Gilbert, it seems, continued on this farm after Robert left for Ellisland till 1800; and the next tenant had occupied it till but a year or two ago, when the present young people came in.
Mauchline, at the distance of a few minutes, abounds with recollections of Burns. There is the inn where Burns used to meet his merry club. There is the church-yard where the scene of the Holy Fair is laid, though the old church which stood in Burns's time has disappeared, and a new one taken its place. Opposite to the church-yard gates runs the street called "The Cowgate," up which he makes Common Sense escape; just by is the house of "Posie Nansie," where Burns fell in with the "Jolly Beggars;" not far off is the public house of John Dow, that Burns and his companions frequented at the opening of the Cowgate. Posie Nansie, or Nance Tinnock's, was the house mentioned in the Holy Fair, where the public crowded in during the intervals of the service, having a back door most convenient into the area.
"Now but an' ben, the change-house fills
Wi' yill-caup commentators;
Here's crying out for bakes and gills,
An' there the pint stoup clatters."
Every body can tell of the haunts and places of Burns and his jolly companions in Mauchline. The women came out of their houses as they saw me going about, and were most generously anxious to point out every noted spot. Many of the older people remembered him. "A fine, handsome young fellow, was he not?" I asked of an old woman that would show me where Jean Armour lived. "Oh! jus a black-avised chiel," said she, hurrying up a narrow street parallel to the Cowgate; "but here lived Jean Armor's father. Come in, come," added she, unceremoniously opening the door, when an old dame appeared, who occupied the house. "I am only going to show the gentleman where Robin Burns's Jean lived. Come along, sir, come along," continued she, hastening as unceremoniously up stairs; "ye maun see where the bairns were born. Ha! ha! ha!" "Ha! ha! ha!" screamed the old dame of the house, apparently highly delighted; "ay, show the gentleman! show him! he! he! he!" So up went my free-making guide, up went I, and up came the old lady of the house. "There! there!" exclaimed the first old woman, pointing to a recess bed in one of the chambers, "there were three o' Robin Burns's bairns born. It's true, sir, as I live!" "Ay, gude faith is it," re-echoed the old lady of the house, and the two gossips again were very merry. "But ye maun see where Rob an' Jean were married!" so out of the house the lean and nimble woman again hurried, and again, at a rapid pace, led me down another narrow street just to the back of what they call the castle, Gavin Hamilton's old house. It was in Burns's time Gavin Hamilton's office, and in that office Burns was married. It is now a public house.
Having taken a survey of all the scenes of Burns's youthful life here, I proceeded to that house where he was always so welcome a guest—the house of Gavin Hamilton itself. Though called the castle, it is, in fact, a mere keep, with an ordinary house attached to it in a retired garden. The garden is surrounded by lofty walls, with a remarkably large tree in the center. The house, a mere cottage, is huddled down in the far right-hand corner, and opposite to it stands the old keep, a conspicuous object as you descend the hill into the town. It is maintained in good order, and used as a laundry. A bare-legged lassie was spreading out her wash on the grass-plot, who informed me that not only was Gavin Hamilton dead, but his son too, and that his son's widow and her children were living there. I was shown the room where Burns, one Sunday, on coming in after kirk, wrote the satirical poem of the Calf, on the clergyman. An ordinary little parlor.
In traversing the streets of Mauchline, it was impossible to avoid not only recalling all the witty jollity of Burns here, but his troubles that wellnigh drove him from the land. The opposition of Jean Armour's family; the tearing up of her secret marriage-lines by herself in her despair; Burns's distraction, his poverty, his hidings from the myrmidons of the law, and his daily thirteen miles' walk to correct the proofs of his poems at Kilmarnock, to save postage. But now the Muse which had made him poor refused to permit him to quit his native land. Out burst the sun of his glory, and our scene changes with this change to Edinburgh.[31]
To describe all the haunts of Burns in Edinburgh were a long affair. They were the houses of all the great and gay: of the Gordons, the Hamiltons, the Montgomeries, of the learned, and the beautiful. The celebrated Duchess of Gordon, at that time at the zenith of beauty and fashion, was one of his warmest admirers, and had him to her largest parties. The young plowman of Ayrshire sat hob-nobbing in the temples of splendor and luxury with the most distinguished in every walk of life. Yet his haunts also lay equally among the humble and the undistinguished. Burns was true to his own maxim, "a man's a man for a' that;" and where there were native sense, wit, and good-humor, there he was to be found, were it even in a cellar with only a wooden stool to sit on. At his first arrival in Edinburgh he took up his quarters with a young Ayrshire acquaintance, Richmond, a writer's apprentice, in the house of a Mrs. Carfrae, Baxter's Close, Lawn Market, where he had a share of the youth's room and bed. From the most splendid entertainments of the aristocracy he described himself as groping his way at night through the dingy alleys of the "gude town to his obscure lodgings, with his share of a deal table, a sanded floor, and a chaff bed, at eighteen pence a week." This was during the winter and spring of 1786-7, on his first visit to Edinburgh, where he became the great fashionable lion, and while his new edition by Creech was getting out. In the spring, finding his popularity had brought him so much under the public eye that his obscure lodgings in the Lawn Market were not quite befitting him, he went and lodged with his new acquaintance, William Nicol, one of the masters of the High School, who lived in the Buccleugh Road. In the winter of 1787, on his second visit to Edinburgh, he had lodgings in a house at the entrance of James's Square, on the left hand. As you go up East Register-street, at the end of the Register House, you see the end of a house at the left-hand side of the top of the street. There is a perpendicular row of four windows: the top window belongs to the room Burns occupied. Here it was that he was visited by the lady with whom at this time he corresponded under the name of Sylvander, and she with him as Clarinda. His leg had been hurt by an overturn of a carriage by a drunken coachman, and he was laid up some time, and compelled to use crutches. Allan Cunningham tells us that this lady "now and then visited the crippled bard, and diverted him by her wit, and soothed him by her presence." She was the Mrs. Mac of his toasts. A blithe, handsome, and witty widow, a great passion or flirtation grew up between Burns and her. In one of his letters to his friend, Richard Brown, December 30, 1787, he says, "Almighty love still reigns and revels in my bosom, and I am at this moment ready to hang myself for a young Edinburgh widow." In a letter of their correspondence which has recently been published, he bids Clarinda look up at his window as she occasionally goes past, and in another complains that she does not look high enough for a bard's lodgings, and so he perceives her only gazing at one of the lower windows. If we are to believe the stanza of hers quoted by Burns, we must suppose Clarinda to have been unhappily married:
"Talk not of love—it gives me pain—
For love has been my foe;
He bound me with an iron chain,
And plunged me deep in woe."
If it be true, as Allan Cunningham surmises, that those inimitable verses in the song of "Ae fond kiss, and then we sever," which expresses the pain of a final parting better than any other words ever did, have reference to Clarinda, then Burns must have been passionately attached to her indeed: