ROBERT BURNS was born on the 25th of January, 1759, in the town of Ayr, in Scotland. His pretensions by birth, were a descent from poor and humble, but honest and intelligent parents; and a title to inherit all their intelligence and virtue, as well as all their poverty. Upon the nature of these pretensions, Burns, in a letter to a friend, dated many years after, takes occasion to say: "I have not the most distant pretensions to assume that character, which the pye-coatcd guardians of escutcheons call a gentleman. When at Edinborough last winter, I got acquainted in the Herald's Office; and looking through that granary of honors, I there found almost every name in the kingdom: but for me,—
'My ancient but ignoble blood
Has crept thro' scoundrels ever since the flood.'"
His father was a native of the north of Scotland, but he was driven by various misfortunes to Edinborough, and thence still farther south to Ayrshire, where he was first employed as a gardener in one of the families in that vicinity, and afterwards, being desirous of settling in life, took a lease of a little farm of seven acres, on which he reared a clay cottage with his own hands, and soon after married a wife. The first fruit of this union was our poet, whose birth took place two years thereafter. Robert, during his early days, was by no means a favorite with any body. He was remarkable, however, for a retentive memory, and a thoughtful turn of mind. His ear was dull, and his voice harsh and dissonant, and he evinced no musical talent or poetical genius until his fifteenth or sixteenth year. It is pretended by his biographers, (of whom there have been several, and who all agree in this opinion,) that the seeds of Poetry were very early implanted in his mind, and that the recitations and fireside chaunts of an old crone, who was familiar in his father's family, served to cherish their growth, and strengthen their hold upon his memory. This "auld gudewife" is said to have had the largest collection in the country of tales and songs concerning fairies, witches, warlocks, apparitions, giants, dragons, and other agents of romantic fiction. Speaking of these tales and songs, he says, in his later years, "so strong an effect had they upon my imagination, that even to this hour, in my nocturnal rambles, I am fain to keep a sharp look out in suspicious places; and, though nobody can feel more sceptical than I have ever done in such matters, yet it often requires an effort of Philosophy to shake off these idle terrors."
When Robert was in his seventh year, his father quitted the birth-place of the poet, and took a lease of a small farm on the estate of Mr. Fergusson, called Mount Oliphant. He had been, for a year or two previous to this event, a pupil of Dr. Murdoch, who is represented as being a very worthy and acute man, and who took much pains with the education of the future poet. In fact, his father had previously taught him arithmetic, and whatever of lore could be gathered from the "big ha' bible," as they sat by their solitary candle; and he had been sent, alternately with his brother, a week at a time during a summer's quarter, to a writing master at the parish school at Dalrymple. But Dr. Murdoch, his faithful friend in youth and age, instructed him in English Grammar, and aided him in the acquisition of a little French. After a fortnight's instruction in the latter language, he was able to translate it into English prose, but, farther than this, his new attainment was never of much advantage to him. Indeed, his attempts to speak the language were ridiculously futile at times. On one occasion, when he called in Edinborough at the house of an accomplished friend, a lady who had been educated in France, he found her conversing with a French lady, to whom he was introduced. The French woman understood English; but Burns must need try his powers. His first sentence was intended to compliment the lady on her apparent eloquence in conversation; but by mistaking some idiom, he made the lady understand that she was too fond of hearing herself speak. The French woman, highly incensed, replied, that there were more instances of vain poets than of talkative women; and Burns was obliged to use his own language in appeasing her. He attempted the Latin, but his success did not encourage him to persevere. And, in fine, with the addition of a quarter's attendance to Geometry and Surveying, at the age of nineteen, and a few lessons at a country dancing school, I have now mentioned all his opportunities of acquiring a scholastic education. He says of himself, in allusion to his boyish days, "though it cost the schoolmaster many thrashings, I made an excellent English scholar; and by the time I was ten or eleven years of age, I was a critic in substantives, verbs and particles."
As soon as young Burns had strength to work, he was employed as a laborer upon his father's farm. At twelve he was a good ploughman; a year later he assisted at the threshing-floor; and was his father's main dependance at fifteen, there being no hired laborers, male or female, in the family at the time. In one of his letters, (and it is by extracting copiously from them, that I propose chiefly to narrate his history,) he remarks upon this subject—"I saw my father's situation entailed on me perpetual labor: the only two openings by which I could enter the temple of fortune, were the gate of niggardly economy, or the path of little, chicaning bargain-making. The first is so contracted an aperture, I never could squeeze myself into it; the last I always hated—there was contamination in the very entrance!" And it was this kind of life,—the cheerless gloom of a hermit, with the unceasing toil of a galley-slave, that brought him to his sixteenth year, at about which period he first perpetrated the sin of rhyming. Of this you shall have an account in the author's own language.
"You know our country custom of coupling a man and woman together as partners in the labors of harvest. In my fifteenth autumn my partner was a bewitching creature, a year younger than myself. My scarcity of English denies me the power of doing her justice in that language; but you know the Scottish idiom,—she was a bonnie, sweet, sonsie lass. In short, she altogether, unwittingly to herself, initiated me in that delicious passion, which, in spite of acid disappointment, rigid prudence, and book-worm philosophy, I hold to be the first of human joys, our dearest blessing here below! How she caught the contagion I cannot tell. You medical people—(he was addressing the celebrated Dr. Moore) you medical people talk much of infection from breathing the same air, the touch, &c.; but I never expressly said I loved her. Indeed, I did not know myself why I liked so much to loiter behind with her, when returning in the evening from our labors; why the tones of her voice made my heartstrings thrill like an Eolian harp; and particularly why my pulse beat such a furious ratan, when I plucked the cruel nettle-stings and thistles from her little white hand. Among her other love-inspiring qualities, she sung sweetly; and it was her favorite reel, to which I attempted giving an embodied vehicle in rhyme. I was not so presumptuous as to imagine that I could make verses like printed ones, composed by men who had Greek and Latin: but my girl sung a song, which was said to have been composed by a country laird's son upon a neighboring maiden with whom he was in love! and I saw; no reason why I might not rhyme as well as he; for, excepting that he could shear sheep and cast peats, (his father living in the moorlands,) he had no more scholar craft than myself."
Thus, with Burns, began Love and Poetry. This, his first effort, is valuable, more from the promise it gave of his future excellence as a poet, than for any intrinsic merit which it possessed as a performance of so gifted a genius. I have been the more particular in describing the circumstances attending the composition of these, his earliest verses, for the proof they afford of the truth of the general remark, that of all the poetical compositions of Burns, his love-songs, and amatory poetry are far the best. His feelings predominated over his fancy, and whenever the latter is introduced we are forced to deem it an intrusion for the strong contrast it presents with the native and characteristic simplicity of his more natural and heartfelt effusions.
Referring to the predilections which I have said gave a character to so large a portion of his poetical writings, he says,—"My heart was completely tinder, and was eternally lighted up by some goddess or other: and, as in every other warfare in this world, my fortune was various; sometimes I was received with favor, and sometimes I was mortified with a repulse." And in another letter he says farther, "Another circumstance in my life which made some alterations in my mind and manners, was, that I spent my nineteenth summer on a smuggling coast, a good distance from home, at a noted school, to learn mensuration, surveying, dialling, &c. in which I made a pretty good progress. But I made a greater progress in the knowledge of mankind. Scenes of riot and roaring dissipation were, till now, new to me; but I was no enemy to social life. For all that, I went on with a high hand in my geometry till the sun entered Virgo, (a month, which is always a carnival in my bosom,) when a charming fair one, who lived next door to the school, overset my trigonometry, and set me off at a tangent from the sphere of my duties. I, however, struggled on with my sines and co-sines for a few days more, but stepping into the garden one charming noon to take the sun's altitude, there I met my angel,
| 'Like Proserpine, gathering flowers, Herself, a fairer flower.' |
It was in vain to think of doing any more good at school. The remaining weeks I staid I did nothing but craze the faculties of my soul about her, or steal out to meet her. And the two last nights of my stay in the country, had sleep been a mortal sin, the image of this modest and innocent girl had kept me guiltless."