“Jamie,” said the poet one day, as he gave this character a penny, “you should pray to be turned from the evil of your ways; you are ready now to melt that penny into whisky.”
“Turn!” exclaimed Jamie, who was a wit in his way, “I wish some ane wad turn me into the worm o’ Will Hyslop’s whisky-still, that the drink micht dribble through me for ever.”
“Weel said, Jamie,” responded the poet; “you shall have a glass of whisky once a week for that if you will come sober for it.”
A friend rallied Burns for indulging such creatures.
“You don’t understand the matter,” said he; “they are poets; they have the madness of the muse, and all they want is the inspiration—a mere trifle!”
A prophet has no honour in his own country, and few of the peasantry personally acquainted with Burns were willing to allow that his merit exceeded their own. Mrs. M’Quistan, the housekeeper at Dunlop House, where the poet was a frequent visitor, saw nothing in his writings calling for special admiration, and doubted the propriety of her mistress entertaining a mere ploughman who made rhymes. As regarded “The Cottar’s Saturday Night,” she declared to Mrs. Dunlop, with much shaking of the head, that “Nae doubt gentlemen and ladies think muckle o’ that, but, for me, it’s naething but what I saw in my ain faither’s house every day, and I dinna see who he could hae tauld it ony other way.” It was a splendid compliment. Yet the author once received perhaps a better—in his own hearing, too—one, at least, which he appreciated more. A little boy was asked which of the poet’s works he liked best. “I like ‘The Cottar’s Saturday Night’ far best,” he exclaimed, “though it made me greet when my father made me read it to my mother.”
The poet, with a sudden start, looked into the boy’s face intently, and, patting him on the cheek, said, the tear glistening in his eye the while, “Well, my callant, it made me greet, too, more than once, when I was writing it at my father’s fireside.”
Scott, when about seventeen years of age, saw Burns in Edinburgh, and has afforded the most truthful and graphic account of his personal appearance extant. It was at a literary dinner at Professor Fergusson’s that they met. The wondrous boy enlightened the party as to the authorship of the line—
“The child of misery baptized in tears,”
by telling them it was Langhorne’s,[2] whereupon Burns looked towards him and exclaimed, “You will be a man yet.” No prophecy received fuller fulfilment; for if Sir Walter Scott did not rise to the full stature of true manhood, no mere man ever did. Scott brought pleasure with him into every party he chose to enter. His rich, racy humour in telling stories and giving anecdotes, always on the spur of the moment, was delightful. He had an anecdote ready, a story to match, or “cap,” as he used to call it, every one he heard, and with most perfect ease and hearty good humour. His first publisher, says one, Robert Millar, gave anecdotes very pleasantly, and one day, after dinner, he was telling the company that he, or some friend, had been present at an Assize Court in Jedburgh, when a farm servant had summoned his master for non-payment of wages, which he, the servant, had justly forfeited through some misconduct. After a great deal of cross-questioning—