But left behind her ain grey tail;
The carlin claught her by the rump,
And left poor Maggie scarce a stump.”
I have seen the tavern, the church, the bridge, the statue of Tam, but a grateful public has forgotten to properly commemorate the services of Meg and the sacrifice of the tail.
Across the river Ayr are “the auld brig” and “the new brig” which held a joint debate as reported by Burns’s muse. The city council was recently about to take down the auld brig because it was unsafe, but a general howl went up, and the bridge is to be preserved. All of the relics of Burns are being taken care of, and so far as possible the old cottage and other places connected with his life are restored to the condition they were in when Burns was plowing and quit work to write poetry to a mouse he had stirred out of its nest. I can readily understand why Burns did not make a success as a farmer, for like other poets he did not like to work. However, the dislike for work is not confined to poets, who have more of an excuse for this fault than the rest of us.
I have not yet found a Scotchman who cannot quote Burns’s poetry by the yard. It is all I can do to read most of Burns’s lines, and the words I skip often look rough and jagged. But when a Scotchman recites Burns, the dialect and the broad accent make the rhymes sound like music. The strange syllables fit together in harmony so that one can understand that Burns knew what he was about when he used the local phrases and words in so much of his writing. Burns was a good scholar, and could and did write the purest of English, but he took the homely phrases of the Scottish life to make the common things he writes about ring clear and right.
Ayr is about forty miles from Glasgow. As soon as you leave the Burns neighborhood you get into a country of coal mines, factories, and golf links. There are miles of golf grounds on the moors along the road. Most of the land is only fit to raise heather and lose golf balls. No wonder Burns’s father failed and Robert was going to emigrate. The more I see of Scottish soil the more I take off my hat to the Scotch farmers, who must be the bravest men in the world.