In his ‘Epistle to James Smith’ he wrote:
Truce with peevish, poor complaining!
Is Fortune’s fickle Luna waning?
E’en let her gang!
Beneath what light she has remaining
Let’s sing our sang.
Dr John M’Kenzie of Mauchline, in 1810, thirteen years after the death of Burns, described a visit made to see his father when he was ill. In it he says: ‘Gilbert, in the first interview I had with him at Lochlea, was frank, modest, well-informed, and communicative. The poet seemed distant, suspicious, and without any wish to interest or please. He kept himself very silent in a dark corner of the room; and before he took any part in the conversation, I frequently detected him scrutinising me during my conversation with his father and brother.
‘But afterwards, when the conversation, which was on a medical subject, had taken the turn he wished, he began to engage in it, displaying a dexterity of reasoning, an ingenuity of reflection, and a familiarity with topics apparently beyond his reach, by which his visitor was no less gratified than astonished.’
Burns lived next door to Dr M’Kenzie after he was married the second time to Jean Armour. They were great friends. Burns wrote a masonic poem to him, and called him ‘Common-sense’ in ‘The Holy Fair.’
In the letter from which the above quotation is made, Dr M’Kenzie says Robert took his characteristics mainly from his mother, and that Gilbert resembled his father.
Burns looked like his mother, and inherited his temperamental characteristics mainly from her.
Burns had a definitely religious tendency as one of his strong characteristics when he was a child. In the sketch of his life that he wrote to Dr Moore, of London, when he was twenty-eight years old, he says that as a boy he possessed ‘an enthusiastic idiot-piety. I say idiot-piety because I was then a child.’
He wrote several religious poems while living on Lochlea farm and on Mossgiel farm. ‘The Cotter’s Saturday Night’ was written at Mossgiel.
Throughout his life his religious tendency was one of his characteristics. This will be considered more fully in the chapter on ‘Burns’s Great Work for Religion.’