V
LIVELIHOOD
To Burns in the vigour of his early manhood the question of livelihood seemed easily answered. He was a good enough ploughman to be assured of the porridge and the few shillings a week which a skilled labourer could earn on a Scottish farm. There was no degradation in such service. The labourers, like the hired help on New England farms, ate with the family and took whatever share in the conversation they were capable of. Moreover, anyone, whatever his rank, who was capable of ‘a sensible crack’ was sure of welcome in households which had either to provide their own entertainment or go without. Not even the prospect of dependent old age held any terrors. The tradition of the blue-gowns, or licensed beggars, still persisted in rural Scotland. An old man past work who could talk interestingly could count on a meal and a place by the fire at almost any farmer’s ingle. Burns seriously thought of this as a possible end of his own life. The expression of the idea in several poems might be dismissed as rhetoric had he not repeated it in the sober prose of his letters. He actually pictured himself as spending his manhood in labour, love-making, and poetry and his old age as a sort of Edie Ochiltree.
Such a vision of course was adolescent. To fulfil it a man must have no dependents. Burns seems to have imagined at first that if he could help to keep the home together until his brothers and sisters were able to establish themselves his responsibilities would end. The liberation of his poetic talent entailed among other things a shrinking from the burdens of marriage on narrow means. His rejected proposal to Alison Begbie had come before his realization of his poetic calling; his rejected offer to Jean Armour in 1786 was the result of sympathy for her condition and not of a desire to settle down. But he soon learned that he could not so simply escape responsibility. His children must be provided for somehow even if he did not marry their mothers. Despite the casualness with which he incurred paternity his parental feelings were strong. ‘Vive l’amour et vive la bagatelle’ sounded well as a motto until it was confronted by the actual problem of helpless lives which owed their existence to him. As a Man of Feeling he could not, even had he wished to, turn his back on them with Don Juan-like callousness. Besides, the law might have something to say in the matter—as Burns learned in the course of four suits or threatened suits by four different women within two years. Unless he chose to flee the country and repudiate his obligations he had to provide himself with settled livelihood.
For a man of his rank and education the possible choices open in 1786 were limited. He could continue as a farmer; he could attempt to support himself by writing, or he could seek a salaried position at home or in the colonies. Each alternative had its drawbacks. By the beginning of 1786 his reputation in the community was such that he could scarcely continue the partnership at Mossgiel, but he lacked the capital necessary for setting up independently elsewhere. The hope of any large financial returns from his poetry seemed too fantastic for consideration; he lacked the training for journalism or hackwork when Grub Street was crowded with penniless university men. There remained the chance of some salaried position. Yet even if he had been temperamentally fitted for a commercial job he was by this time too old. Merchants’ clerks began their apprenticeship as boys in their teens. Burns was twenty-seven. A post in the Excise Service might be feasible but was not easy to get. All government jobs went by favour, and despite the unpopularity of the service among the people at large the number of aspirants so far exceeded the available places that the endorsement of some influential person was almost essential. The same thing was true of India, where the East India Company’s monopoly gave patronage as large a part as it had in the government services. The United States, not yet united, were in economic chaos; Canada was undeveloped. There remained the West Indies, then at the height of a prosperity built on slave labour, where independent planters with Scottish connexions were numerous enough to make it possible for a Scotsman with the necessary introductions to secure some sort of work. The story of Burns’s struggle for livelihood is the story of his efforts in each of the four possibilities open to him.
The West Indian venture was the only one which never came to actual trial. The documents are lost which would settle the date at which Burns began seriously to consider emigration, but his mind was made up at the very beginning of 1786. Through friends in Ayrshire he obtained the offer of a position at thirty pounds a year as clerk and overseer on a Jamaica plantation. The story is still repeated that he published the Kilmarnock Poems to pay his passage-money, but his own contemporary account of the matter is sufficient refutation. He had already arranged to go to Jamaica, his employer to pay his fare and deduct the sum from his first year’s salary, before he decided to print the poems. For Burns emigration was not only flight but almost a death sentence. He had some justification for his feeling. The West Indian climate helped to insure the financial success of a small minority of white immigrants by killing off most of their rivals. He published his poems because he wished, before saying farewell forever to Scotland, to leave behind some tangible memorial. When the publication proved so unexpectedly successful it immediately cancelled his flight.
Burns’s first extant reference to Jamaica is in a letter to John Arnot of Dalquhatswood, which was written in April, 1786, when the subscription for the Poems was well under way. Negotiations were then almost complete: by June 12th Burns was able to announce that the ship was on her way home that was to take him out; on August 14th he explained that he was entering the employ of Charles Douglas of Port Antonio and all that remained to settle was the route by which he was to travel. In view of the time required for exchange of letters between Scotland and the West Indies it is certain that the correspondence with Douglas must have begun in the winter, before the Kilmarnock volume was planned and while a considerable part of it was still unwritten. As the troubles with the Armours thickened during the summer so did Burns’s references to his impending emigration. During July and the first part of August he was announcing that he had booked passage from Greenock to Savannah-la-Mar in the Nancy, sailing about September 1. Then returned Jamaicans advised him that the route was too roundabout, and when the captain of the Nancy notified him that the ship was about to sail, Burns decided that the notice was too abrupt. The Nancy sailed without him, and he transferred his booking to the Bell, which was to sail direct to Port Antonio at the end of September.
The truth was that he was already wavering. The enthusiastic reception of his poems, the interest which influential gentlemen began to take in his welfare, were changing his opinion of himself and his prospects in Scotland. Moreover, the Armours were calming down; friends had promised to help him should Jean’s father renew the effort to execute his warrant. Nevertheless he did not immediately abandon the Jamaica plan. Though the Bell in her turn sailed without him, he still watched the shipping news as he collected his subscriptions and set his affairs in order. Jean’s twins, born on September 3rd, increased the need for settled livelihood, but increased also his reluctance to leave Scotland.
Most of his letters of the autumn of 1786 have perished. As late as October he was still talking of emigration, though he had again postponed it after actually packing his trunk and starting for Greenock at the end of September. He still feared, he told Robert Aiken, that ‘the consequences of his follies’ might banish him; in other words, Betty Paton was threatening to sue him. The Armour affair had already been compromised by dividing the responsibility for the care of the twins between the two families. When the extant correspondence resumes a month later, Jamaica had been discarded. By November 1st the poet had decided to try his luck in Edinburgh. For this reversal the Kilmarnock volume was directly responsible.
When Burns had begun in April to solicit subscriptions for a volume of his poems he had had no idea of making it a commercial success. The book was intended as a memento of himself—a souvenir for his friends and a final and unanswerable fling at his enemies. He probably hoped for no more material return than would cover the expenses of publication. Its success therefore was all the more intoxicating. Six hundred and twelve copies were printed, of which about half were subscribed for in advance, thanks mainly to Robert Aiken. When the book came out at the beginning of August it furnished the first literary sensation Ayrshire had ever known. The subscribers’ copies were passed from reader to reader, creating such a demand that the entire edition was sold within three months. When Mrs. Dunlop ordered six copies in mid-November only five were left. At the end of July Burns had been a fugitive with a warrant out against him, to escape which he was shifting from one friend’s house to another. Two weeks later he was a celebrity. His journeys through the country as he collected his subscriptions became a sort of royal progress. The fact that he was making a profit out of the book meant far less to him than the applause of all sorts and conditions of men. People of influence assured him that something could be done for him at home, though they were vague as to precisely what. After the printer’s bills were paid the volume showed a profit of more than £50, though forfeited deposits on passage money and a substantial payment to Betty Paton reduced his net gain to about twenty. But Burns still had no wish to write poetry for money. He considered that ‘downright Sodomy of Soul’. Poetry was his calling, but he refused to think of it as his livelihood.
Another man for other reasons doubted the commercial prospects of poetry. In spite of the handsome balance-sheet of the first edition, John Wilson, the Kilmarnock printer, declined to undertake a second without advance payment for all labour and materials. He felt that the first had glutted the market. His timidity helped to transform Burns from a local celebrity into a national figure. When friends in Mauchline and Ayr suggested republishing the poems in Edinburgh Burns thought it an attractive but impractical dream. But when copies of the book reached people of influence in the capital and they repeated the suggestion it wore a different look. By October the hope of a favourable reception in the city had come to Burns from at least three different sources. His friend, the Rev. George Lawrie of Loudoun, had sent a copy of the book to Thomas Blacklock, the blind poet; Blacklock had commended it warmly and had even promised—not so warmly—to bring it to the attention of Hugh Blair. The famous professor of rhetoric, Blacklock thought, was too refined in his taste to relish it. Another eminent professor was not so finicky. Dugald Stewart, whose country home was at Catrine a few miles from Mauchline, read and enjoyed the poems, invited the poet to dinner, and added his personal encouragement to the Edinburgh venture. Finally the book reached even the peerage.
On November 1st Alexander Dalziel, steward of the Earl of Glencairn’s estates, wrote that he had showed the poems to the Earl and that the Earl had expressed his pleasure in them and his desire to befriend their author. This approbation was heartening as Blacklock’s and even Dugald Stewart’s could not be. The Earl had a reputation for generosity and for keeping his word; he was one of the most popular and influential peers in Scotland and his endorsement would have weight with the people of wealth and fashion on whom the success of a subscription would have to depend. But the Earl had nothing to do with the abandonment of Jamaica. The same letter which brought the news of the Earl’s interest also brought Dalziel’s congratulations on Burns’s giving up his plans for leaving the country. What Glencairn really did was to confirm the poet in his determination to offer his poems to a larger audience.
Undoubtedly Burns realized before he went to Edinburgh that he was setting out on the old and painful quest of patronage—a quest which had broken the hearts of more poets than it had ever freed from penury. But it was still fame more than money that he looked for from his poems. He continued to hope for some means of modest livelihood independent of his writing; if his subscription brought a little capital to help him on his way, so much the better. When he reached Edinburgh he made no effort to appear more than he was; he even sought deliberately to appear less. He dressed as a plain young farmer, and finding that the metropolitan critics were praising his work as that of an unlettered ploughman who wrote from pure inspiration he did his best to act the part. When Robert Anderson pointed out in private conversation some evidence of extensive knowledge of other poets Burns readily admitted his indebtedness, but in public he would not permit his claims to pure inspiration to be challenged. If an unlettered bard was what his patrons wanted he would do his best to be one. Many times, however, his role was trying, especially when stupider people than himself condescended, and gave him good advice.
Undoubtedly there were matters in which he needed good advice, but he did not get it even from the patrons who did not condescend. Among all his new friends there was no one to take his part as Sir Walter Scott later took Southey’s in seeing that he got a fair contract with his publisher. Glencairn had been as good as his word in securing fashionable subscriptions. The Countess of Eglinton made the Earl subscribe ten guineas; the entire membership of the aristocratic Caledonian Hunt put down their names, but altered the first proposal that they give two guineas each to a mere subscription at the regular price. But Glencairn knew nothing about the business end of publishing. In introducing Burns to William Creech, his brother’s former tutor and the best-known publisher in the city, Glencairn no doubt felt that he had done his best. He had, up to that point, but at that point a good contract lawyer was needed. Unfortunately Henry Mackenzie and the other men of letters in the city still adhered to the convention of the writing gentleman who was supposed to disdain pecuniary rewards. A few years earlier, when David Hume was alive, Burns might have been secured better terms; a few years later under the leadership of Scott he would certainly have secured them. Burns’s perverse pride would not allow him to haggle over a contract which in any case offered more ready money than he had handled in all his previous life. What he needed and did not have was a hard-boiled business friend to do his haggling for him.
As it was, Creech made an agreement which left Burns to bear all the immediate risks and perhaps to receive a modest immediate profit, but which reserved the long-term earnings for the publisher alone. As was often the case with books published by subscription, the man whose name appeared on the title-page was not the publisher in the modern sense, but merely the author’s agent. He provided the facilities for collecting the subscriptions and distributing the books, but took none of the financial responsibility. The author received the entire payment for the subscribers’ copies, but out of these receipts had to pay the printer, the bookbinder, and also, presumably, the transportation charges on copies delivered out-of-town. Furthermore, the agents who distributed the books naturally expected to be paid. Hence Burns, wherever possible, enlisted his friends for this service—Alexander Pattison at Paisley, for instance, and Robert Muir at Kilmarnock—and when that was not feasible still sought to avoid the regular booksellers because they took ‘no less than the unconscionable, Jewish tax of 25 pr Cent. by way of agency’.
The price to subscribers was set at the modest sum of five shillings, and close to three thousand subscriptions were obtained. Burns objected to printing the names of the subscribers—quite naturally, for the thirty-eight pages meant money out of his pocket merely to gratify the vanity of people yearning to see their names in print as patrons of literature—but was overborne by some friends whom he did not ‘chuse to thwart’. Professor Snyder calculates Burns’s utmost possible gross receipts from the subscription at £750. But after all charges were paid the net profit cannot have been more than half that sum. He told Mrs. Dunlop that he cleared about £540, but there, as in a similar statement to John Moore, he was reckoning in Creech’s payment of 100 guineas for the copyright.
That was the sum agreed on when, just as his book was ready for delivery, Burns decided, ‘by advice of friends’ to dispose of his copyright. Once more he had sought the advice of others, and once more they told him the wrong thing. In this instance, the person most at fault was Henry Mackenzie, to whom Burns and Creech referred the question. Mackenzie was a lawyer, and ought to have warned Burns against the absolute sale of his rights in a potentially valuable piece of property. Instead Mackenzie contented himself with naming one hundred guineas as his idea of a fair price. That was on April 17. Creech delayed his acceptance until the 23rd, on the pretence of waiting to hear if Cadell and Davies would buy a share for their London trade, but finally consented to ‘take the whole matter upon himself, that Mr. Burns might be at no uncertainty in the matter.’ Thereupon Creech left town, without either paying the money or giving his note for it. A few days later Burns himself started on his Border tour, still without any legal contract with Creech, but with his hands full for the time being with the task of arranging deliveries, collecting subscriptions, and paying the printer and the binder. Had not Peter Hill, then Creech’s chief clerk, taken a good part of the burden on himself, Burns would have been swamped under the worry of larger transactions than he had known in all his life before.
In August Burns returned to Edinburgh, but Creech was either again absent or again coy. Not until October 23 did the publisher at last set his hand to a note promising to pay the sum ‘on demand’. How soon Burns began to ask for payment is uncertain, but by January Creech had delayed and evaded so often that Burns ‘broke measures with [him], and ... wrote him a frosty keen letter. He replied in forms of chastisement’, promised payment on a set date—and broke his promise. To add to the poet’s anxiety, rumours were afloat. It was hinted that Creech was on the verge of bankruptcy; it was also hinted that he had cheated Burns by secretly printing additional copies of the Poems, which he sold for his own profit. Burns bewailed his own fate as a ‘poor, d-mned, incautious, duped, unfortunate fool’; two months later ‘that arch-rascal Creech’ was still making promises, and still reneguing. Not until May 30, more than seven months after he had agreed to pay ‘on demand’, did Creech at last part with his hundred guineas. And even then Burns’s troubles were not over. Still another visit to Edinburgh, at the end of February, 1789, was necessary before Creech paid over the final sums due the poet for subscription copies, so that at last he could report to Jean: ‘I have settled matters greatly to my satisfaction with Mr. Creech.—He is certainly not what he should be nor has he given me what I should have, but I am better than I expected.’
The estimate of Creech was temperate enough; indeed, it erred, like Burns’s statement to John Moore that Creech had ‘been amicable and fair’ with him, on the side of charity. It is easy to condone Mackenzie’s blunder and Creech’s sharp bargain on the ground that neither of them could guess the future value of the copyright, but it is impossible to excuse Creech’s postponements of the day of reckoning. Prompt settlement of accounts after the book was published would have sent Burns back to the country with his pockets comfortably lined and with some of the glowing enthusiasm of his first season in Edinburgh still undimmed. By his paltry delays Creech kept the poet in the city until the interest of his fashionable ‘patrons’ had waned, until all the pleasure of publication and fame had evaporated in bitterness and disgust, and until the mere necessities of living must have made considerable inroads on his irreplaceable capital.
Indeed one of the extraordinary facts about Burns’s life in Edinburgh is that he emerged from it without greater depletion of his capital. Contemporary report calls him dissipated. Yet somehow Burns managed to spend nearly a year and a half either in residence in Edinburgh or in journeying to and fro, and still came out with about four hundred and fifty pounds. So far as is known he had no income from July, 1786, when he assigned his rights in Mossgiel to Gilbert, until he reaped his harvest, such as it was, at Ellisland in the autumn of 1788. Even then he netted little, for the outgoing tenant exacted a price of £72 for the standing crops. However great his experience in the distracting ‘task of the superlatively Damn’d—making one guinea do the business of three’—his twenty pounds from the Kilmarnock volume cannot have lasted long, and if there were any gifts except the Earl of Eglinton’s ten guineas and the same sum from Patrick Miller he nowhere mentions them. If Burns dissipated heavily he managed somehow to do it without heavy expenditure, an art few people have ever learned.
The possibility that he received funds from Gilbert even after the deed of assignment must be ruled out. The flow of funds in fact was the other way. The supposedly careful and efficient Gilbert was in constant difficulties at Mossgiel. Robert sent him ten pounds from Edinburgh in the spring of 1787; during the following winter he authorized John Ballantine to pay over to Gilbert about thirty pounds of subscription money then in Ballantine’s hands. And this was only the beginning. The letter to Gavin Hamilton already quoted indicates that Gilbert was so far in arrears with his rent in March, 1788, that Hamilton wanted Burns to sign some sort of a note for him. This Burns refused to do, because he had already lent Gilbert £200—nearly half his receipts from the Edinburgh edition. Whether the previous payments were counted as part of this loan or not is uncertain; probably they were not, for after the poet’s death John Syme declared that Gilbert owed £300, though the legal accounting sets the figure at £200. It seems likely therefore that Gilbert regarded the earlier payments as gifts, and that the sum which Gilbert at last repaid to his brother’s family represented the final loan in 1788. As part of the interest on the loan Burns arranged that Gilbert should pay his mother an annuity of £5 a year and should continue to care for Betty Paton’s daughter. The result was that Gilbert made no cash payment during Burns’s life, and never was able to pay off the principal until he undertook to re-edit the Poems in 1820. Burns had given most substantial proof of his loyalty to his family and in doing so had destroyed his only hope of success in his own venture at Ellisland.
Gilbert and his mother and sisters were not the whole of Burns’s responsibilities. His younger brother William was approaching manhood and turned naturally for support to the celebrity of the family. He appears to have been an amiable but ineffective youth. He had served at least part of an apprenticeship as a saddler, and in the autumn of 1787 Burns made some fruitless efforts to find him a job in Edinburgh. A year or so later William set out to look for employment and held jobs briefly in Longtown, in Newcastle, and finally in London, where he died of typhus and where his funeral was arranged by John Murdoch and paid for by Burns. Burns’s letters to this brother during his year of wandering consist in about equal proportion of exhortations to brace up and be a man and of enumerations of gifts—shoes and shirts and waistcoats and above all money. Burns’s position as family capitalist was no sinecure.
While he was struggling with Creech and trying to keep Mossgiel afloat, Burns was constantly harried by the problem of his own future. The only two possibilities he could see were a farm of his own or a post in the Excise, and for a long time there seemed little chance of achieving either. He had no intention of trying again for public aid through his writing. One subscription might be regarded as a public tribute; a repetition would look like begging. Besides, his common sense told him that a second subscription would have little hope of success unless it came at a long interval after the first and for work of a different character. He had not exhausted his talents, but he had exhausted his novelty. For the rest of his life he steadfastly refused to accept payment for anything he wrote and actually gave away poems which make up two-thirds of the bulk of his collected works. His sole payment for ‘Tam o’ Shanter’ was a dozen copies of the proof-sheets; his payment for Creech’s second edition in 1793—which included ‘Tam’ and a score of other new poems—was twenty presentation copies grudgingly allowed him. His fondness for making gestures of gallant but unwise generosity can hardly be better illustrated than by his dealings with Creech over this edition. The publisher wrote to him in 1791, proposing a reissue of the work and asking Burns to contribute some new poems to it, but without suggesting payment for them. Burns told Cunningham that he had taken a damned revenge of Creech by ignoring his letter. Yet a few months later he relented, and after reminding Creech that the new poems were his own absolute property, turned them over to him without asking any payment except the twenty gift copies. Such a gesture might have shamed some publishers, but Creech merely accepted it as his right. In the same spirit Burns hotly resented George Thomson’s payment of £5 for his contributions to the first number of the Select Scotish Airs, and Thomson, like Creech, felt no compunction at accepting the poet’s quixotic generosity.
On at least two occasions, moreover, Burns was offered pay for journalistic writing in party newspapers. The origin, extent, and duration of his relations with Peter Stuart of the London Star are all obscure, but it is plain that Stuart as a zealous Whig tried to get Burns as a regular contributor. The poet refused. When he struck off a satirical skit he was willing to give it to Stuart, but the only pay he accepted was a free subscription to the paper. Thus he managed to acquire the reputation, injurious to his hopes in government employ, of being a partisan writer without any reward except notoriety. Again in 1794 Patrick Miller, Jr., his landlord’s son who had been put into Parliament at the age of twenty-one, persuaded James Perry of the London Chronicle to offer Burns what for those days was a fair salary if he would come to London and devote his talents to the press. Again Burns refused. He realized well enough that the prosperity of a newspaper was often short-lived and he feared to jeopardize his children’s future by exchanging an assured though meagre income for the chances of the journalistic profession. Besides, the writer in a partisan paper in 1794 was risking jail as well as economic insecurity, as the sedition trials then in progress had proclaimed to all the kingdom.
But if he was not to support himself by writing how was he to support himself? That question hammered in his mind from the time he abandoned the Jamaica project until the early spring of 1788. Even before he went to Edinburgh he had thought of the Excise. But he found his Edinburgh patrons cold to all hints. These gentlemen reasoned simply. Burns was the ploughman poet: ergo, he should continue to plough. The only definite gesture made towards getting him government work was Mrs. Dunlop’s. She offered an introduction to Adam Smith in the hope that Smith might help him to a job in the customs, but the philosopher had left for London the day before Burns presented his letter. Moreover Smith no longer took an interest in much except his own health, and if Burns sought later to renew his application nothing came of it. His most favourable opportunity to cultivate the acquaintance of high officials was lost when he allowed William Nicol to drag him away from Blair Athole, where Robert Graham of Fintry, Commissioner of Excise, was one of the guests, and where Henry Dundas was shortly to appear.
Meanwhile an offer of another sort was being pressed upon him. He had been in Edinburgh only a few weeks when the prosperous and enthusiastic Patrick Miller sought his acquaintance. Miller, after a varied career, at sea and as a banker, had retired from business with a comfortable fortune and was devoting himself to miscellaneous experiments. He was the sort of capitalist who is a godsend to struggling inventors, for his enthusiastic imagination enabled him both to visualize the inventor’s aims and to overlook all the practical details and delays which intervene between a project and its fulfilment. His strongest enthusiasm at the moment was the improvement of navigation, but his interests also included agriculture. Not long before Burns came to Edinburgh Miller had bought the run-down estate of Dalswinton near Dumfries, and it was Ellisland, one of the farms on this estate, which he urged upon Burns.
The poet was afraid of it from the start, and for good reason. Miller, he said, was no judge of land, and what Miller thought was an advantageous offer might ruin his tenant. Had Burns been gifted with second-sight he could not have prophesied more accurately. Yet the difficulty he always found in saying ‘No’ to people whose intentions were friendly combined with his own inclinations to keep him from refusing Miller’s offer outright. Farming was the business he knew best, and a farmer’s life he held was the best of lives—if one could live by it—but Mount Oliphant, Lochlie, and Mossgiel had been a triple lesson on the fate of the tenant who undertook a lease without capital enough to stock a farm profitably. Even if the Dalswinton farm were all that Miller thought it, Burns doubted if his literary profits would suffice to give him a start. However, he agreed to look at Ellisland when he reached Dumfries at the end of his Border tour. When he did so he could scarcely have been in the mood for a really critical examination. The savage hospitality he had experienced for the past three weeks had left him jaded and depressed, and the annoyance of being greeted at Dumfries by Meg Cameron’s letter would not sharpen his critical faculties. Even so he could see at a glance that the soil was exhausted and would require long and careful nursing. In fact the only thing to be said for Miller’s offer was that, recognizing the run-down condition of the property, he was offering it at a low rental for the first three years. Fifty pounds per annum for a farm of more than a hundred acres contrasted favourably with the prices in East Lothian, where landlords were asking as much as thirty shillings an acre. Burns went home to Mossgiel without having made up his mind; if discussion with the cautious Gilbert contributed to any decision it was a negative one. Ellisland was too big a risk. He returned to Edinburgh in the fall with his mind made up. He would renew his efforts to secure an Excise commission and would bank the profits of his poems as a reserve fund for the education and security of his children.
But Miller was not easily discouraged. He had evidently decided that the poet as a tenant would be an asset to Dalswinton. Accordingly he urged Burns to go down again and have a more critical look at the place. A severe cold which confined him to the house enabled Burns again to evade committing himself and not long afterwards came the injury to his knee which laid him up for weeks and involved him in the Clarinda affair. But meanwhile his endeavours for an Excise commission were not prospering. Glencairn disapproved; Mrs. Dunlop disapproved; apparently everyone who might have exerted the necessary influence disapproved. In January Miss Nimmo sent him to a Mrs. Stewart who was supposed to have influence with the commissioners. The interview was not a success. Burns came away from it boiling with helpless rage. He had been questioned like a child about his most private affairs and Mrs. Stewart had further improved the occasion by rebuking him for the Jacobite sentiments he had scratched on the window of the inn at Stirling. If the quest for an Excise job was to expose him to this sort of thing Burns was ready to throw up the whole project.
Just when the matter appeared most hopeless his chance came from an unexpected quarter. The surgeon who had treated his injured knee was Alexander Wood, better known to his fellow-citizens as Lang Sandy Wood, who after a wild youth had become one of the most respectable characters, in both senses of that word, in Edinburgh. Wood learned of his patient’s desire and offered to do what Glencairn and the others had refused or evaded—to bring Burns’s case directly and personally before the Board. The result was that before he left Edinburgh Burns found himself, ‘without any mortifying solicitation’ on his own part, equipped with the official order for the six-weeks’ course of special instructions which would entitle him to an Excise commission. It came none too soon. One of the rules of the service was that no man could enter it who was in debt, who was more than thirty years old, or who had more than three children. Burns’s time for meeting these two latter qualifications was getting very short indeed.
But now that he saw an open road into the Excise Burns’s mind veered round. Farming after all was a more poetical occupation than ‘searching auld wives’ barrels’. Miller was still urging Ellisland upon him, and the possibility of failure there did not look so black when he knew that if he did fail he had the Excise to turn to. He agreed to revisit the farm. No doubt he told himself, as he told Clarinda, that he did so only out of courtesy to Miller, knowing that the Excise must be his lot. His judgement warned him that the farm would not do; his emotions swayed him in its favour. In an effort to strengthen his judgement he invited his old friend, John Tennant of Glenconner, to join the tour of inspection. Glenconner’s mind would not be biased by any poetic considerations. It did not occur to Burns that even the most experienced of farmers, looking at soil different from that he was accustomed to, could scarcely gauge its productivity rightly at the end of February. The rule-of-thumb farming which Glenconner and most of his contemporaries practised required the sight of growing crops for correct judgement. Tennant looked the place over and told Burns it was a bargain at Miller’s price. The opinion astonished the poet, but he failed to realize that it was merely a guess less accurate than the opinion he himself had formed on seeing the place the previous June. Burns frequently made mistakes, but his worst ones were made when he relied on other people’s judgement. In March he signed Miller’s lease and committed himself to three years of struggle and discouragement which swallowed all the capital which had not already been poured into the bottomless morass of Mossgiel.
Legend has it that Burns was offered his choice of two farms on the Dalswinton estate and selected Ellisland because of its more attractive location—‘a poet’s choice and not a farmer’s’. In fact Miller offered no choice, and in drawing up the lease employed all the usual legal technicalities with one or two additions of his own. The rent was to be £50 a year for the first three years and £70 thereafter, and Miller’s zeal for improvements was to have scope even while the tenant was in possession. The landlord reserved the right to take over the riverbank, a twenty-yard-wide belt along the Friars Carse boundary, and two acres of other land at his own choice to plant with trees. He agreed, however, to put money of his own into the place. It had not even a farmhouse when Burns signed the lease, and Miller undertook to provide adequate buildings. The contractor’s delay in constructing these caused further needless anxiety and actual loss to Burns.
After the die was cast all Burns’s earlier doubts about Ellisland and his own ability to handle it returned with redoubled force. His first move was to make sure of his Excise appointment by taking the necessary six weeks of special instructions from the officer at Mauchline, even though this delayed his settlement until mid-June. Inasmuch as these six weeks included also the emotional stress of the ending of the Clarinda romance and his acknowledgement of Jean as his wife, his nerves were overwrought when he finally reached his farm. The prospect there might have discouraged a more phlegmatic man. The farmhouse was not even started, and his only shelter was a leaky and chimneyless labourer’s hovel. The sparse growth of the crops planted by his predecessor confirmed the exhaustion of the soil, and he was confronted as never before with the need for executive skill. That aspect of his nature which led him to remark that somehow he could make himself pretty generally beloved yet never could get the art of commanding respect told heavily against him when he had both to keep his own labourers at work and to bully or cajole the contractor into finishing the farmhouse at the time agreed upon. When he was not present the farmhands lay down on the job; when he was present they found it altogether too easy to engage him in talk while the work suffered. The friendship he formed with Thomas Boyd, the contractor, led among other things to an acquaintance with Thomas Telford, the great engineer, but it did not lead to the speedy completion of his house. As late as March, 1789, he was still pleading with Boyd to get at least the shell of it finished. Moreover he was too sympathetic with his workmen. The margin of profit on such a farm was too small to permit indulgence in humanitarian sentiments, but Burns knew too much of the lives of the lower classes to have the necessary hardness. Two letters to the owner of the neighbouring farm with whom Burns had cooperated in digging a drain do credit to his feelings if not to his business capacity. The labourer who undertook the job at seventeen pence a rood had underestimated the time. In order to give him a fair wage for his labour Burns added three-pence a rood to the contract price for his share and asked the neighbour to do the same—with what result is not recorded.
But there was a still deeper psychological hindrance to success at Ellisland. Even had the soil been productive, even had he secured a foreman who could have kept his hands at work, the Burns who undertook Ellisland was not the Burns of Lochlie or even of Mossgiel. Though by no means setting up as a gentleman farmer, he had become conscious of having a position to maintain. Gilbert, he thought, might be able to take over Ellisland and succeed with it; ‘as he can with propriety do things that I now cannot do.’ Physical debility was also to be reckoned with, for he must have got out of training during almost two years of exemption from regular labour, and his weakened heart would prevent his easily recovering his lost tone. But in fact his mind was filled with other matters and metres. That during his first summer he spent alternate fortnights with Jean in Mauchline was a temporary circumstance without relation to the success of the farm thereafter, but that his work for Johnson’s Museum was filling his mind was a fact less easily discounted. In the middle of his first summer he had a fiddler with him for at least two days playing over a collection of Highland music in quest of lyric tunes for Johnson. It was a prelude to his greatest period of lyric creativeness, but it was not an augury of success in managing a poor farm on limited capital.
The first season’s harvest offered little encouragement. Wet weather and scanty labour made it difficult to salvage whatever thin crop the fields had produced. Before his lease was six months old Burns was confiding to his friends that he was uncertain of his farm’s doing well, but, as he told Ainslie, he had his Excise commission in his pocket and did not care three skips of a cur dog for the gambols of Fortune. The chance of obtaining the commission had made him willing to undertake the farm; possession added still another psychological handicap to its successful conduct. Embittered youthful memories of the humiliations of a tenant farmer had been reinforced by the development of his poetic vocation to clog whole-hearted effort. Now the existence of his commission held always open a door of escape from any threatened renewal of the old humiliation and thereby unconsciously slowed still further the endeavours which were his only safeguard. He was defeated at Ellisland before he began.
By the following spring he had begun to realize his defeat. The farm and his family, including William, were swallowing the remains of his capital so rapidly that it was doubtful if he could hold on without more income than the farm was likely to yield. It occurred to him that he might use his commission while he still held the farm. He had not thought of this at first. The usual procedure for a beginner was to be assigned to some district where a place was vacant, there to serve several months’ apprenticeship without pay. When pay commenced, it had until recently been at the rate of £35 a year, but about the time Burns obtained his commission the initial stipend was raised to £50. Looking about his own neighbourhood, Burns learned that the officer in charge of the rural parishes to the north of Dumfries was a certain Leonard Smith, who had recently inherited money and was not distinguishing himself by activity in the service. Burns decided to play politics.
His commission had been obtained through Robert Graham of Fintry, one of the chief Commissioners for Scotland. Fintry had expressed personal interest in the poet’s welfare in terms which must have soothed his bristling pride, for Burns had already addressed to him both a prose letter of thanks and a poetic epistle in imitation of Pope. Though Fintry never quite supplanted Lord Glencairn in Burns’s esteem, he in fact became the poet’s second patron and in the long run did more for him than even the Earl had done. Graham’s first favour had been the commission itself; his second was the appointment to active duty. Before his first harvest was over Burns coolly suggested that Smith might be relieved from duty without serious loss to himself and perhaps with a gain to the Service. On his visit to Edinburgh in February, 1789, Burns pressed the matter further. Graham promised to do what he could, but pointed out that it was clean against regulations to start a new man at full pay without a probationary period. Nevertheless he undertook to investigate Smith’s conduct and by midsummer had found cause for removing him, had given Burns the place, and had circumvented the rule against starting a new man at full duty and on full pay. For one who had always boasted his independence and had spoken scornfully of the political quest for favours, Burns had done a neat and successful job of wire-pulling.
Having once got his appointment, however, Burns had no intention of treating it as a sinecure. His district covered twelve sparsely-settled parishes and his tours of inspection required, to fulfil the letter of the law, that he ride two hundred miles a week in all weathers and all states of the uniformly bad roads. This meant that he could give little of his time and less of his strength to Ellisland. To provide for the farm he endeavoured to increase his dairy stock, which Jean could supervise in the intervals of having babies and managing her household. The cattle, too, might help in the slow task of rebuilding the worn-out acres.
But the strain of his new duties soon took physical toll. In the late fall of 1789, after less than two months of service, ‘a malignant squinancy and low fever’ laid him up for six weeks. His handwriting indicates that the illness was really serious; the letters written during convalescence are in a hand almost as weak and straggling as that of June and July, 1796. Nevertheless he had proved his qualifications for the job. An official report on various subordinate officers in the Excise bears after Burns’s name the notation ‘a poet—never tried—turns out well.’ He had moreover established friendly relations with his immediate superiors, Alexander Findlater, the Supervisor, and John Mitchell, the Collector, of the Dumfries district. With the latter, indeed, he was already on terms approaching intimacy, sending him gifts of new-laid eggs from Ellisland and accompanying them at least once with a poetic epistle so broadly humorous that no editor has ever printed it all. Both men testified to Burns’s fidelity by defending his character after his death and—what is far more significant—by reporting favourably on him during his life.
He was giving reason for favourable reports. His predecessor had been so slack that Burns was able to appear, at the first session of court after he began duty, with an impressive array of cases of tax evasion. In handling these he again displayed political astuteness. The minor offenders, mostly poor men who could ill afford a fine, he begged off with warnings or suspended sentences. This almost compelled the magistrates to fine the larger offenders for whom he refused to intercede, and inasmuch as Excise officers then, like American customs inspectors today, received a percentage of these penalties, Burns found his procedure remunerative in cash as well as in official credit. He soon discovered, though, that zeal had its drawbacks. Gentlemen of position, including some of the magistrates themselves, had their favourite smugglers or home-brewers, and when Burns caught one of these he started all the machinery of influence and political pressure so familiar to Americans during the prohibition era. Once he told Collector Mitchell, after a hard day’s riding in rounding up witnesses in a case, that he expected for his pains to be clapped in jail for annoying the friends of half the gentlemen in the county. The grosser temptations of bribery, however, did not touch him. The various legends, deriving from highly unreliable oral tradition, of his leniency with small offenders mean no more, even if literally true, than that Burns had learned the common sense of his profession. A customs inspector knows that his job is not to penalize every tourist who has failed to declare a dozen handkerchiefs but to catch the large-scale smuggler. The same was true of the laws Burns had to enforce, which imposed taxes on everything from whisky to candles. Not but what he made ordinary human distinctions between his public and his private capacities. William Lorimer, father of ‘Chloris’, was one of the poet’s intimate friends. He was also a bootlegger whose ways were, ‘like the grace of G—, past all comprehension’. Seemingly Lorimer maintained a moderate legal stock for inspection purposes, but once when he was absent and his wife drunk something slipped in the working of the gentlemen’s agreement, and Burns had to explain to Supervisor Findlater. Another time he helped, as revenue officer, in a series of raids on Dumfries haberdashers who had been selling smuggled French gloves. A few days later, as private citizen, he supplied Maria Riddell with similar gloves from a still unraided dealer’s stock. The problems and conditions of law enforcement are among the few immutables in human history.
After two years’ experience Burns reaffirmed that the Excise was after all the business for him. He added, ‘I find no difficulty in being an honest man in it; the work of itself, is easy; and it is a devilish different affair, managing money matters where I care not a damn whether the money is paid or not; from the long faces made to a haughty Laird or still more haughty Factor, when rents are demanded, and money, alas, not to be had!’ His position as tenant farmer was no longer an irritation; it was an obsession. Ellisland, he told Gilbert, had undone his enjoyment of himself. He looked forward with the same desperate hope as his father’s at Mount Oliphant to the ‘freedom in his lease’. The three-year period of the £50 rental ended in 1791. After that, if he chose to stay, Ellisland would cost £70 a year. Naturally, his discouragement and defeat on the farm had affected his relations with his landlord. Miller’s kindness, he said, had been just such another thing as Creech’s, and the fact that Mrs. Miller had failed to appreciate one of his poorer contributions to Johnson’s Museum did not heighten his esteem for the family. He wanted no more to do with landlords or anything that belonged to them.
His only good luck at Ellisland came at the end. The surrender of the lease did not annoy Miller as Burns had expected, for a purchaser was in the market, and Miller was glad enough to dispose of the farm which the Nith separated from the rest of his estate. After sending Jean and the children to Mauchline, Burns held an auction of his standing crops and provided the lavish drinks expected by auction-goers. One result was that the exhilarated bidders ran up the prices nearly a guinea an acre beyond the market rates; another was that house and stable-yard were strewn with helplessly drunk and retching neighbours. The sale brought ready cash for the first time in two years, and Burns used some of it to clear up a variety of small debts, including the four pounds he owed his namesake, Robert Burn of Edinburgh, for erecting Fergusson’s tombstone. He also celebrated his manumission by a brief visit to Edinburgh to say farewell to Clarinda and to try to do something for sick and penniless Jenny Clow.
While things had been going so badly on the farm his position in the Excise had been improving. After less than a year and a half in his laborious rural division he had wangled a transfer to a vacant ‘footwalk’, the ‘3d, or Tobacco, Division’, in Dumfries. This meant lighter work, and enabled him to dispense with his horse—not too soon, for his poor worn-out mare had given him several nasty falls on the bad roads, bruising him severely and once breaking his arm. In town, though, he had small opportunity for increasing his income through fines and penalties as he had done in the rural division. When at the end of 1791 he moved his family into Dumfries the best quarters he could afford were a crowded and uncomfortable half-of-a-house in the Stinking Vennel, near the river. He was still receiving only the minimum salary of £50 a year, and though Jean said long afterwards that they did not come empty-handed into Dumfries not much cash can have remained after he had discharged his debts. As early as March, 1790, he had estimated that he would be lucky if he did not lose more than £100 out of an investment of little more than £200. Such anticipatory estimates are oftener under the mark than over it; one suspects that if Burns recovered as much as £50 of the money he had put into Ellisland, he was lucky.
By comparison, his prospects in the Excise were roseate. The Port Division in Dumfries, best paid of the subordinate posts, was vacant, and Burns lobbied for it with William Corbet, general supervisor of Excise, as he had done with Graham of Fintry for his first appointment. Corbet was an old friend of Mrs. Dunlop’s, and her intercession was effectively supplemented by a warm recommendation from Findlater, the local supervisor. Burns got the job early in 1792. The salary was £70 a year with various perquisites worth another £20. It scarcely represented luxurious living, but it was a better income than most Scottish schoolmasters or even ministers received in the eighteenth century, and though ‘Robin’s temper was not cold and frugal’ he managed to be fairly comfortable. After a year in the Stinking Vennel he moved to a better house in what was then called Mill Street and is now Burns Street—the last of his numerous abodes.
Even before he left Ellisland Burns’s name had been placed on the list of those eligible for promotion to the rank of Supervisor. This was the most laborious of the Excise posts, for the supervisors did most of the real work of collection and administration. They received salaries of from £200 to £400 a year, but their duties filled most of their waking hours. So long as he was merely Port Officer Burns had time and energy for reading and song-writing. He knew, however, that when in the course of seniority he became a supervisor most of this would cease. But he was already looking beyond. The next rank above Supervisor was Collector, and the collectors held well-paid sinecures. In theory at least supervisors were appointed by merit, but collectorships admittedly went by favour, and Burns began to cultivate political friendships which might in the future secure him the necessary influence.
Not that he had any intention of soldiering on his job and trusting to influence to lift him to a better one. He was taking an intelligent interest in his work and sought the attention of his superiors by his understanding of their business. Thus he had not been long in his Port Division before he wrote to Provost Staig of Dumfries pointing out that the town was losing revenue through failure to assess a tax on imported ale, and backed his statement with an estimate of the sums involved and some shrewd advice as to the best method of getting his chiefs to enforce their collection. A year or so later he pointed out to Robert Graham that one of the Dumfries divisions could be abolished and its duties distributed among the other officers without overburdening them. There cannot be many instances on record of a government employee’s informing his superiors that he was underworked. On this occasion at least Burns took an unusual way of drawing attention to himself. He was also once more suggesting his own advancement at the expense of another man, but admitted the fact and coupled his recommendation with a plea that if the change were made the present incumbent, burdened with an expensive family, be provided for elsewhere.
He would have been the last to claim that these suggestions were free of any ulterior motive beside the general one of making himself known as a thoughtful and efficient officer. He had other and more immediate purposes. Not long after showing Provost Staig the revenue possibilities of the ‘twa pennies’ tax on ale he had a petition to make to the Burgh Council. When he first visited Dumfries in 1787 he had been made an honorary burgess; he now wanted that nominal citizenship converted into a real one so far at least as concerned the local schools. The sons of burgesses were entitled to free tuition at Dumfries Academy, and the chance of getting his boys into a first-rate school was not to be neglected. His petition set forth in detail the help he had given to the local revenues. This may not have been the reason why the Council at once granted his application, but it certainly did not hamper it. Similarly his letters to Graham were frankly motivated by a desire to get a post as acting supervisor at the earliest possible moment and thereby to secure not only some small immediate increase in income but the experience and reputation which would count in his favour when a permanent position opened.
These were reasonable and legitimate efforts to gain prestige. He indulged in others more ticklish and, in the perspective of history, more futile. Burns lacked the right temperament for cultivating politicians, but he could not help trying. He was once introduced, for instance, to that very shady character, the Duke of Queensberry, whom previously he had rated with some justice as a complete scoundrel. At their meeting the Duke proved affable, and hearing that Burns had written a song about the notorious ‘Whistle’ drinking bout mentioned that he would like a copy. Burns sent it to him with a flattering letter, no doubt hoping that at some future date the Duke’s influence might be useful. There was nothing particularly dangerous in this, for the Duke’s rank made him a public character irrespective of what party was in power. But when Burns undertook to meddle in parliamentary contests he was playing with fire. He had of course no vote himself, but he wrote ballads in support of Whig candidates and continued to do so until a few months before his death. From the viewpoint of 1792 something might have been said for this as good strategy, regardless of the poet’s actual sympathies. Except for the brief Rockingham ministry at the end of the American War the Tories had been in power for nearly a generation and a reversal was overdue. When and if the Whigs came in a man who had supported them in their time of adversity would be entitled to special favours. Neither Burns nor anyone else in Britain could foresee Napoleon and realize that Pitt’s ministry, which had already been on the verge of disaster over the Regency Bill, would, thanks to the Frenchman, remain in office until after Burns and most of his parliamentary friends were in their graves. As things turned out, silence would have been the better part for Burns, but he had no gift for silence.
In the same year moreover in which Burns secured his Port Division the effects of the upheaval in France were stirring both Burns and Scotland. The cries of Liberty and Equality and Fraternity were echoed in the North and enlisted as in England a motley collection of supporters who ranged from poetic idealists, like Burns and Wordsworth, through professional agitators like Thomas Paine and Horne Tooke to unprincipled rabble. Burns’s first public gesture of sympathy with the French Revolution came as a by-product of the most exciting episode in his career as an Excise officer. In the early spring of 1792 a smuggling schooner named the Rosamond was caught in the Solway. The ship was heavily armed and thanks to the active co-operation of the coastwise folks, who staved in all their rowboats to keep the Excise officers from using them, she landed her cargo. The Rosamond, however, remained aground on the tidal flats and when an armed force of dragoons and Excise officers—Burns among them—waded out to attack her the crew fled after scuttling the ship. Salvaged and towed into the Nith the Rosamond with all her gear was confiscated and sold at auction. Her armament included four carronades which Burns bought for £4 and dispatched as a gift to the French Convention. Such at least is the traditional story, and every detail of it, except the actual dispatch of the carronades, is corroborated by documents found among the Abbotsford papers. The tradition continues that the guns never reached France, being seized by the customs officials at Dover; but here again confirmation is lacking. Legally there was nothing wrong in Burns’s action. France and England were still officially at peace, though their relations were steadily growing tenser. Nevertheless, from the practical viewpoint of a government employee with a dependent family it was a gesture of almost criminal recklessness. The government has never yet existed which looked benevolently upon manifestations of revolutionary sympathies among its servants, and before many months had passed Burns had good reason to be frightened.
The autumn of 1792 saw England ready to join the coalition against revolutionary France, though war was not declared until February 1, 1793. To the privileged classes in England the war had all the characteristics of a crusade except the obligation to take a personal share. The Revolution threatened the very foundations of the aristocratic social system, and the depth of the government’s fear is measured by the violence alike of official denunciations of France and of the suppression of dissenting opinion at home. Charges of sedition were pressed not only against avowed revolutionary sympathizers but against almost anyone who had advocated the slightest modification of the existing order. It was not surprising that Burns, always unguarded in speech and action, should face investigation of his conduct. The details of the charges and their outcome belong in another chapter. For a time Burns thought that all his hopes of advancement were blasted, but the storm soon blew over, and even before he advertised his loyalty by enlisting in the Dumfries Volunteers he had good reason to anticipate that promotion would come in due course.
But though he escaped the storm of persecution he did not escape the economic consequences of the war. It had the usual and inevitable results of tight money and rising prices; a wave of bankruptcies swept over Scotland; the monthly lists of failures in the Scots Magazine increased from an average of half-a-dozen a month to forty-six in July, 1793, and among the victims was Burns’s friend, Walter Auld the saddler. The poet himself was not exempt. The war cut off the greater part of the import trade and with it much of the income and perquisites of Dumfries Port Division. Burns had just begun to extend his expenditures in keeping with his increased income. The carronades and his better house were only part of the expansion. He had backed a friend’s note and had to pay it when the friend defaulted; he had lent considerable sums to another friend, the schoolmaster at Moffat, who was engaged in a long-drawn-out wrangle with the Earl of Hopetoun, patron of the school; there were other smaller loans as well. Caught thus with ready cash exhausted, income reduced, and prices rising, Burns found himself once again in the grimly familiar position of being unable to pay his landlord. That the landlord was a gentleman and a personal friend who did not dun for his money made the situation more painful. In January, 1795, Burns had actually to borrow three guineas from his friend, William Stewart, in order to pay part of his rent. Nevertheless even in these hard times he managed occasional expenditures that came in the class of luxuries—a week’s tour in Galloway with John Syme, the restoration of a Jacobite relic in form of Lord Balmerino’s dirk, even a miniature portrait of himself. He and his family never lacked for the necessaries of life, and though he was somewhat in debt the accounting of his executors is proof that the amount never passed reasonable bounds.
As soon as the excitement over the sedition charges subsided his prospects in the Excise brightened steadily. Friends in Edinburgh were secretly trying to get him transferred to a more lucrative position, but even in Dumfries things looked hopeful. At the end of December, 1794, Supervisor Findlater fell ill, and Burns took over his duties. The work lasted three months or more, and though it is uncertain if Burns received any extra pay for his labour he at least gained valuable experience and competently handled his complex duties. The only adverse criticism of his conduct related to a technical irregularity in his final report, and this was the fault not of Burns himself but of one of his subordinates. The passage of each year brought him higher on the list of candidates for supervisor’s posts. Had he lived another year or two he would automatically have been appointed even if his Edinburgh friends had failed in their efforts to hasten the process.
The prospect of promotion was becoming very real—so real that during the very months when he was acting as supervisor Burns devoted some of his scanty leisure to composing a group of political ballads. Patrick Heron of Heron—the same Heron whose bank failure had once ruined half Ayrshire—was the Whig candidate in a by-election at Kirkcudbright. In return for the support of Burns’s pen Heron asked if he could do anything for the poet. Burns’s reply showed his mind at its coldest level of realism. Nothing could be done, he said, for two or three years, until he reached the head of the supervisors’ list. Then a political friend could be of service in getting him appointed in some agreeable part of the kingdom and of still more service in hastening his next step in rank. Collectorships went by favour, and the time he must spend in the drudgery of a supervisorship would therefore depend on the amount of influence his friends could exert. The letter is graphic proof of Burns’s open-eyed acceptance of the system in which he worked; it is also proof of his irrepressible lack of discretion. From the viewpoint of mere self-interest he would have done better to hold aloof from all political contests and, when the time came, to base his appeal for influence upon his standing as a poet instead of identifying himself with any party. But such calm calculation was not in his nature.
In any case his hopes were vain. His disease was gaining on him; he experienced sharp twinges of pain which he and his doctors called rheumatism, but which were probably angina pectoris. In June and again in December, 1795, he had serious illnesses which left him weak and shaken. In the face of his increasing weakness he had taken on additional labour by enlisting in a volunteer company organized in Dumfries in the early spring. The manual of arms and frequent drills were dangerous medicine for a diseased heart, and to this physical labour Burns added active participation in all the business affairs of the corps. His final breakdown could not in any circumstances have been long delayed, but the Dumfries Volunteers undoubtedly hastened it.
The winter of 1795-6 was a time of famine. Crops had been bad; trade was dislocated by the war. Nearly one-fourth of the inhabitants of Edinburgh were being fed by charity, and flour was so scarce that even those who could afford it were asked to ration themselves to one loaf of bread per capita a week. Conditions in the smaller towns were as bad or worse; there were serious food riots in Dumfries in February and March. With his health steadily declining Burns was exposed to constant worry for the welfare of his family. Excise officers who were unable over long periods to perform their duties because of illness were reduced to half-pay, and as matters stood in the spring of 1796 half-pay would have meant almost starvation for his children. That things did not come to this pass for Burns was due to the generosity of Adam Stobbie, who handled his work for him and refused compensation for the service. This relieved some of his immediate anxiety, but did little to answer the main question of what would become of Jean and the children if he died.
The problem of livelihood, never long absent from his mind, occupied it during his last weeks almost to the exclusion of other thoughts. The only prescriptions the doctors could offer in his illness involved expenditures he could not afford, and his enlistment in the Volunteers now returned to plague him. The tailor who had made his uniform began to dun for payment, and to the poet’s fevered imagination it seemed that his life was going to close as his father’s had, under the shadow of a debtors’ prison. He spent some of his last days of consciousness in writing frantic letters begging the friends to whom he had lent money to repay their loans and asking others like George Thomson and James Burness to advance him money. Thomson was the only one who gave grudgingly. The others willingly and promptly sent what he asked, but too late to lift the cloud from his dying mind. His last articulate words were an imprecation against the tailor who had threatened him, and he died without the comfort of knowing that his death would awaken the generosity he had never experienced in his life, and that the admirers of his poetry would make it possible for Jean to keep her home together and for his children to be decently educated and launched on respectable careers.