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.