His health now began to give his friends serious concern. To Cunningham he wrote, February 24, 1794: 'For these two months I have not been able to lift a pen. My constitution and my frame were ab origine blasted with a deep, incurable taint of hypochondria, which poisons my existence.' A little later he confesses: 'I have been in poor health. I am afraid that I am about to suffer for the follies of my youth. My medical friends threaten me with a flying gout, but I trust they are mistaken.' His only comfort in those days was his correspondence with Thomson and with Johnson. He kept pouring out song after song, criticising, rewriting, changing what was foul and impure into songs of the tenderest delicacy. He showed love in every mood, from the rapture of pure passion in the Lea Rig, the maidenly abandon of Whistle and I'll come to you, my Lad, to the humour of Last May a Braw Wooer and Duncan Gray, and the guileless devotion of O wert thou in the Cauld Blast. But he sang of more than love. Turning from the coldness of the high and mighty, who had once been his friends, he found consolation in the naked dignity of manhood, and penned the hymn of humanity, A Man's a Man for a' that. Perhaps he found his text in Tristram Shandy: 'Honours, like impressions upon coin, may give an ideal and local value to a bit of base metal, but gold and silver pass all the world over with no other recommendation than their own weight.' Something like this occurs in Massinger's Duke of Florence, where it is said of princes that
'They can give wealth and titles, but no virtues;
This is without their power.'
Gower also had written—
'A king can kill, a king can save;
A king can make a lord a knave,
And of a knave a lord also.'
But the poem is undoubtedly Burns's, and it is one he must have written ere he passed away. Scots wha hae is another of his Dumfries poems. Mr. Syme gives a highly-coloured and one-sided view of the poet riding in a storm between Gatehouse and Kenmure, where we are assured he composed this ode. Carlyle accepts Syme's authority, and adds: 'Doubtless this stern hymn was singing itself, as he formed it, through the soul of Burns; but to the external ear it should be sung with the throat of the whirlwind.' Burns gives an account of the writing of the poem, which it is difficult to reconcile with Mr. Syme's sensational details. It matters not, however, when or how it was written; we have it now, one of the most martial and rousing odes ever penned. Not only has it gripped the heart of Scotsmen, but it has taken the ear of the world; its fire and vigour have inspired soldiers in the day of battle, and consoled them in the hour of death. We are not forgetful of the fact that Mrs. Hemans, who wrote some creditable verse, and the placid Wordsworth, discussed this ode, and agreed that it was little else than the rhodomontade of a schoolboy. It is a pity that such authorities should have missed the charm of Scots wha hae. More than likely they made up for the loss in a solitary appreciation of Betty Foy or The Pilgrim Fathers.
Another martial ode, composed in 1795, was called forth by the immediate dangers of the time. The country was roused by the fear of foreign invasion, and Burns, who had enrolled himself in the ranks of the Dumfriesshire Volunteers, penned the patriotic song, Does Haughty Gaul Invasion threat? This song itself might have reinstalled him in public favour, and dispelled all doubt as to his loyalty, had he cared again to court the society of those who had dropped him from the list of their acquaintance. But Burns had grown indifferent to any favour save the favour of his Muse; besides, he was now shattered in health, and assailed with gloomy forebodings of an early death. For himself he would have faced death manfully, but again it was the thought of wife and bairns that unmanned him.
Not content with supplying Thomson with songs, he wrote letters full of hints and suggestions anent songs and song-making, and now and then he gave a glimpse of himself at work. We see him sitting under the shade of an old thorn crooning to himself until he gets a verse to suit the measure he has in his mind; looking round for objects in nature that are in unison and harmony with the cogitations of his fancy; humming every now and then the air with the verses; retiring to his study to commit his effusions to paper, and while he swings at intervals on the hind legs of his elbow-chair, criticising what he has written. A common walk of his when he was in the poetical vein was to the ruins of Lincluden Abbey, whither he was often accompanied by his eldest boy; sometimes towards Martingdon ford, on the north side of the Nith. When he returned home with a set of verses, he listened attentively to his wife singing them, and if she happened to find a word that was harsh in sound, a smoother one was immediately substituted; but he would on no account ever sacrifice sense to sound.
During the earlier part of this year Burns had taken his full share in the political contest that was going on, and fought for Heron of Heron, the Whig candidate, with electioneering ballads, not to be claimed as great poems nor meant to be so ranked, but marked with all his incisiveness of wit and satire, and with his extraordinary deftness of portraiture. Heron was the successful candidate, and his poetical supporter again began to indulge in dreams of promotion: 'a life of literary leisure with a decent competency was the summit of his wishes.' But his dreams were not to be realised.
In September his favourite child and only daughter, Elizabeth, died at Mauchline, and he was prostrated with grief. He had also taken very much to heart the inexplicable silence of his old friend, and for many years constant correspondent, Mrs. Dunlop. To both these griefs he alludes in a letter to her, dated January 31, 1796: 'These many months you have been two packets in my debt. What sin of ignorance I have committed against so highly valued a friend I am utterly at a loss to guess. Alas! madam, I can ill afford at this time to be deprived of any of the small remnant of my pleasures. I have lately drunk deep of the cup of affliction. The autumn robbed me of my only daughter and darling child, and that at a distance, too, and so rapidly as to put it out of my power to pay my last duties to her. I had scarcely begun to recover from that shock when I became myself the victim of a severe rheumatic fever, and long the die spun doubtful, until, after many weeks of a sickbed, it seems to have turned up life.'
There was an evident decline in the poet's appearance, Dr. Currie tells us, for upwards of a year before his death, and he himself was sensible that his constitution was sinking. During almost the whole of the winter of 1795-96 he had been confined to the house. Then follows the unsubstantiated story which has done duty for Shakspeare and many other poets. 'He dined at a tavern, returned home about three o'clock in a very cold morning, benumbed and intoxicated. This was followed by an attack of rheumatism.' It is difficult to kill a charitable myth, especially one that is so agreeable to the levelling instincts of ordinary humanity, and of such sweet consolation to the weaker brethren. Of course there are variants of the story, with a stair and sleep and snow brought in as sensational, if improbable, accessories; but such stories as these all good men refuse to believe, unless they are compelled to do so by the conclusive evidence of direct authority; and that, in this case, is altogether awanting. All evidence that has been forthcoming has gone directly against it, and the story may be accepted as a myth. The fact is that brains have been ransacked to find reason for the poet's early death,—as if the goings and comings of death could be scientifically calculated in biography,—and the last years of his 'irregular life' are blamed: Dumfries is set apart as the chief sinner. No doubt his life was irregular there; his duties were irregular; his hours were irregular. But Burns in his thirty-six years, had lived a full life, putting as much into one year as the ordinary sons of men put into two. He had had threatenings of rheumatism and heart disease when he was an overworked lad at Lochlea; and now his constitution was breaking up from the rate at which he had lived. Excess of work more than excess of drink brought him to an early grave. During his few years' stay at Dumfries he had written over two hundred poems, songs, etc., many of them of the highest excellence, and most of them now household possessions. Besides his official duties, we know also that he took a great interest in his home and in the education of his children. Mr. Gray, master of the High School of Dumfries, who knew the poet intimately, wrote a long and interesting letter to Gilbert Burns, in which he mentions particularly the attention he paid to his children's education. 'He was a kind and attentive father, and took great delight in spending his evenings in the cultivation of the minds of his children. Their education was the grand object of his life; and he did not, like most parents, think it sufficient to send them to public schools; he was their private instructor; and even at that early age bestowed great pains in training their minds to habits of thought and reflection, and in keeping them pure from every form of vice. This he considered a sacred duty, and never to his last illness relaxed in his diligence.'