[[75]] Answer to Verses addressed to the Poet by the Guidwife of Wauchope House.
[[76]] Burns himself says of his early days, in his autobiographical letter to Dr. Moore: "The great misfortune of my life was never to have an aim."
[[77]] Perhaps Carlyle is misled in his estimate of Burns by his own high conception of the vocation of the man of letters. The profession of literature is hardly older than our own century; Dr. Johnson is really the first example of it. For a man, unsupported by a patron, to make poetry his means of subsistence, was almost unknown in the eighteenth century. Burns was too proud to depend on a patron, and his refusal to accept money for his contributions to Johnson's Museum and Thomson's Scottish Airs was only in accord with the ideas of his time; besides, he feared that such a proceeding would injure his spontaneity. To receive pay for a volume of poems, originally written without reference to publication, was quite a different matter.
Carlyle, in his lecture on The Hero as Man of Letters, in Heroes and Hero-Worship, develops his own point of view more fully.
[[78]] Burns himself says of his father: "I have met with few who understood Men, their manners and their ways, equal to him."
[[79]] These words seem like a prophecy of Carlyle's own career, which was just beginning when this essay was written.
[[80]] See The Cotter's Saturday Night.
[[81]] Wordsworth: Resolution and Independence (1807 edition). Our editions read: "Following his plough, along the mountain side." The reference in the poem is to Burns.
[[82]] Apparently the "best evidence" is conflicting. Burns, in his autobiographical letter to Dr. Moore, says of himself as a boy: "I was, perhaps, the most ungainly, awkward being in the parish." And Murdock, Burns's schoolmaster, in a letter printed in Currie's Life and reproduced in Lockhart's, says: "Robert's ear was remarkably dull, and his voice untamable.... Robert's countenance was generally grave and expressive of a serious, contemplative, and thoughtful mind."
[[83a]] The phrases are drawn from Burns's letter to Dr. Moore.