Early in his residence at Ellisland he formed a close relation with a neighboring proprietor, Colonel Robert Riddel. For him he copied into two volumes a large part of what he considered the best of his unpublished verse and prose, thus forming the well-known Glenriddel Manuscript. Had not one already become convinced of the fact from internal evidence, it would be clear enough from this prose volume that Burns's letters were often as much works of art to him as his poems. This is of supreme importance in weighing the epistolary evidence for his character and conduct. Even when his words seem to be the direct outpourings of his feelings—of love, of friendship, of gratitude, of melancholy, of devotion, of scorn—a comparative examination will show that in prose as much as in verse we are dealing with the work of a conscious artist, enamored of telling expression, aware of his reader, and anything but the naif utterer of unsophisticated emotion. To recall this will save us from much perplexity in the interpretation of his words, and will clear up many an apparent contradiction in his evidence about himself.

Burns was never very sanguine about success on the Ellisland farm. By the end of the summer of 1789 he concluded that he could not depend on it, determined to turn it into a dairy farm to be conducted mainly by his wife and sisters, and took up the work in the excise for which he had prepared himself. He had charge of a large district of ten parishes, and had to ride some two hundred miles a week in all weathers. With the work he still did on the farm one can see that he was more than fully employed, and need not wonder that there was little time for poetry. Yet these years at Ellisland were on the whole happy years for himself and his family; he found time for pleasant intercourse with some of his neighbors, for a good deal of letter-writing, for some interest in politics, and for the establishing, with Colonel Riddel, of a small neighborhood library. As an excise officer he seems to have been conscientious and efficient, though at times, in the case of poor offenders, he tempered justice with mercy. Ultimately, despairing of making the farm pay and hoping for promotion in the government service, he gave up his lease, sold his stock, and in the autumn of 1791 moved to Dumfries, where he was given a district which did not involve keeping a horse, and which paid him about seventy pounds a year. Thus ended the last of Burns's disastrous attempts to make a living from the soil.

5. Dumfries

The house in which the Burnses with their three sons first lived in Dumfries was a three-roomed cottage in the Wee Vennel, now Banks Street. Though his income was small, it must be remembered that the cost of food was low. “Beef was 3d. to 5d. a lb.; mutton, 3d. to 4-1/2d.; chickens, 7d. to 8d. a pair; butter (the lb. of 24 oz.), 7d. to 9d.; salmon, 6d. to 9-1/2d. a lb.; cod, 1d. and even 1/2d. a lb.” Though hardly in easy circumstances then, Burns's situation was such that it was possible to avoid his greatest horror, debt.

Meantime, his interest in politics had greatly quickened. He had been from youth a sentimental Jacobite; but this had little effect upon his attitude toward the parties of the day. In Edinburgh he had worn the colors of the party of Fox, presumably out of compliment to his Whig friends, Glencairn and Erskine. During the Ellisland period, however, he had written strongly against the Regency Bill supported by Fox; and in the general election of 1790 he opposed the Duke of Queensberry and the local Whig candidate. But in his early months in Dumfries we find him showing sympathy with the doctrines of the French Revolution, a sympathy which was natural enough in a man of his inborn democratic tendencies. A curious outcome of these was an incident not yet fully cleared up. In February, 1792, Burns, along with some fellow officers, assisted by a body of dragoons, seized an armed smuggling brig which had run aground in the Solway, and on her being sold, he bought for three pounds four of the small guns she carried. These he is said to have presented “to the French Convention,” but they were seized by the British Government at Dover. As a matter of fact, the Convention was not constituted till September, and the Legislative Assembly which preceded it was not hostile to Britain. Thus, Burns's action, though eccentric and extravagant, was not treasonable in law or in spirit, and does not seem to have entailed on him any unfortunate consequences.

In the course of that year symptoms of the infection of part of the British public with revolutionary principles began to be evident, and the government was showing signs of alarm. The Whig opposition was clamoring for internal reform, and Burns sided more and more definitely with it, and was rash enough to subscribe for a Reform paper called The Gazetteer, an action which would have put him under suspicion from his superiors, had it become known. Some notice of his Liberal tendencies did reach his official superiors, and an inquiry was made into his political principles which caused him no small alarm. In a letter to Mr. Graham of Fintry, through whom he had obtained his position, he disclaimed all revolutionary beliefs and all political activity. No action was taken against him, nor was his failure to obtain promotion to an Examinership due to anything but the slow progress involved in promotion by seniority. Hereafter, he exercised considerable caution in the expression of his political sympathies, though he allowed himself to associate with men of revolutionary opinions. The feeling that he was not free to utter what he believed on public affairs was naturally chafing to a man of his independent nature.

Burns's chief enjoyment in these days was the work he was doing for Scottish song. While in Edinburgh he had made the acquaintance of an engraver, James Johnson, who had undertaken the publication of the Scots Musical Museum, a collection of songs and music. Burns agreed to help him by the collection and refurbishing of the words of old songs, and when these were impossible, by providing new words for the melodies. The work finally extended to six volumes; and before it was finished a more ambitious undertaking, managed by a Mr. George Thomson, was set on foot. Burns was invited to cooperate in this also, and entered into it with such enthusiasm that he was Thomson's main support. In both of these publications the poet worked purely with patriotic motives and for the love of song, and had no pecuniary interest in either. Once Thomson sent him a present of five pounds and endangered their relations thereby; later, when Burns was in his last illness, he asked and received from Thomson an advance of the same amount. Apart from these sums Burns never made or sought to make a penny from his writings after the publication of the first Edinburgh edition. Twice he declined journalistic work for a London paper. Poetry was the great consolation of his life, and even in his severest financial straits he refused to consider the possibility of writing for money, regarding it as a kind of prostitution.

By the autumn of 1795 signs began to appear that the poet's constitution was breaking down. The death of his daughter Elizabeth and a severe attack of rheumatism plunged him into deep melancholy and checked for a time his song-writing; and though for a time he recovered, his disease returned early in the next year. It seems clear, too, that though the change from Ellisland to Dumfries relieved him of much of the severer physical exertion, other factors more than counterbalanced this relief. Burns had never been a slave to drink for its own sake; it had always been the accompaniment—in those days an almost inevitable accompaniment—of sociability. Some of his wealthier friends in the vicinity were in this respect rather excessive in their hospitality; in Dumfries the taverns were always at hand; and as Burns came to realize the comparative failure of his career as a man, he found whisky more and more a means of escape for depression. Even if we distrust the local gossip that made much of the dissipations of his later years, it appears from the evidence of his physician that alcohol had much to do with the rheumatic and digestive troubles that finally broke him down. In July, 1796, he was sent, as a last resort, to Brow-on-Solway to try sea-bathing and country life; but he returned little improved, and well-nigh convinced that his illness was mortal. His mental condition is shown by the fact that pressure from a solicitor for the payment of a tailor's debt of some seven pounds, incurred for his volunteer's uniform, threw him into a panic lest he should be imprisoned, and his last letters are pitiful requests for financial help, and two notes to his father-in-law urging him to send her mother to Jean, as she was about to give birth to another child. In such harassing conditions he sank into delirium, and died on July 21, 1796. The child, who died in infancy, was born on the day his father was buried.

With Burns's death a reaction in popular opinion set in. He was given a military funeral; and a subscription which finally amounted to one thousand two hundred pounds was raised for his family. The official biography, by Doctor Currie of Liverpool, doubled this sum, so that Jean was enabled to bring up the children respectably, and end her days in comfort. Scotland, having done little for Burns in his life, was stricken with remorse when he died, and has sought ever since to atone for her neglect by an idolatry of the poet and by a more than charitable view of the man.