The Letters of Robert Burns
by Robert Burns · English · Gutenberg #9863 · 701,937 chars · public domain (US)
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Title: The Letters of Robert Burns
Author: Robert Burns
Release date: February 1, 2006 [eBook #9863]
Most recently updated: December 27, 2020
Language: English
Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/9863
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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE LETTERS OF ROBERT BURNS ***
Produced by Charles Franks, Debra Storr and PG Distributed Proofreaders
BURNS'S LETTERS.
THE LETTERS OF ROBERT BURNS,
SELECTED AND ARRANGED,
WITH AN INTRODUCTION,
BY J. LOGIE ROBERTSON, M.A.
_"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"_--Burns.
_"My life reminded me of a ruined temple: what strength, what proportion
in some parts! what unsightly gaps, what prostrate ruin in
others!"_--Burns.
GENERAL CORRESPONDENCE
To Ellison or Alison Begbie (?)
To Ellison Begbie
To Ellison Begbie
To Ellison Begbie
To Ellison Begbie
To his Father
To Sir John Whitefoord, Bart., of Ballochmyle
To Mr. John Murdoch, schoolmaster, Staples Inn Buildings, London
To his Cousin, Mr. James Burness, writer, Montrose
To Mr. James Burness, writer, Montrose
To Mr. James Burness, writer, Montrose
To Thomas Orr, Park, Kirkoswald
To Miss Margaret Kennedy
To Miss----, Ayrshire
To Mr. John Richmond, law clerk, Edinburgh
To Mr. James Smith, shopkeeper, Mauchline
To Mr. Robert Muir, wine merchant, Kilmarnock
To Mr. John Ballantine, banker, Ayr
To Mr. M'Whinnie, writer, Ayr
To John Arnot, Esquire, of Dalquatswood
To Mr. David Brice, shoemaker, Glasgow
To Mr. John Richmond, Edinburgh
To Mr. John Richmond
To Mr. John Kennedy
To his Cousin, Mr. James Burness, writer, Montrose
To Mrs. Stewart, of Stair
To Mr. Robert Aikin, writer, Ayr
To Dr. Mackenzie, Mauchline; inclosing him verses on dining with Lord
Daer
To Mrs. Dunlop, of Dunlop
To Miss Alexander
In the Name of the Nine. _Amen_
To James Dalrymple, Esquire, Orangefield
To Sir. John Whitefoord
To Mr. Gavin Hamilton, Mauchline
To Mr. John Ballantine, banker, at one time Provost of Ayr
To Mr. Robert Muir
To Mr. William Chambers, writer, Ayr
To the Earl of Eglinton
To Mr. John Ballantine
To Mrs. Dunlop
To Dr. Moore
To the Rev. G. Lawrie, Newmilns, near Kilmarnock
To the Earl of Buchan
To Mr. James Candlish, student in physic, Glasgow College
To Mr. Peter Stuart, Editor of "The Star," London
To Mrs. Dunlop
To Mrs. Dunlop
To Dr. Moore
To Mrs. Dunlop
To Mr. William Nicol, classical master, High School, Edinburgh
To Mr. William Nicol
To Mr. Robert Ainslie
To Mr. James Smith, Linlithgow, formerly of Mauchline
To Mr. John Richmond
To Mr. Robert Ainslie
To Dr. Moore
To Mr. Archibald Lawrie
To Mr. Robert Muir, Kilmarnock
To Mr. Gavin Hamilton
To Mr. Walker, Blair of Athole
To his Brother, Mr. Gilbert Burns, Mossgiel
To Mr. Patrick Miller, Dalswinton
To Rev. John Skinner
To Miss Margaret Chalmers, Harvieston
To Mrs. Dunlop of Dunlop House, Stewarton
To Mr. James Hoy, Gordon Castle
To the Earl of Glencairn
To Miss Chalmers
To Miss Chalmers
To Miss Chalmers
To Mr. Richard Brown, Irvine
To Mrs. Dunlop
To Mrs. Dunlop
To the Rev. John Skinner
To Mrs. Rose, of Kilravock
To Richard Brown, Greenock
To Mr. William Cruikshank
To Mr. Robert Ainslie
To Mr. Richard Brown
To Mr. Robert Muir
To Mrs. Dunlop
To Mr. William Nicol (perhaps)
To Miss Chalmers
THE CLARINDA LETTERS
GENERAL CORRESPONDENCE (RESUMED)--
To Mr. Gavin Hamilton
To Mr. William Dunbar, W.S., Edinburgh
To Mrs. Dunlop
To Mr. James Smith, Avon Printfield, Linlithgow
To Professor Dugald Stewart
To Mrs. Dunlop
To Mr. Samuel Brown, Kirkoswald
To Mr. James Johnson, engraver, Edinburgh
To Mr. Robert Ainslie
To Mrs. Dunlop
To Mrs. Dunlop, at Mr. Dunlop's, Haddington
To Mr. Robert Ainslie
To Mr. Robert Ainslie
To Mrs. Dunlop
To Mr. Peter Hill, bookseller, Edinburgh
To Mrs. Dunlop
To Mrs. Dunlop
To Mr. Beugo, engraver, Edinburgh
To Mr. Robert Graham, of Fintry
To his Wife, at Mauchline.
To Miss Chalmers, Edinburgh
To Mr. Morison, wright, Mauchline
To Mrs. Dunlop, of Dunlop
To Mr. Peter Hill
To the Editor of the "Star"
To Mrs. Dunlop, at Moreham Mains
To Dr. Blacklock
To Mrs. Dunlop
To Mr. John Tennant
To Mrs. Dunlop
To Dr. Moore, London
To Mr. Robert Ainslie
To Professor Dugald Stewart
To Mr. Robert Cleghorn, Saughton Mills
To Bishop Geddes, Edinburgh
To Mr. James Burness
To Mrs. Dunlop
To, Mrs. M'Lehose (formerly Clarinda)
To Dr. Moore
To his Brother, Mr. William Burns
To Mr. Hill, bookseller, Edinburgh
To Mrs. M'Murdo, Drumlanrig
To Mr. Cunningham
To Mr. Richard Brown
To Mr. Robert Ainslie
To Mrs. Dunlop
To Miss Helen Maria Williams
To Mr. Robert Graham, of Fintry.
To David Sillar, merchant, Irvine.
To Mr. John Logan, of Knock Shinriock
To Mr. Peter Stuart, editor, London
To his Brother, William Burns, saddler, Newcastle-on-Tyne
To Mrs. Dunlop
To Captain Riddel, Friars Carse
To Mr. Robert Ainslie, W.S.
To Mr. Richard Brown, Port-Glasgow
To Mr. R. Graham, of Fintry
To Mrs. Dunlop
To Lady Winifred M. Constable
To Mr. Charles K. Sharpe, of Hoddam
To his Brother, Gilbert Burns, Mossgiel
To Mr. William Dunbar, W.S.
To Mrs. Dunlop
To Mr. Peter Hill, bookseller, Edinburgh
To Mr. W. Nicol
To Mr. Cunningham, writer, Edinburgh
To Mr. Hill, bookseller, Edinburgh
To Mrs. Dunlop
To Dr. John Moore, London
To Mr. Murdoch, teacher of French, London
To Mr. Cunningham
To Mr. Crauford Tait, W.S., Edinburgh
To Mrs. Dunlop
To Mr. William Dunbar, W.S.
To Mr. Peter Hill
To Dr. Moore
To Mrs. Dunlop
To the Rev. Arch. Alison
To the Rev. G. Haird
To Mr. Cunningharn, writer, Edinburgh
To Mrs. Dunlop
To Mr. Cunningham
To Mr. Thomas Sloan
To Mr. Ainslie
To Miss Davies
To Mrs. Dunlop
To Mr. William Smellie, printer
To Mr. William Nicol
To Mr. Francis Grose, F.S.A
To Mrs. Dunlop
To Mr. Cunningham
To Mrs. Dunlop
To Mrs. Dunlop
To Mrs. Dunlop
To Mr. R. Graham, Fintry
To Mrs. Dunlop
To Mr. Robert Graham, of Fintry
To Mr. Alex. Cunningham, W.S., Edinbiugh
To Mr. Cunningham
To Miss Benson, York, afterwards Mrs. Basil Montagu
To Mr. John Francis Erskine, of Mar
To Miss M'Murdo, Drumlanrig
To John M'Murdo, Esq., Drumlanrig
To Mrs. Riddel
To Mrs. Riddel
To Mrs. Riddel
To Mrs. Riddel
To Mr. Cunningham
To Mrs. Dunlop
To Mr. James Johnson
To Mr. Peter Hill, Jun., of Dalswinton
To Mrs. Riddel
To Mrs. Dunlop
To Mrs. Dunlop, in London
To the Hon. The Provost, etc., of Damfries
To Mrs. Dunlop
To Mr James Johnson
To Mr. Cunningham
To Mr. Gilbert Burns
To Mrs. Burns
To Mrs. Dunlop
To Mr. James Burness, writer, Montrose
To his Father-in-law, James Armour, mason, Mauchline
THE THOMSON LETTERS
BURNS'S LETTERS.
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 _Cæsar_--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 thousand 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 Æolian
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 him[b] 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 _à propos_ of passing events, and
therefore they are forced and affected. Few are likely to be imposed
upon by such shallow reasoning. Another critic[c] 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 writer[e] 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.
[Footnote a: This is really the exposure of an absurdity.]
[Footnote b: By Jeffrey.]
[Footnote c: Dr. Hately Waddell.]
[Footnote d: See, for example, the _Cheese_ Letter to Peter Hill, or the
_Snail's-horns_ Letter to Mrs. Dunlop.]
[Footnote e: Mr. R. L. Stevenson.]
GENERAL CORRESPONDENCE.
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.
[Footnote 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.]
* * * * *
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.
* * * * *
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.
* * * * *
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.
* * * * *
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.
* * * * *
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.
[Footnote 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."]
* * * * *
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.
[Footnote 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.]
[Footnote 4: It was in June, 1782.]
* * * * *
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[5] does 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.
[Footnote 5:
"The last o't, the warst o't,
Is only for to beg."
--_First Epistle to Davie._]
[Footnote 6:
"For the glorious privilege
Of being independent."
--_Epistle to a Young Friend. _]
* * * * *
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,
[Footnote 6: The writer's uncle.]
* * * * *
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.
* * * * *
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's[6a] 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.
[Footnote 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.]
* * * * *
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
enough[7a] 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, 11_th Nov_. 1784.
[Footnote 7: Peggy Thomson.]
[Footnote 7a: Birth of his illegitimate child by Elizabeth Paton,
once a servant with his father at Lochlie.]
* * * * *
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.
[Footnote 8: Niece of Sir Andrew Cathcait, of Carleton. A melancholy
interest attaches to her subsequent history. Burns's prayers for her
happiness were unavailing.]
* * * * *
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.
[Footnote 9: Lady unidentified.]
* * * * *
XV.--TO MR. JOHN RICHMOND, LAW CLERK, EDINBURGH.[10]
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;[11a] he 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.
[Footnote 10: Three months before this letter was written Richmond
was a clerk in the office of Mr. Gavin Hamilton, writer, Mauchline.]
[Footnote 11: Fergusson's _Poems_.]
[Footnote 11a: Keeper of a haberdashery store in Mauchline.]
* * * * *
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.
[Footnote 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."]
* * * *
XVII.--TO MR. ROBERT MUIR, WINE MERCHANT, KILMARNOCK.
MOSSGIEL, 20_th 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.
* * * *
XVIII.--To MR. JOHN BALLANTINE, BANKER, AYR. (?)
[_April_ 1786.]
HONOURED SIR,--My proposals[12a] 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
paper[12c] 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.
[Footnote 12a: Proposals for publishing his Scottish Poems by
subscription.]
[Footnote 12b: Writer in Ayr.]
[Footnote 12c: The written acknowledgment of his marriage which Burns
gave to Jean. She, influenced by her father, consented to
destroy it.]
* * * *
XIX.--TO MR. M'WHINNIE, WRITER, AYR.
[MOSSGIEL, 17_th 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.
[Footnote 13: Cp. "Something cries _Hoolie! I rede ye, honest man,
tak tent, ye'll show your folly!_"]
* * * *
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.
[Footnote 14: Proposals for publishing.]
[Footnote 15: Misquoted from Shakspeare's _Henry VIII_.]
[Footnote 15a: Reference to the rejection of his acknowledgment of
marriage.]
* * * *
XXI.--To MR. DAVID BRICE, SHOEMAKER, GLASGOW.
MOSSGIEL, _June_ 12_th_, 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.
* * * *
XXII.--To MR. JOHN RICHMOND, EDINBURGH.
MOSSGIEL, 9_th 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.
[Footnote 15a: Rev. Mr. Auld--Daddie Auld.]
[Footnote 16: This accordingly he did.]
* * * *
XXIII--To MR. JOHN RICHMOND.
OLD ROME FOREST,[17] 30_th 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.
[Footnote 17: In the neighbourhood of Kilmarnock. Here he had
deposited his travelling chest in the house of a relative.]
* * * *
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.
[Footnote 18: The Kilmarnock Edition of his poems was published on
3ist July.]
* * * *
XXV.--To HIS COUSIN, MR. JAMES BURNESS, WRITER, MONTROSE.
MOSSGIEL, _Tuesday Noon_, 26_th 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.
* * * *
XXVI.-To MRS. STEWART, OF STAIR.[19]
[_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.
[Footnote 19: Mrs. Stewart, of Stair, was the first person of note to
discover in the Ayrshire ploughman a genius of the first order.]
[Footnote 20: The Bonnie Lass of Ballochmyle]
* * * *
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.
* * * *
XXVIII.--TO DR. MACKENZIE, MAUCHLINE; INCLOSING HIM VERSES ON DINING
WITH LORD DAER.
_Wednesday Morning_ [1_st 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.
[Footnote 21: Dugald Stewart, Professor of Moral Philosophy in the
University of Edinburgh.]
* * * *
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.
* * * *
XXX.--TO MISS ALEXANDER.
MOSSGIEL, 18_th Nov_. 1786.
MADAM,--Poets are such _outré_ 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.
[Footnote 22: As Depute Master of St. James's Lodge, Burns admitted
Claude Alexander, Esq., of Ballochmyle, an honorary member, in
July 1789.]
* * * *
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!
[Footnote 23: His birthday.]
[Footnote 24: Old bachelors]
* * * *
XXXII.--TO JAMES DALRYMPLE, ESQ., ORANGEFIELD.
[30_th 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.
* * * *
XXXIII.-To SIR JOHN WHITEFOORD.
EDINBURGH, 1_st 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.
[Footnote 25: From Dr. Mackenzie, Burns's friend, and medical
attendant of the family of Sir John.]
* * * *
XXXIV.--To MR, GAVIN HAMILTON, MAUCHLINE.
EDINBURGH, _Dec_. 7_th_, 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
à 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.
* * * * *
XXXV.--To MR. JOHN BALLANTINE, BANKER, AT ONE TIME PROVOST OF AYR.
EDINBURGH, 13_th 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.
[Footnote 26: A mistake for "a fortnight."]
[Footnote 27: Cunningham]
[Footnote 28: The paper here alluded to was written by Mackenzie, the
celebrated author of _The Man of Feeling_.]
* * * *
XXXVI.--TO MR. ROBERT MUIR.
EDINBURGH, _Dec_. 20_th_, 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.
* * * *
XXXVII.--TO MR. WILLIAM CHALMERS, WRITER, AYR.
EDINBURGH, _Dec_. 27_th_, 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.
* * * *
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.
* * * *
XXXIX.--TO MR. JOHN BALLANTINE.
EDINBURGH, _Jan_. 14_th_ 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.
[Footnote 29: Mrs. Carfrae, Baxter's Close, Lawnmarket, Edinburgh,
according to John Richmond, law clerk.]
* * * *
XL.--TO MRS. DUNLOP.
EDINBURGH, 15_th 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.
[Footnote 30: Stanza in the "Vision," beginning, "By stately tower or
palace fair," and ending with the first Duan.]
* * * *
XLI--TO DR. MOORE.[31]
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.
[Footnote 31: Father of the hero of Coruña, and author of _Zeluco_,
etc.]
* * * * *
XLII.--To THE REV. G. LAWRIE, NEWMILNS, NEAR KILMARNOCK.
EDINBURGH, _Feb_. 5_th_, 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.
* * * *
XLIII.-To THE EARL OF BUCHAN.[32]
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.
[Footnote 32: The Earl of Buchan was the very pink of parsimonious
patrons.--MOTHERWELL.]
* * * *
XLIV.--TO MR. JAMES CANDLISH,[33] STUDENT IN PHYSIC, GLASGOW COLLEGE.
EDINBURGH, _March_ 21_st_, 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.
[Footnote 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.]
* * * *
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."
* * * *
XLVI--TO MRS. DUNLOP.
EDINBURGH, _March_ 22_nd_, 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.
[Footnote 34: The proceeds amounted to more--some £500 or so.]
* * * *
XLVII--TO MRS. DUNLOP.
EDINBURGH, 15_th 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.
[Footnote 35: Adam Smith, the celebrated author of _The Wealth of
Nations_.]
* * * *
XLVIII.--TO DR. MOORE.
EDINBURGH, 23_rd 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.
* * * *
XLIX.--TO MRS. DUNLOP.
EDINBURGH, 30_th 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.
[Footnote 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.]
* * * *
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, weel-far'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.
[Footnote 37: Louis Cauvin, teacher of French.]
* * * *
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.
* * * * *
LII.-To MR. ROBERT AINSLIE.[38]
ARROCHAR, 28_th 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.
[Footnote 38: A young writer in Edinburgh.]
* * * * *
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.
[Footnote 39: Scotch tunes.]
* * * * *
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.
* * * *
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.
* * * *
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 à l'adorable moitié 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 personæ_ 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]
[Footnote 40: Richard Brown.]
[Footnote 41: A young poetical lady, though not a poetess.]
[Footnote 42: His Edinburgh publisher; a bookseller, afterwards Lord
Provost of the city.]
[Footnote 43: The foregoing biographical letter brings us down to
Burns's 29th year.]
* * * *
LVIL.--To MR. ARCHIBALD LAWRIE.[44]
EDINBURGH, 14_th 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 pennæ_, 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.
[Footnote 44: Son, and successor, to the minister of Loudon.]
* * * *
LVIII.--To MR. ROBERT MUIR, KILMARNOCK.
STIRLING, 26_th 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.
[Footnote 45: A shopkeeper on the North Bridge, Edinburgh.]
[Footnote 46: The wee Hughoc mentioned in "Poor Maillie."]
* * * *
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.
[Footnote 47: Step-brother, more correctly.]
[Footnote 48: This is the "Wee Curlie Johnnie" mentioned in Burns's
_Dedication to Gavin Hamilton, Esq._]
* * * *
LX.--To MR. WALKER, BLAIR OF ATHOLE.[49]
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.
[Footnote 49: Mr. Walker was tutor to the children of the Duke of
Athole. He afterwards became Professor of Humanity in the University
of Glasgow.]
[Footnote 50: The Humble Petition of Bruar Water.]
* * * *
LXI.--To His BROTHER, MR. GILBERT BURNS, MOSSGIEL.
EDINBERG, 17_th 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 throu
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