Pride and Passion: Robert Burns, 1759-1796

by J. De Lancey Ferguson

III

MEN

Burns entered on his manhood at Irvine in 1781. Before his ill-starred venture as a flax-dresser he was an aimless and inarticulately rebellious youth; after it, though he was still aimless for a time, his rebellion against the narrow world of his origin was overt and vocal. Yet even under the stimulus of Irvine he was long in finding his proper speech. When he wrote the earliest of his extant letters, Burns, already a man in years, was still a boy in mind. His self-conscious disquisitions on such high-resounding themes as Pride and Courage mark him as less mature at twenty-one than Chatterton was at sixteen; he had passed the age at which Keats died before he began to say anything worth heeding. At twenty-two, his vague aspirations momentarily focussed on the idea of establishing himself in business as a necessary prelude to matrimony, he made his sole attempt at living according to the standards of a working-day world. Materially, the attempt was an abject failure; spiritually, it set him on the direct road to realizing himself.

Knowledge of the material side of the Irvine partnership is limited to what Burns himself told in his autobiographic letter, which is not wholly reliable evidence. Not that Burns intentionally coloured the facts. The safest rule in reading his letters is to take it for granted that if he said a thing about himself it was true; if he said a thing about someone else, he believed it to be true. But to his passionate temperament and ‘skinless sensibility’ (the phrase is his own) anyone through whom he suffered loss or humiliation became almost automatically a villain of the blackest. Hence his charges that Peacock, his Irvine partner, ‘was a scoundrel of the first water, who made money by the mystery of thieving’, need not be taken literally. Burns, a complete greenhorn at business, may possibly have been taken in by an unscrupulous rascal, but it is equally possible that Burns in retrospect blamed Peacock for a failure in which they were both at fault. In any case, the business side of these months influenced Burns’s future only as it convinced him of his unfitness for ‘the little chicaning art of bargain-making’. What really mattered were the new friends, and the new ideas of himself and his place in the world inspired by these friends and by the introspection resulting from ill-health.

Chief of the new friends was the sailor, Richard Brown, whom Burns looked up to as a junior schoolboy looks to the athletic senior. Brown was about the poet’s age, but had all the worldly experience Burns lacked. He was better educated than most seamen of his day, though perhaps his story of having been patronized by a wealthy man who promised to set him up in life was only another sailor’s yarn. He had at any rate abilities of a sort. An incompetent man could not have become the master of a West Indiaman while still in his twenties. But in 1781 that promotion was still to win. Brown just then was down on his luck. His ship had recently been captured by an American privateer, and he had been put ashore on the coast of Connaught with nothing but his life and the clothes he wore. Nevertheless the friendship with Burns probably began with something of patronage on Brown’s part. The experienced, far-travelled, and distinctly hard-boiled sailor was interested in the awkward, stoop-shouldered country lad who in company alternated between sullen silence and—if he felt himself at ease—unusually vivid and copious speech. Obviously Brown realized that there was something in him; obviously also he took pleasure in enlightening him as to the ways of the world. Burns saw in Brown ‘every noble, manly virtue’ and strove to imitate him. Burns was already proud; Brown taught his pride to flow in proper channels—whatever that may mean. But Brown also was the only man the poet ever met who was a bigger fool than himself where women were concerned. The various goddesses by whom Burns’s tinder heart was continually lighted up still roused a hobbledehoy calf-love, as adolescent as his hero-worship of the sailor. Brown taught him that direct action might usually be counted on to bring results, and here, as Burns later admitted, the friendship did him a mischief.

Yet Brown was something more than a hard-boiled sailor initiating a green youngster. One Sunday afternoon the pair took a walking trip to Eglinton Wood, where under the inspiring influence of a spot associated with the memory of Sir William Wallace Burns confided to his mentor that he occasionally tried to write poetry. He was already poet enough to have a copy in his pocket. Brown listened, and declared that verses of such merit ought to be sent to a magazine. It was actually this, Burns recorded long afterwards, that first gave him the idea that he might amount to something as a poet. It was one thing to have one’s verses praised by a rural maiden like Nellie Kilpatrick or by one’s own admiring family; it was quite another to have them endorsed by a man of the world. Unfortunately Burns failed to name the poem Brown commended. At a guess it may well have been the two somewhat bawdy stanzas beginning ‘I murder hate by field or flood’, Andrew Dunlop’s manuscript of which was headed, ‘On the great Recruiting in the year 17— during the American war’. Burns had no motive for mystifying Dunlop; hence the date of these stanzas can scarcely be later than 1781, and Brown would have been more likely to applaud such lines than the conventional religious pieces more or less contemporary with them.

The good as well as the ill of Brown’s friendship belongs to the six or eight months at Irvine. If the friends met during the next four or five years, no references to their intercourse survive. When the Kilmarnock Poems were published, Brown received the only inscribed presentation copy on record, and in December, 1787, the two began a correspondence which lasted for a couple of years in the intervals of Brown’s voyages. Their only recorded meeting, however, was in Glasgow in February, 1788, when the poet told Brown all about Jean Armour. Burns’s last letter, in November, 1789, in reply to a complaint about his silence, is as cordial as ever, yet the friendship ended. According to tradition, Burns’s charge about Brown’s moral influence had reached the sailor, now a married man with a steadily improving position to maintain and far from eager to be reminded that he had heard the chimes at midnight. After Brown’s death, the presentation copy was found hidden away in the back of an old sideboard. The sailor was not the only friend who in later years wanted to live down his associations with the poet. The descendants of John Wilson concealed for more than a century the fact that instead of resenting ‘Death and Dr. Hornbook’ he appealed to Burns for help when his position as schoolmaster at Tarbolton became intolerable. On the other hand, James Humphry of Mauchline continued till his dying day to boast that he was ‘Burns’s bletherin’ bitch’.

During the same months in which Brown was stirring Burns to a new self-confidence his health was producing opposite effects. Throughout his life his diseased heart reacted unfavourably to nervous stress; the Irvine experience was the first of many. Realization of his bad bargain with Peacock combined with the unaccustomed strain of dusty indoor labour to bring on a period of ‘hypochondria’—in other words, nervous depression resulting from defective heart-action. Its tangible results were such lachrymose verses as the ‘Prayer in the Prospect of Death’ and the letter to his father in which he announces that he is ‘quite transported at the thought that ere long, perhaps very soon, I shall bid an eternal adiew to all the pains, and uneasiness, and disquietudes of this weary life; for I assure you I am heartily tired of it.’ The letter is not merely morbid, it is adolescent; and Mrs. Carswell has noted that the solemn announcement that ‘I am not formed for the bustle of the busy nor the flutter of the Gay’ is cribbed verbatim from The Man of Feeling. William Burnes, however, probably regarded it as admirable proof that his son was beginning to take serious views of religion and life. In any case it represents only a passing mood of ill-health. The important fact about the Irvine days is that Burns was considering seriously his own abilities and his future position.

The partnership had at least the merit of a dramatic and even spectacular finish. A New Year’s Eve celebration, whatever it may have done for Burns, brought his partner and his wife to such a state of drunkenness that they knocked over a lamp and set fire to the shop. The place was completely burned out, and after a month or two Burns returned to Lochlie poorer than he went, but with a rich store of experiences, a new outlook on life, and a mature confidence in himself which he had never before possessed. But he still lacked an aim. For another four years the pride which Brown had taught to flow in proper channels was still to display itself mainly in obscure rebellion against his lot in life, and in anything but obscure defiance of the unco guid.

The situation confronting him at home would in any event have matured him, but without Irvine it might have been in a different way. Firmly convinced as always of his own justice and rectitude—a conviction which he imparted with equal vigour to his eldest son—William Burnes was closing his long series of misfortunes in a violent contest with his landlord, David M’Lure. The dispute had begun in a difference over their respective shares of the expenses of liming and fencing the farm and erecting new buildings. Pending arbitration of the case, William Burnes had held up payment of his rent. In September, 1782, the matter was submitted to James Grieve of Boghead and Charles Norval of Coilsfield—chosen respectively by M’Lure and Burnes—for adjudication. When they were unable to agree, John Hamilton of Sundrum was chosen as ‘Oversman’ or referee. Not until August, 1783, did Hamilton complete his analysis of the accounts and hand down his decision, which was that of £775 claimed by M’Lure, £543 was offset by credits for improvements made by Burnes, part payments on rent, and other items. But before this decision was rendered M’Lure, whose estates were heavily mortgaged to the defunct Douglas and Heron Bank, and who desperately needed cash, had tried to force payment by entering a sequestration on the stock and crops of Lochlie. By the time John Hamilton reported, M’Lure was so deep in debt that it was uncertain whether the rent belonged to him or to his creditors. Thereupon indomitable William Burnes carried the case to the Court of Session at Edinburgh. His first petition being thrown out on a technicality, he renewed it, and at last, on January 27, 1784, less than three weeks before his death, won his case. He had had the cash on hand to deposit with the court, when he made his appeal, the whole amount due; the decision absolved him of further responsibility in the matter, and summoned the various claimants to bring in their claims for adjudication. William Burnes had vindicated himself; his view of his obligations had been upheld by the highest court in the land. All that it had cost him was the last of his money and the last of his strength. He was not an old man, but the long struggle for livelihood, culminating in the protracted lawsuit, made him the easier prey to tuberculosis. His conviction of his own rightness, like his irascibility, grew stronger as his body weakened, and mingled with his wrath at M’Lure was anxiety, bluntly expressed, over Robert’s growing defiance of Presbyterian decorum.

In calmer circumstances, his father’s displeasure would have weighed heavily on the poet’s mind, but now he was looking beyond it. Watching their father’s sinking health, the children were consulting with each other about their future. The end of Lochlie could not be long delayed: death would evict them, because after the litigation none of the claimants to the property was likely to give them a renewal of the lease. Though Robert subsequently gave Gilbert the credit of being a full partner in the next undertaking, he probably was not. It is difficult to imagine the timid and subservient Gilbert taking the lead in anything. Not long after returning from Irvine Burns had made the acquaintance of a prosperous Mauchline lawyer named Gavin Hamilton, who may have been attracted to the young farmer by reports of his outspoken ridicule of the Old Lights in the Kirk. Hamilton being also a Mason, they doubtless met first in the fellowship of square and compass. The lawyer, already in hot water with his more orthodox neighbours, may also have realized the potential value of Burns’s wit in the impending contests, but whatever his motives it was Hamilton who suggested to William Burnes’s children a practical and legal way out of their trouble.

Several years before, Hamilton had rented Mossgiel farm, about three miles from Mauchline, and had rebuilt the cottage as a country retreat. The plan of being gentleman farmer as well as lawyer had palled, and Hamilton now offered to sublet Mossgiel to Robert and Gilbert at a lower rental—£90 a year for 118 acres—than they were paying at Lochlie. The lease was quietly signed at Martinmas, 1783, it being apparent by that time that William Burnes had not many weeks to live. Secrecy was necessary; the Court of Session had not yet rendered its decision, and their action, if it became known, might be unfavourably construed. Whatever small savings had not gone for legal expenses were invested in the new enterprise, and Hamilton pointed out a loop-hole through which the children might salvage something after their father’s death. Robert and Gilbert were already credited with the regular wages of labourers. Let the other children also get themselves ranked as employees on the farm. Then they could enter claims for unpaid wages against their father’s estate, thereby becoming preferred creditors who must be paid in full before M’Lure or his mortgagors got anything. The scheme worked. Enough was saved from the wreck to enable the family, shaken and desperately poor—when the youngest boy, John, died in November, 1785, they could not raise the few shillings to pay for the best mortcloth at his funeral—to re-establish their household at Mossgiel, intact except for its head.

The new head was Robert, and in the months that followed his father’s death the full results of his Irvine lessons showed for the first time. In the two intervening years he had been too much oppressed with labour and anxiety to have time or inclination to show the new spirit in all its fullness, though he had shown enough to disturb his father. Now he was free, and the fruits of his freedom were varied and not always edifying. The earnest young debater of the Tarbolton Bachelors’ Club and the self-conscious author of essay-letters gave place to Rab Mossgiel. Burns became the focus for a group of reckless youngsters, most of them younger than himself, who looked up to him much as he had looked up to Richard Brown three years before. Foremost in the group were John Richmond and James Smith, both of them full of the animal high spirits which so often disguise the basic commonplaceness of young minds. Along with Burns they set out to scandalize the orthodox, and succeeded. By the end of 1785 Richmond and Smith, like Burns, had mounted the cutty-stool for fornication, and Richmond had fled from the turmoil to the comparative sanctuary of an Edinburgh lawyer’s office.

These cronies are chiefly noteworthy as evidence of Burns’s still uncritical mind. As with Bob Ainslie later, there was really nothing to them except youthful exuberance. Their laughter was the ready chorus for Burns’s wit; his sparkle made them shine with a reflected light to which they actually contributed little. By comparison the poor poetaster, Davie Sillar of the Tarbolton Bachelors, was almost a genius. In his characterization of Tarbolton townsfolk Sillar left behind him at least one quotable phrase, which is more than any of the Mauchline group did. They cannot be charged with leading Burns astray—if any leading was needed Burns supplied it—and their biographical importance is negligible except as they gave him an outlet for confidences which might not otherwise have been recorded. When Burns went to Edinburgh he lodged with Richmond during his first winter; during the second winter Richmond was in Mauchline a good part of the time. Burns’s last extant letters to him reveal some details about Jean Armour and her children, but lack the enthusiasm of the ones written in 1786. Smith left Mauchline to engage in calico-printing at Linlithgow. Failing there, he fled to the West Indies and died obscurely, as Burns came so near doing. Both friendships were spent and empty before the correspondence closed. The contrast between the mediocre abilities of the two men and the quality of the poetry they evoked from Burns is even more remarkable than the disparity between the illiterate farm-lasses of Tarbolton and Mauchline and the lyrics Burns addressed to them.

By the time he was twenty-six Burns’s status among people of his own rank was firmly established. He was the unquestioned leader of the reckless young; the welcome companion of ribald and unorthodox elders. The attitude toward him of the staid and sober ranged from sad head-shaking to violent denunciation. With people of rank above his own, however, he was still uneasy. Hamilton was probably the first man of the professional class with whom he formed a genuine friendship. John Mackenzie, the Mauchline surgeon who attended William Burnes in his last illness, remembered that on first visiting Lochlie he found Gilbert frank, modest, well-informed, and communicative, the father revealing the remains of an able mind beneath the cloud of illness and distress, and the mother quiet, sagacious, and self-possessed. But Burns sat glowering in a dark corner, ‘distant, suspicious, and without any wish to interest or please’; scrutinizing Mackenzie and obviously prepared to resent any display of superiority or patronage. As the doctor showed himself affable Burns gradually thawed. Though the written records of the friendship are meagre, Burns plainly liked and trusted Mackenzie, and Mackenzie reciprocated. From the time of their first meeting, the doctor declared, ‘I took a lively interest in Robert Burns, and, before I was acquainted with his poetical power, I perceived that he possessed very great mental abilities, an uncommon, fertile and lively imagination, a thorough acquaintance with many of our Scottish poets, and an enthusiastic admiration of Ramsay and Fergusson. I have always thought that no person could have a just idea of the extent of Burns’s talents who had not an opportunity to hear him converse. His discrimination of character was great beyond that of any person I ever knew....’ The surgeon introduced Burns as a poet to his own friend and patron, Sir John Whitefoord, who had previously known of the young farmer only as an earnest member of St. James’s Lodge; he also gave an introduction to Captain Andrew Erskine of Edinburgh, Boswell’s friend, and claimed to have been the first to bring the Kilmarnock Poems to the attention of Hugh Blair. It was to Mackenzie and not to Gavin Hamilton that Burns turned for very practical help in the stormy weeks preceding his final acknowledgement of his marriage to Jean Armour, and when Mackenzie provided Jean and her lover with quarters in his own house he must have faced a weight of criticism from the embattled saints and gossips of the village that would have daunted many a man with a professional status to maintain.

The pride which Richard Brown had taught to flow in proper channels was becoming all the more touchy as Burns’s confidence in himself increased. Sure of himself now among his equals, he was still resentfully helpless when superiors rubbed in their superiority. He had come as far as he could in his merely social capacity; what carried him the rest of the way was his poetry. Here Gavin Hamilton more or less unwittingly took the lead in introducing Burns to a new world. The Kirk Session of Mauchline, seeking to re-establish the old-time rigours of the Scottish Sabbath, had decided for once to make an example of a prominent citizen instead of an obscure one. Accordingly in the summer of 1784 Hamilton was summoned to stand trial for various ecclesiastical crimes such as absenting himself from church, habitually neglecting family worship, and causing a servant to dig new potatoes on a Sunday. On being convicted, Hamilton promptly appealed his case to the Presbytery of Ayr, and ultimately won it. How Burns intervened with ‘The Twa Herds’ has already been told. His authorship of that poem and its successors was soon avowed as the manuscripts passed from hand to New Light hand amid roars of Homeric laughter. People and institutions accustomed to taking themselves and being taken by others with the most intense seriousness are helpless in the face of mirth. Burns had found the one weapon which the orthodox could not withstand, though they could, and did, revenge themselves on the author of their humiliation. The fury generated by his satires did as much as, or more than, the odium of his personal sins to make Mauchline so unbearable that by 1786 Burns was ready to flee to Jamaica.

But if his satires made the village too hot for him they were also the direct means of enabling him to escape both from the village and from the ranks of the peasantry. One of the first friends to whom Hamilton showed ‘The Twa Herds’ was another lawyer, Robert Aiken of Ayr, who conducted and won Hamilton’s case before the Presbytery. Hamilton, apart from the conviviality almost inseparable from a man of his profession in eighteenth-century Scotland, was cool and businesslike. Aiken was emotional and enthusiastic, a good forensic reader and speaker, and an easy prey to sentiment. Pathos, in life or in a poem, suffused his eyes with tears and set the buttons popping on his tight waistcoat. But, like the more famous Man of Feeling, Henry Mackenzie, Aiken seldom in daily life permitted sentiment to overcloud common sense. Along with his fellow townsman, John Ballantine the banker, the lawyer soon became the poet’s confidant and chief literary adviser. ‘Orator Bob’ lost no opportunity of reading his young friend’s verses aloud, with such expression that Burns later declared he had never fully appreciated his own work until he heard Aiken read it. As the poet’s troubles thickened in the early months of 1786 it was with Aiken and Ballantine that he discussed both his plans for emigration and his arrangements for publishing his poems, their decision as to what ought to be included in the Kilmarnock volume apparently being final. Though Aiken’s action, as James Armour’s legal adviser, in cancelling whatever ‘lines’ Burns had given Jean, caused a momentary chill, the lawyer soon proved that his professional conduct did not interfere with his private friendships. He obtained 145 subscriptions for the Kilmarnock Poems—nearly one-fourth of the entire edition. Even amid the excitement of his first dazzling fame in Edinburgh Burns recalled with a glow of affection the kindly patronage of Aiken and Ballantine, and long after he had quitted Ayrshire forever he continued from time to time to send them new poems which he thought they might like. As late as 1791 he was still gratefully remembering Ballantine’s part in handing him ‘up to the “Court of the Gentiles” in the temple of Fame’—a figure of speech which combined neatness and literal accuracy. It was only to the outer court—that of the bourgeoisie and minor gentry—that Aiken and Ballantine were able to conduct him.

The association with Hamilton fared worse. Poetry, except in the form of humour and satire, did not, it would seem, appeal to Hamilton as it did to Aiken, and between him and Burns was always the barrier of their business relation as landlord and tenant. Ultimately, indeed, a matter of business estranged them. In the spring of 1788, nearly two years after Gilbert Burns had become the sole lessee of Mossgiel, Hamilton apparently asked Burns to become his brother’s surety. The poet, who was lending Gilbert nearly half the proceeds of the Edinburgh Poems, declined to commit himself any further:

‘The language of refusal is to me the most difficult language on earth, and you are the man of the world, excepting One of R^t Hon^ble designation [i. e., Lord Glencairn], to whom it gives me the greatest pain to hold such language.... I never wrote a letter which gave me so much pain in my life, as I know the unhappy consequences: I shall incur the displeasure of a Gentleman for whom I have the highest respect, and to whom I am deeply oblidged.’

The foreboding was justified. After that reluctant refusal, Burns’s relations with his former landlord never regained their old cordiality.

In his contacts with Aiken, Ballantine, Hamilton, and certain of the New Light clergy Burns had, by the spring of 1786, taken a further step in the realization of his own capacities. He found himself quite at ease, at least in male company, among members of the professional class to whom as a lad he had looked up with awe. He was discovering, moreover, that he was not their inferior in native ability. Though he did not know it then, he had in fact reached as high a level as he was ever to maintain in Scottish society. These lesser gentry not only received him, but treated him as an equal. The higher gentry—people of estates and pedigrees—the higher professional classes, and the nobility, might receive him for a time, but always with a latent condescension. Sooner or later, even with Mrs. Dunlop, even with Robert Riddell, some incident would reveal that their feeling toward him was after all de haut en bas. The friends whom he kept among men of social and professional standing, from Aiken and Ballantine at the beginning of his career to Alexander Findlater and John Syme at its close, were gentlemen, were men of education, but they were not, in Burns’s favourite capitalized phrase, Great People.

But in the summer and autumn of 1786 it seemed there might be no limit to Burns’s social advancement. As he went about the country during August and September, collecting the subscriptions for his poems, the parish outcast of a few months earlier found himself everywhere courted and applauded. New acquaintances and old united to draw him out, and the bolder his remarks the better they liked them. But he was still capable of awe. In October came an invitation to dine on the 23rd at Catrine House, country home of Dugald Stewart, Professor of Moral Philosophy in Edinburgh University. The company included Basil William, Lord Daer, the flighty and consumptive but liberal-minded son and heir of the Earl of Selkirk. In an amusing set of verses Burns described how, at the prospect of meeting a peer for the first time, his knees shook as he sidled into the Professor’s drawing-room, and he reverted to his old trick of watching from a corner until he had taken the measure of the company. The incident is worth mentioning because it was probably the last time Burns was ever unsure of himself in society. In later months and years he was often irritated and uncomfortable when members of the upper classes emphasized their elevation, but such feelings were the reverse of awe. Two months after the dinner at Catrine he was meeting professors and peers by the dozen instead of the brace, and was maintaining not merely self-possession but critical appraisal.

Burns’s standards of social intercourse, as of so many other things, were firmly established before the surviving records become full enough for detailed study. They were as honest and straight-forward as the rest of his dealings. Except for the brief embarrassment of a first meeting, rank as such meant nothing to him. What he demanded, and all he demanded, of any man was, in his own phrase, that he have something to him. That something must be native; a matter of mind and personality, not of social place. A Souter Johnie was better company than a Hugh Blair, because the cobbler’s wit and wisdom were the product of native shrewdness dealing with first-hand experience; the professor’s attainments were ‘meerly an astonishing proof what industry and application can do’. To his cultured friends, Burns seemed to have a perverse taste for low company, whereas his real quest was genuine company. His own unbridled wit and tempestuous emotions naturally made him gravitate towards other similarly endowed people, who too often were not pillars of society, but this was not his reason for choosing them. When a pillar of society bore himself ‘to all the Actors, high and low, in the drama of Life, simply as they merited in playing their parts’, and excelled in telling a story—in other words, when the pillar was Dugald Stewart—Burns enjoyed his company as much as John Rankine’s or Willie Nicol’s. Nor was wit or waggishness necessarily demanded. Grave wisdom Burns could relish as well as gay, though not in every mood; what he could never endure was dullness, pomposity, or conceit.

As the autumn of 1786 wore on, new friends and old agreed that the success of the Kilmarnock Poems should make Burns abandon his flight to Jamaica. He ought to publish a second edition in Edinburgh and then settle down, either on a farm of his own, or—as Aiken suggested—in the Excise service. The poet would find plenty of friends to help him win a hearing, and publishing in the capital would give him a national instead of a local audience. Burns must have made up his mind immediately after his dinner with Dugald Stewart. Among his new friends was Alexander Dalziel, steward of the Renfrewshire estates of the Earl of Glencairn. On November 1 Dalziel wrote to congratulate Burns on abandoning the West Indian venture and to tell him that he had showed the Poems to the Earl himself. The Earl bought a copy, which he had richly bound, and expressed warm interest in the poems and their author.

Thus began Burns’s most successful acquaintance with a peer—the only association of the sort which did not sooner or later end in apathy on one side and humiliation on the other. Though the circumstances of Burns’s earliest introduction to Edinburgh society are obscure, the obscurity is lightened if we take at face value the poet’s repeated statements that he owed everything to Glencairn—that the Earl, as he put it, took him by the hand and led him up to fame. Burns afterwards said that he went to the city without letters of introduction, but that can have been true only in the narrowest sense. Dalziel certainly apprised Glencairn of Burns’s plans, as Dr. Mackenzie apprised Sir John Whitefoord and Andrew Erskine, and as the Rev. George Lawrie of Loudoun apprised the blind poet, Thomas Blacklock. Dugald Stewart also must have known of the decision. Within a week of his arrival, Burns was the lion of the Edinburgh season. Many new friends must have contributed to such immediate success, but the poet’s emphasis on Glencairn’s kindness marks the Earl as the man who secured the patronage of the fashionable Caledonian Hunt, and probably also as his sponsor in Masonic society.

All this the Earl succeeded in doing without offending the touchy poet by condescension, though Burns’s pride sometimes suffered because of Glencairn’s deference to people of superior rank. Once, indeed, Burns was ‘within half a point’ of throwing down his ‘gage of contemptuous defiance’ because the Earl was giving too much attention to a wealthy dunderpate, but even then he was quickly reassured as to Glencairn’s sincere good wishes. Touchiness aside, Burns’s position in Edinburgh recalls Benjamin Franklin’s at Versailles a decade before. In each place the fashionable world thought it had discovered a child of nature; in each place the newcomer had really a shrewder mind and a quicker penetration of character and motive than most of the élite who patronized him. The contrast between Burns’s attitude toward Glencairn and toward his fellow peer, the Earl of Buchan, shows how thoroughly the poet had learned to take men’s measure regardless of rank. Buchan also had professed great interest in Burns and was lavish with advice, but Burns recognized the man as an egotistical windbag and received his advice with an elaborate irony of compliment which would have betrayed itself to anyone less conceited than the busybody who once, when Sir Walter Scott lay ill, volunteered to arrange his funeral, and who, when he himself had written some amazingly bad verses, accepted as a tribute John Taylor’s publication of them in a part of The Scots Magazine ‘distinct from the mass of vulgar poetry’.

Nevertheless, Burns’s deference to Glencairn had unfortunate results. In securing William Creech, his brother’s former tutor, as Burns’s publisher, Glencairn thought he was doing the best possible good turn. Yet the outcome was months of vexation and delay for the poet, and the loss of all profits from later editions of his poems. Moreover, the poet had soberly decided that his best hope for a livelihood lay in securing an Excise post which would support him while he banked his profits as a reserve fund for his children. But Glencairn, like Mrs. Dunlop and other gentry whose knowledge of the lives of tenant farmers was limited to the quarterly receipt of their rents, was all for the poet’s investing his capital in a farm of his own. Disapproving of the Excise scheme, Glencairn would do nothing to forward it, though a word from him in the right place—that is, in the ears of Henry Dundas—would have procured Burns the appointment he sought. As it was, all hints fell dead, while meantime Patrick Miller dangled the bait of Ellisland. When at last Burns interested a man willing to help the Excise plan, the mischief was already done; he was committed to the undertaking which swallowed all his little capital. The best intentions of his would-be patrons kept turning to evil for Burns; even Glencairn’s gift of a diamond-pointed pencil made trouble by supplying the poet with the means of inscribing blazing indiscretions on window-panes.

Burns observed the rest of the Edinburgh gentry and literati as closely as he did Glencairn and Buchan. He was measuring himself and his native ability against them, and was not inclined to award himself second place. But he was not comfortable with most of them. Even if they did not offend him by overt condescension he was fully aware that they received him only because he was the fad of the moment. When the novelty staled he could not hope to continue many friendships in exalted quarters. The tide of popularity had swept him higher than he could expect to remain; its ebb might leave him stranded far lower than he deserved. It was not long, indeed, before his hosts began to find things to criticize. Burns not only said what he thought, he said it with an emphasis they found unbecoming in a man of peasant birth. The great Doctor Johnson could be as gruff as he pleased with his Scottish hosts because he was Johnson; Lord Braxfield could roar and Lord Kames rave, both bawdy, in a gentleman’s home because they were Lords of Session; for Burns to express emphatic opinions argued a lack of the humility which beseemed a ploughman entertained by his betters.

The fact was that Burns lacked both the finesse which would have enabled him neatly and inoffensively to deal with snubs, and the insensitive egotism which could have ignored them. No one could snub the Ettrick Shepherd, because his magnificent self-esteem made it impossible for him to see any remark in anything but a complimentary light. One did not safely snub Charles Kirkpatrick Sharpe, because that wasp could sting. Burns’s pride, unfortunately, not only made him sensitive; it made him aggressive and heavy-handed. When he flaunted the blue-and-buff of the Whigs he was going out of his way to assert his independence among people who were mostly Tories; when he told a lady, who had not waited an introduction before inviting him to her party, that he would come if she would also invite the learned pig from the Grassmarket, he was making a show of himself in one way in the very act of resenting being made a show in another. The consciousness that he was acting a part—whether behaving like a country bumpkin in Smellie’s printing-house, or posing as the Bard of Nature in drawing-rooms—no doubt partly explains some of his more violent outbursts. Thus when he demolished a clergyman, whose niggling criticisms of Gray had goaded him beyond endurance, with the Johnsonian thunderbolt, ‘Sir, I now perceive a man may be an excellent judge of poetry by square and rule, and after all be a damned blockhead!’ the victim was probably drawing all the electric tension which had been accumulating in the poet’s nerves through a long series of irritations and repressions. But such things did him no good in Edinburgh society.

It was not that his manners were worse than gentlemen’s. In some respects they were probably better. ‘Swearing,’ Henry Cockburn dryly records, ‘was thought the right, and the mark, of a gentleman. And, tried by this test, nobody, who had not seen them, could now be made to believe how many gentlemen there were.’ Boswell’s long-suffering wife, Margaret Montgomerie, took her husband to task for his loud and abusive manner of asserting himself in argument, and Boswell admitted to his journal that she was right. Benjamin Franklin remarked that Edinburgh was the only place he knew where violent disputatiousness was not confined to lawyers and university men. But when a mere peasant exhibited, in however mild a form, the traits of the gentry, he was forgetting his place, and should be put back in it.

Moreover, Burns quickly realized that these gentry scorned the national tradition which was his life-blood. If they did not all, like Dr. John Moore, urge him henceforth to write in standard English, they at least made it plain that a Scots poet could not aspire to literary equality with Dr. Beattie and Dr. Blair. Robert Fergusson was a regrettable scamp whom Edinburgh preferred to forget; Burns erected, at his own expense, a monument to Fergusson, and insisted, in speech and writing, on praising the dead poet and heaping scorn on the gentry who had let him starve. The place where Burns, after the first few weeks, really enjoyed himself in Edinburgh and where he made most of his intimate and lasting friendships, was among the Crochallan Fencibles. This was one of the numerous clubs in which lawyers and merchants carried on the old convivial traditions of their city. Edinburgh clubs were ancient institutions which arrayed bibulous functions in ceremonials ranging from the harmless High Jinks described by Scott in Guy Mannering to almost psychopathic debauchery in such an organization as the Wig Club. They were, in fact, along with the Freemasons, the ancestors both of the American fraternal orders and of the Rotary and Kiwanis Clubs. In the more elaborately organized groups each officer, and sometimes every member, had a special title. Thus each member in Allan Ramsay’s Easy Club took the name of an old Scottish writer; in the Cape Club, to which Robert Fergusson belonged, each member was a Knight Companion of the Cape, with tides like Sir Cape, Sir Brimstone, Sir Precenter (Fergusson himself), Sir Nun and Abbess, and Sir Pope. The Fencibles went in for military designations. William Smellie, the gruff, slovenly, and erudite printer who was handling the Edinburgh edition of the Poems, as Adjutant of the corps introduced the poet. Burns’s publisher, Creech, proved a social disappointment as well as a financial disaster; his printer was a man after his own heart, an ‘old Veteran in Genius, Wit and Bawdry’. Smellie, like Burns, concealed an inward diffidence and sensitivity beneath an aggressive manner; like Burns, too, he was self-educated. The poet was not far wrong in describing him as ‘a man positively of the first abilities and greatest strength of mind, as well as one of the best hearts and keenest wits that I have met with.’ He had displayed his intellectual power in his Philosophy of Natural History, long regarded as a standard work, and in writing large sections of the original Encyclopædia Britannica; his wit he reserved for conversation, where, like Burns’s, it allowed no considerations of reverence or prudery to stand in its way. Despite his rough exterior, he was able to captivate an intelligent woman of the world like Maria Riddell, as well as the ebullient poet. But the records of this friendship were too much for Smellie’s squeamish executors; his biographer piously relates that ‘many letters of Burns to Mr. Smellie which remained, being totally unfit for publication, and several of them containing severe reflections on many respectable people still in life, have been burnt.’

The records of another friendship which had its start among the Edinburgh bookmen fared better. Peter Hill, five years the poet’s senior, was in 1787 a clerk in Creech’s shop, but was soon to set up in business for himself and prove a kindly and indulgent master to an apprentice named Archibald Constable. Hill’s was one of the few friendships Burns made in Edinburgh which suffered no abatement with time. From the summer of 1787, when Hill was handling some of the innumerable details of business relating to the Edinburgh Poems, until the beginning of 1796, when Burns sent his ‘annual’ gift of a kippered salmon from the Nith, their association was unclouded. Hill supplied the poet with books, sent presents to his family, and took care of miscellaneous business errands in the city. Burns secured for Hill the book-orders, first of the Monkland Friendly Society and later of the Dumfries Public Library, and interspersed his business communications with hearty blasts of execration, broad humour, and messages to all their common friends. Though the phraseology of the letters often seems stilted, behind its stiffness glows a genuine affection and esteem.

But the backbone of the Fencibles was the lawyers. Their Colonel, William Dunbar, was a jolly little bachelor some years older than the poet; their Major and Muster-Master General was Charles Hay, friend of Boswell in the days when the latter was striving for distinction at the Scottish bar, whose port-inflamed countenance blinks above his judicial robes as Lord Newton in Raeburn’s superb portrait in the Scottish National Gallery. More notable for ‘law, paunch, whist, claret, and worth’ than for literary interests, Hay’s one poetic suggestion to Burns had humiliating results. He was among those who urged the poet to compose the unfortunate elegy ‘On the Death of Lord President Dundas’, the complete ignoring of which by Dundas’s son inflicted on Burns’s pride a wound which never healed.

Among the lawyer Fencibles the most congenial to Burns was Alexander Cunningham, a distant and impoverished relative of Lord Glencairn. Though Burns described him to his face as dissipated but not debauched—a subtle distinction of which the exact import is probably forever lost—Cunningham was diffident and retiring. Perhaps for this reason, perhaps also because of his kinship to Glencairn, Burns never sent him on such ticklish errands as he entrusted to Bob Ainslie, but their literary and intellectual fellowship was sincere. Unlike Hay and Ainslie, Cunningham had real fondness for the higher types of poetry, though to offset this he had the anglicized Scotsman’s inability to see anything but the ludicrous and the low in folk literature. Burns felt that in offering ‘My Love is like a red red rose’ to Cunningham he had to apologize for its simplicity; Popean imitations would have been more in his line. The young lawyer, in short, belonged to the generation which was trying to live down the national characteristics that meant most to Burns. In Edinburgh the legal profession was the last stronghold of the rich old gusto of Scottish life, the last group of men unashamed of being ‘characters’. But even there such traits belonged mainly to the generation passing or past which included men like Braxfield, Monboddo, and Kames, or to the already mature generation of Charles Hay and Henry Erskine. Cunningham belonged more nearly to the generation of Henry Cockburn, without Cockburn’s relish for the memories of traits which he did not share.

Within the limits imposed by his diffidence and his tastes, Cunningham had no reason to complain of lack of sympathy or confidence from Burns. When his first sweetheart jilted him with humiliating publicity, Cunningham told his sorrow to Burns, who had previously supplied him with a poor song in furtherance of his suit, and who now condoled in terms which bore hard on the young lady. The poet’s letters ranged from gay impromptu verses to the confession that as a result of the fiasco of the elegy, ‘I never see the name, Dundas, in the column of a newspaper, but my heart seems straitened for room in my bosom; & if I am obliged to read aloud a paragraph relating to one of them, I feel my forehead flush, & my nether lip quivers.’ On his part, Cunningham obtained for Burns the last national honour which Edinburgh conferred in his lifetime—election to membership in the socially exclusive Royal Company of Archers. And at the end Cunningham received one of the poet’s desperate appeals for help—not for money, but for intercession with the Commissioners of Excise not to put him on half-pay during his illness. Cunningham, moreover, shared with John Syme the credit for setting on foot the subscription for Jean and the children after Burns’s death, though his diffidence made him a poor collector of funds. Through diffidence, also, he permitted George Thomson to prepare for the newspapers the obituary he should have written himself, and by this neglect did injury to his friend’s memory.

But the names of three other friends are associated with much more damage to Burns’s reputation during his life and after his death. Only one of the three was a Fencible—Robert Cleghorn, a jolly gentleman farmer from Corstorphine. Cleghorn had what Cunningham lacked, a strong relish for vernacular literature, publishable or unpublishable. Thus he became the recipient of many choice bits of verse, sometimes traditional and sometimes original, for his own and his friends’ edification. The correspondence harmed Burns’s reputation not through its publication but through its long suppression. That remarkable moralist, Lord Byron, read the Cleghorn letters in manuscript and set down in his journal a highly-coloured summary of them as ‘full of oaths and obscene songs’ which stimulated the imaginations of several generations of readers. Now that the surviving letters can be read in full, they produce no such revulsion as do some of the things Burns wrote about Jean Armour and Maria Riddell. For readers who do not relish broad humour they may be distasteful, but beneath their coarseness is the record of a genuine friendship with an honest, hearty, and generous man. One suspects that had Cunningham, for instance, visited Burns at Ellisland or Dumfries, he would have felt the same disillusionment at sight of the poet’s narrow and primitive domestic life which the pettier Robert Ainslie recorded. Cleghorn made such a visit in 1795, when Burns’s health and spirits were already declining, and left behind him a warm glow of renewed and strengthened friendship.

It is regrettable that Cleghorn’s name should be, for most readers of Burns, associated with the poet’s collection of ‘cloaciniad’ verse. In fact, Cleghorn received no more of such work than did a dozen other friends, but John Allen, his stepson and heir, had ideas about the treatment of a great poet’s manuscripts which differed from those of William Smellie’s executors. Allen did not feel free, by mutilating some of his most characteristic letters, to ‘protect the memory’ of a poet who had never tried to disguise any side of his own nature. And Cleghorn’s tastes were as catholic as David Herd’s, or as Burns’s own. He measured the merit of a song by its singing quality, and not by its suitability for use in a young ladies’ seminary. Burns sent him the charming ‘O wat ye wha that lo’es me’ with the certainty that it would please him as much as the broadest ribaldry. The male who in male company does not occasionally relish crude humour is a scarce creature in any age or nation; was perhaps unusually scarce in eighteenth-century Scotland. The songs which went to Cleghorn went also to Graham of Fintry and Provost Maxwell, to Collector Mitchell and John M’Murdo and John Syme—in other words, to some of the best and most loyal characters in Burns’s circle. Boswell’s journals are crammed with proof that similar tastes prevailed in still higher ranks of society.

To avoid misunderstanding both Burns and his friends, a brief digression is necessary regarding the book entitled The Merry Muses of Caledonia. Burns was well aware that his own work, like the folk-songs he collected, was divided into the publishable and the unpublishable. But he did not draw the line where his later editors did. To him, ‘The Jolly Beggars’, ‘A Poet’s Welcome’, and ‘Holy Willie’ were no fitter for general circulation than were ‘When Princes and Prelates’ and ‘The Court of Equity’. They were jeux d’esprit intended for private circulation among a few intimates. His riotous imagination respected no boundaries when it began to play; what distinguishes most of his bawdry from the common sort is its wit. And this wit as frequently saw how an improper folk-song could be made more brilliantly improper as it saw how a halting one could be made lyric. Much of his folk collection, together with ‘a very few’ of his own composition, was written into a manuscript volume which he sometimes lent about, with strict injunctions as to secrecy. According to tradition, that volume fell after his death into unscrupulous hands and formed the basis of the earliest of the various collections called The Merry Muses. The tradition is almost certainly wrong. The ultimate source may have been Burns, but not the immediate one. In all the editions the authentic Burns verses are too garbled to have been printed from his own copies. They bear every sign of oral transmission or hasty transcription at several removes from the original. The real manuscript was probably destroyed after Burns’s death; certainly it was never printed. It would have been better for his reputation if it had, for he now stands father or godfather to a garbled mass of Scottish, English, and Irish filth, little of which he wrote, and some of which he never even saw.

Neither Robert Ainslie nor William Nicol needed the chance association of their names with fescennine verse to bring discredit on Burns. Their own conduct sufficed. Ainslie, like Cunningham, was a young lawyer, but the two moved in different orbits, and were never brought together even by their friendship for Burns. They appealed to different facets of the poet’s nature, Ainslie’s relation to him being that of Smith and Richmond in the days of the Fornicators’ Court. The son of a good family in the Border village of Dunse, Ainslie was celebrating his recent emancipation from parental government by sowing a plentiful crop of wild oats. Full of the high spirits of twenty-one, he furnished the same ready chorus of laughter the Mauchline cronies had provided, and was rapidly qualifying himself to discuss with Burns the pleasing topic of comparative bastardy. The most enjoyable part of the poet’s Border tour in May, 1787, was his visit to Dunse; after Ainslie left him he complained that he never had a mouthful of really hearty laughter on the trip.

Even the mutilated letters which survive show that Burns freely confided his past and present peccadillos to Ainslie; the sequel proves the confidence to have been ill bestowed. At the end of the Border tour, for instance, Burns found awaiting him in Dumfries post-office a letter from Meg Cameron, an Edinburgh servant girl who was to bear a child which she claimed was his. Ainslie was commissioned to ‘send for the wench and give her ten or twelve shillings’ against the poet’s return to the city. In reply, Ainslie broke the news that he had himself just become the father of an illegitimate son, and received from his friend a roaring welcome to ‘the venerable Society of Fathers’. Again in the following year Burns favored Ainslie with a highly-coloured account of his final reconciliation with Jean Armour, and early in 1789 instructed his young friend to locate Jenny Clow so that Burns, on his arrival in Edinburgh, could settle the suit Jenny had brought against him. More creditable matters also occupied the correspondence. Some of Burns’s earliest doubts about Ellisland, some of his deepest gloom about his own and his family’s future, were told to Ainslie. But the friendship died before Burns did, and through Ainslie’s fault.

On Friday, October 15, 1790, Ainslie came to Ellisland for the week-end. On Monday he reported the visit to Agnes M’Lehose, with whom he was by this time on confidential, and even flirtatious, terms. The warmth of Burns’s welcome was gratifying, but the house, he noted, was ‘ill contrived—and pretty Dirty, and Hugry Mugry’, and its other inmates pleased him little. Jean was ‘Vulgar & Common-place in a considerable degree—and pretty round & fat’, but ‘a kind Body in her Own way, and the husband Tolerably Attentive to her’. Also present were Burns’s sister and sister-in-law—‘common looking girls’—and ‘3 Male and female cousins’ who had been helping with the harvest.

Burns rejoiced that his friend had arrived ‘upon his Kirn night, when he Expected some of his friends to help make merry’, but sight of the guests deepened Ainslie’s depression, for they were ‘a Vulgar looking Tavern keeper from Dumfries; and his Wife more Vulgar—Mr. Miller of Dalswinton’s Gardener and his Wife—and said Wife’s sister—and a little fellow from Dumfries, who had been a Clerk’. Burns and the rest had a good time, ‘Dancing, and Kissing the Lasses at the End of every dance’, while Ainslie shuddered to the depths of his paltry little soul. Burns the peasant was enjoying himself in the world of his birth, and the young snob from Edinburgh couldn’t understand him at all:

‘... Our Friend himself is as ingenious as ever, and Seems very happy with the Situation I have described—His Mind however now appears to me to be a great Mixture of the poet and the Excise Man—One day he sits down and Writes a Beautiful poem—and the Next he Seizes a cargo of Tobacco from some unfortunate Smuggler—or Roups out some poor Wretch for Selling liquors without a License. From his conversation he Seems to be frequently among the Great—but No Attention is paid by people of any rank to his wife....’

After such a letter—withheld from complete publication until 1938—it is plain enough why the friendship went into a swift decline. For another year or two Burns continued to write, gaily or confidentially, but got small response. Ainslie’s last letter, early in 1794, ‘was so dry, so distant, so like a card to one of his clients’, that the poet ‘could scarce bear to read it’, and never answered it. The lawyer was already on his way, via the fashionable Werther melancholy, back to the orthodox piety which led him, early in the nineteenth century, to compose a couple of devotional pamphlets. But neither piety nor loyalty sufficed to make him protect the memory of the friend whose name has kept his alive. Preserving the reckless letters Burns had written him, he allowed them to pass into circulation, once at least accompanied by a formal docket certifying that Burns was the author of a letter signed with a humorous pen-name. The mutilations which so many of the manuscripts have suffered were the work of later owners.

Ainslie’s chief injury to Burns’s fame was inflicted after the poet’s death; William Nicol, Latin master in Edinburgh High School, harmed him in life. A coarse, egotistical, drunken man of violent temper, Nicol was also one of the foremost Latin scholars of his day. In his bawdy violence of language Burns saw wit; his emphatic dislike of his superiors Burns interpreted as proof of an independent spirit. No great harm might have come of the friendship had it been confined to drinking bouts in Edinburgh and to correspondence thereafter. Unfortunately Burns took Nicol as his travelling companion on the tour of the Highlands in September, 1787. This tour was Burns’s chance to meet influential folk in their homes and to show himself at his best. Thanks to Nicol he came near to showing himself at his worst. Among the people from whom he had invitations were the Duke and Duchess of Athole. Their reception of him at Blair Athole was all the touchy poet could desire. The Duke and Duchess were cordiality itself; among the guests was Robert Graham of Fintry, Commissioner of Excise, whose friendship and influence could be of the utmost importance to Burns; a still more influential person, Henry Dundas, dispenser of patronage for all Scotland, was expected next day on one of his periodical inspections of his political fences. Everything seemed to be going well for Burns when Nicol, the ‘most unprincipled savage’, intervened. The boorish schoolmaster, finding himself neglected in favour of his companion, decided to move on at once, and insisted on Burns’s going with him. The poet’s pride made him guilty of outrageous bad manners. In reply to Nicol’s insistence, Burns should have bidden him go to the devil his own gait. But that might have been interpreted as subservience to the Great. Through what can only be described as inverted snobbery, Burns allowed Nicol to drag him away. The scene was repeated at Castle Gordon, where the merry Duchess, who had declared in Edinburgh that Burns swept her off her feet, pleaded in vain against Nicol’s urgings. Though he afterwards wrote complimentary and apologetic letters, and cursed the ‘obstinate son of Latin Prose’, Burns could not efface the impression he had made. He never saw the Atholes or the Gordons again.

Throughout the trip Nicol’s conduct was the same; he even snatched Burns away before breakfast from the home of his cousin, James Burness of Montrose. The Highland tour, though he did not then realize it, was Burns’s last opportunity to enlist the active friendship of people whose influence might have changed his life. His failure was largely Nicol’s fault. Reports of his abrupt and ungracious conduct undoubtedly came back to Edinburgh and contributed to the comparative neglect he suffered during his second winter in the city. Edinburgh was too small a place for misconduct to hide in; every lawyer in the old Parliament House would have heard that a servant girl had brought suit against the Ayrshire Bard; the stories from the Highlands, losing nothing in the telling, would add to the swelling tide of hostile gossip. The talk, indeed, reached so far, and was believed so implicitly, that not even death could alter Edinburgh opinion. Cunningham’s efforts to interest prominent citizens in the subscription for Burns’s widow and children met repeated snubs and refusals; to this day, despite the monument on the Calton Hill, the city pays only a half-hearted tribute to his memory.

Of course all blame for the hostile talk cannot be shifted to Nicol, or even to Meg Cameron and Jenny Clow. Burns was indiscreet enough to start plenty of tales without help. But his too long stay unfortunately predisposed many people to believe the worst not only of his conduct in the city but afterwards. Henry Mackenzie and Dugald Stewart, for instance, both accepted at face value the second-hand reports of Burns’s alleged misdoings in Dumfries, and wrote him off their books. For years anecdotes showing Burns in an absurd or discreditable light circulated in Edinburgh. Some may have been true; others were malicious distortions which point the direction taken by city opinion. Thus Lockhart told how Hugh Blair had suggested, when a party of gentlemen were discussing possible changes in the Kilmarnock Poems, that ‘tidings of salvation’ might advantageously be emended to ‘tidings of damnation’. Thereupon the poet, according to Lockhart, embarrassed the professor by asking permission to acknowledge his improvement in a footnote. The basis of the story is truth; its details are not. Blair did suggest the change; Burns did, in conversation with other people, acknowledge his help. But Blair’s suggestion came in writing, as a carefully veiled hint amid other criticisms of the poems. The episode as Lockhart told it is city gossip intended to display Blair as the urbane professor and patron and Burns as a clumsy rustic. Of no importance in itself, the story is symptomatic of the attitude of cultured Edinburgh after the first enthusiasm over Burns had waned.

But no realization of the trouble Nicol was helping to make, no recognition of the schoolmaster’s real character, affected Burns. He continued, after he left the city, to correspond with Nicol; when the obstinate son of Latin Prose got into the row which finally led to his resignation from the High School, Burns championed him against his amiable principal, Dr. Alexander Adam. By christening one of his sons William Nicol, Burns proclaimed his friendship to the world at large, and during the years at Ellisland performed such services as getting appraisals of a farm Nicol was buying, and maintaining a broken-down mare which a horse-coper had passed off on the schoolmaster. The friendship lasted until February, 1793, when Burns was suffering from the rage and humiliation which followed the official inquiry into his revolutionary sympathies. Some report of the matter having reached Nicol, he undertook to rebuke Burns in a would-be facetious vein. The poet was in no mood for rebuke or good advice, facetious or not, and with his heavily satirical reply to Nicol their correspondence ended—too late.

In any case Edinburgh friendships, good or bad, however much he might try to maintain them by correspondence, could not supply companionship when Burns moved to Ellisland. Though on his first visit to Dumfries he had professed himself enchanted with the company he met, he was lonely enough when he actually settled there. He made acquaintances, no doubt ‘men of talent and humour’, among the tradesfolk and professional men of the town, but people like Dr. James Mundell, Walter Auld the saddler, Henry Clint of the King’s Arms, William Hyslop of the Globe Inn, and Thomas Boyd, the contractor who built Ellisland, are names and little more. Apart from his landlord, Patrick Miller, with whom his relations were soon strained, the most congenial friend he had during the three years on the farm was Robert Riddell of Glenriddell, whose estate of Friars Carse marched with Ellisland.

Riddell was a country gentleman turned amateur antiquarian. He had embellished his grounds with a ‘Druid Circle’ and a ‘Hermitage’; he dabbled in numismatics and church architecture. These would scarcely have interested Burns—though he remained in the hermitage long enough to inscribe some verses on the window with Glencairn’s diamond-pointed pencil—but Riddell was also a musician in a small way. Besides composing a few commonplace airs of his own he professed great interest in the traditional music of his country. Here Burns shared his enthusiasm and far excelled his knowledge. The laird, perhaps at Burns’s suggestion, subscribed for Johnson’s Museum and had his set bound with blank interleaves for notes on the songs, their authors, and their history. The number of his annotations gives the measure of his knowledge. Out of four hundred songs, one hundred and seventy have notes. Of these, one hundred and fifty-two were written by Burns, who must have spent many evenings at the task in his friend’s library; eighteen were by Riddell himself or an amanuensis. Sir Walter Scott summed up the laird’s prose writings as ‘truly the most extravagant compositions that ever a poor Man abandoned by providence to the imaginations of his own heart had the misfortune to devise.’

The company which sometimes came to Carse, including as it did men like Joseph Farington the painter—who noted that ‘Mr. Burns the Scottish Poet’ was ‘a middle-sized man, ... black complexioned, and his general appearance that of a tradesman or mechanick’, had ‘a strong expressive manner of delivering himself in conversation’, and knew no Latin—and Francis Grose, the antiquary whose inspiring enthusiasm was the real source of ‘Tam o’ Shanter’, was more important than Riddell himself. The laird’s real tastes and aptitudes were convivial. A man of powerful physique and a rather overwhelming robustiousness of manner—William Smellie spoke of ‘his immense fist and stentorian voice’—he succeeded, like so many gentlemen of his day, in wrecking his health at an early age. The notorious ‘Whistle’ contest, in which Riddell and his kinsmen Sir Robert Laurie and Alexander Fergusson of Craigdarroch undertook to drink each other under the table for the possession of a family heirloom, was probably more typical of the laird’s true aptitudes than the annotations were. Even at that, though, he was outdone by Craigdarroch, who won the whistle by drinking ‘upds. of 5 Bottles of Claret’. Burns, like most of the friends of the contestants, found the incident vastly amusing; Burns’s biographers have argued the question of his real presence at Friars Carse with an almost theological fervour; nevertheless its only interest or value for posterity lies in the light it sheds on Robert Riddell’s character. According to biographical tradition, Robert Riddell was the staid member of the family and his brother Walter the wild one; actually such distinction between them seems as baseless as the kindred legend that Gilbert Burns was a better farmer than his brother. But whether Glenriddell led or followed in the events which for a time estranged the poet from the whole Riddell family, the circumstances of the breach resemble with painful clarity many other episodes in Burns’s contacts with the gentry.

The full story of the ‘Rape of the Sabines’ is Maria Riddell’s more than her brother-in-law’s, but Robert Riddell had a share in the trouble. During 1792 and 1793, when Walter Riddell and his wife Maria were occupying the estate of Goldielea or Woodley Park, family relations were not always harmonious. At a guess, Walter wanted to borrow from his elder brother the funds to complete payment for Woodley Park; at a guess, the wives failed to charm each other. Whatever the causes, by the autumn of 1792 Burns had to assure Maria that he would listen to no stories about her from Glenriddell—and presumably also from Glenriddell’s wife. Yet for another year or more the poet managed to stay on good terms with both families. The year 1793 was, poetically and flirtatiously, the highest point of Burns’s friendship with Maria; the same year produced asseverations of friendship as ‘ardent & grateful’ on Burns’s part as Robert Riddell’s was ‘kind and generous’. In leisure moments the poet was transcribing a collection of his letters as a companion volume to the collection of unpublished verse he had given the laird in 1791. On Christmas day he was still transcribing. On January 12, 1794, his quarrel with Maria had reached its climax. Somewhere between those two dates had occurred the mysterious brawl in which Robert Riddell’s part is still a matter of controversy.

If Robert Riddell was the host, who, by compelling Burns to drink more than he wished to, reduced the poet to a state in which he insulted his hostess, the laird’s conduct admits of small excuse; if, as report has it, the scene occurred at Woodley Park and Robert Riddell subsequently took up the quarrel, he is even less excusable. Whichever version one accepts, Riddell was displaying innate snobbishness towards a man he considered, after all, a social inferior. If he was the host, realization of his own share in the matter should have made him charitable; if his brother was the host, Glenriddell was indulging in violent and uncalled-for partisanship. He held, it would seem, the same theory of a gentleman’s privileges as was enunciated a few years later by Sir John Graham Dalyell: ‘I am a gentleman, and I will be treated as such; and if any person presumes to pervert my meaning in any way whatever, if his rank is not equal to mine I will kick him; and if it is equal I will shoot him.’ Burns, as a plebeian, was kicked. There is a little satisfaction in knowing that the poet held to his resolution not to apologize to his host. The ‘Remorseful Apology’ supposed to have been addressed to a Riddell was really sent, early in 1796, to a Mr. S. Mackenzie. Four months after the quarrel Glenriddell was dead, still unreconciled to the poet who had done more for him than he could ever have done for the poet. A loud blustering squire, a hollow and unsubstantial mind; that was Robert Riddell.

For the last five years of his life Burns’s social world centred in Dumfries. About it cluster dark stories and darker hints, in the effort to refute which the poet’s defenders have sometimes been led to dangerous extremities of special pleading. The truth is that Burns in Dumfries was neither better nor worse than Burns in Tarbolton and Mauchline. Such a report as James Gray’s of finding Burns reading poetry with his children and hearing the older boys recite their lessons does not refute the tales of boisterous revelry in taverns; both are true. The sole difference is that Burns in Tarbolton was an unimportant young man amid a group of other youths; in Edinburgh he was partly lost in the crowds; in Dumfries he was a prominent figure whose every action was noted. He did not degenerate in Dumfries, but neither did he become a chocolate seraph.

Fortunately it is no longer necessary to rely on conjecture and second-hand reports in studying Burns’s last years. The letters which passed between two of his most intimate friends, John Syme of Dumfries and Alexander Cunningham of Edinburgh, are now available to replace guess-work with facts. Of all the friends of Burns’s last years, Syme is now the one who emerges most clearly, and with most credit to himself. A man of good education, a college friend of Dr. James Currie, the poet’s first biographer, Syme regarded Dumfries as a place of exile in which Burns’s society was almost the only redeeming feature. Having lost his small paternal estate of Barncailzie near Kirkcudbright, he had managed to recoup his fortunes by getting appointed to the sinecure post of Collector of Stamps at Dumfries. He first met Burns in 1788, but not until two years later did they become intimate. Syme was a man of sentiment in the best tradition of Henry Mackenzie and The Sorrows of Werther. He went into raptures over thunderstorms and desolate scenery; he read Zimmermann’s Treatise on Solitude; he thought Clarinda’s the finest love-letters ever written. Rhapsodic and absent-minded, he was the sort who could set off on a long-planned hunting-trip and find on arriving at his destination that he had forgotten his dogs. Maria Riddell paid warm tribute to his good head and excellent heart, but added that in matters of business he wanted method: ‘He is always in a labyrinth of papers and accounts, and, somewhat like the cuttlefish, he obscures himself altogether in a mist of his own creating.’

Burns admired Syme’s education and literary taste; Syme thought the poet ‘a noble fellow’, admired his wit and brilliant conversation, but could not admire his wife. ‘Methinks he has exhibited his poetical genius when he celebrated her’, he said to Cunningham after his first sight of Jean. Before long Burns was submitting his new poems to Syme and expressing implicit confidence in his judgement, though Syme avowed that he scarcely dared to touch a line of them. Sometimes the two would meet in a boisterous crowd at a tavern; again they would spend a quiet evening over a single bottle of wine in the little croft of Ryedale which Syme regarded as his refuge ‘from the frivolous and dissipated society’ of Dumfries. Without Burns, said Syme, his life in the town would be ‘a dreary blank’. Syme had set himself up as a clearing-house for humorous and satirical verses written or collected by his friends, and Burns quickly became the chief contributor to the hoard. Some of the verses compelled caution in sharing them. Of the epigram on the Loyal Natives Club, for instance, Syme told Cunningham that, though he and Burns were ‘far from differing from them on sentiments of loyalty, we differ on sentiment, abstractly considered. They scarcely know the meaning of the word Sentiment, & their Society consists in roaring & drinking.’ ‘Don’t,’ he added after quoting the epigram, ‘let any Dumfries person see this, for one of the Savages, if he heard it, might cut Robin’s pipe.’

Syme’s letters abundantly illustrate what he meant by ‘frivolous and dissipated society’. When the Caledonian Hunt met at Dumfries in November, 1794, ‘Baker, one of the knowing english Squires on the Turf, made an elegant appearance by insulting in the grossest manner Squire Walter Riddel of this place, who pursued him to Durham and made him ask pardon, which is published in our papers of last week.’ On the same occasion the Honourable Ramsay Maule of Panmure showed that for once at least Burns was justified in the tone of a satirical epigram, for Panmure and some drunken companions smeared a helpless underling’s hair with mustard and stuck it full of toothpick quills, ‘by way of hedgehogging him’. That Burns gnashed his teeth and passed by on the other side when he encountered such members of the organization to which he had dedicated his Edinburgh Poems, is no ground for wonder. He had larded the Caledonian Hunt with flattery, and they were behaving like cads and bullies.

But though Burns shrank from the Caledonian Hunt he did not always avoid similar company. There were meetings at which he and Syme drank bumpers out with wild Irishmen—such meetings as led Thomas Telford the engineer jovially to warn Burns that if he went on ‘in his old way, not even a she Devil will be able to meet with a Milt in him.’ There was a drunken brawl with one Captain Dods, who took hot exception to the poet’s toast, ‘May our success in the present war be equal to the justice of our cause.’ That Burns escaped a duel only because he was not the Captain’s social equal did not lessen his humiliation. Most biographers have held that such a toast in the presence of gentlemen holding the King’s commission was a huge breach of the proprieties, and so it was—if Burns was not goaded into giving it. Nothing in the record as it stands forbids belief that Dods, or some other officer who knew that Burns was suspected of sympathy with the French, may have called for a round of loyal toasts with the deliberate intention of embarrassing the poet. In that case, nothing could have been neater than Burns’s evasion, and since nothing came of the episode it is to be presumed that Samuel Clarke succeeded in making the sobered Dods realize what his objection to the sentiment implied.

But there were other similar episodes which cannot be so favourably explained, and which multiply proof that Burns had never acquired finesse, whether in toasting, flattering, or sinning. Whatever he did was done so forthrightly that it attracted attention. And the moment he attracted attention his companions recollected that after all he was a peasant received on sufferance into gentle company. The outcome might be expulsion from the house for conduct which a gentleman born need not even have apologized for, it might be a verbal attack like Captain Dods’s, or it might be merely a tacit resolve to drop him forthwith. The Edinburgh experience repeated itself in Dumfries. Burns’s ill-repute in certain quarters during his life and after his death was not owing to his being a sinner above the other Caledonians, but simply to his lack of the social standing which enabled Kames and Braxfield and Boswell to misbehave without penalty, and which would have tempered the sting of his satirical outbursts.

Occasional public drunken squabbles are not the only evidence that during these last years Burns’s nerves were often exacerbated. The loyal Syme once undertook to rebuke him for some of his wild doings and sayings. His language was too strong—telling the story afterwards he admitted, ‘I may have spoken daggers, but I meant none.’ The poet, his face black with anger, fumbled with his sword-cane. Syme, half laughing, half serious, exclaimed, ‘What! and in my own house, too!’ The conscience-stricken Burns flung away the cane, burst into tears, and positively grovelled in contrition on the flagstone floor. It is not a pleasant scene, and though the vividness with which it stayed in Syme’s memory is indication enough that it was exceptional, it cannot be ignored. No man, drunk or sober, whose nerves were normal could have behaved so.

Fortunately the vividness of Syme’s memory is not the only proof that such conduct was exceptional. Others besides Syme who were nearest to Burns in his last years concur in their loyalty and affection. At the end of 1790 Alexander Findlater reported to his official superior, Supervisor Corbet, that Burns was ‘an active, faithful & zealous officer’, gave ‘the most unremitting attention to the duties of his office (which, by the bye is more than I at first looked for from so eccentric a Genius)’, and might ‘be considered a credit to the profession’. And the judgment which Findlater thus expressed at the beginning of the poet’s Excise career he reaffirmed after his death. Others testified to their regard in deeds as well as words. Though Burns continued to display his life-long preference for the company of extravagant and outré sorts of people the best men in the Excise were the ones who esteemed him most. John Lewars, for example, brother of the Jessie of the songs, was a man of some education, and above the level of the common riding-officer. His father had been Collector at Dumfries, and thus a man of standing in the community. Burns called Lewars ‘a young fellow of uncommon merit—indeed, by far the cleverest fellow I have met with in this part of the world’, and Lewars reciprocated the poet’s affection by service to him and his family during his illness and after his death. And that Burns’s long absence from duty did not bear more heavily on him was due to the kindness of Adam Stobbie, a young expectant who throughout the spring of 1796 performed Burns’s rounds without pay, that the poet might continue to draw his full salary.

Fortunately, too, Syme records bright passages as well as dark in the last years. There were evenings at Ryedale when they consumed more cups of tea than bottles of wine, and when ‘Robin’s confounding wit’ played as sharply as it ever did over a punchbowl. In 1793 and 1794 there were brief excursions with Burns into Kirkcudbright on which the mercurial poet displayed every facet of his nature, bursting into furious rage over a spoiled pair of boots, fulminating brilliantly satirical epigrams against the Earl of Galloway, announcing that he would dine nowhere where he could not ‘eat like a Turk, drink like a fish and swear like the Devil’, and anon proving a decorous and fascinating houseguest at St. Mary’s Isle, seat of the Earl of Selkirk, whose son Lord Daer had given Burns his first glimpse of the peerage. Burns still shrank from the ordeal of encountering such exalted folk—‘I am indeed ill at ease whenever I approach your Honorables & Right Honorables’—though now for a different reason. In 1786 the consciousness of his own rusticity had been uppermost; in 1794 he did not wish to be laid open either to a fresh snub or renewed condescension. But his last recorded intercourse with the peerage was as pleasant—and as dangerous—as his first. The Earl of Selkirk was one of the few Scottish peers who were Whigs at a time when all power belonged to the Tories; thus meeting Burns on congenial grounds he helped to draw him into the last of his ill-advised meddlings with politics by interesting him in the parliamentary campaign of Patrick Heron of Heron. So to the last the peerage influenced Burns against his own best interests. Nevertheless this visit to St. Mary’s Isle is refutation enough of the charge that in his last years Burns had sunk so low that gentlefolk shunned him. The man who so charmed the Earl’s young daughter, Lady Mary Douglas, that she lent him a volume of music and entered into correspondence about his task of fitting Scottish airs with words, can scarcely have been the social outcast some biographers have portrayed. In fact, he strikingly resembles the man who in 1787 swept the Duchess of Gordon off her feet, and won the esteem of Lady Harriet Don and the Dowager Countess of Glencairn.

Despite their intimacy, it would be false to claim that Syme shared all Burns’s interests. No one man could do that. The very topic on which Burns and Lady Mary found common ground was outside Syme’s range. He never could understand what Burns saw in the crude and half-literate James Johnson, because he never understood the bond of fellowship established by mutual devotion to Scottish folk-song. Nevertheless, Syme was probably the closest to Burns of all his Dumfries friends, and knew—as certain impassioned defenders like Anna Dorothea Benson could not—the worst as well as the best in his later conduct. The man who noted that ‘Robin’s temper is not cold and frugal’, and who did not hesitate to record the sword-cane story and certain other episodes, cannot be charged with allowing affection to obscure the full truth about his friend. Hence Syme’s deeds and words at the time of Burns’s death give as reliable a verdict on the poet’s last years as can now be reached.

As Burns’s health failed in 1796 Syme watched him with increasing anxiety. As long as he could he hoped for recovery, but when the poet returned from the Brow Well his ‘cadaverous aspect and shaken frame’ told the truth which the doctors confirmed. On July 17 Syme wrote to warn Cunningham and to urge him to press their friend’s petition to the Commissioners of Excise that they continue his full salary. Two days later, when Syme called at the little house in Mill Street, he saw the hand of Death visibly fixed on Burns:

‘I cannot dwell on the scene. It overpowers me—yet gracious God were it thy will to recover him! He had life enough to acknowledge me, and Mrs. Burns said he had been calling on you and me continually. He made a wonderful exertion when I took him by the hand. With a strong voice he said, “I am much better today—I shall soon be well again, for I command my spirits & my mind. But yesterday I resigned myself to death.” Alas it will not do.’

Syme was already consulting with Patrick Miller, John M’Murdo, Dr. Maxwell, and other Dumfries friends to set measures afoot for the welfare of Jean and the children; when he wrote again on the 21st, shaken by the ‘variety of distressful emotions’ stirred by Burns’s death, he gave further details of their plans, and urged Cunningham to launch a similar plan in Edinburgh and to see that a proper obituary was prepared. Here Cunningham blundered. He entrusted the obituary to George Thomson, and the latter’s remark that Burns’s ‘extraordinary endowments were accompanied with frailties which rendered them useless to himself and his family’ roused the Dumfries friends to indignation. ‘We were much hurt at this,’ said Syme, ‘& reckoned it indelicate, if not unfeelingly superfluous on that occasion.’

These feelings were intensified by the appearance in the London Chronicle of a longer article, also by Thomson, which included assertions that Burns’s ‘talents were often obscured and finally impaired by excess,’ that ‘his conduct and his fate afford[ed] but too melancholy proofs’ of his possessing the failings as well as the powers of genius, and that, ‘like his predecessor Ferguson, though he died at an early age, his mind was previously exhausted.’ Thomson had never been in Dumfries, and had never met Burns. The friends in Dumfries who read his article did not concur. Syme’s comment was brief and pointed. These statements were ‘d——d illiberal lies’. On that comment, by the man who knew him best in his last years, the case for the defence of Burns against the stories of his deterioration in Dumfries may be allowed to rest.