph on William Hood, Senior

Epitaph on William Muir

Epitaph on Wm. Graham, Esq., of Mossknowe

Esteem for Chloris

Extemporaneous Effusion on being appointed to an Excise Division

Extempore in the Court of Session

Extempore on some commemorations of Thomson

Extempore Reply to an Invitation

Fairest Maid on Devon’s Banks (Song)

Farewell thou stream that winding flows (Song)

Farewell to Ballochmyle (Song)

Farewell to Eliza (Song)

Farewell to the Banks of Ayr (Song)

Farewell to the Highlands (Song)

Fickle Fortune: A Fragment

For a’ that (Song)

For the sake o’ Somebody (Song)

Forlorn, my love, no comfort here (Song)

Frae the friends and land I love (Song)

Fragment on Sensibility

Go on, Sweet Bird, and Soothe my Care (Song)

Grace before and after Meat

Green Grow the Rashes (Song)

Gudewife, count the lawin (Song)

Guid ale keeps the heart aboon (Song)

Had I a cave (Song)

Had I the wyte, she bade me (Song)

Halloween

Handsome Nell (Song)

Her Flwoing Locks (Fragment of a Song)

Here’s his Health in Water

Here’s to thy health, my bonie lass (Song)

Hey, the Dusty Miller (Song)

Highland Harry back again (Song)

Highland Mary (Song)

Holy Willie’s Prayer

How cruel are the parents (Song)

How lang and dreary is the night (Song)

How Long and Dreary is the Night (Song)

I do confess thou art sae fair (Song)

I dream’d I lay (Song)

I Gaed a Waefu’ Gate Yestreen (Song)

I hae a Wife o’ my Ain (Song)

I hae been at Crookieden (Song)

I Love my Love in Secret (Song)

I Murder hate (Song)

I Reign in Jeanie’s Bosom (Song)

I’ll aye ca’ in by yon town (Song)

I’ll go and be a Sodger

I’ll meet thee on the Lea Rig (Song)

I’m O’er Young to Marry yet (Song)

Impromptu Lines to Captain Riddell

Impromptu on Carron Iron Works

Impromptu on Dumourier’s Desertion of the French Republican Army

Impromptu on Mrs. Riddell’s Birthday

In the Character of a Ruined Farmer (Song)

Inconstancy in love (Song)

Indeed will I, quo’ Findlay (Song)

Inscribed on a Work of Hannah More’s

Inscription at Friars’ Carse Hermitage

Inscription for an Alter of Independence

Inscription for the Headstone of Fergusson the Poet

inscription on Mr. Syme’s crystal goblet

Inscription to Chloris

Inscription to Jessie Lewars

Inscription to Miss Graham of Fintry

It is na, Jean, thy Bonie Face (Song)

It was a’ for our rightfu’ King (Song)

Jamie, Come Try Me (Song)

Jockie’s taen the parting Kiss (Song)

John Anderson, My Jo (Song)

John Barleycorn: A Ballad

Johnie lad, Cock up your Beaver (Fragment of a Song)

Kellyburn Braes (Song)

Kenmure’s on and awa, Willie (Song)

Kissing my Katie (Song)

Lady Mary Ann (Song)

Lady Onlie, Honest Luckie (Song)

Lament for James, Earl of Glencairn

Lament of Mary, Queen of Scots

Lassie wi’ the Lint-white Locks (Song)

Leezie Lindsay (Fragment of a Song)

Lines Inscribed in a Lady’s Pocket Almanack

Lines Inscribed under Fergusson’s Portrait

Lines of John M’Murdo, Esq.

Lines on Fergusson, the Poet

Lines on Meeting with Lord Daer

Lines on the Author’s Death

Lines on the Fall of Fyers

Lines to a Gentleman who sent a Newspaper

Lines to an Old Sweetheart

Lines to John M’Murdo of Drumlanrig

Lines to John Syme, Esq., with a dozen of Porter

Lines to Mr. John Kennedy

Lines to Sir John Whitefoord, Bart

Lines written on a Bank-note

Lines Written under the Picture of Miss Burns

Logan Braes (Song)

Lord Gregory: A Ballad

Love for love (Fragment of a Song)

Love in the Guise of Friendship (Song)

Lovely Polly Stewart (Song)

Lovely young Jessie (Song)

M’Pherson’s Farewell (Song)

Mally’s meek, Mally’s sweet (Song)

Man was made to Mourn: A Dirge

Mary Morison (Song)

Masonic Song — Ye Sons of Old Killie

Meg o’ the Mill (Another Version) (Song)

Meg o’ the Mill (Song)

Monody on a Lady, famed for her Caprice

Montgomerie’s Peggy (Song)

Motto prefixed to the Author’s first Publication

Mr. William Smellie: A Sketch

My Bonie Bell (Song)

My Bonie Mary (Song)

My Collier Laddie (Song)

My Eppie Adair (Song)

My Eppie Macnab (Song)

My Father was a Farmer: A Ballad

My Girl she’s Airy: A Fragment

My Highland Lassie, O

My Hoggie (Song)

My Jean! (Fragment of a Song)

My Lord a-Hunting he is gane (Song)

My Love she’s but a Lassie yet (Song)

My Nanie, O! (Song)

My Nanie’s awa (Song)

My Native Land sae far awa (Song)

My Peggy’s Charms (Song)

My Spouse Nancy (Song)

My Tocher’s the Jewel (Song)

My Wife’s a winsome wee thing (Song)

Nature’s Law: A Poem

News, lassies, news (Song)

Nithdale’s Welcome Hame (Song)

No Churchman am I (Song)

No cold approach (Fragment of a Song)

Note to Mr. Renton of Lamerton

Now Spring has clad the grove in green (Song)

O aye my wife she dang me (Song)

O bonie was yon rosy Brier (Song)

O can ye Labour Lea? (Song)

O for ane an’ twenty, Tam (Song)

O lay thy loof in mine, lass (Song)

O Leave Novels! (Song)

O let me in this ae night (Song)

O May, thy Morn (Song)

O that’s the lassie o’ my heart (Song)

O Tibbie, I hae seen the day (Song)

O wat ye wha’s in yon town (Song)

O were I on Parnassus Hill (Song)

O were my love you lilac fair (Song)

O wert thou in the cauld blast (Song)

Ode for General Washington’s Birthday

Ode on the Departed Regency Bill

Ode, Sacred to the Memory of Mrs. Oswald of Auchencruive

Of a’ the Airts the Wind can Blaw (Song)

On a Bank of Flowers (Song)

On a Scotch Bard, gone to the West Indies

On Chloris being ill (Song)

On Chloris requesting a sprig of blossom’d thorn

On Elphinstone’s Translation of Martial’s Epigrams

On Glenriddell’s Fox breaking his chain: A Fragment

On Scaring some Water-Fowl in Lock Turit

On seeing Mrs. Kemble in Yarico

On Tam the Chapman

On the Birth of a Posthumous Child

On the Death of John M’Leod, Esq.

On the Death of Robert Dundas, Esq., of Arniston

On the late Captain Grose’s Peregrinations

On the Seas and far away (Song)

One Night as I did Wander

Open the door to me, oh (Song)

Out over the Forth (Song)

Paraphrase of the First Psalm

Pegasus at Wanlockhead

Phillis the Fair (Song)

Phillis the Queen o’ the fair (Song)

Poem on Pastoral Poetry

Poem on Sensibility

Poor Mailie’s Elegy

Poortith cauld and restless love (Song)

Prayer — O Thou Dread Power

Pretty Peg, my dearie (Song)

Prologue spoken at the Theatre of Dumfries

Prologue, spoken by Mr. Woods at Edinburgh

Raging Fortune: A Fragment (Song)

Rantin, Rovin Robin (Song)

Rattlin, Roarin Willie (Song)

Raving Winds Around her Blowing (Song)

Remorse: A Fragment

Remorseful Apology

Reply to a Trimming Epistle, received from a Tailor

Reply to an Announcement by J. Rankine

Reply to the Threat of a Censorious Critic

Rhyming Reply to a Note from Captain Riddell

Robert Bruce’s March to Bannockburn (Song)

Robin Shure in Hairst (Song)

Sappho Redivivus: A Fragment

Saw ye Bonie Lesley (Song)

Saw you my dear, my Philly (Song)

Scotch Drink

Scots Prologue for Mr. Sutherland

Scroggam, my dearie (Song)

Second Epistle to Davie

Second Epistle to J. Lapraik

Second Epistle to Robert Graham, Esq., of Fintry

She says she loes me best of a’ (Song)

She’s Fair and Fause (Song)

Sic a Wife as Willie had (Song)

Sketch — New Year’s Day, 1790

Sketch in Verse, inscribed to the Right Hon. C. J. Fox

Sonnet on the Author’s Birthday

Sonnet on the Death of Robert Riddell

Sonnet to R. Graham, Esq., on Receiving a Favour

Stanzas on Naething

Stanzas, on the same Occasion

Stay my Charmer (Song)

Steer her up and haud her gaun (Song)

Strathallan’s Lament (Song)

Such a parcel of Rogues in a Nation (Song)

Suppressed Stanzas of “The Vision”

Sweet Afton (Song)

Sweet Tibbie Dunbar (Song)

Sylvander to Clarinda

Talk of him that’s Far Awa (Song)

Tam Glen (Song)

Tam o’ Shanter: A Tale

Tam Samson’s Elegy

The Auld Farmer’s New-Year-Morning Salutation to his Auld Mare, Maggie

The Author’s Earnest Cry and Prayer

The Banks o’ Doon (First Version) (Song)

The Banks o’ Doon (Second Version) (Song)

The Banks o’ Doon (Third Version) (Song)

The Banks of Nith (Song)

The Banks of the Devon (Song)

The Bannocks o’ Bear Meal (Song)

The Bard at Inverary

The Battle of Sherramuir (Song)

The Belles of Mauchline

The Birks of Aberfeldy (Song)

The Bonie Lad that’s Far Awa (Song)

The Bonie Lass of Albany (Song)

The Bonie Moor-hen (Song)

The Bonie Wee Thing (Song)

The Bookworms

The Braes o’ Killiecrankie (Song)

The Braw Wooer (Song)

The Brigs of Ayr

The Calf

The Captain’s Lady (Song)

The Captive Ribband (Song)

The Cardin o’t, the Spinning o’t (Song)

The charming month of May (Song)

The Charms of Lovely Davies (Song)

The Chevalier’s Lament (Song)

The Cooper o’ Cuddy (Song)

The Cotter’s Saturday Night

The Country Lass (Song)

The Day Returns (Song)

The Dean of Faculty: A new Ballad

The Death and Dying Words of Poor Mailie

The Deil’s awa wi’ the Exciseman (Song)

The Deuks dang o’er my Daddie (Song)

The Dumfries Volunteers (Song)

The Epitaph on Captain Matthew Henderson

The Fall of the Leaf (Song)

The Farewell

The Farewell to the Brethren of St. James’s Lodge, Tarbolton

The Fete Champetre

The First Six Verses of the Ninetieth Psalm versified

The Five Carlins: An Election Ballad

The Flowery banks of Cree (Song)

The Gallant Weaver (Song)

The Gardener wi’ his Paidle (Song)

The Gowden Locks of Anna (Song)

The Henpecked Husband

The Highland Balou (Song)

The Highland Widow’s Lament

The Holy Fair

The Humble Petition of Bruar Water

The Inventory

The Jolly Beggars: A Cantata

The Kirk of Scotland’s Alarm: A Ballad

The Lad they ca’ Jumpin John (Song)

The Laddie’s dear sel’ (Song)

The Lament

The Lass o’ Ballochmyle

The Lass o’ Ecclefechan (Song)

The Lass of Cessnock Banks (Song)

The lass that made the bed to me (Song)

The last time I cam o’er the Moor (Song)

The Libeller’s Self-reproof

The Lovely Lass o’ Inverness (Song)

The Lover’s Morning Salute to his Mistress

The Mauchline Lady: A Fragment

The Minstel at Lincluden

The Night was Still (Fragment of a Song)

The Ordination

The Ploughman’s Life

The Poet’s Progress

The Posie (Song)

The Rantin Dog, the Daddie o’t

The Rights of Women — Spoken by Miss Fontenelle

The Rigs o’ Barley (Song)

The Ronalds of the Bennals

The Slave’s Lament (Song)

The Soldier’s Return: A Ballad

The Solemn League and Covenant

The Song of Death

The Tarbolton Lasses

The Tear-drop— “Wae is my heart” (Song)

The Twa Dogs

The Twa Herds; or, The Holy Tulyie

The Vision

The weary Pund o’ Tow (Song)

The Whistle: A Ballad

The Winter it is Past (Song)

The Winter of Life (Song)

The Wounded Hare

The Wren’s Nest (Fragment of a Song)

The Young Highland Rover (Song)

Their groves o’ sweet myrtle (Song)

Theniel Menzies’ Bonie Mary (Song)

There was a Bonie Lass (Fragment of a Song)

There’ll never be Peace till Jamie comes hame (Song)

Thine am I, my faithful Fair (Song)

Third Epistle to J. Lapraik

This is no my ain lassie (Song)

Thou Fair Eliza (Song)

Thou Gloomy December (Song)

Thou hast left me ever, jamie (Song)

To a Louse

To a Mountain Daisy

To a Mouse

To Alex. Cunningham, Esq., Writer, Edinburgh

To Daunton Me (Song)

To Gavin Hamilton, Esq., Mauchline, recommending a Boy

To John Kennedy, Dumfries House

To Mary in Heaven (Song)

To Miss Ferrier, enclosing Elegy on Sir J. H. Blair

To Miss Logan, with Beattie’s Poems

To Mr. M’Adam, of Craigen-Gillan

To Ruin

To the beautiful Miss Eliza J –- n, on her principles of Liberty and Eqality

To the Weaver’s gin ye go (Song)

Tragic Fragment — All villain as I am

Twas na her bonie blue e’e (Song)

Up in the Morning Early (Song)

Verses inscribed under a Noble Earl’s Picture

Verses on a Parting Kiss

Verses on Captain Grose

Verses on Castle Gordon

Verses on Friars’ Carse Hermitage (First Version)

Verses on the destruction of the Woods near Drumlanrig

Verses to Clarinda, with Drinking Glasses

Verses to Collector Mitchell

Verses to Miss Cruickshank

Verses Written with a Pencil at the Inn at Kenmore

Versicles on Sign-Posts

Versified Note to Dr. Mackenzie, Mauchline

Versified Reply to an Invitation

Wandering Willie (Revised Version) (Song)

Wandering Willie (Song)

Wee Willie Gray (Fragment of a Song)

What can a Young Lassie do wi’ an Auld Man? (Song)

When she cam ben she bobbed (Song)

Where are the Joys I have met (Song)

Whistle and I’ll come to you (Song)

Whistle o’er the lave o’t (Song)

Why tell the lover (Fragment of a Song)

Will ye go to the Indies, my Mary? (Song)

Willie brew’d a Peck o’ Maut (Song)

Willie Chalmers (Song)

Wilt thou be my Dearie (Song)

Winter: A Dirge

Written by Somebody on the Window of an Inn at Stirling

Written in Friars’ Carse Hermitage (Second Version)

Ye Jacobites by Name (Song)

Yon Wild Mossy Mountains (Song)

Yonder pomp of costly fashion (Song)

You’re welcome, Willie Stewart (Song)

Young Jamie, pride of a’ the plain (Song)

Young Jockie was the Blythest Lad (Song)

Young Peggy Blooms (Song)

Glossary of Scots Words

A glossary of Scots dialect words is provided in this section of the eBook. Select a letter to navigate to the location of the word you wish to find. It is advisable to bookmark this section for later use.

A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W Y

A

A’, all.

A-back, behind, away.

Abiegh, aloof, off.

Ablins, v. aiblins.

Aboon, above up.

Abread, abroad.

Abreed, in breadth.

Ae, one.

Aff, off.

Aff-hand, at once.

Aff-loof, offhand.

A-fiel, afield.

Afore, before.

Aft, oft.

Aften, often.

Agley, awry.

Ahin, behind.

Aiblins, perhaps.

Aidle, foul water.

Aik, oak.

Aiken, oaken.

Ain, own.

Air, early.

Airle, earnest money.

Airn, iron.

Airt, direction.

Airt, to direct.

Aith, oath.

Aits, oats.

Aiver, an old horse.

Aizle, a cinder.

A-jee, ajar; to one side.

Alake, alas.

Alane, alone.

Alang, along.

Amaist, almost.

Amang, among.

An, if.

An’, and.

Ance, once.

Ane, one.

Aneath, beneath.

Anes, ones.

Anither, another.

Aqua-fontis, spring water.

Aqua-vit&ae, whiskey.

Arle, v. airle.

Ase, ashes.

Asklent, askew, askance.

Aspar, aspread.

Asteer, astir.

A’thegither, altogether.

Athort, athwart.

Atweel, in truth.

Atween, between.

Aught, eight.

Aught, possessed of.

Aughten, eighteen.

Aughtlins, at all.

Auld, old.

Auldfarran, auldfarrant, shrewd, old-fashioned, sagacious.

Auld Reekie, Edinburgh.

Auld-warld, old-world.

Aumous, alms.

Ava, at all.

Awa, away.

Awald, backways and doubled up.

Awauk, awake.

Awauken, awaken.

Awe, owe.

Awkart, awkward.

Awnie, bearded.

Ayont, beyond.

B

Ba’, a ball.

Backet, bucket, box.

Backit, backed.

Backlins-comin, coming back.

Back-yett, gate at the back.

Bade, endured.

Bade, asked.

Baggie, stomach.

Baig’nets, bayonets.

Baillie, magistrate of a Scots burgh.

Bainie, bony.

Bairn, child.

Bairntime, brood.

Baith, both.

Bakes, biscuits.

Ballats, ballads.

Balou, lullaby.

Ban, swear.

Ban’, band (of the Presbyterian clergyman).

Bane, bone.

Bang, an effort; a blow; a large number.

Bang, to thump.

Banie, v. bainie.

Bannet, bonnet.

Bannock, bonnock, a thick oatmeal cake.

Bardie, dim. of bard.

Barefit, barefooted.

Barket, barked.

Barley-brie, or bree, barley-brew-ale or whiskey.

Barm, yeast.

Barmie, yeasty.

Barn-yard, stackyard.

Bartie, the Devil.

Bashing, abashing.

Batch, a number.

Batts, the botts; the colic.

Bauckie-bird, the bat.

Baudrons, Baudrans, the cat.

Bauk, cross-beam.

Bauk, v. bawk.

Bauk-en’, beam-end.

Bauld, bold.

Bauldest, boldest.

Bauldly, boldly.

Baumy, balmy.

Bawbee, a half-penny.

Bawdrons, v. baudrons.

Bawk, a field path.

Baws’nt, white-streaked.

Bear, barley.

Beas’, beasts, vermin.

Beastie, dim. of beast.

Beck, a curtsy.

Beet, feed, kindle.

Beild, v. biel.

Belang, belong.

Beld, bald.

Bellum, assault.

Bellys, bellows.

Belyve, by and by.

Ben, a parlor (i. e., the inner apartment); into the parlor.

Benmost, inmost.

Be-north, to the northward of.

Be-south, to the southward of.

Bethankit, grace after meat.

Beuk, a book: devil’s pictur’d beuks — playing-cards.

Bicker, a wooden cup.

Bicker, a short run.

Bicker, to flow swiftly and with a slight noise.

Bickerin, noisy contention.

Bickering, hurrying.

Bid, to ask, to wish, to offer.

Bide, abide, endure.

Biel, bield, a shelter; a sheltered spot.

Biel, comfortable.

Bien, comfortable.

Bien, bienly, comfortably.

Big, to build.

Biggin, building.

Bike, v. byke.

Bill, the bull.

Billie, fellow, comrade, brother.

Bings, heaps.

Birdie, dim. of bird; also maidens.

Birk, the birch.

Birken, birchen.

Birkie, a fellow.

Birr, force, vigor.

Birring, whirring.

Birses, bristles.

Birth, berth.

Bit, small (e.g., bit lassie).

Bit, nick of time.

Bitch-fou, completely drunk.

Bizz, a flurry.

Bizz, buzz.

Bizzard, the buzzard.

Bizzie, busy.

Black-bonnet, the Presbyterian elder.

Black-nebbit, black-beaked.

Blad, v. blaud.

Blae, blue, livid.

Blastet, blastit, blasted.

Blastie, a blasted (i. e., damned) creature; a little wretch.

Blate, modest, bashful.

Blather, bladder.

Blaud, a large quantity.

Blaud, to slap, pelt.

Blaw, blow.

Blaw, to brag.

Blawing, blowing.

Blawn, blown.

Bleer, to blear.

Bleer’t, bleared.

Bleeze, blaze.

Blellum, a babbler; a railer; a blusterer.

Blether, blethers, nonsense.

Blether, to talk nonsense.

Bletherin’, talking nonsense.

Blin’, blind.

Blink, a glance, a moment.

Blink, to glance, to shine.

Blinkers, spies, oglers.

Blinkin, smirking, leering.

Blin’t, blinded.

Blitter, the snipe.

Blue-gown, the livery of the licensed beggar.

Bluid, blood.

Bluidy, bloody.

Blume, to bloom.

Bluntie, a stupid.

Blypes, shreds.

Bobbed, curtsied.

Bocked, vomited.

Boddle, a farthing.

Bode, look for.

Bodkin, tailor’s needle.

Body, bodie, a person.

Boggie, dim. of bog.

Bogle, a bogie, a hobgoblin.

Bole, a hole, or small recess in the wall.

Bonie, bonnie, pretty, beautiful.

Bonilie, prettily.

Bonnock, v. Bannock.

‘Boon, above.

Boord, board, surface.

Boord-en’, board-end.

Boortress, elders.

Boost, must needs.

Boot, payment to the bargain.

Bore, a chink, recess.

Botch, an angry tumor.

Bouk, a human trunk; bulk.

Bountith, bounty.

‘Bout, about.

Bow-hough’d, bandy-thighed.

Bow-kail, cabbage.

Bow’t, bent.

Brachens, ferns.

Brae, the slope of a hill.

Braid, broad.

Broad-claith, broad-cloth.

Braik, a harrow.

Braing’t, plunged.

Brak, broke.

Brak’s, broke his.

Brankie, gay, fine.

Branks, a wooden curb, a bridle.

Bran’y, brandy.

Brash, short attack.

Brats, small pieces, rags.

Brats, small children.

Brattle, a scamper.

Brattle, noisy onset.

Braw, handsome, fine, gaily dressed.

Brawlie, finely, perfectly, heartily.

Braxies, sheep that have died of braxie (a disease).

Breastie, dim. of breast.

Breastit, sprang forward.

Brechan, ferns.

Breeks, breeches.

Breer, brier.

Brent, brand.

Brent, straight, steep (i. e., not sloping from baldness).

Brie, v. barley-brie.

Brief, writ.

Brier, briar.

Brig, bridge.

Brisket, breast.

Brither, brother.

Brock, a badger.

Brogue, a trick.

Broo, soup, broth, water; liquid in which anything is cooked.

Brooses, wedding races from the church to the home of the bride.

Brose, a thick mixture of meal and warm water; also a synonym for porridge.

Browster wives, ale wives.

Brugh, a burgh.

Brulzie, brulyie, a brawl.

Brunstane, brimstone.

Brunt, burned.

Brust, burst.

Buckie, dim. of buck; a smart younker.

Buckle, a curl.

Buckskin, Virginian: the buckskin kye, negroes.

Budget, tinker’s bag of tools.

Buff, to bang, to thump.

Bughtin, folding.

Buirdly, stalwart.

Bum, the buttocks.

Bum, to hum.

Bum-clock, beetle, cockchafer, Junebug.

Bummle, a drone, a useless fellow.

Bunker, a seat.

Bunters, harlots.

Burdies, dim. of bird or burd (a lady); maidens.

Bure, bore.

Burn, a rivulet.

Burnewin, the blacksmith (i. e., burn the wind).

Burnie, dim. of burn, a rivulet.

Burr-thistle, spear-thistle.

Busk, to dress; to garb; to dress up; to adorn.

Buss, a bush.

Bussle, bustle.

But, without.

But, butt, in the kitchen (i. e., the outer apartment).

By, past, aside.

By, beside.

By himsel, beside himself.

Bye attour (i. e., by and attour), beside and at a distance.

Byke, a bees’ nest; a hive; a swarm; a crowd.

Byre, a cow-house.

C

Ca’, call, knock, drive.

Cadger, a hawker (especially of fish).

Cadie, caddie, a fellow.

Caff, chaff.

Caird, a tinker.

Calf-ward, grazing plot for calves (i. e., churchyard).

Callan, callant, a stripling.

Caller, cool, refreshing.

Callet, a trull.

Cam, came.

Canie, cannie, gentle, tractable, quiet, prudent, careful.

Cankrie, crabbed.

Canna, can not.

Canniest, quietest.

Cannilie, cannily, quietly, prudently, cautiously.

Cantie, cheerful, lively, jolly, merry.

Cantraip, magic, witching.

Cants, merry stories, canters or sprees or merry doings.

Cape-stanc, copestone.

Capon, castrate.

Care na by, do not care.

Carl, carle, a man, an old man.

Carl-hemp, male-hemp.

Carlie, a manikin.

Carlin, carline, a middle-aged, or old, woman; a beldam, a witch.

Carmagnole, a violent Jacobin.

Cartes, playing-cards.

Cartie, dim. of cart.

Catch-the-plack, the hunt for money.

Caudron, a caldron.

Cauf, calf.

Cauf-leather, calf-leather.

Cauk, chalk.

Cauld, cold.

Cauldron, caldron.

Caup, a wooden drinking vessel.

Causey-cleaners, causeway-cleaners.

Cavie, a hen-coop.

Chamer, chaumer, chamber.

Change-house, tavern.

Chanter, bagpipes; the pipe of the bagpipes which produces the melody; song.

Chap, a fellow, a young fellow.

Chap, to strike.

Chapman, a pedler.

Chaup, chap, a stroke, a blow.

Chear, cheer.

Chearfu’, cheerful.

Chearless, cheerless.

Cheary, cheery.

Cheek-for-chow, cheek-by-jowl (i. e., close beside).

Cheep, peep, squeak.

Chiel, chield (i. e., child), a fellow, a young fellow.

Chimla, chimney.

Chittering, shivering.

Chows, chews.

Chuck, a hen, a dear.

Chuckie, dim. of chuck, but usually signifies mother hen, an old dear.

Chuffie, fat-faced.

Chuse, to choose.

Cit, the civet.

Cit, a citizen, a merchant.

Clachan, a small village about a church.

Claeding, clothing.

Claes, claise, clothes.

Claith, cloth.

Claithing, clothing.

Clankie, a severe knock.

Clap, the clapper of a mill.

Clark, a clerk.

Clark, clerkly, scholarly.

Clarkit, clerked, wrote.

Clarty, dirty.

Clash, an idle tale; gossip.

Clash, to tattle.

Clatter, noise, tattle, talk, disputation, babble.

Clatter, to make a noise by striking; to babble; to prattle.

Claught, clutched, seized.

Claughtin, clutching, grasping.

Claut, a clutch, a handful.

Claut, to scrape.

Claver, clover.

Clavers, gossip, nonsense.

Claw, a scratch, a blow.

Claw, to scratch, to strike.

Clay-cauld, clay-cold.

Claymore, a two-handed Highland sword.

Cleckin, a brood.

Cleed, to clothe.

Cleek, to snatch.

Cleekit, linked arms.

Cleg, gadfly.

Clink, a sharp stroke; jingle.

Clink, money, coin.

Clink, to chink.

Clink, to rhyme.

Clinkin, with a smart motion.

Clinkum, clinkumbell, the beadle, the bellman.

Clips, shears.

Clish-ma-claver, gossip, taletelling; nonsense.

Clockin-time, clucking- (i. e., hatching-) time.

Cloot, the hoof.

Clootie, cloots, hoofie, hoofs (a nickname of the Devil).

Clour, a bump or swelling after a blow.

Clout, a cloth, a patch.

Clout, to patch.

Clud, a cloud.

Clunk, to make a hollow sound.

Coble, a broad and flat boat.

Cock, the mark (in curling).

Cockie, dim. of cock (applied to an old man).

Cocks, fellows, good fellows.

Cod, a pillow.

Coft, bought.

Cog, a wooden drinking vessel, a porridge dish, a corn measure for horses.

Coggie, dim. of cog, a little dish.

Coil, Coila, Kyle (one of the ancient districts of Ayrshire).

Collieshangie, a squabble.

Cood, cud.

Coof, v. cuif.

Cookit, hid.

Coor, cover.

Cooser, a courser, a stallion.

Coost (i. e., cast), looped, threw off, tossed, chucked.

Cootie, a small pail.

Cootie, leg-plumed.

Corbies, ravens, crows.

Core, corps.

Corn mou, corn heap.

Corn’t, fed with corn.

Corse, corpse.

Corss, cross.

Cou’dna, couldna, couldn’t.

Countra, country.

Coup, to capsize.

Couthie, couthy, loving, affable, cosy, comfortable.

Cowe, to scare, to daunt.

Cowe, to lop.

Crack, tale; a chat; talk.

Crack, to chat, to talk.

Craft, croft.

Craft-rig, croft-ridge.

Craig, the throat.

Craig, a crag.

Craigie, dim. of craig, the throat.

Craigy, craggy.

Craik, the corn-crake, the land-rail.

Crambo-clink, rhyme.

Crambo-jingle, rhyming.

Cran, the support for a pot or kettle.

Crankous, fretful.

Cranks, creakings.

Cranreuch, hoar-frost.

Crap, crop, top.

Craw, crow.

Creel, an osier basket.

Creepie-chair, stool of repentance.

Creeshie, greasy.

Crocks, old ewes.

Cronie, intimate friend.

Crooded, cooed.

Croods, coos.

Croon, moan, low.

Croon, to toll.

Crooning, humming.

Croose, crouse, cocksure, set, proud, cheerful.

Crouchie, hunchbacked.

Crousely, confidently.

Crowdie, meal and cold water, meal and milk, porridge.

Crowdie-time, porridge-time (i. e., breakfast-time).

Crowlin, crawling.

Crummie, a horned cow.

Crummock, cummock, a cudgel, a crooked staff.

Crump, crisp.

Crunt, a blow.

Cuddle, to fondle.

Cuif, coof, a dolt, a ninny; a dastard.

Cummock, v. crummock.

Curch, a kerchief for the head.

Curchie, a curtsy.

Curler, one who plays at curling.

Curmurring, commotion.

Curpin, the crupper of a horse.

Curple, the crupper (i. e., buttocks).

Cushat, the wood pigeon.

Custock, the pith of the colewort.

Cutes, feet, ankles.

Cutty, short.

Cutty-stools, stools of repentance.

D

Dad, daddie, father.

Daez’t, dazed.

Daffin, larking, fun.

Daft, mad, foolish.

Dails, planks.

Daimen icker, an odd ear of corn.

Dam, pent-up water, urine.

Damie, dim. of dame.

Dang, pret. of ding.

Danton, v. daunton.

Darena, dare not.

Darg, labor, task, a day’s work.

Darklins, in the dark.

Daud, a large piece.

Daud, to pelt.

Daunder, saunter.

Daunton, to daunt.

Daur, dare.

Daurna, dare not.

Daur’t, dared.

Daut, dawte, to fondle.

Daviely, spiritless.

Daw, to dawn.

Dawds, lumps.

Dawtingly, prettily, caressingly.

Dead, death.

Dead-sweer, extremely reluctant.

Deave, to deafen.

Deil, devil.

Deil-haet, nothing (Devil have it).

Deil-ma-care, Devil may care.

Deleeret, delirious, mad.

Delvin, digging.

Dern’d, hid.

Descrive, to describe.

Deuk, duck.

Devel, a stunning blow.

Diddle, to move quickly.

Dight, to wipe.

Dight, winnowed, sifted.

Din, dun, muddy of complexion.

Ding, to beat, to surpass.

Dink, trim.

Dinna, do not.

Dirl, to vibrate, to ring.

Diz’n, dizzen, dozen.

Dochter, daughter.

Doited, muddled, doting; stupid, bewildered.

Donsie, vicious, bad-tempered; restive; testy.

Dool, wo, sorrow.

Doolfu’, doleful, woful.

Dorty, pettish.

Douce, douse, sedate, sober, prudent.

Douce, doucely, dousely, sedately, prudently.

Doudl’d, dandled.

Dought (pret. of dow), could.

Douked, ducked.

Doup, the bottom.

Doup-skelper, bottom-smacker.

Dour, doure, stubborn, obstinate; cutting.

Dow, dowe, am (is or are) able, can.

Dow, a dove.

Dowf, dowff, dull.

Dowie, drooping, mournful.

Dowilie, drooping.

Downa, can not.

Downa-do (can not do), lack of power.

Doylt, stupid, stupefied.

Doytin, doddering.

Dozen’d, torpid.

Dozin, torpid.

Draigl’t, draggled.

Drant, prosing.

Drap, drop.

Draunting, tedious.

Dree, endure, suffer.

Dreigh, v. dreight.

Dribble, drizzle.

Driddle, to toddle.

Dreigh, tedious, dull.

Droddum, the breech.

Drone, part of the bagpipe.

Droop-rumpl’t, short-rumped.

Drouk, to wet, to drench.

Droukit, wetted.

Drouth, thirst.

Drouthy, thirsty.

Druken, drucken, drunken.

Drumlie, muddy, turbid.

Drummock, raw meal and cold water.

Drunt, the huff.

Dry, thirsty.

Dub, puddle, slush.

Duddie, ragged.

Duddies, dim. of duds, rags.

Duds, rags, clothes.

Dung, v. dang.

Dunted, throbbed, beat.

Dunts, blows.

Durk, dirk.

Dusht, pushed or thrown down violently.

Dwalling, dwelling.

Dwalt, dwelt.

Dyke, a fence (of stone or turf), a wall.

Dyvor, a bankrupt.

E

Ear’, early.

Earn, eagle.

Eastlin, eastern.

E’e, eye.

E’ebrie, eyebrow.

Een, eyes.

E’en, even.

E’en, evening.

E’enin’, evening.

E’er, ever.

Eerie, apprehensive; inspiring ghostly fear.

Eild, eld.

Eke, also.

Elbuck, elbow.

Eldritch, unearthly, haunted, fearsome.

Elekit, elected.

Ell (Scots), thirty-seven inches.

Eller, elder.

En’, end.

Eneugh, enough.

Enfauld, infold.

Enow, enough.

Erse, Gaelic.

Ether-stane, adder-stone.

Ettle, aim.

Evermair, evermore.

Ev’n down, downright, positive.

Eydent, diligent.

F

Fa’, fall.

Fa’, lot, portion.

Fa’, to get; suit; claim.

Faddom’d, fathomed.

Fae, foe.

Faem, foam.

Faiket, let off, excused.

Fain, fond, glad.

Fainness, fondness.

Fair fa’, good befall! welcome.

Fairin., a present from a fair.

Fallow, fellow.

Fa’n, fallen.

Fand, found.

Far-aff, far-off.

Farls, oat-cakes.

Fash, annoyance.

Fash, to trouble; worry.

Fash’d, fash’t, bothered; irked.

Fashious, troublesome.

Fasten-e’en, Fasten’s Even (the evening before Lent).

Faught, a fight.

Fauld, the sheep-fold.

Fauld, folded.

Faulding, sheep-folding.

Faun, fallen.

Fause, false.

Fause-house, hole in a cornstack.

Faut, fault.

Fautor, transgressor.

Fawsont, seemly, well-doing; good-looking.

Feat, spruce.

Fecht, fight.

Feck, the bulk, the most part.

Feck, value, return.

Fecket, waistcoat; sleeve waistcoat (used by farm-servants as both vest and jacket).

Feckless, weak, pithless, feeble.

Feckly, mostly.

Feg, a fig.

Fegs, faith!

Feide, feud.

Feint, v. fient.

Feirrie, lusty.

Fell, keen, cruel, dreadful, deadly; pungent.

Fell, the cuticle under the skin.

Felly, relentless.

Fen’, a shift.

Fen’, fend, to look after; to care for; keep off.

Fenceless, defenseless.

Ferlie, ferly, a wonder.

Ferlie, to marvel.

Fetches, catches, gurgles.

Fetch’t, stopped suddenly.

Fey, fated to death.

Fidge, to fidget, to wriggle.

Fidgin-fain, tingling-wild.

Fiel, well.

Fient, fiend, a petty oath.

Fient a, not a, devil a.

Fient haet, nothing (fiend have it).

Fient haet o’, not one of.

Fient-ma-care, the fiend may care (I don’t!).

Fier, fiere, companion.

Fier, sound, active.

Fin’, to find.

Fissle, tingle, fidget with delight.

Fit, foot.

Fittie-lan’, the near horse of the hindmost pair in the plough.

Flae, a flea.

Flaffin, flapping.

Flainin, flannen, flannel.

Flang, flung.

Flee, to fly.

Fleech, wheedle.

Fleesh, fleece.

Fleg, scare, blow, jerk.

Fleth’rin, flattering.

Flewit, a sharp lash.

Fley, to scare.

Flichterin, fluttering.

Flinders, shreds, broken pieces.

Flinging, kicking out in dancing; capering.

Flingin-tree, a piece of timber hung by way of partition between two horses in a stable; a flail.

Fliskit, fretted, capered.

Flit, to shift.

Flittering, fluttering.

Flyte, scold.

Fock, focks, folk.

Fodgel, dumpy.

Foor, fared (i. e., went).

Foorsday, Thursday.

Forbears, forebears, forefathers.

Forby, forbye, besides.

Forfairn, worn out; forlorn.

Forfoughten, exhausted.

Forgather, to meet with.

Forgie, to forgive.

Forjesket, jaded.

Forrit, forward.

Fother, fodder.

Fou, fow, full (i. e., drunk).

Foughten, troubled.

Foumart, a polecat.

Foursome, a quartet.

Fouth, fulness, abundance.

Fow, v. fou.

Fow, a bushel.

Frae, from.

Freath, to froth.

Fremit, estranged, hostile.

Fu’, full.

Fu’-han’t, full-handed.

Fud, a short tail (of a rabbit or hare).

Fuff’t, puffed.

Fur, furr, a furrow.

Fur-ahin, the hindmost plough-horse in the furrow.

Furder, success.

Furder, to succeed.

Furm, a wooden form.

Fusionless, pithless, sapless, tasteless.

Fyke, fret.

Fyke, to fuss; fidget.

Fyle, to defile, to foul.

G

Gab, the mouth.

Gab, to talk.

Gabs, talk.

Gae, gave.

Gae, to go.

Gaed, went.

Gaen, gone.

Gaets, ways, manners.

Gairs, gores.

Gane, gone.

Gang, to go.

Gangrel, vagrant.

Gar, to cause, to make, to compel.

Garcock, the moorcock.

Garten, garter.

Gash, wise; self-complacent (implying prudence and prosperity); talkative.

Gashing, talking, gabbing.

Gat, got.

Gate, way-road, manner.

Gatty, enervated.

Gaucie, v. Gawsie.

Gaud, a. goad.

Gaudsman, goadsman, driver of the plough-team.

Gau’n, gavin.

Gaun, going.

Gaunted, gaped, yawned.

Gawky, a foolish woman or lad.

Gawky, foolish.

Gawsie, buxom; jolly.

Gaylies, gaily, rather.

Gear, money, wealth; goods; stuff.

Geck, to sport; toss the head.

Ged, a pike.

Gentles, gentry.

Genty, trim and elegant.

Geordie, dim. of George, a guinea.

Get, issue, offspring, breed.

Ghaist, ghost.

Gie, to give.

Gied, gave.

Gien, given.

Gif, if.

Giftie, dim. of gift.

Giglets, giggling youngsters or maids.

Gillie, dim. of gill (glass of whiskey).

Gilpey, young girl.

Gimmer, a young ewe.

Gin, if, should, whether; by.

Girdle, plate of metal for firing cakes, bannocks.

Girn, to grin, to twist the face (but from pain or rage, not joy); gapes; snarls.

Gizz, wig.

Glaikit, foolish, thoughtless, giddy.

Glaizie, glossy, shiny.

Glaum’d, grasped.

Gled, a hawk, a kite.

Gleede, a glowing coal.

Gleg, nimble, sharp, keen-witted.

Gleg, smartly.

Glieb, a portion of land.

Glib-gabbet, smooth-tongued.

Glint, sparkle.

Gloamin, twilight; gloamin-shot, sunset.

Glow’r, stare.

Glunch, frown, growl.

Goavin, looking dazedly; mooning.

Gotten, got.

Gowan, the wild, or mountain, daisy.

Gowany, covered with wild daisies.

Gowd, gold.

Gowdie, the head.

Gowff’d, struck, as in the game of golf.

Gowk, the cuckoo, a dolt.

Gowling, lamenting (as a dog in grief).

Graff, a grave, a vault.

Grain’d, groaned.

Graip, a dung-fork.

Graith, implements, gear; furniture; attire.

Graithing, gearing, vestments.

Grane, groan.

Grannie, graunie, grandmother.

Grape, grope.

Grat, wept.

Gree, the prize (degree).

Gree, to agree.

Greet, to weep.

Groanin maut, groaning malt, brewed for a lying-in.

Grozet, a gooseberry.

Grumphie, the pig.

Grun’, the ground.

Gruntle, the face.

Gruntle, dim. of grunt.

Grunzie, growing.

Grutten, wept.

Gude, God.

Guid, gude, good.

Guid-e’en, good evening.

Guid-father, father-in-law.

Guid-man, husband.

Guid-wife, mistress of the house.

Guid-willie, hearty, full of good-will.

Gullie, gully, a large knife.

Gulravage, riotous play.

Gumlie, muddy.

Gumption, wisdom.

Gusty, tasty.

Gutcher, goodsire, grandfather.

H

Ha’, hall.

Ha’ folk, the servants.

Haddin, holding, inheritance.

Hae, have.

Haet, a thing.

Haffet, hauffet, the temple, the side of the head.

Haffets, side-locks.

Hafflins, half, partly.

Hag, a moss, a broken bog.

Haggis, a special Scots pudding, made of sheep’s lungs, liver and heart, onions and oatmeal, boiled in a sheep’s stomach.

Hain, to spare, to save.

Hairst, har’st, harvest.

Haith, faith (an oath).

Haivers, v. havers.

Hal’, hald, holding, possession.

Hale, hail, the whole.

Hale, health.

Hale, hail, whole, healthy.

Halesome, wholesome.

Hallan, a partition wall, a porch, outer door.

Halloween, All Saints’ Eve (31st of October).

Hallowmas, All Saints’ Day (1st of November).

Haly, holy.

Hame, home.

Han’, haun, hand.

Han-darg, v. darg.

Hand-wal’d, hand-picked (i. e., choicest).

Hangie, hangman (nickname of the Devil).

Hansel, the first gift; earnest.

Hap, a wrap, a covering against cold.

Hap, to shelter.

Hap, to hop.

Happer, hopper (of a mill).

Hap-step-an’-lowp, hop-step-and-jump.

Harkit, hearkened.

Harn, coarse cloth.

Hash, an oaf.

Haslock woo, the wool on the neck of a sheep.

Haud, to hold, to keep.

Hauf, half.

Haughs, lowlying rich lands by a river.

Haun, v. han’.

Haurl, to trail.

Hause, cuddle, embrace.

Haveril, hav’rel, one who talks nonsense.

Havers, nonsense.

Havins, manners, conduct.

Hawkie, a white-faced cow; a cow.

Heal, v. hale.

Healsome, v. halesome.

Hecht, to promise; threaten.

Heckle, a flax-comb.

Heels-o’er-gowdie, v. gowdie.

Heeze, to hoist.

Heich, heigh, high.

Hem-shin’d, crooked-shin’d.

Herd, a herd-boy.

Here awa, hereabout.

Herry, to harry.

Herryment, spoliation.

Hersel, herself.

Het, hot.

Heugh, a hollow or pit; a crag, a steep bank.

Heuk, a hook.

Hilch, to hobble.

Hiltie-skiltie, helter-skelter.

Himsel, himself.

Hiney, hinny, honey.

Hing, to hang.

Hirple, to move unevenly; to limp.

Hissels, so many cattle as one person can attend (R. B.).

Histie, bare.

Hizzie, a hussy, a wench.

Hoast, cough.

Hoddin, the motion of a sage countryman riding on a cart-horse (R. B.).

Hoddin-grey, coarse gray woolen.

Hoggie, dim. of hog; a lamb.

Hog-score, a line on the curling rink.

Hog-shouther, a kind of horse-play by jostling with the shoulder; to jostle.

Hoodie-craw, the hooded crow, the carrion crow.

Hoodock, grasping, vulturish.

Hooked, caught.

Hool, the outer case, the sheath.

Hoolie, softly.

Hoord, hoard.

Hoordet, hoarded.

Horn, a horn spoon; a comb of horn.

Hornie, the Devil.

Host, v. hoast.

Hotch’d, jerked.

Houghmagandie, fornication.

Houlet, v. howlet.

Houpe, hope.

Hove, swell.

Howdie, howdy, a midwife.

Howe, hollow.

Howk, to dig.

Howlet, the owl.

Hoyse, a hoist.

Hoy’t, urged (R. B.).

Hoyte, to amble crazily (R. B.).

Hughoc, dim. of Hugh.

Hullions, slovens.

Hunder, a hundred.

Hunkers, hams.

Hurcheon, the hedgehog.

Hurchin, urchin.

Hurdies, the loins, the crupper (R. B.) (i. e., the buttocks).

Hurl, to trundle.

Hushion, a footless stocking.

Hyte, furious.

I

I’, in.

Icker, an ear of corn.

Ier-oe, a great-grandchild.

Ilk, ilka, each, every.

Ill o’t, bad at it.

Ill-taen, ill-taken.

Ill-thief, the Devil.

Ill-willie, ill-natured, niggardly.

Indentin, indenturing.

Ingine, genius, ingenuity; wit.

Ingle, the fire, the fireside.

Ingle-cheek, fireside (properly the jamb of the fireplace).

Ingle-lowe, ingle-low, flame of the fire.

I’se, I shall, or will.

Itsel’, itself.

Ither, other, another.

J

Jad, a jade.

Janwar, January.

Jauk, to trifle, to dally.

Jauner, gabber.

Jauntie, dim. of jaunt.

Jaup, splash.

Jaw, talk, impudence.

Jaw, to throw, to dash.

Jeeg, to jog.

Jillet, a jilt.

Jimp, small, slender.

Jimply, neatly.

Jimps, stays.

Jink, the slip.

Jink, to frisk, to sport, to dodge.

Jinker, dodger (coquette); a jinker noble; a noble goer.

Jirkinet, bodice.

Jirt, a jerk.

Jiz, a wig.

Jo, a sweetheart.

Jocteleg, a clasp-knife.

Jouk, to duck, to cover, to dodge.

Jow, to jow, a verb which included both the swinging motion and pealing sound of a large bell (R. B.).

Jumpet, jumpit, jumped.

Jundie, to jostle.

Jurr, a servant wench.

K

Kae, a jackdaw.

Kail, kale, the colewort; cabbage; Scots’ broth.

Kail-blade, the leaf of the colewort.

Kail-gullie, a cabbage knife.

Kail-runt, the stem of the colewort.

Kail-whittle, a cabbage knife.

Kail-yard, a kitchen garden.

Kain, kane, rents in kind.

Kame, a comb.

Kebars, rafters.

Kebbuck, a cheese; a kebbuck heel = the last crust of a cheese.

Keckle, to cackle, to giggle.

Keek, look, glance.

Keekin-glass, the looking-glass.

Keel, red chalk.

Kelpies, river demons.

Ken, to know.

Kenna, know not.

Kennin, a very little (merely as much as can be perceived).

Kep, to catch.

Ket, the fleece on a sheep’s body.

Key, quay.

Kiaugh, anxiety.

Kilt, to tuck up.

Kimmer, a wench, a gossip; a wife.

Kin’, kind.

King’s-hood, the 2d stomach in a ruminant (equivocal for the scrotum).

Kintra, country.

Kirk, church.

Kirn, a churn.

Kirn, harvest home.

Kirsen, to christen.

Kist, chest, counter.

Kitchen, to relish.

Kittle, difficult, ticklish, delicate, fickle.

Kittle, to tickle.

Kittlin, kitten.

Kiutlin, cuddling.

Knaggie, knobby.

Knappin-hammers, hammers for breaking stones.

Knowe, knoll.

Knurl, knurlin, dwarf.

Kye, cows.

Kytes, bellies.

Kythe, to show.

L

Laddie, dim. of lad.

Lade, a load.

Lag, backward.

Laggen, the bottom angle of a wooden dish.

Laigh, low.

Laik, lack.

Lair, lore, learning.

Laird, landowner.

Lairing, sticking or sinking in moss or mud.

Laith, loath.

Laithfu’, loathful, sheepish.

Lallan, lowland.

Lallans, Scots Lowland vernacular.

Lammie, dim. of lamb.

Lan’, land.

Lan’-afore, the foremost horse on the unplowed land side.

Lan’-ahin, the hindmost horse on the unplowed land side.

Lane, lone.

Lang, long.

Lang syne, long since, long ago.

Lap, leapt.

Lave, the rest.

Laverock, lav’rock, the lark.

Lawin, the reckoning.

Lea, grass, untilled land.

Lear, lore, learning.

Leddy, lady.

Lee-lang, live-long.

Leesome, lawful.

Leeze me on, dear is to me; blessings on; commend me to.

Leister, a fish-spear.

Len’, to lend.

Leugh, laugh’d.

Leuk, look.

Ley-crap, lea-crop.

Libbet, castrated.

Licks, a beating.

Lien, lain.

Lieve, lief.

Lift, the sky.

Lift, a load.

Lightly, to disparage, to scorn.

Lilt, to sing.

Limmer, to jade; mistress.

Lin, v. linn.

Linn, a waterfall.

Lint, flax.

Lintwhite, flax-colored.

Lintwhite, the linnet.

Lippen’d, trusted.

Lippie, dim. of lip.

Loan, a lane.

Loanin, the private road leading to a farm.

Lo’ed, loved.

Lon’on, London.

Loof (pl. looves), the palm of the hand.

Loon, loun, lown, a fellow, a varlet.

Loosome, lovable.

Loot, let.

Loove, love.

Looves, v. loof.

Losh, a minced oath.

Lough, a pond, a lake.

Loup, lowp, to leap.

Low, lowe, a flame.

Lowin, lowing, flaming, burning.

Lown, v. loon.

Lowp, v. loup.

Lowse, louse, to untie, let loose.

Lucky, a grandmother, an old woman; an ale wife.

Lug, the ear.

Lugget, having ears.

Luggie, a porringer.

Lum, the chimney.

Lume, a loom.

Lunardi, a balloon bonnet.

Lunches, full portions.

Lunt, a column of smoke or steam.

Luntin, smoking.

Luve, love.

Lyart, gray in general; discolored by decay or old age.

Lynin, lining.

M

Mae, more.

Mailen, mailin, a farm.

Mailie, Molly.

Mair, more.

Maist. most.

Maist, almost.

Mak, make.

Mak o’, make o’, to pet, to fondle.

Mall, Mally.

Manteele, a mantle.

Mark, merk, an old Scots coin (13 1-3d. sterling).

Mashlum, of mixed meal.

Maskin-pat, the teapot.

Maukin, a hare.

Maun, must.

Maunna, mustn’t.

Maut, malt.

Mavis, the thrush.

Mawin, mowing.

Mawn, mown.

Mawn, a large basket.

Mear, a mare.

Meikle, mickle, muckle, much, great.

Melder, a grinding corn.

Mell, to meddle.

Melvie, to powder with meal-dust.

Men’, mend.

Mense, tact, discretion, politeness.

Menseless, unmannerly.

Merle, the blackbird.

Merran, Marian.

Mess John, Mass John, the parish priest, the minister.

Messin, a cur, a mongrel.

Midden, a dunghill.

Midden-creels, manure-baskets.

Midden dub, midden puddle.

Midden-hole, a gutter at the bottom of the dunghill.

Milking shiel, the milking shed.

Mim, prim, affectedly meek.

Mim-mou’d, prim-lipped.

Min’, mind, remembrance.

Mind, to remember, to bear in mind.

Minnie, mother.

Mirk, dark.

Misca’, to miscall, to abuse.

Mishanter, mishap.

Mislear’d, mischievous, unmannerly.

Mistak, mistake.

Misteuk, mistook.

Mither, mother.

Mixtie-maxtie, confused.

Monie, many.

Mools, crumbling earth, grave.

Moop, to nibble, to keep close company, to meddle.

Mottie, dusty.

Mou’, the mouth.

Moudieworts, moles.

Muckle, v. meikle.

Muslin-kail, beefless broth.

Mutchkin, an English pint.

N

Na, nae, no, not.

Naething, naithing, nothing.

Naig, a nag.

Nane, none.

Nappy, ale, liquor.

Natch, a notching implement; abuse.

Neebor, neibor, neighbor.

Needna, needn’t.

Neist, next.

Neuk, newk, a nook, a corner.

New-ca’d, newly driven.

Nick (Auld), Nickie-ben, a name of the Devil.

Nick, to sever; to slit; to nail, to seize away.

Nickie-ben, v. Nick.

Nick-nackets, curiosities.

Nicks, cuts; the rings on a cow’s horns.

Nieve, the fist.

Nieve-fu’, fistful.

Niffer, exchange.

Nit, a nut.

No, not.

Nocht, nothing.

Norland, northern.

Nowt, nowte, cattle.

O

O’, of.

O’erword, the refrain; catchword.

Onie, any.

Or, ere, before.

Orra, extra.

O’t, of it.

Ought, aught.

Oughtlins, aughtlins, aught in the least; at all.

Ourie, shivering, drooping.

Outler, unhoused.

Owre, over, too.

Owsen, oxen.

Owthor, author.

Oxter’d, held up under the arms.

P

Pack an’ thick, confidential.

Paidle, to paddle, to wade; to walk with a weak action.

Paidle, nail-bag.

Painch, the paunch.

Paitrick, a partridge; used equivocally of a wanton girl.

Pang, to cram.

Parishen, the parish.

Parritch, porridge.

Parritch-pats, porridge-pots.

Pat, pot.

Pat, put.

Pattle, pettle, a plow-staff.

Paughty, haughty.

Paukie, pauky, pawkie, artful, sly.

Pechan, the stomach.

Pechin, panting, blowing.

Penny-fee, wage in money.

Penny-wheep, small beer.

Pettle, v. pattle.

Philibeg, the Highlander’s kilt.

Phraisin, flattering, wheedling.

Phrase, to flatter, to wheedle.

Pickle, a few, a little.

Pint (Scots), three imperial pints.

Pit, put.

Placads, proclamations.

Plack, four pennies (Scots).

Plackless, penniless.

Plaiden, coarse woolen cloth.

Plaister, plaster.

Plenish’d, stocked.

Pleugh, plew, a plow.

Pliskie, a trick.

Pliver, a plover.

Pock, a poke, a bag, a wallet.

Poind, to seize, to distrain, to impound.

Poortith, poverty.

Pou, to pull.

Pouch, pocket.

Pouk, to poke.

Poupit, pulpit.

Pouse, a push.

Poussie, a hare (also a cat).

Pouther, powther, powder.

Pouts, chicks.

Pow, the poll, the head.

Pownie, a pony.

Pow’t, pulled.

Pree’d, pried (proved), tasted.

Preen, a pin.

Prent, print.

Prie, to taste.

Prief, proof.

Priggin, haggling.

Primsie, dim. of prim, precise.

Proveses, provosts.

Pu’, to pull.

Puddock-stools, toadstools, mushrooms.

Puir, poor.

Pun’, pund, pound.

Pursie, dim. of purse.

Pussie, a hare.

Pyet, a magpie.

Pyke, to pick.

Pyles, grains.

Q

Quat, quit, quitted.

Quean, a young woman, a lass.

Queir, choir.

Quey, a young cow.

Quietlin-wise, quietly.

Quo’, quod, quoth.

R

Rab, rob.

Rade, rode.

Raep, a rope.

Ragweed, ragwort.

Raibles, recites by rote.

Rair, to roar.

Rairin, roaring.

Rair’t, roared.

Raise, rase, rose.

Raize, to excite, anger.

Ramfeezl’d, exhausted.

Ramgunshoch, surly.

Ram-stam, headlong.

Randie, lawless, obstreperous.

Randie, randy, a scoundrel, a rascal.

Rant, to rollick, to roister.

Rants, merry meetings; rows.

Rape, v. raep.

Raploch, homespun.

Rash, a rush.

Rash-buss, a clump of rushes.

Rashy, rushy.

Rattan, rattoon, a rat.

Ratton-key, the rat-quay.

Raucle, rough, bitter, sturdy.

Raught, reached.

Raw, a row.

Rax, to stretch, to extend.

Ream, cream, foam.

Ream, to cream, to foam.

Reave, to rob.

Rebute, rebuff.

Red, advised, afraid.

Red, rede, to advise, to counsel.

Red-wat-shod, red-wet-shod.

Red-wud, stark mad.

Reek, smoke.

Reekie, reeky, smoky.

Reestit, scorched.

Reestit, refused to go.

Reif, theiving.

Remead, remedy.

Rickles, small stacks of corn in the fields.

Rief, plunder.

Rig, a ridge.

Riggin, the roof-tree, the roof.

Rigwoodie, lean.

Rin, to run.

Ripp, a handful of corn from the sheaf.

Ripplin-kame, the wool or flax comb.

Riskit, cracked.

Rive, to split, to tear, to tug, to burst.

Rock, a distaff.

Rockin, a social meeting.

Roon, round, shred.

Roose, to praise, to flatter.

Roose, reputation.

Roosty, rusty.

Rottan, a rat.

Roun’, round.

Roupet, exhausted in voice.

Routh, v. rowth.

Routhie, well-stocked.

Row, rowe, to roll; to flow, as a river; to wrap.

Rowte, to low, to bellow.

Rowth, plenty, a store.

Rozet, resin.

Run-deils, downright devils.

Rung, a cudgel.

Runkl’d, wrinkled.

Runt, a cabbage or colewort stalk.

Ryke, to reach.

S

Sab, to sob.

Sae, so.

Saft, soft.

Sair, sore, hard, severe, strong.

Sair, to serve.

Sair, sairly, sorely.

Sairie, sorrowful, sorry.

Sall, shall.

Sandy, Sannack, dim. of Alexander.

Sark, a shirt.

Saugh, the willow.

Saul, soul.

Saumont, sawmont, the salmon.

Saunt, saint.

Saut, salt.

Saut-backets, v. backets.

Saw, to sow.

Sawney, v. sandy.

Sax, six.

Scar, to scare.

Scar, v. scaur.

Scathe, scaith, damage; v. skaith.

Scaud, to scald.

Scaul, scold.

Scauld, to scold.

Scaur, afraid; apt to be scared.

Scaur, a jutting rock or bank of earth.

Scho, she.

Scone, a soft flour cake.

Sconner, disgust.

Sconner, sicken.

Scraichin, calling hoarsely.

Screed, a rip, a rent.

Screed, to repeat rapidly, to rattle.

Scriechin, screeching.

Scriegh, skriegh, v. skriegh.

Scrievin, careering.

Scrimpit, scanty.

Scroggie, scroggy, scrubby.

Sculdudd’ry, bawdry.

See’d, saw.

Seisins, freehold possessions.

Sel, sel’, sell, self.

Sell’d, sell’t, sold.

Semple, simple.

Sen’, send.

Set, to set off; to start.

Set, sat.

Sets, becomes.

Shachl’d, shapeless.

Shaird, shred, shard.

Shanagan, a cleft stick.

Shanna, shall not.

Shaul, shallow.

Shaver, a funny fellow.

Shavie, trick.

Shaw, a wood.

Shaw, to show.

Shearer, a reaper.

Sheep-shank, a sheep’s trotter; nae sheep-shank bane = a person of no small importance.

Sheerly, wholly.

Sheers, scissors.

Sherra-moor, sheriffmuir.

Sheugh, a ditch, a furrow; gutter.

Sheuk, shook.

Shiel, a shed, cottage.

Shill, shrill.

Shog, a shake.

Shool, a shovel.

Shoon, shoes.

Shore, to offer, to threaten.

Short syne, a little while ago.

Shouldna, should not.

Shouther, showther, shoulder.

Shure, shore (did shear).

Sic, such.

Siccan, such a.

Sicker, steady, certain; sicker score = strict conditions.

Sidelins, sideways.

Siller, silver; money in general.

Simmer, summer.

Sin, son.

Sin’, since.

Sindry, sundry.

Singet, singed, shriveled.

Sinn, the sun.

Sinny, sunny.

Skaith, damage.

Skeigh, skiegh, skittish.

Skellum, a good-for-nothing.

Skelp, a slap, a smack.

Skelp, to spank; skelpin at it = driving at it.

Skelpie-limmer’s-face, a technical term in female scolding (R. B.).

Skelvy, shelvy.

Skiegh, v. skeigh.

Skinking, watery.

Skinklin, glittering.

Skirl, to cry or sound shrilly.

Sklent, a slant, a turn.

Sklent, to slant, to squint, to cheat.

Skouth, scope.

Skriech, a scream.

Skriegh, to scream, to whinny.

Skyrin, flaring.

Skyte, squirt, lash.

Slade, slid.

Slae, the sloe.

Slap, a breach in a fence; a gate.

Slaw, slow.

Slee, sly, ingenious.

Sleekit, sleek, crafty.

Slidd’ry, slippery.

Sloken, to slake.

Slypet, slipped.

Sma’, small.

Smeddum, a powder.

Smeek, smoke.

Smiddy, smithy.

Smoor’d, smothered.

Smoutie, smutty.

Smytrie, a small collection; a litter.

Snakin, sneering.

Snap, smart.

Snapper, to stumble.

Snash, abuse.

Snaw, snow.

Snaw-broo, snow-brew (melted snow).

Sned, to lop, to prune.

Sneeshin mill, a snuff-box.

Snell, bitter, biting.

Snick, a latch; snick-drawing = scheming; he weel a snick can draw = he is good at cheating.

Snirtle, to snigger.

Snoods, fillets worn by maids.

Snool, to cringe, to snub.

Snoove, to go slowly.

Snowkit, snuffed.

Sodger, soger, a soldier.

Sonsie, sonsy, pleasant, good-natured, jolly.

Soom, to swim.

Soor, sour.

Sough, v. sugh.

Souk, suck.

Soupe, sup, liquid.

Souple, supple.

Souter, cobbler.

Sowens, porridge of oat flour.

Sowps, sups.

Sowth, to hum or whistle in a low tune.

Sowther, to solder.

Spae, to foretell.

Spails, chips.

Spairge, to splash; to spatter.

Spak, spoke.

Spates, floods.

Spavie, the spavin.

Spavit, spavined.

Spean, to wean.

Speat, a flood.

Speel, to climb.

Speer, spier, to ask.

Speet, to spit.

Spence, the parlor.

Spier, v. speer.

Spleuchan, pouch.

Splore, a frolic; a carousal.

Sprachl’d, clambered.

Sprattle, scramble.

Spreckled, speckled.

Spring, a quick tune; a dance.

Sprittie, full of roots or sprouts (a kind of rush).

Sprush, spruce.

Spunk, a match; a spark; fire, spirit.

Spunkie, full of spirit.

Spunkie, liquor, spirits.

Spunkies, jack-o’-lanterns, will-o’-wisps.

Spurtle-blade, the pot-stick.

Squatter, to flap.

Squattle, to squat; to settle.

Stacher, to totter.

Staggie, dim. of staig.

Staig, a young horse.

Stan’, stand.

Stane, stone.

Stan’t, stood.

Stang, sting.

Stank, a moat; a pond.

Stap, to stop.

Stapple, a stopper.

Stark, strong.

Starnies, dim. of starn, star.

Starns, stars.

Startle, to course.

Staumrel, half-witted.

Staw, a stall.

Staw, to surfeit; to sicken.

Staw, stole.

Stechin, cramming.

Steek, a stitch.

Steek, to shut; to close.

Steek, to shut; to touch, meddle with.

Steeve, compact.

Stell, a still.

Sten, a leap; a spring.

Sten’t, sprang.

Stented, erected; set on high.

Stents, assessments, dues.

Steyest, steepest.

Stibble, stubble.

Stibble-rig, chief reaper.

Stick-an-stowe, completely.

Stilt, limp (with the aid of stilts).

Stimpart, a quarter peck.

Stirk, a young bullock.

Stock, a plant of cabbage; colewort.

Stoited, stumbled.

Stoiter’d, staggered.

Stoor, harsh, stern.

Stoun’, pang, throb.

Stoure, dust.

Stourie, dusty.

Stown, stolen.

Stownlins, by stealth.

Stoyte, to stagger.

Strae death, death in bed. (i. e., on straw).

Staik, to stroke.

Strak, struck.

Strang, strong.

Straught, straight.

Straught, to stretch.

Streekit, stretched.

Striddle, to straddle.

Stron’t, lanted.

Strunt, liquor.

Strunt, to swagger.

Studdie, an anvil.

Stumpie, dim. of stump; a worn quill.

Sturt, worry, trouble.

Sturt, to fret; to vex.

Sturtin, frighted, staggered.

Styme, the faintest trace.

Sucker, sugar.

Sud, should.

Sugh, sough, sigh, moan, wail, swish.

Sumph, churl.

Sune, soon.

Suthron, southern.

Swaird, sward.

Swall’d, swelled.

Swank, limber.

Swankies, strapping fellows.

Swap, exchange.

Swapped, swopped, exchanged.

Swarf, to swoon.

Swat, sweated.

Swatch, sample.

Swats, new ale.

Sweer, v. dead-sweer.

Swirl, curl.

Swirlie, twisted, knaggy.

Swith, haste; off and away.

Swither, doubt, hesitation.

Swoom, swim.

Swoor, swore.

Sybow, a young union.

Syne, since, then.

T

Tack, possession, lease.

Tacket, shoe-nail.

Tae, to.

Tae, toe.

Tae’d, toed.

Taed, toad.

Taen, taken.

Taet, small quantity.

Tairge, to target.

Tak, take.

Tald, told.

Tane, one in contrast to other.

Tangs, tongs.

Tap, top.

Tapetless, senseless.

Tapmost, topmost.

Tappet-hen, a crested hen-shaped bottle holding three quarts of claret.

Tap-pickle, the grain at the top of the stalk.

Topsalteerie, topsy-turvy.

Targe, to examine.

Tarrow, to tarry; to be reluctant, to murmur; to weary.

Tassie, a goblet.

Tauk, talk.

Tauld, told.

Tawie, tractable.

Tawpie, a foolish woman.

Tawted, matted.

Teats, small quantities.

Teen, vexation.

Tell’d, told.

Temper-pin, a fiddle-peg; the regulating pin of the spinning-wheel.

Tent, heed.

Tent, to tend; to heed; to observe.

Tentie, watchful, careful, heedful.

Tentier, more watchful.

Tentless, careless.

Tester, an old silver coin about sixpence in value.

Teugh, tough.

Teuk, took.

Thack, thatch; thack and rape = the covering of a house, and so, home necessities.

Thae, those.

Thairm, small guts; catgut (a fiddle-string).

Theckit, thatched.

Thegither, together.

Thick, v. pack an’ thick.

Thieveless, forbidding, spiteful.

Thiggin, begging.

Thir, these.

Thirl’d, thrilled.

Thole, to endure; to suffer.

Thou’se, thou shalt.

Thowe, thaw.

Thowless, lazy, useless.

Thrang, busy; thronging in crowds.

Thrang, a throng.

Thrapple, the windpipe.

Thrave, twenty-four sheaves of corn.

Thraw, a twist.

Thraw, to twist; to turn; to thwart.

Thraws, throes.

Threap, maintain, argue.

Threesome, trio.

Thretteen, thirteen.

Thretty, thirty.

Thrissle, thistle.

Thristed, thirsted.

Through, mak to through = make good.

Throu’ther (through other), pell-mell.

Thummart, polecat.

Thy lane, alone.

Tight, girt, prepared.

Till, to.

Till’t, to it.

Timmer, timber, material.

Tine, to lose; to be lost.

Tinkler, tinker.

Tint, lost

Tippence, twopence.

Tip, v. toop.

Tirl, to strip.

Tirl, to knock for entrance.

Tither, the other.

Tittlin, whispering.

Tocher, dowry.

Tocher, to give a dowry.

Tocher-gude, marriage portion.

Tod, the fox.

To-fa’, the fall.

Toom, empty.

Toop, tup, ram.

Toss, the toast.

Toun, town; farm steading.

Tousie, shaggy.

Tout, blast.

Tow, flax, a rope.

Towmond, towmont, a twelvemonth.

Towsing, rumpling (equivocal).

Toyte, to totter.

Tozie, flushed with drink.

Trams, shafts.

Transmogrify, change.

Trashtrie, small trash.

Trews, trousers.

Trig, neat, trim.

Trinklin, flowing.

Trin’le, the wheel of a barrow.

Trogger, packman.

Troggin, wares.

Troke, to barter.

Trouse, trousers.

Trowth, in truth.

Trump, a jew’s harp.

Tryste, a fair; a cattle-market.

Trysted, appointed.

Trysting, meeting.

Tulyie, tulzie, a squabble; a tussle.

Twa, two.

Twafauld, twofold, double.

Twal, twelve; the twal = twelve at night.

Twalpennie worth, a penny worth (English money).

Twang, twinge.

Twa-three, two or three.

Tway, two.

Twin, twine, to rob; to deprive; bereave.

Twistle, a twist; a sprain.

Tyke, a dog.

Tyne, v. tine.

Tysday, Tuesday.

U

Ulzie, oil.

Unchancy, dangerous.

Unco, remarkably, uncommonly, excessively.

Unco, remarkable, uncommon, terrible (sarcastic).

Uncos, news, strange things, wonders.

Unkend, unknown.

Unsicker, uncertain.

Unskaithed, unhurt.

Usquabae, usquebae, whisky.

V

Vauntie, proud.

Vera, very.

Virls, rings.

Vittle, victual, grain, food.

Vogie, vain.

W

Wa’, waw, a wall.

Wab, a web.

Wabster, a weaver.

Wad, to wager.

Wad, to wed.

Wad, would, would have.

Wad’a, would have.

Wadna, would not.

Wadset, a mortgage.

Wae, woful, sorrowful.

Wae, wo; wae’s me = wo is to me.

Waesucks, alas!

Wae worth, wo befall.

Wair, v. ware.

Wale, to choose.

Wale, choice.

Walie, wawlie, choice, ample, large.

Wallop, to kick; to dangle; to gallop; to dance.

Waly fa’, ill befall!

Wame, the belly.

Wamefou, bellyful.

Wan, won.

Wanchancie, dangerous.

Wanrestfu’, restless.

Ware, wair, to spend; bestow.

Ware, worn.

Wark, work.

Wark-lume, tool.

Warl’, warld, world.

Warlock, a wizard

Warl’y, warldly, worldly.

Warran, warrant.

Warse, worse.

Warsle, warstle, wrestle.

Wast, west.

Wastrie, waste.

Wat, wet.

Wat, wot, know.

Water-fit, water-foot (the river’s mouth).

Water-kelpies, v. kelpies.

Wauble, to wobble.

Waught, a draft.

Wauk, to awake.

Wauken, to awaken.

Waukin, awake.

Waukit (with toil), horny.

Waukrife, wakeful.

Waulie, jolly.

Waur, worse.

Waur, to worst.

Waur’t, worsted, beat.

Wean (wee one), a child.

Weanies, babies.

Weason, weasand.

Wecht, a measure for corn.

Wee, a little; a wee = a short space or time.

Wee things, children.

Weel, well.

Weel-faured, well-favored.

Weel-gaun, well-going.

Weel-hain’d, well-saved.

Weepers, mournings (on the steeve or hat).

Werena, were not.

We’se, we shall.

Westlin, western.

Wha, who.

Whaizle, wheeze.

Whalpet, whelped.

Wham, whom.

Whan, when.

Whang, a shive.

Whang, flog.

Whar, whare, where.

Wha’s, whose.

Wha’s, who is.

Whase, whose.

What for, whatfore, wherefore.

Whatna, what.

What reck, what matter; nevertheless.

Whatt, whittled.

Whaup, the curlew.

Whaur, where.

Wheep, v. penny-wheep.

Wheep, jerk.

Whid, a fib.

Whiddin, scudding.

Whids, gambols.

Whigmeleeries, crotches.

Whingin, whining.

Whins, furze.

Whirlygigums, flourishes.

Whist, silence.

Whissle, whistle.

Whitter, a draft.

Whittle, a knife.

Wi’, with.

Wick a bore, hit a curling-stone obliquely and send it through an opening.

Wi’s, with his.

Wi’t, with it.

Widdifu’, gallows-worthy.

Widdle, wriggle.

Wiel, eddy.

Wight, strong, stout.

Wighter, more influential.

Willcat, wildcat.

Willyart, disordered.

Wimple, to meander.

Win, won.

Winn, to winnow.

Winna, will not.

Winnin, winding.

Winnock, window.

Winnock-bunker, v. bunker.

Win’t, did wind.

Wintle, a somersault.

Wintle, to stagger; to swing; to wriggle.

Winze, a curse.

Wiss, wish.

Won, to dwell.

Wonner, a wonder.

Woo’, wool.

Woodie, woody, a rope (originally of withes); a gallows rope.

Woodies, twigs, withes.

Wooer-babs, love-knots.

Wordy, worthy.

Worset, worsted.

Worth, v. wae worth.

Wraith, ghost.

Wrang, wrong.

Wud, wild, mad.

Wumble, wimble.

Wyliecoat, undervest.

Wyte (weight), blame.

Wyte, to blame; to reproach.

Y

Yard, a garden; a stackyard.

Yaud, an old mare.

Yealings, coevals.

Yell, dry (milkless).

Yerd, earth.

Yerkit, jerked.

Yerl, earl.

Ye’se, ye shall.

Yestreen, last night.

Yett, a gate.

Yeuk, to itch.

Yill, ale.

Yill-Caup, ale-stoup.

Yird, yearth, earth.

Yokin, yoking; a spell; a day’s work.

Yon, yonder.

Yont, beyond.

Yowe, ewe.

Yowie, dim. of ewe; a pet ewe.

Yule, Christmas.

The Letters

Ellisland Farm, northwest of Dumfries in village of Auldgirth, was built by Burns, who lived and farmed there from 1788 to 1791.

THE LETTERS OF ROBERT BURNS

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

GENERAL CORRESPONDENCE.

THE CLARINDA LETTERS.

GENERAL CORRESPONDENCE (continued).

THE THOMSON LETTERS.

Detailed Table of Contents for the letters

The Statue of Burns in Dumfries town centre, unveiled in 1882

INTRODUCTION

It is not perhaps generally known that the prose of Burns exceeds in quantity his verse. The world remembers him as a poet, and forgets or overlooks his letters. His place among the poets has never been denied — it is in the first rank; nor is he lowest, though little remembered, among letter-writers. His letters gave Jeffrey a higher opinion of him as a man than did his poetry, though on both alike the critic saw the seal and impress of genius. Dugald Stewart thought his letters objects of wonder scarcely less than his poetry. And Robertson, comparing his prose with his verse, thought the former the more extraordinary of the two. In the popular view of his genius there is, however, no denying the fact that his poetry has eclipsed his prose.

His prose consists mostly of letters, but it also includes a noble fragment of autobiography; three journals of observations made at Mossgiel, Edinburgh, and Ellisland respectively; two itineraries, the one of his border tour, the other of his tour in the Highlands; and historical notes to two collections of Scottish songs. A full enumeration of his prose productions would take account also of his masonic minutes, his inscriptions, a rather curious business paper drawn up by the poet-exciseman in prosecution of a smuggler, and of course his various prefaces, notably the dedication of his poems to the members of the Caledonian Hunt.

His letters, however, far exceed the sum of his other-prose writings. Close upon five hundred and forty have already been published. These are not all the letters he ever wrote. Where, for example, is the literary correspondence in which he engaged so enthusiastically with his Kirkoswald schoolfellows? “Though I had not three farthings’ worth of business in the world, yet every post brought me as many letters as if I had been a broad-plodding son of daybook and ledger.” Where are the letters which brought to the ploughman at Lochlie such a constant and copious stream of replies? The circumstances of his position will explain why they perished: he was then “a youth and all unknown to fame.” It is even doubtful if the five hundred and forty published letters include all the letters of Burns that now exist. Scarcely a year passes but some epistolary scrap in the well-known handwriting is unearthed and ceremoniously added to the previous sum total, And yet, notwithstanding losses past or within recall, it is probable that we have long had the whole of Burns’s most characteristic letters. It was inevitable that these should be preserved and published. His fame was so rooted in the popular regard in his lifetime, that a characteristic letter from his hand was sure to be received as something singularly precious. It must not be forgotten, however, that Burns’s personality was so intense as to colour the smallest fragment of his correspondence, and it is on this account desirable that every note he penned that yet remains unpublished should be produced. It might give no new feature to our conception of his character; but it would help the shading — which, in the portraiture of any person, must chiefly be furnished by the minor and more commonplace actions of his everyday life.

The correspondence of Burns, as we have it, commences, presumably, near the close of his twenty-second year, and extends to all but exactly the middle of his thirty-eighth. The dates are a day somewhere at the end of 1780, and Monday, 18th July 1796. Between these limits lies the printed correspondence of sixteen years. The sum total of this correspondence allows about thirty-four letters to each year, but the actual distribution is very unequal, ranging from the minimum, in 1782, of one, a masonic letter addressed to Sir John Whitefoord of Ballochmyle, to the maximum number of ninety-two, in 1788, the great year of the Clarinda episode. It is in 1786, the year of the publication of his first volume at Kilmarnock, the year of his literary birth, that his correspondence first becomes heavy. It rises at a leap from two letters in the preceding year to as many as forty-four. The phenomenal increase is partly explained by the success of his poems. He became a man that was worth the knowing, whose correspondence was worth preserving. The six years of his published correspondence previous to the discovery of his genius in 1786 are represented by only fourteen letters in all. But in those years his letters, though both numerous and prized above the common, were not considered as likely to be of future interest, and were therefore suffered to live or die as chance might determine. They mostly perished, the recipients thinking it hardly worth their while to be sae nice wi’ Robin as to preserve them.

After the recognition of his power in 1786, the record of his preserved letters shews, for the ten years of his literary life, several fluctuations which admit of easy explanation. Commencing with 1787, the numbers are: — 78, 92, 54, 33, 44, 31, 66, 30, 27, 24. The first of these years was totally severed from rural occupations, or business of any kind, if we except the publication of the first Edinburgh edition of his poems. It was a complete holiday year to him. He was either resident in Edinburgh, studying men and manners, or touring about the country, visiting those places which history, song, or scenery had made famous. Wherever he was, his fame brought him the acquaintance of a great many new people. His leisure and the novelty of his situation afforded him both opportunity and subject for an extensive correspondence. For a large part of the next year, 1788, he was similarly circumstanced, and the number of his letters was exceptionally increased by his entanglement with Mrs. M’Lehose. To her alone, in less than three months of this year, he wrote at least thirty-six letters, — considerably over one-third of the entire epistolary produce of the year. In 1789 we find the number of his letters fall to fifty-four. This was, perhaps, the happiest year of his life. He was now comfortably established as a farmer in a home of his own, busied with healthy rural work, and finding in the happy fireside clime which he was making for wife and weans “the true pathos and sublime” of human duty. He has still, however, time and inclination to write on the average one letter a week. For each of the next three years the average number is thirty-six. In 1793 the number suddenly goes up to sixty-six: the increase is due to the heartiness with which he took up the scheme of George Thomson to popularise and perpetuate the best old Scottish airs by fitting them with words worthy of their merits. He wrote, in this year, twenty-six letters in support of the scheme.

There is a sad falling off in Burns’s ordinary correspondence in the last three years of his life. The amount of it scarcely touches twenty letters per year. Even the correspondence with Thomson, though on a subject so dear to the heart of Burns, rousing at once both his patriotism and his poetry, sinks to about ten letters per year, and is irregular at that. Burns was losing hope and health, and caring less and less for the world’s favour and the world’s friendships. He had lost largely in self-respect as well as in the respect of friends. The loss gave him little heart to write.

Burns’s correspondents, as far as we know them, numbered over a hundred and fifty persons. The number is large and significant. Neither Gray, nor Cowper, nor Byron commanded so wide a circle. They had not the far-reaching sympathies of Burns. They were all more or less fastidious in their choice of correspondents. Burns, on the contrary, was as catholic, or as careless, in his friendships as his own Caesar — who

“Wad spend an hour caressin’

Ev’n wi’ a tinkler gipsy’s messan.”

He moved freely up and down the whole social scale, blind to the imaginary distinctions of blood and title and the extrinsic differences of wealth, seeing true superiority in an honest manly heart, and bearing himself wherever he found it as an equal and a brother. His correspondents were of every social grade — peers and peasants; of every intellectual attainment — philosophers like Dugald Stewart, and simple swains like Thomas Orr; and of almost every variety of calling, from professional men of recognised eminence to obscure shopkeepers, cottars, and tradesmen. They include servant-girls, gentlewomen, and ladies of titled rank; country schoolmasters and college professors; men of law of all degrees, from poor John Richmond, a plain law-clerk with a lodging in the Lawnmarket, to the Honourable Henry Erskine, Dean of the Faculty; farmers, small and large; lairds, large and small; shoemakers and shopkeepers; ministers, bankers, and doctors; printers, booksellers, editors; knights, earls — nay, a duke; factors and wine-merchants; army officers, and officers of Excise. His female correspondents were women of superior intelligence and accomplishments. They can lay claim to a large proportion of his letters. Mrs. McLehose takes forty-eight; Mrs. Dunlop, forty-two; Maria Riddell, eighteen; Peggy Chalmers, eleven. These four ladies received among them rather more than one-fourth of the whole of his published correspondence. No four of his male correspondents can be accredited with so many, even though George Thomson for his individual share claims fifty-six.

It is rather remarkable that so few of the letters are addressed to his own relatives. His cousin, James Burness of Montrose, and his own younger brother William receive, indeed, ten and eight respectively; but to his other brother Gilbert, with whom he was on the most affectionate and confidential terms, there fall but three; to his wife only two; one to his father; and none to either his sisters or his mother. A maternal uncle, Samuel Brown, is favoured with one — if, indeed, the old man was not scandalised with it — and there are two to James Armour, mason in Mauchline, his somewhat stony-hearted father-in-law.

Burns’s letters exhibit quite as much variety of mood — seldom, of course, so picturesquely conveyed — as his poems. He is, in promiscuous alternation, refined, gross, sentimental, serious, humorous, indignant, repentant, dignified, vulgar, tender, manly, sceptical, reverential, rakish, pathetic, sympathetic, satirical, playful, pitiably self-abased, mysteriously self-exalted. His letters are confessions and revelations. They are as sincerely and spontaneously autobiographical of his inner life as the sacred lyrics of David the Hebrew. They were indited with as much free fearless abandonment. The advice he gave to young Andrew to keep something to himsel’, not to be told even to a bosom crony, was a maxim of worldly prudence which he himself did not practice. He did not “reck his own rede.” And, though that habit of unguarded expression brought upon him the wrath and revenge of the Philistines, and kept him in material poverty all his days, yet, prompted as it always was by sincerity, and nearly always by absolute truth, it has made the manhood of to-day richer, stronger, and nobler. The world to-day has all the more the courage of its opinions that Burns exercised as a right the freedom of sincere and enlightened speech — and suffered for his bravery.

The subjects of his letters are numerous, and, to a pretty large extent, of much the same sort as the subjects of his poems. Often, indeed, you have the anticipation of an image or a sentiment which his poetry has made familiar. You have a glimpse of green buds which afterwards unfold into fragrance and colour. This is an interesting connection, of which one or two examples may be given. So early as 1781 he wrote to Alison Begbie— “Once you are convinced I am sincere, I am perfectly certain you have too much goodness and humanity to allow an honest man to languish in suspense only because he loves you too well.” Alison Begbie becomes Mary Morison, and the sentiment, so elegantly turned in prose for her, is thus melodiously transmuted for the lady-loves of all languishing lovers —

“O Mary, canst thou wreck his peace

Wha for thy sake would gladly dee,

Or canst thou break that heart of his

Wha’s only faut is loving thee?

If love for love thou wiltna gie,

At least be pity on me shown:

A thocht ungentle canna be

The thocht o’ Mary Morison!”

Again, in the first month of 1783 he writes to Murdoch, the schoolmaster— “I am quite indolent about those great concerns that set the bustling busy sons of care agog; and if I have wherewith to answer for the present hour, I am very easy with regard to anything further. Even the last worst shift of the unfortunate and wretched does not greatly terrify me.” Just one year later this sentiment was sent current in the well-known stanza concluding —

“But, Davie lad, ne’er fash your head

Though we hae little gear;

We’re fit to win our daily bread

As lang’s we’re hale an’ fier;

Mair speer na, nor fear na;

Auld age ne’er mind a fig,

The last o’t, the warst o’t,

Is only for to beg!”

Again, in the letter last referred to occurs the passage— “I am a strict economist, not indeed for the sake of the money, but one of the principal parts in my composition is a kind of pride, and I scorn to fear the face of any man living. Above everything I abhor as hell the idea of sneaking into a corner to avoid a dun.” This is metrically rendered, in May 1786, in the following lines: —

“To catch dame Fortune’s golden smile,

Assiduous wait upon her,

And gather gear by every wile

That’s justified by honour: —

Not for to hide it in a hedge,

Nor for a train attendant,

But for the glorious privilege

Of being independent.”

It would be easy to multiply examples: he is jostled in his letters by market-men before he is “hog-shouthered and jundied” by them in his verse; and the legends of Alloway Kirk are narrated in a letter to Grose before the immortal tale of Tam o’Shanter is woven for The Antiquities of Scotland.

There is nothing morbid or narrow in Burns’s letters. They are frank and healthy. You can spend a day over them, and feel at the end of it as if you had been wandering at large through the freedom of nature. They seem to have been written in the open air. The first condition necessary to an appreciative understanding of them is to concern yourself with the sentiment. And, indeed, the strength and sincerity of the sentiment by-and-by draw you away to oblivion of the style, however much it may at first strike you as redundant and affected. They are not the letters of a literary man. They have nothing suggestive of the studious chamber and the midnight lamp. There is often a narrowness of idea in the merely literary man which limits his auditory to men of his peculiar pattern. To this narrowness Burns, with all his faults of style, was a stranger. His letters are the utterances of a man who refused to be imprisoned in any single department of human thought. He was no specialist, pinned to one standpoint, and making the width of the world commensurate with the narrowness of his own horizon. He moved about, he looked abroad; he had no pet subject, no restricted field of study; nature and human nature in their multitudinous phases and many retreats were his range, and he expressed his views as freely and vigorously as he took them.

The general tone of the letters is high. The subject is not seldom of supreme interest. Questions are discussed which are rarely discussed in ordinary correspondence. The writer rises above creeds and formularies and arbitrarily established rule. He speculates on a theology beyond the bounds of Calvinism, on a philosophy of the soul above the dialectics of the schoolmen, on a morality at variance with conventional law. He interrogates the intuitions of the mind and the intimations of nature in order that, if possible, he may learn something of the soul’s origin, destiny, and supremest duty. But let us hear himself: —

(a) “I have ever looked on mankind in the lump to be nothing better than a foolish, head-strong, credulous, unthinking mob; and their universal belief has ever had extremely little weight with me…. I am drawn by conviction like a Man, not by a halter like an Ass.”

(b) “‘On Earth Discord! A gloomy Heaven above opening its jealous gates to the nineteen-thousandth part of the tithe of mankind! And below an inexorable Hell expanding its leviathan jaws for the vast residue of mortals!’ O doctrine comfortable and healing to the weary wounded soul of man! Ye sons and daughters of affliction, to whom day brings no pleasure and night yields no rest, be comforted! ‘Tis one to but nineteen hundred housand that your situation will mend in this world, and ‘tis nineteen hundred thousand to one, by the dogmas of theology, that you will be damned eternally in the world to come.”

(c) “A pillar that bears us up amid the wreck of misfortune and misery is to be found in those feelings and sentiments which, however the sceptic may deny or the enthusiast disfigure them, are yet, I am convinced, original and component parts of the human soul; those; senses of the mind, if I may be allowed the expression, which link us to the awful obscure realities of an all-powerful and equally beneficent God and a world-to-come beyond death and the grave.”

(d) “Can it be possible that when I resign this frail, feverish being I shall still find myself in conscious existence?… Shall I yet be warm in life, seeing and seen, enjoying and enjoyed? Ye venerable Sages and holy Flamens, is there probability in your conjectures, truth in your stories, of another world beyond death, or are they all alike baseless visions and fabricated fables? If there is another life, it must only be for the just, the benevolent, the amiable, and the humane; what a flattering idea then is a world to come! Would to God I as firmly believed it as I ardently wish it!… Jesus Christ, thou amiablest of characters! I trust thou art no impostor…. I trust that in Thee shall all the families of the earth be blessed.”

(e) “From the seeming nature of the human mind, as well as from the evident imperfections in the administration of affairs, in both the natural and moral worlds, there must be a retributive scene of existence beyond the grave.”

(f) “I never hear the loud solitary whistle of the curlew in a summer’s noon, or the wild mixing cadence of a troop of grey plover in an autumn morning, without feeling an elevation of soul like the enthusiasm of Devotion or Poetry. Tell me, my dear friend, to what can this be owing? Are we a piece of machinery, that, like the AEolian harp, passive, takes the impression of the passing accident? Or do these workings argue something within us above the trodden clod?”

(g) “Gracious Heaven! why this disparity between our wishes and our powers? Why is the most generous wish to make others blest, impotent and ineffectual?… Out upon the world! say I, that its affairs are administered so ill.”

(h) “At first glance, several of your propositions startled me as paradoxical. That the martial clangour of a trumpet had something in it vastly more grand, heroic, and sublime than the twingle-twangle of a jew’s-harp; that the delicate flexure of a rose-twig, when the half-blown flower is heavy with the tears of the dawn, was infinitely more beautiful and elegant than the upright stub of a burdock; and that, from something innate and independent of all associations of ideas — these I had set down as irrefragable orthodox truths.”a

(i) “O, I could curse circumstances, and the coarse tie of human laws which keeps fast what common-sense would loose, and which bars that happiness it cannot give — happiness which otherwise love and honour would warrant!”

(j) “If there is no man on earth to whom your heart and affections are justly due, it may savour of imprudence, but never of criminality, to bestow that heart and those affections where you please. The God of love meant and made those delicious attachments to be bestowed on somebody.”

The inequalities of fortune, the pleasures of friendship, the miseries of poverty, the glories of independence, the privileges of wealth allied to generosity, the sin of ingratitude, and similar topics, are continually recurring to prove the elevation at which his spirit usually soared and surveyed mankind. It has been charged against himb that these subjects were not the food of his daily contemplation, but were lugged into his letters for the sake of effect, and that their clumsy introduction was frequently apologised for by the complaint that the writer had nothing else to write about. The frequent apologies here spoken of will be hard to find, and the critic’s only reason for advancing the charge, for which he would fain find support in the fancied apologies of Burns, is that many of the letters “relate neither to facts nor feelings peculiarly connected with the author or his correspondent.” This only means that a very large proportion of Burns’s letters are not like the letters of ordinary men, and therefore do not satisfy the critic’s idea or definition of a letter. They treat of themes that are not specially a propos of passing events, and therefore they are forced and affected. Few are likely to be imposed upon by such shallow reasoning. Another criticc avers that “while Burns says nothing of difficulties at all, he yet leaves an admirable letter, out of nothing, in your hands!” We may pit the one critic against the other, and so leave them, while we peruse the letters, and form an opinion for ourselves.

While both the verse and the prose of Burns are revelations, his letters reveal more than his poems the failings and frailties of the man. His poems, taken altogether, shew him at his best, as we wish to — and as we mainly do — remember him; a man to be loved, admired, even envied, and by no means pitied, for his soul, though often vexed with the irritations incidental to an obscure and toiling lot, has a strength and buoyancy which readily raise it to divine altitudes, where it might well be content to see and smile at the petty class distinctions and the paltry social tyranny from which those irritations chiefly spring. His letters, on the other hand, present him to us less frequently on those commanding altitudes. He is oftener careful and concerned about many things, groping occasionally in the world’s ways for the world’s gifts, and handicapped in the struggle for them by a contemptuous and half-hearted adoption of the world’s methods of winning them.

The same personality that stands forth in the poems is everywhere present in all essential features in the letters. We have in the latter the same view of life, present and future; the same fierce contentment with honest poverty; the same aggressive independency of manhood; the same patriotism, susceptibility to female loveliness, love of sociality, undaunted likes and dislikes. The humour is the same, though often too elaborately expressed.d In one important respect, however, his letters fail to reflect that image of him which his poetry presents. It is remarkable that his descriptions of rural nature, and one might add of rustic life, so full and plentiful in his verse, are so few and slight in his letters. He seems to have reserved these descriptions for his verse.

The best, because the most genuine, biography of Burns is furnished by his own writings. His letters will, if carefully studied, disprove many of the positions taken up so confidently by would-be interpreters of his history. It is not the purpose of this discursive paper to take up the details of the Clarinda episode; but philandering is scarcely the word by which to describe the mutual relations of the lovers. As for Mrs. M’Lehose, the severest thing that can with justice be said against her is that, if she maintained her virtue, she endangered her reputation. One remarkable position taken up by a recent writere on the subject of Burns’s amours is, that he never really loved any woman, and least of all Jean Armour. The letters would rather warrant the converse of his statement. They go to prove that while Burns’s affections were more than oriental in their strength and liberality, they were especially centred upon Jean. He felt “a miserable blank in his heart with want of her;” “a rooted attachment for her;” “had no reason on her part to rue his marriage with her;” and “never saw where he could have made it better.” If Burns was never really in love, it is more than probable that the whole world has been mistaking some other passion for it. It is this same writer who in one breath speaks of Burns philandering with Clarinda, and yet declaring his attachment to her in the best songs he ever wrote. Another error which the letters should correct is the belief expressed in some quarters that Burns was no longer capable of producing poetry after his fatal residence in Edinburgh. It was, as a matter of fact, subsequent to his residence in Edinburgh that he wrote the poems for which he is now, and for which he will be longest, famous — namely, his songs. The writer already referred to compares the composition of these songs to the carving of cherry-stones. They were, he says in effect, the amusement of a man who could do nothing better in literature! The world has agreed that they are the best things Burns has done; and rates him for their sake in the highest rank of its poets. The truth is that Burns came to Ellisland with numerous schemes of future poetical work, vigorous hopes of carrying some of them, and an inspiration and faculty of utterance unimpaired. It was in Dumfriesshire that he composed the most tenderly and melodiously seraphic of his lyrics— “To Mary in Heaven” and “Highland Mary;” the most powerful and popular of his narrative poems— “Tam O’ Shanter;” the first of all patriotic odes— “Bruce’s Address to his Army”; and the noblest manifesto of the rights and hopes of manhood— “A Man’s a Man for a’ that.”

With one word on his style as a prose-writer this short paper must close. The most diverse opinions have been uttered on the subject. The critics trip up each other with charming independency. To Jeffrey they seemed to be “all composed as exercises and for display.” Carlyle declared that they were written “for the most part with singular force and even gracefulness,” and that when Burns wrote “to trusted friends on real interests, his style became simple, vigorous, expressive, sometimes even beautiful.” Dr. Waddell prefers him to Cowper and Byron as a letter-writer. Scott, while allowing passages of great eloquence, found in the letters “strong marks of affectation, with a tincture of pedantry.” Taine thinks “Burns brought ridicule on himself by imitating the men of the academy and the court.” Lockhart thought, with Walker, that “he accommodated his style to the tastes” of his correspondents. And so on.

It is worth while to learn from Burns himself what he thought of his talent for prose-composition. And in the first place it is to be noted that he practised prose-composition before he took to poetry. At sixteen he was carrying on an extensive literary correspondence, which was virtually a competition in essay-writing. He kept copies of the letters he liked best, and was flattered to find that he was superior to his correspondents. He studied the essayists of Queen Anne’s time, and formed his style upon theirs, and that of their most distinguished followers. Steele, Addison, Swift, Sterne, and Mackenzie were his models. He liked their rounded sentences, and caught their conventional phrases. He found delight in imitating them. He volunteered his services with the pen on behalf of his fellow-swains. He became the “Complete Letter-Writer” of his parish, and was proud of his function and his faculty. He was aware of his “abilities at a billet-doux.” To the very last he had a high opinion of himself as a writer of letters. He speaks of one letter being in his “very best manner;” and of waiting for an hour of inspiration to write another that should be as good. He retained copies of about thirty of his longer letters, and had them bound for preservation.

The most serious, almost the only charge brought against the prose style of Burns is the charge of affectation more or less occasional. All the earlier critics make it or imply it, and with such an apparent show of proof that it has generally been believed. Later critics, while unable to deny the feature of his style which so looks like affectation, have explained it to such good effect as to make it appear a beauty; they have asked us to regard it as the happy result of a sympathetic mind adapting itself to the object of its address. This looks very like blaming Burns’s correspondents for the badness of his style. There is some truth in the explanation, putting it even so extremely. But when this allowance is made, there still remains a wide and well-marked difference between his use of English prose and his mastery of Scottish verse. The latter is complete — it is the mastery of an originator of style. The former, on the other hand, is the attainment of a clever pupil when the sentiment is commonplace; when it is deep and vehement, it is often, in the language of Carlyle, “the effort of a man to express something which he has no organ fit for expressing.” Common people, to whom niceties of style are unknown, and who read primarily or exclusively for the sake of the matter, perceive nothing of this affectation, and think scarcely less highly of Burns’s letters than they do of his poetry.

J. LOGIE ROBERTSON.

7 LOCKHARTON TERRACE, SLATEFORD, EDINBURGH.

GENERAL CORRESPONDENCE.

Detailed Table of Contents for the letters

I. — TO ELLISON OR ALISON BEGBIE (?)1

What you may think of this letter when you see the name that subscribes it I cannot know; and perhaps I ought to make a long preface of apologies for the freedom I am going to take; but as my heart means no offence, but, on the contrary, is rather too warmly interested in your favour, — for that reason I hope you will forgive me when I tell you that I most sincerely and affectionately love you. I am a stranger in these matters, A — , as I assure you that you are the first woman to whom I ever made such a declaration; so I declare I am at a loss how to proceed.

I have more than once come into your company with a resolution to say what I have just now told you; but my resolution always failed me, and even now my heart trembles for the consequence of what I have said. I hope, my dear A –- , you will not despise me because I am ignorant of the flattering arts of courtship: I hope my inexperience of the work will plead for me. I can only say I sincerely love you, and there is nothing on earth I so ardently wish for, or that could possibly give me so much happiness, as one day to see you mine.

I think you cannot doubt my sincerity, as I am sure that whenever I see you my very looks betray me: and when once you are convinced I am sincere, I am perfectly certain you have too much goodness and humanity to allow an honest man to languish in suspense only because he loves you too well. And I am certain that in such a state of anxiety as I myself at present feel, an absolute denial would be a much preferable state.

1 The original MS. of the foregoing letter is the property of John Adam, Esquire, Greenock, and the letter was first published in 1878. If it is a genuine love-letter, and not a mere exercise in love-letter writing, it was probably the first of the short series to Alison Begbie, who is supposed to have been the daughter of a small farmer, and who has been identified with the Mary Morison of the well-known lyric. The sentiment of the last paragraph of the letter agrees with the sentiment of the last stanza of the song.

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II. — TO ELLISON BEGBIE.

[LOCHLIE, 1780.]

MY DEAR E., — I do not remember, in the course of your acquaintance and mine, ever to have heard your opinion on the ordinary way of falling in love, amongst people in our station in life; I do not mean the persons who proceed in the way of bargain, but those whose affection is really placed on the person.

Though I be, as you know very well, but a very awkward lover myself, yet, as I have some opportunities of observing the conduct of others who are much better skilled in the affair of courtship than I am, I often think it is owing to lucky chance, more than to good management, that there are not more unhappy marriages than usually are.

It is natural for a young fellow to like the acquaintance of the females, and customary for him to keep them company when occasion serves; some one of them is more agreeable to him than the rest; there is something, he knows not what, pleases him, he knows not how, in her company. This I take to be what is called love with the greater part of us; and I must own, my dear E., it is a hard game such a one as you have to play when you meet with such a lover. You cannot refuse but he is sincere, and yet though you use him ever so favourably, perhaps in a few months, or at farthest in a year or two, the same unaccountable fancy may make him as distractedly fond of another, whilst you are quite forgot. I am aware that perhaps the next time I have the pleasure of seeing you, you may bid me take my own lesson home, and tell me that the passion I have professed for you is perhaps one of those transient flashes I have been describing; but I hope, my dear E., you will do me the justice to believe me, when I assure you that the love I have for you is founded on the sacred principles of virtue and honour, and by consequence so long as you continue possessed of those amiable qualities which first inspired my passion for you, so long must I continue to love you. Believe me, my dear, it is love like this alone which can render the marriage state happy. People may talk of flames and raptures as long as they please, and a warm fancy, with a flow of youthful spirits, may make them feel something like what they describe; but sure I am the nobler faculties of the mind with kindred feelings of the heart can only be the foundation of friendship, and it has always been my opinion that the married life was only friendship in a more exalted degree.

If you will be so good as to grant my wishes, and it should please Providence to spare us to the latest periods of life, I can look forward and see that, even then, though bent down with wrinkled age — even then, when all other worldly circumstances will be indifferent to me, I will regard my E. with the tenderest affection, and for this plain reason, because she is still possessed of those noble qualities, improved to a much higher degree, which first inspired my affection for her.

O! happy state, when souls each other draw,

Where love is liberty, and nature law.

I know, were I to speak in such a style to many a girl, who thinks herself possessed of no small share of sense, she would think it ridiculous — but the language of the heart is, my dear E., the only courtship I shall ever use to you.

When I look over what I have written, I am sensible it is vastly different from the ordinary style of courtship — but I shall make no apology — I know your good nature will excuse what your good sense may see amiss.

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III. — TO ELLISON BEGBIE.

[LOCHLIE, 1780.]

I verily believe, my dear E., that the pure genuine feelings of love are as rare in the world as the pure genuine principles of virtue and piety. This, I hope, will account for the uncommon style of all my letters to you. By uncommon, I mean their being written in such a serious manner, which, to tell you the truth, has made me often afraid lest you should take me for some zealous bigot, who conversed with his mistress as he would converse with his minister. I don’t know how it is, my dear; for though, except your company, there is nothing on earth gives me so much pleasure as writing to you, yet it never gives me those giddy raptures so much talked of among lovers. I have often thought, that if a well-grounded affection be not really a part of virtue, ‘tis something extremely akin to it. Whenever the thought of my E. warms my heart, every feeling of humanity, every principle of generosity, kindles in my breast. It extinguishes every dirty spark of malice and envy, which are but too apt to infest me. I grasp every creature in the arms of universal benevolence, and equally participate in the pleasures of the happy, and sympathise with the miseries of the unfortunate. I assure you, my dear, I often look up to the Divine disposer of events with an eye of gratitude for the blessing which I hope He intends to bestow on me, in bestowing you. I sincerely wish that He may bless my endeavours to make your life as comfortable and happy as possible, both in sweetening the rougher parts of my natural temper, and bettering the unkindly circumstances of my fortune. This, my dear, is a passion, at least in my view, worthy of a man, and, I will add, worthy of a Christian. The sordid earth-worm may profess love to a woman’s person, whilst, in reality, his affection is centred in her pocket; and the slavish drudge may go a-wooing as he goes to the horse-market, to choose one who is stout and firm, and as we say of an old horse, one who will be a good drudge and draw kindly. I disdain their dirty, puny ideas. I would be heartily out of humour with myself, if I thought I were capable of having so poor a notion of the sex, which were designed to crown the pleasures of society. Poor devils! I don’t envy them their happiness who have such notions. For my part, I propose quite other pleasures with my dear partner.

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IV. — TO ELLISON BEGBIE.

[LOCHLIE, 178l.]

MY DEAR E., — I have often thought it a peculiarly unlucky circumstance in love, that though, in every other situation in life, telling the truth is not only the safest, but actually by far the easiest way of proceeding, a lover is never under greater difficulty in acting, or more puzzled for expression, than when his passion is sincere, and his intentions are honourable. I do not think that it is very difficult for a person of ordinary capacity to talk of love and fondness which are not felt, and to make vows of constancy and fidelity which are never intended to be performed, if he be villain enough to practice such detestable conduct; but to a man whose heart glows with the principles of integrity and truth, and who sincerely loves a woman of amiable person, uncommon refinement of sentiment, and purity of manners — to such a one, in such circumstances, I can assure you, my dear, from my own feelings at this present moment, courtship is a task indeed. There is such a number of foreboding fears and distrustful anxieties crowd into my mind when I am in your company, or when I sit down to write to you, that what to speak or what to write, I am altogether at a loss.

There is one rule which I have hitherto practised, and which I shall invariably keep with you, and that is, honestly to tell you the plain truth. There is something so mean and unmanly in the arts of dissimulation and falsehood, that I am surprised they can be used by any one in so noble, so generous a passion as virtuous love. No, my dear E., I shall never endeavour to gain your favour by such detestable practices. If you will be so good and so generous as to admit me for your partner, your companion, your bosom friend through life, there is nothing on this side of eternity shall give me greater transport; but I shall never think of purchasing your hand by any arts unworthy of a man, and, I will add, of a Christian. There is one thing, my dear, which I earnestly request of you, and it is this: that you would soon either put an end to my hopes by a peremptory refusal, or cure me of my fears by a generous consent.

It would oblige me much if you would send me a line or two when convenient. I shall only add, further, that if behaviour, regulated (though perhaps but very imperfectly) by the rules of honour and virtue, if a heart devoted to love and esteem you, and an earnest endeavour to promote your happiness; if these are qualities you would wish in a friend, in a husband, I hope you shall ever find them in your real friend and sincere lover.

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V. — TO ELLISON BEGBOE.

[LOCHLIE, 1781.]

I ought, in good manners, to have acknowledged the receipt of your letter before this time, but my heart was so shocked with the contents of it, that I can scarcely yet collect my thoughts so as to write you on the subject. I will not attempt to describe what I felt on receiving your letter. I read it over and over, again and again, and though it was in the politest language of refusal, still it was peremptory; “you were sorry you could not make me a return, but you wish me” what, without you, I never can obtain, “you wish me all kind of happiness.” It would be weak and unmanly to say that without you I never can be happy; but sure I am, that sharing life with you would have given it a relish, that, wanting you, I can never taste.

Your uncommon personal advantages, and your superior good sense, do not so much strike me; these, possibly, in a few instances may be met with in others; but that amiable goodness, that tender feminine softness, that endearing sweetness of disposition, with all the charming offspring of a warm feeling heart — these I never again expect to meet with, in such a degree, in this world. All these charming qualities, heightened by an education much beyond anything I have ever met in any woman I ever dared to approach, have made an impression on my heart that I do not think the world can ever efface. My imagination has fondly flattered myself with a wish, I dare not say it ever reached a hope, that possibly I might one day call you mine. I had formed the most delightful images, and my fancy fondly brooded over them; but now I am wretched for the loss of what I really had no right to expect. I must now think no more of you as a mistress; still I presume to ask to be admitted as a friend. As such I wish to be allowed to wait on you, and as I expect to remove in a few days a little further off, and you, I suppose, will soon leave this place, I wish to see or hear from you soon; and if an expression should perhaps escape me, rather too warm for friendship, I hope you will pardon it in, my dear Miss — , (pardon me the dear expression for once) R. B.

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VI. — TO HIS FATHER.

IRVINE, December 27, 1781.

HONOURED SIR, — I have purposely delayed writing in the hope that I should have the pleasure of seeing you on New Year’s day; but work comes so hard upon us that I do not choose to be absent on that account, as well as for some other little reasons which I shall tell you at meeting. My health is nearly the same as when you were here, only my sleep is a little sounder, and on the whole I am rather better than otherwise, though I mend by very slow degrees. The weakness of my nerves has so debilitated my mind that I dare neither review my past wants nor look forward into futurity; for the least anxiety or perturbation in my breast produces most unhappy effects on my whole frame. Sometimes, indeed, when for an hour or two my spirits are a little lightened, I glimmer a little into futurity; but my principal, and indeed my only pleasurable, employment, is looking backwards and forwards in a moral and religious way; I am quite transported at the thought, that ere long, perhaps very soon, I shall bid an eternal adieu to all the pains, and uneasiness, and disquietudes of this weary life; for I assure you I am heartily tired of it; and, if I do not very much deceive myself, I could contentedly and gladly resign it.

The soul, uneasy, and confin’d at home,

Rests and expatiates in a life to come.

It is for this reason I am more pleased with the 15th, 16th, and 17th verses of the 7th chapter of Revelation^2 than with any ten times as many verses in the whole Bible, and would not exchange the whole noble enthusiasm with which they inspire me, for all that this world has to offer. As for this world, I despair of ever making a figure in it I am not formed for the bustle of the busy, nor the flutter of the gay. I shall never again be capable of entering into such scenes. Indeed, I am altogether unconcerned at the thoughts of this life. I foresee that poverty and obscurity probably await me, and I am in some measure prepared, and daily preparing, to meet them. I have but just time and paper to return you my grateful thanks for the lessons of virtue and piety you have given me, which were too much neglected at the time of giving them, but which I hope have been remembered ere it is yet too late. Present my dutiful respects to my mother, and my compliments to Mr. and Mrs. Muir; and with wishing you a merry New-year’s day, I shall conclude. — I am, honoured Sir, your dutiful son,

ROBERT BURNESS.

P. S. — My meal is nearly out, but I am going to borrow till I get more.

2 “Therefore are they before the throne of God, and serve him day and night in his temple; and he that sitteth on the throne shall dwell among them.

They shall hunger no more, neither thirst any more; neither shall the sun light on them, nor any heat.

For the Lamb, which is in the midst of the throne, shall feed them, and shall lead them unto living fountains of waters; and God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes.”

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VII. — TO SIR JOHN WHITEFOORD, BART., OF BALLOCHMYLE.3

SIR, — We who subscribe this are both members of St. James’s Lodge, Tarbolton, and one of us in the office of warden, and as we have the honour of having you for master of our lodge we hope you will excuse this freedom, as you are the proper person to whom we ought to apply. We look on our Mason Lodge to be a serious matter, both with respect to the character of masonry itself, and likewise as it is a charitable society. This last, indeed, does not interest you further than a benevolent heart is interested in the welfare of its fellow-creatures; but to us, sir, who are of the lower order of mankind, to have a fund in view on which we may with certainty depend to be kept from want, should we be in circumstances of distress, or old age — this is a matter of high importance.

We are sorry to observe that our lodge’s affairs with respect to its finances have for a good while been in a wretched situation. We have considerable sums in bills which lie by without being paid, or put in execution, and many of our members never mind their yearly dues, or anything else belonging to the lodge. And since the separation^4 from St. David’s we are not sure even of our existence as a lodge. There has been a dispute before the Grand Lodge, but how decided, or if decided at all, we know not.

For these and other reasons we humbly beg the favour of you, as soon as convenient, to call a meeting, and let us consider on some means to retrieve our wretched affairs. — We are, etc.

3 The MS. of the foregoing joint letter in Burns’s handwriting belongs to John Adam, Esquire, Greenock, and the letter was first published in 1878. Burns was first admitted in St. David’s (Tarbolton) Lodge in July, 1781. At the separation preferred to he became a member of the new lodge, St. James’s, of which, two years afterwards, he was depute-master.

4 It was in June, 1782.

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VIII. — TO MR. JOHN MURDOCH, SCHOOL-MASTER, STAPLES INN BUILDINGS, LONDON.

LOCHLIE, 15th January, 1783.

DEAR SIR, — As I have an opportunity of sending you a letter without putting you to that expense which any production of mine would but ill repay, I embrace it with pleasure, to tell you that I have not forgotten, or ever will forget, the many obligations I lie under to your kindness and friendship.

I do not doubt, Sir, but you will wish to know what has been the result of all the pains of an indulgent father, and a masterly teacher; and I wish I could gratify your curiosity with such a recital as you would be pleased with; — but that is what I am afraid will not be the case. I have, indeed, kept pretty clear of vicious habits; and in this respect, I hope, my conduct will not disgrace the education I have gotten; but as a man of the world, I am most miserably deficient. One would have thought that, bred as I have been, under a father who has figured pretty well as un homme des affaires, I might have been what the world calls a pushing active fellow; but to tell you the truth, Sir, there is hardly anything more my reverse. I seem to be one sent into the world to see and observe; and I very easily compound with the knave who tricks me of my money, if there be anything original about him which shows me human nature in a different light from anything I have seen before. In short, the joy of my heart is to “study men, their manners, and their ways;” and for this darling subject, I cheerfully sacrifice every other consideration. I am quite indolent about those great concerns that set the bustling, busy sons of care agog; and if I have to answer for the present hour, I am very easy with regard to anything further. Even the last, worst shift of the unfortunate and the wretched^5does not much terrify me: I know that even then my talent for what countryfolks call “a sensible crack,” when once it is sanctified by a hoary head, would procure me so much esteem that even then — I would learn to be happy. However, I am under no apprehensions about that; for though indolent, yet so far as an extremely delicate constitution permits, I am not lazy; and in many things, especially in tavern matters, I am a strict economist; not, indeed, for the sake of the money; but one of the principal parts in my composition is a kind of pride of stomach; and I scorn to fear the face of any man living: above every thing, I abhor as hell the idea of sneaking in a corner to avoid a dun — possibly some pitiful sordid wretch, whom in my heart I despise and detest. ‘Tis this, and this alone, that endears economy to me.6

In the matter of books, indeed, I am very profuse. My favourite authors are of the sentimental kind, such as Shenstone, particularly his Elegies; Thomson; Man of Feeling, — a book I prize next to the Bible; Man of the World; Sterne, especially his Sentimental Journey; Macpherson’s Ossian, etc.; — these are the glorious models after which I endeavour to form my conduct, and ‘tis incongruous—‘tis absurd to suppose that the man whose mind glows with sentiments lighted up at their sacred flame — the man whose heart distends with benevolence to all the human race — he “who can soar above this little scene of things” — can he descend to mind the paltry concerns about which the terrae-filial race fret, and fume, and vex themselves! O, how the glorious triumph swells my heart! I forget that I am a poor insignificant devil, unnoticed and unknown, stalking up and down fairs and markets, when I happen to be in them reading a page or two of mankind, and “catching the manners living as they rise,” whilst the men of business jostle me on every side as an idle incumbrance in their way. But, I daresay, I have by this time tired your patience; so I shall conclude with begging you to give Mrs. Murdoch — not my compliments, for that is a mere commonplace story; but my warmest, kindest wishes for her welfare; and accept the same for yourself, from, — Dear Sir, yours, etc.

5“The last o’t, the warst o’t,

Is only for to beg.”

— First Epistle to Davie.

6“For the glorious privilege

Of being independent.”

— Epistle to a Young Friend.

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IX. — TO HIS COUSIN, MR. JAMES BURNESS, WRITER, MONTROSE.

LOCHLIE, 21st June, 1783.

DEAR SIR, — My father received your favour of the both current, and as he has been for some months very poorly in health, and is in his own opinion (and, indeed, in almost every body’s else) in a dying condition, he has only, with great difficulty, written a few farewell lines to each of his brothers-in-law. For this melancholy reason, I now hold the pen for him to thank you for your kind letter, and to assure you, Sir, that it shall not be my fault if my father’s correspondence in the north die with him. My brother writes to John Caird,6 and to him I must refer you for the news of our family.

I shall only trouble you with a few particulars relative to the wretched state of this country. Our markets are exceedingly high; oatmeal 17d. and 18d. per peck, and not to be got even at that price. We have indeed been pretty well supplied with quantities of white peas from England and elsewhere, but that resource is likely to fail us, and what will become of us then, particularly the very poorest sort, Heaven only knows. This country, till of late, was flourishing incredibly in the manufacture of silk, lawn, and carpet-weaving; and we are still carrying on a good deal in that way, but much reduced from what it was. We had also a fine trade in the shoe way, but now entirely ruined, and hundreds driven to a starving condition on account of it. Farming is also at a very low ebb with us. Our lands, generally speaking, are mountainous and barren; and our land-holders, full of ideas of farming gathered from the English and the Lothians, and other rich soils in Scotland, make no allowance for the odds of the quality of land, and consequently stretch us much beyond what in the event we will be found able to pay. We are also much at a loss for want of proper methods in our improvements of farming. Necessity compels us to leave our old schemes, and few of us have opportunities of being well informed in new ones. In short, my dear Sir, since the unfortunate beginning of this American war, and its as unfortunate conclusion, this country has been, and still is, decaying very fast. Even in higher life, a couple of Ayrshire noblemen, and the major part of our knights and squires, are all insolvent. A miserable job of a Douglas, Heron & Co.‘s bank, which no doubt you have heard of, has undone numbers of them; and imitating English and French, and other foreign luxuries and fopperies, has ruined as many more. There is a great trade of smuggling carried on along our coasts, which, however destructive to the interests of the kingdom at large, certainly enriches this corner of it, but too often at the expense of our morals. However, it enables individuals to make, at least for a time, a splendid appearance; but Fortune, as is usual with her when she is uncommonly lavish of her favours, is generally even with them at last; and happy were it for numbers of them if she would leave them no worse than when she found them.

My mother sends you a small present of a cheese; ‘tis but a very little one, as our last year’s stock is sold off; but if you could fix on any correspondent in Edinburgh or Glasgow, we would send you a proper one in the season. Mrs. Black promises to take the cheese under her care so far, and then to send it to you by the Stirling carrier.

I shall conclude this long letter with assuring you that I shall be very happy to hear from you, or any of our friends in your country, when opportunity serves.

My father sends you, probably for the last time in this world, his warmest wishes for your welfare and happiness; and my mother and the rest of the family desire to inclose their kind compliments to you, Mrs. Burness, and the rest of your family, along with those of, dear Sir, your affectionate cousin,

6 The writer’s uncle.

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X. — TO MR. JAMES BURNESS, WRITER, MONTROSE.

LOCHLIE, 17th Feb. 1784.

DEAR COUSIN, — I would have returned you my thanks for your kind favour of the 13th of December sooner, had it not been that I waited to give you an account of that melancholy event, which, for some time past, we have from day to day expected.

On the 13th current I lost the best of fathers. Though, to be sure, we have had long warning of the impending stroke, still the feelings of nature claim their part, and I cannot recollect the tender endearments and parental lessons of the best of friends and ablest of instructors, without feeling what perhaps the calmer dictates of reason would partly condemn.

I hope my father’s friends in your country will not let their connection in this place die with him. For my part I shall ever with pleasure — with pride, acknowledge my connection with those who were allied by the ties of blood and friendship to a man whose memory I shall ever honour and revere.

I expect, therefore, my dear Sir, you will not neglect any opportunity of letting me hear from you, which will very much oblige, — My dear Cousin, yours sincerely,

ROBERT BURNESS.

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XI. — TO MR. JAMES BURNESS, WRITER, MONTROSE.

MOSSGIEL, 3rd August 1784.

MY DEAR SIR, — I ought in gratitude to have acknowledged the receipt of your last kind letter before this time, but, without troubling you with any apology, I shall proceed to inform you that our family are all in good health at present, and we were very happy with the unexpected favour of John Caird’s6a company for nearly two weeks, and I must say it of him that he is one of the most agreeable, facetious, warm-hearted lads I was ever acquainted with.

We have been surprised with one of the most extraordinary phenomena in the moral world, which, I dare say, has happened in the course of this half century. We have had a party of Presbytery relief, as they call themselves, for some time in this country. A pretty thriving society of them has been in the burgh of Irvine for some years past, till about two years ago a Mrs. Buchan from Glasgow came among them, and began to spread some fanatical notions of religion among them, and in a short time made many converts; and among others their preacher, Mr. Whyte, who, upon that account, has been suspended and formally deposed by his brethren. He continued, however, to preach in private to his party, and was supported, both he, and their spiritual mother, as they affect to call old Buchan, by the contributions of the rest, several of whom were in good circumstances; till, in spring last, the populace rose and mobbed Mrs. Buchan, and put her out of the town; on which all her followers voluntarily quitted the place likewise, and with such precipitation that many of them never shut their doors behind them; one left a washing on the green, another a cow bellowing at the crib without food or anybody to mind her, and after several stages they are fixed at present in the neighbourhood of Dumfries. Their tenets are a strange jumble of enthusiastic jargon; among others, she pretends to give them the Holy Ghost by breathing on them, which she does with postures and practices that are scandalously indecent; they have likewise disposed of all their effects, and hold a community of goods, and live nearly an idle life, carrying on a great farce of pretended devotion in barns and woods, where they lodge and lie all together, and hold likewise a community of women, as it is another of their tenets that they can commit no moral sin. I am personally acquainted with most of them, and I can assure you the above mentioned are facts.

This, my dear Sir, is one of the many instances of the folly of leaving the guidance of sound reason and common sense in matters of religion.

Whenever we neglect or despise these sacred monitors, the whimsical notions of a perturbated brain are taken for the immediate influences of the Deity, and the wildest fanaticism, and the most inconsistent absurdities, will meet with abetters and converts. Nay, I have often thought, that the more out-of-the-way and ridiculous the fancies are, if once they are sanctified under the sacred name of religion, the unhappy mistaken votaries are the more firmly glued to them.

I expect to hear from you soon, and I beg you will remember me to all friends, and believe me to be, my dear Sir, your affectionate cousin,

ROBERT BURNESS.

P.S. — Direct to me at Mossgiel, parish of Mauchline, near Kilmarnock.

6a Probably John Caird, junior, as the father would be over sixty if he was about his wife’s age, and she, Elspat Burnes, was born, we know, in 1725.

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XII. — TO THOMAS ORR, PARK, KIRKOSWALD.

DEAR THOMAS, — I am much obliged to you for your last letter, though I assure you the contents of it gave me no manner of concern. I am presently so cursedly taken in with an affair of gallantry that I am very glad Peggy^7 is off my hand, as I am at present embarrassed enough7a without her. I don’t choose to enter into particulars in writing, but never was a poor rakish rascal in a more pitiful taking. I should be glad to see you to tell you the affair. — Meanwhile I am your friend, ROBERT BURNESS.

MOSSGAVIL, 11th Nov. 1784.

7 Peggy Thomson.

7a Birth of his illegitimate child by Elizabeth Paton, once a servant with his father at Lochlie.

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XIII. — TO MISS MARGARET KENNEDY.8

[A young lady of seventeen, when this letter was addressed to her, and on a visit to Mrs. Gavin Hamilton at Mauchline.]

[Probably Autumn, 1785.]

MADAM, — Permit me to present you with the enclosed song as a small though grateful tribute for the honour of your acquaintance. I have in these verses attempted some faint sketch of your portrait in the unembellished simple manner of descriptive truth. Flattery I leave to your lovers whose exaggerating fancies may make them imagine you are still nearer perfection than you really are.

Poets, Madam, of all mankind, feel most forcibly the powers of beauty, — as, if they are really poets of nature’s making, their feelings must be finer and their taste more delicate than most of the world. In the cheerful bloom of spring, or the pensive mildness of autumn, the grandeur of summer, or the hoary majesty of winter, the poet feels a charm unknown to the most of his species. Even the sight of a fine flower, or the company of a fine woman (by far the finest part of God’s works below), has sensations for the poetic heart that the herd of men are strangers to. On this last account, Madam, I am, as in many other things, indebted to Mr. Hamilton’s kindness in introducing me to you. Your lovers may view you with a wish — I look on you with pleasure; their hearts in your presence may glow with desire — mine rises with admiration.

That the arrows of misfortune, however they should, as incident to humanity, glance a slight wound, may never reach your heart; that the snares of villainy may never beset you in the road of life; that innocence may hand you by the path of honour to the dwelling of peace — is the sincere wish of him who has the honour to be, etc. R. B.

8 Niece of Sir Andrew Cathcait, of Carleton. A melancholy interest attaches to her subsequent history. Burns’s prayers for her happiness were unavailing.

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XIV. — TO MISS –- , AYRSHIRE.9

[1785.]

MY DEAR COUNTRYWOMAN, — I am so impatient to show you that I am once more at peace with you, that I send you the book I mentioned, directly, rather than wait the uncertain time of my seeing you. I am afraid I have mislaid or lost Collins’s Poems, which I promised to Miss Irvin. If I can find them I will forward them by you; if not, you must apologise for me.

I know you will laugh at it when I tell you that your piano and you together have played the deuce somehow about my heart. My breast has been widowed these many months, and I thought myself proof against the fascinating witchcraft; but I am afraid you will “feelingly convince me what I am.”. I say, I am afraid, because I am not sure what is the matter with me. I have one miserable bad symptom, — when you whisper, or look kindly to another, it gives me a draught of damnation. I have a kind of wayward wish to be with you ten minutes by yourself, though what I would say, Heaven above knows, for I am sure I know not. I have no formed design in all this; but just, in the nakedness of my heart, write you down a mere matter-of-fact story. You may perhaps give yourself airs of distance on this, and that will completely cure me; but I wish you would not; just let us meet, if you please, in the old beaten way of friendship.

I will not subscribe myself your humble servant, for that is a phrase, I think, at least fifty miles off from the heart; but I will conclude with sincerely wishing that the Great Protector of innocence may shield you from the barbed dart of calumny, and hand you by the covert snare of deceit. R. B.

9 Lady unidentified.

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XV. — TO MR. JOHN RICHMOND, LAW CLERK, EDINBURGH.1^0

MOSSGIEL, Feb. 17th, 1786.

MY DEAR SIR, — I have not time at present to upbraid you for your silence and neglect; I shall only say I received yours with great pleasure. I have enclosed you a piece of rhyming ware for your perusal. I have been very busy with the muses since I saw you, and have composed, among several others, “The Ordination,” a poem on Mr. M’Kinlay’s being called to Kilmarnock; “Scotch Drink,” a poem; “The Cottar’s Saturday Night;” “An Address to the Devil,” etc. I have likewise completed my poem on the “Dogs,” but have not shown it to the world. My chief patron now is Mr. Aikin, in Ayr, who is pleased to express great approbation of my works. Be so good as send me Fergusson^11, by Connell, and I will remit you the money. I have no news to acquaint you with about Mauchline, they are just going on in the old way. I have some very important news with respect to myself, not the most agreeable — news that I am sure you cannot guess, but I shall give you the particulars another time. I am extremely happy with Smith;11ahe is the only friend I have now in Mauchline. I can scarcely forgive your long neglect of me, and I beg you will let me hear from you regularly by Connell. If you would act your part as a friend, I am sure neither good nor bad fortune should estrange or alter me. Excuse haste, as I got yours but yesterday. — I am, my dear Sir, yours, ROBERT BURNESS.

10 Three months before this letter was written Richmond was a clerk in the office of Mr. Gavin Hamilton, writer, Mauchline.

11 Fergusson’s Poems.

11a Keeper of a haberdashery store in Mauchline.

Detailed Table of Contents for the letters

XVI. — TO MR. JAMES SMITH^12, SHOPKEEPER, MAUCHLINE.

[Spring of 1786.]

… Against two things I am fixed as fate, — staying at home, and owning her conjugally. The first, by Heaven, I will not do! — the last, by Hell, I will never do! A good God bless you, and make you happy up to the warmest weeping wish of parting friendship! … If you see Jean tell her I will meet her, so help me God in my hour of need! R. B.

12 The confidant of his amour with Jean Armour, daughter of James Armour, mason, Mauchline. Notwithstanding the blustering threat — for which Smith was probably more than half responsible — Burns was afterwards content to “own bonny Jean conjugally.”

Detailed Table of Contents for the letters

XVII. — TO MR. ROBERT MUIR, WINE MERCHANT, KlLMARNOCK.

MOSSGIEL, 20th March, 1786.

DEAR SIR, — I am heartily sorry I had not the pleasure of seeing you as you returned through Mauchline; but as I was engaged, I could not be in town before the evening.

I here inclose you my “Scotch Drink,” and “may the deil follow with a blessing for your edification.” I hope, sometime before we hear the gowk, to have the pleasure of seeing you at Kilmarnock, when I intend we shall have a gill between us, in a mutchkin-stoup; which will be a great comfort and consolation to, dear Sir, your humble servant, ROBERT BURNESS.

Detailed Table of Contents for the letters

XVIII. — TO MR. JOHN BALLANTINE, BANKER, AYR. (?)

[April 1786.]

HONOURED SIR, — My proposals12a came to hand last night, and, knowing that you would wish to have it in your power to do me a service as early as any body, I enclose you half a sheet of them. I must consult you, first opportunity, on the propriety of sending my quondam friend, Mr. Aiken,12b a copy. If he is now reconciled to my character as an honest man, I would do it with all my soul; but I would not be beholden to the noblest being ever God created if he imagined me to be a rascal. Apropos, old Mr. Armour prevailed with him to mutilate that unlucky paper12c yesterday. Would you believe it? though I had not a hope, nor even a wish to make her mine after her conduct, yet when he told me the names were cut out of the paper, my heart died within me, and he cut my veins with the news. Perdition seize her falsehood! ROBERT BURNS.

12a Proposals for publishing his Scottish Poems by subscription.

12bWriter in Ayr.

12c The written acknowledgment of his marriage which Burns gave to Jean. She, influenced by her father, consented to destroy it.

Detailed Table of Contents for the letters

XIX. — TO MR. M’WHINNIE, WRITER, AYR.

[MOSSGIEL, 17th April 1786.]

IT is injuring some hearts, those hearts that elegantly bear the impression of the good Creator, to say to them you give them the trouble of obliging a friend; for this reason, I only tell you that I gratify my own feelings in requesting your friendly offices with respect to the enclosed, because I know it will gratify yours to assist me in it to the utmost of your power.

I have sent you four copies, as I have no less than eight dozen, which is a great deal more than I shall ever need.

Be sure to remember a poor poet militant in your prayers He looks forward with fear^13 and trembling to that, to him, important moment which stamps the die with — with — with, perhaps, the eternal disgrace of, my dear Sir, your humble, afflicted, tormented, ROBERT BURNS.

13 Cp. “Something cries Hoolie! I rede ye, honest man, tak tent, ye’ll show your folly!”

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XX. — TO JOHN ARNOT, ESQUIRE, OF DALQUATSWOOD.

[April 1786.]

SIR, — I have long wished for some kind of claim to the honour of your acquaintance, and since it is out of my power to make that claim by the least service of mine to you, I shall do it by asking a friendly office of you to me. — I should be much hurt, Sir, if any one should view my poor Parnassian Pegasus in the light of a spur-galled Hack, and think that I wish to make a shilling or two by him. I spurn the thought.

It may do, maun do, Sir, wi’ them who

Maun please the great-folk for a wame-fou;

For me, sae laigh I needna boo

For, Lord be thankit! I can ploo;

And, when I downa yoke a naig,

Then, Lord be thankit! I can beg.

You will then, I hope, Sir, forgive my troubling you with the enclosed,14 and spare a poor heart-crushed devil a world of apologies — a business he is very unfit for at any time, but at present, widowed as he is of every woman-giving comfort, he is utterly incapable of. Sad and grievous of late, Sir, has been my tribulation, and many and piercing my sorrows; and, had it not been for the loss the world would have sustained in losing so great a poet, I had ere now done as a much wiser man, the famous Achitophel of long-headed memory, did before me, when he “went home and set his house in order.” I have lost, Sir, that dearest earthly treasure, that greatest blessing here below, that last, best gift which completed Adam’s happiness in the garden of bliss; I have lost, I have lost — my trembling hand refuses its office, the frighted ink recoils up the quill, — I have lost a, a, a wife.

Fairest of God’s creation, last and best,

Now art thou lost!

You have doubtless, Sir, heard my story, heard it with all its exaggerations; but as my actions, and my motives for action, are peculiarly like myself and that is peculiarly like nobody else, I shall just beg a leisure moment and a spare tear of you until I tell my own story my own way.

I have been all my life, Sir, one of the rueful-looking, long-visaged sons of disappointment. A damned star has always kept my zenith, and shed its hateful influence in the emphatic curse of the prophet— “And behold whatsoever he doth, it shall not prosper!” I rarely hit where I aim, and if I want anything, I am almost sure never to find it where I seek it. For instance, if my penknife is needed, I pull out twenty things — a plough-wedge, a horse nail, an old letter, or a tattered rhyme, in short, everything but my penknife; and that, at last, after a painful, fruitless search, will be found in the unsuspected corner of an unsuspected pocket, as if on purpose thrust out of the way. Still, Sir, I long had a wishing eye to that inestimable blessing, a wife.

… A young fellow, after a few idle commonplace stories from a gentleman in black … no one durst say black was his eye; while I … only wanting that ceremony, am made a Sunday’s laughing-stock, and abused like a pickpocket. I was well aware, though, that if my ill-starred fortune got the least hint of my connubial wish, my scheme would go to nothing. To prevent this I determined to take my measures with such thought and fore-thought, such cautions and precautions, that all the malignant planets in the hemisphere should be unable to blight my designs …. Heaven and Earth! must I remember? my damned star wheeled about to the zenith, by whose baleful rays Fortune took the alarm.15a … In short, Pharaoh at the Red Sea, Darius at Arbela, Pompey at Pharsalia, Edward at Bannockburn, Charles at Pultoway, Burgoyne at Saratoga — no prince, potentate, or commander of ancient or modern unfortunate memory ever got a more shameful or more total defeat. How I bore this can only be conceived. All powers of recital labour far, far behind. There is a pretty large portion of Bedlam in the composition of a poet at any time; but on this occasion I was nine parts and nine tenths, out of ten, stark staring mad. At first I was fixed in stuporific insensibility, silent, sullen, staring like Lot’s wife besaltified in the plains of Gomorrha. But my second paroxysm chiefly beggars description. The rifted northern ocean, when returning suns dissolve the chains of winter, and loosening precipices of long-accumulated ice tempest with hideous crash the foaming deep, — images like these may give some faint shadow of what was the situation of my bosom. My chained faculties broke loose; my maddening passions, roused to tenfold fury, bore over their banks with impetuous, resistless force, carrying every check and principle before them. Counsel was an unheeded call to the passing hurricane; Reason a screaming elk in the vortex of Malstrom; and Religion a feebly-struggling beaver down the roarings of Niagara. I reprobated the first moment of my existence; execrated Adam’s folly-infatuated wish for that goodly-looking but poison-breathing gift which had ruined him and undone me; and called on the womb of uncreated night to close over me and all my sorrows.

A storm naturally overblows itself. My spent passions gradually sunk into a lurid calm; and by degrees I have subsided into the time-settled sorrow of the sable-widower, who, wiping away the decent tear, lifts up his grief-worn eye to look-for another wife.

Such is the state of man; to-day he buds

His tender leaves of hope; to-morrow blossoms

And bears his blushing honours thick upon him;

The third day comes a frost, a killing frost,

And nips his root, and then he falls as I do.15

Such, Sir, has been the fatal era of my life. And it came to pass that when I looked for sweet, behold bitter; and for light, behold darkness.

But this is not all: already the holy beagles begin to snuff the scent, and I expect every moment to see them cast off, and hear them after me in full cry; but as I am an old fox, I shall give them dodging and doubling for it, and by and by I intend to earth among the mountains of Jamaica.

I am so struck, on a review, with the impertinent length of this letter, that I shall not increase it with one single word of apology, but abruptly conclude with assuring you that I am, Sir, yours and misery’s most humble servant.

ROBERT BURNS.

14 Proposals for publishing.

15 Misquoted from Shakspeare’s Henry VIII.

15a Reference to the rejection of his acknowledgment of marriage.

Detailed Table of Contents for the letters

XXI. — TO MR. DAVID BRICE, SHOEMAKER, GLASGOW.

MOSSGIEL, June 12th, 1786.

DEAR BRICE, — I received your message by G. Paterson, and as I am not very throng at present, I just write to let you know that there is such a worthless, rhyming reprobate as your humble servant still in the land of the living, though I can scarcely say in the place of hope. I have no news to tell you that will give me any pleasure to mention, or you to hear.

Poor, ill-advised, ungrateful Armour came home on Friday last. You have heard all the particulars of that affair, and a black affair it is. What she thinks of her conduct now I don’t know; one thing I do know — she has made me completely miserable. Never man loved, or rather adored a woman more than I did her; and, to confess a truth between you and me, I do still love her to distraction after all, though I won’t tell her so if I were to see her, which I don’t want to do. My poor dear unfortunate Jean! how happy have I been in thy arms! It is not the losing her that makes me so unhappy, but for her sake I feel most severely: I foresee she is in the road to, I am afraid, eternal ruin.

May Almighty God forgive her ingratitude and perjury to me, as I from my very soul forgive her; and may His grace be with her and bless her in all her future life! I can have no nearer idea of the place of eternal punishment than what I have felt in my own breast on her account. I have tried often to forget her; I have run into all kinds of dissipation and riots, mason-meetings, drinking-matches, and other mischief, to drive her out of my head, but all in vain. And now for a grand cure; the ship is on her way home that is to take me out to Jamaica; and then, farewell, dear old Scotland! and farewell, dear ungrateful Jean! for never, never will I see you more.

You will have heard that I am going to commence poet in print; and to-morrow my work goes to the press. I expect it will be a volume of about two hundred pages — it is just the last foolish action I intend to do, and then turn a wise man as fast as possible. — Believe me to be, dear Brice, your friend and well-wisher. R. B.

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XXII. — TO MR. JOHN RICHMOND, EDINBURGH.

MOSSGIEL, 9th July 1786.

With the sincerest grief I read your letter. You are truly a son of misfortune. I shall be extremely anxious to hear from you how your health goes on; if it is in any way re-establishing, or if Leith promises well; in short, how you feel in the inner man.

No news worth anything; only godly Bryan was in the inquisition yesterday, and half the countryside as witnesses against him. He still stands out steady and denying; but proof was led yesternight of circumstances highly suspicious, almost de facto; one of the servant girls made oath that she upon a time rashly entered into the house, to speak in your cant, “in the hour of cause.”

I have waited on Armour since her return home; not from the least view of reconciliation, but merely to ask for her health, and to you I will confess it, from a foolish hankering fondness, very ill placed indeed. The mother forbade me the house, nor did Jean show that penitence that might have been expected. However, the priest,15a I am informed, will give me a certificate as a single man, if I comply with the rules of the church, which for that very reason I intend to do.16

I am going to put on sackcloth and ashes this day. I am indulged so far as to appear in my own seat. Peccavi, pater, miserere mei. My book will be ready in a fortnight. If you have any subscribers, return them by Connell. The Lord stand with the righteous; amen, amen. R. B.

15a Rev. Mr. Auld — Daddie Auld.

16 This accordingly he did.

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XXIII — TO MR. JOHN RICHMOND.

OLD ROME FOREST,17 30th July 1786.

MY DEAR RICHMOND, — My hour is now come — you and I will never meet in Britain more. I have orders, within three weeks at farthest, to repair aboard the Nancy, Captain Smith, from Clyde to Jamaica, and to call at Antigua. This, except to our friend Smith, whom God long preserve, is a secret about Mauchline. Would you believe it? Armour has got a warrant to throw me in jail till I find security for an enormous sum. This they keep an entire secret, but I got it by a channel they little dream of; and I am wandering from one friend’s house to another, and, like a true son of the Gospel, “have nowhere to lay my head.” I know you will pour an execration on her head, but spare the poor, ill-advised girl, for my sake; though may all the furies that rend the injured, enraged lover’s bosom await her mother until her latest hour! I write in a moment of rage, reflecting on my miserable situation — exiled, abandoned, forlorn. I can write no more — let me hear from you by the return of the coach. I will write you ere I go. — I am, dear Sir, yours, here and hereafter, R. B.

17 In the neighbourhood of Kilmarnock. Here he had deposited his travelling chest in the house of a relative.

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XXIV. — TO MR. JOHN KENNEDY.

KILMARNOCK, August 1786.

MY DEAR SIR — Your truly facetious epistle of the 3rd instant gave me much entertainment. I was only sorry I had not the pleasure of seeing you as I passed your way; but we shall bring up all our lee way on Wednesday, the 16th current, when I hope to have it in my power to call on you, and take a kind, very probably a last adieu, before I go for Jamaica; and I expect orders to repair to Greenock every day. I have at last made my public appearance, and am solemnly inaugurated into the numerous class.18 Could I have got a carrier, you should have got a score of vouchers for my authorship; but, now you have them, let them speak for themselves. —

Farewell, dear friend! may guid luck hit you,

And ‘mang her favourites admit you,

If e’er Detraction shore to smit you,

May nane believe him,

And ony Deil that thinks to get you,

Good LORD, deceive him,

R.B.

18 The Kilmarnock Edition of his poems was published on 31st July.

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XXV. — TO HIS COUSIN, MR. JAMES BURNESS, WRITER, MONTROSE.

MOSSGIEL, Tuesday Noon, 26th Sept. 1786.

MY DEAR SIR, — I this moment receive yours — receive it with the honest hospitable warmth of a friend’s welcome. Whatever comes from you always wakens up the better blood about my heart, which your kind little recollections of my parental friend carries as far as it will go. ‘Tis there that man is blest! ‘Tis there, my friend, man feels a consciousness of something within him above the trodden clod! The grateful reverence to the hoary earthly authors of his being, the burning glow when he clasps the woman of his soul to his bosom, the tender yearnings of heart for the little angels to whom he has given existence — these Nature has poured in milky streams about the human heart; and the man who never rouses them to action by the inspiring influences of their proper objects loses by far the most pleasurable part of his existence.

My departure is uncertain, but I do not think it will be till after harvest. I will be on very short allowance of time indeed, if I do not comply with your friendly invitation. When it will be I don’t know, but if I can make my wish good I will endeavour to drop you a line some time before. My best compliments to Mrs. Burness; I should be equally mortified should I drop in when she is abroad, but of that, I suppose, there is little chance. What I have wrote, heaven knows. I have not time to review it, so accept of it in the beaten way of friendship. With the ordinary phrase, and perhaps rather more than the ordinary sincerity, I am, dear Sir, ever yours, R. B.

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XXVI. — TO MRS. STEWART, OF STAIR.1^9

[Oct. 1786.?]

MADAM, — The hurry of my preparations for going abroad has hindered me from performing my promise so soon as I intended. I have here sent you a parcel of songs, etc., which never made their appearance, except to a friend or two at most. Perhaps some of them may be no great entertainment to you, but of that I am far from being an adequate judge. The song to the time of “Ettrick Banks”20 you will easily see the impropriety of exposing much even in manuscript. I think, myself, it has some merit, both as a tolerable description of one of nature’s sweetest scenes, a July evening, and as one of the finest pieces of nature’s workmanship, the finest indeed we know anything of, an amiable, beautiful young woman; but I have no common friend to procure me that permission, without which I would not dare to spread the copy.

I am quite aware, Madam, what task the world would assign me in this letter. The obscure bard, when any of the great condescend to take notice of him, should heap the altar with the incense of flattery. Their high ancestry, their own great and godlike qualities and actions, should be recounted with the most exaggerated description. This, Madam, is a task for which I am altogether unfit. Besides a certain disqualifying pride of heart, I know nothing of your connections in life, and have no access to where your real character is to be found — the company of your compeers: and more, I am afraid that even the most refined adulation is by no means the road to your good opinion.

One feature of your character I shall ever with grateful pleasure remember — the reception I got when I had the honour of waiting on you at Stair. I am little acquainted with politeness, but I know a good deal of benevolence of temper and goodness of heart. Surely did those in exalted stations know how happy they could make some classes of their inferiors by condescension and affability, they would never stand so high, measuring out with every look the height of their elevation, but condescend as sweetly as did Mrs. Stewart of Stair. R. B.

19 Mrs. Stewart, of Stair, was the first person of note to discover in the Ayrshire ploughman a genius of the first order.

20 The Bonnie Lass of Ballochmyle

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XXVII. — TO MR. ROBERT AIKIN, WRITER, AYR.

[Oct. 1786.?]

SIR, — I was with Wilson, my printer, t’other day, and settled all our by-gone matters between us. After I had paid him all demands, I made him the offer of the second edition, on the hazard of being paid out of the first and readiest, which he declines. By his account, the paper of a thousand copies would cost about twenty-seven pounds, and the printing about fifteen or sixteen: he offers to agree to this for the printing, if I will advance for the paper, but this, you know, is out of my power; so farewell hopes of a second edition ‘till I grow richer! an epocha which, I think, will arrive at the payment of the British national debt.

There is scarcely anything hurts me so much in being disappointed of my second edition, as not having it in my power to show my gratitude to Mr. Ballantine, by publishing my poem of “The Brigs of Ayr.” I would detest myself as a wretch, if I thought I were capable in a very long life of forgetting the honest, warm, and tender delicacy with which he enters into my interests. I am sometimes pleased with myself in my grateful sensations; but I believe, on the whole, I have very little merit in it, as my gratitude is not a virtue, the consequence of reflection, but sheerly the instinctive emotion of my heart, too inattentive to allow worldly maxims and views to settle into selfish habits.

I have been feeling all the various rotations and movements within, respecting the Excise. There are many things plead strongly against it; the uncertainty of getting soon into business; the consequences of my follies, which may perhaps make it impracticable for me to stay at home; and, besides, I have for some time been pining under secret wretchedness, from causes which you pretty well know — the pang of disappointment, the sting of pride, with some wandering stabs of remorse, which never fail to settle on my vitals like vultures, when attention is not called away by the calls of society, or the vagaries of the muse. Even in the hour of social mirth, my gaiety is the madness of an intoxicated criminal under the hands of the executioner. All these reasons urge me to go abroad, and to all these reasons I have only one answer — the feelings of a father. This, in the present mood I am in, overbalances everything that can be laid in the scale against it.

You may perhaps think it an extravagant fancy, but it is a sentiment which strikes home to my very soul: though sceptical in some points of our current belief, yet, I think, I have every evidence for the reality of a life beyond the stinted bourne of our present existence; if so, then, how should I, in the presence of that tremendous Being, the Author of existence, how should I meet the reproaches of those who stand to me in the dear relation of children, whom I deserted in the smiling innocency of helpless infancy? O, thou great unknown Power! — thou Almighty God! who has lighted up reason in my breast, and blessed me with immortality! — I have frequently wandered from that order and regularity necessary for the perfection of Thy works, yet Thou hast never left me nor forsaken me!

Since I wrote the foregoing sheet, I have seen something of the storm of mischief thickening over my folly-devoted head. Should you, my friends, my benefactors, be successful in your applications for me, perhaps it may not be in my power, in that way, to reap the fruit of your friendly efforts. What I have written in the preceding pages, is the settled tenor of my present resolution; but should inimical circumstances forbid me closing with your kind offer, or enjoying it only threaten to entail farther misery —

To tell the truth, I have little reason for this last complaint; as the world, in general, has been kind to me fully up to my deserts. I was, for some time past, fast getting into the pining, distrustful snarl of the misanthrope. I saw myself alone, unfit for the struggle of life, shrinking at every rising cloud in the chance-directed atmosphere of fortune, while, all defenceless, I looked about in vain for a cover. It never occurred to me, at least never with the force it deserved, that this world is a busy scene, and man, a creature destined for a progressive struggle; and that, however I might possess a warm heart and inoffensive manners (which last, by the by, was rather more than I could well boast) still, more than these passive qualities, there was something to be done. When all my school-fellows and youthful compeers (those misguided few excepted who joined, to use a Gentoo phrase, the “hallachores” of the human race) were striking off with eager hope and earnest intent, in some one or other of the many paths of busy life, I was “standing idle in the market-place,” or only left the chase of the butterfly from flower to flower, to hunt fancy from whim to whim.

You see, Sir, that if to know one’s errors were a probability of mending them, I stand a fair chance: but, according to the reverend Westminster divines, though conviction must precede conversion, it is very far from always implying it.

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XXVIII. — TO DR. MACKENZIE, MAUCHLINE; INCLOSING HIM VERSES ON DINING WITH LORD DAER.

Wednesday Morning [1st Nov. 1786].

DEAR SIR, — I never spent an afternoon among great folks with half that pleasure as when, in company with you, I had the honour of paying my devoirs to that plain, honest, worthy man, the professor^21 I would be delighted to see him perform acts of kindness and friendship, though I were not the object; he does it with such a grace. I think his character, divided into ten parts, stands thus, — four parts Socrates — four parts Nathaniel — and two parts Shakespeare’s Brutus.

The following verses were really extempore, but a little corrected since. They may entertain you a little with the help of that partiality with which you are so good as to favour the performances of, dear Sir, your very humble servant, R. B.

21 Dugald Stewart, Professor of Moral Philosophy in the University of Edinburgh.

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XXIX. — TO MRS. DUNLOP, OF DUNLOP.

Nov. 1786.

MADAM, — I am truly sorry I was not at home yesterday, when I was so much honoured with your order for my copies, and incomparably more by the handsome compliments you are pleased to pay my poetic abilities. I am fully persuaded that there is not any class of mankind so feelingly alive to the titillations of applause as the sons of Parnassus; nor is it easy to conceive how the heart of the poor bard dances with rapture, when those, whose character in life gives them a right to be polite judges, honour him with their approbation. Had you been thoroughly acquainted with me, Madam, you could not have touched my darling heart-chord more sweetly, than by noticing my attempts to celebrate your illustrious ancestor, the saviour of his country.

Great patriot hero! ill-requited chief!

The first book I met with in my early years which I perused with pleasure was The Life of Hannibal; the next was The History of Sir William Wallace: for several of my early years I had few other authors; and many a solitary hour have I stole out, after the laborious vocations of the day, to shed a tear over their glorious, but unfortunate stories. In those boyish days I remember, in particular, being struck with that part of Wallace’s story, where these lines occur —

“Syne to the Leglen wood, when it was late,

To make a silent and a safe retreat.”

I chose a fine summer Sunday, the only day my line of life allowed, and walked half-a-dozen of miles to pay my respects to the Leglen wood, with as much devout enthusiasm as ever pilgrim did to Loretto; and as I explored every den and dell where I could suppose my heroic countryman to have lodged, I recollect (for even then I was a rhymer) that my heart glowed with a wish to be able to make a song on him in some measure equal to his merits. R. B.

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XXX. — TO MISS ALEXANDER.

MOSSGIEL, 18th Nov. 1786.

MADAM, — Poets are such outre beings, so much the children of wayward fancy and capricious whim, that I believe the world generally allows them a larger latitude in the laws of propriety than the sober sons of judgment and prudence. I mention this as an apology for the liberties that a nameless stranger has taken with you in the inclosed poem, which he begs leave to present you with. Whether it has poetical merit any way worthy of the theme, I am not the proper judge: but it is the best my abilities can produce; and what to a good heart will, perhaps, be a superior grace, it is equally sincere as fervent.

The scenery was nearly taken from real life, though I dare say, Madam, you do not recollect it, as I believe you scarcely noticed the poetic reveur as he wandered by you. I had roved out as chance directed, in the favourite haunts of my muse, on the banks of the Ayr, to view nature in all the gaiety of the vernal year. The evening sun was flaming over the distant western hills; not a breath stirred the crimson opening blossom, or the verdant-spreading leaf. It was a golden moment for a poetic heart. I listened to the feathered warblers, pouring their harmony on every hand, with a congenial kindred regard, and frequently turned out of my path, lest I should disturb their little songs, or frighten them to another station. Surely, said I to myself, he must be a wretch indeed, who, regardless of your harmonious endeavour to please him, can eye your elusive flights to discover your secret recesses, and to rob you of all the property nature gives you — your dearest comforts, your helpless nestlings. Even the hoary hawthorn twig that shot across the way, what heart at such a time but must have been interested in its welfare, and wished it preserved from the rudely-browsing cattle, or the withering eastern blast? Such was the scene, and such the hour, when, in a corner of my prospect, I spied one of the fairest pieces of nature’s workmanship that ever crowned a poetic landscape, or met a poet’s eye, those visionary bards excepted, who hold commerce with aerial beings! Had Calumny and Villainy taken my walk, they had at that moment sworn eternal peace with such an object.

What an hour of inspiration for a poet! It would have raised plain dull historic prose into metaphor and measure.

The inclosed song was the work of my return; and perhaps it but poorly answers what might have been expected from such a scene. — I have the honour to be, Madam, your most obedient and very humble servant,

R. B.

P.S. — Well, Mr. Burns, and did the lady give you the desired permission? No; she was too fine a lady to notice so plain a compliment. As to her great brothers, whom I have since met in life on more equal terms^22 of respectability — why should I quarrel with their want of attention to me? When fate swore that their purses should be full, nature was equally positive that their heads should be empty. Men of their fashion were surely incapable of being unpolite? Ye canna mak a silk-purse o’ a sow’s lug.

R. B., 1792.

22 As Depute Master of St. James’s Lodge, Burns admitted Claude Alexander, Esq., of Ballochmyle, an honorary member, in July 1789.

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XXXI. — IN THE NAME OF THE NINE.

Amen.

WE, Robert Burns, by virtue of a warrant from Nature, bearing date the twenty-fifth day of January, Anno Domini one thousand seven hundred and fifty-nine,23 Poet Laureat, and Bard-in-Chief, in and over the districts and countries of Kyle, Cunningham, and Carrick, of old extent, — To our trusty and well-beloved William Chalmers and John M’Adam, students and practitioners in the ancient and mysterious science of confounding right and wrong.

RIGHT TRUSTY, — Be it known unto you, That whereas in the course of our care and watchings over the order and police of all and sundry the manufacturers, retainers, and vendors of poesy; bards, poets, poetasters, rhymers, jinglers, songsters, ballad-singers, etc., etc., etc., etc., male and female — We have discovered a certain nefarious, abominable, and wicked song or ballad, a copy whereof we have here inclosed; Our Will therefore is, that Ye pitch upon and appoint the most execrable individual of that most execrable species known by the appellation, phrase, and nickname of The Deil’s Yell Nowte,24 and after having caused him to kindle a fire at the Cross of Ayr, ye shall, at noontide of the day, put into the said wretch’s merciless hands the said copy of the said nefarious and wicked song, to be consumed by fire in presence of all beholders, in abhorrence of, and terrorem to, all such compositions and composers. And this in no wise leave ye undone, but have it executed in every point as this our mandate bears, before the twenty-fourth current, when in person We hope to applaud your faithfulness and zeal.

Given at Mauchline this twentieth day of November, Anno Domini one thousand seven hundred and eighty-six. God save the Bard!

23 His birthday.

24 Old bachelors

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XXXII. — TO JAMES DALRYMPLE, ESQ., ORANGEFIELD.

[30th Nov. 1786.]

DEAR SIR, — I suppose the devil is so elated with his success with you, that he is determined by a coup de main to complete his purposes on you all at once, in making you a poet. I broke open the letter you sent me; hummed over the rhymes; and as I saw they were extempore, said to myself, they were very well; but when I saw at the bottom a name that I shall ever value with grateful respect, “I gapit wide, but naething spak.” I was nearly as much struck as the friends of Job, of affliction-bearing memory, when they sat down with him seven days and seven nights, and spake not a word.

I am naturally of a superstitious cast, and as soon as my wonder-scared imagination regained its consciousness, and resumed its functions, I cast about what this mania of yours might portend. My foreboding ideas had the wide stretch of possibility; and several events, great in their magnitude, and important in their consequences, occurred to my fancy. The downfall of the conclave, or the crushing of the Cork rumps; a ducal coronet to Lord George Gordon, and the protestant interest; or St Peter’s keys to …..

You want to know how I come on. I am just in statu quo, or, not to insult a gentleman with my Latin, in “auld use and wont.” The noble Earl of Glencairn took me by the hand to-day, and interested himself in my concerns, with a goodness like that benevolent Being whose image he so richly bears. He is a stronger proof of the immortality of the soul than any that philosophy ever produced. A mind like his can never die. Let the worshipful squire H. L., or the reverend Mass J. M. go into their primitive nothing. At best, they are but ill-digested lumps of chaos, only one of them strongly tinged with bituminous particles and sulphureous effluvia. But my noble patron, eternal as the heroic swell of magnanimity, and the generous throb of benevolence, shall look on with princely eye at “the war of elements, the wreck of matter, and the crash of worlds.” R. B.

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XXXIII. — TO SIR JOHN WHITEFOORD.

EDINBURGH, 1st Dec. 1786.

SIR, — Mr. McKenzie in Mauchline, my very warm and worthy friend, has informed me how much you are pleased to interest yourself in my fate as a man, and — what to me is incomparably dearer-my fame as a poet. I have, Sir, in one or two instances, been patronised by those of your character in life, when I was introduced to their notice by social friends to them, and honoured acquaintances to me; but you are the first gentleman in the country whose benevolence and goodness of heart has interested him for me, unsolicited and unknown. I am not master enough of the etiquette of these matters to know, nor did I stay to inquire, whether formal duty bade or cold propriety disallowed my thanking you in this manner, as I am convinced, from the light in which you kindly view me, that you will do me the justice to believe this letter is not the manoeuvre of the needy sharping author, fastening on those in upper life who honour him with a little notice of him or his works. Indeed, the situation of poets is generally such, to a proverb, as may, in some measure, palliate that prostitution of heart and talents they have at times been guilty of. I do not think that prodigality is, by any means, a necessary concomitant of a poetic turn, but I believe a careless, indolent inattention to economy is almost inseparable from it; then there must be in the heart of every bard of nature’s making a certain modest sensibility, mixed with a kind of pride, which will ever keep him out of the way of those windfalls of fortune, which frequently light on hardy impudence and foot-licking servility. It is not easy to imagine a more helpless state than his whose poetic fancy unfits him for the world, and whose character as a scholar gives him some pretensions to the politesse of life, yet is as poor as I am. For my part, I thank heaven my star has been kinder: learning never elevated my ideas above the peasant’s shed, and I have an independent fortune at the plough-tail.

I was surprised to hear^25 that any one who pretended in the least to the manners of the gentleman should be so foolish, or worse, as to stoop to traduce the morals of such a one as I am, and so inhumanly cruel, too, as to meddle with that late most unfortunate, unhappy part of my story. With a tear of gratitude I thank you, Sir, for the warmth with which you interposd in behalf of my conduct. I am, I acknowledge, too frequently the sport of whim, caprice, and passion; but reverence to God, and integrity to my fellow-creatures, I hope I shall ever preserve. I have no return, Sir, to make you for your goodness, but one — a return which I am persuaded will not be unacceptable — the honest warm wishes of a grateful heart for your happiness, and every one of that lovely flock who stand to you in a filial relation. If ever Calumny aims the poisoned shaft at them, may friendship be by to ward the blow! R. B.

25 From Dr. Mackenzie, Burns’s friend, and medical attendant of the family of Sir John.

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XXXIV. — TO MR, GAVIN HAMILTON, MAUCHLINE.

EDINBURGH, Dec. 7th, 1786,

HONOURED SIR, — I have paid every attention to your commands, but can only say what perhaps you will have heard before this reach you, that Muirkirklands were bought by a John Gordon, W.S., but for whom I know not; Mauchlands, Haugh Miln, etc., by a Frederick Fotheringham, supposed to be for Ballochmyle Laird, and Adam-hill and Shawood were bought for Oswald’s folks. This is so imperfect an account, and will be so late ere it reach you, that were it not to discharge my conscience I would not trouble you with it; but after all my diligence I could make it no sooner nor better.

For my own affairs, I am in a fair way of becoming as eminent as Thomas a Kempis or John Bunyan; and you may expect henceforth to see my birthday inserted among the wonderful events in the poor Robin’s and Aberdeen Almanacks, along with the black Monday and the battle of Bothwell Bridge. My Lord Glencairn and the Dean of Faculty, Mr. H. Erskine, have taken me under their wing; and by all probability I shall soon be the tenth worthy, and the eighth wise man of the world. Through my lord’s influence, it is inserted in the records of the Caledonian Hunt, that they universally, one and all, subscribe for the second edition. My subscription bills come out to-morrow, and you shall have some of them next post. I have met in Mr. Dalrymple, of Orangefield, what Solomon emphatically calls, “a friend that sticketh closer than a brother.” The warmth with which he interests himself in my affairs is of the same enthusiastic kind which you, Mr. Aikin, and the few patrons that took notice of my earlier poetic days, showed for the poor unlucky devil of a poet.

I always remember Mrs. Hamilton and Miss Kennedy in my poetic prayers, but you both in prose and verse.

May cauld ne’er catch you, but a hap,

Nor hunger but in plenty’s lap!

Amen!

R. B.

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XXXV. — TO MR. JOHN BALLANTINE, BANKER, AT ONE TIME PROVOST OF AYR.

EDINBURGH, 13th December 1786.

MY HONOURED FRIEND, — I would not write you till I could have it in my power to give you some account of myself and my matters, which, by the by, is often no easy task. I arrived here on Tuesday was se’nnight^26, and have suffered ever since I came to town with a miserable headache and stomach complaint, but am now a good deal better. I have found a worthy warm friend in Mr. Dalrymple, of Orangefield, who introduced me to Lord Glencairn, a man whose worth and brotherly kindness to me I shall remember when time shall be no more. By his interest it is passed in the “Caledonian Hunt,” and entered in their books, that they are to take each a copy of the second edition, for which they are to pay one guinea. I have been introduced to a good many of the noblesse, but my avowed patrons and patrones es are, the Duchess of Gordon — the Countess of Glencairn, with my Lord and Lady Betty^27 — the Dean of Faculty — Sir John Whitefoord. I have likewise warm friends among the literati; Professors Stewart, Blair, and Mr. Mackenzie — the Man of Feeling. An unknown hand left ten guineas for the Ayrshire bard with Mr. Sibbald, which I got. I since have discovered my generous unknown friend to be Patrick Miller, Esq., brother to the Justice Clerk; and drank a glass of claret with him, by invitation, at his own house yesternight. I am nearly agreed with Creech to print my book, and I suppose I will begin on Monday. I will send a subscription bill or two, next post; when I intend writing my first kind patron, Mr. Aikin. I saw his son to-day, and he is very well.

Dugald Stewart, and some of my learned friends, put me in the periodical paper called the Lounger,28 a copy of which I here enclose you. I was, Sir, when I was first honoured with your notice, too obscure; now I tremble lest I should be ruined by being dragged too suddenly into the glare of polite and learned observation.

I shall certainly, my ever honoured patron, write you an account of my every step; and better health and more spirits may enable me to make it something better than this stupid matter-of-fact epistle. — I have the honour to be, good Sir, your ever grateful humble servant, R. B.

If any of my friends write me, my direction is care of Mr. Creech, Bookseller.

26 A mistake for “a fortnight.”

27 Cunningham

28 The paper here alluded to was written by Mackenzie, the celebrated author of The Man of Feeling.

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XXXVI. — TO MR. ROBERT MUIR.

EDINBURGH, Dec. 20th, 1786.

MY DEAR FRIEND, — I have just time for the carrier, to tell you that I received your letter, of which I shall say no more but what a lass of my acquaintance said of her bastard wean; she said she “didna ken wha was the father exactly, but she suspected it was some o’ thae bonny blackguard smugglers, for it was like them.” So I only say, your obliging epistle was like you. I enclose you a parcel of subscription bills. Your affair of sixty copies is also like you; but it would not be like me to comply.

Your friend’s notion of my life has put a crotchet in my head of sketching it in some future epistle to you. My compliments to Charles and Mr. Parker. R. B.

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XXXVII. — TO MR. WILLIAM CHALMERS, WRITER, AYR.

EDINBURGH, Dec. 27th, 1786.

MY DEAR FRIEND, — I confess I have sinned the sin for which there is hardly any forgiveness — ingratitude to friendship, in not writing you sooner; but of all men living, I had intended to have sent you an entertaining letter; and by all the plodding, stupid powers, that in nodding conceited majesty preside over the dull routine of business — a heavily-solemn oath this! — I am and have been, ever since I came to Edinburgh, as unfit to write a letter of humour, as to write a commentary on the Revelation of St. John the Divine, who was banished to the Isle of Patmos by the cruel and bloody Domitian, son to Vespasian and brother to Titus, both emperors of Rome, and who was himself an emperor, and raised the second or third persecution, I forget which, against the Christians, and after throwing the said apostle John, brother to the apostle James, commonly called James the Greater, to distinguish him from another James, who was on some account or other known by the name of James the Less — after throwing him into a cauldron of boiling oil from which he was miraculously preserved, he banished the poor son of Zebedee to a desert island in the Archipelago where he was gifted with the second sight, and saw as many wild beasts as I have seen since I came to Edinburgh; which, a circumstance not uncommon in story-telling, brings me back to where I set out.

To make you some amends for what, before you reach this paragraph, you will have suffered, I enclose you two poems I have carded and spun since I passed Glenbuck.

One blank in the address to Edinburgh— “Fair B –- ,” is heavenly Miss Burnet, daughter to Lord Monboddo, at whose house I have had the honour to be more than once. There has not been anything nearly like her in all the combinations of beauty, grace, and goodness the great Creator has formed, since Milton’s Eve on the first day of her existence.

My direction is — care of Andrew Bruce, merchant, Bridge Street. R. B.

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XXXVIII. — TO THE EARL OF EGLINGTON.

EDINBURGH, January 1787.

MY LORD, — As I have but slender pretensions to philosophy, I cannot rise to the exalted ideas of a citizen of the world, but have all those national prejudices, which I believe glow peculiarly strong in the breast of a Scotchman. There is scarcely anything to which I am so fully alive as the honour and welfare of my country; and as a poet, I have no higher enjoyment than singing her sons and daughters. Fate had cast my station in the veriest shades of life; but never did a heart pant more ardently than mine to be distinguished; though till very lately I looked in vain on every side for a ray of light. It is easy then to guess how much I was gratified with the countenance and approbation of one of my country’s most illustrious sons, when Mr. Wauchope called on me yesterday on the part of your lordship. Your munificence, my lord, certainly deserves my very grateful acknowledgments; but your patronage is a bounty peculiarly suited to my feelings. I am not master enough of the etiquette of life to know, whether there be not some impropriety in troubling your lordship with my thanks, but my heart whispered me to do it. From the emotions of my inmost soul I do it. Selfish ingratitude I hope I am incapable of; and mercenary servility, I trust, I shall ever have so much honest pride as to detest. R. B.

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XXXIX. — TO MR. JOHN BALLANTINE.

EDINBURGH, Jan. 14th 1787.

MY HONOURED FRIEND, — It gives me a secret comfort to observe in myself that I am not yet so far gone as Willie Gaw’s Skate, “past redemption;” for I have still this favourable symptom of grace, that when my conscience, as in the case of this letter, tells me I am leaving something undone that I ought to do, it teases me eternally till I do it.

I am still “dark as was Chaos” in respect to futurity. My generous friend, Mr. Patrick Miller, has been talking with me about a lease of some farm or other in an estate called Dalswinton, which he has lately bought near Dumfries. Some life-rented embittering recollections whisper me that I will be happier anywhere than in my old neighbourhood, but Mr. Miller is no judge of land; and though I daresay he means to favour me, yet he may give me, in his opinion, an advantageous bargain that may ruin me. I am to take a tour by Dumfries as I return, and have promised to meet Mr. Miller on his lands some time in May.

I went to a mason-lodge yesternight, where the Most Worshipful Grand Master Chartres, and all the Grand Lodge of Scotland visited. The meeting was numerous and elegant; all the different lodges about town were present, in all their pomp. The Grand Master, who presided with great solemnity and honour to himself as a gentleman and mason, among other general toasts gave “Caledonia, and Caledonia’s Bard, Brother Burns,” which rung through the whole assembly with multiplied honours and repeated acclamations. As I had no idea such a thing would happen, I was downright thunderstruck, and, trembling in every nerve, made the best return in my power. Just as I had finished, some of the grand officers said so loud that I could hear with a most comforting accent, “Very well, indeed!” which set me something to rights again.

I have just now had a visit from my landlady,29 who is a staid, sober, piously-disposed, vice-abhorring widow, coming on her climacteric; she is at present in great tribulation respecting some daughters of Belial who are on the floor immediately above. My landlady, who, as I have said, is a flesh-disciplining godly matron, firmly believes her husband is in heaven; and, having been very happy with him on earth, she vigorously and perseveringly practises such of the most distinguished Christian virtues as attending church, railing against vice, etc., that she may be qualified to meet him in that happy place where the ungodly shall never enter. This, no doubt, requires some strong exertions of self-denial in a hale, well-kept widow of forty-five; and as our floors are low and ill-plastered, we can easily distinguish our laughter-loving, night-rejoicing neighbours when they are eating, drinking, singing, etc. My worthy landlady tosses sleepless and unquiet, “looking for rest and finding none,” the whole night. Just now she told me — though by-the-by she is sometimes dubious that I am, in her own phrase, “but a rough an’ roun’ Christian,” — that “we should not be uneasy or envious because the wicked enjoy the good things of this life, for the jades would one day lie in hell,” etc., etc.

I have to-day corrected my 152nd page. My best good wishes to Mr. Aikin. — I am ever, dear Sir, your much indebted humble servant, R. B.

29 Mrs. Carfrae, Baxter’s Close, Lawnmarket, Edinburgh, according to John Richmond, law clerk.

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XL. — TO MRS. DUNLOP.

EDINBURGH, 15th January 1787.

MADAM, — Yours of the 9th current, which I am this moment honoured with, is a deep reproach to me for ungrateful neglect. I will tell you the real truth, for I am miserably awkward at a fib — I wished to have written to Dr. Moore before I wrote to you; but, though every day since I received yours of December 30th, the idea, the wish to write to him has constantly pressed on my thoughts, yet I could not for my soul set about it. I know his fame and character, and I am one of “the sons of little men.” To write him a mere matter-of-fact affair, like a merchant’s order, would be disgracing the little character I have; and to write the author of The View of Society and Manners a letter of sentiment — I declare every artery runs cold at the thought. I shall try, however, to write to him to-morrow or next day. His kind interposition on my behalf I have already experienced, as a gentleman waited on me the other day, on the part of Lord Eglinton, with ten guineas, by way of subscription, for two copies of my next edition.

The word you object to in the mention I have made of my glorious countryman and your immortal ancestor, is indeed borrowed from Thomson; but it does not strike me as an improper epithet. I distrusted my own judgment on your finding fault with it, and applied for the opinion of some of the literati here, who honour me with their critical strictures, and they all allowed it to be proper. The song you ask I cannot recollect, and I have not a copy of it. I have not composed anything on the great Wallace, except what you have seen in print; and the inclosed, which I will print in this edition.30 You will see I have mentioned some others of the name. When I composed my “Vision,” long ago, I had attempted a description of Kyle, of which the additional stanzas are a part as it originally stood. My heart glows with a wish to be able to do justice to the merits of the “saviour of his country,” which sooner or later I shall at least attempt.

You are afraid I shall grow intoxicated with my prosperity as a poet; alas! Madam, I know myself and the world too well. I do not mean any airs of affected modesty; I am willing to believe that my abilities deserve some notice; but in a most enlightened, informed age and nation, when poetry is and has been the study of men of the first natural genius, aided with all the powers of polite learning, polite books, and polite company — to be dragged forth to the full glare of learned and polite observation, with all my imperfections of awkward rusticity and crude unpolished ideas on my head — I assure you, Madam, I do not dissemble when I tell you I tremble for the consequences. The novelty of a poet in my obscure situation, without any of those advantages which are reckoned necessary for that character, at least at this time of day, has raised a partial tide of public notice which has borne me to a height, where I am absolutely, feelingly certain, my abilities are inadequate to support me; and too surely do I see that time when the same tide will leave me, and recede, perhaps, as far below the mark of truth. I do not say this in the ridiculous affectation of self-abasement and modesty. I have studied myself, and know what ground I occupy; and however a friend or the world may differ from me in that particular, I stand for my own opinion, in silent resolve, with all the tenaciousness of property. I mention this to you once for all to disburthen my mind, and I do not wish to hear or say more about it. But

When proud fortune’s ebbing tide recedes,

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

Your patronising me and interesting yourself in my fame and character as a poet, I rejoice in; it exalts me in my own idea; and whether you can or cannot aid me in my subscription is a trifle. Has a paltry subscription-bill any charms to the heart of a bard, compared with the patronage of the descendant of the immortal Wallace? R. B.

30 Stanza in the “Vision,” beginning, “By stately tower or palace fair,” and ending with the first Duan.

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XLI — TO DR. MOORE.3^1

EDINBURGH, Jan. 1787.

SIR, — Mrs. Dunlop has been so kind as to send me extracts of letters she has had from you, where you do the rustic bard the honour of noticing him and his works. Those who have felt the anxieties and solicitudes of authorship, can only know what pleasure it gives to be noticed in such a manner, by judges of the first character. Your criticisms, Sir, I receive with reverence: only I am sorry they mostly came too late: a peccant passage or two that I would certainly have altered, were gone to the press.

The hope to be admired for ages is, in by far the greater part of those even who are authors of repute, an unsubstantial dream. For my part, my first ambition was, and still my strongest wish is, to please my compeers, the inmates of the hamlet, while ever-changing language and manners shall allow me to be relished and understood. I am very willing to admit that I have some poetical abilities; and as few, if any, writers, either moral or poetical, are intimately acquainted with the classes of mankind among whom I have chiefly mingled, I may have seen men and manners in a different phasis from what is common, which may assist originality of thought. Still I know very well the novelty of my character has by far the greatest share in the learned and polite notice I have lately had; and in a language where Pope and Churchill have raised the laugh, and Shenstone and Gray drawn the tear; where Thomson and Beattie have painted the landscape, and Lyttelton and Collins described the heart, I am not vain enough to hope for distinguished poetic fame. R. B.

31 Father of the hero of Coruna, and author of Zeluco, etc.

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XLII. — TO THE REV. G. LAWRIE, NEWMILNS, NEAR KILMARNOCK.

EDINBURGH, Feb. 5th, 1787.

REVEREND AND DEAR SIR, — When I look at the date of your kind letter, my heart reproaches me severely with ingratitude in neglecting so long to answer it. I will not trouble you with any account, by way of apology, of my hurried life and distracted attention: do me the justice to believe that my delay by no means proceeded from want of respect. I feel, and ever shall feel for you, the mingled sentiments of esteem for a friend and reverence for a father.

I thank you, Sir, with all my soul, for your friendly hints, though I do not need them so much as my friends are apt to imagine. You are dazzled with newspaper accounts and distant reports; but, in reality, I have no great temptation to be intoxicated with the cup of prosperity. Novelty may attract the attention of mankind awhile; to it I owe my present eclat; but I see the time not far distant when the popular tide which has borne me to a height of which I am, perhaps, unworthy, shall recede with silent celerity, and leave me a barren waste of sand, to descend at my leisure to my former station. I do not say this in the affectation of modesty; I see the consequence is unavoidable, and am prepared for it. I had been at a good deal of pains to form a just, impartial estimate of my intellectual powers before I came here: I have not added, since I came to Edinburgh, anything to the account; and I trust I shall take every atom of it back to my shades, the coverts of my unnoticed early years.

In Dr. Blacklock, whom I see very often, I have found what I would have expected in our friend, a clear head and an excellent heart.

By far the most agreeable hours I spend in Edinburgh must be placed to the account of Miss Lawrie and her pianoforte. I cannot help repeating to you and Mrs. Lawrie a compliment that Mr. Mackenzie, the celebrated “Man of Feeling,” paid to Miss Lawrie, the other night, at the concert. I had come in at the interlude, and sat down by him till I saw Miss Lawrie in a seat not very far distant, and went up to pay my respects to her. On my return to Mr. Mackenzie he asked me who she was; I told him ‘twas the daughter of a reverend friend of mine in the west country. He returned, there were something very striking, to his idea, in her appearance. On my desiring to know what it was, he was pleased to say, “She has a great deal of the elegance of a well-bred lady about her, with all the sweet simplicity of a country girl.”

My compliments to all the happy inmates of St. Margaret’s. — I am, my dear Sir, yours, most gratefully,

ROBERT BURNS.

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XLIII. — TO THE EARL OF BUCHAN.3^2

MY LORD, — The honour your lordship has done me, by your notice and advice in yours of the 1st instant, I shall ever gratefully remember: —

Praise from thy lips ‘tis mine with joy to boast,

They best can give it who deserve it most.

Your lordship touches the darling chord of my heart, when you advise me to fire my muse at Scottish story and Scottish scenes. I wish for nothing more than to make a leisurely pilgrimage through my native country; to sit and 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. But, my lord, in the midst of these enthusiastic reveries, a long-visaged, dry moral-looking phantom strides across my imagination, and pronounces these emphatic words: —

“I, Wisdom, dwell with Prudence. Friend, I do not come to open the ill-closed wounds of your follies and misfortunes, merely to give you pain: I wish through these wounds to imprint a lasting lesson on your heart. I will not mention how many of my salutary advices you have despised: I have given you line upon line and precept upon precept; and while I was chalking out to you the straight way to wealth and character, with audacious effrontery you have zigzagged across the path, contemning me to my face; you know the consequences. It is not yet three months since home was so hot for you, that you were on the wing for the western shore of the Atlantic, not to make a fortune, but to hide your misfortune.

“Now that your dear-loved Scotia puts it in your power to return to the situation of your forefathers, will you follow these will-o’-wisp meteors of fancy and whim, till they bring you once more to the brink of ruin? I grant that the utmost ground you can occupy is but half a step from the veriest poverty; but still it is half a step from it. If all that I can urge be ineffectual, let her who seldom calls to you in vain, let the call of pride prevail with you. You know how you feel at the iron gripe of ruthless oppression: you know how you bear the galling sneer of contumelious greatness. I hold you out the conveniences, the comforts of life, independence and character, on the one hand; I tender you servility, dependence, and wretchedness on the other. I will not insult your understanding by bidding you make a choice.”

This, my lord, is unanswerable. I must return to my humble station, and woo my rustic muse in my wonted way at the plough-tail. Still, my lord, while the drops of life warm my heart, gratitude to that dear-loved country in which I boast my birth, and gratitude to those her distinguished sons, who have honoured me so much with their patronage and approbation, shall, while stealing through my humble shades, ever distend my bosom, and at times, as now, draw forth the swelling tear.

R. B.

32 The Earl of Buchan was the very pink of parsimonious patrons. — MOTHERWELL.

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XLIV. — TO MR. JAMES CANDLISH,33STUDENT IN PHYSIC, GLASGOW COLLEGE.

EDINBURGH, March 21st, 1787.

MY EVER DEAR OLD ACQUAINTANCE, — I was equally surprised and pleased at your letter, though I dare say you will think, by my delaying so long to write to you, that I am so drowned in the intovirarion of good fortune as to be indifferent to old, and once dear connections. The truth is, I was determined to write a good letter, full of argument, amplification, erudition, and, as Bayes says, all that. I thought of it, and thought of it, and, by my soul, I could not; and, lest you should mistake the cause of my silence, I just sit down to tell you so. Don’t give yourself credit, though, that the strength of your logic scares me; the truth is, I never mean to meet you on that ground at all. You have shown me one thing which was to be demonstrated: that strong pride of reasoning, with a little affectation of singularity, may mislead the best of hearts. I likewise, since you and I were first acquainted, in the pride of despising old women’s stories, ventured in “the daring path Spinosa trod;” but experience of the weakness, not the strength of human powers, made me glad to grasp at revealed religion.

I am still, in the Apostle Paul’s phrase, “the old man with his deeds,” as when we were sporting about the “Lady Thorn.” I shall be four weeks here yet at least: and so I shall expect to hear from you; welcome sense, welcome nonsense. — I am, with the warmest sincerity, R. B.

33 Mr. Candlish married Miss Smith, one of the six belles of Mauchline. Their son was the Rev. Dr. Candlish, of Free St. George’s Church, Edinburgh.

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XLV. — TO MR. PETER STUART, EDITOR OF “THE STAR,” LONDON.

EDINBURGH, 1787.

MY DEAR SIR, — You may think, and too justly, that I am a selfish, ungrateful fellow, having received so many repeated instances of kindness from you, and yet never putting pen to paper to say thank you; but if you knew what a devil of a life my conscience has led me on that account, your good heart would think yourself too much avenged. By the by, there is nothing in the whole frame of man which seems to be so unaccountable as that thing called conscience. Had the troublesome yelping cur powers efficient to prevent a mischief, he might be of use; out at the beginning of the business, his feeble efforts are, to the workings of passion, as the infant frosts of an autumnal morning to the unclouded fervour of the rising sun; and no sooner are the tumultuous doings of the wicked deed over, than amidst the bitter native consequences of folly in the very vortex of our horrors, up starts conscience, and harrows us with the feelings of the damned.

I have inclosed you, by way of expiation, some verse and prose, that, if they merit a place in your truly entertaining miscellany, you are welcome to. The prose extract is literally as Mr. Sprott sent it me.

The inscription on the stone is as follows: —

“HERE LIES ROBERT FERGUSSON, POET,

Born, September 5th, 1751 — Died, 16th October 1774.

No sculptured marble here, nor pompous lay,

‘No storied urn nor animated bust;’

This simple stone directs pale Scotia’s way

To pour her sorrows o’er her poet’s dust.”

On the other side of the stone is as follows: —

“By special grant of the managers to Robert Burns, who erected this stone, this burial place is to remain for ever sacred to the memory of Robert Fergusson.”

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XLVI — TO MRS. DUNLOP.

EDINBURGH, March 22nd, 1787.

MADAM, — I read your letter with watery eyes. A little, very little while ago, I had scarce a friend but the stubborn pride of my own bosom; now I am distinguished, patronised, befriended by you. Your friendly advices — I will not give them the cold name of criticisms — I receive with reverence. I have made some small alterations in what I before had printed. I have the advice of some very judicious friends among the literati here, but with them I sometimes find it necessary to claim the privilege of thinking for myself. The noble Earl of Glencairn, to whom I owe more than to any man, does me the honour of giving me his strictures; his hints, with respect to impropriety or indelicacy, I follow implicitly.

You kindly interest yourself in my future views and prospects; there I can give you no light. It is all

Dark as was Chaos ere the infant sun

Was roll’d together, or had tried his beams

Athwart the gloom profound.

The appellation of a Scottish bard is by far my highest pride; to continue to deserve it is my most exalted ambition. Scottish scenes and Scottish story are the themes I could wish to sing. I have no dearer aim than to have it in my power, unplagued with the routine of business, for which Heaven knows I am unfit enough, to make leisurely pilgrimages through Caledonia; to sit on the fields of her battles; to wander on the romantic banks of her rivers; and to muse by the stately towers or venerable ruins, once the honoured abodes of her heroes.

But these are all Utopian thoughts: I have dallied long enough with life; ‘tis time to be in earnest. I have a fond, an aged mother to care for: and some other bosom ties perhaps equally tender. Where the individual only suffers by the consequences of his own thoughtlessness, indolence, or folly, he may be excusable; nay, shining abilities, and some of the nobler virtues, may half sanctify a heedless character; but where God and nature have intrusted the welfare of others to his care; where the trust is sacred, and the ties are dear, that man must be far gone in selfishness, or strangely lost to reflection, whom these connections will not rouse to exertion.

I guess that I shall clear between two and three hundred pounds by my authorship;34 with that sum I intend, so far as I may be said to have any intention, to return to my old acquaintance, the plough; and, if I can meet with a lease by which I can live, to commence farmer. I do not intend to give up poetry; being bred to labour, secures me independence, and the muses are my chief, sometimes have been my only enjoyment. If my practice second my resolution, I shall have principally at heart the serious business of life; but while following my plough, or building up my shocks, I shall cast a leisure glance to that dear, that only feature of my character, which gave me the notice of my country, and the patronage of a Wallace.

Thus, honoured Madam, I have given you the bard, his situation, and his views, native as they are in his own bosom. R. B.

34 The proceeds amounted to more — some PS500 or so.

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XLVII — TO MRS. DUNLOP.

EDINBURGH, 15th April 1787.

MADAM, — There is an affectation of gratitude which I dislike. The periods of Johnson and the pauses of Sterne may hide a selfish heart. For my part, Madam, I trust I have too much pride for servility, and too little prudence for selfishness. I have this moment broken open your letter, but

Rude am I in speech,

And therefore little can I grace my cause

In speaking for myself —

so I shall not trouble you with any fine speeches and hunted figures. I shall just lay my hand on my heart and say, I hope I shall ever have the truest, the warmest sense of your goodness.

I come abroad, in print, for certain on Wednesday. Your orders I shall punctually attend to; only, by the way, I must tell you that I was paid before for Dr. Moore’s and Miss Williams’s copies, through the medium of Commissioner Cochrane in this place, but that we can settle when I have the honour of waiting on you.

Dr. Smith^35 was just gone to London the morning before I received your letter to him. R. B.

35 Adam Smith, the celebrated author of The Wealth of Nations.

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XLVIII. — TO DR. MOORE.

EDINBURGH, 23rd April 1787.

I received the books, and sent the one you mentioned to Mrs. Dunlop. I am ill skilled in beating the coverts of imagination for metaphors of gratitude. I thank you, Sir, for the honour you have done me and to my latest hour will warmly remember it. To be highly pleased with your book, is what I have in common with the world; but to regard these volumes as a mark of the author’s friendly esteem, is a still more supreme gratification.

I leave Edinburgh in the course of ten days or a fortnight, and after a few pilgrimages over some of the classic ground of Caledonia, Cowden Knowes, Banks of Yarrow, Tweed, etc., I shall return to my rural shades, in all likelihood never more to quit them. I have formed many intimacies and friendships here, but I am afraid they are all of too tender a construction to bear carriage a hundred and fifty miles. To the rich, the great, the fashionable, the polite, I have no equivalent to offer; and I am afraid my meteor appearance will by no means entitle me to a settled correspondence with any of you, who are the permanent lights of genius and literature.

My most respectful compliments to Miss Williams. If once this tangent flight of mine were over, and I were returned to my wonted leisurely motion in my old circle, I may probably endeavour to return her poetic compliment in kind. R. B.

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XLIX. — TO MRS. DUNLOP.

EDINBURGH, 30th April 1787.

— Your criticisms, Madam, I understand very well, and could have wished to have pleased you better. You are right in your guess that I am not very amenable to counsel. Poets, much my superiors, have so flattered those who possessed the adventitious qualities of wealth and power, that I am determined to flatter no created being, either in prose or verse.

I set as little by princes, lords, clergy, critics, etc., as, all these respective gentry do by my bardship. I know what I may expect from the world, by-and-bye — illiberal abuse, and perhaps contemptuous neglect.

I am happy, Madam, that some of my own favourite pieces are distinguished by your particular approbation. For my “dream,”36 which has unfortunately incurred your loyal displeasure, I hope, in four weeks, or less, to have the honour of appearing, at Dunlop, in its defence in person. R. B.

36 The well-known poem, beginning, “Guid morning to your Majesty.” Mrs. Dunlop had recommended its omission, in the second edition, on the score of prudence.

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L — TO MR. WILLIAM NICOL, CLASSICAL MASTER, HIGH SCHOOL, EDINBURGH.

CARLISLE, June 1, 1787.

KIND, HONEST-HEARTED WILLIE. — I’m sitten down here, after seven-and-forty miles’ ridin’, e’en as forjesket and forniaw’d as a forfoughten cock, to gie ye some notion o’ my land lowper-like stravaguin sin the sorrowfu’ hour that I sheuk hands and parted wi’ auld Reekie.

My auld, ga’d gleyde o’ a meere has huchyall’d up hill and down brae, in Scotland and England, as teugh and birnie as a very deil wi’ me. It’s true, she’s as poor’s a sang-maker and as hard’s a kirk, and tipper-taipers when she taks the gate, first like a lady’s gentlewoman in a minuwae, or a hen on a het girdle; but she’s a yauld, poutherie Girran for a’ that, and has a stomack like Willie Stalker’s meere that wad hae disgeested tumbler-wheels, for she’ll whip me aff her five stimparts o’ the best aits at a down-sittin and ne’er fash her thumb. When ance her ring-banes and spavies, her crucks and cramps, are fairly soupl’d, she beets to, beets to, and aye the hindmost hour the tightest. I could wager her price to a thretty pennies, that for twa or three wooks ridin’ at fifty miles a day, the deil-stickit a five gallopers acqueesh Clyde and Whithorn could cast saut on her tail.

I hae dander’d owre a’ the kintra frae Dunbar to Selcraig, and hae forgather’d wi’ mony a guid fallow, and mony a weelfar’d hizzie. I met wi’ twa dink quines in particlar, ane o’ them a sonsie, fine, fodgel lass, baith braw and bonnie; the tither was a clean-shankit, straught, tight, weelfar’d winch, as blythe’s a lintwhite on a flowerie thorn, and as sweet and modest’s a new blawn plumrose in a hazle shaw. They were baith bred to mainers by the beuk, and onie ane o’ them had as muckle smeddum and rumblegumtion as the half o’ some presbyteries that you and I baith ken.

I was gaun to write ye a lang pystle, but, Gude forgie me, I gat mysel sae notouriously fou the day after kail-time that I can hardly stoiter but and ben.

My best respecks to the guidwife and a’ our common friens, especiall Mr. and Mrs. Cruikshank, and the honest guidman o’ Jock’s Lodge.37

I’ll be in Dumfries the morn gif the beast be to the fore, and the branks bide hale.

Gude be wi’ you, Willie! Amen!

R. B.

37 Louis Cauvin, teacher of French.

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LI. — TO MR. WILLIAM NICOL.

MAUCHLINE, June l8, 1787.

My dear friend, — I am now arrived safe in my native country, after a very agreeable jaunt, and have the pleasure to find all my friends well. I breakfasted with your greyheaded, reverend friend, Mr. Smith; and was highly pleased, both with the cordial welcome he gave me, and his most excellent appearance and sterling good sense.

I have been with Mr. Miller at Dalswinton, and am to meet him again in August. From my view of the lands, and his reception of my bardship, my hopes in that business are rather mended; but still they are but slender.

I am quite charmed with Dumfries folks — Mr. Burnside, the clergyman, in particular, is a man whom I shall ever gratefully remember; and his wife, Gude forgie me! I had almost broke the tenth commandment on her account. Simplicity, elegance, good sense, sweetness of disposition, good humour, kind hospitality, are the constituents of her manner and heart; in short — but if I say one word more about her, I shall be directly in love with her.

I never, my friend, thought mankind very capable of anything generous; but the stateliness of the patricians in Edinburgh, and the servility of my plebeian brethren (who, perhaps, formerly eyed me askance) since I returned home, have nearly put me out of conceit altogether with my species. I have bought a pocket Milton which I carry perpetually about with me, in order to study the sentiments — the dauntless magnanimity, the intrepid, unyielding independence, the desperate daring, and noble defiance of hardship in that great personage, SATAN. ‘Tis true, I have just now a little cash; but I am afraid the star that hitherto has shed its malignant, purpose-blasting rays full in my zenith; that noxious planet, so baneful in its influence to the rhyming tribe — I much dread it is not yet beneath my horizon. Misfortune dodges the path of human life; the poetic mind finds itself miserably deranged in, and unfit for the walks of business; add to all, that thoughtless follies and hare-brained whims, like so many ignes fatui, eternally diverging from the right line of sober discretion, sparkle with step-bewitching blaze in the idly-gazing eyes of the poor heedless Bard, till, pop, “he falls like Lucifer, never to hope again.” God grant this may be an unreal picture with respect to me! but should it not, I have very little dependence on mankind. I will close my letter with this tribute my heart bids me pay you — the many ties of acquaintance and friendship which I have, or think I have in life, I have felt along the lines, and damn them, they are almost all of them of such frail contexture, that I am sure they would not stand the breath of the least adverse breeze of fortune; but from you, my ever dear Sir, I look with confidence for the Apostolic love that shall wait on me “through good report and bad report” — the love which Solomon emphatically says “is strong as death.” My compliments to Mrs. Nicol and all the circle of our common friends.

P.S. — I shall be in Edinburgh about the latter end of July.

R. B.

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LII. — TO MR. ROBERT AINSLIE

.38

ARROCHAR, 28th June 1787.

My dear sir, — I write this on my tour through a country where savage streams tumble over savage mountains, thinly overspread with savage flocks, which sparingly support as savage inhabitants. My last stage was Inverary — to-morrow night’s stage Dumbarton. I ought sooner to have answered your kind letter, but you know I am a man of many sins. R. B.

38 A young writer in Edinburgh.

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LIII. — TO MR. JAMES SMITH, LINLITHGOW, FORMERLY OF MAUCHLINE

June 30th, 1787.

MY DEAR FRIEND, — On our return, at a Highland gentleman’s hospitable mansion, we fell in with a merry party, and danced till the ladies left us, at three in the morning. Our dancing was none of the French or English insipid formal movements; the ladies sung Scotch songs like angels, at intervals; then we flew at Bab at the Bowster, Tullochgorum, Loch Erroch Side,39 etc., like midges sporting in the mottie sun, or craws prognosticating a storm in a hairst day. When the dear lasses left us, we ranged round the bowl till the good-fellow hour of six; except a few minutes that we went out to pay our devotions to the glorious lamp of day peering over the towering top of Benlomond. We all kneeled; our worthy landlord’s son held the bowl; each man a full glass in his hand; and I, as priest, repeated some rhyming nonsense, like Thomas-a-Rhymer’s prophecies, I suppose. After a small refreshment of the gifts of Somnus, we proceeded to spend the day on Lochlomond, and reached Dumbarton in the evening. We dined at another good fellow’s house, and, consequently, pushed the bottle; when we went out to mount our horses we found ourselves “No vera fou but gaylie yet.” My two friends and I rode soberly down the Loch side, till by came a Highlandman at the gallop, on a tolerably good horse, but which had never known the ornaments of iron or leather. We scorned to be out-galloped by a Highlandman, so off we started, whip and spur. My companions, though seemingly gaily mounted, fell sadly astern; but my old mare, Jenny Geddes, one of the Rosinante family, she strained past the Highlandman in spite of all his efforts with the hair halter: just as I was passing him, Donald wheeled his horse, as if to cross before me to mar my progress, when down came his horse, and threw his rider’s breekless a –- in a clipt hedge; and down came Jenny Geddes over all, and my hardship between her and the Highlandman’s horse. Jenny Geddes trode over me with such cautious reverence, that matters were not so bad as might well have been expected; so I came off with a few cuts and bruises, and a thorough resolution to be a pattern of sobriety for the future.

I have yet fixed on nothing with respect to the serious business of life. I am, just as usual, a rhyming, mason-making, raking, aimless, idle fellow. However, I shall somewhere have a farm soon. I was going to say, a wife too; but that must never be my blessed lot. I am but a younger son of the house of Parnassus, and like other younger sons of great families, I may intrigue, if I choose to run all risks, but must not marry.

I am afraid I have almost ruined one source, the principal one indeed, of my former happiness; that eternal propensity I always had to fall in love. My heart no more glows with feverish rapture. I have no paradisiacal evening interviews, stolen from the restless cares and prying inhabitants of this weary world. I have only –- . This last is one of your distant acquaintances, has a fine figure, and elegant manners; and in the train of some great folks whom you know, has seen the politest quarters in Europe. I do like her a deal; but what piques me is her conduct at the commencement of our acquaintance. I frequently visited her when I was in –- , and after passing regularly the intermediate degrees between the distant formal bow and the familiar grasp round the waist, I ventured, in my careless way, to talk of friendship in rather ambiguous terms; and after her return to –- , I wrote to her in the same style. Miss, construing my words farther, I suppose, than even I intended, flew off in a tangent of female dignity and reserve, like a mounting lark in an April morning; and wrote me an answer which measured me out very completely what an immense way I had to travel before I could reach the climate of her favour. But I am an old hawk at the sport, and wrote her such a cool, deliberate, prudent reply, as brought my bird from her aerial towerings, pop down at my foot, like Corporal Trim’s hat.

As for the rest of my acts, and my wars, and all my wise sayings, and why my mare was called Jenny Geddes, they shall be recorded in a few weeks hence at Linlithgow, in the chronicles of your memory, by

R. B.

39 Scotch tunes.

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LIV. — TO MR. JOHN RICHMOND.

MOSSGIEL, 7th July 1787.

MY DEAR RICHMOND,-I am all impatience to hear of your fate since the old confounder of right and wrong has turned you out of place, by his journey to answer his indictment at the bar of the other world. He will find the practice of the court so different from the practice in which he has for so many years been thoroughly hackneyed, that his friends, if he had any connections truly of that kind, which I rather doubt, may well tremble for his sake. His chicane, his left-handed wisdom, which stood so firmly by him, to such good purpose, here, like other accomplices in robbery and plunder, will, now the piratical business is blown, in all probability turn king’s evidences, and then the devil’s bagpiper will touch him off “Bundle and go!”

If he has left you any legacy, I beg your pardon for all this; if not, I know you will swear to every word I said about him.

I have lately been rambling over by Dumbarton and Inverary, and running a drunken race on the side of Loch Lomond with a wild Highlandman; his horse, which had never known the ornaments of iron or leather, zig-zagged across before my old spavin’d hunter, whose name is Jenny Geddes, and down came the Highlandman, horse and all, and down came Jenny and my bardship; so I have got such a skinful of bruises and wounds, that I shall be at least four weeks before I dare venture on my journey to Edinburgh.

Not one new thing under the sun has happened in Mauchline since you left it. I hope this will find you as comfortably situated as formerly, or, if heaven pleases, more so; but, at all events, I trust you will let me know of course how matters stand with you, well or ill. ‘Tis but poor consolation to tell the world when matters go wrong; but you know very well your connection and mine stands on a different footing. — I am ever, my dear friend, yours,

R. B.

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LV. — TO MR. ROBERT AINSLIE.

MAUCHLINE, 23rd July 1787.

MY DEAR AINSLIE,-There is one thing for which I set great store by you as a friend, and it is this, that I have not a friend upon earth, besides yourself, to whom I can talk nonsense without forfeiting some degree of his esteem. Now, to one like me, who never cares for speaking anything else but nonsense, such a friend as you is an invaluable treasure. I was never a rogue, but have been a fool all my life; and, in spite of all my endeavours, I see now plainly that I shall never be wise. Now it rejoices my heart to have met with such a fellow as you, who, though you are not just such a hopeless fool as I, yet I trust you will never listen so much to temptation as to grow so very wise that you will in the least disrespect an honest fellow because he is a fool. In short, I have set you down as the staff of my old age, when the whole list of my friends will, after a decent share of pity, have forgot me.

Though in the morn comes sturt and strife,

Yet joy may come at noon;

And I hope to live a merry, merry life

When a’ thir days are done.

Write me soon, were it but a few lines, just to tell me how that good, sagacious man your father is, — that kind, dainty body your mother, — that strapping chiel your brother Douglas-and my friend Rachel, who is as far before Rachel of old, as she was before her blear-eyed sister Leah.

R. B.

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LVI-To DR. MOORE.

MAUCHLINE, 2nd August 1787.

SIR,-For some months past I have been rambling over the country, but I am now confined with some lingering complaints, originating, as I take it, in the stomach. To divert my spirits a little in this miserable fog of ennui, I have taken a whim to give you a history of myself. My name has made some little noise in this country; you have done me the honour to interest yourself very warmly in my behalf; and I think a faithful account of what character of a man I am, and how I came by that character, may perhaps amuse you in an idle moment. I will give you an honest narrative, though I know it will be often at my own expense; for I assure you, Sir, I have, like Solomon, whose character, excepting in the trifling affair of wisdom, I sometimes think I resemble, — I have, I say, like him, turned my eyes to behold madness and folly, and like him, too, frequently shaken hands with their intoxicating friendship. After you have perused these pages, should you think them trifling and impertinent, I only beg leave to tell you, that the poor author wrote them under some twitching qualms of conscience, arising from a suspicion that he was doing what he ought not to do: a predicament he has more than once been in before.

I have not the most distant pretensions to assume that character which the pye-coated guardians of escutcheons call a gentleman. When at Edinburgh last winter, I got acquainted in the herald’s office; and, looking through that granary of honours, I there found almost every name in the kingdom; but for me,

My ancient but ignoble blood

Has crept thro’ scoundrels ever since the flood.

Gules, purpure, argent, etc., quite disowned me.

My father was in the north of Scotland the son of a farmer, and was thrown by early misfortunes on the world at large, where, afier many years’ wanderings and sojournings, he picked up a pretty large quantity of observation and experience, to which I am indebted for most of my little pretensions to wisdom. I have met with few who understood men, their manners, and their ways, equal to him; but stubborn, ungainly integrity, and headlong, ungovernable irascibility are disqualifying circumstances; consequently, I was born a very poor man’s son. For the first six or seven years of my life, my father was gardener to a worthy gentleman of small estate in the neighbourhood of Ayr. Had he continued in that station, I must have marched off to be one of the little underlings about a farm house; but it was his dearest wish and prayer to have it in his power to keep his children under his own eye, till they could discern between good and evil; so, with the assistance of his generous master, my father ventured on a small farm on his estate. At those years, I was by no means a favourite with anybody. I was a good deal noted for a retentive memory, a stubborn sturdy something in my disposition, and an enthusiastic idiot piety. I say idiot piety, because I was then but a child. Though it cost the schoolmaster some thrashings, I made an excellent English scholar; and by the time I was ten or eleven years of age, I was a critic in substantives, verbs, and particles. In my infant and boyish days, too, I owed much to an old woman who resided in the family, remarkable for her ignorance, credulity, and superstition. She had, I suppose, the largest collection in the country of tales and songs concerning devils, ghosts, fairies, brownies, witches, warlocks, spunkies, kelpies, elf-candles, dead-lights, wraiths, apparitions, cantraips, giants, enchanted towers, dragons, and other trumpery. This cultivated the latent seeds of poetry, but had so strong an effect on my imagination, that to this hour, in my nocturnal rambles, I sometimes keep a sharp look out in suspicious places; and though nobody can be more sceptical than I am in such matters, yet it often takes an effort of philosophy to shake off these idle terrors. The earliest composition that I recollect taking pleasure in was “The Vision of Mirza,” and a hymn of Addison’s, beginning, “How are thy servants blest, O Lord!” I particularly remember one half-stanza which was music to my boyish ear —

“For though on dreadful whirls we hung

High on the broken wave— “

I met with these pieces in Manson’s English Collection, one of my school-books. The first two books I ever read in private, and which gave me more pleasure than any two books I ever read since, were the Life of Hannibal, and the History of Sir William Wallace. Hannibal gave my young ideas such a turn, that I used to strut in rapture up and down after the recruiting drum and bag-pipe, and wish myself tall enough to be a soldier; while the story of Wallace poured a Scottish prejudice into my veins which will boil along there, till the flood-gates of life shut in eternal rest.

Polemical divinity about this time was putting the country half mad, and I, ambitious of shining in conversation parties on Sundays, between sermons, at funerals, etc., used a few years afterwards to puzzle Calvinism with so much heat and indiscretion, that I raised a hue and cry of heresy against me, which has not ceased to this hour.

My vicinity to Ayr was of some advantage to me. My social disposition, when not checked by some modifications of spirited pride, was like our catechism definition of infinitude, without bounds or limits. I formed several connections with other younkers, who possessed superior advantages; the youngling actors who were busy in the rehearsal of parts, in which they were shortly to appear on the stage of life, where, alas! I was destined to drudge behind the scenes. It is not commonly at this green stage that our young gentry have a just sense of the immense distance between them and their ragged play-fellows. It takes a few dashes into the world, to give the young great man that proper, decent, unnoticing disregard for the poor, insignificant, stupid devils, the mechanics and peasantry around him, who were, perhaps, born in the same village. My young superiors never insulted the clouterly appearance of my plough-boy carcase, the two extremes of which were often exposed to all the inclemencies of all the seasons. They would give me stray volumes of books; among them, even then, I could pick up some observations; and one, whose heart, I am sure, not even the “Munny Begum” scenes have tainted, helped me to a little French. Parting with these my young friends and benefactors, as they occasionally went off for the East or West Indies, was often to me a sore affliction; but I was soon called to more serious evils. My father’s generous master died; the farm proved a ruinous bargain; and to clench the misfortune, we fell into the hands of a factor, who sat for the picture I have drawn of one in my tale of “Twa Dogs.” My father was advanced in life when he married; I was the eldest of seven children, and he, worn out by early hardships, was unfit for labour. My father’s spirit was soon irritated, but not easily broken. There was a freedom in his lease in two years more, and to weather these two years, we retrenched our expenses. We lived very poorly: I was a dexterous ploughman for my age; and the next eldest to me was a brother (Gilbert), who could drive a plough very well, and help me to thrash the corn. A novel-writer might, perhaps, have viewed these scenes with some satisfaction, but so did not I; my indignation yet boils at the recollection of the scoundrel factor’s insolent threatening letters, which used to set us all in tears.

This kind of life — the cheerless gloom of a hermit with the unceasing moil of a galley-slave, brought me to my sixteenth year; a little before which period I first committed the sin of rhyme. You know our country custom of coupling a man and woman together as partners in the labours of harvest. In my fifteenth autumn, my partner was a bewitching creature, a year younger than myself. My scarcity of English denies me the power of doing her justice in that language, but you know the Scottish idiom: she was a “bonnie, sweet, sonsie lass.” In short, she, altogether unwittingly to herself, initiated me in that delicious passion, which, in spite of acid disappointment, gin-horse prudence, and book-worm philosophy, I hold to be the first of human joys, our dearest blessing here below! How she caught the contagion I cannot tell; you medical people talk much of infection from breathing the same air, the touch, etc.; but I never expressly said I loved her. Indeed, I did not know myself why I liked so much to loiter behind with her, when returning in the evening from our labours; why the tones of her voice made my heart-strings thrill like an Aeolian harp; and particularly why my pulse beat such a furious ratan, when I looked and fingered over her little hand to pick out the cruel nettle-stings and thistles. Among her other love-inspiring qualities, she sung sweetly; and it was her favourite reel to which I attempted giving an embodied vehicle in rhyme. I was not so presumptuous 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, excepting that he could smear sheep, and cast peats, his father living in the moorlands, he had no more scholar-craft than myself.

Thus with me began love and poetry; which at times have been my only, and till within the last twelve months, have been my highest enjoyment. My father struggled on till he reached the freedom in his lease, when he entered on a larger farm, about ten miles farther in the country. The nature of the bargain he made was such as to throw a little ready money into his hands at the commencement of his lease, otherwise the affair would have been impracticable. For four years we lived comfortably here, but a difference commencing between him and his landlord as to terms, after three years tossing and whirling in the vortex of litigation, my father was just saved from the horrors of a jail, by a consumption, which, after two years’ promises, kindly stepped in, and carried him away, to where the wicked cease from troubling, and where the weary are at rest!

It is during the time that we lived on this farm that my little story is most eventful. I was, at the beginning of this period, perhaps the most ungainly awkward boy in the parish — no solitaire was less acquainted with the ways of the world. What I knew of ancient story was gathered from Salmon’s and Guthrie’s Geographical Grammars; and the ideas I had formed of modern manners, of literature, and criticism, I got from the Spectator. These, with Pope’s Works, some Plays of Shakespeare, Tull and Dickson on Agriculture, The Pantheon, Locke’s Essay on the Human Understanding, Stackhouse’s History of the Bible, Justice’s British Gardener’s Directory, Boyle’s Lectures, Allan Ramsays’s Works, Taylor’s Scripture Doctrine of Original Sin, A Select Collection of English Songs, and Hervey’s Meditations, had formed the whole of my reading. The collection of songs was my vade mecum. I pored over them, driving my cart, or walking to labour, song by song, verse by verse; carefully noting the true tender, or sublime, from affectation and fustian. I am convinced I owe to this practice much of my critic-craft, such as it is.

In my seventeenth year, to give my manners a brush, I went to a country dancing-school. My father had an unaccountable antipathy against these meetings, and my going was, what to this moment I repent, in opposition to his wishes. My father, as I said before, was subject to strong passions; from that instance of disobedience in me, he took a sort of dislike to me, which, I believe, was one cause of the dissipation which marked my succeeding years. I say dissipation, comparatively with the strictness, and sobriety, and regularity of presbyterian country life; for though the will-o’-wisp meteors of thoughtless whim were almost the sole lights of my path, yet early ingrained piety and virtue kept me for several years afterwards within the line of innocence. The great misfortune of my life was to want an aim. I had felt early some stirrings of ambition, but they were the blind gropings of Homer’s Cyclops round the walls of his cave. I saw my father’s situation entailed on me perpetual labour. The only two openings by which I could enter the temple of fortune were the gate of niggardly economy, or the path of little chicaning bargain-making. The first is so contracted an aperture I never could squeeze myself into it — the last I always hated — there was contamination in the very entrance! Thus abandoned of aim or view in life, with a strong appetite for sociability, as well from native hilarity as from a pride of observation and remark; a constitutional melancholy or hypochondriasm that made me fly solitude; add to these incentives to social life, my reputation for bookish knowledge, a certain wild logical talent, and a strength of thought something like the rudiments of good sense; and it will not seem surprising that I was generally a welcome guest where I visited, or any great wonder that always, where two or three met together, there was I among them. But far beyond all other impulses of my heart, was un penchant a l’adorable moitie du genre humain. My heart was completely tinder, and was eternally lighted up by some goddess or other; and, as in every other warfare in this world, my fortune was various; sometimes I was received with favour, and sometimes I was mortified with a repulse. At the plough, scythe, or reap-hook, I feared no competitor, and thus I set absolute want at defiance; and as I never cared further for my labours than while I was in actual exercise, I spent the evenings in the way after my own heart. A country lad seldom carries on a love adventure without an assisting confidant. I possessed a curiosity, zeal, and intrepid dexterity that recommended me as a proper second on these occasions; and I dare say I felt as much pleasure in being in the secret of half the loves of the parish of Tarbolton, as ever did statesman in knowing the intrigues of half the courts of Europe. The very goose-feather in my hand seems to know instinctively the well-worn path of my imagination, the favourite theme of my song, and is with difficulty restrained from giving you a couple of paragraphs on the love-adventures of my compeers, the humble inmates of the farm-house and cottage; but the grave sons of science, ambition, or avarice, baptise these things by the name of follies. To the sons and daughters of labour and poverty they are matters of the most serious nature: to them the ardent hope, the stolen interview, the tender farewell, are the greatest and most delicious parts of their enjoyments.

Another circumstance in my life which made some alteration in my mind and manners, was, that I spent my nineteenth summer on a smuggling coast, a good distance from home, at a noted school, to learn mensuration, surveying, dialling, etc., in which I made a pretty good progress. But I made a greater progress in the knowledge of mankind. The contraband trade was at that time very successful, and it sometimes happened to me to fall in with those who carried it on. Scenes of swaggering riot and roaring dissipation were, till this time, new to me: but I was no enemy to social life. Here, though I learned to fill my glass, and to mix without fear in a drunken squabble, yet I went on with a high hand with my geometry, till the sun entered Virgo, a month which is always a carnival in my bosom, when a charming fillette, who lived next door to the school, overset my trigonometry, and set me off at a tangent from the spheres of my studies. I, however, struggled on with my sines and cosines for a few days more; but stepping into the garden one charming noon, to take the sun’s altitude, there I met my angel,

Like Proserpine gathering flowers,

Herself a fairer flower.

It was in vain to think of doing any more good at school.

The remaining week I staid I did nothing but craze the faculties of my soul about her, or steal out to meet her; and the two last nights of my stay in the country, had sleep been a mortal sin, the image of this modest and innocent girl had kept me guiltless.

I returned home very considerably improved. My reading was enlarged with the very important edition of Thomson’s and Shenstone’s Works; I had seen human nature in a new phasis; and I engaged several of my schoolfellows to keep up a literary correspondence with me. This improved me in composition. I had met with a collection of letters by the wits of Queen Anne’s reign, and I pored over them most devoutly. I kept copies of any of my own letters that pleased me, and a comparison between them and the composition of most of my correspondents flattered my vanity. I carried this whim so far, that though I had not three-farthings’ worth of business in the world, yet almost every post brought me as many letters as if I had been a broad plodding son of day-book and ledger.

My life flowed on much in the same course till my twenty-third year. Vive l’amour, et vive la bagatelle, were my sole principles of action. The addition of two more authors to my library gave me great pleasure; Sterne and Mackenzie — Tristram Shandy and the Man of Feeling were my bosom favourites. Poesy was still a darling walk for my mind, but it was only indulged in according to the humour of the hour. I had usually half-a-dozen or more pieces on hand: I took up one or other, as it suited the momentary tone of the mind, and dismissed the work as it bordered on fatigue. My passions, when once lighted up, raged like so many devils, till they got vent in rhyme; and then the conning over my verses, like a spell, soothed all into quiet! None of the rhymes of those days are in print, except “Winter, a Dirge,” the eldest of my printed pieces; “The Death of Poor Maillie,” “John Barleycorn,” and songs first, second, and third. Song second was the ebullition of that passion which ended the forementioned school business.

My twenty-third year was to me an important era. Partly through whim, and partly that I wished to set about doing something in life, I joined a flax-dresser in a neighbouring town (Irvine), to learn his trade. This was an unlucky affair. My partner was a scoundrel of the first water; and to finish the whole, as we were giving a welcome carousal to the New Year, the shop took fire and burnt to ashes, and I was left, like a true poet, not worth a sixpence.

I was obliged to give up this scheme; the clouds of misfortune were gathering thick round my father’s head; and, what was worst of all, he was visibly far gone in a consumption; and, to crown my distresses, a belle fille, whom I adored, and who had pledged her soul to meet me in the field of matrimony, jilted me, with peculiar circumstances of mortification. The finishing evil that brought up the rear of this infernal file, was my constitutional melancholy being increased to such a degree that for three months I was in a state of mind scarcely to be envied by the hopeless wretches who have got their mittimus— “Depart from me, ye cursed.”

From this adventure I learned something of a town life; but the principal thing which gave my mind a turn was a friendship I formed with a young fellow, a very noble character, but a hapless son of misfortune.40 He was the son of a simple mechanic; but a great man in the neighbourhood taking him under his patronage, gave him a genteel education, with a view of bettering his situation in life. The patron dying just as he was ready to launch out into the world, the poor fellow, in despair, went to sea; where, after a variety of good and ill fortune, a little before I was acquainted with him he had been sent on shore by an American privateer, on the wild coast of Connaught, stripped of everything. I cannot quit this poor fellow’s story without adding, that he is at this time master of a large West-India-man belonging to the Thames.

His mind was fraught with independence, magnanimity, and every manly virtue. I loved and admired him to a degree of enthusiasm, and of course strove to imitate him.

In some measure I succeeded; I had pride before, but he taught it to flow in proper channels. His knowledge of the world was vastly superior to mine, and I was all attention to learn. He was the only man I ever saw who was a greater fool than myself where woman was the presiding star; but he spoke of illicit love with the levity of a sailor, which hitherto I had regarded with horror. Here his friendship did me a mischief, and the consequence was, that soon after I resumed the plough, I wrote the “Poet’s Welcome.” My reading only increased while in this town by two stray volumes of Pamela, and one of Ferdinand Count Fathom, which gave me some idea of novels. Rhyme, except some religious pieces that are in print, I had given up; but meeting with Fergusson’s Scottish Poems, I strung anew my wildly-sounding lyre with emulating vigour. When my father died, his all went among the hell-hounds that prowl in the kennel of justice; but we made a shift to collect a little money in the family amongst us, with which, to keep us together, my brother and I took a neighbouring farm. My brother wanted my hair-brained imagination, as well as my social and amorous madness; but in good sense, and every sober qualification, he was far my superior.

I entered on this farm with a full resolution, “Come, go to, I will be wise!” I read farming books; I calculated crops; I attended markets; and, in short, in spite of the devil, and the world, and the flesh, I believe I should have been a wise man; but the first year, from unfortunately buying bad seed, the second from a late harvest, we lost half our crops. This overset all my wisdom, and I returned “like the dog to his vomit, and the sow that was washed, to her wallowing in the mire.”

I now began to be known in the neighbourhood as a maker of rhymes. The first of my poetic offspring that saw the light was a burlesque lamentation on a quarrel between two reverend Calvinists, both of them dramatis personae in my “Holy Fair”. I had a notion myself that the piece had some merit; but, to prevent the worst, I gave a copy of it to a friend, who was very fond of such things, and told him that I could not guess who was the author of it, but that I thought it pretty clever. With a certain description of the clergy, as well as laity, it met with a roar of applause. “Holy Willie’s Prayer” next made its appearance, and alarmed the kirk-session so much, that they held several meetings to look over their spiritual artillery, if haply any of it might be pointed against profane rhymers. Unluckily for me, my wanderings led me on another side, within point-blank shot of their heaviest metal. This is the unfortunate story that gave rise to my printed poem, “The Lament.” This was a most melancholy affair, which I cannot yet bear to reflect on, and had very nearly given me one or two of the principal qualifications for a place among those who have lost the chart, and mistaken the reckoning of rationality. I gave up my part of the farm to my brother; in truth it was only nominally mine; and made what little preparation was in my power for Jamaica. But before leaving my native country for ever, I resolved to publish my poems. I weighed my productions as impartially as was in my power; I thought they had merit; and it was a delicious idea that I should be called a clever fellow, even though it should never reach my ears — a poor negro-driver — or perhaps a victim to that inhospitable clime, and gone to the world of spirits! I can truly say, that, pauvre inconnu as I then was, I had pretty nearly as high an idea of myself and of my works as I have at this moment, when the public has decided in their favour. It ever was my opinion that the mistakes and blunders, both in a rational and religious point of view, of which we see thousands daily guilty, are owing to their ignorance of themselves. To know myself, had been all along my constant study. I weighed myself alone; I balanced myself with others; I watched every means of information, to see how much ground I occupied as a man, and as a poet; I studied assiduously Nature’s design in my formation — where the lights and shades in my character were intended. I was pretty confident my poems would meet with some applause; but at the worst, the roar of the Atlantic would deafen the voice of censure, and the novelty of West Indian scenes make me forget neglect. I threw off six hundred copies, of which I had got subscriptions for about three hundred and fifty. My vanity was highly gratified by the reception I met with from the public; and besides, I pocketed, all expenses deducted, nearly twenty pounds. This sum came very seasonably, as I was thinking of indenting myself, for want of money to procure my passage. As soon as I was master of nine guineas, the price of wafting me to the torrid zone, I took a steerage passage in the first ship that was to sail from the Clyde, for

Hungry ruin had me in the wind.

I had been for some days skulking from covert to covert, under all the terrors of a jail; as some ill-advised people had uncoupled the merciless pack of the law at my heels. I had taken the last farewell of my few friends; my chest was on the road to Greenock; I had composed the last song I should ever measure in Caledonia— “The gloomy night is gathering fast,” when a letter from Dr. Blacklock to a friend of mine overthrew all my schemes, by opening new prospects to my poetic ambition. The doctor belonged to a set of critics, for whose applause I had not dared to hope. His opinion, that I would meet with encouragement in Edinburgh for a second edition, fired me so much, that away I posted for that city, without a single acquaintance or a single letter of introduction. The baneful star that had so long shed its blasting influence in my zenith, for once made a revolution to the nadir; and a kind Providence placed me under the patronage of one of the noblest of men, the Earl of Glencairn. Oubliez moi, grand Dieu, si jamais je l’oublie!

I need relate no farther. At Edinburgh I was in a new world; I mingled among many classes of men, but all of them new to me, and I was all attention to “catch” the characters, and “the manners living as they rise.”

You can now, Sir, form a pretty near guess of what sort of a wight he is whom for some time you have honoured with your correspondence. That whim and fancy, keen sensibility and riotous passions, may still make him zigzag in his future path of life is very probable; but come what will, I shall answer for him the most determinate integrity and honour. And though his evil star should again blaze in his meridian with tenfold more direful influence, he may reluctantly tax friendship with pity, but with no more.

My most respectful compliments to Miss Williams.41 The very elegant and friendly letter she honoured me with a few days ago I cannot answer at present, as my presence is required at Edinburgh for a week or so, and I set off to-morrow.

I enclose you Holy Willie for the sake of giving you a little further information of the affair than Mr. Creech^42 could do. An elegy I composed the other day on Sir James H. Blair, if time allow, I will transcribe. The merit is just mediocre.

If you will oblige me so highly, and do me so much honour as now and then to drop me a line, please direct to me at Mauchline. With the most grateful respect, I have the honour to be, Sir, your very humble servant, ROBERT BURNS.43

40 Richard Brown.

41 A young poetical lady, though not a poetess.

42 His Edinburgh publisher; a bookseller, afterwards Lord Provost of the city.

43 The foregoing biographical letter brings us down to Burns’s 29th year.

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LVIL. — TO MR. ARCHIBALD LAWRIE.4^4

EDINBURGH, 14th August 1787.

MY DEAR SIR, — Here am I. That is all I can tell you of that unaccountable being, myself. What I am doing no mortal can tell; what I am thinking, I myself cannot tell; what I am usually saying is not worth telling. The clock is just striking — one, two, three, four…twelve, forenoon; and here I sit in the attic storey, the garret, with a friend on the right hand of my standish, a friend whose kindness I shall largely experience at the close of this line — there, thank you! — a friend, my dear Lawrie, whose kindness often makes me blush — a friend who has more of the milk of human kindness than all the human race put together, and what is highly to his honour, peculiarly a friend to the friendless as often as they come his way; in short, Sir, he is wthout the least alloy a universal philanthropist, and his much-beloved name is a bottle of good old Port!

In a week, if whim and weather serve, I set out for the north, a tour to the Highlands.

I ate some Newhaven broth — in other words, boiled mussels — with Mr. Farquharson’s family t’other day. Now I see you prick up your ears. They are all well, and mademoiselle is particularly well. She begs her respects to you all — along with which please present those of your humble servant. I can no more. I have so high a veneration, or rather idolatrization, for the clerical character, that even a little futurum esse priestling, with his penna pennae, throws an awe over my mind in his presence, and shortens my sentences into single ideas.

Farewell, and believe me to be ever, my dear Sir, yours,

ROBERT BURNS.

44 Son, and successor, to the minister of Loudon.

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LVIII. — TO MR. ROBERT MUIR, KILMARNOCK.

STIRLING, 26th August 1787.

MY DEAR SIR, — I intended to have written you from Edinburgh, and now write you from Stirling to make an excuse. Here am I, on my way to Inverness, with a truly original, but very worthy man, a Mr. Nicol, one of the masters of the High-school in Edinburgh. I left Auld Reekie yesterday morning, and have passed, besides by-excursions, Linlithgow, Borrowstounness, Falkirk, and here am I undoubtedly. This morning I knelt at the tomb of Sir John the Graham, the gallant friend of the immortal Wallace; and two hours ago I said a fervent prayer for old Caledonia over the hole in a blue whinstone, where Robert de Bruce fixed his royal standard on the banks of Bannockburn and just now, from Stirling Castle, I have seen by the setting sun the glorious prospect of the windings of Forth through the rich carse of Stirling, and skirting the equally rich carse of Falkirk. The crops are very strong, but so very late that there is no harvest except a ridge or two perhaps in ten miles, all the way I have travelled from Edinburgh.

I left Andrew Bruce^45 and family all well. I will be at least three weeks in making my tour, as I shall return by the coast, and have many people to call for.

My best compliments to Charles, our dear kinsman and fellow-saint; and Messrs. W. and H. Parkers. I hope Hughoc^46 is going on and prospering with God and Miss M’Causlin.

If I could think on anything sprightly, I should let you hear every other post; but a dull, matter-of-fact business like this scrawl, the less and seldomer one writes the better.

Among other matters-of-fact I shall add this, that I am and ever shall be, my dear Sir, your obliged,

ROBERT BURNS.

45 A shopkeeper on the North Bridge, Edinburgh.

46 The wee Hughoc mentioned in “Poor Maillie.”

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LIX. — TO MR. GAVIN HAMILTON.

STIRLING, 28th August 1787.

MY DEAR SIR, — Here am I on my way to Inverness. I have rambled over the rich, fertile carses of Falkirk and Stirling, and am delighted with their appearance: richly waving crops of wheat, barley, etc., but no harvest at all yet, except, in one or two places, an old-wife’s ridge. Yesterday morning I rode from this town up the meandering Devon’s banks, to pay my respects to some Ayrshire folks at Harvieston. After breakfast, we made a party to go and see the famous Caudron-linn, a remarkable cascade in the Devon, about five miles above Harvieston; and after spending one of the most pleasant days I ever had in my life, I returned to Stirling in the evening. They are a family, Sir, though I had not had any prior tie, though they had not been the brother and sisters of a certain generous friend of mine, I would never forget them. I am told you have not seen them these several years, so you can have very little idea of what these young folks are now. Your brother^47 is as tall as you are, but slender rather than otherwise; and I have the satisfaction to inform you that he is getting the better of those consumptive symptoms which I suppose you know were threatening him. His make, and particularly his manner, resemble you, but he will have a still finer face. (I put in the word still, to please Mrs. Hamilton.) Good sense, modesty, and at the same time a just idea of that respect that man owes to man, and has a right in his turn to exact, are striking features in his character; and, what with me is the Alpha and the Omega, he has a heart that might adorn the breast of a poet! Grace has a good figure, and the look of health and cheerfulness, but nothing else remarkable in her person. I scarcely ever saw so striking a likeness as is between her and your little Beenie; the mouth and chin particularly. She is reserved at first; but as we grew better acquainted, I was delighted with the native frankness of her manner, and the sterling sense of her observation. Of Charlotte I cannot speak in common terms of admiration: she is not only beautiful but lovely. Her form is elegant; her features not regular, but they have the smile of sweetness, and the settled complacency of good nature in the highest degree; and her complexion, now that she has happily recovered her wonted health, is equal to Miss Burnet’s. After the exercises of our riding to the Falls, Charlotte was exactly Dr. Donne’s mistress: —

Her pure and eloquent blood

Spoke in her cheeks, and so distinctly wrought,

That one would almost say her body thought.

Her eyes are fascinating; at once expressive of good sense, tenderness, and a noble mind.

I do not give you all this account, my good Sir, to flatter you. I mean it to reproach you. Such relations the first peer in the realm might own with pride; then why do you not keep up more correspondence with these so amiable young folks? I had a thousand questions to answer about you. I had to describe the little ones with the minuteness of anatomy. They were highly delighted when I told them that John^48 was so good a boy, and so fine a scholar, and that Willie was going on still very pretty; but I have it in commission to tell her from them, that beauty is a poor silly bauble without she be good. Miss Chalmers I had left in Edinburgh, but I had the pleasure of meeting with Mrs. Chalmers, only Lady Mackenzie being rather a little alarmingly ill of a sore throat somewhat marred our enjoyment.

I shall not be in Ayrshire for four weeks. My most respectful compliments to Mrs. Hamilton, Miss Kennedy, and Doctor Mackenzie. I shall probably write him from some stage or other. — I am ever; Sir, yours most gratefully,

ROBT. BURNS.

47 Step-brother, more correctly.

48 This is the “Wee Curlie Johnnie” mentioned in Burns’s Dedication to Gavin Hamilton, Esq.

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LX. — TO MR. WALKER, BLAIR OF ATHOLE.4^9

INVERNESS, 5th September 1787.

MY DEAR SIR, — I have just time to write the foregoing,50 and to tell you that it was (at least most part of it) the effusion of an half-hour I spent at Bruar. I do not mean it was extempore, for I have endeavoured to brush it up as well as Mr. Nicol’s chat, and the jogging of the chaise, would allow. It eases my heart a good deal, as rhyme is the coin with which a poet pays his debts of honour or gratitude. What I owe to the noble family of Athole, of the first kind, I shall ever proudly boast; what I owe of the last, so help me God in my hour of need! I shall never forget.

The “little angel-band!” I declare I prayed for them very sincerely today at the Fall of Fyers. I shall never forget the fine family-piece I saw at Blair; the amiable, the truly noble duchess, with her smiling little seraph in her lap, at the head of the table; the lovely “olive plants,” as the Hebrew bard finely says, round the happy mother; the beautiful Mrs. G — ; the lovely, sweet Miss C., etc. I wish I had the powers of Guido to do them justice! My Lord Duke’s kind hospitality — markedly kind indeed; Mr. Graham of Fintry’s charms of conversation; Sir W. Murray’s friendship. In short, the recollection of all that polite, agreeable company raises an honest glow in my bosom.

R. B.

49 Mr. Walker was tutor to the children of the Duke of Athole. He afterwards became Professor of Humanity in the University of Glasgow.

50 The Humble Petition of Bruar Water.

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LXI. — TO His BROTHER, MR. GILBERT BURNS, MOSSGIEL.

EDINBERG, 17th September 1787.

My Dear Sir, — I arrived here safe yesterday evening after a tour of twenty-two days, and travelling near six hundred miles, windings included. My farthest stretch was about ten miles beyond Inverness. I went through the heart of the Highlands by Crieff, Taymouth, the famous seat of Lord Breadalbane, down the Tay, among cascades and druidical circles of stones, to Dunkeld, a seat of the Duke of Athole; thence across Tay, and up one of his tributary streams to Blair of Athole, another of the duke’s seats, where I had the honour of spending nearly two days with his grace and family; thence many miles through a wild country among cliffs grey with eternal snows, and gloomy savage glens, till I crossed Spey and went down the stream through Strathspey, so famous in Scottish music; Badenoch, etc., till I reached Grant Castle, where I spent half a day with Sir James Grant and family; and then crossed the country for Fort George, but called by the way at Cawdor, the ancient seat of Macbeth; there I saw the identical bed in which tradition says king Duncan was murdered: lastly, from Fort George to Inverness.

I returned by the coast through Nairn, Forres, and so on, to Aberdeen, thence to Stonehive, where James Burness, from Montrose, met me by appointment. I spent two days among our relations, and found our aunts, Jean and Isabel, still alive, and hale old women. John Cairn, though born the same year with our father, walks as vigorously as I can: they have had several letters from his son in New York. William Brand is likewise a stout old fellow; but further particulars I delay till I see you, which will be in two or three weeks. The rest of my stages are not worth rehearsing; warm as I was for Ossian’s country, where I had seen his very grave, what cared I for fishing-towns or fertile carses? I slept at the famous Brodie of Brodie’s one night, and dined at Gordon Castle next day, with the Duke, Duchess, and family. I am thinking to cause my old mare to meet me, by means of John Ronald, at Glasgow; but you shall hear farther from me before I leave Edinburgh. My duty and many compliments from the north to my mother; and my brotherly compliments to the rest. I have been trying for a berth for William,51 but am not likely to be successful. Farewell. R. B.

51 Their youngest brother, afterwards a journeyman saddler.

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LXII. — TO MR. PATRICK MILLER,52DALSWINTON.

EDINBURGH, 20th Oct., 1787.

SIR, — I was spending a few days at Sir William Murray’s, Ochtertyre, and did not get your obliging letter till to-day I came to town. I was still more unlucky in catching a miserable cold, for which the medical gentlemen have ordered me into close confinement under pain of death — the severest of penalties. In two or three days, if I get better, and if I hear at your lodgings that you are still at Dalswinton, I will take a ride to Dumfries directly. From something in your last, I would wish to explain my idea of being your tenant. I want to be a farmer in a small farm, about a plough-gang, in a pleasant country, under the auspices of a good landlord. I have no foolish notion of being a tenant on easier terms than another. To find a farm where one can live at all is not easy — I only mean living soberly, like an old-style farmer, and joining personal industry. The banks of the Nith are as sweet poetic ground as any I ever saw; and besides, Sir, ‘tis but justice to the feelings of my own heart and the opinion of my best friends, to say that I would wish to call you landlord sooner than any landed gentleman I know. These are my views and wishes; and in whatever way you think best to lay out your farms I shall be happy to rent one of them. I shall certainly be able to ride to Dalswinton about the middle of next week, if I hear that you are not gone. — I have the honour to be, Sir, your obliged humble servant,

ROBERT BURNS.

52 His future landlord, at Ellisland.

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LXIII. — TO REV. JOHN SKINNER.

Edinburgh, October 25th, 1787.

Reverend and Venerable Sir, — Accept, in plain, dull prose, my most sincere thanks for the best poetical compliment I ever received. I assure you, Sir, as a poet, you have conjured up an airy demon of vanity in my fancy, which the best abilities in your other capacity would be ill able to lay. I regret, and while I live I shall regret, that when I was in the north I had not the pleasure of paying a younger brother’s dutiful respect to the author of the best Scotch song ever Scotland saw— “Tullochgorum’s my delight!” The world may think slightingly of the craft of song-making if they please; but, as Job says— “O that mine adversary had written a book!” — let them try. There is a certain something in the old Scotch songs, a wild happiness of thought and expression, which peculiarly marks them, not only from English songs, but also from the modern efforts of song-wrights, in our native manner and language. The only remains of this enchantment, these spells of the imagination, rest with you. Our true brother, Ross of Lochlee, was likewise “owre cannie” — a “wild warlock” — but now he sings among the “sons of the morning.”

I have often wished, and will certainly endeavour, to form a kind of common acquaintance among all the genuine sons of Caledonian song. The world, busy in low prosaic pursuits, may overlook most of us; but “reverence thyself.” The world is not our peers so we challenge the jury. We can lash that world, and find ourselves a very great source of amusement and happiness independent of that world.

There is a work^53 going on in Edinburgh, just now, which claims your best assistance. An engraver in this town has set about collecting and publishing all the Scotch songs, with the music, that can be found. Songs in the English language, if by Scotchmen, are admitted, but the music must all be Scotch. Drs. Beattie and Blacklock are lending a hand, and the first musician in town presides over that department. I have been absolutely crazed about it, collecting old stanzas, and every information remaining respecting their origin, authors, etc., etc. This last is but a very fragment business; but at the end of his second number — the first is already published — a small account will be given of the authors, particularly to preserve those of latter times. Your three songs, “Tullochgorum,” “John of Badenyon,” and “Ewie wi’ the crookit Horn,” go in this second number. I was determined, before I got your letter, to write you, begging that you would let me know where the editions of these pieces may be found as you would wish them to continue in future times: and if you would be so kind to this undertaking as send any songs, of your own or others, that you would think proper to publish, your name will be inserted among the other authors. “Nill ye, will ye,” one-half of Scotland already give your songs to other authors. Paper is done. I beg to hear from you; the sooner the better, as I leave Edinburgh in a fortnight or three weeks. — I am, with the warmest sincerity, Sir, your obliged humble Servant, R. B.

53 Johnson’s Musical Museum.

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LXIV. — TO Miss MARGARET CHALMERS, HARVIESTON. (AFTERWARDS MRS. HAY, OF EDINBURGH.)

Oct. 26, 1787.

I send Charlotte the first number of the songs; I would not wait for the second number; I hate delays in little marks of friendship, as I hate dissimulation in the language of the heart. I am determined to pay Charlotte a poetic compliment, if I could hit on some glorious old Scotch air, in number second.54 You will see a small attempt on a shred of paper in the book; but though Dr. Blacklock commended it very highly, I am not just satisfied with it myself. I intend to make it a description of some kind: the whining cant of love, except in real passion, and by a masterly hand, is to me as insufferable as the preaching cant of old Father Smeaton, whig-minister at Kilmaurs. Darts, flames, cupids, loves, graces, and all that farrago, are just a Mauchline — a senseless rabble.

I got an excellent poetic epistle yesternight from the old, venerable author of “Tullochgorum,” “John of Badenyon,” etc. I suppose you know he is a clergyman. It is by far the finest poetic compliment I ever got. I will send you a copy of it.

I go on Thursday or Friday to Dumfries, to wait on Mr. Miller about his farms. Do tell that to Lady Mackenzie, that she may give me credit for a little wisdom. “I, Wisdom, dwell with Prudence.” What a blessed fireside! How happy should I be to pass a winter evening under their venerable roof! and smoke a pipe of tobacco, or drink water-gruel with them! What solemn, lengthened, laughter-quashing gravity of phiz! What sage remarks on the good-for-nothing sons and daughters of indiscretion and folly! And what frugal lessons, as we straitened the fireside circle, on the uses of the poker and tongs!

Miss N. is very well, and begs to be remembered in the old way to you. I used all my eloquence, all the persuasive flourishes of the hand, and heart-melting modulation of periods in my power, to urge her out to Harvieston, but all in vain. My rhetoric seems quite to have lost its effect on the lovely half of mankind. I have seen the day — but this is “a tale of other years.” In my conscience I believe that my heart has been so oft on fire that it is absolutely vitrified. I look on the sex with something like the admiration with which I regard the starry sky in a frosty December night. I admire the beauty of the Creator’s workmanship; I am charmed with the wild but graceful eccentricity of their motions, and — wish them good-night. I mean this with respect to a certain passion dont j’at eu l’honneur d’etre un miserable esclave. As for friendship, you and Charlotte have given me pleasure, permanent pleasure, “which the world cannot give, nor take away,” I hope, and which will outlast the heavens and the earth.

R. B.

54 Of the Scots Musical Museum.

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LXV. — TO MRS. DUNLOP OF DUNLOP HOUSE, STEWARTON.

Edin., 4th Nov. 1787.

Madam, — … When you talk of correspondence and friendship to me, you do me too much honour; but, as I shall soon be at my wonted leisure and rural occupation, if any remark on what I have read or seen, or any new rhyme that I may twist, be worth the while … you shall have it with all my heart and soul. It requires no common exertion of good sense and philosophy in persons of elevated rank to keep a friendship properly alive with one much their inferior. Externals, things wholly extraneous of the man, steal upon the hearts and judgments of almost, if not altogether, all mankind; nor do I know more than one instance of a man who fully regards all the world as a stage and all the men and women merely players, and who (the dancing-school bow excepted) only values these players, the dramatis personae who build cities and who rear hedges, who govern provinces or superintend flocks, merely as they act their parts. For the honour of Ayrshire this man is Professor Dugald Stewart of Catrine. To him I might perhaps add another instance, a Popish bishop, Geddes of Edinburgh…. I ever could ill endure those … beasts of prey who foul the hallowed ground of religion with their nocturnal prowlings; and if the prosecution against my worthy friend, Dr. McGill, goes on, I shall keep no measure with the savages, but fly at them with the faucons of ridicule, or run them down with the bloodhounds of satire as lawful game wherever I start them.

I expect to leave Edinburgh in eight or ten days, and shall certainly do myself the honour of calling at Dunlop House as I return to Ayrshire. — I have the honour to be, Madam, your obliged humble Servant,

ROBERT BURNS.

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LXVI. — TO MR. JAMES HOY,55GORDON CASTLE.

Edinburg, 6th November 1787.

Dear Sir, — I would have wrote you immediately on receipt of your kind letter, but a mixed impulse of gratitude and esteem whispered to me that I ought to send you something by way of return. When a poet owes anything, particularly when he is indebted for good offices, the payment that usually recurs to him — the only coin, indeed, in which he is probably conversant — is rhyme. Johnson sends the books by the fly, as directed, and begs me to inclose his most grateful thanks: my return I intended should have been one or two poetic bagatelles which the world have not seen, or, perhaps, for obvious seasons, cannot see. These I shall send you before I leave Edinburgh. They may make you laugh a little, which, on the whole, is no bad way of spending one’s precious hours and still more precious breath. At any rate, they will be, though a small, yet a very sincere mark of my respectful esteem for a gentleman whose farther acquaintance I should look upon as a peculiar obligation.

The Duke’s song, independent totally of his dukeship, charms me. There is I know not what of wild happiness of thought and expression peculiarly beautiful in the old Scottish song style, of which his Grace, old venerable Skinner, the author of “Tullochgorum,” etc., and the late Ross, at Lochlee, of true Scottish poetic memory, are the only modern instances that I recollect, since Ramsay, with his contemporaries, and poor Bob Fergusson, went to the world of deathless existence and truly immortal song. The mob of mankind, that many-headed beast, would laugh at so serious a speech about an old song; but, as Job says, “O that mine adversary had written a book!” Those who think that composing a Scotch song is a trifling business — let them try.

I wish my Lord Duke would pay a proper attention to the Christian admonition, “Hide not your candle under a bushel,” but “let your light shine before men.” I could name half-a-dozen Dukes that I guess are a deal worse employed; nay, I question if there are half-a-dozen better: perhaps there are not half that scanty number whom Heaven has favoured with the tuneful, happy, and, I will say, glorious gift. — I am, dear Sir, your obliged humble servant, R. B.

55 Librarian to the Duke of Gordon.

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LXVII. — TO THE EARL OF GLENCAIRN.

Edinburg, (End of 1787.)

My Lord, — I know your lordship will disapprove of my ideas in a request I am going to make to you; but I have weighed, long and seriously weighed, my situation, my hopes, and turn of mind, and am fully fixed to my scheme, if I can possibly effectuate it. I wish to get into the Excise: I am told that your lordship’s interest will easily procure me the grant from the commissioners; and your lordship’s patronage and goodness, which have already rescued me from obscurity, wretchedness, and exile, embolden me to ask that interest. You have likewise put it in my power to save the little tie of home that sheltered an aged mother, two brothers, and three sisters from destruction. There, my lord, you have bound me over to the highest gratitude.

My brother’s farm is but a wretched lease, but I think he will probably weather out the remaining seven years of it; and after the assistance which I have given, and will give him, to keep the family together, I think, by my guess, I shall have rather better than two hundred pounds, and instead of seeking, what is almost impossible at present to find, a farm that I can certainly live by, with so small a stock, I shall lodge this sum in a banking-house, a sacred deposit, excepting only the calls of uncommon distress or necessitous old age.

These, my lord, are my views: I have resolved from the maturest deliberation; and now I am fixed, I shall leave no stone unturned to carry my resolve into execution. Your lordship’s patronage is the strength of my hopes; nor have I yet applied to anybody else. Indeed my heart sinks within me at the idea of applying to any other of the great who have honoured me with their countenance. I am ill-qualified to dog the heels of greatness with the impertinence of solicitation, and tremble nearly as much at the thought of the cold promise as the cold denial; but to your lordship I have not only the honour, the comfort, but the pleasure of being your lordship’s much obliged and deeply indebted humble servant,

R. B.

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LXVIII — TO Miss CHALMERS.

Edinburgh, Nov. 21, 1787.

I have one vexatious fault to the kindly, welcome, well-filled sheet which I owe to your and Charlotte’s goodness — it contains too much sense, sentiment, and good spelling. It is impossible that even you two, whom, I declare to my God, I will give credit for any degree of excellence the sex are capable of attaining-it is impossible you can go on to correspond at that rate; so, like those who, Shenstone says, retire because they have made a good speech, I shall, after a few letters, hear no more of you. I insist that you shall write whatever comes first — what you see, what you read, what you hear, what you admire, what you dislike, trifles, bagatelles, nonsense; or, to fill up a corner, e’en put down a laugh at full length. Now, none of your polite hints about flattery; I leave that to your lovers, if you have or shall have any; though, thank heaven, I have found at last two girls who can be luxuriantly happy in their own minds and with one another, without that commonly necessary appendage to female bliss — A LOVER.

Charlotte and you are just two favourite resting-places for my soul in her wanderings through the weary, thorny wilderness of this world. God knows, I am ill-fitted for the struggle: I glory in being a poet, and I want to be thought a wise man — I would fondly be generous, and I wish to be rich. After all, I am afraid I am a lost subject. “Some folk hae a hantle o’ faults, and I’m but a ne’er-do-well”.

Afternoon. — To close the melancholy reflections at the end of last sheet, I shall just add a piece of devotion, commonly known in Carrick by the title of the “Wabster’s grace”: —

Some say we’re thieves, and e’en sae are we,

Some say we lie, and e’en sae do we!

Gude forgie us, and I hope sae will he!

Up and to your looms, lads.

R. B.

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LXIX. — TO MISS CHALMERS.

Edinburgh, Dec. 12, 1787.

I am here under the care of a surgeon, with a bruised limb extended on a cushion, and the tints of my mind vieing with the livid horror preceding a midnight thunderstorm. A drunken coachman was the cause of the first, and incomparably the lightest evil; misfortune, bodily constitution, hell, and myself have formed a “quadruple alliance” to guarantee the other. I got my fall on Saturday, and am getting slowly better.

I have taken tooth and nail to the Bible, and am got through the five books of Moses, and half way in Joshua. It is really a glorious book. I sent for my bookbinder today, and ordered him to get me an octavo Bible in sheets, the best paper and print in town, and bind it with all the elegance of his craft.

I would give my best song to my worst enemy — I mean the merit of making it — to have you and Charlotte by me. You are angelic creatures, and would pour oil and wine into my wounded spirit.

I inclose you a proof copy of the “Banks of the Devon”, which present with my best wishes to Charlotte. The “Ochil Hills”56 you shall probably have next week for yourself. None of your fine speeches!

R. B.

56 The song in honour of Miss Chalmers, beginning, “Where, braving angry winter’s storms”.

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LXX. — TO MISS CHALMERS.

Edinburgh, 19th Dec. 1787.

I begin this letter in answer to yours of the 17th current, which is not yet cold since I read it. The atmosphere of my soul is vastly clearer than when I wrote you last. For the first time, yesterday I crossed the room on crutches. It would do your heart good to see my hardship, not on my poetic, but on my oaken stilts; throwing my best leg with an air! and with as much hilarity in my gait and countenance, as a May frog leaping across the newly-harrowed ridge, enjoying the fragrance of the refreshed earth, after the long-expected shower!

I can’t say I am altogether at my ease when I see anywhere in my path that meagre, squalid, famine-faced spectre, poverty; attended as he always is, by iron-fisted oppression, and leering contempt; but I have sturdily withstood his buffetings many a hard-laboured day already, and still my motto is — I DARE! My worst enemy is moi meme. I lie so miserably open to the inroads and incursions of a mischievous, light-armed, well-mounted banditti, under the banners of imagination, whim, caprice, and passion; and the heavy-armed veteran regulars of wisdom, prudence, and forethought move so very, very slow, that I am almost in a state of perpetual warfare, and, alas! frequent defeat. There are just two creatures I would envy, a horse in his wild state traversing the forests of Asia, or an oyster on some of the desert shores of Europe. The one has not a wish without enjoyment, the other has neither wish nor fear.

R. B.

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LXXI. — TO MR. RICHARD BROWN, IRVINE.

Edinburgh, 30th Dec. 1787.

My Dear Sir, — I have met with few things in life which have given me more pleasure, than Fortune’s kindness to you since those days in which we met in the vale of misery; as I can honestly say, that I never knew a man who more truly deserved it, or to whom my heart more truly wished it. I have been much indebted, since that time, to your story and sentiments for steeling my mind against evils, of which I have had a pretty decent share. My will-o’-wisp fate you know: do you recollect a Sunday we spent together in Eglinton woods? You told me, on my repeating some verses to you, that you wondered I could resist the temptation of sending verses of such merit to a magazine. It was from this remark I derived that idea of my own pieces, which encouraged me to endeavour at the character of a poet. I am happy to hear that you will be two or three months at home. As soon as a bruised limb will permit me I shall return to Ayrshire, and we shall meet; “and faith, I hope we’ll not sit dumb, nor yet cast out!”

I have much to tell you “of men, their manners, and their ways,” perhaps a little of the other sex. Apropos, I beg to be remembered to Mrs. Brown. There, I doubt not, my dear friend, but you have found substantial happiness. I expect to find you something of an altered but not a different man; the wild, bold, generous young fellow composed into the steady affectionate husband, and the fond careful parent. For me, I am just the same will-o’-wisp being I used to be. About the first and fourth quarters of the moon, I generally set in for the trade wind of wisdom; but about the full and change, I am the luckless victim of mad tornadoes, which blow me into chaos. Almighty love still reigns and revels in my bosom; and I am at this moment ready to hang myself for a young Edinburgh widow,57who has wit and wisdom more murderously fatal than the assassinating stiletto of the Sicilian bandit, or the poisoned arrow of the savage African. My Highland dirk, that used to hang beside my crutches, I have gravely removed into a neighbouring closet, the key of which I cannot command, in case of spring-tide paroxysms. My best compliments to our friend Allan. Adieu!

R. B.

57 The earliest allusion to Clarinda (Mrs. M’Lehose). Her husband was alive, in the West Indies.

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LXXII — TO MRS. DUNLOP.

Edinburg, January 21, 1788.

After six weeks’ confinement, I am beginning to walk across the room. They have been six horrible weeks; anguish and low spirits made me unfit to read, write, or think.

I have a hundred times wished that one could resign life as an officer resigns a commission; for I would not take in any poor, ignorant wretch by selling out. Lately I was a sixpenny private, and, God knows, a miserable soldier enough; now I march to the campaign, a starving cadet; a little more conspicuously wretched.

I am ashamed of all this; for though I do want bravery for the warfare of life, I could wish, like some other soldiers, to have as much fortitude or cunning as to dissemble or conceal my cowardice.

As soon as I can bear the journey, which will be, I suppose, about the middle of next week, I leave Edinburgh; and soon after I shall pay my grateful duty at Dunlop House. R. B.

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LXXIII. — TO MRS. DUNLOP.

EDINBURGH, February 12, 1788.

Some things in your late letters hurt me — not that you say them, but that you mistake me. Religion, my honoured Madam, has not only been all my life my chief dependance, but my dearest enjoyment. I have, indeed, been the luckless victim of wayward follies; but, alas! I have ever been “more fool than knave.” A mathematician without religion is a probable character; an irreligious poet is a monster.

R. B.

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LXXIV. — TO THE REV. JOHN SKINNER.

EDINBURGH, 14th February 1788.

Reverend and Dear Sir, — I have been a cripple now near three months, though I am getting vastly better, and have been very much hurried beside, or else I would have wrote you sooner. I must beg your pardon for the epistle you sent me appearing in the Magazine. I had given a copy or two to some of my intimate friends, but did not know of the printing of it till the publication of the Magazine. However, as it does great honour to us both, you will forgive it.

The second volume of the songs I mentioned to you in my last is published to-day. I send you a copy, which I beg you will accept as a mark of the veneration I have long had, and shall ever have, for your character, and of the claim I make to your continued acquaintance. Your songs appear in the third volume, with your name in the index; as I assure you, Sir, I have heard your “Tullochgorum,” particularly among our west-country folks, given to many different names, and most commonly to the immortal author of “The Minstrel,” who, indeed, never wrote any thing superior to “Gie’s a sang, Montgomery cried.” Your brother^58 has promised me your verses to the Marquis of Huntley’s reel, which certainly deserve a place in the collection. My kind host, Mr. Cruikshank, of the High School here, and said to be one of the best Latins in this age, begs me to make you his grateful acknowledgments for the entertainment he has got in a Latin publication of yours, that I borrowed for him from your acquaintance and much-respected friend in this place, the Rev. Dr. Webster. Mr. Cruikshank maintains that you write the best Latin since Buchanan. I leave Edinburgh to-morrow, but shall return in three weeks. Your song you mentioned in your last, to the tune of “Dumbarton Drums,” and the other, which you say was done by a brother in trade of mine, a ploughman, I shall thank you for a copy of each. I am ever, Reverend Sir, with the most respectful esteem and sincere veneration, yours, R. B.

58 Half-brother, James, a writer to the Signet.

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LXXV. — TO MRS. ROSE, OF KILRAVOCK.

EDINBURGH, February 17th, 1788.

MADAM, — You are much indebted to some indispensable business I have had on my hands, otherwise my gratitude threatened such a return for your obliging favour, as would have tired your patience. It but poorly expresses my feelings to say, that I am sensible of your kindness: it may be said of hearts such as yours is, and such, I hope, mine is, much more justly than Addison applies it, —

Some souls by instinct to each other turn.

There was something in my reception at Kilravock so different from the cold, obsequious, dancing-school bow of politeness, that it almost got into my head that friendship had occupied her ground without the intermediate march of acquaintance. I wish I could transcribe, or rather transfuse into language, the glow of my heart when I read your letter. My ready fancy, with colours more mellow than life itself, painted the beautifully wild scenery of Kilravock — the venerable grandeur of the castle — the spreading woods — the winding river, gladly leaving his unsightly, heathy source, and lingering with apparent delight as he passes the fairy walk at the bottom of the garden; — your late distressful anxieties — your present enjoyments — your dear little angel, the pride of your hopes; — my aged friend, venerable in worth and years, whose loyalty and other virtues will strongly entitle her to the support of the Almighty Spirit here, and His peculiar favour in a happier state of existence. You cannot imagine, Madam, how much such feelings delight me; they are my dearest proofs of my own immortality. Should I never revisit the north, as probably I never will, nor again see your hospitable mansion, were I, some twenty years hence, to see your little fellow’s name making a proper figure in a newspaper paragraph, my heart would bound with pleasure.

I am assisting a friend in a collection of Scottish songs, set to their proper tunes; every air worth preserving is to be included; among others I have given “Morag,” and some few Highland airs which pleased me most, a dress which will be more generally known, though far, far inferior in real merit. As a small mark of my grateful esteem, I beg leave to present you with a copy of the work, as far as it is printed; the Man of Feeling, that first of men, has promised to transmit it by the first opportunity.

I beg to be remembered most respectfully to my venerable friend, and to your little Highland chieftain. When you see the “two fair spirits of the hill,” at Kildrummie, tell them that I have done myself the honour of setting myself down as one of their admirers for at least twenty years to come, consequently they must look upon me as an acquaintance for the same period; but, as the Apostle Paul says, “this I ask of grace, not of debt.” — I have the honour to be, Madam, etc., ROBERT BURNS.

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LXXVI-To RICHARD BROWN, GREENOCK.

MOSSGIEL, 24th February 1788.

MY DEAR SIR, — I cannot get the proper direction for my friend in Jamaica, but the following will do: — To Mr, Jo. Hutchinson, at Jo. Brownrigg’s, Esq., care of Mr. Benjamin Henriquez, merchant, Orange Street, Kingston. I arrived here, at my brother’s, only yesterday, after fighting my way through Paisley and Kilmarnock, against those old powerful foes of mine, the devil, the world, and the flesh — so terrible in the fields of dissipation. I have met with few incidents in my life which gave me so much pleasure as meeting you in Glasgow. There is a time of life beyond which we cannot form a tie worth the name of friendship, “O youth! enchanting stage, profusely blest.” Life is a fairy scene: almost all that deserves the name of enjoyment or pleasure is only a charming delusion; and in comes repining age, in all the gravity of hoary wisdom, and wretchedly chases away the bewitching phantom. When I think of life, I resolve to keep a strict look-out in the course of economy, for the sake of worldly convenience and independence of mind; to cultivate intimacy with a few of the companions of youth, that they may be the friends of age; never to refuse my liquorish humour a handful of the sweetmeats of life, when they come not too dear; and, for futurity, —

The present moment is our ain,

The neist we never saw!

How like you my philosophy? Give my best compliments to Mrs. B., and believe me to be, my dear Sir, yours most truly, ROBERT BURNS.

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LXXVII. — TO MR. WILLIAM CRUIKSHANK.5^9

MAUCHLINE, March 3rd, 1788.

My dear Sir, — Apologies for not writing are frequently like apologies for not singing — the apology better than the song. I have fought my way severely through the savage hospitality of this country, the object of all hosts being to send every guest drunk to bed if they can.

I executed your commission in Glasgow, and I hope the cocoa came safe. ‘Twas the same price and the very same kind as your former parcel, for the gentleman recollected your buying there perfectly well.

I Should return my thanks for your hospitality (I leave a blank for the epithet, as I know none can do it justice) to a poor, wayfaring bard, who was spent and almost overpowered fighting with prosaic wickedness in high places; but I am afraid lest you should burn the letter whenever you come to the passage, so I pass over it in silence. I am just returned from visiting Mr. Miller’s farm. The friend whom I told you I would take with me was highly pleased with the farm; and as he is, without exception, the most intelligent farmer in the country, he has staggered me a good deal. I have the two plans of life before me; I shall balance them to the best of my judgment; and fix on the most eligible. I have written Mr. Miller, and shall wait on him when I come to town, which shall be the beginning or middle of next week: I would be in sooner, but my unlucky knee is rather worse, and I fear for some time will scarcely stand the fatigue of my Excise instructions. I only mention these ideas to you, and, indeed, except Mr. Ainslie, whom I intend writing to tomorrow, I will not write at all to Edinburgh till I return to it. I would send my compliments to Mr. Nicol, but he would be hurt if he knew I wrote to anybody and not to him; so I shall only beg my best, kindest, kindest compliments to my worthy hostess, and the sweet little rose-bud.

So soon as I am settled in the routine of life, either as an Excise-officer, or as a farmer, I propose myself great pleasure from a regular correspondence with the only man almost I ever saw, who joined the most attentive prudence with the warmest generosity.

I am much interested for that best of men, Mr. Wood; I hope he is in better health and spirits than when I saw him last. — I am ever, my dearest friend, your obliged, humble servant, R. B.

59 One of the masters of the High School of Edinburgh.

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LXXVIII. — TO MR. ROBERT AINSLIE.

MAUCHLINE, 3rd March 1788.

MY DEAR FRIEND, — I am just returned from Mr. Miller’s farm. My old friend whom I took with me was highly pleased with the bargain, and advised me to accept of it. He is the most intelligent sensible farmer in the county, and his advice has staggered me a good deal. I have the two plans before me; I shall endeavour to balance them to the best of my judgment, and fix on the most eligible. On the whole, if I find Mr. Miller in the same favourable disposition as when I saw him last, I shall, in all probability, turn farmer.

I have been through sore tribulation and under much buffetting of the wicked one, since I came to this country. Jean I found banished, forlorn, destitute, and friendless; I have reconciled her to her fate, and I have reconciled her to her mother…. I swore her privately and solemnly never to attempt any claim on me as a husband, even though anybody should persuade her she had such a claim….

I shall be in Edinburgh middle of next week. My farming ideas I shall keep private till I see. I got a letter from Clarinda yesterday, and she tells me she has got no letter of mine but one. Tell her that I wrote to her from Glasgow, from Kilmarnock, from Mauchline, and yesterday from Cumnock as I returned from Dumfries. Indeed she is the only person in Edinburgh I have written to till this day. How are your soul and body putting up? — a little like man and wife I suppose. — Your faithful friend,

ROBERT BURNS.

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LXXIX. — TO MR. RICHARD BROWN.

MAUCHLINE, 7th March 1788.

I have been out of the country, my dear friend, and have not had an opportunity of writing till now, when, I am afraid, you will be gone out of the country too. I have been looking at farms, and, after all, perhaps I may settle in the character of a farmer. I have got so vicious a bent to idleness, and have ever been so little a man of business, that it will take no ordinary effort to bring my mind properly into the routine: but you will say a “great effort is worthy of you.” I say so myself; and butter up my vanity with all the stimulating compliments I can think of. Men of grave, geometrical minds, the sons of “which was to be demonstrated,” may cry up reason as much as they please; but I have always found an honest passion, or native instinct, the truest auxiliary in the warfare of this world. Reason almost always comes to me like an unlucky wife to a poor devil of a husband, just in sufficient time to add her reproaches to his other grievances.

I am gratified with your kind inquiries after Jean; as, after all, I may say with Othello —

Excellent wretch!

Perdition catch my soul, but I do love thee!

I go for Edinburgh on Monday. — Yours,

ROBERT BURNS.

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LXXX. — TO MR. ROBERT MUIR.

MOSSGIEL, 7th March 1788.

DEAR SIR, — I have partly changed my ideas, my dear friend, since I saw you. I took old Glenconner with me to Mr. Miller’s farm, and he was so pleased with it, that I have wrote an offer to Mr. Miller, which, if he accepts, I shall sit down a plain farmer, the happiest of lives when a man can live by it. In this case I shall not stay in Edinburgh above a week. I set out on Monday, and would have come by Kilmarnock; but there are several small sums owing me for my first edition about Galston and Newmilns, and I shall set off so early as to despatch my business and reach Glasgow by night. When I return, I shall devote a forenoon or two to make some kind of acknowledgment for all the kindness I owe your friendship. Now that I hope to settle with some credit and comfort at home, there was not any friendship or friendly correspondence that promised me more pleasure than yours; I hope I will not be disappointed. I trust the spring will renew your shattered frame, and make your friends happy. You and I have often agreed that life is no great blessing on the whole. The close of life, indeed, to a reasoning age, is

Dark as was chaos, ere the infant sun

Was roll’d together, or had tried his beams

Athwart the gloom profound.

But 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. Every age and every nation has had a different set of stories; and as the many are always weak, of consequence they have often, perhaps always, been deceived. 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.

These, my worthy friend, are my ideas; and I know they are not far different from yours. It becomes a man of sense to think for himself, particularly in a case where all men are equally interested, and where, indeed, all men are equally in the dark.

Adieu, my dear Sir; God send us a cheerful meeting!

R. B.

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LXXXI — TO MRS. DUNLOP.

MOSSGIEL, 7th March 1788.

MADAM, — The last paragraph in yours of the 30th February affected me most; so I shall begin my answer where you ended your letter. That I am often a sinner with any little wit I have, I do confess; but I have taxed my recollection to no purpose to find out when it was employed against you. I hate an ungenerous sarcasm a great deal worse than I do the devil — at least as Milton describes him; and though I may be rascally enough to be sometimes guilty of it myself, I cannot endure it in others. You, my honoured friend, who cannot appear in any light but you are sure of being respectable — you can afford to pass by an occasion to display your wit, because you may depend for fame on your sense; or, if you choose to be silent, you know you can rely on the gratitude of many, and the esteem of all; but, God help us, who are wits or witlings by profession, if we stand not for fame there, we sink unsupported!

I am highly flattered by the news you tell me of Coila. I may say to the fair painter^60 who does me so much honour, as Dr. Beattie says to Ross, the poet of his muse Scota, from which, by the by, I took the idea of Coila: (‘tis a poem of Beattie’s in the Scottish dialect, which, perhaps, you have never seen): —

Ye shak your head, but o’ my fegs,

Ye’ve set auld Scota on her legs;

Lang had she lien wi’ beffs and flegs,

Bumbaz’d and dizzie,

Her fiddle wanted strings and pegs,

Wae’s me, poor hizzie.

R.B.

60 One of Mrs. Dunlop’s daughters was painting a sketch from the “Coila of the Vision”.

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LXXXII — TO MR. WM. NICOL (PERHAPS).

MAUCHLINE, 7th March 1788.

MY DEAR SIR, — My life, since I saw you last, has been one continued hurry; that savage hospitality which knocks a man down with strong liquors, is the devil. I have a sore warfare in this world; the devil, the world, and the flesh, are three formidable foes. The first I generally try to fly from; the second, alas! generally flies from me; but the third is my plague, worse than the ten plagues of Egypt.

I have been looking over several farms in this country; one in particular, in Nithsdale, pleased me so well, that if my offer to the proprietor is accepted, I shall commence farmer at Whit-Sunday. If farming do not appear eligible, I shall have recourse to any other shift; but this to a friend.

I set out for Edinburgh on Monday morning; how long I stay there is uncertain, but you will know so soon as I can inform you myself. However I determine, poesy must be laid aside for some time; my mind has been vitiated with idleness, and it will take a good deal of effort to habituate it to the routine of business. — I am, my dear Sir, yours sincerely, R. B.

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LXXXIII. — TO MISS CHALMERS.

EDINBURGH, March 14th, 1788.

I know, my ever dear friend, that you will be pleased with the news when I tell you I have at last taken a lease of a farm. Yesternight I completed a bargain with Mr. Miller, of Dalswinton, for the farm of Ellisland, on the banks of the Nith, between five and six miles above Dumfries. I begin at Whit-Sunday to build a house, drive lime, etc., and Heaven be my help! for it will take a strong effort to bring my mind into the routine of business. I have discharged all the army of my former pursuits, fancies, and pleasures — a motley host! and have literally and strictly retained only the ideas of a few friends, which I have incorporated into a life-guard. I trust in Dr. Johnson’s observation, “Where much is attempted, something is done.” Firmness, both in sufferance and exertion, is a character I would wish to be thought to possess: and have always despised the whining yelp of complaint, and the cowardly, feeble resolve.

Poor Miss K.61 is ailing a good deal this winter, and begged me to remember her to you the first time I wrote to you. Surely woman, amiable woman, is often made in vain. Too delicately formed for the rougher pursuits of ambition; too noble for the dirt of avarice, and even too gentle for the rage of pleasure; formed, indeed, for, and highly susceptible of enjoyment and rapture; but that enjoyment, alas! almost wholly at the mercy of the caprice, malevolence, stupidity, or wickedness of an animal at all times comparatively unfeeling, and often brutal. R.B.

61 Miss Kennedy, sister of Gavin Hamilton. She lived nearly half a century after this.

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THE CLARINDA LETTERS.

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NOTE PREFATORY TO THE LETTERS TO CLARINDA

We have now arrived, in the history of Burns, as his general correspondence reveals it, at the middle of March 1788. Before the end of the month he had broken off from Clarinda, and shortly afterwards he married Jean Armour. The correspondence with Clarinda began in the last month of 1787, and ran its course in three months. It is now necessary to go back to the commencement of this correspondence, and to follow it down to its first conclusion at the point to which his general correspondence has brought us. It has been thought preferable to take it by itself.

Clarinda’s maiden name was Agnes Craig. She was the daughter of Mr. Andrew Craig, who had been a surgeon in Glasgow. Lord Craig of the Court of Session was her cousin. She was born in the same year as Burns, but three months later. At the age of seventeen she was married to Mr. James M’Lehose, a law agent in Glasgow. Incompatibility of temper resulted in a separation of the unhappy pair five years after their marriage. The lady went home to her father, and on his death in 1782 removed to Edinburgh, where she lived independently on a small annuity. Her two sons lived with her. Her husband meanwhile went out to the West Indies to push his fortune.

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LETTERS TO CLARINDA.

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I.

Thursday Evening [Dec. 6th, 1787].

MADAM, — I had set no small store by my tea-drinking tonight, and have not often been so disappointed. Saturday evening I shall embrace the opportunity with the greatest pleasure. I leave this town this day se’ennight, and, probably, for a couple of twelvemonths; but must ever regret that I so lately got an acquaintance I shall ever highly esteem, and in whose welfare I shall ever be warmly interested.

Our worthy common friend, in her usual pleasant way, rallied me a good deal on my new acquaintance, and in the humour of her ideas I wrote some lines, which I inclose you, as I think they have a good deal of poetic merit: and Miss Nimmo tells me you are not only a critic, but a poetess. Fiction, you know, is the native region of poetry; and I hope you will pardon my vanity in sending you the bagatelle as a tolerably off-hand jeu-d’esprit. I have several poetic trifles, which I shall gladly leave with Miss Nimmo, or you, if they were worth house room; as there are scarcely two people on earth by whom it would mortify me more to be forgotten, though at the distance of ninescore miles. — I am, Madam, with the highest respect, your very humble servant,

ROBERT BURNS.

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II.

Saturday Evening, Dec. 8th, 1787.

I can say with truth, Madam, that I never met with a person in my life whom I more anxiously wished to meet again than yourself. To-night I was to have had that very great pleasure; I was intoxicated with the idea, but an unlucky fall from a coach has so bruised one of my knees, that I can’t stir my leg; so if I don’t see you again, I shall not rest in my grave for chagrin. I was vexed to the soul I had not seen you sooner; I determined to cultivate your friendship with the enthusiasm of religion; but thus has Fortune ever served me. I cannot bear the idea of leaving Edinburgh without seeing you. I know not how to account for it — I am strangely taken with some people, nor am I often mistaken. You are a stranger to me; but I am an odd being: some yet unnamed feelings, things, not principles, but better than whims, carry me farther than boasted reason ever did a philosopher. Farewell! every happiness be yours! ROBERT BURNS.

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III.

Dec. 12, 1787.

I stretch a point indeed, my dearest Madam, when I answer your card on the rack of my present agony. Your friendship, Madam! By heavens, I was never proud before. Your lines, I maintain it, are poetry, and good poetry; mine were indeed partly fiction and partly a friendship, which, had I been so blest as to have met with you in time, might have led me — god of love only knows where. Time is too short for ceremonies. I swear solemnly, in all the tenor of my former oath, to remember you in all the pride and warmth of friendship until I cease to be! To-morrow, and every day till I see you, you shall hear from me. Farewell! May you enjoy a better night’s repose than I am likely to have. R. B.

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IV.

Thursday, Dec. 20, 1787.

Your last, my dear Madam, had the effect on me that Job’s situation had on his friends when they sat down seven days and seven nights astonished and spake not a word. “Pay my addresses to a married woman!” I started as if I had seen the ghost of him I had injured. I recollected my expressions; some of them were indeed in the law phrase “habit and repute,” which is being half guilty. I cannot possibly say, Madam, whether my heart might not have gone astray a little; but I can declare upon the honour of a poet that the vagrant has wandered unknown to me. I have a pretty handsome troop of follies of my own, and, like some other people’s, they are but undisciplined blackguards; but the luckless rascals have something like honour in them — they would not do a dishonest thing.

To meet with an unfortunate woman, amiable and young, deserted and widowed by those who were bound by every tie of duty, nature, and gratitude to protect, comfort and cherish her; add to all, when she is perhaps one of the first of lovely forms and noble minds — the mind, too, that hits one’s taste as the joys of Heaven do a saint — should a faint idea, the natural child of imagination, thoughtfully peep over the fence — were you, my friend, to sit in judgment, and the poor, airy straggler brought before you, trembling, self-condemned, with artless eyes, brimful of contrition, looking wistfully on its judge — you could not, my dear Madam, condemn the hapless wretch to death without benefit of clergy? I won’t tell you what reply my heart made to your raillery of seven years, but I will give you what a brother of my trade says on the same allusion: —

The patriarch to gain a wife,

Chaste, beautiful, and young,

Served fourteen years a painful life,

And never thought it long.

O were you to reward such cares,

And life so long would stay,

Not fourteen but four hundred years

Would seem but as a day.62

I have written you this scrawl because I have nothing else to do, and you may sit down and find fault with it, if you have no better way of consuming your time. But finding fault with the vagaries of a poet’s fancy is much such another business as Xerxes chastising the waves of Hellespont.

My limb now allows me to sit in some peace: to walk I have yet no prospect of, as I can’t mark it to the ground.

I have just now looked over what I have written, and it is such a chaos of nonsense that I daresay you will throw it into the fire and call me an idle, stupid fellow; but, whatever you may think of my brains, believe me to be, with the most sacred respect and heart-felt esteem, my dear Madam, your humble Servant, ROBT. BURNS.

62 Tom D’Urfey’s Songs.

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V.

Friday Evening, 28th December 1787.

I beg your pardon, my dear “Clarinda,” for the fragment scrawl I sent you yesterday. I really do not know what I wrote. A gentleman, for whose character, abilities, and critical knowledge I have the highest veneration, called in just as I had begun the second sentence, and I would not make the porter wait. I read to my much-respected friend several of my own bagatelles, and, among others, your lines, which I had copied out. He began some criticisms on them as on the other pieces, when I informed him they were the work of a young lady in this town, which, I assure you, made him stare. My learned friend seriously protested that he did not believe any young woman in Edinburgh was capable of such lines; and if you know anything of Professor Gregory, you will neither doubt of his abilities nor his sincerity. I do love you, if possible, still better for having so fine a taste and turn for poesy. I have again gone wrong in my usual unguarded way, but you may erase the word, and put esteem, respect, or any other tame Dutch expression you please in its place. I believe there is no holding converse, or carrying on correspondence, with an amiable woman, much less a gloriously amiable fine woman, without some mixture of that delicious passion, whose most devoted slave I have more than once had the honour of being. But why be hurt or offended on that account? Can no honest man have a prepossession for a fine woman, but he must run his head against an intrigue? Take a little of the tender witchcraft of love, and add to it the generous, the honourable sentiments of manly friendship, and I know but one more delightful morsel, which few, few in any rank ever taste. Such a composition is like adding cream to strawberries; it not only gives the fruit a more elegant richness, but has a deliciousness of its own.

I inclose you a few lines I composed on a late melancholy occasion. I will not give above five or six copies of it in all, and I should be hurt if any friend should give any copies without my consent.

You cannot imagine, Clarinda (I like the idea of Arcadian names in a commerce of this kind), how much store I have set by the hopes of your future friendship. I do not know if you have a just idea of my character, but I wish you to see me as I am. I am, as most people of my trade are, a strange Will-o’-Wisp being: the victim, too frequently, of much imprudence and many follies. My great constituent elements are pride and passion. The first I have endeavoured to humanise into integrity and honour; the last makes me a devotee to the warmest degree of enthusiasm, in love, religion, or friendship — either of them, or all together, as I happen to be inspired. ‘Tis true, I never saw you but once; but how much acquaintance did I form with you in that once? Do not think I flatter you, or have a design upon you, Clarinda; I have too much pride for the one, and too little cold contrivance for the other; but of all God’s creatures I ever could approach in the beaten way of my acquaintance, you struck me with the deepest, the strongest, the most permanent impression. I say the most permanent, because I know myself well, and how far I can promise either on my prepossessions or powers. Why are you unhappy? And why are so many of our fellow-creatures, unworthy to belong to the same species with you, blest with all they can wish? You have a hand all benevolent to give-why were you denied the pleasure? You have a heart formed — gloriously formed — for all the most refined luxuries of love:-why was that heart ever wrung? O Clarinda! shall we not meet in a state, some yet unknown state of being, where the lavish hand of plenty shall minister to the highest wish of benevolence; and where the chill north-wind of prudence shall never blow over the flowery fields of enjoyment? If we do not, man was made in vain! I deserved most of the unhappy hours that have lingered over my head; they were the wages of my labour: but what unprovoked demon, malignant as hell, stole upon the confidence of unmistrusting busy Fate, and dashed your cup of life with undeserved sorrow?

Let me know how long your stay will be out of town; I shall count the hours till you inform me of your return. Cursed etiquette forbids your seeing me just now; and so soon as I can walk I must bid Edinburgh adieu. Lord! why was I born to see misery which I cannot relieve, and to meet with friends whom I cannot enjoy? I look back with the pang of unavailing avarice on my loss in not knowing you sooner: all last winter, these three months past, what luxury of intercourse have I not lost! Perhaps, though,‘twas better for my peace. You see I am either above, or incapable of dissimulation. I believe it is want of that particular genius. I despise design, because I want either coolness or wisdom to be capable of it. I am interrupted. Adieu! my dear Clarinda!

SYLVANDER.

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VI.

Thursday, Jan. 3, 1788.

You are right, my dear Clarinda: a friendly correspondence goes for nothing, except one writes his or her undisguised sentiments. Yours please me for their instrinsic merit, as well as because they are yours, which I assure you, is to me a high recommendation. Your religious sentiments, Madam, I revere. If you have, on some suspicious evidence, from some lying oracle, learned that I despise or ridicule so sacredly important a matter as real religion, you have, my Clarinda, much misconstrued your friend. “I am not mad, most noble Festus!” Have you ever met a perfect character? Do we not sometimes rather exchange faults, than get rid of them? For instance, I am perhaps tired with, and shocked at a life too much the prey of giddy inconsistencies and thoughtless follies; by degrees I grow sober, prudent, and statedly pious — I say statedly, because the most unaffected devotion is not at all inconsistent with my first character — I join the world in congratulating myself on the happy change. But let me pry more narrowly into this affair. Have I, at bottom, any thing of a sacred pride in these endowments and emendations? Have I nothing of a presbyterian sourness, an hypocritical severity, when I survey my less regular neighbours? In a word, have I missed all those nameless and numberless modifications of indistinct selfishness, which are so near our own eyes, that we can scarcely bring them within the sphere of our vision, and which the known spotless cambric of our character hides from the ordinary observer?

My definition of worth is short; truth and humanity respecting our fellow-creatures; reverence and humility in the presence of that Being, my Creator and Preserver, and who, I have every reason to believe, will one day be my Judge. The first part of my definition is the creature of unbiassed instinct; the last is the child of after reflection. Where I found these two essentials I would gently note and slightly mention any attendant flaws — flaws, the marks, the consequences of human nature.

I can easily enter into the sublime pleasures that your strong imagination and keen sensibility must derive from religion, particularly if a little in the shade of misfortune; but I own I cannot, without a marked grudge, see Heaven totally engross so amiable, so charming a woman, as my friend Clarinda; and should be very well pleased at a circumstance that would put it in the power of somebody (happy somebody!) to divide her attention, with all the delicacy and tenderness of an earthly attachment.

You will not easily persuade me that you have not a grammatical knowledge of the English language. So far from being inaccurate, you are elegant beyond any woman of my acquaintance, except one, — whom I wish you knew.

Your last verses to me have so delighted me, that I have got an excellent old Scots air that suits the measure, and you shall see them in print in the Scots Musical Museum, a work publishing by a friend of mine in this town. I want four stanzas, you gave me but three, and one of them alluded to an expression in my former letter; so I have taken your two first verses, with a slight alteration in the second, and have added a third, but you must help me to a fourth. Here they are; the latter half of the first stanza would have been worthy of Sappho; I am in raptures with it.

Talk not of Love, it gives me pain,

For Love has been my foe:

He bound me with an iron chain,

And sunk me deep in woe.

But Friendship’s pure and lasting joys

My heart was formed to prove:

There welcome, win and wear the prize,

But never talk of Love.

Your friendship much can make me blest,

O why that bliss destroy!

[only]

Why urge the odious one request,

[will]

You know I must deny.

The alteration in the second stanza is no improvement, but there was a slight inaccuracy in your rhyme. The third I only offer to your choice, and have left two words for your determination. The air is “The banks of Spey,” and is most beautiful.

To-morrow evening I intend taking a chair, and paying a visit at Park Place to a much-valued old friend.63 If I could be sure of finding you at home (and I will send one of the chairmen to call), I would spend from five to six o’clock with you, as I go past. I cannot do more at this time, as I have something on my hand that hurries me much. I propose giving you the first call, my old friend the second, and Miss Nimmo as I return home. Do not break any engagement for me, as I will spend another evening with you at any rate before I leave town.

Do not tell me that you are pleased, when your friends inform you of your faults. I am ignorant what they are; but I am sure they must be such evanescent trifles, compared with your personal and mental accomplishments, that I would despise the ungenerous narrow soul, who would notice any shadow of imperfections you may seem to have, any other way than in the most delicate agreeable raillery. Coarse minds are not aware how much they injure the keenly feeling tie of bosom friendship, when, in their foolish officiousness, they mention what nobody cares for recollecting. People of nice sensibility, and generous minds, have a certain intrinsic dignity, that fires at being trifled with, or lowered, or even too nearly approached.

You need make no apology for long letters; I am even with you. Many happy new years to you, charming Clarinda! I can’t dissemble, were it to shun perdition. He who sees you as I have done, and does not love you, deserves to be damn’d for his stupidity! He who loves you, and would injure you, deserves to be doubly damn’d for his villany! Adieu.

SYLVANDER.

P.S. What would you think of this for a fourth stanza?

Your thought, if love must harbour there,

Conceal it in that thought,

Nor cause me from my bosom tear

The very friend I sought.

63 Probably Mr. Nicol, who lived in Buccleuch Pend, a short distance from Clarinda’s residence.

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VII.

Saturday Noon [5th January].

Some days, some nights, nay, some hours, like the “ten righteous persons in Sodom,” save the rest of the vapid, tiresome, miserable months and years of life. One of these hours my dear Clarinda blest me with yesternight.

One well-spent hour,

In such a tender circumstance for friends,

Is better than an age of common time!

THOMSON.

My favourite feature in Milton’s Satan is his manly fortitude in supporting what cannot be remedied — in short, the wild broken fragments of a noble exalted mind in ruins. I meant no more by saying he was a favourite hero of mine.

I mentioned to you my letter to Dr. Moore, giving an account of my life: it is truth, every word of it; and will give you a just idea of the man whom you have honoured with your friendship. I am afraid you will hardly be able to make sense of so torn a piece. Your verses I shall muse on, deliciously, as I gaze on your image in my mind’s eye, in my heart’s core: they will be in time enough for a week to come. I am truly happy your headache is better. O, how can pain or evil be so daringly unfeeling, cruelly savage, as to wound so noble a mind, so lovely a form!

My little fellow is all my namesake. Write me soon. My every, strongest good wishes attend you, Clarinda!

SYLVANDER.

I know not what I have written — I am pestered with people around me.

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VIII.

Jan. 8, 1788, Tuesday Night.

I am delighted, charming Clarinda, with your honest enthusiasm for religion. Those of either sex, but particularly the female, who are lukewarm in that most important of all things, “O my soul, come not thou into their secrets!” I feel myself deeply interested in your good opinion, and will lay before you the outlines of my belief. He who is our Author and Preserver, and will one day be our Judge, must be (not for his sake in the way of duty, but from the native impulse of our hearts), the object of our reverential awe and grateful adoration: He is Almighty and all-bounteous, we are weak and dependent; hence prayer and every other sort of devotion. “He is not willing that any should perish, but that all should come to everlasting life;” consequently it must be in every one’s power to embrace his offer of “everlasting life;” otherwise he could not, in justice, condemn those who did not. A mind pervaded, actuated, and governed by purity, truth, and charity, though it does not merit heaven, yet is an absolute necessary prerequisite, without which heaven can neither be obtained nor enjoyed; and, by divine promise, such a mind shall never fail of attaining “everlasting life;” hence the impure, the deceiving, and the uncharitable extrude themselves from eternal bliss, by their unfitness for enjoying it. The Supreme Being has put the immediate administration of all this, for wise and good ends known to himself, into the hands of Jesus Christ, a great personage, whose relation to him we cannot comprehend, but whose relation to us is a guide and Saviour; and who, except for our own obstinacy and misconduct, will bring us all, through various ways, and by various means, to bliss at last.

These are my tenets, my lovely friend; and which I think cannot well be disputed. My creed is pretty nearly expressed in the last clause of Jamie Dean’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!”

I am flattered by the entertainment you tell me you have found in my packet. You see me as I have been, you know me as I am, and may guess at what I am likely to be. I too may say, “Talk not of love,” etc., for indeed he has “plunged me deep in woe!” Not that I ever saw a woman who pleased unexceptionably, as my Clarinda elegantly says, “in the companion, the friend, and the mistress.” One indeed I could except — One, before passion threw its mists over my discernment, I knew — the first of women! Her name is indelibly written in my heart’s core — but I dare not look in on it — a degree of agony would be the consequence. Oh! thou perfidious, cruel, mischief-making demon, who presidest over that frantic passion — thou mayest, thou dost poison my peace, but thou shalt not taint my honour. I would not, for a single moment, give an asylum to the most distant imagination, that would shadow the faintest outline of a selfish gratification, at the expense of her whose happiness is twisted with the threads of my existence. — May she be as happy as she deserves! and if my tenderest, faithfullest friendship, can add to her bliss, I shall at least have one solid mine of enjoyment in my bosom! Don’t guess at these ravings!

I watched at our front window to-day, but was disappointed. It has been a day of disappointments. I am just risen from a two hours’ bout after supper, with silly or sordid souls, who could relish nothing in common with me but the Port. — One! — Tis now “witching time of night;” and whatever is out of joint in the foregoing scrawl, impute it to enchantments and spells; for I can’t look over it, but will seal it up directly, as I don’t care for to-morrow’s criticisms on it.

You are by this time fast asleep, Clarinda; may good angels attend and guard you as constantly and faithfully as my good wishes do.

Beauty, which, whether waking or asleep,

Shot forth peculiar graces.

John Milton, I wish thy soul better rest than I expect on my own pillow to-night! O for a little of the cart-horse part of human nature! Good night, my dearest Clarinda!

SYLVANDER.

Detailed Table of Contents for the letters

IX

Thursday Noon, 10th January 1788.

I am certain I saw you, Clarinda; but you don’t look to the proper storey for a poet’s lodging —

Where speculation roosted near the sky.

I could almost have thrown myself over for vexation. Why didn’t you look higher? It has spoiled my peace for this day. To be so near my charming Clarinda; to miss her look while it was searching for me — I am sure the soul is capable of disease, for mine has convulsed itself into an inflammatory fever.

You have converted me, Clarinda. (I shall love that name while I live: there is heavenly music in it.) Booth and Amelia I know well.64 Your sentiments on that subject, as they are on every subject, are just and noble. “To be feelingly alive to kindness, and to unkindness,” is a charming female character.

What I said in my last letter, the powers of fuddling sociality only know for me. By yours, I understand my good star has been partly in my horizon, when I got wild in my reveries. Had that evil planet, which has almost all my life shed its baleful rays on my devoted head, been, as usual, in my zenith, I had certainly blabbed something that would have pointed out to you the dear object of my tenderest friendship, and, in spite of me, something more. Had that fatal information escaped me, and it was merely chance, or kind stars, that it did not, I had been undone!

You would never have written me, except perhaps once more! O, I could curse circumstances, and the coarse tie of human laws, which keeps fast what common sense would loose, and which bars that happiness itself cannot give — happiness which otherwise Love and Honour would warrant! But hold — I shall make no more “hair-breadth ‘scapes.”

My friendship, Clarinda, is a life-rent business. My likings are both strong and eternal. I told you I had but one male friend: I have but two female. I should have a third, but she is surrounded by the blandishments of flattery and courtship. The name I register in my heart’s core is Peggy Chalmers. Miss Nimmo can tell you how divine she is. She is worthy of a place in the same bosom with my Clarinda. That is the highest compliment I can pay her.

Farewell, Clarinda! Remember

SYLVANDER.

64 See Fielding’s Amelia.

Detailed Table of Contents for the letters

X.

Saturday Morning, 12th January.

Your thoughts on religion, Clarinda, shall be welcome. You may perhaps distrust me, when I say ‘tis also my favourite topic; but mine is the religion of the bosom. I hate the very idea of a 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. I have a little infirmity in my disposition, that where I fondly love, or highly esteem, I cannot bear reproach.

“Reverence thyself” is a sacred maxim, and I wish to cherish it. I think I told you Lord Bolingbroke’s saying to Swift— “Adieu, dear Swift, with all thy faults I love thee entirely; make an effort to love me with all mine.” A glorious sentiment, and without which there can be no friendship! I do highly, very highly, esteem you indeed, Clarinda — you merit it all! Perhaps, too, I scorn dissimulation! I could fondly love you: judge then what a maddening sting your reproach would be. “O! I have sins to Heaven but none to you!” With what pleasure would I meet you to-day, but I cannot walk to meet the fly. I hope to be able to see you on foot about the middle of next week.

I am interrupted — perhaps you are not sorry for it, you will tell me — but I won’t anticipate blame. O Clarinda! did you know how dear to me is your look of kindness, your smile of approbation! you would not, either in prose or verse, risk a censorious remark.

Curst be the verse, how well soe’er it flow,

That tends to make one worthy man my foe!

SYLVANDER.

Detailed Table of Contents for the letters

XI.

Saturday, Jan. 12, 1788.

You talk of weeping, Clarinda! Some involuntary drops wet your lines as I read them. Offend me, my dearest angel! You cannot offend me, you never offended me! If you had ever given me the least shadow of offence so pardon me, God, as I forgive Clarinda! I have read yours again; it has blotted my paper. Though I find your letter has agitated me into a violent headache, I shall take a chair and be with you about eight. A friend is to be with us to tea on my account, which hinders me from coming sooner. Forgive, my dearest Clarinda, my unguarded expressions. For Heaven’s sake, forgive me, or I shall never be able to bear my own mind. Your unhappy Sylvander.

Detailed Table of Contents for the letters

XII.

Monday Evening, 11 o’clock, 14th January.

Why have I not heard from you, Clarinda? To-day I expected it; and before supper when a letter to me was announced, my heart danced with rapture: but behold, ‘twas some fool, who had taken it into his head to turn poet, and made me an offering of the first-fruits of his nonsense. “It is not poetry, but prose run mad.” Did I ever repeat to you an epigram I made on a Mr. Elphinstone,65 who has given a translation of Martial, a famous Latin poet? The poetry of Elphinstone can only equal his prose notes. I was sitting in a merchant’s shop of my acquaintance, waiting somebody; he put Elphinstone into my hand, and asked my opinion of it; I begged leave to write it on a blank leaf, which I did, —

TO MR. ELPHINSTONE.

O thou, whom poesy abhors!

Whom prose has turned out of doors!

Heardst thou yon groan? proceed no further!

‘Twas laurel’d Martial calling murther!

I am determined to see you, if at all possible, on Saturday evening. Next week I must sing —

The night is my departing night,

The morn’s the day I maun awa;

There’s neither friend nor foe o’ mine

But wishes that I were awa!

What I hae done for lack o’ wit,

I never, never can reca’;

I hope ye’re a’ my friends as yet,

Gude night, and joy be wi’ you a’!

If I could see you sooner, I would be so much the happier; but I would not purchase the dearest gratification on earth, if it must be at your expense in worldly censure, far less inward peace!

I shall certainly be ashamed of thus scrawling whole sheets of incoherence. The only unity (a sad word with poets and critics!) in my ideas, is CLARINDA. There my heart “reigns and revels.”

What art thou, Love? whence are those charms,

That thus thou bear’st an universal rule?

For thee the soldier quits his arms,

The king turns slave, the wise man fool.

In vain we chase thee from the field,

And with cool thoughts resist thy yoke:

Next tide of blood, alas! we yield;

And all those high resolves are broke!

I like to have quotations for every occasion They give one’s ideas so pat, and save one the trouble of finding expression adequate to one’s feelings. I think it is one of the greatest pleasures attending a poetic genius, that we can give our woes, cares, joys, loves, etc., an embodied form in verse, which, to me, is ever immediate ease. Goldsmith says finely of his Muse —

Thou source of all my bliss and all my woe;

Thou foundst me poor at first, and keep’st me so.

My limb has been so well to-day, that I have gone up and down stairs often without my staff. To-morrow I hope to walk once again on my own legs to dinner. It is only next street. — Adieu. Sylvander.

65 A native of Edinburgh, and a schoolmaster in London. He was a friend of Samuel Johnson

Detailed Table of Contents for the letters

XIII.

Tuesday Evening, Jan. 15.

That you have faults, my Clarinda, I never doubted; but I knew not where they existed, and Saturday night made me more in the dark than ever. O Clarinda! why will you wound my soul, by hinting that last night must have lessened my opinion of you? True, I was “behind the scenes with you;” but what did I see? A bosom glowing with honour and benevolence; a mind ennobled by genius, informed and refined by education and reflection, and exalted by native religion, genuine as in the climes of heaven: a heart formed for all the glorious meltings of friendship, love, and pity. These I saw — I saw the noblest immortal soul creation ever showed me.

I looked long, my dear Clarinda, for your letter; and am vexed that you are complaining. I have not caught you so far wrong as in your idea, that the commerce you have with one friend hurts you, if you cannot tell every tittle of it to another. Why have so injurious a suspicion of a good God, Clarinda, as to think that Friendship and Love, on the sacred inviolate principles of Truth, Honour, and Religion! can be anything else than an object of His divine approbation.

I have mentioned in some of my former scrawls, Saturday evening next. Do allow me to wait on you that evening. Oh, my angel! how soon must we part! and when can we meet again! I look forward on the horrid interval with tearful eyes! What have I lost by not knowing you sooner. I fear, I fear my acquaintance with you is too short, to make that lasting impression on your heart I could wish.

SYLVANDER.

Detailed Table of Contents for the letters

XIV.

Saturday Morning, 19th Jan

There is no time, my Clarinda, when the conscious thrilling chords of Love and Friendship give such delight, as in the pensive hours of what our favourite Thomson calls, “philosophic melancholy.” The sportive insects, who bask in the sunshine of prosperity; or the worms that luxuriantly crawl amid their ample wealth of earth, they need no Clarinda: they would despise Sylvander — if they durst. The family of Misfortune, a numerous group of brothers and sisters! they need a resting place to their souls: unnoticed, often condemned by the world — in some degree, perhaps, condemned by themselves, they feel the full enjoyment of ardent love, delicate tender endearments, mutual esteem and mutual reliance.

In this light I have often admired religion. In proportion as we are wrung with grief, or distracted with anxiety, the ideas of a compassionate Deity, an Almighty Protector, are doubly dear.

‘Tis this, my friend, that streaks our morning bright;

‘Tis this that gilds the horrors of our night.’

I have been this morning taking a peep through, as Young finely says, “the dark postern of time long elaps’d;” and, you will easily guess,‘twas a rueful prospect. What a tissue of thoughtlessness, weakness, and folly! My life reminded me of a ruined temple; what strength, what proportion in some parts! what unsightly gaps, what prostrate ruin in others! I kneeled down before the Father of mercies, and said, “Father, I have sinned against heaven, and in thy sight, and am no more worthy to be called thy son!” I rose, eased and strengthened. I despise the superstition of a fanatic, but I love the religion of a man. “The future,” said I to myself, “is still before me;” there let me

on reason build resolve,

That column of true majesty in man!

“I have difficulties many to encounter,” said I; “but they are not absolutely insuperable; and where is firmness of mind shown but in exertion? mere declamation is bombast rant.” Besides, wherever I am, or in whatever situation I may be —

‘Tis nought to me:

Since God is ever present, ever felt,

In the void waste as in the city full;

And where He vital breathes, there must be joy!

Saturday night — half after Ten.

What luxury of bliss I was enjoying this time yesternight! My ever dearest Clarinda, you have stolen away my soul; but you have refined, you have exalted it; you have given it a stronger sense for virtue, and a stronger relish for piety. Clarinda, first of your sex, if ever I am the veriest wretch on earth to forget you, if ever your lovely image is effaced from my soul,

May I be lost, no eye to weep my end;

And find no earth that’s base enough to bury me!

What trifling silliness is the childish fondness of the every-day children of the world! ‘tis the unmeaning toying of the younglings of the fields and forests; but where Sentiment and Fancy unite their sweets, where Taste and Delicacy refine, where Wit adds the flavour, and Good Sense gives strength and spirit to all, what a delicious draught is the hour of tender endearment! Beauty and Grace, in the arms of Truth and Honour, in all the luxury of mutual love.

Clarinda, have you ever seen the picture realised? Not in all its very richest colouring.

Last night, Clarinda, but for one slight shade, was the glorious picture.

Innocence

Look’d gaily smiling on; while rosy Pleasure

Hid young Desire amid her flowery wreath,

And pour’d her cup luxuriant; mantling high,

The sparkling heavenly vintage, Love and Bliss!

Clarinda, when a poet and poetess of Nature’s making, two of Nature’s noblest productions! when they drink together of the same cup of Love and Bliss — attempt not, ye coarser stuff of human nature, profanely to measure enjoyment ye never can know! Good night, my dear Clarinda!

SYLVANDER.

Detailed Table of Contents for the letters

XV

Sunday Night, 20th January.

The impertinence of fools has joined with a return of an old indisposition, to make me good for nothing to-day. The paper has lain before me all this evening, to write to my dear Clarinda, but —

Fools rush’d on fools, as waves succeed to waves.

I cursed them in my soul; they sacrilegiously disturbed my meditations on her who holds my heart. What a creature is man! A little alarm last night and to-day, that I am mortal, has made such a revolution on my spirits! There is no philosophy, no divinity, comes half so home to the mind. I have no idea of courage that braves heaven. ‘Tis the wild ravings of an imaginary hero in bedlam. I can no more, Clarinda; I can scarcely hold up my head; but I am happy you do not know it, you would be so uneasy.

SYLVANDER.

Monday Morning.

I am, my lovely friend, much better this morning on the whole; but I have a horrid languor on my spirits.

Sick of the world, and all its joys,

My soul in pining sadness mourns;

Dark scenes of woe my mind employs,

The past and present in their turns.

Have you ever met with a saying of the great, and like wise good Mr. Locke, author of the famous Essay on the Human Understanding? He wrote a letter to a friend, directing it, “not to be delivered till after my decease;” it ended thus— “I know you loved me when living, and will preserve my memory now I am dead. All the use to be made of it is, that this life affords no solid satisfaction, but in the consciousness of having done well, and the hopes of another life. Adieu! I leave my best wishes with you. J. LOCKE.”

Clarinda, may I reckon on your friendship for life? I think I may. Thou Almighty Preserver of men! thy friendship, which hitherto I have too much neglected, to secure it shall, all the future days and nights of my life, be my steady care! The idea of my Clarinda follows —

Hide it, my heart, within that close disguise,

Where, mix’d with God’s, her lov’d idea lies.

But I fear that inconstancy, the consequent imperfection of human weakness. Shall I meet with a friendship that defies years of absence, and the chances and changes of fortune? Perhaps “such things are;” one honest man65a I have great hopes from that way: but who, except a romance writer, would think on a love that could promise for life, in spite of distance, absence, chance, and change; and that, too, with slender hopes of fruition? For my own part, I can say to myself in both requisitions, “Thou art the man!” I dare, in cool resolve I dare, declare myself that friend, and that lover. If womankind is capable of such things, Clarinda is. I trust that she is; and I feel I shall be miserable if she is not. There is not one virtue which gives worth, or one sentiment which does honour to the sex, that she does not possess superior to any woman I ever saw; her exalted mind, aided a little perhaps by her situation, is, I think, capable of that nobly-romantic love-enthusiasm.

May I see you on Wednesday evening, my dear angel? The next Wednesday again will, I conjecture, be a hated day to us both. I tremble for censorious remark, for your sake, but, in extraordinary cases, may not usual and useful precaution be a little dispensed with? Three evenings, three swift-winged evenings, with pinions of down, are all the past; I dare not calculate the future. I shall call at Miss Nimmo’s to-morrow evening;‘twill be a farewell call.

I have wrote out my last sheet of paper, so I am reduced to my last half-sheet. What a strange mysterious faculty is that thing called imagination! We have no ideas almost at all of another world; but I have often amused myself with visionary schemes of what happiness might be enjoyed by small alterations — alterations that we can fully enter into, in this present state of existence. For instance, suppose you and I, just as we are at present; the same reasoning powers, sentiments, and even desires; the same fond curiosity for knowledge and remarking observation in our minds; and imagine our bodies free from pain, and the necessary supplies for the wants of nature at all times, and easily, within our reach: imagine further, that we were set free from the laws of gravitation, which bind us to this globe, and could at pleasure fly, without inconvenience, through all the yet unconjectured bounds of creation, what a life of bliss would we lead, in our mutual pursuit of virtue and knowledge, and our mutual enjoyment of friendship and love!

I see you laughing at my fairy fancies, and calling me a voluptuous Mahometan; but I am certain I would be a happy creature, beyond anything we call bliss here below; nay, it would be a paradise congenial to you too. Don’t you see us, hand in hand, or rather, my arm about your lovely waist, making our remarks on Sirius, the nearest of the fixed stars; or surveying a comet, flaming innoxious by us, as we just now would mark the passing pomp of a travelling monarch; or in a shady bower of Mercury or Venus, dedicating the hour to love, in mutual converse, relying honour, and revelling endearment, whilst the most exalted strains of poesy and harmony would be the ready spontaneous language of our souls! Devotion is the favourite employment of your heart; so it is of mine: what incentives then to, and powers for reverence, ‘gratitude, faith, and hope, in all the fervours of adoration and praise to that Being, whose unsearchable wisdom, power, and goodness, so pervaded, so inspired every sense and feeling! By this time, I daresay, you will be blessing the neglect of the maid that leaves me destitute of paper!

SYLVANDER.

65a Alluding to Captain Brown.

Detailed Table of Contents for the letters

XVI.

[Monday, 21st Jan. 1788.]

… I am a discontented ghost, a perturbed spirit. Clarinda, if ever you forget Sylvander, may you be happy, but he will be miserable. O what a fool I am in love! What an extraordinary prodigal of affection! Why are your sex called the tender sex, when I have never met with one who can repay me in passion? They are either not so rich in love as I am, or they are niggards where I am lavish.

O Thou, whose I am, and whose are all my ways! Thou seest me here, the hapless wreck of tides and tempests in my own bosom: do Thou direct to Thyself that ardent love for which I have so often sought a return in vain from my fellow-creatures! If Thy goodness has yet such a gift in store for me as an equal return of affection from her who, Thou knowest, is dearer to me than life, do Thou bless and hallow our bond of love and friendship; watch over us in all our outgoings and incomings for good: and may the tie that unites our hearts be strong and indissoluble as the thread of man’s immortal life!…

I am just going to take your “Blackbird,”66 the sweetest, I am sure, that ever sung, and prune its wings a little.

SYLVANDER.

66 Her verses, “To a Blackbird Singing.”

Detailed Table of Contents for the letters

XVII.

Thursday Morning, 24th January.

Unlavish Wisdom never works in vain.

I have been tasking my reason, Clarinda, why a woman, who, for native genius, poignant wit, strength of mind, generous sincerity of soul, and the sweetest female tenderness, is without a peer, and whose personal charms have few, very very few parallels, among her sex; why, or how she should fall to the blessed lot of a poor hairum scairum poet, whom Fortune had kept for her particular use, to wreak her temper on whenever she was in ill humour. One time I conjectured, that as Fortune is the most capricious jade ever known, she may have taken, not a fit of remorse, but a paroxysm of whim, to raise the poor devil out of the mire, where he had so often and so conveniently served her as a stepping stone, and given him the most glorious boon she ever had in her gift, merely for the maggot’s sake, to see how his fool head and his fool heart will bear it. At other times I was vain enough to think, that Nature, who has a great deal to say with Fortune, had given the coquettish goddess some such hint as, “Here is a paragon of female excellence, whose equal, in all my former compositions, I never was lucky enough to hit on, and despair of ever doing so again; you have cast her rather in the shades of life; there is a certain Poet of my making; among your frolics it would not be amiss to attach him to this masterpiece of my hand, to give her that immortality among mankind, which no woman, of any age, ever more deserved, and which few rhymsters of this age are better able to confer.”

Evening, 9 o’clock.

I am here, absolutely unfit to finish my letter — pretty hearty after a bowl, which has been constantly plied since dinner till this moment. I have been with Mr. Schetki, the musician, and he has set it 66a — See Poems. finely. –- I have no distinct ideas of anything, but that I have drunk your health twice to-night, and that you are all my soul holds dear in this world.

SYLVANDER.

66a “Clarinda, Mistress of my Soul, etc.” — See Poems.

Detailed Table of Contents for the letters

XVIII.

[Friday, Jan. 25.]

Clarinda, my life, you have wounded my soul. Can I think of your being unhappy, even though it be not described in your pathetic elegance of language, without being miserable? Clarinda, can I bear to be told from you that you “will not see me to-morrow night” — that you “wish the hour of parting were come?” Do not let us impose on ourselves by sounds. If in the moment of tender endearment I perhaps trespassed against the letter of decorum’s law I appeal even to you whether I ever sinned in the very least degree against the spirit of her strictest statute. But why, my love, talk to me in such strong terms? — every word of which cuts me to the very soul. You know a hint, the slightest signification of your wish is to me a sacred command. Be reconciled, my angel, to your God, yourself, and me: and I pledge you Sylvander’s honour — an oath I daresay you will trust without reserve — that you shall never more have reason to complain of his conduct. Now, my love, do not wound our next meeting with any averted looks or restrained caresses. I have marked the line of conduct, a line I know exactly to your taste, and which I will inviolably keep; but do not you shew the least inclination to make boundaries. Seeming distrust where you know you may confide is a cruel sin against sensibility. “Delicacy, you know, it was, which won me to you at once — take care you do not loosen the dearest, most sacred tie that unites us.” Clarinda, I would not have stung your soul, I would not have bruised your spirit, as that harsh, crucifying “Take Care” did mine — no, not to have gained Heaven! Let me again appeal to your dear self, if Sylvander, even when he seemingly half-transgressed the laws of decorum, if he did not shew more chastened trembling, faltering delicacy than the many of the world do in keeping these laws?

O Love and Sensibility, ye have conspired against my peace! I love to madness and I feel to torture! Clarinda, how can I forgive myself that I have ever touched a single chord in your bosom with pain! Would I do it willingly? Would any consideration, any gratification make me do so? Oh, did you love like me, you would not, you could not, deny or put off a meeting with the man who adores you — who would die a thousand deaths before he would injure you; and who must soon bid you a long farewell!

I had proposed bringing my bosom friend, Mr. Ainslie, to-morrow evening at his strong request to see you, as he has only time to stay with us about ten minutes for an engagement. But I shall hear from you — this afternoon, for mercy’s sake! for till I hear from you I am wretched. O Clarinda, the tie that binds me to thee is intwisted, incorporated with my dearest threads of life!

SYLVANDER.

Detailed Table of Contents for the letters

XIX.

[Sat., 26 Jan.]

I was on the way, my Love, to meet you (I never do things by halves), when I got your card. Mr. Ainslie goes out of town to-morrow morning, to see a brother of his who is newly arrived from France. I am determined that he and I shall call on you together; so, look you, lest I should never see to-morrow, we will call on you to-night; Mary and you may put off tea till about seven; at which time, in the Galloway phrase, “an the beast be to the fore, and the branks bide hale,” expect the humblest of your humble servants, and his dearest friend. We propose staying only half-an-hour, “for ought we ken.” I could suffer the lash of misery eleven months in the year, were the twelfth to be composed of hours like yesternight. You are the soul of my enjoyment: all else is of the stuff of stocks and stones.

SYLVANDER.

Detailed Table of Contents for the letters

XX.

Sunday Noon, Jan. 27th.

I have almost given up the excise idea. I have been just now to wait on a great person, Miss — —‘s friend, –- . Why will great people not only deafen us with the din of their equipage, and dazzle us with their fastidious pomp, but they must also be so very dictatorially wise? I have been questioned like a child about my matters, and blamed and schooled for my inscription on Stirling window. Come Clarinda-Come! curse me Jacob, and come defy me Israel!

Sunday Night.

I have been with Miss Nimmo; she is indeed a good soul, as my Clarinda finely says. She has reconciled me in a good measure to the world with her friendly prattle.

Schetki has sent me the song set to a fine air of his composing. I have called the song “Clarinda.” I have carried it about in my pocket and hummed it over all day.

Monday Morning.

If my prayers have any weight in heaven, this morning looks in on you and finds you in the arms of Peace, except where it is charmingly interrupted by the ardours of devotion. I find so much serenity of soul, so much positive pleasure, so much fearless daring toward the world when I warm in devotion, or feel the glorious sensation of a consciousness of Almighty friendship, that I am sure I shall soon be an honest enthusiast.

How are Thy Servants blest, O Lord,

How sure is their defence!

I am, my dear madam, yours, SYLVANDER.

Detailed Table of Contents for the letters

XXI.

Tuesday Morning, 29th January.

I cannot go out to-day, my dearest love, without sending you half a line, by way of a sin-offering; but, believe me, ‘twas the sin of ignorance. Could you think that I intended to hurt you by any thing I said yesternight? Nature has been too kind to you for your happiness, your delicacy, your sensibility. O why should such glorious qualifications be the fruitful source of woe! You have “murdered sleep” to me last night. I went to bed, impressed with an idea that you were unhappy; and every start I closed my eyes, busy Fancy painted you in such scenes of romantic misery, that I would almost be persuaded you were not well this morning.

If I unweeting have offended,

Impute it not.

But while we live

But one short hour perhaps, between us two,

Let there be peace.

If Mary is not gone by this reaches you, give her my best compliments. She is a charming girl, and highly worthy of the noblest love.

I send you a poem to read, till I call on you this night, which will be about nine. I wish I could procure some potent spell, some fairy charm, that would protect from injury, or restore to rest that bosom-chord, “tremblingly alive all o’er,” on which hangs your peace of mind. I thought, vainly, I fear, thought that the devotion of love — love strong as even you can feel — love guarded, invulnerably guarded, by all the purity of virtue, and all the pride of honour; I thought such a love would make you happy — shall I be mistaken? I can no more for hurry.

SYLVANDER.

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XXII.

Sunday Morning, 3rd February.

I have just been before the throne of my God, Clarinda; according to my association of ideas, my sentiments of love and friendship, I next devote myself to you. Yesternight I was happy — happiness “that the world cannot give.” I kindle at the recollection; but it is a flame where innocence looks smiling on, and honour stands by, a sacred guard. Your heart, your fondest wishes, your dearest thoughts, these are yours to bestow; your person is unapproachable by the laws of your country; and he loves not as I do, who would make you miserable.

You are an angel, Clarinda; you are surely no mortal that “the earth owns.” To kiss your hand, to live on your smile, is to me far more exquisite bliss than the dearest favours that the fairest of the sex, yourself excepted, can bestow.

Sunday Evening.

You are the constant companion of my thoughts. How wretched is the condition of one who is haunted with conscious guilt, and trembling under the idea of dreaded vengeance! and what a placid calm, what a charming secret enjoyment it gives, to bosom the kind feelings of friendship and the fond throes of love! Out upon the tempest of anger, the acrimonious gall of fretful impatience, the sullen frost of louring resentment, or the corroding poison of withered envy! They eat up the immortal part of man! If they spent their fury only on the unfortunate objects of them, it would be something in their favour; but these miserable passions, like traitor Iscariot, betray their lord and master.

Thou Almighty Author of peace, and goodness, and love! do thou give me the social heart that kindly tastes of every man’s cup! Is it a draught of joy? — warm and open my heart to share it with cordial unenvying rejoicing! Is it the bitter potion of sorrow? — melt my heart with sincerely sympathetic woe! Above all, do thou give me the manly mind that resolutely exemplifies, in life and manners, those sentiments which I would wish to be thought to possess! The friend of my soul — there may I never deviate from the firmest fidelity and most active kindness! Clarinda, the dear object of my fondest love; there may the most sacred inviolate honour, the most faithful kindling constancy, ever watch and animate my every thought and imagination!

Did you ever meet with the following lines spoken of Religion, your darling topic? —

‘Tis this, my friend, that streaks our morning bright;

‘Tis this that gilds the horrors of our night;

When wealth forsakes us, and when friends are few,

When friends are faithless, or when foes pursue;

‘Tis this that wards the blow, or stills the smart,

Disarms affliction, or repels its dart:

Within the breast bids purest rapture rise,

Bids smiling Conscience spread her cloudless skies.67

I met with these verses very early in life, and was so delighted with them that I have them by me, copied at school.

Good night and sound rest, my dearest Clarinda!

SYLVANDER.

67 From Hervey’s Meditations.

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XXIII.

Thursday Night, Feb. 7, 1788.

It is perhaps rather wrong to speak highly to a friend of his letter; it is apt to lay one under a little restraint in their future letters, and restraint is the death of a friendly epistle. But there is one passage in your last charming letter, Thomson or Shenstone never exceeded nor often came up to. I shall certainly steal it, and set it in some future poetic production, and get immortal fame by it. ‘Tis when you bid the Scenes of Nature remind me of Clarinda. Can I forget you, Clarinda? I would detest myself as a tasteless, unfeeling, insipid, infamous blockhead! I have loved women of ordinary merit whom I could have loved for ever. You are the first, the only unexceptionable individual of the beauteous sex that I ever met with: and never woman more entirely possessed my soul. I know myself, and how far I can depend on passions, well. It has been my peculiar study.

I thank you for going to Myers.68 Urge him, for necessity calls, to have it done by the middle of next week, Wednesday at latest. I want it for a breast-pin, to wear next my heart. I propose to keep sacred set times, to wander in the woods and wilds for meditation on you. Then, and only then, your lovely image shall be produced to the day, with a reverence akin to devotion….

To-morrow night shall not be the last. Good-night! I am perfectly stupid, as I supped late yesternight.

SYLVANDER.

68 Miniature painter.

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XXIV.

Wednesday, 13th February.

My ever dearest Clarinda, — I make a numerous dinner party wait me, while I read yours and write this. Do not require that I should cease to love you, to adore you in my soul—‘tis to me impossible — your peace and happiness are to me dearer than my soul: name the terms on which you wish to see me, to correspond with me, and you have them — I must love, pine, mourn, and adore in secret — this you must not deny me; you will ever be to me

Dear as the light that visits these sad eyes,

Dear as the ruddy drops that warm my heart!

I have not patience to read the puritanic scrawl. Damn’d sophistry! Ye heavens! thou God of nature! thou Redeemer of mankind! ye look down with approving eyes on a passion inspired by the purest flame, and guarded by truth, delicacy, and honour; but the half-inch soul of an unfeeling, cold-blooded, pitiful presbyterian bigot,69 cannot forgive anything above his dungeon bosom and foggy head.

Farewell; I’ll be with you to-morrow evening — and be at rest in your mind — I will be yours in the way you think most to your happiness! I dare not proceed — I love, and will love you, and will with joyous confidence approach the throne of the Almighty Judge of men, with your dear idea, and will despise the scum of sentiment, and the mist of sophistry. SYLVANDER.

69 Rev. Mr. Kemp, Clarinda’s spiritual adviser.

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XXV.

Wednesday Midnight [Feb. 13].

MADAM,-After a wretched day I am preparing for a sleepless night. I am going to address myself to the Almighty Witness of my actions, some time, perhaps very soon, my Almighty Judge. I am not going to be the advocate of passion: be Thou my inspirer and testimony, O God, as I plead the cause of truth!

I have read over your friend’s^70 haughty dictatorial letter: you are answerable only to your God in such a matter. Who gave any fellow-creature of yours (one incapable of being your judge because not your peer) a right to catechise, scold, undervalue, abuse, and insult — wantonly and inhumanly to insult you thus? I do not even wish to deceive you, Madam. The Searcher of hearts is my witness how dear you are to me; but though it were possible you could be still dearer to me, I would not even kiss your hand at the expense of your conscience. Away with declamation! let us appeal to the bar of commonsense. It is not mouthing everything sacred; it is not vague ranting assertions; it is not assuming, haughtily and insultingly, the dictatorial language of a Roman pontiff, that must dissolve a union like ours. Tell me, Madam — Are you under the least shadow of an obligation to bestow your love, tenderness, caresses, affections, heart and soul, on Mr. M’Lehose, the man who has repeatedly, habitually, and barbarously broken through every tie of duty, nature, and gratitude to you? The laws of your country, indeed, for the most useful reasons of policy and sound government, have made your person inviolate; but, are your heart and affections bound to one who gives not the least return of either to you? You cannot do it: it is not in the nature of things: the common feelings of humanity forbid it. Have you then a heart and affections which are no man’s right? You have. It would be absurd to suppose the contrary. Tell me then, in the name of commonsense, can it be wrong, is such a supposition compatible with the plainest ideas of right and wrong, that it is improper to bestow the heart and these affections on another — while that bestowing is not in the smallest degree hurtful to your duty to God, to your children, to yourself, or to society at large?

This is the great test; the consequences: let us see them. In a widowed, forlorn, lonely condition, with a bosom glowing with love and tenderness, yet so delicately situated that you cannot indulge these nobler feelings…. [cetera desunt.]

70 Rev. Mr. Kemp.

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XXVI.

Thurs., 14 Feb.

“I am distressed for thee, my brother Jonathan!” I have suffered, Clarinda, from your letter. My soul was in arms at the sad perusal; I dreaded that I had acted wrong. If I have robbed you of a friend,71 God forgive me!

But, Clarinda, be comforted: let me raise the tone of our feelings a little higher and bolder. A fellow-creature who leaves us, who spurns us without a just cause, though once our bosom friend — up with a little honest pride — let them go! How shall I comfort you, who am the cause of the injury? Can I wish that I had never seen you, that we had never met? No! I never will. But have I thrown you friendless? There is almost distraction in that thought.

Father of mercies! against Thee often have I sinned: through Thy grace I will endeavour to do so no more! She who, Thou knowest, is dearer to me than myself, pour Thou the balm of peace into her past wounds, and hedge her about with Thy peculiar care, all her future days and nights. Strengthen her tender noble mind, firmly to suffer, and magnanimously to bear! Make me worthy of that friendship she honours me with. May my attachment to her be pure as devotion, and lasting as immortal life! O Almighty Goodness, hear me! Be to her at all times, particularly in the hour of distress or trial, a Friend and Comforter, a Guide and Guard.

How are Thy servants blest, O Lord,

How sure is their defence!

Eternal Wisdom is their guide,

Their help, Omnipotence!

Forgive me, Clarinda, the injury I have done you! Tonight I shall be with you; as indeed I shall be ill at ease till I see you.

SYLVANDER.

71 Her minister.

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XXVII.

Thursday, 14th Feb., Two o’clock.

I just now received your first letter of yesterday, by the careless negligence of the penny-post. Clarinda, matters are grown very serious with us; then seriously hear me, and hear me, Heaven — I met you, my dear Nancy, by far the first of womankind, at least to me; I esteemed, I loved you at first sight; the longer I am acquainted with you the more innate amiableness and worth I discover in you. You have suffered a loss, I confess, for my sake: but if the firmest, steadiest, warmest friendship; if every endeavour to be worthy of your friendship; if a love, strong as the ties of nature, and holy as the duties of religion — if all these can make anything like a compensation for the evil I have occasioned you, if they be worth your acceptance, or can in the least add to your enjoyment — so help Sylvander, ye Powers above, in his hour of need, as he freely gives these all to Clarinda!

I esteem you, I love you as a friend; I admire you, I love you as a woman, beyond any one in all the circle of creation; I know I shall continue to esteem you, to love you, to pray for you, nay, to pray for myself for your sake.

Expect me at eight. And believe me to be ever, my dearest Madam, yours most entirely, SYLVANDER.

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XXVIII.

February 15th, 1788.

When matters, my love, are desperate, we must put on a desperate face —

On reason build resolve,

That column of true majesty in man.

Or, as the same author finely says in another place —

Let thy soul spring up,

And lay strong hold for help on Him that made thee.

I am yours, Clarinda, for life. Never be discouraged at all this. Look forward; in a few weeks I shall be somewhere or other out of the possibility of seeing you: till then I shall write you often, but visit you seldom. Your fame, your welfare, your happiness are dearer to me than any gratification whatever. Be comforted, my love! the present moment is the worst; the lenient hand of Time is daily and hourly either lightening the burden, or making us insensible to the weight. None of these friends, I mean Mr. –- and the other gentleman, can hurt your worldly support; and for their friendship, in a little time you will learn to be easy, and, by and by, to be happy without it. A decent means of livelihood in the world, an approving God, a peaceful conscience, and one firm, trusty friend — can anybody that has these be said to be unhappy? These are yours.

To-morrow evening I shall be with you about eight; probably for the last time till I return to Edinburgh. In the meantime, should any of these two unlucky friends question you respecting me, whether I am the man, I do not think they are entitled to any information. As to their jealousy and spying, I despise them. — Adieu, my dearest Madam!

SYLVANDER.

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XXIX.

GLASGOW, Monday Evening, 9 o’clock, 18th Feb. 1788.

The attraction of love, I find, is in an inverse proportion to the attraction of the Newtonian philosophy. In the system of Sir Isaac, the nearer objects are to one another, the stronger is the attractive force; in my system, every mile-stone that marked my progress from Clarinda, awakened a keener pang of attachment to her. How do you feel, my love? Is your heart ill at ease? I fear it. — God forbid that these persecutors should harass that peace, which is more precious to me than my own. Be assured I shall ever think of you, muse on you, and, in my moments of devotion, pray for you. The hour that you are not in all my thoughts— “be that hour darkness! let the shadows of death cover it! let it not be numbered in the hours of the day!”

When I forget the darling theme,

Be my tongue mute! my fancy paint no more!

And, dead to joy, forget, my heart, to beat!

I have just met with my old friend, the ship captain;72 guess my pleasure — to meet you could alone have given me more. My brother William, too, the young saddler, has come to Glasgow to meet me; and here are we three spending the evening.

I arrived here too late to write by post; but I’ll wrap half a dozen sheets of blank paper together, and send it by the fly, under the name of a parcel. You shall hear from me next post town. I would write you a long letter, but for the present circumstance of my friend.

Adieu, my Clarinda! I am just going to propose your health by way of grace-drink. SYLVANDER.

72 Richard Brown, whom he first knew at Irvine.

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XXX.

CUMNOCK, 2nd March 1788.

I hope, and am certain, that my generous Clarinda^73 will not think my silence, for now a long week, has been in any decree owing to my forgetfulness. I have been tossed about through the country ever since I wrote you; and am here, returning from Dumfries-shire, at an inn, the post office of the place, with just so long time as my horse eats his corn, to write you. I have been hurried with business and dissipation almost equal to the insidious decree of the Persian monarch’s mandate, when he forbade asking petition of God or man for forty days. Had the venerable prophet been as throng as I, he had not broken the decree, at least not thrice a day.

I am thinking my farming scheme will yet hold. A worthy intelligent farmer, my father’s friend and my own, has been with me on the spot: he thinks the bargain practicable. I am myself, on a more serious review of the lands, much better pleased with them. I won’t mention this in writing to any body but you and Ainslie. Don’t accuse me of being fickle: I have the two plans of life before me, and I wish to adopt the one most likely to procure me independence. I shall be in Edinburgh next week. I long to see you: your image is omnipresent to me; nay, I am convinced I would soon idolatrise it most seriously; so much do absence and memory improve the medium through which one sees the much-loved object. Tonight, at the sacred hour of eight, I expect to meet you — at the Throne of Grace. I hope, as I go home tonight, to find a letter from you at the post office in Mauchline. I have just once seen that dear hand since I left Edinburgh — a letter indeed which much affected me. Tell me, first of womankind! will my warmest attachment, my sincerest friendship, my correspondence, will they be any compensation for the sacrifices you make for my sake! If they will, they are yours. If I settle on the farm I propose, I am just a day and a half’s ride from Edinburgh. We will meet — don’t you say, “perhaps too often!”

Farewell, my fair, my charming Poetess! May all good things ever attend you! I am ever, my dearest Madam, yours, SYLVANDER.

73 The letter about the 23rd of February seems to be wanting.

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XXXI.

MAUCHLINE, 6 Mar.

I own myself guilty, Clarinda; I should have written you last week; but when you recollect, my dearest Madam, that yours of this night’s post is only the third I have got from you, and that this is the fifth or sixth I have sent to you, you will not reproach me, with a good grace, for unkindness. I have always some kind of idea, not to sit down to write a letter except I have time and possession of my faculties, so as to do some justice to my letter; which at present is rarely my situation. For instance, yesterday I dined at a friend’s at some distance; the savage hospitality of this country spent me the most part of the night over the nauseous potion in the bowl: this day — sick — headache — low spirits — miserable — fasting, except for a draught of water or small beer: now eight o’clock at night — only able to crawl ten minutes walk into Mauchline to wait the post, in the pleasurable hope of hearing from the mistress of my soul.

But, truce with all this! When I sit down to write to you, all is harmony and peace. A hundred times a day do I figure you, before your taper, your book, or work laid aside, as I get within the room. How happy have I been! and how little of that scantling portion of time, called the life of man, is sacred to happiness! much less transport!

I could moralise to-night like a death’s head.

O what is life, that thoughtless wish of all!

A drop of honey in a draught of gall.

Nothing astonishes me more, when a little sickness clogs the wheels of life, than the thoughtless career we run in the hour of health. “None saith, where is God, my Maker, that giveth songs in the night; who teacheth us more knowledge than the beasts of the field, and more understanding than the fowls of the air.”

Give me, my Maker, to remember thee! Give me to act up to the dignity of my nature! Give me to feel “another’s woe;” and continue with me that dear-loved friend that feels with mine!

The dignified and dignifying consciousness of an honest man, and the well-grounded trust in approving Heaven, are two most substantial foundations of happiness.

SYLVANDER.

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XXXII

.MOSSGIEL, 7th March 1788.

Clarinda, I have been so stung with your reproach for unkindness, a sin so unlike me, a sin I detest more than a breach of the whole Decalogue, fifth, sixth, seventh and ninth articles excepted, that I believe I shall not rest in my grave about it, if I die before I see you. You have often allowed me the head to judge, and the heart to feel, the influence of female excellence.

Was it not blasphemy, then, against your own charms, and against my feelings, to suppose that a short fortnight could abate my passion? You, my love, may have your cares and anxieties to disturb you, but they are the usual recurrences of life; your future views are fixed, and your mind in a settled routine. Could not you, my ever dearest Madam, make a little allowance for a man, after long absence, paying a short visit to a country full of friends, relations, and early intimates? Cannot you guess, my Clarinda, what thoughts, what cares, what anxious forebodings, hopes and fears, must crowd the breast of the man of keen sensibility, when no less is on the tapis than his aim, his employment, his very existence, through future life!

Now that, not my apology, but my defence is made, I feel my soul respire more easily. I know you will go along with me in my justification — would to Heaven you could in my adoption too! I mean an adoption beneath the stars — an adoption where I might revel in the immediate beams of

Her, the bright sun of all her sex.

I would not have you, my dear Madam, so much hurt at Miss Nimmo’s coldness. ‘Tis placing yourself below her, an honour she by no means deserves. We ought, when we wish to be economists in happiness — we ought, in the first place, to fix the standard of our own character; and when, on full examination, we know where we stand, and how much ground we occupy, let us contend for it as property; and those who seem to doubt, or deny us what is justly ours, let us either pity their prejudices, or despise their judgment. I know, my dear, you will say this is self-conceit; but I call it self-knowledge. The one is theoverweening opinion of a fool, who fancies himself to be what he wishes himself to be thought; the other is the honest justice that a man of sense, who has thoroughly examined the subject, owes to himself. Without this standard, this column in our own mind, we are perpetually at the mercy of the petulance, the mistakes, the prejudices, nay, the very weakness and wickedness of our fellow-creatures.

I urge this, my dear, both to confirm myself in the doctrine, which, I assure you, I sometimes need; and because I know that this causes you often much disquiet. To return to Miss Nimmo: she is most certainly a worthy soul, and equalled by very, very few, in goodness of heart. But can she boast more goodness of heart than Clarinda? Not even prejudice will dare to say so. For penetration and discernment, Clarinda sees far beyond her: to wit, Miss Nimmo dare make no pretence; to Clarinda’s wit, scarcely any of her sex dare make pretence. Personal charms, it would be ridiculous to run the parallel. And for conduct in life, Miss Nimmo was never called out, either much to do or to suffer; Clarinda has been both; and has performed her part, where Miss Nimmo would have sunk at the bare idea.

Away, then, with these disquietudes! Let us pray with the honest weaver of Kilbarchan— “Lord, send us a gude conceit o’ oursel!” Or, in the words of the auld sang,

Who does me disdain, I can scorn them again,

And I’ll never mind any such foes.

There is an error in the commerce of intimacy^74 …

way of exchange, have not an equivalent to give us; and, what is still worse, have no idea of the value of our goods. Happy is our lot indeed, when we meet with an honest merchant, who is qualified to deal with us on our own terms; but that is a rarity. With almost everybody we must pocket our pearls, less or more, and learn in the old Scotch phrase— “To gie sic like as we get.” For this reason one should try to erect a kind of bank or store-house in one’s own mind; or, as the Psalmist says, “We should commune with our own hearts, and be still.” This is exactly [MS. dilapidated.]

74 The MS. is so worn as to be indecipherable.

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XXXIII.

EDINBURGH, 18th March 1788.

I am just hurrying away to wait on the great man, Clarinda; but I have more respect on my own peace and happiness than to set out without waiting on you; for my imagination, like a child’s favourite bird, will fondly flutter along with this scrawl till it perch on your bosom I thank you for all the happiness of yesterday — the walk delightful, the evening rapture. Do not be uneasy today, Clarinda. I am in rather better spirits today, though I had but an indifferent night. Care, anxiety, sat on my spirits. All the cheerfulness of this morning is the fruit of some serious, important ideas that lie, in their realities, beyond the dark and narrow house. The Father of mercies be with you, Clarinda. Every good thing attend you!

SYLVANDER.

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XXXIV.

Friday 9 [p.m., 21st March 1788].

I am just now come in, and have read your letters. The first thing I did was to thank the Divine Disposer of events that he has had such happiness in store for me as the connexion I have with you. Life, my Clarinda, is a weary, barren path; and woe be to him or her that ventures on it alone! For me, I have my dearest partner of my soul. Clarinda and I will make out our pilgrimage together. Wherever I am, I shall constantly let her know how I go on, what I observe in the world around me, and what adventures I meet with. Would it please you, my love, to get every week, or every fortnight at least, a packet of two or three sheets of remarks, nonsense, news, rhymes and old songs? Will you open with satisfaction and delight a letter from a man who loves you, who has loved you, and who will love you to death, through death, and for ever? O Clarinda! what do I owe to heaven for blessing me with such a piece of exalted excellence as you! I call over your idea, as a miser counts over his treasure. Tell me, were you studious to please me last night? I am sure you did it to transport.

How rich am I who have such a treasure as you! You know me; you know how to make me happy, and you do it most effectually. God bless you with “long life, long youth, long pleasure, and a friend!” Tomorrow night, according to your own direction, I shall watch the window—‘tis the star that guides me to Paradise. The great relish to all is that honour, that innocence, that Religion are the witnesses and guarantees of our affection, Adieu, Clarinda! I am going to remember you in my prayers.

SYLVANDER.

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GENERAL CORRESPONDENCE (continued).

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LXXXIV. — TO MR. GAVIN HAMILTON.

[April 1788] MOSSGIEL, Friday Morning.

The language of refusal is to me the most difficult language on earth, and you are the man in the world, excepting one of Right Hon. designation, to whom it gives me the greatest pain to hold such language. My brother has already got money,75 and shall want nothing in my power to enable him to fulfil his engagement with you; but to be security on so large a scale, even for a brother, is what I dare not do, except I were in such circumstances of life as that the worst that might happen could not greatly injure me.

I never wrote a letter which gave me so much pain in my life, as I know the unhappy consequences: — I shall incur the displeasure of a gentleman for whom I have the highest respect and to whom I am deeply obliged. — I am etc.

ROBERT BURNS.

75 Altogether PS180. Gilbert is meant, and the business referred to was renewal of lease of Mossgiel, the poet to be cautioner.

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LXXXV. — TO MR. WILLIAM DUNBAR, W.S., EDINBURGH.

MAUCHLINE, 7th April 1788.

I have not delayed so long to write you, my much respected friend, because I thought no further of my promise. I have long since given up that formal kind of correspondence where one sits down irksomely to write a letter, because he is in duty bound to do so.

I have been roving over the country, as the farm^76 I have taken is forty miles from this place, hiring servants and preparing matters; but most of all, I am earnestly busy to bring about a revolution in my own mind. As, till within these eighteen months, I never was the wealthy master of ten guineas, my knowledge of business is to learn. Add to this, my late scenes of idleness and dissipation have enervated my mind to an alarming degree. Skill in the sober science of life is my most serious, and hourly study. I have dropped all conversation and all reading (prose reading) but what tends in some way or other to my serious aim. Except one worthy young fellow^77 I have not a single correspondent in Edinburgh. You have indeed kindly made me an offer of that kind. The world of wits, the gens comme-il-faut, which I lately left, and in which I never again will intimately mix — from that port, Sir, I expect your gazette, what the beaux esprits are saying, what they are doing, and what they are singing. Any sober intelligence from my sequestered life is all you have to expect from me. I have scarcely made a single distich since I saw you. When I meet with an old Scots air that has any facetious idea in its name, I have a peculiar pleasure in following out that idea for a verse or two.

I trust this will find you in better health than I did the last time I called for you. A few lines from you, directed to me, at Mauchline, were it but to let me know how you are, will settle my mind a good deal. Now, never shun the idea of writing me because, perhaps, you may be out of humour or spirits. I could give you a hundred good consequences attending a dull letter; one, for example, and the remaining ninety-nine some other time — it will always serve to keep in countenance, my much respected Sir, your obliged friend and humble servant, R. B.

76 Ellisland, near Dumfries.

77 Robert Ainslie, W.S.

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LXXXVI. — TO MRS. DUNLOP.

MAUCHLINE, 28th April 1788.

MADAM, — Your powers of reprehension must be great indeed, as I assure you they make my heart ache with penitential pangs, even though I was really not guilty. As I commence farming at Whitsunday, you will easily guess I must be pretty busy; but that is not all. As I got the offer of the Excise business without solicitation, and as it costs me only six months’ attendance for instructions, to entitle me to a commission — which commission lies by me, and at any future period, on my simple petition, can be resumed — I thought five-and-thirty pounds a-year was no bad dernier ressort for a poor poet, if Fortune in her jade tricks should kick him down from the little eminence to which she has lately helped him up.

For this reason, I am at present attending these instructions, to have them completed before Whitsunday. Still, Madam, I prepared with the sincerest pleasure to meet you at the Mount, and came to my brother’s on Saturday night, to set out on Sunday; but for some nights preceding I had slept in an apartment, where the force of the winds and rains was only mitigated by being sifted through numberless apertures in the windows, walls, etc. In consequence I was on Sunday, Monday, and part of Tuesday, unable to stir out of bed, with all the miserable effects of a violent cold.

You see, Madam, the truth of the French maxim, le vrai n’est pas toujours le vrai-semblable; your last was so full of expostulation, and was something so like the language of an offended friend, that I began to tremble for a correspondence, which I had with grateful pleasure set down as one of the greatest enjoyments of my future life.

Your books have delighted me; Virgil, Dryden, and Tasso were all equally strangers to me; but of this more at large in my next. R. B.

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LXXXVII. — TO MR. JAMES SMITH, AVON PRINTFIELD, LINLITHGOW.

MAUCHLINE, April 28th, 1788.

Beware of your Strasburgh, my good Sir! Look on this as the opening of a correspondence, like the opening of a twenty-four gun battery!

There is no understanding a man properly, without knowing something of his previous ideas; that is to say, if the man has any ideas; for I know many who, in the animal-muster, pass for men, that are the scanty masters of only one idea on any given subject, and by far the greatest part of your acquaintances and mine can barely boast of ideas, 1.25 — 1.5 — 1.75 (or some such fractional matter); so to let you a little into the secrets of my pericranium, there is, you must know, a certain clean-limbed, handsome, bewitching young hussy of your acquaintance, to whom I have lately and privately given a matrimonial title to my corpus.

Bode a robe and wear it,

Bode a pock and bear it,

says the wise old Scots adage! I hate to presage ill-luck; and as my girl has been doubly kinder to me than even the best of women usually are to their partners of our sex, in similar circumstances, I reckon on twelve times a brace of children against I celebrate my twelfth wedding-day: these twenty-four will give me twenty-four gossipings, twenty-four christenings (I mean one equal to two), and I hope, by the blessing of the God of my fathers, to make them twenty-four dutiful children to their parents, twenty-four useful members of society, and twenty-four approved servants of their God….

“Light’s heartsome,” quo’ the wife when she was stealing sheep. You see what a lamp I have hung up to lighten your paths, when you are idle enough to explore the combinations and relations of my ideas. ‘Tis now as plain as a pike-staff, why a twenty-four gun battery was a metaphor I could readily employ.

Now for business. I intend to present Mrs. Burns with a printed shawl, an article of which I dare say you have variety: ‘tis my first present to her since I have irrevocably called her mine, and I have a kind of whimsical wish to get her the first said present from an old and much-valued friend of hers and mine, a trusty Trojan, on whose friendship I count myself possessed of as a life-rent lease.

Look on this letter as a “beginning of sorrows;” I will write you till your eyes ache reading nonsense.

Mrs. Burns (‘tis only her private designation) begs her best compliments to you. R. B.

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LXXXVIII — TO PROFESSOR DUGALD STEWART.

MAUCHLINE, 3rd May 1788.

SIR, — I enclose you one or two more of my bagatelles. If the fervent wishes of honest gratitude have any influence with that great unknown Being who frames the chain of causes and events, prosperity and happiness will attend your visit to the Continent, and return you safe to your native shore.

Wherever I am, allow me, Sir, to claim it as my privilege to acquaint you with my progress in my trade of rhymes; as I am sure I could say it with truth, that, next to my little fame, and the having it in my power to make life more comfortable to those whom nature has made dear to me, I shall ever regard your countenance, your patronage, your friendly good offices, as the most valued consequence of my late success in life. R. B.

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LXXXIX. — TO MRS. DUNLOP.

MAUCHLINE, 4th May 1788.

MADAM, — Dryden’s Virgil has delighted me. I do not know whether the critics will agree with me, but the Georgics are to me by far the best of Virgil. It is indeed a species of writing entirely new to me, and has filled my head with a thousand fancies of emulation; but, alas! when I read the Georgics, and then survey my own powers, ‘tis like the idea of a Shetland pony, drawn up by the side of a thorough-bred hunter, to start for the plate. I own I am disappointed in the AEneid. Faultless correctness may please, and does highly please, the lettered critic; but to that awful character T have not the most distant pretensions. I do not know whether I do not hazard my pretensions to be a critic of any kind, when I say that I think Virgil, in many instances, a servile copier of Homer. If I had the Odyssey by me, I could parallel many passages where Virgil has evidently copied, but by no means improved, Homer. Nor can I think there is anything of this owing to the translators; for, from everything I have seen of Dryden, I think him, in genius and fluency of language, Pope’s master. I have not perused Tasso enough to form an opinion: in some future letter you shall have my ideas of him; though I am conscious my criticisms must be very inaccurate and imperfect, as there I have ever felt and lamented my want of learning most. R. B.

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XC. — TO MR. SAMUEL BROWN, KIRKOSWALD.

MOSSGIEL, 4th May 1788.

DEAR UNCLE, — This, I hope, will find you and your conjugal yoke-fellow in your good old way. I am impatient to know if the Ailsa^78 fowling be commenced for this season yet, as I want three or four stones of feathers, and I hope you will bespeak them for me. It would be a vain attempt for me to enumerate the various transactions I have been engaged in since I saw you last; but this know — I engaged in a smuggling trade, and no poor man ever experienced better returns, two for one: but as freight and delivery have turned out so dear, I am thinking of taking out a license and beginning in fair trade. I have taken a farm, on the borders of the Nith, and in imitation of the old patriarchs, get men-servants and maid-servants, and flocks and herds, and beget sons and daughters. — Your obedient nephew,

ROBERT BURNS.

78 A well-known rock in the Firth of Clyde, frequented by innumerable sea-fowl.

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XCI. — TO MR. JAMES JOHNSON, ENGRAVER, EDINBURGH.

MAUCHLINE, 25th May 1788.

MY DEAR SIR, — I am really uneasy about that money which Mr. Creech owes me per note in your hand, and I want it much at present, as I am engaging in business pretty deeply both for myself and my brother. A hundred guineas can be but a trifling affair to him, and’tis a matter of most serious importance to me.79 To-morrow I begin my operations as a farmer, and so God speed the plough!

I am so enamoured of a certain girl…. To be serious, I found I had a long and much-loved fellow-creature’s happiness or misery in my hands; and though pride and seeming justice were murderous king’s advocates on the one side, yet humanity, generosity, and forgiveness were such powerful, such irresistible counsel on the other, that a jury of all endearments and new attachments brought in a unanimous verdict of not guilty. And the panel, be it known unto all whom it concerns, is installed and instated into all the rights, privileges, etc., that belong to the name, title, and designation of wife.

79 Creech paid the amount five days after the date of this letter.

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XCII. — TO MR. ROBERT AINSLIE.

MAUCHLINE, May 26th, 1788.

MY DEAR FRIEND, — I am two kind letters in your debt; but I have been from home, and horridly busy, buying and preparing for my farming business, over and above the plague of my Excise instructions, which this week will finish.

As I flatter my wishes that I foresee many future years’ correspondence between us, ‘tis foolish to talk of excusing dull epistles! a dull letter may be a very kind one. I have the pleasure to tell you that I have been extremely fortunate in all my buyings and bargainings hitherto, Mrs. Burns not excepted; which title I now avow to the world. I am truly pleased with this last affair. It has indeed added to my anxieties for futurity, but it has given a stability to my mind and resolutions unknown before; and the poor girl has the most sacred enthusiasm of attachment to me, and has not a wish but to gratify my every idea of her deportment. I am interrupted. Farewell! my dear Sir. R. B.

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XCIII. — TO MRS. DUNLOP.

27th May 1788.

MADAM, — I have been torturing my philosophy to no purpose to account for that kind partiality of yours, which has followed me, in my return to the shade of life, with assiduous benevolence. Often did I regret, in the fleeting hours of my late will-o’-wisp appearance, that “here I had no continuing city;” and, but for the consolation of a few solid guineas, could almost lament the time that a momentary acquaintance with wealth and splendour put me so much out of conceit with the sworn companions of my road through life — insignificance and poverty.

There are few circumstances relating to the unequal distribution of the good things of this life that give me more vexation (I mean in what I see around me) than the importance the opulent bestow on their trifling family affairs, compared with the very same things on the contracted scale of a cottage. Last afternoon I had the honour to spend an hour or two at a good woman’s fireside, where the planks that composed the floor were decorated with a splendid carpet, and the gay table sparkled with silver and china. ‘Tis now about term-day, and there has been a revolution among those creatures who, though in appearance partakers, and equally noble partakers, of the same nature with Madame, are from time to time — their nerves, their sinews, their health, strength, wisdom, experience, genius, time, nay, a good part of their very thoughts — sold for months and years, not only to the necessities, the conveniences, but the caprices of the important few. We talked of the insignificant creatures; nay, notwithstanding their general stupidity and rascality, did some of the poor devils the honour to commend them. But light be the turf upon his breast who taught “Reverence thyself!” We looked down on the unpolished wretches, their impertinent wives, and clouterly brats, as the lordly bull does on the little dirty ant-hill, whose puny inhabitants he crushes in the carelessness of his ramble, or tosses in the air in the wantonness of his pride.

R. B.

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XCIV. — TO MRS. DUNLOP, AT MR. DUNLOP’S, HADDINGTON.

ELLISLAND, 13th June 1788.

Where’er I roam, whatever realms I see,

My heart, untravell’d, fondly turns to thee;

Still to my friend it turns with ceaseless pain,

And drags, at each remove, a lengthen’d chain.

GOLDSMITH.

This is the second day, my honoured friend, that I have been on my farm. A solitary inmate of an old smoky spence; far from every object I love, or by whom I am beloved; nor any acquaintance older than yesterday, except Jenny Geddes, the old mare I ride on; while uncouth cares and novel plans hourly insult my awkward ignorance and bashful inexperience. There is a foggy atmosphere native to my soul in the hour of care; consequently the dreary objects seem larger than the life. Extreme sensibility, irritated and prejudiced on the gloomy side by a series of misfortunes and disappointments, at that period of my existence when the soul is laying in her cargo of ideas for the voyage of life, is, I believe, the principal cause of this unhappy frame of mind.

The valiant, in himself, what can he suffer?

Or what need he regard his single woes?

Your surmise, Madam, is just: I am indeed a husband.

I found a once much-loved and still much-loved female, literally and truly cast out to the mercy of the naked elements — but there is no sporting with a fellow-creature’s happiness or misery…. The most placid good-nature and sweetness of disposition; a warm heart, gratefully devoted with all its powers to love me; vigorous health and sprightly cheerfulness, set off to the best advantage by a more than common handsome figure — these, I think, in a woman may make a good wife though she should never have read a page but the Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments, nor have danced in a brighter assembly than a penny pay wedding.

R. B.

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XCV. — TO MR. ROBERT AINSLIE.

ELLISLAND, June 14th, 1788.

This is now the third day, my dearest Sir, that I have sojourned in these regions; and during these three days you have occupied more of my thoughts than in three weeks preceding: in Ayrshire I have several variations of friendship’s compass, here it points invariably to the pole. My farm gives me a good many uncouth cares and anxieties, but I hate the language of complaint. Job, or some one of his friends, says well— “Why should a living man complain?”

I have lately been much mortified with contemplating an unlucky imperfection in the very framing and construction of my soul; namely, a blundering inaccuracy of her olfactory organs in hitting the scent of craft or design in my fellow-creatures. I do not mean any compliment to my ingenuousness, or to hint that the defect is in consequence of the unsuspicious simplicity of conscious truth and honour: I take it to be, in some way or other, an imperfection in the mental sight; or, metaphor apart, some modification of dulness. In two or three instances lately, I have been most shamefully out.

I have all along, hitherto, in the warfare of life, been bred to arms among the light horse — the piquet-guards of fancy; a kind of hussars and Highlanders of the brain; but I am firmly resolved to sell out of these giddy battalions, who have no ideas of a battle but fighting the foe, or of a siege but storming the town. Cost what it will, I am determined to buy in among the grave squadrons of heavy-armed thought, or the artillery corps of plodding contrivance.

What books are you reading, or what is the subject of your thoughts, besides the great studies of your profession? You said something about religion in your last. I don’t exactly remember what it was, as the letter is in Ayrshire; but I thought it not only prettily said, but nobly thought. You will make a noble fellow if once you were married. I make no reservation of your being well-married; you have so much sense, and knowledge of human nature, that though you may not realise perhaps the ideas of romance, yet you will never be ill-married.

Were it not for the terrors of my ticklish situation respecting provision for a family of children, I am decidedly of opinion that the step I have taken is vastly for my happiness.80 As it is, I look to the Excise scheme as a certainty of maintenance; a maintenance! — luxury to what either Mrs. Burns or I were born to. Adieu.

R. B.

80 This alludes to his marriage.

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XCVI. — TO MR. ROBERT AINSLIE.

ELLISLAND, 30th June 1788.

MY DEAR SIR, — I just now received your brief epistle; and, to take vengeance on your laziness, I have, you see, taken a long sheet of writing-paper, and have begun at the top of the page, intending to scribble on to the very last corner.

I am vexed at that affair of the …, but dare not enlarge on the subject until you send me your direction, as I suppose that will be altered on your late master and friend’s death.81 I am concerned for the old fellow’s exit, only as I fear it may be to your disadvantage in any respect — for an old man’s dying, except he have been a very benevolent character, or in some particular situation of life that the welfare of the poor or the helpless depended on him, I think it an event of the most trifling moment to the world. Man is naturally a kind, benevolent animal, but he is dropped into such a needy situation here in this vexatious world, and has such a hungry, growling, multiplying pack of necessities, appetites, passions, and desires about him, ready to devour him for want of other food, that in fact he must lay aside his cares for others that he may look properly to himself. You have been imposed upon in paying Mr. Miers for the profile of a Mr. H. I did not mention it in my letter to you, nor did I ever give Mr. Miers any such order. I have no objection to lose the money, but I will not have any such profile in my possession.

I desired the carrier to pay you, but as I mentioned only 15s. to him, I will rather inclose you a guinea-note. I have it not, indeed, to spare here, as I am only a sojourner in a strange land in this place; but in a day or two I return to Mauchline, and there I have the bank-notes through the house like salt permits.

There is a great degree of folly in talking unnecessarily of one’s private affairs. I have just now been interrupted by one of my new neighbours, who has made himself absolutely contemptible in my eyes, by his silly, garrulous pruriency. I know it has been a fault of my own, too; but from this moment I abjure it as I would the service of hell! Your poets, spendthrifts, and other fools of that kidney, pretend, forsooth, to crack their jokes on prudence; but’tis a squalid vagabond glorying in his rags. Still, imprudence respecting money matters is much more pardonable than imprudence respecting character, I have no objection to prefer prodigality to avarice, in some few instances; but I appeal to your observation if you have not met, and often met, with the same disingenuousness, the same hollow-hearted insincerity, and disintegritive depravity of principle, in the hackneyed victims of profusion, as in the unfeeling children of parsimony. I have every possible reverence for the much talked-of world beyond the grave, and I wish that which piety believes, and virtue deserves, may be all matter of fact. But in things belonging to, and terminating in this present scene of existence, man has serious and interesting business on hand. Whether a man shall shake hands with welcome in the distinguished elevation of respect, or shrink from contempt in the abject corner of insignificance: whether he shall wanton under the tropic of plenty, at least enjoy himself in the comfortable latitude of easy convenience, or starve in the arctic circle of dreary poverty; whether he shall rise in the manly consciousness of a self-approving mind, or sink beneath a galling load of regret and remorse — these are alternatives of the last moment.

You see how I preach. You used occasionally to sermonise too; I wish you would, in charity, favour me with a sheet full in your own way. I admire the close of a letter Lord Bolingbroke writes to Dean Swift:— “Adieu, dear Swift! with all thy faults I love thee entirely: make an effort to love me with all mine!” Humble servant, and all that trumpery, is now such a prostituted business, that honest friendship, in her sincere way, must have recourse to her primitive, simple — farewell!

R. B.

81 Samuel Mitchelson, W.S., with whom young Ainslie served his apprenticeship.

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XCVII — TO MRS. DUNLOP.

MAUCHLINE, July 10th, 1788.

MY MUCH HONOURED FRIEND, — Yours of the 24th June is before me. I found it, as well as another valued friend — my wife, waiting to welcome me to Ayrshire: I met both with the sincerest pleasure.

When I write you, Madam, I do not sit down to answer every paragraph of yours, by echoing every sentiment, like the faithful Commons of Great Britain in Parliament assembled, answering a speech from the best of kings! I express myself in the fulness of my heart, and may, perhaps, be guilty of neglecting some of your kind inquiries; but not from your very odd reason, that I do not read your letters. All your epistles, for several months, have cost me nothing except a swelling throb of gratitude, or a deep-felt sentiment of veneration.

When Mrs. Burns, Madam, first found herself “as women wish to be who love their lords,” as I loved her nearly to distraction, we took steps for a private marriage. Her parents got the hint; and not only forbade me her company and their house, but, on my rumoured West Indian voyage, got a warrant to put me in jail, till I should find security in my about-to-be paternal relation. You know my lucky reverse of fortune. On my eclatant return to Mauchline, I was made very welcome to visit my girl. The usual consequences began to betray her; and, as I was at that time laid up a cripple in Edinburgh, she was turned, literally turned, out of doors, and I wrote to a friend to shelter her till my return, when our marriage was declared. Her happiness or misery were in my hands, and who could trifle with such a deposit?

To jealousy or infidelity I am an equal stranger. My preservative against the first is the most thorough consciousness of her sentiments of honour and her attachment to me; my antidote against the last is my long and deep-rooted affection for her. I can easily fancy a more agreeable companion for my journey of life; but, upon my honour, I have never seen the individual instance.

In household matters, of aptness to learn and activity to execute, she is eminently mistress; and during my absence in Nithsdale, she is regularly and constantly apprentice to my mother and sisters in their dairy, and other rural business.

The muses must not be offended when I tell them, the concerns of my wife and family will, in my mind, always take the pas; but I assure them their ladyships will ever come next in place.

You are right that a bachelor state would have insured me more friends; but, from a cause you will easily guess, conscious peace in the enjoyment of my own mind, and unmistrusting confidence in approaching my God, would seldom have been of the number.

Circumstanced as I am, I could never have got a female partner for life who could have entered into my favourite studies, relished my favourite authors, etc., without probably entailing on me at the same time expensive living, fantastic caprice, perhaps apish affectation, with all the other blessed boarding-school acquirements, which (pardonnez moi, Madame) are sometimes to be found among females of the upper ranks, but almost universally pervade the misses of the would-be gentry.82

I like your way in your churchyard lucubrations. Thoughts that are the spontaneous result of accidental situations, either respecting health, place, or company, have often a strength, and always an originality, that would in vain be looked for in fancied circumstances, and studied paragraphs. For me, I have often thought of keeping a letter, in progression by me, to send you when the sheet was written out. Now I talk of sheets, I must tell you, my reason for writing to you on paper of this kind is my pruriency of writing to you at large. A page of post is on such a dis-social, narrow-minded scale, that I cannot abide it; and double letters, at least in my miscellaneous reverie manner, are a monstrous tax in a close correspondence. R. B.

82 In Burns’s private memoranda are these words:— “I am more and more pleased with the step I took respecting my Jean. A wife’s head is immaterial compared with her heart; and Virtue’s (for wisdom, what poet pretends to it?) ‘ways are ways of pleasantness, and all her paths are peace.’”

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XCVIII. — TO MR. PETER HILL, BOOKSELLER, EDINBURGH.

MY DEAR HILL, — I shall say nothing to your mad present — you have so long and often been of important service to me, and I suppose you mean to go on conferring obligations until I shall not be able to lift up my face before you. In the meantime, as Sir Roger de Coverley, because it happened to be a cold day in which he made his will, ordered his servants great-coats for mourning, so, because I have been this week plagued with an indigestion, I have sent you by the carrier a fine old ewe-milk cheese.83

Indigestion is the devil: nay, ‘tis the devil and all. It besets a man in every one of his senses. I lose my appetite at the sight of successful knavery, and sicken to loathing at the noise and nonsense of self-important folly. When the hollow-hearted wretch takes me by the hand, the feeling spoils my dinner; the proud man’s wine so offends my palate that it chokes me in the gullet; and the pulvilised, feathered, pert coxcomb, is so disgustful in my nostril that my stomach turns.

If ever you have any of these disagreeable sensations, let me prescribe for you patience, and a bit of my cheese. I know that you are no niggard of your good things among your friends, and some of them are in much need of a slice. There, in my eye, is our friend Smellie; a man positively of the first abilities and greatest strength of mind, as well as one of the best hearts and keenest wits that I have ever met with; when you see him, as, alas! he too is smarting at the pinch of distressful circumstances, aggravated by the sneer of contumelious greatness — a bit of my cheese alone will not cure him, but if you add a tankard of brown stout, and superadd a magnum of bright Oporto, you will see his sorrows vanish like the morning mist before the summer sun.

Candlish, the earliest friend, except my only brother, that I have on earth, and one of the worthiest fellows that ever any man called by the name of friend, if a luncheon of my cheese would help to rid him of some of his superabundant modesty, you would do well to give it him.

David,84 with his Courant, comes, too, across my recollection, and I beg you will help him largely from the said ewe-milk cheese, to enable him to digest those bedaubing paragraphs with which he is eternally larding the lean characters of certain great men in a certain great town. I grant you the periods are very well turned; so, a fresh egg is a very good thing, but when thrown at a man in a pillory, it does not at all improve his figure, not to mention the irreparable loss of the egg.

My facetious friend Dunbar, I would wish also to be a partaker: not to digest his spleen, for that he laughs off, but to digest his last night’s wine at the last field-day of the Crochallan corps.85

Among our common friends I must not forget one of the dearest of them — Cunningham. The brutality, insolence, and selfishness of a world unworthy of having such a fellow as he is in it, I know sticks in his stomach, and if you can help him to anything that will make him a little easier on that score, it will be very obliging.

As to honest John Sommerville, he is such a contented, happy man, that I know not what can annoy him, except, perhaps, he may not have got the better of a parcel oif modest anecdotes which a certain poet gave him one night at supper, the last time the said poet was in town.

Though I have mentioned so many men of law, I shall have nothing to do with them professedly — the faculty are beyond my prescription. As to their clients, that is another thing; God knows they have much to digest!

The clergy I pass by; their profundity of erudition, and their liberality of sentiment, their total want of pride, and their detestation of hypocrisy, are so proverbially notorious as to place them far, far above either my praise or censure.

I was going to mention a man of worth, whom I have the honour to call friend — the Laird of Craigdarroch; but I have spoken to the landlord of the King’s Arms Inn here, to have at the next county meeting a large ewe-milk cheese on the table, for the benefit of the Dumfriesshire Whigs, to enable them to digest the Duke of Queensberry’s late political conduct.

I have just this moment an opportunity of a private hand to Edinburgh, as perhaps you would not digest double postage.

R. B.

83 In return for some valuable books.

84 Printer of the Edinburgh Evening Courant.

85 A club of boon companions.

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XCIX. — TO MRS. DUNLOP.

MAUCHLINE, August 2nd, 1788.

HONOURED MADAM, — Your kind letter welcomed me, yesternight, to Ayrshire. I am, indeed, seriously angry with you at the quantum of your luckpenny; but, vexed and hurt as I was, I could not help laughing very heartily at the noble lord’s apology for the missed napkin.

I would write you from Nithsdale, and give you my direction there, but I have scarce an opportunity of calling at a post-office once in a fortnight. I am six miles from Dumfries, am scarcely ever in it myself, and, as yet, have little acquaintance in the neighbourhood. Besides, I am now very busy on my farm, building a dwelling-house; as at present I am almost an evangelical man in Nithsdale, for I have scarce “where to lay my head.”

There are some passages in your last that brought tears in my eyes. “The heart knoweth its own sorrows, and a stranger intermeddleth not therewith.” The repository of these “sorrows of the heart” is a kind of sanctum sanctorum: and’tis only a chosen friend, and that, too, at particular, sacred times, who dares enter into them: —

Heaven oft tears the bosom-chords

That nature finest strung.

You will excuse this quotation for the sake of the author. Instead of entering on this subject farther, I shall transcribe you a few lines I wrote in a hermitage, belonging to a gentleman in my Nithsdale neighbourhood. They are almost the only favour the muses have conferred on me in that country.86

Since I am in the way of transcribing, the following were the production of yesterday as I jogged through the wild hills of New Cumnock. I intend inserting them, or something like them, in an epistle I am going to write to the gentleman on whose friendship my Excise hopes depend, Mr. Graham of Fintray, one of the worthiest and most accomplished gentlemen, not only of this country, but, I will dare to say it, of this age. The following are just the first crude thoughts “unhousel’d, unanointed, unanneal’d:”87 —

Here the muse left me. I am astonished at what you tell me of Anthony’s writing me. I never received it. Poor fellow I you vex me much by telling me that he is unfortunate. I shall be in Ayrshire ten days from this date. I have just room for an old Roman FAREWELL.

R. B.

86 Lines written in Friar’s Carse Hermitage.

87 First Epistle to Robert Graham.

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C. — TO MRS. DUNLOP.

ELLISLAND, 16th August 1788.

I am in a fine disposition, my honoured friend, to send you an elegiac epistle; and want only genius to make it quite Shenstonian: —

Why droops my heart with fancied woes forlorn?

Why sinks my soul beneath each wintry sky?

My increasing cares in this, as yet, strange country — gloomy conjectures in the dark vista of futurity — consciousness of my own inability for the struggle of the world — my broadened mark to misfortune in a wife and children; — I could indulge these reflections, till my humour should ferment into the most acid chagrin, that would corrode the very thread of life.

To counterwork these baneful feelings, I have sat down to write to you; as I declare upon my soul I always find that the most sovereign balm for my wounded spirit.

I was yesterday at Mr. Miller’s to dinner, for the first time. My reception was quite to my mind: from the lady of the house quite flattering. She sometimes hits on a couplet or two, impromptu. She repeated one or two to the admiration of all present. My suffrage as a professional man was expected: I for once went agonising over the belly of my conscience. Pardon me, ye, my adored household gods, independence of spirit, and integrity of soul! In the course of conversation, Johnsorfs Musical Museum, a collection of Scottish songs with the music, was talked of. We got a song on the harpsichord, beginning

Raving winds around her blowing.

The air was much admired: the lady of the house asked me whose were the words. “Mine, Madam — they are indeed my very best verses;” she took not the smallest notice of them! The old Scottish proverb says well, “King’s caff is better than ither folks’ corn.” I was going to make a New Testament quotation about “casting pearls,” but that would be too virulent, for the lady is actually a woman of sense and taste.

After all that has been said on the other side of the question, man is by no means a happy creature. I do not speak of the selected few, favoured by partial heaven, whose souls are tuned to gladness amidst riches and honours, and prudence and wisdom. I speak of the neglected many, whose nerves, whose sinews, whose days are sold to the minions of fortune.

If I thought you had never seen it, I would transcribe for you a stanza of an old Scottish ballad, called “The Life and Age of Man;” beginning thus: —

‘Twas in the sixteenth hundred year

Of God and fifty-three

Frae Christ was born, that bought us dear,

As writings testifie.

I had an old grand-uncle, with whom my mother lived a while in her girlish years; the good old man, for such he was, was long blind ere he died, during which time his highest enjoyment was to sit down and cry, while my mother would sing the simple old song of “The Life and Age of Man.”

It is this way of thinking; it is these melancholy truths, that make religion so precious to the poor, miserable children of men. If it is a mere phantom, existing only in the heated imagination of enthusiasm,

What truth on earth so precious as the lie?

My idle reasonings sometimes make me a little sceptical, but the necessities of my heart always give the cold philosophisings the lie. Who looks for the heart weaned from earth; the soul affianced to her God; the correspondence fixed with heaven; the pious supplication and devout thanksgiving, constant as the vicissitudes of even and morn; who thinks to meet with these in the court, the palace, in the glare of public life? No; to find them in their precious importance and divine efficacy, we must search among the obscure recesses of disappointment, affliction, poverty, and distress.

I am sure, dear Madam, you are now more than pleased with the length of my letters. I return to Ayrshire middle of next week: and it quickens my pace to think that there will be a letter from you waiting me there. I must be here again very soon for my harvest.

R. B.

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CI. — TO MR. BEUGO, ENGRAVER, EDINBURGH.

ELLISLAND, 9th Sept. 1788.

MY DEAR SIR, — There is not in Edinburgh above the number of the graces whose letters would have given so much pleasure as yours of the 3rd instant, which only reached me yesternight.

I am here on my farm, busy with my harvest; but for all that most pleasurable part of life called SOCIAL COMMUNICATION, I am here at the very elbow of existence. The only things that are to be found in this country, in any degree of perfection, are stupidity and canting. Prose they only know in graces, prayers, etc., and the value of these they estimate, as they do their plaiding webs, by the ell! As for the muses, they have as much an idea of a rhinoceros as of a poet. For my old, capricious, but good-natured hussy of a muse,

By banks of Nith I sat and wept

When Coila I thought on,

In midst thereof I hung my harp

The willow trees upon.

I am generally about half my time in Ayrshire with my “darling Jean,” and then I, at lucid intervals, throw my horny fist across my becobwebbed lyre, much in the same manner as an old wife throws her hand across the spokes of her spinning-wheel.

I will send you the “Fortunate Shepherdess” as soon as I return to Ayrshire, for there I keep it with other precious treasure. I shall send it by a careful hand, as I would not for anything it should be mislaid or lost. I do not wish to serve you from any benevolence, or other grave Christian virtue; ‘tis purely a selfish gratification of my own feelings whenever I think of you.

If your better functions would give you leisure to write me, I should be extremely happy; that is to say, if you neither keep nor look for a regular correspondence. I hate the idea of being obliged to write a letter. I sometimes write a friend twice a week; at other times once a quarter.

I am exceedingly pleased with your fancy in making the author you mention place a map of Iceland, instead of his portrait, before his works; ‘twas a glorious idea.

Could you conveniently do me one thing? — whenever you finish any head, I should like to have a proof copy of it. I might tell you a long story about your fine genius; but, as what everybody knows cannot have escaped you, I shall not say one syllable about it.

R. B.

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CII. — TO MR. ROBERT GRAHAM, OF FINTRAY.

SIR, — When I had the honour of being introduced to you at Athole House, I did not think so soon of asking a favour of you. When Lear, in Shakespeare, asked Old Kent why he wished to be in his service, he answers, “Because you have that in your face which I would fain call master.” For some such reason, Sir, do I now solicit your patronage. You know, I dare say, of an application I lately made to your Board to be admitted an officer of the Excise. I have, according to form, been examined by a supervisor, and today I gave in his certificate, with a request for an order for instructions. In this affair, if I succeed, I am afraid I shall but too much need a patronising friend. Propriety of conduct as a man, and fidelity and attention as an officer, I dare engage for; but with anything like business, except manual labour, I am totally unacquainted.

I had intended to have closed my late appearance on the stage of life in the character of a country farmer; but, after discharging some filial and fraternal claims, I find I could only fight for existence in that miserable manner, which I have lived to see throw a venerable parent into the jaws of a jail, whence death, the poor man’s last and often best friend, rescued him.

I know, Sir, that to need your goodness, is to have a claim on it; may I, therefore, beg your patronage to forward me in this affair, till I be appointed to a division, where, by the help of rigid economy, I will try to support that independence so dear to my soul, but which has been too often so distant from my situation.

R. B.

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CII. — TO His WIFE, AT MAUCHLINE.

ELLISLAND, Friday, 12th Sep. 1788.

MY DEAR LOVE, — I received your kind letter with a pleasure which no letter but one from you could have given me. I dreamed of you the whole night last; but alas! I fear it will be three weeks yet ere I can hope for the happiness of seeing you. My harvest is going on. I have some to cut down still, but I put in two stacks to-day, so I’m as tired as a dog.

You might get one of Gilbert’s sweet-milk cheeses, and send it to…. On second thoughts I believe you had best get the half of Gilbert’s web of table linen and make it up; though I think it damnable dear, but it is no outlaid money to us, you know. I have just now consulted my old landlady about table linen, and she thinks I may have the best for two shillings a yard; so, after all, let it alone till I return; and some day soon I will be in Dumfries and ask the price there. I expect your new gowns will be very forward or ready to make, against I be home to get the baiveridge.88

I have written my long-thought-on letter to Mr. Graham, the Commissioner of Excise; and have sent a sheetful of poetry besides.

88 On her first appearance in public in a new dress a young woman was subject to this tax, if claimed by the young man who happened first to meet her.

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CIV. — TO Miss CHALMERS, EDINBURGH.

ELLISLAND, NEAR DUMFRIES, Sept. 16th, 1788.

Where are you? and how are you? and is Lady Mackenzie recovering her health? for I have had but one solitary letter from you. I will not think you have forgot me, Madam and, for my part,

When thee, Jerusalem, I forget,

Skill part from my right hand!

“My heart is not of that rock, nor my soul careless as that sea.” I do not make my progress among mankind as a bowl does among its fellows-rolling through the crowd without bearing away any mark or impression, except where they hit in hostile collision.

I am here, driven in with my harvest-folks by bad weather; and as you and your sister once did me the honour of interesting yourselves much a l’ egard de moi, I sit down to beg the continuation of your goodness. I can truly say that, all the exterior of life apart, I never saw two whose esteem flattered the nobler feelings of my soul — I will not say more, but so much, as Lady Mackenzie and Miss Chalmers. When I think of you — hearts the best, minds the noblest of human kind — unfortunate even in the shades of life — when I think I have met with you, and have lived more of real life with you in eight days than I can do with almost anybody I meet with in eight years — when I think on the improbability of meeting you in this world again — I could sit down and cry like a child! If ever you honoured me with a place in your esteem, I trust I can now plead more desert. I am secure against that crushing grip of iron poverty, which, alas! is less or more fatal to the native worth and purity of, I fear, the noblest souls; and a late important step in my life has kindly taken me out of the way of those ungrateful iniquities, which, however overlooked in fashionable licence, or varnished in fashionable phrase, are indeed but lighter and deeper shades of villainy.

Shortly after my last return to Ayrshire, I married “my Jean.” This was not in consequence of the attachment of romance, perhaps; but 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 deposit. Nor have I any cause to repent it. If I have not got polite tattle, modish manners, and fashionable dress, I am not sickened and disgusted with the multiform curse of boarding-school affectation; and I have got the handsomest figure, the sweetest temper, the soundest constitution, and the kindest heart in the county. Mrs. Burns believes, as firmly as her creed, that I am le plus bel esprit, et le plus honnete homme in the universe; although she scarcely ever in her life, except the Scriptures of the old and New Testament, and the Psalms of David in metre, spent five minutes together on either prose or verse. I must except also from this last a certain late publication of Scots poems, which she has perused very devoutly; and all the ballads in the country, as she has (O the partial lover! you will cry) the finest “wood note wild” I ever heard. I am the more particular in this lady’s character, as I know she will henceforth have the honour of a share in your best wishes. She is still at Mauchline, as I am building my house; for this hovel that I shelter in, while occasionally here, is pervious to every blast that blows, and every shower that falls; and I am only preserved from being chilled to death, by being suffocated with smoke. I do not find my farm that pennyworth I was taught to expect, but I believe, in time, it may be a saving bargain. You will be pleased to hear that I have laid aside the idle eclat, and bind every day after my reapers.

To save me from that horrid situation of at any time going down, in a losing bargain of a farm, to misery, I have taken my Excise instructions, and have my commission in my pocket for any emergency of fortune. If I could set all before your view, whatever disrespect you, in common with the world, have for this business, I know you would approve of my idea.

I will make no apology, dear Madam, for this egotistic detail; I know you and your sister will be interested in every circumstance of it. What signify the silly, idle gew-gaws of wealth, or the ideal trumpery of greatness! When fellow-partakers of the same nature fear the same God, have the same benevolence of heart, the same nobleness of soul, the same detestation at everything dishonest, and the same scorn at everything unworthy — if they are not in the dependence of absolute beggary, in the name of common sense, are they not equals? And if the bias, the instinctive bias of their souls run the same way, why may they not be friends?

When I may have an opportunity of sending you this, Heaven only knows. Shenstone says, “When one is confined idle within doors by bad weather, the best antidote against ennui is to read the letters of, or write to, one’s friends;” in that case then, if the weather continues thus, I may scrawl you half a quire.

I very lately — to wit, since harvest began — wrote a poem, not in imitation, but in the manner of Pope’s Moral Epistles. It is only a short essay, just to try the strength of my Muse’s pinion in that way. I will send you a copy of it, when once I have heard from you. I have likewise been laying the foundation of some pretty large poetic works; how the superstructure will come on, I leave to that great maker and marrer of projects, time. Johnson’s collection of Scots songs is going on in the third volume; and, of consequence, finds me a consumpt for a great deal of idle metre. One of the most tolerable things I have done in that way, is two stanzas I made to an air a musical gentleman of my acquaintance composed for the anniversary of his wedding-day, which happens on the seventh of November. Take it as follows: —

The day returns — my bosom burns —

The blissful day we twa did meet, etc.

I shall give over this letter for shame. If I should be seized with a scribbling fit, before this goes away, I shall make it another letter; and then you may allow your patience a week’s respite between the two. I have not room for more than the old, kind, hearty farewell!

To make some amends, mes cheres Mesdames, for dragging you on to this second sheet; and to relieve a little the tiresomeness of my unstudied and uncorrectible prose, I shall transcribe you some of my late poetic bagatelles; though I have, these eight or ten months, done very little that way. One day, in a hermitage on the banks of Nith, belonging to a gentleman in my neighbourhood, who is so good as give me a key at pleasure, I wrote as follows; supposing myself the sequestered, venerable inhabitant of the lonely mansion.

LINES WRITTEN IN FRIARS-CARSE HERMITAGE.

Thou whom chance may hither lead,

Be thou clad in russet weed, etc.

R. B.

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CV. — TO MR. MORISON, WRIGHT, MAUCHLINE.

Ellisland, September 22nd 1788.

MY DEAR SIR, — Necessity obliges me to go into my new house, even before it be plastered. I will inhabit the one end until the other is finished. About three weeks more, I think, will at farthest be my time, beyond which I cannot stay in this present house. If ever you wish to deserve the blessing of him that was ready to perish; if ever you were in a situation that a little kindness would have rescued you from many evils; if ever you hope to find rest in future states of untried being-get these matters of mine ready.89 My servant will be out in the beginning of next week for the clock. My compliments to Mrs. Morison. — I am, after all my tribulation, Dear Sir, yours,

R. B.

89 The letter refers to chairs and other articles of furniture which the Poet had ordered.

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CVI. — TO MRS. DUNLOP, OF DUNLOP.

Mauchline, 27th Sept. 1788.

I have received twins, dear Madam, more than once; but scarcely ever with more pleasure than when I received yours of the 12th instant. To make myself understood; I had wrote to Mr. Graham, enclosing my poem addressed to him, and the same post which favoured me with yours brought me an answer from him. It was dated the very day he had received mine; and I am quite at a loss to say whether it was most polite or kind.

Your criticisms, my honoured benefactress, are truly the work of a friend. They are not the blasting depredations of a canker-toothed, caterpillar critic; nor are they the fair statement of cold impartiality, balancing with unfeeling exactitude the pro and con of an author’s merits; they are the judicious observations of animated friendship, selecting the beauties of the piece. I am just arrived from Nithsdale, and will be here a fortnight. I was on horseback this morning by three o’clock; for between my wife and my farm is just forty-six miles. As I jogged on in the dark, I was taken with a poetic fit, as follows:

“Mrs. Ferguson of Craigdarroch’s lamentation for the death of her son; an uncommonly promising youth of eighteen or nineteen years of age: —

Fate gave the word — the arrow sped,

And pierced my darling’s heart,”(i>etc.)

You will not send me your poetic rambles, but, you see, I am no niggard of mine. I am sure your impromptus give me double pleasure; what falls from your pen can neither be unentertaining in itself, nor indifferent to me.

The one fault you found is just: but I cannot please myself in an emendation.

What a life of solicitude is the life of a parent! You interested me much in your young couple.

I would not take my folio paper for this epistle, and now I repent it. I am so jaded with my dirty long journey, that I was afraid to drawl into the essence of dulness with anything larger than a quarto, and so I must leave out another rhyme of this morning’s manufacture.

I will pay the sapientipotent George most cheerfully, to hear from you ere I leave Ayrshire. R. B.

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CVII — TO MR. PETER HILL.

Mauchline, 1st October 1788.

I have been here in this country about three days, and all that time my chief reading has been the “Address to Lochlomond” you were so obliging as to send to me. Were I impanneled one of the author’s jury, to determine his criminality respecting the sin of poesy, my verdict should be “Guilty! A poet of nature’s making!” It is an excellent method for improvement, and what I believe every poet does, to place some favourite classic author in his walks of study and composition before him as a model. Though your author had not mentioned the name, I could have, at half a glance, guessed his model to be Thomson. Will my brother-poet forgive me if I venture to hint that his imitation of that immortal bard is, in two or three places, rather more servile than such a genius as his required: — e.g.

To soothe the maddening passions all to peace.

ADDRESS.

To soothe the throbbing passions into peace.

THOMSON.

I think the “Address” is in simplicity, harmony, and elegance of versification, fully equal to the “Seasons.” Like Thomson, too, he has looked into nature for himself: you meet with no copied description. One particular criticism I made at first reading; in no one instance has he said too much. He never flags in his progress, but, like a true poet of nature’s making, kindles in his course. His beginning is simple and modest, as if distrustful of the strength of his passion; only, I do not altogether like —

Truth,

The soul of every song that’s nobly great.

Fiction is the soul of many a song that is nobly great. Perhaps I am wrong: this may be but a prose criticism. Is not the phrase, in line 7, page 6, “Great lake,” too much vulgarised by every-day language for so sublime a poem?

Great mass of waters, theme for nobler song,

is perhaps no emendation. His enumeration of a comparison with other lakes is at once harmonious and poetic. Every reader’s ideas must sweep the

Winding margin of a hundred miles.

The perspective that follows mountains blue — the imprisoned billows beating in vain — the wooded isles — the digression on the yew-tree— “Benlomond’s lofty, cloud-envelop’d head,” etc., are beautiful. A thunder-storm is a subject which has been often tried, yet our poet, in his grand picture, has interjected a circumstance, so far as I know, entirely original in

the gloom

Deep seam’d with frequent streaks of moving fire.

In his preface to the Storm, “the glens how dark between,” is noble highland landscape! The “rain ploughing the red mould,” too, is beautifully fancied. “Benlomond’s lofty, pathless top,” is a good expression; and the surrounding view from it is truly great: the

silver mist,

Beneath the beaming sun,

is well described; and here he has contrived to enliven his poem with a little of that passion which bids fair, I think, to usurp the modern muses altogether. I know not how far this episode is a beauty on the whole, but the swain’s wish to carry “some faint idea of the vision bright,” to entertain her “partial listening ear,” is a pretty thought. But, in my opinion, the most beautiful passages in the whole poem are the fowls crowding, in wintry frosts, to Lochlomond’s “hospitable flood;” their wheeling round; their lighting, mixing, diving, etc.; and the glorious description of the sportsman. This last is equal to anything in the “Seasons.” The idea of “the floating tribes distant seen, far glistering to the moon,” provoking his eye as he is obliged to leave them, is a noble ray of poetic genius.

The “howling winds,” the “hideous roar” of “the white cascades,” are all in the same style.

I forget that while I am thus holding forth, with the heedless warmth of an enthusiast, I am perhaps tiring you with nonsense. I must, however, mention that the last verse of the sixteenth page is one of the most elegant compliments I have ever seen. I must likewise notice that beautiful paragraph beginning “The gleaming lake,” etc. I dare not go into the particular beauties of the last two paragraphs, but they are admirably fine, and truly Ossianic. I must beg your pardon for this lengthened scrawl. I had no idea of it when I began — I should like to know who the author is; but, whoever he be, please present him with my grateful thanks for the entertainment he has afforded me.90

A friend of mine desired me to commission for him two books, Letters on the Religion essential to Man, a book you sent me before; and The World Unmasked, or the Philosopher the greatest Cheat. Send me them by the first opportunity. The Bible you sent me is truly elegant; I only wish it had been in two volumes. R. B.

90 The poem, entitled “An Address to Lochlomond,” is said to have been written by one of the masters of the High School of Edinburgh.

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CVIIL — TO THE EDITOR OF THE “STAR”.

November 8th, 1788.

Sir, — Notwithstanding the opprobrious epithets with which some of our philosophers and gloomy sectarians have branded our nature — the principle of universal selfishness, the proneness to all evil, they have given us — still, the detestation in which inhumanity to the distressed, or insolence to the fallen, are held by all mankind, shows that they are not natives of the human heart. Even the unhappy partner of our kind who is undone, the bitter consequence of his follies or his crimes — who but sympathises with the miseries of this ruined profligate brother? We forget the injuries, and feel for the man.

I went, last Wednesday, to my parish church, most cordially to join in grateful acknowledgment to the AUTHOR OF ALL GOOD for the consequent blessings of the glorious Revolution. To that auspicious event we owe no less than our liberties, civil and religious; 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.

Bred and educated in revolution principles, the principles of reason and common sense, it could not be any silly political prejudice which made my heart revolt at the harsh, abusive manner in which the reverend gentleman mentioned the House of Stuart, and which, I am afraid, was too much the language of the day. We may rejoice sufficiently in our deliverance from past evils, without cruelly raking up the ashes of those whose misfortune it was, perhaps as much as their crime, to be the authors of those evils; and we may bless GOD for all His goodness to us as a nation, 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.

“The bloody and tyrannical House of Stuart” may be said with propriety and justice, when compared with the present Royal Family, and the sentiments of our days; but is there no allowance to be made for the manners of the times? Were the royal contemporaries of the Stuarts more attentive to their subjects’ rights? 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?

The simple state of the case, Sir, seems to be this: — At that period, the science of government, the knowledge of the true relation between king and subject, was, like other sciences and other knowledge, just in its infancy, emerging from dark ages of ignorance and barbarity.

The Stuarts only contended for prerogatives which they knew their predecessors enjoyed, and which they saw their contemporaries enjoying; but these prerogatives were inimical to the happiness of a nation and the rights of subjects.

In this contest between prince and people, the consequence of that light of science which had lately dawned over Europe, the monarch of France, for example, was victorious over the struggling liberties of his people: with us, luckily, the monarch failed, and his unwarrantable pretensions fell a sacrifice to our rights and happiness. Whether it was owing to the wisdom of leading individuals, or to the justling of parties, I cannot pretend to determine; but, likewise, happily for us, the kingly power was shifted into another branch of the family, who, as they owed the throne solely to the call of a free people, could claim nothing inconsistent with the covenanted terms which placed them there.

The Stuarts have been condemned and laughed at, for the folly and impracticability of their attempts in 1715, and 1745. That they failed, I bless GOD; but cannot join in the ridicule against them. Who does not know that the abilities or defects of leaders and commanders are often hidden, until put to the touchstone of exigency; and that there is a caprice of fortune, an omnipotence in particular accidents and conjunctures of circumstances, which exalt us as heroes, or brand us as madmen, just as they are for or against us?

Man, Mr. Publisher, is a strange, weak, inconsistent being: who would believe, Sir, that in this our Augustan age of liberality and refinement, while we seem so justly sensible and jealous of our rights and liberties, and animated with such indignation against the very memory of those who would have subverted them — that a certain people under our national protection should complain, not against our monarch and a few favourite advisers, but against our WHOLE LEGISLATIVE BODY, for similar oppression, and almost in the very same terms, as our forefathers did of the House 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 be as able and enlightened as the English Convention was in 1688; and that their posterity will celebrate the centenary of their deliverance from us, as duly and sincerely, as we do ours from the oppressive measures of the wrong-headed House of Stuart.

To conclude, Sir; let every man who has a tear for the many miseries incident to humanity, feel for a family illustrious as any in Europe, and unfortunate beyond historic precedent; and let every Briton (and particularly every Scotsman) who ever looked with reverential pity on the dotage of a parent, cast a veil over the fatal mistake of the Kings of his forefathers.

R. B.

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CIX. — TO MRS. DUNLOP, AT MOREHAM MAINS.

MAUCHLINE, 13th November 1788.

Madam, — I had the very great pleasure of dining at Dunlop yesterday. Men are said to flatter women because they are weak, if it is so, poets must be weaker still; for Misses R. and K. and Miss G. M’K., with their flattering attentions, and artful compliments, absolutely turned my head. I own they did not lard me over as many a poet does his patron, but they so intoxicated me with their sly insinuations and delicate innuendos of compliment, that if it had not been for a lucky recollection, how much additional weight and lustre your good opinion and friendship must give me in that circle, I had certainly looked upon myself as a person of no small consequence. I dare not say one word how much I was charmed with the Major’s friendly welcome, elegant manner, and acute remark, lest I should be thought to balance my orientalisms of applause over-against the finest heifer in Ayrshire, which he made me a present of to help and adorn my farm-stock. As it was on hallow-day, I am determined annually as that day returns, to decorate her horns with an ode of gratitude to the family of Dunlop.

So soon as I know of your arrival at Dunlop, I will take the first conveniency to dedicate a day, or perhaps two, to you and friendship, under the guarantee of the Major’s hospitality. There will soon be three score and ten miles of permanent distance between us; and now that your friendship and friendly correspondence is entwisted with the heart-strings of my enjoyment of life, I must indulge myself in a happy day of “the feast of reason and the flow of soul.”

R. B.

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CX. — TO DR. BLACKLOCK.

MAUCHLINE, November 15th, 1788.

Reverend and dear Sir, — As I hear nothing of your motions, but that you are, or were, out of town, I do not know where this may find you, or whether it will find you at all. I wrote you a long letter, dated from the land of matrimony, in June; but either it had not found you, or, what I dread more, it found you or Mrs. Blacklock in too precarious a state of health and spirits to take notice of an idle packet.

I have done many little things for Johnson since I had the pleasure of seeing you; and I have finished one piece, in the way of Pope’s “Moral Epistles;” but, from your silence, I have everything to fear, so I have only sent you two melancholy things, which I tremble to fear may too well suit the tone of your present feelings.

In a fortnight I move, bag and baggage, to Nithsdale; till then, my direction is at this place; after that period, it will be at Ellisland, near Dumfries. It would extremely oblige me, were it but half a line, to let me know how you are, and where you are. Can I be indifferent to the fate of a man to whom I owe so much — a man whom I not only esteem, but venerate?

My warmest good wishes and most respectful compliments to Mrs. Blacklock, and Miss Johnson, if she is with you.

I cannot conclude without telling you that I am more and more pleased with the step I took respecting “my Jean.” Two things, from my happy experience, I set down as apophthegms in life, — a wife’s head is immaterial, compared with her heart; and “Virtue’s (for wisdom, what poet pretends to it?) ways are ways of pleasantness, and all her paths are peace.” Adieu!

R. B.91

91 Here follow “The mother’s lament for the loss of her son,” and the song beginning “The lazy mist hangs from the brow of the hill.”

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CXI. — TO MRS. DUNLOP.

ELLISLAND, 17th December 1788.

My dear honoured friend, — Yours, dated Edinburgh, which I have just read, makes me very unhappy. “Almost blind and wholly deaf” are melancholy news of human nature; but when told of a much-loved and honoured friend, they carry misery in the sound. Goodness on your part, and gratitude on mine, began a tie which has gradually entwisted itself among the dearest chords of my bosom, and I tremble at the omens of your late and present ailing habit and shattered health. You miscalculate matters widely, when you forbid my waiting on you, lest it should hurt my worldly concerns. My small scale of farming is exceedingly more simple and easy than what you have lately seen at Moreham Mains. But, be that as it may, the heart of the man and the fancy of the poet are the two grand considerations for which I live: if miry ridges and dirty dunghills are to engross the best part of the functions of my soul immortal, I had better been a rook or a magpie at once, and then I should not have been plagued with any ideas superior to breaking of clods and picking up grubs; not to mention barn-door cocks of mallards, creatures with which I could almost exchange lives at any time. If you continue so deaf, I am afraid a visit will be no great pleasure to either of us; but if I hear you are got so well again as to be able to relish conversation, look you to it, Madam, for I will make my threatenings good. I am to be at the New-year-day fair of Ayr, and, by all that is sacred in the world, friend, I will come and see you.

Your meeting, which you so well describe, with your old schoolfellow and friend, was truly interesting. Out upon the ways of the world! They spoil these “social offsprings of the heart.” Two veterans of the “men of the world” would have met with little more heart-workings than two old hacks worn out on the road. Apropos, is not the Scotch phrase, “Auld lang syne,” exceedingly expressive? There is an old song and tune which has often thrilled through my soul. You know I am an enthusiast in old Scotch song. I shall give you the verses on the other sheet, as I suppose Mr. Kerr^92 will save you the postage.

Should auld acquaintance be forgot?

Light be the turf on the breast of the Heaven-inspired poet who composed this glorious fragment! There is more of the fire of native genius in it than in half a dozen of modern English Bacchanalians! Now I am on my hobbyhorse, I cannot help inserting two other old stanzas, which please me mightily: —

Go fetch to me a pint o’ wine, etc.

R. B.

92 Postmaster in Edinburgh.

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CXII. — TO MR. JOHN TENNANT.

December 22nd, 1788.

I yesterday tried my cask of whisky for the first time, and I assure you it does you great credit. It will bear five waters, strong: or six ordinary toddy. The whisky of this country is a most rascally liquor; and, by consequence, only drunk by the most rascally part of the inhabitants. I am persuaded, if you once get a footing here, you might do a great deal of business, in the way of consumpt; and should you commence distiller again, this is the native barley country. I am ignorant if, in your present way of dealing, you would think it worth your while to extend your business so far as this country-side. I write you this on the account of an accident, which I must take the merit of having partly designed too. A neighbour of mine, a John Currie, miller, in Carse Mill — a man who is, in a word, a very good man, even for a PS500 bargain — he and his wife were in my house the time I broke open the cask. They keep a country public-house and sell a great deal of foreign spirits, but all along thought that whisky would have degraded their house. They were perfectly astonished at my whisky, both for its taste and strength; and, by their desire, I write you to know if you could supply them with liquor of an equal quality, and what price. Please write me by first post, and direct to me at Ellisland, near Dumfries. If you could take a jaunt this way yourself, I have a spare spoon, knife, and fork, very much at your service. My compliments to Mrs. Tennant, and all the good folks in Glenconnel and Barguharrie.

R. B.

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CXIII. — TO MRS. DUNLOP.

ELLISLAND, New-year-day Morning, 1789.

This, dear Madam, is a morning of wishes, and would to God that I came under the Apostle James’s description! — the prayer of a righteous man availeth much. In that case, Madam, you should welcome in a year full of blessings: everything that obstructs or disturbs tranquillity and self-enjoyment should be removed, and every pleasure that frail humanity can taste, should be yours. I own myself so little a Presbyterian, that I approve of set times and seasons of more than ordinary acts of devotion, for breaking in on that habituated routine of life and thought, which is so apt to reduce our existence to a kind of instinct, or even sometimes, and with some minds, to a state very little superior to mere machinery.

This day; the first Sunday of May; a breezy blue-skyed noon some time about the beginning, and a hoary morning and calm sunny day about the end of autumn; these, time out of mind, have been with me a kind of holiday.

I believe I owe this to that glorious paper in the Spectator “The Vision of Mirza,” a piece that struck my young fancy before I was capable of fixing an idea to a word of three syllables: “On the fifth day of the moon, which, according to the custom of my forefathers, I always keep holy, after having washed myself, and offered up my morning devotions, I ascended the high hill of Bagdat, in order to pass the rest of the day in meditation and prayer.”

We know nothing, or next to nothing, of the substance or structure of our souls, so cannot account for those seeming caprices in them, that one should be particularly pleased with this thing, or struck with that, which, on minds of a different cast, makes no extraordinary impression. I have some favourite flowers in spring, among which are the mountain-daisy, the hare-bell, the fox-glove, the wild brier-rose, the budding birch, and the hoary hawthorn, that I view and hang over with particular delight. I never hear the loud, solitary whistle of the curlew in a summer noon, or the wild mixing cadence of a troop of grey plovers, in an autumnal morning, without feeling an elevation of soul like the enthusiasm of devotion or poetry. Tell me, my dear friend, to what can this be owing? Are we a piece of machinery, which, like the AEolian harp, passive, takes the impression of the passing accident? Or do these workings argue something within us above the trodden clod? I own myself partial to such proofs of those awful and important realities — a God that made all things — man’s immaterial and immortal nature — and a world of weal or woe beyond death and the grave.

R. B.

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CXIV. — TO DR. MOORE, LONDON.

ELLISLAND, 4th Jan. 1789.

Sir, — As often as I think of writing to you, which has been three or four times every week these six months, it gives me something so like the idea of an ordinary-sized statue offering at a conversation with the Rhodian Colossus, that my mind misgives me, and the affair always miscarries somewhere between purpose and resolve. I have at last got some business with you, and business letters are written by the style-book. I say my business is with you, Sir, for you never had any with me, except the business that benevolence has in the mansion of poverty.

The character and employment of a poet were formerly my pleasure, but are now my pride. I know that a very great deal of my late eclat was owing to the singularity of my situation, and the honest prejudice of Scotsmen; but still, as I said in the preface to my first edition, I do look upon myself as having some pretensions from nature to the poetic character. I have not a doubt but the knack, the aptitude, to learn the Muses’ trade, is a gift bestowed by Him “who forms the secret bias of the soul;” but I as firmly believe that excellence in the profession is the fruit of industry, labour, attention, and pains. At least I am resolved to try my doctrine by the test of experience. Another appearance from the press I put off to a very distant day, a day that may never arrive — but poesy I am determined to prosecute with all my vigour. Nature has given very few, if any, of the profession, the talents of shining in every species of composition. I shall try (for until trial it is impossible to know) whether she has qualified me to shine in any one. The worst of it is, by the time one has finished a piece, it has been so often viewed and reviewed before the mental eye, that one loses in a good measure the powers of critical discrimination. Here the best criterion I know is a friend — not only of abilities to judge, but with good-nature enough, like a prudent teacher with a young learner, to praise perhaps a little more than is exactly just, lest the thin-skinned animal fall into that most deplorable of all poetic diseases — heart-breaking despondency of himself. Dare I, Sir, already immensely indebted to your goodness, ask the additional obligation of your being that friend to me? I inclose you an essay of mine in a walk of poesy to me entirely new; I mean the epistle addressed to R. G., Esq., or Robert Graham, of Fintry, Esq., a gentleman of uncommon worth, to whom I lie under very great obligations. The story of the poem, like most of my poems, is connected with my own story, and to give you the one, I must give you something of the other. I cannot boast of Mr. Creech’s ingenuous fair dealing to me. He kept me hanging about Edinburgh from the 7th August 1787 until the 13th April 1788 before he would condescend to give a statement of affairs; nor had I got it even then, but for an angry letter I wrote him, which irritated his pride. “I could” not a “tale,” but a detail “unfold”; but what am I that should speak against the Lord’s anointed Bailie of Edinburgh?93

I believe I shall, in whole, PS100 copyright included, clear about PS400, some little odds; and even part of this depends upon what the gentleman has yet to settle with me. I give you this information, because you did me the honour to interest yourself much in my welfare. I give you this information, but I give it to yourself only, for I am still much in the gentleman’s mercy. Perhaps I injure the man in the idea I am sometimes tempted to have of him — God forbid I should. A little time will try, for in a month I shall go to town to wind up the business, if possible.

To give the rest of my story in brief, I have married “my Jean,” and taken a farm; with the first step I have every day more and more reason to be satisfied; with the last, it is rather the reverse. I have a younger brother, who supports my aged mother, another still younger brother, and three sisters, in a farm. On my last return from Edinburgh it cost me about PS180 to save them from ruin.

Not that I have lost so much — I only interposed between my brother and his impending fate by the loan of so much. I give myself no airs on this, for it was mere selfishness on my part; I was conscious that the wrong scale of the balance was pretty heavily charged, and I thought that throwing a little filial piety and fraternal affection into the scale in my favour, might help to smooth matters at the grand reckoning. There is still one thing would make my circumstances quite easy — I have an excise officer’s commission, and I live in the midst of a country division. My request to Mr. Graham, who is one of the commissioners of excise, was, if in his power, to procure me that division. If I were very sanguine, I might hope that some of my great patrons might procure me a treasury warrant for supervisor, surveyor-general, etc.

Thus, secure of a livelihood, “to thee, sweet poetry, delightful maid,”94 I would consecrate my future days.

R. B.

93 Creech; remarkable for his reluctance to settle accounts.

94 Goldsmith’s “Deserted Village.”

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CXV. — TO MR. ROBERT AINSLIE.

ELLISLAND, January 6th, 1789.

Many happy returns of the season to you, my dear Sir! May you be comparatively happy, up to your comparative worth among the sons of men; which wish would, I am sure, make you one of the most blessed of the human race.

I do not know if passing a “Writer to the Signet” be a trial of scientific merit, or a mere business of friends and interest. However it be, let me quote you my two favourite passages, which, though I have repeated them ten thousand times, still they rouse my manhood and steel my resolution like inspiration.

On Reason build resolve.

That column of true majesty in man.

YOUNG.

Hear, Alfred, hero of the slate,

Thy genius heaven’s high will declare;

The triumph of the truly great,

Is never, never to despair!

Is never to despair!

MASQUE OF ALFRED.

I grant you enter the lists of life, to struggle for bread, business, notice, and distinction, in common with hundreds. But who are they? Men like yourself, and of that aggregate body your compeers, seven-tenths of them come short of your advantages, natural and accidental; while two of those that remain, either neglect their parts, as flowers blooming in a desert, or misspend their strength like a bull goring a bramble bush.

But to change the theme: I am still catering for Johnson’s publication; and among others, I have brushed up the following old favourite song a little, with a view to your worship. I have only altered a word here and there; but if you like the humour of it, we shall think of a stanza or two to add to it. R. B.

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CXVI. — TO PROFESSOR DUGALD STEWART.

ELLISLAND, 20th Jan. 1789.

Sir, — The inclosed sealed packet I sent to Edinburgh, a few days after I had the happiness of meeting you in Ayrshire, but you were gone for the Continent. I have now added a few more of my productions, those for which I am indebted to the Nithsdale Muses. The piece inscribed to R. G., Esq., is a copy of verses I sent Mr. Graham, of Fintry, accompanying a request for his assistance in a matter to me of very great moment. To that gentleman I am already doubly indebted; for deeds of kindness of serious import to my dearest interests, done in a manner grateful to the delicate feelings of sensibility. This poem is a species of composition new to me, but I do not intend it shall be my last essay of the kind, as you will see by the “Poet’s Progress.” These fragments, if my design succeed, are but a small part of the intended whole. I propose it shall be the work of my utmost exertions, ripened by years; of course I do not wish it much known. The fragment beginning “A little upright, pert, tart,” etc., I have not shown to man living, till I now send it you. It forms the postulata, the axioms, the definition of a character, which, if it appear at all, shall be placed in a variety of lights. This particular part I send you merely as a sample of my hand at portrait-sketching; but, lest idle conjecture should pretend to point out the original, please to let it be for your single, sole inspection.

Need I make any apology for this trouble, to a gentleman who has treated me with such marked benevolence and peculiar kindness; who has entered into my interests with so much zeal, and on whose critical decisions I can so fully depend? A poet as I am by trade, these decisions are to me of the last consequence. My late transient acquaintance among some of the mere rank and file of greatness, I resign with ease; but to the distinguished champions of genius and learning, I shall be ever ambitious of being known. The native genius and accurate discernment in Mr. Stewart’s critical strictures; the justness (iron justice, for he has no bowels of compassion for a poor poetic sinner) of Dr. Gregory’s remarks, and the delicacy of Professor Dalzel’s taste, I shall ever revere.

I shall be in Edinburgh some time next month. — I have the honour to be, Sir, your highly obliged, and very humble servant, R. B.

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CXVII. — TO MR. ROBERT CLEGHORN, SAUGHTON MILLS.

ELLISLAND, 23rd Jan. 1789.

I must take shame and confusion of face to myself, my dear friend and brother Farmer, that I have not written you much sooner. The truth is I have been so tossed about between Ayrshire and Nithsdale that, till now I have got my family here, I have had time to think of nothing except now and then a stanza or so as I rode along. Were it not for our gracious monarch’s cursed tax of postage I had sent you one or two pieces of some length that I have lately done. I have no idea of the Press. I am more able to support myself and family, though in a humble, yet an independent way; and I mean, just at my leisure, to pay court to the tuneful sisters in the hope that they may one day enable me to carry on a work of some importance. The following are a few verses which I wrote in a neighbouring gentleman’s hermitage to which he is so good as let me have a key.

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CXVIII. — TO BISHOP GEDDES, EDINBURGH.

ELLISLAND, 3rd Feb. 1789.

VENERABLE FATHER, — As I am conscious that wherever I am, you do me the honour to interest yourself in my welfare, it gives me pleasure to inform you, that I am here at last, stationary in the serious business of life, and have now not only the retired leisure, but the hearty inclination, to attend to those great and important questions, — what I am? where I am? and for what I am destined.

In that first concern, the conduct of the man, there was ever but one side on which I was habitually blameable, and there I have secured myself in the way pointed out by nature and nature’s God. I was sensible that, to so helpless a creature as a poor poet, a wife and family were incumbrances, which a species of prudence would bid him shun; but when the alternative was, being at eternal warfare with myself, on account of habitual follies, to give them no worse name, which no general example, no licentious wit, no sophistical infidelity, would, to me, ever justify, I must have been a fool to have hesitated, and a madman to have made another choice. Besides, I had in “my Jean” a long and much-loved fellow-creature’s happiness or misery among my hands, and who could trifle with such a deposit?

In the affair of a livelihood, I think myself tolerably secure: I have good hopes of my farm, but should they fail, I have an excise commission, which, on my simple petition, will, at any time, procure me bread. There is a certain stigma affixed to the character of an excise officer, but I do not pretend to borrow honour from my profession; and though the salary be comparatively small, it is luxury to anything that the first twenty-five years of my life taught me to expect.

Thus, with a rational aim and method in life, you may easily guess, my reverend and much-honoured friend, that my characteristical trade is not forgotten. I am, if possible, more than ever an enthusiast to the Muses. I am determined to study man and nature, and in that view incessantly; and to try if the ripening and corrections of years can enable me to produce something worth preserving.

You will see in your book, which I beg your pardon for detaining so long, that I have been tuning my lyre on the banks of Nith. Some large poetic plans that are floating in my imagination, or partly put in execution, I shall impart to you when I have the pleasure of meeting with you; which, if you are then in Edinburgh, I shall have about the beginning of March.

That acquaintance, worthy Sir, with which you were pleased to honour me, you must still allow me to challenge; for, with whatever unconcern I give up my transient connection with the merely great, I cannot lose the patronising notice of the learned and good without the bitterest regret.

R. B.

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CXIX. — TO MR. JAMES BURNESS.

ELLISLAND, 9th Feb. 1789.

MY DEAR SIR, — Why I did not write to you long ago is what, even on the rack, I could not answer. If you can in your mind form an idea of indolence, dissipation, hurry, cares, change of country, entering on untried scenes of life, all combined, you will save me the trouble of a blushing apology. It could not be want of regard for a man for whom I had a high esteem before I knew him — an esteem which has much increased since I did know him; and this caveat entered, I shall plead guilty to any other indictment with which you shall please to charge me.

After I parted from you, for many months my life was one continued scene of dissipation. Here at last I am become stationary, and have taken a farm and — a wife.

The farm is beautifully situated on the Nith, a large river that runs by Dumfries, and falls into the Solway frith. I have gotten a lease of my farm as long as I please; but how it may turn out is just a guess, and it is yet to improve and inclose, etc.; however, I have good hopes of my bargain on the whole.

My wife is my Jean, with whose story you are partly acquainted. I found I had a much-loved fellow-creature’s happiness or misery among my hands, and I durst not trifle with so sacred a deposit. Indeed, I have not any reason to repent the step I have taken, as I have attached myself to a very good wife, and have shaken myself loose of every bad failing.

I have found my book a very profitable business, and with the profits of it I have begun life pretty decently. Should fortune not favour me in farming, as I have no great faith in her fickle ladyship, I have provided myself in another resource, which, however some folks may affect to despise it, is still a comfortable shift in the day of misfortune. In the hey-day of my fame, a gentleman, whose name at least I daresay you know, as his estate lies somewhere near Dundee, Mr. Graham, of Fintry, one of the commissioners of Excise, offered me the commission of an excise officer. I thought it prudent to accept the offer; and, accordingly, I took my instructions, and have my commission by me. Whether I may ever do duty, or be a penny the better for it, is what I do not know; but I have the comfortable assurance that, come whatever ill fate will, I can, on my simple petition to the Excise Board, get into employ.

We have lost poor uncle Robert this winter. He has long been very weak, and with very little alteration on him; he expired 3rd January.

His son William has been with me this winter, and goes in May to be an apprentice to a mason. His other son, the eldest, John, comes to me I expect in summer. They are both remarkably stout young fellows, and promise to do well. His only daughter, Fanny, has been with me ever since her father’s death, and I purpose keeping her in my family till she is woman grown, and fit for better service. She is one of the cleverest girls, and has one of the most amiable dispositions I have ever seen.

All friends in this country and Ayrshire are well. Remember me to all friends in the north. My wife joins me in compliments to Mrs. B. and family. — I am ever, my dear cousin, yours sincerely,

R. B.95

95 “Fanny Burns, the Poet’s relation, merited all the commendations he has here bestowed. I remember her while she lived at Ellisland, and better still as the wife of Adam Armour, the brother of bonnie Jean.” — CUNNINGHAM.

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CXX. — TO MRS. DUNLOP.

ELLISLAND, 4th March 1789.

Here am I, my honoured friend, returned safe from the capital. To a man who has a home, however humble or remote — if that home is like mine, the scene of domestic comfort — the bustle of Edinburgh will soon be a business of sickening disgust.

Vain pomp and glory of this world, I hate you!

When I must skulk into a corner, lest the rattling equipage of some gaping blockhead should mangle me in the mire, I am tempted to exclaim— “What merits has he had, or what demerit have I had, in some state of pre-existence, that he is ushered into this state of being with the sceptre of rule, and the key of riches in his puny fist, and I am kicked into the world, the sport of folly, or the victim of pride?” I have read somewhere of a monarch (in Spain I think it was) who was so out of humour with the Ptolemean system of astronomy, that he said, had he been of the Creator’s council, he could have saved him a great deal of labour and absurdity. I will not defend this blasphemous speech; but often, as I have glided with humble stealth through the pomp of Princes Street, it has suggested itself to me, as an improvement on the present human figure, that a man, in proportion to his own conceit of his consequence in the world, could have pushed out the longitude of his common size, as a snail pushes out his horns, or as we draw out a perspective. This trifling alteration, not to mention the prodigious saving it would be in the tear and wear of the neck and limb-sinews of many of his majesty’s liege-subjects, in the way of tossing the head and tip-toe strutting, would evidently turn out a vast advantage, in enabling us at once to adjust the ceremonials in making a bow, or making way to a great man, and that too within a second of the precise spherical angle of reverence, or an inch of the particular point of respectful distance, which the important creature itself requires, as a measuring-glance at its towering altitude would determine the affair like instinct.

You are right, Madam, in your idea of poor Mylne’s poem, which he has addressed to me. The piece has a good deal of merit, but it has one great fault — it is, by far, too long. Besides, my success has encouraged such a shoal of ill-spawned monsters to crawl into public notice, under the title of Scottish Poets, that the very term Scottish Poetry borders on the burlesque. When I write to Mr. Carfrae, I shall advise him rather to try one of his deceased friend’s English pieces. I am prodigiously hurried with my own matters, else I would have requested a perusal of all Mylne’s poetic performances, and would have offered his friends my assistance in either selecting or correcting what would be proper for the press. What it is that occupies me so much, and perhaps a little oppresses my present spirits, shall fill up a paragraph in some future letter. In the meantime, allow me to close this epistle with a few lines done by a friend of mine…. I give you them, that, as you have seen the original, you may guess whether one or two alterations I have ventured to make in them, be any real improvement.

Like the fair plant that from our touch withdraws,

Shrink, mildly fearful, even from applause,

Be all a mother’s fondest hope can dream,

And all you are, my charming Rachel, seem.

Straight as the fox-glove, ere her bells disclose,

Mild as the maiden-blushing hawthorn blows,

Fair as the fairest of each lovely kind,

Your form shall be the image of your mind;

Your manners shall so true your soul express,

That all shall long to know the worth they guess;

Congenial hearts shall greet with kindred love,

And even sick’ning envy must approve.96

R. B.

96 These lines are Mrs. Dunlop’s own, addressed to her daughter.

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CXXI. — TO MRS. M’LEHOSE (FORMERLY CLARINDA).

ELLISLAND, Mar. 9th, 1789.

Madam, — The letter you wrote me to Heron’s carried its own answer. You forbade me to write you unless I was willing to plead guilty to a certain indictment you were pleased to bring against me. As I am convinced of my own innocence, and, though conscious of high imprudence and egregious folly, can lay my hand on my breast and attest the rectitude of my heart, you will pardon me, Madam, if I do not carry my complaisance so far as humbly to acquiesce in the name of “Villain” merely out of compliment to your opinion, much as I esteem your judgment and warmly as I regard your worth.

I have already told you, and I again aver it, that, at the time alluded to, I was not under the smallest moral tie to Mrs. Burns; nor did I, nor could I, then know all the powerful circumstances that omnipotent necessity was busy laying in wait for me. When you call over the scenes that have passed between us, you will survey the conduct of an honest man struggling successfully with temptations the most powerful that ever beset humanity, and preserving untainted honour in situations where the austerest virtue would have forgiven a fall; situations that, I will dare to say not a single individual of all his kind, even with half his sensibility and passion, could have encountered without ruin; and I leave you, Madam, to guess how such a man is likely to digest an accusation of “perfidious treachery.”

When I shall have regained your good opinion, perhaps I may venture to solicit your friendship; but, be that as it may, the first of her sex I ever knew shall always be the object of my warmest good wishes.

ROBT. BURNS.

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CXXIL — TO DR. MOORE.

ELLISLAND, 23rd March 1789.

Sir, — The gentleman who will deliver you this is a Mr. Nielson, a worthy clergyman in my neighbourhood, and a very particular acquaintance of mine. As I have troubled him with this packet, I must turn him over to your goodness, to recompense him for it in a way in which he much needs your assistance, and where you can effectually serve him. Mr. Nielson is on his way for France, to wait on his Grace of Queensberry, on some little business of a good deal of importance to him, and he wishes for your instructions respecting the most eligible mode of travelling, etc., for him, when he has crossed the channel. I should not have dared to take this liberty with you, but that I am told, by those who have the honour of your personal acquaintance, that to be a poor honest Scotsman is a letter of recommendation to you, and that to have it in your power to serve such a character, gives you much pleasure.

The inclosed ode is a compliment to the memory of the late Mrs. Oswald of Auchencruive. You probably knew her personally, an honour of which I cannot boast; but I spent my early years in the neighbourhood, and among her servants and tenants. I know that she was detested with the most heartfelt cordiality. However, in the particular part of her conduct which roused my poetic wrath, she was much less blameable. In January last, on my road to Ayrshire, I had put up at Bailie Whigham’s, in Sanquhar, the only tolerable inn in the place. The frost was keen, and the grim evening and howling wind were ushering in a night of snow and drift. My horse and I were both much fatigued with the labours of the day, and just as my friend the Bailie and I were bidding defiance to the storm, over a smoking bowl, in wheels the funeral pageantry of the late great Mrs. Oswald, and poor I am forced to brave all the horrors of the tempestuous night, and jade my horse, my young favourite horse, whom I had just christened Pegasus, twelve miles farther on, through the wildest moors and hills of Ayrshire, to New Cumnock, the next inn. The powers of poesy and prose sink under me, when I would describe what I felt. Suffice it to say, that when a good fire at New Cumnock had so far recovered my frozen sinews, I sat down and wrote the inclosed ode.

I was at Edinburgh lately, and settled finally with Mr. Creech; and I must own, that at last, he has been amicable and fair with me.

R. B.

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CXXIII. — TO HIS BROTHER, MR. WILLIAM BURNS.

ISLE, March 25th 1789.

I have stolen from my corn-sowing this minute to write a line to accompany your shirt and hat, for I can no more. Your sister Nannie arrived yesternight, and begs to be remembered to you. Write me every opportunity — never mind postage. My head, too, is as addle as an egg this morning, with dining abroad yesterday. I received yours by the mason. Forgive me this foolish looking scrawl of an epistle. — I am ever, my dear William, yours,

R. B.

P.S. — If you are not then gone from Longtown, I’ll write you a long letter by this day se’ennight. If you should not succeed in your tramps, don’t be dejected, or take any rash step — return to us in that case, and we will court Fortune’s better humour. Remember this, I charge you.

R. B.

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CXXIV. — TO MR. HILL, BOOKSELLER, EDINBURGH.

ELLISLAND, 2nd April 1789.

I will make no excuse, my dear Bibliopolus (God forgive me for murdering language!) that I have sat down to write you on this vile paper.

It is economy, Sir; it is that cardinal virtue, prudence; so I beg you will sit down, and either compose or borrow a panegyric. If you are going to borrow, apply to^97 … to compose, or rather to compound, something very clever on my remarkable frugality; that I write to one of my most esteemed friends on this wretched paper, which was originally intended for the venal fist of some drunken exciseman, to take dirty notes in a miserable vault of an ale-cellar.

O Frugality! thou mother of ten thousand blessings — thou cook of fat beef and dainty greens! — thou manufacturer of warm Shetland hose, and comfortable surtouts! — thou old housewife, darning thy decayed stockings with thy ancient spectacles on thy aged nose! — lead me, hand me in thy clutching palsied fist, up those heights, and through those thickets, hitherto inaccessible, and impervious to my anxious, weary feet: — not those Parnassian crags, bleak and barren, where the hungry worshippers of fame are, breathless, clambering, hanging between heaven and hell; but those glittering cliffs of Potosi, where the all-sufficient, all-powerful deity, wealth, holds his immediate court of joy and pleasures; where the sunny exposure of plenty, and the hot walls of profusion, produce those blissful fruits of luxury, exotics in this world, and natives of paradise! — Thou withered sibyl, my sage conductress, usher me into thy refulgent, adored presence! — The power, splendid and potent as he now is, was once the puling nursling of thy faithful care and tender arms! Call me thy son, thy cousin, thy kinsman, or favourite, and adjure the god by the scenes of his infant years, no longer to repulse me as a stranger, or an alien, but to favour me with his peculiar countenance and protection! He daily bestows his great kindness on the undeserving and the worthless — assure him that I bring ample documents of meritorious demerits! Pledge yourself for me, that, for the glorious cause of lucre, I will do anything, be anything; but the horse-leech of private oppression, or the vulture of public robbery!

But to descend from heroics.

I want a Shakespeare; I want likewise an English dictionary, — Johnson’s, I suppose, is best. In these and all my prose commissions, the cheapest is always the best for me. There is a small debt of honour that I owe Mr. Robert Cleghorn, in Saughton Mills, my worthy friend, and your well-wisher. Please give him, and urge him to take it, the first time you see him, ten shillings worth of anything you have to sell, and place it to my account.

The library scheme that I mentioned to you is already begun under the direction of Captain Riddel. There is another in emulation of it going on at Closeburn, under the auspices of Mr. Monteith of Closeburn, which will be on a greater scale than ours. Captain Riddel gave his infant society a great many of his old books, else I had written you on that subject; but, one of these days, I shall trouble you with a commission for “The Monkland Friendly Society,” a copy of The Spectator, Mirror, and Lounger, Man of Feeling, Man of the World, Guthrie’s Geographical Grammar, with some religious pieces, will likely be our first order.

When I grow richer, I will write to you on gilt-post, to make amends for this sheet. At present every guinea has a five guinea errand with, my dear Sir, your faithful, poor, but honest friend,

R. B.

97 Creech? or Ramsay of The Courant?

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CXXV. — TO MRS. M’MURDO, DRUMLANRIG.

ELLISLAND, 2nd May 1789.

Madam, — I have finished the piece which had the happy fortune to be honoured with your approbation; and never did little Miss, with more sparkling pleasure, show her applauded sampler to partial Mamma, than I now send my poem to you and Mr. M’Murdo,98 if he is returned to Drumlanrig. You cannot easily imagine what thin-skinned animals — what sensitive plants poor poets are. How do we shrink into the imbittered corner of self-abasement, when neglected or condemned by those to whom we look up! and how do we, in erect importance, add another cubit to our stature on being noticed and applauded by those whom we honour and respect! My late visit to Drumlanrig has, I can tell you, Madam, given me a balloon waft up Parnassus, where, on my fancied elevation, I regard my poetic self with no small degree of complacency. Surely with all their sins, the rhyming tribe are not ungrateful creatures — I recollect your goodness to your humble guest — I see Mr. M’Murdo adding to the politeness of the gentleman, the kindness of a friend, and my heart swells as it would burst, with warm emotions and ardent wishes! It may be it is not gratitude — it may be a mixed sensation. That strange, shifting, doubling animal, MAN, is so generally, at best, but a negative, often a worthless creature, that we cannot see real goodness and native worth, without feeling the bosom glow with sympathetic approbation. With every sentiment of grateful respect, I have the honour to be, Madam, your obliged and grateful humble servant,

R. B.

98 The piece beginning — There was a lass and she was fair.

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CXXVI. — TO MR. CUNNINGHAM.

ELL ISLAND, 4th May 1789.

My dear Sir, — Your duty-free favour of the 25th April I received two days ago; I will not say I perused it with pleasure; that is the cold compliment of ceremony; I perused it, Sir, with delicious satisfaction; — in short, it is such a letter, that not you, nor your friend, but the legislature, by express proviso in their postage laws, should frank. A letter informed with the soul of friendship is such an honour to human nature, that they should order it free ingress and egress to and from their bags and mails, as an encouragement and mark of distinction to supereminent virtue.

I have just put the last hand to a little poem, which I think will be something to your taste.99 One morning lately, as I was out pretty early in the fields, sowing some grass seeds, I heard the burst of a shot from a neighbouring plantation, and presently a poor little wounded hare came crippling by me. You will guess my indignation at the inhuman fellow who could shoot a hare at this season, when all of them have young ones. Indeed there is something in that business of destroying, for our sport, individuals in the animal creation that do not injure us materially, which I could never reconcile to my ideas of virtue.

Let me know how you like my poem. I am doubtful whether it would not be an improvement to keep out the last stanza but one altogether.

Cruikshank is a glorious production of the author of man. You, he, and the noble Colonel^100 of the Crochallan Fencibles are to me

Dear as the ruddy drops which warm my heart.

I have got a good mind to make verses on you all, to the tune of “Three guid fellows ayont the glen”

R. B.

99 See the poem on the “Wounded Hare.”

100 That is, William Dunbar, W.S.

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CXXVIL — TO MR. RICHARD BROWN.

MAUCHLINE, 21st May 1789.

My Dear Friend, — I was in the country by accident, and hearing of your safe arrival, I could not resist the temptation of wishing you joy on your return — wishing you would write to me before you sail again — wishing that you would always set me down as your bosom friend — wishing you long life and prosperity, and that every good thing may attend you — wishing Mrs. Brown and your little ones as free of the evils of this world as is consistent with humanity — wishing you and she were to make two at the ensuing lying-in, with which Mrs. B. threatens very soon to favour me — wishing I had longer time to write to you at present; and, finally, wishing that if there is to be another state of existence, Mrs. Brown, Mrs. Burns, our little ones of both families, and you and I, in some snug retreat, may make a jovial party to all eternity!

My direction is at Ellisland, near Dumfries. — Yours,

R. B.

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CXXVIIL — TO MR. ROBERT AINSLIE.

ELLISLAND, 8th June 1789.

MY DEAR FRIEND, — I am perfectly ashamed of myself when I look at the date of your last. It is not that I forget the friend of my heart and the companion of my peregrinations; but I have been condemned to drudgery beyond sufferance, though not, thank God, beyond redemption. I have had a collection of poems by a lady put into my hands to prepare them for the press; which horrid task, with sowing corn with my own hand, a parcel of masons, wrights, plasterers, etc., to attend to, roaming on business through Ayrshire — all this was against me, and the very first dreadful article was of itself too much for me.

13th. I have not had a moment to spare from incessant toil since the 8th. Life, my dear Sir, is a serious matter. You know by experience that a man’s individual self is a good deal, but believe me, a wife and family of children, whenever you have the honour to be a husband and a father, will show you that your present and most anxious hours of solitude are spent on trifles. The welfare of those who are very dear to us, whose only support, hope, and stay we are — this, to a generous mind, is another sort of more important object of care than any concerns whatever which centre merely in the individual. On the other hand, let no young, rakehelly dog among you, make a song of his pretended liberty and freedom from care. If the relations we stand in to king, country, kindred, and friends, be anything but the visionary fancies of dreaming metaphysicians; if religion, virtue, magnanimity, generosity, humanity and justice, be ought but empty sounds; then the man who may be said to live only for others, for the beloved, honourable female, whose tender faithful embrace endears life, and for the helpless little innocents who are to be the men and women, the worshippers of his God, the subjects of his king, and the support, nay the very vital existence of his COUNTRY, in the ensuing age; — compare such a man with any fellow whatever, who, whether he bustle and push in business among labourers, clerks, statesmen; or whether he roar and rant, and drink and sing in taverns — a fellow over whose grave no one will breathe a single heigh-ho, except from the cobweb-tie of what is called good fellowship — who has no view nor aim but what terminates in himself — if there be any grovelling earth-born wretch of our species, a renegade to common sense, who would fain believe that the noble creature, man, is no better than a sort of fungus, generated out of nothing, nobody knows how, and soon dissipating in nothing, nobody knows where; such a stupid beast, such a crawling reptile, might balance the foregoing unexaggerated comparison, but no one else would have the patience.

Forgive me, my dear Sir, for this long silence. To make you amends, I shall send you soon, and more encouraging still, without any postage, one or two rhymes of my later manufacture.

R. B.

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CXXIX. — TO MRS. DUNLOP.

ELLISLAND, 21st June 1789.

Dear Madam, — Will you take the effusions, the miserable effusions of low spirits, just as they flow from their bitter spring? I know not of any particular cause for this worst of all my foes besetting me; but for some time my soul has been beclouded with a thickening atmosphere of evil imaginations and gloomy presages.

Monday Evening.

I have just heard Mr. Kilpatrick 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, my honoured friend, 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 existence 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.

Whatever mitigates the woes, or increases the happiness of others, this is my criterion of goodness; and whatever injures society at large, or any individual in it, this is my measure of iniquity.

What think you, Madam, of my creed? I trust that I have said nothing that will lessen me in the eye of one, whose good opinion I value almost next to the approbation of my own mind.

R. B.

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CXXX. — TO MISS HELEN MARIA WILLIAMS.

ELLISLAND, 1789.

Madam, — Of the many problems in the nature of that wonderful creature, man, this is one of the most extraordinary — that he shall go on from day to day, from week to week, from month to month, or perhaps from year to year, suffering a hundred times more in an hour from the impotent consciousness of neglecting what he ought to do, than the very doing of it would cost him. I am deeply indebted to you, first, for a most elegant poetic compliment; then for a polite, obliging letter; and, lastly, for your excellent poem on the Slave Trade; and yet, wretch that I am! though the debts were debts of honour, and the creditor a lady, I have put off and put off even the very acknowledgment of the obligation, until you must indeed be the very angel I take you for, if you can forgive me.

Your poem I have read with the highest pleasure. I have a way whenever I read a book — I mean a book in our own trade, Madam, a poetic one, and when it is my own property — that I take a pencil and mark at the ends of verses, or note on margins and odd paper, little criticisms of approbation or disapprobation as I peruse along. I will make no apology for presenting you with a few unconnected thoughts that occurred to me in my repeated perusals of your poem. I want to show you that I have honesty enough to tell you what I take to be truths, even when they are not quite on the side of approbation; and I do it in the firm faith that you have equal greatness of mind to hear them with pleasure. [Here follows a list of strictures.]

I had lately the honour of a letter from Dr. Moore, where he tells me that he has sent me some books; they are not yet come to hand, but I hear they are on the way.

Wishing you all success in your progress in the path of fame, and that you may equally escape the danger of stumbling through incautious speed, or losing ground through loitering neglect, I am, etc.

R. B.

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CXXXI. — TO MR. ROBERT GRAHAM, OF FINTRY.

ELLISLAND, 31st july 1789.

Sir, — The language of gratitude has been so prostituted by servile adulation and designing flattery that I know not how to express myself when I would acknowledge receipt of your last letter. I beg and hope, ever-honoured “Friend of my life and patron of my rhymes,” that you will always give me credit for the sincerest, chastest gratitude. I dare call the Searcher of hearts and Author of all Goodness to witness how truly grateful I am.

Mr. Mitchell^101 did not wait my calling on him, but sent me a kind letter, giving me a hint of the business; and yesterday he entered with the most friendly ardour into my views and interests. He seems to think, and from my private knowledge I am certain he is right, that removing the officer who now does, and for these many years has done, duty in the Division in the middle of which I live, will be productive of at least no disadvantage to the revenue, and may likewise be done without any detriment to him. Should the Honourable Board [of Excise] think so, and should they deem it eligible to appoint me to officiate in his present place, I am then at the top of my wishes. The emoluments in my office will enable me to carry on, and enjoy those improvements on my farm, which but for this additional assistance, I might in a year or two have abandoned. Should it be judged improper to place me in this Division, I am deliberating whether I had not better give up my farming altogether, and go into the Excise whenever I can find employment. Now that the salary is PS50 per annum, the Excise is surely a much superior object to a farm, which, without some foreign assistance, must for half a lease be a losing bargain. The worst of it is — I know there are some respectable characters who do me the honour to interest themselves in my welfare and behaviour, and, as leaving the farm so soon may have an unsteady, giddy-headed appearance, I had better perhaps lose a little money than hazard their esteem.

You see, Sir, with what freedom I lay before you all my little matters — little indeed to the world, but of the most important magnitude to me…. Were it not for a very few of our kind, the very existence of magnanimity, generosity, and all their kindred virtues, would be as much a question with metaphysicians as the existence of witchcraft. Perhaps the nature of man is not so much to blame for this, as the situation in which by some miscarriage or other he is placed in this world. The poor, naked, helpless wretch, with such voracious appetites and such a famine of provision for them, is under a cursed necessity of turning selfish in his own defence. Except a few instances of original scoundrelism, thorough-paced selfishness is always the work of time. Indeed, in a little time, we generally grow so attentive to ourselves and so regardless of others that I have often in poetic frenzy looked on this world as one vast ocean, occupied and commoved by innumerable vortices, each whirling round its centre. These vortices are the children of men. The great design and, if I may say so, merit of each particular vortex consists in how widely it can extend the influence of its circle, and how much floating trash it can suck in and absorb.

I know not why I have got into this preaching vein, except it be to show you that it is not my ignorance but my knowledge of mankind which makes me so much admire your goodness to me.

I shall return your books very soon. I only wish to give Dr. Adam Smith one other perusal, which I will do in one or two days.

R. B.

101 A collector in the Excise.

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CXXXIL — TO DAVID SILLAR, MERCHANT, IRVINE.10^2

ELLISLAND, 5 Aug. 1789.

My Dear Sir, — I was half in thoughts not to have written to you at all, by way of revenge for the two damn’d business letters you sent me. I wanted to know all about your publications — your news, your hopes, fears, etc., in commencing poet in print. In short, I wanted you to write to Robin like his old acquaintance Davie, and not in the style of Mr. Tare to Mr. Tret, as thus: —

“Mr. Tret. — Sir, — This comes to advise you that fifteen barrels of herrings were, by the blessing of God, shipped safe on board the Lovely Janet, Q.D.C., Duncan Mac-Leerie, master, etc.”

I hear you have commenced married man — so much the better. I know not whether the nine gipsies are jealous of my lucky, but they are a good deal shyer since I could boast the important relation of husband.

I have got about eleven subscribers for your book…. My best compliments to Mrs. Sillar, and believe me to be, dear Davie, ever yours,

ROBT. BURNS.

102 This letter was first published in 1879. The original is probably lost, but a copy is to be found in the minute-book of the Irvine Burns Club. Sillar was “Davie, a brother poet.”

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CXXXIII. — TO MR. JOHN LOGAN, OF KNOCK SHINNOCK.

ELLISLAND, NEAR DUMFRIES, 7th Aug. 1789.

Dear Sir, — I intended to have written you long ere now, and, as I told you, I had gotten three stanzas on my way in a poetic epistle to you; but that old enemy of all good works, the Devil, threw me into a prosaic mire, and for the soul of me I cannot get out of it. I dare not write you a long letter, as I am going to intrude on your time with a long ballad. I have, as you will shortly see, finished “The Kirk’s Alarm;” but now that it is done, and that I have laughed once or twice at the conceits in some of the stanzas, I am determined not to let it get into the public; so I send you this copy, the first that I have sent to Ayrshire, except some few of the stanzas, which I wrote off in embryo for Gavin Hamilton, under the express provision and request that you will only read it to a few of us, and do not on any account give, or permit to be taken, any copy of the ballad. If I could be of any service to Dr. M’Gill, I would do it, though it should be at a much greater expense than irritating a few bigoted priests, but I am afraid serving him in his present embarras is a task too hard for me. I have enemies enow, God knows, though I do not wantonly add to the number. Still, as I think there is some merit in two or three of the thoughts, I send it to you as a small, but sincere testimony how much, and with what respectful esteem, I am, dear Sir, your obliged humble servant

R. B.

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CXXXIV. — TO MR. PETER STUART, EDITOR, LONDON.

End of Aug. 1789.

My dear Sir, — The hurry of a farmer in this particular season, and the indolence of a poet at all seasons, will, I hope, plead my excuse for neglecting so long to answer your obliging letter of the 5th August.

… When I received your letter I was transcribing for The Star my letter to the magistrates of the Canongate of Edinburgh, begging their permission to place a tombstone over poor Fergusson. 112a. Poor Fergusson! if there be a life beyond the grave, which I trust there is; and if there be a good God presiding over all nature, which I am sure there is, thou art now enjoying existence in a glorious world where worth of heart alone is distinction in the man; where riches, deprived of their pleasure-purchasing powers, return to their native sordid matter; where titles and honours are the disregarded reveries of an idle dream; and where that heavy virtue, which is the negative consequence of steady dulness, and those thoughtless though often destructive follies, which are the unavoidable aberrations of frail human nature, will be thrown into equal oblivion as if they had never been!

R. B.

112a: A young Scottish poet of undoubted ability who perished miserably in Edinburgh at the age of twenty-four. He was the senior of Burns, who greatly admired and mourned him, by about eight year

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CXXXV. — TO HIS BROTHER, WILLIAM BURNS, SADDLER, NEWCASTLE-ON-TYNE.

ELLISLAND, 14th Aug. 1789.

My Dear William, — I received your letter, and am very happy to hear that you have got settled for the winter. I enclose you the two guinea-notes of the Bank of Scotland, which I hope will serve your need. It is, indeed, not quite so convenient for me to spare money as it once was, but I know your situation, and, I will say it, in some respects your worth. I have no time to write at present, but I beg you will endeavour to pluck up a little more of the Man than you used to have. Remember my favourite quotations:

On reason build resolve,

That pillar of true majesty in man.103

and

What proves the hero truly great,

Is never, never to despair!103a

Your mother and sisters desire their compliments. A Dieu je vous commende,

ROBT. BURNS.

103 From Young.

103a From Thomson.

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CXXXVL — TO MRS. DUNLOP.

ELLISLAND, 6th Sept. 1789.

Dear Madam, — I have mentioned, in my last, my appointment to the Excise, and the birth of little Frank; who, by the bye, I trust will be no discredit to the honourable name of Wallace, as he has a fine manly countenance, and a figure that might do credit to a liltle fellow two months older; and likewise an excellent good temper, though when he pleases he has a pipe, only not quite so loud as the horn that his immortal namesake blew as a signal to take out the pin of Stirling bridge.

I had some time ago an epistle, part poetic, and part prosaic, from your poetess Miss. J. Little,104 a very ingenious, but modest composition. I should have written her as she requested, but for the hurry of this new business. I have heard of her and her compositions in this country; and I am happy to add, always to the honour of her character. The fact is, I knew not well how to write to her: I should sit down to a sheet of paper that I knew not how to stain. I am no dab at fine-drawn letter-writing; and, except when prompted by friendship or gratitude, or, which happens extremely rarely, inspired by the Muse (I know not her name) that presides over epistolary writing, I sit down, when necessitated to write, as I would sit down to beat hemp.

Some parts of your letter of the 2oth August struck me with the most melancholy concern for the state of your mind at present.

Would I could write you a letter of comfort, I would sit down to it with as much pleasure as I would to write an epic poem of my own composition that should equal the Iliad! Religion, my dear friend, is the true comfort. A strong persuasion in a future state of existence; a proposition so obviously probable, that, setting revelation aside, every nation and people, so far as investigation has reached, for at least near four thousand years, have, in some mode or other, firmly believed it. In vain would we reason and pretend to doubt. I have myself done so to a very daring pitch; but, when I reflected that I was opposing the most ardent wishes and the most darling hopes of good men, and flying in the face of all human belief, in all ages, I was shocked at my own conduct.

I know not whether I have ever sent you the following lines; or if you have ever seen them; but it is one of my favourite quotations, which I keep constantly by me in my progress through life, in the language of the book of Job,

Against the day of battle and of war —

spoken of religion:

‘Tis this, my friend, that streaks our morning bright,

‘Tis this that gilds the horror of our night,

When wealth forsakes us, and when friends are few;

When friends are faithless, or when foes pursue;

Tis this that wards the blow, or stills the smart,

Disarms affliction, or repels his dart;

Within the breast bids purest raptures rise,

Bids smiling conscience spread her cloudless skies.

I have been busy with Zeluco. The Doctor is so obliging as to request my opinion of it; and I have been revolving in my mind some kind of criticisms on novel-writing, but it is a depth beyond my research. I shall, however, digest my thoughts on the subject as well as I can. Zeluco is a most sterling performance.

Farewell! A Dieu, le bon Dieu, je vous commende!

104 A maid servant at Loudon house.

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CXXXVIL — TO CAPTAIN RIDDEL, FRIARS CARSE.

ELLISLAND, 16th October 1789.

Sir, — Big with the idea of this important day at Friars Carse, I have watched the elements and skies, in the full persuasion that they would announce it to the astonished world by some phenomena of terrific portent. Yesternight until a very late hour, did I wait with anxious horror for the appearance of some comet firing half the sky, or aerial armies of sanguinary Scandinavians, darting athwart the startled heavens, rapid as the ragged lightning, and horrid as those convulsions of nature that bury nations.

The elements, however, seem to take the matter very quietly; they did not even usher in this morning with triple suns and a shower of blood, symbolical of the three potent heroes^105 and the mighty claret-shed of the day. For me — as Thomson in his Winter says of the storm — I shall “hear astonished, and astonished sing”

The WHISTLE and the man I sing,

The man that won the whistle, etc.

To leave the heights of Parnassus and come to the humble vale of prose. I have some misgivings that I take too much upon me, when I request you to get your guest, Sir Robert Lawrie, to frank the two inclosed covers for me, the one of them to Sir William Cunningham, of Robertland, Bart., at Kilmarnock, — the other, to Mr. Allan Masterton, Writing-Master, Edinburgh. The first has a kindred claim on Sir Robert, as being a brother Baronet, and likewise a keen Foxite; the other is one of the worthiest men in the world, and a man of real genius; so, allow me to say, he has a fraternal claim on you. I want them franked for to-morrow, as I cannot get them to the post to-night. I shall send a servant again for them in the evening. Wishing that your head may be crowned with laurels to-night, and free from aches to-morrow, I have the honour to be, Sir, your deeply indebted humble Servant,

R. B.

105 Sir Robert Lawrie of Maxwellton, the holder of the Whistle, Alexander Fergusson of Craigdarroch, and Captain Riddel. See the Poem. Burns was apparently absent.

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CXXXVIII — TO MR. ROBERT AINSLIE, W.S.

ELLISLAND, 1st Nov. 1789.

My Dear Friend, — I had written you ere now, could I have guessed where to find you, for I am sure you have more good sense than to waste the precious days of vacation time in the dirt of business and Edinburgh. Wherever you are, God bless you, and lead you not into temptation, but deliver you from evil!

I do not know if I have informed you that I am now appointed to an Excise division, in the middle of which my house and farm lie. In this I was extremely lucky. Without ever having been an expectant, as they call their journeymen excisemen, I was directly planted down to all intents and purposes an officer of Excise; there to flourish and bring forth fruits — worthy of repentance.

You need not doubt that I find several very unpleasant and disagreeable circumstances in my business; but I am tired with and disgusted at the language of complaint against the evils of life. Human existence in the most favourable situations does not abound with pleasures, and has its inconveniences and ills: capricious foolish man mistakes these inconveniences and ills as if they were the peculiar property of his particular situation; and hence that eternal fickleness, that love of change, which has ruined, and daily does ruin many a fine fellow, as well as many a blockhead, and is almost, without exception, a constant source of disappointment and misery.

I long to hear from you how you go on-not so much in business as in life. Are you pretty well satisfied with your own exertions, and tolerably at ease in your internal reflections? ‘Tis much to be a great character as a lawyer, but beyond comparison more to be a great character as a man. That you may be both the one and the other is the earnest wish, and that you will be both is the firm persuasion of, my dear Sir, etc.

R. B.

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CXXXIX. — TO MR. RICHARD BROWN, PORT-GLASGOW.

ELLISLAND, 4th November 1789.

I have been so hurried, my ever dear friend, that though I got both your letters, I have not been able to command an hour to answer them as I wished; and even now, you are to look on this as merely confessing debt, and craving days. Few things could have given me so much pleasure as the news that you were once more safe and sound on terra firma, and happy in that place where happiness is alone to be found, in the fireside circle. May the benevolent Director of all things peculiarly bless you in all those endearing connections consequent on the tender and venerable names of husband and father! I have indeed been extremely lucky in getting an additional income of PS50 a-year, while, at the same time, the appointment will not cost me above PS10 or PS12 per annum of expenses more than I must have inevitably incurred. The worst circumstance is, that the Excise division which I have got is so extensive, no less than ten parishes to ride over; and it abounds besides with so much business, that I can scarcely steal a spare moment. However, labour endears rest, and both together are absolutely necessary for the proper enjoyment of human existence. I cannot meet you anywhere.

No less than an order from the Board of Excise, at Edinburgh, is necessary before I can have so much time as to meet you in Ayrshire. But do you come, and see me. We must have a social day, and perhaps lengthen it out with half the night, before you go again to sea. You are the earliest friend I now have on earth, my brothers excepted; and is not that an endearing circumstance? When you and I first met, we were at the green period of human life. The twig would easily take a bent, but would as easily return to its former state. You and I not only took a mutual bent, but, by the melancholy, though strong influence of being both of the family of the unfortunate, we were entwined with one another in our growth towards advanced age; and blasted be the sacrilegious hand that shall attempt to undo the union! You and I must have one bumper to my favourite toast, “May the companions of our youth be the friends of our old age!” Come and see me one year; I shall see you at Port-Glasgow the next, and if we can contrive to have a gossiping between our two bed-fellows, it will be so much additional pleasure. Mrs. Burns joins me in kind compliments to you and Mrs. Brown. Adieu! — I am ever, my dear Sir, yours,

R. B.

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CXL. — TO MR. R. GRAHAM, OF FINTRY.

9th December 1789.

Sir, — I have a good while had a wish to trouble you with a letter, and had certainly done it long ere now, but for a humiliating something that throws cold water on the resolution, as if one should say, “You have found Mr. Graham a very powerful and kind friend indeed, and that interest he is so kindly taking in your concerns, you ought by everything in your power to keep alive and cherish.” Now, though since God has thought proper to make one powerful and another helpless, the connection of obliger and obliged is all fair; and though my being under your patronage is to me highly honourable, yet, Sir, allow me to flatter myself that, — as a poet and an honest man you first interested yourself in my welfare, and principally as such still, you permit me to approach you.

I have found the Excise business go on a great deal smoother with me than I expected; owing a good deal to the generous friendship of Mr. Mitchell, my collector, and the kind assistance of Mr. Findlater, my supervisor. I dare to be honest, and I fear no labour. Nor do I find my hurried life greatly inimical to my correspondence with the Muses. Their visits to me, indeed, and I believe to most of their acquaintance, like the visits of good angels, are short and far between; but I meet them now and then as I jog through the hills of Nithsdale, just as I used to do on the banks of Ayr. I take the liberty to inclose you a few bagatelles, all of them the productions of my leisure thoughts in my excise rides.

If you know or have ever seen Captain Grose, the antiquarian, you will enter into any humour that is in the verses on him. Perhaps you have seen them before, as I sent them to a London newspaper. Though, I dare say, you have none of the solemn-league-and-covenant fire, which shone so conspicuous in Lord George Gordon, and the Kilmarnock weavers, yet I think you must have heard of Dr. M’Gill, one of the clergymen of Ayr, and his heretical book. God help him, poor man! Though he is one of the worthiest, as well as one of the ablest of the whole priesthood of the Kirk of Scotland, in every sense of that ambiguous term, yet the poor Doctor and his numerous family are in imminent danger of being thrown out to the mercy of the winter-winds. The inclosed ballad on that business is, I confess, too local, but I laughed myself at some conceits in it, though I am convinced in my conscience that there are a good many heavy stanzas in it too.106

The election ballad,107 as you will see, alludes to the present canvass in our string of boroughs. I do not believe there will be such a hard run match in the whole general election.

I am too little a man to have any political attachments; I am deeply indebted to, and have the warmest veneration for, individuals of both parties; but a man^108 who has it in his power to be the father of a country, and who is only known to that country by the mischiefs he does in it, is a character that one cannot speak of with patience.

Sir J. J. does “what man can do,” but yet I doubt his fate.

R. B.

106 The Kirk’s Alarm.

107 The Five Carlines.

108 Duke of Queensbury.

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CXLL — TO MRS. DUNLOP.

ELLISLAND, 13th December 1789.

Many thanks, dear Madam, for your sheetful of rhymes. Though at present I am below the veriest prose, yet from you everything pleases. I am groaning under the miseries of a diseased nervous system; a system, the state of which is most conducive to our happiness — or the most productive of our misery. For now near three weeks I have been so ill with a nervous headache, that I have been obliged for a time to give up my excise-books, being scare able to lift my head, much less to ride once a week over ten muir parishes. What is man? To-day, in the luxuriance of health, exulting in the enjoyment of existence; in a few days, perhaps in a few hours, loaded with conscious painful being, counting the tardy pace of the lingering moments by the repercussions of anguish, and refusing or denied a comforter. Day follows night, and night comes after day, only to curse him with life which gives him no pleasure; and yet the awful, dark termination of that life, is something at which he recoils.

Tell us, ye dead; will none of you in pity

Disclose the secret

What’tis you are, and we must shortly be?

‘Tis no matter:

A little time will make us learn’d as you are.

Can it be possible, that when I resign this frail, feverish being, I shall still find myself in conscious existence? When the last gasp of agony has announced that I am no more to those that knew me, and the few who loved me; when the cold, stiffened, unconscious, ghastly corse is resigned into the earth, to be the prey of unsightly reptiles, and to become in time a trodden clod, shall I be yet warm in life, seeing and seen, enjoying and enjoyed? Ye venerable sages, and holy flamens, is there probability in your conjectures, truth in your stories, of another world beyond death; or are they all alike, baseless visions, and fabricated fables? If there is another life, it must be only for the just, the benevolent, the amiable, and the humane; what a flattering idea, then, is a world to come! Would to God I as firmly believed it, as I ardently wish it! There I should meet an aged parent, now at rest from the many buffetings of an evil world, against which he so long and so bravely struggled. There should I meet the friend, the disinterested friend of my early life; the man who rejoiced to see me, because he loved me and could serve me. Muir, thy weaknesses were the aberrations of human nature, but thy heart glowed with everything generous, manly, and noble; and if ever emanation from the All-good Being animated a human form, it was thine! There should I, with speechless agony of rapture, again recognise my lost, my ever dear Mary! whose bosom was fraught with truth, honour, constancy, and love.

My Mary, dear departed shade!

Where is thy place of heavenly rest?

Seest thou thy lover lowly laid?

Hear’st thou the groans that rend his breast?

Jesus Christ, thou amiablest of characters! I trust thou art no impostor, and that thy revelation of blissful scenes of existence beyond death and the grave, is not one of the many impositions which time after time have been palmed on credulous mankind. I trust that in thee “shall all the families of the earth be blessed,” by being yet connected together in a better world, where every tie that bound heart to heart, in this state of existence, shall be, far beyond our present conceptions, more endearing.

I am a good deal inclined to think with those who maintain, that what are called nervous affections are in fact diseases of the mind. I cannot reason, I cannot think; and but to you I would not venture to write anything above an order to a cobbler. You have felt too much of the ills of life not to sympathise with a diseased wretch, who has impaired more than half of any faculties he possessed. Your goodness will excuse this distracted scrawl, which the writer dare scarcely read, and which he would throw into the fire, were he able to write anything better, or indeed anything at all.

Rumour told me something of a son of yours, who was returned from the East or West Indies. If you have gotten news from James or Anthony, it was cruel in you not to let me know; as I promise you, on the sincerity of a man, who is weary of one world, and anxious about another, that scarce anything could give me so much pleasure as to hear of any good thing befalling my honoured friend.

If you have a minute’s leisure, take up your pen in pity to LE PAUVRE MISERABLE.

R. B.

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CXLII. — TO LADY WINIFRED M. CONSTABLE.

ELLISLAND, 16th DECEMBER 1789.

My Lady, — In vain have I from day to day expected to hear from Mis. Young, as she promised me at Dalswinton that she would do me the honour to introduce me at Tinwald; and it was impossible, not from your Ladyship’s accessibility, but from my own feelings, that I could go alone. Lately, indeed, Mr. Maxwell, of Currachan, in his usual goodness, offered to accompany me, when an unlucky indisposition on my part hindered my embracing the opportunity. To court the notice or the tables of the great, except where I sometimes have had a little matter to ask of them, or more often the pleasanter task of witnessing my gratitude to them, is what I never have done, and I trust never shall do. But with your Ladyship I have the honour to be connected by one of the strongest and most endearing ties in the whole moral world. Common sufferings, in a cause where even to be unfortunate is glorious — the cause of heroic loyalty! Though my fathers had not illustrious honours and vast properties to hazard in the contest, though they left their humble cottages only to add so many units more to the unnoted crowd that followed their leaders, yet what they could they did, and what they had they lost; with unshaken firmness and unconcealed political attachments, they shook hands with Ruin for what they esteemed the cause of their king and their country. This language and the inclosed verses are for your Ladyship’s eye alone. Poets are not very famous for their prudence; but as I can do nothing for a cause which is now nearly no more, I do not wish to hurt myself. — I have the honour to be, my lady, your Ladyship’s obliged and obedient humble servant.

R. B.

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CXLIII. — TO MR. CHARLES K. SHARPE, OF HODDAM.

Under a fictitious Signature, inclosing a Ballad, 1790 or 1791.109

It is true, Sir, you are a gentleman of rank and fortune, and I am a poor devil; you are a feather in the cap of society, and I am a very hobnail in his shoes; yet I have the honour to belong to the same family with you, and on that score I now address you. You will perhaps suspect that I am going to claim affinity with the ancient and honourable house of Kirkpatrick. No, no, Sir. I cannot indeed be properly said to belong to any house, or even any province or kingdom; as my mother, who for many years was spouse to a marching regiment, gave me into this bad world, aboard the packet-boat, somewhere between Donaghadee and Portpatrick. By our common family, I mean, Sir, the family of the Muses. I am a fiddler and a poet; and you, I am told, play an exquisite violin, and have a standard taste in the belles lettres. The other day, a brother catgut gave me a charming Scots air of your composition. If I was pleased with the tune, I was in raptures with the title you have given it, and, taking up the idea, I have spun it into the three stanzas inclosed. Will you allow me, Sir, to present you them, as the dearest offering that a misbegotten son of poverty and rhyme has to give? I have a longing to take you by the hand and unburden my heart by saying, “Sir, I honour you as a man who supports the dignity of human nature, amid an age when frivolity and avarice have, between them, debased us below the brutes that perish!” But, alas, Sir! to me you are unapproachable. It is true, the Muses baptised me in Castalian streams; but the thoughtless gipsies forgot to give me a name. As the sex have served many a good fellow, the Nine have given me a great deal of pleasure; but, bewitching jades! they have beggared me. Would they but spare me a little of their cast-linen! Were it only to put it in my power to say, that I have a shirt on my back! But the idle wenches, like Solomon’s lilies, “they toil not, neither do they spin;” so I must e’en continue to tie my remnant of a cravat, like the hangman’s rope, round my naked throat, and coax my galligaskins to keep together their many-coloured fragments. As to the affair of shoes, I have given that up. My pilgrimages in my ballad-trade, from town to town, and on your stony-hearted turnpikes too, are not what even the hide of Job’s behemoth could bear. The coat on my back is no more: I shall not speak evil of the dead. It would be equally unhandsome and ungrateful to find fault with my old surtout, which so kindly supplies and conceals the want of that coat. My hat, indeed, is a great favourite; and though I got it literally for an old song, I would not exchange it for the best beaver in Britain. I was, during several years, a kind of fac-totum servant to a country clergyman, where I picked up a good many scraps of learning, particularly — in some branches of the mathematics. Whenever I feel inclined to rest myself on my way, I take my seat under a hedge, laying my poetic wallet on the one side, and my fiddle-case on the other, and placing my hat between my legs, I can by means of its brim, or rather brims, go through the whole doctrine of the Conic Sections. However, Sir, don’t let me mislead you, as if I would interest your pity. Fortune has so much forsaken me, that she has taught me to live without her; and, amid all my rags and poverty, I am as independent, and much more happy than a monarch of the world. According to the hackneyed metaphor, I value the several actors in the great drama of life, simply as they act their parts. I can look on a worthless fellow of a duke with unqualified contempt, and can regard an honest scavenger with sincere respect. As you, Sir, go through your role with such distinguished merit, permit me to make one in the chorus of universal applause, and assure you that with the highest respect, I have the honour to be, etc.

109 “Here Burns plays high Jacobite to that singular old curmudgeon, Lady Constable. I imagine his Jacobitism, like my own, belonged to the fancy rather than the reason.” — Scott.

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CXLIV. — TO HIS BROTHER, GILBERT BURNS, MOSSGIEL.

ELLISLAND, 11th January 1790.

Dear Brother, — I mean to take advantage of the frank, though I have not in my present frame of mind much appetite for exertion in writing. My nerves are in a cursed state. I feel that horrid hypochondria pervading every atom of both body and soul. This farm has undone my enjoyment of myself. It is a ruinous affair on all hands. But let it go to hell! I’ll fight it out and be off with it.

We have gotten a set of very decent players here just now. I have seen them an evening or two. David Campbell, in Ayr, wrote to me by the manager of the company, a Mr. Sutherland, who is a man of apparent worth. On New-year-day evening I gave him the following prologue, which he spouted to his audience with applause: —

No song nor dance I bring from yon great city, etc.

I can no more. If once I was clear of this curst farm, I should respire more at ease.

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CXLV. — TO MR. WILLIAM DUNBAR, W.S.

ELLISLAND, 14th Jan. 1790.

Since we are here creatures of a day, since “a few summer days, a few winter nights, and the life of man is at an end,” why, my dear much esteemed Sir, should you and I let negligent indolence, for I know it is nothing worse, step in between us and bar the enjoyment of a mutual correspondence? We are not shapen out of the common, heavy, methodical clod, the elemental stuff of the plodding selfish race, the sons of Arithmetic and Prudence; our feelings and hearts are not benumbed and poisoned by the cursed influence of riches, which, whatever blessing they may be in other respects, are no friends to the nobler qualities of the heart; in the name of random sensibility, then, let never the moon change on our silence any more. I have had a tract of bad health the most part of this winter, else you had heard from me long ere now. Thank heaven, I am now got so much better as to be able to partake a little in the enjoyments of life.

Our friend, Cunningham, will perhaps have told you of my going into the Excise. The truth is, I found it a very convenient business to have PS50 per annum, nor have I yet felt any of these mortifying circumstances in it that I was led to fear.

Feb. 2nd. — I have not for sheer hurry of business been able to spare five minutes to finish my letter. Besides my farm business, I ride on my Excise matters at least two hundred miles every week. I have not by any means given up the Muses. You will see in the third volume of Johnson’s Scots songs that I have contributed my mite there.

But, my dear Sir, little ones that look up to you for paternal protection are an important charge. I have already two fine healthy stout little fellows, and I wish to throw some light upon them. I have a thousand reveries and schemes about them, and their future destiny. Not that I am an Utopian projector in these things. I am resolved never to breed up a son of mine to any of the learned professions. I know the value of independence; and since I cannot give my sons an independent fortune, I shall give them an independent line of life. What a chaos of hurry, chance, and changes is this world, when one sits soberly down to reflect on it! To a father, who himself knows the world, the thought that he shall have sons to usher into it, must fill him with dread; but if he have daughters, the prospect in a thoughtful moment is apt to shock him.

I hope Mrs. Fordyce and the two young ladies are well. Do let me forget that they are nieces of yours, and let me say that I never saw a more interesting, sweeter pair of sisters in my life. I am the fool of my feelings and attachments. I often take up a volume of my Spenser to realise you to my imagination, 109a. and think over the social scenes we have had together. God grant that there may be another world more congenial for honest fellows beyond this; a world where these rubs and plagues of absence, distance, misfortunes, ill-health, etc., shall no more damp hilarity and divide friendship. This I know is your throng season, but half a page will much oblige, my dear Sir, yours sincerely,

R. B.

109a Mr. Dunbar had made him a present of a Spenser’s Poems

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CXLVL. — TO MRS. DUNLOP.

ELLISLAND, 25th January 1790.

It has been owing to unremitting hurry of business that I have not written to you, Madam, long ere now. My health is greatly better, and I now begin once more to share in satisfaction and enjoyment with the rest of my fellow-creatures.

Many thanks, my much esteemed friend, for your kind letters; but why will you make me run the risk of being contemptible and mercenary in my own eyes? When I pique myself on my independent spirit, I hope it is neither poetic licence, nor poetic rant; and I am so flattered with the honour you have done me in making me your compeer in friendship and friendly correspondence, that I cannot without pain, and a degree of mortification, be reminded of the real inequality between our situations.

Most sincerely do I rejoice with you, dear Madam, in the good news of Anthony. Not only your anxiety about his fate, but my own esteem for such a noble, warm-hearted, manly young fellow, in the little I had of his acquaintance, has interested me deeply in his fortunes.

Falconer, the unfortunate author of the “Shipwreck,” which you so much admire, is no more. After witnessing the dreadful catastrophe he so feelingly describes in his poem, and after weathering many hard gales of fortune, he went to the bottom with the Aurora frigate!

I forget what part of Scotland had the honour of giving him birth; but he was the son of obscurity and mis’ortune.110 He was one of those daring, adventurous spirits, which Scotland, beyond any other country, is remarkable for producing. Little does the fond mother think, as she hangs delighted over the sweet little leech at her bosom, where the poor fellow may hereafter wander, or what may be his fate. I remember a stanza in an old Scottish ballad, which, notwithstanding its rude simplicity, speaks feelingly to the heart: —

Little did my mother think,

That day she cradled me,

What land I was to travel in,

Or what death I should dee!

Old Scottish songs are, you know, a favourite study and pursuit of mine, and now I am on that subject, allow me to give you two stanzas of another old simple ballad, which I am sure will please you. The catastrophe of the piece is a poor ruined female, lamenting her fate, She concludes with this pathetic wish: —

O that my father had ne’er on me smil’d;

O that my mother had ne’er to me sung!

O that my cradle had never been rock’d;

But that I had died when I was young!

O that the grave it were my bed;

My blankets were my winding sheet;

The clocks and the worms my bedfellows a’;

And O sad sound as I should sleep!

I do not remember in all my reading to have met with anything more truly the language of misery than the exclamation in the last line. Misery is like love; to speak its language truly, the author must have felt it.

I am every day expecting the doctor to give your little godson the small-pox. They are rife in the country, and I tremble for his fate. By the way, I cannot help congratulating you on his looks and spirit. Every person who sees him, acknowledges him to be the finest, handsomest child he has ever seen. I am myself delighted with the manly swell of his little chest, and a certain miniature dignity in the carriage of his head, and the glance of his fine black eye, which promise the undaunted gallantry of an independent mind.

I thought to have sent you some rhymes, but time forbids. I promise you poetry until you are tired of it, next time I have the honour of assuring you how truly I am, etc.

R. B.

110 He was of poor parentage, and a native of Edinburgh.

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CXLVII. — TO MR. PETER HILL, BOOKSELLER, EDINBURGH.

ELLISLAND, 2nd Feb. 1790.

No! I will not say one word about apologies or excuses for not writing — I am a poor, rascally gauger, condemned to gallop at least 200 miles every week to inspect dirty ponds and yeasty barrels, and where can I find time to write to, or importance to interest anybody? The upbraidings of my conscience, nay, the upbraidings of my wife, have persecuted me on your account these two or three months past. I wish to God I was a great man, that my correspondence might throw light upon you, to let the world see what you really are: and then I would make your fortune, without putting my hand in my pocket for you, which, like all other great men, I suppose I would avoid as much as possible. What are you doing, and how are you doing? Have you lately seen any of my few friends? What has become of the borough reform, or how is the fate of my poor namesake Mademoiselle Burns decided? O man! but for thee and thy selfish appetites, and dishonest artifices, that beauteous form, and that once innocent and still ingenuous mind, might have shone conspicuous and lovely in the faithful wife, and the affectionate mother; and shall the unfortunate sacrifice to thy pleasures have no claim on thy humanity!

I saw lately, in a review, some extracts from a new poem, called the “Village Curate;” send it me. I want likewise a cheap copy of The World. Mr. Armstrong, the young poet, who does me the honour to mention me so kindly in his works, please give him my best thanks for the copy of his book.111 — I shall write him, my first leisure hour. I like his poetry much, but I think his style in prose quite astonishing.

Your book came safe, and I am going to trouble you with farther commissions. I call it troubling you, because I want only books; the cheapest way, the best; so you may have to hunt for them in the evening auctions. I want Smollett’s Works, for the sake of his incomparable humour. I have already Roderick Random and Humphrey Clinker; — Peregrine Pickle, Launcelot Greaves, and Ferdinand, Count Fathom, I still want; but, as I said, the veriest ordinary copies will serve me. I am nice only in the appearance of my poets. I forget the price of Cowper’s Poems, but, I believe, I must have them. I saw the other day, proposals for a publication, entitled Banks’s New and Complete Christian Family Bible, printed for C. Cooke, Paternoster Row, London. He promises at least to give in the work, I think it is three hundred and odd engravings, to which he has put the names of the first artists in London. You will know the character of the performance, as some numbers of it are published, and if it is really what it pretends to be, set me down as a subscriber, and send me the published numbers.

Let me hear from you, your first leisure minute, and trust me, you shall in future have no reason to complain of my silence. The dazzling perplexity of novelty will dissipate, and leave me to pursue my course in the quiet path of methodical routine.

R. B.

111 John Armstrong, student in the University of Edinburgh, who had recently published a volume of Juvenile Poems.

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CXLVIIL. — TO MR. W. NICOL.

ELLISLAND, Feb. 9th, 1790.

My Dear Sir, — That damn’d mare of yours is dead. I would freely have given her price to have saved her; she has vexed me beyond description. Indebted as I was to your goodness beyond what I can ever repay, I eagerly grasped at your offer to have the mare with me. That I might at least show my readiness in wishing to be grateful, I took every care of her in my power. She was never crossed for riding above half a score of times by me or in my keeping. I drew her in the plough, one of three, for one poor week. I refused fifty-five shillings for her, which was the highest bode I could squeeze for her. I fed her up and had her in fine order for Dumfries fair, when, four or five days before the fair, she was seized with an unaccountable disorder in the sinews, or somewhere in the bones of the neck — with a weakness or total want of power in her fillets; and, in short, the whole vertebrae of her spine seemed to be diseased and unhinged, and in eight and forty hours, in spite of the two best farriers in the country, she died and be damn’d to her! The farriers said that she had been quite strained in the fillets beyond cure before you had bought her; and that the poor devil, though she might keep a little flesh, had been jaded and quite worn out with fatigue and oppression. While she was with me she was under my own eye, and I assure you, my much valued friend, everything was done for her that could be done; and the accident has vexed me to the heart. In fact, I could not pluck up spirits to write to you, on account of the unfortunate business.

There is little new in this country. Our theatrical company, of which you must have heard, leave us this week. Their merit and character are indeed very great, both on the stage and in private life; not a worthless creature among them; and their encouragement has been accordingly. Their usual run is from eighteen to twenty-five pounds a night; seldom less than the one, and the house will hold no more than the other. There have been repeated instances of sending away six, and eight, and ten pounds a night for want of room. A new theatre is to be built by subscription; the first stone is to be laid on Friday first to come. Three hundred guineas have been raised by thirty subscribers, and thirty more might have been got if wanted. The manager, Mr. Sutherland, was introduced to me by a friend from Ayr; and a worthier or cleverer fellow I have rarely met with. Some of our clergy have slipt in by stealth now and then; but they have got up a farce of their own. You must have heard how the Rev. Mr. Lawson of Kirkmahoe, seconded by the Rev. Mr. Kirkpatrick of Dunscore, and the rest of that faction, have accused, in formal process, the unfortunate and Rev. Mr. Heron of Kirkgunzeon, that in ordaining Mr. Nielson to the cure of souls in Kirkbean, he, the said Heron, feloniously and treasonably bound the said Nielson to the confession of faith, so far as it was agreeable to reason and the word of God!

Mrs. B. begs to be remembered most gratefully to you. Little Bobby and Frank are charmingly well and healthy. I am jaded to death with fatigue. For these two or three months, on an average, I have not ridden less than two hundred miles per week. I have done little in the poetic way. I have given Mr. Sutherland two Prologues, one of which was delivered last week. I have likewise strung four or five barbarous stanzas, to the tune of Chevy Chase, by way of Elegy on your poor unfortunate mare, beginning (the name she got here was Peg Nicholson), —

Peg Nicholson was a good bay mare,

As ever trod on airn;

But now she’s floating down the Nith,

And past the mouth o’ Cairn.

My best compliments to Mrs. Nicol, and little Neddy, and all the family; I hope Ned is a good scholar, and will come out to gather nuts and apples with me next harvest.

R. B.

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CXLIX. — TO MR. CUNNINGHAM, WRITER, EDINBURGH.

ELLISLAND, 13th February 1790.

I beg your pardon, my dear and much valued friend, for writing to you on this very unfashionable, unsightly sheet —

My poverty but not my will consents.

But to make amends, since of modish post I have none, except one poor widowed half-sheet of gilt, which lies in my drawer, among my plebeian foolscap pages, like the widow of a man of fashion, whom that unpolite scoundrel, Necessity, has driven from Burgundy and Pineapple to a dish of Bohea, with the scandal-bearing help-mate of a village-priest; or a glass of whisky-toddy with a ruby-nosed yokefellow of a foot-padding exciseman — I make a vow to inclose this sheet-full of epistolary fragments in that my only scrap of gilt paper.

I am, indeed, your unworthy debtor for three friendly letters. I ought to have written to you long ere now, but it is a literal fact, I have scarcely a spare moment. It is not that I will not write to you: Miss Burnet is not more dear to her guardian angel, nor his grace the Duke of Queensberry to the powers of darkness, than my friend Cunningham to me. It is not that I cannot write to you; should you doubt it, take the following fragment, which was intended for you some time ago, and be convinced that I can antithesize sentiment, and circumvolute periods, as well as any coiner of phrase in the regions of philology.

December 1789.

My Dear Cunningham, — Where are you? And what are you doing? Can you be that son of levity, who takes up a friendship as he takes up a fashion; or are you, like some other of the worthiest fellows in the world, the victim of indolence, laden with fetters of ever-increasing weight?

What strange beings we are! Since we have a portion of conscious existence, equally capable of enjoying pleasure, happiness, and rapture, or of suffering pain, wretchedness, and misery, it is surely worthy of an inquiry, whether there be not such a thing as a science of life; whether method, economy, and fertility of expedients, be not applicable to enjoyment; and whether there be not a want of dexterity in pleasure, which renders our little scantling of happiness still less; and a profuseness, an intoxication in bliss, which leads to satiety, disgust, and self-abhorrence. There is not a doubt but that health, talents, character, decent competency, respectable friends, are real substantial blessings; and yet do we not daily see those who enjoy many or all of these good things, contrive, notwithstanding, to be as unhappy as others to whose lot few of them have fallen? I believe one great source of this mistake or misconduct is owing to a certain stimulus, with us called ambition, which goads us up the hill of life, not as we ascend other eminences; for the laudable curiosity of viewing an extended landscape, but rather for the dishonest pride of looking down on others of our fellow-creatures, seemingly diminutive in humbler stations, etc., etc.

Sunday, 14th February 1790.

God help me! I am now obliged to join

Night to day, and Sunday to the week.

If there be any truth in the orthodox faith of these churches, I am damn’d past redemption, and what is worse, damn’d to all eternity. I am deeply read in Boston’s Four-fold State, Marshal On Sanctification, Guthrie’s Trial of a Saving Interest, etc., but “there is no balm in Gilead, there is no physician there,” for me; so I shall e’en turn Arminian, and trust to “Sincere though imperfect obedience.”

Tuesday, 16th.

Luckily for me, I was prevented from the discussion of the knotty point at which I had just made a full stop. All my fears and 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 inquirer must in some degree be a sceptic. It is not that there are any very staggering arguments against the immortality of man; but, like electricity, phlogiston, etc., the subject is so involved in darkness, that we want data to go upon. One thing frightens me much: that we are to live for ever seems too good news to be true. That we are to enter into a new scene of existence, where, exempt from want and pain, we shall enjoy ourselves and our friends without satiety or separation — how much should I be indebted to any one who could fully assure me that this was certain!

My time is once more expired. I will write to Mr. Cleghorn soon. God bless him and all his concerns! And may all the powers that preside over conviviality and friendship, be present with all their kindest influence, when the bearer of this, Mr. Syme, and you meet! I wish I could also make one.

Finally, brethren, farewell! Whatsoever things are lovely, whatsoever things are gentle, whatsoever things are charitable, whatsoever things are kind, think on these things, and think on

R. B.

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CL. — TO MR. HILL, BOOKSELLER, EDINBURGH.

ELLISLAND, 2nd March 1790.

At a late meeting of the Monkland Friendly Society, it was resolved to augment their library by the following books, which you are to send us as soon as possible: — The Mirror, The Lounger, Man of Feeling, Man of the World, (these, for my own sake, I wish to have by the first carrier), Knox’s History of the Reformation, Rae’s History of the Rebellion in 1715, any good History of the Rebellion in 1745, A Display of the Secession Act and Testimony, by Mr. Gib, Hervey’s Meditations, Beveridge’s Thoughts, and another copy of Watson’s Body of Divinity.

I wrote to Mr. A. Masterton three or four months ago, to pay some money he owed me into your hands, and lately I wrote to you to the same purpose, but I have heard from neither one nor other of you.

In addition to the books I commissioned in my last, I want very much, an Index to the Excise Laws, or an Abridgment of all the statutes now in force, relative to the Excise, by Jellinger Symons; I want three copies of this book: if it is now to be had, cheap or dear, get it for me. An honest country neighbour of mine wants too a Family Bible, the larger the better, but second-handed, for he does not choose to give above ten shillings for the book. I want likewise for myself, as you can pick them up, second-handed or cheap, copies of Otway’s Dramatic Works, Ben Jonson’s, Dryden’s, Congreve’s, Wycherley’s, Vanbrugh’s, Gibber’s, or any Dramatic Works of the more modern Macklin, Garrick, Foote, Colman, or Sheridan. A good copy too of Moliere, in French, I much want. Any other good dramatic authors in that language I want also; but comic authors chiefly, though I should wish to have Racine, Corneille, and Voltaire too. I am in no hurry for all, or any of these, but if you accidentally meet with them very-cheap, get them for me.

And now, to quit the dry walk of business, how do you do, my dear friend? and how is Mrs. Hill? I trust, if now and then not so elegantly handsome, at least as amiable, and sings as divinely as ever. My good wife too has a charming “wood-note wild;” now could we four get together, etc.

I am out of all patience with this vile world, for one thing. Mankind are by nature benevolent creatures, except in a few scoundrelly instances. I do not think that avarice of the good things we chance to have, is born with us; but we are placed here amid so much nakedness, and hunger, and poverty, and want, that we are under a cursed necessity of studying selfishness, in order that we may exist! Still there are, in every age, a few souls that all the wants and woes of life cannot debase to selfishness, or even to the necessary alloy of caution and prudence. If ever I am in danger of vanity, it is when I contemplate myself on this side of my disposition and character. God knows I am no saint; I have a whole host of follies and sins to answer for; but if I could — and I believe I do it as far as I can — I would wipe away all tears from all eyes. Adieu!

R. B.

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CLI. — TO MRS. DUNLOP.

ELLISLAND, 10th April 1790.

I have just now, my ever honoured friend, enjoyed a very high luxury, in reading a paper of the Lounger. You know my national prejudices. I had often read and admired the Spectator, Adventurer, Rambler, and World, but still with a certain regret, that they were so thoroughly and entirely English. Alas! have I often said to myself, what are all the boasted advantages which my country reaps from the Union, that can counterbalance the annihilation of her independence, and even her very name? I often repeat that couplet of my favourite 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,” etc., 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? I believe in my conscience such ideas as “my country; her independence; her honour; the illustrious names that mark the history of my native land,” etc. — I believe these, among your men of the world, men who, in fact, guide for the most part and govern our world, are looked on as so many modifications of wrong-headedness. They know the use of bawling out such terms, to rouse or lead THE RABBLE; but for their own private use, with almost all the able statesmen that ever existed, or now exist, when they talk of right and wrong they only mean proper and improper; and their measure of conduct is, not what they ought, but what they dare. For the truth of this I shall not ransack the history of nations, but appeal to one of the ablest judges of men that ever lived — the celebrated Earl of Chesterfield. In fact, a man who could thoroughly control his vices whenever they interfered with his interests, and who could completely put on the appearance of every virtue as often as it suited his purposes, is, on the Stanhopian plan, the perfect man; a man to lead nations. But are great abilities, complete without a flaw, and polished without a blemish, the standard of human excellence? This is certainly the staunch opinion of men of the world; but I call on honour, virtue, and worth, to give the Stygian doctrine a loud negative! However, this must be allowed, that, if you abstract from man the idea of an existence beyond the grave, then, the true measure of human conduct is, proper and improper: virtue and vice, as dispositions of the heart, are, in that case, of scarcely the same import and value to the world at large, as harmony and discord in the modifications of sound; and a delicate sense of honour, like a nice ear for music, though it may sometimes give the possessor an ecstacy unknown to the coarser organs of the herd, yet, considering the harsh gratings, and inharmonic jars, in this ill-tuned state of being, it is odds but the individual would be as happy, and certainly would be as much respected by the true judges of society as it would then stand, without either a good ear or a good heart.

You must know I have just met with the Mirror and Lounger for the first time, and I am quite in raptures with them; I should be glad to have your opinion of some of the papers. The one I have just read, Lounger, No. 61, has cost me more honest tears than anything I have read for a long time. Mackenzie has been called the Addison of the Scots, and in my opinion, Addison would not be hurt at the comparison. If he has not Addison’s exquisite humour, he as certainly outdoes him in the tender and the pathetic. His Man of Feeling (but I am not counsel learned in the laws of criticism) I estimate as the first performance in its kind I ever saw. From what book, moral or even pious, will the susceptible young mind receive impressions more congenial to humanity and kindness, generosity and benevolence; in short, more of all that ennobles the soul to herself, or endears her to others — than from the simple affecting tale of poor Harley?

Still, with all my admiration of Mackenzie’s writings, I do not know if they are the fittest reading for a young man who is about to set out, as the phrase is, to make his way into life. Do you not think, Madam, that among the few favoured of Heaven in the structure of their minds (for such there certainly are) there may be a purity, a tenderness, a dignity, an elegance of soul, which are of no use, nay, in some degree, absolutely disqualifying for the truly important business of making a man’s way into life? If I am not much mistaken, my gallant young friend, Antony, is very much under these disqualifications; and for the young females of a family I could mention, well may they excite parental solicitude; for I, a common acquaintance, or as my vanity will have it, an humble friend, have often trembled for a turn of mind which may render them eminently happy — or peculiarly miserable!

I have been manufacturing some verses lately; but as I have got the most hurried season of Excise business over, I hope to have more leisure to transcribe any thing that may show how much I have the honour to be, Madam, yours, etc.

R. B.

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CLII. — TO DR. JOHN MOORE, LONDON.

DUMFRIES, Excise-Office, 14th July 1790.

Sir, — Coming into town this morning to attend my duty in this office, it being collection-day, I met with a gentleman who tells me he is on his way to London; so I take the opportunity of writing to you, as franking is at present under a temporary death. I shall have some snatches of leisure through the day, amid our horrid business and bustle, and I shall improve them as well as I can; but let my letter be as stupid as…, as miscellaneous as a newspaper, as short as a hungry grace-before-meat, or as long as a law-paper in the Douglas cause; as ill spelt as country John’s billet-doux, or as unsightly a scrawl as Betty Byre-Mucker’s answer to it; I hope, considering circumstances, you will forgive it; and as it will put you to no expense of postage, I shall have the less reflection about it.

I am sadly ungrateful in not returning you my thanks for your most valuable present, Zeluco. In fact, you are in some degree blameable for my neglect. You were pleased to express a wish for my opinion of the work, which so flattered me, that nothing less would serve my over-weening fancy, than a formal criticism on the book. In fact, I have gravely planned a comparative view of you, Fielding, Richardson, and Smollett, in your different qualities and merits as novel-writers. This, I own, betrays my ridiculous vanity, and I may probably never bring the business to bear; but I am fond of the spirit young Elihu shows in the book of Job— “And I said, I will also declare my opinion.” I have quite disfigured my copy of the book with my annotations. I never take it up without at the same time taking my pencil, and marking with asterisms, parentheses, etc., wherever I meet with an original thought, a nervous remark on life and manners, a remarkably well-turned period, or a character sketched with uncommon precision.

Though I should hardly think of fairly writing out my “Comparative View,” I shall certainly trouble you with my remarks, such as they are.

I have just received from my gentleman that horrid summons in the Book of Revelation— “that time shall be no more.”

The little collection of sonnets have some charming poetry in them. If indeed I am indebted to the fair author for the book, and not, as I rather suspect, to a celebrated author of the other sex, I should certainly have written to the lady, with my grateful acknowledgments, and my own idea of the comparative excellence of her pieces.112 I would do this last, not from any vanity of thinking that my remarks could be of much consequence to Mrs. Smith, but merely from my own feelings as an author, doing as I would be done by.

R. B.

112 Sonnets of Charlotte Smith.

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CLIII. — TO MR. MURDOCH,113 TEACHER OF FRENCH, LONDON.

ELLISLAND, July 16th, 1790.

My Dear Sir, — I received a letter from you a long time ago, but unfortunately, as it was in the time of my peregrinations and journeyings through Scotland, I mislaid or lost it, and by consequence your direction along with it. Luckily my good star brought me acquainted with Mr. Kennedy, who, I understand, is an acquaintance of yours: and by his means and mediation I hope to replace that link, which my unfortunate negligence had so unluckily broke, in the chain of our correspondence. I was the more vexed at the vile accident, as my brother William, a journeyman saddler, has been for some time in London; and wished above all things for your direction, that he might have paid his respects to his father’s friend.

His last address he sent me was, “Wm. Burns, at Mr. Barber’s, saddler, No. 181 Strand.” I writ him by Mr. Kennedy, but neglected to ask him for your address; so, if you find a spare half minute, please let my brother know by a card where and when he will find you, and the poor fellow will joyfully wait on you, as one of the few surviving friends of the man whose name, and Christian name too, he has the honour to bear.

The next letter I write you shall be a long one. I have much to tell you of “hair-breadth ‘scapes in th’ imminent deadly breach,” with all the eventful history of a life, the early years of which owed so much to your kind tutorage; but this at an hour of leisure. My kindest compliments to Mrs. Murdoch and family. — I am ever, my dear Sir, your obliged friend,

R. B.

113 He had been Burns’s schoolmaster at Mount Oliphant.

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CLIV. — TO MR. CUNNINGHAM.

ELLISLAND, 8th August 1790.

Forgive me, my once dear, and ever dear friend, my seeming negligence. You cannot sit down and fancy the busy life I lead.

I laid down my goose feather to beat my brains for an apt simile, and had some thoughts of a country grannum at a family christening; a bride on the market-day before her marriage; or a tavern-keeper at an election dinner; but the resemblance that hits my fancy best is, that blackguard miscreant, Satan, who roams about like a roaring lion, seeking, searching, whom he may devour. However, tossed about as I am, if I choose (and who would not choose) to bind down with the crampets of attention the brazen foundation of integrity, I may rear up the superstructure of Independence, and from its daring turrets bid defiance to the storms of fate. And is not this a “consummation devoutly to be wished?”

Thy spirit, Independence, let me share;

Lord of the lion-heart, and eagle-eye!

Thy steps I follow with my bosom bare,

Nor heed the storm that howls along the sky!

Are not these noble verses? They are the introduction of Smollett’s Ode to Independence: if you have not seen the poem, I will send it to you. How wretched is the man that hangs on by the favours of the great! To shrink from every dignity of man, at the approach of a lordly piece of self-consequence, who, amid all his tinsel glitter, and stately hauteur, is but a creature formed as thou art — and perhaps not so well formed as thou art — came into the world a puling infant as thou didst, and must go out of it as all men must, a naked corse…

R. B.

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CLV. — TO MR. CRAUFORD TAIT,114 W.S., EDINBURGH.

ELLISLAND, 15th October 1790.

Dear Sir, — Allow me to introduce to your acquaintance the bearer, Mr. Wm. Duncan, a friend of mine, whom I have long known and long loved. His father, whose only son he is, has a decent little property in Ayrshire, and has bred the young man to the law, in which department he comes up an adventurer to your good town. I shall give you my friend’s character in two words: as to his head, he has talents enough, and more than enough for common life; as to his heart, when nature had kneaded the kindly clay that composes it, she said, “I can no more.”

You, my good Sir, were born under kinder stars; but your fraternal sympathy, I well know, can enter into the feelings of the young man who goes into life with the laudable ambition to do something, and to be something among his fellow-creatures; but whom the consciousness of friendless obscurity presses to the earth and wounds to the soul!

Even the fairest of his virtues are against him. That independent spirit, and that ingenuous modesty, qualities inseparable from a noble mind, are, with the million, circumstances not a little disqualifying. What pleasure is in the power of the fortunate and the happy, by their notice and patronage, to brighten the countenance and glad the heart of such depressed youth! I am not so angry with mankind for their deaf economy of the purse — the goods of this world cannot be divided without being lessened — but why be a niggard of that which bestows bliss on a fellow-creature, yet takes nothing from our own means of enjoyment? We wrap ourselves up in the cloak of our own better fortune, and turn away our eyes, lest the wants and woes of our brother-mortals should disturb the selfish apathy of our souls!

I am the worst hand in the world at asking a favour. That indirect address, that insinuating implication, which, without any positive request, plainly expresses your wish, is a talent not to be acquired at a plough-tail. Tell me, then, for you can, in what periphrasis of language, in what circumvolution of phrase, I shall envelope, yet not conceal, the plain story. “My dear Mr, Tait, my friend, Mr. Duncan, whom I have the pleasure of introducing to you, is a young lad of your own profession, and a gentleman of much modesty and great worth. Perhaps it may be in your power to assist him in the, to him, important consideration of getting a place; but, at all events, your notice and acquaintance will be a very great acquisition to him; and I dare pledge myself that he will never disgrace your favour.”

You may possibly be surprised, Sir, at such a letter from me; ‘tis, I own, in the usual way of calculating these matters, more than our acquaintance entitles me to; but my answer is short: Of all the men at your time of life whom I knew in Edinburgh, you are the most accessible on the side on which I have assailed you. You are very much altered indeed from what you were when I knew you, if generosity point the path you will not tread, or humanity call to you in vain.

As to myself, a being to whose interest I believe you are still a well-wisher; I am here, breathing at all times, thinking sometimes, and rhyming now and then. Every situation has its share of the cares and pains of life, and my situation I am persuaded has a full ordinary allowance of its pleasures and enjoyments.

My best compliments to your father and Miss Tait. If you have an opportunity, please remember me in the solemn league and covenant of friendship to Mrs. Lewis Hay.115 I am a wretch for not writing her; but I am so hackneyed with self-accusation in that way, that my conscience lies in my bosom with scarce the sensibility of an oyster in its shell. Where is Lady M’Kenzie? wherever she is, God bless her! I likewise beg leave to trouble you with compliments to Mr. Wm. Hamilton; Mrs. Hamilton and family; and Mrs. Chalmers, when you are in that country. Should you meet with Miss Nimmo, please remember me kindly to her.

R. B.

114 Son of Mr. Tait of Harviestoun, where Burns was a happy guest in the Autumn of 1787. He was also father of the late Archbishop Tait.

115 Miss Peggy Chalmers.

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CLVL. — TO MRS. DUNLOP.

ELLISLAND, November 1790.

“As cold waters to a thirsty soul, so is good news from a far country.”

Fate has long owed me a letter of good news from you, in return for the many tidings of sorrow which I have received. In this instance I most cordially obey the apostle— “Rejoice with them that do rejoice;” for me, to sing for joy, is no new thing; but to preach for joy, as I have done in the commencement of this epistle, is a pitch of extravagant rapture to which I never rose before.

I read your letter — 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 the moment of inspiration and rapture; and stride, stride-quick and quicker-out skipt I among the broomy banks of Nith to muse over my joy by retail. To keep within the bounds of prose was impossible. Mrs. Little’s is a more elegant, but not a more sincere compliment to the sweet little fellow, than I, extempore almost, poured out to him in the following verses: —

Sweet flow’ret, pledge o’ meikle love, etc.116

I am much flattered by your approbation of my “Tam o’ Shanter,” which you express in your former letter; though, by-the-bye, you load me in that said letter with accusations heavy and many; to all which I plead, not guilty! Your book is, I hear, on the road to reach me. As to printing of poetry, when you prepare it for the press, you have only to spell it right, and place the capital letters properly: as to the punctuation, the printers do that themselves.

I have a copy of “Tam o’ Shanter” ready to send you by the first opportunity: it is too heavy to send by post.

I heard of Mr. Corbet lately. 116a He, in consequence of your recommendation, is most zealous to serve me. Please favour me soon with an account of your good folks; if Mrs. H. is recovering, and the young gentleman doing well.

R. B.

116 See Poems.

116a A Supervisor of Excise.

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CLVIL. — TO MR. WILLIAM DUNBAR, W.S.

ELLISLAND, 17th January 1791.

I am not gone to Elysium, most noble Colonel,117 but am still here in this sublunary world, serving my God by propagating His image, and honouring my king by begetting him loyal subjects.

Many happy returns of the season await my friend. May the thorns of care never beset his path! May peace be an inmate of his bosom, and rapture a frequent visitor of his soul! May the blood-hounds of misfortune never track his steps, nor the screech-owl of sorrow alarm his dwelling! May enjoyment tell thy hours, and pleasure number thy days, thou friend of the Bard! “Blessed be he that blesseth thee, and cursed be he that curseth thee!!!”

As a farther proof that I am still in the land of existence, I send you a poem, the latest I have composed. I have a particular reason for wishing you only to show it to select friends, should you think it worthy a friend’s perusal: but if at your first leisure hour you will favour me with your opinion of, and strictures on the performance, it will be an additional obligation on, dear Sir, your deeply indebted humble servant,

R. B.

117 Colonel of Volunteers.

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CLVIIL. — TO MR. PETER HILL.

ELLISLAND, 17th January 1791.

Take these two guineas, and place them over against that damn’d account of yours which has gagged my mouth these five or six months. I can as little write good things as apologies to the man I owe money to. O the supreme misery of making three guineas do the business of five! Not all the labours of Hercules not all the Hebrews’ three centuries of Egyptian bondage, were such an insuperable business, such an infernal task! Poverty, thou half-sister of death, thou cousin-german of hell! where shall I find force or execration equal to the amplitude of thy demerits? Oppressed by thee, the venerable ancient, grown hoary in the practice of every virtue, laden with years and wretchedness, implores a little, little aid to support his existence, from a stony-hearted son of Mammon, whose sun of prosperity never knew a cloud; and is by him denied and insulted. Oppressed by thee, the man of sentiment, whose heart glows with independence, and melts with sensibility, inly pines under the neglect, or writhes in bitterness of soul under the contamely of arrogant unfeeling wealth. Oppressed by thee, the son of genius, whose ill-starred ambition plants him at the tables of the fashionable and polite, must see in suffering silence his remark neglected and his person despised, while shallow greatness, in his idiot attempts at wit, shall meet with countenance and applause. Nor is it only the family of worth that have reason to complain of thee; the children of folly and vice, though in common with thee the offspring of evil, smart equally under thy rod. Owing to thee, the man of unfortunate disposition and neglected education, is condemned as a fool for his dissipation, despised and shunned as a needy wretch, when his follies as usual bring him to want; and when his unprincipled necessities drive him to dishonest practices, he is abhorred as a miscreant, and perishes by the justice of his country. But far otherwise is the lot of the man of family and fortune. His early follies and extravagance are spirit and fire; his consequent wants are the embarrassments of an honest fellow; and when, to remedy the matter, he has gained a legal commission to plunder distant provinces, or massacre peaceful nations, he returns, perhaps, laden with the spoils of rapine and murder; lives wicked and respected; and dies a scoundrel and a lord. Nay, worst of all, alas for helpless woman!…

Well! divines may say of it what they please; but execration is to the mind, what phlebotomy is to the body; the overloaded sluices of both are wonderfully relieved by their respective evacuations.

R. B.

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CLIX. — TO DR. MOORE.

ELLISLAND, 28th January 1791.

I do not know, Sir, whether you are a subscriber to Grose’s Antiquities of Scotland. If you are, the inclosed poem will not be altogether new to you. Captain Grose did me the favour to send me a dozen copies of the proof sheet, of which this is one. Should you have read the piece before, still this will answer the principal end I have in view: it will give me another opportunity of thanking you for all your goodness to the rustic bard; and also of showing you, that the abilities you have been pleased to commend and patronise, are still employed in the way you wish.

The Elegy on Captain Henderson is a tribute to the memory of the man I loved much. Poets have in this the same advantage as Roman Catholics; they can be of service to their friends after they have passed that bourne where all other kindness ceases to be of avail. Whether, after all, either the one or the other be of any real service to the dead, is, I fear, very problematical; but I am sure they are highly gratifying to the living: and as a very orthodox text, I forget where in Scripture, says, “whatsoever is not of faith is sin;” so say I, whatsoever is not detrimental to society, and is of positive enjoyment, is of God, the giver of all good things, and ought to be received and enjoyed by His creatures with thankful delight. As almost all my religious tenets originate from my heart, I am wonderfully pleased with the idea, that I can still keep up a tender intercourse with the dearly beloved friend, or still more dearly beloved mistress, who is gone to the world of spirits.

The ballad on Queen Mary was begun while I was busy with Percy’s Reliques of English Poetry. By the way, how much is every honest heart, which has a tincture of Caledonian prejudice, obliged to you for your glorious story of Buchanan and Targe! ‘Twas an unequivocal proof of your loyal gallantry of soul giving Targe the victory. I should have been mortified to the ground if you had not.

I have just read over, once more of many times, your Zeluco. I marked with my pencil as I went along, every passage that pleased me above the rest; and one or two, which, with humble deference, I am disposed to think unequal to the merits of the book. I have sometimes thought to transcribe these marked passages, or at least so much of them as to point where they are, and send them to you. Original strokes that strongly depict the human heart, is your and Fielding’s province, beyond any other novelist I have ever perused. Richardson, indeed, might, perhaps, be excepted; but unhappily, his dramatis personae are beings of another world; and however they may captivate the unexperienced romantic fancy of a boy or a girl, they will ever, in proportion as we have made human nature our study, dissatisfy our riper years.

As to my private concerns, I am going on, a mighty tax-gatherer before the Lord, and have lately had the interest to get myself ranked on the list of excise as a supervisor. T am not yet employed as such, but in a few years I shall fall into the file of supervisorship by seniority. I have had an immense loss in the death of the Earl of Glencairn — the patron from whom all my fame and fortune took its rise. Independent of my grateful attachment to him, which was indeed so strong that it pervaded my very soul, and was entwined with the thread of my existence; so soon as the prince’s friends had got in, (and every dog, you know, has his day) my getting forward in the excise would have been an easier business than otherwise it will be. Though this was a consummation devoutly to be wished, yet, thank Heaven, I can live and rhyme as I am; and as to my boys, poor little fellows! if I cannot place them on as high an elevation in life as I could wish, I shall, if I am favoured so much of the Disposer of events as to see that period, fix them on as broad and independent a basis as possible. Among the many wise adages which have been treasured up by our Scottish ancestors, this is one of the best — Better be the head o’ the commonalty than the tail o’ the gentry.

But I am got on a subject which, however interesting to me, is of no manner of consequence to you; so I shall give you a short poem on the other page, and close this with assuring you how sincerely I have the honour to be, yours, etc.,

R. B.

Written on the blank leaf of a book which I presented to a very young lady, whom I had formerly characterised under the denomination of The Rose Bud.118

118 See Poems— “Lines to Miss Cruikshank.”

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CLX. — TO MRS. DUNLOP.

ELLISLAND, 7th Feb. 1791.

When I tell you, Madam, that by a fall, not from my horse, but with my horse, I have been a cripple some time, and that this is the first day my arm and hand have been able to serve me in writing, — you will allow that it is too good an apology for my seemingly ungrateful silence. I am now getting better, and am able to rhyme a little, which implies some tolerable ease; as I cannot think that the most poetic genius is able to compose on the rack.

I do not remember if ever I mentioned to you my having an idea of composing an elegy on the late Miss Burnet, of Monboddo. I had the honour of being pretty well acquainted with her, and have seldom felt so much at the loss of an acquaintance, as when I heard that so amiable and accomplished a piece of God’s work was no more. I have, as yet, gone no farther than the following fragment, of which please let me have your opinion. You know that elegy is a subject so much exhausted, that any new idea on the business is not to be expected: ‘tis well if we can place an old idea in a new light. How far I have succeeded as to this last, you will judge from what follows. I have proceeded no further.

Your kind letter, with your kind remembrance of your godson, came safe. This last, Madam, is scarcely what my pride can bear. As to the little fellow,118a he is, partiality apart, the finest boy I have of a long time seen. He is now seventeen months old, has the small-pox and measles over, has cut several teeth, and never had a grain of doctor’s drugs in his bowels.

I am truly happy to hear that the “little floweret” is blooming so fresh and fair, and that the “mother plant” is rather recovering her drooping head. Soon and well may her “cruel wounds” be healed! I have written thus far with a good deal of difficulty. When I get a little abler you shall hear farther from, Madam, yours,

R. B.

118a The infant was Francis Wallace, the Poet’s second son.

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CLXI. — TO THE REV. ARCH. ALISON.

ELLISLAND, near Dumfries 14th Feb. 1791.

Sir, — You must by this time have set me down as one of the most ungrateful of men. You did me the honour to present me with a book, which does honour to science and the intellectual powers of man, and I have not even so much as acknowledged the receipt of it. The fact is, you yourself are to blame for it. Flattered as I was by your telling me that you wished to have my opinion of the work, the old spiritual enemy of mankind, who knows well that vanity is one of the sins that most easily beset me, put it into my head to ponder over the performance with the look-out of a critic, and to draw up forsooth a deep learned digest of strictures on a composition, of which, in fact, until I read the book, I did not even know the first principles. I own, Sir, that at first glance, several of your propositions startled me as paradoxical. That the martial clangour of a trumpet had something in it vastly more grand, heroic, and sublime, than the twingle twangle of a Jews-harp; that the delicate flexure of a rose-twig, when the half-blown flower is heavy with the tears of the dawn, was infinitely more beautiful and elegant than the upright stub of a burdock; and that from something innate and independent of all associations of ideas;-these I had set down as irrefragable, orthodox truths, until perusing your book shook my faith. In short, Sir, except Euclid’s Elements of Geometry, which I made a shift to unravel by my father’s fire-side, in the winter evening of the first season I held the plough, I never read a book which gave me such a quantum of information, and added so much to my stock of ideas, as your Essays on the Principles of Taste. One thing, Sir, you must forgive my mentioning as an uncommon merit in the work, I mean the language. To clothe abstract philosophy in elegance of style, sounds something like a contradiction in terms; but you have convinced me that they are quite compatible.

I inclose you some poetic bagatelles of my late composition. The one in print is my first essay in the way of telling a tale. — I am, Sir, etc.

R. B.

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CLXII. — TO THE REV. G. BAIRD.

ELLISLAND, 1791.

Reverend Sir, — Why did you, my dear Sir, write to me in such a hesitating style on the business of poor Bruce?119 Don’t I know, and have I not felt, the many ills, the peculiar ills, that poetic flesh is heir to? You shall have your choice of all the unpublished poems^120 I have; and had your letter had my direction so as to have reached me sooner (it only came to my hand this moment) I should have directly put you out of suspense on the subject. I only ask, that some prefatory advertisement in the book, as well as the subscription bills, may bear, that the publication is solely for the benefit of Bruce’s mother. I would not put it in the power of ignorance to surmise, or malice to insinuate, that I clubbed a share in the work from mercenary motives. Nor need you give me credit for any remarkable generosity in my part of the business. I have such a host of peccadilloes, failings, follies, and backslidings (anybody but myself might perhaps give some of them a worse appellation), that by way of some balance, however trifling, in the account, I am fain to do any good that occurs in my very limited power to a fellow-creature, just for the selfish purpose of clearing a little the vista of retrospection.

R. B.

119 Michael Bruce, a young poet of Kinross-Shire.

120 Tam o’ Shanter included! It was refused!!

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CLXIII. — TO MR. CUNNINGHAM, WRITER, EDINBURGH.

ELLISLAND, 2th March 1791.

If the foregoing piece be worth your strictures, let me have them. For my own part, a thing I have just composed always appears through a double portion of that partial medium in which an author will ever view his own works. I believe, in general, novelty has something in it that inebriates the fancy, and not unfrequently dissipates and fumes away like other intoxication, and leaves the poor patient, as usual, with an aching heart. A striking instance of this might be adduced, in the revolution of many a hymeneal honeymoon. But lest I sink into stupid prose, and so sacrilegiously intrude on the office of my parish priest, I shall fill up the page in my own way, and give you another song of my late composition, which will appear perhaps in Johnson’s work, as well as the former.

You must know a beautiful Jacobite air, There’ll never be peace till Jamie comes hame. When political combustion ceases to be the object of princes and patriots, it then, you know, becomes the lawful prey of historians and poets.

By yon castle wa’ at the close of the day,

I heard a man sing, tho’ his head it was grey;

And as he was singing, the tears fast down came —

There’ll never be peace till Jamie comes hame.

If you like the air, and if the stanzas hit your fancy, you cannot imagine, my dear friend, how much you would oblige me, if, by the charms of your delightful voice, you would give my honest effusion, to “the memory of joys that are past,” to the few friends whom you indulge in that pleasure. But I have scribbled on till I hear the clock has intimated the near approach of

That hour, o’ night’s black arch the key-stane.

So good night to you! Sound be your sleep, and delectable your dreams! Apropos, how do you like this thought in a ballad I have just now on the tapis? —

I look to the west when I gae to my rest,

That happy my dreams and my slumbers may be;

Far, far in the west is he I lo’e best,

The lad that is dear to my babie and me!

Good night once more, and God bless you!

R. B.

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CLXIV. — TO MRS. DUNLOP.

ELLISLAND, 11th April 1791.

I am once more able, my honoured friend, to return you, with my own hand, thanks for the many instances of your friendship, and particularly for your kind anxiety in this last disaster that my evil genius had in store for me. However, life is chequered — joy and sorrow — for on Saturday morning last, Mrs. Burns made me a present of a fine boy; rather stouter, but not so handsome as your godson was at his time of life. Indeed, I look on your little namesake to be my chef d’oeuvre in that species of manufacture, as I look on “Tam o’ Shanter” to be my standard performance in the poetical line. ‘Tis true, both the one and the other discover a spice of roguish waggery, that might perhaps be as well spared; but then they also show, in my opinion, a force of genius, and a finishing polish, that I despair of ever excelling. Mrs. Burns is getting stout again, and laid as lustily about her to-day at breakfast, as a reaper from the corn-ridge. That is the peculiar privilege and blessing of our hale sprightly damsels, that are bred among the hayand heather. We cannot hope for that highly polished mind, that charming delicacy of soul, which is found among the female world in the more elevated stations of life, and which is certainly by far the most bewitching charm in the famous cestus of Venus, It is indeed such an inestimable treasure, that where it can be had in its native heavenly purity, unstained by some one or other of the many shades of affectation, and unalloyed by some one or other of the many species of caprice, I declare to Heaven I should think it cheaply purchased at the expense of every other earthly good! But as this angelic creature is, I am afraid, extremely rare in any station and rank of life, and totally denied to such an humble one as mine, we meaner mortals must put up with the next rank of female excellence. As fine a figure and face we can produce as any rank of life whatever; rustic, native grace; unaffected modesty and unsullied purity; nature’s mother-wit and the rudiments of taste, a simplicity of soul, unsuspicious of, because unacquainted with, the crooked ways of a selfish, interested, disingenuous world; and the dearest charm of all the rest, a yielding sweetness of disposition, and a generous warmth of heart, grateful for love on our part, and ardently glowing with a more than equal return; these, with a healthy frame, a sound, vigorous constitution, which your higher ranks can scarcely ever hope to enjoy, are the charms of lovely woman in my humble walk of life.

This is the greatest effort my broken arm has yet made. Do let me hear, by first post, how cher petit Monsieur comes on with his small-pox. May Almighty goodness preserve and restore him!

R. B.

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CLXV. — TO MR. CUNNINGHAM.

11th June 1791.

Let me interest you, my dear Cunningham, in behalf of the gentleman who waits on you with this. He is a Mr. Clarke, of Moffat, principal schoolmaster there, and is at present suffering severely under the persecution of one or two powerful individuals of his employers. He is accused of harshness to boys that were placed under his care. God help the teacher, if a man of sensibility and genius, and such is my friend Clarke, when a booby father presents him with his booby son, and insists on lighting up the rays of science in a fellow’s head whose skull is impervious and inaccessible by any other way than a positive fracture with a cudgel: a fellow whom in fact it savours of impiety to attempt making a scholar of, as he has been marked a blockhead in the book of fate, at the almighty fiat of his Creator.

The patrons of Moffat school are the ministers, magistrates, and town council of Edinburgh; and as the business comes now before them, let me beg my dearest friend to do every thing in his power to serve the interests of a man of genius and worth, and a man whom I particularly respect and esteem. You know some good fellows among the magistracy and council, but particularly you have much to say with a reverend gentleman to whom you have the honour of being very nearly related, and whom this country and age have had the honour to produce. I need not name the historian of Charles V.121 I tell him through the medium of his nephew’s influence, that Mr. Clarke is a gentleman who will not disgrace even his patronage. I know the merits of the cause thoroughly, and say it, that my friend is falling a sacrifice to prejudiced ignorance.

God help the children of dependence! Hated and persecuted by their enemies, and too often, alas! almost unexceptionally always, received by their friends with disrespect and reproach, under the thin disguise of cold civility and humiliating advice. O! to be a sturdy savage, stalking in the pride of his independence, amid the solitary wilds of his deserts, rather than in civilised life, helplessly to tremble for a subsistence precarious as the caprice of a fellow-creature! Every man has his virtues, and no man is without his failings; and plague on that privileged plain-dealing of friendship, which, in the hour of my calamity, cannot reach forth the helping hand without at the same time pointing out those failings, and apportioning them their share in procuring my present distress. My friends, for such the world calls ye, and such ye think yourselves to be, pass by my virtues if you please, but do, also, spare my follies; the first will witness in my breast for themselves, and the last will give pain enough to the ingenuous mind without you. And since deviating more or less from the paths of propriety and rectitude must be incident to human nature, do thou, Fortune, put it in my power, always from myself, and of myself, to bear the consequence of those errors! I do not want to be independent that I may sin, but I want to be independent in my sinning.

To return in this rambling letter to the subject I set out with, let me recommend my friend, Mr. Clarice, to your acquaintance and good offices; his worth entitles him to the one, and his gratitude will merit the other. I long much to hear from you. Adieu!

R. B.

121 Dr. Robertson, uncle to Mr. Alexander Cunningham.

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CLXVL — TO MR. THOMAS SLOAN

.122

ELLISLAND, Sept. 1st, 1791.

My Dear Sloan, — Suspense is worse than disappointment; for that reason I hurry to tell you that I just now learn that Mr. Ballantine does not choose to interfere more in the business. I am truly sorry for it, but cannot help it.

You blame me for not writing you sooner, but you will please to recollect that you omitted one little necessary piece of information; — your address.

However, you know equally well my hurried life, indolent temper, and strength of attachment. It must be a longer period than the longest life “in the world’s hale and undegenerate days,” that will make me forget so dear a friend as Mr. Sloan. I am prodigal enough at times, but I will not part with such a treasure as that.

I can easily enter into the embarras of your present situation. You know my favourite quotation from Young —

On Reason build RESOLVE!

That column of true majesty in man, —

and that other favourite one from Thomson’s “Alfred” —

What proves the hero truly GREAT,

Is, never, never to despair.

Or, shall I quote you an author of your acquaintance? —

Whether DOING, SUFFERING, or FORBEARING,

You may do miracles by — PERSEVERING.

I have nothing new to tell you. The few friends we have are going on in the old way. I sold my crop on this day se’ennight, and sold it very well. A guinea an acre, on an average, above value. But such a scene of drunkenness was hardly ever seen in this country. After the roup was over, about thirty people engaged in a battle, every man for his own hand, and fought it out for three hours. Nor was the scene much better in the house. No fighting, indeed, but folks lying drunk on the floor, and decanting, until both my dogs got so drunk by attending them, that they could not stand. You will easily guess how I enjoyed the scene, as I was no farther over than you used to see me.

Mrs. B. and family have been in Ayrshire these many weeks.

Farewell! and God bless you, my dear Friend! R.B.

122 Of Wanlockhead. Burns got to know him during his frequent journeys between Ellisland and Mauchline in 1788-9.

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CLXVII — TO MR. AINSLIE.

ELLISLAND, 1791.

My Dear Ainslie, — Can you minister to a mind diseased? can you, amid the horrors of penitence, regret, remorse, head-ache, nausea, and all the rest of the damn’d hounds of hell that beset a poor wretch who has been guilty of the sin of drunkenness — can you speak peace to a troubled soul?

Miserable perdu that I am, I have tried every thing that used to amuse me, but in vain; here must I sit, a monument of the vengeance laid up in store for the wicked, slowly counting every click of the clock as it slowly, slowly numbers over these lazy scoundrels of hours, who, damn them, are ranked up before me, every one at his neighbour’s backside, and every one with a burthen of anguish on his back, to pour on my devoted head — and there is none to pity me. My wife scolds me, my business torments me, and my sins come staring me in the face, every one telling a more bitter tale than his fellow. — When I tell you even –- has lost its power to please, you will guess something of my hell within, and all around me. — I began Elibanks and Elibraes, but the stanzas fell unenjoyed and unfinished from my listless tongue: at last I luckily thought of reading over an old letter of yours, that lay by me in my bookcase, and I felt something for the first time since I opened my eyes, of pleasurable existence. –- Well — I begin to breathe a little, since I began to write to you. How are you, and what are you doing? How goes Law? Apropos, for correction’s sake do not address to me supervisor, for that is an honour I cannot pretend to — I am on the list, as we call it, for a supervisor, and will be called out by-and-by to act as one; but at present I am a simple gauger, tho’ t’other day I got an appointment to an excise division of PS25 per annum better than the rest. My present income, down money, is PS70 per annum.

I have one or two good fellows here whom you would be glad to know.

R. B.

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CLXVIII. — TO MISS DAVIES.

It is impossible, Madam, that the generous warmth and angelic purity of your youthful mind can have any idea of that moral disease under which I unhappily must rank as the chief of sinners; I mean a torpitude of the moral powers that may be called a lethargy of conscience. In vain Remorse rears her horrent crest, and rouses all her snakes: beneath the deadly-fixed eye and leaden hand of Indolence their wildest ire is charmed into the torpor of the bat, slumbering out the rigours of winter in the chink of a ruined wall. Nothing less, Madam, could have made me so long neglect your obliging commands. Indeed, I had one apology — the bagatelle was not worth presenting. Besides, so strongly am I interested in Miss Davies’s fate and welfare in the serious business of life, amid its chances and changes, that to make her the subject of a silly ballad is downright mockery of these ardent feelings; ‘tis like an impertinent jest to a dying friend.

Gracious Heaven! why this disparity between our wishes and our powers? Why is the most generous wish to make others blest impotent and ineffectual as the idle breeze that crosses the pathless desert? In my walks of life I have met with a few people to whom how gladly would I have said— “Go, be happy! I know that your hearts have been wounded by the scorn of the proud, whom accident has placed above you; or worse still, in whose hands are, perhaps, placed many of the comforts of your life. But there! ascend that rock, Independence, and look justly down on their littleness of soul. Make the worthless tremble under your indignation, and the foolish sink before your contempt; and largely impart that happiness to others which, I am certain, will give yourselves so much pleasure to bestow.”

Why, dear Madam, must I wake from this delightful reverie, and find it all a dream? Why, amid my generous enthusiasm, must I find myself poor and powerless, incapable of wiping one tear from the eye of pity, or of adding one comfort to the friend I love? Out upon the world! say I, that its affairs are administered so ill! They talk of reform; — good Heaven! what a reform would I make among the sons, and even the daughters of men! Down, immediately, should go fools from the high places where misbegotten chance has perked them up, and through life should they skulk, ever haunted by their native insignificance, as the body marches accompanied by its shadow. As for a much more formidable class, the knaves, I am at a loss what to do with them: had I a world, there should not be a knave in it.

But the hand that could give, I would liberally fill: and I would pour delight on the heart that could kindly forgive, and generously love.

Still the inequalities of life are, among men, comparatively tolerable; but there is a delicacy, a tenderness, accompanying every view in which we can place lovely Woman, that are grated and shocked at the rude, capricious distinctions of Fortune. Woman is the blood-royal of life: let there be slight degrees of precedency among them — but let them be ALL sacred. Whether this last sentiment be right or wrong, I am not accountable; it is an original component feature of my mind.

R. B.

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CLXIX. — TO MRS. DUNLOP.

5th January 1792.

You see my hurried life, Madam: I can only command starts of time; however, I am glad of one thing; since I finished the other sheet, the political blast that threatened my welfare is overblown. I have corresponded with Commissioner Graham, for the Board had made me the subject of their animadversions; and now I have the pleasure of informing you that all is set to rights in that quarter. Now as to these informers, may the devil be let loose to — but, hold! I was praying most fervently in my last sheet, and I must not so soon fall a swearing in this.

Alas! how little do the wantonly or idly officious think what mischief they do by their malicious insinuations, indirect impertinence, or thoughtless babblings. What a difference there is in intrinsic worth, candour, benevolence, generosity, kindness, — in all the charities and all the virtues — between one class of human beings and another!

For instance, the amiable circle I so lately mixed with in the hospitable hall of Dunlop, their generous hearts — their uncontaminated dignified minds — their informed and polished understandings — what a contrast, when compared — if such comparing were not downright sacrilege — with the soul of the miscreant who can deliberately plot the destruction of an honest man that never offended him, and with a grin of satisfaction see the unfortunate being, his faithful wife, and prattling innocents, turned over to beggary and ruin!

Your cup, my dear Madam, arrived safe. I had two worthy fellows dining with me the other day, when I, with great formality, produced my whigmeleerie cup, and told them that it had been a family-piece among the descendants of William Wallace, This roused such an enthusiasm, that they insisted on bumpering the punch round in it; and by-and-by, never did your great ancestor lay a Southron more completely to rest than for a time did your cup my two friends. Apropos, this is the season of wishing. May God bless you, my dear friend, and bless me, the humblest and sincerest of your friends, by granting you yet many returns of the season! May all good things attend you and yours wherever they are scattered over the earth!

R.B.

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CLXX. — TO MR. WILLIAM SMELLIE, PRINTER.

DUMFRIES, 22nd January 1792.

I sit down, my dear Sir, to introduce a young lady^123 to you, and a lady in the first ranks of fashion, too. What a task! to you — who care no more for the herd of animals called young ladies than you do for the herd of animals called young gentlemen; to you — who despise and detest the groupings and combinations of fashion, as an idiot painter that seems industrious to place staring fools and unprincipled knaves in the foreground of his picture, while men of sense and honesty are too often thrown in the dimmest shades. Mrs. Riddell, who will take this letter to town with her, and send it to you, is a character that, even in your own way as a naturalist and a philosopher, would be an acquisition to your acquaintance. The lady, too, is a votary of the muses; and as I think myself somewhat of a judge in my own trade, I assure you that her verses, always correct, and often elegant, are much beyond the common run of the lady poetesses of the day. She is a great admirer of your book; and, hearing me say that I was acquainted with you, she begged to be known to you, as she is just going to pay her first visit to our Caledonian capital. I told her that her best way was to desire her near relation, and your intimate friend, Craigdarroch, to have you at his house while she was there; and lest you might think of a lively West Indian girl of eighteen, as girls of eighteen too often deserve to be thought of, I should take care to remove that prejudice. To be impartial, however, in appreciating the lady’s merits, she has one unlucky failing — a failing which you will easily discover, as she seems rather pleased with indulging in it; and a failing that you will easily pardon, as it is a sin which very much besets yourself; — where she dislikes, or despises, she is apt to make no more a secret of it, than where she esteems and respects.

I will not present you with the unmeaning compliments of the season, but I will send you my warmest wishes and most ardent prayers, that Fortune may never throw your subsistence to the mercy of a knave, or set your character on the judgment of a fool; but that, upright and erect, you may walk to an honest grave, where men of letters shall say, here lies a man who did honour to science, and men of worth shall say, here lies a man who did honour to human nature.

R. B.

123 Maria Riddell, a gay, clever, young Creole, wife of Walter, brother of Captain Riddell.

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CLXXL — TO MR. WILLIAM NICOL.

20th February 1792.

O thou wisest among the wise, meridian blaze of prudence, full moon of discretion, and chief of many counsellors! How infinitely is thy puddle-headed, rattleheaded, wrong-headed, round-headed slave indebted to thy super-eminent goodness, that from the luminous path of thy own right-lined rectitude, thou lookest benignly down on an erring wretch, of whom the zig-zag wanderings defy all the powers of calculation, from the simple copulation of units, up to the hidden mysteries of fluxions! May one feeble ray of that light of wisdom which darts from thy sensorium, straight as the arrow of heaven, and bright as the meteor of inspiration, may it be my portion, so that I may be less unworthy of the face and favour of that father of proverbs and master of maxims, that antipode of folly, and magnet among the sages, the wise and witty Willie Nicol! Amen! Amen! Yea, so be it!

For me! I am a beast, a reptile, and know nothing! From the cave of my ignorance, amid the fogs of my dulness, and pestilential fumes of my political heresies, I look up to thee, as doth a toad through the iron-barred lucarne of a pestiferous dungeon, to the cloudless glory of a summer sun! Sorely sighing in bitterness of soul, I say, When shall my name be the quotation of the wise, and my countenance be the delight of the godly, like the illustrious lord of Laggan’s many hills?124 As for him, his works are perfect: never did the pen of calumny blur the fair page of his reputation, nor the bolt of hatred fly at his dwelling.

Thou mirror of purity, when shall the elfin lamp of my glimmerous understanding, purged from sensual appetites and gross desires, shine like the constellation of thy intellectual powers. As for thee, thy thoughts are pure and thy lips are holy. Never did the unhallowed breath of the powers of darkness, and the pleasures of darkness, pollute the sacred flame of thy sky-descended and heaven-bound desires: never did the vapours of impurity stain the unclouded serene of thy cerulean imagination. O that like thine were the tenor of my life, like thine the tenor of my conversation! then should no friend fear for my strength, no enemy rejoice in my weakness! Then should I lie down and rise up, and none to make me afraid. May thy pity and thy prayer be exercised for, O thou lamp of wisdom and mirror of morality! thy devoted slave,

R. B.

124 Mr. Nicol had purchased a small piece of ground called Laggan, on the Nith. There took place the Bacchanalian scene which called forth “Willie brew’d a peck o’ Maat.”

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CLXXIL. — TO MR. FRANCIS GROSE, F.S A.

DUMFRIES, 1792.

Among the many witch stories I have heard, relating to Alloway Kirk, I distinctly remember only two or three.

Upon a stormy night, amid whistling squalls of wind, and bitter blasts of hail; in short, on such a night as the devil would choose to take the air in; a farmer or farmer’s servant was plodding and plashing homeward with his plough-irons on his shoulder, having been getting some repairs on them at a neighbouring smithy. His way lay by the kirk of Alloway, and being rather on the anxious look out in approaching a place so well known to be a favourite haunt of the devil and the devil’s friends and emissaries, he was struck aghast by discovering through the horrors of the storm and stormy night, a light, which on his nearer approach plainly showed itself to proceed from the haunted edifice. Whether he had been fortified from above on his devout supplication, as is customary with people when they suspect the immediate presence of Satan; or whether, according to another custom, he got courageously drunk at the smithy, I will not pretend to determine; but so it was that he ventured to go up to, nay, into the very kirk. As luck would have it his temerity came off unpunished.

The members of the infernal junto were all out on some midnight business or other, and he saw nothing but a kind of kettle or caldron, depending from the roof, over the fire, simmering some heads of unchristened children, limbs of executed malefactors, etc., for the business of the night. It was in for a penny, in for a pound, with the honest ploughman: so without ceremony he unhooked the caldron from off the fire, and, pouring out the damn’d ingredients, inverted it on his head, and carried it fairly home, where it remained long in the family, a living evidence of the truth of the story.

Another story, which I can prove to be equally authentic, is as follows:

On a market day in the town of Ayr a farmer from Carrick, and consequently whose way lay by the very gate of Alloway kirk-yard, in order to cross the river Doon at the old Bridge, which is about two or three hundred yards farther on than the said gate, had been detained by his business, till by the time he reached Alloway it was the wizard hour, between night and morning.

Though he was terrified with a blaze streaming from the kirk, yet as it is a well-known fact that to turn back on these occasions is running by far the greatest risk of mischief, he prudently advanced on his road. When he had reached the gate of the kirk-yard, he was surprised and entertained, through the ribs and arches of an old gothic window, which still faces the highway, to see a dance of witches merrily footing it round their old sooty blackguard master, who was keeping them all alive with the power of his bagpipe. The farmer stopping his horse to observe them a little, could plainly descry the faces of many old women of his acquaintance and neighbourhood. How the gentleman was dressed tradition does not say; but that the ladies were all in their smocks: and one of them happening unluckily to have a smock which was considerably too short to answer all the purpose of that piece of dress, our farmer was so tickled that he involuntarily burst out with a loud laugh, “Weel luppen, Maggy wi’ the short sark!” and recollecting himself, instantly spurred his horse to the top of his speed. I need not mention the universally known fact, that no diabolical power can pursue you beyond the middle of a running stream. Lucky it was for the poor farmer that the river Doon was so near, for, notwithstanding the speed of his horse, which was a good one, against he reached the middle of the arch of the bridge, and consequently the middle of the stream, the pursuing, vengeful hags were so close at his heels, that one of them actually sprung to seize him; but it was too late; nothing was on her side of the stream but the horse’s tail, which immediately gave way at her infernal grip, as if blasted by a stroke of lightning; but the farmer was beyond her reach. However, the unsightly, tail-less condition of the vigorous steed was to the last hour of the noble creature’s life, an awful warning to the Carrick farmers, not to stay too late in Ayr markets.

The last relation I shall give, though equally true, is not so well identified as the two former, with regard to the scene; but as the best authorities give it for Alloway, I shall relate it.

On a summer’s evening, about the time nature puts on her sables to mourn the expiry of the cheerful day, a shepherd boy, belonging to a farmer in the immediate neighbourhood of Alloway kirk, had just folded his charge, and was returning home. As he passed the kirk, in the adjoining field he fell in with a crew of men and women, who were busy pulling stems of the plant ragwort. He observed that as each person pulled a ragwort, he or she got astride of it, and called out, “Up, horsie!” on which the ragwort flew off, like Pegasus, through the air with its rider. The foolish boy likewise pulled his ragwort, and cried with the rest, “Up, horsie!” and, strange to tell, away he flew with the company. The first stage at which the cavalcade stopt was a merchant’s wine-cellar in Bourdeaux, where, without saying “By your leave,” they quaffed away at the best the cellar could afford, until the morning, foe to the imps and works of darkness, threatened to throw light on the matter, and frightened them from their carousals.

The poor shepherd lad, being equally a stranger to the scene and the liquor, heedlessly got himself drunk; and when the rest took horse, he fell asleep, and was found so next day by some of the people belonging to the merchant. Somebody that understood Scotch, asking him what he was, he said such a-one’s herd in Alloway, and by some means or other getting home again, he lived long to tell the world the wondrous tale.125

R. B.

125 Cp.Hogg’s Witch of Fife.

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CLXXIIL. — TO MRS. DUNLOP.

ANNAN WATER FOOT, 22nd August 1792.

Do not blame me for it, Madam — my own conscience, hackneyed and weather-beaten as it is, in watching and reproving my vagaries, follies, indolence, etc., has continued to punish me sufficiently.

Do you think it possible, my dear and honoured friend, that I could be so lost to gratitude for many favours; to esteem for much worth; and to the honest, kind, pleasurable tie of, now old acquaintance, and I hope and am sure of progressive, increasing friendship — as, for a single day, not to think of you nor to ask the Fates what they are doing and about to do with my much loved friend and her wide scattered connections, and to beg of them to be as kind to you and yours as they possibly can?

Apropos! (though how it is apropos I have not leisure to explain) do you know that I am almost in love with an acquaintance of yours? — Almost! said I — I am in love, souse! over head and ears, deep as the most unfathomable abyss of the boundless ocean; but the word Love, owing to the intermingledoms of the good and the bad, the pure and the impure, in this world, being rather an equivocal term for expressing one’s sentiments and sensations, I must do justice to the sacred purity of my attachment. Know, then, that the heart-struck awe the distant humble approach; the delight we should have in gazing upon and listening to a Messenger of Heaven, appearing in all the unspotted purity of his celestial home, among the coarse, polluted, far inferior sons of men, to deliver to them tidings that make their hearts swim in joy, and their imaginations soar in transport — such, so delighting and so pure, were the emotions of my soul on meeting the other day with Miss Lesley Baillie, your neighbour at Mayfield. Mr. B., with his two daughters, accompanied by Mr. H. of G., passing through Dumfries a few days ago, on their way to England, did me the honour of calling on me; on which I took my horse (though God knows I could ill spare the time), and accompanied them fourteen or fifteen miles, and dined and spent the day with them. Twas about nine, I think, when I left them, and, riding home, I composed the following ballad, of which you will probably think you have a dear bargain, as it will cost you another groat of postage. You must know that there is an old ballad beginning with —

My bonnie Lizzie Bailie,

I’ll lowe thee in my plaidie, (etc,)

So I parodied it as follows, which is literally the first copy, “unanointed, unanneal’d,” as Hamlet says, —

O saw ye bonny Lesley

As she gaed o’er the border?

She’s gane, like Alexander,

To spread her conquests farther, (etc.)

So much for ballads. I regret that you are gone to the east country, as I am to be in Ayrshire in about a fortnight. This world of ours, notwithstanding it has many good things in it, yet it has ever had this curse, that two or three people, who would be the happier the oftener they met together, are, almost without exception, always so placed as never to meet but once or twice a-year, which, considering the few years of a man’s life, is a very great “evil under the sun,” which I do not recollect that Solomon has mentioned in his catalogue of the miseries of man. I hope and believe that there is a state of existence beyond the grave, where the worthy of this life will renew their former intimacies, with this endearing addition, that “we meet to part no more”

Tell us, ye dead,

Will none of you in pity disclose the secret

What ‘tis you are, and we must shortly be!

A thousand times have I made this apostrophe to the departed sons of men, but not one of them has ever thought fit to answer the question. “O that some courteous ghost would blab it out!” but it cannot be; you and I, my friend, must make the experiment by ourselves, and for ourselves. However, I am so convinced that an unskaken faith in the doctrines of religion is not only necessary, by making us better men, but also by making us happier men, that I shall take every care that your little godson, and every little creature that shall call me father, shall be taught them. So ends this heterogeneous letter, written at this wild place of the world, in the intervals of my labour of discharging a vessel of rum from Antigua.

R. B.

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CLXXIV. — TO MR. CUNNINGHAM.

DUMFRIES, 10th September 1792.

No! I will not attempt an apology. Amid all my hurry of business, grinding the faces of the publican and the sinner on the merciless wheels of the Excise; making ballads, and then drinking, and singing them; and, over and above all, the correcting the press-work of two different publications; still, still I might have stolen five minutes to dedicate to one of the first of my friends and fellow-creatures. I might have done, as I do at present-snatched an hour near “witching time of night,” and scrawled a page or two; I might have congratulated my friend on his marriage; or I might have thanked the Caledonian archers for the honour they have done me (though, to do myself justice, I intended to have done both in rhyme, else I had done both long ere now). Well, then, here is to your good health! for you must know, I have set a nipperkin of toddy by me, just by way of spell, to keep away the meikle horned deil, or any of his subaltern imps who may be on their nightly rounds.

But what shall I write to you?— “The voice said, cry,” and I said, “What shall I cry?” — O, thou spirit! whatever thou art, or wherever thou makest thyself visible! be thou a bogle by the eerie side of an auld thorn, in the dreary glen through which the herd-callan maun bicker in his gloamin route frae the fauld! — Be thou a brownie, set, at dead of night, to thy task by the blazing ingle, or in the solitary barn, where the repercussions of thy iron flail half affright thyself, as thou performest the work of twenty of the sons of men, ere the cock-crowing summon thee to thy ample cog of substantial brose. Be thou a kelpie, haunting the ford or ferry, in the starless night, mixing thy laughing yell with the howling of the storm and the roaring of the flood, as thou viewest the perils and miseries of man on the foundering horse, or in the tumbling boat! — Or, lastly, be thou a ghost, paying thy nocturnal visits to the hoary ruins of decayed grandeur; or performing thy mystic rites in the shadow of the time-worn church, while the moon looks, without a cloud, on the silent, ghastly dwellings of the dead around thee; or taking thy stand by the bedside of the villain, or the murderer, portraying on his dreaming fancy, pictures, dreadful as the horrors of unveiled hell, and terrible as the wrath of incensed Deity! — Come, thou spirit, but not in these horrid forms; come with the milder, gentle, easy inspirations, which thou breathest round the wig of a prating advocate, or the tete of a tea-sipping gossip, while their tongues run at the light-horse gallop of clish-maclaver for ever and ever — come and assist a poor devil who is quite jaded in the attempt to share half an idea among half a hundred words; to fill up four quarto pages, while he has not got one single sentence of recollection, information, or remark worth putting pen to paper for.

I feel, I feel the presence of supernatural assistance! Circled in the embrace of my elbow-chair, my breast labours, liked the bloated Sibyl on her three-footed stool, and like her too, labours with Nonsense. Nonsense, auspicious name! Tutor, friend, and finger-post in the mystic mazes of law; the cadaverous paths of physic: and particularly in the sightless soarings of SCHOOL DIVINITY, who, leaving Common Sense confounded at the strength of his pinion; Reason delirious with eyeing his giddy flight; and Truth creeping back into the bottom of her well, cursing the hour that ever she offered her scorned alliance to the wizard power of Theologic Vision-raves abroad on all the winds:— “On earth discord! a gloomy Heaven above, opening her jealous gates to the nineteen-thousandth part of the tithe of mankind! and below, an inescapable and inexorable hell, expanding its leviathan jaws for the vast residue of mortals!!! ” — O doctrine! comfortable and healing to the weary wounded soul of man! Ye sons and daughters of affliction, ye pauvres miserables, to whom day brings no pleasure, and night yields no rest, be comforted! ‘Tis but one to nineteen hundred thousand that your situation will mend in this world; so, alas, the experience of the poor and needy too often affirms; and ‘tis nineteen hundred thousand to one, by the dogmas of Theology, that you will be condemned eternally in the world to come!

But of all Nonsense, Religious Nonsense is the most nonsensical; so enough, and more than enough, of it. Only, by-the-bye, will you, or can you tell me, my dear Cunningham, why a sectarian turn of mind has always a tendency to narrow and illiberalise the heart? They are orderly; they may be just; nay, I have known them merciful: but still your children of sanctity move among their fellow-creatures with a nostril snuffing putrescence, and a foot spurning filth — in short, with a conceited dignity that your titled Douglases, or any other of your Scottish lordlings of seven centuries standing, display when they accidentally mix among the many-aproned sons of mechanical life. I remember, in my plough-boy days, I could not conceive it possible that a noble lord could be a fool, or a godly man could be a knave. How ignorant are plough-boys! — Nay, I have since discovered that a godly woman may be a — ! — But hold — here’s t’ye again — this rum is generous Antigua, so a very unfit menstruum for scandal.

Apropos, how do you like, I mean really like, the married life? Ah, my friend! matrimony is quite a different thing from what your love-sick youths and sighing girls take it to be! But marriage, we are told, is appointed by God, and I shall never quarrel with any of His institutions. I am a husband of older standing than you, and shall give you my ideas of the conjugal state, (en passant — you know I am no Latinist-is not conjugal derived from jugum, a yoke?) Well, then, the scale of good wifeship I divide into ten parts. Good-nature, four; Good Sense, two; Wit, one; Personal Charms, viz., a sweet face, eloquent eyes, fine limbs, graceful carriage (I would add a fine waist too, but that is so soon spoilt, you know), all these, one; as for the other qualities belonging to, or attending on, a wife, such as Fortune, Connections, Education (I mean education extraordinary), Family blood, etc., divide the two remaining degrees among them as you please; only, remember that all these minor properties must be expressed by fractions, for there is not any one of them, in the aforesaid scale, entitled to the dignity of an integer.

As for the rest of my fancies and reveries — how I lately met with Miss Lesley Baillie, the most beautiful, elegant woman in the world — how I accompanied her and her father’s family fifteen miles on their journey, out of pure devotion, to admire the loveliness of the works of God, in such an unequalled display of them — how, in galloping home at night, I made a ballad on her, of which these two stanzas make a part —

Thou, bonnie Lesley, art a queen,

Thy subjects we before thee;

Thou, bonnie Lesley, art divine,

The hearts o’ men adore thee.

The very deil he could na scathe

Whatever wad belang thee!

He’d look into thy bonnie face

And say, “I canna wrang thee” —

behold all these things are written in the chronicles of my imagination, and shall be read by thee, my dear friend, and by thy beloved spouse, my other dear friend, at a more convenient season.

Now to thee and thy wife [etc. — a mock benediction.]

R.B.

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CLXXV. — TO MRS. DUNLOP.

DUMFRIES, 24th September 1792.

I have this moment, my dear Madam, yours of the twenty-third. All your other kind reproaches, your news, etc., are out of my head when I read and think of Mrs. Henri’s^126 situation. Good God! a heart-wounded helpless young woman — in a strange, foreign land, and that land convulsed with every horror that can harrow the human feelings — sick-looking, longing for a comforter, but finding none — a mother’s feelings, too: — but it is too much: He who wounded (He only can) may He heal!

I wish the farmer great joy of his new acquisition to his family…. I cannot say that I give Him joy of his life as a farmer. ‘Tis, as a farmer paying a dear, unconscionable rent, a cursed life! As to a laird farming his own property; sowing his own corn in hope; and reaping it, in spite of brittle weather, in gladness; knowing that none can say unto him, “What dost thou?” — fattening his herds; shearing his flocks; rejoicing at Christmas; and begetting sons and daughters, until he be the venerated, grey-haired leader of a little tribe—‘tis a heavenly life! but devil take the life of reaping the fruits that another must eat!

Well, your kind wishes will be gratified, as to seeing me when I make my Ayrshire visit. I cannot leave Mrs. Burns until her nine months’ race is run, which may perhaps be in three or four weeks. She, too, seems determined to make me the patriarchal leader of a band. However, if Heaven will be so obliging as to let me have them in the proportion of three boys to one girl, I shall be so much the more pleased. I hope, if I am spared with them, to show a set of boys that will do honour to my cares and name; but I am not equal to the task of rearing girls. Besides, I am too poor; a girl should always have a fortune. Apropos, your little godson is thriving charmingly, but is a very deil. He, though two years younger, has completely mastered his brother. Robert is indeed the mildest, gentlest creature I ever saw. He has a most surprising memory, and is quite the pride of his schoolmaster.

You know how readily we get into prattle upon a subject dear to our heart: you can excuse it. God bless you and yours!

126 Her daughter, ill in France.

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CLXXVI. — TO MRS. DUNLOP.

Supposed to have been written on the Death of Mirs. Henri, her daughter, at Muges.

I had been from home, and did not receive your letter until my return the other day. What shall I say to comfort you, my much-valued, much-afflicted friend! I can but grieve with you; consolation I have none to offer, except that which religion holds out to the children of affliction — children of affliction! — how just the expression! and like every other family, they have matters among them which they hear, see, and feel in a serious, all-important manner, of which the world has not, nor cares to have, any idea. The world looks indifferently on, makes the passing remark, and proceeds to the next novel occurrence.

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

I am interrupted, and must leave off. You shall soon hear from me again.

R. B.

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CLXXVII. — TO MRS. DUNLOP.

DUMFRIES, 6th December 1792.

I shall be in Ayrshire, I think, next week; and, if at all possible, I shall certainly, my much esteemed friend, have the pleasure of visiting at Dunlop House.

Alas, Madam! how seldom do we meet in this world, that we have reason to congratulate ourselves on accessions of happiness! I have not passed half the ordinary term of an old man’s life, and yet I scarcely look over the obituary of a newspaper that I do not see some names that I have known, and which I and other acquaintances little thought to meet with there so soon. Every other instance of the mortality of our kind makes us cast an anxious look into the dreadful abyss of uncertainty, and shudder with apprehension for our own fate. But of how different an importance are the lives of different individuals! Nay, of what importance is one period of the same life more than another? A few years ago I could have lain down in the dust, “careless of the voice of the morning;” and now not a few, and these most helpless individuals, would, on losing me and my exertions, lose both “staff and shield.” By the way, these helpless ones have lately got an addition — Mrs. B. having given me a fine girl since I wrote you. There is a charming passage in Thomson’s” Edward and Eleanora:”

The valiant, in himself what can he suffer?

Or what need he regard his single woes? (etc.)

I do not remember to have heard you mention Thomson’s dramas. I pick up favourite quotations, and store them in my mind as ready armour, offensive or defensive, amid the struggle of this turbulent existence. Of these is one, a very favourite one, from his “Alfred:”

Attach thee firmly to the virtuous deeds

And offices of life; to life itself,

With all its vain and transient joys, sit loose.

Probably I have quoted these to you formerly, as indeed, when I write from the heart, I am apt to be guilty of repetitions. The compass of the heart, in the musical style of expression, is much more bounded than that of the imagination; so the notes of the former are extremely apt to run into one another; but in return for the paucity of its compass, its few notes are much more sweet….

I see you are in for double postage, so I shall e’en scribble out t’other sheet. We in this country here have many alarms of the reforming, or rather the republican spirit, of your part of the kingdom. Indeed, we are a good deal in commotion ourselves. For me, I am a placeman, you know; a very humble one indeed, Heaven knows, but still so much as to gag me. What my private sentiments are, you will find out without an interpreter.

I have taken up the subject, and the other day, for a pretty actress’s benefit night, I wrote an address, which I will give on the other page, called “The Rights of Woman.” I shall have the honour of receiving your criticisms in person at Dunlop.

R. B.

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CLXXVIII. — TO MR. R. GRAHAM, FINTRY.

December 1792.

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

Sir, you are a husband — and a father. You know what you would feel, to see the much-loved wife of your bosom, and your helpless, prattling little ones, turned adrift into the world, degraded and disgraced from a situation in which they had been respectable and respected, and left almost without the necessary support of a miserable existence. Alas, Sir! must I think that such, soon, will be my lot! and from the damn’d, dark insinuations of hellish, groundless envy too! I believe, Sir, I may aver it, and in the sight of Omniscience, that I would not tell a deliberate falsehood, no, not though even worse horrors, if worse can be, than those I have mentioned, hung over my head; and I say, that the allegation, whatever villain has made it, is a lie! To the British Constitution, on revolution principles, next after my God, I am most devoutly attached. You, Sir, have been much and generously my friend: Heaven knows how warmly I have felt the obligation, and how gratefully I have thanked you. Fortune, Sir, has made you powerful, and me impotent; has given you patronage, and me dependence. I would not for my single self call on your humanity; were such my insular, unconnected situation, I would despise the tear that now swells in my eye — I could brave misfortune, I could face ruin; for at the worst, “Death’s thousand doors stand open;” but, good God! the tender concerns that I have mentioned, the claims and ties that I see at this moment, and feel around me, how they unnerve Courage, and wither Resolution! To your patronage, as a man of some genius, you have allowed me a claim; and your esteem, as an honest man, I know is my due: to these, Sir, permit me to appeal; by these may I adjure you to save me from that misery which threatens to overwhelm me, and which, with my latest breath I will say it, I have not deserved.

R. B.

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CLXXIX. — TO MRS. DUNLOP.

DUMFRIES, 31st December 1792.

Dear Madam, — A hurry of business, thrown in heaps by my absence, has until now prevented my returning my grateful acknowledgments to the good family of Dunlop, and you in particular, for that hospitable kindness which rendered the four days I spent under that genial roof, four of the pleasantest I ever enjoyed. Alas, my dearest friend! how few and fleeting are those things we call pleasures! on my road to Ayrshire I spent a night with a friend whom I much valued; a man whose days promised to be many; and on Saturday last we laid him in the dust!

Jan. 2nd, 1793.

I have just received yours of the 30th, and feel much for your situation. However, I heartily rejoice in your prospect of recovery from that vile jaundice. As to myself, I am better, though not quite free of my complaint. You must not think, as you seem to insinuate, that in my way of life I want exercise. Of that I have enough; but occasional hard drinking is the devil to me. Against this I have again and again bent my resolution, and have greatly succeeded. Taverns I have totally abandoned: it is the private parties in the family way, among the hard-drinking gentlemen of this country, that do me the mischief — but even this I have more than half given over.

Mr. Corbet can be of little service to me at present; at least I should be shy of applying. I cannot possibly be settled as a supervisor for several years. I must wait the rotation of the list, and there are twenty names before mine. — I might indeed get a job of officiating, where a settled supervisor was ill, or aged; but that hauls me from my family, as I could not remove them on such an uncertainty. Besides, some envious, malicious devil has raised a little demur on my political principles, and I wish to let that matter settle before I offer myself too much in the eye of my supervisors. I have set, henceforth, a seal on my lips, as to these unlucky politics; but to you I must breathe my sentiments. In this, as in everything else, I shall show the undisguised emotions of my soul. War I deprecate: misery and ruin to thousands are in the blast that announces the destructive demon. But….

R. B.

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CLXXX. — TO MR. ROBERT GRAHAM OF FINTRY.

DUMFRIES, Morning of 5th Jan. 1793.

Sir, — I am this moment honoured with your letter. With what feelings I received this other instance of your goodness I shall not pretend to describe.

Now to the charges which malice and misrepresentation have brought against me.127 It has been said, it seems, that I not only belong to, but head a disaffected party in this town. I know of no party here, republican or reform, except an old Burgh-Reform party, with which I never had anything to do. Individuals, both republican and reform, we have, though not many of either; but if they have associated, it is more than I have the least knowledge of, and if such an association exist it must consist of such obscure, nameless beings as precludes any possibility of my being known to them, or they to me.

I was in the playhouse one night when Ca Ira was called for. I was in the middle of the pit, and from the pit the clamour arose. One or two persons, with whom I occasionally associate, were of the party, but I neither knew of, nor joined in the plot, nor at all opened my lips to hiss or huzza that, or any other political tune whatever. I looked on myself as far too obscure a man to have any weight in quelling a riot, and at the same time as a person of higher respectability than to yell to the howlings of a rabble. I never uttered any invectives against the king. His private worth it is altogether impossible that such a man as I can appreciate; but in his public capacity I always revered, and always will with the soundest loyalty revere the monarch of Great Britain as — to speak in masonic — the sacred keystone of our royal arch constitution. As to Reform principles, I look upon the British Constitution, as settled at the Revolution, to be the most glorious on earth, or that perhaps the wit of man can frame; at the same time I think, not alone, that we have a good deal deviated from the original principles of that Constitution, — particularly, that an alarming system of corruption has pervaded the connection between the Executive and the House of Commons. This is the whole truth of my Reform opinions, which, before I knew the complexion of these innovating times, I too unguardedly as I now see sported with: henceforth I seal up my lips. But I never dictated to, corresponded with, or had the least connection with any political association whatever. Of Johnstone, the publisher of the Edinburgh Gazetteer, I know nothing. One evening, in company with four or five friends, we met with his prospectus, which we thought manly and independent; and I wrote to him, ordering his paper for us. If you think I act improperly in allowing his paper to come addressed to me, I shall immediately countermand it. I never wrote a line of prose to The Gazetteer in my life. An address, spoken by Miss Fontenelle on her benefit night, and which I called “The Rights of Woman,” I sent to The Gazetteer, as also some stanzas on the Commemoration of the poet Thomson: both of these I will subjoin for your perusal. You will see they have nothing whatever to do with politics.

As to France, I was her enthusiastic votary in the beginning of the business. When she came to shew her old avidity for conquest by annexing Savoy and invading the rights of Holland, I altered my sentiments.

This, my honoured patron, is all. To this statement I challenge disquisition. Mistaken prejudice or unguarded passion may mislead, have often misled me; but when called on to answer for my mistakes, though no man can feel keener compunction for them, yet no man can be more superior to evasion or disguise. — I have the honour to be, Sir, your ever grateful, etc.,

ROBT. BURNS.

127 Because of what Burns elsewhere called “Some temeraire conduct of mine, in the political opinions of the day.”

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CLXXXI. — TO MR. ALEX. CUNNINGHAM, W.S., EDINBURGH.

DUMFRIES, 20th Feb. 1793.

What are you doing? What hurry have you got on your head, my dear Cunningham, that I have not heard from you? Are you deeply engaged in the mazes of the Jaw, the mysteries of love, or the profound wisdom of politics? Curse on the word!

Q. What is Politics?

A. It is a science wherewith, by means of nefarious cunning and hypocritical pretence, we govern civil politics (sic) for the emolument of ourselves and adherents.

Q. What is a minister?

A. An unprincipled fellow who, by the influence of hereditary or acquired wealth, by superior abilities or by a lucky conjuncture of circumstances, obtains a principal place in the administration of the affairs of government.

Q. What is a patriot?

A. An individual exactly of the same description as a minister, only out of place.

I was interrupted in my Catechism, and am returned at a late hour just to subscribe my name, and to put you in mind of the forgotten friend of that name who is still in the land of the living, though I can hardly say in the place of hope.

I made the enclosed sonnet^128 the other day. Adieu!

ROBT. BURNS.

128 “On Hearing a Thrush Sing.”

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CLXXXIL — TO MR. CUNNINGHAM.

3rd March 1793.

Since I wrote to you the last lugubrious sheet, I have not had time to write to you farther. When I say that I had not time, that, as usual, means that the three demons, indolence, business, and ennui, have so completely shared my hours among them, as not to leave me a five minutes’ fragment to take up a pen in.

Thank Heaven, I feel my spirits buoying upwards with the renovating year. Now I shall in good earnest take up Thomson’s songs. I dare say he thinks I have used him unkindly, and I must own with too much appearance of truth…

There is one commission that I must trouble you with. I lately lost a valuable seal, a present from a departed friend, which vexes me much. I have gotten one of your Highland pebbles, which I fancy would make a very decent one; and I want to cut my armorial bearing on it; will you be so obliging as inquire what will be the expense of such a business? I do not know that my name is matriculated, as the heralds call it, at all; but I have invented arms for myself, so you know I shall be chief of the name; and, by courtesy of Scotland, will likewise be entitled to supporters. These, however, I do not intend having on my seal. I am a bit of a herald, and shall give you, secundum artem, my arms. On a field, azure, a holly bush, seeded, proper, in base; a shepherd’s pipe and crook, saltier-wise, also proper, in chief. On a wreath of the colours, a wood-lark perching on a sprig of bay-tree, proper, for crest. Two mottoes; round the top of the crest, Wood notes wild; at the bottom of the shield, in the usual place, Better a wee bush than nae bield. By the shepherd’s pipe and crook I do not mean the nonsense of painters of Arcadia, but a Stock and Horn, and a Club such as you see at the head of Allan Ramsay, in Allan’s quarto edition of the “Gentle Shepherd.” By-the-bye, do you know Allan? He must be a man of very great genius — Why is he not more known? — Has he no patrons? or do “Poverty’s cold wind and crushing rain beat keen and heavy” on him? I once, and but once, got a glance of that noble edition of the noblest pastoral in the world: and dear as it was, I mean dear as to my pocket, I would have bought it; but I was told that it was printed and engraved for subscribers only. He is the only artist who has hit genuine pastoral costume. What, my dear Cunningham, is there in riches, that they narrow and harden the heart so? I think, that were I as rich as the sun, I should be as generous as the day: but as I have no reason to imagine my soul a nobler one than any other man’s, I must conclude that wealth imparts a bird-lime quality to the possessor, at which the man, in his native poverty, would have revolted. What has led me to this, is the idea of such merit as Mr. Allan possesses, and such riches as a nabob or government contractor possesses, and why they do not form a mutual league. Let wealth shelter and cherish unprotected merit, and the gratitude and celebrity of that merit will richly repay it.

R. B.

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CLXXXIII. — TO Miss BENSON, YORK, AFTERWARDS MRS. BASIL MONTAGU.

DUMFRIES, 21st March 1793.

Madam, — Among many things for which I envy those hale, long-lived old fellows before the flood, is this in particular, that when they met with anybody after their own heart, they had a charming long prospect of many, many happy meetings with them in after-life.

Now, in this short, stormy, winter day of our fleeting existence, when you now and then, in the Chapter of Accidents, meet an individual whose acquaintance is a real acquisition, there are all the probabilities against you, that you shall never meet with that valued character more. On the other hand, brief as this miserable being is, it is none of the least of the miseries belonging to it, that if there is any miscreant whom you hate, or creature whom you despise, the ill-run of the chances shall be so against you, that in the over takings, turnings, and jostlings of life, pop! at some unlucky corner, eternally comes the wretch upon you, and will not allow your indignation or contempt a moment’s repose. As I am a sturdy believer in the powers of darkness, I take these to be the doings of that old author of mischief, the devil. It is well known that he has some kind of short-hand way of taking down our thoughts, and I make no doubt that he is perfectly acquainted with my sentiments respecting Miss Benson; how much I admired her abilities and valued her worth, and how very fortunate I thought myself in her acquaintance. For this last reason, my dear Madam, I must entertain no hopes of the very great pleasure of meeting with you again. — I am, etc.

R. B.

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CLXXXIV. — TO MR. JOHN FRANCIS ERSKINE, OF MAR.

DUMFRIES, 13th April 1793.

Sir, — Degenerate as human nature is said to be — and in many instances worthless and unprincipled it is — still there are bright examples to the contrary: examples that, even in the eyes of superior beings, must shed a lustre on the name of Man.

Such an example have I now before me, when you, Sir, came forward to patronise and befriend a distant and obscure stranger, merely because poverty had made him helpless, and his British hardihood of mind had provoked the arbitrary of wantonness and power. My much esteemed friend, Mr, Riddel of Glenriddel, has just read me a paragraph of a letter he had from you. Accept, Sir, of the silent throb of gratitude, for words would but mock the emotions of my soul.

You have been misinformed as to my final dismissal from the Excise; I am still in the service. Indeed, but for the exertions of a gentleman who must be known to you, Mr. Graham of Fintry, a gentleman who has ever been my warm and generous friend, I had, without so much as a hearing, or the slightest previous intimation, been turned adrift, with my helpless family, to all the horrors of want. Had I had any other resource, probably I might have saved them the trouble of a dismissal; but the little money I gained by my publication is almost every guinea embarked to save from ruin an only brother, who, though one of the worthiest, is by no means one of the most fortunate of men.

In my defence to their accusations, I said, that whatever might be my sentiments of republics, ancient or modern, as to Britain, I abjured the idea: That a constitution, which, in its original principles, experience had proved to be every way fitted for our happiness in society, it would be insanity to sacrifice to an untried visionary theory: That, in consideration of my being situated in a department, however humble, immediately in the hands of people in power, I had forborne taking any active part, either personally, or as an author, in the present business of Reform: but that, where I must declare my sentiments, I would say there existed a system of corruption between the executive power and the representative part of the legislature, which boded no good to our glorious constitution, and which every patriotic Briton must wish to see amended. Some such sentiments as these I stated in a letter to my generous patron, Mr. Graham, which he laid before the Board at large; where, it seems, my last remark gave great offence: and one of our supervisors-general, a Mr. Corbet, was instructed to inquire on the spot, and to document me— “that my business was to act, not to think; and that whatever might be men or measures, it was for me to be silent and obedient“.

Mr. Corbet was likewise my steady friend; so between Mr. Graham and him I have been partly forgiven; only I understand that all hopes of my getting officially forward are blasted.

Now, Sir, to the business in which I would more immediately interest you. The partiality of my countrymen has brought me forward as a man of genius, and has given me a character to support. In the Poet I have avowed manly and independent sentiments, which I trust will be found in the man. Reasons of no less weight than the support of a wife and family, have pointed out as the eligible, and situated as I was, the only eligible line of life for me, my present occupation. Still my honest fame is my dearest concern; and a thousand times have I trembled at the idea of those degrading epithets that malice or misrepresentation may affix to my name. I have often, in blasting anticipation, listened to some future hackney scribbler, with the heavy malice of savage stupidity, exulting in his hireling paragraphs— “Burns, notwithstanding the fanfaronade of independence to be found in his works, and after having been held forth to public view and to public estimation as a man of some genius, yet, quite destitute of resources within himself to support his borrowed dignity, he dwindled into a paltry exciseman, and slunk out the rest of his insignificant existence in the meanest of pursuits, and among the vilest of mankind.”

In your illustrious hands, Sir, permit me to lodge my disavowal and defiance of these slanderous falsehoods. Burns was a poor man from birth, and an exciseman by necessity; but — I will say it! the sterling of his honest worth no poverty could debase, and his independent British mind, oppression might bend, but could not subdue. Have not I, to me a more precious stake in my country’s welfare, than the richest dukedom in it? — I have a large family of children, and the prospect of more. I have three sons, who, I see already, have brought into the world souls ill qualified to inhabit the bodies of slaves. — Can I look tamely on, and see any machinations to wrest from them the birthright of my boys, — the little independent Britons, in whose veins runs my own blood? — No! I will not! should my heart’s blood stream around my attempt to defend it!

Does any man tell me that my full efforts can be of no service; and that it does not belong to my humble station to meddle with the concerns of a nation?

I can tell him that it is on such individuals as I that a nation has to rest, both for the hand of support and the eye of intelligence. The uninformed mob may swell a nation’s bulk; and the titled, tinsel, courtly throng may be its feathered ornament; but the number of those who are elevated enough in life to reason and to reflect, yet low enough to keep clear of the venal contagion of a court! — these are a nation’s strength.

I know not how to apologise for the impertinent length of this epistle; but one small request I must ask of you farther — When you have honoured this letter with a perusal, please to commit it to the flames. Burns, in whose behalf you have so generously interested yourself, I have here, in his native colours, drawn as he is; but should any of the people in whose hands is the very bread he eats, get the least knowledge of the picture, it would ruin the poor bard for ever!

My poems having just come out in another edition, I beg leave to present you with a copy as a small mark of that high esteem and ardent gratitude with which I have the honour to be, Sir, your deeply indebted, and ever devoted, humble servant,

R. B.129

129 This letter was penned in response to the sympathy which Mr. Erskine had expressed for Burns in a letter to Captain Riddell of Carse, when Burns was taken to task by the Board of Excise for his political opinions.

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CLXXXV. — TO MISS M’MORDO, DRUMLANRIG.

DUMFRIES, Juy 1793.

… Now let me add a few wishes which every man, who has himself the honour of being a father, must breathe when he sees female youth, beauty, and innocence about to enter into this chequered and very precarious world. May you, my young madam, escape that frivolity which threatens universally to pervade the minds and manners of fashionable life, The mob of fashionable female youth — what are they? Are they anything? They prattle, laugh, sing, dance, finger a lesson, or perhaps turn the pages of a fashionable novel; but are their minds stored with any information worthy of the noble powers of reason and judgment? and do their hearts glow with sentiment, ardent, generous, or humane? Were I to poetize on the subject I would call them the butterflies of the human kind, remarkable only for the idle variety of their ordinary glare, sillily straying from one blossoming weed to another, without a meaning or an aim, the idiot prey of every pirate of the skies who thinks them worth his while as he wings his way by them, and speedily by wintry time swept to that oblivion whence they might as well never have appeared. Amid this crowd of nothings may you be something, etc.

R. B.

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CLXXXVI. — TO JOHN M’MURDO, ESQ., DRUMLANRIG.

This is a painful, disagreeable letter, and the first of the kind I ever wrote. I am truly in serious distress for three or four guineas: can you, my dear sir, accommodate me? These accursed times by tripping up importation have, for this year at least, lopped off a full third of my income;130 and with my large family this is to me a distressing matter.

R. B.

130 Never more than 70 UK pounds.

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CLXXXVII. — TO MRS. RIDDEL.

Dear Madam, — I meant to have called on you yesternight, but as I edged up to your box-door, the first object which greeted my view, was one of those lobster-coated puppies^131 sitting like another dragon, guarding the Hesperian fruit. On the conditions and capitulations you so obligingly offer, I shall certainly make my weather-beaten rustic phiz a part of your box-furniture on Tuesday; when we may arrange the business of the visit.

Among the profusion of idle compliments, which insidious craft, or unmeaning folly, incessantly offer at your shrine — a shrine, how far exalted above such adoration — permit me, were it but for rarity’s sake, to pay you the honest tribute of a warm heart and an independent mind; and to assure you that I am, thou most amiable, and most accomplished of thy sex, with the most respectful esteem, and fervent regard, thine, etc.

R. B.

131 Military officers.

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CLXXXVIII. — TO MRS. RIDDEL.

I will wait on you, my ever valued friend, but whether in the morning I am not sure. Sunday closes a period of our curst revenue business, and may probably keep me employed with my pen until noon. Fine employment for a poet’s pen! There is a species of human genus that I call the gin-horse class: what enviable dogs they are! Round, and round, and round they go, — Mundell’s ox, that drives his cotton mill, is their exact prototype — without an idea or wish beyond their circle; fat, sleek, stupid, patient, quiet, and contented; while here I sit, altogether Novemberish, a damn’d melange of fretfulness and melancholy; not enough of the one to rouse me to passion, nor of the other to repose me in torpor; my soul flouncing and fluttering round her tenement, like a wild finch, caught amid the horrors of winter, and newly thrust into a cage. Well, I am persuaded that it was of me the Hebrew sage prophesied, when he foretold— “And behold, on whatsoever this man doth set his heart, it shall not prosper!” If my resentment is awaked, it is sure to be where it dare not squeak; and if — ….

Pray that wisdom and bliss be more frequent visitors of

R. B.

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CLXXXIX. — TO MRS. RIDDEL.

I have often told you, my dear friend, that you had a spice of caprice in your composition, and you have as often disavowed it; even perhaps while your opinions were, at the moment, irrefragably proving it. Could any thing estrange me from a friend such as you? — No! To-morrow I shall have the honour of waiting on you.

Farewell, thou first of friends, and most accomplished of women I even with all thy little caprices!

R B.

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CXC. — TO MRS. RIDDEL.

Madam, — I return your commonplace book. I have perused it with much pleasure, and would have continued my criticisms, but as it seems the critic has forfeited your esteem, his strictures must lose their value.

If it is true that “offences come only from the heart,” before you I am guiltless. To admire, esteem, and prize you as the most accomplished of women, and the first of friends — if these are crimes, I am the most offending thing alive.

In a face where I used to meet the kind complacency of friendly confidence, now to find cold neglect and contemptuous scorn — is a wrench that my heart can ill bear. It is, however, some kind of miserable good luck, that while de-haut-en-bas rigour may depress an unoffending wretch to the ground, it has a tendency to rouse a stubborn something in his bosom, which, though it cannot heal the wounds of his soul, is at least an opiate to blunt their poignancy.

With the profoundest respect for your abilities, the most sincere esteem and ardent regard for your gentle heart and amiable manners, and the most fervent wish and prayer for your welfare, peace, and bliss, I have the honour to be, Madam, your most devoted humble servant.

R. B.

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CXCI. — TO MR. CUNNINGHAM.

25th February 1794.

Canst thou minister to a mind diseased? Canst thou speak peace and rest to a soul tost on a sea of troubles, without one friendly star to guide her course, and dreading that the next surge may overwhelm her? Canst thou give to a frame, tremblingly alive to the tortures of suspense, the stability and hardihood of the rock that braves the blast? If thou canst not do the least of these, why wouldst thou disturb me in my miseries, with thy inquiries after me?

For these two months I have not been able to lift a pen. My constitution and frame were, ab origine, blasted with a deep incurable taint of hypochondria, which poisons my existence. Of late a number of domestic vexations, and some pecuniary share in the ruin of these cursed times; losses which, though trifling, were yet what I could ill bear, have so irritated me, that my feelings at times could only be envied by a reprobate spirit listening to the sentence that dooms it to perdition.

Are you deep in the language of consolation? I have exhausted in reflection every topic of comfort. A heart at ease would have been charmed with my sentiments and reasonings; but as to myself, I was like Judas Iscariot preaching the gospel; he might melt and mould the hearts of those around him, but his own kept its native incorrigibility.

Still there are two great pillars that bear us up, amid the wreck of misfortune and misery. The ONE is composed of the different modifications of a certain noble, stubborn something in a man, known by the names of courage, fortitude, magnanimity. The OTHER is made up of 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 if I may be allowed the expression, which connect us with, and link us to, those awful obscure realities — an all-powerful, and equally beneficent God; and a world to come, beyond death and the grave. The first gives the nerve of combat, while a ray of hope beams on the field: the last pours the balm of comfort into the wounds which time can never cure.

I do not remember, my dear Cunningham, that you and I ever talked on the subject of religion at all. I know some who laugh at it, as the trick of the crafty FEW, to lead the undiscerning MANY; or at most, as an uncertain obscurity which mankind can never know anything of, and with which they are fools if they give themselves much to do. Nor would I quarrel with a man for his irreligion, any more than I would for his want of a musical ear, I would regret that he was shut out from what, to me and to others, were such superlative sources of enjoyment. It is in this point of a view, and for this reason, that I will deeply imbue the mind of every child of mine with religion. If my son should happen to be a man of feeling, sentiment, and taste, I shall thus add largely to his enjoyments. Let me flatter myself that this sweet little fellow, who is just now running about my desk, will be a man of a melting, ardent, glowing heart; and an imagination, delighted with the painter, and rapt with the poet. Let me figure him wandering out in a sweet evening, to inhale the balmy gales, and enjoy the glowing luxuriance of the spring; himself the while in the blooming youth of life. He looks abroad on all nature, and through nature up to nature’s God. His soul, by swift delighting degrees, is rapt above this sublunary sphere until he can be silent no longer, and bursts out into the glorious enthusiasm of Thomson,

These, as they change, Almighty Father, these

Are but the varied God. The rolling year

Is full of thee.

And so on, in all the spirit and ardour of that charming hymn. These are no ideal pleasures, they are real delights; and I ask, what of the delights among the sons of men are superior, not to say equal to them? And they have this precious, vast addition, that conscious virtue stamps them for her own; and lays hold on them to bring herself into the presence of a witnessing, judging, and approving God.

R. B.

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CXCII. — TO MRS. DUNLOP.

CASTLE DOUGLAS, 25th June 1794.

Here in a solitary inn, in a solitary village, am I set by myself, to amuse my brooding fancy as I may. Solitary confinement, you know, is Howard’s favourite idea of reclaiming sinners; so let me consider by what fatality it happens, that I have so long been exceeding sinful as to neglect the correspondence of the most valued friend I have on earth. To tell you that I have been in poor health will not be excuse enough, though it is true. I am afraid that I am about to suffer for the follies of my youth. My medical friends threaten me with a flying gout; but I trust they are mistaken.

I am just going to trouble your critical patience with the first sketch of a stanza I have been framing, as I passed along the road. The subject is Liberty: you know, my honoured friend, how dear the theme is to me. I design it an irregular ode for General Washington’s birth-day. After having mentioned the degeneracy of other kingdoms I come to Scotland thus:

Thee, Caledonia, thy wild heaths among,

Thee, famed for martial deed and sacred song,

To thee I turn with swimming eyes;

Where is that soul of freedom fled?

Immingled with the mighty dead!

Beneath the hallowed turf where Wallace lies!

Hear it not, Wallace, in thy bed of death;

Ye babbling winds, in silence sweep,

Disturb ye not the hero’s sleep.

You will probably have another scrawl from me in a stage or two.

R. B.

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CXCIII. — TO MR. JAMES JOHNSON.

DUMFRIES, 1794.

My Dear Friend, — You should have heard from me long ago; but over and above some vexatious share in the pecuniary losses of these accursed times, I have all this winter been plagued with low spirits and blue devils, so that I have almost hung my harp on the willow trees.

I am just now busy correcting a new edition of my poems, and this, with my ordinary business, finds me in full employment.

I send you by my friend, Mr. Wallace, forty-one songs for your fifth volume; if we cannot finish it any other way, what would you think of Scotch words to some beautiful Irish airs? In the meantime, at your leisure, give a copy of the Museum to my worthy friend, Mr. Peter Hill, bookseller, to bind for me, interleaved with blank leaves, exactly as he did the Laird of Glenriddel’s, that I may insert every anecdote I can learn, together with my own criticisms and remarks on the songs. A copy of this kind I shall leave with you, the editor, to publish at some after period, by way of making the Museum a book famous to the end of time, and you renowned for ever.

I have got a highland dirk, for which I have great veneration, as it once was the dirk of Lord Balmerino. It fell into bad hands, who stripped it of the silver mounting, as well as the knife and fork. I have some thoughts of sending it to your care, to get it mounted anew. — Yours, etc.,

R. B.

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CXCIV. — TO MR. PETER MILLER, JUN., OF DALSWINION.13^1

DUMFRIES, Nov. 1794.

Dear Sir, — Your offer is indeed truly generous, and sincerely do I thank you for it; but in my present situation, I find that I dare not accept it. You well know my political sentiments; and were I an insular individual, unconnected with a wife and a family of children, with the most fervid enthusiasm I would have volunteered my services; I then could and would have despised all consequences that might have ensued.

My prospect in the Excise is something; at least, it is — encumbered as I am with the welfare, the very existence, of near half-a-score of helpless individuals — what I dare not sport with.

In the meantime, they are most welcome to my Ode; only, let them insert it as a thing they have met with by accident and unknown to me. Nay, if Mr. Perry, whose honour, after your character of him, I cannot doubt, if he will give me an address and channel by which anything will come safe from those spies with which he may be certain that his correspondence is beset, I will now and then send him any bagatelle that I may write. In the present hurry of Europe, nothing but news and politics will be regarded; but against the days of peace, which Heaven send soon, my little assistance may perhaps fill up an idle column of a newspaper. I have long had it in my head to try my hand in the way of little prose essays, which I propose sending into the world through the medium of some newspaper; and should these be worth his while, to these Mr. Perry shall be welcome; and all my reward shall be, his treating me with his paper, which, by-the-by, to anybody who has the least relish for wit, is a high treat indeed.

With the most grateful esteem, I am ever, Dear Sir,

R. B.

131 He had offered Burns a post on the staff of The Morning Chronicle, of which newspaper Mr. Perry was proprietor.

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CXCV. — TO MRS, RIDDEL

Madam, — I dare say that this is the first epistle you ever received from this nether world. I write you from the regions of hell, amid the horrors of the damn’d. The time and manner of my leaving your earth I do not exactly know, as I took my departure in the heat of a fever of intoxication, contracted at your too hospitable mansion; but, on my arrival here, I was fairly tried, and sentenced to endure the purgatorial tortures of this infernal confine for the space of ninety-nine years, eleven months, and twenty-nine days, and all on account of the impropriety of my conduct yesternight under your roof. Here am I, laid on a bed of pitiless furze, with my aching head reclined on a pillow of ever-piercing thorn, while an infernal tormentor, wrinkled, and old, and cruel — his name I think is Recollection — with a whip of scorpions, forbids peace or rest to approach me, and keeps anguish eternally awake. Still, Madam, if I could in any measure be reinstated in the good opinion of the fair circle whom my conduct last night so much injured, I think it would be an alleviation to my torments. For this reason I trouble you with this letter. To the men of the company I will make no apology. — Your husband, who insisted on my drinking more than I chose, has no right to blame me, and the other gentlemen were partakers of my guilt. But to you, Madam, I have much to apologise. Your good opinion I valued as one of the greatest acquisitions I had made on earth, and I was truly a beast to forfeit it. There was a Miss I — too, a woman of fine sense, gentle and unassuming manners — do make, on my part, a miserable damn’d wretch’s best apology to her. A Mrs. G — , a charming woman, did me the honour to be prejudiced in my favour; this makes me hope that I have not outraged her beyond all forgiveness. — To all the other ladies please present my humblest contrition for my conduct, and my petition for their gracious pardon. O all ye powers of decency and decorum! whisper to them that my errors, though great, were involuntary — that an intoxicated man is the vilest of beasts — that it was not in my nature to be brutal to any one — that to be rude to a woman, when in my senses, was impossible with me — but —

Regret! Remorse! Shame! ye three hell hounds that ever dog my steps and bay at my heels, spare me! spare me!

Forgive the offences, and pity the perdition of, Madam, your humble slave,

R. B.

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CXCVI. — TO MRS. DUNLOP.

15th December 1795.

My Dear Friend, — As I am in a complete Decemberish humour, gloomy, sullen, stupid, as even the Deity of Dulness herself could wish, I shall not drawl out a heavy letter with a number of heavier apologies for my late silence. Only one I shall mention, because I know you will sympathise with it: these four months, a sweet little girl, my youngest child, has been so ill, that every day a week or less threatened to terminate her existence. There had much need be many pleasures annexed to the states of husband and father, for, God knows, they have many peculiar cares. I cannot describe to you the anxious, sleepless hours these ties frequently give me. I see a train of helpless little folks; me and my exertions all their stay: and on what a brittle thread does the life of man hang! If I am nipt off at the command of fate! even in all the vigour of manhood as I am — such things happen every day — Gracious God! what would become of my little flock! ‘Tis here that I envy your people of fortune. A father on his deathbed, taking an everlasting leave of his children, has indeed woe enough; but the man of competent fortune leaves his sons and daughters independency and friends; while I — but I shall run distracted if I think any longer on the subject!

To leave talking of the matter so gravely, I shall sing with the old Scots ballad —

O that I had ne’er been married,

I would never had nae care;

Now I’ve gotten wife and bairns,

They cry crowdie evermair.

Crowdie ance, crowdie twice:

Crowdie three times in a day:

An ye crowdie ony mair,

Ye’ll crowdie a’ my meal away.

25th, Christmas Morning.

This, my much-loved friend, is a morning of wishes; accept mine — so Heaven hear me as they are sincere! that blessings may attend your steps, and affliction know you not! In the charming words of my favourite author— “The Man of Feeling,” “May the Great Spirit bear up the weight of thy grey hairs, and blunt the arrow that brings them rest!”

Now that I talk of authors, how do you like Cowper? Is not the “Task” a glorious poem? The religion of the “Task,” bating a few scraps of Calvinistic divinity, is the religion of God and Nature; the religion that exalts, that ennobles man. Were not you to send me your Zeluco in return for mine? Tell me how you like my marks and notes through the book. I would not give a farthing for a book, unless I were at liberty to blot it with my criticisms.

R. B.

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CXCVII. — TO MRS. DUNLOP, IN LONDON.

DUMFRIES, 2Oth December 1795.

I have been prodigiously disappointed in this London journey of yours…. Do let me hear from you the soonest possible. As I hope to get a frank from my friend Captain Miller, I shall, every leisure hour, take up the pen and gossip away whatever comes first, prose or poetry, sermon or song. In this last article I have abounded of late. I have often mentioned to you a superb publication of Scottish songs, which is making its appearance in our great metropolis, and where I have the honour to preside over the Scottish verse, as no less a personage than Peter Pindar does over the English.

December 29th.

Since I began this letter, I have been appointed to act in the capacity of supervisor here, and I assure you, what with the load of business, and what with that business being new to me, I could scarcely have commanded ten minutes to have spoken to you, had you been in town, much less to have written you an epistle. This appointment is only temporary, and during the illness of the present incumbent; but I look forward to an early period when I shall be appointed in full form: a consummation devoutly to be wished! My political sins seem to be forgiven me.

This is the season (New Year’s day is now my date) of wishing, and mine are most fervently offered up for you! May life to you be a positive blessing while it lasts, for your own sake; and that it may yet be greatly prolonged is my wish for my own sake, and for the sake of the rest of your friends! What a transient business is life! Very lately I was a boy; but t’other day I was a young man; and I already begin to feel the rigid fibre and stiffening joints of old age coming fast o’er my frame. With all my follies of youth, and, I fear, a few vices of manhood, still I congratulate myself on having had in early days religion strongly impressed on my mind. I have nothing to say to any one as to which sect he belongs to, or what creed he believes: but I look on the man who is firmly persuaded of infinite Wisdom and Goodness superintending and directing every circumstance that can happen in his lot — I felicitate such a man for having a solid foundation for his mental enjoyment; a firm prop and sure stay, in the hour of difficulty, trouble, and distress; and a never-failing anchor of hope when he looks beyond the grave.

R. B.

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CXVIII. — TO THE HON, THE PROVOST, ETC., OF DUMFRIES.

Gentlemen, — The literary taste, and liberal spirit, of your good town has so ably filled the various departments of your schools, as to make it a very great object for a parent to have his children educated in them. Still, to me, a stranger, with my large family, and very stinted income, to give my young ones the education I wish, at the high-school fees which a stranger pays, will bear hard upon me.

Some years ago, your good town did me the honour of making me an honorary Burgess. Will you allow me to request that this mark of distinction may extend so far, as to put me on a footing of a real freeman of the town, in the schools?

If you are so very kind as to grant my request, it will certainly be a constant incentive to me to strain every nerve where I can officially serve you; and will, if possible, increase that grateful respect with which I have the honour to be, Gentlemen, your devoted humble servant,

R. B.132

132 With the Poet’s request the Magistiates of Dumfries very handsomely complied. He was induced to make the request through the persuasions of Mr. James Gray and Mr. Thomas White, Masters of the Grammar School, Dumfries whose memories are still green on the banks of the Nith. — CUNNINGHAM.

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CXCIX. — TO MRS. DUNLOP.13^3

DUMFRIES, 3lst January 1796.

These many months you have been two packets in my debt — what sin of ignorance I have committed against so highly valued a friend I am utterly at a loss to guess. Alas! Madam, ill can I afford, at this time, to be deprived of any of the small remnant of my pleasures. I have lately drunk deep of the cup of affliction. The autumn robbed me of my only daughter and darling child, and that at a distance too, and so rapidly, as to put it out of my power to pay the last duties to her. 133a I had scarcely begun to recover from that shock, when I became myself the victim of a most severe rheumatic fever, and long the die spun doubtful; until after many weeks of a sick bed, it seems to have turned up life, and I am beginning to crawl across my room, and once indeed have been before my own door in the street.

R. B.

133 Cunningham says— “It seems all but certain that Mrs. Dunlop regarded the Poet with some little displeasure during the evening of his days.”

133aThis child died at Mauchline.

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CC. — TO MR. JAMES JOHNSON.

DUMFRIES, 4th July 1796.

How are you, my dear friend, and how comes on your fifth volume?134 You may probably think that for some time past I have neglected you and your work; but, alas! the hand of pain, and sorrow, and care has these many months lain heavy on me! Personal and domestic affliction have almost entirely banished that alacrity and life with which I used to woo the rural muse of Scotia.

You are a good, worthy, honest fellow, and have a good right to live in this world — because you deserve it. Many a merry meeting this publication has given us, and possibly it may give us more, though, alas! I fear it. This protracting, slow, consuming illness which hangs over me will, I doubt much, my dear friend, arrest my sun before he has well reached his middle career, and will turn over the poet to far more important concerns than studying the brilliancy of wit, or the pathos of sentiment! However, hope is the cordial of the human heart, and I endeavour to cherish it as well as I can.

I am ashamed to ask another favour of you, because you have been so very good already; but my wife has a very particular friend, a young lady who sings well, to whom she wishes to present the Scots Musical Museum. If you have a spare copy, will you be so obliging as to send it by the very first fly, as I am anxious to have it soon. — Yours ever,

R. B.135

134 Of the Musical Museum.

135 “In this humble manner did poor Burns ask for a copy of a work to which he had contributed, gratuitously, not less than 184 original, altered, and collected songs!” — CROMEK.

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CCI — TO MR. CUNNINGHAM.

BROW, Sea-bathing quarters, 7th July 1796.

My Dear Cunningham, — I received yours here this moment, and am indeed highly flattered with the approbation of the literary circle you mention; a literary circle inferior to none in the two kingdoms. Alas! my friend, I fear the voice of the bard will soon be heard among you no more! For these eight or ten months I have been ailing, sometimes bedfast and sometimes not; but these last three months I have been tortured with an excruciating rheumatism, which has reduced me to nearly the last stage. You actually would not know me if you saw me. Pale, emaciated, and so feeble, as occasionally to need help from my chair — my spirits fled! fled! — but I can no more on the subject — only the medical folks tell me that my last and only chance is bathing and country quarters, and riding. The deuce of the matter is this — when an exciseman is off duty, his salary is reduced to PS35 instead of PS50. What way, in the name of thrift, shall I maintain myself, and keep a horse in country quarters, with a wife and five children at home, on 35 pounds? I mention this, because I had intended to beg your utmost interest, and that of all the friends you can muster, to move our Commissioners of Excise to grant me the full salary; I dare say you know them all personally. If they do not grant it me, I must lay my account with an exit truly en poete; if I die not of disease, I must perish with hunger.136

I have sent you one of the songs; the other my memory does not serve me with, and I have no copy here, but I shall be at home soon, when I will send it you. Apropos to being at home, Mrs. Burns threatens in a week or two to add one more to my paternal charge, which, if of the right gender, I intend shall be introduced to the world by the respectable designation of Alexander Cunningham Burns. My last was James Glencairn, so you can have no objection to the company of nobility. Farewell.

R. B.

136 Not granted.

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CCII. — TO MR. GILBERT BURNS.

10th July 1795.

Dear Brother, — It will be no very pleasing news to you to be told that I am dangerously ill, and not likely to get better. An inveterate rheumatism has reduced me to such a state of debility, and my appetite is so totally gone, that I can scarcely stand on my legs. I have been a week at sea-bathing, and will continue there, or in a friend’s house in the country, all the summer. God keep my wife and children; if I am taken from their head, they will be poor indeed. I have contracted one or two serious debts, partly from my illness these many months, partly from too much thoughtlessness as to expense when I came to town, that will cut in too much on the little I leave them in your hands. Remember me to my mother. — Yours,

R. B.

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CCIII. — TO MRS. BURNS.13^7

BROW, Thursday.

My Dearest Love, — I delayed writing until I could tell you what effect sea-bathing was likely to produce. It would be injustice to deny that it has eased my pains, and I think has strengthened me; but my appetite is still extremely bad. No flesh nor fish can I swallow: porridge and milk are the only things I can taste. I am very happy to hear, by Miss Jess Lewars, that you are all well. My very best and kindest compliments to her, and to all the children. I will see you on Sunday. — Your affectionate husband,

R. B.

137 One evening, while at the Brow, Burns was visited by two young ladies. The sun, setting on the western hills, threw a strong light upon him through the window. One of them perceiving this, proceeded to draw the curtain; “Let me look at the sun, my dear,” said the sinking poet, “he will not long shine on me.”

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CCIV. — TO MRS. DUNLOP.

BROW, Saturday, 12th July 1796.

Madam, — I have written you so often, without receiving any answer, that I would not trouble you again, but for the circumstances in which I am. An illness which has long hung about me, in all probability will speedily send me beyond that bourne whence no traveller returns. Your friendship, with which for many years you honoured me, was a friendship dearest to my soul. Your conversation, and especially your correspondence, were at once highly entertaining and instructive. With what pleasure did I use to break up the seal! The remembrance yet adds one pulse more to my poor palpitating heart. Farewell!!!

R. B.

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CCV. — TO MR. JAMES BURNESS, WRITER, MONTROSE.

DUMFRIES, 12th July.

MY DEAR COUSIN, — When you offered me money assistance, little did I think I should want it so soon. A rascal of a haberdasher, to whom I owe a considerable bill, taking it into his head that I am dying, has commenced a process against me, and will infallibly put my emaciated body into jail. Will you be so good as to accommodate me, and that by return of post, with ten pounds? O James, did you know the pride of my heart, you would feel doubly for me! Alas! I am not used to beg! The worst of it is, my health was coming about finely. Melancholy and low spirits are half my disease. If I had it settled, I would be, I think, quite well in a manner.

R. B.

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CCVI. — TO HIS FATHER-IN-LAW, JAMES ARMOUR, MASON, MAUCHLINE.13^8

DUMFRIES, 18th July 1799.

MY DEAR SIR, — Do, for heaven’s sake, send Mrs. Armour here immediately. My wife is hourly expecting to be put to bed. Good God! what a situation for her to be in, poor girl, without a friend! I returned from sea-bathing quarters to-day, and my medical friends would almost persuade me that I am better, but I think and feel that my strength is so gone that the disorder will prove fatal to me. — Your son-in-law,

R. B.

138 Mrs. Burns’s father. This is the very last of Burns’s compositions, being written only three days before his death.

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THE THOMSON LETTERS.

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PREFATORY NOTE.

This correspondence began in September 1792, when Burns had already been domiciled nine months in the town of Dumfries, and ended only with his death in July 1796. It originated in the request of a stranger for a series of songs to suit a projected collection of the best Scottish airs. The stranger was George Thomson, a young man of about Burns’s own age, and head clerk in the office of the Board of Manufactures in Edinburgh. Thomson outlived his great correspondent by more than half a century. He died so recently as 1851, at the advanced age of ninety-two. Robert Chambers has described him as a most honourable man, of singularly amiable character and cheerful manners. It may interest some people to know that his granddaughter was the wife of Dickens, the famous novelist.

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THE THOMSON LETTER.

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I.

DUMFRIES, 16th September 1792.

Sir, — I have just this moment got your letter. As the request you make to me will positively add to my enjoyments in complying with it, I shall enter into your undertaking with all the small portion of abilities I have, strained to their utmost exertion by the impulse of enthusiasm. Only, don’t hurry me. “Deil tak the hindmost” is by no means the crie de guerre of my muse. Will you, as I am inferior to none of you in enthusiastic attachment to the poetry and music of old Caledonia, and, since you request it, have cheerfully promised my mite of assistance — will you let me have a list of your airs, with the first line of the printed verses you intend for them, that I may have an opportunity of suggesting any alteration that may occur to me? You know ‘tis in the way of my trade; still leaving you, gentlemen,139 the undoubted rights of publishers, to approve or reject at your pleasure, for your own publication. Apropos 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, particularly the works of Scotsmen, that have merit, are certainly very eligible. “Tweedside;” “Ah! the Poor Shepherd’s Mournful Fate;” “Ah! Chloris, could I now but sit,” etc., you cannot mend; but such insipid stuff as “To Fanny fair, could I impart,” etc., usually set to “The Mill, Mill, O,” is a disgrace to the collections in which it has already appeared, and would doubly disgrace a collection that will have the very superior merit of yours. But more of this in the farther prosecution of the business, if I am to be called on for my strictures and amendments — I say, amendments; for I will not alter, accept where I myself, at least, think that I amend.

As to any renumeration, you may think my songs either above or below price; for they shall absolutely be the one or the other. In the honest enthusiasm with which I embark in your undertaking, to talk of money, wages, fee, hire, etc., would be downright sodomy of soul! A proof of each of the songs that I compose or amend I shall receive as a favour. In the rustic phrase of the season, “Gude speed the wark!” — I am, Sir, your very humble servant,

R. BURNS.

P.S. — I have some particular reasons for wishing my interference to be known as little as possible.

139 Thomson in his letter spoke of coadjutors, but in less than a year he became sole editor of the collection.

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II.

My Dear Sir, — Let me tell you that you are too fastidious in your ideas of songs and ballads. I own that your criticisms are just; the songs you specify in your list have, all but one, the faults you remark in them; but how shall we mend the matter? Who shall rise up and say — Go to, I will make a better? For instance, on reading over “The Lea-rig,” I immediately set about trying my hand on it, and, after all, I could make nothing more of it than the following, which, Heaven knows, is poor enough: —

When o’er the hill the eastern star

Tells bughtin-time is near, my jo, (etc.)

Your observation as to the aptitude of Dr. Percy’s ballad to the air, “Nannie O,” is just. It is besides, perhaps, the most beautiful ballad in the English language. But let me remark to you, that in the sentiment and style of our Scottish airs there is a pastoral simplicity, a something that one may call the Doric style and dialect of vocal music, to which a dash of our native tongue and manners is particularly, nay, peculiarly apposite. For this reason, and upon my honour, for this reason alone, I am of opinion (but, as I told you before, my opinion is yours, freely yours to approve or reject as you please) that my ballad of “Nannie, O”, might perhaps do for one set of verses to the tune. Now don’t let it enter into your head that you are under any necessity of taking my verses. I have long ago made up my mind as to my own reputation in the business of authorship; and have nothing to be pleased or offended at, in your adoption or rejection of my verses. Though you should reject one half of what I give you, I shall be pleased with your adopting the other half, and shall continue to serve you with the same assiduity.

In the printed copy of my “Nannie, O”, the name of the river is horridly prosaic. I will alter it,

Behind yon hills where Lugar flows.

Girvan is the name of the river that suits the idea of the stanza best, but Lugar is the most agreeable modulation of syllables.

I will soon give you a great many more remarks on this business; but I have just now an opportunity of conveying you this scrawl, free of postage, an expense that it is ill able to pay; so, with my best compliments to honest Allan,140 goodbye to ye.

Friday night.

Saturday morning.

As I find I have still an hour to spare this morning before my conveyance goes away, I will give you “Nannie, O”, at length.

Your remarks on “Ewe-bughts, Marion”, are just; still it has obtained a place among our more classical Scottish songs; and what with many beauties in its composition, and more prejudices in its favour, you will not find it easy to supplant it.

In my very early years, when I was thinking of going to the West Indies, I took the following farewell of a dear girl. It is quite trifling, and has nothing of the merits of “Ewe-bughts”, but it will fill up this page. You must know that all my earlier love-songs were the breathings of ardent passion, and though it might have been easy in after-times to have given them a polish, yet that polish, to me, whose they were, and who perhaps alone cared for them, would have defaced the legend of my heart, which was so faithfully inscribed on them. Their uncouth simplicity was, as they say of wines, their race.

Will ye go to the Indies, my Mary, (etc.)

“Gala Water,” and “Auld Rob Morris,” I think, will most probably be the next subject of my musings. However, even on my verses, speak out your criticisms with equal frankness. My wish is, not to stand aloof, the uncomplying bigot of opiniatrete, but cordially to join issue with you in the furtherance of the work. Gude speed the wark!

Amen.

140 David Allan, the artist.

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III.

November 8th, 1792,

If you mean, my dear Sir, that all the songs in your collection shall be poetry of the first merit, I am afraid you will find more difficulty in the undertaking than you are aware of. There is a peculiar rhythmus in many of our airs, and a necessity of adapting syllables to the emphasis, or what I would call the feature-notes of the tune, that cramp the poet, and lay him under almost insuperable difficulties. For instance, in the air, “My Wife’s a wanton wee Thing”, if a few lines, smooth and pretty, can be adapted to it, it is all you can expect. The enclosed were made extempore to it; and though, on farther study, I might give you something more profound, yet it might not suit the light-horse gallop of the air so well as this random clink.

I have just been looking over the “Collier’s bonny Dochter”, and if the enclosed rhapsody which I composed the day, on a charming Ayrshire girl, Miss Baillie, as she passed through this place to England, will suit your taste better than the “Collier Lassie”, fall on and welcome.

I have hitherto deferred the sublimer, more pathetic airs until more leisure, as they will take, and deserve a greater effort. However, they are all put into your hands, as clay into the hands of the potter, to make one vessel to honour, and another to dishonour. Farewell, etc.

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IV.

Inclosing “Highland Mary”. — Tune — Katharine Ogie.

Ye banks, and braes, and streams around, (etc.)

14th November 1792.

My Dear Sir, — I agree with you, that the song “Katharine Ogie”, is very poor stuff, and unworthy, altogether unworthy, of so beautiful an air. I tried to mend it; but the awkward sound “Ogie,” recurring in the rhyme, spoils every attempt at introducing sentiment into the piece. The foregoing song pleases myself; I think it is in my happiest manner; you will see at the first glance that it suits the air. The subject of the song is one of the most interesting passages of my youthful days; and I own that I should be much flattered to see the verses set to an air which would ensure celebrity. Perhaps, after all,‘tis the still glowing prejudice of my heart that throws a borrowed lustre over the merits of the composition.

I have partly taken your idea of “Auld Rob Morris”. I have adopted the two first verses, and am going on with the song on a new plan, which promises pretty well. I take up one or another, just as the bee of the moment buzzes in my bonnet-lug; and do you, sans ceremonie, make what use you choose of the productions. Adieu! etc.

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V.

26th January 1793.

I approve greatly, my dear Sir, of your plans. Dr. Beattie’s essay will of itself be a treasure. On my part, I mean to draw up an appendix to the Doctor’s essay, containing my stock of anecdotes, etc., of our Scots songs. All the late Mr. Tytler’s anecdotes I have by me, taken down in the course of my acquaintance with him, from his own mouth. I am such an enthusiast, that in the course of my several peregrinations through Scotland, I made a pilgrimage to the individual spot from which every song took its rise, Lochaber and the Braes of Ballendean excepted. So far as locality, either from the title of the air, or the tenor of the song, could be ascertained, I have paid my devotions at the particular shrine of every Scots Muse.

I do not doubt but you might make a very valuable collection of Jacobite songs — but would it give no offence? In the meantime, do not you think that some of them, particularly “The Sow’s Tail to Geordie”, as an air, with other words, might be well worth a place in your collection of lively songs?

If it were possible to procure songs of merit, it would be proper to have one set of Scots words to every air, and that the set of words to which the notes ought to be set. There is a naivete, a pastoral simplicity, in a slight intermixture of Scots words and phraseology, which is more in unison (at least to my taste, and, I will add, to every genuine Caledonian taste), with the simple pathos or rustic sprightliness of our native music, than any English verses whatever.

The very name of Peter Pindar is an acquisition to your work. His “Gregory” is beautiful. I have tried to give you a set of stanzas in Scots, on the same subject, which are at your service. Not that I intend to enter the lists with Peter; that would be presumption indeed. My song, though much inferior in poetic merit, has, I think, more of the ballad simplicity in it.

LORD GREGORY.

O mirk, mirk is this midnight hour, (etc.)

Your remark on the first stanza of my “Highland Mary” is just, but I cannot alter it, without injuring the poetry.

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VI.

20th March 1793.

My Dear Sir, — The song prefixed (“Mary Morison”) is one of my juvenile works. I leave it in your hands. I do not think it very remarkable, either for its merits or demerits. It is impossible (at least I feel it so in my stinted powers) to be always original, entertaining, and witty.

What is become of the list, etc., of your songs? I shall be out of all temper with you by and by. I have always looked on myself as the prince of indolent correspondents, and valued myself accordingly; and I will not, cannot bear rivalship from you, nor anybody else.

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VII.

7th April 1793.

Thank you, my dear Sir, for your packet. You cannot imagine how much this business of composing for your publication has added to my enjoyments. What, with my early attachment to ballads, your book, etc., ballad-making is now as completely my hobby-horse as ever fortification was Uncle Toby’s; so I’ll e’en canter it away till I come to the limit of my race (God grant that I may take the right side of the winning-post!) and then cheerfully looking back on the honest folks with whom I have been happy, I shall say, or sing, “Sae merry as we a’ hae been” and raising my last looks to the whole human race, the last words of the voice of Coila shall be, “Good night, and joy be wi’ you a’!” So much for my last words; now for a few present remarks as they have occurred at random, on looking over your list.

The first lines of “The last time I came o’er the Moor”, and several other lines in it, are beautiful; but in my opinion — pardon me, revered shade of Ramsay! — the song is unworthy of the divine air. I shall try to make or mend. “For ever, Fortune, wilt thou prove,” is a charming song; but “Logan Burn and Logan Braes” are sweetly susceptible of rural imagery; I’ll try that likewise, and if I succeed, the other song may class among the English ones. I remember the two last lines of a verse in some of the old songs of “Logan Water” (for I know a good many different ones), which I think pretty —

Now my dear lad maun face his faes,

Far, far frae me, and Logan braes.

“My Patie is a lover gay”, is unequal. “His mind is never muddy,” is a muddy expression indeed.

Then I’ll resign and marry Pate,

And syne my cockernony —

This is surely far unworthy of Ramsay, or your book. My song, “Rigs of Barley”, to the same tune, does not altogether please me; but if I can mend it, and thresh a few loose sentiments out of it, I will submit it to your consideration. The “Lass o’ Patie’s Mill” is one of Ramsay’s best songs; but there is one loose sentiment in it, which my much-valued friend, Mr. Erskine, will take into his critical consideration. In Sir J. Sinclair’s statistical volumes are two claims, one I think, from Aberdeenshire, and the other from Ayrshire, for the honour of this song. The following anecdote, which I had from the present Sir William Cunningham, of Robertland, who had it of the late John, Earl of Loudon, I can on such authorities believe.

Allan Ramsay was residing at Loudon Castle with the then Earl, father to Earl John; and one forenoon, riding or walking out together, his lordship and Allan passed a sweet romantic spot on Irwine water, still called “Patie’s Mill,” where a bonnie lass was “tedding hay, bareheaded on the green.” My lord observed to Allan, that it would be a fine theme for a song, Ramsay took the hint, and lingering behind, he composed the first sketch of it, which he produced at dinner.

“One day I heard Mary say,” is a fine song; but for consistency’s sake, alter the name “Adonis.” Was there ever such banns published, as a purpose of marriage between Adonis and Mary? I agree with you that my song, “There’s nought but care on every hand,” is much superior to “Poortith Cauld.” The original song, “The Mill, Mill, O,” though excellent, is, on account of delicacy, inadmissible; still I like the title, and think a Scottish song would suit the notes best; and let your chosen song, which is very pretty, follow, as an English set. The “Banks of Dee” is, you know, literally “Langolee” to slow time. The song is well enough, but has some false imagery in it, for instance,

And sweetly the nightingale sung from the tree.

In the first place, the nightingale sings in a low bush, but never from a tree; and in the second place, there never was a nightingale seen or heard on the banks of the Dee, or on the banks of any other river in Scotland. Exotic rural imagery is always comparatively flat. If I could hit on another stanza equal to “The small birds rejoice,” etc., I do myself honestly avow that I think it a superior song. “John Anderson, my jo” — the song to this tune in Johnson’s Museum is my composition, and I think it not my worst: if it suit you, take it and welcome. Your collection of sentimental and pathetic songs is, in my opinion, very complete; but not so your comic ones. Where are “Tullochgorum,” “Lumps o’ Puddin’,” “Tibbie Fowler,” and several others, which, in my humble judgment, are well worthy of preservation? There is also one sentimental song of mine in the Museum, which never was known out of the immediate neighbourhood, until I got it taken down from a country girl’s singing. It is called “Craigie-burn Wood;” and in the opinion of Mr. Clarke is one of our sweetest Scottish songs. He is quite an enthusiast about it; and I would take his taste in Scottish music against the taste of most connoisseurs.

You are quite right in inserting the last five in your list, though they are certainly Irish. “Shepherds, I have lost my love,” is to me a heavenly air — what would you think of a set of Scottish verses to it? I have made one a good while ago, which I think is the best love song^141 I ever composed in my life; but in its original state it is not quite a lady’s song. I enclose an altered, not amended copy for you, if you choose to set the tune to it, and let the Irish verses follow.

Mr. Erskine’s songs are all pretty, but his “Lone Vale” is divine. — Yours, etc.

Let me know just how you like these random hints.

141 “Yestreen I had a pint o’ wine.”

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VIII.

April 1793.

My Dear Sir, — I own my vanity is flattered when you give my songs a place in your elegant and superb work; but to be of service to the work is my first wish. As I have often told you, I do not in a single instance wish you, out of compliment to me, to insert anything of mine. One hint let me give you — whatever Mr. Peyel does, let him not alter one iota of the original Scottish airs; I mean in the song department; but let our national music preserve its native features. They are, I own, frequently wild, and irreducible to the more modern rules; but on that very eccentricity, perhaps, depends a great part of their effect.

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IX.

June 1793.

When I tell you, my dear Sir, that a friend of mine, in whom I am much interested, has fallen a sacrifice to these accursed times, you will easily allow that it might unhinge me for doing any good among ballads. My own loss, as to pecuniary matters, is trifling; but the total ruin of a much-loved friend is a loss indeed. Pardon my seeming inattention to your last commands.

I cannot alter the disputed lines in the “Mill, Mill, O.”142 What you think a defect I esteem as a positive beauty; so you see how doctors differ. I shall now, with as much alacrity as I can muster, go on with your commands.

You know Frazer, the hautboy player in Edinburgh — he is here instructing a band of music for a fencible corps quartered in this country. Among many of the airs that please me, there is one well known as a reel, by the name of “The Quaker’s Wife”; and which I remember a grand-aunt of mine used to sing, by the name of “Liggeram Cosh, my bonnie wee lass”. Mr. Frazer plays it slow, and with an expression that quite charms me. I became such an enthusiast about it that I made a song for it, which I here subjoin, and inclose Frazer’s set of the tune. If they hit your fancy, they are at your service; if not, return me the tune, and I will put it in Johnson’s Museum. I think the song is not in my worst manner.

Blithe hae I been on yon hill, (etc.)

I should wish to hear how this pleases you.

142 The lines were the third and fourth —

Wi’ mony a sweet babe fatherless,

And mony a widow mourning.

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X.

June 25th 1793.

Have you ever, my dear Sir, felt your bosom ready to burst with indignation on reading of those mighty villains who divide kingdom against kingdom, desolate provinces, and lay nations waste, out of the wantonness of ambition, or often from still more ignoble passions? In a mood of this kind to-day I recollected the air of “Logan Water;” and it occurred to me that its querulous melody probably had its origin from the plaintive indignation of some swelling, suffering heart, fired at the tyrannic strides of some public destroyer, and overwhelmed with private distress, the consequence of a country’s ruin. If I have done anything at all like justice to my feelings, the following song, composed in three quarters of an hour’s meditation in my elbow-chair, ought to have some merit.

[Here follows “Logan Water.”]

Do you know the following beautiful little fragment in Witherspoon’s Collection of Scots Songs?

Air — Hughie Graham.

O gin my love were yon red rose,

That grows upon the castle wa’,

And I mysel’ a drap o’ dew

Into her bonnie breast to fa’!

Oh, there beyond expression blest,

I’d feast on beauty a’ the night;

Seal’d on her silk saft faulds to rest,

Till fley’d awa by Phoebus light.

This thought is inexpressibly beautiful; and quite, so far as I know, original. It is too short for a song, else I would forswear you altogether, unless you gave it a place. I have often tried to eke a stanza to it, but in vain. After balancing myself for a musing five minutes, on the hind legs of my elbow-chair, I produced the following. The verses are far inferior to the foregoing, I frankly confess; but if worthy of insertion at all, they might be first in place; as every poet, who knows anything of his trade, will husband his best thoughts for a concluding stroke.

O were my love yon lilac fair,

Wi’ purple blossoms to the spring;

And I a bird to shelter there,

When wearied on my little wing;

How I wad mourn, when it was torn

By autumn wild, and winter rude!

But I wad sing on wanton wing,

When youthfu’ May its bloom renew’d.

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XI.

July 1793.

I assure you, my dear Sir, that you truly hurt me with your pecuniary parcel. It degrades me in my own eyes. However, to return it would savour of affectation; but as to any more traffic of that debtor or creditor kind, I swear by that HONOUR which crowns the upright statue of ROBERT BURNS’S INTEGRITY — on the least motion of it, I will indignantly spurn the by — past transaction, and from that moment commence entire stranger to you! BURNS’S character for generosity of sentiment and independence of mind will, I trust, long outlive any of his wants, which the cold, unfeeling ore can supply: at least, I will take care that such a character he shall deserve.

Thank you for my copy of your publication. Never did my eyes behold, in any musical work, such elegance and correctness. Your preface, too, is admirably written; only, your partiality to me has made you say too much: however, it will bind me down to double every eifort in the future progress of the work. The following are a few remarks on the songs in the list you sent me. I never copy what I write to you, so I may be often tautological, or perhaps contradictory.

“The Flowers of the Forest” is charming as a poem; and should be, and must be, set to the notes; but, though out of your rule, the three stanzas, beginning,

I hae seen the smiling o’ fortune beguiling,

are worthy of a place, were it but to immortalise the author of them, who is an old lady^143 of my acquaintance, and at this moment living in Edinburgh. She is a Mrs. Cockburn; I forget of what place; but from Roxburghshire. What a charming apostrophe is

O fickle Fortune, why this cruel sporting,

Why, why torment us — poor sons of a day!

The old ballad, “I wish I were where Helen lies,” is silly, to contemptibility. My alteration of it, in Johnson’s, is not much better.

142 Nee Rutherford, of Selkirkshire. She was then 81 years old.

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XII.

August 1793.

That tune, “Cauld Kail,” is such a favourite of yours, that I once more roved out yesterday for a gloamin-shot at the muses; when the muse that presides o’er the shores of Nith, or rather my old inspiring dearest nymph, Coila, whispered me the following. I have two reasons for thinking that it was my early, sweet, simple inspirer that was by my elbow, “smooth gliding without step,” and pouring the song on my glowing fancy. In the first place, since I left Coila’s haunts, not a fragment of a poet has arisen to cheer her solitary musings, by catching inspiration from her; so I more than suspect she has followed me hither, or at least makes me occasional visits; secondly, the last stanza of this song I send you is the very words that Coila taught me many years ago, and which I set to an old Scots reel in Johnson’s Museum.

Autumn is my propitious season. I make more verses in it than in all the year else. God bless you.

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XIII.

Sept. 1793.

You may readily trust, my dear Sir, that any exertion in my power is heartily at your service. But one thing I must hint to you; the very name of Peter Finder is of great service to your publication, so get a verse from him now and then; though I have no objection, as well as I can, to bear the burden of the business.

You know that my pretensions to musical taste are merely a few of nature’s instincts, untaught and untutored by art. For this reason, many musical compositions, particularly where much of the merit lies in counterpoint, however they may transport and ravish the ears of your connoisseurs, affect my simple lug no otherwise than merely as melodious din. On the other hand, by way of amends, I am delighted with many little melodies which the learned musician despises as silly and insipid. I do not know whether the old air “Hey tuttie taittie” may rank among this number; but well I know that, with Frazer’s hautboy, it has often filled my eyes with tears. There is a tradition, which I have met with in many places of Scotland, that it was Robert Bruce’s march at the battle of Bannockburn. This thought, in my solitary wanderings, warmed me to a pitch of enthusiasm on the theme of Liberty and Independence, which I threw into a kind of Scottish ode, fitted to the air, that one might suppose to be the gallant Royal Scot’s address to his heroic followers on that eventful morning.

BRUCE TO HIS TROOPS,

On the Eve of the Battle of Bannockburn.

Hey tuttie taittie.

Scots, wha hae wi’ Wallace bled, (etc.)

So may God ever defend the cause of Truth and Liberty, as He did that day! — Amen.

P.S. — I showed the air to Urbani, who was highly pleased with it, and begged me to make soft verses for it; but I had no idea of giving myself any trouble on the subject, till the accidental recollection of that glorious struggle for freedom, associated with the glowing ideas of some other struggles of the same nature, not quite so ancient, roused my rhyming mania. Clarke’s set of the tune, with his bass, you will find in the Museum; though I am afraid that the air is not what will entitle it to a place in your elegant selection.

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XIV.

September 1793.

I have received your list, my dear Sir, and here go my observations on it.143

“Down the burn, Davie.” I have this moment tried an alteration, leaving out the last half of the third stanza, and the first half of the last stanza, thus: —

As down the burn they took their way,

And thro’ the flowery dale,

His cheek to hers he aft did lay,

And love was aye the tale.

With “Mary, when shall we return,

Sic pleasure to renew?”

Quoth Mary, “Love, I like the burn,

And aye shall follow you.”

“Thro’ the wood, laddie.” I am decidedly of opinion that both in this and “There’ll never be peace till Jamie comes hame,” the second or high part of the tune being a repetition of the first part an octave higher, is only for instrumental music, and would be much better omitted in singing.

“Cowden-knowes.” Remember in your index that the song in pure English, to this tune, beginning

When summer comes, the swains on Tweed,

is the production of Crawford; Robert was his Christian name.

“Laddie lie near me,” must lie by me for some time. I do not know the air; and until I am complete 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 choose my theme, begin one stanza; when that is composed, which is generally the most difficult part of the business, I walk out, sit down now and then, look out for objects in nature around me that are in unison or harmony with the cogitations of my fancy, and workings of my bosom; humming every now and then the air, with the verses I have framed. When I feel my muse beginning to jade, I retire to the solitary fireside of my study, and there commit my effusions to paper; swinging at intervals on the hind legs of my elbow chair, by way of calling forth my own critical strictures, as my pen goes on. Seriously, this, at home, is almost invariably my way. What cursed egotism!

“Gil Morice” I am for leaving out. It is a plaguy length; the air itself is never sung, and its place can well be supplied by one or two songs for fine airs that are not in your list. For instance, “Craigieburn-wood” and “Roy’s Wife”. The first, besides its intrinsic merit, has novelty; and the last has high merit, as well as great celebrity. I have the original words of a song for the last air in the handwriting of the lady who composed it, and they are superior to any edition of the song which the public has yet seen.

“Highland Laddie”. The old set will please a mere Scotch ear best; and the new an Italianised one. There is a third, and what Oswald calls the “Old Highland Laddie”, which pleases we more than either of them. It is sometimes called “Jinglan Johnnie”, it being the air of an old humorous tawdry song of that name. You will find it in the Museum, “I hae been at Crookie-den,” etc. I would advise you in this musical quandary, to offer up your prayers to the muses for inspiring direction; and, in the meantime, waiting for this direction, bestow a libation to Bacchus, and there is not a doubt but you will hit on a judicious choice. Probatum est.

“Auld Sir Simon,” I must beg you to leave out, and put in its place “The Quaker’s Wife”.

“Blythe hae I been on yon hill” is one of the finest songs ever I made in my life; and, besides, is composed on a young lady positively the most beautiful, lovely woman in the world. As I purpose giving you the names and designations of all my heroines, to appear in some future edition of your work, perhaps half a century hence, you must certainly include the bonniest lass in a’ the warld in your collection.

“Daintie Davie” I have heard sung nineteen thousand, nine hundred, and ninety-nine times, and always with the low part of the tune; and nothing has surprised me so much as your opinion on this subject. If it will not suit, as I propose, we will lay two of the stanzas together, and then make the chorus follow.

“Fee him, Father”. I enclose you Frazer’s set of this tune when he plays it slow; in fact, he makes it the language of despair, I shall here give you two stanzas in that style, merely to try if it will be any improvement. Were it possible, in singing, to give it half the pathos which Frazer gives it in playing, it would make an admirable pathetic song. I do not give these verses for any merit they have. I composed them at the time at which Patie Allan’s mither died; that was the back o’ midnight; and by the lee-side of a bowl of punch, which had overset every mortal in the company, except the hautbois and the muse.

Thou hast left me ever, Jamie, (etc.)

“Jockie and Jenny” I would discard, and in its place would put “There’s nae luck about the house”, which has a very pleasant air; and which is positively the finest love-ballad in that style in the Scottish, or perhaps in any other language. “When she came ben she bobbet”, as an air, is more beautiful than either, and in the andante way would unite with a charming sentimental ballad.

“Saw ye my father” is one of my greatest favourites. The evening before last I wandered out, and began a tender song, in what I think its native style. I must premise that the old way, and the way to give most effect, is to have no starting note, as the fiddlers call it, but to burst at once into the pathos. Every country girl sings-“Saw ye my father”, etc.

My song is just begun; and I should like, before I proceed, to know your opinion of it. I have sprinkled it with the Scottish dialect, but it may be easily turned into correct English.

Fragment. — Tune— “Saw ye my Father”

Where are the joys I hae met in the morning, (etc.)

“Todlin hame”: Urbani mentioned an idea of his, which has long been mine; and this air is highly susceptible of pathos; accordingly, you will soon hear him, at your concert, try it to a song of mine in the Museum— “Ye banks and braes o’ bonnie Doon”. One song more and I have done: “Auld lang syne”. The air is but mediocre; but the following song, the old song of the olden times, and which has never been in print, nor even in manuscript, until I took it down from an old man’s singing, is enough to recommend any air.144

AULD LANG SYNE.

Should auld acquaintance be forgot, (etc.)

Now, I suppose I have tired your patience fairly. You must, after all is over, have a number of ballads, properly so called, “Gil Morice”, “Tranent Muir”, “M’Pherson’s Farewell”, “Battle of Sheriff-Muir”, or “We ran and they ran” (I know the author of this charming ballad, and his history); “Hardiknute”, “Barbara Allan” (I can furnish a finer set of this tune than any that has yet appeared), and besides, do you know that I really have the old tune to which “The Cherry and the Slae” was sung? and which is mentioned as a well-known air in Scotland’s Complaint, a book published before poor Mary’s days. It was then called “The Banks o’ Helicon”; an old poem which Pinkerton has brought to light. You will see all this in Tytler’s History of Scottish Music. The tune, to a learned ear, may have no great merit; but it is a great curiosity. I have a good many original things of this kind.

143 Songs for his publication. Burns goes through the whole; but only his remarks of any importance are presented here.

144 It is believed to have been his own composition.

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XV.

September 1793.

“Who shall decide when doctors disagree?” My ode^145 pleases me so much that I cannot alter it. Your proposed alterations would, in my opinion, make it tame. I am exceedingly obliged to you for putting me on reconsidering it; as I think I have much improved it. Instead of “sodger! hero!” I will have it “Caledonian! on wi’ me!”

I have scrutinised it over and over; and to the world some way or other it shall go as it is. At the same time it will not in the least hurt me, should you leave it out altogether, and adhere to your first intention of adopting Logan’s verses.

I have finished my song to “Saw ye my Father;” and in English, as you will see. That there is a syllable too much for the expression of the air, is true; but allow me to say, that the mere dividing of a dotted crotchet into a crotchet and a quaver is not a great matter; however, in that, I have no pretensions to cope in judgment with you. Of the poetry I speak with confidence; but the music is a business where I hint my ideas with the utmost diffidence.

145 Scots wha hae.

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XVI.

May 1794.

My Dear Sir, — I return you the plates, with which I am highly pleased. I would humbly propose, instead of the younker knitting stockings, to put a stock and horn into his hands. A friend of mine, who is positively the ablest judge on the subject I have ever met with, and though an unknown, is yet a superior artist with the burin, is quite charmed with Allan’s manner. I got him a peep of the “Gentle Shepherd”, and he pronounces Allan a most original artist of great excellence.

For my part, I look on Mr. Allan’s choosing my favourite poem for his subject to be one of the highest compliments I have ever received.

I am quite vexed at Pleyel’s being cooped up in France, as it will put an entire stop to our work. Now, and for six or seven months, I shall be quite in song, as you shall see by-and-by. I got an air, pretty enough, composed by Lady Elizabeth Heron, of Heron, which she calls “The Banks of Cree.” Cree is a beautiful romantic stream, and, as her ladyship is a particular friend of mine, I have written the following song to it: —

Here is the glen, and here the bower, (etc.)

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XVII.

Sept. 1794.

I shall withdraw my “On the seas and far away” altogether; it is unequal, and unworthy of the work. Making a poem is like begetting a son; you cannot know whether you have a wise man or a fool, until you produce him to the world and try him.

For that reason I have sent you the offspring of my brain, abortions and all; and as such, pray look over them, and forgive them, and burn them. I am flattered at your adopting “Ca’ the yowes to the knowes”, as it was owing to me that it ever saw the light. About seven years ago I was well acquainted with a worthy little fellow of a clergyman, a Mr. Clunie, who sung it charmingly: and, at my request, Mr. Clarke took it down from his singing. When I gave it to Johnson, I added some stanzas to the song, and mended others, but still it will not do for you. In a solitary stroll which I took to-day, I tried my hand on a few pastoral lines, following up the idea of the chorus, which I would preserve. Here it is, with all its crudities and imperfections on its head.

Ca’ the yowes, (etc.)

I shall give you my opinion of your other newly adopted songs, my first scribbling fit.

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XVIII.

19th October 1794.

My Dear Friend, — By this morning’s post I have your list, and, in general, I highly approve of it. I shall, at more leisure, give you a critique on the whole. Clarke goes to your town by to-day’s fly, and I wish you would call on him and take his opinion in general; you know his taste is a standard. He will return here again in a week or two, so please do not miss asking for him. One thing I hope he will do — persuade you to adopt my favourite, “Craigie-burn wood”, in your selection; it is as great a favourite of his as of mine. The lady on whom it was made is one of the finest women in Scotland; and, in fact (entre nous), is in a manner to me what Sterne’s Eliza was to him — a mistress, a friend, or what you will, in the guileless simplicity of Platonic love. (Now, don’t put any of your squinting constructions on this, or have any clishmaclaiver about it among our acquaintances.) I assure you that to my lovely friend you are indebted for many of your best songs of mine. Do you think that the sober gin-horse routine of existence could inspire a man with life, and love, and joy — could fire him with enthusiasm, or melt him with pathos, equal to the genius of your book? No! no! Whenever I want to be more than ordinary in song — to be in some degree equal to your diviner airs — do you imagine I fast and pray for the divine emanation? Tout au contraire! I have a glorious recipe — the very one that for his own use was invented by the divinity of healing and poetry, when erst he piped to the flocks of Admetus. I put myself on a regimen of admiring a fine woman; and in proportion to the adorability of her charms, in proportion you are delighted with my verses. The lightning of her eye is the godhead of Parnassus, and the witchery of her smile the divinity of Helicon!

To descend to business; if you like my idea of “When she cam ben she bobbit”, the enclosed stanzas of mine, altered a little from what they were formerly when set to another air, may perhaps do instead of worse stanzas.

Now for a few miscellaneous remarks. “The Posie” (in the Museum) is my composition; the air was taken down from Mrs. Burns’s voice. It is well known in the West Country, but the old words are trash. By-the-bye, take a look at the tune again, and tell me if you do not think it is the original from which “Roslin Castle” is composed. The second part in particular, for the first two or three bars, is exactly the old air. “Strathallan’s Lament” is mine; the music is by our right trusty and deservedly well beloved, Allan Masterton. “Donocht head” is not mine; I would give ten pounds if it were. It appeared first in the Edinburgh Herald; and came to the editor of that paper with the Newcastle post-mark on it^146

“Whistle o’er the lave o’t” is mine; the music is said to be by a John Bruce, a celebrated violin player in Dumfries, about the beginning of this century. This I know, Bruce, who was an honest man, though a redwud Highlandman, constantly claimed it; and by all the old musical people here is believed to be the author of it.

“Andrew and his cutty gun”. The song to which this is set in the Museum is mine; and was composed on Miss Euphemia Murray, of Lintrose, commonly and deservedly called the “Flower of Strathmore.”

“How lang and dreary is the night.” I met with some such words in a collection of songs somewhere, which I altered and enlarged; and to please you, and to suit your favourite air, I have taken a stride or two across the room, and have arranged it anew, as you will find on the other page.

Tune — Cauld Kail in Aberdeen.

How lang and dreary is the night, (etc.)

Tell me how you like this. I differ from your idea of the expression of the tune. There is, to me, a great deal of tenderness in it.

I would be obliged to you if you would procure me a sight of Ritson’s Collection of English Songs, which you mention in your letter. I will thank you for another information, and that as speedily as you please — whether this miserable drawling hotch-potch epistle has not completely tired you of my correspondence.

146“Keen blaws the wind o’er Donocht head,

The snaw drives snelly thro’ the dale,

The Gaberlunzie tirls my sneck,

And, shivering, tells his waefu’ tale.

“Cauld is the night, O let me in,

And dinna let your minstrel fa’,

And dinna let his winding-sheet

Be naething but a wreath o’ snaw.”(etc.)

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XIX.

November 1794.

Many thanks to you, my dear sir, for your present: it is a book of the utmost importance to me. I have yesterday begun my anecdotes, etc., for your work. I intend drawing it up in the form of a letter to you, which will save me from the tedious dull business of systematic arrangement. Indeed, as all I have to say consists of unconnected remarks, anecdotes, scraps of old songs, etc., it would be impossible to give the work a beginning, a middle, and an end; which the critics insist to be absolutely necessary in a work. In my last, I told you my objections to the song you had selected for “My lodging is on the cold ground”. On my visit the other day to my fair Chloris (that is the poetic name of the lovely goddess of my inspiration), she suggested an idea, which I, on my return from the visit, wrought into the following song: —

My Chloris, mark how green the groves, (etc,)

How do you like the simplicity and tenderness of this pastoral? I think it pretty well.

I like you for entering so candidly and so kindly into the story of ma chlre amie. I assure you, I was never more in earnest in my life than in the account of that affair which I sent you in my last. Conjugal love is a passion which I deeply feel and highly venerate; but, somehow, it does not make such a figure in poesy as that other species of the passion,

Where Love is liberty, and Nature law,

Musically speaking, the first is an instrument of which the gamut is scanty and confined, but the tones inexpressibly sweet; while the last has powers equal to all the intellectual modulations of the human soul. Still, I am a very poet, in my enthusiasm of the passion. The welfare and happiness of the beloved object is the first and inviolate sentiment that pervades my soul; and whatever pleasures I might wish for, or whatever might be the raptures they would give me, yet, if they interfere with that first principle, it is having these pleasures at a dishonest price; and justice forbids, and generosity disdains, the purchase!

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XX.

I am out of temper that you should set so sweet, so tender an air, as “Deil tak the wars,” to the foolish old verses. You talk of the silliness of “Saw ye my father:” by heavens, the odds is gold to brass! Besides, the old song, though now pretty well modernised into the Scottish language, is, originally, and in the early editions, a bungling low imitation of the Scottish manner, by that genius, Tom D’Urfey; so has no pretensions to be a Scottish production. There is a pretty English song by Sheridan in the “Duenna,” to this air, which is out of sight superior to D’Urfey’s. It begins,

When sable night each drooping plant restoring.

The air, if I understand the expression of it properly, is the very native language of simplicity, tenderness, and love. I have again gone over my song to the tune as follows.147

There is an air, “The Caledonian Hunt’s delight”, to which I wrote a song that you will find in Johnson. “Ye banks and braes o’ bonnie Doon”; this air, I think, might find a place among your hundred, as Lear says of his knights. Do you know the history of the air? It is curious enough. A good many years ago, Mr. James Miller, writer in your good town, a gentleman whom possibly you know, was in company with our friend Clarke; and talking of Scottish music, Miller expressed an ardent ambition to be able to compose a Scots air. Mr. Clarke, partly by way of joke, told him to keep to the black keys of the harpsichord, and preserve some kind of rhythm, and he would infallibly compose a Scots air. Certain it is, that in a few days, Mr. Miller produced the rudiments of an air, which Mr. Clarke, with some touches and corrections, fashioned into the tune in question. Ritson, you know, has the same story of the “Black keys;” but this account which I have just given you, Mr. Clarke informed me of several years ago. Now, to shew you how difficult it is to trace the origin of our airs, I have heard it repeatedly asserted that this was an Irish air nay, I met with an Irish gentleman who affirmed he had heard it in Ireland among the old women; while, on the other hand, a countess informed me, that the first person who introduced the air into this country was a baronet’s lady of her acquaintance, who took down the notes from an itinerant piper in the Isle of Man. How difficult then to ascertain the truth respecting our poesy and music! I, myself, have lately seen a couple of ballads sung through the streets of Dumfries, with my name at the head of them as the author, though it was the first time I had ever seen them.

I am ashamed, my dear fellow, to make the request; ‘tis dunning your generosity; but in a moment when I had forgotten whether I was rich or poor, I promised Chloris a copy of your songs. It wrings my honest pride to write you this; but an ungracious request is doubly so, by a tedious apology. To make you some amends, as soon as I have extracted the necessary information out of them, I will return you Ritson’s volumes.

The lady is not a little proud that she is to make so distinguished a figure in your collection, and I am not a little proud that I have it in my power to please her so much. Lucky it is for your patience that my paper is done, for when I am in a scribbling humour, I know not when to give over.

147 Our Bard remarks upon it, “I could easily throw this into an English mould; but, to my taste, in the simple and the tender of the pastoral song, a sprinkling of the old Scottish has an inimitable effect.”

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XXI.

19th Nov. 1794.

Tell my friend Allan (for I am sure that we only want the trifling circumstance of being known to one another to be the best friends on earth) that I much suspect he has, in his plates, mistaken the figure of the stock and horn. I have, at last, gotten one; but it is a very rude instrument. It is composed of three parts; the stock, which is the hinder thigh-bone of a sheep, such as you see in a mutton-ham, the horn, which is a common Highland cow’s horn, cut off at the smaller end, until the aperture be large enough to admit the stock to be pushed up through the horn, until it be held by the thicker end of the thigh-bone; and, lastly, an oaten reed exactly cut and notched like that which you see every shepherd boy have, when the corn stems are green and full-grown. The reed is not made fast in the bone, but is held up by the lips, and plays loose in the smaller end of the stock; while the stock, with the horn hanging on its larger end, is held by the hands in playing. The stock has six or seven ventiges on the upper side, and one back ventige, like the common flute. This of mine was made by a man from the Braes of Athole, and is exactly what the shepherds wont to use in that country.

However, either it is not quite properly bored in the holes, or else we have not the art of blowing it rightly; for we can make little of it. If Mr. Allan chooses, I will send him a sight of mine; as I look on myself to be a kind of brother-brush with him. “Pride in poets is nae sin”, and I will say it, that I look on Mr. Allan and Mr. Burns to be the only genuine and real painters of Scottish costume in the world.

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XXII.

January 1795.

I fear for my songs; however a few may please, yet originality is a coy feature in composition, and in a multiplicity of efforts in the same style, disappears altogether. For these three thousand years we poetic folks have been describing the spring, for instance; and, as the spring continues the same, there must soon be a sameness in the imagery, etc., of these said rhyming folks.

A great critic, Aikin on Songs, says that love and wine are the exclusive themes for song-writing. The following is on neither subject, and consequently is no song; but will be allowed, I think, to be two or three pretty good prose thoughts, inverted into rhyme.

FOR A’ THAT AND A’ THAT.

Is there for honest poverty, (etc.)

Detailed Table of Contents for the letters

XXIII.

Ecclefechan,148 7th Feb. 1795.

My Dear Thomson, — You cannot have any idea of the predicament in which I write to you. In the course of my duty as supervisor (in which capacity I have acted of late) I came yesternight to this unfortunate, wicked little village. I have gone forward, but snows of ten feet deep have impeded my progress: I have tried to “gae back the gate I cam again,” but the same obstacle has shut me up within insuperable bars. To add to my misfortune, since dinner, a scraper has been torturing catgut, in sounds that would have insulted the dying agonies of a sow under the hands of a butcher, and thinks himself, on that very account, exceeding good company. In fact, I have been in a dilemma, either to get drunk, to forget these miseries; or to hang myself, to get rid of them; like a prudent man (a character congenial to my every thought, word, and deed) I of two evils have chosen the least, and am very drunk at your service!

I wrote you yesterday from Dumfries. I had not time then to tell you all I wanted to say; and Heaven knows, at present I have not capacity.

Do you know an air — I am sure you must know it, “We’ll gang nae mair to yon town?” I think, in slowish time, it would make an excellent song. I am highly delighted with it; and if you should think it worthy of your attention, I have a fair dame in my eye to whom I would consecrate it.

As I am just going to bed, I wish you a good night.

148 The birthplace of Carlyle.

Detailed Table of Contents for the letters

XXIV.

You see how I answer your orders; your tailor could not be more punctual. I am just now in a high fit of poetising, provided that the strait-jacket of criticism don’t cure me. If you can, in a post or two, administer a little of the intoxicating potion of your applause, it will raise your humble servant’s frenzy to any height you want. I am at this moment “holding high converse” with the Muses, and have not a word to throw away on such a prosaic dog as you are.

Detailed Table of Contents for the letters

XXV.

April 1796.

Alas, my dear Thomson, I fear it will be some time ere I tune my lyre again! “By Babel streams I have sat and wept” almost ever since I wrote you last. I have only known existence by the pressure of the heavy hand of sickness, and have counted time by the repercussions of pain! Rheumatism, cold, and fever have formed to me a terrible combination. I close my eyes in misery, and open them without hope. I look on the vernal day, and say, with poor Fergusson —

Say, wherefore has an all indulgent Heaven

Light to the comfortless and wretched given?

This will be delivered to you by a Mrs. Hyslop, landlady of the Globe Tavern here, which for these many years has been my howff, and where our friend Clarke and I have had many a merry squeeze. I am highly delighted with Mr. Allan’s etchings. “Woo’d and married and a’”, is admirable! The grouping is beyond all praise. The expression of the figures, conformable to the story in the ballad, is absolutely faultless perfection. I next admire “Turnim-spike”. What I like least is, “Jenny said to Jockey”. Besides the female being in her appearance quite a virago, if you take her stooping into the account, she is at least two inches taller than her lover. Poor Cleghorn! I sincerely sympathise with him! Happy am I to think that he yet has a well-grounded hope of health and enjoyment in this world. As for me — but that is a damning subject!

Detailed Table of Contents for the letters

XXVI.

[Probably May 1796.]

My Dear Sir, — Inclosed is a certificate which (although little different from the model) I suppose will amply answer the purpose, and I beg you will prosecute the miscreants^149 without mercy. 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, and others — at least, all the songs of which I wish to be called the author. I do not propose this so much in the way of emolument as to do justice to my muse, lest I should be blamed for trash I never saw, or be defrauded by false claimants of what is justly my own. The post is going. — I will write you again to-morrow. Many thanks for the beautiful seal.

R. B.

149 For infringement of copyright.

Detailed Table of Contents for the letters

XXVII.

BROW-ON-SOLWAY, 4th July 1796.

My Dear Sir, — I received your songs; but my health is so precarious, nay, dangerously situated, that, as a last effort, I am here at sea-bathing quarters. Besides an inveterate rheumatism, my appetite is quite gone, and I am so emaciated as to be scarce able to support myself on my own legs. Alas! Is this a time for me to woo the muses? However, I am still anxiously willing to serve your work, and if possible shall try. I would not like to see another employed — unless you could lay your hand upon a poet whose productions would be equal to the rest. Farewell, and God bless you.

R. BURNS.

Detailed Table of Contents for the letters

XXVIII.

BROW, on the Solway Firth, 12th July 1796.

After all my boasted independence, curst necessity compels me to implore you for five pounds. A cruel wretch of a haberdasher, to whom I owe an account, taking it into his head that I am dying, has commenced a process, and will infallibly put me into jail.

Do, for God’s sake, send me that sum, and that by return of post. Forgive me this earnestness, but the horrors of a jail have made me half distracted. I do not ask all this gratuitously; for, upon returning health, I hereby promise and engage to furnish you with five pounds worth of the neatest song-genius you have seen. I tried my hand on “Rothiemurchie” this morning. The measure is so difficult that it is impossible to infuse much genius into the lines; they are on the other side. Forgive, forgive me!150

Fairest maid on Devon banks,

Crystal Devon, winding Devon,

Wilt thou lay that frown aside,

And smile as thou wert wont to do? (etc.)

150 These verses, and the letter inclosing them, are written in a character that marks the very feeble state of their author.

DETAILED TABLE OF CONTENTS FOR THE LETTERS

INTRODUCTION

GENERAL CORRESPONDENCE.

I. — TO ELLISON OR ALISON BEGBIE (?)[1]

II. — TO ELLISON BEGBIE.

III. — TO ELLISON BEGBIE.

IV. — TO ELLISON BEGBIE.

V. — TO ELLISON BEGBOE.

VI. — TO HIS FATHER.

VII. — TO SIR JOHN WHITEFOORD, BART., OF BALLOCHMYLE.[3]

VIII. — TO MR. JOHN MURDOCH, SCHOOL-MASTER, STAPLES INN BUILDINGS, LONDON.

IX. — TO HIS COUSIN, MR. JAMES BURNESS, WRITER, MONTROSE.

X. — TO MR. JAMES BURNESS, WRITER, MONTROSE.

XI. — TO MR. JAMES BURNESS, WRITER, MONTROSE.

XII. — TO THOMAS ORR, PARK, KIRKOSWALD.

XIII. — TO MISS MARGARET KENNEDY.[8]

XIV. — TO MISS –- , AYRSHIRE.[9]

XV. — TO MR. JOHN RICHMOND, LAW CLERK, EDINBURGH.[10]

XVI. — TO MR. JAMES SMITH[12], SHOPKEEPER, MAUCHLINE.

XVII. — TO MR. ROBERT MUIR, WINE MERCHANT, KlLMARNOCK.

XVIII. — TO MR. JOHN BALLANTINE, BANKER, AYR. (?)

XIX. — TO MR. M’WHINNIE, WRITER, AYR.

XX. — TO JOHN ARNOT, ESQUIRE, OF DALQUATSWOOD.

XXI. — TO MR. DAVID BRICE, SHOEMAKER, GLASGOW.

XXII. — TO MR. JOHN RICHMOND, EDINBURGH.

XXIII — TO MR. JOHN RICHMOND.

XXIV. — TO MR. JOHN KENNEDY.

XXV. — TO HIS COUSIN, MR. JAMES BURNESS, WRITER, MONTROSE.

XXVI. — TO MRS. STEWART, OF STAIR.[19]

XXVII. — TO MR. ROBERT AIKIN, WRITER, AYR.

XXVIII. — TO DR. MACKENZIE, MAUCHLINE; INCLOSING HIM VERSES ON DINING WITH LORD DAER.

XXIX. — TO MRS. DUNLOP, OF DUNLOP.

XXX. — TO MISS ALEXANDER.

XXXI. — IN THE NAME OF THE NINE.

XXXII. — TO JAMES DALRYMPLE, ESQ., ORANGEFIELD.

XXXIII. — TO SIR JOHN WHITEFOORD.

XXXIV. — TO MR, GAVIN HAMILTON, MAUCHLINE.

XXXV. — TO MR. JOHN BALLANTINE, BANKER, AT ONE TIME PROVOST OF AYR.

XXXVI. — TO MR. ROBERT MUIR.

XXXVII. — TO MR. WILLIAM CHALMERS, WRITER, AYR.

XXXVIII. — TO THE EARL OF EGLINGTON.

XXXIX. — TO MR. JOHN BALLANTINE.

XL. — TO MRS. DUNLOP.

XLI — TO DR. MOORE.[31]

XLII. — TO THE REV. G. LAWRIE, NEWMILNS, NEAR KILMARNOCK.

XLIII. — TO THE EARL OF BUCHAN.[32]

XLIV. — TO MR. JAMES CANDLISH,[33]STUDENT IN PHYSIC, GLASGOW COLLEGE.

XLV. — TO MR. PETER STUART, EDITOR OF “THE STAR,” LONDON.

XLVI — TO MRS. DUNLOP.

XLVII — TO MRS. DUNLOP.

XLVIII. — TO DR. MOORE.

XLIX. — TO MRS. DUNLOP.

L — TO MR. WILLIAM NICOL, CLASSICAL MASTER, HIGH SCHOOL, EDINBURGH.

LI. — TO MR. WILLIAM NICOL.

LII. — TO MR. ROBERT AINSLIE

LIII. — TO MR. JAMES SMITH, LINLITHGOW, FORMERLY OF MAUCHLINE

LIV. — TO MR. JOHN RICHMOND.

LV. — TO MR. ROBERT AINSLIE.

LVI-To DR. MOORE.

LVIL. — TO MR. ARCHIBALD LAWRIE.[44]

LVIII. — TO MR. ROBERT MUIR, KILMARNOCK.

LIX. — TO MR. GAVIN HAMILTON.

LX. — TO MR. WALKER, BLAIR OF ATHOLE.[49]

LXI. — TO His BROTHER, MR. GILBERT BURNS, MOSSGIEL.

LXII. — TO MR. PATRICK MILLER,[52]DALSWINTON.

LXIII. — TO REV. JOHN SKINNER.

LXIV. — TO Miss MARGARET CHALMERS, HARVIESTON. (AFTERWARDS MRS. HAY, OF EDINBURGH.)

LXV. — TO MRS. DUNLOP OF DUNLOP HOUSE, STEWARTON.

LXVI. — TO MR. JAMES HOY,[55]GORDON CASTLE.

LXVII. — TO THE EARL OF GLENCAIRN.

LXVIII — TO Miss CHALMERS.

LXIX. — TO MISS CHALMERS.

LXX. — TO MISS CHALMERS.

LXXI. — TO MR. RICHARD BROWN, IRVINE.

LXXII — TO MRS. DUNLOP.

LXXIII. — TO MRS. DUNLOP.

LXXIV. — TO THE REV. JOHN SKINNER.

LXXV. — TO MRS. ROSE, OF KILRAVOCK.

LXXVI-To RICHARD BROWN, GREENOCK.

LXXVII. — TO MR. WILLIAM CRUIKSHANK.[59]

LXXVIII. — TO MR. ROBERT AINSLIE.

LXXIX. — TO MR. RICHARD BROWN.

LXXX. — TO MR. ROBERT MUIR.

LXXXI — TO MRS. DUNLOP.

LXXXII — TO MR. WM. NICOL (PERHAPS).

LXXXIII. — TO MISS CHALMERS.

THE CLARINDA LETTERS.

NOTE PREFATORY TO THE LETTERS TO CLARINDA

LETTERS TO CLARINDA.

I.

II.

III.

IV.

V.

VI.

VII.

VIII.

IX

X.

XI.

XII.

XIII.

XIV.

XV

XVI.

XVII.

XVIII.

XIX.

XX.

XXI.

XXII.

XXIII.

XXIV.

XXV.

XXVI.

XXVII.

XXVIII.

XXIX.

XXX.

XXXI.

XXXII

XXXIII.

XXXIV.

GENERAL CORRESPONDENCE (continued).

LXXXIV. — TO MR. GAVIN HAMILTON.

LXXXV. — TO MR. WILLIAM DUNBAR, W.S., EDINBURGH.

LXXXVI. — TO MRS. DUNLOP.

LXXXVII. — TO MR. JAMES SMITH, AVON PRINTFIELD, LINLITHGOW.

LXXXVIII — TO PROFESSOR DUGALD STEWART.

LXXXIX. — TO MRS. DUNLOP.

XC. — TO MR. SAMUEL BROWN, KIRKOSWALD.

XCI. — TO MR. JAMES JOHNSON, ENGRAVER, EDINBURGH.

XCII. — TO MR. ROBERT AINSLIE.

XCIII. — TO MRS. DUNLOP.

XCIV. — TO MRS. DUNLOP, AT MR. DUNLOP’S, HADDINGTON.

XCV. — TO MR. ROBERT AINSLIE.

XCVI. — TO MR. ROBERT AINSLIE.

XCVII — TO MRS. DUNLOP.

XCVIII. — TO MR. PETER HILL, BOOKSELLER, EDINBURGH.

XCIX. — TO MRS. DUNLOP.

C. — TO MRS. DUNLOP.

CI. — TO MR. BEUGO, ENGRAVER, EDINBURGH.

CII. — TO MR. ROBERT GRAHAM, OF FINTRAY.

CII. — TO His WIFE, AT MAUCHLINE.

CIV. — TO Miss CHALMERS, EDINBURGH.

CV. — TO MR. MORISON, WRIGHT, MAUCHLINE.

CVI. — TO MRS. DUNLOP, OF DUNLOP.

CVII — TO MR. PETER HILL.

CVIIL — TO THE EDITOR OF THE “STAR”.

CIX. — TO MRS. DUNLOP, AT MOREHAM MAINS.

CX. — TO DR. BLACKLOCK.

CXI. — TO MRS. DUNLOP.

CXII. — TO MR. JOHN TENNANT.

CXIII. — TO MRS. DUNLOP.

CXIV. — TO DR. MOORE, LONDON.

CXV. — TO MR. ROBERT AINSLIE.

CXVI. — TO PROFESSOR DUGALD STEWART.

CXVII. — TO MR. ROBERT CLEGHORN, SAUGHTON MILLS.

CXVIII. — TO BISHOP GEDDES, EDINBURGH.

CXIX. — TO MR. JAMES BURNESS.

CXX. — TO MRS. DUNLOP.

CXXI. — TO MRS. M’LEHOSE (FORMERLY CLARINDA).

CXXIL — TO DR. MOORE.

CXXIII. — TO HIS BROTHER, MR. WILLIAM BURNS.

CXXIV. — TO MR. HILL, BOOKSELLER, EDINBURGH.

CXXV. — TO MRS. M’MURDO, DRUMLANRIG.

CXXVI. — TO MR. CUNNINGHAM.

CXXVIL — TO MR. RICHARD BROWN.

CXXVIIL — TO MR. ROBERT AINSLIE.

CXXIX. — TO MRS. DUNLOP.

CXXX. — TO MISS HELEN MARIA WILLIAMS.

CXXXI. — TO MR. ROBERT GRAHAM, OF FINTRY.

CXXXIL — TO DAVID SILLAR, MERCHANT, IRVINE.[102]

CXXXIII. — TO MR. JOHN LOGAN, OF KNOCK SHINNOCK.

CXXXIV. — TO MR. PETER STUART, EDITOR, LONDON.

CXXXV. — TO HIS BROTHER, WILLIAM BURNS, SADDLER, NEWCASTLE-ON-TYNE.

CXXXVL — TO MRS. DUNLOP.

CXXXVIL — TO CAPTAIN RIDDEL, FRIARS CARSE.

CXXXVIII — TO MR. ROBERT AINSLIE, W.S.

CXXXIX. — TO MR. RICHARD BROWN, PORT-GLASGOW.

CXL. — TO MR. R. GRAHAM, OF FINTRY.

CXLL — TO MRS. DUNLOP.

CXLII. — TO LADY WINIFRED M. CONSTABLE.

CXLIII. — TO MR. CHARLES K. SHARPE, OF HODDAM.

CXLIV. — TO HIS BROTHER, GILBERT BURNS, MOSSGIEL.

CXLV. — TO MR. WILLIAM DUNBAR, W.S.

CXLVL. — TO MRS. DUNLOP.

CXLVII. — TO MR. PETER HILL, BOOKSELLER, EDINBURGH.

CXLVIIL. — TO MR. W. NICOL.

CXLIX. — TO MR. CUNNINGHAM, WRITER, EDINBURGH.

CL. — TO MR. HILL, BOOKSELLER, EDINBURGH.

CLI. — TO MRS. DUNLOP.

CLII. — TO DR. JOHN MOORE, LONDON.

CLIII. — TO MR. MURDOCH,[113] TEACHER OF FRENCH, LONDON.

CLIV. — TO MR. CUNNINGHAM.

CLV. — TO MR. CRAUFORD TAIT,[114] W.S., EDINBURGH.

CLVL. — TO MRS. DUNLOP.

CLVIL. — TO MR. WILLIAM DUNBAR, W.S.

CLVIIL. — TO MR. PETER HILL.

CLIX. — TO DR. MOORE.

CLX. — TO MRS. DUNLOP.

CLXI. — TO THE REV. ARCH. ALISON.

CLXII. — TO THE REV. G. BAIRD.

CLXIII. — TO MR. CUNNINGHAM, WRITER, EDINBURGH.

CLXIV. — TO MRS. DUNLOP.

CLXV. — TO MR. CUNNINGHAM.

CLXVL — TO MR. THOMAS SLOAN

CLXVII — TO MR. AINSLIE.

CLXVIII. — TO MISS DAVIES.

CLXIX. — TO MRS. DUNLOP.

CLXX. — TO MR. WILLIAM SMELLIE, PRINTER.

CLXXL — TO MR. WILLIAM NICOL.

CLXXIL. — TO MR. FRANCIS GROSE, F.S A.

CLXXIIL. — TO MRS. DUNLOP.

CLXXIV. — TO MR. CUNNINGHAM.

CLXXV. — TO MRS. DUNLOP.

CLXXVI. — TO MRS. DUNLOP.

CLXXVII. — TO MRS. DUNLOP.

CLXXVIII. — TO MR. R. GRAHAM, FINTRY.

CLXXIX. — TO MRS. DUNLOP.

CLXXX. — TO MR. ROBERT GRAHAM OF FINTRY.

CLXXXI. — TO MR. ALEX. CUNNINGHAM, W.S., EDINBURGH.

CLXXXIL — TO MR. CUNNINGHAM.

CLXXXIII. — TO Miss BENSON, YORK, AFTERWARDS MRS. BASIL MONTAGU.

CLXXXIV. — TO MR. JOHN FRANCIS ERSKINE, OF MAR.

CLXXXV. — TO MISS M’MORDO, DRUMLANRIG.

CLXXXVI. — TO JOHN M’MURDO, ESQ., DRUMLANRIG.

CLXXXVII. — TO MRS. RIDDEL.

CLXXXVIII. — TO MRS. RIDDEL.

CLXXXIX. — TO MRS. RIDDEL.

CXC. — TO MRS. RIDDEL.

CXCI. — TO MR. CUNNINGHAM.

CXCII. — TO MRS. DUNLOP.

CXCIII. — TO MR. JAMES JOHNSON.

CXCIV. — TO MR. PETER MILLER, JUN., OF DALSWINION.[131]

CXCV. — TO MRS, RIDDEL

CXCVI. — TO MRS. DUNLOP.

CXCVII. — TO MRS. DUNLOP, IN LONDON.

CXVIII. — TO THE HON, THE PROVOST, ETC., OF DUMFRIES.

CXCIX. — TO MRS. DUNLOP.[133]

CC. — TO MR. JAMES JOHNSON.

CCI — TO MR. CUNNINGHAM.

CCII. — TO MR. GILBERT BURNS.

CCIII. — TO MRS. BURNS.[137]

CCIV. — TO MRS. DUNLOP.

CCV. — TO MR. JAMES BURNESS, WRITER, MONTROSE.

CCVI. — TO HIS FATHER-IN-LAW, JAMES ARMOUR, MASON, MAUCHLINE.[138]

THE THOMSON LETTERS.

PREFATORY NOTE.

THE THOMSON LETTER.

I.

II.

III.

IV.

V.

VI.

VII.

VIII.

IX.

X.

XI.

XII.

XIII.

XIV.

XV.

XVI.

XVII.

XVIII.

XIX.

XX.

XXI.

XXII.

XXIII.

XXIV.

XXV.

XXVI.

XXVII.

XXVIII.

The Biographies

Burns’ last home in Dumfries, where he died aged 37

LIFE OF ROBERT BURNS by Thomas Carlyle

Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881) was a Scottish philosopher, satirical writer, essayist and historian during the Victorian era, rising to became a controversial social commentator of his time. Coming from a strict Calvinist family, Carlyle was expected to become a preacher by his parents, but while at the University of Edinburgh he lost his Christian faith. Calvinist values, however, remained with him throughout his life. His combination of a religious temperament with loss of faith in traditional Christianity, made Carlyle’s work appealing to many Victorians who were grappling with scientific and political changes that threatened the traditional social order. He offered an incisive style to his social and political criticism and a complex literary style to works such as The French Revolution: A History (1837), which later served as a source for Charles Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities.

Carlyle developed influential ideas of Socialism and his belief in the importance of heroic leadership, as argued in his monumental work On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History (1841), in which he compared a wide range of different types of heroes, including Oliver Cromwell, Napoleon, William Shakespeare and, of course, his beloved fellow Scot Robert Burns. In his mature years, Carlyle published the following detailed and affectionate biography of Robert Burns in 1859.

Thomas Carlyle

CONTENTS

PART FIRST.

PART SECOND.

PART FIRST.

Robert Burns, the national bard of Scotland, was born on the 25th of January, 1759, in a clay-built cottage about two miles south of the town of Ayr. He was the eldest son of William Burnes, or Burness, who, at the period of Robert’s birth, was gardener and overseer to a gentleman of small estate; but resided on a few acres of land which he had on lease from another person. The father was a man of strict religious principles, and also distinguished for that penetration and knowledge of mankind which was afterwards so conspicuous in his son. The mother of the poet was likewise a very sagacious woman, and possessed an inexhaustible store of ballads and legendary tales, with which she nourished the infant imagination of him whose own productions were destined to excel them all.

These worthy individuals labored diligently for the support of an increasing family; nor, in the midst of harassing struggles did they neglect the mental improvement of their offspring; a characteristic of Scottish parents, even under the most depressing circumstances. In his sixth year, Robert was put under the tuition of one Campbell, and subsequently under Mr. John Murdoch, a very faithful and pains-taking teacher. With this individual he remained for a few years, and was accurately instructed in the first principles of composition. The poet and his brother Gilbert were the aptest pupils in the school, and were generally at the head of the class. Mr. Murdoch, in afterwards recording the impressions which the two brothers made on him, says: “Gilbert always appeared to me to possess a more lively imagination, and to be more of the wit, than Robert. I attempted to teach them a little church music. Here they were left far behind by all the rest of the school. Robert’s ear, in particular, was remarkably dull, and his voice untunable. It was long before I could get them to distinguish one tune from another. Robert’s countenance was generally grave, and expressive of a serious, contemplative, and thoughtful mind. Gilbert’s face said, Mirth, with thee I mean to live; and certainly, if any person who knew the two boys had been asked which of them was the most likely to court the muses, he would never have guessed that Robert had a propensity of that kind.”

Besides the tuition of Mr. Murdoch, Burns received instructions from his father in writing and arithmetic. Under their joint care, he made rapid progress, and was remarkable for the ease with which he committed devotional poetry to memory. The following extract from his letter to Dr. Moore, in 1787, is interesting, from the light which it throws upon his progress as a scholar, and on the formation of his character as a poet:— “At those years,” says he, “I was by no means a favorite with anybody. I was a good deal noted for a retentive memory, a stubborn, sturdy something in my disposition, and an enthusiastic idiot piety. I say idiot piety, because I was then but a child. Though it cost the schoolmaster some thrashings, I made an excellent scholar; and by the time I was ten or eleven years of age, I was a critic in substantives, verbs, and particles. In my infant and boyish days, too, I owed much to an old woman who resided in the family, remarkable for her ignorance, credulity, and superstition. She had, I suppose, the largest collection in the country, of tales and songs, concerning devils, ghosts, fairies, brownies, witches, warlocks, spunkies, kelpies, elf-candles, dead-lights, wraiths, apparitions, cantrips, giants, enchanted towers, dragons, and other trumpery. This cultivated the latent seeds of poetry; but had so strong an effect upon my imagination, that to this hour, in my nocturnal rambles, I sometimes keep a sharp look-out in suspicious places; and though nobody can be more skeptical than I am in such matters, yet it often takes an effort of philosophy to shake off these idle terrors. The earliest composition that I recollect taking pleasure in, was, The Vision of Mirza, and a hymn of Addison’s, beginning, “How are thy servants blest, O Lord!” I particularly remember one-half stanza, which was music to my boyish ear:

“For though on dreadful whirls we hung

High on the broken wave.”

I met with these pieces in Mason’s English Collection, one of my school-books. The first two books I ever read in private, and which gave me more pleasure than any two books I ever read since, were, The Life of Hannibal, and The History of Sir William Wallace. Hannibal gave my young ideas such a turn, that I used to strut in raptures up and down after the recruiting drum and bagpipe, and wish myself tall enough to be a soldier; while the story of Wallace poured a tide of Scottish prejudice into my veins, which will boil along there till the flood-gates of life shut in eternal rest.”

Mr. Murdoch’s removal from Mount Oliphant deprived Burns of his instructions; but they were still continued by the father of the bard. About the age of fourteen, he was sent to school every alternate week for the improvement of his writing. In the mean while, he was busily employed upon the operations of the farm; and, at the age of fifteen, was considered as the principal laborer upon it. About a year after this he gained three weeks of respite, which he spent with his old tutor, Murdoch, at Ayr, in revising the English grammar, and in studying the French language, in which he made uncommon progress. Ere his sixteenth year elapsed, he had considerably extended his reading. The vicinity of Mount Oliphant to Ayr afforded him facilities for gratifying what had now become a passion. Among the books which he had perused were some plays of Shakspeare, Pope, the works of Allan Ramsay, and a collection of songs, which constituted his vade mecum. “I pored over them,” says he, “driving my cart or walking to labor, song by song, verse by verse, carefully noticing the true, tender or sublime, from affectation and fustian.” So early did he evince his attachment to the lyric muse, in which he was destined to surpass all who have gone before or succeeded him.

At this period the family removed to Lochlea, in the parish of Tarbolton. Some time before, however, he had made his first attempt in poetry. It was a song addressed to a rural beauty, about his own age, and though possessing no great merit as a whole, it contains some lines and ideas which would have done honor to him at any age. After the removal to Lochlea, his literary zeal slackened, for he was thus cut off from those acquaintances whose conversation stimulated his powers, and whose kindness supplied him with books. For about three years after this period, he was busily employed upon the farm, but at intervals he paid his addresses to the poetic muse, and with no common success. The summer of his nineteenth year was spent in the study of mensuration, surveying, etc., at a small sea-port town, a good distance from home. He returned to his father’s considerably improved. “My reading,” says he, “was enlarged with the very important addition of Thomson’s and Shenstone’s works. I had seen human nature in a new phasis; and I engaged several of my school-fellows to keep up a literary correspondence with me. This improved me in composition. I had met with a collection of letters by the wits of Queen Anne’s reign, and I pored over them most devoutly; I kept copies of any of my own letters that pleased me, and a comparison between them and the composition of most of my correspondents flattered my vanity. I carried this whim so far, that though I had not three farthings’ worth of business in the world, yet almost every post brought me as many letters as if I had been a broad, plodding son of day-book and ledger.”

His mind, peculiarly susceptible of tender impressions, was continually the slave of some rustic charmer. In the “heat and whirlwind of his love,” he generally found relief in poetry, by which, as by a safety-valve, his turbulent passions were allowed to have vent. He formed the resolution of entering the matrimonial state; but his circumscribed means of subsistence as a farmer preventing his taking that step, he resolved on becoming a flax-dresser, for which purpose he removed to the town of Irvine, in 1781. The speculation turned out unsuccessful; for the shop, catching fire, was burnt, and the poet returned to his father without a sixpence. During his stay at Irvine he had met with Ferguson’s poems. This circumstance was of some importance to Burns, for it roused his poetic powers from the torpor into which they had fallen, and in a great measure finally determined the Scottish character of his poetry. He here also contracted some friendships, which he himself says did him mischief; and, by his brother Gilbert’s account, from this date there was a serious change in his conduct. The venerable and excellent parent of the poet died soon after his son’s return. The support of the family now devolving upon Burns, in conjunction with his brother he took a sub-lease of the farm of Mossgiel, in the parish of Mauchline. The four years which he resided upon this farm were the most important of his life. It was here he felt that nature had designed him for a poet; and here, accordingly, his genius began to develop its energies in those strains which will make his name familiar to all future times, the admiration of every civilized country, and the glory and boast of his own.

The vigor of Burns’s understanding, and the keenness of his wit, as displayed more particularly at masonic meetings and debating clubs, of which he formed one at Mauchline, began to spread his fame as a man of uncommon endowments. He now could number as his acquaintance several clergymen, and also some gentlemen of substance; amongst whom was Mr. Gavin Hamilton, writer in Mauchline, one of his earliest patrons. One circumstance more than any other contributed to increase his notoriety. “Polemical divinity,” says he to Dr. Moore in 1787, “about this time was putting the country half mad; and I, ambitious of shining in conversation-parties on Sundays, at funerals, etc., used to puzzle Calvinism with so much heat and indiscretion, that I raised a hue-and-cry of heresy against me, which has not ceased to this hour.” The farm which he possessed belonged to the Earl of Loudon, but the brothers held it in sub-lease from Mr. Hamilton. This gentleman was at open feud with one of the ministers of Mauchline, who was a rigid Calvinist. Mr. Hamilton maintained opposite tenets; and it is not matter of surprise that the young farmer should have espoused his cause, and brought all the resources of his genius to bear upon it. The result was The Holy Fair, The Ordination, Holy Willie’s Prayer, and other satires, as much distinguished for their coarse severity and bitterness, as for their genius.

The applause which greeted these pieces emboldened the poet, and encouraged him to proceed. In his life, by his brother Gilbert, a very interesting account is given of the occasions which gave rise to the poems, and the chronological order in which they were produced. The exquisite pathos and humor, the strong manly sense, the masterly command of felicitous language, the graphic power of delineating scenery, manners, and incidents, which appear so conspicuously in his various poems, could not fail to call forth the admiration of those who were favored with a perusal of them. But the clouds of misfortune were gathering darkly above the head of him who was thus giving delight to a large and widening circle of friends. The farm of Mossgiel proved a losing concern; and an amour with Miss Jane Armour, afterwards Mrs. Burns, had assumed so serious an aspect, that he at first resolved to fly from the scene of his disgrace and misery. One trait of his character, however, must be mentioned. Before taking any steps for his departure, he met Miss Armour by appointment, and gave into her hands a written acknowledgment of marriage, which, when produced by a person in her situation, is, according to the Scots’ law, to be accepted as legal evidence of an irregular marriage having really taken place. This the lady burned, at the persuasion of her father, who was adverse to a marriage; and Burns, thus wounded in the two most powerful feelings of his mind, his love and pride, was driven almost to insanity. Jamaica was his destination; but as he did not possess the money necessary to defray the expense of his passage out, he resolved to publish some of his best poems, in order to raise the requisite sum. These views were warmly promoted by some of his more opulent friends; and a sufficiency of subscribers having been procured, one of the finest volumes of poetry that ever appeared in the world issued from the provincial press of Kilmarnock.

It is hardly possible to imagine with what eager admiration and delight they were every where received. They possessed in an eminent degree all those qualities which invariably contribute to render any literary work quickly and permanently popular. They were written in a phraseology of which all the powers were universally felt, and which being at once antique, familiar, and now rarely written, was therefore fitted to serve all the dignified and picturesque uses of poetry, without making it unintelligible. The imagery and the sentiments were at once natural, impressive, and interesting. Those topics of satire and scandal in which the rustic delights; that humorous imitation of character, and that witty association of ideas, familiar and striking, yet not naturally allied to one another, which has force to shake his sides with laughter; those fancies of superstition, at which one still wonders and trembles; those affecting sentiments and images of true religion, which are at once dear and awful to the heart; were all represented by Burns with the magical power of true poetry. Old and young, high and low, grave and gay, learned and ignorant, all were alike surprised and transported.

In the mean time, a few copies of these fascinating poems found their way to Edinburgh, and having been read to Dr. Blacklock, obtained his warmest approbation; and he advised the author to repair to Edinburgh. Burns lost no time in complying with this request; and accordingly, towards the end of the year 1786, he set out for the capitol, where he was received by Dr. Blacklock with the most flattering kindness, and introduced to every person of taste among that excellent man’s friends. Multitudes now vied with each other in patronizing the rustic poet. Those who possessed at once true taste and ardent philanthropy were soon united in his praise; those who were disposed to favor any good thing belonging to Scotland, purely because it was Scottish, gladly joined the cry; while those who had hearts and understandings to be charmed without knowing why, when they saw their native customs, manners, and language, made the subjects and the materials of poesy, could not suppress that impulse of feeling which struggled to declare itself in favor of Burns.

Thus did Burns, ere he had been many weeks in Edinburgh, find himself the object of universal curiosity, favor, admiration, and fondness. He was sought after, courted with attentions the most respectful and assiduous, feasted, flattered, caressed, and treated by all ranks as the great boast of his country, whom it was scarcely possible to honor and reward in a degree equal to his merits.

A new edition of his poems was called for; and the public mind was directed to the subject by Henry Mackenzie, who dedicated a paper in the Lounger to a commendatory notice of the poet. This circumstance will ever be remembered to the honor of that polished writer, not only for the warmth of the eulogy he bestowed, but because it was the first printed acknowledgment which had been made to the genius of Burns. The copyright was sold to Creech for PS100; but the friends of the poet advised him to forward a subscription. The patronage of the Caledonian Hunt, a very influential body, was obtained. The list of subscribers rapidly rose to 1500, many gentlemen paying a great deal more than the price of the volume; and it was supposed that the poet derived from the subscription and the sale of his copyright a clear profit of at least PS700.

The conversation of Burns, according to the testimony of all the eminent men who heard him, was even more wonderful than his poetry. He affected no soft air nor graceful motions of politeness, which might have ill accorded with the rustic plainness of his native manners. Conscious superiority of mind taught him to associate with the great, the learned, and the gay, without being overawed into any such bashfulness as might have rendered him confused in thought, or hesitating in elocution. He possessed withal an extraordinary share of plain common sense, or mother-wit, which prevented him from obtruding upon persons, of whatever rank, with whom he was admitted to converse, any of those effusions of vanity, envy, or self-conceit, in which authors who have lived remote from the general practice of life, and whose minds have been almost exclusively confined to contemplate their own studies and their own works, are but too prone to indulge. In conversation, he displayed a sort of intuitive quickness and rectitude of judgment, upon every subject that arose. The sensibility of his heart, and the vivacity of his fancy, gave a rich coloring to whatever opinions he was disposed to advance; and his language was thus not less happy in conversation than in his writings. Hence those who had met and conversed with him once, were pleased to meet and to converse with him again and again.

For some time he associated only with the virtuous, the learned, and the wise, and the purity of his morals remained uncontaminated. But unfortunately he fell, as others have fallen in similar circumstances. He suffered himself to be surrounded by persons who were proud to tell that they had been in company with Burns, and had seen Burns as loose and as foolish as themselves. He now also began to contract something of arrogance in conversation. Accustomed to be among his associates what is vulgarly but expressively called “the cock of the company,” he could scarcely refrain from indulging in a similar freedom and dictatorial decision of talk, even in the presence of persons who could less patiently endure presumption.

After remaining some months in the Scottish metropolis, basking in the noontide sun of a popularity which, as Dugald Stewart well remarks, would have turned any head but his own, he formed a resolution of returning to the shades whence he had emerged, but not before he had perambulated the southern border. On the 6th of May, 1787, he set out on his journey, and, visiting all that appeared interesting on the north of the Tweed, proceeded to Newcastle and other places on the English side. He returned in about two months to his family at Mauchline; but in a short period he again set out on an excursion to the north, where he was most flatteringly received by all the great families. On his return to Mossgiel he completed his marriage with Miss Armour. He then concluded a bargain with Mr. Miller of Dalswinton, for a lease of the farm of Elliesland, on advantageous terms.

Burns entered on possession of this farm at Whit-Sunday, 1788. He had formerly applied with success for an excise commission, and during six weeks of this year, he had to attend to the business of that profession at Ayr. His life for some time was thus wandering and unsettled; and Dr. Currie mentions this as one of his chief misfortunes. Mrs. Burns came home to him towards the end of the year, and the poet was accustomed to say that the happiest period of his life was the first winter spent in Elliesland. The neighboring farmers and gentlemen, pleased to obtain for a neighbor the poet by whose works they had been delighted, kindly sought his company, and invited him to their houses. Burns, however, found an inexpressible charm in sitting down beside his wife, at his own fireside; in wandering over his own grounds; in once more putting his hand to the spade and the plough; in farming his enclosures, and managing his cattle. For some months he felt almost all that felicity which fancy had taught him to expect in his new situation. He had been for a time idle; but his muscles were not yet unbraced for rural toil. He now seemed to find a joy in being the husband of the mistress of his affections, and in seeing himself the father of children such as promised to attach him for ever to that modest, humble, and domestic life, in which alone he could hope to be permanently happy. Even his engagements in the service of excise did not, at first, threaten either to contaminate the poet or to ruin the farmer.

From various causes, the farming speculation did not succeed. Indeed, from the time he obtained a situation under government, he gradually began to sink the farmer in the exciseman. Occasionally he assisted in the rustic occupations of Elliesland, but for the most part he was engaged in very different pursuits. In his professional perambulations over the moors of Dumfries-shire he had to encounter temptations which a mind and temperament like his found it difficult to resist. His immortal works had made him universally known and enthusiastically admired; and accordingly he was a welcome guest at every house, from the most princely mansion to the lowest country inn. In the latter he was too frequently to be found as the presiding genius, and master of the orgies. However, he still continued at intervals to cultivate the muse; and, besides a variety of other pieces, he produced at this period the inimitable poem of Tam O’Shanter. Johnson’s Miscellany was also indebted to him for the finest of its lyrics. One pleasing trait of his character must not be overlooked. He superintended the formation of a subscription library in the parish, and took the whole management of it upon himself. These institutions, though common now, were not so short at the period of which we write; and it should never be forgotten that Burns was amongst the first, if not the very first, of their founders in the rural districts of southern Scotland.

Towards the close of 1791 he finally abandoned his farm; and obtaining an appointment to the Dumfries division of excise, he repaired to that town on a salary of PS70 per annum. All his principal biographers concur in stating that after settling in Dumfries his moral career was downwards. Heron, who had some acquaintance with the matter, says, “His dissipation became still more deeply habitual; he was here more exposed than in the country to be solicited to share the revels of the dissolute and the idle; foolish young men flocked eagerly about him, and from time to time pressed him to drink with them, that they might enjoy his wit. The Caledonia Club, too, and the Dumfries-shire and Galloway Hunt, had occasional meetings in Dumfries after Burns went to reside there: and the poet was of course invited to share their conviviality, and hesitated not to accept the invitation. In the intervals between his different fits of intemperance, he suffered the keenest anguish of remorse, and horribly afflictive foresight. His Jane behaved with a degree of conjugal and maternal tenderness and prudence, which made him feel more bitterly the evil of his misconduct, although they could not reclaim him.”

This is a dark picture — perhaps too dark. The Rev. Mr. Gray, who, as the teacher of his son, was intimately acquainted with Burns, and had frequent opportunities of judging of his general character and deportment, gives a more amiable portrait of the bard. Being an eye-witness, the testimony of this gentleman must be allowed to have some weight. “The truth is,” says he, “Burns was seldom intoxicated. The drunkard soon becomes besotted, and is shunned even by the convivial. Had he been so, he could not have long continued the idol of every party.” This is strong reasoning; and he goes on to mention other circumstances which seem to confirm the truth of his position. In balancing these two statements, a juster estimate of the moral deportment of Burns may be formed.

In the year 1792 party politics ran to a great height in Scotland, and the liberal and independent spirit of Burns did certainly betray him into some indiscretions. A general opinion prevails, that he so far lost the good graces of his superiors by his conduct, as to consider all prospects of future promotion as hopeless. But this appears not to have been the case; and the fact that he acted as supervisor before his death is a strong proof to the contrary. Of his political verses, few have as yet been published. But in these he warmly espoused the cause of the Whigs, which kept up the spleen of the other party, already sufficiently provoked; and this may in some measure account for the bitterness with which his own character was attacked.

Whatever opinion may be formed of the extent of his dissipation in Dumfries, one fact is unquestionable, that his powers remained unimpaired to the last; it was there he produced his finest lyrics, and they are the finest, as well as the purest, that ever delighted mankind. Besides Johnson’s Museum, in which he took an interest to the last, and to which he contributed most extensively, he formed a connection with Mr. George Thomson, of Edinburgh. This gentleman had conceived the laudable design of collecting the national melodies of Scotland, with accompaniments by the most eminent composers, and poetry by the best writers, in addition to those words which were originally attached to them. From the multitude of songs which Burns wrote, from the year 1792 till the commencement of his illness, it is evident that few days could have passed without his producing some stanzas for the work. The following passage from his correspondence, which was also most extensive, proves that his songs were not hurriedly got up, but composed with the utmost care and attention. “Until I am complete master of a tune in my own singing, such as it is,” says he, “I can never compose for it. My way is this: I consider the poetic sentiment correspondent to my idea of the musical expression — then choose my theme — compose one stanza. When that is composed, which is generally the most difficult part of the business, I walk out — sit down now and then — look out for objects in nature round me that are in unison or harmony with the cogitations of my fancy, and workings of my bosom — humming every now and then the air, with the verses I have framed. When I feel my muse beginning to jade, I retire to the solitary fireside of my study, and there commit my effusions to paper; swinging at intervals on the hind legs of my elbow-chair, by way of calling forth my own critical strictures, as my pen goes. Seriously, this, at home, is almost invariably my way.” This is not only interesting for the light which it throws upon his method of composition, but it proves that conviviality had not as yet greater charms for him than the muse.

From his youth Burns had exhibited ominous symptoms of a radical disorder in his constitution. A palpitation of the heart, and a derangement of the digestive organs, were conspicuous. These were, doubtless, increased by his indulgences, which became more frequent as he drew towards the close of his career. In the autumn of 1795 he lost an only daughter, which was a severe blow to him. Soon afterwards he was seized with a rheumatic fever; and “long the die spun doubtful,” says he, in a letter to his faithful friend Mrs. Dunlap, “until, after many weeks of a sick bed, it seems to have turned up life, and I am beginning to crawl across my room.” The cloud behind which his sun was destined to be eclipsed at noon had begun to darken above him. Before he had completely recovered, he had the imprudence to join a festive circle; and, on his return from it, he caught a cold, which brought back his trouble upon him with redoubled severity. Sea-bathing was had recourse to, but with no ultimate success. He lingered until the 21st of July, 1796, when he expired. The interest which the death of Burns excited was intense. All differences were forgotten; his genius only was thought of. On the 26th of the same month he was conveyed to the grave, followed by about ten thousand individuals of all ranks, many of whom had come from distant parts of the country to witness the solemnity. He was interred with military honors by the Dumfries volunteers, to which body he had belonged.

Thus, at the age of thirty-seven, an age when the mental powers of man have scarcely reached their climax, died Robert Burns, one of the greatest poets whom his country has produced. It is unnecessary to enter into any lengthened analysis of his poetry or character. His works are universally known and admired, and criticism has been drawn to the dregs upon the subject; and that, too, by the greatest masters who have appeared since his death, — no mean test of the great merits of his writings. He excels equally in touching the heart by the exquisiteness of his pathos, and exciting the risible faculties by the breadth of his humor. His lyre had many strings, and he had equal command over them all; striking each, and frequently in chords, with the skill and power of a master. That his satire sometimes degenerates into coarse invective, can not be denied; but where personality is not permitted to interfere, his poems of this description may take their place beside any thing of the kind which has ever been produced, without being disgraced by the comparison. It is unnecessary to re-echo the praises of his best pieces, as there is no epithet of admiration which has not been bestowed upon them. Those who had best opportunities of judging, are of opinion that his works, stamped as they are with the impress of sovereign genius, fall short of the powers he possessed. It is therefore to be lamented that he undertook no great work of fiction or invention. Had circumstances permitted, he would probably have done so; but his excise duties, and without doubt his own follies, prevented him. His passions were strong, and his capacity of enjoyment corresponded with them. These continually precipitated him into the variety of pleasure, where alone they could be gratified; and the reaction consequent upon such indulgences (for he possessed the finest discrimination between right and wrong) threw him into low spirits, to which he was also constitutionally liable. His mind, being thus never for any length of time in an equable tone, could scarcely pursue with steady regularity a work of any length. His moral aberrations, as detailed by some of his biographers, have been exaggerated, as already noticed. This has been proved by the testimony of many witnesses, from whose authority there can be no appeal; for they had the best opportunities of judging. In fine, it may be doubted whether he has not, by his writings, exercised a greater power over the minds of men, and the general system of life, than has been exercised by any other modern poet. A complete edition of his works, in four vols. 8vo., with a life, was published by Dr. Currie of Liverpool, for the benefit of his family, to whom it realized a handsome sum. Editions have been since multiplied beyond number; and several excellent biographies of the poet have been published, particularly that by Mr. Lockhart.

PART SECOND.

In the modern arrangements of society, it is no uncommon thing that a man of genius must, like Butler, “ask for bread and receive a stone;” for, in spite of our grand maxim of supply and demand, it is by no means the highest excellence that men are most forward to recognize. The inventor of a spinning-jenny is pretty sure of his reward in his own day; but the writer of a true poem, like the apostle of a true religion, is nearly as sure of the contrary. We do not know whether it is not an aggravation of the injustice, that there is generally a posthumous retribution. Robert Burns, in the course of nature, might yet have been living; but his short life was spent in toil and penury; and he died, in the prime of his manhood, miserable and neglected; and yet already a brave mausoleum shines over his dust, and more than one splendid monument has been reared in other places to his fame: the street where he languished in poverty is called by his name; the highest personages in our literature have been proud to appear as his commentators and admirers, and here is the sixth narrative of his Life, that has been given to the world!

Mr. Lockhart thinks it necessary to apologize for this new attempt on such a subject: but his readers, we believe, will readily acquit him; or, at worst, will censure only the performance of his task, not the choice of it. The character of Burns, indeed, is a theme that cannot easily become either trite or exhausted; and will probably gain rather than lose in its dimensions by the distance to which it is removed by Time. No man, it has been said, is a hero to his valet: and this is probably true; but the fault is at least as likely to be the valet’s as the hero’s: For it is certain, that to the vulgar eye few things are wonderful that are not distant. It is difficult for men to believe that the man, the mere man whom they see, nay, perhaps, painfully feel, toiling at their side through the poor jostlings of existence, can be made of finer clay than themselves. Suppose that some dining acquaintance of Sir Thomas Lucy’s, and neighbour of John a Combe’s, had snatched an hour or two from the preservation of his game, and written us a Life of Shakspeare! What dissertations should we not have had, — not on Hamlet and The Tempest, but on the wool-trade and deer-stealing, and the libel and vagrant laws! and how the Poacher became a Player; and how Sir Thomas and Mr. John had Christian bowels, and did not push him to extremities! In like manner, we believe, with respect to Burns, that till the companions of his pilgrimage, the honourable Excise Commissioners, and the Gentlemen of the Caledonian Hunt, and the Dumfries Aristocracy, and all the Squires and Earls, equally with the Ayr Writers, and the New and Old Light Clergy, whom he had to do with, shall have become invisible in the darkness of the Past, or visible only by light borrowed from his juxtaposition, it will be difficult to measure him by any true standard, or to estimate what he really was and did, in the eighteenth century, for his country and the world. It will be difficult, we say; but still a fare problem for literary historians; and repeated attempts will give us repeated approximations.

His former biographers have done something, no doubt, but by no means a great deal, to assist us. Dr. Currie and Mr. Walker, the principal of these writers, have both, we think, mistaken one essentially important thing: — Their own and the world’s true relation to their author, and the style in which it became such men to think and to speak of such a man. Dr. Currie loved the poet truly; more perhaps than he avowed to his readers, or even to himself; yet he everywhere introduces him with a certain patronizing, apologetic air; as if the polite public might think it strange and half unwarrantable that he, a man of science, a scholar, and gentleman, should do such honour to a rustic. In all this, however, we readily admit that his fault was not want of love, but weakness of faith; and regret that the first and kindest of all our poet’s biographers should not have seen farther, or believed more boldly what he saw. Mr. Walker offends more deeply in the same kind: and both err alike in presenting us with a detached catalogue of his several supposed attributes, virtues, and vices, instead of a delineation of the resulting character as a living unity. This, however, is not painting a portrait; but gauging the length and breadth of the several features, and jotting down their dimensions in arithmetical ciphers. Nay, it is not so much as this: for we are yet to learn by what arts or instruments the mind could be so measured and gauged.

Mr. Lockhart, we are happy to say, has avoided both these errors. He uniformly treats Burns as the high and remarkable man the public voice has now pronounced him to be: and in delineating him, he has avoided the method of separate generalities, and rather sought for characteristic incidents, habits, actions, sayings; in a word, for aspects which exhibit the whole man, as he looked and lived among his fellows. The book accordingly, with all its deficiencies, gives more insight, we think, into the true character of Burns, than any prior biography; though, being written on the very popular and condensed scheme of an article for Constable’s Miscellany, it has less depth than we could have wished and expected from a writer of such power, and contains rather more, and more multifarious, quotations, than belong of right to an original production. Indeed, Mr. Lockhart’s own writing is generally so good, so clear, direct, and nervous, that we seldom wish to see it making place for another man’s. However, the spirit of the work is throughout candid, tolerant, and anxiously conciliating; compliments and praises are liberally distributed, on all hands, to great and small; and, as Mr. Morris Birkbeck observes of the society in the backwoods of America, “the courtesies of polite life are never lost sight of for a moment.” But there are better things than these in the volume; and we can safely testify, not only that it is easily and pleasantly read a first time, but may even be without difficulty read again.

Nevertheless, we are far from thinking that the problem of Burns’s Biography has yet been adequately solved. We do not allude so much to deficiency of facts or documents, — though of these we are still every day receiving some fresh accession, — as to the limited and imperfect application of them to the great end of Biography. Our notions upon this subject may perhaps appear extravagant; but if an individual is really of consequence enough to have his life and character recorded for public remembrance, we have always been of opinion, that the public ought to be made acquainted with all the inward springs and relations of his character. How did the world and man’s life, from his particular position, represent themselves to his mind? How did coexisting circumstances modify him from without? how did he modify these from within? With what endeavors and what efficacy rule over them? with what resistance and what suffering sink under them? In one word, what and how produced was the effect of society on him? what and how produced was his effect on society? He who should answer these questions, in regard to any individual, would, as we believe, furnish a model of perfection in biography. Few individuals, indeed, can deserve such a study; and many lives will be written, and, for the gratification of innocent curiosity, ought to be written, and read, and forgotten, which are not in this sense biographies. But Burns, if we mistake not, is one of these few individuals; and such a study, at least with such a result, he has not yet obtained. Our own contributions to it, we are aware, can be but scanty and feeble; but we offer them with goodwill, and trust they may meet with acceptance from those for whom they are intended.

Burns first came upon the world as a prodigy; and was, in that character, entertained by it, in the usual fashion, with loud, vague, tumultuous wonder, speedily subsiding into censure and neglect; till his early and most mournful death again awakened an enthusiasm for him, which, especially as there was now nothing to be done, and much to be spoken, has prolonged itself even to our own time. It is true, the “nine days” have long since elapsed; and the very continuance of this clamor proves that Burns was no vulgar wonder. Accordingly, even in sober judgments, where, as years passed by, he has come to rest more and more exclusively on his own intrinsic merits, and may now be well nigh shorn of that casual radiance, he appears not only as a true British poet, but as one of the most considerable British men of the eighteenth century. Let it not be objected that he did little: he did much, if we consider where and how. If the work performed was small, we must remember that he had his very materials to discover; for the metal he worked in lay hid under the desert, where no eye but his had guessed its existence; and we may almost say, that with his own hand he had to construct the tools for fashioning it. For he found himself in deepest obscurity, without help, without instruction, without model; or with models only of the meanest sort. An educated man stands, as it were, in the midst of a boundless arsenal and magazine, filled with all the weapons and engines which man’s skill has been able to devise from the earliest time; and he works, accordingly, with a strength borrowed from all past ages. How different is his state who stands on the outside of that storehouse, and feels that its gates must be stormed, or remain for ever shut against him? His means are the commonest and rudest; the mere work done is no measure of his strength. A dwarf behind his steam engine may remove mountains; but no dwarf will hew them down with the pick-axe; and he must be a Titan that hurls them abroad with his arms.

It is in this last shape that Burns presents himself. Born in an age the most prosaic Britain had yet seen, and in a condition the most disadvantageous, where his mind, if it accomplished aught, must accomplish it under the pressure of continual bodily toil, nay, of penury and desponding apprehension of the worst evils, and with no furtherance but such knowledge as dwells in a poor man’s hut, and the rhymes of a Ferguson or Ramsay for his standard of beauty, he sinks not under all these impediments. Through the fogs and darkness of that obscure region, his eagle eye discerns the true relations of the world and human life; he grows into intellectual strength, and trains himself into intellectual expertness. Impelled by the irrepressible movement of his inward spirit, he struggles forward into the general view, and with haughty modesty lays down before us, as the fruit of his labor, a gift, which Time has now pronounced imperishable. Add to all this, that his darksome, drudging childhood and youth was by far the kindliest era of his whole life; and that he died in his thirty-seventh year; and then ask if it be strange that his poems are imperfect, and of small extent, or that his genius attained no mastery in its art? Alas, his Sun shone as through a tropical tornado; and the pale Shadow of Death eclipsed it at noon! Shrouded in such baleful vapors, the genius of Burns was never seen in clear azure splendor, enlightening the world. But some beams from it did, by fits, pierce through; and it tinted those clouds with rainbow and orient colors into a glory and stern grandeur, which men silently gazed on with wonder and tears!

We are anxious not to exaggerate; for it is exposition rather than admiration that our readers require of us here; and yet to avoid some tendency to that side is no easy matter. We love Burns, and we pity him; and love and pity are prone to magnify. Criticism, it is sometimes thought, should be a cold business; we are not so sure of this; but, at all events, our concern with Burns is not exclusively that of critics. True and genial as his poetry must appear, it is not chiefly as a poet, but as a man, that he interests and affects us. He was often advised to write a tragedy: time and means were not lent him for this; but through life he enacted a tragedy, and one of the deepest. We question whether the world has since witnessed so utterly sad a scene; whether Napoleon himself, left to brawl with Sir Hudson Lowe, and perish on his rock, “amid the melancholy main,” presented to the reflecting mind such a “spectacle of pity and fear,” as did this intrinsically nobler, gentler, and perhaps greater soul, wasting itself away in a hopeless struggle with base entanglements, which coiled closer and closer round him, till only death opened him an outlet. Conquerors are a race with whom the world could well dispense; nor can the hard intellect, the unsympathizing loftiness, and high but selfish enthusiasm of such persons, inspire us in general with any affection; at best it may excite amazement; and their fall, like that of a pyramid, will be beheld with a certain sadness and awe. But a true Poet, a man in whose heart resides some effluence of Wisdom, some tone of the “Eternal Melodies,” is the most precious gift that can be bestowed on a generation: we see in him a freer, purer, development of whatever is noblest in ourselves; his life is a rich lesson to us, and we mourn his death, as that of a benefactor who loved and taught us.

Such a gift had Nature in her bounty bestowed on us in Robert Burns; but with queen-like indifference she cast it from her hand, like a thing of no moment; and it was defaced and torn asunder, as an idle bauble, before we recognized it. To the ill-starred Burns was given the power of making man’s life more venerable, but that of wisely guiding his own was not given. Destiny — for so in our ignorance we must speak, — his faults, the faults of others, proved too hard for him; and that spirit, which might have soared, could it but have walked, soon sank to the dust, its glorious faculties trodden under foot in the blossom, and died, we may almost say, without ever having lived. And so kind and warm a soul; so full of inborn riches, of love to all living and lifeless things! How his heart flows out in sympathy over universal nature; and in her bleakest provinces discerns a beauty and a meaning! The “Daisy” falls not unheeded under his ploughshare; nor the ruined nest of that “wee, cowering, timorous beastie,” cast forth, after all its provident pains, to “thole the sleety dribble, and cranreuch cauld.” The “hoar visage” of Winter delights him: he dwells with a sad and oft-returning fondness in these scenes of solemn desolation; but the voice of the tempest becomes an anthem to his ears; he loves to walk in the sounding woods, for “it raises his thoughts to Him that walketh on the wings of the wind.” A true Poet-soul, for it needs but to be struck, and the sound it yields will be music! But observe him chiefly as he mingles with his brother men. What warm, all-comprehending, fellow-feeling, what trustful, boundless love, what generous exaggeration of the object loved! His rustic friend, his nut-brown maiden, are no longer mean and homely, but a hero and a queen, whom he prizes as the paragons of Earth. The rough scenes of Scottish life, not seen by him in any Arcadian illusion, but in the rude contradiction, in the smoke and soil of a too harsh reality, are still lovely to him: Poverty is indeed his companion, but Love also, and Courage; the simple feelings, the worth, the nobleness, that dwell under the straw roof, are dear and venerable to his heart; and thus over the lowest provinces of man’s existence he pours the glory of his own soul; and they rise, in shadow and sunshine, softened and brightened into a beauty which other eyes discern not in the highest. He has a just self-consciousness, which too often degenerates into pride; yet it is a noble pride, for defence, not for offence, no cold, suspicious feeling, but a frank and social one. The peasant Poet bears himself, we might say, like a King in exile; he is cast among the low, and feels himself equal to the highest; yet he claims no rank, that none may be disputed to him. The forward he can repel, the supercilious he can subdue; pretensions of wealth or ancestry are of no avail with him; there is a fire in that dark eye, under which the “insolence of condescension” cannot thrive. In his abasement, in his extreme need, he forgets not for a moment the majesty of Poetry and Manhood. And yet, far as he feels himself above common men, he wanders not apart from them, but mixes warmly in their interests; nay, throws himself into their arms; and, as it were, entreats them to love him. It is moving to see how, in his darkest despondency, this proud being still seeks relief from friendship; unbosoms himself, often to the unworthy; and, amid tears, strains to his glowing heart a heart that knows only the name of friendship. And yet he was “quick to learn;” a man of keen vision, before whom common disguises afforded no concealment. His understanding saw through the hollowness even of accomplished deceivers; but there was a generous credulity in his Heart. And so did our Peasant show himself among us; “a soul like an AEolian harp, in whose strings the vulgar wind, as it passed through them, changed itself into articulate melody.” And this was he for whom the world found no fitter business than quarrelling with smugglers and vintners, computing excise dues upon tallow, and gauging ale-barrels! In such toils was that mighty Spirit sorrowfully wasted: and a hundred years may pass on, before another such is given us to waste.

All that remains of Burns, the Writings he has left, seem to us, as we hinted above, no more than a poor mutilated fraction of what was in him; brief, broken glimpses of a genius that could never show itself complete; that wanted all things for completeness; culture, leisure, true effort, nay, even length of life. His poems are, with scarcely any exception, mere occasional effusions, poured forth with little premeditation, expressing, by such means as offered, the passion, opinion, or humor of the hour. Never in one instance was it permitted him to grapple with any subject with the full collection of his strength, to fuse and mould it in the concentrated fire of his genius. To try by the strict rules of Art such imperfect fragments, would be at once unprofitable and unfair. Nevertheless, there is something in these poems, marred and defective as they are, which forbids the most fastidious student of poetry to pass them by. Some sort of enduring quality they must have; for, after fifty years of the wildest vicissitudes in poetic taste, they still continue to be read; nay, are read more and more eagerly, more and more extensively; and this not only by literary virtuosos, and that class upon whom transitory causes operate most strongly, but by all classes, down to the most hard, unlettered, and truly natural class, who read little, and especially no poetry, except because they find pleasure in it. The grounds of so singular and wide a popularity, which extends, in a literal sense, from the palace to the hut, and over all regions where the English tongue is spoken, are well worth inquiring into. After every just deduction, it seems to imply some rare excellence in these works. What is that excellence?

To answer this question will not lead us far. The excellence of Burns is, indeed, among the rarest, whether in poetry or prose; but, at the same time, it is plain and easily recognized: his Sincerity, his indisputable air of Truth. Here are no fabulous woes or joys; no hollow fantastic sentimentalities; no wiredrawn refinings, either in thought or feeling: the passion that is traced before us has glowed in a living heart; the opinion he utters has risen in his own understanding, and been a light to his own steps. He does not write from hearsay, but from sight and experience; it is the scenes he has lived and labored amidst, that he describes: those scenes, rude and humble as they are, have kindled beautiful emotions in his soul, noble thoughts, and definite resolves; and he speaks forth what is in him, not from any outward call of vanity or interest, but because his heart is too full to be silent. He speaks it, too, with such melody and modulation as he can; “in homely rustic jingle;” but it is his own, and genuine. This is the grand secret for finding readers and retaining them: let him who would move and convince others, be first moved and convinced himself. Horace’s rule, Si vis me flere, is applicable in a wider sense than the literal one. To every poet, to every writer, we might say: Be true, if you would be believed. Let a man but speak forth with genuine earnestness the thought, the emotion, the actual condition, of his own heart; and other men, so strangely are we all knit together by the tie of sympathy, must and will give heed to him. In culture, in extent of view, we may stand above the speaker, or below him; but in either case, his words, if they are earnest and sincere, will find some response within us; for in spite of all casual varieties in outward rank, or inward, as face answers to face, so does the heart of man to man.

This may appear a very simple principle, and one which Burns had little merit in discovering. True, the discovery is easy enough: but the practical appliance is not easy; is indeed the fundamental difficulty which all poets have to strive with, and which scarcely one in the hundred ever fairly surmounts. A head too dull to discriminate the true from the false; a heart too dull to love the one at all risks, and to hate the other in spite of all temptations, are alike fatal to a writer. With either, or, as more commonly happens, with both, of these deficiencies, combine a love of distinction, a wish to be original, which is seldom wanting, and we have Affectation, the bane of literature, as Cant, its elder brother, is of morals. How often does the one and the other front us, in poetry, as in life! Great poets themselves are not always free of this vice; nay, it is precisely on a certain sort and degree of greatness that it is most commonly ingrafted. A strong effort after excellence will sometimes solace itself with a mere shadow of success, and he who has much to unfold, will sometimes unfold it imperfectly. Byron, for instance, was no common man: yet if we examine his poetry with this view, we shall find it far enough from faultless. Generally speaking, we should say that it is not true. He refreshes us, not with the divine fountain, but too often with vulgar strong waters, stimulating indeed to the taste, but soon ending in dislike or even nausea. Are his Harolds and Giaours, we would ask, real men, we mean, poetically consistent and conceivable men? Do not these characters, does not the character of their author, which more or less shines through them all, rather appear a thing put on for the occasion; no natural or possible mode of being, but something intended to look much grander than nature? Surely, all these stormful agonies, this volcanic heroism, superhuman contempt, and moody desperation, with so much scowling, and teeth-gnashing, and other sulphurous humors, is more like the brawling of a player in some paltry tragedy, which is to last three hours, than the bearing of a man in the business of life, which is to last threescore and ten years. To our minds, there is a taint of this sort, something which we should call theatrical, false and affected, in every one of these otherwise powerful pieces. Perhaps Don Juan, especially the latter parts of it, is the only thing approaching to a sincere work, he ever wrote; the only work where he showed himself, in any measure, as he was; and seemed so intent on his subject, as, for moments, to forget himself. Yet Byron hated this vice; we believe, heartily detested it: nay, he had declared formal war against it in words. So difficult is it even for the strongest to make this primary attainment, which might seem the simplest of all: to read its own consciousness without mistakes, without errors involuntary or wilful! We recollect no poet of Burns’s susceptibility who comes before us from the first, and abides with us to the last, with such a total want of affectation. He is an honest man, and an honest writer. In his successes and his failures, in his greatness and his littleness, he is ever clear, simple, true, and glitters with no lustre but his own. We reckon this to be a great virtue; to be, in fact, the root of most other virtues, literary as well as moral.

It is necessary, however, to mention, that it is to the poetry of Burns that we now allude; to those writings which he had time to meditate, and where no special reason existed to warp his critical feeling, or obstruct his endeavor to fulfil it. Certain of his Letters, and other fractions of prose composition, by no means deserve this praise. Here, doubtless, there is not the same natural truth of style; but on the contrary, something not only stiff, but strained and twisted; a certain high-flown, inflated tone; the stilting emphasis of which contrasts ill with the firmness and rugged simplicity of even his poorest verses. Thus no man, it would appear, is altogether unaffected. Does not Shakspeare himself sometimes premeditate the sheerest bombast! But even with regard to these Letters of Burns, it is but fair to state that he had two excuses. The first was his comparative deficiency in language. Burns, though for most part he writes with singular force, and even gracefulness, is not master of English prose, as he is of Scottish verse; not master of it, we mean, in proportion to the depth and vehemence of his matter. These Letters strike us as the effort of a man to express something which he has no organ fit for expressing. But a second and weightier excuse is to be found in the peculiarity of Burns’s social rank. His correspondents are often men whose relation to him he has never accurately ascertained; whom therefore he is either forearming himself against, or else unconsciously flattering, by adopting the style he thinks will please them. At all events, we should remember that these faults, even in his Letters, are not the rule, but the exception. Whenever he writes, as one would ever wish to do, to trusted friends and on real interests, his style becomes simple, vigorous, expressive, sometimes even beautiful. His Letters to Mrs. Dunlop are uniformly excellent.

But we return to his poetry. In addition to its sincerity, it has another peculiar merit, which indeed is but a mode, or perhaps a means, of the foregoing. It displays itself in his choice of subjects, or rather in his indifference as to subjects, and the power he has of making all subjects interesting. The ordinary poet, like the ordinary man, is for ever seeking, in external circumstances, the help which can be found only in himself. In what is familiar and near at hand, he discerns no form or comeliness; home is not poetical but prosaic; it is in some past, distant, conventional world, that poetry resides for him; were he there and not here, were he thus and not so, it would be well with him. Hence our innumerable host of rose-colored novels and iron-mailed epics, with their locality not on the Earth, but somewhere nearer to the Moon. Hence our Virgins of the Sun, and our Knights of the Cross, malicious Saracens in turbans, and copper-colored Chiefs in wampum, and so many other truculent figures from the heroic times or the heroic climates, who on all hands swarm in our poetry. Peace be with them! But yet, as a great moralist proposed preaching to the men of this century, so would we fain preach to the poets, “a sermon on the duty of staying at home.” Let them be sure that heroic ages and heroic climates can do little for them. That form of life has attraction for us, less because it is better or nobler than our own, than simply because it is different; and even this attraction must be of the most transient sort. For will not our own age, one day, be an ancient one; and have as quaint a costume as the rest; not contrasted with the rest, therefore, but ranked along with them, in respect of quaintness? Does Homer interest us now, because he wrote of what passed out of his native Greece, and two centuries before he was born; or because he wrote of what passed in God’s world, and in the heart of man, which is the same after thirty centuries? Let our poets look to this; is their feeling really finer, truer, and their vision deeper than that of other men, they have nothing to fear, even from the humblest object; is it not so? — they have nothing to hope, but an ephemeral favor, even from the highest.

The poet, we cannot but think, can never have far to seek for a subject; the elements of his art are in him, and around him on every hand; for him the Ideal world is not remote from the Actual, but under it and within it; nay, he is a poet, precisely because he can discern it there. Wherever there is a sky above him, and a world around him, the poet is in his place; for here too is man’s existence, with its infinite longings and small acquirings; its ever-thwarted, ever-renewed endeavors; its unspeakable aspirations, its fears and hopes that wander through Eternity: and all the mystery of brightness and of gloom that it was ever made of, in any age or climate, since man first began to live. Is there not the fifth act of a Tragedy, in every death-bed, though it were a peasant’s and a bed of heath? And are wooings and weddings obsolete, that there can be Comedy no longer? Or are men suddenly grown wise, that Laughter must no longer shake his sides, but be cheated of his Farce? Man’s life and nature is, as it was, and as it will ever be. But the poet must have an eye to read these things, and a heart to understand them; or they come and pass away before him in vain. He is a vates, a seer; a gift of vision has been given him. Has life no meanings for him, which another can not equally decipher? then he is no poet, and Delphi itself will not make him one.

In this respect, Burns, though not perhaps absolutely a great poet, better manifests his capability, better proves the truth of his genius, than if he had, by his own strength, kept the whole Minerva Press going, to the end of his literary course. He shows himself at least a poet of Nature’s own making; and Nature, after all, is still the grand agent in making poets. We often hear of this and the other external condition being requisite for the existence of a poet. Sometimes it is a certain sort of training; he must have studied certain things, studied for instance “the elder dramatists,” and so learned a poetic language; as if poetry lay in the tongue, not in the heart. At other times we are told, he must be bred in a certain rank, and must be on a confidential footing with the higher classes; because, above all other things, he must see the world. As to seeing the world, we apprehend this will cause him little difficulty, if he have but an eye to see it with. Without eyes, indeed, the task might be hard. But happily every poet is born in the world, and sees it, with or against his will, every day and every hour he lives. The mysterious workmanship of man’s heart, the true light and the inscrutable darkness of man’s destiny, reveal themselves not only in capital cities and crowded saloons, but in every hut and hamlet where men have their abode. Nay, do not the elements of all human virtues, and all human vices — the passions at once of a Borgia and of a Luther, lie written, in stronger or fainter lines, in the consciousness of every individual bosom, that has practised honest self-examination? Truly, this same world may be seen in Mossgiel and Tarbolton, if we look well, as clearly as it ever came to light in Crockford’s, or the Tuileries itself.

But sometimes still harder requisitions are laid on the poor aspirant to poetry; for it is hinted that he should have been born two centuries ago; inasmuch as poetry, soon after that date, vanished from the earth, and became no longer attainable by men! Such cobweb speculations have, now and then, overhung the field of literature; but they obstruct not the growth of any plant there: the Shakspeare or the Burns, unconsciously, and merely as he walks onward, silently brushes them away. Is not every genius an impossibility till he appear? Why do we call him new and original, if we saw where his marble was lying, and what fabric he could rear from it? It is not the material but the workman that is wanting. It is not the dark place that hinders, but the dim eye. A Scottish peasant’s life was the meanest and rudest of all lives, till Burns became a poet in it, and a poet of it; found it a man’s life, and therefore significant to men. A thousand battle-fields remain unsung; but the Wounded Hare has not perished without its memorial; a balm of mercy yet breathes on us from its dumb agonies, because a poet was there. Our Halloween had passed and repassed, in rude awe and laughter, since the era of the Druids; but no Theocritus, till Burns, discerned in it the materials of a Scottish Idyl: neither was the Holy Fair any Council of Trent, or Roman Jubilee; but nevertheless, Superstition and Hypocrisy, and Fun having been propitious to him, in this man’s hand it became a poem, instinct with satire, and genuine comic life. Let but the true poet be given us, we repeat it, place him where and how you will, and true poetry will not be wanting.

Independently of the essential gift of poetic feeling, as we have now attempted to describe it, a certain rugged sterling worth pervades whatever Burns has written: a virtue, as of green fields and mountain breezes, dwells in his poetry; it is redolent of natural life, and hardy, natural men. There is a decisive strength in him; and yet a sweet native gracefulness: he is tender, and he is vehement, yet without constraint or too visible effort; he melts the heart, or inflames it, with a power which seems habitual and familiar to him. We see in him the gentleness, the trembling pity of a woman, with the deep earnestness, the force and passionate ardor of a hero. Tears lie in him, and consuming fire; as lightning lurks in the drops of the summer cloud. He has a resonance in his bosom for every note of human feeling: the high and the low, the sad, the ludicrous, the joyful, are welcome in their turns to his “lightly-moved and all-conceiving spirit.” And observe with what a prompt and eager force he grasps his subject, be it what it may! How he fixes, as it were, the full image of the matter in his eye; full and clear in every lineament; and catches the real type and essence of it, amid a thousand accidents and superficial circumstances, no one of which misleads him! Is it of reason — some truth to be discovered? No sophistry, no vain surface-logic detains him; quick, resolute, unerring, he pierces through into the marrow of the question, and speaks his verdict with an emphasis that can not be forgotten. Is it of description — some visual object to be represented? No poet of any age or nation is more graphic than Burns: the characteristic features disclose themselves to him at a glance; three lines from his hand, and we have a likeness. And, in that rough dialect, in that rude, often awkward, metre, so clear, and definite a likeness! It seems a draughtsman working with a burnt stick; and yet the burin of a Retzsch is not more expressive or exact.

This clearness of sight we may call the foundation of all talent; for in fact, unless we see our object, how shall we know how to place or prize it; in our understanding, our imagination, our affections? Yet it is not in itself perhaps a very high excellence; but capable of being united indifferently with the strongest, or with ordinary powers. Homer surpasses all men in this quality: but strangely enough, at no great distance below him are Richardson and Defoe. It belongs, in truth, to what is called a lively mind: and gives no sure indication of the higher endowments that may exist along with it. In all the three cases we have mentioned, it is combined with great garrulity; their descriptions are detailed, ample, and lovingly exact; Homer’s fire bursts through, from time to time, as if by accident; but Defoe and Richardson have no fire. Burns, again, is not more distinguished by the clearness than by the impetuous force of his conceptions. Of the strength, the piercing emphasis with which he thought, his emphasis of expression may give an humble but the readiest proof. Who ever uttered sharper sayings than his; words more memorable, now by their burning vehemence, now by their cool vigor and laconic pith? A single phrase depicts a whole subject, a whole scene. Our Scottish forefathers in the battle-field struggled forward, he says, “red-wat shod;” giving, in this one word, a full vision of horror and carnage, perhaps too frightfully accurate for Art!

In fact, one of the leading features in the mind of Burns is this vigor of his strictly intellectual perceptions. A resolute force is ever visible in his judgments, as in his feelings and volitions. Professor Stewart says of him, with some surprise: “All the faculties of Burns’s mind were, as far as I could judge, equally vigorous; and his predilection for poetry was rather the result of his own enthusiastic and impassioned temper, than of a genius exclusively adapted to that species of composition. From his conversation I should have pronounced him to be fitted to excel in whatever walk of ambition he had chosen to exert his abilities.” But this, if we mistake not, is at all times the very essence of a truly poetical endowment. Poetry, except in such cases as that of Keats, where the whole consists in extreme sensibility, and a certain vague pervading tunefulness of nature, is no separate faculty, no organ which can be superadded to the rest or disjoined from them; but rather the result of their general harmony and completion. The feelings, the gifts, that exist in the Poet, are those that exist, with more or less development, in every human soul: the imagination, which shudders at the Hell of Dante, is the same faculty, weaker in degree, which called that picture into being. How does the poet speak to all men, with power, but by being still more a man than they? Shakspeare, it has been well observed, in the planning and completing of his tragedies, has shown an Understanding, were it nothing more, which might have governed states, or indited a Novum Organum. What Burns’s force of understanding may have been, we have less means of judgment: for it dwelt among the humblest objects, never saw philosophy, and never rose, except for short intervals, into the region of great ideas. Nevertheless, sufficient indication remains for us in his works: we discern the brawny movement of a gigantic though untutored strength, and can understand how, in conversation, his quick, sure insight into men and things may, as much as aught else about him, have amazed the best thinkers of his time and country.

But, unless we mistake, the intellectual gift of Burns is fine as well as strong. The more delicate relation of things could not well have escaped his eye, for they were intimately present to his heart. The logic of the senate and the forum is indispensable, but not all-sufficient; nay, perhaps the highest Truth is that which will the most certainly elude it. For this logic works by words, and “the highest,” it has been said, “cannot be expressed in words.” We are not without tokens of an openness for this higher truth also, of a keen though uncultivated sense for it, having existed in Burns. Mr. Stewart, it will be remembered, “wonders,” in the passage above quoted, that Burns had formed some distinct conception of the “doctrine of association.” We rather think that far subtiler things than the doctrine of association had from of old been familiar to him. Here for instance:

“We know nothing,” thus writes he, “or next to nothing, of the structure of our souls, so we cannot account for those seeming caprices in them, that one should be particularly pleased with this thing, or struck with that, which, on minds of a different cast, makes no extraordinary impression. I have some favorite flowers in spring, among which are the mountain-daisy, the hare-bell, the fox-glove, the wild-brier rose, the budding birch, and the hoary hawthorn, that I view and hang over with particular delight. I never hear the loud solitary whistle of the curlew in a summer noon, or the wild mixing cadence of a troop of gray plover in an autumnal morning, without feeling an elevation of soul like the enthusiasm of devotion or poetry. Tell me, my dear friend, to what can this be owing? Are we a piece of machinery, which, like the AEolian harp, passive, takes the impression of the passing accident; or do these workings argue something within us above the trodden clod? I own myself partial to such proofs of those awful and important realities: a God that made all things, man’s immaterial and immortal nature, and a world of weal or wo beyond death and the grave.”

Force and fineness of understanding are often spoken of as something different from general force and fineness of nature, as something partly independent of them. The necessities of language probably require this; but in truth these qualities are not distinct and independent: except in special cases, and from special causes, they ever go together. A man of strong understanding is generally a man of strong character; neither is delicacy in the one kind often divided from delicacy in the other. No one, at all events, is ignorant that in the poetry of Burns, keenness of insight keeps pace with keenness of feeling; that his light is not more pervading than his warmth. He is a man of the most impassioned temper; with passions not strong only, but noble, and of the sort in which great virtues and great poems take their rise. It is reverence, it is Love towards all Nature that inspires him, that opens his eyes to its beauty, and makes heart and voice eloquent in its praise. There is a true old saying, that “love furthers knowledge:” but, above all, it is the living essence of that knowledge which makes poets; the first principle of its existence, increase, activity. Of Burns’s fervid affection, his generous, all-embracing Love, we have spoken already, as of the grand distinction of his nature, seen equally in word and deed, in his Life and in his Writings. It were easy to multiply examples. Not man only, but all that environs man in the material and moral universe, is lovely in his sight: “the hoary hawthorn,” the “troop of gray plover,” the “solitary curlew,” are all dear to him — all live in this Earth along with him, and to all he is knit as in mysterious brotherhood. How touching is it, for instance, that, amidst the gloom of personal misery, brooding over the wintry desolation without him and within him, he thinks of the “ourie cattle” and “silly sheep,” and their sufferings in the pitiless storm!

“I thought me on the ourie cattle,

Or silly sheep, wha bide this brattle

O’ wintry war;

Or thro’ the drift, deep-lairing, sprattle,

Beneath a scaur.

Ilk happing bird, wee helpless thing,

That in the merry month o’ spring

Delighted me to hear thee sing,

What comes o’ thee?

Where wilt thou cow’r thy chittering wing,

And close thy ee?”

The tenant of the mean hut, with its “ragged roof and chinky wall,” has a heart to pity even these! This is worth several homilies on Mercy; for it is the voice of Mercy herself. Burns, indeed, lives in sympathy; his soul rushes forth into all realms of being; nothing that has existence can be indifferent to him. The very devil he cannot hate with right orthodoxy!

“But fare you weel, auld Nickie-ben;

O wad ye tak a thought and men’!

Ye aiblins might, — I dinna ken, —

Still hae a stake;

I’m wae to think upo’ yon den,

Even for your sake!”

He did not know, probably, that Sterne had been beforehand with him. “‘He is the father of curses and lies,’ said Dr. Slop; ‘and is cursed and damned already.’—‘I am sorry for it,’ quoth my uncle Toby!”— “A poet without Love, were a physical and metaphysical impossibility.”

Why should we speak of Scots, wha hae wi’ Wallace bled; since all know it, from the king to the meanest of his subjects? This dithyrambic was composed on horseback; in riding in the middle of tempests, over the wildest Galloway moor, in company with a Mr. Syme, who, observing the poet’s looks, forebore to speak, — judiciously enough, — for a man composing Bruce’s Address might be unsafe to trifle with. Doubtless this stern hymn was singing itself, as he formed it, through the soul of Burns; but to the external ear, it should be sung with the throat of the whirlwind. So long as there is warm blood in the heart of a Scotchman or man, it will move in fierce thrills under this war-ode, the best, we believe, that was ever written by any pen.

Another wild, stormful song, that dwells in our ear and mind with a strange tenacity, is Macpherson’s Farewell. Perhaps there is something in the tradition itself that co-operates. For was not this grim Celt, this shaggy Northland Cacus, that “lived a life of sturt and strife, and died by treacherie,” was not he too one of the Nimrods and Napoleons of the earth, in the arena of his own remote misty glens, for want of a clearer and wider one? Nay, was there not a touch of grace given him? A fibre of love and softness, of poetry itself, must have lived in his savage heart; for he composed that air the night before his execution; on the wings of that poor melody, his better soul would soar away above oblivion, pain, and all the ignominy and despair, which, like an avalanche, was hurling him to the abyss! Here, also, as at Thebes, and in Pelops’ line, was material Fate matched against man’s Free-will; matched in bitterest though obscure duel; and the ethereal soul sunk not, even in its blindness, without a cry which has survived it. But who, except Burns, could have given words to such a soul — words that we never listen to without a strange half-barbarous, half-poetic fellow-feeling?

Sae rantingly, sae wantonly,

Sae dauntingly gaed he;

He play’d a spring, and danced it round,

Below the gallows tree.

Under a lighter and thinner disguise, the same principle of Love, which we have recognized as the great characteristic of Burns, and of all true poets, occasionally manifests itself in the shape of Humor. Everywhere, indeed, in his sunny moods, a full buoyant flood of mirth rolls through the mind of Burns; he rises to the high, and stoops to the low, and is brother and playmate to all Nature. We speak not of his bold and often irresistible faculty of caricature; for this is Drollery rather than Humor: but a much tenderer sportfulness dwells in him; and comes forth, here and there, in evanescent and beautiful touches; as in his Address to the Mouse, or the Farmer’s Mare, or in his Elegy on Poor Mailie, which last may be reckoned his happiest effort of this kind. In these pieces, there are traits of a Humor as fine as that of Sterne; yet altogether different, original, peculiar, — the Humor of Burns.

Of the tenderness, the playful pathos, and many other kindred qualities of Burns’s poetry, much more might be said; but now, with these poor outlines of a sketch, we must prepare to quit this part of our subject. To speak of his individual writings, adequately, and with any detail, would lead us far beyond our limits. As already hinted, we can look on but few of these pieces as, in strict critical language, deserving the name of Poems; they are rhymed eloquence, rhymed pathos, rhymed sense; yet seldom essentially melodious, aerial, poetical. Tam O’Shanter itself, which enjoys so high a favor, does not appear to us, at all decisively, to come under this last category. It is not so much a poem, as a piece of sparkling rhetoric; the heart and body of the story still lies hard and dead. He has not gone back, much less carried us back, into that dark, earnest wondering age, when the tradition was believed, and when it took its rise; he does not attempt, by any new modelling of his supernatural ware, to strike anew that deep mysterious chord of human nature, which once responded to such things; and which lives in us too, and will forever live, though silent, or vibrating with far other notes, and to far different issues. Our German readers will understand us, when we say, that he is not the Tieck but the Musaus of this tale. Externally it is all green and living; yet look closer, it is no firm growth, but only ivy on a rock. The piece does not properly cohere; the strange chasm which yawns in our incredulous imaginations between the Ayr public-house and the gate of Tophet, is nowhere bridged over, nay, the idea of such a bridge is laughed at; and thus the Tragedy of the adventure becomes a mere drunken phantasmagoria, painted on ale-vapors, and the farce alone has any reality. We do not say that Burns should have made much more of this tradition; we rather think that, for strictly poetical purposes, not much was to be made of it. Neither are we blind to the deep, varied, genial power displayed in what he has actually accomplished: but we find far more “Shakspearian” qualities, as these of Tam O’Shanter have been fondly named, in many of his other pieces; nay, we incline to believe, that this latter might have been written, all but quite as well, by a man who, in place of genius, had only possessed talent.

Perhaps we may venture to say, that the most strictly poetical of all his “poems” is one, which does not appear in Currie’s Edition; but has been often printed before and since, under the humble title of The Jolly Beggars. The subject truly is among the lowest in nature; but it only the more shows our poet’s gift in raising it into the domain of Art. To our minds, this piece seems thoroughly compacted; melted together, refined; and poured forth in one flood of true liquid harmony. It is light, airy, and soft of movement; yet sharp and precise in its details; every face is a portrait: that raucle carlin, that wee Apollo, that Son of Mars, are Scottish, yet ideal; the scene is at once a dream, and the very Rag-castle of “Poosie-Nansie.” Farther, it seems in a considerable degree complete, a real self-supporting Whole, which is the highest merit in a poem. The blanket of the night is drawn asunder for a moment; in full, ruddy, and flaming light, these rough tatterdemalions are seen in their boisterous revel; for the strong pulse of Life vindicates its right to gladness even here; and when the curtain closes, we prolong the action without effort; the next day, as the last, our Caird and our Balladmonger are singing and soldiering; their “brats and callets” are hawking, begging, cheating; and some other night, in new combinations, they will ring from Fate another hour of wassail and good cheer. It would be strange, doubtless, to call this the best of Burns’s writings; we mean to say only, that it seems to us the most perfect of its kind, as a piece of poetical composition, strictly so called. In the Beggar’s Opera, in the Beggar’s Bush, as other critics have already remarked, there is nothing which, in real poetic vigor, equals this Cantata; nothing, as we think, which comes within many degrees of it.

But by far the most finished, complete, and truly inspired pieces of Burns are, without dispute, to be found among his Songs. It is here that, although through a small aperture, his light shines with the least obstruction; in its highest beauty, and pure sunny clearness. The reason may be, that Song is a brief and simple species of composition: and requires nothing so much for its perfection as genuine poetic feeling, genuine music of heart. The Song has its rules equally with the Tragedy; rules which in most cases are poorly fulfilled, in many cases are not so much as felt. We might write a long essay on the Songs of Burns; which we reckon by far the best that Britain has yet produced; for, indeed, since the era of Queen Elizabeth, we know not that, by any other hand, aught truly worth attention has been accomplished in this department. True, we have songs enough “by persons of quality;” we have tawdry, hollow, wine-bred, madrigals; many a rhymed “speech” in the flowing and watery vein of Ossorius the Portugal Bishop, rich in sonorous words, and, for moral, dashed perhaps with some tint of a sentimental sensuality; all which many persons cease not from endeavoring to sing: though for most part, we fear, the music is but from the throat outward, or at best from some region far enough short of the Soul; not in which, but in a certain inane Limbo of the Fancy, or even in some vaporous debatable land on the outside of the Nervous System, most of such madrigals and rhymed speeches seem to have originated. With the Songs of Burns we must not name these things. Independently of the clear, manly, heartfelt sentiment that ever pervades his poetry, his Songs are honest in another point of view: in form as well as in spirit. They do not affect to be set to music; but they actually and in themselves are music; they have received their life, and fashioned themselves together, in the medium of Harmony, as Venus rose from the bosom of the sea. The story, the feeling, is not detailed, but suggested; not said, or spouted, in rhetorical completeness and coherence; but sung, in fitful gushes, in glowing hints, in fantastic breaks, in warblings not of the voice only, but of the whole mind. We consider this to be the essence of a song; and that no songs since the little careless catches, and, as it were, drops of song, which Shakspeare has here and there sprinkled over his plays, fulfil this condition in nearly the same degree as most of Burns’s do. Such grace and truth of external movement, too, presupposes in general a corresponding force and truth of sentiment, and inward meaning. The Songs of Burns are not more perfect in the former quality than in the latter. With what tenderness he sings, yet with what vehemence and entireness! There is a piercing wail in his sorrow, the purest rapture in his joy: he burns with the sternest ire, or laughs with the loudest or slyest mirth; and yet he is sweet and soft, “sweet as the smile when fond lovers meet, and soft as their parting tear!” If we farther take into account the immense variety of his subjects; how, from the loud flowing revel in Willie brew’d a peck o’ Maut, to the still, rapt enthusiasm of sadness for Mary in Heaven; from the glad kind greeting of Auld Langsyne, or the comic archness of Duncan Gray, to the fire-eyed fury of Scots, wha hae wi’ Wallace bled, he has found a tone and words for every mood of man’s heart, — it will seem a small praise if we rank him as the first of all our song-writers; for we know not where to find one worthy of being second to him.

It is on his Songs, as we believe, that Burns’s chief influence as an author will ultimately be found to depend: nor, if our Fletcher’s aphorism is true, shall we account this a small influence. “Let me make the songs of a people,” said he, “and you shall make its laws.” Surely, if ever any Poet might have equalled himself with Legislators, on this ground, it was Burns. His songs are already part of the mother tongue, not of Scotland only but of Britain, and of the millions that in all the ends of the earth speak a British language. In hut and hall, as the heart unfolds itself in the joy and wo of existence, the name, the voice of that joy and that wo, is the name and voice which Burns has given them. Strictly speaking, perhaps, no British man has so deeply affected the thoughts and feelings of so many men as this solitary and altogether private individual, with means apparently the humblest.

In another point of view, moreover, we incline to think that Burns’s influence may have been considerable: we mean, as exerted specially on the Literature of his country, at least on the Literature of Scotland. Among the great changes which British, particularly Scottish literature, has undergone since that period, one of the greatest will be found to consist in its remarkable increase of nationality. Even the English writers, most popular in Burns’s time, were little distinguished for their literary patriotism, in this its best sense. A certain attenuated cosmopolitanism had, in good measure, taken place of the old insular home-feeling; literature was, as it were, without any local environment — was not nourished by the affections which spring from a native soil. Our Grays and Glovers seemed to write almost as if in vacuo; the thing written bears no mark of place; it is not written so much for Englishmen, as for men; or rather, which is the inevitable result of this, for certain Generalizations which philosophy termed men. Goldsmith is an exception; not so Johnson; the scene of his Rambler is little more English than that of his Rasselas. But if such was, in some degree, the case with England, it was, in the highest degree, the case with Scotland. In fact, our Scottish literature had, at that period, a very singular aspect; unexampled, so far as we know, except perhaps at Geneva, where the same state of matters appears still to continue. For a long period after Scotland became British, we had no literature: at the date when Addison and Steele were writing their Spectators, our good Thomas Boston was writing, with the noblest intent, but alike in defiance of grammar and philosophy, his Fourfold State of Man. Then came the schisms in our National Church, and the fiercer schisms in our Body Politic: Theologic ink, and Jacobite blood, with gaul enough in both cases, seemed to have blotted out the intellect of the country; however, it was only obscured, not obliterated. Lord Kames made nearly the first attempt, and a tolerably clumsy one, at writing English; and, ere long, Hume, Robertson, Smith, and a whole host of followers, attracted hither the eyes of all Europe. And yet in this brilliant resuscitation of our “fervid genius,” there was nothing truly Scottish, nothing indigenous; except, perhaps, the natural impetuosity of intellect, which we sometimes claim, and are sometimes upbraided with, as a characteristic of our nation. It is curious to remark that Scotland, so full of writers, had no Scottish culture, nor indeed any English; our culture was almost exclusively French. It was by studying Racine and Voltaire, Batteux and Boileau, that Kames had trained himself to be a critic and philosopher: it was the light of Montesquieu and Mably that guided Robertson in his political speculations: Quesnay’s lamp that kindled the lamp of Adam Smith. Hume was too rich a man to borrow; and perhaps he reached on the French more than he was acted on by them: but neither had he aught to do with Scotland; Edinburgh, equally with La Fleche, was but the lodging and laboratory, in which he not so much morally lived, as metaphysically investigated. Never, perhaps, was there a class of writers, so clear and well-ordered, yet so totally destitute, to all appearance, of any patriotic affection, nay, of any human affection whatever. The French wits of the period were as unpatriotic; but their general deficiency in moral principle, not to say their avowed sensuality and unbelief in all virtue, strictly so called, render this accountable enough. We hope there is a patriotism founded on something better than prejudice; that our country may be dear to us, without injury to our philosophy; that in loving and justly prizing all other lands, we may prize justly, and yet love before all others, our own stern Motherland, and the venerable structure of social and moral Life, which Mind has through long ages been building up for us there. Surely there is nourishment for the better part of man’s heart in all this: surely the roots, that have fixed themselves in the very core of man’s being, may be so cultivated as to grow up not into briers, but into roses, in the field of his life! Our Scottish sages have no such propensities: the field of their life shows neither briers nor roses; but only a flat, continuous thrashing-floor for Logic, whereon all questions, from the “Doctrine of Rent,” to the “Natural History of Religion,” are thrashed and sifted with the same mechanical impartiality!

With Sir Walter Scott at the head of our literature, it cannot be denied that much of this evil is past, or rapidly passing away: our chief literary men, whatever other faults they may have, no longer live among us like a French Colony, or some knot of Propaganda Missionaries; but like natural-born subjects of the soil, partaking and sympathizing in all our attachments, humors, and habits. Our literature no longer grows in water, but in mould, and with the true racy virtues of the soil and climate. How much of this change may be due to Burns, or to any other individual, it might be difficult to estimate. Direct literary imitation of Burns was not to be looked for. But his example, in the fearless adoption of domestic subjects, could not but operate from afar; and certainly in no heart did the love of country ever burn with a warmer glow than in that of Burns: “a tide of Scottish prejudice,” as he modestly calls this deep and generous feeling, “had been poured along his veins; and he felt that it would boil there till the flood-gates shut in eternal rest.” It seemed to him, as if he could do so little for his country, and yet would so gladly have done all. One small province stood open for him; that of Scottish song, and how eagerly he entered on it; how devotedly he labored there! In his most toilsome journeyings, this object never quits him; it is the little happy-valley of his careworn heart. In the gloom of his own affliction, he eagerly searches after some lonely brother of the muse, and rejoices to snatch one other name from the oblivion that was covering it! These were early feelings, and they abode with him to the end.

–- a wish, (I mind its power,)

A wish, that to my latest hour

Will strongly heave my breast;

That I, for poor auld Scotland’s sake,

Some useful plan or book could make,

Or sing a sang at least.

The rough bur Thistle spreading wide

Amang the bearded bear,

I turn’d my weeding-clips aside,

And spared the symbol dear.

But to leave the mere literary character of Burns, which has already detained us too long, we cannot but think that the Life he willed, and was fated to lead among his fellow-men, is both more interesting and instructive than any of his written works. These Poems are but like little rhymed fragments scattered here and there in the grand unrhymed Romance of his earthly existence; and it is only when intercalated in this at their proper places, that they attain their full measure of significance. And this too, alas, was but a fragment! The plan of a mighty edifice had been sketched; some columns, porticoes, firm masses of building, stand completed; the rest more or less clearly indicated; with many a far-stretching tendency, which only studious and friendly eyes can now trace towards the purposed termination. For the work is broken off in the middle, almost in the beginning; and rises among us, beautiful and sad, at once unfinished and a ruin! If charitable judgment was necessary in estimating his poems, and justice required that the aim and the manifest power to fulfil it must often be accepted for the fulfilment; much more is this the case in regard to his life, the sum and result of all his endeavors, where his difficulties came upon him not in detail only, but in mass; and so much has been left unaccomplished, nay, was mistaken, and altogether marred.

Properly speaking, there is but one era in the life of Burns, and that the earliest. We have not youth and manhood; but only youth: for, to the end, we discern no decisive change in the complexion of his character; in his thirty-seventh year, he is still, as it were, in youth. With all that resoluteness of judgment, that penetrating insight, and singular maturity of intellectual power, exhibited in his writings, he never attains to any clearness regarding himself; to the last he never ascertains his peculiar aim, even with such distinctness as is common among ordinary men; and therefore never can pursue it with that singleness of will, which insures success and some contentment to such men. To the last, he wavers between two purposes: glorying in his talent, like a true poet, he yet cannot consent to make this his chief and sole glory, and to follow it as the one thing needful, through poverty or riches, through good or evil report. Another far meaner ambition still cleaves to him; he must dream and struggle about a certain “Rock of Independence;” which, natural and even admirable as it might be, was still but a warring with the world, on the comparitively insignificant ground of his being more or less completely supplied with money, than others; of his standing at a higher, or at a lower altitude in general estimation, than others. For the world still appears to him, as to the young, in borrowed colors; he expects from it what it cannot give to any man; seeks for contentment, not within himself, in action and wise effort, but from without, in the kindness of circumstances, in love, friendship, honor, pecuniary ease. He would be happy, not actively and in himself, but passively, and from some ideal cornucopia of Enjoyments, not earned by his own labor, but showered on him by the beneficence of Destiny. Thus, like a young man, he cannot steady himself for any fixed or systematic pursuit, but swerves to and fro, between passionate hope, and remorseful disappointment: rushing onwards with a deep tempestuous force, he surmounts or breaks asunder many a barrier; travels, nay, advances far, but advancing only under uncertain guidance, is ever and anon turned from his path: and to the last, cannot reach the only true happiness of a man, that of clear, decided Activity in the sphere for which by nature and circumstances he has been fitted and appointed.

We do not say these things in dispraise of Burns: nay, perhaps, they but interest us the more in his favor. This blessing is not given soonest to the best; but rather, it is often the greatest minds that are latest in obtaining it; for where most is to be developed, most time may be required to develope it. A complex condition had been assigned him from without, as complex a condition from within: no “pre-established harmony” existed between the clay soil of Mossgiel and the empyrean soul of Robert Burns; it was not wonderful, therefore, that the adjustment between them should have been long postponed, and his arm long cumbered, and his sight confused, in so vast and discordant an economy, as he had been appointed steward over. Byron was, at his death, but a year younger than Burns; and through life, as it might have appeared, far more simply situated; yet in him, too, we can trace no such adjustment, no such moral manhood; but at best, and only a little before his end, the beginning of what seemed such.

By much the most striking incident in Burns’s Life is his journey to Edinburgh; but perhaps a still more important one is his residence at Irvine, so early as in his twenty-third year. Hitherto his life had been poor and toilworn; but otherwise not ungenial, and, with all its distresses, by no means unhappy. In his parentage, deducting outward circumstances, he had every reason to reckon himself fortunate: his father was a man of thoughtful, intense, earnest character, as the best of our peasants are; valuing knowledge, possessing some, and, what is far better and rarer, open-minded for more; a man with a keen insight, and devout heart; reverent towards God, friendly therefore at once, and fearless towards all that God has made; in one word, though but a hard-handed peasant, a complete and fully unfolded Man. Such a father is seldom found in any rank in society; and was worth descending far in society to seek. Unfortunately, he was very poor; had he been even a little richer, almost ever so little, the whole might have issued far otherwise. Mighty events turn on a straw; the crossing of a brook decides the conquest of the world. Had this William Burns’s small seven acres of nursery ground anywise prospered, the boy Robert had been sent to school; had struggled forward, as so many weaker men do, to some university; come forth not as a rustic wonder, but as a regular well-trained intellectual workman, and changed the whole course of British Literature, — for it lay in him to have done this! But the nursery did not prosper; poverty sank his whole family below the help of even our cheap school-system: Burns remained a hard-worked plough-boy, and British literature took its own course. Nevertheless, even in this rugged scene, there is much to nourish him. If he drudges, it is with his brother, and for his father and mother, whom he loves, and would fain shield from want. Wisdom is not banished from their poor hearth, nor the balm of natural feeling: the solemn words, Let us Worship God, are heard there from a “priest-like father;” if threatenings of unjust men throw mother and children into tears, these are tears not of grief only, but of holiest affection; every heart in that humble group feels itself the closer knit to every other; in their hard warfare they are there together, a “little band of brethren.” Neither are such tears, and the deep beauty that dwells in them, their only portion. Light visits the hearts as it does the eyes of all living: there is a force, too, in this youth, that enables him to trample on misfortune; nay, to bind it under his feet to make him sport. For a bold, warm, buoyant humor of character has been given him; and so the thick-coming shapes of evil are welcomed with a gay, friendly irony, and in their closest pressure he bates no jot of heart or hope. Vague yearnings of ambition fail not, as he grows up; dreamy fancies hang like cloud-cities around him; the curtain of Existence is slowly rising, in many-colored splendor and gloom: and the auroral light of first love is gilding his horizon, and the music of song is on his path; and so he walks

” –- in glory and in joy,

Behind his plough, upon the mountain side!”

We know, from the best evidence, that up to this date, Burns was happy; nay, that he was the gayest, brightest, most fantastic, fascinating being to be found in the world; more so even than he ever afterwards appeared. But now at this early age, he quits the paternal roof; goes forth into looser, louder, more exciting society; and becomes initiated in those dissipations, those vices, which a certain class of philosophers have asserted to be a natural preparative for entering on active life; a kind of mud-bath, in which the youth is, as it were, necessitated to steep, and, we suppose, cleanse himself, before the real toga of Manhood can be laid on him. We shall not dispute much with this class of philosophers; we hope they are mistaken; for Sin and Remorse so easily beset us at all stages of life, and are always such indifferent company, that it seems hard we should, at any stage, be forced and fated not only to meet, but to yield to them; and even serve for a term in their leprous armada. We hope it is not so. Clear we are, at all events, it cannot be the training one receives in this service, but only our determining to desert from it, that fits for true manly Action. We become men, not after we have been dissipated, and disappointed in the chase of false pleasure; but after we have ascertained, in any way, what impassable barriers hem us in through this life; how mad it is to hope for contentment to our infinite soul from the gifts of this extremely finite world! that a man must be sufficient for himself; and that “for suffering and enduring there is no remedy but striving and doing.” Manhood begins when we have in any way made truce with Necessity; begins, at all events, when we have surrendered to Necessity, as the most part only do; but begins joyfully and hopefully only when we have reconciled ourselves to Necessity; and thus, in reality, triumphed over it, and felt that in Necessity we are free. Surely, such lessons as this last, which, in one shape or other, is the grand lesson for every mortal man, are better learned from the lips of a devout mother, in the looks and actions of a devout father, while the heart is yet soft and pliant, than in collision with the sharp adamant of Fate, attracting us to shipwreck us, when the heart is grown hard, and may be broken before it will become contrite! Had Burns continued to learn this, as he was already learning it, in his father’s cottage, he would have learned it fully, which he never did, — and been saved many a lasting aberration, many a bitter hour and year of remorseful sorrow.

It seems to us another circumstance of fatal import in Burns’s history, that at this time too he became involved in the religious quarrels of his district; that he was enlisted and feasted, as the fighting man of the New-Light Priesthood, in their highly unprofitable warfare. At the tables of these free-minded clergy, he learned much more than was needful for him. Such liberal ridicule of fanaticism awakened in his mind scruples about Religion itself; and a whole world of Doubts, which it required quite another set of conjurors than these men to exorcise. We do not say that such an intellect as his could have escaped similar doubts, at some period of his history; or even that he could, at a later period, have come through them altogether victorious and unharmed: but it seems peculiarly unfortunate that this time, above all others, should have been fixed for the encounter. For now, with principles assailed by evil example from without, by “passions raging like demons” from within, he had little need of skeptical misgivings to whisper treason in the heat of the battle, or to cut off his retreat if he were already defeated. He loses his feeling of innocence; his mind is at variance with itself; the old divinity no longer presides there; but wild Desires and wild Repentance alternately oppress him. Ere long, too, he has committed himself before the world; his character for sobriety, dear to a Scottish peasant, as few corrupted worldings can even conceive, is destroyed in the eyes of men; and his only refuge consists in trying to disbelieve his guiltiness, and is but a refuge of lies. The blackest desperation now gathers over him, broken only by the red lightnings of remorse. The whole fabric of his life is blasted asunder; for now not only his character, but his personal liberty, is to be lost; men and Fortune are leagued for his hurt; “hungry Ruin has him in the wind.” He sees no escape but the saddest of all: exile from his loved country, to a country in every sense inhospitable and abhorrent to him. While the “gloomy night is gathering fast,” in mental storm and solitude, as well as in physical, he sings his wild farewell to Scotland:

“Farewell, my friends, farewell my foes!

My peace with these, my love with those:

The bursting tears my heart declare;

Adieu, my native banks of Ayr!”

Light breaks suddenly in on him in floods; but still a false transitory light, and no real sunshine. He is invited to Edinburgh; hastens thither with anticipating heart; is welcomed as in triumph, and with universal blandishment and acclamation; whatever is wisest, whatever is greatest, or loveliest there, gathers round him, to gaze on his face, to show him honor, sympathy, affection. Burns’s appearance among the sages and nobles of Edinburgh, must be regarded as one of the most singular phenomena in modern Literature; almost like the appearance of some Napoleon among the crowned sovereigns of modern Politics. For it is nowise as a “mockery king,” set there by favor, transiently, and for a purpose, that he will let himself be treated; still less is he a mad Rienzi, whose sudden elevation turns his too weak head; but he stands there on his own basis; cool, unastonished, holding his equal rank from Nature herself; putting forth no claim which there is not strength in him, as well as about him, to vindicate. Mr. Lockhart has some forcible observations on this point:

“It needs no effort of imagination,” says he, “to conceive what the sensations of an isolated set of scholars (almost all either clergymen or professors) must have been, in the presence of this big-boned, black-browed, brawny stranger, with his great flashing eyes, who, having forced his way among them from the plough-tail, at a single stride, manifested in the whole strain of his bearing and conversation, a most thorough conviction, that in the society of the most eminent men of his nation, he was exactly where he was entitled to be; hardly deigned to flatter them by exhibiting even an occasional symptom of being flattered by their notice; by turns calmly measured himself against the most cultivated understandings of his time in discussion; overpowered the bon mots of the most celebrated convivialists by broad floods of merriment, impregnated with all the burning life of genius; astounded bosoms habitually enveloped in the thrice-piled folds of social reserve, by compelling them to tremble, — nay, to tremble visibly, — beneath the fearless touch of natural pathos; and all this without indicating the smallest willingness to be ranked among those professional ministers of excitement, who are content to be paid in money and smiles for doing what the spectators and auditors would be ashamed of doing in their own persons, even if they had the power of doing it; and last, and probably worst of all, who was known to be in the habit of enlivening societies which they would have scorned to approach, still more frequently than their own, with eloquence no less magnificent; with wit, in all likelihood still more daring; often enough as the superiors whom he fronted without alarm might have guessed from the beginning, and had, ere long, no occasion to guess, with wit pointed at themselves.”

The farther we remove from this scene, the more singular will it seem to us: details of the exterior aspect of it are already full of interest. Most readers recollect Mr. Walker’s personal interviews with Burns as among the best passages of his Narrative; a time will come when this reminiscence of Sir Walter Scott’s, slight though it is, will also be precious.

“As for Burns,” writes Sir Walter, “I may truly say Vergilium vidi tantum. I was a lad of fifteen in 1786-7, when he came first to Edinburgh, but had sense and feeling enough to be much interested in his poetry, and would have given the world to know him: but I had very little acquaintance with any literary people; and still less with the gentry of the west country, the two sets that he most frequented. Mr. Thomas Grierson was at that time a clerk of my father’s. He knew Burns, and promised to ask him to his lodgings to dinner, but had no opportunity to keep his word; otherwise I might have seen more of this distinguished man. As it was, I saw him one day at the late venerable Professor Ferguson’s, where there were several gentlemen of literary reputation, among whom I remember the celebrated Mr. Dugald Stewart. Of course, we youngsters sat silent, looked and listened. The only thing I remember, which was remarkable in Burns’s manner, was the effect produced upon him by a print of Bunbury’s, representing a soldier lying dead on the snow, his dog sitting in misery on one side, — on the other, his widow, with a child in her arms. These lines were written beneath:

“Cold on Canadian hills, or Minden’s plain,

Perhaps that mother wept her soldier slain:

Bent o’er her babe, her eye dissolved in dew,

The big drops mingling with the milk he drew

Gave the sad presage of his future years,

The child of misery baptized in tears.”

“Burns seemed much affected by the print, or rather by the ideas which it suggested to his mind. He actually shed tears. He asked whose the lines were, and it chanced that nobody but myself remembered that they occur in a half-forgotten poem of Langhorne’s, called by the unpromising title of “The Justice of Peace.” I whispered my information to a friend present, he mentioned it to Burns, who rewarded me with a look and a word, which, though of mere civility, I then received and still recollect with very great pleasure.

“His person was strong and robust; his manners rustic, not clownish; a sort of dignified plainness and simplicity, which received part of its effect perhaps from one’s knowledge of his extraordinary talents. His features are represented in Mr. Nasmyth’s picture: but to me it conveys the idea that they are diminished, as if seen in perspective. I think his countenance was more massive than it looks in any of the portraits. I should have taken the poet, had I not known what he was, for a very sagacious country farmer of the old Scotch school, i. e. none of your modern agriculturists who keep laborers for their drudgery, but the douce gudeman who held his own plough. There was a strong expression of sense and shrewdness in all his lineaments; the eye alone, I think, indicated the poetical character and temperament. It was large, and of a dark cast, which glowed (I say literally glowed) when he spoke with feeling or interest. I never saw such another eye in a human head, though I have seen the most distinguished men of my time. His conversation expressed perfect self-confidence, without the slightest presumption. Among the men who were the most learned of their time and country, he expressed himself with perfect firmness, but without the least intrusive forwardness; and when he differed in opinion, he did not hesitate to express it firmly, yet at the same time with modesty. I do not remember any part of his conversation distinctly enough to be quoted; nor did I ever see him again, except in the street, where he did not recognize me, as I could not expect he should. He was much caressed in Edinburgh: but (considering what literary emoluments have been since his day) the efforts made for his relief were extremely trifling.

“I remember, on this occasion, I mention, I thought Burns’s acquaintance with English poetry was rather limited; and also, that having twenty times the abilities of Allan Ramsay and of Ferguson, he talked of them with too much humility as his models: there was doubtless national predilection in his estimate.

“This is all I can tell you about Burns. I have only to add, that his dress corresponded with his manner. He was like a farmer dressed in his best to dine with the laird. I do not speak in malam partem, when I say, I never saw a man in company with his superiors in station or information more perfectly free from either the reality or the affectation of embarrassment. I was told, but did not observe it, that his address to females was extremely deferential, and always with a turn either to the pathetic or humorous, which engaged their attention particularly. I have heard the late Duchess of Gordon remark this. I do not know any thing I can add to these recollections of forty years since.”

The conduct of Burns under this dazzling blaze of favor; the calm, unaffected, manly manner, in which he not only bore it, but estimated its value, has justly been regarded as the best proof that could be given of his real vigor and integrity of mind. A little natural vanity, some touches of hypocritical modesty, some glimmerings of affectation, at least some fear of being thought affected, we could have pardoned in almost any man; but no such indication is to be traced here. In his unexampled situation the young peasant is not a moment perplexed; so many strange lights do not confuse him, do not lead him astray. Nevertheless, we cannot but perceive that this winter did him great and lasting injury. A somewhat clearer knowledge of men’s affairs, scarcely of their characters, it did afford him: but a sharper feeling of Fortune’s unequal arrangements in their social destiny it also left with him. He had seen the gay and gorgeous arena, in which the powerful are born to play their parts; nay, had himself stood in the midst of it; and he felt more bitterly than ever, that here he was but a looker-on, and had no part or lot in that splendid game. From this time a jealous, indignant fear of social degradation takes possession of him; and perverts, so far as aught could pervert, his private contentment, and his feelings towards his richer fellows. It was clear enough to Burns that he had talent enough to make a fortune, or a hundred fortunes, could he but have rightly willed this; it was clear also that he willed something far different, and therefore could not make one. Unhappy it was that he had not power to choose the one, and reject the other; but must halt forever between two opinions, two objects; making hampered advancement towards either. But so is it with many men: we “long for the merchandise, yet would fain keep the price;” and so stand chaffering with Fate in vexatious altercation, till the Night come, and our fair is over!

The Edinburgh learned of that period were in general more noted for clearness of head than for warmth of heart: with the exception of the good old Blacklock, whose help was too ineffectual, scarcely one among them seems to have looked at Burns with any true sympathy, or indeed much otherwise than as at a highly curious thing. By the great, also, he is treated in the customary fashion; entertained at their tables, and dismissed: certain modica of pudding and praise are, from time to time, gladly exchanged for the fascination of his presence; which exchange once effected, the bargain is finished, and each party goes his several way. At the end of this strange season, Burns gloomily sums up his gains and losses, and meditates on the chaotic future. In money he is somewhat richer; in fame and the show of happiness, infinitely richer; but in the substance of it, as poor as ever. Nay, poorer, for his heart is now maddened still more with the fever of mere worldly Ambition: and through long years the disease will rack him with unprofitable sufferings, and weaken his strength for all true and nobler aims.

What Burns was next to do or avoid; how a man so circumstanced was now to guide himself towards his true advantage, might at this point of time have been a question for the wisest: and it was a question which he was left altogether to answer for himself: of his learned or rich patrons it had not struck any individual to turn a thought on this so trivial matter. Without claiming for Burns the praise of perfect sagacity, we must say, that his Excise and Farm scheme does not seem to us a very unreasonable one; and that we should be at a loss, even now, to suggest one decidedly better. Some of his admirers, indeed, are scandalized at his ever resolving to gauge; and would have had him apparently lie still at the pool, till the spirit of Patronage should stir the waters, and then heal with one plunge all his worldly sorrows! We fear such counsellors knew but little of Burns; and did not consider that happiness might in all cases be cheaply had by waiting for the fulfilment of golden dreams, were it not that in the interim the dreamer must die of hunger. It reflects credit on the manliness and sound sense of Burns, that he felt so early on what ground he was standing; and preferred self-help, on the humblest scale, to dependence and inaction, though with hope of far more splendid possibilities. But even these possibilities were not rejected in his scheme: he might expect, if it chanced that he had any friend, to rise, in no long period, into something even like opulence and leisure; while again, if it chanced that he had no friend, he could still live in security; and for the rest, he “did not intend to borrow honor from any profession.” We think, then, that his plan was honest and well calculated: all turned on the execution of it. Doubtless it failed; yet not, we believe, from any vice inherent in itself. Nay, after all, it was no failure of external means, but of internal, that overtook Burns. His was no bankruptcy of the purse, but of the soul; to his last day, he owed no man any thing.

Meanwhile he begins well; with two good and wise actions. His donation to his mother, munificent from a man whose income had lately been seven pounds a year, was worthy of him, and not more than worthy. Generous also, and worthy of him, was his treatment of the woman whose life’s welfare now depended on his pleasure. A friendly observer might have hoped serene days for him: his mind is on the true road to peace with itself: what clearness he still wants will be given as he proceeds; for the best teacher of duties, that still lie dim to us, is the Practice of those we see, and have at hand. Had the “patrons of genius,” who could give him nothing, but taken nothing from him, at least nothing more! — the wounds of his heart would have healed, vulgar ambition would have died away. Toil and Frugality would have been welcome, since Virtue dwelt with them, and poetry would have shone through them as of old; and in her clear ethereal light, which was his own by birth-right, he might have looked down on his earthly destiny, and all its obstructions, not with patience only, but with love.

But the patrons of genius would not have it so. Picturesque tourists, all manner of fashionable danglers after literature, and, far worse, all manner of convivial Mecaenases, hovered round him in his retreat; and his good as well as his weak qualities secured them influence over him. He was flattered by their notice; and his warm social nature made it impossible for him to shake them off, and hold on his way apart from them. These men, as we believe, were proximately the means of his ruin. Not that they meant him any ill; they only meant themselves a little good; if he suffered harm, let him look to it! But they wasted his precious time and his precious talent; they disturbed his composure, broke down his returning habits of temperance and assiduous contented exertion. Their pampering was baneful to him; their cruelty, which soon followed, was equally baneful. The old grudge against Fortune’s inequality awoke with new bitterness in their neighborhood, and Burns had no retreat but to the “Rock of Independence,” which is but an air-castle, after all, that looks well at a distance, but will screen no one from real wind and wet. Flushed with irregular excitement, exasperated alternately by contempt of others, and contempt of himself, Burns was no longer regaining his peace of mind, but fast losing it forever. There was a hollowness at the heart of his life, for his conscience did not now approve what he was doing.

Amid the vapors of unwise enjoyment, of bootless remorse, and angry discontent with Fate, his true loadstar, a life of Poetry, with Poverty, nay, with Famine if it must be so, was too often altogether hidden from his eyes. And yet he sailed a sea, where, without some such guide, there was no right steering. Meteors of French Politics rise before him, but these were not his stars. An accident this, which hastened, but did not originate, his worst distresses. In the mad contentions of that time, he comes in collision with certain official Superiors; is wounded by them; cruelly lacerated, we should say, could a dead mechanical implement, in any case, be called cruel: and shrinks, in indignant pain, into deeper self-seclusion, into gloomier moodiness than ever. His life has now lost its unity: it is a life of fragments; led with little aim, beyond the melancholy one of securing its own continuance — in fits of wild false joy, when such offered, and of black despondency when they passed away. His character before the world begins to suffer: calumny is busy with him; for a miserable man makes more enemies than friends. Some faults he has fallen into, and a thousand misfortunes; but deep criminality is what he stands accused of, and they that are not without sin, cast the first stone at him! For is he not a well-wisher of the French Revolution, a Jacobin, and therefore in that one act guilty of all? These accusations, political and moral, it has since appeared, were false enough; but the world hesitated little to credit them. Nay, his convivial Mecaenases themselves were not the last to do it. There is reason to believe that, in his later years, the Dumfries Aristocracy had partly withdrawn themselves from Burns, as from a tainted person, no longer worthy of their acquaintance. That painful class, stationed, in all provincial cities, behind the outmost breastwork of Gentility, there to stand siege and do battle against the intrusion of Grocerdom, and Grazierdom, had actually seen dishonor in the society of Burns, and branded him with their veto; had, as we vulgarly say, cut him! We find one passage in this work of Mr. Lockhart’s, which will not out of our thoughts:

“A gentleman of that country, whose name I have already more than once had occasion to refer to, has often told me that he was seldom more grieved, than when, riding into Dumfries one fine summer evening about this time to attend a country ball, he saw Burns walking alone, on the shady side of the principal street of the town, while the opposite side was gay with successive groups of gentlemen and ladies, all drawn together for the festivities of the night, not one of whom appeared willing to recognize him. The horseman dismounted, and joined Burns, who, on his proposing to cross the street, said: ‘Nay, nay, my young friend, that’s all over now;’ and quoted, after a pause, some verses of Lady Grizzel Baillie’s pathetic ballad:

‘His bonnet stood ance fu’ fair on his brow,

His auld ane looked better than mony ane’s new;

But now he lets ‘t wear ony way it will hing,

And casts himsell dowie upon the corn-bing.

‘O were we young, as we ance hae been,

We sud hae been galloping down on yon green,

And linking it ower the lily-white lea!

And werena my heart light I wad die.’

It was little in Burns’s character to let his feelings on certain subjects escape in this fashion. He, immediately after reciting these verses, assumed the sprightliness of his most pleasing manner; and, taking his young friend home with him, entertained him very agreeably till the hour of the ball arrived.”

Alas! when we think that Burns now sleeps “where bitter indignation can no longer lacerate his heart,” and that most of these fair dames and frizzled gentlemen already lie at his side, where the breastwork of gentility is quite thrown down, — who would not sigh over the thin delusions and foolish toys that divide heart from heart, and make man unmerciful to his brother!

It was not now to be hoped that the genius of Burns would ever reach maturity, or accomplish ought worthy of itself. His spirit was jarred in its melody; not the soft breath of natural feeling, but the rude hand of Fate, was now sweeping over the strings. And yet what harmony was in him, what music even in his discords! How the wild tones had a charm for the simplest and the wisest; and all men felt and knew that here also was one of the Gifted! “If he entered an inn at midnight, after all the inmates were in bed, the news of his arrival circulated from the cellar to the garret; and ere ten minutes had elapsed, the landlord and all his guests were assembled!” Some brief, pure moments of poetic life were yet appointed him, in the composition of his Songs. We can understand how he grasped at this employment; and how, too, he spurned at all other reward for it but what the labor itself brought him. For the soul of Burns, though scathed and marred, was yet living in its full moral strength, though sharply conscious of its errors and abasement: and here, in his destitution and degradation, was one act of seeming nobleness and self-devotedness left even for him to perform. He felt, too, that with all the “thoughtless follies” that had “laid him low,” the world was unjust and cruel to him; and he silently appealed to another and calmer time. Not as a hired soldier, but as a patriot, would he strive for the glory of his country; so he cast from him the poor sixpence a-day, and served zealously as a volunteer. Let us not grudge him this last luxury of his existence; let him not have appealed to us in vain! The money was not necessary to him; he struggled through without it; long since, these guineas would have been gone, and now the high-mindedness of refusing them will plead for him in all hearts for ever.

We are here arrived at the crisis of Burns’s life; for matters had now taken such a shape with him as could not long continue. If improvement was not to be looked for, Nature could only for a limited time maintain this dark and maddening warfare against the world and itself. We are not medically informed whether any continuance of years was, at this period, probable for Burns; whether his death is to be looked on as in some sense an accidental event, or only as the natural consequence of the long series of events that had preceded. The latter seems to be the likelier opinion; and yet it is by no means a certain one. At all events, as we have said, some change could not be very distant. Three gates of deliverance, it seems to us, were open for Burns: clear poetical activity, madness, or death. The first, with longer life, was still possible, though not probable; for physical causes were beginning to be concerned in it: and yet Burns had an iron resolution; could he but have seen and felt, that not only his highest glory, but his first duty, and the true medicine for all his woes, lay here. The second was still less probable; for his mind was ever among the clearest and firmest. So the milder third gate was opened for him: and he passed, not softly, yet speedily, into that still country, where the hail-storms and fire-showers do not reach, and the heaviest-laden wayfarer at length lays down his load!

Contemplating this sad end of Burns, and how he sank unaided by any real help, uncheered by any wise sympathy, generous minds have sometimes figured to themselves, with a reproachful sorrow, that much might have been done for him; that by counsel, true affection, and friendly ministrations, he might have been saved to himself and the world. We question whether there is not more tenderness of heart than soundness of judgment in these suggestions. It seems dubious to us whether the richest, wisest, most benevolent individual, could have lent Burns any effectual help. Counsel, which seldom profits any one, he did not need; in his understanding, he knew the right from the wrong, as well perhaps as any man ever did; but the persuasion, which would have availed him, lies not so much in the head, as in the heart, where no argument or expostulation could have assisted much to implant it. As to money again, we do not really believe that this was his essential want; or well see how any private man could, even presupposing Burns’s consent, have bestowed on him an independent fortune, with much prospect of decisive advantage. It is a mortifying truth, that two men in any rank of society could hardly be found virtuous enough to give money, and to take it, as a necessary gift, without injury to the moral entireness of one or both. But so stands the fact: friendship, in the old heroic sense of that term, no longer exists; except in the cases of kindred or other legal affinity; it is in reality no longer expected, or recognized as a virtue among men. A close observer of manners has pronounced “Patronage,” that is, pecuniary or other economic furtherance, to be “twice cursed;” cursing him that gives, and him that takes! And thus, in regard to outward matters also, it has become the rule, as in regard to inward it always was and must be the rule, that no one shall look for effectual help to another; but that each shall rest contented with what help he can afford himself. Such, we say, is the principle of modern Honor; naturally enough growing out of that sentiment of Pride, which we inculcate and encourage as the basis of our whole social morality. Many a poet has been poorer than Burns; but no one was ever prouder: and we may question, whether, without great precautions, even a pension from Royalty would not have galled and encumbered, more than actually assisted him.

Still less, therefore, are we disposed to join with another class of Burns’s admirers, who accuse the higher ranks among us of having ruined Burns by their selfish neglect of him. We have already stated our doubts whether direct pecuniary help, had it been offered, would have been accepted, or could have proved very effectual. We shall readily admit, however, that much was to be done for Burns; that many a poisoned arrow might have been warded from his bosom; many an entanglement in his path cut asunder by the hand of the powerful; and light and heat shed on him from high places, would have made his humble atmosphere more genial; and the softest heart then breathing might have lived and died with some fewer pangs. Nay, we shall grant further, and for Burns it is granting much, that with all his pride, he would have thanked, even with exaggerated gratitude, any one who had cordially befriended him: patronage, unless once cursed, needed not to have been twice so. At all events, the poor promotion he desired in his calling might have been granted: it was his own scheme, therefore likelier than any other to be of service. All this it might have been a luxury, nay, it was a duty, for our nobility to have done. No part of all this, however, did any of them do; or apparently attempt, or wish to do; so much is granted against them. But what then is the amount of their blame? Simply that they were men of the world, and walked by the principles of such men; that they treated Burns, as other nobles and other commoners had done other poets; as the English did Shakspeare; as King Charles and his cavaliers did Butler, as King Philip and his Grandees did Cervantes. Do men gather grapes of thorns? or shall we cut down our thorns for yielding only a fence, and haws? How, indeed, could the “nobility and gentry of his native land” hold out any help to this “Scottish Bard, proud of his name and country?” Were the nobility and gentry so much as able rightly to help themselves? Had they not their game to preserve; their borough interests to strengthen; dinners, therefore, of various kinds to eat and give? Were their means more than adequate to all this business, or less than adequate? Less than adequate in general: few of them in reality were richer than Burns; many of them were poorer; for sometimes they had to wring their supplies, as with thumbscrews, from the hard hand; and, in their need of guineas, to forget their duty of mercy; which Burns was never reduced to do. Let us pity and forgive them. The game they preserved and shot, the dinners they ate and gave, the borough interests they strengthened, the little Babylons they severally builded by the glory of their might, are all melted, or melting back into the primeval Chaos, as man’s merely selfish endeavors are fated to do: and here was an action extending, in virtue of its worldly influence, we may say, through all time; in virtue of its moral nature, beyond all time, being immortal as the Spirit of Goodness itself; this action was offered them to do, and light was not given them to do it. Let us pity and forgive them. But, better than pity, let us go and do otherwise. Human suffering did not end with the life of Burns; neither was the solemn mandate, “Love one another, bear one another’s burdens,” given to the rich only, but to all men. True, we shall find no Burns to relieve, to assuage by our aid or our pity: but celestial natures, groaning under the fardels of a weary life, we shall still find; and that wretchedness which Fate has rendered voiceless and tuneless, is not the least wretched, but the most.

Still we do not think that the blame of Burns’s failure lies chiefly with the world. The world, it seems to us, treated him with more, rather than with less kindness, than it usually shows to such men. It has ever, we fear, shown but small favor to its Teachers; hunger and nakedness, perils and reviling, the prison, the cross, the poison-chalice, have, in most times and countries, been the market-place it has offered for Wisdom, the welcome with which it has greeted those who have come to enlighten and purify it. Homer and Socrates, and the Christian Apostles belong to old days; but the world’s Martyrology was not completed with these. Roger Bacon and Galileo languish in priestly dungeons, Tasso pines in the cell of a madhouse, Camoens dies begging on the streets of Lisbon. So neglected, so “persecuted they the Prophets,” not in Judea only, but in all places where men have been. We reckon that every poet of Burns’s order is, or should be, a prophet and teacher to his age; that he has no right therefore to expect great kindness from it, but rather is bound to do it great kindness; that Burns, in particular, experienced fully the usual proportion of the world’s goodness; and that the blame of his failure, as we have said, lies not chiefly with the world.

Where then does it lie? We are forced to answer: With himself; it is his inward, not his outward misfortunes, that bring him to the dust. Seldom, indeed, is it otherwise; seldom is a life morally wrecked, but the grand cause lies in some internal mal-arrangement, some want less of good fortune than of good guidance. Nature fashions no creature without implanting in it the strength needful for its action and duration; least of all does she so neglect her masterpiece and darling, the poetic soul. Neither can we believe that it is in the power of any external circumstances utterly to ruin the mind of a man; nay, if proper wisdom be given him, even so much as to affect its essential health and beauty. The sternest sum-total of all worldly misfortunes is Death; nothing more can lie in the cup of human wo: yet many men, in all ages, have triumphed over Death, and led it captive; converting its physical victory into a moral victory for themselves, into a seal and immortal consecration for all that their past life had achieved. What has been done, may be done again; nay, it is but the degree and not the kind of such heroism that differs in different seasons; for without some portion of this spirit, not of boisterous daring, but of silent fearlessness, of Self-denial, in all its forms, no good man, in any scene or time, has ever attained to be good.

We have already stated the error of Burns; and mourned over it, rather than blamed it. It was the want of unity in his purposes, of consistency in his aims; the hapless attempt to mingle in friendly union the common spirit of the world with the spirit of poetry, which is of a far different and altogether irreconcilable nature. Burns was nothing wholly, and Burns could be nothing; no man formed as he was can be any thing, by halves. The heart, not of a mere hot-blooded, popular verse-monger, or poetical Restaurateur, but of a true Poet and Singer, worthy of the old religious heroic times, had been given him: and he fell in an age, not of heroism and religion, but of skepticism, selfishness, and triviality, when true Nobleness was little understood, and its place supplied by a hollow, dissocial, altogether barren and unfruitful principle of Pride. The influences of that age, his open, kind, susceptible nature, to say nothing of his highly untoward situation, made it more than usually difficult for him to repel or resist; the better spirit that was within him ever sternly demanded its rights, its supremacy; he spent his life in endeavoring to reconcile these two; and lost it, as he must have lost it, without reconciling them here.

Burns was born poor; and born also to continue poor, for he would not endeavor to be otherwise: this it had been well could he have once for all admitted, and considered as finally settled. He was poor, truly; but hundreds even of his own class and order of minds have been poorer, yet have suffered nothing deadly from it: nay, his own father had a far sorer battle with ungrateful destiny than his was; and he did not yield to it, but died courageously warring, and to all moral intents prevailing, against it. True, Burns had little means, had even little time for poetry, his only real pursuit and vocation; but so much the more precious was what little he had. In all these external respects his case was hard; but very far from the hardest. Poverty, incessant drudgery, and much worse evils, it has often been the lot of poets and wise men to strive with, and their glory to conquer. Locke was banished as a traitor; and wrote his Essay on the Human Understanding, sheltering himself in a Dutch garret. Was Milton rich or at his ease, when he composed Paradise Lost? Not only low, but fallen from a height; not only poor, but impoverished; in darkness and with dangers compassed round, he sang his immortal song, and found fit audience, though few. Did not Cervantes finish his work, a maimed soldier, and in prison? Nay, was not the Araucana, which Spain acknowledges as its Epic, written without even the aid of paper; scraps of leather, as the stout fighter and voyager snatched any moment from that wild warfare?

And what then had these men, which Burns wanted? Two things; both which, it seems to us, are indispensable for such men. They had a true, religious principle of morals; and a single not a double aim in their activity. They were not self-seekers and self-worshippers; but seekers and worshippers of something far better than Self. Not personal enjoyment was their object; but a high, heroic idea of Religion, of Patriotism, of heavenly Wisdom, in one or the other form, ever hovered before them; in which cause, they neither shrunk from suffering, nor called on the earth to witness it as something wonderful; but patiently endured, counting it blessedness enough so to spend and be spent. Thus the “golden calf of Self-love,” however curiously carved, was not their Deity; but the Invisible Goodness, which alone is man’s reasonable service. This feeling was as a celestial fountain, whose streams refreshed into gladness and beauty all the provinces of their otherwise too desolate existence. In a word, they willed one thing, to which all other things were subordinated, and made subservient; and therefore they accomplished it. The wedge will rend rocks; but its edge must be sharp and single: if it be double, the wedge is bruised in pieces and will rend nothing.

Part of this superiority these men owed to their age; in which heroism and devotedness were still practised, or at least not yet disbelieved in; but much of it likewise they owed to themselves. With Burns again it was different. His morality, in most of its practical points, is that of a mere worldly man; enjoyment, in a finer or a coarser shape, is the only thing he longs and strives for. A noble instinct sometimes raises him above this; but an instinct only, and acting only for moments. He has no Religion; in the shallow age, where his days were cast, Religion was not discriminated from the New and Old Light forms of Religion; and was, with these, becoming obsolete in the minds of men. His heart, indeed, is alive with a trembling adoration, but there is no temple in his understanding. He lives in darkness and in the shadow of doubt. His religion, at best, is an anxious wish; like that of Rabelais, “a great Perhaps.”

He loved Poetry warmly, and in his heart; could he but have loved it purely, and with his whole undivided heart, it had been well. For Poetry, as Burns could have followed it, is but another form of Wisdom, of Religion; is itself Wisdom and Religion. But this also was denied him. His poetry is a stray vagrant gleam, which will not be extinguished within him, yet rises not to be the true light of his path, but is often a wildfire that misleads him. It was not necessary for Burns to be rich, to be, or to seem, “independent;” but it was necessary for him to be at one with his own heart; to place what was highest in his nature, highest also in his life; “to seek within himself for that consistency and sequence, which external events would for ever refuse him.” He was born a poet; poetry was the celestial element of his being, and should have been the soul of his whole endeavors. Lifted into that serene ether, whither he had wings given him to mount, he would have needed no other elevation: Poverty, neglect, and all evil, save the desecration of himself and his Art, were a small matter to him; the pride and the passions of the world lay far beneath his feet; and he looked down alike on noble and slave, on prince and beggar, and all that wore the stamp of man, with clear recognition, with brotherly affection, with sympathy, with pity. Nay, we question whether for his culture as a Poet, poverty, and much suffering for a season, were not absolutely advantageous. Great men, in looking back over their lives, have testified to that effect. “I would not for much,” says Jean Paul, “that I had been born richer.” And yet Paul’s birth was poor enough; for, in another place, he adds; “The prisoner’s allowance is bread and water; and I had often only the latter.” But the gold that is refined in the hottest furnace comes out the purest; or, as he has himself expressed it, “the canary-bird sings sweeter the longer it has been trained in a darkened cage.”

A man like Burns might have divided his hours between poetry and virtuous industry; industry which all true feeling sanctions, nay prescribes, and which has a beauty, for that cause, beyond the pomp of thrones: but to divide his hours between poetry and rich men’s banquets, was an ill-starred and inauspicious attempt. How could he be at ease at such banquets? What had he to do there, mingling his music with the coarse roar of altogether earthly voices, and brightening the thick smoke of intoxication with fire lent him from heaven? Was it his aim to enjoy life? To-morrow he must go drudge as an Exciseman! We wonder not that Burns became moody, indignant, and at times an offender against certain rules of society; but rather that he did not grow utterly frantic, and run a-muck against them all. How could a man, so falsely placed, by his own or others’ fault, ever know contentment or peaceable diligence for an hour? What he did, under such perverse guidance, and what he forbore to do, alike fill us with astonishment at the natural strength and worth of his character.

Doubtless there was a remedy for this perverseness: but not in others; only in himself; least of all in simple increase of wealth and worldly “respectability.” We hope we have now heard enough about the efficacy of wealth for poetry, and to make poets happy. Nay, have we not seen another instance of it in these very days? Byron, a man of endowment considerably less ethereal than that of Burns, is born in the rank not of a Scottish ploughman, but of an English peer: the highest worldly honors, the fairest worldly career, are his by inheritance: the richest harvest of fame he soon reaps, in another province, by his own hand. And what does all this avail him? Is he happy, is he good, is he true? Alas, he has a poet’s soul, and strives towards the Infinite and the Eternal; and soon feels that all this is but mounting to the house-top to reach the stars! Like Burns, he is only a proud man; might like him have “purchased a pocket-copy of Milton to study the character of Satan;” for Satan also is Byron’s grand exemplar, the hero of his poetry, and the model apparently of his conduct. As in Burns’s case, too, the celestial element will not mingle with the clay of earth; both poet and man of the world he must not be; vulgar Ambition will not live kindly with poetic Adoration; he cannot serve God and Mammon. Byron, like Burns, is not happy; nay, he is the most wretched of all men. His life is falsely arranged: the fire that is in him is not a strong, still, central fire, warming into beauty the products of a world; but it is the mad fire of a volcano; and now, — we look sadly into the ashes of a crater, which ere long, will fill itself with snow!

Byron and Burns were sent forth as missionaries to their generation, to teach it a higher doctrine, a purer truth: they had a message to deliver, which left them no rest till it was accomplished; in dim throes of pain, this divine behest lay smouldering within them; for they knew not what it meant, and felt it only in mysterious anticipation, and they had to die without articulately uttering it. They are in the camp of the Unconverted. Yet not as high messengers of rigorous though benignant truth, but as soft flattering singers, and in pleasant fellowship, will they live there; they are first adulated, then persecuted; they accomplish little for others; they find no peace for themselves, but only death and the peace of the grave. We confess, it is not without a certain mournful awe that we view the fate of these noble souls, so richly gifted, yet ruined to so little purpose with all their gifts. It seems to us there is a stern moral taught in this piece of history, — twice told us in our own time! Surely to men of like genius, if there be any such, it carries with it a lesson of deep impressive significance. Surely it would become such a man, furnished for the highest of all enterprises, that of being the Poet of his Age, to consider well what it is that he attempts, and in what spirit he attempts it. For the words of Milton are true in all times, and were never truer than in this: “He, who would write heroic poems, must make his whole life a heroic poem.” If he cannot first so make his life, then let him hasten from this arena; for neither its lofty glories, nor its fearful perils, are for him. Let him dwindle into a modish balladmonger; let him worship and be-sing the idols of the time, and the time will not fail to reward him, — if, indeed, he can endure to live in that capacity! Byron and Burns could not live as idol-priests, but the fire of their own hearts consumed them; and better it was for them that they could not. For it is not in the favor of the great, or of the small, but in a life of truth, and in the inexpugnable citadel of his own soul, that a Byron’s or a Burns’s strength must lie. Let the great stand aloof from him, or know how to reverence him. Beautiful is the union of wealth with favor and furtherance for literature; like the costliest flower-jar enclosing the loveliest amaranth. Yet let not the relation be mistaken. A true poet is not one whom they can hire by money or flattery to be a minister of their pleasures, their writer of occasional verses, their purveyor of table-wit; he cannot be their menial, he cannot even be their partisan. At the peril of both parties, let no such union be attempted! Will a Courser of the Sun work softly in the harness of a Drayhorse? His hoofs are of fire, and his path is through the heavens, bringing light to all lands; will he lumber on mud highways, dragging ale for earthly appetites, from door to door?

But we must stop short in these considerations, which would lead us to boundless lengths. We had something to say on the public moral character of Burns; but this also we must forbear. We are far from regarding him as guilty before the world, as guiltier than the average; nay, from doubting that he is less guilty than one of ten thousand. Tried at a tribunal far more rigid than that where the Plebiscita of common civic reputations are pronounced, he has seemed to us even there less worthy of blame than of pity and wonder. But the world is habitually unjust in its judgments of such men; unjust on many grounds, of which this one may be stated as the substance: it decides, like a court of law, by dead statutes; and not positively but negatively; less on what is done right, than on what is, or is not, done wrong. Not the few inches of reflection from the mathematical orbit, which are so easily measured, but the ratio of these to the whole diameter, constitutes the real aberration. This orbit may be a planet’s, its diameter the breadth of the solar system; or it may be a city hippodrome; nay, the circle of a ginhorse, its diameter a score of feet or paces. But the inches of deflection only are measured; and it is assumed that the diameter of the ginhorse, and that of the planet, will yield the same ratio when compared with them. Here lies the root of many a blind, cruel condemnation of Burnses, Swifts, Rousseaus, which one never listens to with approval. Granted, the ship comes into harbor with shrouds and tackle damaged; and the pilot is therefore blameworthy; for he has not been all-wise and all-powerful; but to know how blameworthy, tell us first whether his voyage has been round the Globe, or only to Ramsgate and the Isle of Dogs.

With our readers in general, with men of right feeling anywhere, we are not required to plead for Burns. In pitying admiration, he lies enshrined in all our hearts, in a far nobler mausoleum than that one of marble; neither will his Works, even as they are, pass away from the memory of man. While the Shakspeares and Miltons roll on like mighty rivers through the country of Thought, bearing fleets of traffickers and assiduous pearl-fishers on their waves; this little Valclusa Fountain will also arrest our eye: for this also is of Nature’s own and most cunning workmanship, bursts from the depths of the earth, with a full gushing current, into the light of day; and often will the traveller turn aside to drink of its clear waters, and muse among its rocks and pines!

THE END

THE REAL ROBERT BURNS by J. L. Hughes

CONTENTS

FOREWORD.

CHAPTER I. The True Values of Biography.

CHAPTER II. The Educational Advantages of Burns.

CHAPTER III. The Characteristics of Burns.

CHAPTER IV. Burns was a Religious Man.

CHAPTER V. Burns the Democrat.

CHAPTER VI. Burns and Brotherhood.

CHAPTER VII. Burns a Revealer of Pure Love.

CHAPTER VIII. Burns a Philosopher.

CHAPTER IX. The Development of Burns.

FOREWORD.

The writer of the following pages learned years ago to reverence the memories of Burns and Dickens. Frequently hearing one or the other attacked from platform or pulpit, and believing both to be great interpreters of the highest things taught by Christ, as the basis of the development of humanity towards the Divine, he resolved that some day he would try to help the world to understand correctly the work of these two great men. His book, Dickens as an Educator, has helped to give a new conception of Dickens, as an educational pioneer and as a philosopher. The purpose of this book is to show that Burns was well educated, and that both in his poems and in his letters he was an unsurpassed exponent of the highest human ideals yet expressed of religion — democracy based on the value of the individual soul, brotherhood, love, and the philosophy of human life.

The writer believes that gossiping in regard to the weakness of the living is indecent and degrading, but that it is pardonable as compared with the debasing practice of gossiping about the weaknesses of the dead. Those who can wallow in the muck of degraded biographers are only a degree less wicked than the biographers themselves, who sin against the dead, and sin against the living by providing debasing matter for them to read.

The evidence to prove the positions claimed to be true in this book is mainly taken from the poems and letters of Burns himself. Some may doubt the sincerity of Burns. Carlyle had no doubt about his sincerity or his honesty. He says of the popularity of Burns: ‘The grounds of so singular and wide a popularity, which extends, in a literal sense, from the palace to the hut, and over all regions where the English tongue is spoken, are well worth inquiring into. After every just deduction, it seems to imply some rare excellence in these works. What is that excellence? To answer this question will not lead us far. The excellence of Burns is, indeed, among the rarest, whether in poetry or in prose, but, at the same time, it is plain and easily recognised — his sincerity, his indisputable air of truth.’

Speaking of the moral character of Burns, Carlyle said: ‘We are far from regarding him as guilty before the world, as guiltier than the average; nay, from doubting that he is less guilty than one of ten thousand…. What he did under such circumstances, and what he forbore to do, alike fill us with astonishment at the natural strength and worth of his character.’

Shakespeare says in Hamlet: ‘Ay, sir, to be honest, as this world goes, is to be one man picked out of ten thousand.’ Carlyle chose Burns as one of ten thousand.

These quotations should help two classes of men: the ‘unco guid,’ who believe evil stories, most of which had no real foundation; and those professed lovers of Burns who love him for his weaknesses. The real Robert Burns was not weak enough to suit either of these two classes. ‘Less guilty than one in ten thousand’ is a high standard.

To do something to help all men and women to a juster understanding of the real Robert Burns is the aim of the writer. Let us learn, and ever remember, that he was a reverent writer about religion, a clear interpreter of Christ’s teaching of democracy and brotherhood, a profound philosopher, and the author of the purest love-songs ever written.

CHAPTER I. The True Values of Biography.

A man’s biography should relate the story of his development in power, and his achievements for his fellow-men. Biography can justify itself only in two ways: by revealing the agencies and experiences that formed a man’s character and aided in the growth of his highest powers; and by relating the things he achieved for humanity, and the processes by which he achieved them.

Only the good in the lives of great men should be recorded in biographies. To relate the evil men do, or describe their weaknesses, is not only objectionable, it is in every way execrable. It degrades those who write it and those who read it. Biography should not be mainly a story; it should be a revelation, not of evil, but of good. It should unfold and impress the value of the visions of the great man whose biography is being written, and his success in revealing his high visions to his fellow-men. It should tell the things he achieved or produced to make the world better; the things that aid in the growth of humanity towards the divine. The biographer who tells of evils is, from thoughtlessness or malevolence, a mischievous enemy of mankind.

No man’s memory was ever more unjustly dealt with than the memory of Robert Burns. His first editor published many poems that Burns said on his death-bed should be allowed ‘to sink into oblivion,’ and told all of weakness that he could learn in order that he might be regarded as just. He considered justice to himself of more consequence than justice to Burns, or to humanity. His only claim to be remembered is the fact that he prepared the poems of Burns for publication, and wrote his biography. It is much to be regretted that he had not higher ideals of what a biography should be, not merely for the memory of the man about whom it is written, but for its influence in enlightening and uplifting those who read it. Biographers should reveal not weaknesses, but the things achieved for God and humanity.

Carlyle, writing of the biographers of Burns, says: ‘His former biographers have done something, no doubt, but by no means a great deal, to assist us. Dr Currie and Mr Walker, the principal of these writers, have both, we think, mistaken one important thing: their own and the world’s true relation to the author, and the style in which it became such men to think and to speak of such a man. Dr Currie loved the poet truly, more perhaps than he avowed to his readers, or even to himself; yet he everywhere introduces him with a certain patronising, apologetic air, as if the polite public might think it strange and half unwarrantable that he, a man of science, a scholar and a gentleman, should do such honour to a rustic. In all this, however, we readily admit that his fault was not want of love, but weakness of faith; and regret that the first and kindest of all our poet’s biographers should not have seen farther, or believed more boldly what he saw. Mr Walker offends more deeply in the same kind, and both err alike in presenting us with a detached catalogue of his attributes, virtues, and vices, instead of a delineation of the resulting character as a living unity.’

The biographers of Robert Burns criticised reputed defects of his — defects common among men of all classes and all professions in his time — but failed to give him credit for his revelations of divine wisdom. They bemoaned his lack of religion — though he was a reverently religious man — instead of telling the simple truth that he was the greatest religious reformer of his time in any part of the world. They said he was not a Christian because he did not perform certain ceremonies required by the churches, when freer and less bigoted men would have told the real fact, that he was one of the world’s greatest interpreters of Christ’s highest ideals — democracy and brotherhood. He still holds that high rank. They related idle gossip about his vanity and other trivial stories, instead of being content with proclaiming him the greatest genius of his time in the comprehensiveness of his visions, and in the scope of his powers. Some of them tried to prove that he was not a loyal man; they should have revealed him as the giant leader of men in making them conscious of the value of liberty and of the right of every man to its fullest enjoyment.

The oft-repeated charge of disloyalty was disproved when the charge was made during the life of Burns, but the false accusation has been accepted as a fact by many people to the present time. Fortunately the records of the Dumfries Volunteers have been discovered recently, and Mr William Will has published them in a book entitled Robert Burns as a Volunteer. They prove most conclusively that Burns was a truly loyal man. When the Provost of Dumfries called a meeting of the citizens of Dumfries to consider the need of establishing a company of Volunteers Burns attended the meeting, and was chosen as a member of a small committee to write to the king asking permission to form a company. When permission was granted by the king, Burns joined the company on the night when it was first organised, and sat up most of the night composing ‘The Dumfries Volunteers,’ the most inspiring poem of its kind ever written. It did more to arouse the people of Scotland and England to put down the bolshevism of the time than any other loyal propaganda.

The minutes of the Volunteer Company in Dumfries give a perfect answer to the basest slander ever made against Burns — that he had sunk so low as a hopelessly vile drunkard the respectable people of Dumfries would not associate with him; that he was ostracised by the community at large. Yet this ‘ostracised man’ was chosen by the best citizens of Dumfries as one of the committee to write to King George, and was elected as a member of the committee to manage the company. This slander was so generally accepted in Carlyle’s time that even Carlyle himself wrote that Burns did not die too soon, as he had lost the respect of his fellow-men, and had lost also the power to write. His first statement is proved to have no true foundation by the record of the Dumfries Volunteer Company, and the second by the fact that Burns wrote the greatest poem ever written by any man to interpret Christ’s highest visions, democracy and brotherhood, ‘A Man’s a Man for a’ That,’ the year before he died, and ‘The Dumfries Volunteers.’ The second year before his death he wrote ‘The Tree of Liberty’ and ‘The Ode to Liberty,’ and the third year before he died he wrote the clarion call to fight in defence of freedom, ‘Scots, wha hae.’ These poems have no equals in any literature of their kind. During the same three years of his life he wrote one hundred and seventeen other fine songs and sent them to Edinburgh for publication, the last one on the ninth day before his death. It should be remembered, too, that Burns had to ride two hundred miles each week in the discharge of his duty to the government; and that after the organisation of the Volunteer Company he had to drill four hours each week, and attend the meetings of the company committee. The minutes of the company show he was never fined for absence.

The last meeting he attended before his fatal illness was called to prepare a letter of gratitude to God for preserving the life of the king when the London bolshevistic mob tried to kill him on his way to the House of Commons. Assisting to prepare this letter to the king was the last public act of Burns.

Had his weaknesses been tenfold what they were, his biographers should have said nothing about them, for in spite of his human weakness he had divine power to reveal to all men Christ’s teachings — democracy and brotherhood, based on the value of the individual soul. He was also the greatest poet of religion, ethics, and love; and he holds a high place among the loving interpreters of Nature.

To relate facts in his life to account for the development of his powers, so that he was able to be so great a revealer of the highest things in the lives of men and women, should have been the work of his biographers.

It is worthy of note that Wordsworth wrote to the publishers of the biography of Burns in regard to the true attitude of a biographer. He objected to recording imputed failings, and expressed indignation at Dr Currie for devoting so much attention to the infirmities of Burns.

Chambers and Douglas were in most respects better than his other early biographers. The Rev. Lauchlan MacLean Watt, of Edinburgh, wrote for the Nation’s Library in 1914 the sanest, truest book yet written about Burns.

CHAPTER II. The Educational Advantages of Burns.

Many people still speak of Burns as an ‘uneducated man.’ Although a farmer, he was in reality a well-educated man. He was not a finished scholar in the accepted sense of the universities, but both in his poetry and in his unusually forceful and polished prose he was superior to most of the university men of his time. He had read many books, the best books that his intelligent father could buy, or that he could borrow from friends or from libraries. In addition to school-books, he names the following among those books read in his youth and young manhood — The Spectator, Pope’s Works, Shakespeare, Works on Agriculture, The Pantheon, Locke’s Essay on the Human Understanding, Stackhouse’s History of the Bible, Justice’s British Gardener, Boyle Lectures, Allan Ramsay’s Works, Doctor Taylor’s Doctrine of Original Sin, A Select Collection of English Songs, Hervey’s Meditations, Thomson’s Works, Shenstone’s Works, The Letters by the Wits of Queen Anne’s Reign, Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, Mackenzie’s The Man of Feeling, Macpherson’s Ossian, two volumes of Pamela, and one novel by Smollett, Ferdinand, Count Fathom. In addition to these he had read some French and some Latin books, guided by one of the greatest teachers of his time, John Murdoch, who was so great that when he established a private school in London his fame spread to France, and some leading young men, notably Talleyrand, came to receive his training and inspiration.

William Burns read regularly at night to his two sons, Robert and Gilbert, and after the reading the three fellow-students discussed the matter that had been read, each from his own individual standpoint. As the boys grew older they read books during their meals, so earnest were they in their desire to become acquainted with the best thought of the world’s leaders, so far as it was available. David Sillar has stated that Robert generally carried a book with him when he was alone, that he might read and think. When Robert settled at Ellisland he aroused an interest among the people of the district, and succeeded in establishing a circulating library.

His father, though a labourer, was supremely desirous that his family should be educated and thoughtful. This desire prompted him to become a farmer, that he might keep his family at home. He was an independent thinker himself, and by example and experience he trained his sons to love reading and to think independently. Robert never thought he was thinking when he let other people’s thoughts run through his mind.

The result of the reading and thinking which their father led Robert and Gilbert to do was most gratifying. The influence on Robert’s mind must be recognised. He became not only a great writer in prose and in poetry, but a great orator as well. He stood modestly, but conscious of his power, and proved his superiority both in conversation and impromptu oratory to the leading university men of his time in Edinburgh. Gilbert, too, became an original thinker and a writer of clear and forceful English. In a long letter to Dr Currie he discussed very profoundly and very independently some deep psychological ideas in excellent language. Few men of his time could have written more thoughtfully or more definitely. As illustrations of Robert’s learning, as well as of his independent thought in relating the books he read to each other and to human life, two instances are worth recording. First, in a letter to Dr Moore, of London, an author of some distinction, who had sent him a copy of one of his books, Burns said, 1790: ‘You were pleased to express a wish for my opinion of your work, which so flattered me that nothing less would serve my overweening fancy than a formal criticism on the book. In fact, I have gravely planned a comparative view of you, Fielding, Richardson, and Smollett in your different qualities and merits as novel writers. This, I own, betrays my ridiculous vanity, and I may probably never bring the business to bear, but I am fond of the spirit young Elihu shows in the Book of Job— “And I said, I will also declare my opinion.”’

To Mrs Dunlop he wrote, 1788: ‘Dryden’s Virgil has delighted me. I do not know whether the critics will agree with me, but the Georgics are to me by far the best of Virgil. It is indeed a species of writing entirely new to me, and has filled my head with a thousand fancies of emulation…. I own I am disappointed in the AEneid. Faultless correctness may please, and does highly please, the letter critic; but to that awful character I have not the most distant pretensions. I do not know whether I do not hazard my pretensions to be a critic of any kind, when I say that I think Virgil, in many instances, a servile copier of Homer. If I had the Odyssey by me, I could parallel many passages where Virgil has evidently copied, but by no means improved, Homer. Nor can I think there is anything of this owing to the translators; for from everything I have seen of Dryden, I think him in genius and fluency of language Pope’s Master.’

But a small percentage of university graduates of his time could have written independent criticisms, wise or otherwise, of Homer and Virgil, or even of English writers, as clearly as Burns did. They could have told what the opinions of other people were in regard to Homer and Virgil; they could have told what they had been told. Burns had been trained to think by his father, and to express his own thoughts about the books he read; they had merely been informed. The advantage in real education was greatly in favour of Burns. Their memories had been stored with opinions of others; his mind had been trained to read carefully, to relate the thoughts of others to life, to decide as to their wisdom, and to think independently himself. His education from books was somewhat limited, but the development of his mind that came from discussions of the value of the matter read was vital, and helped him to relate himself to men, to nature around him, to the universe, and to God.

In schools Burns had not a very extended experience. When six years old he was sent to a small school beside the mill on the Doon at Alloway. His teacher gave up the school soon after Burns began to attend it. Mr Burns secured the co-operation of several of his neighbours, and they engaged a young man named Murdoch to teach their children, agreeing to take him in turn as their guest, and to pay him a small salary. The fact that John Murdoch formed a high estimate of Mr Burns is a proof of the ability and sincerity of the father of the poet.

When Burns was seven years old his father removed to Mount Oliphant farm, but Robert continued to attend the school of Mr Murdoch, about two miles away, in Alloway. The books used were a spelling-book, the New Testament, the Bible, Mason’s Collection of Prose and Verse, and Fisher’s English Grammar.

Mr Murdoch gave up his Alloway school when Burns was nine years old. After that time the teacher of his sons was their father. He taught them arithmetic, and bought them Salmon’s Geographical Grammar, Derham’s Physico-and Astro-Theology, Hay’s Wisdom of God in the Creation, and the History of the Reigns of James I. and Charles I. of England. Robert, when eleven years old, showed a deep interest in the study of grammar and language, and ‘excelled as a critic in substantives, verbs, and participles.’ In his twelfth year he was kindled in his patriotic spirit by the Life of Sir William Wallace. Wallace remained a hero to him throughout his life. In his thirty-fifth year he wrote the grandest call to the defence of liberty ever written, beginning:

Scots, wha hae wi’ Wallace bled.

In his eleventh year, which seemed to be a kindling epoch in his mind, his mother’s brother gave him a collection of Letters by the Wits of Queen Anne’s Reign. He read them over and over again, greatly delighted by both their contents and their literary style. They had a distinct influence in forming his own prose style, as during his twelfth year he conducted an imaginary correspondence of quite an extensive character and in a stately style.

When he was thirteen the greatest kindler of his early powers, John Murdoch, became teacher of English in the Ayr High School. Robert was sent to board with him to study grammar and composition. He received instruction from Murdoch in French and in Latin. He continued the study of French in the evenings at home, as he had obtained a French dictionary and a French grammar.

His formal education, so far as it became an element in the cultivation of his mind and the development of his supreme powers, ended with the few weeks spent with John Murdoch in Ayr. They were epoch weeks to Burns; transforming weeks, because of the increased range of his learning, but made infinitely more richly transforming by the revelation of new visions of life, and by the culture gained by association with a man of rare ability and supreme kindling power, such as John Murdoch undoubtedly possessed. A genius like Burns, living with a great teacher like Murdoch, could in a month get many of the new revelations, the new visions, and the strong impulses that should come into a growing soul as the result of a university course.

Burns, in his seventeenth year, was sent to Kirkoswald to study mensuration and surveying. He intended to become a surveyor. Peggy Thomson lived next door to the school he attended. He met Peggy, loved her madly, and found it impossible to study longer. He afterwards wrote two beautiful poems to her. His school life for a brief period in Kirkoswald had little influence in the development of his power, except for the organisation of a debating society composed of a companion, William Niven, and himself. They met weekly to hold debates, and these debates were greatly enjoyed by Burns. His practice in debating societies afterwards organised by him in Tarbolton and in Mauchline not only developed in him his unusual oratorical ability, but at the same time gave him mental training of vital importance. Impromptu speaking surpasses any other known educational process in developing the human mind. However, Burns could neither study for Hugh Rodger nor debate with William Niven after he fell in love with Peggy Thomson, so, after a sleepless week, he went home.

Some may wonder, when they learn that for a time Burns took more interest in studying Euclid’s Elements of Geometry than in any other department of study in his home under his father’s guidance. When the Rev. Archibald Alison sent him his book, Essays on the Principles of Taste, Burns thanked him, and in his letter said: ‘In short, sir, except Euclid’s Elements of Geometry, which I made a shift to unravel by my father’s fireside in the winter evenings of the first season I held the plough, I never read a book which gave me such a quantum of information, and added so much to my stock of ideas, as your Essays on the Principles of Taste.’

Burns evidently studied geometry at the time his mind was ripe for new development by that special study. All children and young people would be fortunate if they could be guided to the special study capable of arousing their deepest interest, and therefore capable of promoting their highest development, at the special period of their mental growth when that particular study will awaken their deepest and most productive interest.

Robert’s mind appears to have had a splendid power of adaptation to the books and studies which his father secured for his sons. Gilbert says: ‘Robert read all these with an avidity and industry scarcely to be equalled; and no book was so voluminous as to slacken his industry, or so antiquated as to damp his researches.’ Dr Moore wrote to Burns in 1787: ‘I know very well you have a mind capable of attaining knowledge by a shorter process than is commonly used, and I am certain you are capable of making better use of it, when attained, than is generally done.’

This makes it easier to understand why Burns had a mind so well stored with so many kinds of knowledge; and knowledge classified by himself, and related to life, so well that he could use it readily when he required to do so. The university men in Edinburgh marvelled more at the vastness of his stores of different kinds of knowledge, when he met them with dignified calmness, than they did because of his wonderful gifts of poetic genius. Douglas says of Burns in Edinburgh: ‘Burns did not fail to mix by times with the eminent men of letters and philosophy, who then shed lustre on the name of Scotland.’

Lockhart wrote: ‘Burns’s poetry might have procured him access to these circles; but it was the extraordinary resources he displayed in conversation, the strong sagacity of his observations on life and manners, the splendour of his wit, and the glowing energy of his eloquence, that made him the serious object of admiration among these practised masters of the arts of talk. Even the stateliest of these philosophers had enough to do to maintain the attitude of equality when brought into contact with Burns’s gigantic understanding; and every one of them whose impressions on the subject have been recorded agrees in pronouncing his conversation to have been the most remarkable thing about him.’

Speaking of this, Chambers properly says: ‘We are thus left to understand that the best of Burns has not been, and was not of a nature to be, transmitted to posterity.’ Why was Burns, though a ploughman, able to meet a galaxy of leaders in different spheres of learning, and culture, and philosophy, and outshine any of them in his own special department? The answer is simple. He had two great teachers to kindle him and guide him in the development of his remarkable natural powers: his father, William Burns, and his teacher and friend, John Murdoch.

His father made it certain that he would possess a wide range of knowledge of the best available books on religious, ethical, and philosophical subjects — philosophy of science and philosophy of the mind; and, better than that, he trained him definitely by nightly practice to digest, and expound, and relate, and even dare to disbelieve, the opinions expressed in the books he read. In nightly discussions with his father and Gilbert his mind became keen and broad, and he became self-reliant. He had not merely stored knowledge in his mind, he had wrought the knowledge into his being, as an element of his growing power. Like great players of chess who sometimes meet several opposing players of eminence at the same time and vanquish them all at one period of play, Burns could meet the leaders of many departments of progress, culture, and philosophy at the same time, and stand calm and serene in glory with each leader on the crest of his own special mountain of knowledge.

From John Murdoch he received the inspiration of a vital comradeship, a fine training in English language — grammar, and a good introduction to literature — and visions of higher relationships to his fellow-men and to God.

However, great as Murdoch was as a kindler and a teacher, the education of Robert Burns was mainly due to his remarkable father. Alexander Smith, in his memoir of Burns, which Douglas claimed to be ‘the finest biography of its extent ever written,’ speaking of William Burns, says: ‘In his whole mental build and training he was superior to the people by whom he was surrounded. He had forefathers he could look back to; he had family traditions which he kept sacred. Hard-headed, industrious, religious, somewhat austere, he ruled his house with a despotism which affection and respect on the part of the ruled made light and easy. To the blood of the Burnses a love of knowledge was native, as valour in the old times was native to the blood of the Douglases.’

John Murdoch wrote of William Burns: ‘Although I cannot do justice to the character of this worthy man, yet you will perceive from what I have written what kind of person had the principal part in the education of the poet. He spoke the English language with more propriety, both with respect to diction and pronunciation, than any man I ever knew with no greater advantages; this had a very good effect on the boys, who talk and reason like men much sooner than their neighbours.’

These two quotations help us to understand William Burns as a great teacher of his sons, and his daughters, too, although he did not deem it quite so important to educate his daughters as his sons. It is perfectly clear that the paternal despotism spoken of by Mr Smith, which indeed was supposed to be necessary one hundred and fifty years ago, was not the reason why his boys so early talked and reasoned like men. William Burns was the elderly friend of his sons, not a despot, when he trained them to love reading, and much better to speak freely their individual opinions about what they read. This naturally led his sons to speak like men early and fearlessly. Despotism on the part of the father would have had directly the opposite effect.

Gilbert Burns sums up his father’s estimate of early education and good training when he says: ‘My father laboured hard, and lived with the most rigid economy, that he might be able to keep his children at home, thereby having an opportunity of watching the progress of our young minds and forming in them early habits of piety and virtue; and from this motive alone did he engage in farming, the source of all his difficulties and distresses.’

Robert, after his father’s death, wrote to his cousin, and said his father was ‘the best of friends, and the ablest of instructors.’

In the sketch of his life sent to Dr Moore, of London, he wrote: ‘My father, after many years of wanderings and sojournings, picked up a pretty large quantity of observation and experience, to which I am indebted for most of my pretensions to wisdom.’

An important element in the education of Burns was his love of Nature. His mind was specially susceptible to development by Nature in any of its forms of beauty or of majesty. A friend who was his guide through the grounds of Athole House, when he was making his tour through the Highlands, in a letter to Mr Alex. Cunningham, wrote: ‘I had often, like others, experienced the pleasures which arise from the sublime or elegant landscape, but I never saw those feelings so intense as in Burns.’

Burns was born and spent his early life and young manhood in a district whose beauty has few equals anywhere. Its rivers — Ayr, Doon, Afton, Lugar, Fail, and Cessnock; all, except Afton, within easy walking distance of his homes in Ayrshire — with their beautifully wooded banks, were, in a very definite way, transforming agencies in the growth of his mind, and therefore most important elements in his highest education. The ‘winding Nith,’ which flowed within a few yards of the home he built on Ellisland farm, around the promontory on which stand the ruins of Lincluden Abbey, and on through Dumfries, continued during the last few years of his life the educational work of the rivers of his native Ayrshire.

The mind of Burns was brought into unity with spiritual ideals through the influence of Nature more productively than by any other agency. He walked in the gloaming, according to his own statement, by the riverside or in woodland paths when he was composing his poems. While residing in Dumfries he had a favourite walk up the Nith to Lincluden Abbey, amid whose ruins he sat in the gloaming, and on moonlight nights often till midnight, recording the visions that came to him in that sacred environment of wooded river and linn (waterfall).

There was much similarity between the most vital educational development of Burns and of Mrs Browning. In Aurora Leigh, the record of her own growth, she describes her true education, although not her actual life’s history. Aurora loses her mother in her fifth year, and lives with her father for nine great years near Florence; she says:

So nine full years our days were hid with God

Among His mountains. I was just thirteen,

Still growing like a plant from unseen roots

In tongue-tied springs; and suddenly awoke

To full life, and life’s needs and agonies,

With an intense, strong, struggling heart beside

A stone-dead father. Life struck sharp on death

Makes awful lightning.

Her years till thirteen are spent mainly in her father’s fine library reading what she most loved of the treasuries of the world. Her own statement of her father’s educational guidance is:

My father taught me what he had learnt the best

Before he died, and left me — grief and love;

And seeing we had books among the hills,

Strong words of counselling souls, confederate

With vocal pines and waters, out of books

He taught me all the ignorance of men,

And how God laughs in heaven when any man

Says, ‘Here I’m learned; this I understand;

In that I’m never caught at fault or doubt.’

Like Burns she reads good books with joyous interest; like Burns she has a father deeply interested in her education who teaches her vital things; and like Burns she loves to learn from the ‘vocal pines and waters,’ and finds her richest revelations for her mind ‘with God among His mountains.’

The hills of Ayrshire, the rivers, and the river-glens, whose sides are covered with beautiful trees, were to Burns kindlers of high ideals, and revealers of God.

CHAPTER III. The Characteristics of Burns.

He was a truly independent democrat. The love of liberty was the basic element of his character. His fundamental philosophy he expressed in the unanswered and unanswerable questions:

Why should ae man better fare,

And a’ men brothers?

Epistle to Dr Blacklock.

If I’m designed yon lordling’s slave,

By Nature’s law designed,

Why was an independent wish

E’er planted in my mind?

Man was Made to Mourn.

To the Right Hon. John Francis Erskine he wrote: ‘The partiality of my countrymen has brought me forward as a man of genius, and has given me a character to support. In the Poet I have avowed manly and independent sentiments, which I trust will be found in the Man.’

Referring to the fact that his father’s family rented land from the ‘famous, noble Keiths,’ and had the honour of sharing their fate — their estates were forfeited because they took part in the rebellion of 1715 — he says: ‘Those who dare welcome Ruin and shake hands with Infamy, for what they believe sincerely to be the cause of their God and their King, are — as Mark Antony in Shakespeare says of Brutus and Cassius— “Honourable men.”’

Though his father was not born in 1715, he undoubtedly got from his family the principles of independence and the love of liberty which he afterwards taught to his sons, and which Robert propagated with so much zeal.

In a letter to Mrs Dunlop he wrote: ‘Light be the turf upon his breast who taught, “Reverence thyself.”’

To Lord Glencairn, after expressing his gratitude, he said: ‘My gratitude is not selfish design — that I disdain; it is not dodging after the heel of greatness — that is an offering you disdain. It is a feeling of the same kind with my devotion.’

In many of his letters he expresses the same sentiments. In his Epistle to his young friend, Andrew Aiken, he advises him, among other things,

To gather gear by every wile

That’s justified by honor;

Not for to hide it in a hedge,

Nor for a train attendant;

But for the glorious privilege

Of being independent.

In a letter to Mr William Dunbar, dealing with his consciousness of his responsibility for his children, he wrote, 1790: ‘I know the value of independence; and since I cannot give my sons an independent fortune, I shall give them an independent line of life.’

Writing to Mrs Dunlop about his son — her god-son — Burns said: ‘I am myself delighted with the manly swell of his little chest, and a certain miniature dignity in the carriage of the head, and the glance of his fine black eye, which promise the undaunted gallantry of an independent mind.’

In ‘A Man’s a Man for a’ That’ he says:

Ye see yon birkie, ca’d ‘a lord,’

Wha struts, and stares, and a’ that;

Tho’ hundreds worship at his word,

He’s but a coof for a’ that. blockhead

For a’ that, and a’ that,

His ribband, star, and a’ that,

The man o’ independent mind

He looks and laughs at a’ that.

In the same great poem he crystallises a fundamental truth in the immortal couplet:

The rank is but the guinea stamp,

The man’s the gowd for a’ that. gold

To Mrs Dunlop he wrote in 1787: ‘I trust I have too much pride for servility, and too little prudence for selfishness.’

To Mrs M’Lehose he wrote in 1788: ‘The dignifying and dignified consciousness of an honest man, and the well-grounded trust in approving heaven, are two most substantial foundations of happiness.’

To Mrs Dunlop he wrote in 1788: ‘Two of my adored household gods are independence of spirit and integrity of soul.’

To Mrs Graham he wrote in 1791: ‘May my failings ever be those of a generous heart and an independent mind.’

To John Francis Erskine he wrote in 1793: ‘My independent British mind oppression might bend, but could not subdue.’

In the ‘Vision’ the message he says he received from Coila, the genius of Kyle, the part of Ayrshire in which he was born, was:

Preserve the dignity of Man, with soul erect.

Burns has been criticised for meddling with what his critics called politics. The highest messages Christ gave to the world were the value of the individual soul, and brotherhood based on the unity of developed individual souls. His highest messages were understood by Burns more clearly than by any one else during his time, and Burns was too great a man to be untrue to his greatest visions. His poems are still among the best interpretations of Christ’s ideals of democracy and brotherhood.

The supreme aim of Burns was to secure for all men and women freedom from the unnatural restrictions of class or custom, so that each individual might have equal opportunity for the development of his highest element of power, his individuality, or self-hood — really the image of God in each. God gave him the vision of the ideal: ‘Why should ae man better fare, and a’ men brothers?’ and he tried to reveal the great vision to the world to kindle the hearts of men.

Burns was a devoted son, and a loving, considerate, respectful, and generous brother. After his father died, Robert wrote to his cousin: ‘On the 13th current I lost the best of fathers. Though, to be sure, we have had long warning of the impending stroke, still the feelings of nature claim their part, and I cannot recollect the tender endearments and paternal lessons of the best of friends and the ablest of instructors without feeling what, perhaps, the calmer dictates of reason would partly condemn.

‘I hope my father’s friends in your country will not let their connection in this place die with him. For my part, I shall ever with pleasure — with pride — acknowledge my connection with those who were allied by the ties of blood and friendship to a man whose memory I shall ever honour and revere.’

On the stone above his father’s grave in Alloway Kirkyard are engraved the words Burns wrote as his father’s epitaph:

O ye, whose cheek the tear of pity stains,

Draw near with pious reverence and attend!

Here lies the loving husband’s dear remains,

The tender father, and the gen’rous friend;

The pitying heart that felt for human woe;

The dauntless heart that feared no human pride;

The friend of man — to vice alone a foe;

For ev’n his failings leaned to virtue’s side.

John Murdoch warmly approved of this epitaph of his former pupil and friend Robert. He wrote: ‘I have often wished, for the good of mankind, that it were as customary to honour and perpetuate the memory of those who excel in moral rectitude, as it is to extol what are called heroic actions.’

When Burns found that the Edinburgh edition of his poems had brought him about five hundred pounds, he loaned Gilbert one hundred and fifty pounds to assist him to get out of debt, in order that his mother and sisters might be placed in a position of security and greater happiness. In a letter to Robert Graham of Fintry, explaining the circumstances that led him to accept the position of an exciseman, he first explains that Ellisland farm, which he rented, was in the last stage of worn-out poverty when he got possession of it, and that it would take some time before it would pay the rent. Then he says: ‘I might have had cash to supply the deficiencies of these hungry years; but I have a younger brother and three sisters on a farm in Ayrshire, and it took all my surplus over what I thought necessary for my farming capital to save not only the comfort, but the very existence, of that fireside circle from impending destruction.’

He helped with sympathy, advice, and material support a younger brother who lived in England. His true attitude towards his own wife and family is shown in his ‘Epistle to Dr Blacklock’:

To make a happy fireside clime

For weans and wife,

Is the true pathos and sublime

Of human life.

The greatest dread of his later years was that he might not be able to provide for his family in case of his death.

Burns was an upright, honest man. To the mother of the Earl of Glencairn he wrote: ‘I would much rather have it said that my profession borrowed credit from me, than that I borrowed credit from my profession.’

To James Hamilton, of Glasgow, he wrote: ‘Among some distressful emergencies that I have experienced in life, I have ever laid it down as my foundation of comfort — that he who has lived the life of an honest man has by no means lived in vain.’

To Sir John Whitefoord he wrote in 1787: ‘Reverence to God and integrity to my fellow-creatures I hope I shall ever preserve.’

In a letter to John M’Murdo in 1793 he wrote: ‘To no man, whatever his station in life, have I ever paid a compliment at the expense of truth.’

In ‘Lines written in Friar’s Carse’ he wrote:

Keep the name of Man in mind,

And dishonour not your kind.

To Robert Ainslie he wrote: ‘It is much to be a great character as a lawyer, but beyond comparison more to be a great character as a man.’

To Andrew Aiken, in his ‘Epistle to a Young Friend,’ he wrote:

Where you feel your honour grip,

Let that aye be your border.

In ‘A Man’s a Man for a’ That’ he expresses his faith in righteousness as a fundamental element in character, where he says:

The honest man, tho’ e’er sae poor,

Is king o’ men for a’ that.

Burns had a sympathetic heart that overflowed with kindness for his fellow-men, and even for animals, domestic and wild. In a letter to the Rev. G. H. Baird in 1791 he said: ‘I am fain to do any good that occurs in my very limited power to a fellow-creature, just for the selfish purpose of clearing a little the vista of retrospection.’

It was the big heart of Burns that directed the writing of the first part of that sentence, and his modesty that led to the expression of the second part. The joy of remembering a good deed was never his chief reason for doing it. In a ‘Tragic Fragment’ he wrote:

With sincere though unavailing sighs

I view the helpless children of distress.

A number of stories have been preserved to prove that while Burns was strict and stern in dealing with smugglers, and others who made a practice of breaking the law by illegally selling strong drink without licence, he was tenderly kind and protective to poor women who had little stores of refreshments to sell to their friends on fair and market days.

Professor Gillespie related that he overheard Burns say to a poor woman of Thornhill one fair-day as she stood at her door: ‘Kate, are you mad? Don’t you know that the Supervisor and I will be in upon you in the course of forty minutes? Good-bye t’ye at present.’

His friendly hint saved a poor widow from a heavy fine of several pounds, while the annual loss to the revenue would be only a few shillings.

He was ordered to look into the case of another old woman, suspected of selling home-brewed ale without licence. When she knew his errand she said: ‘Mercy on us! are ye an exciseman? God help me, man! Ye’ll surely no inform on a puir auld body like me, as I hae nae other means o’ leevin’ than sellin’ my drap o’ home-brewed to decent folk that come to Holywood Kirk.’

Burns patted her on the shoulder and said: ‘Janet, Janet, sin awa’, and I’ll protect ye.’

In ‘A Winter Night’ Burns reveals a deep and genuine sympathy with the outlying cattle, the poor sheep hiding from the storm, the wee helpless birds, and even for the fox and the wolf; and mourns because the pitiless tempest beats on them.

Carlyle says of ‘A Winter Night’ that ‘it is worth seven homilies on mercy, for it is the voice of Mercy herself. Burns indeed lives in sympathy; his soul rushes into all the realms of being; nothing that has existence can be indifferent to him.’

The auld farmer’s ‘New Year Morning Salutation to his Auld Mare, Maggie,’ reveals a profound and affectionate sympathy more tender than the pity he felt for the animals and birds that suffered from the winter storm. It is based on long years of friendly association in co-operative achievement. From the New Year’s wish at the beginning, to the end, where he assures her that she is no less deserving now than she was

That day ye pranced wi’ muckle pride

When ye bure hame my bonnie bride;

And sweet and gracefu’ she did ride

Wi’ maiden air!

and tells her that he has a heapet feed of oats laid by for her, and will also tether her on a reserved ridge of fine pasture, where she may have plenty to eat and a comfortable place on which to rest; each verse is full of pleasant memories.

His kindly sympathy is as appreciative as if she had been a human being instead of a mare.

‘Poor Mailie’s Elegy’ is a natural expression of sorrow in the heart — the great, loving heart of Burns — for the death of the pet lamb. He says:

He’s lost a friend and neighbour dear

In Mailie dead.

Thro’ a’ the toun she trotted by him;

A lang half-mile she could descry him;

Wi’ kindly bleat, when she did spy him,

She ran wi’ speed;

A friend mair faithfu’ ne’er cam nigh him,

Than Mailie dead.

So in the pathos and emotion shown for the mouse whose home his plough destroyed at the approach of winter; for the wounded hare that limped past him; for the starving thrush with which he offered to share his last crust; and for the scared water-fowl that flew from him, when he regretted that they had reason to do so on account of man’s treatment of them, he gives ample evidence of the warmth of the glow of his sympathy.

One of the most prominent characteristics of Burns was loyalty to his native land. One of his earliest dreams, when he was a boy, was a hope that some day he might be able to do something that would bring honour to Scotland. In his Epistle to Mrs Scott of Wauchope-House he says:

I mind it weel, in early date,

When I was beardless, young, and blate, bashful

******

When first amang the yellow corn

A man I reckoned was,

******

E’en then a wish (I mind its power),

A wish that to my latest hour

Shall strongly heave my breast;

That I for poor auld Scotland’s sake

Some usefu’ plan or book could make,

Or sing a sang at least.

The rough burr-thistle, spreading wide

Amang the bearded bear, barley

I turned the weeder-clips aside

And spared the symbol dear:

No nation, no station,

My envy e’er could raise;

A Scot still, but blot still, without

I knew nae higher praise.

The boy who had such a reverent feeling in his heart for the thistle, the symbol of his native land, that he did not like to cut it, continued throughout his life to have a reverence for the land itself, and tried to honour it in every possible way.

He did make the book and sing the songs that brought more lasting glory to Scotland than any other work done by any other man or combination of men in his time.

He wrote more than two hundred and fifty love-songs, and he refused to accept a shilling for them, though he needed money very badly. Many of his love-songs were the direct out-pouring of his heart, the overflow of his love for Nellie Kirkpatrick and Peggy Thomson, the girl lovers of his boyhood; and for Alison Begbie, Jean Armour, Mary Campbell, and Mrs M’Lehose; but most of his love-songs were ‘fictitious,’ as he said they were in the inscription on the copy of his works presented to Jean Lorimer, the Chloris of his Ellisland and Dumfries period. They were written mainly to provide pure language and thought for fine melodies of Scotland composed long before his time; but the words of the songs that were sung to them were indelicate. He wrote his unequalled songs for Scotland’s sake, and by doing so he gave to Scotland the gift of the sweetest love-songs ever written. But for these sacred songs his patriotic spirit resented the idea of acceptance of material reward. No higher revelation of genuine patriotism was ever shown than this.

Burns was a sensitive and very shy man. He is commonly supposed to have been just the opposite. He was brought up in a home at Mount Oliphant where he rarely associated with other people. Months sometimes passed without an evening spent in any other way than in reading and discussions of the matter read by his father, Gilbert, and himself; so in boyhood and early youth he was reserved. When he began to go out among other young men his comparatively developed mind, his very unusual stores of knowledge — not merely stored, but classified and related — and his extraordinary power of eloquence made him at once a leader and a favourite, so he soon overcame his reserve and shyness with young men. It was not so with young women. He had been trained to wait for introductions to them. He was walking past Jean Armour, when she was at the town pump at Mauchline getting water to sprinkle the clothes on the bleaching-green, without speaking to her, and she spoke to him, recalling a remark she heard him make at the annual dance on the evening of the fair. He was twenty-five, and she was eighteen. He would have passed close to her in respectful silence if she had not spoken.

Sir Walter Scott wrote: ‘I was told, but did not observe it, that his address to females was extremely deferential.’

Scott did not mean to suggest a doubt about what he was told, but just to intimate that he had not had opportunity to observe the fact. Scott met Burns only once in company, and Scott was a boy at the time.

He dearly and reverently loved Alison Begbie when he was twenty-one. She was the first woman whom he asked to become his wife. She was a servant in a farm-house on the banks of Cessnock Water, in the neighbourhood of Lochlea farm. He was twenty-two when he asked her to marry him, and he was so shy, even at that age, that he could not propose when he was with her. She did not accept his offer. Few women of his acquaintance would have refused to accept his written proposal. Probably none of them — not even Alison Begbie — would have refused him if he had been able to overcome his shyness, and had proposed in person instead of by letter.

He wrote five letters to Alison Begbie, and definitely asked her to marry him in the fourth letter. In the first he said: ‘I am a stranger in these matters, as I assure you that you are the first woman to whom I ever made such a declaration, so I declare I am at a loss how to proceed. I have more than once come into your company with a resolution to say what I have just now told you; but my resolution always failed me, and even now my heart trembles for the consequence of what I have said.’

The following copies of the letter containing his proposal (the fourth), and of his reply to her refusal, if read carefully, should reveal several admirable characteristics of Burns.

‘Lochlea, 1781.

‘My Dear E., — I have often thought it a peculiarly unlucky circumstance in love that, though in every other situation in life, telling the truth is not only the safest, but actually by far the easiest way of proceeding, a Lover is never under greater difficulty in acting, or more puzzled for expression, than when his passion is sincere, and his intentions are honourable. I do not think that it is very difficult for a person of ordinary capacity to talk of love and fondness which are not felt, and to make vows of constancy and fidelity which are never intended to be performed, if he be villain enough to practise such detestable conduct; but to a man whose heart glows with the principles of integrity and truth, and who sincerely loves a woman of amiable person, uncommon refinement of sentiment, and purity of manners — to such a one in such circumstances I can assure you, my Dear, from my own feelings at this present moment, Courtship is a task indeed.

There is such a number of foreboding fears, and distrustful anxieties crowd into my mind when I am in your company, or when I sit down to write to you, that what to speak or what to write I am altogether at a loss.

‘There is one rule which I have hitherto practised, and which I shall invariably keep with you, and that is, honestly to tell you the plain truth. There is something so mean and unmanly in the arts of dissimulation and falsehood, that I am surprised they can be used by any one in so noble, so generous a passion as Virtuous Love. No, my dear E., I shall never endeavour to gain your favour by such detestable practices. If you will be so good and so generous as to admit me for your partner, your companion, your bosom friend through life, there is nothing on this side of eternity shall give me greater transport; but I shall never think of purchasing your hand by any arts unworthy of a man, and, I will add, of a Christian. There is one thing, my Dear, which I earnestly request of you, and it is this: that you would soon either put an end to my hopes by a peremptory refusal, or cure me of my fears by a generous consent.

‘It would oblige me much if you would send me a line or two when convenient. I shall only add further, that if a behaviour regulated (though perhaps but very imperfectly) by the rules of Honour and Virtue, if a heart devoted to love and esteem you, and an earnest endeavour to promote your happiness; if these are qualities you would wish in a friend, in a husband, I hope you shall ever find them in your real friend and sincere lover.’

After her refusal he wrote:

‘Lochlea, 1781.

‘I ought in good manners to have acknowledged the receipt of your letter before this time, but my heart was so shocked with the contents of it, that I can scarcely yet collect my thoughts so as to write to you on the subject. I will not attempt to describe what I felt on receiving your letter. I read it over and over, again and again, and though it was in the politest language of refusal, still it was peremptory; you “were very sorry you could not make me a return, but you wish me — what without you I can never obtain — you wish me all kinds of happiness.” It would be weak and unmanly to say that without you I never can be happy; but sure I am, that sharing life with you would have given it a relish that, wanting you, I can never taste.

‘Your uncommon personal advantages, and your superior good sense, do not so much strike me; these possibly in a few instances may be met with in others; but that amiable goodness, that tender, feminine softness, that endearing sweetness of disposition, with all the charming offspring of a warm, feeling heart — these I never again expect to meet with in such a degree in this world. All these charming qualities, heightened by an education much beyond anything I have ever met with in any woman I ever dared to approach, have made an impression on my heart that I do not think the world can ever efface. My imagination had fondly flattered itself with a wish — I dare not say it ever reached a hope — that possibly I might one day call you mine. I had formed the most delightful images, and my fancy fondly brooded over them; but now I am wretched for the loss of what I really had no right to expect. I must now think no more of you as a mistress, still I presume to ask to be admitted as a friend. As such I wish to be allowed to wait on you, and as I expect to remove in a few days a little farther off, and you, I suppose, will perhaps soon leave this place, I wish to see you or hear from you soon; and if an expression should perhaps escape me rather too warm for friendship, I hope you will pardon it in, my dear Miss –- (pardon me the dear expression for once),

‘R. B.’

Those who say that these letters ‘have an air of taskwork and constraint about them’ should remember that Burns formed the style of his letter-writing when but a boy from a book containing the letters of leaders of Queen Anne’s time, which was given to him by his uncle. His own letters on all subjects are written in a dignified style. It is worth noting that Motherwell, who criticised the style of the letters, says of them: ‘They are, in fact, the only sensible love-letters we have ever seen.’

Though naturally a very shy man, he grew to be happier as his powers developed. In his teens and young manhood he had fits bordering on despondency. But he passed through them and became more buoyant in spirit, and, though poor, was contented.

In ‘My Nannie O’ he wrote:

Come weel, come woe, I care na by,

I’ll tak what Heaven will sen’ me.

In ‘It is na, Jean, thy Bonnie Face,’ he said:

Content am I if Heaven shall give

But happiness to thee.

This shows that consideration for others was one of his sources of happiness.

In his ‘Epistle to James Smith’ he wrote:

Truce with peevish, poor complaining!

Is Fortune’s fickle Luna waning?

E’en let her gang!

Beneath what light she has remaining

Let’s sing our sang.

Dr John M’Kenzie of Mauchline, in 1810, thirteen years after the death of Burns, described a visit made to see his father when he was ill. In it he says: ‘Gilbert, in the first interview I had with him at Lochlea, was frank, modest, well-informed, and communicative. The poet seemed distant, suspicious, and without any wish to interest or please. He kept himself very silent in a dark corner of the room; and before he took any part in the conversation, I frequently detected him scrutinising me during my conversation with his father and brother.

‘But afterwards, when the conversation, which was on a medical subject, had taken the turn he wished, he began to engage in it, displaying a dexterity of reasoning, an ingenuity of reflection, and a familiarity with topics apparently beyond his reach, by which his visitor was no less gratified than astonished.’

Burns lived next door to Dr M’Kenzie after he was married the second time to Jean Armour. They were great friends. Burns wrote a masonic poem to him, and called him ‘Common-sense’ in ‘The Holy Fair.’

In the letter from which the above quotation is made, Dr M’Kenzie says Robert took his characteristics mainly from his mother, and that Gilbert resembled his father.

Burns looked like his mother, and inherited his temperamental characteristics mainly from her.

Burns had a definitely religious tendency as one of his strong characteristics when he was a child. In the sketch of his life that he wrote to Dr Moore, of London, when he was twenty-eight years old, he says that as a boy he possessed ‘an enthusiastic idiot-piety. I say idiot-piety because I was then a child.’

He wrote several religious poems while living on Lochlea farm and on Mossgiel farm. ‘The Cotter’s Saturday Night’ was written at Mossgiel.

Throughout his life his religious tendency was one of his characteristics. This will be considered more fully in the chapter on ‘Burns’s Great Work for Religion.’

Burns was the warm, personal friend of the best people in every district in or near which he lived. He must have been a good man who could count among his friends such men and women as the following: Lord Glencairn, Mrs Dunlop, the Earl of Eglintoun, Dr Moore, Dr M’Kenzie, Gavin Hamilton, Hon. Henry Erskine, the Duchess of Gordon, Right Rev. Bishop Geddes, Robert Graham of Fintry, Robert Riddell, Robert Aiken, the Earl of Buchan, Prof. Dugald Stewart, Dr Candlish, Sir John Whitefoord, John Murdoch, Dr Blacklock, Dr Hugh Blair, Alex. Cunningham, Rev. Archibald Alison, Sir John Sinclair, Rev. John M’Math, and the best ministers of the ‘New Licht,’ or progressive class; the leading professors in Edinburgh University, and the leading schoolmasters in his neighbourhood. In fact, he was loved and respected by leaders of all classes except the ‘Auld Licht’ preachers. He lives on and becomes more popular as he becomes better known.

His one characteristic that would most fully represent him and his work for God and humanity is his propelling tendency to be a reformer of conditions. He accepted no existing conditions as good enough. He saw quickly and clearly the defects of conditions as they existed, and he never hesitated to attack any evil that he could help to overthrow. He saw that individual freedom and pure religion were vital and essential elements of human progress and happiness. He saw with unerring vision the lack of freedom and of vital religion in the lives of the people; so to make all men free, to give all children equal opportunity to develop the best in their souls, and to purify religion from superstition, hypocrisy, bigotry, and kindred evils that were blighting it, became his highest purposes.

What was the character of Burns in the estimation of the leading people of his own time? On replying to a request that he would use his influence in favour of Burns for an appointment Sir John Whitefoord wrote: ‘Your character as a man, as well as a poet, entitles you, I think, to the assistance of every inhabitant of Ayrshire.’

Sir John owned the Ballochmyle estate near Mauchline, and was one of the leading country gentlemen of Ayrshire in his time.

Mr Archibald Prentice, editor of the Manchester Times, was the son of a prominent man who lived about half-way between Mauchline and Edinburgh, at Covington, in Lanarkshire. Mr Prentice, senior, was a great admirer of Burns, as were leaders everywhere. Mr Archibald Prentice, writing about his father’s affectionate respect for Burns, said; ‘My father, though a strictly moral and religious man himself, always maintained that the virtues of the poet greatly predominated over his faults. I once heard him exclaim with hot wrath, when somebody was quoting from an apologist, “What! do they apologise for him! One half of his good, and all his bad divided among a score of them, would make them a’ better men!”

‘In the year 1809 I resided for a short time in Ayrshire, in the hospitable house of my father’s friend Reid, and surveyed with a strong interest such visitors as had known Burns. I soon learned how to anticipate their representations of his character. The men of strong minds and strong feelings were invariable in their expressions of admiration; but the prosy, consequential bodies all disliked him as exceedingly dictatorial. The men whose religion was based on intellect and high moral sentiment all thought well of him; but the mere professors [of religion] “with their three-mile prayers and half-mile graces” denounced him as worse than an infidel.’

The progress of religious reformers has always been a thorny one. The Master, Christ Himself, was crucified by the ‘Auld Lichts’ of His time, and they stoned Stephen to death. So, through the centuries unprogressive theologians have persecuted and often murdered the religious reformers, who saw the evils in theology, and wished to remove them from the creeds that blighted men’s souls. They burned Latimer in England; and Luther in Germany was saved by the action of his friends by shutting him in Wartburg Castle for protection. Religious reformers in the time of Burns were not burned or stoned to death, but they were persecuted and prosecuted before the Church Courts by men who did not approve of their higher visions of truth. Burns himself was regarded as unorthodox, but his creed is much more in harmony with the religious thought of to-day than it was with the creed of the ‘Auld Licht’ preachers. One of the marvels of human development through the ages has been that the bigoted theologians of each succeeding century resented the attempts of men with clearer vision to reform their creeds.

Men who truly believe in God cannot believe that any creed made by men can be infallible; they should know that from generation to generation humanity consciously grows towards the Divine, and that as they climb they see in the clearer spiritual air new visions of higher meaning in regard to life and to vital religion, revealing to each man new conceptions of his duty to God and to his fellow-men.

Lovers of Burns reverence his memory because he was so great and so wise a reformer, and did so much to make men truly free, and to make religion a more vitally uplifting agency in the hearts of men.

CHAPTER IV. Burns was a Religious Man.

‘Burns a religious man!’ scoffers exclaim. ‘He was a drunkard.’ Burns was a moderate drinker compared with most of the ministers of his time. If drinking whisky was a disqualification for religious character in the time of Burns, a large proportion of the ministers of his time were disqualified. Burns should not, in all fairness, be judged by the standards of our time. More than fifty years after Burns died it was customary for even Methodist ministers in Canada, when visiting the members of their churches, to accept a little whisky punch as an evidence of good fellowship and comradeship. This custom persisted in Scotland and England for more than a century after Burns died, and in many places it exists still. In a letter to Mr William Cruickshank in 1788 he said: ‘I have fought my way severely through the savage hospitality of this country — the object of all hosts being to send every guest to bed drunk if they can.’

Burns was not speaking of hotel-keepers, but of homes of people of high respectability. He wrote in 1793: ‘Taverns I have totally abandoned, but it is the private parties in the family way among the hard-drinking gentlemen of the country that do me the mischief.’

He did occasionally go to the Globe Tavern in Dumfries after 1793, when the guest of visitors who came to Dumfries solely for the purpose of meeting him and having the honour of entertaining him.

In his short life of Burns, Alexander Smith says: ‘If he drank hard, it was in an age when hard drinking was fashionable. If he sinned in this respect, he sinned in company with English Prime Ministers, Scotch Lords of Session, grave dignitaries of the Church in both countries, and thousands of ordinary blockheads who went to their graves in the odour of sanctity, and whose epitaphs are a catalogue of all the virtues.’

Burns spoke with all sincerity, in a letter to his friend Samuel Clark of Dumfries, when he wrote: ‘Some of our folks about the Excise office, Edinburgh, had, and perhaps still have, conceived a prejudice against me as being a drunken, dissipated character. I might be all this, you know, and yet be an honest fellow; but you know that I am an honest fellow, and am nothing of this.’ His superiors in the Excise department gave him a high record for accuracy and honesty in his work.

Other objectors say: ‘He could not be religious, because he attacked religion.’ This statement is not correct. He attacked the evils that in his time robbed religion of its vital power, but never religion. Emerson says: ‘Not Luther, not Latimer, struck stronger blows against false theology than did the poet Burns.’

To Clarinda, Burns wrote: ‘I hate the superstition of a fanatic, but I love the religion of a man.’

In his poem ‘The Tree of Liberty’ he lays the blame of the terrible degradation of the French peasantry on

Superstition’s wicked brood.

In his ‘Epistle to John Goudie’ he speaks of

Poor gapin’, glowrin’ superstition.

He attacked superstition, but not religion.

He attacked hypocrisy, and true men are grateful to him because he did so.

In his ‘Epistle to Rev. John M’Math,’ the ‘New Licht’ minister of Tarbolton, Burns says:

God knows I’m not the thing I should be,

Nor am I ev’n the thing I could be;

But twenty times I rather would be

An atheist clean,

Than under gospel colours hid be

Just for a screen.

He ridiculed hypocrisy, and we are grateful to him for doing so. Nothing more contemptible than a religious hypocrite can be made of a being created in the image of God. Hypocrisy is not religion.

He attacked bigotry, one of the most savage monsters that ever tried to block the way of Christ’s highest teaching, the brotherhood of man. No phenomenal religious absurdity is more incomprehensible than the idea that Christianity can be promoted by the multiplication of religious denominations; especially when, as in the time of Burns, and long after his time, leaders of so-called Christian denominations refused to have fellowship with each other, or to unite on a common platform in working for the promotion of Christian ideals. How trivial the formalisms of theologians seem that kept men apart whom Christ desired to become co-operative and loving brothers, working harmoniously together for the achievement of the great visions he revealed!

He wrote to Clarinda, 1788: ‘I hate the very idea of a controversial divinity; and I firmly believe that every upright, honest man, of whatever sect, will be accepted of the Deity.’

In his ‘Epistle to John Goudie’ Burns calls bigotry

Sour bigotry on its last legs.

He wrote this in 1785, and much more than a century later bigotry is still on its legs, but it is tottering to its final overthrow. Burns attacked bigotry, but not religion.

He attacked the doctrine of predestination, as taught in his time, a most soul-dwarfing doctrine, calculated to rob humanity of motives to stimulate it to greater and nobler efforts to achieve for God. He makes Holy Willie say he deserved damnation five thousand years before he was born. Few people now regard predestination as an element in vital religion.

He attacked one of the most horribly blasphemous doctrines ever preached, but preached in the time of Burns, and long after:

That God sends ane to heaven and ten to hell

For His ain glory.

He puts this impious doctrine into the mouth of Holy Willie. More than half a century after the time of Burns, preachers in the presence of mothers of their dead babies taught that the babes could not go to heaven because they were too young to be ‘believers in Christ;’ and being unable to account for their statements logically, would say, ‘God did these things for His own glory.’ Burns attacked such horrible teaching, but in doing so he was not attacking religion.

Burns did not believe in the use of the fear of hell as a means of promoting true religion. There is no soul-kindling power in fear. Fear is one of the most powerful agencies of evil in preventing the conscious development of the soul, and of the faith that each soul should have in God as the source of power, in Christ as the revealer of individual power, and in himself as God’s partner. Fear is a negative agency that appeals to the weaker side of character. Humanity will not be able to make the rapid progress towards the Divine that it should make until fear ceases to be a motive in the minds of men, women, and children. In his great ‘Epistle to a Young Friend’ Burns says:

The fear o’ hell’s a hangman’s whip

To haud the wretch in order. keep

Burns proved himself to be a philosopher when he attacked the common plan of using fear o’ hell to make men religious. This was not attacking religion.

The Rev. L. MacLean Watt says: ‘While the professional Christians of Scotland were fighting about Hell, the humble hearts by the lowly firesides, with the open book before them, were enriched by the knowledge of heaven; and while the hypocrites in holy places were scourging those who were in their power with the thorns of Christ, there were cotters in their kitchens that had found the healing and the balm of the warm blood of a Redeemer who died on Calvary for a wider world than theologians seemed to know.’

Speaking further of the theologians of the time of Burns the Rev. Mr Watt says: ‘Their idea of God was shaped in fashion like themselves — merciless, remorseless, hating, and hateful; His only passion seeming to their narrow souls to be damnation and torture of the wretched, lost, and wandering. Their preachers loved to picture the souls of the condemned swathed in batches lying in eternal anguish of a most real blazing hell as punishment for some small offence, or as having been outcast from grace through the wanton exercise of divine prerogatives. To commend such a God for worship were like praising and complimenting the cruel child who, for sport, spent a whole day plucking the limbs and wings from the palpitating body of some poor, helpless insect. It was a false and blasphemous insult to the human intelligence.’

Burns had the good fortune to be a cotter, trained by a father who was a remarkably able man, a great teacher, and a reverently religious man of very advanced ideals; and it took a century or more of theological evolution to bring the religious teaching of the world up to the standards of belief of the Ayrshire cotter.

He attacked the doctrine of Faith without Works. In a letter to Gavin Hamilton, one of the leading men of the town of Mauchline, a warm, personal friend of the poet, and an advanced thinker among ‘New Licht’ laymen, he wrote in a humorous but really profound way: ‘I understand you are in the habit of intimacy with that Boanerges of Gospel powers, Father Auld. Be earnest with him that he will wrestle in prayer for you that you may see the vanity of vanities in trusting to, even practising, the carnal moral works of charity, humanity, and generosity; things which you practised so flagrantly that it was evident you delighted in them, neglecting, or perhaps profanely despising, the wholesome doctrine of faith without works, the only hope of salvation.’

Burns did not say a word against faith in Christ, or love for Christ, or reverence for the teaching of Christ. So true a Christian as Dean Stanley said Burns was a ‘wise religious teacher.’ Burns deplored the fact that the love of Christ — the highest revelation of love ever given to the world — should be limited to saving the individual believer from eternal punishment. That was degrading the highest love into selfishness. Burns pleaded for loving service for humanity, and for Christ’s highest revelation, brotherhood, as evidence of vital Christian-hood; not merely ‘sound believing.’ This was not attacking religion. He attacked the men who attacked other men, like Gavin Hamilton among laymen, and Rev. Dr M’Gill of Ayr among ministers, because they had advanced ideas regarding religion.

He attacked the gloom and awful Sunday solemnity of those who professed to be religious. The world owes him a debt of gratitude for helping to remove the shadows of religious gloom from human lives. In his poem ‘A Dedication,’ addressed to Gavin Hamilton, he advises him ironically, in order that he may be acceptable to Daddy Auld and others of the ‘Auld Licht’ creed, to

Learn three-mile pray’rs an’ half-mile graces,

Wi’ weel-spread looves, an’ lang, wry faces; palms

Grunt up a solemn, lengthened groan,

And damn a’ parties [religious] but your own;

I’ll warrant then you’re nae deceiver,

A steady, sturdy, staunch believer.

If true religion means anything vitally hopeful to a man, it should mean what Burns said it meant to him in a letter to Mrs Dunlop: ‘My dearest enjoyment.’

In his wise poem, ‘Epistle to a Young Friend,’ he says:

But still the preaching cant forbear,

And ev’n the rigid feature.

He attacked the ‘unco guid,’ who delighted to tell how good they were themselves, and how many were the weaknesses and evil-doings of their neighbours. He had no more respect for the self-righteous than Christ had. The fact that he attacked and exposed them, and spoke kindly and reasonably to them, in his great ‘Address to the Unco Guid,’ is an evidence that in this respect at any rate he was a true Christian. One of the most comprehensively Christian doctrines ever written is the verse:

Who made the heart, ‘tis He alone

Decidedly can try us;

He knows each heart — its various tone,

Each spring — its various bias.

Then at the balance let’s be mute,

We never can adjust it;

What’s done we partly may compute,

But know not what’s resisted.

There is sound philosophy in the first verse of the poem addressed to the unco guid:

The rigid righteous is a fool,

The rigid wise another.

He often advised the ‘douce folks’ to be considerate of those who had greater temptations than they knew; and advised them to try to help them to overcome their temptations, and with Christian comradeship win their admiration and sympathetic co-operation in some department of achieving good.

In the time of Burns nothing would have surprised a wayward man or woman more than to have received genuine sympathy and respectful comradeship from members of the Church, the institution that claimed to represent Christ, who told the story of the one stray lamb, and the story of the prodigal son; the Great Teacher who said, ‘Let him that is without sin cast the first stone.’

Burns attacked superstition, hypocrisy, bigotry, predestination (taught in its most repellent form in the time of Burns), the equally repellent doctrine that ‘God sends men to hell for His own glory;’ fear of hell as a basis of religious life; faith without works; religious gloom; and the spirit of the unco guid. He helped to free religion from these evils more than any other man of his time did; but that was just the opposite to attacking religion.

In the ‘Holy Fair’ and ‘The Twa Herds’ he criticised with biting sarcasm certain things connected with religion in his time, from which it is now happily free. But he did not attack religion. The Rev. L. MacLean Watt, when summing up the great work Burns did for true religion, especially in ‘The Holy Fair,’ ‘The Twa Herds,’ and ‘Holy Willie’s Prayer,’ says: ‘It was in consequence of this ecclesiastical contact that he was, ere long, involved in a bitter and incessant warfare with the mediaeval shadows of ultra-Calvinism, which laid upon the people the bondage of a rigid predestinarianism, the terrible result of which in parochial religion was, that it became a commonplace in the matter of conduct that it did not matter what you did so long as you believed certain hard and fast tenets dealing with the purpose of God and the future of the human soul. This could not but inevitably lead to the observation of grave discrepancies between creed and conduct; and the setting up of the greatest hypocrisies, veiled in the cloak of religiousness, that yet, with searching eye of judgment, sat testing the conduct of better men. Burns was one of the better men.’

His own attitude towards true religion is shown in his ‘Epistle to the Rev. John M’Math,’ a progressive Presbyterian minister in Tarbolton. In it he says:

All hail, Religion! maid divine!

Pardon a muse sae mean as mine,

Who in her rough, imperfect line

Thus daurs to name thee;

To stigmatise false friends of thine

Can ne’er defame thee.

He stigmatised false friends of religion, but not religion itself.

There are some who yet say ‘Burns could not have been a religious man, because he was a sceptic.’ Burns was an independent thinker. His mind did not accept dogmas or creeds without investigation. In his father’s fine school he was not trained to think he was thinking, when he was merely allowing the ideas of others to run through his head on the path of memory. Burns was not trained to believe that he believed, but to think till he believed; and to accept in the realm beyond his power to reason great fundamental principles that supplied the conscious needs of his own heart, as those principles are revealed in the Bible.

In a letter to Mrs Dunlop he wrote: ‘I am a very sincere believer in the Bible; but I am drawn by the conviction of a man, not by the halter of an ass.’

To Mrs Dunlop he wrote, 1788: ‘My idle reasonings sometimes made me a little sceptical, but the necessities of my own heart always gave the cold philosophisings the lie.’

To Mr Peter Stuart he wrote, referring to the poet Fergusson, 1789: ‘Poor Fergusson! If there be a life beyond the grave, which I trust there is; and if there be a good God presiding over all Nature, which I am sure there is — thou art now enjoying existence in a glorious world, where worth of the heart alone is the distinction of man.’

To Mrs Dunlop, to whom more than to any other person he revealed the depths of his heart, he wrote again, 1789: ‘In vain would we reason and pretend to doubt. I have myself done so to a very daring pitch; but when I reflected that I was opposing the most ardent wishes, and the most darling hopes of good men, and flying in the face of all human belief, in all ages, I was shocked at my own conduct.’

To Robert Aiken he wrote, 1786: ‘Though sceptical in some points of our current belief, yet I think I have every evidence for the reality of a life beyond the stinted bourne of our present existence.’

To Dr Candlish, of Edinburgh, he wrote, 1787: ‘Despising old women’s stories, I ventured into the daring path Spinoza trod, but my experience with the weakness, not the strength, of human power made me glad to grasp revealed religion.’

To Clarinda he wrote, 1788: ‘The Supreme Being has put the immediate administration of all this for wise and good ends known to Himself into the hands of Jesus Christ, a great personage whose relation to Him we cannot comprehend, but whose relation to us is that of a Guide and Saviour.’

In his epistle to his young friend Andrew Aiken, he sums up in two lines his attitude to scepticism:

An atheist’s laugh’s a poor exchange

For Deity offended.

The men who believe most profoundly are those who honestly doubted in early life, but who naturally loved truth, and sought it with hopeful minds till they found it. Burns was not a sceptic. He was a reverently religious man. No man could have written ‘The Cotter’s Saturday Night’ who was not a reverently religious man. His father, from the earliest years, when his children were old enough to understand them, began to teach them fundamental religious principles. They took root deeply in Robert’s mind. William Burns preferred not to use the ‘Shorter Catechism,’ so he wrote a special catechism for his own family. It is a remarkable production for a man in his position in life. It deals with vitally fundamental principles, and shows a clear understanding of the Bible.

Burns wrote several short religious poems in his early young manhood, probably his twenty-second and twenty-third years, showing that his mind was deeply impressed by the majesty, justice, and love of God. Two of these poems are paraphrases of the Psalms.

The fact that religion was one of the most important elements of his thought and life is amply proved by the five letters he wrote to Alison Begbie in his twenty-first and twenty-second years — even before he wrote his early religious poems. Love-letters though they were, they related nearly as much to religion as to love. Some people have tried to say irreverently smart things about the absurdity of writing about religion in letters to his loved one. Both the religion and the love of his letters to the first woman he ever asked to marry him are too sacred to provoke ridicule in the minds of men with proper reverence for either religion or love. No one can carefully read these five letters without having a deeper respect for Burns, the young gentleman who loved so deeply that he regarded love worthy to be placed in association with religion. Religion was the subject that had been given first place in his life and thought by the teaching and the life of his father, who had meant infinitely more to him than most fathers ever mean to their sons.

In his epistle to Andrew Aiken he recommends, in the last verse but one, two things of vast importance ‘when on life we’re tempest-driv’n’: first,

A conscience but a canker. without

Second,

A correspondence fixed wi’ Heaven

Is sure a noble anchor.

Many people read the last couplet without consciously thinking what a correspondence fixed with Heaven means. Clearly it may have three meanings: prayer, communion in spirit with the Divine, and similarity to or harmony with the divine spirit.

Burns had family worship in his home every day to the end of his life when he was not absent, and though some scoffers may smile, he was earnest and sincere in trying to conduct for himself and for his family a ‘correspondence fixed with heaven’ in a spirit of communion with the Divine Father. He had other altars for communion with God in addition to his home. He composed his poems in the gloaming after his day’s work, in favourite spots in the deep woods, where he was ‘hid with God’ alone. God revealed Himself to Burns in the woods and by the sides of his sacred rivers more fully than in any other places. One of the most sacred shrines in Scotland is the great root under one of the mighty beeches of the fine park on Ballochmyle estate, on which Burns sat so often to compose his poems in the long Scottish twilights, and later on in the moonlight, when he lived on Mossgiel farm. Then next night, at his desk over the stable at Mossgiel, he would rewrite them and improve their form.

No man but a religious man would have written, in his ‘Epistle to a Young Friend,’ as Burns did to Andrew Aiken:

The great Creator to revere

Must sure become the creature.

When in Irvine, in his twenty-third year, he wrote a letter to his father. As usual, he wrote not of trivial matters, but of the great realities of time and eternity. Among other serious things he wrote: ‘My principal, and, indeed, my only pleasurable, employment is looking backwards and forwards in a moral and religious way.’ In the same letter he wrote:

The soul, uneasy and confined, at home

Rests and expatiates in a life to come.

Burns follows this quotation by saying to his father: ‘It is for this reason that I am more pleased with the 15th, 16th, and 17th verses of the 7th Chapter of Revelation than with any ten times as many verses in the whole Bible, and would not exchange the noble enthusiasm with which they inspire me for all that the world has to offer.’

His imagination enabled him to see clearly the glories of joy, and service, and association, and reward, in the heavenly paradise, as revealed in those triumphant verses.

To Mrs Dunlop he wrote, 1788: ‘Religion, my honoured Madam, has not only been all my life my chief dependence, but my dearest enjoyment…. An irreligious poet would be a monster.’

In his ‘Grace before Eating’ he reveals his gratitude and conscious dependence on God:

O Thou, who kindly dost provide

For every creature’s want!

We bless Thee, God of Nature wide,

For all Thy goodness lent.

In ‘Winter: a Dirge’ he says, in reverent submission to God’s will:

Thou Power supreme, whose mighty scheme

Those woes of mine fulfil,

Here firm I rest, they must be best,

Because they are Thy Will.

In a poem to Clarinda he wrote, recognising the blessing of Gods universal presence, not in awe so much as in joy:

God is ever present, ever felt,

In the void waste, as in the city full;

And where He vital breathes, there must be joy!

In the ‘Cotter’s Saturday Night’ he teaches absolute faith in God, and indicates man’s true relationship to the Divine Father:

Lest in temptation’s path ye gang astray,

Implore His counsel and assisting might:

They never sought in vain, that sought the Lord aright.

Writing in condemnation of a miserably selfish miser, he said:

See these hands, ne’er stretched to save,

Hands that took, but never gave;

Keeper of Mammon’s iron chest,

Lo, there she goes, unpitied and unblest;

She goes, but not to realms of everlasting rest.

And are they of no more avail,

Ten thousand glittering pounds a year?

In other worlds can Mammon fail,

Omnipotent as he is here?

O, bitter mockery of the pompous bier,

While down the wretched Vital Part is driven!

The cave-lodged beggar, with a conscience clear,

Expires in rags, unknown, and goes to heaven.

The philosophy of his mind, and the affectionate sympathy of his heart made Burns believe that unselfish service for our fellow-men should be one of the manifestations of true religion.

In the fine poem he wrote to Mrs Dunlop on New Year’s Day, 1790, he says:

A few days may, a few years must,

Repose us in the silent dust.

Then is it wise to damp our bliss?

Yes — all such reasonings are amiss!

The voice of Nature loudly cries,

And many a message from the skies,

That something in us never dies;

That on this frail, uncertain state

Hang matters of eternal weight;

That future life in worlds unknown

Must take its hue from this alone;

Whether as heavenly glory bright,

Or dark as Misery’s woeful night.

Let us the important Now employ,

And live as those who never die.

Since, then, my honoured first of friends,

On this poor living all depends.

Any honest man who reads those lines must admit that Burns was a man of deep religious thought and feeling.

Mrs Dunlop, to whom he wrote so many letters, was one of the leading women of Scotland in her time. She was a woman of great wisdom and deep religious character. Like the other great people who knew Burns, she was his friend. Many of his clearest expressions of his religious opinions are contained in his letters to her. In a letter to her on New Year’s morning, 1789, he said: ‘I have some favourite flowers in Spring, among which are the mountain-daisy, the hare-bell, the foxglove, the wild brier-rose, the budding birk [birch], and the hoary hawthorn, that I view and hang over with particular delight. I never hear the loud, solitary whistle of the curlew in the Summer noon, or the wild, mixing cadence of a troop of grey-plover in an Autumnal morning, without feeling an elevation of soul like the enthusiasm of Devotion or Poetry. Tell me, my dear friend, to what can this be owing? Are we a piece of machinery that, like the AEolian harp, passive, takes the impression of the passing accident? Or do these workings argue something within us above the trodden clod? I own myself partial to these proofs of those awful and important realities — a God that made all things — man’s immaterial and immortal nature — and a world of weal or woe beyond death and the grave — these proofs that we deduct by dint of our own powers of observation. However respectable Individuals in all ages have been, I have ever looked on Mankind in the lump to be nothing better than a foolish, head-strong, credulous, unthinking Mob; and their universal belief has ever had extremely little weight with me. Still, I am a very sincere believer in the Bible.’

In September 1789 he wrote to Mrs Dunlop: ‘Religion, my dear friend, is true comfort! A strong persuasion in a future state of existence; a proposition so obviously probable, that, setting revelation aside, every nation and people, so far as investigation has reached, for at least four thousand years, have, in some mode or other, firmly believed it.’

To Mrs Dunlop, in 1792, he wrote: ‘I am so convinced that an unshaken faith in the doctrines of religion is not only necessary by making us better men, but also by making us happier men, that I shall take every care that your little god-son [his son], and every creature that shall call me father, shall be taught them.’

One of his most beautiful religious letters was written to Alexander Cunningham, of Edinburgh, in 1794: ‘Still there are two pillars that bear us up amid the wreck of misfortune and misery. The one is composed of the different modifications of a certain noble, stubborn something in man, known by the names of courage, fortitude, magnanimity. The other is made up of those feelings and sentiments which, however the sceptic may deny them, or the enthusiast may disfigure them, are yet, I am convinced, original and component parts of the human soul; those senses of the mind, if I may be allowed the expression, which connect us with and link us to, those awful, obscure realities — an all-powerful and equally beneficent God, and a world to come, beyond death and the grave. The first gives the nerve of combat, while a ray of hope beams on the field; the last pours the balm of comfort into the wounds which time can never cure.

‘I do not remember, my dear Cunningham, that you and I ever talked on the subject of religion at all. I know some who laugh at it, as the trick of the crafty FEW, to lead the undiscerning MANY; or at most as an uncertain obscurity, which mankind can never know anything of, and with which they are fools if they give themselves much to do. Nor would I quarrel with a man for his irreligion, any more than I would for his want of a musical ear. I would regret that he was shut out from what, to me and to others, were such superlative sources of enjoyment. It is in this point of view, and for this reason, that I will deeply imbue the mind of every child of mine with religion. If my son should happen to be a man of feeling, sentiment, and taste, I shall thus add largely to his enjoyments. Let me flatter myself that this sweet little fellow, who is just now running about my desk, will be a man of a melting, ardent, glowing heart; and an imagination, delighted with the painter and rapt with the poet. Let me figure him wandering out in a sweet evening, to inhale the balmy gales, and enjoy the glowing luxuriance of the spring; himself the while in the blooming youth of life. He looks abroad on all Nature, and thro’ Nature up to Nature’s God; his soul, by swift delighting degrees, is rapt above this sublunary sphere, until he can be silent no longer, and bursts out into the glorious enthusiasm of Thomson:

‘“These, as they change, Almighty Father — these

Are but the varied God; the rolling year

Is full of thee.”

‘and so on, in all the spirit and ardour of that charming hymn.

‘These are no ideal pleasures; they are real delights; and I ask what of the delights among the sons of men are superior, not to say equal, to them? And they have this precious, vast addition, that conscious Virtue stamps them for her own, and lays hold on them to bring herself into the presence of a witnessing, judging, and approving God.’

In 1788 he wrote to Clarinda: ‘My definition of worth is short: truth and humanity respecting our fellow-creatures; reverence and humility in the presence of that Being, my Creator and Preserver, and who, I have every reason to believe, will be my judge.’

Again to Clarinda he wrote in 1788: ‘He who is our Author and Preserver, and will one day be our Judge, must be — not for His sake in the way of duty, but from the natural impulse of our hearts — the object of our reverential awe and grateful adoration. He is almighty and all-bounteous; we are weak and dependent; hence prayer and every other sort of devotion. “He is not willing that any should perish, but that all should come to everlasting life;” consequently it must be in every one’s power to embrace His offer of everlasting life; otherwise He could not in justice condemn those who did not.’

Again in 1788 he wrote to Clarinda: ‘In proportion as we are wrung with grief, or distracted with anxiety, the ideas of a Compassionate Deity, an Almighty Protector, are doubly dear.’

To Mrs Dunlop, in 1795, a year and a half before he died, he wrote: ‘I have nothing to say to any one as to which sect he belongs to, or what creed he believes; but I look on the man who is firmly persuaded of Infinite Wisdom and Goodness superintending and directing every circumstance that can happen in his lot — I felicitate such a man as having a solid foundation for his mental enjoyment; a firm prop and stay in the hour of difficulty, trouble, and distress; and a never-failing anchor of hope when he looks beyond the grave.’

This quotation emphasises his lifelong faith in God, and his belief in his own immortality. It also shows his perfect freedom from bigotry, and the broadness of his creed.

In his first ‘Commonplace Book’ he wrote: ‘The grand end of Human being is to cultivate an intercourse with that Being to whom we owe life, with every enjoyment that renders life delightful; and to maintain an integritive conduct towards our fellow-creatures; that by so forming Piety and Virtue into habit, we may be fit members for that society of the Pious, and the Good, which reason and revelation teach us to expect beyond the grave.’

There are no truly good men who will yield to the temptation to speak sneeringly of any man who fails in his life to reach his highest ideals. The little-minded men who may sneer at Burns, when they read this quotation written in his youth, should read his ‘Address to the Unco Guid’ over and over, till they get a glimmering comprehension of its meaning. Whatever the puny minds may be focussed on in the life of Burns, they should be ‘mute at the balance.’ They should remember that Burns did more than any man of his time for true religion, and that to the end of his life his mind and heart overflowed with the same faith and gratitude to God that he almost continuously expressed throughout his life.

A final quotation from the letters of Burns about religion may fittingly be taken from a letter to Robert Aiken, written in 1786: ‘O thou unknown Power! Thou Almighty God who hast lighted up Reason in my breast, and blessed me with immortality! I have frequently wandered from that order and regularity necessary for the perfection of Thy works, yet Thou hast never left me nor forsaken me.’

Burns was a reverently religious man. Dean Stanley said: ‘Burns was a wise religious teacher.’ Principal Rainy objected to Dean Stanley’s view because ‘Burns had never become a member of a church on profession of Faith in Christ.’ Professor Rainy either did not remember, or had never realised, that Burns had done more to reveal Christ’s highest teachings — the value of the individual soul, and brotherhood — than any other man in the church, or out of it, in Scotland in his time; and also did more to make religion free from false theology and dwarfing practices, than any other man of his time, or of any other time in Scotland.

Rev. L. MacLean Watt, of Edinburgh, in his most admirable book on Burns, answers Principal Rainy’s objections with supreme ability, as the following quotations amply prove: ‘Because a man does not categorically declare his belief in Christ, as that belief is formulated in existing dogmatic statements of theological authority, it does not mean that he abhors that belief; nor even though he withhold himself from explicitly uttering that confession of the Christian faith, does it preclude him from being a religious teacher. A man may have an enormous influence as a religious teacher, and yet never have made a formal statement of Christianity, nor signed a Christian creed.’—‘The measure of a man’s faithfulness to the better side of his nature is not to be gauged by the depth of his fall, but the height to which he rises…. Burns was, unfortunately, confronted by a narrow and self-righteous set, who were enslaved to doctrine and dogma, rather than to the practice of the Christian life with charity and humanity of spirit, part and parcel of a system of petty tyrannies and mean oppressions, the exercise of which made for exile from the fold, because of the spiritual conceit and sectarian humbug which created such characters as “Holy Willie,” and the “Unco Guid,” with the superior airs of religious security from which they looked down on all besides.’

We should test neither the terrible theologians of his time — those men who attacked Burns and called him irreligious, because he had a clear vision of a higher, holier religion than the one they preached — nor Burns himself by the conditions of our own time. It is unjust both to Burns and to his enemies to do so.

A comparison of the religious principles of the best Christians in the world nearly a century and a half after his time will show, however, that the creed of the present is more — much more — like the creed of Burns than the creed of the dreadful theologians of his time. The creed of the religious leaders a century hence will be still more like the creed of Robert Burns than is the creed of to-day.

The following creed is taken from the letters of Burns, expressed in his own language, except the last article, which is found in longer form in many of his letters, and more nearly in ‘The Hermit,’ in which he says:

Let me, O Lord! from life retire,

Unknown each guilty, worldly fire,

Remorse’s throb, or loose desire;

And when I die

Let me in this belief expire —

To God I fly.

THE CREED OF ROBERT BURNS.

1. Religion should be a simple business, as it equally concerns the ignorant and the learned, the poor and the rich.

2. There is a great and incomprehensible Being to whom I owe my existence.

3. The Creator perfectly understands the being He has made.

4. There is a real and eternal distinction between vice and virtue.

5. There must be a retributive scene of existence beyond the grave.

6. From the sublimity, the excellence, and the purity of His doctrines and precepts, I believe Jesus Christ came from God.

7. Whatever is done to mitigate the woes, or increase the happiness of humanity, is goodness.

8. Whatever injures society or any member of it is iniquity.

9. I believe in the immaterial and immortal nature of man.

10. I believe in eternal life with God.

Carlyle expressed regret that ‘Burns became involved in the religious quarrels of his district.’ This statement proves that Carlyle failed fully to comprehend the religious character of Burns. His chivalrous nature was partly responsible for his entering the battle waged by the ‘Auld Lichts’ against his dear friend the Rev. Dr M’Gill of Ayr and Gavin Hamilton of Mauchline; but his chief reason was his innate determination to free religion from the evils taught and practised in the name of religion in his time. He had the soul of a reformer, and the two leading elements in his soul were Religion and Liberty for the individual. It would have robbed the world of one of the greatest steps in human progress towards the Divine made in the eighteenth century, if Burns had failed to be true to the greatest things in his mind and heart.

Carlyle had clearly not studied the religious elements in either the poems or the letters of Burns, or he could not have written his comparison between Burns and Locke, Milton, and Cervantes, who did in poverty and unusual difficulties grand work. He asks: ‘What, then, had these men which Burns wanted? Two things; both which, it seems to us, are indispensable for such men. They had a true religious principle of morals, and a single, not a double, aim in their activity. They were not self-seekers and self-worshippers; but seekers and worshippers of something far better than self. Not personal enjoyment was their object; but a high heroic idea of Religion, of Patriotism, of Heavenly Wisdom in one form or the other form ever hovered before them.

It passes understanding to comprehend how Carlyle could regard Burns as a ‘selfish’ man, or a man with ‘a double aim’ — that is, two conflicting and opposing aims that he wasted his power in trying to harmonise.

Burns had three great aims: Purer Religion, a just Democracy, and closer Brotherhood; but these aims are in perfect harmony.

Carlyle ends the contrast between Burns and his model trio — Locke, Milton, and Cervantes — by saying of Burns: ‘He has no religion; in the shallow age, where his days were cast, Religion was not discriminated from the New and Old Light forms of Religion; and was, with these, becoming obsolete in the minds of men.’

‘The heart not of a mere hot-blooded, popular verse-monger, or poetical Restaurateur, but of a true poet and singer, worthy of the old religions heroic, had been given him, and he fell in an age, not of heroism and religion, but of scepticism, selfishness, and triviality, when true nobleness was little understood, and its place supplied by a hollow, dissocial, altogether barren and unfruitful principle of Pride.’

In a just comparison between Burns and the three named by Carlyle, Burns will need no apologists. Burns, directly in opposition to the statement of Carlyle, was more vitally religious and less selfish than any of them. When twenty-one years of age he said, in one of his beautiful love-letters to Alison Begbie: ‘I grasp every creature in the arms of universal benevolence, and equally participate in the pleasures of the happy, and sympathise with the miseries of the unfortunate.’ This alone proves that Burns was one of the least selfish men who ever lived.

As an heroic teacher of vital religion Burns was infinitely greater than any other man of his time, and has been much more influential since his time in promoting Christ’s ideals than the men named by Carlyle. He was a fearless hero, and so meets the requirements specified by Carlyle, because, when he recognised the evils connected with religion in his time, when true religion was, to use Carlyle’s words, ‘becoming obsolete,’ he valiantly attacked them, hoping to enable his fellow-men to see the vision of true religion which his father had given him by his life and teaching.

There was absolutely no justification for calling Burns a mere verse-monger. To write such a wild nightmare dream about Scotland’s greatest and most self-less poet was unworthy of one of Scotland’s leading prose-writers.

It seems almost ludicrous to take notice of the assertion that Burns had not a high ideal of patriotism, as compared with the three ideal men of Carlyle — Burns, whose love for Scotland was a sacred feeling, a holy fire that never ceased to burn. This criticism needs no answer now.

CHAPTER V. Burns the Democrat.

No man ever comprehended Christ’s ideals regarding democracy more fully than did Burns. Christ based His teaching of the need of human liberty on His revelation of the value of the individual soul. Burns clearly understood Christ’s ideals regarding individual freedom, and faithfully followed Him.

The message of Coila in ‘The Vision’ to Burns was:

Preserve the dignity of man

With soul erect.

This was the central thought in the work of Burns regarding the freedom of all mankind: freedom from oppression by other men; freedom from the bondage imposed on the peasant and the labouring man by customs organised by so-called ‘higher classes’; freedom from the hardship and sorrow of poverty; freedom for each child to grow under proper conditions of nourishment, of physical development, and of educational training.

His whole nature was stirred to dignified indignation and resentment by class distinctions among men and women who were all created in the image of God, and who, in accordance with the teaching of Christ, should be brothers. He despised class distinctions which were made by man, whether the distinctions were made on the basis of rank or wealth. He was ashamed of the toadies who reverenced a lord merely because he chanced to be born a lord, and pitied those who accepted without protest inferiority to men of wealth. He was so true a democrat that he freely and respectfully recognised the worth of members of the aristocracy or of the wealthy class whose ability and high character made them worthy of respect; but he held in contempt those who assumed superiority simply because of rank or gold.

One of his most brilliant poems is ‘A Man’s a Man for a’ That.’ In it he gives comprehensive expression to his opinions, based on the fundamental principle,

The honest man, though e’er sae poor,

Is King o’ men for a’ that.

Is there for honesty poverty,

That hangs his head an’ a’ that?

The coward-slave, we pass him by;

We dare be poor for a’ that.

For a’ that, an’ a’ that,

Our toils obscure, an’ a’ that;

The rank is but the guinea stamp,

The man’s the gowd for a’ that. gold

Ye see yon birkie, ca’d a lord,

Wha struts, and stares, an’ a’ that;

Tho’ hundreds worship at his word,

He’s but a coof for a’ that: blockhead

For a’ that, an’ a’ that,

His ribband, star, an’ a’ that;

The man of independent mind

He looks and laughs at a’ that.

A prince can mak a belted knight,

A marquis, duke, an’ a’ that;

But an honest man’s aboon his might, above

Gude faith he maunna fa’ that. must not try

For a’ that, an’ a’ that,

Their dignities an’ a’ that,

The pith o’ sense, an’ pride o’ worth,

Are higher ranks than a’ that.

Labouring man on farm or in factory, this is your charter. Let this be your creed. Sing this great democratic hymn at your gatherings — ay, sing it in your homes with your children, and each time you sing it, it should kindle some new light in your soul that will bring you new vision of the greatest fact in connection with human life and duty, that you are alive to be God’s partner, and that while you remain honest, and unselfishly consider the rights of others, as fully as you consider your own, you are entitled to stand with kings, because you are an honest man.

The discussion between Caesar the aristocratic dog and Luath the cotter’s dog is a fair representation of class conditions in Scotland in the time of Burns. Caesar describes the laird’s riches, his idleness, his racked rents, and the compulsory services required from the poor tenants; dilates on the wastefulness in connection with the meals even of the servants in the homes of the great; and expresses surprise that poor folks could exist under their trying conditions.

Luath admits that sometimes the strain on the cotter was very severe: digging ditches, building dykes with dirty stones, baring a quarry, ‘an’ sic like,’ as a means of sustaining a lot of ragged children with nothing but his hand labour. He acknowledges that, when ill or out of work, it sometimes seems hopeless; but, after all, though past his comprehension, the poor folks are wonderfully contented, and stately men and clever women are brought up in their homes.

Caesar then expatiates on the contemptuous way the poor are ‘huffed, and cuffed, and disrespecket.’ He especially sympathises with the poor on account of the way tenants are treated by the laird’s agents on rent-day — compelled to submit to their insolence, while they swear and threaten to seize their property; and concludes that poor folks must be very wretched.

Luath replies that, after all, they are not so wretched as he thinks; that their dearest enjoyments are in their wives and thriving children; that they often forget their private cares and discuss the affairs of kirk and state; that Hallowe’en and Christmas celebrations give them grand opportunities for happiness that make them forget their hardships and sorrows, and that during these festivals the old folks are so cheery and the young ones are so frolicsome that he ‘for joy has barket wi’ them!’ Still, he admits that it is owre true what Caesar says, and that many decent, honest folk ‘are riven out, baith root and branch, some rascal’s pridefu’ greed to quench.’

Caesar then describes the reckless way in which the money received from the poor cotters was wasted at operas, plays, mortgaging, gambling, masquerading, or taking trips to Calais, Vienna, Versailles, Madrid, or Italy; and finally to Germany, to some resort where their dissipations may be overcome by drinking muddy German water.

Luath is surprised to learn that the money for which the cotters have toiled so hard should be spent so wastefully; and wishes the gentry would stay at home and take interest in the sports of their own country, as it would be so much better for all: laird, tenant, and cotter. He closes by saying that many of the lairds are not ill-hearted fellows, and asks Caesar if there is not a great deal of true pleasure in the lives of the rich.

Caesar replies:

Lord, man, were ye but whyles where I am,

The gentles ye wad ne’er envy them.

Admitting that they need not starve or work hard through winter’s cold or summer’s heat, or suffer in old age from working all day in the wet, he says:

But human bodies are sic fools,

For a’ their colleges and schools,

That when nae real ills perplex them,

They mak enow themsels to vex them;

An’ aye the less they hae to sturt them,

In like proportion less will hurt them.

A country fellow at the pleugh,

His acres till’d, he’s right eneugh;

A country girl at her wheel,

Her dizzens dune, she’s unco weel;

But gentlemen, and ladies warst,

Wi’ ev’n-down want o’ wark are curst.

They loiter, lounging, lank and lazy;

Tho’ deil-haet ails them, yet uneasy;

Their days insipid, dull, an’ tasteless;

Their nights unquiet, lang, and restless.

An’ even their sports, their balls and races,

Their galloping through public places,

There’s sic parade, sic pomp an’ art,

The joy can scarcely reach the heart.

The ladies arm-in-arm in clusters,

As great and gracious a’ as sisters;

But hear their absent thoughts o’ ither,

They’re a’ run deils and jads thegither.

Whyles, ower the wee bit cup an’ plaitie,

They sip the scandal-potion pretty;

Or lee-lang nights, wi’ crabbet leuks,

Pore ower the devil’s pictured beuks; cards

Stake on a chance a farmer’s stackyard,

An’ cheat like ony unhanged blackguard.

There’s some exceptions, man an’ woman;

But this is gentry’s life in common.

Burns was a philosopher, and he knew such conditions were wrong, and that they should not be allowed to last. They are better, after more than a century, since Burns became the champion of the poor; but the great problem, ‘Why should ae man better fare, and a’ men brothers?’ is not properly answered yet. The wisest among the aristocracy know this, and admit it, and sincerely hope that the inevitable evolution to juster conditions and relationships may be brought about by constitutional means, and not by revolution.

Professor Dugald Stewart, of Edinburgh University, wrote: ‘I recollect once he told me, when I was admiring a distant prospect in one of our morning walks, that the sight of so many smoking cottages gave a pleasure to his mind none could understand who had not witnessed, like himself, the happiness and the worth which they contained.’

It was not the unhappiness of the peasantry that stirred the democratic heart of Burns. It was ‘man’s inhumanity’ to his fellow-men; the assumption of those belonging to the so-called upper classes that they had a divine right to hold higher positions than the common people, and that the poorer people should be contented in the ‘station to which God had called them,’ that led Burns to write so ably in favour of democracy. He recognised no human right to establish stations to which people were called, and in which they should remain, in spite of their right to fill any positions for which they had proved their fitness. He could not be so irreverent or so unreasonable as to believe God could establish the conditions found all around him, so he claimed the right of every child to full opportunity for its best development, and to rise honourably to any position to which it could attain.

In a letter to Miss Margaret Chalmers, 1788, he wrote: ‘What signify the silly, idle gewgaws of wealth, or the idle trumpery of greatness? When fellow-partakers of the same nature fear the same God, have the same benevolence of heart, the same nobleness of soul, the same detestation of everything dishonest, and the same scorn at everything unworthy — in the name of common-sense, are they not equals?’

To Mrs Dunlop he wrote in 1788: ‘There are few circumstances, relating to the unequal distribution of good things of this life, that give me more vexation (I mean in what I see around me) than the importance the opulent bestow on their trifling family affairs, compared with the very same things on the contracted scale of the cottage. Last afternoon I had the honour to spend an hour or two at a good woman’s fireside, where the planks that composed the floor were decorated with a splendid carpet, and the gay table sparkled with silver and china. ‘Tis now about term-day [a regular time twice a year was fixed for hiring servants], and there has been a revolution among those creatures [servants], who, though in appearance partakers, and equally noble partakers, of the same nature as Madame, are from time to time — their nerves, sinews, their health, strength, wisdom, experience, genius, time, nay, a good part of their very thoughts — sold for months and years, not only to the necessities but the caprices of the important few. We talked of the insignificant creatures; nay, notwithstanding their general stupidity and rascality, did some of the poor devils the honour to commend them. But light be the turf upon his breast who taught “Reverence thyself!” We looked down on the unpolished wretches, their impertinent wives, and clouterly brats, as the lordly bull does on the little, dirty anthill, whose puny inhabitants he crushes in the carelessness of his ramble, or tosses in the air in the wantonness of his pride.’

Such experiences added fuel to the divine purpose in his mind to free a large portion of his fellow-countrymen from the bonds that had been bound on their bodies and souls by long years of class presumption and heartless tyranny, which, till Burns attacked them, had grown more unjust and contemptuous as generation succeeded generation.

Burns’s reverence for real manhood, a basic principle of true democratic spirit, is shown in the closing verse of his ‘Elegy on Captain Matthew Henderson’:

Go to your sculptured tombs, ye Great,

In a’ the tinsel trash o’ state!

But by thy honest turf I’ll wait,

Thou man of worth!

And weep the ae best fellow’s fate

E’er lay in earth.

To John Francis Erskine he wrote, 1793: ‘Burns was a poor man from birth and an exciseman from necessity; but — I will say it — the sterling of his honest worth no poverty could debase, and his independent British mind oppression might bend, but could not subdue…. Can I look tamely on and see any machination to wrest from them the birthright of my boys — the little, independent Britons, in whose veins runs my own blood?… Does any man tell me that my full efforts can be of no service, and that it does not belong to my humble station to meddle with the concerns of a nation? I can tell him that it is on such individuals as I that a nation has to rest, both for the hand of support and the eye of intelligence. The uninformed Mob may swell a Nation’s bulk, and the titled, tinsel, courtly throng may be its feathered ornament; but the number of those who are elevated enough in life to reason and reflect, yet low enough to keep clear of the venal contagion of a court — these are a nation’s strength.’

He wrote the letter, from which this is an extract, because some super-loyalists were trying to undermine his reputation on account of his independence of spirit and his democratic principles, with a view to having him removed from the paltry position he held as an Excise officer.

He was proudly, sensitively independent. He inherited his temperamental characteristics from his mother. He was happier defending others than working for himself. Writing to the Earl of Eglintoun, he said: ‘Mercenary servility, I trust, I shall ever have as much honest pride as to detest.’

Writing to Mr Francis Grose, F.S.A., in 1790, about Professor Dugald Stewart, he said: ‘Mr Stewart’s principal characteristic is your favourite feature — that sterling independence of mind which, though every man’s right, so few men have the courage to claim, and fewer still the magnanimity to support.’

In 1795, the year before his death, he wrote three poems favourable to the election of Mr Heron, the Whig candidate. In the first poem he said:

The independent commoner

Shall be the man for a’ that.

Mrs Riddell, writing of Burns after his death, said: ‘His features were stamped with the hardy character of independence.’

He was a democrat whose democracy was based on the rock of independence and a character that ‘preserved the dignity of man with soul erect.’

Burns saw both sides of the ideal of freedom. He hated tyrants, and he despised those who tamely submitted to tyranny. The inscription on the Altar to Independence, erected by Mr Heron at Kerroughtree, written by Burns, reads:

Thou of an independent mind,

With soul resolv’d, with soul resign’d;

Prepar’d Power’s proudest frown to brave,

Who wilt not be, nor have a slave;

Virtue alone who dost revere,

Thy own reproach alone dost fear —

Approach this shrine, and worship here.

The man of whom Burns approved was ‘one who wilt not be nor have a slave.’

In ‘Lines Inscribed in a Lady’s Pocket Almanac’ he says:

Deal Freedom’s sacred treasures free as air,

Till Slave and Despot be but things that were.

In the ‘Lines on the Commemoration of Rodney’s Victory’ he wrote:

Be Anarchy cursed, and be Tyranny damned; condemned

And who would to Liberty e’er be disloyal

May his son be a hangman — and he his first trial.

Burns was a philosopher whose mind had been trained to look at both sides of a question, and estimate truly their relationships to each other. Even in one of his beautiful poems to his wife, written after he was married, ‘I Hae a Wife o’ My Ain,’ he wrote:

I am naebody’s lord,

I’ll be slave to naebody.

While Burns was an intense lover of freedom, he had no sympathy with those who would overturn constituted authority. He wished to achieve the freedom of the people, but to achieve it by constitutional means. He was a national volunteer in Dumfries, and he composed a fine patriotic song for the corps to sing. He revealed his balanced mind in the following lines in that song:

The wretch that would a tyrant own,

And the wretch, his true-born brother,

Who would set the mob aboon the throne, above

May they be damned together.

Burns had as little respect for a king who was a tyrant, as he had for a tyrant in any other situation in life; but he clearly saw the wicked folly of allowing mob-rule to be substituted for constitutional authority.

In the Prologue written to be spoken by an actor on his benefit night, Burns wrote:

No hundred-headed Riot here we meet

With decency and law beneath his feet;

Nor Insolence assumes fair Freedom’s name.

Here, again, he records the dominant ideal of his mind through life; but at the same time he utters a warning against ignorant and wild theorists, who, in their madness, would overthrow civilisation.

He overflows again on his favourite theme in the ‘Lines on the Commemoration of Rodney’s Victory,’ when he was proposing toasts:

The next in succession I’ll give you’s the King!

Whoe’er would betray him, on high may he swing!

And here’s the grand fabric, the free Constitution,

As built on the base of our great Revolution.

The love of liberty grew stronger in his heart and in his mind as he grew older. In his songs, and in his letters, he frequently moralised on independence of character and the value of liberty. In a letter to the Morning Chronicle he said, 1795: ‘I am a Briton, and must be interested in the cause of liberty.’

To Patrick Miller he sent a copy of his poems in 1793, accompanied by a letter expressing gratitude for his kindness and appreciation of him ‘as a patriot who in a venal, sliding age stands forth the champion of the liberties of my country.’

In his love-song, ‘Their Groves o’ Sweet Myrtle,’ he compares the boasted glories of tropical lands with the beauty of his beloved Scotland, and boasts in pride of the charms of the

Lone glen o’ green breckan, ferns

Wi’ the burn stealing under the lang yellow broom,

and of the sweetness of

Yon humble broom bowers,

Where the blue-bell and gowan lurk, lowly, unseen.

He cannot close the song, however, without claiming that beautiful as are the ‘sweet-scented woodlands’ of these foreign countries, they are, after all, ‘the haunt of the tyrant and slave,’ and that

The slave’s spicy forests, and gold-bubbling fountains,

The brave Caledonian views wi’ disdain;

He wanders as free as the winds of his mountains.

Burns celebrated the success of the French Revolution in a poem entitled ‘The Tree of Liberty.’ His heart bled for the peasantry of France, whom the aristocrats had treated so contemptuously, and with such lack of consideration, and cruelty. He rejoiced in the overthrow of their oppressors, and the establishment of a republican form of government. In this poem he gives credit to Lafayette, the great Frenchman who had gone to assist the people of the United States in their brave struggle to get free. He asks blessings on the head of the noble man, Lafayette, in the verse:

My blessings aye attend the chiel

Wha pitied Gallia’s slaves, man,

And staw a branch, spite o’ the deil, stole

Frae yont the western waves, man.

Fair Virtue watered it wi’ care,

And now she sees wi’ pride, man,

How weel it buds and blossoms there,

Its branches spreading wide, man.

******

A wicked crew syne, on a time,

Did tak a solemn aith, man, oath

It ne’er should flourish to its prime,

I wat they pledged their faith, man.

Awa they gaed, wi’ mock parade,

Like beagles hunting game, man,

But soon grew weary o’ the trade,

And wished they’d stayed at hame, man.

Fair Freedom, standing by the tree,

Her sons did loudly ca’, man;

She sang a song o’ liberty, Marseillaise

Which pleased them ane and a’, man.

By her inspired, the new-born race

Soon drew the avenging steel, man;

The hirelings ran — her friends gied chase

And banged the despot weel, man.

******

Wi’ plenty o’ sic trees, I trow,

The warld would live at peace, man;

The sword would help to mak’ a plough;

The din o’ war wad cease, man.

The greatest poem Burns wrote to rejoice at the victorious progress of humanity towards freedom was his ‘Ode to Liberty,’ written to express his supreme gratification at the success of the people of the United States in their struggle for independence from England. He wrote it, as he wrote most of his poems during his life in Dumfries, in the moonlight in Lincluden Abbey ruins, on the Nith River, just outside of Dumfries. He introduces the ode in a poem named ‘A Vision.’

He tells that, at midnight, while in the ruins, he saw in the roofless tower of the abbey, a vision:

By heedless chance I turned my eyes,

And, by the moonbeam, shook to see

A stern and stalwart ghaist arise, ghost

Attired as minstrels wont to be.

Had I a statue been o’ stane,

His daring look had daunted me;

And on his bonnet graved was plain,

The sacred posy, ‘Libertie.’

And frae his harp sic strains did flow

Might rouse the slumbering dead to hear;

But oh! it was a tale of woe,

As ever met a Briton’s ear!

The ghost tells the story of the tyranny England exercised over the people of the United States, and of the breaking of the tyrant’s chains. Burns had no more respect for despotism by an English king than he had for the despotism of a tyrant in any other land. He knew the people of the American colonies were right. England’s greatest statesman, Pitt, had said so, when the colonists, driven to desperation, rebelled; so the ghost’s revelation should be to a liberty-loving Briton’s ear ‘a tale of woe.’

The ode begins:

No Spartan tube, no Attic shell,

No lyre AEolian I awake;

‘Tis liberty’s bold note I swell;

Thy harp, Columbia, let me take!

See gathering thousands, while I sing,

A broken chain exultant bring,

And dash it in the tyrant’s face,

And dare him to his very beard,

And tell him he no more is feared —

No more the despot of Columbia’s race!

A tyrant’s proudest insults braved,

They shout — a People freed! They hail an Empire saved.

******

But come, ye sons of Liberty,

Columbia’s offspring, brave and free.

In danger’s hour still flaming in the van,

Ye know and dare maintain ‘the Royalty of Man.’

So the poem proceeds, till he appeals to King Alfred, and finally to Caledonia:

Alfred! on thy starry throne,

Surrounded by the tuneful choir,

The bards that erst have struck the patriotic lyre,

And rous’d the freeborn Briton’s soul of fire,

No more thy England own!

Dare injured nations form the great design,

To make detested tyrants bleed?

Thy England execrates the glorious deed!

Beneath her hostile banners waving,

Every pang of honour braving,

England, in thunder calls, ‘The tyrant’s cause is mine!’

That hour accurst how did the fiends rejoice,

And hell, through all her confines, raise the exulting voice!

That hour which saw the generous English name

Linkt with such damned deeds of everlasting shame!

Thee, Caledonia! thy wild heaths among,

Fam’d for the martial deed, the heaven-taught song,

To thee I turn with swimming eyes;

Where is that soul of Freedom fled?

Immingled with the mighty dead,

Beneath that hallow’d turf where Wallace lies!

Hear it not, Wallace! in thy bed of death.

Ye babbling winds! in silence sweep,

Disturb not ye the hero’s sleep,

Nor give the coward secret breath.

Is this the ancient Caledonian form,

Firm as the rock, resistless as the storm?

He loved to stir the liberty-loving spirit of his beloved Caledonia, so to her sons he makes the final appeal in his great ode. He wrote in a similar strain in the Prologue written for his friend Woods, the actor:

O Thou dread Power! whose empire-giving hand

Has oft been stretched to shield the honoured land!

Strong may she glow with all her ancient fire!

May every son be worthy of his sire!

Firm may she rise with generous disdain

At Tyranny’s, or direr Pleasure’s, chain;

Still self-dependent in her native shore,

Bold may she brave grim Danger’s loudest roar,

Till fate the curtain drop on worlds to be no more.

He reached the highest degree of patriotic fervour, and his clearest call, not only to Scotsmen, but to all true men, to be ready to do their duty for justice and liberty, in ‘Bruce’s Address at Bannockburn.’

In a letter to the Earl of Buchan, 1794, enclosing a copy of this poem, he wrote: ‘Independent of my enthusiasm as a Scotsman, I have rarely met with anything in history which interests my feelings as a man equal with the story of Bannockburn. On the one hand a cruel, but able, usurper, leading on the finest army in Europe, to extinguish the last spark of freedom among a greatly daring and greatly injured people; on the other hand, the desperate relics of a gallant nation, devoting themselves to rescue their bleeding country or perish with her. Liberty! thou art a prize truly and indeed invaluable, for never canst thou be too dearly bought.’

Scots, wha hae wi’ Wallace bled,

Scots, wham Bruce has aften led,

Welcome to your gory bed,

Or to Victorie!

Now’s the day and now’s the hour;

See the front o’ battle lour!

See approach proud Edward’s power —

Chains and slaverie!

Wha will be a traitor knave?

Wha can fill a coward’s grave?

Wha sae base as be a slave?

Let him turn and flee!

Wha for Scotland’s King and Law,

Freedom’s sword will strongly draw,

Free-Man stand, or Free-Man fa’?

Let him follow me!

By Oppression’s woes and pains!

By your Sons in servile chains!

We will drain our dearest veins,

But they shall be free!

Lay the proud Usurpers low!

Tyrants fall in every foe!

Liberty’s in every blow!

Let us Do — or Die.

‘So may God ever defend the cause of Truth and Liberty as he did that day.

‘Robert Burns.’

Because he was so outspoken in regard to democracy, some men assumed he was not a loyal man. The truth is, that he always loved his country, but he ardently desired to improve the conditions of the great body of his countrymen. Complaints were made about his disloyalty to the Excise commissioners under whom he worked. These complaints were investigated, and Burns was found to be a loyal man.

When the call came from the Government for volunteers, Burns joined the Dumfries Volunteers. In his great song composed for these volunteers he strongly expresses his loyalty, both to his country and to his king, in the following quotations:

We’ll ne’er permit a foreign foe

On British ground to rally.

Be Britain still to Britain true,

Amang oursels united;

For never but by British hands

Maun British wrangs be righted. must

Who will not sing ‘God save the King,’

Shall hang as high’s the steeple!

But while we sing ‘God save the King,’

We’ll ne’er forget the people.

To Robert Graham of Fintry, 1792, he wrote: ‘To the British Constitution on revolution principles, next after my God, I am most devoutly attached.’

Again, a month later, he wrote to Mr Graham: ‘I never uttered any invectives against the King. His private worth it is altogether impossible that such a man as I can appreciate; but in his public capacity I always revered, and always will, with the soundest loyalty, revere the Monarch of Great Britain as (to speak in Masonic) the sacred Keystone of our Royal Arch Constitution. As to reform principles, I look upon the British Constitution, as settled at the Revolution, to be the most glorious Constitution on earth, or that perhaps the wit of man can frame.

********

‘I never dictated to, corresponded with, or had the least connection with, any political association whatever — except that when the magistrates and principal inhabitants of Dumfries met to declare their attachment to the Constitution, and their abhorrence of riot.’

He had strong desires to effect many reforms in public life, but he was an intelligent believer in the British Constitution, and had no faith in any method of achieving reforms in the Empire except by constitutional measures. He was a radical reformer with a grand mental balance-wheel; and such reformers make the best type of citizens, ardent reformers with cool heads and unselfish hearts.

Carlyle strangely misunderstood the spirit of democracy in Burns, although he justly wrote, long after the poet’s death: ‘He appears not only as a true British poet, but as one of the most considerable British men of the eighteenth century.’

What were the achievements, in addition to his poetic power, that made Burns ‘one of the most considerable men of the eighteenth century?’ Mainly the work he did to develop in the souls of men a consciousness of fundamental principles of democracy, and higher ideals of vital religion; yet Carlyle does not approve of his efforts to reform either social or religious conditions. As the centuries pass, the work of Burns for Religion, Democracy, and Brotherhood will be recognised as his greatest work for humanity.

Carlyle’s belief was that Burns wrote about the wrongs of the oppressed because he could not become rich. In that belief he was clearly in error. The love of freedom, justice, and independence was a basic passion in the character of Burns. The anxiety of Burns regarding money was not for himself, but for his family in case he should die. Several times he referred to this in letters to his most intimate friends.

CHAPTER VI. Burns and Brotherhood.

In the third letter Burns wrote Alison Begbie, the first woman he asked to marry him, he said: ‘I grasp every creature in the arms of Universal Benevolence, and equally participate in the pleasures of the happy, and sympathise with the miseries of the unfortunate.’

This statement of one of the fundamental principles which guided him during his whole life is a profound interpretation of the teachings of Christ in regard to the attitude that each individual should have, must have, in order that brotherhood may be established on the earth. He taught universal benevolence and vital sympathy with — not for — humanity; not merely when sorrows and afflictions bring dark clouds to hearts, but in times of happiness and rejoicing; affectionate sympathy, unostentatious sympathy, co-operative sympathy that stimulates helpfulness and hopefulness; sympathy that produces activity of the divine in the human heart and mind, and leads to brotherhood.

The amazing fact is, not that Burns wrote such fundamental Christian philosophy in a love-letter, but that a youth of twenty-one could think it and express it so perfectly.

To Clarinda he wrote, 1787: ‘Lord! why was I born to see misery which I cannot relieve?’

Again, in 1788, he wrote to her: ‘Give me to feel “another’s woe,” and continue with me that dear-loved friend that feels with mine.’

To Mrs Walter Riddell he wrote, 1793: ‘Of all the qualities we assign to the Author and Director of Nature, by far the most enviable is to be able “to wipe away all tears from all eyes.” O what insignificant, sordid wretches are they, however chance may have loaded them with wealth, who go to their graves, to their magnificent mausoleums, with hardly the consciousness of having made one poor, honest heart happy.’

In ‘A Winter Night,’ the great poem of universal sympathy, he says:

Affliction’s sons are brothers in distress;

A brother to relieve, how exquisite the bliss.

He closes the poem with four great lines:

But deep this truth impressed my mind —

Thro’ all His works abroad,

The heart benevolent and kind

The most resembles God.

In the same poem he paints the characters who lack loving sympathy, and whose lives and attitudes towards their fellow-men separate men, and break the ties that should unite all men, and thus prevent the development of the spirit of brotherhood. After describing the fierceness of the storm and expressing his heartfelt sympathy for the cattle, the sheep, the birds, and even with destructive animals such as prey on hen-roosts or defenceless lambs, his mind was filled with a plaintive strain, as he thought of the bitterness of man to his brother man, and he proceeds:

Blow, blow, ye winds, with heavier gust!

And freeze, thou bitter-biting frost!

Descend, ye chilly, smothering snows!

Not all your rage, as now united, shows

More hard unkindness, unrelenting,

Vengeful malice unrepenting,

Than heaven-illumined man on brother man bestows.

The depth and universality of his sympathy is shown in ‘To a Mouse,’ after he had destroyed its nest while ploughing:

I’m truly sorry man’s dominion

Has broken Nature’s social union,

An’ justifies that ill opinion

Which makes thee startle

At me, thy poor earth-born companion,

An’ fellow-mortal!

In his ‘Epistle to Davie,’ a brother poet, he emphasises the value of true sympathy, that should bind all hearts, must yet bind all hearts in universal brotherhood, when he says:

All hail! ye tender feelings dear!

The smile of love, the friendly tear,

The sympathetic glow!

Long since, this world’s thorny ways

Had numbered out my weary days,

Had it not been for you.

In his ‘Epistle to Robert Graham of Fintry,’ after describing the thrifty but selfishly prudent, ‘who feel by reason and who give by rule,’ and expressing regret that ‘the friendly e’er should want a friend,’ he writes:

But come ye, who the godlike pleasure know,

Heaven’s attribute distinguished — to bestow!

Whose arms of love would grasp the human race.

In the opinion of Burns, they are the ideal men and women who best understood, and most perfectly practised, the teaching of Christ.

In one of his epistles to his friend Lapraik he says:

For thus the royal mandate ran,

When first the human race began:

The social, friendly, honest man,

Whate’er he be —

‘Tis he fulfils great Nature’s plan,

And none but he.

The influence of any act on society, on the brotherhood of man as a whole, was the supreme test of Burns to distinguish between goodness and evil.

To Dr Moore, of London, he said: ‘Whatsoever is not detrimental to society, and is of positive enjoyment, is of God, the giver of all good things, and ought to be received and enjoyed by His creatures with thankful delight.’

To Clarinda he wrote: ‘Thou Almighty Author of peace, and goodness, and love! Do thou give me the social heart that kindly tastes of every man’s cup! Is it a draught of joy? Warm and open my heart to share it with cordial, unenvying rejoicing! Is it the bitter potion of sorrow? Melt my heart with sincerely sympathetic woe! Above all, do Thou give me the manly mind, that resolutely exemplifies in life and manners those sentiments which I would wish to be thought to possess.’

In ‘On the Seas and Far Away’ he says:

Peace, thy olive wand extend,

And bid wild war his ravage end;

Man with brother man to meet,

And as a brother kindly greet.

In the ‘Tree of Liberty’ he says, if we had plenty of the trees of Liberty growing throughout the whole world:

Like brothers in a common cause

We’d on each other smile, man;

And equal rights and equal laws

Wad gladden ev’ry isle, man.

To Clarinda, when he presented a pair of wine-glasses — a perfectly proper gift to a lady in the opinion of his time — he gave her at the same time a poem, in which he said:

And fill them high with generous juice,

As generous as your mind;

And pledge them to the generous toast,

‘The whole of human kind!’

In his ‘Epistle to John Lapraik,’ after describing those whose lives do not help men towards brotherhood, he describes those who are true to the great ideal:

But ye whom social pleasure charms,

Whose hearts the tide of kindness warms,

Who hold your being on the terms,

‘Each aid the others,’

Come to my bowl, come to my arms,

My friends, my brothers.

Burns gives each man the true test of the influence of his life for the promotion of true brotherhood in the short line, ‘Each aid the others.’ That line is the supreme test of duty, and is the highest interpretation of Christ’s commandment to His disciples, and through them to all men, ‘Love one another, as I have loved you.’ Vital love means vital helpfulness.

Dickens gives the same great message as Burns when, in describing Little Dorritt, he says: ‘She was something different from the rest, and she was that something for the rest.’ This is probably the shortest sentence ever written that conveys so clearly the two great revelations of Christ: Individuality and Brotherhood.

There are some who dislike the expression ‘Come to my bowl.’ They should test Burns by the accepted standards of his time, not by the standards of our time. The bowl was the symbol of true comradeship in castle and cot, in the manse and in the layman’s home, in the time of Burns.

No other writer has interpreted Christ’s revelations of Democracy and Brotherhood so clearly and so fully as Robert Burns. He sums up the whole matter of man’s relationship to man in ‘A Man’s a Man for a’ That,’ in the last verse:

Then let us pray that come it may —

As come it will for a’ that —

That sense and worth, o’er a’ the earth,

Shall bear the gree, an’ a’ that. pre-eminence

For a’ that, an’ a’ that,

It’s coming yet, for a’ that,

That man to man the world o’er,

Shall brothers be for a’ that.

He revealed his supreme purpose in ‘A Revolutionary Lyric’:

In virtue trained, enlightened youth

Will love each fellow-creature;

And future years shall prove the truth —

That man is good by nature.

The golden age will then revive;

Each man will love his brother;

In harmony we all shall live,

And share the earth together.

While the so-called religious teachers of the time of Burns were dividing men into creeds based on petty theological distinctions, Burns was interpreting for humanity the highest teachings of Christ: Democracy based on recognition of the value of the individual soul, and Brotherhood as the natural fruit of true democracy.

CHAPTER VII. Burns a Revealer of Pure Love.

Many people yet believe that Burns was a universal and inconstant lover. He really did not love many women. He loved deeply, but he had not a great many really serious experiences of love. He loved Nellie Kirkpatrick when he was fifteen, and Peggy Thomson when he was seventeen. He says his love of Nellie made him a poet. There is no other experience that will kindle the strongest element in a human soul during the adolescent period so fully, and so permanently, as genuine love. Love will not make all young people poets, but it will kindle with its most developing glow whatever is the strongest natural power in each individual soul. Parents should foster such love in young people during the adolescent period, instead of ridiculing it, as is too often done. God may not mean that the love is to be permanent, but there is no other agency that can be so productive at the time of adolescence as love that is reverenced by parents who, by due reverence, sympathy, and comradeship, help love to do its best work.

These two adolescent loves did their work in developing Burns, but they were not loves of maturity. From seventeen till he was twenty-one he was not really in love. Then he met, and deeply and reverently loved, Alison Begbie. She was a servant girl of charm, sweetness, and dignity, in a home not far from Lochlea farm. He wrote three poems to her: ‘The Lass o’ Cessnock Banks,’ ‘Peggy Alison,’ and ‘Mary Morrison.’ He reversed her name for the second title, because it possessed neither the elements of metre nor of rhyme. He gave his third poem to her the title ‘Mary Morrison’ to make it conform to the same metre as ‘Peggy Alison.’ There was a Mary Morrison who was nine years of age when Burns wrote ‘Mary Morrison.’ She is buried in Mauchline Churchyard, and on her tombstone it is stated that she was ‘the Mary Morrison of Burns.’ His brother Gilbert knew better. He said the poem was written to the lady to whom ‘Peggy Alison’ was written. It is impossible to believe that Burns would write ‘Mary Morrison’ to a child only nine years old.

Burns wrote five love-letters to Alison Begbie. Beautiful and reverent letters they were, too. In the fourth, he asked her to become his wife. In Chapter III. it has been explained that he was too shy, even at twenty-two, to ask the woman whom he loved to marry him when he was with her. This does not indicate that he had a new love each week, as many yet believe. Miss Begbie refused to marry him, and his reply should win him the respect of every reasonable man or woman who reads it. It is the dignified and reverent outpouring of a loving heart, held in control by a well-balanced and considerate mind.

Although Burns had no lover from seventeen to twenty-one years of age, he wrote love-songs during those years, but even his mother could not tell the name of any young woman who kindled his muse during these four years. Neither could the other members of his family.

He wrote one poem, ‘My Nannie O,’ during this period. He first wrote for the first line:

Beyond the hills where Stinchar flows.

He did not like the word ‘Stinchar,’ so he changed it to ‘Lugar,’ a much more euphonious word. He had no lover named ‘Nannie.’ Lugar and Stinchar were several miles apart. He was really writing about love, not the love of any one woman, during those four years; and he was writing about other great subjects more than about love, mainly religious and ethical ideals.

From the age of twenty-two he was for three years without a lover. At twenty-five he met Jean Armour, then eighteen. Jean spoke first to the respectfully shy man. At the annual dance on Fair night in Mauchline, Burns was one of the young men who were present. His dog, Luath, who loved him, and whom he loved in return, traced his master upstairs to the dance hall. Of course the dance was interrupted when Luath got on the floor and found his master. Burns kindly led the dog out, and as he was going he said, ‘I wish I could find a lassie to loe me as well as my dog.’ A short time afterwards Burns was going along a street in Mauchline, and was passing Jean Armour without speaking to her, because he had not been introduced to her. She was at the village pump getting water to sprinkle her clothes on the village green, and as he was passing her she asked, ‘Hae you found a lassie yet to loe you as well as your dog?’ Burns then stopped and conversed with her. She was a handsome, bright young woman. Their acquaintance soon developed a strong love between them, and resulted in a test of the real manhood of the character of Burns. When he realised that Jean was to become a mother, he did not hesitate as to his duty. He gave her a legal certificate of marriage, signed by himself and regularly witnessed, which was as valid as a marriage certificate of a clergyman or a magistrate in Scottish law.

Jean’s father compelled her to destroy, or let him destroy, the certificate. This, and her father’s threatened legal prosecution, nearly upset the mind of Burns. He undoubtedly loved Jean Armour. In a letter written at the time to David Brice, a friend in Glasgow, he wrote: ‘Never man loved, or rather adored, a woman more than I did her; and, to confess a truth between you and me, I do still love her to distraction after all…. May Almighty God forgive her ingratitude and perjury to me, as I from my very soul forgive her; and may His grace be with her, and bless her in all her future life.’

He had arranged to leave Scotland for Jamaica to escape from his mental torture, when two things came into his life: Mary Campbell, and the suggestion that he should publish his poems. The first filled his heart, the second gave him the best tonic for his mind — deeply and joyously interesting occupation.

Mary Campbell, ‘Highland Mary,’ he had met when she was a nursemaid in the home of his friend Gavin Hamilton. Meeting her again, when she was a servant in Montgomery Castle, he became acquainted with her, and they soon loved each other. It is not remarkable that Burns should love Mary Campbell, because she was a winsome, quiet, refined young woman, and his heart was desolate at the loss of Jean Armour. He, at the time he made love to Mary, had no hope of reconciliation with Jean. The greater his love for Jean had been, and still was, the greater his need was for another love to fill his heart, and he found a pure and satisfying lover in Mary. Their love was deep and short, lasting only about two months. Two busy months they were, as Burns was preparing his poems for the Kilmarnock edition, till he and Mary agreed to be married. They parted for the last time on 14th May 1785. The day was Sunday. They spent the afternoon in the fine park of Montgomery Castle, through which the Fail River runs for a mile and a half. In the evening they went out of the grounds about half a mile to Failford, a little village at the junction of the Fail with the Ayr. The Fail runs parallel to the Ayr, and in the opposite direction after leaving the castle grounds, until it reaches Failford. There it meets a solid rock formation, which compels it to turn squarely to the right and flow into the Ayr, about three hundred yards away. At a narrow place where the Fail had cut a passage through the soft rock on its way to the Ayr, Burns and Highland Mary parted. He stood on one side of the river and Mary on the other, and after they had exchanged Bibles, they made their vows of intention to marry, he holding one side of an open Bible and she the other side. Mary went home to prepare for her marriage, but a relative in Greenock fell ill with malignant fever, and Mary went to nurse him, and caught the fever herself and died.

The poems he wrote to her and about her made her a renowned character. When in 1919 a shipbuilding company at Greenock, after a four years’ struggle, finally purchased the church and churchyard in which Mary was buried, with the intention of removing the bodies to another place, the British Parliament passed an Act providing that her monument must stand forever over her grave, where it had always stood. Though she held a humble position, the beautiful poems of her lover gave her an honoured place in the hearts of millions of people all over the world.

Burns did not go to Jamaica, although he had secured a berth on a ship to take him to that beautiful island. Calls came to him just in time to publish an edition of his poems in Edinburgh. He answered the calls, startled and delighted Edinburgh society, published his poems, and met Clarinda.

Mrs M’Lehose was a cultured and charming grass-widow. She had been courted and married by a wealthy young man in Glasgow when she was only seventeen years of age. Though a lady of the highest character, on the advice of relatives and friends she left her husband. He then went to Jamaica.

Burns and Mrs M’Lehose mutually admired each other when they met, and their friendship quickly developed into affection. Under the names of Sylvander and Clarinda they conducted a love correspondence which will probably always remain the finest love correspondence of the ages. Clarinda was a religious and cultured woman; Burns was a religious and cultured man, so their letters of love are on a high plane. Clarinda wrote very good poems as well as good prose, and Burns wrote some of his best poems to Clarinda. His parting song to Clarinda is, in the opinion of many literary men, the greatest love-song of its kind ever written. Those who study the Clarinda correspondence will find not only love, but many interesting philosophical discussions regarding religion and human life.

Thus ends the record of his real loves, notwithstanding the outrageous misstatements that his loves extended, according to one writer, to nearly four hundred. He had just four deep and serious loves, not counting the two deep and transforming affections of his adolescent period for Nellie Kirkpatrick and Peggy Thomson. He loved four women: Alison Begbie, Jean Armour, Mary Campbell, and Mrs M’Lehose. At the age of twenty-one he loved Alison Begbie, and, when twenty-two, he asked her to marry him. She declined his proposal. He was too shy to propose to her when he was with her. Get this undoubted fact into your consciousness, and think about it fairly and reasonably, and it will help you to get a truer vision of the real Burns. Read the proposal and his subsequent letter on pages 51-55, and your mind should form juster conceptions of Burns as a lover and as a man. You will find it harder to be misled by the foolish or the malicious misrepresentations that have too long passed as facts concerning him as a lover.

From twenty-two to twenty-five he had no lover; then he loved and married Jean Armour. No act of his prevented that marriage-contract remaining in force. When her father forced the destruction of the contract, and much against his will, and in defiance of the love of his heart, he found that he had lost his wife beyond any reasonable hope of reconciliation and reunion, and was therefore free to love another, he loved Mary Campbell, and honourably proposed marriage to her. She accepted his offer, but died soon after. He was untrue to no one when he took Clarinda into his heart. Of course he could not ask her to marry him, as she was already married.

The first three women he loved after he reached the age of twenty-one years were Alison Begbie, Jean Armour, and Mary Campbell. The first refused his offer; he married the second, and was forced into freedom by her father; the third accepted his offer of marriage, but died before they could be married. The fourth woman whom he loved loved him, but could not marry him, a fact recognised by both of them. There is not a shadow of evidence of inconstancy or unfaithfulness on his part in the eight years during which he loved the four women — the only four he did love after he became a man.

It may be answered that Burns was not loyal to Jean Armour because he loved Mary Campbell and Clarinda after he was married to Jean. Burns absolutely believed that his marriage to Jean was annulled by the burning of the marriage certificate. He would not have pledged matrimony with Mary Campbell if he had known that Jean was still his wife. When Mary died, and he found Jean’s father was willing that he might again marry Jean, he did marry her in Gavin Hamilton’s home. In writing to Clarinda he forgot himself for a moment and spoke disrespectfully of Jean, but his prompt and honourable action in marrying her soon after showed him to be a true man.

It should ever be remembered that Burns was in no sense a fickle lover. To each of the three women whom he loved, his love was reverent and true. He had a reverent affection for Alison Begbie after she refused him; he loved Jean Armour after she allowed their marriage-certificate to be destroyed; and he loved Mary Campbell, not only till she died, but to the end of his life. The fact that he sat out in the stackyard on Ellisland farm through the long moonlit night, with tears flowing down his cheeks, on the third anniversary of her death, and wrote ‘To Mary in Heaven,’ proves the depth and permanency of his love.

In ‘My Eppie Adair’ he says:

By love and by beauty, by law and by duty,

I swear to be true to my Eppie Adair.

In these lines Burns truly defines his own type of love.

It is true that Miss Margaret Chalmers told the poet Campbell, after Burns died, that he had asked her to marry him. His letters to her are letters of deep friendship — reverent friendship — not love. It is true that the last poem he ever wrote was written to Margaret Chalmers, and that in it he said:

Full well thou knowest I love thee, dear.

But it must be remembered that Burns had been married to Jean and living happily with her for eight years, so the love of this line was not the love that is expected to lead to marriage, but an expression of reverent affection. The whole tenor of this last poem of his life indicates that he thought her feeling for him was cooling, and his deep affectionate friendship urged him to plead with her for a continuance of their long-existing and quite unusual relationship.

Many people will doubtless say, ‘What about Chloris?’ Chloris was his name for Jean Lorimer, the daughter of a friend of his who dwelt near him when he lived on Ellisland farm after his second marriage to Jean Armour. Chloris was a sweet singer and player, who frequently visited Mrs Burns, and who sang for Burns, sometimes, with Mrs Burns the grand old Scottish airs that had long been sung to words that were not pure, and to which he was writing new and pure words nearly every day. A number of these songs were addressed to Chloris, but in a book of his poems presented to Miss Lorimer he states clearly that the love he appeared to be expressing for her was an assumed, or, as he called it, a ‘fictitious,’ and not a real love.

When Burns had earned five hundred pounds by the sale of the Edinburgh edition of his poems, he decided ‘that he had the responsibility for the temporal and possibly the eternal welfare of a dearly loved fellow-creature;’ so again giving proof of his honest manhood and recognising his plain duty, he married Jean Armour a second time, in the home of his dear friend Gavin Hamilton. Of the first three women whom he loved one refused him, one died after their sacred engagement, and the third he married twice. The fourth and last woman that he loved could not marry.

Any one of the first three would have made him a good wife, but no one could have been more considerate or more faithful than the one he married.

Could any reasonable man believe that if Burns had really loved other women, as he loved Alison Begbie, Jean Armour, Mary Campbell, and Mrs M’Lehose, the names of the other women would not have been known by the world? He never tried to hide his love. He wrote songs of love with other names attached to them, used for variety. In a letter to a friend he regretted the use of ‘Chloris’ in several of his Ellisland and Dumfries poems, and to her directly he said they were ‘fictitious’ or assumed expressions of love. Notwithstanding the foolish or malicious statements that Burns had many lovers, he had but four real loves. One would have been his limit if the first had accepted him and lived as long as he did.

It has been said that ‘the love of Burns was the love of the flesh.’ It is worth while to examine the love-songs of Burns to learn what elements of thought and feeling dominated his mind and heart. He wrote two hundred and fifty love-songs, and only three or four contain indelicate references; even these were not considered improper in his time.

What were the themes of his love-songs? What were the symbols that he used to typify love? There is no beauty or delight in Nature on earth or sky that he did not use as a symbol of true love. He saw God through Nature as few men ever saw Him, and he therefore naturally used the beauty and sweetness and glory of Nature to help to reveal the beauty and sweetness and glory of love, the element of the Divine that thrilled him with the deepest joy and the highest reverence.

In his first poem, written when he was fifteen, describing his fourteen-year-old sweetheart, he says:

A bonnie lass, I will confess,

Is pleasant to the e’e;

But without some better qualities,

She’s no a lass for me.

******

But it’s innocence and modesty

That polishes the dart.

‘Tis this in Nelly pleases me,

‘Tis this enchants my soul;

For absolutely in my breast

She reigns without control.

Of Peggy Thomson, his second love, he wrote:

Not vernal showers to budding flowers,

Not autumn to the farmer,

So dear can be as thou to me,

My fair, my lovely charmer.

Of Alison Begbie he wrote in ‘The Lass o’ Cessnock Banks’:

But it’s not her air, her form, her face,

Tho’ matching beauty’s fabled queen;

‘Tis the mind that shines in ev’ry grace,

And chiefly in her rogueish een.

In ‘Young Peggy Blooms’ he describes her:

Young Peggy blooms our bonniest lass,

Her blush is like the morning,

The rosy dawn, the springing grass

With early gems adorning.

Her eyes outshine the radiant beams

That gild the passing shower,

And glitter o’er the crystal streams,

And cheer each fresh’ning flower.

In ‘Will Ye Go to the Indies, My Mary?’ he says:

O sweet grows the lime and the orange,

And the apple o’ the pine;

But a’ the charms o’ the Indies

Can never equal thine.

The following are emblems of beauty in the ‘Lass o’ Ballochmyle’:

On every blade the pearls hang.

Her look was like the morning’s eye,

Her air like Nature’s vernal smile.

Fair is the morn in flowery May,

And sweet is night in autumn mild.

Describing ‘My Nannie O’ he says:

Her face is fair, her heart is true;

As spotless as she’s bonnie, O;

The opening gowan, wat wi’ dew, daisy

Nae purer is than Nannie O.

In ‘The Birks [birches] of Aberfeldy’ he speaks to his lover of ‘Summer blinking on flowery braes’ and ‘Playing o’er the crystal streamlets;’ and the ‘Blythe singing o’ the little birdies’ and ‘The braes o’erhung wi’ fragrant woods’ and ‘The hoary cliffs crowned wi’ flowers;’ and ‘The streamlet pouring over a waterfall.’ Love and Nature were united in his heart.

In ‘Blythe was She’ he describes the lady by saying she was like beautiful things:

Her looks were like a flower in May.

Her smile was like a simmer morn;

Her bonnie face it was as meek

As any lamb upon a lea;

and the ‘ev’ning sun.’

Her step was

As light’s a bird upon a thorn.

He wrote ‘O’ a’ the Airts the Wind can Blaw’ about Jean Armour after they were married, while he was building their home on Ellisland. He says in this exquisite song:

By day and night my fancy’s flight

Is ever wi’ my Jean.

I see her in the dewy flowers,

I see her sweet and fair;

I hear her in the tunefu’ birds,

I hear her charm the air:

There’s not a bonnie flower that springs

By fountain, shaw, or green; woodland

There’s not a bonnie bird that sings,

But minds me o’ my Jean.

To Jean he wrote again:

It is na, Jean, thy bonnie face,

Nor shape that I admire;

Although thy beauty and thy grace

Might weel awake desire.

Something in ilka part o’ thee

To praise, to love, I find;

But dear as is thy form to me,

Still dearer is thy mind.

In ‘Delia — an Ode,’ he uses the ‘fair face of orient day,’ and ‘the tints of the opening rose’ to suggest her beauty, and ‘the lark’s wild warbled lay’ and the ‘sweet sound of the tinkling rill’ to suggest the sweetness of her voice.

In ‘I Gaed a Waefu’ Gate Yestreen’ he says:

She talked, she smiled, my heart she wiled;

She charmed my soul, I wist na how.

It was the soul of Burns that responded to love. Neither Alison Begbie nor Mary Campbell excelled in beauty, and no one acquainted with their high character could have had the temerity to suggest that love for them was ‘the love of the flesh.’ His beautiful poems to Jean Armour place his love for her on a high plane. He was a man of strong passion, but passion was not the source of his love.

In ‘Aye sae Bonnie, Blythe and Gay’ he says:

She’s aye sae neat, sae trim, sae light, the graces round her hover,

Ae look deprived me o’ my heart, and I became her lover

‘Ilka bird sang o’ its love’ he makes Miss Kennedy say in ‘The Banks o’ Doon.’ As the birds ever sang love to Burns, he naturally makes them sing love to all hearts.

In ‘The Bonnie Wee Thing’ he gives high qualifications for love kindling:

Wit, and grace, and love, and beauty

In ae constellation shine;

To adore thee is my duty,

Goddess o’ this soul o’ mine.

In ‘The Charms of Lovely Davies’ he says:

Each eye it cheers when she appears,

Like Phoebus in the morning,

When past the shower, and ev’ry flower

The garden is adorning.

The last three poems from which quotations have been made were written about two ladies whose lovers had been untrue to them: the first about Miss Kennedy, a member of one of the leading Ayrshire families; the other two about Miss Davies, a relative of the Glenriddell family.

In a letter to Miss Davies he said:

‘Woman is the blood-royal of life; let there be slight degrees of precedency among them, but let them all be sacred. Whether this last sentiment be right or wrong, I am not accountable; it is an original component feature of my mind.’

Burns was not in love with either Miss Kennedy or Miss Davies, but he explains the writing of the songs to Miss Davies, in a letter enclosing ‘Bonnie Wee Thing,’ by saying, ‘When I meet a person of my own heart I positively can no more desist from rhyming on impulse than an AEolian harp can refuse its tones to the streaming air.’

One of his most beautiful poems is ‘The Posie,’ which he planned to pull for his ‘Ain dear May.’

The primrose I will pu’, the firstling o’ the year,

And I will pu’ the pink, the emblem o’ my dear,

For she’s the pink o’ womankind, and blooms without a peer.

I’ll pu’ the budding rose, when Phoebus peeps in view,

For it’s like a baumy kiss o’ her sweet, bonnie mou’;

The hyacinth’s for constancy, wi’ its unchanging blue.

The lily it is pure, and the lily it is fair,

And in her lovely bosom I’ll place the lily there;

The daisy’s for simplicity and unaffected air.

The woodbine I will pu’, when the e’ening star is near,

And the diamond draps o’ dew shall be her een sae clear;

The violet’s for modesty, which weel she fa’s to wear.

I’ll tie the posie round wi’ the silken band o’ luve,

And I’ll place it in her breast, and I’ll swear by a’ above

That to my latest draught o’ life the band shall ne’er remove,

And this will be a posie to my ain dear May.

In ‘Lovely Polly Stewart’ he says:

O lovely Polly Stewart,

O charming Polly Stewart,

There’s ne’er a flower that blooms in May

That’s half so fair as thou art.

The flower it blaws, it fades, it fa’s,

And art can ne’er renew it;

But worth and truth, eternal youth

Will gie to Polly Stewart.

In ‘Thou Fair Eliza’ he says:

Not the bee upon the blossom,

In the pride o’ sinny noon;

Not the little sporting fairy,

All beneath the simmer moon;

Not the minstrel, in the moment

Fancy lightens in his e’e,

Kens the pleasure, feels the rapture,

That thy presence gies to me.

In ‘My Bonie Bell’ he writes:

The smiling spring comes in rejoicing,

The surly winter grimly flies;

Now crystal clear are the falling waters,

And bonie blue are the sunny skies.

Fresh o’er the mountains breaks forth the morning,

The evening gilds the ocean’s swell;

All creatures joy in the sun’s returning,

And I rejoice in my Bonie Bell.

‘Sweet Afton’ was suggested by the following: ‘I charge you, O ye daughters of Jerusalem, that ye stir not, nor awaken my love — my dove, my undefiled! The flowers appear on the earth, the time of the singing of birds is come, and the voice of the turtle is heard in the land.’

In descriptive power and in fond and reverent love no poem of Burns, or any other writer, surpasses Sweet Afton. Authorities have been divided in regard to the person who was the Mary of Sweet Afton. Currie and Lockhart declined to accept the statement of Gilbert Burns that it was Highland Mary. Chambers and Douglas, the most illuminating and reliable of the early biographers of Burns, agree with Gilbert. One of Mrs Dunlop’s daughters stated that she heard Burns himself say that Mary Campbell was the woman whose name he used to represent the lover for whom he asked such reverent consideration. He had no lover at any period of his life on the Afton. He had but one lover named Mary, and she stirred him to a degree of reverence that toned the music of his love to the end of his life. Mary Campbell was alive to Burns in a truly realistic sense when he wrote the sacred poem ‘Sweet Afton.’

In ‘O were my Love yon Lilac Fair’ he assumes that his love might be

A lilac fair,

Wi’ purpling blossoms in the spring,

And I a bird to shelter there,

When wearied on my little wing.

In the second verse he says:

O gin my love were yon red rose if

That grows upon the castle wa’;

And I mysel’ a drop o’ dew,

Into her bonie breast to fa’!

Could imagination kindle more pure ideals to reveal love than these? In ‘Bonie Jean — A Ballad’ he gives two delightful pictures of love:

As in the bosom of the stream

The moonbeam dwells at dewy e’en;

So trembling, pure, was tender love

Within the breast of Bonie Jean.

******

The sun was sinking in the west,

The birds sang sweet in ilka grove; every

His cheek to hers he fondly laid,

And whispered thus his tale of love.

In ‘Phillis the Fair’ he writes:

While larks, with little wing, fann’d the pure air,

Tasting the breathing spring, forth did I fare;

Gay the sun’s golden eye

Peep’d o’er the mountains high;

Such thy morn! did I cry, Phillis the fair.

In each bird’s careless song glad did I share;

While yon wild-flow’rs among, chance led me there!

Sweet to the op’ning day,

Rosebuds bent the dewy spray;

Such thy bloom! did I say, Phillis the fair.

In ‘By Allan Stream’ he describes the glories of Nature, but gives them second place to the joys of love:

The haunt o’ spring’s the primrose-brae,

The summer joys the flocks to follow;

How cheery thro’ her short’ning day

Is autumn in her weeds o’ yellow;

But can they melt the glowing heart,

Or chain the soul in speechless pleasure?

Or thro’ each nerve the rapture dart,

Like meeting her, our bosom’s treasure?

In ‘Phillis, the Queen o’ the Fair’ he uses many beautiful things to illustrate her charms:

The daisy amused my fond fancy,

So artless, so simple, so wild:

Thou emblem, said I, o’ my Phillis —

For she is Simplicity’s child.

The rosebud’s the blush o’ my charmer,

Her sweet, balmy lip when ‘tis prest:

How fair and how pure is the lily!

But fairer and purer her breast.

Yon knot of gay flowers in the arbour,

They ne’er wi’ my Phillis can vie:

Her breath is the breath of the woodbine,

Its dew-drop o’ diamond her eye.

Her voice is the song o’ the morning,

That wakes thro’ the green-spreading grove,

When Phoebus peeps over the mountains

On music, and pleasure, and love.

But beauty, how frail and how fleeting!

The bloom of a fine summer’s day;

While worth, in the mind o’ my Phillis,

Will flourish without a decay.

In ‘My Love is like a Red, Red Rose’ he uses exquisite symbolism:

My luve is like a red, red rose

That’s newly sprung in June;

My luve is like a melodie

That’s sweetly play’d in tune.

As fair art thou, my bonie lass,

So deep in luve am I;

And I will luve thee still, my dear,

Till a’ the seas gang dry.

In the pastoral song, ‘Behold, my Love, how Green the Groves,’ he says in the last verse:

These wild-wood flowers I’ve pu’d to deck

That spotless breast o’ thine;

The courtier’s gems may witness love,

But never love like mine.

In the dialogue song ‘Philly and Willy,’

He says,

As songsters of the early spring

Are ilka day more sweet to hear, each

So ilka day to me mair dear

And charming is my Philly.

She replies,

As on the brier the budding rose

Still richer breathes and fairer blows,

So in my tender bosom grows

The love I bear my Willy.

In ‘O Bonnie was yon Rosy Brier’ he says:

O bonnie was yon rosy brier

That blooms so far frae haunt o’ man;

And bonnie she, and ah, how dear!

It shaded frae the e’ening sun.

Yon rosebuds in the morning dew,

How pure amang the leaves sae green;

But purer was the lover’s vow

They witnessed in their shade yestreen.

All in its rude and prickly bower,

That crimson rose, how sweet and fair.

But love is far a sweeter flower,

Amid life’s thorny path o’ care.

In ‘A Health to Ane I Loe Dear’ — one of his most perfect love-songs — he says:

Thou art sweet as the smile when fond lovers meet,

And soft as their parting tear.

******

‘Tis sweeter for thee despairing

Than aught in the world beside.

In ‘My Peggy’s Charms,’ describing Miss Margaret Chalmers, Burns confines himself mainly to her mental and spiritual charms. This was clearly a distinctive characteristic of nearly the whole of his love-songs. No other man ever wrote so many pure songs without suggestion of the flesh as did Robert Burns.

My Peggy’s face, my Peggy’s form,

The frost of hermit age might warm;

My Peggy’s worth, my Peggy’s mind,

Might charm the first of human kind.

I love my Peggy’s angel air,

Her face so truly, heavenly fair.

Her native grace, so void of art;

But I adore my Peggy’s heart.

The tender thrill, the pitying tear,

The generous purpose, nobly dear;

The gentle look that rage disarms —

These are all immortal charms.

In his ‘Epistle to Davie — A Brother Poet’ Burns, after detailing the many hardships and sorrows of the poor, forgets the hardships, and recalls his blessings:

There’s a’ the pleasures o’ the heart,

The lover and the frien’;

Ye hae your Meg, your dearest part,

And I my darling Jean.

It warms me, it charms me,

To mention but her name;

It heats me, it beets me, kindles

And sets me a’ on flame.

O all ye powers who rule above!

O Thou whose very self art love!

Thou know’st my words sincere!

The life-blood streaming through my heart,

Or my more dear immortal part

Is not more fondly dear!

When heart-corroding care and grief

Deprive my soul of rest,

Her dear idea brings relief

And solace to my breast.

Thou Being, All-Seeing,

O hear my fervent prayer;

Still take her, and make her

Thy most peculiar care.

Three years after the death of Highland Mary, Burns remained out in the stackyard on Ellisland farm and composed ‘To Mary in Heaven.’ Nothing could more strikingly prove the sincerity, the permanence, the purity, and the sacredness of the white-souled love of Burns than this poem:

Thou ling’ring star, with less’ning ray,

That lov’st to greet the early morn,

Again thou usher’st in the day

My Mary from my soul was torn.

O Mary! dear departed shade!

Where is thy place of blissful rest?

See’st thou thy lover lowly laid?

Hear’st thou the groans that rend his breast?

That sacred hour can I forget?

Can I forget that hallow’d grove

Where, by the winding Ayr, we met

To live one day of parting love?

Eternity can not efface

Those records dear of transports past;

Thy image at our last embrace;

Ah! little thought we ‘twas our last!

Ayr, gurgling, kiss’d his pebbled shore,

O’erhung with wild-woods, thickening green;

The fragrant birch and hawthorn hoar

Twined amorous round the raptured scene:

The flowers sprang wanton to be prest,

The birds sang love on every spray;

Till too, too soon, the glowing west,

Proclaimed the speed of winged day.

Still o’er these scenes my mem’ry wakes,

And fondly broods with miser-care;

Time but th’ impression stronger makes,

As streams their channels deeper wear.

My Mary, dear departed shade!

Where is thy place of blissful rest?

See’st thou thy lover lowly laid?

Hear’st thou the groans that rend his breast?

The general themes of this sacred poem, written three years after Mary Campbell’s death, are the preponderating themes of his love-songs. No love-songs ever written have so little of even embracing and kissing as the love-songs of Burns, except the sonnets of Mrs Browning.

It is worthy of note that Mary Campbell was not a beauty — her attractions were kindness, honesty, and unselfishness; yet, though happily married himself, he loved her, three years after her death, as profoundly as when they parted on the Fail, more than three years before he wrote the poem.

CHAPTER VIII. Burns a Philosopher.

The fine training by their father developed the minds of both Robert and Gilbert Burns as original, independent thinkers, chiefly in regard to religious, ethical, and social problems. Professor Dugald Stewart, of Edinburgh University, expressed the opinion that ‘the mind of Burns was so strong and clear that he might have taken high rank as a thinker in any department of human thought; probably attaining as high rank in any other department as he achieved as a poet.’ The quotations given from his writings in the preceding pages prove that he was a philosopher of unusual power in regard to Religion, Democracy, and Brotherhood.

Lockhart said, speaking of the ranking of Burns as a thinker, compared with the best trained minds in Edinburgh: ‘Even the stateliest of these philosophers had enough to do to maintain the attitude of equality when brought into contact with Burns’s gigantic understanding.’

Many of his poems are ornamented and increased in value by flashes of philosophic thought. His ‘Epistle to a Young Friend’ is a series of philosophical statements for human guidance.

Ye’ll find mankind an unco squad, strange

And muckle they may grieve ye, much

I’ll no say men are villains a’;

The real hardened wicked,

Wha hae nae check but human law,

Are to a few restricket; restricted

But, och! mankind are unco weak, very

An’ little to be trusted;

If self the wavering balance shake

It’s rarely right adjusted.

He takes a kindly view, that men as a whole are not so bad as pessimists would have us believe; that there are comparatively few that have no respect for the Divine Law, and are kept in check only by the fear of human law; but mourns because most men yet think more of self than of their neighbours, to whom they may be of service, and sees that, where our relations with our fellow-men are not satisfactorily balanced, the destroyer of harmony is universally selfishness in one form or another.

The fear o’ Hell’s a hangman’s whip

To haud the wretch in order.

Even yet this is advanced philosophy, that fear, being a negative motive, cannot kindle human power or lead men to higher growth. So far as it can influence the human soul, its effect must be to depress it. Not only the fear of hell, but fear of anything, is an agency of evil. Some day a better word than fear will be used to express the proper attitude of human souls towards God.

But where you feel your honour grip

Let that aye be your border.

What you think of yourself matters more to you than what others think of you. Let honour and conscience be your guide, and go not beyond the limits they prescribe. Stop at the slightest warning honour gives,

And resolutely keep its laws,

Uncaring consequences.

In regard to religious matters, he gave his young friend sage advice:

The great Creator to revere

Must sure become the creature;

But still the preaching cant forbear,

And ev’n the rigid feature.

The soul’s attitude to the Creator is a determining factor in deciding its happiness and growth. Reverence should not mean solemnity and awe. Reverence based on dread blights the soul and dwarfs it. True reverence reaches its highest when its source is joy; then it becomes productive of character — constructively transforming character. The formalism of ‘preaching cant’ robs religion of its natural attractiveness, especially to younger people; the ‘rigid feature’ turns those who would enjoy religion from association with those who claim to be Christians, and yet, especially when they speak about religion, look like melancholy and miserable criminals whose final appeal for pardon has been refused. Burns’s philosophy would lift the shadows of frightfulness from religion and let its joyousness be revealed.

An Atheist’s laugh’s a poor exchange

For Deity offended.

A correspondence fixed wi’ heaven

Is sure a noble anchor.

To Burns, the relationship of the soul to God was of first importance. He cared little for man’s formalisms, but personal connection with a loving Father he regarded as the supreme source of happiness. Only a reverent and philosophic mind would think of prayer as ‘a correspondence with heaven.’

Burns holds a high rank as a profound philosopher of human life, of human growth, and of human consciousness of the Divine, as the vital centre of human power.

Burns was a philosopher in his recognition that productive work is essential to human happiness and progress.

In ‘The Twa Dogs’ he makes Caesar say:

But human bodies are sic fools,

For a’ their colleges and schools,

That when nae real ills perplex them,

They mak enow themselves to vex them;

An’ ay the less they hae to sturt them, trouble

In like proportion less will hurt them.

******

But gentleman, and ladies warst,

Wi’ ev’n-down want o’ wark are curst.

Burns had real sympathy for the idle rich. He saw that idleness leads to many evils, and that probably the worst evils, those that produce most unhappiness, are those that result from neglecting to use, or misusing, powers that, if wisely used, would produce comfort and happiness for ourselves as well as for others. He believed that every man and woman would be happier if engaged in some productive occupation, and that those who do not use their hands to produce for themselves and their fellows are ‘curst wi’ want o’ wark.’

This belief is based on an old and very profound philosophy, that is not even yet understood as widely and as fully as it should be: the philosophy first expounded by Plato, and afterwards by Goethe and Ruskin, that ‘all evil springs from unused, or misused, good.’ Whatever element is highest in our lives will degrade us most if misused. The best in the lives of the idle sours and causes deterioration instead of development of character, and breeds discontent and unhappiness, so that days are ‘insipid, dull and tasteless,’ and nights are ‘unquiet, lang and restless.’

Burns showed that he understood this revealing philosophy in ‘The Vision.’ In this great poem he assumes that Coila, the genius of Kyle, his native district in Ayrshire, appeared to him in a vision, and revealed a clear understanding of the epoch events of his past life and their influence on his development, and gave him advice to guide him for the future. In one verse he says:

I saw thy pulse’s maddening play

Wild send thee pleasure’s devious way,

Misled by fancy’s meteor-ray,

By passion driven;

But yet the light that led astray

Was light from heaven.

He was attacked and criticised severely for the statement contained in the last two lines. The statement is but philosophic truth that his critics did not understand. Fancy and passion are elements of power given from heaven. Properly used they become important elements in human happiness and development. Improperly used they produce unhappiness and degradation.

Burns understood clearly the philosophic basis of modern education, the importance of developing the individuality, or selfhood, or special power of each child. The poem he wrote to his friend Robert Graham of Fintry, beginning:

When Nature her great masterpiece designed

And framed her last, best work, the human mind,

Her eye intent on all the mazy plan,

She formed of various parts the various man,

is a philosophical description of how Nature produced various types of men, giving to each mind special powers and aptitudes. The thought of the poem is the basis of all modern educational thought: the value of the individuality of each child, and the importance of developing it.

He expresses very beautifully the philosophy of the ephemeral nature of certain forms of pleasure in eight lines of ‘Tam o’ Shanter’:

But pleasures are like poppies spread,

You seize the flower, its bloom is shed;

Or as the snowfall in the river,

A moment white, then melts forever;

Or like the borealis race,

That flit e’er you can point their place;

Or like the rainbow’s lovely form,

Evanishing amid the storm.

Burns understood the philosophy of the simple life in the development of character and happiness.

In ‘The Cotter’s Saturday Night,’ after dilating on the glories of simple, reverent religion, as compared with ‘Religion’s Pride,’

In all the pomp of method and of art,

When men display to congregations wide

Devotion’s every grace except the heart,

he prays for the young people of Scotland —

Long may thy hardy sons of rustic toil

Be blest with health, and peace, and sweet content;

And O! may Heaven their simple lives prevent

From luxury’s contagion, weak and vile!

Then, howe’er crowns and coronets be rent,

A virtuous populace may rise the while,

And stand a wall of fire around their much-loved isle.

He understood the value of simplicity in life as well as in religion, and expressed it in admirable form.

‘The Address to the Unco Guid’ has a kindly philosophic sympathy running like a stream of light through it; the profound sympathy of the Master who searched for the one stray lamb, and who suggested that he who was without sin should cast the first stone. The last verse especially contains a sublime human philosophy, that if studied till understood, and then practised, would work a greatly needed change in the attitude of the rest of humanity towards the so-called wayward. It is one of the strange anomalies of life that, generally, professing Christian women have in the past been the last to come with Christian sympathy of an affectionate, and sisterly, and respectful quality to take an erring sister in their arms to try to prove that she still possessed their esteem, and to rekindle faith in her heart.

His poem to Mrs Dunlop on ‘New Year’s Day, 1790;’ ‘A Man’s a Man for a’ That;’ ‘A Winter Night;’ ‘Sketch in Verse;’ and ‘Verses written in Friar’s Carse Hermitage,’ all show him to have been a philosophic student of human nature.

A few quotations from letters to his friends will show his philosophical attitude to general matters, as the quotations from his letters showed the clearness and trueness of his philosophy regarding religion, democracy, and brotherhood.

Burns saw man’s duty to his fellows and to himself in this life.

In a letter to Robert Ainslie, Edinburgh, 1788, he wrote: ‘I have no objection to prefer prodigality to avarice, in some few instances; but I appeal to your observation, if you have not met, and often met, with the same disingenuousness, the same hollow-hearted insincerity, and disintegrative depravity of principle, in the hackneyed victims of profusion, as in the unfeeling children of parsimony. I have every possible reverence for the much-talked-of world beyond the grave, and I wish that which piety believes, and virtue deserves, may be all matter of fact. But in all things belonging to, and terminating in, the present scene of existence, man has serious business on hand. Whether a man shall shake hands with welcome in the distinguished elevation of respect, or shrink from contempt in the abject corner of insignificance; whether he shall wanton under the tropic of plenty, or at least enjoy himself in the comfortable latitudes of easy convenience, or starve in the arctic circle of poverty; whether he shall rise in the manly consciousness of a self-approving mind, or sink beneath a galling load of regret and remorse — these are alternatives of the last moment.’

Since the time of Burns men and women, both in the churches and out of them, have learned to set more store on the importance of living truly on the earth, and have ceased to a large extent to think only of a life to come after death. Men and women are now trying in increasing numbers to make it more heavenly here.

Burns taught a sound philosophy of contentment as a basis for happiness.

He wrote to Mr Ainslie in 1789: ‘You need not doubt that I find several very unpleasant and disagreeable circumstances in my business [that of a gauger], but I am tired with and disgusted at the language of complaint at the evils of life. Human existence in the most favourable situations does not abound with pleasures, and has its inconveniences and ills; capricious, foolish man mistakes these inconveniences and ills, as if they were the peculiar property of his own particular situation; and hence that eternal fickleness, that love of change, which has ruined, and daily does ruin, many a fine fellow, as well as many a blockhead; and is almost without exception a constant source of disappointment and misery. So far from being dissatisfied with my present lot, I earnestly pray the Great Disposer of events that it may never be worse, and I think I can lay my hand on my heart and say “I shall be content.”’

Good, sound philosophy of contentment! Not the contentment that does not try to improve life’s conditions, but the wise contentment that recognises the best in present conditions, instead of foolishly resenting what it cannot change.

Burns taught the philosophy of good citizenship.

In 1789 he wrote to Mr Ainslie: ‘If the relations we stand in to King, country, kindred, and friends be anything but the visionary fancies of dreaming metaphysicians; if religion, virtue, magnanimity, generosity, humanity, and justice be aught but empty sounds; then the man who may be said to live only for others, for the beloved, honourable female whose tender, faithful embrace endears life, and for the helpless little innocents who are to be the men and women, the worshippers of his God, the subjects of his King, and the support, nay the very vital existence, of his country in the ensuing age, is the type of truest manhood.’

This quotation from a letter written to a warm, personal friend from whom he was not seeking any favours gives an insight into a rational mind loyal to God, loyal to his king, loyal to his country, and lovingly loyal to his wife and family.

In a letter to the Right Rev. Dr Geddes, a Roman Catholic Bishop resident in Edinburgh, a very kind friend to Burns, he wrote, 1789: ‘I am conscious that wherever I am, you do me the honour to interest yourself in my welfare. It gives me pleasure to inform you that I am here at last [at Ellisland], stationary in the serious business of life, and have now not only the retired leisure, but the hearty inclination to attend to those great and important questions: What I am? Where I am? For what I am destined? Thus with a rational aim and method in life, you may easily guess, my reverend and much honoured friend, that my characteristical trade is not forgotten; I am, if possible, more than ever an enthusiast to the Muses. I am determined to study Man and Nature, and in that view, incessantly to try if the ripening and corrections of years can enable me to produce something worth preserving.’

Bishop Gillis, a Roman Catholic Bishop who lived more than sixty years after the death of Burns, said, in reference to the letter from which this quotation was made: ‘If any man, after perusing this letter, will still say that the mind of Burns was beyond the reach of religious influence, or, in other words, that he was a scoffer at revelation, that man need not be reasoned with, as his own mind must be hopelessly beyond the reach of argument.’

In a letter to his friend Cunningham he wrote, 1789: ‘What strange beings we are! Since we have a portion of conscious existence equally capable of enjoying pleasure, happiness, and rapture, or of suffering pain, wretchedness, and misery, it is surely worthy of inquiry whether there be not such a thing as a science of life; whether method, economy, and fertility of expedients be not applicable to enjoyment, and whether there be not a want of dexterity in pleasure which renders our little scantling of happiness still less; and a profuseness and intoxication in bliss which leads to satiety, disgust, and self-abhorrence.

‘There is not a doubt but that health, talents, character, decent competency, respectable friends, are real, substantial blessings; and yet do we not daily see those who enjoy many, or all, of these good things, and notwithstanding contrive to be as unhappy as others to whose lot few of them have fallen? I believe one great source of this mistake or misconduct is owing to a certain stimulus, with us called ambition, which goads us up the hill of life — not as we ascend other eminences, for the laudable curiosity of viewing an extended landscape, but rather for the dishonest pride of looking down on others of our fellow-creatures, seemingly diminutive in other stations, &c.’

His philosophy clearly recognised the evils of unduly centring our minds and hearts on pleasure, and thus not only robbing ourselves of development, and humanity of the advantage of the many things we might do in our overtime devoted to pleasure, but destroying our interest in the things that were intended to give us happiness.

He also recognised fully the evils of selfish ambition which aims at attaining higher positions than others; which climbs, not to get into purer air to see more widely our true relationships to our fellow-men, but for the degrading satisfaction of being able to look down with a hardening pride that separates humanity into groups instead of uniting all men in brotherhood. A man whose heart and mind are engrossed by base material aims cannot grow truly, and he loses the advantages that should have come to him from the elements of blessing he possesses by misusing them for selfish ends.

In another letter he wrote: ‘All my fears and 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 inquirer must in some degree be a sceptic. It is not that there are any very staggering arguments against the immortality of man, but, like electricity, phlogiston, &c., the subject is so involved in darkness that we want data to go upon.’

His philosophy left him no fears for what comes after death. He had deep faith in the justice of God. ‘I believe,’ he said, ‘that God perfectly understands the being He has made.’ Believing this, and believing also that God is just, he feared not the future. Burns, as he said to Mrs Dunlop, was ‘in his idle moments sometimes a little sceptical.’ But they were only moments. He knew there were problems he could not solve, and so, as he wrote to Dr Candlish, ‘he was glad to grasp revealed religion.’ A thoughtful man requires more faith in revealed religion than a man who does not really think, but only thinks he is thinking, when other people’s thoughts are running through his head. Burns needed strong faith, and he had it even about religious matters he could not explain. ‘The necessities of my own heart,’ as he wrote to Mrs Dunlop, ‘gave the lie to my cold philosophisings.’ His ‘Ode to Mrs Dunlop on New Year’s Day, 1790,’ said:

The voice of Nature loudly cries,

And many a message from the skies,

That something in us never dies.

He accepted by faith the ‘messages from the skies,’ and in his soul harmonised the messages with the ‘Voice of Nature,’ even though his philosophic mind searched for proof of problems he could not solve.

In a letter to Peter Hill, 1790, he wrote: ‘Mankind are by nature benevolent creatures, except in a few scoundrelly instances. I do not think that avarice for the good things we chance to have is born with us; but we are placed here among so much nakedness and hunger and poverty and want, that we are under a damning necessity of studying selfishness in order that we may EXIST. Still there are in every age a few souls that all the wants and woes of life cannot debase into selfishness, or even give the necessary alloy of caution and prudence. If ever I am in danger of vanity, it is when I contemplate myself on this side of my disposition and character. God knows I am no saint; I have a whole host of follies and sins to answer for, but if I could (and I believe I do, as far as I can), I would ‘wipe away all tears from all eyes.’

Burns was not self-righteous. He moralises in this quotation not as one of the ‘unco guid,’ but as a man on what he thought was one of life’s most perplexing problems, poverty. He saw the problem more keenly than most men see it yet. It was not the poverty of Burns himself that, as Carlyle believed, made him write and work for freedom and justice for the labouring-classes. It is quite true, however, that one of his reasons for pleading for democracy was the poverty among the peasantry of his time. He saw the injustice of conditions, and admitted in his poem to Davie, a brother poet, that

It’s hardly in a body’s power

To keep at times from being sour,

To see how things are shared.

Burns recommended the philosophy of right, not expediency in public as well as private matters.

He wrote a letter to Mrs Dunlop in 1790, in which he said: ‘I believe, in my conscience, such ideas as, “my country; her independence; her honour; the illustrious names that mark the history of my native land,” &c. — I believe these, among your men of the world; men who, in fact, guide, for the most part, and govern our world, are looked on as so many modifications of wrong-headedness. They knew the use of bawling out such terms to rouse or lead the Rabble; but for their own private use, with almost all the able statesmen that ever existed, or now exist, when they talk of right and wrong, they only mean proper and improper; and their measure of conduct is not what they ought, but what they dare. For the truth of this, I shall not ransack the history of nations, but appeal to one of the ablest judges of men, and himself one of the ablest men that ever lived — the celebrated Earl of Chesterfield. In fact a man that could thoroughly control his vices, whenever they interfered with his interest, and who could completely put on the appearance of every virtue as often as it suited his purposes, is, on the Stanhopian plan, the perfect man, a man to lead nations. But are great abilities, complete without a flaw, and polished without a blemish, the standard of human excellence? This is certainly not the staunch opinion of men of the world; but I call on honour, virtue, and worth to give the Stygian doctrine a loud negative! However, this must be allowed, that, if you abstract from man the idea of an existence beyond the grave, then the true measure of human conduct is proper and improper; virtue and vice, as dispositions of the heart, are, in that case, of scarcely the same import and value to the world at large as harmony and discord in the modifications of sound; and a delicate sense of honour, like a nice ear for music, though it may sometimes give the possessor an ecstasy unknown to the coarser organs of the herd, yet, considering the harsh gratings and inharmonic jars in this ill-tuned state of being, it is odds but the individual would be as happy, and certainly would be as much respected by the true judges of society, as it would then stand, without either a good ear or a good heart….

‘Mackenzie has been called “the Addison of the Scots,” and, in my opinion, Addison would not be hurt at the comparison. If he has not Addison’s exquisite humour, he as certainly outdoes him in the tender and the pathetic. His Man of Feeling — but I am not counsel-learned in the laws of criticism — I estimate as the first performance of the kind I ever saw. From what book, moral or even pious, will the susceptible young mind receive impressions more congenial to humanity and kindness, generosity and benevolence — in short, more of all that ennobles the soul to herself, or endears her to others, than from the simple, affecting tale of poor Harley?

‘Still, with all my admiration of Mackenzie’s writings, I do not know if they are the fittest reading for a young man who is about to set out, as the phrase is, to make his way into life. Do you not think, Madam, that among the few favoured of heaven in the structure of their minds (for such there certainly are) there may be a purity, a tenderness, a dignity, and elegance of soul, which are of no use, nay, in some degree absolutely disqualifying, for the truly important business of making a man’s way into life?’

Burns understood the underlying philosophy of sensitiveness.

In a letter to Miss Craik, 1790, he wrote: ‘There is not among the martyrologies ever penned so rueful a narrative as the lives of the poets. In the comparative view of wretches, the criterion is not what they are doomed to suffer, but how they are formed to bear. Take a being of our kind, give him a stronger imagination and a more delicate sensibility, which between them will ever engender a more ungovernable set of passions than are the usual lot of man; implant in him an irresistible impulse to some idle vagary, such as arranging wild flowers in fantastical nosegays, tracing the grasshopper to his haunt by his chirping song, watching the frisks of the little minnows in the sunny pool, or hunting after the intrigues of wanton butterflies — in short, send him adrift after some pursuit which shall eternally mislead him from the paths of lucre, and yet curse him with a keener relish than any man living for the pleasures that lucre can purchase; lastly, fill up the measure of his woes by bestowing on him a spurning sense of his own dignity, and you have created a wight nearly as miserable as a poet. To you, Madam, I need not recount the fairy pleasures the Muse bestows to counterbalance this catalogue of evils. Bewitching poesy is like bewitching woman: she has in all ages been accused of misleading mankind from the counsels of wisdom and the paths of prudence, involving them in difficulties, baiting them with poverty, branding them with infamy, and plunging them in the whirling vortex of ruin; yet, where is the man but must own that all our happiness on earth is not worth the name — that even the holy hermit’s solitary prospect of paradisaical bliss is but the glitter of a northern sun rising over a frozen region, compared with the many pleasures, the nameless raptures that we owe to the lovely Queen of the heart of Man!’

He based the last two lines in his ‘Poem on Sensibility’ on this philosophy:

Chords that vibrate sweetest pleasure,

Thrill the deepest notes of woe.

His ‘Parting Song to Clarinda’ reveals in the four lines, said by Sir Walter Scott ‘to contain the essence of a thousand love-tales,’ how deepest love may bring darkest sorrow:

Had we never loved sae kindly,

Had we never loved sae blindly,

Never met — or never parted,

We had ne’er been broken-hearted.

In a letter to Crawford Tait, Esq., Edinburgh, 1790, requesting a sympathetic interest on behalf of a young man from Ayrshire, he says: ‘I shall give you my friend’s character in two words: as to his head, he has talents enough, and more than enough, for common life; as to his heart, when Nature had kneaded the kindly clay that composes it, she said, “I can no more.”

‘You, my good Sir, were born under kinder stars; but your fraternal sympathy, I well know, can enter into the feelings of the young man who goes into life with the laudable ambition to do something, and to be something among his fellow-creatures; but whom the consciousness of friendless obscurity presses to the earth, and wounds to the soul!

‘Even the fairest of his virtues are against him. That independent spirit, and that ingenuous modesty — qualities inseparable from a noble mind — are, with the million, circumstances not a little disqualifying. What pleasure is in the power of the fortunate and the happy, by their notice and patronage, to brighten the countenance and glad the heart of such depressed youth! I am not so angry with mankind for their deaf economy of the purse — the goods of this world cannot be divided without being lessened — but why be a niggard of that which bestows bliss on a fellow-creature, yet takes nothing from our own means of enjoyment? We wrap ourselves up in the cloak of our better-fortune and turn away our eyes, lest the wants and woes of our brother-mortals should disturb the selfish apathy of our souls.’

Burns was a deep character student, and he was able to adjust the balance fairly when weighing the characteristics that count for success in public life, in business, and in private life. He always recommended honesty, and always admired that independent spirit and that ingenuous modesty inseparable from a noble mind. Much as he admired them, however, he clearly understood that these admirable qualities might prevent the perfect development of a soul if they made a man morbidly sensitive, or interfered in any way with his faith in himself.

Speaking of ‘independence and sensibility,’ the same qualities he discussed in the letter quoted (to Mr Crawford Tait), he says in a letter to Peter Hill, Edinburgh, 1791, addressing poverty: ‘By thee the man of sentiment, whose heart flows with independence, and melts with sensibility, inly pines under the neglect or writhes in bitterness of soul under the contumely of arrogant, unfeeling wealth.’

Burns taught the just philosophy of gratitude to God.

In a letter to Dr Moore, of London, he wrote, 1791: ‘Whatsoever is not detrimental to society, and is of positive enjoyment, is of God, the Giver of all good things, and ought to be received and enjoyed by His creatures with thankful delight.’

We cannot yet estimate the philosophic vision of Burns. It will grow clearer as century follows century. Carlyle said of him: ‘We see that in this man was the gentleness, the trembling pity of a woman, with the deep earnestness, the force, and passionate ardour of a hero. Tears lie in him, and a consuming fire, as lightning lurks in the drop of the summer clouds.’

So much for his heart; what says Carlyle about his mind?

‘Burns never studied philosophy…. Nevertheless, sufficient indication, if no proof sufficient, remains for us in his works; we discern the brawny movements of a gigantic though untutored strength; and can understand how, in conversation, his quick, sure insight into men and things may, as aught else about him, have amazed the best thinkers of his time and country.

‘But, unless we mistake, the intellectual gift of Burns is fine as well as strong. The more delicate relations of things could not well have escaped his eye, for they were intimately present to his heart. The logic of the senate and the forum is indispensable, but not all-sufficient; nay, perhaps the highest truth is that which will most certainly elude it, for this logic works by words, and “the highest,” it has been said, “cannot be expressed in words.” We are not without tokens of an openness for this higher truth also, a keen though uncultivated sense for it having existed in Burns. Mr Stewart, it will be remembered, wondered that Burns had formed some distinct conception of the doctrine of Association. We rather think that far subtler things than the doctrine of Association had from of old been familiar to him.’

Carlyle’s last statement is correct. He admits the great essential truth that Burns was a subtle philosopher. What a pity that such a man as Carlyle should have thought it necessary to say that Burns ‘never studied philosophy.’ The statement is incorrect, but, if it had been correct, why make it? and why call his mental strength ‘untutored,’ and his ‘keen sense of the highest philosophy’ ‘uncultivated’?

Did any other philosopher of the time of Burns in the universities reveal a more profound philosophy of human life, and make so many applications of it, as Robert Burns revealed in the quotations in this chapter, and in the chapters on Democracy, Brotherhood, and Love?

Burns was a philosopher, an independent thinker, whose thought is more highly appreciated now than it was in the time of Carlyle.

In a letter to Mrs Graham, 1791, he wrote: ‘I was born a poor dog; and however I may occasionally pick a better bone than I used to do, I know I must live and die poor. But I will indulge the flattering faith that my poetry will considerably outlive my poverty; and without any fustian affectation of spirit, I can promise and affirm that it must be no ordinary craving of the latter that shall ever make me do anything injurious to the honest fame of the former. Whatever may be my failings — for failings are a part of human nature — may they ever be those of a generous heart and an independent mind.’

Speaking of the moral character of Burns, Carlyle is wise and just. He says: ‘We are far from regarding him as guilty before the world, as guiltier than the average; nay, from doubting that he is less guilty than one of ten thousand tried at a tribunal far more rigid than that where the Plebiscite of common civic reputations are pronounced, he has seemed to us less worthy of blame than of pity and wonder. But the world is habitually unjust in its judgments of such men; unjust on many grounds, of which this one may be stated as the substance; it decides, like a court of law, by dead statutes; and not positively, but negatively, less on what is done right than on what is or is not done wrong…. What Burns did under his circumstances, and what he forbore to do, alike fill us with astonishment at the natural strength and worth of his character.’

Burns was naturally a student gifted with a great mind. His splendid mind was trained to act logically by his remarkable father, and quickened and illuminated by his great teacher John Murdoch. He was a great philosopher, not merely because he read Locke’s ‘Essay on the Human Understanding’ when a boy, but because during his short life he read with joyous interest many books of a philosophical character, and what is of infinitely greater importance, he interpreted all he read with an independent mind, and related all truth as he understood it to human life. He could discuss even the principles of Spinoza, and ‘venture into the daring path Spinoza trod.’ Yet, as he told Dr Candlish, of Edinburgh, he merely ‘ventured in’ to test Spinoza’s philosophy, which he soon found to be inadequate to the true development of the human soul, and therefore he ‘was glad to grasp revealed religion.’ Not merely as a great poetic genius, but as a profound philosophic teacher of religion, democracy, and brotherhood — the most essentially vital elements related to the highest development of the souls of men and women — will the real Robert Burns become known as he is more justly and more deeply studied.

CHAPTER IX. The Development of Burns.

BORN 1759 — DIED 1796.

6 Years Old.

At six years of age he was sent to a school in a little home near Alloway Mill for a few months. Then the school was closed, and William Burns, his father, and a few neighbours engaged a remarkably fine teacher named John Murdoch to teach their children.

7 Years Old.

When Burns was seven years old his father moved to Mount Oliphant farm, about two miles from Alloway. Robert continued to attend Murdoch’s school.

8 Years Old.

He continued to attend Murdoch’s school.

9 Years Old.

Murdoch, his beloved teacher, left Alloway. He had not only been the teacher of Burns, but had lent the boy books, among them being The Life of Hannibal. Burns said this book ‘was the earliest I recollect taking any pleasure in.’ Murdoch presented him with an English grammar and a book translated from the French, named The School for Love. His imagination during this period was kindled by many legends, ghost stories, tales, and songs told and sung by an old lady, Betty Davidson, who lived in the family home.

10 Years Old.

Read and studied with his father, discussing freely the merits of the books read.

11 Years Old.

He studied, and continued to study with enthusiasm, English grammar, and had become an unusually excellent scholar for his age in English. His father regularly taught his family after Murdoch left Alloway. A deep and lasting impression was made on Robert’s mind during this year by a Collection of Letters, written by the leading authors of Queen Anne’s reign.

12 Years Old.

Worked on the farm, and read with his father at night. Wrote many letters to imaginary correspondents.

13 Years Old.

He was sent for a few weeks to a school in Dalrymple to learn penmanship. John Murdoch was appointed teacher in the High School at Ayr. He became again a visitor to the Burns’ home, in which he was a most welcome guest. He presented Pope’s works to Robert. During this year Burns continued an imaginary correspondence with many people, and began to form a style moulded by the Letters of the great prose-writers of Queen Anne’s time.

14 Years Old.

Boarded with Murdoch in Ayr for a few weeks, to devote himself to a deeper study of English. Studied French a little, and gave a little attention to Latin. The best influence of his brief period with Murdoch was the kindling of his vision with higher ideals of life, his relationship to his fellow-men, and his duty to God.

15 Years Old.

Began to take his place as an independent thinker with men, and surprised them by his wide knowledge and his unusual powers of expression and impression. Took his share in reaping the grain on the farm, and fell in love with his harvest mate, Nellie Kirkpatrick, who bound and shocked, or stooked, what he reaped. She was a good-looking girl of fourteen, who sang well. Burns said her love made him a poet. He composed his first poem, ‘Handsome Nell,’ as a tribute to her. His love for her undoubtedly kindled him at the centre of his power, as a true love that is respectfully treated by parents always does for a youth during the adolescent period.

16 Years Old.

He laboured hard on the farm, but was worried by his father’s poverty, by the poorness of the soil of Mount Oliphant farm, and especially by the harsh and over-bearing manner in which his father was treated by the landlord’s agent. Hard labour and possibly insufficient nourishment for a youth growing rapidly, coupled with his humiliation at the conduct of the agent, and his sorrowful sympathy, affected his health. He became depressed and moody, and suffered from headaches and palpitation of the heart. He had become acquainted with a few respectable women in Ayr, one of whom lent him the Spectator and Pope’s Homer. These he read and digested with a growing interest, and used with rapidly developing power.

17 Years Old.

Was sent to the school of Hugh Rodger at Kirkoswald to learn mathematics, especially mensuration and surveying. He enjoyed the work and made rapid progress. He formed a friendship with William Niven, who went to the same school; and in order to develop his powers as an independent thinker and a public speaker, he and Willie organised a debating society of two, which met in formal debate once a week. This developed his intellectual powers more than the study of mathematics. His school-days in Kirkoswald came to a sudden ending when he met Peggy Thomson, who lived next to the school. His second adolescent love came unexpectedly, and with great force. He says Peggy Thomson’s charms ‘Overset his trigonometry, and set him off at a tangent from his studies.’ He tried to study, but at the end of the week gave it all up and went home.

His schoolmaster learned about the debates between him and Willie Niven, and determined to put an end to such waste of time from the study of mathematics. He charged Niven one day with the crime of debating, and demanded the subject for the next debate. Willie told him the subject for to-morrow was, ‘Resolved that a great general is of more use to the world than a good merchant.’ ‘Nonsense,’ thundered the teacher; ‘everybody ought to know that a general is of far more importance to the world than a merchant.’ Burns promptly said to the teacher, ‘You take the general’s side, and I will take the merchant’s side, and let us see.’

Burns spoke with such wide information, such fine reasoning and such splendid eloquence, that he soon had the boys cheering him wildly. This annoyed the master, and he became so angry that he dismissed the school for the day.

Even at the early age of seventeen he had few rivals as a public speaker and debater. He took lessons in a dancing-school at Tarbolton, when he returned from Kirkoswald, to improve his social manners. During this year he read Thomson’s works, Shenstone’s works, a Select Collection of English Songs, Allan Ramsay’s works, Hervey’s Meditations, and some of Shakespeare’s plays.

18 Years Old.

The family moved to Lochlea farm, about four miles from Mauchline. Up to this time he had been an awkward and bashful youth. He began now to be more at ease with the opposite sex after he had been introduced to them. He had no real lover, however, between 17 and 21.

19 Years Old.

About this time he made a plan for a tragedy. He never finished it, and preserved only a fragment, beginning, ‘All devil as I am.’

20 Years Old.

A year of work, reading, and visions that were but the bases of higher visions yet to come.

21 Years Old.

He, with his brother Gilbert and five other young men, founded a debating club in an upstairs room of a private house in Tarbolton. He read persistently; held a book in his left hand at meals; and usually carried a book with him while walking. About this time he began to be known as a critic of the preaching and practices of the ‘Auld Licht’ preachers, and enjoyed shocking those who were, in his judgment, not vital, but only professing, Christians, who did nothing to prove the genuineness of their religion. In this year his heart was kindled by the first love of his manhood.

22 Years Old.

He read Sterne’s works, Macpherson’s Ossian, and Mackenzie’s The Man of the World and Man of Feeling. He said ‘he valued the last book more than any other book, except the Bible.’ His mind turned to religious subjects very definitely at this period. He developed a deep and reverent affection for Alison Begbie, who was a servant on a farm not far from Lochlea farm. The farm was on Cessnock Water. He wrote three poems to her: ‘The Lass of Cessnock Banks,’ ‘Peggy Alison,’ and ‘Mary Morrison.’ His letters to her reveal the two great dominant elements in his mind and heart at that time: a deep and respectful love, and some of the highest ideals of vital religion.

In this year love again stirred him to write poetry. He said it became ‘a darling walk for his mind.’ ‘Winter — a Dirge’ belongs to this period.

23 Years Old.

This was an eventful year. Alison Begbie had declined his offer of marriage. Had she married him and lived he would have had but one love after maturity. He ventured into business in Irvine. He says his partner ‘was a scoundrel of the first water, who made money by the mystery of thieving.’ Their shop was burned, and he found himself not worth a sixpence. He read two novels, Pamela, and Ferdinand, Count Fathom, and Fergusson’s Poems, which filled him with a deeper determination to write poetry. He wrote several religious poems this year.

24 Years Old.

He became a Freemason in Tarbolton, and devoted a good deal of time to the order. He did not write much poetry. His mind was occupied by religious matters, and he had an impression that his life was not going to last very long. This idea haunted him for two or three years after his maturity. He contemplated death as a rest, but he continued to store his mind and think independently. Dr Mackenzie, who attended his father on his death-bed towards the end of the year, wrote, ‘that on his first visit he found Gilbert and his father friendly and cordial, but Robert silent and uncompanionable, till he began discussing a medical subject, when Robert promptly joined in the discussion, and showed an unexpected and remarkable understanding of the subject.’ During this year he wrote ‘My Father was a Farmer’ and ‘The Death and Dying Words of Poor Mailie.’

25 Years Old.

His father died in February, leaving the family very poor. Robert and Gilbert rented Mossgiel farm, about two miles from Mauchline, and the family moved there. Robert determined to be a scientific farmer. He read the best books he could get on agriculture; but bad seed, bad weather, and late harvest left the brothers only half an average crop. He continued to work on the farm, but evidently began to realise more clearly the kindling call to poetry as the special work of his life. During the next twelve years he produced a continuous out-pouring of wonderful poems, although about half of the twelve years he worked as a farmer on Mossgiel and Ellisland farms, and most of the rest of the time worked hard as a gauger, riding two hundred miles each week in the performance of his duties. In this year he wrote ‘The Rigs of Barley,’ composed in August; ‘My Nannie O,’ ‘Green Grow the Rashes,’ ‘Man was Made to Mourn,’ ‘The Twa Herds,’ and the ‘Epitaph on My Ever Honoured Father.’ In this year he met Jean Armour, and soon loved her.

26 Years Old.

He wrote many poems during this year, the most important being ‘Epistle to Davie, a Brother Poet,’ ‘Holy Willie’s Prayer,’ ‘Death and Doctor Hornbook,’ three long ‘Epistles to John Lapraik,’ ‘Epistle to William Simpson,’ ‘Epistle to John Goldie,’ ‘Rantin’, Rovin’ Robin,’ ‘Epistle to Rev. John M’Math,’ ‘Second Epistle to Davie,’ ‘Farewell to Ballochmyle,’ ‘Hallowe’en,’ ‘To a Mouse,’ ‘The Jolly Beggars,’ ‘The Cotter’s Saturday Night,’ ‘Address to the Deil,’ and ‘The Auld Farmer’s New-Year Morning Salutation to his Auld Mare Maggie.’

27 Years Old.

This was an eventful and productive year for Burns. Quickly following each other came ‘The Twa Dogs,’ ‘The Author’s Earnest Cry and Prayer,’ ‘The Ordination,’ ‘Epistle to James Smith,’ ‘The Vision,’ ‘Address to the Unco Guid,’ ‘The Holy Fair,’ ‘To a Mountain Daisy,’ ‘To Ruin,’ ‘Despondency: an Ode,’ ‘Epistle to a Young Friend,’ ‘Nature’s Law,’ ‘The Brigs of Ayr,’ ‘O Thou Dread Power!’ ‘Farewell Song to the Banks of Ayr,’ ‘Lines on Meeting Lord Daer,’ ‘Masonic Song,’ ‘Tam Samson’s Elegy,’ ‘A Winter Night,’ ‘Yon Wild Mossy Mountains,’ ‘Address to Edinburgh,’ and ‘Address to a Haggis,’ with love-songs and many minor pieces.

Burns had given Jean Armour a certificate of marriage, and he nearly lost his mental balance when, at her father’s order, she consented to have it burned. Fortunately for him two things aided in preserving his balance: the publication of the Kilmarnock edition of his poems, and his love for Mary Campbell, ‘Highland Mary.’ No man ever needed a love, deep and true, to save him more than Burns did. He believed Jean was lost to him for ever. He was not a faithless but a needy lover when he found a responsive heart in Highland Mary. They made their marriage vows on the Fail, Sunday, 14th May 1786. Mary went home to prepare for marriage, but caught a fever and died. Burns went to Edinburgh later in the year to publish a second edition of his poems, as the first edition had been so well received. In Edinburgh he was the hero of the highest and most thoroughly educated classes. He wrote several fine poems to Mary Campbell.

28 Years Old.

Three thousand copies of his poems were published in April in Edinburgh, netting him over five hundred pounds. He made two triumphal tours — the Border Tour and the Highland Tour. As Mary Campbell was dead, his love was kindled by Clarinda, Mrs M’Lehose, with whom he conducted an intensive love correspondence, and to whom he wrote several beautiful love-songs. As she was a married woman who was separated from her husband, Burns could not marry her. In this year he wrote the ‘Inscription for the Headstone of Fergusson,’ ‘Epistle to Mrs Scott,’ ‘The Bonnie Moor Hen,’ ‘On the Death of John M’Leod,’ ‘Elegy on the Death of James Hunter Blair,’ ‘The Humble Petition of Bruar Water,’ ‘Lines on the Fall of Fyers,’ ‘Castle Gordon,’ ‘On Scaring Some Waterfowl,’ ‘A Rosebud by My Early Walk,’ ‘The Banks of Devon,’ ‘The Young Highland Rover,’ ‘Birthday Ode,’ and many short pieces and love-songs, among them ‘The Birks of Aberfeldy.’

29 Years Old.

Rented Ellisland farm, on the Nith, near Dumfries. Married Jean Armour (second marriage to her) in April, and left her in Mauchline till he could build a home for her on Ellisland, which was ready in December. Building his new home, stocking and managing the farm, and riding fifty miles occasionally to his Jean, made his year so busy that he wrote little poetry, but exquisite love-songs. The estate of Glenriddell, owned in the time of Burns by Robert Riddell, bordered on Ellisland farm. Robert Riddell was a fine type of Scottish gentleman, and Burns and he became warm friends. Among the best poems of this year, not love-songs, are ‘Verses written in Friar’s Carse Hermitage,’ ‘Epistle to Robert Graham of Fintry,’ ‘The Day Returns,’ ‘A Mother’s Lament,’ ‘The Fall of the Leaf,’ ‘Auld Lang Syne,’ ‘The Poet’s Progress,’ ‘Elegy on the Year 1788,’ and ‘Epistle to James Tennant.’

30 Years Old.

Wrote many love-songs for Johnson’s Scots Musical Museum, though busily engaged in farming, and, in addition, a new Psalm for the Chapel of Kilmarnock; a sketch in verse to Right Hon. C. J. Fox, ‘The Wounded Hare,’ ‘The Banks of Nith,’ ‘John Anderson my Joe,’ ‘The Kirk of Scotland’s Alarm,’ ‘Caledonia,’ ‘The Battle of Sherramuir,’ ‘The Braes o’ Killiecrankie,’ ‘Farewell to the Highlands,’ ‘To Mary in Heaven,’ ‘Epistle to Dr Blacklock,’ and ‘New Year’s Day, 1790.’

31 Years Old.

Found his farm ‘a ruinous affair.’ Accepted a position as an exciseman at fifty pounds a year. Had to ride two hundred miles each week. Continued writing love-songs for Johnson’s Museum (without pay), and wrote in addition, ‘Tam o’ Shanter,’ ‘Lament of Mary Queen of Scots,’ and ‘The Banks of Doon.’

32 Years Old.

Continued to write love-songs, among the most beautiful being ‘Sweet Afton’ and ‘Parting Song to Clarinda.’ In addition, wrote ‘Lament for James, Earl of Glencairn,’ ‘On Glenriddell’s Fox Breaking his Chain,’ ‘Poem on Pastoral Poetry,’ ‘Verses on the Destruction of the Woods near Drumlanrig,’ ‘Second Epistle to Robert Graham of Fintry,’ ‘The Song of Death,’ and ‘Poem on Sensibility.’

33 Years Old.

Wrote many love-songs, among them ‘The Lea Rig’ and ‘Highland Mary.’ His other poems were mainly election ballads. His love-songs were now written mainly for Thomson’s National Songs and Melodies. He still refused pay for his songs.

34 Years Old.

Still, notwithstanding his very busy life, he sent a continuous stream of songs to Edinburgh. Other poems of the year were ‘Sonnet Written on the Author’s Birthday,’ ‘Lord Gregory,’ and ‘Scots, wha hae wi’ Wallace bled.’ In this year he moved to the house in which he died, and in which Jean died thirty-eight years afterwards.

35 Years Old.

In this year Burns, to supplement ‘Scots, wha hae’ (the greatest bugle-song of freedom), wrote two grand poems on Liberty: ‘The Ode to Liberty’ and ‘The Tree of Liberty;’ and ‘Contented Wi’ Little and Cantie Wi’ Mair.’ In this year he declined an offer from the London Morning Chronicle to become a regular contributor to that paper.

36 Years Old.

Love-songs, and election ballads in favour of his friend Mr Heron, were his most numerous poems this year. In addition to other minor pieces he wrote a fine poem to his friend, Alexander Cunningham, ‘Does Haughty Gaul Invasion Threat,’ and the most triumphant combined interpretation of democracy and brotherhood ever written, ‘A Man’s a Man for a’ That.’

37 Years Old.

Early in the year his health gave way, and he died, 21st July 1796. Though apparently a strong man, it is reasonable to believe that he had a constitutional tendency towards consumption. His father died from this dread disease, and his grandmother (his mother’s mother) died at thirty-five from the same cause. Burns inherited his physical and intellectual powers mainly from his mother. Both by heredity and contagion, therefore, he was made susceptible to influences that develop consumption. He continued to write poetry, chiefly love-songs, during his illness. His last poem was written, nine days before his death, to Miss Margaret Chalmers, for whom he had a reverent affection.

No reference has been made in this sketch of his development to the prose written each year. Five hundred and thirty-four of his letters have been published. They are written in a stately style, and most of them contain philosophic discussions of religion, ethics, or democracy.

A shy, sensitive, retiring boy; a deep-thinking, persistently studying, eloquent, still shy youth; a brilliant reasoner, a thinker ranking with leaders in his neighbourhood, meeting each on equal terms, and easily proving his superiority by his remarkable knowledge of each man’s special subject of study, and by his still more remarkable powers of independent thinking and clear revelation of his thought in his young manhood, but still at twenty-two too shy to propose to the first lover of his maturity; always a reverent lover of Nature, whose mind saw God in beauty, in dawn-gleam and eve-glow, in tree and flower, in river and mountain; he studied, thought, and expressed his thoughts in exquisite poetry, and, according to those who knew him best, in still richer and more captivating conversation, until at twenty-seven he stood in the midst of the most learned professors of Scotland and outclassed them all. No single professor of the galaxy of culture in which he stood, modest and dignified, could have spoken so wisely, so profoundly, so easily, and with such graceful manner and charming eloquence on so many subjects as did Burns.

It is a marvel that grows greater the more we try to understand it, that a boy who left school when he was nine years old, and, except for a few weeks, did not go to school again; and who, from nine years of age to his thirty-second year, was a steady farm-worker, with the exception of a brief interval during which he was engaged publishing his poems; and was a gauger from thirty-two to thirty-six, should have been able to write so much immortal poetry and so much instructive prose in such a short time.

One of the most interesting of all the pictures of the lives of the world’s literary leaders is the picture of Robert Burns, after a day of toil on the farm, walking from Mossgiel farm, when his evening meal was over, two miles to his favourite seat in the woods on Ballochmyle estate, and sitting there on the high bank of the Ayr in the long Scottish gloaming, and often on in the moonlight, ‘shut in with God,’ revealing in sublime form the visions that thrilled his soul. During the last few years of his life he walked from his home to Lincluden Abbey ruins on his favourite path beside the winding Nith to spend his gloaming hours alone, and composed there some of his masterpieces.

Short was his life, but he lives on in the hearts of succeeding generations. He lives on, too, in his permanent influence on religion, freedom, and brotherhood.

THE END

ROBERT BURNS by John Campbell Shairp

CONTENTS

CHAPTER I. YOUTH IN AYRSHIRE.

CHAPTER II. FIRST WINTER IN EDINBURGH

CHAPTER III. BORDER AND HIGHLAND TOURS.

CHAPTER IV. SECOND WINTER IN EDINBURGH.

CHAPTER V. LIFE AT ELLISLAND.

CHAPTER VI. MIGRATION TO DUMFRIES.

CHAPTER VII. LAST YEARS.

CHAPTER VIII. CHARACTER, POEMS, SONGS.

CHAPTER I. YOUTH IN AYRSHIRE.

Great men, great events, great epochs, it has been said, grow as we recede from them; and the rate at which they grow in the estimation of men is in some sort a measure of their greatness. Tried by this standard, Burns must be great indeed, for during the eighty years that have passed since his death, men’s interest in the man himself and their estimate of his genius have been steadily increasing. Each decade since he died has produced at least two biographies of him. When Mr. Carlyle wrote his well-known essay on Burns in 1828, he could already number six biographies of the Poet, which had been given to the world during the previous thirty years; and the interval between 1828 and the present day has added, in at least the same proportion, to their number. What it was in the man and in his circumstances that has attracted so much of the world’s interest to Burns, I must make one more attempt to describe.

If success were that which most secures men’s sympathy, Burns would have won but little regard; for in all but his poetry his was a defeated life — sad and heart-depressing to contemplate beyond the lives even of most poets.

Perhaps it may be the very fact that in him so much failure and shipwreck were combined with such splendid gifts, that has attracted to him so deep and compassionate interest. Let us review once more the facts of that life, and tell again its oft-told story.

It was on the 25th of January, 1759, about two miles from the town of Ayr, in a clay-built cottage, reared by his father’s own hands, that Robert Burns was born. The “auld clay bigging” which saw his birth still stands by the side of the road that leads from Ayr to the river and the bridge of Doon. Between the banks of that romantic stream and the cottage is seen the roofless ruin of “Alloway’s auld haunted kirk,” which Tam o’ Shanter has made famous. His first welcome to the world was a rough one. As he himself says, —

A blast o’ Janwar’ win’

Blew hansel in on Robin.

A few days after his birth, a storm blew down the gable of the cottage, and the poet and his mother were carried in the dark morning to the shelter of a neighbour’s roof, under which they remained till their own home was repaired. In after-years he would often say, “No wonder that one ushered into the world amid such a tempest should be the victim of stormy passions.” “It is hard to be born in Scotland,” says the brilliant Parisian. Burns had many hardships to endure, but he never reckoned this to be one of them.

His father, William Burness or Burnes, for so he spelt his name, was a native not of Ayrshire, but of Kincardineshire, where he had been reared on a farm belonging to the forfeited estate of the noble but attainted house of Keith-Marischal. Forced to migrate thence at the age of nineteen, he had travelled to Edinburgh, and finally settled in Ayrshire, and at the time when Robert, his eldest child, was born, he rented seven acres of land, near the Brig o’ Doon, which he cultivated as a nursery-garden. He was a man of strict, even stubborn integrity, and of strong temper — a combination which, as his son remarks, does not usually lead to worldly success. But his chief characteristic was his deep-seated and thoughtful piety. A peasant-saint of the old Scottish stamp, he yet tempered the stern Calvinism of the West with the milder Arminianism more common in his northern birthplace. Robert, who, amid all his after-errors, never ceased to revere his father’s memory, has left an immortal portrait of him in The Cotter’s Saturday Night, when he describes how

The saint, the father, and the husband prays.

William Burness was advanced in years before he married, and his wife, Agnes Brown, was much younger than himself. She is described as an Ayrshire lass, of humble birth, very sagacious, with bright eyes and intelligent looks, but not beautiful, of good manners and easy address. Like her husband, she was sincerely religious, but of a more equable temper, quick to perceive character, and with a memory stored with old traditions, songs, and ballads, which she told or sang to amuse her children. In his outer man the poet resembled his mother, but his great mental gifts, if inherited at all, must be traced to his father.

Three places in Ayrshire, besides his birthplace, will always be remembered as the successive homes of Burns. These were Mount Oliphant, Lochlea (pronounced Lochly), and Mossgiel.

Mount Oliphant. — This was a small upland farm, about two miles from the Brig o’ Doon, of a poor and hungry soil, belonging to Mr. Ferguson, of Doon-holm, who was also the landlord of William Burness’ previous holding. Robert was in his seventh year when his father entered on this farm at Whitsuntide, 1766, and he had reached his eighteenth when the lease came to a close in 1777. All the years between these two dates were to the family of Burness one long sore battle with untoward circumstances, ending in defeat. If the hardest toil and severe self-denial could have procured success, they would not have failed. It was this period of his life which Robert afterwards described, as combining “the cheerless gloom of a hermit with the unceasing moil of galley-slave.” The family did their best, but a niggard soil and bad seasons were too much for them. At length, on the death of his landlord, who had always dealt generously by him, William Burness fell into the grip of a factor, whose tender mercies were hard. This man wrote letters which set the whole family in tears. The poet has not given his name, but he has preserved his portrait in colours which are indelible: —

I’ve noticed, on our Laird’s court-day,

An’ mony a time my heart’s been wae,

Poor tenant bodies, scant o’ cash,

How they maun thole a factor’s snash;

He’ll stamp an’ threaten, curse and swear,

He’ll apprehend them, poind their gear,

While they maun stan’, wi aspect humble,

And hear it a’, an’ fear an’ tremble.

In his autobiographical sketch the poet tells us that, “The farm proved a ruinous bargain. I was the eldest of seven children, and my father, worn out by early hardship, was unfit for labour. His spirit was soon irritated, but not easily broken. There was a freedom in the lease in two years more; and to weather these two years we retrenched expenses, and toiled on.” Robert and Gilbert, the two eldest, though still boys, had to do each a grown man’s full work. Yet for all their hardships these Mount Oliphant days were not without alleviations. If poverty was at the door, there was warm family affection by the fireside. If the two sons had, long before manhood, to bear toil beyond their years, still they were living under their parents’ roof, and those parents two of the wisest and best of Scotland’s peasantry. Work was no doubt incessant, but education was not neglected — rather it was held one of the most sacred duties. When Robert was five years old, he had been sent to a school at Alloway Mill, and when the family removed to Mount Oliphant, his father combined with four of his neighbours to hire a young teacher, who boarded among them, and taught their children for a small salary. This young teacher, whose name was Murdoch, has left an interesting description of his two young pupils, their parents, and the household life while he sojourned at Mount Oliphant. At that time Murdoch thought that Gilbert possessed a livelier imagination, and was more of a wit than Robert. “All the mirth and liveliness,” he says, “were with Gilbert. Robert’s countenance at that time wore generally a grave and thoughtful look.” Had their teacher been then told that one of his two pupils would become a great poet, he would have fixed on Gilbert. When he tried to teach them church music along with other rustic lads, they two lagged far behind the rest. Robert’s voice especially was untuneable, and his ear so dull, that it was with difficulty he could distinguish one tune from another. Yet this was he who was to become the greatest song-writer that Scotland — perhaps the world — has known. In other respects the mental training of the lads was of the most thorough kind. Murdoch taught them not only to read, but to parse, and to give the exact meaning of the words, to turn verse into the prose order, to supply ellipses, and to substitute plain for poetic words and phrases. How many of our modern village schools even attempt as much? When Murdoch gave up, the father himself undertook the education of his children, and carried it on at night after work-hours were over. Of that father Murdoch speaks as by far the best man he ever knew. Tender and affectionate towards his children he describes him, seeking not to drive, but to lead them to the right, by appealing to their conscience and their better feelings, rather than to their fears. To his wife he was gentle and considerate in an unusual degree, always thinking of her ease and comfort; and she repaid it with the utmost reverence. She was a careful and thrifty housewife, but, whenever her domestic tasks allowed, she would return to hang with devout attention on the discourse that fell from her wise husband. Under that father’s guidance knowledge was sought for as hid treasure, and this search was based on the old and reverential faith that increase of knowledge is increase of wisdom and goodness. The readings of the household were wide, varied, and unceasing. Some one entering the house at meal-time found the whole family seated, each with a spoon in one hand and a book in the other. The books which Burns mentions as forming part of their reading at Mount Oliphant surprise us even now. Not only the ordinary school-books and geographies, not only the traditional life of Wallace and other popular books of that sort, but The Spectator, odd plays of Shakespeare, Pope (his Homer included), Locke on the Human Understanding, Boyle’s Lectures, Taylor’s Scripture Doctrine of Original Sin, Allan Ramsay’s works, formed the staple of their reading. Above all there was a collection of songs, of which Burns says, “This was my vade mecum. I pored over them driving my cart, or walking to labour, song by song, verse by verse; carefully noting the true tender or sublime, from affectation and fustian, I am convinced I owe to this practice much of my critic-craft, such as it is!” And he could not have learnt it in a better way.

There are few countries in the world which could at that time have produced in humble life such a teacher as Murdoch and such a father as William Burness. It seems fitting, then, that a country which could rear such men among its peasantry should give birth to such a poet as Robert Burns to represent them. The books which fed his young intellect were devoured only during intervals snatched from hard toil. That toil was no doubt excessive. And this early over-strain showed itself soon in the stoop of his shoulders, in nervous disorder about the heart, and in frequent fits of despondency. Yet perhaps too much has sometimes been made of these bodily hardships, as though Burns’s boyhood had been one long misery. But the youth which grew up in so kindly an atmosphere of wisdom and home affection, under the eye of such a father and mother, cannot be called unblest.

Under the pressure of toil and the entire want of society, Burns might have grown up the rude and clownish and unpopular lad that he has been pictured in his early teens. But in his fifteenth summer there came to him a new influence, which at one touch unlocked the springs of new emotions. This incident must be given in his own words:— “You know,” he says, “our country custom of coupling a man and woman together as partners in the labours of the harvest. In my fifteenth summer my partner was a bewitching creature, a year younger than myself. My scarcity of English denies me the power of doing her justice in that language, but you know the Scottish idiom. She was a bonnie, sweet, sonsie lass. In short, she, altogether unwittingly to herself, initiated me in that delicious passion, which, in spite of acid disappointment, gin-horse prudence, and book-worm philosophy, I hold to be the first of human joys here below! How she caught the contagion I cannot tell…. Indeed I did not know myself why I liked so much to loiter behind with her, when returning in the evening from our labours; why the tones of her voice made my heartstrings thrill like an AEolian harp; and especially why my pulse beat such a furious ratan when I looked and fingered over her little hand, to pick out the cruel nettle-stings and thistles. Among her love-inspiring qualities, she sung sweetly; and it was her favourite reel to which I attempted giving an embodied vehicle in rhyme. I was not so presumptuous as to imagine that I could make verses like printed ones, composed by men who read Greek and Latin; but my girl sung a song which was said to be composed by a 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, excepting that he could shear sheep, and cast peats, his father living in the moorlands, he had no more scholar-craft than myself. Thus with me began love and poetry.”

The song he then composed is entitled “Handsome Nell,” and is the first he ever wrote. He himself speaks of it as very puerile and silly — a verdict which Chambers endorses, but in which I cannot agree. Simple and artless it no doubt is, but with a touch of that grace which bespeaks the true poet. Here is one verse which, for directness of feeling and felicity of language, he hardly ever surpassed: —

She dresses aye sae clean and neat,

Baith decent and genteel,

And then there’s something in her gait

Gars ony dress look weel.

“I composed it,” says Burns, “in a wild enthusiasm of passion, and to this hour I never recollect it but my heart melts, my blood sallies at the remembrance.”

Lochlea. — Escaped from the fangs of the factor, with some remnant of means, William Burness removed from Mount Oliphant to Lochlea in the parish of Tarbolton (1777), an upland undulating farm, on the north bank of the River Ayr, with a wide outlook, southward over the hills of Carrick, westward toward the Isle of Arran, Ailsa Craig, and down the Firth of Clyde, toward the Western Sea. This was the home of Burns and his family from his eighteenth till his twenty-fifth year. For a time the family life here was more comfortable than before, probably because several of the children were now able to assist their parents in farm labour. “These seven years,” says Gilbert Burns, “brought small literary improvement to Robert,” but I can hardly believe this when we remember that Lochlea saw the composition of The Death and Dying Words of Poor Mailie, and of My Nannie, O, and one or two more of his most popular songs. It was during those days that Robert, then growing into manhood, first ventured to step beyond the range of his father’s control, and to trust the promptings of his own social instincts and headlong passions. The first step in this direction was to go to a dancing school, in a neighbouring village, that he might there meet companions of either sex, and give his rustic manners “a brush,” as he phrases it. The next step was taken when Burns resolved to spend his nineteenth summer in Kirkoswald, to learn mensuration and surveying from the schoolmaster there, who was famous as a teacher of these things. Griswold, on the Carrick coast, was a village full of smugglers and adventurers, in whose society Burns was introduced to scenes of what he calls “swaggering riot and roaring dissipation.” It may readily be believed that with his strong love of sociality and excitement he was an apt pupil in that school. Still the mensuration went on till one day, when in the kail-yard behind the teachers house, Burns met a young lass, who set his heart on fire, and put an end to mensuration. This incident is celebrated in the song beginning —

Now westlin winds and slaughtering guns

Bring Autumn’s pleasant weather, —

“the ebullition,” he calls it, “of that passion which ended the school business at Kirkoswald.”

From this time on for several years, love making was his chief amusement, or rather his most serious business. His brother tells us that he was in the secret of half the love affairs of the parish of Tarbolton, and was never without at least one of his own. There was not a comely girl in Tarbolton on whom he did not compose a song, and then he made one which included them all. When he was thus inly moved, “the agitations of his mind and body,” says Gilbert, “exceeded anything of the kind I ever knew in real life. He had always a particular jealousy of people who were richer than himself, or had more consequence. His love therefore rarely settled on persons of this description.” The jealousy here noted, as extending even to his loves, was one of the weakest points of the poet’s character. Of the ditties of that time, most of which have been preserved, the best specimen is My Nannie, O. This song, and the one entitled Mary Morison render the whole scenery and sentiment of those rural meetings in a manner at once graphic and free from coarseness. Yet, truth to speak, it must be said that those gloaming trysts, however they may touch the imagination and lend themselves to song, do in reality lie at the root of much that degrades the life and habits of the Scottish peasantry.

But those first three or four years at Lochlea, if not free from peril, were still with the poet times of innocence. His brother Gilbert, in the words of Chambers, “used to speak of his brother as at this period, to himself, a more admirable being than at any other. He recalled with delight the days when they had to go with one or two companions to cut peats for the winter fuel, because Robert was sure to enliven their toil with a rattling fire of witty remarks on men and things, mingled with the expressions of a genial glowing heart, and the whole perfectly free from the taint which he afterwards acquired from his contact with the world. Not even in those volumes which afterwards charmed his country from end to end, did Gilbert see his brother in so interesting a light as in these conversations in the bog, with only two or three noteless peasants for an audience.”

While Gilbert acknowledges that his brother’s love-makings were at this time unceasing, he asserts that they were “governed by the strictest rules of virtue and modesty, from which he never deviated till he reached his twenty-third year.” It was towards the close of his twenty-second that there occurs the record of his first serious desire to marry and settle in life. He had set his affections on a young woman named Ellison Begbie, daughter of a small farmer, and at that time servant in a family on Cessnock Water, about two miles from Lochlea. She is said to have been not a beauty, but of unusual liveliness and grace of mind. Long afterwards, when he had seen much of the world, Burns spoke of this young woman as, of all those on whom he ever fixed his fickle affections, the one most likely to have made a pleasant partner for life. Four letters which he wrote to her are preserved, in which he expresses the most pure and honourable feelings in language which, if a little formal, is, for manliness and simplicity, a striking contrast to the bombast of some of his later epistles. Songs, too, he addressed to her — The Lass of Cessnock Banks, Bonnie Peggy Alison, and Mary Morison. The two former are inconsiderable; the latter is one of those pure and beautiful love-lyrics, in the manner of the old ballads, which, as Hazlitt says, “take the deepest and most lasting hold on the mind.”

Yestreen, when to the trembling string,

The dance gaed thro’ the lighted ha’,

To thee my fancy took its wing,

I sat, but neither heard nor saw:

Tho’ this was fair, and that was braw,

And yon the toast of a’ the town,

I sigh’d, and said amang them a’,

“Ye are na Mary Morison.”

Oh, Mary, canst thou wreck his peace,

Wha for thy sake wad gladly die;

Or canst thou break that heart of his,

Whase only faut is loving thee?

If love for love thou wilt na gie,

At least be pity to me shown;

A thought ungentle canna be

The thought o’ Mary Morison.

In these lines the lyric genius of Burns was for the first time undeniably revealed.

But neither letters nor love-songs prevailed. The young woman, for some reason untold, was deaf to his entreaties, and the rejection of this his best affection fell on him with a malign influence, just as he was setting his face to learn a trade which he hoped would enable him to maintain a wife.

Irvine was at that time a centre of the flax-dressing art, and as Robert and his brother raised flax on their farm, they hoped that if they could dress as well as grow flax, they might thereby double their profits. As he met with this heavy disappointment in love just as he was setting out for Irvine, he went thither downhearted and depressed, at Midsummer, 1781. All who met him at that time were struck with his look of melancholy, and his moody silence, from which he roused himself only when in pleasant female society, or when he met with men of intelligence. But the persons of this sort whom he met in Irvine were probably few. More numerous were the smugglers and rough-living adventurers with which that seaport town, as Kirkoswald, swarmed. Among these he contracted, says Gilbert, “some acquaintance of a freer manner of thinking and living than he had been used to, whose society prepared him for over-leaping the bonds of rigid virtue which had hitherto restrained him.” One companion, a sailor-lad of wild life and loose and irregular habits, had a wonderful fascination for Burns, who admired him for what he thought his independence and magnanimity. “He was,” says Burns, “the only man I ever knew who was a greater fool than myself, where woman was the presiding star; but he spoke of lawless love with levity, which hitherto I had regarded with horror. Here his friendship did me a mischief.”

Another companion, older than himself, thinking that the religious views of Burns were too rigid and uncompromising, induced him to adopt “more liberal opinions,” which in this case, as in so many others, meant more lax opinions. With his principles of belief, and his rules of conduct at once assailed and undermined, what chart or compass remained any more for a passionate being like Burns over the passion-swept sea of life that lay before him? The migration to Irvine was to him the descent to Avernus, from which he never afterwards, in the actual conduct of life, however often in his hours of inspiration, escaped to breathe again the pure upper air. This brief but disastrous Irvine sojourn was brought to a sudden close. Burns was robbed by his partner in trade, his flax-dressing shop was burnt to the ground by fire during the carousal of a New Year’s morning, and himself, impaired in purse, in spirits, and in character, returned to Lochlea to find misfortunes thickening round his family, and his father on his death-bed. For the old man, his long struggle with scanty means, barren soil, and bad seasons, was now near its close. Consumption had set in. Early in 1784, when his last hour drew on, the father said that there was one of his children of whose future he could not think without fear. Robert, who was in the room, came up to his bedside and asked, “O father, is it me you mean?” The old man said it was. Robert turned to the window, with tears streaming down his cheeks, and his bosom swelling, from the restraint he put on himself, almost to bursting. The father had early perceived the genius that was in his boy, and even in Mount Oliphant days had said to his wife, “Whoever lives to see it, something extraordinary will come from that boy.” He had lived to see and admire his son’s earliest poetic efforts. But he had also noted the strong passions, with the weak will, which might drive him on the shoals of life.

Mossgiel. — Towards the close of 1783, Robert and his brother, seeing clearly the crash of family affairs which was impending, had taken on their own account a lease of the small farm of Mossgiel, about two or three miles distant from Lochlea, in the parish of Mauchline. When their father died in February, 1784, it was only by claiming the arrears of wages due to them, and ranking among their father’s creditors, that they saved enough from the domestic wreck, to stock their new farm. Thither they conveyed their widowed mother, and their younger brothers and sisters, in March, 1784. Their new home was a bare upland farm, 118 acres of cold clay-soil, lying within a mile of Mauchline village. Burns entered on it with a firm resolution to be prudent, industrious, and thrifty. In his own words, “I read farming books, I calculated crops, I attended markets, and, in short, in spite of the devil, the world, and the flesh, I should have been a wise man; but the first year from unfortunately buying bad seed — the second, from a late harvest, we lost half our crops. This overset all my wisdom, and I returned like the dog to his vomit, and the sow that was washed to her wallowing in the mire.” Burns was in the beginning of his twenty-sixth year when he took up his abode at Mossgiel, where he remained for four years. Three things those years and that bare moorland farm witnessed, — the wreck of his hopes as a farmer, the revelation of his genius as a poet, and the frailty of his character as a man. The result of the immoral habits and “liberal opinions” which he had learnt at Irvine were soon apparent in that event of which he speaks in his Epistle to John Rankine with such unbecoming levity. In the Chronological Edition of his works it is painful to read on one page the pathetic lines which he engraved on his father’s headstone, and a few pages on, written almost at the same time, the epistle above alluded to, and other poems in the same strain, in which the defiant poet glories in his shame. It was well for the old man that he was laid in Alloway Kirkyard before these things befell. But the widowed mother had to bear the burden, and to receive in her home and bring up the child that should not have been born. When silence and shame would have most become him, Burns poured forth his feelings in ribald verses, and bitterly satirized the parish minister, who required him to undergo that public penance which the discipline of the Church at that time exacted. Whether this was a wise discipline or not, no blame attached to the minister, who merely carried out the rules which his Church enjoined. It was no proof of magnanimity in Burns to use his talent in reviling the minister, who had done nothing more than his duty. One can hardly doubt but that in his inmost heart he must have been visited with other and more penitential feelings than those unseemly verses express. But, as Lockhart has well observed, “his false pride recoiled from letting his jovial associates know how little he was able to drown the whispers of the still small voice; and the fermenting bitterness of a mind ill at ease within himself escaped — as may be often traced in the history of satirists — in angry sarcasms against those who, whatever their private errors might be, had at least done him no wrong.” Mr. Carlyle’s comment on this crisis of his life is too weighty to be omitted here. “With principles assailed by evil example from without, by ‘passions raging like demons’ from within, he had little need of sceptical misgivings to whisper treason in the heat of the battle, or to cut off his retreat if he were already defeated. He loses his feeling of innocence; his mind is at variance with itself; the old divinity no longer presides there; but wild Desires and wild Repentance alternately oppress him. Ere long, too, he has committed himself before the world; his character for sobriety, dear to a Scottish peasant as few corrupted worldlings can even conceive, is destroyed in the eyes of men; and his only refuge consists in trying to disbelieve his guiltiness, and is but a refuge of lies. The blackest desperation gathers over him, broken only by the red lightnings of remorse.” Amid this trouble it was but a poor vanity and miserable love of notoriety which could console itself with the thought

The mair they talk, I’m kent the better,

E’en let them clash.

Or was this not vanity at all, but the bitter irony of self-reproach?

This collision with the minister and Kirk Session of his parish, and the bitter feelings it engendered in his rebellious bosom, at once launched Burns into the troubled sea of religious controversy that was at that time raging all around him. The clergy of the West were divided into two parties, known as the Auld Lights and the New Lights. Ayrshire and the west of Scotland had long been the stronghold of Presbyterianism and of the Covenanting spirit; and in Burns’s day — a century and a half after the Covenant — a large number of the ministers still adhered to its principles, and preached the Puritan theology undiluted. These men were democratic in their ecclesiastical views, and stout protestors against Patronage, which has always been the bugbear of the sects in Scotland. As Burns expresses it, they did their best to stir up their flocks to

Join their counsel and their skills

To cowe the lairds,

An’ get the brutes the power themsels

To chuse their herds.

All Burns’s instincts would naturally have been on the side of those who wished to resist patronage and “to cowe the lairds,” had not this his natural tendency been counteracted by a stronger bias drawing him in an opposite direction. The Auld Lights, though democrats in Church politics, were the upholders of that strict church discipline under which he was smarting, and to this party belonged his own minister, who had brought that discipline to bear upon him. Burns, therefore, naturally threw himself into the arms of the opposite, or New Light party, who were more easy in their life and in their doctrine. This large and growing section of ministers were deeply imbued with rationalism, or, as they then called it, “common-sense,” in the light of which they pared away from religion all that was mysterious and supernatural. Some of them were said to be Socinians or even pure Deists, most of them shone less in the pulpit, than at the festive board. With such men a person in Burns’s then state of mind would readily sympathize, and they received him with open arms. Nothing could have been more unfortunate than that in this crisis of his career he should have fallen into intimacy with those hard-headed but coarse-minded men. They were the first persons of any pretensions to scholarly education with whom he had mingled freely. He amused them with the sallies of his wit and sarcasm, and astonished them by his keen insight and vigorous powers of reasoning. They abetted those very tendencies in his nature which required to be checked. Their countenance, as clergymen, would allay the scruples and misgivings he might otherwise have felt, and stimulate to still wilder recklessness whatever profanity he might be tempted to indulge in. When he had let loose his first shafts of satire against their stricter brethren, those New Light ministers heartily applauded him; and hounded him on to still more daring assaults. He had not only his own quarrel with his parish minister and the stricter clergy to revenge, but the quarrel also of his friend and landlord, Gavin Hamilton, a county lawyer, who had fallen under Church censure for neglect of Church ordinances, and had been debarred from the Communion. Burns espoused Gavin’s cause with characteristic zeal, and let fly new arrows one after another from his satirical quiver.

The first of these satires against the orthodox ministers was The Twa Herds, or the Holy Tulzie, written on a quarrel between two brother clergymen. Then followed in quick succession Holy Willie’s Prayer, The Ordination, and The Holy Fair. His good mother and his brother were pained by these performances, and remonstrated against them. But Burns, though he generally gave ear to their counsel, in this instance turned a deaf ear to it, and listened to other advisers. The love of exercising his strong powers of satire and the applause of his boon-companions, lay and clerical, prevailed over the whispers of his own better nature and the advice of his truest friends. Whatever may be urged in defence of employing satire to lash hypocrisy, I cannot but think that those who have loved most what is best in Burns’ poetry must have regretted that these poems were ever written. Some have commended them on the ground that they have exposed religious pretence and Pharisaism. The good they may have done in this way is perhaps doubtful. But the harm they have done in Scotland is not doubtful, in that they have connected in the minds of the people so many coarse and even profane thoughts with objects which they had regarded till then with reverence. Even The Holy Fair, the poem in this kind which is least offensive, turns on the abuses that then attended the celebration of the Holy Communion in rural parishes, and with great power portrays those gatherings in their most mundane aspects. Yet, as Lockhart has well remarked, those things were part of the same religious system which produced the scenes which Burns has so beautifully described in The Cotter’s Saturday Night. Strange that the same mind, almost at the same moment, should have conceived two poems so different in spirit as The Cotter’s Saturday Night and The Holy Fair!

I have dwelt thus long on these unpleasant satires that I may not have again to return to them. It is a more welcome task to turn to the other poems of the same period. Though Burns had entered on Mossgiel resolved to do his best as a farmer, he soon discovered that it was not in that way he was to attain success. The crops of 1784 and 1785 both failed, and their failure seems to have done something to drive him in on his own internal resources. He then for the first time seems to have awakened to the conviction that his destiny was to be a poet; and he forthwith set himself, with more resolution than he ever showed before or after, to fulfil that mission. Hitherto he had complained that his life had been without an aim; now he determined that it should be so no longer. The dawning hope began to gladden him that he might take his place among the bards of Scotland, who, themselves mostly unknown, have created that atmosphere of minstrelsy which envelopes and glorifies their native country. This hope and aim is recorded in an entry of his commonplace book, of the probable date of August, 1784: —

“However I am pleased with the works of our Scotch poets, particularly the excellent Ramsay, and the still more excellent Fergusson, yet I am hurt to see other places of Scotland, their towns, rivers, woods, and haughs, immortalized in such celebrated performances, while my dear native country, — the ancient bailieries of Carrick, Kyle, and Cunningham, famous both in ancient and modern times for a gallant and warlike race of inhabitants — a country where civil, and particularly religious liberty, have ever found their first support, and their last asylum — a country, the birthplace of many famous philosophers, soldiers, and statesmen, and the scene of many important events recorded in Scottish history, particularly a great many of the actions of the glorious Wallace, the saviour of his country — yet we have never had one Scotch poet of any eminence to make the fertile banks of Irvine, the romantic woodlands and sequestered scenes of Ayr, and the heathy mountainous source and winding sweep of Doon, emulate Tay, Forth, Ettrick, Tweed. This is a complaint I would gladly remedy; but, alas! I am far unequal to the task, both, in native genius and in education. Obscure I am, obscure I must be, though no young poet nor young soldier’s heart ever beat more fondly for fame than mine.”

Though the sentiment here expressed may seem commonplace and the language hardly grammatical, yet this extract clearly reveals the darling ambition that was now haunting the heart of Burns. It was the same wish which he expressed better in rhyme at a later day in his Epistle to the Gude Wife of Wauchope House.

E’en then, a wish, I mind its power,

A wish that to my latest hour

Shall strongly heave my breast,

That I for poor Auld Scotland’s sake

Some usefu’ plan or beuk could make,

Or sing a sang at least.

The rough burr-thistle, spreading wide

Amang the bearded bear,

I turn’d the weeder-clips aside,

An’ spar’d the symbol dear.

It was about his twenty-fifth year when he first conceived the hope that he might become a national poet. The failure of his first two harvests, 1784 and ‘85, in Mossgiel may well have strengthened this desire and changed it into a fixed purpose. If he was not to succeed as a farmer, might he not find success in another employment that was much more to his mind?

And this longing so deeply cherished, he had, within less than two years from the time that the above entry in his diary was written, amply fulfilled. From the autumn of 1784 till May 1786 the fountains of poetry were unsealed within, and flowed forth in a continuous stream. That period so prolific of poetry that none like it ever afterwards visited him, saw the production not only of the satirical poems already noticed, and of another more genial satire, Death and Dr. Hornbook, but also of those characteristic epistles in which he reveals so much of his own character, and of those other descriptive poems in which he so wonderfully delineates the habits of the Scottish peasantry.

Within from sixteen to eighteen months were composed, not only seven or eight long epistles to rhyme-composing brothers in the neighbourhood, David Sillar, John Lapraik, and others, but also, Halloween, To a Mouse, The Jolly Beggars, The Cotter’s Saturday Night, Address to the Deil, The Auld Farmer’s Address to his Auld Mare, The Vision, The Twa Dogs, The Mountain Daisy. The descriptive poems above named followed each other in rapid succession during that spring-time of his genius, having been all composed, as the latest edition of his works shows, in a period of about six months, between November, 1785, and April, 1786. Perhaps there are none of Burns’ compositions which give the real man more naturally and unreservedly than his epistles. Written in the dialect he had learnt by his father’s fireside, to friends in his own station, who shared his own tastes and feelings, they flow on in an easy stream of genial happy spirits, in which kindly humour, wit, love of the outward world, knowledge of men, are all beautifully intertwined into one strand of poetry, unlike anything else that has been seen before or since. The outward form of the verse and the style of diction are no doubt after the manner of his two forerunners whom he so much admired, Ramsay and Fergusson; but the play of soul and power of expression, the natural grace with which they rise and fall, the vividness of every image, and transparent truthfulness of every sentiment, are all his own. If there is any exception to be made to this estimate, it is in the grudge which here and there peeps out against those whom he thought greater favourites of fortune than himself and his correspondents. But taken as a whole, I know not any poetic epistles to be compared with them. They are just the letters in which one friend might unbosom himself to another without the least artifice or disguise. And the broad Doric is so pithy, so powerful, so aptly fitted to the thought, that not even Horace himself has surpassed it in “curious felicity.” Often, when harvests were failing and the world going against him, he found his solace in pouring forth in rhyme his feelings to some trusted friend. As he says in one of these same epistles, —

Leeze me on rhyme! it’s aye a treasure,

My chief, amaist my only pleasure,

At hame, a-fiel’, at wark, at leisure,

The Muse, poor hizzie!

Tho’ rough an’ raploch be her measure,

She’s seldom lazy.

Of the poems founded on the customs of the peasantry, I shall speak in the sequel. The garret in which all the poems of this period were written is thus described by Chambers:— “The farmhouse of Mossgiel, which still exists almost unchanged since the days of the poet, is very small, consisting of only two rooms, a but and a ben as they are called in Scotland. Over these, reached by a trap stair, is a small garret, in which Robert and his brother used to sleep. Thither, when he had returned from his day’s work, the poet used to retire, and seat himself at a small deal table, lighted by a narrow skylight in the roof, to transcribe the verses which he had composed in the fields. His favourite time for composition was at the plough. Long years afterwards his sister, Mrs. Begg, used to tell how when her brother had gone forth again to field work, she would steal up to the garret and search the drawer of the deal table for the verses which Robert had newly transcribed.”

In which of the poems of this period his genius is most conspicuous it might not be easy to determine. But there can be little question about the justice of Lockhart’s remark, that “The Cotter’s Saturday Night is of all Burns’s pieces the one whose exclusion from the collection would be most injurious, if not to the genius of the poet, at least to the character of the man. In spite of many feeble lines, and some heavy stanzas, it appears to me that even his genius would suffer more in estimation by being contemplated in the absence of this poem, than of any other single poem he has left us.” Certainly it is the one which has most endeared his name to the more thoughtful and earnest of his countrymen. Strange it is, not to say painful, to think that this poem, in which the simple and manly piety of his country is so finely touched, and the image of his own religious father so beautifully portrayed, should have come from the same hand which wrote nearly at the same time The Jolly Beggars, The Ordination, and The Holy Fair.

During those two years at Mossgiel, from 1784 to 1786, when the times were hard, and the farm unproductive, Burns must indeed have found poetry to be, as he himself says, its own reward. A nature like his required some vent for itself, some excitement to relieve the pressure of dull farm drudgery, and this was at once his purest and noblest excitement. In two other more hazardous forms of excitement he was by temperament disposed to seek refuge. These were conviviality and love-making. In the former of these, Gilbert says that he indulged little, if at all, during his Mossgiel period. And this seems proved by his brother’s assertion that during all that time Robert’s private expenditure never exceeded seven pounds a year. When he had dressed himself on this, and procured his other necessaries, the margin that remained for drinking must have been small indeed. But love-making — that had been with him, ever since he reached manhood, an unceasing employment. Even in his later teens he had, as his earliest songs show, given himself enthusiastically to those nocturnal meetings, which were then and are still customary among the peasantry of Scotland, and which at the best are full of perilous temptation. But ever since the time when, during his Irvine sojourn, he forsook the paths of innocence, there is nothing in any of his love-affairs which those who prize what was best in Burns would not willingly forget. If here we allude to two such incidents, it is because they are too intimately bound up with his life to be passed over in any account of it. Gilbert says that while “one generally reigned paramount in Robert’s affections, he was frequently encountering other attractions, which formed so many underplots in the drama of his love.” This is only too evident in those two loves which most closely touched his destiny at this time.

From the time of his settlement at Mossgiel frequent allusions occur in his letters and poems to flirtations with the belles of the neighbouring village of Mauchline. Among all these Jean Armour, the daughter of a respectable master-mason in that village, had the chief place in his affections. All through 1785 their courtship had continued, but early in 1786 a secret and irregular marriage, with a written acknowledgment of it had to be effected. Then followed the father’s indignation that his daughter should be married to so wild and worthless a man as Burns; compulsion of his daughter to give up Burns, and to destroy the document which vouched their marriage; Burns’s despair driving him to the verge of insanity; the letting loose by the Armours of the terrors of the law against him; his skulking for a time in concealment; his resolve to emigrate to the West Indies, and become a slave-driver. All these things were passing in the spring months of 1786, and in September of the same year Jean Armour became the mother of twin children.

It would be well if we might believe that the story of his betrothal to Highland Mary was, as Lockhart seems to have thought, previous to and independent of the incidents just mentioned. But the more recent investigations of Mr. Scott Douglas and Dr. Chambers have made it too painfully clear that it was almost at the very time when he was half distracted by Jean Armour’s desertion of him, and while he was writing his broken-hearted Lament over her conduct, that there occurred, as an interlude, the episode of Mary Campbell. This simple and sincere-hearted girl from Argyllshire was, Lockhart says, the object of by far the deepest passion Burns ever knew. And Lockhart gives at length the oft-told tale how, on the second Sunday of May, 1786, they met in a sequestered spot by the banks of the River Ayr, to spend one day of parting love; how they stood, one on either side of a small brook, laved their hands in the stream, and, holding a Bible between them, vowed eternal fidelity to each other. They then parted, never again to meet. In October of the same year Mary came from Argyllshire, as far as Greenock, in the hope of meeting Burns, but she was there seized with a malignant fever which soon laid her in an early grave.

The Bible, in two volumes, which Burns gave her on that parting day, has been recently recovered. On the first volume is inscribed, in Burns’s hand, “And ye shall not swear by My Name falsely, I am the Lord. Levit. 19th chap. 12th verse;” and on the second volume, “Thou shalt not forswear thyself, but shalt perform unto the Lord thine oath. Matth. 5th chap. 33rd verse.” But the names of Mary Campbell and Robert Burns, which were originally inscribed on the volumes, have been almost obliterated. It has been suggested by Mr. Scott Douglas, the most recent editor who has investigated anew the whole incident, that, “in the whirl of excitement which soon followed that Sunday, Burns forgot his vow to poor Mary, and that she, heart-sore at his neglect, deleted the names from this touching memorial of their secret betrothal.”

Certain it is that in the very next month, June, 1786, we find Burns, in writing to one of his friends about “poor, ill-advised, ungrateful Armour,” declaring that, “to confess a truth between you and me, I do still love her to distraction after all, though I won’t tell her so if I were to see her.” And Chambers even suggests that there was still a third love interwoven, at this very time, in the complicated web of Burns’s fickle affections. Burns, though he wrote several poems about Highland Mary, which afterwards appeared, never mentioned her name to any of his family. Even, if there was no more in the story than what has been here given, no wonder that a heart like Burns, which, for all its unsteadfastness, never lost its sensibility, nor even a sense of conscience, should have been visited by the remorse which forms the burden of the lyric to Mary in heaven, written three years after.

See’st thou thy lover lowly laid?

Hear’st thou the pangs that rend his breast?

The misery of his condition, about the time when Highland Mary died, and the conflicting feelings which agitated him, are depicted in the following extract from a letter which he wrote probably about October, 1786, to his friend Robert Aiken: —

“There are many things that plead strongly against it [seeking a place in the Excise]: the uncertainty of getting soon into business; the consequences of my follies, which perhaps make it impracticable for me to stay at home; and, besides, I have been for some time pining under secret wretchedness, from causes which you pretty well know — the pang of disappointment, the sting of pride, with some wandering stabs of remorse, which never fail to settle on my vitals like vultures, when attention is not called away by the calls of society or the vagaries of the Muse. Even in the hour of social mirth, my gaiety is the madness of an intoxicated criminal under the hands of the executioner. All these reasons urge me to go abroad, and to all these reasons I have only one answer — the feelings of a father. This, in the present mood I am in, overbalances everything that can be laid in the scale against it. You may perhaps think it an extravagant fancy, but it is a sentiment which strikes home to my very soul; though sceptical in some points of our current belief, yet I think I have every evidence for the reality of a life beyond the stinted bourne of our present existence: if so, then how should I, in the presence of that tremendous Being, the Author of existence, how should I meet the reproaches of those who stand to me in the dear relation of children, whom I deserted in the smiling innocency of helpless infancy? Oh, Thou great unknown Power! Thou Almighty God! who hast lighted up reason in my breast, and blessed me with immortality! I have frequently wandered from that order and regularity necessary for the perfection of Thy works, yet Thou hast never left me nor forsaken me….”

*

“You see, sir, that if to know one’s errors were a probability of mending them, I stand a fair chance; but, according to the reverend Westminster divines, though conviction must precede conversion, it is very far from always implying it.”

This letter exhibits the tumult of soul in which he had been tossed during the last six months before it was written. He had by his own conduct wound round himself complications from which he could not extricate himself, yet which he could not but poignantly feel. One cannot read of the “wandering stabs of remorse” of which he speaks, without thinking of Highland Mary.

Some months before the above letter was written, in the April of the same year, at the time when he first fell into trouble with Jean Armour and her father, Burns had resolved to leave his country and sail for the West Indies. He agreed with a Mr. Douglas to go to Jamaica and become a book-keeper on his estate there. But how were funds to be got to pay his passage-money? His friend Gavin Hamilton suggested that the needed sum might be raised, if he were to publish by subscription, the poems he had lying in his table-drawer.

Accordingly, in April, the publication of his poems was resolved on. His friends, Gavin Hamilton of Mauchline, Aiken and Ballantyne of Ayr, Muir and Parker of Kilmarnock, and others — all did their best to get the subscription lists quickly filled. The last-named person put down his own name for thirty-five copies. The printing of them was committed to John Wilson, a printer in Kilmarnock, and during May, June, and July of 1786, the work of the press was going forward. In the interval between the resolution to publish and the appearance of the poems, during his distraction about Jean Armour’s conduct, followed by the episode of Highland Mary, Burns gave vent to his own dark feelings in some of the saddest strains that ever fell from him — the lines on The Mountain Daisy, The Lament, the Odes to Despondency and to Ruin. And yet so various were his moods, so versatile his powers, that it was during that same interval that he composed, in a very different vein, The Twa Dogs, and probably also his satire of The Holy Fair. The following is the account the poet gives of these transactions in the autobiographical sketch of himself which he communicated to Dr. Moore: —

“I now began to be known in the neighbourhood as a maker of rhymes. The first of my poetic offspring that saw light was a burlesque lamentation of a quarrel between two reverend Calvinists; both of them were dramatis personae in my Holy Fair. I had a notion myself, that the piece had some merit; but to prevent the worst, I gave a copy of it to a friend who was fond of such things, and told him that I could not guess who was the author of it, but that I thought it pretty clever. With a certain description of the clergy as well as the laity, it met with a roar of applause.

“Holy Willie’s Prayer next made its appearance, and alarmed the Kirk Session so much, that they held several meetings to look over their spiritual artillery, if haply any of it might be pointed against profane rhymers. Unluckily for me, my wandering led me on another side, within point-blank shot of their heaviest metal. This is the unfortunate incident which gave rise to my printed poem, The Lament. This was a most melancholy affair, which I cannot yet bear to reflect on, and had very nearly given me one or two of the principal qualifications for a place among those who have lost the chart and mistaken the reckoning of Rationality.

“I gave up my part of the farm to my brother, and made what little preparation was in my power for Jamaica. But, before leaving my native country for ever, I resolved to publish my poems. I weighed my productions as impartially as was in my power; I thought they had merit; and it was a delicious idea that I should be called a clever fellow, even though it should never reach my ears — a poor negro-driver, or perhaps a victim to that inhospitable clime, and gone to the world of spirits! I can truly say, that pauvre inconnu as I then was, I had pretty nearly as high an idea of my works as I have at this moment, when the public has decided in their favour….

“I threw off about six hundred copies, of which I got subscriptions for about three hundred and fifty. My vanity was highly gratified by the reception I met with from the public; and besides, I pocketed, all expenses deducted, nearly twenty pounds. This sum came very seasonably, as I was thinking of indenting myself, for want of money, to procure a passage. As soon as I was master of nine guineas, the price of wafting me to the torrid zone, I took a steerage passage in the first ship that was to sail from the Clyde, for

Hungry ruin had me in the wind.

“I had been for some days skulking from covert to covert, under all the terrors of a jail, as some ill-advised people had uncoupled the merciless pack of the law at my heels. I had taken the last farewell of my friends; my chest was on the way to Greenock; I had composed the last song I should ever measure in Caledonia, ‘The gloomy night is gathering fast,’ when a letter from Dr. Blackwood to a friend of mine overthrew all my schemes, by opening up new prospects to my poetic ambition.”

It was at the close of July while Burns was, according to his own account, “wandering from one friend’s house to another,” to avoid the jail with which he was threatened by Jean Armour’s father, that the volume appeared, containing the immortal poems (1786). That Burns himself had some true estimate of their real worth is shown by the way in which he expresses himself in his preface to his volume.

Ushered in with what Lockhart calls, a “modest and manly preface,” the Kilmarnock volume went forth to the world. The fame of it spread at once like wild-fire throughout Ayrshire and the parts adjacent. This is the account of its reception given by Robert Heron, a young literary man, who was at that time living in the Stewartry of Kirkcudbright:— “Old and young, high and low, grave and gay, learned or ignorant, were alike delighted, agitated, transported. I was at that time resident in Galloway, contiguous to Ayrshire, and I can well remember how even ploughboys and maid-servants would have gladly bestowed the wages they earned most hardly, and which they wanted to purchase necessary clothing, if they might procure the works of Burns.” The edition consisted of six hundred copies — three hundred and fifty had been subscribed for before publication, and the remainder seems to have been sold off in about two mouths from their first appearance. When all expenses were paid, Burns received twenty pounds as his share of the profits. Small as this sum was, it would have more than sufficed to convey him to the West Indies; and, accordingly, with nine pounds of it he took a steerage passage in a vessel which was expected to sail from Greenock at the beginning of September. But from one cause or another the day of sailing was postponed, his friends began to talk of trying to get him a place in the Excise, his fame was rapidly widening in his own country, and his powers were finding a response in minds superior to any which he had hitherto known. Up to this time he had not associated with any persons of a higher grade than the convivial lawyers of Mauchline and Ayr, and the mundane ministers of the New Light school. But now persons of every rank were anxious to become acquainted with the wonderful Ayrshire Ploughman, for it was by that name he now began to be known, just as in the next generation another poet of as humble birth was spoken of as The Ettrick Shepherd. The first persons of a higher order who sought the acquaintanceship of Burns were Dugald Stewart and Mrs. Dunlop of Dunlop. The former of these two was the celebrated Scotch metaphysician, one of the chief ornaments of Edinburgh and its University at the close of last and the beginning of this century. He happened to be passing the summer at Catrine, on the Ayr, a few miles from Burns’s farm, and having been made acquainted with the poet’s works and character by Mr. Mackenzie, the surgeon of Mauchline, he invited the poet and the medical man to dine with him at Catrine. The day of this meeting was the 23rd of October, only three days after that on which Highland Mary died. Burns met on that day not only the professor and his accomplished wife, but for the first time in his life dined with a live lord — a young nobleman, said to have been of high promise, Lord Daer, eldest son of the then Earl of Selkirk. He had been a former pupil of Dugald Stewart, and happened to be at that time his guest. Burns has left the following humorous record of his own feelings at that meeting: —

This wot ye all whom it concerns,

I, Rhymer Robin, alias Burns,

October twenty-third,

A ne’er to be forgotten day,

Sae far I sprachled up the brae [clambered],

I dinner’d wi’ a Lord.

*

But wi’ a Lord! stand out my shin,

A Lord, — a Peer, an Earl’s Son!

Up higher yet my bonnet!

And sic a Lord! lang Scotch ells twa,

Our Peerage he o’erlooks them a’,

As I look o’er a sonnet.

But oh for Hogarth’s magic power!

To show Sir Bardie’s willyart glower [bewildered],

And how he stared and stammered,

When goavan, as if led in branks, [moving stupidly],

And stumpin’ on his ploughman shanks,

He in the parlour hammered.

I sidling sheltered in a nook,

An’ at his Lordship steal’t a look

Like some portentous omen;

Except good sense and social glee,

An’ (what surprised me) modesty,

I marked nought uncommon.

I watched the symptoms o’ the great,

The gentle pride, the lordly state,

The arrogant assuming;

The fient a pride, nae pride had he,

Nor sauce, nor state, that I could see,

Mair than an honest ploughman.

From this record of that evening given by Burns, it is interesting to turn to the impression made on Professor Stewart by this their first interview. He says, —

“His manners were then, as they continued ever afterwards, simple, manly, and independent; strongly expressive of conscious genius and worth, but without anything that indicated forwardness, arrogance, or vanity. He took his share in conversation, but not more than belonged to him; and listened with apparent attention and deference on subjects where his want of education deprived him of the means of information. If there had been a little more of gentleness and accommodation in his temper, he would, I think, have been still more interesting; but he had been accustomed to give law in the circle of his ordinary acquaintance, and his dread of anything approaching to meanness or servility rendered his manner somewhat decided and hard. Nothing perhaps was more remarkable among his various attainments than the fluency, and precision, and originality of his language, when he spoke in company; more particularly as he aimed at purity in his turn of expression, and avoided, more successfully than most Scotchmen, the peculiarities of Scottish phraseology.”

Burns parted with Dugald Stewart, after this evening spent with him in Ayrshire, to meet him again in the Edinburgh coteries, amid which the professor shone as a chief light.

Not less important in the history of Burns was his first introduction to Mrs. Dunlop of Dunlop, a lady who continued the constant friend of himself and of his family while she lived. She was said to be a lineal descendant of the brother of the great hero of Scotland, William Wallace. Gilbert Burns gives the following account of the way in which his brother’s acquaintance with this lady began.

“Of all the friendships, which Robert acquired in Ayrshire or elsewhere, none seemed more agreeable to him than that of Mrs. Dunlop of Dunlop, nor any which has been more uniformly and constantly exerted in behalf of him and his family, of which, were it proper, I could give many instances. Robert was on the point of setting out for Edinburgh before Mrs. Dunlop heard of him. About the time of my brother’s publishing in Kilmarnock, she had been afflicted with a long and severe illness, which had reduced her mind to the most distressing state of depression. In this situation, a copy of the printed poems was laid on her table by a friend; and happening to open on The Cotter’s Saturday Night, she read it over with the greatest pleasure and surprise; the poet’s description of the simple cottagers operating on her mind like the charm of a powerful exorcist, expelling the demon ennui, and restoring her to her wonted inward harmony and satisfaction. Mrs. Dunlop sent off a person express to Mossgiel, distant fifteen or sixteen miles, with a very obliging letter to my brother, desiring him to send her half a dozen copies of his poems, if he had them to spare, and begging he would do her the pleasure of calling at Dunlop House as soon as convenient. This was the beginning of a correspondence which ended only with the poet’s life. Nearly the last use he made with his pen was writing a short letter to this lady a few days before his death.”

The success of the first edition of his poems naturally made Burns anxious to see a second edition begun. He applied to his Kilmarnock printer, who refused the venture, unless Burns could supply ready money to pay for the printing. This he could not do. But the poems by this time had been read and admired by the most cultivated men in Edinburgh, and more than one word of encouragement had reached him from that city. The earliest of these was contained in a letter from the blind poet, Dr. Blacklock, to whom Mr. Laurie, the kindly and accomplished minister of Loudoun, had sent the volume. This Mr. Laurie belonged to the more cultivated section of the Moderate party in the Church, as it was called, and was the friend of Dr. Hugh Blair, Principal Robertson, and Dr. Blacklock, and had been the channel through which Macpherson’s fragments of Ossian had first been brought under the notice of that literary circle, which afterwards introduced them to the world. The same worthy minister had, on the first appearance of the poems, made Burns’ acquaintance; and had received him with warm-hearted hospitality. This kindness the poet acknowledged, on one of his visits to the Manse of Loudoun, by leaving in the room in which he slept a short poem of six very feeling stanzas, which contained a prayer for the family. This is the last stanza, —

When soon or late they reach that coast,

O’er life’s rough ocean driven,

May they rejoice, no wanderer lost,

A family in heaven!

As soon as Mr. Laurie received the letter from Dr. Blacklock, written on the 4th September, in which warm admiration of the Kilmarnock volume was expressed, he forwarded it to Burns at Mossgiel. The result of it fell like sunshine on the young poet’s heart; for as he says, “The doctor belonged to a set of critics for whose applause I had not dared to hope.” The next word of approval from Edinburgh was a highly appreciative criticism of the poems, which appeared in a number of The Edinburgh Magazine at the beginning of November. Up till this time Burns had not abandoned his resolution to emigrate to the West Indies. But the refusal of the Kilmarnock printer to undertake a new edition, and the voices of encouragement reaching him from Edinburgh, combining with his natural desire to remain, and be known as a poet, in his native country, at length made him abandon the thought of exile. On the 18th November we find him writing to a friend, that he had determined on Monday or Tuesday, the 27th or 28th November, to set his face toward the Scottish capital and try his fortune there.

At this stage of the poet’s career, Chambers pauses to speculate on the feelings with which the humble family at Mossgiel would hear of the sudden blaze of their brother’s fame, and of the change it had made in his prospects. They rejoiced, no doubt, that he was thus rescued from compulsory banishment, and were no way surprised that the powers they had long known him to possess had at length won the world’s admiration. If he had fallen into evil courses, none knew it so well as they, and none had suffered more by these aberrations. Still, with all his faults, he had always been to them a kind son and brother, not loved the less for the anxieties he had caused them. But the pride and satisfaction they felt in his newly-won fame, would be deep, not demonstrative. For the Burns family were a shy, reserved race, and like so many of the Scottish peasantry, the more they felt, the less they would express. In this they were very unlike the poet, with whom to have a feeling and to express it were almost synonymous. His mother, though not lacking in admiration of her son, is said to have been chiefly concerned lest the praises of his genius should make him forget the Giver of it. Such may have been the feelings of the poet’s family.

What may we imagine his own feeling to have been in this crisis of his fate? The thought of Edinburgh society would naturally stir that ambition which was strong within him, and awaken a desire to meet the men who were praising him in the capital, and to try his powers in that wider arena. It might be that in that new scene something might occur which would reverse the current of his fortunes, and set him free from the crushing poverty that had hitherto kept him down. Anyhow, he was conscious of strong powers, which fitted him to shine, not in poetry only, but in conversation and discussion; and, ploughman though he was, he did not shrink from encountering any man or any set of men. Proud, too, we know he was, and his pride often showed itself in jealousy and suspicion of the classes who were socially above him, until such feelings were melted by kindly intercourse with some individual man belonging to the suspected orders. He felt himself to surpass in natural powers those who were his superiors in rank and fortune, and he could not, for the life of him, see why they should be full of this world’s goods, while he had none of them. He had not yet learned — he never did learn — that lesson, that the genius he had received was his allotted and sufficient portion, and that his wisdom lay in making the most of this rare inward gift, even on a meagre allowance of the world’s external goods. But perhaps, whether he knew it or not, the greatest attraction of the capital was the secret hope that in that new excitement he might escape from the demons of remorse and despair which had for many months been dogging him. He may have fancied this, but the pangs which Burns had created for himself were too deep to be in this way permanently put by.

The secret of his settled unhappiness lay in the affections that he had abused in himself and in others who had trusted him. The course he had run since his Irvine sojourn was not of a kind to give peace to him or to any man. A coarse man of the world might have stifled the tender voices that were reproaching him, and have gone on his way uncaring that his conduct —

Hardened a’ within,

And petrified the feeling.

But Burns could not do this. The heart that had responded so feelingly to the sufferings of lower creatures, the unhoused mouse, the shivering cattle, the wounded hare, could not without shame remember the wrongs he had done to those human beings whose chief fault was that they had trusted him not wisely but too well. And these suggestions of a sensitive heart, conscience was at hand to enforce — a conscience wonderfully clear to discern the right, even when the will was least able to fulfil it. The excitements of a great city, and the loud praises of his fellow-men might enable him momentarily to forget, but could not permanently stifle inward voices like these. So it was with a heart but ill at ease, bearing dark secrets he could tell to no one, that Burns passed from his Ayrshire cottage into the applause of the Scottish capital.

CHAPTER II. FIRST WINTER IN EDINBURGH

The journey of Burns from Mossgiel to Edinburgh was a sort of triumphal progress. He rode on a pony, lent him by a friend, and as the journey took two days, his resting-place the first night was at the farm-house of Covington Mains, in Lanarkshire, hard by the Clyde. The tenant of this farm, Mr. Prentice, was an enthusiastic admirer of Burns’ poems, and had subscribed for twenty copies of the second edition. His son, years afterwards, in a letter to Christopher North, thus describes the evening on which Burns appeared at his father’s farm:— “All the farmers in the parish had read the poet’s then published works, and were anxious to see him. They were all asked to meet him at a late dinner, and the signal of his arrival was to be a white sheet attached to a pitchfork, and put on the top of a corn-stack in the barn-yard. The parish is a beautiful amphitheatre, with the Clyde winding through it — Wellbrae Hill to the west, Tinto Hill and the Culter Fells to the south, and the pretty, green, conical hill, Quothquan Law, to the east. My father’s stack-yard, lying in the centre, was seen from every house in the parish. At length Burns arrived, mounted on a borrowed pownie. Instantly was the white flag hoisted, and as instantly were seen the farmers issuing from their houses, and converging to the point of meeting. A glorious evening, or rather night, which borrowed something from the morning, followed, and the conversation of the poet confirmed and increased the admiration created by his writings. On the following morning he breakfasted with a large party at the next farm-house, tenanted by James Stodart; … took lunch with a large party at the bank in Carnwath, and rode into Edinburgh that evening on the pownie, which he returned to the owner in a few days afterwards by John Samson, the brother of the immortal Tam.”

This is but a sample of the kind of receptions which were henceforth to await Burns wherever his coming was known. If such welcomes were pleasing to his ambition, they must have been trying both to his bodily and his mental health.

Burns reached Edinburgh on the 28th of November, 1786. The one man of note there with whom he had any acquaintance was Professor Dugald Stewart, whom, as already mentioned, he had met in Ayrshire. But it was not to him or to any one of his reputation that he first turned; but he sought refuge with John Richmond, an old Mauchline acquaintance, who was humbly lodged in Baxter’s Close, Lawnmarket. During the whole of his first winter in Edinburgh, Burns lived in the lodging of this poor lad, and shared with him his single room and bed, for which they paid three shillings a week. It was from this retreat that Burns was afterwards to go forth into the best society of the Scottish capital, and thither, after these brief hospitalities were over, he had to return. For some days after his arrival in town, he called on no one — letters of introduction he had none to deliver. But he is said to have wandered about alone, “looking down from Arthur’s Seat, surveying the palace, gazing at the castle, or looking into the windows of the booksellers’ shops, where he saw all books of the day, save the poems of the Ayrshire Ploughman.” He found his way to the lowly grave of Fergusson, and, kneeling down, kissed the sod; he sought out the house of Allan Ramsay, and, on entering it, took off his hat. While Burns is thus employed, we may cast a glance at the capital to which he had come, and the society he was about to enter.

Edinburgh at that time was still adorned by a large number of the stars of literature, which, although none of those then living may have reached the first magnitude, had together made a galaxy in the northern heavens, from the middle till the close of last century. At that time literature was well represented in the University. The Head of it was Dr. Robertson, well known as the historian of Charles V., and as the author of other historic works. The chair of Belles Lettres was filled by the accomplished Dr. Hugh Blair, whose lectures remain one of the best samples of the correct and elegant, but narrow and frigid style, both of sentiment and criticism, which then flourished throughout Europe, and nowhere more than in Edinburgh. Another still greater ornament of the University was Dugald Stewart, the Professor of Moral Philosophy, whose works, if they have often been surpassed in depth and originality of speculation, have seldom been equalled for solid sense and polished ease of diction. The professors at that time were most of them either taken from the ranks of the clergy, or closely connected with them.

Among the literary men unconnected with the University by far the greatest name, that of David Hume, had disappeared about ten years before Burns arrived in the capital. But his friend, Dr. Adam Smith, author of The Wealth of Nations, still lingered. Mr. Henry Mackenzie, ‘The Man of Feeling,’ as he was called from his best known work, was at that time one of the most polished as well as popular writers in Scotland. He was then conducting a periodical called the Lounger, which was acknowledged as the highest tribunal of criticism in Scotland, and was not unknown beyond it.

But even more influential than the literary lights of the University were the magnates of the Bench and Bar. During the eighteenth century and the earlier part of the nineteenth, the Scottish Bar was recruited almost entirely from the younger sons of ancient Scottish families. To the patrician feelings which they brought with them from their homes these men added that exclusiveness which clings to a profession claiming for itself the highest place in the city where they resided. Modern democracy has made rude inroads on what was formerly something of a select patrician caste. But the profession of the Bar has never wanted either then or in more recent times some genial and original spirits who broke through the crust of exclusiveness. Such, at the time of Burns’s advent, was Lord Monboddo, the speculative and humorous judge, who in his own way anticipated the theory of man’s descent from the monkey. Such, too, was the genial and graceful Henry Erskine, the brother of the Lord Chancellor of that name, the pride and the favourite of his profession — the sparkling and ready wit who, thirteen years before the day of Burns, had met the rude manners of Dr. Johnson with a well-known repartee. When the Doctor visited the Parliament House, Erskine was presented to him by Boswell, and was somewhat gruffly received. After having made his bow, Erskine slipped a shilling into Boswell’s hand, whispering that it was for the sight of his bear!

Besides these two classes, the occupants of the Professorial chair and of the Bar, there still gathered every winter in Edinburgh a fair sprinkling of rank and beauty, which had not yet abandoned the Scottish for the English capital. The leader at that time in gay society was the well-known Duchess of Gordon, — a character so remarkable in her day that some rumour of her still lives in Scottish memory. The impression made upon her by Burns and his conversation shall afterwards be noticed.

Though Burns for the first day or two after his arrival wandered about companionless, he was not left long unfriended. Mr. Dalrymple, of Orangefield, an Ayrshire country gentleman, a warm-hearted man, and a zealous Freemason, who had become acquainted with Burns during the previous summer, now introduced the Ayrshire bard to his relative, the Earl of Glencairn. This nobleman, who had heard of Burns from his Ayrshire factor, welcomed him in a very friendly spirit, introduced him to his connexion, Henry Erskine, and also recommended him to the good offices of Creech, at that time the first publisher in Edinburgh. Of Lord Glencairn, Chambers says that “his personal beauty formed the index to one of the fairest characters.” As long as he lived he did his utmost to befriend Burns, and on his death, a few years after this time, the poet, who seldom praised the great unless he respected and loved them, composed one of his most pathetic elegies.

It was not, however, to his few Ayrshire connexions only, Mr. Dalrymple, Dugald Stewart, and others, that Burns was indebted for his introduction to Edinburgh society. His own fame was now enough to secure it. A criticism of his poems, which appeared within a fortnight after his arrival in Edinburgh, in the Lounger, on the 9th of December, did much to increase his reputation. The author of that criticism was The Man of Feeling, and to him belongs the credit of having been the first to claim that Burns should be recognized as a great original poet, not relatively only, in consideration of the difficulties he had to struggle with, but absolutely on the ground of the intrinsic excellence of his work. He pointed to his power of delineating manners, of painting the passions, and of describing scenery, as all bearing the stamp of true genius; he called on his countrymen to recognize that a great national poet had arisen amongst them, and to appreciate the gift that in him had been bestowed upon their generation. Alluding to his narrow escape from exile, he exhorted them to retain and to cherish this inestimable gift of a native poet, and to repair, as far as possible, the wrongs which suffering or neglect had inflicted on him. The Lounger had at that time a wide circulation in Scotland, and penetrated even to England. It was known and read by the poet Cowper, who, whether from this or some other source, became acquainted with the poems of Burns within the first year of their publication. In July, 1787, we find the poet of The Task telling a correspondent that he had read Burns’s poems twice; “and though they be written in a language that is new to me … I think them, on the whole, a very extraordinary production. He is, I believe, the only poet these kingdoms have produced in the lower rank of life since Shakespeare (I should rather say since Prior), who need not be indebted for any part of his praise to a charitable consideration of his origin, and the disadvantages under which he has laboured.” Cowper thus endorses the verdict of Mackenzie in almost the same language.

It did not however require such testimonials, from here and there a literary man, however eminent, to open every hospitable door in Edinburgh to Burns. Within a month after his arrival in town he had been welcomed at the tables of all the celebrities — Lord Monboddo, Robertson, the historian, Dr. Hugh Blair, Dugald Stewart, Dr. Adam Ferguson, The Man of Feeling, Mr. Fraser Tytler, and many others. We are surprised to find that he had been nearly two months in town before he called on the amiable Dr. Blacklock, the blind poet, who in his well-known letter to Dr. Laurie had been the first Edinburgh authority to hail in Burns the rising of a new star.

How he bore himself throughout that winter when he was the chief lion of Edinburgh society many records remain to show, both in his own letters and in the reports of those who met him. On the whole, his native good sense carried him well through the ordeal. If he showed for the most part due respect to others, he was still more bent on maintaining his respect for himself; indeed, this latter feeling was pushed even to an exaggerated independence. As Mr. Lockhart has expressed it, he showed, “in the whole strain of his bearing, his belief that in the society of the most eminent men of his nation he was where he was entitled to be, hardly deigning to flatter them by exhibiting a symptom of being flattered.” All who heard him were astonished by his wonderful powers of conversation. These impressed them, they said, with a greater sense of his genius than even his finest poems.

With the ablest men that he met he held his own in argument, astonishing all listeners by the strength of his judgment, and the keenness of his insight both into men and things. And when he warmed on subjects which interested him, the boldest stood amazed at the flashes of his wit, and the vehement flow of his impassioned eloquence. With the “high-born ladies” he succeeded even better than with the “stately patricians,” — as one of those dames herself expressed it, fairly carrying them off their feet by the deference of his manner, and the mingled humour and pathos of his talk.

It is interesting to know in what dress Burns generally appeared in Edinburgh. Soon after coming thither he is said to have laid aside his country clothes for “a suit of blue and buff, the livery of Mr. Fox, with buckskins and top-boots.” How he wore his hair will be seen immediately. There are several well-known descriptions of Burns’s manner and appearance during his Edinburgh sojourn, which, often as they have been quoted, cannot be passed by in any account of his life.

Mr. Walker, who met him for the first time at breakfast in the house of Dr. Blacklock, says, “I was not much struck by his first appearance. His person, though strong and well-knit, and much superior to what might be expected in a ploughman, appeared to be only of the middle size, but was rather above it. His motions were firm and decided, and, though without grace, were at the same time so free from clownish constraint as to show that he had not always been confined to the society of his profession. His countenance was not of that elegant cast which is most frequent among the upper ranks, but it was manly and intelligent, and marked by a thoughtful gravity which shaded at times into sternness. In his large dark eye the most striking index of his genius resided. It was full of mind…. He was plainly but properly dressed, in a style midway between the holiday costume of a farmer and that of the company with which he now associated. His black hair without powder, at a time when it was generally worn, was tied behind, and spread upon his forehead. Had I met him near a seaport, I should have conjectured him to be the master of a merchant vessel…. In no part of his manner was there the slightest affectation; nor could a stranger have suspected, from anything in his behaviour or conversation, that he had been for some months the favourite of all the fashionable circles of the metropolis. In conversation he was powerful. His conceptions and expressions were of corresponding vigour, and on all subjects were as remote as possible from commonplaces. Though somewhat authoritative, it was in a way which gave little offence, and was readily imputed to his inexperience in those modes of smoothing dissent and softening assertion, which are important characteristics of polished manners.

“The day after my first introduction to Burns, I supped with him at Dr. Blair’s. The other guests were few, and as they had come to meet Burns, the Doctor endeavoured to draw him out, and to make him the central figure of the group. Though he therefore furnished the greatest proportion of the conversation, he did no more than what he saw evidently was expected. From the blunders often committed by men of genius Burns was unusually free; yet on the present occasion he made a more awkward slip than any that are reported of the poets or mathematicians most noted for absence of mind. Being asked from which of the public places he had received the greatest gratification, he named the High Church, but gave the preference as a preacher to the colleague of our worthy entertainer, whose celebrity rested on his pulpit eloquence, in a tone so pointed and decisive as to throw the whole company into the most foolish embarrassment!” Dr. Blair, we are told, relieved their confusion by seconding Burns’s praise. The poet saw his mistake, but had the good sense not to try to repair it. Years afterwards he told Professor Walker that he had never spoken of this unfortunate blunder, so painful to him had the remembrance of it been.

There seems little doubt from all the accounts that have been preserved, that Burns in conversation gave forth his opinions with more decision than politeness. He had not a little of that mistaken pride not uncommon among his countrymen, which fancies that gentle manners and consideration for others’ feelings are marks of servility. He was for ever harping on independence, and this betrayed him into some acts of rudeness in society which have been recorded with perhaps too great minuteness.

Against these remarks, we must set the testimony of Dugald Stewart, who says,— “The attentions he received from all ranks and descriptions of persons would have turned any head but his own. I cannot say that I perceived any unfavourable effect which they left on his mind. He retained the same simplicity which had struck me so forcibly when first I saw him in the country, nor did he seem to feel any additional self-importance from the number and rank of his new acquaintance. He walked with me in spring, early in the morning, to the Braid Hills, when he charmed me still more by his private conversation than he had ever done in company. He was passionately fond of the beauties of nature; and he once told me, when I was admiring a distant prospect in one of our morning walks, that the sight of so many smoking cottages gave a pleasure to his mind which none could understand who had not witnessed, like himself, the happiness and worth which they contained…. The idea which his conversation conveyed of the powers of his mind exceeded, if possible, that which is suggested by his writings. All his faculties were, as far as I could judge, equally vigorous, and his predilection for poetry was rather the result of his own enthusiastic and impassioned temper, than of a genius exclusively adapted to that species of composition. I should have pronounced him fitted to excel in whatever walk of ambition he had chosen…. The remarks he made on the characters of men were shrewd and pointed, though frequently inclining too much to sarcasm. His praise of those he loved was sometimes indiscriminate and extravagant…. His wit was ready, and always impressed with the marks of a vigorous understanding; but, to my taste, not often pleasing or happy.”

While the learned of his own day were measuring him thus coolly, and forming their critical estimates of him, youths of the younger generation were regarding him with far other eyes. Of Jeffrey, when a lad in his teens, it is recorded that one day in the winter of 1786-87, as he stood on the High Street of Edinburgh, staring at a man whose appearance struck him, a person at a shop door tapped him on the shoulder and said, “Aye, laddie, ye may weel look at that man. That’s Robbie Burns.” This was the young critic’s first and last look at the poet of his country.

But the most interesting of all the reminiscences of Burns, during his Edinburgh visit, or indeed, during any other time, was the day when young Walter Scott met him, and received from him that one look of approbation.

This is the account of that meeting which Scott himself gave to Lockhart: “As for Burns, I may truly say, ‘Virgilium vidi tantum.’ I was a lad of fifteen when he came to Edinburgh. I saw him one day at the late venerable Professor Adam Fergusson’s. Of course we youngsters sat silent, looked and listened. The only thing I remember which was remarkable in Burns’s manner, was the effect produced upon him by a print of Bunbury’s, representing a soldier lying dead on the snow, his dog sitting in misery on one side, — on the other, his widow, with a child in her arms. These lines were written beneath: —

Cold on Canadian hills, or Minden’s plain,

Perhaps that parent wept her soldier slain, —

Bent o’er the babe, her eye dissolved in dew,

The big drops mingling with the milk he drew,

Gave the sad presage of his future years,

The child of misery baptized in tears.

“Burns seemed much affected by the print: he actually shed tears. He asked whose the lines were, and it chanced that nobody but myself remembered that they occur in a half-forgotten poem of Langhorne’s, called by the unpromising title of The Justice of Peace. I whispered my information to a friend present, who mentioned it to Burns, who rewarded me with a look and a word, which though of mere civility, I then received with very great pleasure. His person was strong and robust; his manner rustic, not clownish; a sort of dignified plainness and simplicity. His countenance was more massive than it looks in any of the portraits. I would have taken the poet, had I not known who he was, for a very sagacious country farmer of the old Scotch school, — the douce gudeman who held his own plough. There was a strong expression of sense and shrewdness in all his lineaments; the eye alone, I think, indicated the poetical character and temperament. It was large, and of a dark cast, which glowed (I say literally glowed) when he spoke with feeling or interest. I never saw such another eye in a human head, though I have seen the most distinguished men of my time.”

While men of the upper ranks, old and young, were thus receiving their impressions, and forming their various estimates of Burns, he, we may be sure, was not behind-hand in his reflections on them, and on himself. He had by nature his full share of that gnawing self-consciousness which haunts the irritable tribe, from which no modern poet but Walter Scott has been able wholly to escape. While he was bearing himself thus manfully to outward appearance, inwardly he was scrutinizing himself and others with a morbid sensitiveness. In the heyday of his Edinburgh popularity, he writes to Mrs. Dunlop, one of his most trusted friends, what he repeats to other correspondents, that he had long been at pains to take a true measure of himself and to form a just estimate of his powers: that this self-estimate was not raised by his present success, nor would it be depressed by future neglect; that though the tide of popularity was now at full flood, he foresaw that the ebb would soon set in, and that he was prepared for it. In the same letters he speaks of his having too much pride for servility, as though there was no third and more excellent way; of “the stubborn pride of his own bosom,” on which he seems mainly to have relied. Indeed throughout his life there is much talk of what Mr. Carlyle well calls the altogether barren and unfruitful principle of pride; much prating about “a certain fancied rock of independence,” — a rock which he found but a poor shelter when the worst ills of life overtook him. This feeling reached its height when soon after leaving Edinburgh, we find him writing to a comrade in the bitterness of his heart that the stateliness of Edinburgh patricians and the meanness of Mauchline plebeians had so disgusted him with his kind, that he had bought a pocket copy of Milton to study the character of Satan, as the great exemplar of “intrepid, unyielding independence.”

If during his stay in Edinburgh, his “irascible humour” never went so far as this, “the contumely of condescension” must have entered pretty deeply into the soul of the proud peasant when he made the following memorable entry in his diary, on the 9th April, 1787. After some remarks on the difficulty of true friendship, and the hazard of losing men’s respect by being too confidential with friends, he goes on: “For these reasons, I am determined to make these pages my confidant. I will sketch every character that any way strikes me, to the best of my power, with unshrinking justice. I will insert anecdotes and take down remarks, in the old law phrase, without feud or favour…. I think a lock and key a security at least equal to the bosom of any friend whatever. My own private story likewise, my love adventures, my rambles; the frowns and smiles of fortune on my bardship my poems and fragments, that must never see the light, shall be occasionally inserted. In short, never did four shillings purchase so much friendship, since confidence went first to the market, or honesty was set up for sale….

“There are few of the sore evils under the sun give me more uneasiness and chagrin, than the comparison how a man of genius, nay, of avowed worth, is received everywhere, with the reception which a mere ordinary character, decorated with the trappings and futile distinctions of fortune, meets: I imagine a man of abilities, his breast glowing with honest pride, conscious that men are born equal, still giving honour to whom honour is due; he meets at a great man’s table a Squire Something or a Sir Somebody; he knows the noble landlord at heart gives the bard, or whatever he is, a share of his good wishes, beyond, perhaps, any one at the table; yet how will it mortify him to see a fellow whose abilities would scarcely have made an eightpenny tailor, and whose heart is not worth three farthings, meet with attention, and notice that are withheld from the son of genius and poverty!

“The noble Glencairn has wounded me to the soul here, because I dearly esteem, respect, and love him. He showed so much attention, engrossing attention, one day, to the only blockhead at table (the whole company consisted of his lordship, dunder-pate, and myself), that I was within half a point of throwing down my gage of contemptuous defiance, but he shook my hand and looked so benevolently good at parting, God bless him! though I should never see him more, I shall love him to my dying day! I am pleased to think I am so capable of gratitude, as I am miserably deficient in some other virtues.”

Lockhart, after quoting largely from this Commonplace Book, adds, “This curious document has not yet been printed entire. Another generation will, no doubt, see the whole of the confession.” All that remains of it has recently been given to the world. The original design was not carried on, and what is left is but a fragment, written chiefly in Edinburgh, with a few additions made at Ellisland. The only characters which are sketched are those of Blair, Stewart, Creech, and Greenfield. The remarks on Blair, if not very appreciative, are mild and not unkindly. There seems to be irony in the praise of Dugald Stewart for the very qualities in which Burns probably thought him to be deficient. Creech’s strangely composite character is well touched off. Dr. Greenfield, the colleague of Dr. Blair, whose eloquence Burns on an unfortunate occasion preferred to that of his host, alone comes in for unaffected eulogy. The plain and manly directness of these prose sketches is in striking contrast to the ambitious flights which the poet attempts in many of his letters.

Dugald Stewart in his cautious way hints that Burns did not always keep himself to the learned circles which had welcomed him, but sometimes indulged in “not very select society.” How much this cautious phrase covers may be seen by turning to Heron’s account of some of the scenes in which Burns mingled. Tavern life was then in Edinburgh, as elsewhere, more or less habitual in all classes. In those clubs and brotherhoods of the middle class, which met in taverns down the closes and wynds of High Street, Burns found a welcome, warmer, freer, more congenial than any vouchsafed to him in more polished coteries. Thither convened when their day’s work was done, lawyers, writers, schoolmasters, printers, shopkeepers, tradesmen, — ranting, roaring boon companions — who gave themselves up, for the time, to coarse songs, rough raillery, and deep drinking. At these meetings all restraint was cast to the winds, and the mirth drove fast and furious. With open arms the clubs welcomed the poet to their festivities; each man proud to think that he was carousing with Robbie Burns. The poet the while gave full vein to all his impulses, mimicking, it is said, and satirizing his superiors in position, who, he fancied, had looked on him coldly, paying them off by making them the butt of his raillery, letting loose all his varied powers, wit, humour, satire, drollery, and throwing off from time to time snatches of licentious song, to be picked up by eager listeners, — song wildly defiant of all the proprieties. The scenes which Burns there took part in far exceeded any revelries he had seen in the clubs of Tarbolton and Mauchline, and did him no good. If we may trust the testimony of Heron, at the meetings of a certain Crochallan club, and at other such uproarious gatherings, he made acquaintances who, before that winter was over, led him on from tavern dissipations to still worse haunts and habits.

By the 21st of April (1787), the ostensible object for which Burns had come to Edinburgh was attained, and the second edition of his poems appeared in a handsome octavo volume. The publisher was Creech, then chief of his trade in Scotland. The volume was published by subscription, “for the sole benefit of the author,” and the subscribers were so numerous that the list of them covered thirty-eight pages. In that list appeared the names of many of the chief men of Scotland, some of whom subscribed for twenty — Lord Eglinton for as many as forty-two, copies. Chambers thinks that full justice has never been done to the liberality of the Scottish public in the way they subscribed for this volume. Nothing equal to the patronage that Burns at this time met with, had been seen since the days of Pope’s Iliad. This second edition, besides the poems which had appeared in the Kilmarnock one, contained several additional pieces the most important of which had been composed before the Edinburgh visit. Such were Death and Doctor Hornbook, The Brigs of Ayr, The Ordination, The Address to the Unco Guid. The proceeds from this volume ultimately made Burns the possessor of about 500l., quite a little fortune for one who, as he himself confesses, had never before had 10l. he could call his own. It would, however, have been doubly welcome and useful to him, had it been paid down without needless delay. But unfortunately this was not Creech’s way of transacting business, so that Burns was kept for many months waiting for a settlement — months during which he could not for want of money turn to any fixed employment, and which were therefore spent by him unprofitably enough.

CHAPTER III. BORDER AND HIGHLAND TOURS.

Some small instalments of the profits of his new volume enabled our Poet, during the summer and autumn of 1787, to make several tours to various districts of Scotland, famous either for scenery or song. The day of regular touring had not yet set in, and few Scots at that time would have thought of visiting what Burns called the classic scenes of their country. A generation before this, poets in England had led the way in this — as when Gray visited the lakes of Cumberland, and Dr. Johnson the Highlands and the Western Isles. In his ardour to look upon places famous for their natural beauty or their historic associations, or even for their having been mentioned in some old Scottish song, Burns surpassed both Gray and Johnson, and anticipated the sentiment of the present century. Early in May he set out with one of his Crochallan club acquaintances, named Ainslie, on a journey to the Border. Ainslie was a native of the Merse, his father and family living in Dunse. Starting thence with Ainslie, Burns traversed the greater part of the vale of Tweed from Coldstream to Peebles, recalling, as he went along, snatches of song connected with the places he passed. He turned aside to see the valley of the Jed, and got as far as Selkirk in the hope of looking upon Yarrow. But from doing this he was hindered by a day of unceasing rain, and he who was so soon to become the chief singer of Scottish song was never allowed to look on that vale which has long been its most ideal home. Before finishing his tour, he went as far as Nithsdale, and surveyed the farm of Ellisland, with some thought already, that he might yet become the tenant of it.

It is noteworthy, but not wonderful, that the scenes visited in this tour called forth no poetry from Burns, save here and there an allusion that occurred in some of his later songs. When we remember with what an uneasy heart Burns left Ayrshire for Edinburgh, that the town life he had there led for the last six months had done nothing to lighten — it had probably done something to increase the load of his mental disquietude, — that in an illness which he had during his tour he confesses that “embittering remorse was scaring his fancy at the gloomy forebodings of death,” and that when his tour was over, soon after his return to Edinburgh, he found the law let loose against him, and what was called a “fugae” warrant issued for his apprehension, owing to some occurrence like to that which a year ago had terrified him with legal penalties, and all but driven him to Jamaica, — when all these things are remembered, is it to be wondered, that Burns should have wandered by the banks of Tweed, in no mood to chaunt beside it “a music sweeter than its own”?

At the close of his Border tour Burns had, as we have seen, visited Nithsdale and looked at the farm of Ellisland. From Nithsdale he made his way back to native Ayrshire and his family at Mossgiel. I have heard a tradition that his mother met him at the door of the small farm-house, with this only salutation, “O Robbie!” Neither Lockhart nor Chambers mentions this, but the latter says, his sister, Mrs. Begg, remembered the arrival of her brother. He came in unheralded, and was in the midst of them before they knew. It was a quiet meeting, for the Mossgiel family had the true Scottish reticence or reserve; but though their words were not “mony feck,” their feelings were strong. It was, indeed, as strange a reverse as ever was made by fortune’s fickle wheel. “He had left them,” to quote the words of Lockhart, “comparatively unknown, his tenderest feelings torn and wounded by the behaviour of the Armours, and so miserably poor that he had been for some weeks obliged to skulk from the sheriff’s officers to avoid the payment of a paltry debt. He returned, his poetical fame established, the whole country ringing with his praise, from a capital in which he was known to have formed the wonder and delight of the polite and the learned; if not rich, yet with more money already than any of his kindred had ever hoped to see him possess, and with prospects of future patronage and permanent elevation in the scale of society, which might have dazzled steadier eyes than those of maternal and fraternal affection. The prophet had at last honour in his own country, but the haughty spirit that had preserved its balance in Edinburgh was not likely to lose it at Mauchline.” The haughty spirit of which Lockhart speaks was reserved for others than his own family. To them we hear of nothing but simple affection. His youngest sister, Mrs. Begg, told Chambers, “that her brother went to Glasgow, and thence sent home a present to his mother and three sisters, namely, a quantity of mode silk, enough to make a bonnet and a cloak to each, and a gown besides to his mother and youngest sister.” This was the way he took to mark their right to share in his prosperity. Mrs. Begg remembers going for rather more than a week to Ayr to assist in making up the dresses, and when she came back on a Saturday, her brother had returned and requested her “to put on her dress that he might see how smart she looked in it.” The thing that stirred his pride and scorn was the servility with which he was now received by his “plebeian brethren” in the neighbourhood, and chief among these by the Armours, who had formerly eyed him with looks askance. If anything “had been wanting to disgust me completely with Armour’s family, their mean, servile compliance would have done it.” So he writes, and it was this disgust that prompted him to furnish himself, as we have seen he did, with a pocket copy of Milton, to study the character of Satan. This fierce indignation was towards the family; towards “bonny Jean” herself his feeling was far other. Having accidentally met her, his old affection revived, and they were soon as intimate as of old.

After a short time spent at Mossgiel wandering about, and once, it would seem, penetrating the West Highlands as far as Inverary, a journey during which his temper seems to have been far from serene, he returned in August to Edinburgh. There he encountered, and in time got rid of, the law troubles already alluded to, and on the 25th of August he set out, on a longer tour than any he had yet attempted, to the Northern Highlands.

The travelling companion whom he chose for this tour was a certain Mr. Nicol, whose acquaintance he seems to have first formed at the Crochallan club, or some other haunt of boisterous joviality. After many ups and downs in life Nicol had at last, by dint of some scholastic ability, settled as a master of the Edinburgh High School. What could have tempted Burns to select such a man for a fellow-traveller? He was cast in one of nature’s roughest moulds; a man of careless habits, coarse manners, enormous vanity, of most irascible and violent temper, which vented itself in cruelties on the poor boys who were the victims of his care. Burns compared himself with such a companion to “a man travelling with a loaded blunderbuss at full cock.” Two things only are mentioned in his favour, that he had a warm heart, and an unbounded admiration of the poet. But the choice of such a man was an unfortunate one, and in the upshot did not a little to spoil both the pleasure and the benefit, which might have been gathered from the tour.

Their journey lay by Stirling and Crieff to Taymouth and Breadalbane, thence to Athole, on through Badenoch and Strathspey to Inverness. The return by the east coast was through the counties of Moray and Banff to Aberdeen. After visiting the county whence his father had come, and his kindred who were still in Kincardineshire, Burns and his companion passed by Perth back to Edinburgh, which they reached on the 16th of September. The journey occupied only two and twenty days, far too short a time to see so much country, besides making several visits, with any advantage. During his Border tour Burns had ridden his Rosinante mare, which he had named Jenny Geddes. As his friend, the schoolmaster, was no equestrian, Burns was obliged to make his northern journey in a post-chaise, not the best way of taking in the varied and ever-changing sights and sounds of Highland scenery.

Such a tour as this, if Burns could have entered on it under happier auspices, that is, with a heart at ease, a fitting companion, and leisure enough to view quietly the scenes through which he passed, and to enjoy the society of the people whom he met, could not have failed, from its own interestingness, and its novelty to him, to have enriched his imagination, and to have called forth some lasting memorials. As it was, it cannot be said to have done either. There are, however, a few incidents which are worth noting. The first of these took place at Stirling. Burns and his companion had ascended the Castle Rock, to look on the blue mountain rampart, that flanks the Highlands from Ben Lomond to Benvoirlich. As they were both strongly attached to the Stuart cause, they had seen with indignation, on the slope of the Castle hill, the ancient hall, in which the Scottish kings once held their Parliaments, lying ruinous and neglected. On returning to their inn, Burns, with a diamond he had bought for such purposes, wrote on the window-pane of his room some lines expressive of the disgust he had felt at that sight, concluding with some offensive remarks on the reigning family. The lines, which had no poetic merit, got into the newspapers of the day, and caused a good deal of comment. On a subsequent visit to Stirling, Burns himself broke the pane of the window on which the obnoxious lines were written, but they were remembered, it is said, long afterwards to his disadvantage.

Among the pleasantest incidents of the tour was the visit to Blair Castle, and his reception by the Duchess of Athole. The two days he spent there he declared were among the happiest of his life. We have seen how sensitive Burns was to the way he was received by the great. Resentful as he was equally of condescension and of neglect, it must have been no easy matter for persons of rank so to adapt their manner as to exactly please him. But his hosts at Blair Castle succeeded to admiration in this. They were assisted by the presence at the Castle of Mr., afterwards Professor, Walker, who had known Burns in Edinburgh, and was during that autumn living as a tutor in the Duke’s family. At dinner Burns was in his most pleasing vein, and delighted his hostess by drinking to the health of her group of fair young children, as “honest men and bonny lassies” — an expression with which he happily closes his Petition of Bruar Water. The Duchess had her two sisters, Mrs. Graham and Miss Cathcart, staying with her on a visit, and all three ladies were delighted with the conversation of the poet. These three sisters were daughters of a Lord Cathcart, and were remarkable for their beauty. The second, Mrs. Graham, has been immortalized as the subject of one of Gainsborough’s most famous portraits. On her early death her husband, Thomas Graham of Balnagown, never again looked on that beautiful picture, but left his home for a soldier’s life, distinguished himself greatly in the Peninsular War, and was afterwards known as Lord Lynedoch. After his death, the picture passed to his nearest relatives, who presented it to the National Portrait Gallery of Scotland, of which it is now the chief ornament. All three sisters soon passed away, having died even before the short-lived poet. By their beauty and their agreeableness they charmed Burns, and did much to make his visit delightful. They themselves were not less pleased; for when the poet proposed to leave, after two days were over, they pressed him exceedingly to stay, and even sent a messenger to the hotel to persuade the driver of Burns’s chaise to pull off one of the horse’s shoes, that his departure might be delayed. Burns himself would willingly have listened to their entreaties, but his travelling mate was inexorable. Likely enough Nicol had not been made so much of as the poet, and this was enough to rouse his irascible temper. For one day he had been persuaded to stay by the offer of good trout-fishing, which he greatly relished, but now he insisted on being off. Burns was reluctantly forced to yield.

This rapid departure was the more unfortunate because Mr. Dundas, who held the keys of Scottish patronage, was expected on a visit to Blair, and had he met the poet he might have wiped out the reproach often cast on the ministry of the day, that they failed in their duty towards Burns. “That eminent statesman,” as Lockhart says, “was, though little addicted to literature, a warm lover of his own country, and, in general, of whatever redounded to her honour; he was, moreover, very especially qualified to appreciate Burns as a companion; and had such an introduction taken place, he might not improbably have been induced to bestow that consideration on the claims of the poet, which, in the absence of any personal acquaintance, Burns’s works ought to have received at his hands.” But during that visit Burns met, and made the acquaintance of, another man of some influence, Mr. Graham of Fintray, whose friendship afterwards, both in the Excise business, and in other matters, stood him in good stead. The Duke, as he bade farewell to Burns at Blair, advised him to turn aside, and see the Falls of the Bruar, about six miles from the Castle, where that stream coming down from its mountains plunges over some high precipices, and passes through a rocky gorge to join the river Garry. Burns did so, and finding the falls entirely bare of wood, wrote some lines entitled The Humble Petition of Bruar Water, in which he makes the stream entreat the Duke to clothe its naked banks with trees. The poet’s petition for the stream was not in vain. The then Duke of Athole was famous as a planter of trees, and those with which, after the poet’s Petition, he surrounded the waterfall remain to this day.

After visiting Culloden Muir, the Fall of Fyers, Kilravock Castle, where, but for the impatience of Mr. Nicol, he would fain have prolonged his stay, he came on to Fochabers and Gordon Castle. This is Burns’s entry in his diary:— “Cross Spey to Fochabers, fine palace, worthy of the noble, the polite, and generous proprietor. The Duke makes me happier than ever great man did; noble, princely, yet mild and condescending and affable — gay and kind. The Duchess, charming, witty, kind, and sensible. God bless them!”

Here, too, as at Blair, the ducal hosts seem to have entirely succeeded in making Burns feel at ease, and wish to protract his visit. But here, too, more emphatically than at Blair, his friend spoilt the game. This is the account of the incident, as given by Lockhart, with a few additions interpolated from Chambers: —

“Burns, who had been much noticed by this noble family when in Edinburgh, happened to present himself at Gordon Castle, just at the dinner-hour, and being invited to take a place at the table, did so, without for a moment adverting to the circumstance that his travelling companion had been left alone at the inn, in the adjacent village. On remembering this soon after dinner, he begged to be allowed to rejoin his friend; and the Duke of Gordon, who now for the first time learned that he was not journeying alone, immediately proposed to send an invitation to Mr. Nicol to come to the Castle. His Grace sent a messenger to bear it; but Burns insisted on himself accompanying him. They found the haughty schoolmaster striding up and down before the inn-door in a high state of wrath and indignation at, what he considered, Burns’s neglect, and no apologies could soften his mood. He had already ordered horses, and was venting his anger on the postillion for the slowness with which he obeyed his commands. The poet, finding that he must choose between the ducal circle and his irascible associate, at once chose the latter alternative. Nicol and he, in silence and mutual displeasure, seated themselves in the post-chaise, and turned their backs on Gordon Castle, where the poet had promised himself some happy days. This incident may serve to suggest some of the annoyances to which persons moving, like our poet, on the debatable land between two different ranks of society must ever be subjected.” “To play the lion under such circumstances must,” as the knowing Lockhart observes, “be difficult at the best; but a delicate business indeed, when the jackals are presumptuous. The pedant could not stomach the superior success of his friend, and yet — alas for poor human nature! — he certainly was one of the most enthusiastic of his admirers, and one of the most affectionate of all his intimates.” It seems that the Duchess of Gordon had some hope that her friend, Mr. Addington, afterwards Lord Sidmouth and the future premier, would have visited at Gordon Castle while Burns was there. Mr. Addington was, Allan Cunningham tells us, an enthusiastic admirer of Burns’s poetry, and took pleasure in quoting it to Pitt and Melville. On that occasion he was unfortunately not able to accept the invitation of the Duchess, but he forwarded to her “these memorable lines — memorable as the first indication of that deep love which England now entertains for the genius of Burns:” —

Yes! pride of Scotia’s favoured plains, ‘tis thine

The warmest feelings of the heart to move;

To bid it throb with sympathy divine,

To glow with friendship, or to melt with love.

What though each morning sees thee rise to toil,

Though Plenty on thy cot no blessing showers,

Yet Independence cheers thee with her smile,

And Fancy strews thy moorland with her flowers!

And dost thou blame the impartial will of Heaven,

Untaught of life the good and ill to scan?

To thee the Muse’s choicest wreath is given —

To thee the genuine dignity of man!

Then to the want of worldly gear resigned,

Be grateful for the wealth of thy exhaustless mind.

It was well enough for Mr. Addington, and such as he, to advise Burns to be content with the want of worldly gear, and to refer him for consolation to the dignity of man and the wealth of his exhaustless mind. Burns had abundance of such sentiments in himself to bring forth, when occasion required. He did not need to be replenished with these from the stores of men who held the keys of patronage. What he wanted from them was some solid benefit, such as they now and then bestowed on their favourites, but which unfortunately they withheld from Burns.

An intelligent boy, who was guide to Burns and Nicol from Cullen to Duff House, gave long afterwards his remembrances of that day. Among these this occurs. The boy was asked by Nicol if he had read Burns’s poems, and which of them he liked best. The boy replied, “‘I was much entertained with The Twa Dogs and Death and Dr. Hornbook, but I like best The Cotter’s Saturday Night, although it made me greet when my father had me to read it to my mother.’ Burns, with a sudden start, looked at my face intently, and patting my shoulder, said, ‘Well, my callant, I don’t wonder at your greeting at reading the poem; it made me greet more than once when I was writing it at my father’s fireside.’”…

On the 16th of September, 1787, the two travellers returned to Edinburgh. This tour produced little poetry directly, and what it did produce was not of a high order. In this respect one cannot but contrast it with the poetic results of another tour made, partly over the same ground, by another poet, less than twenty years after this time. When Wordsworth and his sister made their first visit to Scotland in 1803, it called forth some strains of such perfect beauty as will live while the English language lasts. Burns’s poetic fame would hardly be diminished if all that he wrote on his tours were obliterated from his works. Perhaps we ought to except some allusions in his future songs, and especially that grand song, Macpherson’s Farewell, which, though composed several months after this tour was over, must have drawn its materials from the day spent at Duff House, where he was shown the sword of the Highland Reiver.

But look at the lines composed after his first sight of Breadalbane, which he left in the inn at Kenmore. These Lockhart has pronounced among “the best of his purely English heroics.” If so, we can but say how poor are the best! What is to be thought of such lines as

Poetic ardours in my bosom swell,

Lone wandering by the hermit’s mossy cell, &c., &c.

Nor less stilted, forced, and artificial are the lines in the same measure written at the Fall of Fyers.

The truth is, that Burns’s forte by no means lay in describing scenery alone, and for its own sake. All his really inspired descriptions of it occur as adjuncts to human incident or feeling, slips of landscape let in as a background. Again, as Burns was never at his best when called on to write for occasions — no really spontaneous poet ever can be — so when taken to see much talked-of scenes, and expected to express poetic raptures over them, Burns did not answer to the call.

“He disliked,” we are told, “to be tutored in matters of taste, and could not endure that one should run shouting before him, whenever any fine object came in sight.” On one occasion of this kind, a lady at the poet’s side said, “Burns, have you nothing to say of this?” “Nothing, madam,” he replied, glancing at the leader of the party, “for an ass is braying over it.” Burns is not the only person who has suffered from this sort of officiousness.

Besides this, the tours were not made in the way which most conduces to poetic composition. He did not allow himself the quiet and the leisure from interruption which are needed. It was not with such companions as Ainslie or Nicol by his side that the poet’s eye discovered new beauty in the sight of a solitary reaper in a Highland glen, and his ear caught magical suggestiveness in the words, “What! you are stepping westward,” heard by the evening lake.

Another hindrance to happy poetic description by Burns during these journeys was that he had now forsaken his native vernacular, and taken to writing in English after the mode of the poets of the day. This with him was to unclothe himself of his true strength. His correspondent, Dr. Moore, and his Edinburgh critics had no doubt counselled him to write in English, and he listened for a time too easily to their counsel. He and they little knew what they were doing in giving and taking such advice. The truth is, when he used his own Scottish dialect he was unapproached, unapproachable; no poet before or since has evoked out of that instrument so perfect and so varied melodies. When he wrote in English he was seldom more than third-rate; in fact, he was but a common clever versifier. There is but one purely English poem of his which at all approaches the first rank — the lines To Mary in Heaven.

These may probably have been the reasons, but the fact is certain that Burns’s tours are disappointing in their direct poetic fruits. But in another way Burns turned them to good account. He had by that time begun to devote himself almost entirely to the cultivation of Scottish song. This was greatly encouraged by the appearance of Johnson’s Museum, a publication in which an engraver of that name living in Edinburgh had undertaken to make a thorough collection of all the best of the old Scottish songs, accompanying them with the best airs, and to add to these any new songs of merit which he could lay hands on. Before Burns left Edinburgh for his Border tour, he had begun an acquaintance and correspondence with Johnson, and had supplied him with four songs of his own for the first volume of The Museum. The second volume was now in progress, and his labours for this publication, and for another of the same kind to be afterwards mentioned, henceforth engrossed Burns’s entire productive faculty, and were to be his only serious literary work for the rest of his life. He therefore employed the Highland tour in hearing all he could, that had any bearing on his now absorbing pursuit, and in collecting materials that might promote it. With this view, when on his way from Taymouth to Blair, he had turned aside to visit the famous fiddler and composer of Scotch tunes, Neil Gow, at his house, which is still pointed out, at Inver, on the Braan water, opposite the grounds of Dunkeld. This is the entry about him in Burns’s diary:— “Neil Gow plays — a short, stout-built, honest Highland figure, with his grey hair shed on his honest social brow; an interesting face marking strong sense, kind open-heartedness, mixed with unmistrusting simplicity; visit his house; Margaret Gow.” It is interesting to think of this meeting of these two — the one a Lowlander, the other a Highlander; the one the greatest composer of words, the other of tunes, for Scottish songs, which their country has produced.

As he passed through Aberdeen, Burns met Bishop Skinner, a Bishop of the Scottish Episcopal Church; and when he learnt that the Bishop’s father, the author of the song of Tulloch-gorum, and The Ewie wi’ the crookit horn, and other Scottish songs, was still alive, an aged Episcopalian clergyman, living in primitive simplicity in a but and a ben at Lishart, near Peterhead, and that on his way to Aberdeen he had passed near the place without knowing it, Burns expressed the greatest regret at having missed seeing the author of songs he so greatly admired. Soon after his return to Edinburgh, he received from old Mr. Skinner a rhyming epistle, which greatly pleased the poet, and to which he replied,— “I regret, and while I live shall regret, that when I was north I had not the pleasure of paying a younger brother’s dutiful respect to the author of the best Scotch song ever Scotland saw, Tulloch-gorum’s my delight.” This is strong, perhaps too strong praise. Allan Cunningham, in his Songs of Scotland, thus freely comments on it:— “Tulloch-gorum is a lively clever song, but I would never have edited this collection had I thought with Burns that it is the best song Scotland ever saw. I may say with the king in my favourite ballad, —

I trust I have within my realm,

Five hundred good as he.”

We also find Burns, on his return to Edinburgh, writing to the librarian at Gordon Castle to obtain from him a correct copy of a Scotch song composed by the Duke, in the current vernacular style, Cauld Kail in Aberdeen. This correct copy he wished to insert in the forthcoming volume of Johnson’s Museum, with the name of the author appended.

At Perth he made inquiries, we are told, “as to the whereabouts of the burn-brae on which be the graves of Bessy Bell and Mary Gray.” Whether he actually visited the spot, near the Almond Water, ten miles west of Perth, is left uncertain. The pathetic story of these two hapless maidens, and the fine old song founded on it, had made it to him a consecrated spot.

O Bessy Bell and Mary Gray!

They were twa bonny lasses,

They biggit a bower on yon burn-brae,

And theekit it owre wi’ rashes,

is the beginning of a beautiful song which Allan Ramsay did his best to spoil, as he did in many another instance. Sir Walter Scott afterwards recovered some of the old verses which Ramsay’s had superseded, and repeated them to Allan Cunningham, who gives them in his Songs of Scotland. Whether Burns knew any more of the song than the one old verse given above, with Ramsay’s appended to it, is more than doubtful.

As he passed through Perth he secured an introduction to the family of Belches of Invermay, that, on crossing the river Earn on his southward journey, he might be enabled to see the little valley, running down from the Ochils to the Earn, which has been consecrated by the old and well-known song, The Birks of Invermay.

It thus appears that the old songs of Scotland, their localities, their authors, and the incidents whence they arose, were now uppermost in the thoughts of Burns, whatever part of his country he visited. This was as intense and as genuinely poetical an interest, though a more limited one, than that with which Walter Scott’s eye afterwards ranged over the same scenes. The time was not yet full come for that wide and varied sympathy, with which Scott surveyed the whole past of his country’s history, nor was Burns’s nature or training such as to give him that catholicity of feeling which was required to sympathize as Scott did, with all ranks and all ages. Neither could he have so seized on the redeeming virtues of rude and half-barbarous times, and invested them with that halo of romance which Scott has thrown over them. This romantic and chivalrous colouring was an element altogether alien to Burns’s character. But it may well be, that these very limitations intensified the depth and vividness of sympathy, with which Burns conceived the human situations portrayed in his best songs.

There was one more brief tour of ten days during October, 1787, which Burns made in the company of Dr. Adair. They passed first to Stirling, where Burns broke the obnoxious pane; then paid a second visit to Harvieston near Dollar — for Burns had paid a flying visit of one day there, at the end of August, before passing northward to the Highlands — where Burns introduced his friend, and seems to have flirted with some Ayrshire young ladies, relations of his friend Gavin Hamilton. Thence they passed on a visit to Mr. Ramsay at Ochtertyre on the Teith, a few miles west from Stirling. They then visited Sir William Murray at Ochtertyre in Strathearn, where Burns wrote his Lines on scaring some waterfowl in Lock Turit, and a pretty pastoral song on a young beauty he met there, Miss Murray of Lintrose. From Strathearn he next seems to have returned by Clackmannan, there to visit the old lady who lived in the Tower, of whom he had heard from Mr. Ramsay. In this short journey the most memorable thing was the visit to Mr. Ramsay at his picturesque old country seat, situate on the river Teith, and commanding, down the vista of its old lime-tree avenue, so romantic a view of Stirling Castle rock. There Burns made the acquaintance of Mr. Ramsay, the laird, and was charmed with the conversation of that “last of the Scottish line of Latinists, which began with Buchanan and ended with Gregory,” — an antiquary, moreover, whose manners and home Lockhart thinks that Sir Walter may have had in his recollection, when he drew the character of Monkbarns. Years afterwards, in a letter addressed to Dr. Currie, Ramsay thus wrote of Burns:— “I have been in the company of many men of genius, some of them poets, but I never witnessed such flashes of intellectual brightness as from him, the impulse of the moment, sparks of celestial fire. I never was more delighted, therefore, than with his company two days tete-a-tete. In a mixed company I should have made little of him; for, to use a gamester’s phrase, he did not know when to play off, and when to play on…. When I asked, whether the Edinburgh literati had mended his poems by their criticisms, ‘Sir,’ said he, ‘these gentlemen remind me of some spinsters in my country, who spin their thread so fine, that it is neither fit for weft nor woof.”

There are other incidents recorded of that time. Among these was a visit to Mrs. Bruce, an old Scottish dame of ninety, who lived in the ancient Tower of Clackmannan, upholding her dignity as the lineal descendant and representative of the family of King Robert Bruce, and cherishing the strongest attachment to the exiled Stuarts. Both of these sentiments found a ready response from Burns. The one was exemplified by the old lady conferring knighthood on him and his companion with the actual sword of King Robert, which she had in her possession, remarking as she did it, that she had a better right to confer the title than some folk. Another sentiment she charmed the poet by expressing in the toast she gave after dinner, “Hooi Uncos,” that is, Away Strangers, a word used by shepherds when they bid their collies drive away strange sheep. Who the strangers were in this case may be guessed from her known Jacobite sentiments.

On his way from Clackmannan to Edinburgh he turned aside to see Loch Leven and its island castle, which had been the prison of the hapless Mary Stuart; and thence passing to the Norman Abbey Church of Dunfermline, with deep emotion he looked on the grave of Robert Bruce. At that time the choir of the old church, which had contained the grave, had been long demolished, and the new structure which now covers it, had not yet been thought of. The sacred spot was only marked by two broad flagstones, on which Burns knelt and kissed them, reproaching the while the barbarity that had so dishonoured the resting-place of Scotland’s hero king. Then, with that sudden change of mood, so characteristic of him, he passed within the ancient church, and mounting the pulpit, addressed to his companion, who had, at his desire, mounted the cutty stool, or seat of repentance, a parody of the rebuke, which he himself had undergone some time before at Mauchline.

CHAPTER IV. SECOND WINTER IN EDINBURGH.

These summer and autumn wanderings ended, Burns returned to Edinburgh, and spent there the next five months from the latter part of October, 1787, till the end of March, 1788, in a way which to any man, much more to such an one as he, could give small satisfaction. The ostensible cause of his lingering in Edinburgh was to obtain a settlement with his procrastinating publisher, Creech, because till this was effected, he had no money with which to enter on the contemplated farm, or on any other regular way of life. Probably in thus wasting his time, Burns may have been influenced more than he himself was aware, by a secret hope that something might yet be done for him — that all the smiles lavished on him by the great and powerful could not possibly mean nothing, and that he should be left to drudge on in poverty and obscurity as before.

During this winter Burns changed his quarters from Richmond’s lodging in High Street, where he had lived during the former winter, to a house then marked 2, now 30, St. James’s Square in the New Town. There he lived with a Mr. Cruikshank, a colleague of his friend Nicol in the High School, and there he continued to reside till he left Edinburgh. More than once he paid brief visits to Nithsdale, and examined again and yet again the farm on the Dalswinton property, on which he had long had his eye. This was his only piece of serious business during those months. The rest of his time was spent more or less in the society of his jovial companions. We hear no more during this second winter of his meetings with literary professors, able advocates and judges, or fashionable ladies. His associates seem to have been rather confined to men of the Ainslie and Nicol stamp. He would seem also to have amused himself with flirtations with several young heroines, whose acquaintance he had made during the previous summer. The chief of these were two young ladies, Miss Margaret Chalmers and Miss Charlotte Hamilton, cousins of each other, and relatives of his Mauchline friend, Gavin Hamilton. These he had met during the two visits which he paid to Harvieston, on the river Devon, where they were living for a time. On his return to Edinburgh he continued to correspond with them both, and to address songs of affection, if not of love, now to one, now to another. To Charlotte Hamilton he addressed the song beginning, —

How pleasant the banks of the clear winding Devon;

To Miss Chalmers, one with the opening lines, —

Where, braving angry winter’s storms,

The lofty Ochils rise;

And another beginning thus, —

My Peggy’s face, my Peggy’s form.

Which of these young ladies was foremost in Burns’s affection, it is not easy now to say, nor does it much signify. To both he wrote some of his best letters, and some of not his best verses. Allan Cunningham thinks that he had serious affection for Miss Hamilton. The latest editor of his works asserts that his heart was set on Miss Chalmers, and that she, long afterwards in her widowhood, told Thomas Campbell the poet, that Burns had made a proposal of marriage to her. However this may be, it is certain that while both admitted him to friendship, neither encouraged his advances. They were better “advised than to do so.” Probably they knew too much of his past history and his character to think of him as a husband. Both were soon after this time married to men more likely to make them happy than the erratic poet. When they turned a deaf ear to his addresses, he wrote: “My rhetoric seems to have lost all its effect on the lovely half of mankind; I have seen the day, but that is a tale of other years. In my conscience, I believe, that my heart has been so often on fire that it has been vitrified!” Well perhaps for him if it had been so, such small power had he to guide it. Just about the time when he found himself rejected, notwithstanding all his fine letters and his verses, by the two young ladies on Devon banks, he met with an accident through the upsetting of a hackney coach by a drunken driver. The fall left him with a bruised limb, which confined him to his room from the 7th of December till the middle of February (1787).

During these weeks he suffered much from low spirits, and the letters which he then wrote under the influence of that hypochondria and despondency contain some of the gloomiest bursts of discontent with himself and with the world, which he ever gave vent to either in prose or verse. He describes himself as the “sport, the miserable victim of rebellious pride, hypochondriac imagination, agonizing sensibility, and Bedlam passions. I wish I were dead, but I’m no like to die…. I fear I am something like undone; but I hope for the best. Come, stubborn Pride and unshrinking Resolution; accompany me through this to me miserable world! I have a hundred times wished that one could resign life, as an officer resigns a commission; for I would not take in any poor wretch by selling out. Lately I was a sixpenny private, and, God knows, a miserable soldier enough; now I march to the campaign, a starving cadet — a little more conspicuously wretched.”

But his late want of success on the banks of Devon, and his consequent despondency, were alike dispelled from his thoughts by a new excitement. Just at the time when he met with his accident, he had made the acquaintance of a certain Mrs. M’Lehose, and acquaintance all at once became a violent attachment on both sides. This lady had been deserted by her husband, who had gone to the West Indies, leaving her in poverty and obscurity to bring up two young boys as best she might. We are told that she was “of a somewhat voluptuous style of beauty, of lively and easy manners, of a poetical fabric of mind, with some wit, and not too high a degree of refinement or delicacy — exactly the kind of woman to fascinate Burns.” Fascinated he certainly was. On the 30th December he writes; “Almighty love still reigns and revels in my bosom, and I am at this moment ready to hang myself for a young Edinburgh widow, who has wit and wisdom more murderously fatal than the assassinating stiletto of the Sicilian bandit, or the poisoned arrow of the savage African.” For several months his visits to her house were frequent, his letters unremitting. The sentimental correspondence which they began, in which Burns addresses her as Clarinda, assuming to himself the name of Sylvander, has been published separately, and become notorious. Though this correspondence may contain, as Lockhart says, “passages of deep and noble feeling, which no one but Burns could have penned,” it cannot be denied that it contains many more of such fustian, such extravagant bombast, as Burns or any man beyond twenty might well have been ashamed to write. One could wish that for the poet’s sake this correspondence had never been preserved. It is so humiliating to read this torrent of falsetto sentiment now, and to think that a man gifted like Burns should have poured it forth. How far his feelings towards Clarinda were sincere, or how far they were wrought up to amuse his vacancy by playing at love-making, it is hard to say. Blended with a profusion of forced compliments and unreal raptures, there are expressions in Burns’s letters which one cannot but believe that he meant in earnest, at the moment when he wrote them. Clarinda, it would seem, must have regarded Burns as a man wholly disengaged, and have looked forward to the possible removal of Mr. M’Lehose, and with him of the obstacle to a union with Burns. How far he may have really shared the same hopes it is impossible to say. We only know that he used again and again language of deepest devotion, vowing to “love Clarinda to death, through death, and for ever.”

While this correspondence between Sylvander and Clarinda was in its highest flight of rapture, Burns received, in January or February, 1788, news from Mauchline which greatly agitated him. His renewed intercourse with Jean Armour had resulted in consequences which again stirred her father’s indignation; this time so powerfully, that he turned his daughter to the door. Burns provided a shelter for her under the roof of a friend; but for a time he does not seem to have thought of doing more than this. Whether he regarded the original private marriage as entirely dissolved, and looked on himself as an unmarried man, does not quite appear. Anyhow, he and Clarinda, who knew all that had passed with regard to Jean Armour, seem to have then thought that enough had been done for the seemingly discarded Mauchline damsel, and to have carried on their correspondence as rapturously as ever for fully another six weeks, until the 21st of March (1788). On that day Sylvander wrote to Clarinda a final letter, pledging himself to everlasting love, and following it by a copy of verses beginning, —

Fair empress of the poet’s soul,

presenting her at the same time with a pair of wineglasses as a parting gift.

On the 24th of March, he turned his back on Edinburgh, and never returned to it for more than a day’s visit.

Before leaving town, however, he had arranged three pieces of business, all bearing closely on his future life. First, he had secured for himself an appointment in the Excise through the kindness of “Lang Sandy Wood,” the surgeon who attended him when laid up with a bruised limb, and who had interceded with Mr. Graham of Fintray, the chief of the Excise Board, on Burns’ behalf. When he received his appointment, he wrote to Miss Chalmers, “I have chosen this, my dear friend, after mature deliberation. The question is not at what door of fortune’s palace shall we enter in, but what doors does she open for us. I was not likely to get anything to do. I got this without hanging-on, or mortifying solicitation; it is immediate bread, and though poor in comparison of the last eighteen months of my existence, ‘tis luxury in comparison of all my preceding life.”

Next, he had concluded a bargain with Mr. Miller of Dalswinton, to lease his farm of Ellisland, on which he had long set his heart, and to which he had paid several visits in order to inspect it.

Lastly, he had at last obtained a business settlement with Creech regarding the Second Edition of his Poems. Before this was effected, Burns had more than once lost his temper, and let Creech know his mind. Various accounts have been given of the profits that now accrued to Burns from the whole transaction. We cannot be far wrong in taking the estimate at which Dr. Chambers arrived, for on such a matter he could speak with authority. He sets down the poet’s profits at as nearly as possible 500l. Of this sum Burns gave 180l. to his brother Gilbert, who was now in pecuniary trouble. “I give myself no airs on this,” he writes, “for it was mere selfishness on my part; I was conscious that the wrong scale of the balance was pretty heavily charged, and I thought that throwing a little filial piety and fraternal affection into the scale in my favour, might help to smooth matters at the grand reckoning.” This money was understood by the family to be the provision due from Robert on behalf of his mother, the support of whom he was now, that he was setting up for himself, about to throw on his younger brother. Chambers seems to reckon that as another 120l. must have been spent by Burns on his tours, his accident, and his sojourn in Edinburgh since October, he could not have more than 200l. over, with which to set up at Ellisland. We see in what terms Burns had written to Clarinda on the 21st of March. On his leaving Edinburgh and returning to Ayrshire, he married Jean Armour, and forthwith acknowledged her in letters as his wife. This was in April, though it was not till August that he and Jean appeared before the Kirk-Session, and were formally recognized as man and wife by the Church.

Whether, in taking this step, Burns thought that he was carrying out a legal, as well as a moral, obligation, we know not. The interpreters of the law now assert that the original marriage in 1786 had never been dissolved, and that the destruction of the promissory lines, and the temporary disownment of him by Jean and her family, could not in any way invalidate it. Indeed after all that had happened, for Burns to have deserted Jean, and married another, even if he legally could have done so, would have been the basest infidelity. Amid all his other errors and inconsistencies, and no doubt there were enough of these, we cannot but be glad for the sake of his good name that he now acted the part of an honest man, and did what he could to repair the much suffering and shame he had brought on his frail but faithful Jean.

As to the reasons which determined Burns to marry Jean Armour, and not another, this is the account he himself gives when writing to Mrs. Dunlop, one of his most trusted correspondents, to whom he spoke out his real heart in a simpler, more natural way, than was usual with him in letter-writing: —

“You are right that a bachelor state would have ensured me more friends; but, from a cause you will easily guess, conscious peace in the enjoyment of my own mind, and unmistrusting confidence in approaching my God, would seldom have been of the number. I found a once much-loved, and still much-loved, female, literally and truly cast out to the mercy of the naked elements; but I enabled her to purchase a shelter; — there is no sporting with a fellow-creature’s happiness or misery. The most placid good-nature and sweetness of disposition; a warm heart, gratefully devoted with all its powers to love me; vigorous health and sprightly cheerfulness, set off to the best advantage by a more than commonly handsome figure: these I think, in a woman may make a good wife, though she should never have read a page but the Scriptures of the Old and New Testament, nor have danced in a brighter assembly than a penny pay wedding.”

To Miss Chalmers he says: —

“I have married my Jean. 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 deposit, nor have I any cause to repent it. If I have not got polite tittle-tattle, modish manners, and fashionable dress, I am not sickened and disquieted with the multiform curse of boarding-school affectation; and I have got the handsomest figure, the sweetest temper, the soundest constitution, and the kindest heart in the country…. A certain late publication of Scots poems she has perused very devoutly, and all the ballads in the country, as she has the finest wood-note wild I ever heard.”

There have been many comments on this turning-point in Burns’ life. Some have given him high praise for it, as though he had done a heroic thing in voluntarily sacrificing himself, when it might have been open to him to form a much higher connexion. But all such praise seems entirely thrown away. It was not, as it appears, open to him to form any other marriage legally; certainly it was not open to him morally. The remark of Lockhart is entirely true, that, “had he hesitated to make her his wife, whom he loved, and who was the mother of his children, he must have sunk into the callousness of a ruffian.” Lockhart need hardly have added, “or into that misery of miseries, the remorse of a poet.”

But even had law and morality allowed him to pass by Jean, — which they did not, — would it have been well for Burns, if he had sought, as one of his biographers regrets that he had not done, a wife among ladies of higher rank and more refined manners? That he could appreciate what these things imply, is evident from his own confession in looking back on his introduction to what is called society: “A refined and accomplished woman was a being altogether new to me, and of which I had formed a very inadequate idea.” It requires but little knowledge of the world and its ways to see the folly of all such regrets. Great disparity of condition in marriage seldom answers. And in the case of a wayward, moody man, with the pride, the poverty, and the irregularities of Burns, and the drudging toil which must needs await his wife, it is easy to see what misery such a marriage would have stored up for both. As it was, the marriage he made was, to put it at the lowest, one of the most prudent acts of his life. Jean proved to be all, and indeed more than all, he anticipates in the letters above given. During the eight years of their married life, according to all testimony, she did her part as a wife and mother with the most patient and placid fidelity, and bore the trials which her husband’s irregular habits entailed on her, with the utmost long-suffering. And after his death, during her long widowhood, she revered his memory, and did her utmost to maintain the honour of his name.

With his marriage to his Ayrshire wife, Burns had bid farewell to Edinburgh, and to whatever high hopes it may have at anytime kindled within him, and had returned to a condition somewhat nearer to that in which he was born. With what feelings did he pass from this brilliant interlude, and turn the corner which led him back to the dreary road of commonplace drudgery, which he hoped to have escaped? There can be little doubt that his feelings were those of bitter disappointment. There had been, it is said, a marked contrast between the reception he had met with during his first and second winters in Edinburgh. As Allan Cunningham says, “On his first appearance the doors of the nobility opened spontaneously, ‘on golden hinges turning,’ and he ate spiced meats and drank rare wines, interchanging nods and smiles with high dukes and mighty earls. A colder reception awaited his second coming. The doors of lords and ladies opened with a tardy courtesy; he was received with a cold and measured stateliness, was seldom requested to stop, seldomer to repeat his visit; and one of his companions used to relate with what indignant feeling the poet recounted his fruitless calls and his uncordial receptions in the good town of Edinburgh…. He went to Edinburgh strong in the belief that genius such as his would raise him in society; he returned not without a sourness of spirit, and a bitterness of feeling.”

When he did give vent to his bitterness, it was not into man’s, but into woman’s sympathetic ear that he poured his complaint. It is thus he writes, some time after settling at Ellisland, to Mrs. Dunlop, showing how fresh was still the wound within. “When I skulk into a corner lest the rattling equipage of some gaping blockhead should mangle me in the mire, I am tempted to exclaim, ‘What merits has he had, or what demerit have I had, in some previous state of existence, that he is ushered into this state of being with the sceptre of rule, and the keys of riches in his puny fist, and I am kicked into the world, the sport of folly, or the victim of pride?… Often as I have glided with humble stealth through the pomp of Princes Street, it has suggested itself to me, as an improvement on the present human figure, that a man, in proportion to his own conceit of his own consequence in the world, could have pushed out the longitude of his common size, as a snail pushes out his horns, or as we draw out a prospect-glass.’”

This is a feeling which Burns has uttered in many a form of prose and verse, but which probably never possessed him more bitterly than when he retired from Edinburgh. Many persons in such circumstances may have felt thoughts of this kind pass over them for a moment. But they have felt ashamed of them as they rose, and have at once put them by. Burns no doubt had a severer trial in this way than most, but he never could overcome it, never ceased to chafe at that inequality of conditions which is so strongly fixed in the system in which we find ourselves.

It was natural that he should have felt some bitterness at the changed countenance which Edinburgh society turned on him, and it is easy to be sarcastic on the upper ranks of that day for turning it; but were they really so much to blame? There are many cases under the present order of things, in which we are constrained to say, “It must needs be that offences come.” Taking men and things as they are, could it well have been otherwise?

First, the novelty of Burns’s advent had worn off by his second winter in Edinburgh, and, though it may be a weakness, novelty always counts for something in human affairs. Then, again, the quiet decorous men of Blair’s circle knew more of Burns’s ways and doings than at first, and what they came to know was not likely to increase their desire for intimacy with him. It was, it seems, notorious that Burns kept that formidable memorandum-book already alluded to, in which he was supposed to sketch with unsparing hand, “stern likenesses” of his friends and benefactors. So little of a secret did he make of this, that we are told he sometimes allowed a visitor to have a look at the figures which he had sketched in his portrait-gallery. The knowledge that such a book existed was not likely to make Blair and his friends more desirous of his society.

Again, the festivities at the Crochallan Club and other such haunts, the habits he there indulged in, and the associates with whom he consorted, these were well known. And it was not possible that either the ways, the conversation, or the cronies of the Crochallan Club could be welcomed in quieter and more polished circles. Men of the Ainslie and Nicol stamp would hardly have been quite in place there.

Again — what is much to the honour of Burns — he never in the highest access of his fame, abated a jot of his intimacy and friendship towards the men of his own rank, with whom he had been associated in his days of obscurity. These were tradesmen, farmers, and peasants. The thought of them, their sentiments, their prejudices and habits, if it had been possible, their very persons, he would have taken with him, without disguise or apology, into the highest circles of rank or of literature. But this might not be. It was impossible that Burns could take Mauchline with its belles, its Poosie-Nansies and its Souter Johnnies, bodily into the library of Dr. Blair or the drawing-room of Gordon Castle.

A man, to whom it is open, must make his choice; but he cannot live at once in two different and widely sundered orders of society. To no one is it given, not even to men of genius great as that of Burns, for himself and his family entirely to overleap the barriers with which custom and the world have hedged us in, and to weld the extremes of society into one. To the speculative as well as to the practically humane man, the great inequality in human conditions presents, no doubt, a perplexing problem. A little less worldly pride, and a little more Christian wisdom and humility, would probably have helped Burns to solve it better than he did. But besides the social grievance, which though impalpable is very real, Burns had another more material and tangible. The great whom he had met in Edinburgh, whose castles he had visited in the country, might have done something to raise him at once above poverty and toil, and they did little or nothing. They had, indeed, subscribed liberally for his Second Edition, and they had got him a gauger’s post, with fifty or sixty pounds a year, that was all. What more could they, ought they to have done? To have obtained him an office in some one of the higher professions was not to be thought of, for a man cannot easily at the age of eight-and-twenty change his whole line and adapt himself to an entirely new employment. The one thing they might have combined to do, was to have compelled Dundas, or some other of the men then in power, to grant Burns a pension from the public purse. That was the day of pensions, and hundreds with no claim to compare with Burns’s were then on the pension list: 300l. a year would have sufficed to place him in comfort and independence, and could public money have been better spent? But though the most rigid economist might not have objected, would Burns have accepted such a benefaction, had it been offered? And if he had accepted it, would he not have chafed under the obligation, more even than he did in the absence of it? Such questions as these cannot but arise, as often as we think over the fate of Burns, and ask ourselves, if nothing could have been done to avert it? Though natural, they are vain. Things hold on their own course to their inevitable issues, and Burns left Edinburgh, and set his face first towards Ayrshire, then to Nithsdale, a saddened and embittered man.

CHAPTER V. LIFE AT ELLISLAND.

“Mr. Burns, you have made a poet’s not a farmer’s choice.” Such was the remark of Allan Cunningham’s father, land-steward to the laird of Dalswinton, when the poet turned from the lowlying and fertile farm of Foregirth, which Cunningham had recommended to him, and selected for his future home the farm of Ellisland. He was taken by the beautiful situation and fine romantic outlook of the poorest of several farms on the Dalswinton estate which were in his option. Ellisland lies on the western bank of the river Nith, about six miles above Dumfries. Looking from Ellisland eastward across the river, “a pure stream running there over the purest gravel,” you see the rich holms and noble woods of Dalswinton. Dalswinton is an ancient historic place, which has even within recorded memory more than once changed its mansion-house and its proprietor. To the west the eye falls on the hills of Dunscore, and looking northward up the Nith, the view is bounded by the heights that shut in the river towards Drumlanrig, and by the high conical hill of Corsincon, at the base of which the infant stream slips from the shire of Ayr into that of Dumfries. The farmsteading of Ellisland stands but a few yards to the west of the Nith. Immediately underneath there is a red scaur of considerable height, overhanging the stream, and the rest of the bank is covered with broom, through which winds a greensward path, whither Burns used to retire to meditate his songs. The farm extends to upwards of a hundred acres, part holm, part croft-land, of which the former yielded good wheat, the latter oats and potatoes. The lease was for nineteen years, and the rent fifty pounds for the first three years, seventy for the rest of the tack. The laird of Dalswinton, while Burns leased Ellisland, was Mr. Patrick Millar, not an ordinary laird, but one well known in his day for his scientific discoveries. There was no proper farm-house or offices on the farm — it was part of the bargain that Burns should build these for himself. The want of a house made it impossible for him to settle at once on his farm. His bargain for it had been concluded early in March (1788); but it was not till the 13th of June that he went to reside at Ellisland. In the interval between these two dates he went to Ayrshire, and completed privately, as we have seen, the marriage, the long postponement of which had caused him so much disquiet. With however great disappointment and chagrin he may have left Edinburgh, the sense that he had now done the thing that was right, and had the prospect of a settled life before him, gave him for a time a peace and even gladness of heart, to which he had for long been a stranger. We can, therefore, well believe what he tells us, that, when he had left Edinburgh, he journeyed towards Mauchline with as much gaiety of heart, ‘as a May-frog, leaping across the newly-harrowed ridge, enjoying the fragrance of the refreshed earth after the long-expected shower.’ Of what may be called the poet’s marriage settlement, we have the following details from Allan Cunningham: —

“His marriage reconciled the poet to his wife’s kindred: there was no wedding portion. Armour was a respectable man, but not opulent. He gave his daughter some small store of plenishing; and, exerting his skill as a mason, wrought his already eminent son-in-law a handsome punch-bowl in Inverary marble, which Burns lived to fill often, to the great pleasure both of himself and his friends…. Mrs. Dunlop bethought herself of Ellisland, and gave a beautiful heifer; another friend contributed a plough. The young couple from love to their native county ordered their furniture from a wright in Mauchline; the farm-servants, male and female, were hired in Ayrshire, a matter of questionable prudence, for the mode of cultivation is different from that of the west, and the cold humid bottom of Mossgiel bears no resemblance to the warm and stony loam of Ellisland.”

When on the 13th June he went to live on his farm, he had, as there was no proper dwelling-house on it, to leave Jean and her one surviving child behind him at Mauchline, and himself to seek shelter in a mere hovel on the skirts of the farm. “I remember the house well,” says Cunningham, “the floor of clay, the rafters japanned with soot, the smoke from a hearth-fire streamed thickly out at door and window, while the sunshine which struggled in at those apertures produced a sort of twilight.” Burns thus writes to Mrs. Dunlop, “A solitary inmate of an old smoky spence, far from every object I love or by whom I am beloved; nor any acquaintance older than yesterday, except Jenny Geddes, the old mare I ride on, while uncouth cares and novel plans hourly insult my awkward ignorance and bashful inexperience.” It takes a more even, better-ordered spirit than Burns’ to stand such solitude. His heart, during those first weeks at Ellisland, entirely sank within him, and he saw all men and life coloured by his own despondency. This is the entry in his commonplace book on the first Sunday he spent alone at Ellisland:— “I am such a coward in life, so tired of the service, that I would almost at any time, with Milton’s Adam, ‘gladly lay me in my mother’s lap, and be at peace.’ But a wife and children bind me to struggle with the stream, till some sudden squall shall overset the silly vessel, or in the listless return of years its own craziness reduce it to wreck.”

The discomfort of his dwelling-place made him not only discontented with his lot, but also with the people amongst whom he found himself. “I am here,” he writes, “on my farm, but for all the pleasurable part of life called social communication, I am at the very elbow of existence. The only things to be found in perfection in this country are stupidity and canting…. As for the Muses, they have as much idea of a rhinoceros as a poet.”

When he was not in Ayrshire in bodily presence, he was there in spirit. It was at such a time that looking up to the hills that divide Nithsdale from Ayrshire, he breathed to his wife that most natural and beautiful of all his love-lyrics, —

Of a’ the airts the wind can blaw

I dearly like the west,

For there the bonnie lassie lives,

The lassie I lo’e best.

His disparagement of Nithsdale people, Allan Cunningham, himself a Dumfriesshire man, naturally resents, and accounts for it by supposing that the sooty hovel had infected his whole mental atmosphere. “The Maxwells, the Kirkpatricks, and Dalzells,” exclaims honest Allan, “were fit companions for any man in Scotland, and they were almost his neighbours; Riddell of Friars Carse, an accomplished antiquarian, lived almost next door; and Jean Lindsay and her husband, Patrick Miller, the laird of Dalswinton, were no ordinary people. The former, beautiful, accomplished, a writer of easy and graceful verses, with a natural dignity of manners which became her station; the latter an improver and inventor, the first who applied steam to the purposes of navigation.” But Burns’s hasty judgments of men and things, the result of momentary feeling, are not to be too literally construed.

He soon found that there was enough of sociality among all ranks of Dumfriesshire people, from the laird to the cotter, indeed, more than was good for himself. Yet, however much he may have complained, when writing letters to his correspondents of an evening, he was too manly to go moping about all day long when there was work to be done. He was, moreover, nerved to the task by the thought that he was preparing the home that was to shelter his wife and children. On the laying of the foundation-stone of his future house, he took off his hat and asked a blessing on it. “Did he ever put his own hand to the work?” was asked of one of the men engaged in it. “Ay, that he did, mony a time,” was the answer, “if he saw us like to be beat wi’ a big stane, he would cry, ‘Bide a wee,’ and come rinning. We soon found out when he put to his hand, he beat a’ I ever met for a dour lift.”

During his first harvest, though the weather was unfavourable, and the crop a poor one, we find Burns speaking in his letters of being industriously employed, and binding every day after the reapers. But Allan Cunningham’s father, who had every opportunity of observing, used to allege that Burns seemed to him like a restless and unsettled man. “He was ever on the move, on foot or on horseback. In the course of a single day he might be seen holding the plough, angling in the river, sauntering, with his hands behind his back, on the banks, looking at the running water, of which he was very fond, walking round his buildings or over his fields; and if you lost sight of him for an hour, perhaps you might see him returning from Friars Carse, or spurring his horse through the hills to spend an evening in some distant place with such friends as chance threw in his way.” Before his new house was ready, he had many a long ride to and fro through the Cumnock hills to Mauchline, to visit Jean, and to return. It was not till the first week of December, 1788, that his lonely bachelor life came to an end, and that he was able to bring his wife and household to Nithsdale. Even then the house at Ellisland was not ready for his reception, and he and his family had to put up for a time in a neighbouring farm-house called the Isle. They brought with them two farm-lads from Ayrshire, and a servant lass called Elizabeth Smith, who was alive in 1851, and gave Chambers many details of the poet’s way of life at Ellisland. Among these she told him that her father was so concerned about her moral welfare that, before allowing her to go, he made Burns promise to keep a strict watch over her behaviour, and to exercise her duly in the Shorter Catechism; and that both of these promises he faithfully fulfilled.

The advent of his wife and his child in the dark days of the year kept dulness aloof, and made him meet the coming of the new year (1789) with more cheerful hopes and calmer spirits than he had known for long. Alas, that these were doomed to be so short-lived!

On New Year’s morning, 1789, his brother Gilbert thus affectionately writes to the poet: “Dear Brother, — I have just finished my New Year’s Day breakfast in the usual form, which naturally makes me call to mind the days of former years, and the society in which we used to begin them; and when I look at our family vicissitudes, ‘through the dark postern of time long elapsed,’ I cannot help remarking to you, my dear brother, how good the God of seasons is to us, and that, however some clouds may seem to lower over the portion of time before us, we have great reason to hope that all will turn out well.” On the same New Year’s Day Burns addressed to Mrs. Dunlop a letter, which, though it has been often quoted, is too pleasing to be omitted here. “I own myself so little a Presbyterian, that I approve set times and seasons of more than ordinary acts of devotion for breaking in on that habituated routine of life and thought, which is so apt to reduce our existence to a kind of instinct, or even sometimes, and with some minds, to a state very little superior to mere machinery. This day — the first Sunday of May — a breezy, blue-skied noon some time about the beginning, and a hoary morning and calm sunny day about the end, of autumn — these, time out of mind, have been with me a kind of holiday…. We know nothing, or next to nothing of the substance or structure of our souls, so cannot account for those seeming caprices in them, that we should be particularly pleased with this thing, or struck with that, which on minds of a different cast makes no extraordinary impression. I have some favourite flowers in spring, among which are the mountain-daisy, the harebell, the fox-glove, the wild-brier rose, the budding birch, and the hoary hawthorn, that I view and hang over with particular delight. I never hear the loud, solitary whistle of the curlew in a summer noon, or the wild mixing cadence of a troop of gray plovers in an autumnal morning, without feeling an elevation of soul like the enthusiasm of devotion or poetry. Tell me, my dear friend, to what can this be owing? Are we a piece of machinery, which, like the AEolian harp, passive, takes the impression of the passing accident? Or do these workings argue something within us above the trodden clod? I own myself partial to such proofs of those awful and important realities — a God that made all things — man’s immaterial and immortal nature — and a world of weal or woe beyond death and the grave!”

On reading this beautiful and suggestive letter, an ornithologist remarked that Burns had made a mistake in a fact of natural history. It is not the ‘gray plover,’ but the golden, whose music is heard on the moors in autumn. The gray plover, our accurate observer remarks, is a winter shore bird, found only at that season and in that habitat, in this country.

It was not till about the middle of 1789 that the farm-house of Ellisland was finished, and that he and his family, leaving the Isle, went to live in it. When all was ready, Burns bade his servant, Betty Smith, take a bowl of salt, and place the Family Bible on the top of it, and, bearing these, walk first into the new house and possess it. He himself, with his wife on his arm, followed Betty and the Bible and the salt, and so they entered their new abode. Burns delighted to keep up old-world freits or usages like this. It was either on this occasion, or on his bringing Mrs. Burns to the Isle, that he held a house-heating mentioned by Allan Cunningham, to which all the neighbourhood gathered, and drank, “Luck to the roof-tree of the house of Burns!” The farmers and the well-to-do people welcomed him gladly, and were proud that such a man had come to be a dweller in their vale. Yet the ruder country lads and the lower peasantry, we are told, looked on him not without dread, “lest he should pickle and preserve them in sarcastic song.” “Once at a penny wedding, when one or two wild young lads quarrelled, and were about to fight, Burns rose up and said, ‘Sit down and –- , or else I’ll hang you up like potatoe-bogles in sang to-morrow.’ They ceased, and sat down as if their noses had been bleeding.”

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

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

Searching auld wives’ barrels, —

Och, hon! the day!

That clarty barm should stain my laurels,

But — what ‘ill ye say?

These movin things, ca’d wives and weans,

Wad move the very hearts o’ stanes.

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

“I know not,” he writes, “how the word exciseman, or the still more opprobrious gauger, will sound in your ears. I, too, have seen the day when my auditory nerves would have felt very delicately on this subject; but a wife and children are things which have a wonderful power in blunting this kind of sensations. Fifty pounds a year for life, and a provision for widows and orphans, you will allow, is no bad settlement for a poet.”

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

But what d’ye think, my trusty fier,

I’m turned a gauger — peace be here!

Parnassian queans, I fear, I fear,

Ye’ll now disdain me!

And then my fifty pounds a year

Will little gain me.

*

Ye ken, ye ken

That strang necessity supreme is

‘Mang sons o’ men.

I hae a wife and twa wee laddies,

They maun hae brose and brats o’ duddies;

Ye ken yoursels my heart right proud is,

I need na vaunt,

But I’ll sned besoms, thraw saugh woodies,

Before they want.

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

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

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

Inhuman man! curse on thy barbarous art,

And blasted be thy murder-aiming eye!

May never pity soothe thee with a sigh,

Nor ever pleasure glad thy cruel heart!

Go live, poor wanderer of the wood and field,

The bitter little that of life remains:

No more the thickening brakes and verdant plains

To thee shall home, or food, or pastime yield.

Seek, mangled wretch, some place of wonted rest,

No more of rest, but now thy dying bed!

The sheltering rushes whistling o’er thy head,

The cold earth with thy bloody bosom prest.

Perhaps a mother’s anguish adds its woe;

The playful pair crowd fondly by thy side;

Ah! helpless nurslings, who will now provide

That life a mother only can bestow!

Oft as by winding Nith, I, musing, wait

The sober eve, or hail the cheerful dawn,

I’ll miss thee sporting o’er the dewy lawn,

And curse the ruffian’s aim, and mourn thy hapless fate.

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

I thought me on the ourie cattle,

Or silly sheep, wha bide this brattle

O’ wintry war.

Or thro’ the drift, deep-lairing, sprattle,

Beneath a scaur.

Ilk happing bird, wee helpless thing,

That in the merry months o’ spring,

Delighted me to hear thee sing,

What comes o’ thee?

Whare wilt then cow’r thy chittering wing,

And close thy e’e?

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

Hear, Land o’ Cakes, and brither Scots,

Frae Maidenkirk to Johnnie Groats —

If there’s a hole in a’ your coats,

I rede you tent it:

A chield’s amang you, takin’ notes,

And, faith, he’ll prent it.

By some auld, houlet-haunted biggin,

Or kirk deserted by its riggin,

It’s ten to ane ye’ll find him snug in

Some eldritch part,

Wi’ deils, they say, Lord save’s! colleaguin’

At some black art.

It’s tauld he was a sodger bred,

And ane wad rather fa’n than fled;

But now he’s quat the spurtle-blade,

And dog-skin wallet,

And taen the — Antiquarian trade,

I think they call it.

He has a fouth o’ auld nick-nackets;

Rusty airn caps, and jinglin’ jackets,

Wad haud the Lothians three in tackets,

A towmont gude

And parritch-pats and auld saut-backets,

Before the Flood.

*

Forbye, he’ll shape you aff fu’ gleg

The cut of Adam’s philibeg;

The knife that nicket Abel’s craig

He’ll prove you fully,

It was a faulding jocteleg

Or lang-kail gullie.

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

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

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

O, Willie brewed a peck o’ maut,

And Bob and Allan cam to pree.

If bacchanalian songs are to be written at all, this certainly must be pronounced “The king amang them a’.” But while no one can withhold admiration from the genius and inimitable humour of the song, still we read it with very mingled feelings, when we think that perhaps it may have helped some topers since Burns’s day a little faster on the road to ruin. As for the three boon-companions themselves, just ten years after that night, Currie wrote, “These three honest fellows — all men of uncommon talents — are now all under the turf.” And in 1821, John Struthers, a Scottish poet little known, but of great worth and some genius, thus recurs to Currie’s words: —

Nae mair in learning Willie toils, nor Allan wakes the melting lay,

Nor Rab, wi’ fancy-witching wiles, beguiles the hour o’ dawning day;

For tho’ they were na very fou, that wicked wee drap in the e’e

Has done its turn; untimely now the green grass waves o’er a’ the three.

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

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

Thou lingering star, with lessening ray,

That lovest to greet the early morn,

Again thou usherest in the day

My Mary from my soul was torn.

O Mary! dear departed shade!

Where is thy place of blissful rest?

See’st thou thy lover lowly laid?

Hear’st thou the groans that rend his breast?

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

Ye banks, and braes, and streams around

The castle o’ Montgomery!

Green be your woods, and fair your flowers,

Your waters never drumlie;

There simmer first unfauld her robes,

And there the langest tarry;

For there I took the last Fareweel

O’ my sweet Highland Mary.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Unco pack and thick thegither.

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

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

Now Tam! O Tam! had thae been queans,

A’ plump and strappin’ in their teens.’

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

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

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

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

The bridegroom may forget the bride,

Was made his wedded wife yestreen;

The monarch may forget the crown,

That on his head an hour has been;

The mother may forget the child,

That smiles sae sweetly on her knee;

But I’ll remember thee, Glencairn,

And a’ that thou hast done for me.

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

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

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

Ye flowery banks o’ bonnie Doon,

How can ye blume sae fair?

How can ye chant, ye little birds,

And I sae fu’ o’ care!

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

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

Sweet are the banks, the banks of Doon,

The spreading flowers are fair,

And everything is blythe and glad,

But I am fu’ of care.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

CHAPTER VI. MIGRATION TO DUMFRIES.

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

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

To make a happy fire-side clime,

For weans and wife,

Is the true pathos and sublime

Of human life.

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

To one such invitation his impromptu answer was —

The king’s most humble servant, I

Can scarcely spare a minute;

But I’ll be with you by-and-by,

Or else the devil’s in it.

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

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

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

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

Had we never loved so kindly,

Had we never loved so blindly;

Never met, or never parted,

We had ne’er been broken-hearted.

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

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

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

Self-contempt bitterer to drink than blood.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

They can make who fail to find

Short leisure even in busiest days,

Moments to cast a look behind,

And profit by those kindly rays,

Which through the clouds will sometimes steal,

And all the far-off past reveal.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

CHAPTER VII. LAST YEARS.

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

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

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

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

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

The fear that kills,

And hope that is unwilling to be fed;

Cold, pain, and labour, and all fleshly ills;

And mighty poets in their misery dead.

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

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

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

The first half of the year 1794 was a more than usually unhappy time with Burns. It was almost entirely songless. Instead of poetry, we hear of political dissatisfaction, excessive drinking-bouts, quarrels, and self-reproach. This was the time when our country was at war with the French Republic — a war which Burns bitterly disliked, but his employment under Government forced him to set “a seal on his lips as to those unlucky politics.” A regiment of soldiers was quartered in the town of Dumfries, and to Burns’s eye the sight of their red coats was so offensive, that he would not go down the plain-stones lest he should meet “the epauletted puppies,” who thronged the street. One of these epauletted puppies, whom he so disliked, found occasion to pull Burns up rather smartly. The poet, when in his cups, had in the hearing of a certain captain proposed as a toast, “May our success in the present war be equal to the justice of our cause.” The soldier called him to account — a duel seemed imminent, and Burns had next day to write an apologetic letter, in order to avoid the risk of ruin. About the same time he was involved, through intemperance, in another and more painful quarrel. It has been already noticed that at Woodley Park he was a continual guest. With Mrs. Riddel, who was both beautiful and witty, he carried on a kind of poetic flirtation. Mr. Walter Riddel, the host, was wont to press his guests to deeper potations than were usual even in those hard-drinking days. One evening, when the guests had sat till they were inflamed with wine, they entered the drawing-room, and Burns in some way grossly insulted the fair hostess. Next day he wrote a letter of the most abject and extravagant penitence. This, however, Mr. and Mrs. Riddel did not think fit to accept. Stung by this rebuff, Burns recoiled at once to the opposite extreme of feeling, and penned a grossly scurrilous monody on “a lady famed for her caprice.” This he followed up by other lampoons, full of “coarse rancour against a lady, who had showed him many kindnesses.” The Laird of Friars Carse and his lady naturally sided with their relatives, and grew cold to their old friend of Ellisland. While this coldness lasted, Mr. Riddel, of Friars Carse, died in the spring-time, and the poet, remembering his friend’s worth and former kindness, wrote a sonnet over him — not one of his best or most natural performances, yet showing the return of his better heart. During the same spring we hear of Burns going to the house of one of the neighbouring gentry, and dining there, not with the rest of the party, but, by his own choice, it would seem, with the housekeeper in her room, and joining the gentlemen in the dining-room, after the ladies had retired. He was now, it seems, more disliked by ladies than by men, — a change since those Edinburgh days, when the highest dames of the land had spoken so rapturously of the charm of his conversation.

Amid the gloom of this unhappy time (1791), Burns turned to his old Edinburgh friend, Alexander Cunningham, and poured forth this passionate and well-known complaint:— “Canst thou minister to a mind diseased? Canst thou speak peace and rest to a soul tossed on a sea of troubles, without one friendly star to guide her course, and dreading that the next surge may overwhelm her? Of late, a number of domestic vexations, and some pecuniary share in the ruin of these cursed times, — losses which, though trifling, were what I could ill bear, — have so irritated me, that my feelings at times could only be envied by a reprobate spirit listening to the sentence that dooms it to perdition. — Are you deep in the language of consolation? I have exhausted in reflection every topic of comfort. A heart at ease would have been charmed with my sentiments and reasonings; but as to myself, I was like Judas Iscariot preaching the Gospel…. Still there are two great pillars that bear us up amid the wreck of misfortune and misery. The one is composed of a certain noble, stubborn something in man, known by the names of Courage, Fortitude, Magnanimity. The other is made up of those feelings and sentiments which, however the sceptic may deny them, or the enthusiast may disfigure them, are yet, I am convinced, original and component parts of the human soul, those senses of the mind — if I may be allowed the expression — which connect us with, and link us to those awful obscure realities — an all-powerful and equally beneficent God, and a world to come, beyond death and the grave. The first gives the nerve of combat, while a ray of hope beams on the field: the last pours the balm of comfort into the wounds which time can never cure.”

This remarkable, or, as Lockhart calls it, noble letter was written on February 25, 1794. It was probably a few months later, perhaps in May of the same year, while Burns was still under this depression, that there occurred an affecting incident, which has been preserved by Lockhart. Mr. David McCulloch, of Ardwell, told Lockhart, “that he was seldom more grieved, than when, riding into Dumfries one fine summer’s evening, to attend a country ball, he saw Burns walking alone, on the shady side of the principal street of the town, while the opposite part was gay with successive groups of gentlemen and ladies, all drawn together for the festivities of the night, not one of whom seemed willing to recognize the poet. The horseman dismounted, and joined Burns, who, on his proposing to him to cross the street, said, ‘Nay, nay, my young friend, that’s all over now,’ and quoted, after a pause, some verses of Lady Grizzell Baillie’s pathetic ballad: —

His bonnet stood ance fu’ fair on his brow,

His auld ane looked better than mony ane’s new;

But now he lets ‘t wear ony way it will hing,

And caste himsell dowie upon the corn-bing.

O, were we young, as we ance hae been,

We suld hae been galloping down on yon green,

And linking it owre the lily-white lea, —

And werena my heart light, I wad die.

“It was little in Burns’s character to let his feelings on certain subjects escape in this fashion. He immediately after citing these verses assumed the sprightliness of his most pleasing manner; and taking his young friend home with him, entertained him very agreeably until the hour of the ball arrived, with a bowl of his usual potation, and Bonnie Jean’s singing of some verses which he had recently composed.”

In June we find him expressing to Mrs. Dunlop the earliest hint that he felt his health declining. “I am afraid,” he says, “that I am about to suffer for the follies of my youth. My medical friends threaten me with flying gout; but I trust they are mistaken.” And again, a few months later, we find him, when writing to the same friend, recurring to the same apprehensions. Vexation and disappointment within, and excesses, if not continual, yet too frequent, from without, had for long been undermining his naturally strong but nervously sensitive frame, and those symptoms were now making themselves felt, which were soon to lay him in an early grave. As the autumn drew on, his singing powers revived, and till the close of the year he kept pouring into Thomson a stream of songs, some of the highest stamp, and hardly one without a touch such as only the genuine singer can give.

The letters, too, to Thomson, with which he accompanies his gifts, are full of suggestive thoughts on song, hints most precious to all who care for such matters. For the forgotten singers of his native land he is full of sympathy. “By the way,” he writes to Thomson, “are you not vexed to think that those men of genius, for such they certainly were, who composed our fine Scottish lyrics, should be unknown?”

Many of the songs of that autumn were, as usual, love-ditties; but when the poet could forget the lint-white locks of Chloris, of which kind of stuff there is more than enough, he would write as good songs on other and manlier subjects. Two of these, written, the one in November, 1794, the other in January, 1795, belong to the latter order, and are worthy of careful regard, not only for their excellence as songs, but also as illustrations of the poet’s mood of mind at the time when he composed them.

The first is this, —

Contented wi’ little, and cantie wi’ mair,

Whene’er I forgather wi’ sorrow and care,

I gie them a skelp as they’re creepin’ alang,

Wi’ a cog o’ gude swats, and an auld Scottish sang.

I whyles claw the elbow o’ troublesome thought;

But man is a soger, and life is a faught;

My mirth and gude humour are coin in my pouch,

And my Freedom’s my lairdship nae monarch dare touch.

A towmond o’ trouble, should that be my fa’,

A night o’ gude fellowship sowthers it a’;

When at the blythe end o’ our journey at last,

Wha the deil ever thinks o’ the road he has past?

Blind Chance, let her snapper and stoyte on her way;

Be’t to me, be’t frae me, e’en let the jade gae:

Come Ease, or come Travail, come Pleasure or Pain,

My warst word is — Welcome, and welcome again.

This song gives Burns’s idea of himself, and of his struggle with the world, when he could look on both from the placid, rather than the despondent side. He regarded it as a true picture of himself; for, when a good miniature of him had been done, he wrote to Thomson that he wished a vignette from it to be prefixed to this song, that, in his own words, “the portrait of my face, and the picture of my mind may go down the stream of time together.” Burns had more moods of mind than most men, and this was, we may hope, no unfrequent one with him. But if we would reach the truth, we probably ought to strike a balance between the spirit of this song and the dark moods depicted in some of those letters already quoted.

The other song of the same time is the well-known A Man’s a Man for a’ that. This powerful song speaks out in his best style a sentiment that through all his life had been dear to the heart of Burns. It has been quoted, they say, by Beranger in France, and by Goethe in Germany, and is the word which springs up in the mind of all foreigners when they think of Burns. It was inspired, no doubt, by his keen sense of social oppression, quickened to white heat by influences that had lately come from France, and by what he had suffered for his sympathy with that cause. It has since become the watchword of all who fancy that they have secured less, and others more, of this world’s goods, than their respective merit deserves. Stronger words he never wrote.

The rank is but the guinea’s stamp,

The man’s the gowd for a’ that.

That is a word for all time. Yet perhaps it might have been wished that so noble a song had not been marred by any touch of social bitterness. A lord, no doubt, may be a “birkie” and a “coof,” but may not a ploughman be so too? This great song Burns wrote on the first day of 1795.

Towards the end of 1794, and in the opening of 1795, the panic which had filled the land in 1792, from the doings of the French republicans, and their sympathizers in this country, began to abate; and the blast of Government displeasure, which for a time had beaten heavily on Burns, seemed to have blown over. He writes to Mrs. Dunlop on the 29th of December, 1794. “My political sins seem to be forgiven me,” and as a proof of it he mentions that during the illness of his superior officer, he had been appointed to act as supervisor — a duty which he discharged for about two months. In the same letter he sends to that good lady his usual kindly greeting for the coming year, and concludes thus:— “What a transient business is life! Very lately I was a boy; but t’ other day I was a young man; and I already begin to feel the rigid fibre and stiffening joints of old age coming fast o’er my frame. With all the follies of youth, and, I fear, a few vices of manhood, still I congratulate myself on having had, in early days, religion strongly impressed on my mind.” Burns always keeps his most serious thoughts for this good lady. Herself religious, she no doubt tried to keep the truths of religion before the poet’s mind. And he naturally was drawn out to reply in a tone more unreserved than when he wrote to most others.

In February of the ensuing year, 1795, his duties as supervisor led him to what he describes as the “unfortunate, wicked little village” of Ecclefechan in Annandale. The night after he arrived, there fell the heaviest snowstorm known in Scotland within living memory. When people awoke next morning they found the snow up to the windows of the second story of their houses. In the hollow of Campsie hills it lay to the depth of from eighty to a hundred feet, and it had not disappeared from the streets of Edinburgh on the king’s birthday, the 4th of June. Storm-stayed at Ecclefechan, Burns indulged in deep potations and in song-writing. Probably he imputed to the place that with which his own conscience reproached himself. Currie, who was a native of Ecclefechan, much offended, says, “The poet must have been tipsy indeed to abuse sweet Ecclefechan at this rate.” It was also the birthplace of the poet’s friend Nicol, and of a greater than he. On the 4th of December in the very year on which Burns visited it, Mr. Thomas Carlyle was born in that village. Shortly after his visit, the poet beat his brains to find a rhyme for Ecclefechan, and to twist it into a song.

In March of the same year we find him again joining in local politics, and writing electioneering ballads for Heron of Heron, the Whig candidate for the Stewartry of Kirkcudbright, against the nominee of the Earl of Galloway, against whom and his family Burns seems to have harboured some peculiar enmity.

Mr. Heron won the election, and Burns wrote to him about his own prospects:— “The moment I am appointed supervisor, in the common routine I may be nominated on the collectors’ list; and this is always a business of purely political patronage. A collectorship varies much, from better than 200l. to near 1000l. a year. A life of literary leisure, with a decent competency, is the summit of my wishes.”

The hope here expressed was not destined to be fulfilled. It required some years for its realization, and the years allotted to Burns were now nearly numbered. The prospect which he here dwells on may, however, have helped to lighten his mental gloom during the last year of his life. For one year of activity there certainly was, between the time when the cloud of political displeasure against him disappeared towards the end of 1794, and the time when his health finally gave way in the autumn of 1795, during which, to judge by his letters, he indulged much less in outbursts of social discontent. One proof of this is seen in the following fact. In the spring of 1795, a volunteer corps was raised in Dumfries, to defend the country, while the regular army was engaged abroad, in war with France. Many of the Dumfries Whigs, and among them Burns’s friends, Syme and Dr. Maxwell, enrolled themselves in the corps, in order to prove their loyalty and patriotism, on which some suspicions had previously been cast. Burns too offered himself, and was received into the corps. Allan Cunningham remembered the appearance of the regiment, “their odd but not ungraceful dress; white kerseymere breeches and waistcoat; short blue coat, faced with red; and round hat, surmounted by a bearskin, like the helmets of the Horse Guards.” He remembered the poet too, as he showed among them, “his very swarthy face, his ploughman stoop, his large dark eyes, and his awkwardness in handling his arms.” But if he could not handle his musket deftly, he could do what none else in that or any other corps could, he could sing a patriotic stave which thrilled the hearts not only of his comrades, but every Briton from Land’s-end to Johnny Groat’s.

This is one of the verses: —

The kettle o’ the kirk and state

Perhaps a clout may fail in’t;

But deil a foreign tinkler loan

Shall ever ca’ a nail in’t.

Our fathers’ blade the kettle bought,

And wha wad dare to spoil it;

By heavens! the sacrilegious dog

Shall fuel be to boil it!

By heavens; the sacrilegious dog

Shall fuel be to boil it!

This song flew throughout the land, hit the taste of the country-people everywhere, and is said to have done much to change the feelings of those who were disaffected. Much blame has been cast upon the Tory Ministry, then in power, for not having offered a pension to Burns. It was not, it is said, that they did not know of him, or that they disregarded his existence. For Mr. Addington, afterwards Lord Sidmouth, we have seen, deeply felt his genius, acknowledged it in verse, and is said to have urged his claims upon the Government. Mr. Pitt, soon after the poet’s death, is reported to have said of Burns’s poetry, at the table of Lord Liverpool, “I can think of no verse since Shakespeare’s, that has so much the appearance of coming sweetly from nature.” It is on Mr. Dundas, however, at that time one of the Ministry, and the autocrat of all Scottish affairs, that the heaviest weight of blame has fallen. But perhaps this is not altogether deserved. There is the greatest difference between a literary man, who holds his political opinions in private, but refrains from mingling in party politics, and one who zealously espouses one side, and employs his literary power in promoting it. He threw himself into every electioneering business with his whole heart, wrote, while he might have been better employed, electioneering ballads of little merit, in which he lauded Whig men and theories, and lampooned, often scurrilously, the supporters of Dundas. No doubt it would have been magnanimous in the men then in power to have overlooked all these things, and, condoning the politics, to have rewarded the poetry of Burns. And it were to be wished that such magnanimity were more common among public men. But we do not see it practised even at the present day, any more than it was in the time of Burns.

During the first half of 1795 the poet had gone on with his accustomed duties, and, during the intervals of business, kept sending to Thomson the songs he from time to time composed.

His professional prospects seemed at this time to be brightening, for about the middle of May, 1795, his staunch friend, Mr. Graham of Fintray, would seem to have revived an earlier project of having him transferred to a post in Leith, with easy duty and an income of nearly 200l. a year. This project could not at the time be carried out; but that it should have been thought of proves that political offences of the past were beginning to be forgotten. During this same year there were symptoms that the respectable persons who had for some time frowned on him, were willing to relent. A combination of causes, his politics, the Riddel quarrel, and his own many imprudences, had kept him under a cloud. And this disfavour of the well-to-do had not increased his self-respect or made him more careful about the company he kept. Disgust with the world had made him reckless and defiant. But with the opening of 1795, the Riddels were reconciled to him, and received him once more into their good graces, and others, their friends, probably followed their example.

But the time was drawing near, when the smiles or the frowns of the Dumfries magnates would be alike indifferent to him. There has been more than enough of discussion among the biographers of Burns, as to how far he really deteriorated in himself during those Dumfries years, as to the extent and the causes of the social discredit into which he fell, and as to the charge that he took to low company. His early biographers, Currie, Walker, Heron drew the picture somewhat darkly; Lockhart and Cunningham have endeavoured to lighten the depth of the shadows. Chambers has laboured to give the facts impartially, has faithfully placed the lights and the shadows side by side, and has summed up the whole subject in an appendix on The Reputation of Burns in his Later Years, to which I would refer any who desire to see this painful subject minutely handled. Whatever extenuations or excuses may be alleged, all must allow that his course in Dumfries was on the whole a downward one, and must concur, however reluctantly, in the conclusion at which Lockhart, while decrying the severe judgments of Currie, Heron, and others, is forced by truth to come, that “the untimely death of Burns was, it is too probable, hastened by his own intemperances and imprudences.” To inquire minutely, what was the extent of those intemperances, and what the nature of those imprudences, is a subject which can little profit any one, and on which one has no heart to enter. If the general statement of fact be true, the minute details are better left to the kindly oblivion, which, but for too prying curiosity, would by this time have overtaken them.

Dissipated his life for some years certainly had been — deeply disreputable many asserted it to be. Others, however, there were who took a more lenient view of him. Findlater, his superior in the Excise, used to assert, that no officer under him was more regular in his public duties. Mr. Gray, then teacher of Dumfries school, has left it on record, that no parent he knew watched more carefully over his children’s education — that he had often found the poet in his home explaining to his eldest boy passages of the English poets from Shakespeare to Gray, and that the benefit of the father’s instructions was apparent in the excellence of the son’s daily school performances. This brighter side of the picture, however, is not irreconcilable with that darker one. For Burns’s whole character was a compound of the most discordant and contradictory elements. Dr. Chambers has well shown that he who at one hour was the douce sober Mr. Burns, in the next was changed to the maddest of Bacchanals: now he was glowing with the most generous sentiments, now sinking to the very opposite extreme.

One of the last visits paid to him by any friend from a distance would seem to have been by Professor Walker, although the date of it is somewhat uncertain. Eight years had passed since the Professor had parted with Burns at Blair Castle, after the poet’s happy visit there. In the account which the Professor has left of his two days’ interview with Burns at Dumfries, there are traces of disappointment with the change which the intervening years had wrought. It has been alleged that prolonged residence in England had made the Professor fastidious, and more easily shocked with rusticity and coarseness. However this may be, he found Burns, as he thought, not improved, but more dictatorial, more free in his potations, more coarse and gross in his talk, than when he had formerly known him.

For some time past there had not been wanting symptoms to show that the poet’s strength was already past its prime. In June, 1794, he had, as we have seen, told Mrs. Dunlop that he had been in poor health, and was afraid he was beginning to suffer for the follies of his youth. His physicians threatened him, he said, with flying gout, but he trusted they were mistaken. In the spring of 1795, he said to one who called on him, that he was beginning to feel as if he were soon to be an old man. Still he went about all his usual employments. But during the latter part of that year his health seems to have suddenly declined. For some considerable time he was confined to a sick-bed. Dr. Currie, who was likely to be well informed, states that this illness lasted from October, 1795, till the following January. No details of his malady are given, and little more is known of his condition at this time, except what he himself has given in a letter to Mrs. Dunlop, and in a rhymed epistle to one of his brother Excisemen.

At the close of the year he must have felt that, owing to his prolonged sickness, his funds were getting low. Else he would not have penned to his friend, Collector Mitchell, the following request: —

Friend of the Poet, tried and leal,

Wha, wanting thee, might beg or steal;

Alake, alake, the meikle deil

Wi’ a’ his witches

Are at it, skelpin’! jig and reel,

In my poor pouches.

I modestly fu fain wad hint it,

That one pound one, I sairly want it;

If wi’ the hizzie down ye sent it,

It would be kind;

And while my heart wi’ life-blood dunted,

I’d bear’t in mind.

*

POSTSCRIPT.

Ye’ve heard this while how I’ve been licket

And by fell death was nearly nicket:

Grim loun! he gat me by the fecket,

And sair me sheuk;

But by gude luck I lap a wicket,

And turn’d a neuk.

But by that health, I’ve got a share o’t,

And by that life, I’m promised mair o’t,

My heal and weel I’ll take a care o’t

A tentier way;

Then fareweel folly, hide and hair o’t,

For ance and aye.

It was, alas! too late now to bid farewell to folly, even if he could have done so indeed. With the opening of the year 1796, he somewhat revived, and the prudent resolve of his sickness disappeared with the first prospect of returning health. Chambers thus records a fact which the local tradition of Dumfries confirms:— “Early in the month of January, when his health was in the course of improvement, Burns tarried to a late hour at a jovial party in the Globe tavern. Before returning home, he unluckily remained for some time in the open air, and, overpowered by the effects of the liquor he had drunk, fell asleep…. A fatal chill penetrated his bones; he reached home with the seeds of a rheumatic fever already in possession of his weakened frame. In this little accident, and not in the pressure of poverty or disrepute, or wounded feelings or a broken heart, truly lay the determining cause of the sadly shortened days of our national poet.”

How long this new access of extreme illness confined him seems uncertain. Currie says for about a week; Chambers surmises a longer time. Mr. Scott Douglas says, that from the close of January till the month of April, he seems to have moved about with some hope of permanent improvement. But if he had such a hope, it was destined not to be fulfilled. Writing on the 31st of January, 1796, to Mrs. Dunlop, the trusted friend of so many confidences, this is the account he gives of himself: —

“I have lately drunk deep of the cup of affliction. The autumn robbed me of my only daughter and darling child, and that at a distance, too, and so rapidly as to put it out of my power to pay the last duties to her. I had scarcely begun to recover from that shock, when I became myself the victim of a most severe rheumatic fever, and long the die spun doubtful; until, after many weeks of a sick-bed, it seems to have turned up life, and I am beginning to crawl across my room, and once indeed have been before my own door in the street.” In these words Burns would seem to have put his two attacks together, as though they were but one prolonged illness.

It was about this time that, happening to meet a neighbour in the street, the poet talked with her seriously of his health, and said among other things this: “I find that a man may live like a fool, but he will scarcely die like one.” As from time to time he appeared on the street during the early months of 1796, others of his old acquaintance were struck by the sight of a tall man of slovenly appearance and sickly aspect, whom a second look showed to be Burns, and that he was dying. Yet in that February there were still some flutters of song, one of which was, Hey for the Lass wi’ a Tocher, written in answer to Thomson’s beseeching inquiry if he was never to hear from him again. Another was a rhymed epistle, in which he answers the inquiries of the colonel of his Volunteer Corps after his health.

From about the middle of April, Burns seldom left his room, and for a great part of each day was confined to bed. May came — a beautiful May — and it was hoped that its genial influences might revive him. But while young Jeffrey was writing, “It is the finest weather in the world — the whole country is covered with green and blossoms; and the sun shines perpetually through a light east wind,” Burns was shivering at every breath of the breeze. At this crisis his faithful wife was laid aside, unable to attend him. But a young neighbour, Jessie Lewars, sister of a brother exciseman, came to their house, assisted in all household work, and ministered to the dying poet. She was at this time only a girl, but she lived to be a wife and mother, and to see an honoured old age. Whenever we think of the last days of the poet, it is well to remember one who did so much to smooth his dying pillow.

Burns himself was deeply grateful, and his gratitude as usual found vent in song. But the old manner still clung to him. Even then he could not express his gratitude to his young benefactress without assuming the tone of a fancied lover. Two songs in this strain he addressed to Jessie Lewars. Of the second of these it is told, that one morning the poet said to her that if she would play to him any favourite tune, for which she desired to have new words, he would do his best to meet her wish. She sat down at the piano, and played over several times the air of an old song beginning thus: —

The robin cam to the wren’s nest,

And keekit in, and keekit in.

As soon as Burns had taken in the melody, he set to, and in a few minutes composed these beautiful words, the second of the songs which he addressed to Jessie: —

Oh! wert thou in the cauld blast,

On yonder lea, on yonder lea,

My plaidie to the angry airt,

I’d shelter thee, I’d shelter thee.

Or did misfortune’s bitter storms

Around thee blaw, around thee blaw,

Thy bield should be my bosom,

To share it a’, to share it a.’

Or were I in the wildest waste,

Sae black and bare, sae black and bare,

The desert were a paradise,

If thou wert there, if thou wert there:

Or were I monarch o’ the globe,

Wi’ thee to reign, wi’ thee to reign,

The brightest jewel in my crown

Wad be my queen, wad be my queen.

Mendelssohn is said to have so much admired this song, that he composed for it what Chambers pronounces an air of exquisite pathos.

June came, but brought no improvement, rather rapid decline of health. On the 4th of July (1796) he wrote to Johnson, “Many a merry meeting this publication (the Museum) has given us, and possibly it may give us more, though, alas, I fear it. This protracting, slow consuming illness, will, I doubt much, my ever dear friend, arrest my sun before he has reached his middle career, and will turn over the poet to far more important concerns than studying the brilliancy of wit or the pathos of sentiment.” On the day on which he wrote these words, he left Dumfries for a lonely place called Brow on the Solway shore, to try the effects of sea-bathing. He went alone, for his wife was unable to accompany him. While he was at Brow, his former friend, Mrs. Walter Riddel, to whom, after their estrangement, he had been reconciled, happened to be staying for the benefit of her health in the neighbourhood. She asked Burns to dine with her, and sent her carriage to bring him to her house. This is part of the account she gives of that interview: —

“I was struck with his appearance on entering the room. The stamp of death was imprinted on his features. He seemed already touching the brink of eternity. His first salutation was. ‘Well, madam, have you any commands for the other world?’ I replied that it seemed a doubtful case, which of us should be there soonest, and that I hoped he would yet live to write my epitaph. He looked in my face with an air of great kindness, and expressed his concern at seeing me look so ill, with his accustomed sensibility…. We had a long and serious conversation about his present situation, and the approaching termination of all his earthly prospects. He spoke of his death without any of the ostentation of philosophy, but with firmness as well as feeling, as an event likely to happen very soon, and which gave him concern chiefly from leaving his four children so young and unprotected, and his wife hourly expecting a fifth. He mentioned, with seeming pride and satisfaction, the promising genius of his eldest son, and the flattering marks of approbation he had received from his teachers, and dwelt particularly on his hopes of that boy’s future conduct and merit. His anxiety for his family seemed to hang heavy on him, and the more perhaps from the reflection that he had not done them all the justice he was so well qualified to do. Passing from this subject, he showed great concern about the care of his literary fame, and particularly the publication of his posthumous works. He said he was well aware that his death would create some noise, and that every scrap of his writing would be revived against him to the injury of his future reputation; that his 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.

“He lamented that he had written many epigrams on persons against whom he entertained no enmity, and whose characters he would be sorry to wound; and many indifferent poetical pieces, which he feared would now, with all their imperfections on their head, be thrust upon the world. On this account he deeply regretted having deferred to put his papers in a state of arrangement, as he was now incapable of the exertion…. The conversation,” she adds, “was kept up with great evenness and animation on his side. I had seldom seen his mind greater or more collected. There was frequently a considerable degree of vivacity in his sallies, and they would probably have had a greater share, had not the concern and dejection I could not disguise damped the spirit of pleasantry he seemed not unwilling to indulge.

“We parted about sunset on the evening of that day (the 5th July, 1796), the next day I saw him again, and we parted to meet no more!”

It is not wonderful that Burns should have felt some anxiety about the literary legacy he was leaving to mankind. Not about his best poems; these, he must have known, would take care of themselves. Yet even among the poems which he had published with his name, were some, “which dying” he well might “wish to blot.” There lay among his papers letters too, and other “fallings from him,” which he no doubt would have desired to suppress, but of which, if they have not all been made public, enough have appeared to justify his fears of that idle vanity, if not malevolence, which after his death, would rake up every scrap he had written, uncaring how it might injure his good name, or affect future generations of his admirers. No poet perhaps has suffered more from the indiscriminate and unscrupulous curiosity of editors, catering too greedily for the public, than Burns has done.

Besides anxieties of this kind, he, during those last days, had to bear another burden of care that pressed even more closely home. To pain of body, absence from his wife and children, and haunting anxiety on their account, was added the pressure of some small debts and the fear of want. By the rules of the Excise, his full salary would not be allowed him during his illness; and though the Board agreed to continue Burns in his full pay, he never knew this in time to be comforted by it. With his small income diminished, how could he meet the increased expenditure caused by sickness? We have seen how at the beginning of the year he had written to his friend Mitchell to ask the loan of a guinea. One or two letters, asking for the payment of some old debts due to him by a former companion, still remain. During his stay at Brow, on the 12th of July, he wrote to Thomson the following memorable letter: —

“After all my boasted independence, curst necessity compels me to implore you for five pounds. A cruel scoundrel of a haberdasher, to whom I owe an account, taking it into his head that I am dying, has commenced a process, and will infallibly put me into jail. Do, for God’s sake, send that sum, and that by return of post. Forgive me this earnestness, but the horrors of a jail have made me half distracted. I do not ask all this gratuitously; for, upon returning health, I hereby promise and engage to furnish you with five pounds’ worth of the neatest song-genius you have seen. I tried my hand on Rothemurchie this morning. The measure is so difficult that it is impossible to infuse much genius into the lines. They are on the other side. Forgive, forgive me!”

And on the other side was written Burns’s last song beginning, “Fairest maid, on Devon banks.” Was it native feeling, or inveterate habit, that made him that morning revert to the happier days he had seen on the banks of Devon, and sing a last song to one of the two beauties he had there admired? Chambers thinks it was to Charlotte Hamilton, the latest editor refers it to Peggy Chalmers.

Thomson at once sent the sum asked for. He has been much, but not justly, blamed for not having sent a much larger sum, and indeed for not having repaid the poet for his songs long before. Against such charges it is enough to reply that when Thomson had formerly volunteered some money to Burns in return for his songs, the indignant poet told him that if he ever again thought of such a thing, their intercourse must thenceforth cease. And for the smallness of the sum sent, it should be remembered that Thomson was himself a poor man, and had not at this time made anything by his Collection of Songs, and never did make much beyond repayment of his large outlay.

On the same day on which Burns wrote thus to Thomson, he wrote another letter in much the same terms to his cousin, Mr. James Burnes, of Montrose, asking him to assist him with ten pounds, which was at once sent by his relative, who, though not a rich, was a generous-hearted man.

There was still a third letter written on that 12th of July (1796) from Brow. Of Mrs. Dunlop, who had for some months ceased her correspondence with him, the poet takes this affecting farewell:— “I have written you so often, without receiving any answer, that I would not trouble you again but for the circumstances in which I am. An illness which has long hung about me, in all probability will speedily send me beyond that ‘bourn whence no traveller returns.’ Your friendship, with which for many years you honoured me, was a friendship dearest to my soul. Your conversation, and especially your correspondence, were at once highly entertaining and instructive. With what pleasure did I use to break up the seal! The remembrance yet adds one pulse more to my poor palpitating heart. Farewell!”

On the 14th he wrote to his wife, saying that though the sea-bathing had eased his pains, it had not done anything to restore his health. The following anecdote of him at this time has been preserved:— “A night or two before Burns left Brow, he drank tea with Mrs. Craig, widow of the minister of Ruthwell. His altered appearance excited much silent sympathy; and the evening being beautiful, and the sun shining brightly through the casement, Miss Craig (afterwards Mrs. Henry Duncan) was afraid the light might be too much for him, and rose to let down the window-blinds. Burns immediately guessed what she meant, and regarding the young lady with a look of great benignity, said, ‘Thank you, my dear, for your kind attention; but oh! let him shine; he will not shine long for me.’”

On the 18th July he left Brow, and returned to Dumfries in a small spring cart. When he alighted, the onlookers saw that he was hardly able to stand, and observed that he walked with tottering steps to his door. Those who saw him enter his house, knew by his appearance that he would never again cross that threshold alive. When the news spread in Dumfries that Burns had returned from Brow and was dying, the whole town was deeply moved. Allan Cunningham, who was present, thus describes what he saw:— “The anxiety of the people, high and low, was very great. Wherever two or three were together, their talk was of Burns, and of him alone. They spoke of his history, of his person, and of his works; of his witty sayings, and sarcastic replies, and of his too early fate, with much enthusiasm, and sometimes with deep feeling. All that he had done, and all that they had hoped he would accomplish, were talked of. Half-a-dozen of them stopped Dr. Maxwell in the street, and said, ‘How is Burns, sir?’ He shook his head, saying, ‘He cannot be worse,’ and passed on to be subjected to similar inquiries farther up the way. I heard one of a group inquire, with much simplicity, ‘Who do you think will be our poet now?’”

During the three or four days between his return from Brow and the end, his mind, when not roused by conversation, wandered in delirium. Yet when friends drew near his bed, sallies of his old wit would for a moment return. To a brother volunteer who came to see him he said, with a smile, “John, don’t let the awkward squad fire over me.” His wife was unable to attend him; and four helpless children wandered from room to room gazing on their unhappy parents. All the while, Jessie Lewars was ministering to the helpless and to the dying one, and doing what kindness could do to relieve their suffering. On the fourth day after his return, the 21st of July, Burns sank into his last sleep. His children stood around his bed, and his eldest son remembered long afterwards all the circumstances of that sad hour.

The news that Burns was dead, sounded through all Scotland like a knell announcing a great national bereavement. Men woke up to feel the greatness of the gift which in him had been vouchsafed to their generation, and which had met, on the whole, with so poor a reception. Self-reproach mingled with the universal sorrow, as men asked themselves whether they might not have done more to cherish and prolong that rarely gifted life.

Of course there was a great public funeral, in which the men of Dumfries and the neighbourhood, high and low, appeared as mourners, and soldiers and volunteers with colours, muffled drums, and arms reversed, not very appropriately mingled in the procession. At the very time when they were laying her husband in his grave, Mrs. Burns gave birth to his posthumous son. He was called Maxwell, after the physician who attended his father, but he died in infancy. The spot where the poet was laid was in a comer of St. Michael’s churchyard, and the grave remained for a time unmarked by any monument. After some years his wife placed over it a plain, unpretending stone, inscribed with his name and age, and with the names of his two boys, who were buried in the same place. Well had it been, if he had been allowed to rest undisturbed in this grave where his family had laid him. But well-meaning, though ignorant, officiousness would not suffer it to be so. Nearly twenty years after the poet’s death, a huge, cumbrous, unsightly mausoleum was, by public subscription, erected at a little distance from his original resting-place. This structure was adorned with an ungraceful figure in marble, representing, “The muse of Coila finding the poet at the plough, and throwing her inspiring mantle over him.” To this was added a long, rambling epitaph in tawdry Latin, as though any inscription which scholars could devise could equal the simple name of Robert Burns. When the new structure was completed, on the 19th September, 1815, his grave was opened, and men for a moment gazed with awe on the form of Burns, seemingly as entire as on the day when first it was laid in the grave. But as soon as they began to raise it, the whole body crumbled to dust, leaving only the head and bones. These relics they bore to the mausoleum, which had been prepared for their reception. But not even yet was the poet’s dust to be allowed to rest in peace. When his widow died, in March, 1834, the mausoleum was opened, that she might be laid by her husband’s side. Some craniologists of Dumfries were then permitted, in the name of so-called science, to desecrate his dust with their inhuman outrage. At the dead of night, between the 31st of March and the 1st of April, these men laid their profane fingers on the skull of Burns, “tried their hats upon it, and found them all too little;” applied their compasses, registered the size of the so-called organs, and “satisfied themselves that Burns had capacity enough to compose Tam o’ Shanter, The Cotter’s Saturday Night, and To Mary in Heaven.” This done, they laid the head once again in the hallowed ground, where, let us hope, it will be disturbed no more. The mausoleum, unsightly though it is, has become a place of pilgrimage whither yearly crowds of travellers resort from the ends of the earth, to gaze on the resting-place of Scotland’s peasant poet, and thence to pass to that other consecrated place within ruined Dryburgh, where lies the dust of a kindred spirit by his own Tweed.

CHAPTER VIII. CHARACTER, POEMS, SONGS.

If this narrative has in any way succeeded in giving the lights and the shadows of Burns’s life, little comment need now be added. The reader will, it is hoped, gather from the brief record of facts here presented, a better impression of the man as he was, in his strength and in his weakness, than from any attempt which might have been made to bring his various qualities together into a moral portrait. Those who wish to see a comment on his character, at once wise and tender, should turn to Mr. Carlyle’s famous essay on Burns.

What estimate is to be formed of Burns — not as a poet, but as a man — is a question that will long be asked, and will be variously answered, according to the principles men hold, and the temperament they are of. Men of the world will regard him in one way, worshippers of genius in another; and there are many whom the judgments of neither of these will satisfy. One thing is plain to every one; it is the contradiction between the noble gifts he had and the actual life he lived, which make his career the painful tragedy it was. When, however, we look more closely into the original outfit of the man, we seem in some sort to see how this came to be.

Given a being born into the world with a noble nature, endowments of head and heart beyond any of his time, wide-ranging sympathies, intellectual force of the strongest man, sensibility as of the tenderest woman, possessed also by a keen sense of right and wrong which he had brought from a pure home — place all these high gifts on the one side, and over against them a lower nature, fierce and turbulent, filling him with wild passions which were hard to restrain and fatal to indulge — and between these two opposing natures, a weak and irresolute will, which could overhear the voice of conscience, but had no strength to obey it; launch such a man on such a world as this, and it is but too plain what the end will be. From earliest manhood till the close, flesh and spirit were waging within him interminable war, and who shall say which had the victory? Among his countrymen there are many who are so captivated with his brilliant gifts and his genial temperament, that they will not listen to any hint at the deep defects which marred them. Some would even go so far as to claim honour for him, not only as Scotland’s greatest poet, but as one of the best men she has produced. Those who thus try to canonize Burns are no true friends to his memory. They do but challenge the counter-verdict, and force men to recall facts which, if they cannot forget, they would fain leave in silence. These moral defects it is ours to know; it is not ours to judge him who had them.

While some would claim for Burns a niche among Scotland’s saints, others would give him rank as one of her religious teachers. This claim, if not so absurd as the other, is hardly more tenable. The religion described by Burns in The Cotter’s Saturday Night is, it should be remembered, his father’s faith, not his own. The fundamental truths of natural religion, faith in God and in immortality, amid sore trials of heart, he no doubt clung to, and has forcibly expressed. But there is nothing in his poems or in his letters which goes beyond sincere deism — nothing which is in any way distinctively Christian.

Even were his teaching of religion much fuller than it is, one essential thing is still wanting. Before men can accept any one as a religious teacher, they not unreasonably expect that his practice should in some measure bear out his teaching. It was not as an authority on such matters that Burns ever regarded himself. In his Bard’s Epitaph, composed ten years before his death, he took a far truer and humbler measure of himself than any of his critics or panegyrists have done: —

The poor inhabitant below

Was quick to learn and wise to know,

And keenly felt the friendly glow

And softer flame;

But thoughtless folly laid him low,

And stained his name.

Reader, attend! — whether thy soul

Soars fancy’s flight beyond the pole,

Or darkling grubs this earthly hole,

In low pursuit;

Know, prudent, cautious self-control

Is wisdom’s root.

“A confession,” says Wordsworth, “at once devout, poetical, and human — a history in the shape of a prophecy.”

Leaving the details of his personal story, and —

Each unquiet theme,

Where gentlest judgments may misdeem,

it is a great relief to turn to the bequest that he has left to the world in his poetry. How often has one been tempted to wish that we had known as little of the actual career of Burns as we do of the life of Shakespeare, or even of Homer, and had been left to read his mind and character only by the light of his works! That poetry, though a fragmentary, is still a faithful transcript of what was best in the man; and though his stream of song contains some sediment we could wish away, yet as a whole, how vividly, clearly, sunnily it flows, how far the good preponderates over the evil.

What that good is, must now be briefly said. To take his earliest productions first, his poems as distinct from his songs. Almost all the best of these are, with the one notable exception of Tam O’ Shanter, contained in the Kilmarnock edition. A few pieces actually composed before he went to Edinburgh were included in later editions, but, after leaving Mossgiel he never seriously addressed himself to any form of poetry but song-writing. The Kilmarnock volume contains poems descriptive of peasant life and manners, epistles in verse generally to rhyming brethren, a few lyrics on personal feelings, or on incidents like those of the mouse and the daisy, and three songs. In these, the form, the metre, the style and language, even that which is known as Burns’s peculiar stanza, all belong to the traditional forms of his country’s poetry, and from earlier bards had been handed down to Burns by his two immediate forerunners, Ramsay and Fergusson. To these two he felt himself indebted, and for them he always expresses a somewhat exaggerated admiration. Nothing can more show Burns’s inherent power than to compare his poems with even the best of those which he accepted as models. The old framework and metres which his country supplied, he took; asked no other, no better, and into those old bottles poured new wine of his own, and such wine! What, then, is the peculiar flavour of this new poetic wine of Burns’ poetry? At the basis of all his power lay absolute truthfulness, intense reality, truthfulness to the objects which he saw, truthfulness to himself as the seer of them. This is what Wordsworth recognized as Burns’s leading characteristic. He who acknowledged few masters, owned Burns as his master in this respect when he speaks of him —

Whose light I hailed when first it shone,

And showed my youth,

How verse may build a princely throne

On humble truth.

Here was a man, a son of toil, looking out on the world from his cottage, on society low and high and on nature homely or beautiful, with the clearest eye, the most piercing insight, and the warmest heart; touching life at a hundred points, seeing to the core all the sterling worth, nor less the pretence and hollowness of the men he met, the humour, the drollery, the pathos, and the sorrow of human existence; and expressing what he saw, not in the stock phrases of books, but in his own vernacular, the language of his fireside, with a directness, a force, a vitality that tingled to the finger tips, and forced the phrases of his peasant dialect into literature, and made them for ever classical. Large sympathy, generous enthusiasm, reckless abandonment, fierce indignation, melting compassion, rare flashes of moral insight, all are there. Everywhere you see the strong intellect made alive, and driven home to the mark, by the fervid heart behind it. And if the sight of the world’s inequalities, and some natural repining at his own obscure lot, mingled from the beginning, as has been said, “some bitternesses of earthly spleen and passion with the workings of his inspiration, and if these in the end ate deep into the great heart they had long tormented,” who that has not known his experience may venture too strongly to condemn him?

This prevailing truthfulness of nature and of vision manifested itself in many ways. First. In the strength of it, he interpreted the lives, thoughts, feelings, manners of the Scottish peasantry to whom he belonged, as they had never been interpreted before, and never can be again. Take the poem which stands first in the Kilmarnock edition. The Cotter’s Dog, and the Laird’s Dog, are, as has been often said, for all their moralizing, true dogs in all their ways. Yet through these, while not ceasing to be dogs, the poet represents the whole contrast between the Cotters’ lives, and their Lairds’. This old controversy, which is ever new, between rich and poor, has never been set forth with more humour and power. No doubt it is done from the peasant’s point of view. The virtues and hardships of the poor have full justice done to them; the prosperity of the rich, with its accompanying follies and faults, is not spared, perhaps it is exaggerated. The whole is represented with an inimitably graphic hand, and just when the caustic wit is beginning to get too biting, the edge of it is turned by a touch of kindlier humour. The poor dog speaks of

Some gentle master, Wha, aiblins thrang a-parliamentin,

For Britain’s guid his saul indentin —

Then Caesar, the rich man’s dog, replies, —

Haith, lad, ye little ken about it:

For Britain’s guid! — guid faith! I doubt it.

Say rather, gaun as Premiers lead him,

An’ saying aye or no’s they bid him:

At operas an’ plays parading,

Mortgaging, gambling, masquerading!

Or, may be, in a frolic daft,

To Hague or Calais takes a waft,

To make a tour an’ tak a whirl,

To learn bon ton, an’ see the worl’.

Then, at Vienna or Versailles,

He rives his father’s auld entails;

Or by Madrid he takes the rout,

To thrum guitars and fecht wi’ nowt.

*

For Britain’s guid! for her destruction!

Wi’ dissipation, feud an’ faction.

Then exclaims Luath, the poor man’s dog, —

Hech, man! dear sirs! is that the gate

They waste sae many a braw estate!

Are we sae foughten and harass’d

For gear to gang that gate at last?

And yet he allows, that for all that

–- Thae frank, rantin’, ramblin’ billies,

Fient haet o’ them’s ill-hearted fellows.

“Mark the power of that one word, ‘nowt,’” said the late Thomas Aird. “If the poet had said that our young fellows went to Spain to fight with bulls, there would have been some dignity in the thing, but think of his going all that way ‘to fecht wi’ nowt.’ It was felt at once to be ridiculous. That one word conveyed at once a statement of the folly, and a sarcastic rebuke of the folly.”

Or turn to the poem of Halloween. Here he has sketched the Ayrshire peasantry as they appeared in their hours of merriment — painted with a few vivid strokes a dozen distinct pictures of country lads and lasses, sires and dames, and at the same time preserved for ever the remembrance of antique customs and superstitious observances, which even in Burns’s day were beginning to fade, and have now all but disappeared.

Or again, take The auld Farmer’s New-year-morning Salutation to his auld Mare. In this homely, but most kindly humorous poem, you have the whole toiling life of a ploughman and his horse, done off in two or three touches, and the elements of what may seem a commonplace, but was to Burns a most vivid, experience, are made to live for ever. For a piece of good graphic Scotch, see how he describes the sturdy old mare in the plough setting her face to the furzy braes.

Thou never braing’t, an’ fetch’t, and fliskit,

But thy auld tail thou wad hae whiskit,

An spread abreed thy weel-fill’d brisket,

Wi’ pith an’ pow’r,

Till spritty knowes wad rair’t and riskit,

An’ slypet owre.

To paraphrase this, “Thou didst never fret, or plunge and kick, but thou wouldest have whisked thy old tail, and spread abroad thy large chest, with pith and power, till hillocks, where the earth was filled with tough-rooted plants, would have given forth a cracking sound, and the clods fallen gently over.” The latter part of this paraphrase is taken from Chambers. What pure English words could have rendered these things as compactly and graphically?

Of The Cotter’s Saturday Night it is hardly needful to speak. As a work of art, it is by no means at Burns’s highest level. The metre was not native to him. It contains some lines that are feeble, whole stanzas that are heavy. But as Lockhart has said, in words already quoted, there is none of his poems that does such justice to the better nature that was originally in him. It shows how Burns could reverence the old national piety, however little he may have been able to practise it. It is the more valuable for this, that it is almost the only poem in which either of our two great national poets has described Scottish character on the side of that grave, deep, though undemonstrative reverence, which has been an intrinsic element in it.

No wonder the peasantry of Scotland have loved Burns as perhaps never people loved a poet. He not only sympathized with the wants, the trials, the joys and sorrows of their obscure lot, but he interpreted these to themselves, and interpreted them to others, and this too in their own language made musical, and glorified by genius. He made the poorest ploughman proud of his station and his toil, since Robbie Burns had shared and had sung them. He awoke a sympathy for them in many a heart that otherwise would never have known it. In looking up to him, the Scottish people have seen an impersonation of themselves on a large scale — of themselves, both in their virtues and in their vices.

Secondly, Burns in his poetry was not only the interpreter of Scotland’s peasantry, he was the restorer of her nationality. When he appeared, the spirit of Scotland was at a low ebb. The fatigue that followed a century of religious strife, the extinction of her parliament, the stern suppression of the Jacobite risings, the removal of all symbols of her royalty and nationality, had all but quenched the ancient spirit. Englishmen despised Scotchmen, and Scotchmen seemed ashamed of themselves and of their country. A race of literary men had sprang up in Edinburgh who, as to national feeling, were entirely colourless, Scotchmen in nothing except their dwelling-place. The thing they most dreaded was to be convicted of a Scotticism. Among these learned cosmopolitans in walked Burns, who with the instinct of genius chose for his subject that Scottish life which they ignored, and for his vehicle that vernacular which they despised, and who, touching the springs of long-forgotten emotions, brought back on the hearts of his countrymen a tide of patriotic feeling to which they had long been strangers.

At first it was only his native Ayrshire he hoped to illustrate, to shed upon the streams of Ayr and Doon, the power of Yarrow, and Teviot, and Tweed. But his patriotism was not merely local; the traditions of Wallace haunted him like a passion, the wanderings of Bruce he hoped to dramatize. His well-known words about the Thistle have been already quoted. They express what was one of his strongest aspirations. And though he accomplished but a small part of what he once hoped to do, yet we owe it to him first of all that “the old kingdom” has not wholly sunk into a province. If Scotchmen to-day love and cherish their country with a pride unknown to their ancestors of the last century, if strangers of all countries look on Scotland as a land of romance, this we owe in great measure to Burns, who first turned the tide, which Scott afterwards carried to full flood. All that Scotland had done and suffered, her romantic history, the manhood of her people, the beauty of her scenery, would have disappeared in modern commonplace and manufacturing ugliness, if she had been left without her two “sacred poets.”

Thirdly. Burns’s sympathies and thoughts were not confined to class nor country; they had something more catholic in them, they reached to universal man. Few as were his opportunities of knowing the characters of statesmen and politicians, yet with what “random shots o’ countra wit” did he hit off the public men of his time! In his address to King George III. on his birthday, how gay yet caustic is the satire, how trenchant his stroke! The elder, and the younger Pitt, “yon ill-tongued tinkler Charlie Fox,” as he irreverently calls him — if Burns had sat for years in Parliament, he could scarcely have known them better. Every one of the Scottish M.P.‘s of the time, from —

That slee auld-farran chiel Dundas

to —

That glib-gabbit Highland baron

The Laird o’ Graham,

and —

Erskine a spunkie Norlan billie,

— he has touched their characters as truly as if they had all been his own familiars. But of his intuitive knowledge of men of all ranks, there is no need to speak, for every line he writes attests it. Of his fetches of moral wisdom something has already been said. He would not have been a Scotchman, if he had not been a moralizer; but then his moralizings are not platitudes, but truths winged with wit and wisdom. He had, as we have seen, his limitations — his bias to overvalue one order of qualities, and to disparage others. Some pleading of his own cause and that of men of his own temperament, some disparagement of the severer, less-impulsive virtues, it is easy to discern in him. Yet, allowing all this, what flashes of moral insight, piercing to the quick! what random sayings flung forth, that have become proverbs in all lands— “mottoes of the heart”!

Such are —

O wad some Power the giftie gie us,

To see oursel as ithers see us:

It wad frae mony a blunder free us,

An’ foolish notion;

Or the much-quoted —

Facts are chiels that winna ding

And downa be disputed;

Or —

The heart ay’s the part ay

That makes us right or wrang.

Who on the text, “He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone,” ever preached such a sermon as Burns in his Address to the unco Guid? and in his epistle of advice to a young friend, what wisdom! what incisive aphorisms! In passages like these scattered throughout his writings, and in some single poems, he has passed beyond all bonds of place and nationality, and spoken home to the universal human heart.

And here we may note that in that awakening to the sense of human brotherhood, the oneness of human nature, which began towards the end of last century, and which found utterance through Cowper first of the English poets, there has been no voice in literature, then or since, which has proclaimed it more tellingly than Burns. And then his humanity was not confined to man, it overflowed to his lower fellow-creatures. His lines about the pet ewe, the worn-out mare, the field-mouse, the wounded hare, have long been household words. In this tenderness towards animals we see another point of likeness between him and Cowper.

Fourthly. For all aspects of the natural world he has the same clear eye, the same open heart that he has for man. His love of nature is intense, but very simple and direct, no subtilizings, nor refinings about it, nor any of that nature-worship which soon after his time came in. Quite unconsciously, as a child might, he goes into the outward world for refreshment, for enjoyment, for sympathy. Everywhere in his poetry, nature comes in, not so much as a being independent of man, but as the background of his pictures of life and human character. How true his perceptions of her features are, how pure and transparent the feeling she awakens in him! Take only two examples. Here is the well-known way he describes the burn in his Halloween —

Whyles owre a linn the burnie plays,

As thro’ the glen it wimpl’t;

Whyles round a rocky scaur it strays,

Whyles in a wiel it dimpl’t;

Whyles glitter’d to the nightly rays,

Wi’ bickerin’, dancin’ dazzle:

Whyles cookit underneath the brass,

Below the spreading hazel,

Unseen that night.

Was ever burn so naturally, yet picturesquely described? The next verse can hardly be omitted —

Amang the brachens on the brae,

Between her an’ the moon,

The deil, or else an outler quey,

Gat up an’ gae a croon:

Poor Leezie’s heart maist lap the hool;

Near lav’rock height she jumpit;

But miss’d a fit, an’ in the pool

Out-owre the lugs she plumpit,

Wi’ a plunge that night

“Maist lap the hool,” what condensation in that Scotch phrase! The hool is the pod of a pea — poor Lizzie’s heart almost leapt out of its encasing sheath.

Or look at this other picture: —

Upon a simmer Sunday morn,

When Nature’s face is fair,

I walked forth to view the corn,

And snuff the caller air.

The risin’ sun owre Galston muirs

Wi’ glorious light was glintin;

The hares were hirplin down the furrs,

The lav’rocks they were chantin

Fu’ sweet that day.

I have noted only some of the excellences of Burns’s poetry, which far outnumber its blemishes. Of these last it is unnecessary to speak; they are too obvious, and whatever is gross, readers can of themselves pass by.

Burns’s most considerable poems, as distinct from his songs, were almost all written before he went to Edinburgh. There is, however, one memorable exception. Tam o’ Shanter, as we have seen, belongs to Ellisland days. Most of his earlier poems were entirely realistic, a transcript of the men and women and scenes he had seen and known, only lifted a very little off the earth, only very slightly idealized. But in Tam o’ Shanter he had let loose his powers upon the materials of past experiences, and out of them he shaped a tale which was a pure imaginative creation. In no other instance, except perhaps in The Jolly Beggars, had he done this; and in that cantata, if the genius is equal, the materials are so coarse, and the sentiment so gross, as to make it, for all its dramatic power, decidedly offensive. It is strange what very opposite judgments have been formed of the intrinsic merit of Tam o’ Shanter. Mr. Carlyle thinks that it might have been written “all but quite as well by a man, who, in place of genius, had only possessed talent; that it is act so much a poem, as a piece of sparkling rhetoric; the heart of the story still lies hard and dead.” On the other hand, Sir Walter Scott has recorded this verdict: “In the inimitable tale of Tam o’ Shanter, Burns has left us sufficient evidence of his abilities to combine the ludicrous with the awful and even the horrible. No poet, with the exception of Shakespeare, ever possessed the power of exciting the most varied and discordant emotions with such rapid transitions. His humorous description of death in the poem on Dr. Hornbrook, borders on the terrific; and the witches’ dance in the Kirk of Alloway is at once ludicrous and horrible.” Sir Walter, I believe, is right, and the world has sided with him in his judgment about Tam o’ Shanter. Nowhere in British literature, out of Shakespeare, is there to be found so much of the power of which Scott speaks — that of combining in rapid transition almost contradictory emotions — if we except perhaps one of Scott’s own highest creations, the tale of Wandering Willie, in Redgauntlet.

On the songs of Burns a volume might be written, but a few sentences must here suffice. It is in his songs that his soul comes out fullest, freest, brightest; it is as a song-writer that his fame has spread widest, and will longest last. Mr. Carlyle, not in his essay, which does full justice to Burns’s songs, but in some more recent work, has said something like this, “Our Scottish son of thunder had, for want of a better, to pour his lightning through the narrow cranny of Scottish song — the narrowest cranny ever vouchsafed to any son of thunder.” — The narrowest, it may be, but the most effective, if a man desires to come close to his fellow-men, soul to soul. Of all forms of literature the genuine song is the most penetrating, and the most to be remembered; and in this kind Burns is the supreme master. To make him this, two things combined. First, there was the great background of national melody and antique verse, coming down to him from remote ages, and sounding through his heart from childhood. He was cradled in a very atmosphere of melody, else he never could have sung so well. No one knew better than he did, or would have owned more feelingly, how much he owed to the old forgotten song-writers of his country, dead for ages before he lived, and lying in their unknown graves all Scotland over. From his boyhood he had studied eagerly the old tunes, and the old words where there were such, that had come down to him from the past, treasured every scrap of antique air and verse, conned and crooned them over till he had them by heart. This was the one form of literature that he had entirely mastered. And from the first he had laid it down as a rule, that the one way to catch the inspiration, and rise to the true fervour of song, was, as he phrased it, “to sowth the tune over and over,” till the words came spontaneously. The words of his own songs were inspired by pre-existing tunes, not composed first, and set to music afterwards. But all this love and study of the ancient songs and outward melody would have gone for nothing, but for the second element, that is the inward melody born in the poet’s deepest heart, which received into itself the whole body of national song; and then when it had passed through his soul, sent it forth ennobled and glorified by his own genius.

That which fitted him to do this was the peculiar intensity of his nature, the fervid heart, the trembling sensibility, the headlong passion, all thrilling through an intellect strong and keen beyond that of other men. How mysterious to reflect that the same qualities on their emotional side made him the great songster of the world, and on their practical side drove him to ruin! The first word which Burns composed was a song in praise of his partner on the harvest-rig; the last utterance he breathed in verse was also a song — a faint remembrance of some former affection. Between these two he composed from two to three hundred. It might be wished perhaps that he had written fewer, especially fewer love songs; never composed under pressure, and only when his heart was so full he could not help singing. This is the condition on which alone the highest order of songs is born. Probably from thirty to forty songs of Burns could be named which come up to this highest standard. No other Scottish song-writer could show above four or five of the same quality. Of his songs one main characteristic is that their subjects, the substance they lay hold of, belongs to what is most permanent in humanity, those primary affections, those permanent relations of life which cannot change while man’s nature is what it is. In this they are wholly unlike those songs which seize on the changing aspects of society. As the phases of social life change, these are forgotten. But no time can superannuate the subjects which Burns has sung; they are rooted in the primary strata, which are steadfast. Then as the subjects are primary, so the feeling with which Burns regards them is primary too — that is, he gives us the first spontaneous gush — the first throb of his heart, and that a most strong, simple, manly heart. The feeling is not turned over in the reflective faculty, and there artistically shaped, — not subtilized and refined away till it has lost its power and freshness; but given at first hand, as it comes warm from within. When he is at his best you seem to hear the whole song warbling through his spirit, naturally as a bird’s. The whole subject is wrapped in an element of music, till it is penetrated and transfigured by it. No one else has so much of the native lilt in him. When his mind was at the white heat, it is wonderful how quickly he struck off some of his most perfect songs. And yet he could, when it was required, go back upon them, and retouch them line by line, as we saw him doing in Ye Banks and Braes. In the best of them the outward form is as perfect as the inward music is all-pervading, and the two are in complete harmony.

To mention a few instances in which he has given their ultimate and consummate expression to fundamental human emotions, four songs may be mentioned, in each of which a different phase of love has been rendered for all time —

Of a’ the airts the wind can blaw,

Ye flowery banks o’ bonnie Doon,

Go fetch to me a pint o’ wine;

and that other, in which the calm depth of long-wedded and happy love utters itself, so blithely yet pathetically, —

John Anderson, my Jo, John.

Then for comic humour of courtship, there is —

Duncan Gray cam here to woo.

For that contented spirit which, while feeling life’s troubles, yet keeps “aye a heart aboon them a’,” we have —

Contented wi’ little, and cantie wi’ mair.

For friendship rooted in the past, there is —

Should auld acquaintance be forgot,

even if we credit antiquity with some of the verses.

For wild and reckless daring, mingled with a dash of finer feeling, there is Macpherson’s Farewell. For patriotic heroism —

Scots wha hae wi’ Wallace bled;

and for personal independence, and sturdy, if self-asserting, manhood —

A man’s a man for a’ that.

These are but a few of the many permanent emotions to which Burns has given such consummate expression, as will stand for all time.

In no mention of his songs should that be forgotten which is so greatly to the honour of Burns. He was emphatically the purifier of Scottish song. There are some poems he has left, there are also a few among his songs, which we could wish that he had never written. But we who inherit Scottish song as he left it, can hardly imagine how much he did to purify and elevate our national melodies. To see what he has done in this way, we have but to compare Burns’s songs with the collection of Scottish songs published by David Herd, in 1769, a few years before Burns appeared. A genuine poet, who knew well what he spoke of, the late Thomas Aird, has said, “Those old Scottish melodies, sweet and strong though they were, strong and sweet, were, all the more for their very strength and sweetness, a moral plague, from the indecent words to which many of them had long been set. How was the plague to be stayed? All the preachers in the land could not divorce the grossness from the music. The only way was to put something better in its stead. This inestimable something better Burns gave us.”

So purified and ennobled by Burns, these songs embody human emotion in its most condensed and sweetest essence. They appeal to all ranks, they touch all ages, they cheer toil-worn men under every clime. Wherever the English tongue is heard, beneath the suns of India, amid African deserts, on the western prairies of America, among the squatters of Australia, whenever men of British blood would give vent to their deepest, kindliest, most genial feelings, it is to the songs of Burns they spontaneously turn, and find in them at once a perfect utterance, and a fresh tie of brotherhood. It is this which forms Burns’s most enduring claim on the world’s gratitude.

BRIEF LIFE OF ROBERT BURNS by Allan Cunningham

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘ –- Moody speel the holy door With tidings of salvation?’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But from the day of his departure from “the barren” Ellisland, the downward course of Burns may be dated. The cold neglect of his country had driven him back indignantly to the plough, and he hoped to gain from the furrowed field that independence which it was the duty of Scotland to have provided: but he did not resume the plough with all the advantages he possessed when he first forsook it: he had revelled in the luxuries of polished life — his tastes had been rendered expensive as well as pure: he had witnessed, and he hoped for the pleasures of literary retirement, while the hands which had led jewelled dames over scented carpets to supper tables leaded with silver took hold of the hilts of the plough with more of reluctance than good-will. Edinburgh, with its lords and its ladies, its delights and its hopes, spoiled him for farming. Nor were his new labours more acceptable to his haughty spirit than those of the plough: the excise for a century had been a word of opprobrium or of hatred in the north: the duties which it imposed were regarded, not by peasants alone, as a serious encroachment upon the ancient rights of the nation, and to mislead a gauger, or resist him, even to blood, was considered by few as a fault. That the brightest genius of the nation — one whose tastes and sensibilities were so peculiarly its own — should be, as a reward, set to look after run-rum and smuggled tobacco, and to gauge ale-wife’s barrels, was a regret and a marvel to many, and a source of bitter merriment to Burns himself.

The duties of his situation were however performed punctually, if not with pleasure: he was a vigilant officer; he was also a merciful and considerate one: though loving a joke, and not at all averse to a dram, he walked among suspicious brewers, captious ale-wives, and frowning shop-keepers as uprightly as courteously: he smoothed the ruggedest natures into acquiescence by his gayety and humour, and yet never gave cause for a malicious remark, by allowing his vigilance to slumber. He was brave, too, and in the capture of an armed smuggler, in which he led the attack, showed that he neither feared water nor fire: he loved, also, to counsel the more forward of the smugglers to abandon their dangerous calling; his sympathy for the helpless poor induced him to give them now and then notice of his approach; he has been known to interpret the severe laws of the excise into tenderness and mercy in behalf of the widow and the fatherless. In all this he did but his duty to his country and his kind: and his conduct was so regarded by a very competent and candid judge. “Let me look at the books of Burns,” said Maxwell, of Terraughty, at the meeting of the district magistrates, “for they show that an upright officer may be a merciful one.” With a salary of some seventy pounds a year, the chance of a few guineas annually from the future editions of his poems, and the hope of rising at some distant day to the more lucrative situation of supervisor, Burns continued to live in Dumfries; first in the Bank-vennel, and next in a small house in a humble street, since called by his name.

In his earlier years the poet seems to have scattered songs as thick as a summer eve scatters its dews; nor did he scatter them less carelessly: he appears, indeed, to have thought much less of them than of his poems: the sweet song of Mary Morison, and others not at all inferior, lay unregarded among his papers till accident called them out to shine and be admired. Many of these brief but happy compositions, sometimes with his name, and oftener without, he threw in dozens at a time into Johnson, where they were noticed only by the captious Ritson: but now a work of higher pretence claimed a share in his skill: in September, 1792, he was requested by George Thomson to render, for his national collection, the poetry worthy of the muses of the north, and to take compassion on many choice airs, which had waited for a poet like the author of the Cotter’s Saturday Night, to wed them to immortal verse. To engage in such an undertaking, Burns required small persuasion, and while Thomson asked for strains delicate and polished, the poet characteristically stipulated that his contributions were to be without remuneration, and the language seasoned with a sprinkling of the Scottish dialect. As his heart was much in the matter, he began to pour out verse with a readiness and talent unknown in the history of song: his engagement with Thomson, and his esteem for Johnson, gave birth to a series of songs as brilliant as varied, and as naturally easy as they were gracefully original. In looking over those very dissimilar collections it is not difficult to discover that the songs which he wrote for the more stately work, while they are more polished and elegant than those which he contributed to the less pretending one, are at the same time less happy in their humour and less simple in their pathos. “What pleases me as simple and naive,” says Burns to Thomson, “disgusts you as ludicrous and low. For this reason ‘Fye, gie me my coggie, sirs,’ ‘Fye, let us a’ to the bridal,’ with several others of that cast, are to me highly pleasing, while ‘Saw ye my Father’ delights me with its descriptive simple pathos:” we read in these words the reasons of the difference between the lyrics of the two collections.

The land where the poet lived furnished ready materials for song: hills with fine woods, vales with clear waters, and dames as lovely as any recorded in verse, were to be had in his walks and his visits; while, for the purposes of mirth or of humour, characters, in whose faces originality was legibly written, were as numerous in Nithsdale as he had found them in the west. He had been reproached, while in Kyle, with seeing charms in very ordinary looks, and hanging the garlands of the muse on unlovely altars; he was liable to no such censure in Nithsdale; he poured out the incense of poetry only on the fair and captivating: his Jeans, his Lucys, his Phillises, and his Jessies were ladies of such mental or personal charms as the Reynolds’s and the Lawrences of the time would have rejoiced to lay out their choicest colours on. But he did not limit himself to the charms of those whom he could step out to the walks and admire: his lyrics give evidence of the wandering of his thoughts to the distant or the dead — he loves to remember Charlotte Hamilton and Mary Campbell, and think of the sighs and vows on the Devon and the Doon, while his harpstrings were still quivering to the names of the Millers and the M’Murdos — to the charms of the lasses with golden or with flaxen locks, in the valley where he dwelt. Of Jean M’Murdo and her sister Phillis he loved to sing; and their beauty merited his strains: to one who died in her bloom, Lucy Johnston, he addressed a song of great sweetness; to Jessie Lewars, two or three songs of gratitude and praise: nor did he forget other beauties, for the accomplished Mrs. Riddel is remembered, and the absence of fair Clarinda is lamented in strains both impassioned and pathetic.

But the main inspirer of the latter songs of Burns was a young woman of humble birth: of a form equal to the most exquisite proportions of sculpture, with bloom on her cheeks, and merriment in her large bright eyes, enough to drive an amatory poet crazy. Her name was Jean Lorimer; she was not more than seventeen when the poet made her acquaintance, and though she had got a sort of brevet-right from an officer of the army, to use his southron name of Whelpdale, she loved best to be addressed by her maiden designation, while the poet chose to veil her in the numerous lyrics, to which she gave life, under the names of “Chloris,” “The lass of Craigie-burnwood,” and “The lassie wi’ the lintwhite locks.” Though of a temper not much inclined to conceal anything, Burns complied so tastefully with the growing demand of the age for the exterior decencies of life, that when the scrupling dames of Caledonia sung a new song in her praise, they were as unconscious whence its beauties came, as is the lover of art, that the shape and gracefulness of the marble nymph which he admires, are derived from a creature who sells the use of her charms indifferently to sculpture or to love. Fine poetry, like other arts called fine, springs from “strange places,” as the flower in the fable said, when it bloomed on the dunghill; nor is Burns more to be blamed than was Raphael, who painted Madonnas, and Magdalens with dishevelled hair and lifted eyes, from a loose lady, whom the pope, “Holy at Rome — here Antichrist,” charitably prescribed to the artist, while he laboured in the cause of the church. Of the poetic use which he made of Jean Lorimer’s charms, Burns gives this account to Thomson. “The lady of whom the song of Craigie-burnwood was made is one of the finest women in Scotland, and in fact is to me in a manner what Sterne’s Eliza was to him — a mistress, or friend, or what you will, in the guileless simplicity of platonic love. I assure you that to my lovely friend you are indebted for many of my best songs. Do you think that the sober gin-horse routine of my existence could inspire a man with life and love and joy — could fire him with enthusiasm, or melt him with pathos, equal to the genius of your book? No! no! Whenever I want to be more than ordinary in song — to be in some degree equal to your diviner airs — do you imagine I fast and pray for the celestial emanation? Quite the contrary. I have a glorious recipe; the very one that for his own use was invented by the divinity of healing and poesy, when erst he piped to the flocks of Admetus. I put myself in a regimen of admiring a fine woman; and in proportion to the adorability of her charms, in proportion are you delighted with my verses. The lightning of her eye is the godhead of Parnassus, and the witchery of her smile, the divinity of Helicon.”

Most of the songs which he composed under the influences to which I have alluded are of the first order: “Bonnie Lesley,” “Highland Mary,” “Auld Rob Morris,” “Duncan Gray,” “Wandering Willie,” “Meg o’ the Mill,” “The poor and honest sodger,” “Bonnie Jean,” “Phillis the fair,” “John Anderson my Jo,” “Had I a cave on some wild distant shore,” “Whistle and I’ll come to you, my lad,” “Bruce’s Address to his men at Bannockburn,” “Auld Lang Syne,” “Thine am I, my faithful fair,” “Wilt thou be my dearie,” “O Chloris, mark how green the groves,” “Contented wi’ little, and cantie wi’ mair,” “Their groves of sweet myrtle,” “Last May a braw wooer came down the long glen,” “O Mally’s meek, Mally’s sweet,” “Hey for a lass wi’ a tocher,” “Here’s a health to ane I loe dear,” and the “Fairest maid on Devon banks.” Many of the latter lyrics of Burns were more or less altered, to put them into better harmony with the airs, and I am not the only one who has wondered that a bard so impetuous and intractable in most matters, should have become so soft and pliable, as to make changes which too often sacrificed the poetry for the sake of a fuller and more swelling sound. It is true that the emphatic notes of the music must find their echo in the emphatic words of the verse, and that words soft and liquid are fitter for ladies’ lips, than words hissing and rough; but it is also true that in changing a harsher word for one more harmonious the sense often suffers, and that happiness of expression, and that dance of words which lyric verse requires, lose much of their life and vigour. The poet’s favourite walk in composing his songs was on a beautiful green sward on the northern side of the Nith, opposite Lincluden: and his favourite posture for composition at home was balancing himself on the hind legs of his arm-chair.

While indulging in these lyrical nights, politics penetrated into Nithsdale, and disturbed the tranquillity of that secluded region. First, there came a contest far the representation of the Dumfries district of boroughs, between Patrick Miller, younger, of Dalswinton, and Sir James Johnstone, of Westerhall, and some two years afterwards, a struggle for the representation of the county of Kirkcudbright, between the interest of the Stewarts, of Galloway, and Patrick Heron, of Kerroughtree. In the first of these the poet mingled discretion with his mirth, and raised a hearty laugh, in which both parties joined; for this sobriety of temper, good reasons may be assigned: Miller, the elder, of Dalswinton, had desired to oblige him in the affair of Ellisland, and his firm and considerate friend, M’Murdo, of Drumlanrig, was chamberlain to his Grace of Queensbury, on whoso interest Miller stood. On the other hand, his old Jacobitical affections made him the secret well-wisher to Westerhall, for up to this time, at least till acid disappointment and the democratic doctrine of the natural equality of man influenced him, Burns, or as a western rhymer of his day and district worded the reproach — Rob was a Tory. His situation, it will therefore be observed, disposed him to moderation, and accounts for the milkiness of his Epistle to Fintray, in which he marshals the chiefs of the contending factions, and foretells the fierceness of the strife, without pretending to foresee the event. Neither is he more explicit, though infinitely more humorous, in his ballad of “The Five Carlins,” in which he impersonates the five boroughs — Dumfries, Kirkcudbright, Lochmaben, Sanquhar, and Annan, and draws their characters as shrewd and calculating dames, met in much wrath and drink to choose a representative.

But the two or three years which elapsed between the election for the boroughs, and that for the county adjoining, wrought a serious change in the temper as well as the opinions of the poet. His Jacobitism, as has been said was of a poetic kind, and put on but in obedience to old feelings, and made no part of the man: he was in his heart as democratic as the kirk of Scotland, which educated him — he acknowledged no other superiority but the mental: “he was disposed, too,” said Professor Walker, “from constitutional temper, from education and the accidents of life, to a jealousy of power, and a keen hostility against every system which enabled birth and opulence to anticipate those rewards which he conceived to belong to genius and virtue.” When we add to this, a resentment of the injurious treatment of the dispensers of public patronage, who had neglected his claims, and showered pensions and places on men unworthy of being named with him, we have assigned causes for the change of side and the tone of asperity and bitterness infused into “The Heron Ballads.” Formerly honey was mixed with his gall: a little praise sweetened his censure: in these election lampoons he is fierce and even venomous: — no man has a head but what is empty, nor a heart that is not black: men descended without reproach from lines of heroes are stigmatized as cowards, and the honest and conscientious are reproached as miserly, mean, and dishonourable. Such is the spirit of party. “I have privately,” thus writes the poet to Heron, “printed a good many copies of the ballads, and have sent them among friends about the country. You have already, as your auxiliary, the sober detestation of mankind on the heads of your opponents; find I swear by the lyre of Thalia, to muster on your side all the votaries of honest laughter and fair, candid ridicule.” The ridicule was uncandid, and the laughter dishonest. The poet was unfortunate in his political attachments: Miller gained the boroughs which Burns wished he might lose, and Heron lost the county which he foretold he would gain. It must also be recorded against the good taste of the poet, that he loved to recite “The Heron Ballads,” and reckon them among his happiest compositions.

From attacking others, the poet was — in the interval between penning these election lampoons — called on to defend himself: for this he seems to have been quite unprepared, though in those yeasty times he might have expected it. “I have been surprised, confounded, and distracted,” he thus writes to Graham, of Fintray, “by Mr. Mitchell, the collector, telling me that he has received an order from your board to inquire into my political conduct, and blaming me as a person disaffected to government. Sir, you are a husband and a father: you know what you would feel, to see the much-loved wife of your bosom, and your helpless prattling little ones, turned adrift into the world, degraded and disgraced, from a situation in which they had been respectable and respected. I would not tell a deliberate falsehood, no, not though even worse horrors, if worse can be than those I have mentioned, hung over my head, and I say that the allegation, whatever villain has made it, is a lie! To the British constitution, on Revolution principles, next after my God, I am devotedly attached. To your patronage as a man of some genius, you have allowed me a claim; and your esteem as an honest man I know is my due. To these, sir, permit me to appeal: by these I adjure you to save me from that misery which threatens to overwhelm me, and which with my latest breath I will say I have not deserved.” In this letter, another, intended for the eye of the Commissioners of the Board of Excise, was enclosed, in which he disclaimed entertaining the idea of a British republic — a wild dream of the day — but stood by the principles of the constitution of 1688, with the wish to see such corruptions as had crept in, amended. This last remark, it appears, by a letter from the poet to Captain Erskine, afterwards Earl of Mar, gave great offence, for Corbet, one of the superiors, was desired to inform him, “that his business was to act, and not to think; and that whatever might be men or measures, it was his duty to be silent and obedient.” The intercession of Fintray, and the explanations of Burns, were so far effectual, that his political offense was forgiven, “only I understand,” said he, “that all hopes of my getting officially forward are blasted.” The records of the Excise Office exhibit no trace of this memorable matter, and two noblemen, who were then in the government, have assured me that this harsh proceeding received no countenance at head-quarters, and must have originated with some ungenerous or malicious person, on whom the poet had spilt a little of the nitric acid of his wrath.

That Burns was numbered among the republicans of Dumfries I well remember: but then those who held different sentiments from the men in power, were all, in that loyal town, stigmatized as democrats: that he either desired to see the constitution changed, or his country invaded by the liberal French, who proposed to set us free with the bayonet, and then admit us to the “fraternal embrace,” no one ever believed. It is true that he spoke of premiers and peers with contempt; that he hesitated to take off his hat in the theatre, to the air of “God save the king;” that he refused to drink the health of Pitt, saying he preferred that of Washington — a far greater man; that he wrote bitter words against that combination of princes, who desired to put down freedom in France; that he said the titled spurred and the wealthy switched England and Scotland like two hack-horses; and that all the high places of the land, instead of being filled by genius and talent, were occupied, as were the high-places of Israel, with idols of wood or of stone. But all this and more had been done and said before by thousands in this land, whose love of their country was never questioned. That it was bad taste to refuse to remove his hat when other heads were bared, and little better to refuse to pledge in company the name of Pitt, because he preferred Washington, cannot admit of a doubt; but that he deserved to be written down traitor, for mere matters of whim or caprice, or to be turned out of the unenvied situation of “gauging auld wives’ barrels,” because he thought there were some stains on the white robe of the constitution, seems a sort of tyranny new in the history of oppression. His love of country is recorded in too many undying lines to admit of a doubt now: nor is it that chivalrous love alone which men call romantic; it is a love which may be laid up in every man’s heart and practised in every man’s life; the words are homely, but the words of Burns are always expressive: —

“The kettle of the kirk and state Perhaps a clout may fail in’t, But deil a foreign tinkler loon Shall ever ca’ a nail in’t. Be Britons still to Britons true, Amang ourselves united; For never but by British hands Shall British wrongs be righted.”

But while verses, deserving as these do to become the national motto, and sentiments loyal and generous, were overlooked and forgotten, all his rash words about freedom, and his sarcastic sallies about thrones and kings, were treasured up to his injury, by the mean and the malicious. His steps were watched and his words weighed; when he talked with a friend in the street, he was supposed to utter sedition; and when ladies retired from the table, and the wine circulated with closed doors, he was suspected of treason rather than of toasting, which he often did with much humour, the charms of woman; even when he gave as a sentiment, “May our success be equal to the justice of our cause,” he was liable to be challenged by some gunpowder captain, who thought that we deserved success in war, whether right or wrong. It is true that he hated with a most cordial hatred all who presumed on their own consequence, whether arising from wealth, titles, or commissions in the army; officers he usually called “the epauletted puppies,” and lords he generally spoke of as “feather-headed fools,” who could but strut and stare and be no answer in kind to retort his satiric flings, his unfriends reported that it was unsafe for young men to associate with one whose principles were democratic, and scarcely either modest or safe for young women to listen to a poet whose notions of female virtue were so loose and his songs so free. These sentiments prevailed so far that a gentleman on a visit from London, told me he was dissuaded from inviting Burns to a dinner, given by way of welcome back to his native place, because he was the associate of democrats and loose people; and when a modest dame of Dumfries expressed, through a friend, a wish to have but the honour of speaking to one of whose genius she was an admirer, the poet declined the interview, with a half-serious smile, saying, “Alas! she is handsome, and you know the character publicly assigned to me.” She escaped the danger of being numbered, it is likely, with the Annas and the Chlorises of his freer strains.

The neglect of his country, the tyranny of the Excise, and the downfall of his hopes and fortunes, were now to bring forth their fruits — the poet’s health began to decline. His drooping looks, his neglect of his person, his solitary saunterings, his escape from the stings of reflection into socialities, and his distempered joy in the company of beauty, all spoke, as plainly as with a tongue, of a sinking heart and a declining body. Yet though he was sensible of sinking health, hope did not at once desert him: he continued to pour out such tender strains, and to show such flashes of wit and humour at the call of Thomson, as are recorded of no other lyrist: neither did he, when in company after his own mind, hang the head, and speak mournfully, but talked and smiled and still charmed all listeners by his witty vivacities.

On the 20th of June, 1795, he writes thus of his fortunes and condition to his friend Clarke, “Still, still the victim of affliction; were you to see the emaciated figure who now holds the pen to you, you would not know your old friend. Whether I shall ever get about again is only known to HIM, the Great Unknown, whoso creature I am. Alas, Clarke, I begin to fear the worst! As to my individual self I am tranquil, and would despise myself if I were not: but Burns’s poor widow and half-a-dozen of his dear little ones, helpless orphans! Here I am as weak as a woman’s tear. Enough of this! ‘tis half my disease. I duly received your last, enclosing the note: it came extremely in time, and I am much obliged to your punctuality. Again I must request you to do me the same kindness. Be so very good as by return of post to enclose me another note: I trust you can do so without inconvenience, and it will seriously oblige me. If I must go, I leave a few friends behind me, whom I shall regret while consciousness remains. I know I shall live in their remembrance. O, dear, dear Clarke! that I shall ever see you again is I am afraid highly improbable.” This remarkable letter proves both the declining health, and the poverty of the poet: his digestion was so bad that he could taste neither flesh nor fish: porridge and milk he could alone swallow, and that but in small quantities. When it is recollected that he had no more than thirty shillings a week to keep house, and live like a gentleman, no one need wonder that his wife had to be obliged to a generous neighbour for some of the chief necessaries for her coming confinement, and that the poet had to beg, in extreme need, two guinea notes from a distant friend.

His sinking state was not unobserved by his friends, and Syme and M’Murdo united with Dr. Maxwell in persuading him, at the beginning of the summer, to seek health at the Brow-well, a few miles east of Dumfries, where there were pleasant walks on the Solway-side, and salubrious breezes from the sea, which it was expected would bring the health to the poet they had brought to many. For a while, his looks brightened up, and health seemed inclined to return: his friend, the witty and accomplished Mrs. Riddel, who was herself ailing, paid him a visit. “I was struck,” she said, “with his appearance on entering the room: the stamp of death was impressed on his features. His first words were, ‘Well, Madam, have you any commands for the other world?’ I replied that it seemed a doubtful case which of us should be there soonest; he looked in my face with an air of great kindness, and expressed his concern at seeing me so ill, with his usual sensibility. At table he ate little or nothing: we had a long conversation about his present state, and the approaching termination of all his earthly prospects. He showed great concern about his literary fame, and particularly the publication of his posthumous works; 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 freedom, would be handed about by vanity or malevolence when no dread of his resentment would restrain them, or prevent malice or envy from pouring forth their venom on his name. I had seldom seen his mind greater, or more collected. There was frequently a considerable degree of vivacity in his sallies; but the concern and dejection I could not disguise, damped the spirit of pleasantry he seemed willing to indulge.” This was on the evening of the 5th of July; another lady who called to see him, found him seated at a window, gazing on the sun, then setting brightly on the summits of the green hills of Nithsdale. “Look how lovely the sun is,” said the poet, “but he will soon have done with shining for me.”

He now longed for home: his wife, whom he ever tenderly loved, was about to be confined in child-bed: his papers were in sad confusion, and required arrangement; and he felt that desire to die, at least, among familiar things and friendly faces, so common to our nature. He had not long before, though much reduced in pocket, refused with scorn an offer of fifty pounds, which a speculating bookseller made, for leave to publish his looser compositions; he had refused an offer of the like sum yearly, from Perry of the Morning Chronicle, for poetic contributions to his paper, lest it might embroil him with the ruling powers, and he had resented the remittance of five pounds from Thomson, on account of his lyric contributions, and desired him to do so no more, unless he wished to quarrel with him; but his necessities now, and they had at no time been so great, induced him to solicit five pounds from Thomson, and ten pounds from his cousin, James Burness, of Montrose, and to beg his friend Alexander Cunningham to intercede with the Commissioners of Excise, to depart from their usual practice, and grant him his full salary; “for without that,” he added, “if I die not of disease, I must perish with hunger.” Thomson sent the five pounds, James Burness sent the ten, but the Commissioners of Excise refused to be either merciful or generous. Stobie, a young expectant in the customs, was both; — he performed the duties of the dying poet, and refused to touch the salary. The mind of Burns was haunted with the fears of want and the terrors of a jail; nor were those fears without foundation; one Williamson, to whom he was indebted for the cloth to make his volunteer regimentals, threatened the one; and a feeling that he was without money for either his own illness or the confinement of his wife, threatened the other.

Burns returned from the Brow-well, on the 18th of July: as he walked from the little carriage which brought him up the Mill hole-brae to his own door, he trembled much, and stooped with weakness and pain, and kept his feet with difficulty: his looks were woe-worn and ghastly, and no one who saw him, and there were several, expected to see him again in life. It was soon circulated through Dumfries, that Burns had returned worse from the Brow-well; that Maxwell thought ill of him, and that, in truth, he was dying. The anxiety of all classes was great; differences of opinion were forgotten, in sympathy for his early fate: wherever two or three were met together their talk was of Burns, of his rare wit, matchless humour, the vivacity of his conversation, and the kindness of his heart. To the poet himself, death, which he now knew was at hand, brought with it no fear; his good-humour, which small matters alone ruffled, did not forsake him, and his wit was ever ready. He was poor — he gave his pistols, which he had used against the smugglers on the Solway, to his physician, adding with a smile, that he had tried them and found them an honour to their maker, which was more than he could say of the bulk of mankind! He was proud — he remembered the indifferent practice of the corps to which he belonged, and turning to Gibson, one of his fellow-soldiers, who stood at his bedside with wet eyes, “John,” said he, and a gleam of humour passed over his face, “pray don’t let the awkward-squad fire over me.” It was almost the last act of his life to copy into his Common-place Book, the letters which contained the charge against him of the Commissioners of Excise, and his own eloquent refutation, leaving judgment to be pronounced by the candour of posterity.

It has been injuriously said of Burns, by Coleridge, that the man sunk, but the poet was bright to the last: he did not sink in the sense that these words imply: the man was manly to the latest draught of breath. That he was a poet to the last, can be proved by facts, as well as by the word of the author of Christabel. As he lay silently growing weaker and weaker, he observed Jessie Lewars, a modest and beautiful young creature, and sister to one of his brethren of the Excise, watching over him with moist eyes, and tending him with the care of a daughter; he rewarded her with one of those songs which are an insurance against forgetfulness. The lyrics of the north have nothing finer than this exquisite stanza: —

“Altho’ thou maun never be mine, Altho’ even hope is denied, ‘Tis sweeter for thee despairing, Than aught in the world beside.”

His thoughts as he lay wandered to Charlotte Hamilton, and he dedicated some beautiful stanzas to her beauty and her coldness, beginning, “Fairest maid on Devon banks.”

It was a sad sight to see the poet gradually sinking; his wife in hourly expectation of her sixth confinement, and his four helpless children — a daughter, a sweet child, had died the year before — with no one of their lineage to soothe them with kind words or minister to their wants. Jessie Lewars, with equal prudence and attention, watched over them all: she could not help seeing that the thoughts of the desolation which his death would bring, pressed sorely on him, for he loved his children, and hoped much from his boys. He wrote to his father-in-law, James Armour, at Mauchline, that he was dying, his wife nigh her confinement, and begged that his mother-in-law would hasten to them and speak comfort. He wrote to Mrs. Dunlop, saying, “I have written to you so often without receiving any answer that I would not trouble you again, but for the circumstances in which I am. An illness which has long hung about me in all probability will speedily send me beyond that bourne whence no traveller returns. Your friendship, with which for many years you honoured me, was a friendship dearest to my soul: your conversation and your correspondence were at once highly entertaining and instructive — with what pleasure did I use to break up the seal! The remembrance yet adds one pulse more to my poor palpitating heart. Farewell!” A tremor pervaded his frame; his tongue grew parched, and he was at times delirious: on the fourth day after his return, when his attendant, James Maclure, held his medicine to his lips, he swallowed it eagerly, rose almost wholly up, spread out his hands, sprang forward nigh the whole length of the bed, fell on his face, and expired. He died on the 21st of July, when nearly thirty-seven years and seven months old.

The burial of Burns, on the 25th of July, was an impressive and mournful scene: half the people of Nithsdale and the neighbouring parts of Galloway had crowded into Dumfries, to see their poet “mingled with the earth,” and not a few had been permitted to look at his body, laid out for interment. It was a calm and beautiful day, and as the body was borne along the street towards the old kirk-yard, by his brethren of the volunteers, not a sound was heard but the measured step and the solemn music: there was no impatient crushing, no fierce elbowing — the crowd which filled the street seemed conscious of what they were now losing for ever. Even while this pageant was passing, the widow of the poet was taken in labour; but the infant born in that unhappy hour soon shared his father’s grave. On reaching the northern nook of the kirk-yard, where the grave was made, the mourners halted; the coffin was divested of the mort-cloth, and silently lowered to its resting-place, and as the first shovel-full of earth fell on the lid, the volunteers, too agitated to be steady, justified the fears of the poet, by three ragged volleys. He who now writes this very brief and imperfect account, was present: he thought then, as he thinks now, that all the military array of foot and horse did not harmonize with either the genius or the fortunes of the poet, and that the tears which he saw on many cheeks around, as the earth was replaced, were worth all the splendour of a show which mocked with unintended mockery the burial of the poor and neglected Burns. The body of the poet was, on the 5th of June, 1815, removed to a more commodious spot in the same burial-ground — his dark, and waving locks looked then fresh and glossy — to afford room for a marble monument, which embodies, with neither skill nor grace, that well-known passage in the dedication to the gentlemen of the Caledonian Hunt:— “The poetic genius of my country found me, as the prophetic bard, Elijah, did Elisha, at the plough, and threw her inspiring mantle over me.” The dust of the bard was again disturbed, when the body of Mrs. Burns was laid, in April, 1834, beside the remains of her husband: his skull was dug up by the district craniologists, to satisfy their minds by measurement that he was equal to the composition of “Tam o’ Shanter,” or “Mary in Heaven.” This done, they placed the skull in a leaden box, “carefully lined with the softest materials,” and returned it, we hope for ever, to the hallowed ground.

Thus lived and died Robert Burns, the chief of Scottish poets: in his person he was tall and sinewy, and of such strength and activity, that Scott alone, of all the poets I have seen, seemed his equal: his forehead was broad, his hair black, with an inclination to curl, his visage uncommonly swarthy, his eyes large, dark and lustrous, and his voice deep and manly. His sensibility was strong, his passions full to overflowing, and he loved, nay, adored, whatever was gentle and beautiful. He had, when a lad at the plough, an eloquent word and an inspired song for every fair face that smiled on him, and a sharp sarcasm or a fierce lampoon for every rustic who thwarted or contradicted him. As his first inspiration came from love, he continued through life to love on, and was as ready with the lasting incense of the muse for the ladies of Nithsdale as for the lasses of Kyle: his earliest song was in praise of a young girl who reaped by his side, when he was seventeen — his latest in honour of a lady by whose side he had wandered and dreamed on the banks of the Devon. He was of a nature proud and suspicious, and towards the close of his life seemed disposed to regard all above him in rank as men who unworthily possessed the patrimony of genius: he desired to see the order of nature restored, and worth and talent in precedence of the base or the dull. He had no medium in his hatred or his love; he never spared the stupid, as if they were not to be endured because he was bright; and on the heads of the innocent possessors of titles or wealth he was ever ready to shower his lampoons. He loved to start doubts in religion which he knew inspiration only could solve, and he spoke of Calvinism with a latitude of language that grieved pious listeners. He was warm-hearted and generous to a degree, above all men, and scorned all that was selfish and mean with a scorn quite romantic. He was a steadfast friend and a good neighbour: while he lived at Ellisland few passed his door without being entertained at his table; and even when in poverty, on the Millhole-brae, the poor seldom left his door but with blessings on their lips.

Of his modes of study he has himself informed us, as well as of the seasons and the places in which he loved to muse. He composed while he strolled along the secluded banks of the Doon, the Ayr, or the Nith: as the images crowded on his fancy his pace became quickened, and in his highest moods he was excited even to tears. He loved the winter for its leafless trees, its swelling floods, and its winds which swept along the gloomy sky, with frost and snow on their wings: but he loved the autumn more — he has neglected to say why — the muse was then more liberal of her favours, and he composed with a happy alacrity unfelt in all other seasons. He filled his mind and heart with the materials of song — and retired from gazing on woman’s beauty, and from the excitement of her charms, to record his impressions in verse, as a painter delineates oil his canvas the looks of those who sit to his pencil. His chief place of study at Ellisland is still remembered: it extends along the river-bank towards the Isle: there the neighbouring gentry love to walk and peasants to gather, and hold it sacred, as the place where he composed Tam O’ Shanter. His favourite place of study when residing in Dumfries, was the ruins of Lincluden College, made classic by that sublime ode, “The Vision,” and that level and clovery sward contiguous to the College, on the northern side of the Nith: the latter place was his favourite resort; it is known now by the name of Burns’s musing ground, and there he conceived many of his latter lyrics. In case of interruption he completed the verses at the fireside, where he swung to and fro in his arm-chair till the task was done: he then submitted the song to the ordeal of his wife’s voice, which was both sweet and clear, and while she sung he listened attentively, and altered or amended till the whole was in harmony, music and words.

The genius of Burns is of a high order: in brightness of expression and unsolicited ease and natural vehemence of language, he stands in the first rank of poets: in choice of subjects, in happiness of conception, and loftiness of imagination, he recedes into the second. He owes little of his fame to his objects, for, saving the beauty of a few ladies, they were all of an ordinary kind: he sought neither in romance nor in history for themes to the muse; he took up topics from life around which were familiar to all, and endowed them with character, with passion, with tenderness, with humour — elevating all that he touched into the regions of poetry and morals. He went to no far lands for the purpose of surprising us with wonders, neither did he go to crowns or coronets to attract the stare of the peasantry around him, by things which to them were as a book shut and sealed: “The Daisy” grew on the lands which he ploughed; “The Mouse” built her frail nest on his own stubble-field; “The Haggis” reeked on his own table; “The Scotch Drink” of which he sang was the produce of a neighbouring still; “The Twa Dogs,” which conversed so wisely and wittily, were, one of them at least, his own collies; “The Vision” is but a picture, and a brilliant one, of his own hopes and fears; “Tam Samson” was a friend whom he loved; “Doctor Hornbook” a neighbouring pedant; “Matthew Henderson” a social captain on half-pay; “The Scotch Bard” who had gone to the West Indies was Burns himself; the heroine of “The Lament,” was Jean Armour; and “Tam O’ Shanter” a facetious farmer of Kyle, who rode late and loved pleasant company, nay, even “The Deil” himself, whom he had the hardihood to address, was a being whose eldrich croon bad alarmed the devout matrons of Kyle, and had wandered, not unseen by the bard himself, among the lonely glens of the Doon. Burns was one of the first to teach the world that high moral poetry resided in the humblest subjects: whatever he touched became elevated; his spirit possessed and inspired the commonest topics, and endowed them with life and beauty.

His songs have all the beauties and but few of them the faults of his poems: they flow to the music as readily as if both air and words came into the world together. The sentiments are from nature, they are rarely strained or forced, and the words dance in their places and echo the music in its pastoral sweetness, social glee, or in the tender and the moving. He seems always to write with woman’s eye upon him: he is gentle, persuasive and impassioned: he appears to watch her looks, and pours out his praise or his complaint according to the changeful moods of her mind. He looks on her, too, with a sculptor’s as well as a poet’s eye: to him who works in marble, the diamonds, emeralds, pearls, and elaborate ornaments of gold, but load and injure the harmony of proportion, the grace of form, and divinity of sentiment of his nymph or his goddess — so with Burns the fashion of a lady’s boddice, the lustre of her satins, or the sparkle of her diamonds, or other finery with which wealth or taste has loaded her, are neglected us idle frippery; while her beauty, her form, or her mind, matters which are of nature and not of fashion, are remembered and praised. He is none of the millinery bards, who deal in scented silks, spider-net laces, rare gems, set in rarer workmanship, and who shower diamonds and pearls by the bushel on a lady’s locks: he makes bright eyes, flushing cheeks, the magic of the tongue, and the “pulses’ maddening play” perform all. His songs are, in general, pastoral pictures: he seldom finishes a portrait of female beauty without enclosing it in a natural frame-work of waving woods, running streams, the melody of birds, and the lights of heaven. Those who desire to feel Burns in all his force, must seek some summer glen, when a country girl searches among his many songs for one which sympathizes with her own heart, and gives it full utterance, till wood and vale is filled with the melody. It is remarkable that the most naturally elegant and truly impassioned songs in our literature were written by a ploughman in honour of the rustic lasses around him.

His poetry is all life and energy, and bears the impress of a warm heart and a clear understanding: it abounds with passions and opinions — vivid pictures of rural happiness and the raptures of successful love, all fresh from nature and observation, and not as they are seen through the spectacles of books. The wit of the clouted shoe is there without its coarseness: there is a prodigality of humour without licentiousness, a pathos ever natural and manly, a social joy akin sometimes to sadness, a melancholy not unallied to mirth, and a sublime morality which seeks to elevate and soothe. To a love of man he added an affection for the flowers of the valley, the fowls of the air, and the beasts of the field: he perceived the tie of social sympathy which united animated with unanimated nature, and in many of his finest poems most beautifully he has enforced it. His thoughts are original and his style new and unborrowed: all that he has written is distinguished by a happy carelessness, a bounding elasticity of spirit, and a singular felicity of expression, simple yet inimitable; he is familiar yet dignified, careless, yet correct, and concise, yet clear and full. All this and much more is embodied in the language of humble life — a dialect reckoned barbarous by scholars, but which, coming from the lips of inspiration, becomes classic and elevated.

The prose of this great poet has much of the original merit of his verse, but it is seldom so natural and so sustained: it abounds with fine outflashings and with a genial warmth and vigour, but it is defaced by false ornament and by a constant anxiety to say fine and forcible things. He seems not to know that simplicity was as rare and as needful a beauty in prose as in verse; he covets the pauses of Sterne and the point and antithesis of Junius, like one who believes that to write prose well he must be ever lively, ever pointed, and ever smart. Yet the account which he wrote of himself to Dr. Moore is one of the most spirited and natural narratives in the language, and composed in a style remote from the strained and groped-for witticisms and put-on sensibilities of many of his letters:— “Simple,” as John Wilson says, “we may well call it; rich in fancy, overflowing in feeling, and dashed off in every other paragraph with the easy boldness of a great master.”

The Death Room of Robert Burns

St Michael’s Cemetery, Dumfries — Burns’ final resting place

Burns was buried in St. Michael’s kirkyard, Dumfries in 1796, after his early tragic death to Rheumatic Heart Fever, aged 37. His original modest grave was in the north-east corner of the old cemetery. In 1815, Burns’ remains were exhumed and transferred to a Mausoleum, constructed in the form of a Grecian temple in the same kirkyard as a more fitting and lasting memorial to the great poet.

The Mausoleum shortly after its construction

Burns’ grave