The life and correspondence of Robert Burns

Part I :— Ayrshire

The national poetry of Scotland, like her thistle, is the offspring of the soil. To the poems of our first James, the strains of forgotten minstrels, or the inspiration of shepherds and husbandmen, its origin has been ascribed. Where "proof cannot be procured, we must be content with conjecture : classic or foreign lore can claim no share in the inspiration which comes from nature's free grace and liberality. From whatever source our poetry has sprung, it wears the character and bears the image of the north : the learned and the ignorant have felt alike its tenderness and humour, dignity and ardour ; and both have united in claiming, as its brightest ornament, the poetry of Him of whose life and works I am now about to write. This, however, has already been done with so much affection by Currie, care by Walker, and manliness .by Lockhart — the genius, the manners, and fortunes of Burns have been discussed so fully by critics of all classes, and writers of all ranks, that little remains for a new adventurer in

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the realms of biography, save to extract from thel works of others a clear and judicious narrative. But, I like the artist who founds a statue out of old rnate-l rials, he has to reproduce them in a new shape, touch I them with the light of other feeling, and inform [ them with fresh spirit and sentiment.

Robert Burns, eldest son of William Burness andl Agnes Brown his wife, was born 25th January, 1759, in a clay-built cottage, raised by his father's own hands, on the banks of the Doon, in the district | of Kyle, and county of Ayr. The season was ungentle and rough, the walls weak and new : — some days after his birth a wind arose which crushed the frail structure, and the unconscious Poet was carried unharmed to the shelter of a neighbouring house. He loved to allude, when he grew up, to this circumstance ; and ironically to claim some commiseration for the stormy passions of one ushered into the world by a tempest. This rude edifice is now an alehouse, and belongs to the shoemakers of Ayr : the recess in the wall, where the bed stood in which he was born, is pointed out to inquiring guests : the sagacious landlord remembers, too, as he brings in the ale, that he has seen and conversed with Burns, and ventures to relate traits of his person and manners. There is nothing very picturesque about the cottage or its surrounding grounds : the admirers of the Muses' haunts will see little to call romantic in low meadows, flat enclosures, and long lines of public road. Yet the district, now emphatically called " The Land of Burns," has many attractions. There are fair streams, beautiful glens, rich pastures, picturesque patches of old natural wood ; and, if we

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may trust proverbial rhyme, " Kyle for a man" is a boast of old standing. The birth of the illustrious Poet has caused the vaunt to be renewed in our own days.

The mother of Burns was a native of the county of Ayr ; her birth was humble, and her personal attractions moderate ; yet, in all other respects, she was a remarkable woman. She was blessed with singular equanimity of temper ; her religious feeling was deep and constant ; she loved a well-regulated household ; and it was frequently her pleasure to give wings to the weary hours of a chequered life by chaunting old songs and ballads, of which she had a large store. In her looks she resembled her eldest son ; her eyes were bright and intelligent ; her perception of character, quick and keen. She lived till January 14th, 1820, rejoiced in the fame of the Poet, and partook of the fruits of his genius.

His father was from another district. He was the son of a farmer in Kincardineshire, and born in the year 1721, on the lands of the noble family of Keith Marischall. The retainer, like his chief, fell into misfortunes ; his household was scattered, and William Burness. with a small knowledge of farming, and a large stock of speculative theology, was obliged to leave his native place, in search of better fortune, at the age of nineteen. He has been heard to relate with what bitter feelings he bade farewell to his younger brother, on the top of a lonely hill, and turned his face toward the border. His first resting-place was Edinburgh, where he obtained a slight knowledge of gardening : thence he went into Ayrshire, and procured employment first from Crawls 2 ford of Doonside, and secondly in the double capacity of steward and gardener, from Ferguson of Doonholm. Imagining now that he Irad established a resting-place, he took a wife, December, 1757, leased a small patch of land for a nursery, and raised that frail shealing, the catastrophe of which has already been related.

During his residence with the laird of Doonholm, a rumour was circulated that William Burness had fought for our old line of princes in the late rebellion — the fatal 1745. His austere and somewhat stately manners caused him to be looked on as a man who had a secret in reserve, which he desired to conceal ; and, as a report of that kind was not calculated for his good, he procured a contradiction from the hand of the clergyman of his native parish, acquitting him of all participation in the late " wicked rebellion. " I mention this, inasmuch as the Poet, speaking of his forefathers, says, " they followed boldly where their leaders led," and hints that they suffered in the cause which crushed the fortunes of their chief. Gilbert Burns, a sensible man, but no poet, imagined he read in his brother's words an imputation on the family loyalty, and hastened to contradict it, long after his father had gone where the loyal or rebellious alike find peace. He considered his father's religious turn of mind, and the certificate of his parish minister as decisive : and so they are, as far as regards William Burness ; but the Keiths Marischall were forfeited before he was born, and the Poet plainly alludes to earlier matters than the affair of the " Forty-five."— " My ancestors," he says, " rented lands of the noble Keiths

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Marischall, and had the honour of sharing their fate. I mention this circumstance, because it threw my father on the world at large." Here he means that the misfortunes of the fathers were felt by the children ; he was accurate in all things else, and it is probable he related what his father told him. The feelings of the Poet were very early coloured with Jacobitism.

Though William Burness sought only at first to add the profits of a small stewardship to those of a little garden or nursery, and toiled along with his wife to secure food and clothing, his increasing family induced him to extend his views ; and he accordingly ventured to lease Mount Oliphant, a neighbouring farm of a hundred acres, and entered upon it in 1765, when Robert was between six and seven years old. The elder Burns seems to have been but an indifferent judge of land : in a district where much fine ground is in cultivation, he sat down on a sterile and hungry spot, which no labour could render fruitful. He had commenced, too, on borrowed money ; the seasons as well as the soil, proved churlish ; and Ferguson his friend dying, " a stern factor," says Robert, " whose threatening letters set us all in tears," interposed ; and he was compelled, after a six years' struggle, to relinquish the lease. This harshness was remembered in other days : the factor sat for that living portrait of insolence and wrong in the " Twa Dogs." How easily may -endless infamy be purchased !

From this inhospitable spot William Burness removed his household to Lochlea, a larger and

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better farm, some ten miles oiF, in the parish of Tarbolton. Here he seemed at once to strike root and prosper. He was still strong in body, ardent in mind, and unsubdued in spirit. Every day, too, was bringing vigour to his sons, who, though mere boys, took more than their proper share of toil ; while his wife superintended, with care and success, the whole system of in-door economy. But it seemed as if fortune had determined that nought he set his heart on should prosper. For four years, indeed, seasons were favourable, and markets good ; but, in the fifth year, there ensued a change. It was in vain that he laboured with head and hand, and resolved to be economical and saving. In vain Robert held the plough with the dexterity of a man by day, and thrashed and prepared corn for seed or for sale, evening and morning, before the sun rose and after it set. " The gloom of hermits, and the unceasing moil of galley slaves," were endured to no purpose ; and, to crown all, a difference arose between the tenant and his landlord, as to terms of lease and rotation of crop. The farmer, a stern man, self-willed as well as devoutly honest, admitted but of one interpretation to ambiguous words. The proprietor, accustomed to give law rather than receive it, explained them to his own advantage ; and the declining years of this good man, and the early years of his eminent son, were embittered by disputes, in which sensitive natures suffer and worldly ones thrive.

Amid all these toils and trials, William Burness remembered the worth of religious instruction, and the usefulness of education in the rearing of his children, The former task he took upon himself,

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and, in a little manual of devotion still extant, sought to soften the rigour of the Calvinistic creed into the gentler Arminian. He set, too, the example which he taught. He abstained from all profane swearing and vain discourse, and shunned all approach to levity of conversation or behaviour. A week-day in his house wore the sobriety of a Sunday ; nor did he fail in performing family worship in a way which enabled his son to give the world that fine picture of domestic devotion, the " Cotter's Saturday Night." The depressing cares of the world, and a consciousness, perhaps, that he was fighting a losing battle, brought an almost habitual gloom to his brow. He had nothing to cheer him but a sense of having done his duty. The education of his sons he confided to other hands. At first he sent Robert to a small school at Alloway Miln, within a mile of the place of his birth ; but the master was removed to a be tter situation, and his place was supplied by John Murdoch, a candidate for the honours of the church, who undertook, at a moderate salary, to teach the boys of Lochlea, and the children of five other neighbouring farmers, reading, writing, arithmetic, grammar, and Latin. He was a young man. a good scholar, and an enthusiastic instructor, with a moderate knowledge of human nature, and a competent share of pedantry. He made himself acceptable to the elder Burness by engaging in conversations on speculative theology, and in lending his learning to aid the other's sagacity and penetration ; and he rendered himself welcome to Robert by bringing him knowledge of any kind — by giving him books — telling him about eminent o THE LIFE OF ROBERT BURNS.

men— and teaching him the art — which he was not slow in learning — of opening up fresh sources of information for himself.

Of the progress which Robert made in knowledge, his teacher has given us a very clear account. In reading, writing, and arithmetic, he excelled all boys of his own age, and took rank above several who were his seniors. The New Testament, the Bible, the English Grammar, and Mason's collection of verse and prose, laid the foundation of devotion and knowledge. As soon as he was capable of understanding composition, Murdoch taught him to turn verse into its natural prose order ; sometimes to substitute synonymous expressions for poetical words, and to supply all the ellipses. By these means he perceived when his pupil knew the meaning of his author, and thus sought to instruct him in the proper arrangement of words, as well as variety of expression. For some two years and a half, Robert continued to receive the instructions of his excellent teacher under his father's roof. On Murdoch's nomination to the Grammar School of Ayr, his pupil did not forsake him, but took lodgings with him ; and, during the ordinary school hours, walks in the evening, and other moments of leisure, he sought to master the grammar, in order to take upon himself the task of instructing his brothers and sisters at home. Under the same kind instructor he strove to obtain some knowledge of French. " When walking together, and even at meals," says Murdoch, "T was constantly telling him the names of different objects, as they presented themselves, in French, so that he was hourly laying in a stock of words, and sometimes little phrases. In short, he took such pleasure in learning, and I in teaching, that it was difficult to say which of the two was most zealous in the business ; and about the end of our second week of study of the French, we began to read a little of the Adventures of Telemachus, in Fenelon's own words." All the French which the young Poet picked up, during one fortnight's course of instruction, could not be much ; the coming of harvest called him to more laborious duties ; nor did he, save for a passing hour or so, ever seriously resume his studies in Telemachus.

Of these early and interesting days, during which the future man was seen, like fruit shaping amid the unfolded bloom, we have a picture drawn by the Poet's own hand, and touched off in his own vivid manner. — " At seven years of age I was by no means a favourite with any body. I was a good deal noted for a retentive memory, a stubborn sturdy something in my disposition, and an enthusiastic idiot piety — I say, idiot piety, because I was then but a child. Though it cost the schoolmaster some 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. The earliest composition that I recollect taking pleasure in, was the Vision of Mirza, and a hymn of Addison's, beginning,

" How are thy servants blest, O Lord !"

I particularly remember one half- stanza, which was music to my ear —

" For though on dreadful whirls we hung, High on the broken wave."

I met with these in Mason's English collection, one of my school-books. The first two hooks I ever read in private, and which gave me more pleasure than any two I have read since, were the Life of Hannibal, and the History of the Acts and Deeds of Sir William Wallace. Hannibal gave my young ideas such a turn, that I used to strut in raptures up and down after the recruiting drum and bagpipe, and wish myself tall enough to be a soldier ; while the story of Wallace poured a Scottish prejudice into my veins, which will boil along there till the floodgates of life shut in eternal rest."

The education of Burns was not over when the school-doors were shut. The peasantry of Scotland turn their cottages into schools ; and when a father takes his arm-chair by the evening fire, he seldom neglects to communicate to his children whatever knowledge he possesses himself. Nor is this knowledge very limited ; it extends, generally, to the history of Europe, and to the literature of the island ; but more particularly to the divinity, the poetry, and what may be called, the traditionary history of Scotland. An intelligent peasant is intimate with all those skirmishes, sieges, combats, and quarrels, domestic or national, of which public writers take no account. Genealogies of the chief families are quite familiar to him. He has by heart, too, whole volumes of songs and ballads ; nay, long poems sometimes abide in his recollection ; nor will he think his knowledge much, unless he knows a little about the lives and actions of the men who have done most honour to Scotland. In addition to what he has on his memory, we may mention what he has on the shelf. A common husbandman is frequently master of a little library : history, divinity, and poetry, but most so the latter, compose his collection. Milton and Young are favourites ; the flowery Meditations of Hervey, the religious romance of the Pilgrim's Progress, are seldom absent ; while of Scottish books, Ramsay, Thomson, Fergusson, and now Burns, together with songs and ballad-books innumerable, are all huddled together, soiled with smoke, and frail and tattered by frequent use. The household of William Burness was an example of what I have described ; and there is some truth in the assertion, that in true knowledge the Poet was, at nineteen, a better scholar than nine-tenths of our young gentlemen when they leave school for the college.

Let us look into this a little more closely ; nor can we see with a clearer light than what Burns himself has afforded us. — " What I knew of ancient story/' he observes, " was gathered from Salmon and Guthrie's Geographical Grammars ; and the ideas I had formed of modern manners, of literature and criticism, I got from the Spectator. These, with Pope's Works, some plays of Shakspeare, Tul], and Dickson on Agriculture, the Heathen Pantheon, Locke on the Human Understanding, Stackhouse's History of the Bible, Justice's British Gardener's Dictionary, Boyle's Lectures, Allan Ramsay's Works, Taylor's Scripture Doctrine of Original Sin, A Select Collection of English Songs, and Hervey's Meditations, had formed the whole of my reading." But when to these we add Young's Night Thoughts, which his own poems prove him to have admired, we cannot see that we have advanced far on the way in which he walked, when he disciplined himself for the service of the Scottish muse. In truth, none of the works we have enumerated, save the poems of Allan Ramsay, could be of farther use to him than to fill his mind with information, and shew him what others had done. The " Address to the Deil," " Highland Mary/' and " Tarn o' Shanter" are the fruit of far different studies.

Burns had, in truth, a secret school of study, in which he set up other models for imitation than Pope or Hervey. — " In my infant and boyish days," he observes to Doctor Moore, " I owed much to an old woman who resided in the family (Jenny Wilson by name), remarkable for her ignorance, credulity, and superstition. She had, I suppose, the largest collection in the country of tales and songs concerning devils, ghosts, fairies, brownies, witches, warlocks, spunkies, kelpies, elf-candles, dead-lights, wraiths, apparitions, cantraips, giants, enchanted towers, dragons, and other trumpery. This cultivated the latent seeds of poesie ; but had so strong an effect upon my imagination that to this hour in my nocturnal rambles I sometimes keep a look-out in suspicious places." Here we have the Poet taking lessons in the classic lore of his native land and profiting largely ; yet, to please a scholar like his correspondent, he calls his instructress an ignorant old woman, and her stories idle trumpery. Let the name of Jenny Wilson be reverenced by all lovers of the northern muse ; her tales gave colour and character to many fine effusions. The supernatural in these legends was corrected and modified by the natural which his growing sense saw in human life, and found in the songs of his native land. — " The collection of songs," he says, " was my vade-mecum. I pored over them, driving my^cart or walking to labour, song by song, verse by verse, carefully noting the true tender or sublime, from affectation and fustian. I am convinced I owe to this practice much of my critic craft, such as it is." He is rarely if ever wrong in his remarks on the songs of Scotland. They had, in no remote day, the advantages of the schooling which in these early hours he gave his fancy and understanding.

He had not yet completed these unconscious studies. In his farther progress his mother was his instructress. Her rectitude of heart, and the fine example of her husband, made an impression too strong to be ever effaced from the mind of her son. This was strengthened by the songs and ballads which she commonly chaunted ; they all wore a moral hue. The ballad which she loved most to sing, or her son to hear, is one called " The Life and Age of Man." It is a work of imagination and piety, full of quaintness and nature ; it compares the various periods of man's life to the months of the year ; and the parallel is both ingenious and poetic. — " I had an old grand-uncle," says Burns, " with whom my mother lived a while in her girlish years : the good old man, for such he was, was long blind ere he died, during which time his highest enjoyment was to sit down and cry, while my mother would sing the simple old song of * the Life and Age of Man.' ' ; The mother of the Poet, on being questioned respecting it by Cromek, some years before her death, repeated the ballad word for word, saying it was one of the many nursery songs of her mother, and that she first heard and learned it from her seventy years before. The noble poem of " Man was made to Mourn, " bears a close resemblance to this old strain, both in language and sentiment. It taught Burns the art, which too few learn, of adding a moral aim to his verse ; and though he rose in song to the highest pitch of moral pathos and sublimity, he took his first lesson from this now neglected ballad. In all his letters and memoranda, we see him continually pointing to the rustic productions with which he was in youth familiar, and thus affording us in some measure the means of knowing how little of his excellence is reflected from others, and how much we owe to his own inspiration.

A student in art first studies the works of earlier masters ; as he advances, living figures are placed before him, that he may see nature with his own eyes. Burns, who knew nothing of academic rules, pursued a similar course in poetry. He had become acquainted with limb and lineament of the muse, as she had been seen by others : he could learn no more from the dead, and now had recourse to the living : he had hitherto looked on in silence ; it was now time to speak. Beauty first gave utterance to his crowding thoughts ; with him love and poetry were coevals. " You know," he says, in his communication to Moore, " our country custom of coupling a man and woman together as partners in the labours 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

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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, gin-horse prudence, and bookworm philosophy, I hold to be the first of huihan joys, our dearest blessing here below ! How she caught the contagion I cannot tell. 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 labours — why the tones of her voice made my heart-strings thrill like an Eolian harp — and particularly why my pulse beat such a furious ratan when I looked and fingered over her little hand to pick out the cruel nettle stings and thistles. Among her other love-inspiring qualities, she sang sweetly ; and it was her favourite 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 be composed by a country laird's son on one of his father's maids 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 smear sheep and cast peats, his father living in the moorlands, he had no more scholar craft than myself. Thus with me began love and poetry." This intercourse with the softer and gentler part of the creation — this feeling in the presence of youth and loveliness, and desire to give voice to his passion in song — were, to his slumbering emotions, what the voice in scripture was, among the " dry bones of the valley," calling them into life and action. It is true that his brother looked upon some of the ladies of these early verses as so many moving broomsticks on which fancy hung her garlands. They seemed otherwise to the Poet, He saw charms in them which prosaic spirits failed to see. We would take the word of the muse in such matters against a whole battalion of men,

" Who, darkling, grub this earthly hole In low pursuit."

Having given, as he said, his " heart a heeze" among those soft companions, the Poet, like the picker of samphire on the beetling cliff, proceeded to seek farther knowledge in a perilous place — viz. among the young and the heedless — " the ram-stam squad, who zigzag on," without any settled aim or a wish ungratified. He offended his father, by giving his " manners a brush" at a country dancing-school. The good man had no sincere dislike, as some Calvinists have, to this accomplishment ; still he tolerated rather than approved of it ; he did not imagine that religion took to the barn-floor,

" And reel'd and set, and cross'd, and cleeket ;"

cracking her thumbs and distorting, as Milton says, her " clergy climbs," to the sound of a fiddle ; dancing, in short, he shook his head at, though he did not frown. The Poet felt, therefore, that in this he had approached at least to disobedience — a circumstance which he regrets in after-life, and regards as the first step from the paths of strictness and sobriety. " The will-o'-wisp meteors of thoughtless whim" began

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he says, to be almost the sole lights of his way ; yet early-ingrained piety preserved his innocence, though it could not keep him from folly. " The great misfortune of my life," he wisely observes, " was to want an aim. The only two openings by which I could enter the temple of fortune was the gate of niggardly economy, or the path of little chicaning bargainmaking. 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. Thus abandoned of aim or view in life, with a strong appetite for sociability, as well from native hilarity as from a pride of observation and remark — a constitutional melancholy or hypochondriasm that made me fly solitude : add to these incentives to social life my reputation for bookish knowledge, a certain wild logical talent, and a strength of thought something like the rudiments of good sense ; and it will not seem surprising that I was generally a welcome guest where I visited ; or any great wonder that where two or three met together, there was I among them. Another circumstance in my life, which made some alteration 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 pretty good progress. But I made greater progress in the knowledge of mankind. The contraband trade was at that time very successful, and it sometimes happened to me to fall in with those who carried it on. Scenes of swaggering riot and roaring dissipation were till this time new to me ; but I was no enemy to social

VOL. I. C life. Here, though I learnt to fill my glass and to mix without fear in a drunken squabble, yet I went on with a high hand with my geometry till the sun entered Virgo — a month which is always a carnival in my bosom — when a charming fllette, who lived next door to the school, upset my trigonometry, and set me off at a tangent from the sphere of my studies." Nature, in all this, was pursuing her own plan in the education of Burns. The melancholy of which he complains was a portion of his genius ; the invisible object to which he was impelled was poetry. No one can fail to perceive, in the scenes which he describes as dear to his heart and fancy, the very materials over which his muse afterwards breathed life and inspiration ; and no one can fail to feel, that all this time he had been walking in the path of the muse without knowing it.