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THE JOLLY BEGGARS 
 
 ROBERT BURNS 
 
The world of Chaucer is fairer, richer, 
 more significant than that of Burns ; but 
 ■when the largeness and freedom of Burns 
 gets full sweep, as in Tarn o' Shanter, or 
 still more in that puissant and splendid pro- 
 duction, The Jolly Beggars, his world may 
 be what it will, his poetic genius triumphs 
 over it. In the world of The Jolly Beggars 
 there is more than hideousness and squalor, 
 there is bestiality ; yet the piece is a superb 
 poetic success. It has a breadth, truth, and 
 power which make the famous scene in Auer- 
 bach's Cellar, of Goethe's Faust, seem artifi- 
 cial and tame beside it, and which are only 
 matched by Shakespeare and Aristophanes. 
 
 MATTHEW ARNOLD. 
 

"-*HE JOLLY BEGGARS 
 A CANTATA BY ROBERT BURNS 
 WITH INTRODUCTION BY 
 WILLIAM MARION REEDY 
 
 Portland Maine: Printed for Thomas Bird Mosher 
 
 and published by him at 45 Exchange Street 
 
 MDCCCCXI V 
 
COPYRIGHT 
 
 THOMAS BIRD MOSHER 
 
 I914 
 
tiinj 
 
 DEDICATION 
 
 EAR W. IRVING WAY : 
 
 L recall the fact that our late never- 
 to-be-forgotten Andrew Lang inscribed 
 his exquisite Letters on Literature to 
 you in i88q, just twenty-five years ago. He 
 said he had never seen you, but I have seen 
 you — and still survive ! He also remarked 
 that you were very real to him, and so you are 
 to me. Lastly, he affirmed that you had done 
 him many kindnesses. This, too, I can well 
 believe, for have you not done them unto me? 
 Now, as some slight return for the friendly 
 deeds oj many years L ask your acceptance oj 
 a Dedication to The Jolly Beggars — the first 
 American and certainly the first State of Maine 
 edition, so far as L am able to discover, issued 
 
DEDICATION 
 
 by and /or itself alone. It is " noble and nude 
 and antique.' 1 ' 1 It is also a world classic that 
 aligns with the Greater Testament of Master 
 Francis Villon. lastly it should be compared in 
 its first "beggarly disguise as to paper and 
 print, but magnificent vesture of verse" with that 
 masterpiece of " old Friz's," for whose fair fame 
 we have each of us been laborers in the vineyard. 
 May I not affirm of the 1 'enters ''-like fidelity 
 illumining The Jolly Beggars, what Mtlton 
 in his Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce 
 said of Truth itself: — ". . . . for truth is 
 as impossible to be soiled by any outtvard 
 touch, as the sunbeam, though this ill hap 
 wait on her nativity that she never comes into 
 the world but like a bastard to the ignominy 
 of him that brought her forth." So stand 
 recorded the words of one whose appeal lay to 
 Time the Avenger, and most literally true are 
 such words when applied to the immortal serio- 
 comic Cantata which first saw the light in a 
 diminutive '■chap' long since become priceless. 
 
DEDICATION 
 
 As we know, it was rejected " on principle" by 
 the earliest editor of our poefs collected works, 
 ii prim Currie, of now seldom blessed memory" 
 and, the insult being repeated, Sir Walter Scott 
 filed his everlasting rejoinder. 
 
 It is a man's book : and it became the whole 
 world's book when he who wrote it was 
 
 "... gathered to the kings of thought 
 Who waged contention with their time's decay, 
 And of the past are all that cannot pass away." 
 
 I offer this " puissant and splendid production " 
 in a fashion that seems good to me and as I hope 
 will also be approved by your honoured self. 
 It our friend, 
 
 THOMAS BIRD MOSHER. 
 November, igi4. 
 
The Jolly Beggars, a poem which stands alone in 
 literature, not only unmatched, but unmatchable. The 
 vagabonds in Poosie-Nansie's ought to be miserable, 
 for they are outlaws and outcasts. They are social 
 outlaws and religious outcasts. They are not merely 
 in revolt against the laws and conventions of society. 
 For them the laws and conventions of society do not 
 exist. They do not live in the world we live in. 
 They live in the kingdom of humor, where the soul is 
 a joke and the body is a jest. The menace of laws spir- 
 itual and laws social does not terrify them. They are 
 satisfied with life as a skylark is satisfied with it or a 
 pig. The very fact that they are alive is all they care 
 for. They look neither before nor after. They do not 
 pine for what is not. 
 
 JAMBS DOUGLAS. 
 

 5131 
 
 
 ^^fe^^^^^^^i:^^^ 
 
 
 
 CONTENTS 
 
 PAGE 
 
 
 DEDICATION : TO W. IRVING WAY 
 
 V 
 
 
 BY THE EDITOR 
 
 
 
 INTRODUCTION .... 
 
 . xiii 
 
 
 BY WILLIAM MARION REEDY 
 
 
 
 THE JOLLY BEGGARS : A CANTATA 
 
 • 3 
 
 
 BY ROBERT BURNS 
 
 
 
 NOTES ON TEXT .... 
 
 . 27 
 
 
 BIBLIOGRAPHY .... 
 
 . 29 
 
 
 comments : (not " writ in water " ) 
 
 
 
 i. Sir Walter Scott (1809) 
 
 • 35 
 
 
 11. J. G. Lockhart (1828) 
 
 • 38 
 
 
 in. Thomas Carlyle (1828) 
 
 • 39 
 
 
 iv. William Scott Douglas (189 1) 
 
 • 4i 
 
 
 v. William Ernest Henley (1896) 
 
 • 44 
 
 
 vi. Andrew Lang (1886-1896) . 
 
 • 49 
 
 
 SOME ASPECTS OF ROBERT BURNS 
 
 • 53 
 
 
 BY ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 
 
 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 ILLUSTRATIONS 
 
 frontispiece: photogravure of the nasmyth 
 portrait 
 
 i. facsimile of title-page first edition, 
 
 GLASGOW (1799) 
 
 II. FACSIMILE OF LAST PAGE OF BURNS' MS. 
 FROM LITHOGRAPHED EDITION (1823) 
 
 III. ORIGINAL AIR OF FINAL SONG 
 
INTRODUCTION 
 
Pupil of Ramsay, master of Tannahill, it is natural 
 that Chloris and Damon should linger in his pages 
 beside Jean and Gavin and Davie, and the beggars at 
 Nanse's splore. Everyone of judgment sees that his 
 most underived and passionate work was his best, that 
 his fame rests most firmly on the records of his wildest 
 or freest moods ; more on the Songs and the Satires 
 and Tam o'Shanter and the Cantata than on the 
 Cotter's Saturday Night 
 
 Contrast The Gentle Shepherd with The Jolly Beg- 
 gars — the one is a court pastoral, like a minuet of the 
 ladies of Versailles on the sward of the Swiss village 
 near the Trianon, the other is like the march of the 
 Mcenads with Theroigne de Mericourt. Over all this 
 masterpiece is poured "a flood of liquid harmony:" 
 in the acme of the two-edged satire, aimed alike at 
 laws and law-breakers, the graceless crew are raised 
 above the level of gipsies, footpads, and rogues, and 
 made, like Titans, to launch their thunders of rebel- 
 lion against the world. 
 
 WILLIAM SCOTT DOUGLAS. 
 
INTRODUCTION 
 
 DURNS was twenty-seven when he 
 J wrote " The Jolly Beggars." The 
 j J year was 1785. And there we have, 
 aside from his genius, the explanation 
 of his remarkable performance. 
 
 For the work is, first, the authentic, the 
 insuppressible utterance of youth — youth that 
 believes in itself, in its power to make all 
 things anew ; youth that has no reverence for 
 custom, or tradition or institutions. So it is 
 the mocking spirit of youth that calls the 
 piece " a cantata," in scorn of all the religious 
 connotations of the word. It is the same 
 spirit as asserts itself in the treatment of 
 "Holy Willie," of the "Unco Guid." Youth 
 is infidel. It is so sure of itself, it has no 
 
INTRODUCTION 
 
 faith in aught else that is established. Against 
 what is, youth revolts. So the description, 
 " a cantata," is a fling at religion, of which we 
 know from Burns' biography he had had a 
 disillusioning experience. Not long before, 
 he tells us, he was in danger of being over- 
 pious. But he had read and he had thought, 
 and after the manner of youth, he had found 
 his soul turn sick within him in contemplation 
 of religion gone all to formalism, emptied of 
 substance of love. For the world just then 
 was seething with the stirring of the Enlight- 
 enment. The Encyclopaedists, Rousseau, and 
 others had set the leaven working. America 
 had successfully rebelled. The French Revolu- 
 tion was impending. The world was about to 
 revert to that "state of nature" Jean Jacques 
 had poetized and idealized. 
 
 What was youth to do under the impulse of 
 the new vision ? Nothing but fling itself into 
 the new movement. Man was born free but 
 is everywhere in chains. The world was in 
 
INTRODUCTION 
 
 xv 
 
 the grasp of the oppressors. Youth's heart 
 went out and its song went up for the outcast, 
 the lawless. For Burns was of the people. 
 He was of the oppressed. Society, as he saw 
 it, is pictured in the "Twa Dogs." 
 
 Moreover, experience had begun to touch 
 him with bitterness at Mauchline, and he had 
 had experience of love that made him a rebel 
 against the supreme oppressive mystery of 
 high heaven that defeats love in the ultimate. 
 The storm and stress of life and love were 
 upon him and he was seeking reality. The 
 conventions hemmed him in and tortured him. 
 The ideal was far away. The ideals of this 
 world were false to him. To the winds, then, 
 with the wisdom of this world as represented 
 by the successful whom he knew, with religion 
 as represented by the "Auld LichtsI" There 
 was escape and surcease at Poosie Nansie's. 
 So, many a lesser Burns has fled to — Bohemia. 
 For there are the people who are real, having 
 abandoned conformity, having taken their 
 
INTRODUCTION 
 
 lives in their own hands for living. There is 
 to be found life unconditioned by any law. 
 There one finds those who acknowledge no 
 fealty to duty, who are emancipated of servi- 
 tude to things — to property. Love is free, 
 and drink is there to give glamour to all. 
 And there 's boundless, unquestioning friend- 
 ship among all in a republic of those who live 
 while they live and laugh at all the insane 
 devices of order. All this is youth at its best 
 — in the time of folly and revolt. No wonder 
 Burns found, for a time, what he thought to 
 be a more real world among the Jolly Beggars. 
 And who can fault him for it ? It is nature 
 in the young. It is the course of things. It 
 has its use developmentally. "The follies of 
 youth," says Robert Louis Stevenson, "have 
 a basis in sound reason, just as much as the 
 embarrassing questions sometimes put by 
 young children. Their most anti-social acts 
 indicate the defects of our society. When 
 the torrent sweeps the man against the boulder, 
 
INTRODUCTION 
 
 you must expect him to scream, and you need 
 not be surprised if the scream is sometimes a 
 theory. It is better to be a fool than to be 
 dead. It is better to emit a scream in the 
 shape of a theory than to be entirely insensible 
 to the jars and incongruities of life and take 
 everything as it comes in a forlorn stupidity. 
 For God's sake, give me the young man who 
 has brains enough to make a fool of himself." 
 Divine folly ! What a wealth of music and 
 of wisdom the world owes to it. Without it 
 we had no Villon. And how much of Shak- 
 spere do we owe to nights of bowsing at the 
 Mermaid, with blustering Ben. We sense it 
 in the work of Jean Bocace, it echoes 
 resoundingly in Byron. Out of its fume and 
 plangency came the sombre imaginings of Poe 
 and the piercingly simple spiritualities of 
 Verlaine. Wine and woman and song! Are 
 they not a trinity of the world in revolt against 
 the tyranny of rules, acclaimed by Doctor 
 Martin Luther ? Search me the world and 
 
INTRODUCTION 
 
 find a truer reformer than Master Francis 
 Rabelais, escaped at forty from a monastery 
 and seeing the world with the eyes of youth 
 till then unfelt, unknown. Thus supreme art 
 comes through and from the humanizing touch 
 of the people. Burns perfected, yes, and 
 purified, his philosophy at Poosie Nansie's. 
 
 How he came to write "The Jolly Beggars," 
 thus we see. To explain the poem itself were 
 fatuous. A great work explains, as it pro- 
 claims, itself. But it is not supererogatory to 
 point out that here is Burns at high-water- 
 mark. Note the inclusiveness of his observa- 
 tion. He paints like Teniers. You see, you 
 hear, you smell the room and the company. 
 You plunge from the outer blast into the back 
 room's cosy glow, into the midst of the carouse. 
 Every character is drawn to the life and 
 painted nature's own hue in a stroke, in a 
 dash. The fiddle squeaks and the soldier 
 sings. And as the soldier sings, he indicts 
 War in a jest. He has lost an arm and a leg 
 
INTRODUCTION 
 
 and yet he 's ready to go again at the sound of 
 the drum. He helped make Wolfe immortal 
 "on the heights of Abram," and to bring 
 Moro castle low, and now he must beg, but 
 he's happy with his wallet, his bottle and his 
 callet — and that is all of Britain's glory to 
 him. Then the doxy takes up the song to her 
 sodjer laddie — the last of a long line of loves 
 she has known. This is the joy of living — 
 she knows not how long — a cup and a song. 
 And old age thinks it over and wonders if 
 that philosophy be not as true as any of the 
 others — while it lasts. Merry Andrew rises 
 for his say, and where will you find better 
 expressed the wisdom of the fool, flouting the 
 folly of the wise ? Here is a fool by profes- 
 sion, and it 's better than being one and not 
 knowing it. There 's no wisdom in books. 
 Government? Statesmanship! "There's 
 even I 'm tauld i' the Court a tumbler ca'd 
 the Premier." Look ! a mountebank in the 
 pulpit! . . . "The chiel that's a fool for 
 
INTRODUCTION 
 
 himsel " — well, he 's wiser than those who are 
 fools for others, or for a conventional idea. 
 Hearken to the ranch carlin as she sings her 
 "braw John Highlandman ! " Here's the 
 undying glorification of the strong man who 
 defies the state and the law. All the world 
 loves a rebel — all the world that is not rotten 
 with the infatuation of property and the 
 idolatry of protecting it. The Fiddler sings 
 us the open road, the bed on the heath, the 
 love-clip in the ditch. Away with work, give 
 us the free air, a glass, a song, a kiss, and 
 " we '11 whistle o'er the lave o' it." And the 
 Tinker holds life a gay adventure, making a 
 slight concession to labor. But the end of 
 labor is to gain leisure and that 's why he will 
 "go and clout the cauldron." He's a free 
 laborer, is Messer Tinker, nor slave to boss 
 nor to the Union. Here, in mocking guise, is 
 the philosophy of work : just enough of it to 
 get along short of scant and, now and then, to 
 chousel the state by a feat of bounty-jumping. 
 
INTRODUCTION 
 
 The Poet joins in with his lay, "For a' that." 
 And his theme is as that of the others. Be 
 free. Enjoy the hour. Follow fancy, "but 
 for how lang the flie may stang, let inclination 
 law that ! " The crowd calls for another song 
 from the Poet and he gives them the ditty 
 with a chorus in which we can hear the 
 Ca ira, to which we can imagine, other 
 peasants, a few years later, dancing the car- 
 magnole around the tumbrils : 
 
 " A fig for those by law protected ! 
 
 Liberty 's a glorious feast, 
 Courts for cowards were erected, 
 
 Churches built to please the priest ! " 
 
 This is the culmination of the theme of " The 
 Jolly Beggars." It puts the case for freedom, 
 as youth ever puts it, in the extreme. Later 
 we may come to see that what youth rebels at 
 is but the crust and not the core of life as it 
 is lived in the social contract. Youth would 
 be served with the truth. It cries for it. 
 
INTRODUCTION 
 
 But life cannot quite give the truth desired 
 lest that truth consume us with a withering 
 flame. Life compromises and so must we. 
 
 But even as we so conclude, who of us is 
 not, in his secret heart, at one with Burns in 
 loving life and loving love and hacking at 
 chains. We are sib to Burns as we are to 
 Don Quixote. We go on the quest to destroy 
 wrong and to rescue Beauty. Yes, we know 
 we are fools, but in such sweet folly who 
 would be wise — and bitter? Burns, in "The 
 Jolly Beggars," is simply in the indignant, pro- 
 testing, rebellious phase of his permanent, 
 fundamental mood of universal, democratic 
 sympathy. There is naught here that clashes 
 with the Cotter's Saturday Night, To a Mouse, 
 To a Daisy, the verses to his old mare or to 
 his pet yowe. Shines through the ribaldry 
 ever nothing but love and pity more powerful 
 even than his scorn for the system that makes 
 the folk who live for us, and for all time, in 
 the reeking room at Poosie Nansie's. For 
 
INTRODUCTION 
 
 xxm 
 
 they are our brothers and sisters. To those 
 who sniff at these and hold their nose for that 
 such may come " between the wind and their 
 nobility " we can only say 
 
 " Let them cant about decorum, 
 Who have character to lose." 
 
 WILLIAM MARION REEDY. 
 
THE JOLLY BEGGARS 
 
 A CANTATA 
 
Of all his poems perhaps the greatest — certainly 
 the most imaginative — is The Jolly Beggars. The 
 condition of the characters in this splendid " Cantata " 
 is in one respect akin to that in which the discoverer 
 of the " Everlasting No " imagined that he might 
 ultimately find himself. Tfcey have sounded to the 
 bottom every possibility of disaster and humiliation ; 
 life can bring to them no evil of which they have not 
 had the most intimate experience. The conclusion 
 they draw is not in the least like that drawn by 
 Teufelsdrockh — that man should in this lowest of all 
 depths confront his destiny in a spirit of grim defiance. 
 Their creed is that he should confront it in a spirit of 
 reckless gaiety, snatching from the universe the poor 
 fragments of pleasure which may still be within his 
 reach. And so they kiss, and fight, and drink, and 
 sing their wild songs, and in a whirl of mad excitement 
 forget their rags, and misery, and squalor. There was 
 something in the idea of this poem which struck a 
 deep chord in the mind of Burns, and called into exer- 
 cise his loftiest powers as an artist. From the first 
 line to the last he writes with unflagging vigour and 
 with a sense of boundless freedom. He does not once 
 attempt to tell us directly the secret of the strange 
 scene he depicts, yet we are never for a moment per- 
 mitted to lose sight of its tragic significance. 
 
 JAMBS SIME. 
 
TRE 
 
 JOLLY BEGGARS 
 
 A CANTATA. 
 BY 
 
 ROBERT BURNS. 
 
 Hcre's to budgets, bags, and wallets f 
 Hire's to all the "wandering train / 
 
 Here's our ragged brits and C&Ucts' 
 One and all cry wt, Amen ! 
 
 GLASGOW: 
 
 PRINTED FOR AND SOLD BY 
 
 Stewart & Melkle. 
 
 I— TITLE-PAGE OF FIRST EDITION (l7qq) 
 
THE JOLLY BEGGARS 
 
 A CANTATA 
 
 RECITATIVO 
 
 WHEN lyart leaves bestrow 
 the yird, 
 Or, wavering like the 
 bauckie-bird, 1 
 Bedim cauld Boreas' blast ; 
 When hailstanes drive wi' bitter skyte, 
 And infant frosts begin to bite, 
 
 In hoary cranreuch drest ; 
 Ae night at e'en a merry core 
 
 O' randie, gangrel bodies 
 In Poosie-Nansie's 2 held the splore, 
 To drink their orra duddies : 
 
 withered 
 ground 
 
 lash 
 
 one ; gang 
 
 lawless 
 vagrant 
 
 carousal 
 spare rags 
 
4 
 
 THE JOLLY BEGGARS 
 
 
 Wi' quaffing and laughing 
 
 roistered 
 
 They ranted an' they sang, 
 
 
 Wi' jumping an' thumping 
 
 
 The vera girdle rang.3 
 
 next 
 
 ii 
 First, niest the fire, in auld red rags 
 
 
 Ane sat, weel brac'd wi' mealy bags 4 
 
 
 And knapsack a' in order; 
 
 
 His doxy lay within his arm ; 
 
 whisky 
 
 Wi' usquebae an' blankets warm, 
 
 leered 
 
 She blinket on her sodger. 
 
 flushed with 
 drink 
 
 An' ay he gies the tozie drab 
 
 sounding 
 
 The tither skelpin kiss, 
 
 mouth 
 
 While she held up her greedy gab 
 
 alms-dish 
 
 Just like an aumous dish : 
 
 Each 
 
 Ilk smack still did crack still 
 
 hawker's 
 
 Like onie cadger's whup ; 
 
 
 Then, swaggering an' staggering, 
 
 
 He roar'd this ditty up : — 
 
THE JOLLY BEGGARS 
 
 AIR 
 
 tune : Soldier s Joy 
 
 I 
 I am a son of Mars, who have been in many 
 wars, 
 And show my cuts and scars wherever I 
 come : 
 This here was for a wench, and that other in a 
 trench 
 When welcoming the French at the sound of 
 the drum. 
 
 Lai de daudle, etc, 
 
 n 
 My prenticeship I past, where my leader 
 breath'd his last, 
 When the bloody die was cast on the 
 heights of Abram ; 
 And I served out my trade when the gallant 
 game was play'd, 
 And the Moro low was laid at the sound of 
 the drum. 
 
THE JOLLY BEGGARS 
 
 in 
 
 I lastly was with Curtis among the floating 
 batt'ries, 
 And there I left for witness an arm and a 
 limb ; 
 Yet let my country need me, with Eliott to 
 head me 
 I'd clatter on my stumps at the sound of the 
 drum. 
 
 IV 
 
 trull 
 
 And now, tho' I must beg with a wooden arm 
 and leg 
 And many a tatter'd rag hanging over my 
 bum, 
 I'm as happy with my wallet, my bottle, and 
 my callet 
 As when I us'd in scarlet to follow a 
 drum. 
 
THE JOLLY BEGGARS 
 
 7 
 
 V 
 
 What tho' with hoary locks I must stand the 
 
 
 winter shocks, 
 
 
 Beneath the woods and rocks oftentimes for 
 
 
 a home ? 
 
 
 When the tother bag I sell, and the tother 
 
 
 bottle tell, 
 
 
 I could meet a troop of Hell at the sound 
 
 
 of a drum. 
 
 
 Lai de daudle, etc. 
 
 
 RECITATIVO 
 
 
 He ended ; and the kebars sheuk 
 
 rafters shook 
 
 Aboon the chorus roar ; 
 
 Over 
 
 While frighted rattons backward leuk, 
 
 rats 
 
 An' seek the benmost bore : 
 
 inmost hole 
 
 A fairy fiddler frae the neuk, 
 
 tiny ; corner 
 
 He skirl'd out Encore! 
 
 squeaked 
 
 But up arose the martial chuck, 
 
 dear 
 
 An' laid the loud uproar: — 
 
 
THE JOLLY BEGGARS 
 
 AIR 
 
 tune : Sodger Laddie 
 
 I once was a maid, tho' I cannot tell when, 
 And still my delight is in proper young men. 
 Some one of a troop of dragoons was my daddie : 
 No wonder I 'm fond of a sodger laddie ! 
 
 Sing, lal de dal, etc. 
 
 The first of my loves was a swaggering blade : 
 To rattle the thundering drum was his trade ; 
 His leg was so tight, and his cheek was so 
 
 ruddy, 
 Transported I was with my sodger laddie. 
 
 in 
 
 But the godly old chaplain left him in the lurch ; 
 The sword I forsook for the sake of the church ; 
 He risked the soul, and I ventur'd the body: 
 'Twas then I prov'd false to my sodger laddie. 
 
THE JOLLY BEGGARS 
 
 IV 
 
 Full soon I grew sick of my sanctified sot ; 
 The regiment at large for a husband I got; 
 From the gilded spontoon5 to the fife I was 
 
 ready : 
 I asked no more but a sodger laddie. 
 
 But the Peace it reduc'd me to beg in despair, 
 Till I met my old boy in a Cunningham Fair; 
 His rags regimental they flutter'd so gaudy : 
 My heart it rejoic'd at a sodger laddie. 
 
 VI 
 
 And now I have liv'd — I know not how long 1 
 But still I can join in a cup and a song; 
 And whilst with both hands I can hold the glass 
 
 steady, 
 Here 's to thee, my hero, my sodger laddie ! 
 Sing, lal de dal, etc. 
 
io 
 
 THE JOLLY BEGGARS 
 
 
 RECITATIVO 
 
 
 Poor Merry-Andrew in the neuk 
 
 tinker-wench 
 
 Sat guzzling wi' a tinkler-hizzie ; 
 
 cared not ; 
 took 
 
 They mind 't na wha the chorus teuk, 
 
 
 Between themselves they were sae busy. 
 
 
 At length, wi' drink an' courting dizzy, 
 
 struggled 
 
 He stoiter'd up an' made a face ; 
 
 
 Then turn'd an' laid a smack on Grizzie, 
 
 Then 
 
 Syne tun'd his pipes wi' grave grimace : — 
 
 
 AIR 
 
 
 tune : Auld Sir Symon 
 
 drunk 
 
 I 
 Sir Wisdom 's a fool when he 's fou; 
 
 court 
 
 Sir Knave is a fool in a session : 
 
 
 He 's there but a prentice I trow, 
 
 
 But I am a fool by profession. 
 
 book 
 
 ii 
 My grannie she bought me a beuk, 
 
 went off 
 
 An' I held awa to the school : 
 
 
 I fear I my talent misteuk, 
 
 
 But what will ye hae of a fool ? 
 
THE JOLLY BEGGARS 
 
 1 1 
 
 in 
 
 
 For drink I wad venture my neck ; 
 
 
 A hizzie 's the half of my craft : 
 
 
 But what could ye other expect 
 
 
 Of ane that 's avowedly daft ? 
 
 cracked 
 
 IV 
 
 
 I ance was tyed up like a stirk 6 
 
 bullock 
 
 For civilly swearing and quaffing ; 
 
 
 I ance was abus'd i' the kirk 
 
 rebuked 
 
 For towsing a lass i' my daffin. 
 
 rumpling; fun 
 
 V 
 
 Poor Andrew that tumbles for sport 
 
 
 Let naebody name wi' a jeer : 
 
 
 There 's even, I 'm tauld, i' the Court 
 
 
 A tumbler ca'd the Premier. 
 
 
 VI 
 
 
 Observ'd ye yon reverend lad 
 
 
 Mak faces to tickle the mob ? 
 
 
 He rails at our mountebank squad — 
 
 
 It 's rivalship just i' the job ! 
 
 
THE JOLLY BEGGARS 
 
 fellow 
 
 sturdy beldam 
 
 ducked 
 
 plague upon 
 gallows 
 
 fine 
 
 lowland 
 
 VII 
 
 And now my conclusion I '11 tell, 
 For faith ! I 'm confoundedly dry : 
 
 The chiel that 's a fool for himsel, 
 Guid Lord ! he 's far dafter than I. 
 
 RECITATIVO 
 
 Then niest outspak a raucle carlin, 
 Wha kent fu' weel to cleek the sterling 
 For monie a pursie she had hooked, 8 
 An' had in monie a well been douked. 
 Her love had been a Highland laddie, 
 But weary fa' the waefu' woodie ! 
 Wi' sighs an' sobs she thus began 
 To wail her braw? John Highlandman: — 
 
 AIR 
 
 tune : O, An' \e Were Dead', Guidman 
 i 
 A Highland lad my love was born, 
 The lalland laws he held in scorn, 
 But he still was faithfu' to his clan, 
 My gallant, braw John Highlandman. 
 
THE JOLLY BEGGARS 
 
 i3 
 
 CHORUS 
 
 
 Sing hey my braw John Highlandman ! 
 
 
 Sing ho my braw John Highlandman ! 
 
 
 There 's not a lad in a' the Ian' 
 
 
 Was match for my John Highlandman ! 
 
 
 ii 
 With his philibeg, an' tartan plaid, 
 
 kilt 
 
 An' guid claymore 10 down by his side, 
 
 
 The ladies' hearts he did trepan, 
 
 
 My gallant, braw John Highlandman. 
 
 
 in 
 
 
 We ranged a' from Tweed to Spey, 
 
 
 An' liv'd like lords an' ladies gay, 
 
 
 For a lalland face he feared none, 
 
 
 My gallant, braw John Highlandman. 
 
 
 IV 
 
 They banish'd him beyond the sea, 
 
 
 But ere the bud was on the tree, 
 
 
 Adown my cheeks the pearls ran, 
 
 
 Embracing my John Highlandman. 
 
 
14 
 
 THE JOLLY BEGGARS 
 
 But, Och ! they catch'd him at the last, 
 
 And bound him in a dungeon fast. 
 
 My curse upon them every one — 
 
 They 've hang'd my braw John Highlandman ! 
 
 VI 
 
 And now a widow I must mourn 
 The pleasures that will ne'er return ; 
 No comfort but a hearty can 
 When I think on John Highlandman. 
 
 CHORUS 
 
 Sing hey my braw John Highlandman ! 
 Sing ho my braw John Highlandman ! 
 There 's not a lad in a' the Ian' 
 Was match for my John Highlandman ! 
 
 RECITATIVO 
 
 A pigmy scraper on a fiddle, 
 
 Wha us'd to trystes an' fairs to driddle," 
 
THE JOLLY BEGGARS 
 
 i5 
 
 Her strappin limb an' gawsie middle 
 
 buxom 
 
 (He reach'd nae higher) 
 
 
 Had hol'd his heartie like a riddle, 
 
 
 An' blawn 't on fire. 
 
 blown it 
 
 II 
 
 
 Wi' hand on hainch and upward e'e, 
 
 hip 
 
 He croon'd his gamut, one, two, three, 
 
 hummed 
 
 Then in an arioso key 
 
 
 The wee Apollo 
 
 
 Set off wi' allegretto glee 
 
 
 His giga solo : — 
 
 
 AIR 
 
 
 tune : Whistle Owre the Lave O't 
 
 rest 
 
 I 
 Let me ryke up to dight that tear ; 
 
 reach ; wipe 
 
 An' go wi' me an' be my dear, 
 
 
 An' then your every care an' fear 
 
 
 May whistle owre the lave o't. 
 
 
i6 
 
 THE JOLLY BEGGARS 
 
 
 CHORUS 
 
 
 I am a fiddler to my trade, 
 
 
 An' a' the tunes that e'er I play'd, 
 
 
 The sweetest still to wife or maid 
 
 
 Was Whistle Owre the Lave O't. 
 
 harvesthomes 
 we '11 
 
 ii 
 At kirns an' weddins we 'se be there, 
 
 
 An' 0, sae nicely 's we will fare ! 
 
 
 We '11 bowse about till Daddie Care 
 
 
 Sing Whistle Owre the Lave O't. 
 
 
 in 
 
 bones; pick 
 
 Sae merrily the banes we '11 pyke, 
 
 fence 
 
 An' sun oursels about the dyke ; 
 
 
 An' at our leisure, when ye like, 
 
 
 We '11 — whistle owre the lave o't ! 
 
 
 IV 
 
 
 But bless me wi' your heav'n o' charms, 
 
 tickle ; catgut 
 
 An' while I kittle hair on thairms, 
 
 such 
 
 Hunger, cauld, an' a' sic harms 
 
 
 May whistle owre the lave o't. 
 
THE JOLLY BEGGARS 
 
 i7 
 
 CHORUS 
 
 
 I am a fiddler to my trade, 
 
 
 An' a' the tunes that e'er I play'd, 
 
 
 The sweetest still to wife or maid 
 
 
 Was Whistle Owre the Lave O't. 
 
 
 RECITATIVO 
 
 
 Her charms had struck a sturdy caird 
 
 tinker 
 
 As weel as poor gut-scraper ; 
 
 
 He taks the fiddler by the beard, 
 
 
 An' draws a roosty rapier ; 
 
 rusty 
 
 He swoor by a' was swearing worth 
 
 
 To speet him like a pliver, 
 
 plover 
 
 Unless he would from that time forth 
 
 
 Relinquish her for ever. 
 
 
 ii 
 Wi' ghastly e'e poor Tweedle-Dee 
 
 
 Upon his hunkers bended, 
 
 hams 
 
 An' pray'd for grace wi' ruefu' face, 
 
 
 An' sae the quarrel ended. 
 
 so 
 
THE JOLLY BEGGARS 
 
 But tho' his little heart did grieve 
 When round the tinkler prest her, 
 
 He feign'd to snirtle in his sleeve 
 
 When thus the caird address'd her : — 
 
 AIR 
 
 tune : Clout the Cauldron 
 I 
 My bonie lass, I work in brass, 
 
 A tinkler is my station; 
 I 've travell'd round all Christian ground 
 
 In this my occupation ; 
 I 've taen the gold, an' been enrolled 
 
 In many a noble squadron ; 
 But vain they search'd when off I march'd 
 
 To go an' clout the cauldron. 
 
 ii 
 Despise that shrimp, that wither'd imp, 
 
 With a' his noise an' cap'rin, 
 An' take a share wi' those that bear 
 
 The budget 12 and the apron ! 
 
THE JOLLY BEGGARS 
 
 l 9 
 
 And by that stowp, my faith an' houpe ! 
 
 pot 
 
 And by that dear Kilbaigie !*s 
 
 
 If e'er ye want, or meet wi' scant, 
 
 short com- 
 mons 
 
 May I ne'er weet my craigie ! 
 
 wet ; throat 
 
 • 
 
 RECITATIVO 
 
 
 I 
 
 The caird prevail'd : th' unblushing fair 
 
 
 In his embraces sunk, 
 
 
 Partly wi' love o'ercome sae sair, 
 
 
 An' partly she was drunk. 
 
 
 Sir Violino, with an air 
 
 
 That show'd a man o' spunk, 
 
 spirit 
 
 Wish'd unison between the pair, 
 
 
 An' made the bottle clunk 1 -* 
 
 
 To their health that night. 
 
 
 ii 
 But hurchin Cupid shot a shaft, 
 
 urchin 
 
 That play'd a dame a shavie : 
 
 trick 
 
 The fiddler rak'd her fore and aft 
 
 
 Behint the chicken cavie ; 
 
 hencoop 
 
20 
 
 THE JOLLY BEGGARS 
 
 
 Her lord, a wight of Homer's craft, j s 
 
 spavin 
 
 Tho' limpin' wi' the spavie, 
 
 hobbled 
 leapt like mad 
 
 He hirpl'd up, an' lap like daft, 
 
 offered 
 
 An' shor'd them " Dainty Davie " l6 
 
 gratis 
 
 0' boot that night. 
 
 
 in 
 
 
 He was a care-defying blade 
 
 
 As ever Bacchus listed ! 
 
 
 Tho' Fortune sair upon him laid, 
 
 
 His heart, she ever miss'd it. 
 
 
 He had no wish but — to be glad, 
 
 
 Nor want but — when he thirsted, 
 
 
 He hated nought but — to be sad ; 
 
 
 An' thus the Muse suggested 
 
 
 His sang that night. 
 
 
 AIR 
 
 
 tune: For A' That, An' A' That 
 
 
 I 
 I am a Bard, of no regard 
 
 
 Wi' gentle folks an' a' that, 
 
THE JOLLY BEGGARS 
 
 21 
 
 But Homer-like the glowrin byke, 
 
 staring crowd 
 
 Frae town to town I draw that. 
 
 
 CHORUS 
 
 
 For a' that, an' a' that, 
 
 
 An' twice as muckle 's a' that, 
 
 much 
 
 I 've lost but ane, I 've twa behin', 
 
 
 I 've wife eneugh for a' that. 
 
 
 n 
 I never drank the Muses' stank, 
 
 pond 
 
 Castalia's burn, an' a' that ; 
 
 brook 
 
 But there it streams, an' richly reams — 
 
 foams 
 
 My Helicon '7 I ca' that. 
 
 
 in 
 
 
 Great love I bear to a' the fair, 
 
 
 Their humble slave an' a' that; 
 
 
 But lordly will, I hold it still 
 
 
 A mortal sin to thraw that. 
 
 thwart 
 
22 
 
 THE JOLLY BEGGARS 
 
 
 IV 
 
 
 In raptures sweet this hour we meet 
 
 
 Wi' mutual love an' a' that ; 
 
 fly ; sting 
 
 But for how lang the flie may stang, 
 
 
 Let inclination law that ! 
 
 
 V 
 
 Their tricks an' craft hae put me daft, 
 
 
 They 've taen me in, an' a' that ; 
 
 
 But clear your decks, an' here 's the Sex ! 
 
 
 I like the jads for a' that. 
 
 
 CHORUS 
 
 
 For a' that, an' a' that, 
 
 
 An' twice as muckle 's a' that, 
 
 
 My dearest bluid, to do them guid, 18 
 
 to it 
 
 They 're welcome till 't for a' that ! 
 
 
 RECITATIVO 
 
 walls 
 
 So sung the Bard, and Nansie's wa's 
 
 
 Shook with a thunder of applause, 
 
 
 Re-echo'd from each mouth ! 
 
THE JOLLY BEGGARS 
 
 23 
 
 They toom'd their pocks, they pawn'd their duds, 
 
 emptied their 
 bags 
 
 They scarcely left to coor their fuds, 
 
 cover; tails 
 
 To quench their lowin drouth. 
 
 burning 
 
 Then owre again the jovial thrang 
 
 company 
 
 The Poet did request 
 
 
 To lowse his pack, an' wale a sang, 
 
 untie ; choose 
 
 A ballad o' the best : 
 
 
 He rising, rejoicing 
 
 
 Between his twa Deborahs, 
 
 
 Looks round him, an' found them 
 
 
 Impatient for the chorus : — 
 
 
 AIR 
 
 
 tune : Jolly Mortals, Fill Your Glasses 
 
 
 I 
 
 See the smoking bowl before us ! 
 
 
 Mark our jovial, ragged ring! 
 
 
 Round and round take up the chorus, 
 
 
 And in raptures let us sing : 
 
 
24 
 
 THE JOLLY BEGGARS 
 
 CHORUS 
 
 A fig for those by law protected I 
 Liberty 's a glorious feast, 
 
 Courts for cowards were erected, 
 Churches built to please the priest ! 
 
 ii 
 What is title, what is treasure, 
 
 What is reputation's care ? 
 If we lead a life of pleasure, 
 
 'Tis no matter how or where ! 
 
 in 
 With the ready trick and fable 
 
 Round we wander all the day ; 
 And at night in barn or stable 
 
 Hug our doxies on the hay. 
 
 IV 
 
 Does the train-attended carriage 
 Thro' the country lighter rove ? 
 
 Does the sober bed of marriage 
 Witness brighter scenes of love ? 
 
THE JOLLY BEGGARS 
 
 2 5 
 
 Life is all a variorum, 
 
 We regard not how it goes ; 
 
 Let them cant about decorum, 
 Who have character to lose. 
 
 VI 
 
 Here 's to budgets, bags, and wallets ! 
 
 Here 's to all the wandering train ! 
 Here 's our ragged brats and callets ! 
 
 One and all, cry out, Amen ! 
 
 CHORUS 
 
 A fig for those by law protected ! 
 
 Liberty 's a glorious feast, 
 Courts for cowards were erected, 
 
 Churches built to please the priest ! 
 
NOTES 
 
 1 ' The bauckie -bird ' : — ' The old Scotch name for 
 the bat.' (R. B. in us. [A]). Perhaps because it hides 
 in the roofs of houses near the ' bauks ' or crossbeams. 
 
 2 ' Poosie-Nansie's' : — 'The hostess of a noted 
 caravanserai in Mauchline well known and much fre- 
 quented by the lowest order of travellers and pilgrims.' 
 (R. B. in ms. [B]). 
 
 3 'The vera girdle rang': — The girdle is a round 
 plate of metal used in Scotland from time immemorial 
 in firing the oaten cake. 
 
 4 'Mealy bags': — The meal-bag was the beggars' 
 main equipment, as oatmeal was the staple alms, and 
 might be taken as food or exchange or sold. 
 
 5 'Spon toon': — A weapon carried by soldier- 
 officers instead of a half-pike. 
 
 6 'Tyed up like a stirk': — i.e. Punished with the 
 'jougs,' a sort of iron collar. 
 
 7 'Cleek the sterlin' = ' pinch the ready.' 
 
 8 ' For monie a pursie she had hooked ' : — ' Hook ' 
 is old slang for (i) a finger, (2) a thief. Burns' heroine 
 was, in fact, a pick-pocket. 
 
 9 'Braw': — Here used in its original sense, and = 
 
28 
 
 NOTES 
 
 gaily dressed : the reference being to the tawdry finery 
 of the Highland vagabond. 
 
 10 'Claymore': — A two-handed Highland sword. 
 
 ii 'Driddle': — To driddle = to toddle : the refer- 
 ence being to the short steps of the pigmy scraper, 
 not — as has been supposed — to his bad uneven bow- 
 ing. 'Trysts' are cattle markets, and 'fairs' = hiring 
 fairs or 'mops.' 
 
 12 ' Budget' = tinker's bag of tools. 
 
 13 'And by that dear Kilbaigie': — 'A peculiar 
 sort of whiskey, a great favourite with Poosie Nansie's 
 Clubs.' (R. B. in MS. [A]). 
 
 14 * An' made the bottle clunk ' : — ' Clunk ' — 
 (Yr.faire glou-glou) — describes the sound of empty- 
 ing a narrow-necked bottle, especially by application 
 to the mouth. 
 
 1 5 ' A wight of Homer's craft ' : — ' Homer is allowed 
 to be the eldest ballad singer on record.' (R. B. in 
 MS. [A]). 
 
 16 'Dainty Davie': — This note must be read in 
 Henley, Vol. II, p. 312, where the adventure, as pub- 
 lished by Swift, (Vol. xn, pp. 19, 20, Scott's second 
 edition, 1883) is succulently set forth. 
 
 17 ' Helicon,' = Kilbaigie = whiskey. 
 
 18 'My dearest bluid': — The curious reader is 
 referred to the sonnet attributed to Marlowe. (See 
 Bullen's edition, 1885, Vol. HI, .p. 247.) 
 
~)<*<r fa JrVW fad 0/ WJa/?/lA/?0S n 
 
 
 ^,w**^^*^V 
 
 rHICOBDIHON.dSu) 
 
BIBLIOGRAPHY 
 
 The Jolly Beggars was undoubtedly written as early 
 as 1785. "Although the most dramatic of all Burns' 
 performances, it was not a favourite with his mother 
 and brother, and he never seems to have thought it 
 worthy of publication." (See Alexander Smith's edi- 
 tion of The Poetical Works of Robert Burns, (1865) 
 Vol. 1, p. 319) In the well-known letter to George 
 Thomson (1793) Burns said: "I have forgot the can- 
 tata you allude to, as I kept no copy, and indeed did 
 not know of its existence ; however, I remember that 
 none of the songs pleased myself except the last 
 something about ' Courts for cowards were erected, 
 Churches built to please the priest.' " 
 
 That three or four mss. at one time existed, though 
 Burns in 1793 presumably had no copy in his own 
 possession and professed to hold it in slight regard, is 
 now an accepted fact. Henley had the use of at least 
 two mss. copies which he cites : 
 
3° 
 
 BIBLIOGRAPHY 
 
 (A). From this the Lithographed Facsimile con- 
 isting of 16 folio pages was first printed by Lumsden, 
 Glasgow, (1823 ) and (B), entitled Loz>e and Liberty in 
 the Laing Collection in the University of Edinburgh. 
 
 Henley's text, which we have followed is based on 
 both mss., his preference being in favour of (A), " one of 
 the finest extant specimens of the poet's earlier hand," 
 though (B) has a few readings superior to (A). 
 
 II 
 
 We now come to the first appearance of the 
 printed text (See Facsimile 1) which is definitely set 
 forth in the Memorial Catalogue of the Burns Exhibi- 
 tion i8<p6. (Glasgow 1898) in the following entry: 
 
 LENT BY THE MITCHELL LIBRARY 
 
 No. 1297. The Jolly Beggars : A Cantata, By Robert 
 Burns. [Quotation.] Glasgow : Printed for and sold by 
 Stewart and Meikle. (18 mo. Pp 16) 
 
 First edition, published 13th July 1799, price two-pence. 
 The tract wants recitative beginning — 
 
 " Poor Merry-Andrew in the neuk 
 Sat guzzling with a tinkler-hizzie," 
 
 and song which follows — "Sir Wisdom's a fool when 
 he 's fou." 
 
BIBLIOGRAPHY 
 
 3 1 
 
 From The Printed Works of Robert Burns, a Bibli- 
 ography in Outline by W. Craibe Angus. Glasgow; 
 Privately printed. 1899. (60 copies only.), the fol- 
 lowing entries are taken : 
 
 The Jolly Beggars : a Cantata, By Robert Burns. 
 Glasgow : Printed for and sold by Stewart & Meikle. 
 [Fcap. 8vo. Pp. 16.] [1799.] 
 
 The first edition, issued on 13th July, 1799, price two- 
 pence. Printed from the manuscript given by Burns to 
 John Richmond. 
 
 Uncut. Bound in red morocco and decorated in an 
 original design, intertwined with a verse from the text on 
 each of the boards, by Cobden-Sanderson. The only uncut 
 copy known to collectors. 
 
 The Jolly Beggars ; or Tatterdemallions. A Cantata. 
 By Robert Burns, the Ayrshire Poet. To which are added 
 Lines on Wrangling, The Wish, and The Lady's Choice. 
 Glasgow : Printed by Chapman and Lang for Stewart and 
 Meikle. [Fcap 8vo.] [1800.] With the autograph of 
 Robert Louis Stevenson. Uncut. Mounted in morocco 
 case by Zaehnsdorf. 
 
 The Jolly Beggars: a Cantata, Ascribed to the cele- 
 brated Robert Burns. Newcastle-upon-Tyne. [121110.] 
 1804. 
 
 The Jolly Beggars ; or, Tatterdemalions': a Cantata. By 
 Robert Burns. Edinburgh. [i8mo.] 1808. 
 
 Facsimile of Burns' celebrated Poem, entitled "The 
 Jolly Beggars." From the original manuscript, in the 
 
32 
 
 BIBLIOGRAPHY 
 
 possession of Thomas Stewart, Esq., Greenock. James 
 Lumsden & Son, Glasgow. Uto.] 1823. With the White- 
 foord Mackenzie ex-libris. [See Facsimile 11.] 
 
 Another copy, in coloured wrapper. 
 
 Facsimile of Burns' celebrated Poem, entitled "The 
 Jolly Beggars." Re-issue. 1838. [The copy in the Boston 
 Public Library has a lithographed frontispiece from the 
 original engraving by William Allan. The Preface or 
 'Advertisement' signed W. W. and dated Dec, 1837, is 
 new and replaces that of the 1823 edition.] 
 
 Re-issue, undated. 
 
 The Jolly Beggars : a Cantata. By Robert Burns. 
 Edinburgh : Printed by William Reid. [8vo.] 1829. 
 
 Points of Humour : Illustrated by the Designs of George 
 Cruikshank. London: C.Baldwin. [8vo.] 1823. 
 
 Points v-vm : "The Jolly Beggars; or, Love and 
 Liberty." 
 
 When the library of Mr. W. Craibe Angus of Glas- 
 gow was sold at Alexander Dowell's, Edinburgh, Dec. 
 8-10, 1902, it contained these two lots: 
 
 Burns, R. The Jolly Beggars, a Cantata — The Kirk's 
 Alarm, etc. (enclosed in cloth case), 1799. (489). £26. 
 
 [The Jolly Beggars of which only two copies are said 
 to be known, is a pamphlet of 16 pages. 12 mo. pub- 
 lished at 2d. The two pieces sold on this occasion, each 
 of them belonging to the firstedition, cost Mr. Angus ^21. ] 
 
BIBLIOGRAPHY 
 
 33 
 
 Bums, R. The Jolly Beggars, or Tatterdemallions, a 
 Cantata, etc. 16 pages uncut, unopened, in pouch case of 
 Spanish morocco, made by Zaehnsdorf (with autograph, 
 "Robert Louis Stevenson " on title), Glasgow, Stewart & 
 Meikle, 1799. 13 mo. (465) .£11. 
 
 It will thus be seen that the first printed edition of 
 the text was imperfect, and remained so in the Poems 
 Ascribed to Robert Burns printed for Thomas Stewart, 
 Glasgow, 1 80 1, a copy of which in the original blue 
 paper boards with label on side intact, is now before 
 me. This label design I reproduce on my own cover. 
 
 Scott's censure of Cromek's omission of The Jolly 
 Beggars in his Reliqites, (1808,) was not cheerfully re- 
 ceived by that enterprising publisher, but he did make 
 use of the complete text in his collection of Scottish 
 Songs, (1 810). See Vol. II, pp. 229-264. For a gratui- 
 tous insult flung at Scott, ibid, p. 255. 
 
 The present is the First American edition of The 
 Jolly Beggars issued by and for itself alone. 
 
COMMENTS 
 
 SIR WALTER SCOTT (1809) 
 
 (From a review of Cromek's Reliques of Robert Burns, 
 iSo8, in The Quarterly Review, Edinburgh, Feb- 
 ruary ,1809.) 
 
 YET applauding, as we do most highly 
 applaud, the leading principles of Dr. 
 Currie's selection, we are aware that 
 they sometimes led him into fastidious 
 and over-delicate rejection of the bard's most spirited 
 and happy effusions. A thin octavo, published at 
 Glasgow in 1901, under the title of "Poems ascribed 
 to Robert Burns, the Ayrshire bard," furnishes valu- 
 able proofs of this assertion. It contains, among a 
 good deal of rubbish, some of his most brilliant 
 poetry. A cantata in particular, called The Jolly Beg- 
 gars, for humorous description and nice discrimination 
 of character, is inferior to no poem of the same length 
 
36 
 
 COMMENTS 
 
 in the whole range of English poetry. The scene, 
 indeed, is laid in the very lowest department of low 
 life, the actors being a set of strolling vagrants, met 
 to carouse and barter their rags and plunder for liquor 
 in a hedge ale-house. Yet, even in describing the 
 movements of such a group, the native taste of 
 the poet has never suffered his pen to slide into any 
 thing coarse or disgusting. The extravagant glee and 
 outrageous frolic of the beggars are ridiculously con- 
 trasted with their maimed limbs, rags, and crutches ; 
 the sordid and squalid circumstances of their appear- 
 ance are judiciously thrown into the shade. Nor is 
 the art of the poet less conspicuous in the individual 
 figures, than in the general mass. The festive vagrants 
 are distinguished from each other by personal appear- 
 ance and character, as much as any fortuitous assembly 
 in the higher orders of life. The group, it must be 
 observed, is of Scottish character, and doubtless our 
 northern brethren are more familiar with its varieties 
 than we are : yet the distinctions are too well marked 
 to escape even the Southron. The most prominent 
 persons are a maimed soldier and his female com- 
 panion, a hackneyed follower of the camp, a stroller, 
 late the consort of an Highland ketterer or sturdy 
 beggar, — "but weary fa' the waefu' woodie ! " Being 
 now at liberty, she becomes an object of rivalry 
 
COMMENTS 
 
 37 
 
 between a " pigmy scraper with his fiddle " and a 
 strolling tinker. The latter, a desperate bandit, like 
 most of his profession, terrifies the musician out of 
 the field, and is preferred by the damsel, of course. 
 A wandering ballad -singer, with a brace of doxies, is 
 last introduced upon the stage. Each of these mendi- 
 cants sings a song in character, and such a collection 
 of humorous lyrics, connected by vivid poetical 
 description, is not, perhaps, to be paralleled in the 
 English language. . . . The concluding ditty, chaunted 
 by the ballad-singer at the request of the company, 
 whose " mirth and fun have now grown fast and 
 furious," and set them above all sublunary terrors of 
 jails, stocks, and whipping-posts, is certainly far 
 superior to any thing in the Beggars' Opera, where 
 alone we could expect to find its parallel. 
 
 We are at a loss to conceive any good reason why 
 Dr. Currie did not introduce this singular and humor- 
 ous cantata into his collection. It is true, that, in one 
 or two passages, the muse has trespassed slightly upon 
 decorum, where, in the language of the Scottish song, 
 
 " High kilted was she 
 
 As she gaed owre the lea." 
 
 Something, however, is to be allowed to the nature of 
 the subject, and something to the education of the 
 
38 
 
 COMMENTS 
 
 poet: and if, from veneration to the names of Swift 
 and Dryden, we tolerate the grossness of the one, and 
 the indelicacy of the other, the respect due to that of 
 Burns, may surely claim indulgence for a few light 
 strokes of broad humour. 
 
 II 
 
 LOCKHART (1828) 
 
 (From The Life of Robert Burns by J. G. Lockhart, 
 Edinburgh, 1829.) 
 
 The cantata of The Jolly Beggars, which was not 
 printed at all until some time after the poet's death, 
 and has not been included in the editions of his works 
 until within these few years, cannot be considered as it 
 deserves, without strongly heightening our regret that 
 Burns never lived to execute his meditated drama. 
 That extraordinary sketch, coupled with his later lyrics 
 in a higher vein, is enough to show that in him we had 
 a master capable of placing the musical drama on a 
 level with the loftiest of our classical forms. Beggars 
 Bush, and Beggars' Opera, sink into tameness in the 
 comparison ; and indeed, without profanity to the name 
 of Shakspeare, it may be said, that out of such mate- 
 rials, even his genius could hardly have constructed a 
 
COMMENTS 
 
 39 
 
 piece in which imagination could have more splendidly 
 predominated over the outward show of things — in 
 which the sympathy-awakening power of poetry could 
 have been displayed more triumphantly under circum- 
 stances of the greatest difficulty. That remarkable 
 performance, by the way, was an early production of 
 the Mauchline period; I know nothing but the Tarn o' 
 Shanter that is calculated to convey so high an impres- 
 sion of what Burns might have done. 
 
 Ill 
 
 THOMAS CARLYLE (1828) 
 
 (From the review of Lockhart's Life of Burns in The 
 Edinburgh Review for December, 1828.) 
 
 Perhaps we may venture to say, that the most 
 strictly poetical of all his 'poems' is one which does 
 not appear in Currie's Edition; but has been often 
 printed before and since, under the humble title of 
 The folly Beggars. The subject truly is among the 
 lowest in Nature; but it only the more shews our 
 Poet's gift in raising it into the domain of Art. To 
 our minds, this piece seems thoroughly compacted ; 
 melted together, refined; and poured forth in one 
 flood of true liquid harmony. It is light, airy, soft of 
 
4° 
 
 COMMENTS 
 
 movement ; yet sharp and precise in its details ; every 
 face is a portrait : that rancle carlin, that wee Apollo, 
 that Son of Mars, are Scottish, yet ideal; the scene is 
 at once a dream, and the very Ragcastle of 'Poosie- 
 Nansie.' Farther, it seems in a considerable degree 
 complete, a real self-supporting Whole, which is the 
 highest merit in a poem. The blanket of the Night is 
 drawn asunder for a moment ; in full, ruddy, flaming 
 light, these rough tatterdemalions are seen in their 
 boisterous revel ; for the strong pulse of Life vindi- 
 cates its right to gladness even here; and when the 
 curtain closes, we prolong the action, without effort ; 
 the next day as the last, our Caird and our Ballad- 
 monger, are singing and soldering ; their ' brats and 
 callets ' are hawking, begging, cheating; and some 
 other night, in new combinations, they will wring from 
 Fate another hour of wassail and good cheer. Apart 
 from the universal sympathy with man which this 
 again bespeaks in Burns, a genuine inspiration and no 
 inconsiderable technical talent are manifested here. 
 There is the fidelity, humour, warm life and accurate 
 painting and grouping of some Teniers, for whom 
 hostlers and carousing peasants are not without signifi- 
 cance. It would be strange, doubtless, to call this the 
 best of Burns's writings : we mean to say only, that it 
 seems to us the most perfect of its kind, as a piece of 
 
COMMENTS 
 
 poetical composition, strictly so called. In the Beg- 
 gars' Opera, in the Beggar's Bush, as other critics 
 have already remarked, there is nothing which, in real 
 poetic vigour, equals this Cantata; nothing, as we 
 think, which comes within many degrees of it. 
 
 41 
 
 IV 
 
 WILLIAM SCOTT DOUGLAS (1879) 
 
 (From The Works of Robert Burns, edited by William 
 Scott Douglas, 6 vols, octavo, London, 1891. 
 See Vol. iv, pp. 98-100.) 
 
 Nothing that Burns ever produced displays his 
 genius more completely than his celebrated cantata 
 of The Jolly Beggars, which must have been com- 
 posed at this very period. It is known to have sprung 
 out of a night adventure in the summer or autumn of 
 1785, when the poet, in fellowship with his bosom- 
 cronies, John Richmond and James Smith, was bent 
 on a little more fun, after issuing from their howff&t 
 the VVhitefoord Arms. Nearly opposite the entrance- 
 gate of Mauchline kirkyard, a narrow street, called 
 the Cowgate, runs off from the main street or highway 
 which is here broad and spacious. The spectator, 
 standing with his back to the scene of "The Holy 
 fair," confronts a house of two storeys which was once 
 
42 
 
 COMMENTS 
 
 the white-washed Inn of " John Dow, vintner," with 
 the arms of Sir John Whitefoord of Ballochmyle 
 blazoned on a signboard above the door. It is on the 
 right hand side, near the corner of the Cowgate just 
 referred to; and on the left hand side, at the opposite 
 corner, stands an old building of humbler aspect 
 which, in the poet's Mossgiel days, was tenanted by a 
 Mrs. Gibson, who used it as a licensed ale shop and 
 lodging house for all and sundry pedlars, cadgers and 
 other vagrants. The hostess bore the soubriquet of 
 " Poosie Nancy" and she had a half-witted daughter 
 who was styled "Racer Jess" from her powerful 
 pedestrian qualities and passion for attending country 
 fairs and race-matches. 
 
 Burns and his two companions in passing Nancy's 
 door on the occasion referred to, were attracted by 
 more than common manifestations of uproarious 
 hilarity within, and they knocked and asked leave to 
 mix in the scene of enjoyment, and were made welcome 
 to enter. The "jovial ragged ring" there assembled, 
 and shouting in chorus round a smoking bowl, little 
 knew what sort of chield had come among them 
 " taking notes ; " but the poet and his friends, after a 
 contribution to the general fund, and enjoying for half 
 an hour the rough entertainment, came away somewhat 
 impressed, if not edified, with what they had witnessed. 
 
COMMENTS 
 
 43 
 
 A few days thereafter Burns produced to Richmond a 
 draft of the wonderful cantata, in which a sailor was 
 introduced as one of the persons of the drama, 
 although ultimately left out in the finished manuscript. 
 Richmond who, as we have seen, was a clerk in the 
 office of Mr. Gavin Hamilton, and also "Clerk of 
 Courts" in the burlesque "Court of Equity" which 
 held its meetings in John Dow's Inn, removed from 
 Mauchline to a situation in Edinburgh about Martin- 
 mas, 1785. It is certain that he carried with him a 
 holograph copy of The Jolly Beggars, in whole or in 
 part, and through him the existence of such a poem 
 was made known in Edinburgh. George Thomson, 
 who had seen it or heard of it, made enquiries regard- 
 ing it in one of his letters to Burns in 1793. ^ n tne 
 poet's reply, dated 13th September of that year he 
 says: — "I have forgot the cantata you allude to, as I 
 kept no copy, and indeed did not know of its existence ; 
 however I renumber that none of the songs pleased 
 myself, except the last, something about 
 
 Courts for cowards were erected, 
 Churches built to please the priest." 
 
 George Thomson, in 1818 published the cantata set 
 to music and arranged with choruses by Sir Henry R. 
 Bishop. Some portions of that music, and especially 
 
44 
 
 COMMENTS 
 
 the soldier's song, " I am a son of Mars," have become 
 popular. The grand closing chorus, however, " See 
 the smoking bowl before us," being the song which 
 Burns remembered with most satisfaction, is not so 
 happy, and makes one regret that the composer had 
 not accepted the old air, " Jolly mortals fill your 
 glasses," to which the poet wrote the words. 
 
 The latter, as impressed on our memory by hearing 
 it sung by our schoolfellows half a century ago, we 
 shall here endeavour to convey to the musical reader, 
 [see Facsimile in] in the hope that he may agree with 
 us in thinking that " the auld spring dings the new." 
 
 WILLIAM ERNEST HENLEY (1896) 
 
 (From The Centenary Burns, edited by W. E. Henley 
 and T. F. Henderson, 4 vols, octavo, Edinburgh, 
 1896. The passages that follow are taken from 
 Henley's notes, see Vol. II, pp. 291-306.) 
 
 The Burns of this 'puissant and splendid produc- 
 tion,' as Matthew Arnold calls it — this irresistible 
 presentation of humanity caught in the act and sum- 
 marised for ever in the terms of art — comes into line 
 with divers poets of repute, from our own Dekker and 
 John Fletcher to the singer of les Gueux (18 13) and 
 le Vieux Vagabond (1830), and approves himself their 
 
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COMMENTS 
 
 45 
 
 master in the matter of such qualities as humour, 
 vision, lyrical potency, descriptive style, and the faculty 
 of swift, dramatic presentation, to a purpose that may 
 not be gainsaid. It was suggested by a chance visit 
 (in company with Richmond and Smith) to the 'doss- 
 house ' of Poosie Nansie, as Agnes Gibson was nick- 
 named ... in the Cowgate, Mauchline. This 'ken' 
 stood directly opposite Johnie Dow's tavern (The 
 Whitefoord Arms). Thence issuing, the three friends 
 heard a sound of revelry at Poosie Nansie's, whose 
 company they joined. And a few days afterwards 
 Burns recited several bits of the cantata to Richmond. 
 
 The personages of Burns's Cantata — ruffler and 
 strolling mort, trull and tinker, ballad-singer and bawdy- 
 basket — are more or less the personages of the 
 treatises and songbooks. But they have been renewed 
 by observation from the life, and they are made 
 immortal by the fire of that inspiration through which 
 they were passed. Burns, if we may believe his own 
 words, could sympathise with such outcasts, and had 
 at least a sentimental fancy for the life they led. 
 
 And as early as 1784 he is moved to confide to his 
 First Common Place Book that he has 'often observed, 
 in the course of "his" experience of human life' — 
 
46 
 
 COMMENTS 
 
 which already included Irvine and the Carrick smug- 
 glers — 'that every man, even the worst, has some- 
 thing good about him ' ; for which reason, ' I have 
 often courted the acquaintance of that part of man- 
 kind commonly known by the ordinary phrase of 
 "blackguards," sometimes further than was consistent 
 with the safety of my character.' It is sheer imperti- 
 nence to assume, with certain commentators, that he 
 figured himself in the person of his own Ballad Singer. 
 But it is undeniable that he set forth some of his own 
 philosophy of life at that disreputable artist's lips ; 
 also with him it was ever 'The heart ay 's the part ay 
 That maks us right or wrang' ; and it is pretty safe to 
 argue that his regard for the ' f raternitie of vacabondes ' 
 was so far both temperamental and sincere. And 
 this, in brief, is why Matthew Arnold prefers the 
 Burns of The Jolly Beggars before the Goethe of the 
 ' Scene in Auerbach's Cellar.' With a superb intel- 
 ligence, the Scot creates his people from within ; 
 while the German's apprehension of his company is 
 merely intellectual and pedantic. 
 
 Here as elsewhere, in short, Burns was working on 
 traditional lines; and that The Jolly Beggars remains 
 immortal, while his models have long since disappeared, 
 is due to the fact — not that it is in any sense an 
 
COMMENTS 
 
 47 
 
 invention in form but — that, treating of things 
 familiar in familiar terms, it is also a piece of rare and 
 admirable genius. 
 
 The Jolly Beggars may be the piece referred to in 
 the letter to Richmond, 17th February, 1786: — 'I 
 have enclosed you a piece of rhyming ware for your 
 perusal.' Richmond told Chambers that in the Cantata, 
 as originally composed, to the best of his memory 
 there were included songs for a sweep and a sailor 
 (the whipjack, or dry -land sailor, is one of the oldest 
 members of the Cursitors' Society) ; and there is 
 other evidence that Burns greatly modified his first 
 draft. In reply to a query of George Thomson he 
 wrote in 1793: — 'I have forgot the Cantata you 
 allude to, as I kept no copy, and indeed did not know 
 that it was in existence; however, I remember that 
 none of the songs pleased myself except the last — 
 something about : — 
 
 " Courts for cowards were erected, 
 
 Churches built to please the priest.'" 
 
 This was, no doubt, honest criticism, for the songs 
 were mostly Scoto-English. But the artistic finish of 
 the thing suggests the intention to publish ; and it 
 may very well have been submitted to the 'jury of 
 literati' in Edinburgh (1787), and have failed to 
 
4 8 
 
 COMMENTS 
 
 approve itself to that body's ' pedant frigid soul of 
 criticism.' 
 
 The Jolly Beggars was not published by Currie, 
 and — some have supposed — was not even submitted 
 to him. But that he deliberately rejected it is clear 
 from a MS. letter of Alexander Cunningham to Syme, 
 17th September, 1796 (with other important MSS. in 
 the possession of Cunningham's grandson, who has 
 kindly given us copies): — 'There has been put into 
 my hand a poem entitled Love atid Liberty. I pre- 
 sume you have seen it. Were the pruning-knife 
 applied to some of the broad humour it might be 
 published without incurring much censure — at least 
 it would be admired by many and is surely too valu- 
 able to be thrown aside.' Cromek expressed to 
 Creech strong scruples with regard to publishing The 
 
 Jolly Beggars, as also Holy Willie's Prayer 
 
 Creech seems to have advised him against it, on the 
 score of prudence, for he did not include it in the 
 Peliques, 1808; but, being severely censured by Sir 
 Walter Scott for ignoring it, he published it in Scottish 
 Songs, 1810, at the same time that he declined to take 
 in Holy Willie's Prayer by reason of 'its open and 
 daring profanity, and the frequent and familiar in- 
 troduction of the sacred name of the Deity.' 
 
COMMENTS 
 
 49 
 
 VI 
 
 ANDREW LANG (1886-1896) 
 
 (From Lang's Poems and Songs of Burns, 1896, and 
 Letters to Dead Authors, 1886.) 
 
 This immortal poem was partly given in manuscript 
 by Burns, " as rich men give who care not for their 
 gifts," to one Richmond, in whose company, in 1785, 
 he had watched a festival of vagrom men. In 1793, 
 Burns had forgotten the Cantata, and kept no copy. 
 Shakespeare was not more regardless of his works. 
 The rest of the manuscript was presented by Burns to 
 a Mr. David Woodburn, without Richmond's part, 
 which has been added — it runs from "Poor Merry- 
 Andrew " to " he 's far dafter than I." The whole ms. 
 has wandered to the Azores, to Nova Scotia, and 
 home again. (Scott Douglas.) Part of Tennyson's 
 Vision of Sin is clearly inspired by this Cantata. It is 
 characteristic of Burns that he neither published nor 
 took any pains to secure the future of this extraordi- 
 nary piece, first printed in 1 799, by Stewart and Meikle, 
 without Richmond's portion, added in 1801 by Thomas 
 Stewart. 
 
 The touch of a lettered society, the strife with the 
 Kirk, discontent with the State, poverty and pride* 
 neglect and success, were needed to make your Genius 
 
5° 
 
 COMMENTS 
 
 what it was, and to endow the world with Tarn d 1 
 Shunter, The Jolly Beggars, and Holy Willie's Prayer. 
 Who can praise them too highly — who admire in 
 them too much the humour, the scorn, the wisdom, 
 the unsurpassed energy and courage ? 
 So powerful, so commanding, is the movement of that 
 Beggars' Chorus, that, methinks, it unconsciously 
 echoed in the brain of our greatest living poet when 
 he conceived the Vision of Sin. You shall judge for 
 yourself. Recall — 
 
 Here 's to budgets, bags, and wallets ! 
 Then read this : 
 
 Drink to lofty hopes that cool — 
 
 Visions of a perfect state : 
 Drink we, last, the public fool, 
 
 Frantic love and frantic hate. 
 
 Drink to Fortune, drink to Chance, 
 
 While we keep a little breath ! 
 Drink to heavy Ignorance, 
 
 Hob and nob with brother Death ! 
 
 Is not the movement the same, though the modern 
 speaks a wilder recklessness ? 
 
 So in the best company we leave you, who were the 
 life and soul of so so much company, good and bad. 
 No poet, since the Psalmist of Israel, ever gave the 
 world more assurance of a man. 
 
SOME ASPECTS OF 
 ROBERT BURNS 
 
Some Aspects of Robert Burns which first appeared in 
 the Cornhill Magazine [1879], and was reissued in 
 Familiar Studies of Men and Books, [1882] should be read 
 in connexion and with certain qualifications as set 
 out in Henley's Terminal Essay [i8g6]. For all that 
 " R. L. S." practically remains master of the situa- 
 tion, and with the prefatory addition to his essay we 
 may leave him to the " owre true tale." With the 
 highest opinion of Henley and believing that the 
 Centenary Burns is, humanly speaking, a final critical 
 estimate that will remain when all previous editions 
 and commentaries have gone the ways of dusty death, 
 he still lacked that milk of human kindness which in 
 Stevenson sweetens his depreciation and leavens his 
 " shorter catechist " attitude in its lack of sympathetic 
 interpretation. In other words one can reconcile 
 Stevenson with Burns, whereas there is in Henley's 
 "inspired peasant" insistence in season and out, a 
 something with a bitter taste behind. We may safely 
 rely on Henley as an editor ; as a lover of Bums give 
 me Stevenson, who considered these Aspects with a 
 justifiable degree of self-satisfaction. 
 
 T. B. M. 
 
SOME ASPECTS OF ROBERT 
 BURNS 
 
 =; *\A O write with authority about another 
 man, we must have fellow-feeling and 
 some common ground of experience with 
 our subject. We may praise or blame 
 according as we find him related to us by the best or 
 worst in ourselves ; but it is only in virtue of some 
 relationship that we can be his judges, even to con- 
 demn. Feelings which we share and understand enter 
 for us into the tissue of the man's character; those to 
 which we are strangers in our own experience we are 
 inclined to regard as blots, exceptions, inconsistencies, 
 and excursions of the diabolic ; we conceive them with 
 repugnance, explain them with difficulty, and raise our 
 hands to heaven in wonder when we find them in con- 
 junction with talents that we respect or virtues that 
 we admire. David, king of Israel, would pass a 
 sounder judgment on a man than either Nathaniel or 
 
54 
 
 SOME ASPECTS OF BURNS 
 
 David Hume. Now, Principal Shairp's recent volume, 
 although I believe no one will read it without respect 
 and interest, has this one capital defect — that there is 
 imperfect sympathy between the author and the sub- 
 ject, between the critic and the personality under 
 criticism. Hence an inorganic, if not an incoherent, 
 presentation of both the poems and the man. Of 
 Holy Willie's Prayer, Principal Shairp remarks that 
 " those who have loved most what was best in Burns's 
 poetry must have regretted that it was ever written." 
 To the Jolly Beggars, so far as my memory serve's me, 
 he refers but once ; and then only to remark on the 
 "strange, not to say painful," circumstance that the 
 same hand which wrote the Colter's Saturday A T ight 
 should have stooped to write the Jolly Beggars. The 
 Saturday Night may or may not be an admirable 
 poem ; but its significance is trebled, and the power 
 and range of the poet first appears, when it is set 
 beside the Jolly Beggars. To take a man's work piece- 
 meal, except with the design of elegant extracts, is the 
 way to avoid, and not to perform, the critic's duty. 
 The same defect is displayed in the treatment of 
 Burns as a man, which is broken, apologetical, and 
 confused. The man here presented to us is not that 
 Burns, teres atque rolundus — a burly figure in litera- 
 ture, as, from our present vantage of time, we have 
 
SOME ASPECTS OF BURNS 
 
 55 
 
 begun to see him. This, on the other hand, is Burns 
 as he may have appeared to a contemporary clergyman, 
 whom we shall conceive to have been a kind and indul- 
 gent but orderly and orthodox person, anxious to be 
 pleased, but too often hurt and disappointed by the 
 behaviour of his red-hot protege, and solacing himself 
 with the explanation that the poet was " the most 
 inconsistent of men." If you are so sensibly pained 
 by the misconduct of your subject, and so paternally 
 delighted with his virtues, you will always be an 
 excellent gentleman, but a somewhat questionable 
 biographer. Indeed, we can only be sorry and sur- 
 prised that Principal Shairp should have chosen a 
 theme so uncongenial. When we find a man writing 
 on Burns, who likes neither Holy Willie, nor the Beg- 
 gars, nor the Ordination, nothing is adequate to the 
 situation but the old cry of Geronte: "Que diable 
 allait-il faire dans cette galere ? " And every merit we 
 find in the book, which is sober and candid in a degree 
 unusual with biographies of Burns, only leads us to 
 regret more heartily that good work should be so 
 greatly thrown away. 1 
 
 It is far from my intention to tell over again a story 
 that has been so often told; but there are certainly 
 some points in the character of Burns that will bear to 
 
 i See note at close of this essay. 
 
56 
 
 SOME ASPECTS OF BURNS 
 
 be brought out, and some chapters in Sis life that 
 demand a brief rehearsal. The unity of the man's 
 nature, for all its richness, has fallen somewhat out of 
 sight in the pressure of new information and the apol- 
 ogetical ceremony of biographers. Mr. Carlyle made 
 an inimitable bust of the poet's head of gold; may I 
 not be forgiven if my business should have more to do 
 with the feet, which were of clay. 
 
 Any view of Burns would be misleading which 
 passed over in silence the influences of his home and 
 his father. That father, William Burnes, after having 
 been for many years a gardener, took a farm, married, 
 and, like an emigrant in a new country, built himself a 
 house with his own hands. Poverty of the most dis- 
 tressing sort, with sometimes the near prospect of a 
 gaol, embittered the remainder of his life. Chill, back- 
 ward, and austere with strangers, grave and imperious 
 in his family, he was yet a man of very unusual parts 
 and of an affectionate nature. On his way through 
 life he had remarked much upon other men, with more 
 result in theory than practice ; and he had reflected 
 upon many subjects as he delved the garden. His 
 great delight was in solid conversation ; he would leave 
 his work to talk with the schoolmaster Murdoch ; and 
 
SOME ASPECTS OF BURNS 
 
 57 
 
 Robert, when he came home late at night, not only 
 turned aside rebuke but kept his father two hours 
 beside the fire by the charm of his merry and vigorous 
 talk. Nothing is more characteristic of the class in 
 general, and William Burnes in particular, than the 
 pains he took to get proper schooling for his boys, 
 and, when that was no longer possible, the sense and 
 resolution with which he set himself to supply the 
 deficiency by his own influence. For many years he 
 was their chief companion ; he spoke with them 
 seriously on all subjects as if they had been grown 
 men ; at night, when work was over, he taught them 
 arithmetic ; he borrowed books for them on history, 
 science, and theology ; and he felt it his duty to sup- 
 plement this last — the trait is laughably Scottish — 
 by a dialogue of his own composition, where his own 
 private shade of orthodoxy was exactly represented. 
 He would go to his daughter as she stayed afield herd- 
 ing cattle, to teach her the names of grasses and wild 
 flowers, or to sit by her side when it thundered. Dis- 
 tance to strangers, deep family tenderness, love of 
 knowledge, a narrow, precise, and formal reading of 
 theology — everything we learn of him hangs well 
 together, and builds up a popular Scotch type. If I 
 mention the name of Andrew Fairservice, it is only as 
 I might couple for an instant Dugald Dalgetty with 
 
58 
 
 SOME ASPECTS OF BURNS 
 
 old Marshal Loudon, to help out the reader's compre- 
 hension by a popular but unworthy instance of a class. 
 Such was the influence of this good and wise man 
 that his household became a school to itself, and 
 neighbours who came into the farm at meal-time 
 would find the whole family, father, brothers, and 
 sisters, helping themselves with one hand, and holding 
 a book in the other. We are surprised at the prose 
 style of Robert ; that of Gilbert need surprise us no 
 less ; even William writes a remarkable letter for a 
 young man of such slender opportunities. One anec- 
 dote marks the taste of the family. Murdoch brought 
 Titus Andronicus, and, with such dominie elocution 
 as we may suppose, began to read it aloud before this 
 rustic audience; but when he had reached the passage 
 where Tamora insults Lavinia, with one voice and " in 
 an agony of distress" they refused to hear it to an end. 
 In such a father and with such a home, Robert had 
 already the making of an excellent education ; and 
 what Murdoch added, although it may not have been 
 much in amount, was in character the very essence of 
 a literary training. Schools and colleges, for one great 
 man whom they complete, perhaps unmake a dozen ; 
 the strong spirit can do well upon more scanty fare. 
 
 Robert steps before us, almost from the first, in his 
 complete character — a proud, headstrong, impetuous 
 
SOME ASPECTS OF BURNS 
 
 59 
 
 lad, greedy of pleasure, greedy of notice ; in his own 
 phrase "panting after distinction," and in his brother's 
 "cherishing a particular jealousy of people who were 
 richer or of more consequence than himself:" with 
 all this, he was emphatically of the artist nature. 
 Already he made a conspicuous figure in Tarbolton 
 church, with the only tied hair in the parish, "and his 
 plaid, which was of a particular colour, wrapped in a 
 particular manner round his shoulders." Ten years 
 later, when a married man, the father i f a family, a 
 farmer, and an officer of Excise, we shall find him out 
 fishing in masquerade, with fox-skin cap, belted great- 
 coat, and great Highland broadsword. He liked 
 dressing up, in fact, for its own sake. This is the 
 spirit which leads to the extravant array of Latin 
 Quarter students, and the proverbial velveteen of the 
 English landscape-painter; and, though the pleasure 
 derived is in itself merely personal, it shows a man 
 who is, to say the least of it, not pained by general 
 attention and remark. His father wrote the family 
 name B times ; Robert early adopted the orthography 
 Burness from his cousin in the Mearns; and in his 
 twenty-eighth year changed it once more to Burns. 
 It is plain that the last transformation was not made 
 without some qualm ; for in addressing his cousin he 
 adheres, in at least one more letter, to spelling number 
 
6o 
 
 SOME ASPECTS OF BURNS 
 
 two. And this, again, shows a man preoccupied about 
 the manner of his appearance even down to the name, 
 and little willing to follow custom. Again, he was 
 proud, and justly proud, of his powers in conversation. 
 To no other man's have we the same conclusive testi- 
 mony from different sources and from every rank of 
 life. It is almost a commonplace that the best of his 
 works was what he said in talk. Robertson the his- 
 torian "scarcely ever met any man whose conversation 
 displayed greater vigour " ; the Duchess of Gordon 
 declared that he " carried her off her feet " ; and, 
 when he came late to an inn, the servants would get 
 out of bed to hear him talk. But, in these early days 
 at least, he was determined to shine by any means. 
 He made himself feared in the village for his tongue. 
 He would crush weaker men to their faces, or even 
 perhaps — for the statement of Sillar is not absolute — 
 say cutting things of his acquaintances behind their 
 back. At the church door, between sermons, he 
 would parade his religious views amid hisses. These 
 details stamp the man. He had no genteel timidities 
 in the conduct of his life. He loved to force his per- 
 sonality upon the world. He would please himself, 
 and shine. Had he lived in the Paris of 1S30, and 
 joined his lot with the Romantics, we can conceive 
 him writing Jehan for Jean, swaggering in Gautier's 
 
SOME ASPECTS OF BURNS 
 
 61 
 
 red waistcoat, and horrifying Bourgeois in a public 
 cafe with paradox and gasconade. 
 
 A leading trait throughout his whole career was his 
 desire to be in love. Ne fait pas ce tour qui veut. His 
 affections were often enough touched, but perhaps 
 never engaged. He was all his life on a voyage of 
 discovery, but it does not appear conclusively that he 
 ever touched the happy isle. A man brings to love a 
 deal of ready-made sentiment, and even from child- 
 hood obscurely prognosticates the symptoms of this 
 vital malady. Burns was formed for love ; he had 
 passion, tenderness, and a singular bent in the direc- 
 tion ; rre could foresee, with the intuition of an artist, 
 what love ought to be ; and he could not conceive a 
 worthy life without it. But he had ill-fortune, and was 
 besides so greedy after every shadow of the true 
 divinity, and so much the slave of a strong tempera- 
 ment, that perhaps his nerve was relaxed and his heart 
 had lost the power of self-devotion before an oppor- 
 tunity occurred. The circumstances of his youth 
 doubtless counted for something in the result. For 
 the lads of Ayrshire, as soon as the day's work was 
 over and the beasts were stabled, would take the road, 
 it might be in a winter tempest, and travel perhaps 
 miles by moss and moorland to spend an hour or two 
 in courtship. Rule 10 of the Bachelors' Club at Tar- 
 
62 
 
 SOME ASPECTS OF BURNS 
 
 bolton provides that "every man proper for a member 
 of this Society must be a professed lover of one or 
 more of the female sex." The rich, as Burns himself 
 points out, may have a choice of pleasurable occupa- 
 tions, but these lads had nothing but their "cannie 
 hour at e'en." It was upon love and flirtation that 
 this rustic society was built; gallantry was the essence 
 of life among the Ayrshire hills as well as in the 
 Court of Versailles ; and the days were distinguished 
 from each other by love-letters, meetings, tiffs, recon- 
 ciliations, and expansions to the chosen confidant, as 
 in a comedy of Marivaux. Here was a field for a 
 man of Burns's indiscriminate personal ambition, 
 where he might pursue his voyage of discovery in 
 quest of true love, and enjoy temporary triumphs by 
 the way. He was " constantly the victim of some fair 
 enslaver" — at least, when it was not the other way 
 about; and there were often underplots and secondary 
 fair enslavers in the background. Many — or may we 
 not say most ? — of these affairs were entirely artificial. 
 One, he tells us, he began out of "a vanity of showing 
 his parts in courtship," for he piqued himself on his 
 ability at a love-letter. But, however they began, 
 these flames of his were fanned into a passion ere the 
 end; and he stands unsurpassed in his power of self- 
 deception, and positively without a competitor in the 
 
SOME ASPECTS OF BURNS 
 
 art, to use his own words, " of battering himself into a 
 warm affection," — a debilitating and futile exercise. 
 Once he had worked himself into the vein, " the agita- 
 tions of his mind and body" were an astonishment to 
 all who knew him. Such a course as this, however 
 pleasant to a thirsty vanity, was lowering to his 
 nature. He sank more and more towards the pro- 
 fessional Don Juan. With a leer of what the French 
 call fatuity, he bids the belles of Mauchline beware of 
 his seductions ; and the same cheap self-satisfaction 
 finds a yet uglier vent when he plumes himself on the 
 scandal at the birth of his first bastard. We can well 
 believe what we hear of his facility in striking up an 
 acquaintance with women : he would have conquering 
 manners ; he would bear down upon his rustic game 
 with the grace that comes of absolute assurance — the 
 Richelieu of Lochlea or Mossgiel. In yet another 
 manner did these quaint ways of courtship help him 
 into fame. If he were great as principal, he was 
 unrivalled as confidant. He could enter into a pas- 
 sion ; he could counsel wary moves, being, in his own 
 phrase, so old a hawk; nay, he could turn a letter for 
 some unlucky swain, or even string a few lines of verse 
 that should clinch the business and fetch the hesitat- 
 ing fair one to the ground. Nor, perhaps, was it only 
 his " curiosity, zeal, and intrepid dexterity" that recom- 
 
6 4 
 
 SOME ASPECTS OF BURNS 
 
 mended him for a second in such affairs ; it must have 
 been a distinction to have the assistance and advice of 
 Rab the Ranter ; and one who was in no way formida- 
 ble by himself might grow dangerous and attractive 
 through the fame of his associate. 
 
 I think we can conceive him, in these early years, in 
 that rough moorland country, poor among the poor 
 with his seven pounds a year, looked upon with doubt 
 by respectable elders, but for all that the best talker, 
 the best letter-writer, the most famous lover and con- 
 fidant, the laureate poet, and the only man who wore 
 his hair tied in the parish. He says he had then as 
 high a notion of himself as ever after; and I can well 
 believe it. Among the youth he walked facile prin- 
 ceps, an apparent god ; and even if, from time to time, 
 the Reverend Mr. Auld should swoop upon him with the 
 thunders of the Church, and, in company with seven 
 others, Rab the Ranter must figure some fine Sunday 
 on the stool of repentance, would there not be a sort 
 of glory, an infernal apotheosis, in so conspicuous a 
 shame ? Was not Richelieu in disgrace more idolised 
 than ever by the dames of Paris ? and when was the 
 highwayman most acclaimed but on his way to Tyburn ? 
 Or, to take a simile from nearer home, and still more 
 exactly to the point, what could even corporal punish- 
 ment avail, administered by a cold, abstract, unearthly 
 
SOME ASPECTS OF BURNS 
 
 65 
 
 schoolmaster, against the influence and fame of the 
 school's hero? 
 
 And now we come to the culminating point of 
 Burns's early period. He began to be received into 
 the unknown upper world. His fame soon spread 
 from among his fellow-rebels on the benches, and 
 began to reach the ushers and monitors of this great 
 Ayrshire academy. This arose in part from his lax 
 views about religion ; for at this time that old war of 
 the creeds and confessors, which is always grumbling 
 from end to end of our poor Scotland, brisked up in 
 these parts into a hot and virulent skirmish ; and 
 Burns found himself identified with the opposition 
 party, — a clique of roaring lawyers and half-heretical 
 divines, with wit enough to appreciate the value of the 
 poet's help, and not sufficient taste to moderate his 
 grossness and personality. We may judge of their 
 surprise when Holy Willie was put into their hand ; 
 like the amorous lads of Tarbolton, they recognised 
 in him the best of seconds. His satires began to go 
 the round in manuscript; Mr. Aiken, one of the law- 
 yers, "read him into fame"; he himself was soon 
 welcome in many houses of a better sort, where his 
 admirable talk, and his manners, which he had direct 
 from his Maker, except for a brush he gave them at a 
 country dancing school, completed what his poems 
 
66 
 
 SOME ASPECTS OF BURNS 
 
 had begun. We have a sight of him at his first visit 
 to Adamhill, in his ploughman's shoes, coasting around 
 the carpet as though that were sacred ground. But 
 he soon grew used to carpets and their owners ; and 
 he was still the superior of all whom he encountered, 
 and ruled the roost in conversation. Such was the 
 impression made, that a young clergyman, himself a 
 man of ability, trembled and became confused when he 
 saw Robert enter the church in which he was to 
 preach. It is not surprising that the poet determined 
 to publish : he had now stood the test of some public- 
 ity, and under this hopeful impulse he composed in six 
 winter months the bulk of his more important poems. 
 Here was a young man who, from a very humble place, 
 was mounting rapidly ; from the cynosure of a parish, 
 he had become the talk of a county ; once the bard 
 of rural courtships, he was now about to appear as a 
 bound and printed poet in the world's bookshops. 
 
 A few more intimate strokes are necessary to complete 
 the sketch. This strong young ploughman, who feared 
 no competitor with the flail, suffered like a fine lady 
 from sleeplessness and vapours ; he would fall into the 
 blackest melancholies, and be filled with remorse for 
 the past and terror for the future. He was still not 
 perhaps devoted to religion, but haunted by it; and 
 at a touch of sickness prostrated himself before God 
 
SOME ASPECTS OF BURNS 
 
 67 
 
 in what I can only call unmanly penitence. As he 
 had aspirations beyond his place in the world, so 
 he had tastes, thoughts, and weaknesses to match. 
 He loved to walk under a wood to the sound of a 
 winter tempest; he had a singular tenderness for ani- 
 mals; he carried a book with him in his pocket when 
 he went abroad, and wore out in this service two copies 
 of the Man of Feeling. With young people in the 
 field at work he was very long-suffering; and when 
 his brother Gilbert spoke sharply to them — " O man, 
 ye are no for young folk," he would say, and give the 
 defaulter a helping hand and a smile. In the hearts 
 of the men whom he met, he read as in a book ; and, 
 what is yet more rare, his knowledge of himself 
 equalled his knowledge of others. There are no truer 
 things said of Burns than what is to be found in his 
 own letters. Country Don Juan as he was, he had 
 none of that blind vanity which values itself on what 
 it is not; he knew his own strength and weakness to 
 a hair: he took himself boldly for what he was, and, 
 except in moments of hypochondria, declared himself 
 content. 
 
 THE LOVE STORIES 
 
 On the night of Mauchline races, 1785, the young 
 men and women of the place joined in a penny ball, 
 
68 
 
 SOME ASPECTS OF BURNS 
 
 according to their custom. In the same set danced 
 Jean Armour, the master-mason's daughter, and our 
 dark-eyed Don Juan. His dog (not the immortal 
 Luath, but a successor unknown to fame, caret quia 
 vate sacro), apparently sensible of some neglect, fol- 
 lowed his master to and fro, to the confusion of the 
 dancers. Some mirthful comments followed; and 
 Jean heard the poet say to his partner — or, as I 
 should imagine, laughingly launch the remark to the 
 company at large — that " he wished he could get any 
 of the lasses to like him as well as his dog." Some 
 time after, as the girl was bleaching clothes on Mauch- 
 line green, Robert chanced to go by, still accompanied 
 by his dog ; and the dog, " scouring in long excursion," 
 scampered with four black paws across the linen. 
 This brought the two into conversation; when Jean, 
 with a somewhat hoydenish advance, inquired if " he 
 had yet got any of the lasses to like him as well as his 
 dog ? " It is one of the misfortunes of the professional 
 Don Juan that his honour forbids him to re-refuse 
 battle ; he is in life like the Roman soldier upon duty, 
 or like the sworn physician who must attend on all 
 diseases. Burns accepted the provocation; hungry 
 hope reawakened in his heart; here was a girl — 
 pretty, simple at least, if not honestly stupid, and 
 plainly not averse to his attentions; it seemed to him 
 
SOME ASPECTS OF BURNS 
 
 69 
 
 once more as if love might here be waiting him. Had 
 he but known the truth ! for this facile and empty- 
 headed girl had nothing more in view than a flirta- 
 tion ; and her heart, from the first and on to the end 
 of her story, was engaged by another man. Burns 
 once more commenced the celebrated process of 
 " battering himself into a warm affection " ; and the 
 proofs of his success are to be found in many verses 
 of the period. Nor did he succeed with himself only ; 
 Jean, with her heart still elsewhere, succumbed to his 
 fascination, and early in the next year the natural con- 
 sequence became manifest. It was a heavy stroke for 
 this unfortunate couple. They had trifled with life, and 
 were now rudely reminded of life's serious issues. Jean 
 awoke to the ruin of her hopes ; the best she had now 
 to expect was marriage with a man who was a stranger 
 to her dearest thoughts ; she might now be glad if 
 she could get what she would never have chosen. As 
 for Burns, at the stroke of the calamity he recognised 
 that his voyage of discovery had led him into a wrong 
 hemisphere — that he was not, and never had been, 
 really in love with Jean. Hear him in the pressure of 
 the hour. "Against two things," he writes, "I am as 
 fixed as fate — staying at home, and owning her con- 
 jugally. The first, by heaven, I will not do I — the last, 
 by hell, I will never do !" And then he adds, perhaps 
 
7° 
 
 SOME ASPECTS OF BURNS 
 
 already in a more relenting temper: "If you see Jean, 
 tell her I will meet her, so God help me in my hour of 
 need." They met accordingly; and Burns, touched 
 with her misery, came down from these heights of 
 independence, and gave her a written acknowledgment 
 of marriage. It is the punishment of Don Juanism to 
 create continually false positions — relations in life 
 which are wrong in themselves, and which it is equally 
 wrong to break or to perpetuate. This was such a 
 case. Worldly Wiseman would have laughed and 
 gone his way; let us be glad that Burns was better 
 counselled by his heart. When we discover that we 
 can be no longer true, the next best is to be kind. I 
 daresay he came away from that interview not very 
 content, but with a glorious conscience; and as he 
 went homeward, he would sing his favourite, "How 
 are Thy servants blest, O Lord ! " Jean, on the other 
 hand, armed with her "lines," confided her position to 
 the master-mason, her father, and his wife. Burns 
 and his brother were then in a fair way to ruin them- 
 selves in their farm ; the poet was an execrable match 
 for any well-to-do country lass; and perhaps old 
 Armour had an inkling of a previous attachment on 
 his daughter's part. At least, he was not so much 
 incensed by her slip from virtue as by the marriage 
 which had been designed to cover it. Of this he 
 
SOME ASPECTS OF BURNS 
 
 7i 
 
 would not hear a word. Jean, who had besought the 
 acknowledgment only to appease her parents, and not 
 at all from any violent inclination to the poet, readily 
 gave up the paper for destruction ; and all parties 
 imagined, although wrongly, that the marriage was 
 thus dissolved. To a proud man like Bums here was 
 a crushing blow. The concession which had been 
 wrung from his pity was now publicly thrown back in 
 his teeth. The Armour family preferred disgrace to his 
 connection. Since the promise, besides, he had doubt- 
 less been busy "battering himself" back again into 
 his affection for the girl ; and the blow would not only 
 take him in his vanity, but wound him at the heart. 
 
 He relieved himself in verse; but for such a smart- 
 ing affront manuscript poetry was insufficient to con- 
 sole him. He must find a more powerful remedy in 
 good flesh and blood, and after this discomfiture, set 
 forth again at once upon his voyage of discovery in 
 quest of love. It is perhaps one of the most touching 
 things in human nature, as it is a commonplace of 
 psychology, that when a man has just lost hope or 
 confidence in one love, he is then most eager to find 
 and lean upon another. The universe could not be 
 yet exhausted ; there must be hope and love waiting 
 for him somewhere; and so, with his head down, this 
 poor, insulted poet ran once more upon his fate. 
 
7 2 
 
 SOME ASPECTS OF BURNS 
 
 There was an innocent and gentle Highland nursery- 
 maid at service in a neighbouring family ; and he had 
 soon battered himself and her into a warm affection 
 and a secret engagement. Jean's marriage lines had 
 not been destroyed till March 13, 1786; yet all was 
 settled between Burns and Mary Campbell by Sunday, 
 May 14, when they met for the last time and said 
 farewell with rustic solemnities upon the banks of Ayr. 
 They each wet their hands in a stream, and, standing 
 one on either bank, held a Bible between them as they 
 vowed eternal faith. Then they exchanged Bibles, on 
 one of which Burns, for greater security, had inscribed 
 texts as to the binding nature of an oath; and surely, 
 if ceremony can do aught to fix the wandering affec- 
 tions, here were two people united for life. Mary 
 came of a superstitious family ; so that she perhaps 
 insisted on these rites; but they must have been emi- 
 nently to the taste of Burns at this period; for nothing 
 would seem superfluous, and no oath great enough, to 
 stay his tottering constancy. 
 
 Events of consequence now happened thickly in the 
 poet's life. His book was announced; the Armours 
 sought to summon him at law for the aliment of the 
 child; he lay here and there in hiding to correct the 
 sheets; he w T as under an engagement for Jamaica, 
 where Mary was to join him as his wife ; now he had 
 
SOME ASPECTS OF BURNS 
 
 73 
 
 "orders within three weeks at latest to repair aboard 
 the A T ancy, Captain Smith ; " now his chest was already 
 on the road to Greenock; and now, in the wild 
 autumn weather on the moorland, he measures verses 
 of farewell : — 
 
 " The bursting tears my heart declare ; 
 Farewell the bonny banks of Ayr ! " 
 
 But the great master dramatist had secretly another 
 intention for the piece; by the most violent and com- 
 plicated solution, in which death and birth and sudden 
 fame all play a part as interposing deities, the act-drop 
 fell upon a scene of transformation. Jean was brought 
 to bed of twins, and, by an amicable arrangement, the 
 Burnses took the boy to biing up by hand, while the girl 
 remained with her mother. The success of the book 
 was immediate and emphatic; it put £2.0 at once into 
 the author's pur.se; and he was encouraged upon all 
 hands to go to Edinburgh and push his success in a 
 second and larger edition. Third and last in these 
 series of interpositions, a letter came one day to Moss- 
 giel Farm for Robert. He went to the window to read 
 it; a sudden change came over his face, and he left 
 the room without a word. Years afterwards, when the 
 story began to leak out, his family understood that he 
 had then learned the death of Highland Mary. Except 
 
74 
 
 SOME ASPECTS OF BURNS 
 
 in a few poems and a few dry indications purposely 
 misleading as to date, Burns himself made no reference 
 to this passage of his life ; it was an adventure of 
 which, for I think sufficient reasons, he desired to bury 
 the details. Of one thing we may be glad : in after 
 years he visited the poor girl's mother, and left her 
 with the impression that he was " a real warm-hearted 
 chield." 
 
 Perhaps a month after he received this intelligence, 
 he set out for Edinburgh on a pony he had borrowed 
 from a friend. The town that winter was "agog with 
 the ploughman poet." Robertson, Dugald Stewart, 
 Blair, " Duchess Gordon and all the gay world," were 
 of his acquaintance. Such a revolution is not to be 
 found in literary history. He was now, it must be 
 remembered, twenty-seven years of age ; he had fought 
 since his early boyhood an obstinate battle against 
 poor soil, bad seed, and inclement seasons, wading 
 deep in Ayrshire mosses, guiding the plough in the 
 furrow, wielding "the thresher's weary flingin'-tree ; " 
 and his education, his diet, and his pleasures, had been 
 those of a Scotch countryman. Now he stepped forth 
 suddenly among the polite and learned. We can see 
 him as he then was, in his boots and buckskins, his 
 blue coat and waistcoat striped with buff and blue, like 
 a farmer in his Sunday best ; the heavy ploughman's 
 
SOME ASPECTS OF BURNS 
 
 75 
 
 figure firmly planted on its burly legs; his face full of 
 sense and shrewdness, and with a somewhat melan- 
 choly air of thought, and his large dark eye " literally 
 glowing" as he spoke. "I never saw such another 
 eye in a human head," says Walter Scott, " though I 
 have seen the most distinguished men of my time." 
 With men, whether they were lords or omnipotent 
 critics, his manner was plain, dignified, and free from 
 bashful ness or affectation. If he made a slip, he had 
 the social courage to pass on and refrain from explana- 
 tion. He was not embarrassed in this society, because 
 he read and judged the men; he could spy snobbery 
 in a titled lord ; and, as for the critics, he dismissed 
 their system in an epigram. " These gentlemen," said 
 he, " remind me of some spinsters in my country who 
 spin their thread so fine that it is neither fit for weft 
 nor woof." Ladies, on the other hand, surprised him ; 
 he was scarce commander of himself in their society ; he 
 was disqualified by his acquired nature as a Don Juan ; 
 and he, who had been so much at his ease with country 
 lasses, treated the town dames to an extreme of defer- 
 ence. One lady, who met him at a ball, gave Chambers 
 a speaking sketch of his demeanour. " His manner 
 was not prepossessing — scarcely, she thinks, manly or 
 natural. It seemed as if he affected a rusticity or land- 
 ertness, so that when he said the music was ' bonnie, 
 
76 
 
 SOME ASPECTS OF BURNS 
 
 bonnie,' it was like the expression of a child." These 
 would be company manners ; and doubtless on a slight 
 degree of intimacy the affectation would grow less. 
 And his talk to women had always " a turn either to 
 the pathetic or humorous, which engaged the attention 
 particularly." 
 
 The Edinburgh magnates (to conclude this episode 
 at once) behaved well to Burns from first to last. 
 Were heaven-born genius to revisit us in similar guise, 
 I am not venturing too far when I say that he need 
 expect neither so warm a welcome nor such solid help. 
 Although Burns was only a peasant, and one of no 
 very elegant reputation as to morals, he was made 
 welcome to their homes. They gave him a great deal 
 of good advice, helped him to some five hundred 
 pounds of ready money, and got him, as soon as he 
 asked it, a place in the Excise. Burns, on his part, 
 bore the elevation with perfect dignity ; and with per- 
 fect dignity returned, when the time had come, into 
 a country privacy of life. His powerful sense never 
 deserted him, and from the first he recognised that his 
 Edinburgh popularity was but an ovation and the 
 affair of a day. He wrote a few letters in a high-flown, 
 bombastic vein of gratitude ; but in practice he suffered 
 no man to intrude upon his self-respect. On the other 
 hand, he never turned his back, even for a moment, on 
 
SOME ASPECTS OF BURNS 
 
 77 
 
 his old associates ; and he was always ready to sacrifice 
 an acquaintance to a friend, although the acquaintance 
 were a duke. He would be a bold man who should 
 promise similar conduct in equally exacting circum- 
 stances. It was, in short, an admirable appearance on 
 the stage of life — socially successful, intimately self- 
 respecting, and like a gentleman from first to last. 
 
 In the present study, this must only be taken by the 
 way, while we return to Burns's love affairs. Even on 
 the road to Edinburgh he had seized upon the oppor- 
 tunity of a flirtation, and had carried the "battering" 
 so far that when he next moved from town, it was to 
 steal two days with this anonymous fair one. The 
 exact importance to Burns of this affair may be gath- 
 ered from the song in which he commemorated its 
 occurrence. "I love the dear lassie," he sings, "be- 
 cause she loves me"; or, in the tongue of prose: 
 " Finding an opportunity, I did not hesitate to profit 
 by it ; and even now, if it returned, I should not hesi- 
 tate to profit by it again." A love thus founded has 
 no interest for mortal man. Meantime, early in the 
 winter, and only once, we find him regretting Jean in 
 his correspondence. " Because " — such is his reason 
 — "because he does not think he will ever meet so 
 delicious an armful again;" and then, after a brief 
 excursion into verse, he goes straight on to describe 
 
78 
 
 SOME ASPECTS OF BURNS 
 
 a new episode in the voyage of discovery with the 
 daughter of a Lothian farmer for a heroine. I must 
 ask the reader to follow all these references to his 
 future wife ; they are essential to the comprehension 
 of Burns's character and fate. In June, we find him 
 back at Mauchline, a famous man. There, the Armour 
 family greeted him with a " mean, servile compliance," 
 which increased his former disgust. Jean was not less 
 compliant; a second time the poor girl submitted to 
 the fascination of the man whom she did not love, and 
 whom she had so cruelly insulted little more than a 
 year ago ; and, though Burns took advantage of her 
 weakness, it was in the ugliest and most cynical spirit, 
 and with a heart absolutely indifferent. Judge of this 
 by a letter written some twenty days after his return — 
 a letter to my mind among the most degrading in the 
 whole collection — a letter which seems to have been 
 inspired by a boastful, libertine bagman. " I am 
 afraid," it goes, "I have almost ruined one source, 
 the principal one, indeed, of my former happiness — the 
 eternal propensity I always had to fall in love. My 
 heart no more glows with feverish rapture ; I have no 
 paradisaical evening interviews." Even the process 
 of "battering" has failed him, you perceive. Still he 
 had some one in his eye — a lady, if you please, with 
 a fine figure and elegant manners, and who had "seen 
 
SOME ASPECTS OF BURNS 
 
 79 
 
 the politest quarters in Europe." " I frequently visited 
 her," he writes, "and after passing regularly the inter- 
 mediate degrees between the distant formal bow and 
 the familiar grasp round the waist, I ventured, in my 
 careless way, to talk of friendship in rather ambiguous 
 
 terms ; and after her return to , I wrote her in 
 
 the same terms. Miss, construing my remarks further 
 than even I intended, flew off in a tangent of female 
 dignity and reserve, like a mountain lark in an April 
 morning; and wrote me an answer which measured 
 out very completely what an immense way I had to 
 travel before I could reach the climate of her favours. 
 But I am an old hawk at the sport, and wrote her such 
 a cool, deliberate, prudent reply, as brought my bird 
 from her aerial towerings, pop, down to my foot, like 
 Corporal Trim's hat." I avow a carnal longing, after 
 this transcription, to buffet the Old Hawk about the 
 ears. There is little question that to this lady he must 
 have repeated his addresses, and that he was by her 
 (Miss Chalmers) eventually, though not at all unkindly, 
 rejected. One more detail to characterise the period. 
 Six months after the date of this letter, Burns, back 
 in Edinburgh, is served with a writ in meditatione 
 fugCB, on behalf of some Edinburgh fair one, probably 
 of humble rank, who declared an intention of adding 
 to his family. 
 
SOME ASPECTS OF BURNS 
 
 About the beginning of December (1787), a new 
 period opens in the story of the poet's random affec- 
 tions. He met at a tea party one Mrs. Agnes 
 M'Lehose, a married woman of about his own age, 
 who, with her two children, had been deserted by an 
 unworthy husband. She had wit, could use her pen, 
 and had read Werther with attention. Sociable, and 
 even somewhat frisky, there was a good, sound, human 
 kernel in the woman ; a warmth of love, strong dog- 
 matic religious feeling, and a considerable, but not 
 authoritative, sense of the proprieties. Of what biog- 
 raphers refer to daintily as " her somewhat voluptuous 
 style of beauty," judging from the silhouette in Mr. 
 Scott Douglas's invaluable edition, the reader will be 
 fastidious if he dots not approve. Take her for all in 
 all. I believe she was the best woman Burns encount- 
 ered. The pair took a fancy for each other on the 
 spot; Mrs. M'Lehose, in her turn, invited him to tea; 
 but the poet, in his character of the Old Hawk, pre 
 f erred a tete-a-tete, excused himself at the last moment, 
 and offered a visit instead. An accident confined him 
 to his room for nearly a month, and this led to the 
 famous Clarinda and Sylvander correspondence. It 
 was begun in simple sport; they are already at their 
 fifth or sixth exchange, when Clarinda writes : " It is 
 really curious so much /un passing between two per- 
 
SOME ASPECTS OF BURNS 
 
 sons who saw each other only once" ; but it is hardly 
 safe for a man and woman in the flower of their years 
 to write almost daily, and sometimes in terms too 
 ambiguous, sometimes in terms too plain, and gener- 
 ally in terms too warm, for mere acquaintance. The 
 exercise partakes a little of the nature of battering, 
 and danger may be apprehended when next they meet. 
 It is difficult to give any account of this remarkable 
 correspondence; it is too far away from us, and per- 
 haps, not yet far enough, in point of time and manner ; 
 the imagination is baffled by these stilted literary 
 utterances, warming, in bravura passages, into down- 
 right truculent nonsense. Clarinda has one famous 
 sentence in which she bids Sylvander connect the 
 thought of his mistress with the changing phases of 
 the year; it was enthusiastically admired by the swain, 
 but on the modern mind produces mild amazement 
 and alarm. " Oh, Clarinda," writes Burns, " shall we 
 not meet in a state — some yet unknown state — of 
 being, where the lavish hand of Plenty shall minister 
 to the highest wish of Benovolence, and where the 
 chill north wind of Prudence shall never blow over 
 the flowery field of Enjoyment?" The design may 
 be that of an Old Hawk, but the style is more sug- 
 gestive of a Bird of Paradise. It is sometimes hard to 
 fancy they are not gravely making fun of each other 
 
82 
 
 SOME ASPECTS OF BURNS 
 
 as they write. Religion, poetry, love, and charming 
 sensibility, are the current topics. "I am delighted, 
 charming Clarinda, with your honest enthusiasm for 
 religion," writes Burns; and the pair entertained a 
 fiction that this was their " favourite subject." " This 
 is Sunday," writes the lady, "and not a word on our 
 favourite subject. O fy! 'divine Clarinda!'" I sus- 
 pect, although quite unconsciously on the part of the 
 lady, who was bent on his redemption, they but used 
 the favourite subject as a stalking-horse. In the 
 meantime, the sportive acquaintance was ripening 
 steadily into a genuine passion. Visits took place, 
 and then became frequent. Clarinda's friends were 
 hurt and suspicious ; her clergyman interfered ; she 
 herself had smart attacks of conscience ; but her heart 
 had gone from her control; it was altogether his, and 
 she "counted all things but loss — heaven excepted — 
 that she might win and keep him." Burns himself 
 was transported while in her neighbourhood, but his 
 transports somewhat rapidly declined during an 
 absence. I am tempted to imagine that, womanlike, 
 he took on the colour of his mistress's feeling; that 
 he could not but heat himself at the fire of her 
 unaffected passion; but that, like one who should 
 leave the hearth upon a winter's night, his tempera- 
 ture soon fell when he was out of sight, and in a word, 
 
SOME ASPECTS OF BURNS 
 
 83 
 
 though he could share the symptoms, that he had 
 never shared the disease. At the same time, amid 
 the fustian of the letters there are forcible and true 
 expressions, and the love verses that he wrote upon 
 Clarinda are among the most moving in the language. 
 We are approaching the solution. In mid-winter, 
 Jean, once more in the family way, was turned out of 
 doors by her family ; and Burns had her received 
 and cared for in the house of a friend. For he 
 remained to the last imperfect in his character of 
 Don Juan, and lacked the sinister courage to desert 
 his victim. About the middle of February (17S8), he 
 had to tear himself from his Clarinda and make a 
 journey into the southwest on business. Clarinda 
 gave him two shirts for his little son. They were 
 daily to meet in prayer at an appointed hour. Burns, 
 too late for the post at Glasgow, sent her a letter by 
 parcel that she might not have to wait. Clarinda on 
 her part writes, this time with a beautiful simplicity: 
 " I think the streets look deserted-like since Monday ; 
 and there's a certain insipidity in good kind folks I 
 once enjoyed not a little. Miss Wardrobe supped 
 here on Monday. She once named you, which kept 
 me from falling asleep. I drank your health in a glass 
 of ale — as the lasses do at Hallowe'en — 'in to 
 mysel'.'" Arrived at Mauchline, Burns installed Jean 
 
8 4 
 
 SOME ASPECTS OF BURNS 
 
 Armour in a lodging, and prevailed on Mrs. Armour 
 to promise her help and countenance in the approach- 
 ing confinement. This was kind at least ; but hear 
 his expressions : " I have taken her a room ; I have 
 taken her to my arms ; I have given her a mahogany 
 
 bed; I have given her a guinea I swore her 
 
 privately and solemnly never to attempt any claim on 
 me as a husband, even though anybody should per- 
 suade her she had such a claim — which she has not, 
 neither during my life nor after my death. She did 
 all this like a good girl." And then he took advan- 
 tage of the situation. To Clarinda he wrote: "I this 
 morning called for a certain woman. I am disgusted 
 with her; I cannot endure her;" and he accused her 
 of " tasteless insipidity, vulgarity of soul, and merce- 
 nary fawning." This was already in March ; by the 
 thirteenth of that month he was back in Edinburgh. 
 On the 17th he wrote to Clarinda: "Your hopes, 
 your fears, your cares, my love, are mine ; so don't 
 mind them. I will take you in my hand through the 
 dreary wilds of this world, and scare away the raven- 
 ing bird or beast that would annoy you." Again, on 
 the 2 1st: "Will you open, with satisfaction and 
 delight, a letter from a man who loves you, who has 
 loved you, and who will love you, to death, through 
 death, and for ever. . . . How rich am I to have 
 
SOME ASPECTS OF BURNS 
 
 85 
 
 such a treasure as you! . . . 'The Lord God know- 
 eth,' and, perhaps, 'Israel he shall know,' my love 
 and your merit. Adieu, Clarinda! I am going to 
 remember you in my prayers." By the 7th of April, 
 seventeen days later, he had already decided to make 
 Jean Armour publicly his wife. 
 
 A more astonishing stage-trick is not to be found. 
 And yet his conduct is seen, upon a nearer examina- 
 tion, to be grounded both in reason and in kindness. 
 He was now about to embark on a solid worldly 
 career ; he had taken a farm ; the affair with Clarinda, 
 however gratifying to his heart, was too contingent 
 to offer any great consolation to a man like Burns, to 
 whom marriage must have seemed the very dawn of 
 hope and self-respect. This is to regard the question 
 from its lowest aspect; but there is no doubt that he 
 entered on this new period of his life with a sincere 
 determination to do right. He had just helped his 
 brother with a loan of a hundred and eighty pounds; 
 should he do nothing for the poor girl whom he had 
 ruined ? It was true he could not do as he did without 
 brutally wounding Clarinda; that was the punishment 
 of his bygone fault ; he was, as he truly says, " damned 
 with a choice only of different species of error and 
 misconduct." To be professional Don Juan, to accept 
 the provocation of any lively lass upon the village 
 
86 
 
 SOME ASPECTS OF BURNS 
 
 green, may thus lead a man through a series of detest- 
 able words and actions, and land him at last in an 
 undesired and most unsuitable union for life. If he 
 had been strong enough to refrain or bad enough to 
 persevere in evil ; if he had only not been Don Juan 
 at all, or been Don Juan altogether, there had been 
 some possible road for him throughout this trouble- 
 some world ; but a man, alas ! who is equally at the 
 call of his worse and better instincts, stands among 
 changing events without foundation or resource. ' 
 
 DOWNWARD COURSE 
 
 It may be questionable whether any marriage could 
 have tamed Burns ; but it is at least certain that there 
 was no hope for him in the marriage he contracted. 
 He did right, but then he had done wrong before; it 
 was, as I said, one of those relations in life which it 
 seems equally wrong to break or to perpetuate. He 
 neither loved nor respected his wife. "God knows," 
 he writes, "my choice was as random as blind man's 
 buff." He consoles himself by the thought that he 
 has acted kindly to her ; that she " has the most sacred 
 enthusiasm of attachment to him;" that she has a 
 good figure; that she has a " wood-note wild," "her 
 
 i For the love affairs see, in particular, Mr. Scott Douglas's 
 edition under the different dates. 
 
SOME ASPECTS OF BURNS 
 
 87 
 
 voice rising with ease to B natural," no less. The 
 effect on the reader is one of un mingled pity for both 
 parties concerned. This was not the wife who (in his 
 own words) could " enter into his favourite studies or 
 relish his favourite authors;" this was not even a 
 wife, after the affair of the marriage lines, in whom a 
 husband could joy to put his trust. Let her manage 
 a farm with sense, let her voice rise to B natural all day 
 long, she would still be a peasant to her lettered lord, 
 and an object of pity rather than of equal affection. 
 She could now be faithful, she could now be forgiv- 
 ing, she could now be generous even to a pathetic 
 and touching degree ; but coming from one who was 
 unloved, and who had scarce shown herself worthy 
 of the sentiment, these were all virtues thrown away, 
 which could neither change her husband's heart nor 
 affect the inherent destiny of their relation. From 
 the outset, it was a marriage that had no root in 
 nature ; and we find him, ere long, lyrically regretting 
 Highland Mary, renewing correspondence with Clarinda 
 in the warmest language, on doubtful terms with Mrs. 
 Riddel, and on terms unfortunately beyond any ques- 
 tion with Anne Park. 
 
 Alas ! this was not the only ill circumstance in his 
 future. He had been idle for some eighteen menths, 
 superintending his new edition, hanging on to settle 
 
SOME ASPECTS OF BURNS 
 
 with the publisher, travelling in the Highlands with 
 Willie Nichol, or philandering with Mrs. M'Lehose ; 
 and in this period the radical part of the man had 
 suffered irremediable hurt. He had lost his habits of 
 industry, and formed the habit of pleasure. Apologet- 
 ical biographers assure us of the contrary ; but from 
 the first, he saw and recognised the danger for himself ; 
 his mind, he writes, is " enervated to an alarming 
 degree'' by idleness and dissipation; and again, "my 
 mind has been vitiated with idleness." It never fairly 
 recovered. To business he could bring the required 
 diligence and attention without difficulty; but he was 
 thenceforward incapable, except in rare instances, of 
 that superior effort of concentration which is required 
 for serious literary work. He may be said, indeed, to 
 have worked no more, and only amused himself with 
 letters. The man who had written a volume of master- 
 pieces in six months, during the remainder of his life 
 rarely found courage for any more sustained effort 
 than a song. And the nature of the songs is itself 
 characteristic of these idle later years ; for they are 
 often as polished and elaborate as his earlier works 
 were frank, and headlong, and colloquial ; and this 
 sort of verbal elaboration in short flights is, for a man 
 of literary turn, simply the most agreeable of pastimes. 
 The change in manner coincides exactly with the 
 
SOME ASPECTS OF BURNS 
 
 89 
 
 Edinburgh visit. In 17S6 he had written the Address 
 to a Louse, which may be taken as an extreme instance 
 of the first manner; and already, in 1787, we come 
 upon the rosebud pieces to Miss Cruikshank, which 
 are extreme examples of the second. The change was, 
 therefore, the direct and very natural consequence of 
 his great change in life; but it is not the less typical 
 of his loss of moral courage that he should have given 
 up all larger ventures, nor the less melancholy that a 
 man who first attacked literature with a hand that 
 seemed capable of moving mountains, should have 
 spent his later years in whittling cherry-stones. 
 
 Meanwhile, the farm did not prosper ; he had to join 
 to it the salary of an exciseman ; at last he had to give 
 it up, and rely altogether on the latter resource. He 
 was an active officer; and, though he sometimes 
 tempered severity with mercy, we have local testi- 
 mony oddly representing the public feeling of the 
 period, that, while "in everything else he was a per- 
 fect gentleman, when they met with anything seizable 
 he was no better than any other gauger." 
 
 There is but one manifestation of the man in these 
 last years which need delay us : and that was the sudden 
 interest in politics which arose from his sympathy with 
 the great French Revolution. His only political feel- 
 ing had been hitherto a sentimental Jacobitism, not 
 
9° 
 
 SOME ASPECTS OF BURNS 
 
 more or less respectable than that of Scott, Aytoun, 
 and the rest of what George Borrow has nicknamed 
 the "Charlie over the water" Scotchmen. It was a 
 sentiment almost entirely literary and picturesque in 
 its origin, built on ballads and the adventures of the 
 Young Chevalier; and in Burns it is the more excusa- 
 ble, because he lay out of the way of active politics in 
 his youth. With the great French Revolution, some- 
 thing living, practical, and feasible appeared to him 
 for the first time in this realm of human action. The 
 young ploughman who had desired so earnestly to 
 rise, now reached out his sympathies to a whole nation 
 animated with the same desire. Already in 1788 we 
 find the old Jacobitism hand in hand with the new 
 popular doctrine, when, in a letter of indignation 
 against the zeal of a Whig clergyman, he writes : 
 "I daresay the American Congress in 1776 will be 
 allowed to be as able and as enlightened as the Eng- 
 lish Convention was in 1688; and that their posterity 
 will celebrate the centenary of their deliverance from 
 us, as duly and sincerely as we do ours from the 
 oppressive measures of the wrong-headed House of 
 Stuart." As time wore on, his sentiments grew more 
 pronounced and even violent ; but there was a basis 
 of sense and generous feeling to his hottest excess. 
 What he asked was a fair chance for the individual in 
 
SOME ASPECTS OF BURNS 
 
 9 1 
 
 life ; an open road to success and distinction for all 
 classes of men. It was in the same spirit that he had 
 helped to found a public library in the parish where 
 his farm was situated, and that he sang his fervent 
 snatches against tyranny and tyrants. Witness, were 
 it alone, this verse: — 
 
 " Here 's freedom to him that wad read, 
 
 Here 's freedom to him that wad write ; 
 
 There 's nane ever feared that the truth should be heard 
 
 But them wham the truth wad indite." 
 
 Yet his enthusiasm for the cause was scarce guided 
 by wisdom. Many stories are preserved of the bitter 
 and unwise words he used in country coteries; how he 
 proposed Washington's health as an amendment to 
 Pitt's, gave as a toast " the last verse of the last 
 chapter of Kings," and celebrated Dumouriez in a 
 doggrel impromptu full of ridicule and hate. Now 
 his sympathies would inspire him with Scots, wha hae ; 
 now involve him in a drunken broil with a loyal officer, 
 and consequent apologies and explanations, hard to 
 offer for a man of Burns's stomach. Nor was this the 
 front of his offending. On February 27, 1792, he took 
 part in the capture of an armed smuggler, bought at 
 the subsequent sale four carronades, and despatched 
 them with a letter to the French Assembly. Letter 
 
9 2 
 
 SOME ASPECTS OF BURNS 
 
 and guns were stopped at Dover by the English 
 officials ; there was trouble for Burns with his superi- 
 ors ; he was reminded firmly, however delicately, that, 
 as a paid official, it was his duty to obey and to be 
 silent; and all the blood of this poor, proud, and 
 falling man must have rushed to his head at the 
 humiliation. His letter to Mr. Erskine, subsequently 
 Earl of Mar, testifies, in its turgid, turbulent phrases, 
 to a perfect passion of alarmed self-respect and vanity. 
 He had been muzzled, and muzzled, when all was said, 
 by his paltry salary as an exciseman ; alas ! had he not 
 a family to keep ? Already, he wrote, he looked for- 
 ward to some such judgment from a hackney scribbler 
 as this: "Burns, notwithstanding the fanfaronnade 
 of independence to be found in his works, and after 
 having been held forth to view and to public estima- 
 tion as a man of some genius, yet, quite destitute 
 of resources within himself to support his borrowed 
 dignity, he dwindled into a paltry exciseman, and 
 shrunk out the rest of his insignificant existence in 
 the meanest of pursuits, and among the vilest of man- 
 kind." And then on he goes, in a style of rhodomon- 
 tade, but filled with living indignation, to declare his 
 right to a political opinion, and his willingness to shed 
 his blood for the political birthright of his sons. Poor, 
 perturbed spirit ! he was indeed exercised in vain ; those 
 
SOME ASPECTS OF BURNS 
 
 93 
 
 who share and those who differ from his sentiments 
 about the Revolution, alike understand and sympathise 
 with him in this painful strait; for poetry and human 
 manhood are lasting like the race, and politics, which 
 are but a wrongful striving after right, pass and change 
 from year to year and age to age. The Twa Dogs has 
 already outlasted the constitution of Sieyes and the 
 policy of the Whigs ; and Burns is better known 
 among English-speaking races than either Pitt or Fox. 
 Meanwhile, whether as a man, a husband, or a poet, 
 his steps led downward. He knew, knew bitterly, that 
 the best was out of him ; he refused to make another 
 volume, for he felt that it would be a disappointment ; 
 he grew petulantly alive to criticism, unless he was 
 sure it reached him from a friend. For his songs, he 
 would take nothing; they were all that he could do; 
 the proposed Scotch play, the proposed series of 
 Scotch tales in verse, all had gone to water; and in a 
 fling of pain and disappointment, which is surely noble 
 with the nobility of a viking, he would rather stoop 
 to borrow than to accept money for these last and 
 inadequate efforts of his muse. And this desperate 
 abnegation rises at times near to the height of mad- 
 ness; as when he pretended that he had not written, 
 but only found and published, his immortal A it Id Lang 
 Syne. In the same spirit he became more scrupulous 
 
94 
 
 SOME ASPECTS OF BURNS 
 
 as an artist ; he was doing so little, he would fain do 
 that little well; and about two months before his 
 death, he asked Thomson to send back all his manu- 
 scripts for revisal, saying that he would rather write 
 five songs to his taste than twice that number other- 
 wise. The battle of his life was lost ; in forlorn efforts 
 to do well, in desperate submissions to evil, the last 
 years flew by. His temper is dark and explosive, 
 launching epigrams, quarrelling with his friends, jeal- 
 ous of young puppy officers. He tries to be a good 
 father; he boasts himself a libertine. Sick, sad, and 
 jaded, he can refuse no occasion of temporary pleasure, 
 no opportunity to shine ; and he who had once refused 
 the invitations of lords and ladies is now whistled to the 
 inn by any curious stranger. His death (July 21, 1796), 
 in his thirty -seventh year, was indeed a kindly dispen- 
 sation. It is the fashion to say he died of drink; 
 many a man has drunk more and yet lived with a 
 reputation, and reached a good age. That drink and 
 debauchery helped to destroy his constitution, and 
 were the means of his unconscious suicide, is doubtless 
 true; but he had failed in life, had lost his power of 
 work, and was already married to the poor, unworthy, 
 patient Jean, before he had shown his inclination to 
 convivial nights, or at least before that inclination 
 had become dangerous either to his health or his 
 
SOME ASPECTS OF BURNS 
 
 95 
 
 self-respect. He had trifled with life, and must pay the 
 penalty. He had chosen to be Don Juan, he had 
 grasped at temporary pleasures, and substantial happi- 
 ness and solid industry had passed him by. He died 
 of being Robert Burns, and there is no levity in such 
 a statement of the case ; for shall we not, one and all> 
 deserve a similar epitaph ? 
 
 The somewhat cruel necessity which has lain upon 
 me throughout this paper only to touch upon those 
 points in the life of Burns where correction or amplifi- 
 cation seemed desirable, leaves me little opportunity 
 to speak of the works which have made his name so 
 famous. Yet, even here, a few observations seem 
 necessary. 
 
 At the time when the poet made his appearance and 
 great first success, his work was remarkable in two 
 ways. For, first, in an age when poetry had become 
 abstract and conventional, instead of continuing to 
 deal with shepherds, thunderstorms, and personifica- 
 tions, he dealt with the actual circumstances of his 
 life, however matter-of-fact and sordid these might be. 
 And, second, in a time when English versification was 
 particularly stiff, lame, and feeble, and words were 
 used with ultra-academical timidity, he wrote verses 
 
9 6 
 
 SOME ASPECTS OF BURNS 
 
 that were easy, racy, graphic, and forcible, and used 
 language with absolute tact and courage as it seemed 
 most fit to give a clear impression. If you take even 
 those English authors whom we know Burns to have 
 most admired and studied, you will see at once that he 
 owed them nothing but a warning. Take Shenstone, 
 for instance, and watch that elegant author as he tries 
 to grapple with the facts of life. He has a description, 
 I remember, of a gentleman engaged in sliding or walk- 
 ing on thin ice, which is a little miracle of incompetence. 
 You see my memory fails me, and I positively cannot 
 recollect whether his hero was sliding or walking ; as 
 though a writer should describe a skirmish, and the 
 reader, at the end, be still uncertain whether it were a 
 charge of cavalry or a slow and stubborn advance of 
 foot. There could be no such ambiguity in Burns ; 
 his work is at the opposite pole from such indefinite 
 and stammering performances; and a whole lifetime 
 passed in the study of Shenstone would only lead a 
 man fjurther and further from writing the Address to a 
 Louse. Yet Burns, like most great artists, proceeded 
 from a school and continued a tradition ; only the 
 school and tradition were Scotch, and not English. 
 While the English language was becoming daily more 
 pedantic and inflexible, and English letters more colour- 
 less and slack, there was another dialect in the sister 
 
SOME ASPECTS OF BURNS 
 
 97 
 
 country, and a different school of poetry tracing its 
 descent, through King James I, from Chaucer. The 
 dialect alone accounts for much ; for it was then 
 written colloquially, which kept it fresh and supple ; 
 and, although not shaped for heroic flights, it was a 
 direct and vivid medium for all that had to do with 
 social life. Hence, whenever Scotch poets left their 
 laborious imitations of bad English verses, and fell 
 back on their own dialect, their style would kindle, 
 and they would write of their convivial and somewhat 
 gross existences with pith and point. In Ramsay, and 
 far more in the poor lad Fergusson, there was mettle, 
 humour, literary courage, and a power of saying what 
 they wished to say definitely and brightly, which in 
 the latter case should have justified great anticipa- 
 tions. Had Burns died at the same age as Fergusson, 
 he would have left us literally nothing worth remark. 
 To Ramsay and to Fergusson, then, he was indebted 
 in a very uncommon degree, not only following their 
 tradition and using their measures, but directly and 
 avowedly imitating their pieces. The same tendency 
 to borrow a hint, to work on some one else's founda- 
 tion, is notable in Burns from first to last, in the period 
 of song-writing as well as in that of the early poems ; 
 and strikes one oddly in a man of such deep origin- 
 ality, who left so strong a print on all he touched, and 
 
9 8 
 
 SOME ASPECTS OF BURNS 
 
 whose work is so greatly distinguished by that charac- 
 ter of "inevitability" which Wordsworth denied to 
 Goethe. 
 
 When we remember Burns's obligations to his pred- 
 ecessors, we must never forget his immense advances 
 on them. They had already " discovered " nature ; 
 but Burns discovered poetry — a higher and more 
 intense way of thinking of the things that go to make 
 up nature, a higher and more ideal key of words in 
 which to speak of them. Ramsay and Fergusson 
 excelled at making a popular — or shall we say vulgar 
 — sort of society verses, comical and prosaic, written, 
 you would say, in taverns while a supper party waited 
 for its laureate's word ; but on the appearance of 
 Burns, this coarse and laughing literature was touched 
 to finer issues, and learned gravity of thought and 
 natural pathos. 
 
 What he had gained from his predecessors was a 
 direct, speaking style, and to walk on his own feet 
 instead of on academical stilts. There was never a 
 man of letters with more absolute command of his 
 means; and we may say of him, without excess, that 
 his style was his slave. Hence that energy of epithet, 
 so concise and telling, that a foreigner is tempted to 
 explain it by some special richness or aptitude in the 
 dialect he wrote. Hence that Homeric justice and 
 
SOME ASPECTS OF BURNS 
 
 99 
 
 completeness of description which gives us the very 
 physiognomy of nature, in body and detail, as nature 
 is. Hence, too, the unbroken literary quality of his 
 best pieces, which keeps him from any slip into the 
 weariful trade of word-painting, and presents every- 
 thing, as everything should be presented by the art of 
 words, in a clear, continuous medium of thought. 
 Principal Shairp, for instance, gives us a paraphrase 
 of one tough verse of the original ; and for those who 
 know the Greek poets only by paraphrase, this has 
 the very quality they are accustomed to look for and 
 admire in Greek. The contemporaries of Burns were 
 surprised that he should visit so many celebrated 
 mountains and waterfalls, and not seize the opportun- 
 ity to make a poem. Indeed, it is not for those who 
 have a true command of the art of words, but for 
 peddling, professional amateurs, that these pointed 
 occasions are most useful and inspiring. As those 
 who speak French imperfectly are glad to dwell on 
 any topic they may have talked upon or heard others 
 talk upon before, because they know appropriate 
 words for it in French, so the dabbler in verse rejoices 
 to behold a waterfall, because he has learned the senti- 
 ment and knows appropriate words for it in poetry. 
 But the dialect of Burns was fitted to deal with any 
 subject; and whether it was a stormy night, a 
 
SOME ASPECTS OF BURNS 
 
 shepherd's collie, a sheep struggling in the snow, the 
 conduct of cowardly soldiers in the field, the gait and 
 cogitations of a drunken man, or only a village cock- 
 crow in the morning, he could find language to give it 
 freshness, body, and relief. He was always ready to 
 borrow the hint of a design, as though he had a diffi- 
 culty in commencing — a difficulty, let us say, in 
 choosing a subject out of a world which seemed all 
 equally living and significant to him; but once he had 
 the subject chosen, he could cope with nature single- 
 handed, and make every stroke a triumph. Again, 
 his absolute mastery in his art enabled him to express 
 each and all of his different humours, and to pass 
 smoothly and congruously from one to another. 
 Many men invent a dialect for only one side of their 
 nature — perhaps their pathos or their humour, or 
 delicacy of their senses — and, for lack of a medium, 
 leave all the others unexpressed. You meet such an 
 one, and find him in conversation full of thought, 
 feeling, and experience, which he has lacked the art 
 to employ in his writings. But Burns was not thus 
 hampered in the practice of the literary art ; he could 
 throw the whole weight of his nature into his work, 
 and impregnate it from end to end. If Doctor John- 
 son, that stilted and accomplished stylist, had lacked 
 the sacred Boswell, what should we have known of 
 
SOME ASPECTS OF BURNS 
 
 him ? and how should we have delighted in his 
 acquaintance as we do ? Those who spoke with Bums 
 tell us how much we have lost who did not. But I 
 think they exaggerate their privilege : I think we have 
 the whole Burns in our possession set forth in his 
 consummate verses. 
 
 It was by his style, and not by his matter, that he 
 affected Wordsworth and the world. There is, indeed, 
 only one merit worth considering in a man of letters — 
 that he should write well ; and only one damning fault 
 — that he should write ill. We are little the better 
 for the reflections of the sailor's parrot in the story. 
 And so, if Burns helped to change the course of liter- 
 ary history, it was by his frank, direct, and masterly 
 utterance, and not by his homely choice of subjects. 
 That was imposed upon him, not chosen upon a 
 principle. He wrote from his own experience, because 
 it was his nature so to do, and the tradition of the 
 school from which he proceeded was fortunately not 
 opposed to homely subjects. But to these homely 
 subjects he communicated the rich commentary of his 
 nature; they were all steeped in Burns; and they 
 interest us not in themselves, but because they have 
 been passed through the spirit of so genuine and 
 vigorous a man. Such is the stamp of living literature ; 
 and there was never any more alive than that of Burns. 
 
SOME ASPECTS OF BURNS 
 
 What a gust of sympathy there is in him sometimes 
 flowing out in byways hitherto unused, upon mice, and 
 flowers, and the devil himself; sometimes speaking 
 plainly between human hearts; sometimes ringing out 
 in exultation like a peal of bells ! When we compare 
 the Farmer's Sahrfation to His Auld Mare Maggie, 
 with the clever and inhumane production of half a 
 century earlier, The Auld Alan's Mare y s dead, we see 
 in a nutshell the spirit of the change introduced by 
 Burns. And as to its manner, who that has read it 
 can forget how the collie, Luath, in the Twa Dogs, 
 describes and enters into the merry-making in the 
 cottage ? 
 
 "The luntin' pipe an' sneeshin' mill 
 Are handed round wi' richt guid will ; 
 The canty auld folks crackin' crouse, 
 The young anes rantin' through the house — 
 My heart has been sae fain to see them 
 That I for joy hae barkit wi' them." 
 
 It was this ardent power of sympathy that was fatal 
 to so many women, and, through Jean Armour, to 
 himself at last. His humour comes from him in a 
 stream so deep and easy that I will venture to call him 
 the best of humorous poets. He turns about in the 
 midst to utter a noble sentiment or a trenchant 
 remark on human life, and the style changes and rises 
 
SOME ASPECTS OF BURNS 
 
 103 
 
 to the occasion. I think it is Principal Shairp who 
 says, happily, that Burns would have been no Scotch- 
 man if he had not loved to moralise ; neither, may we 
 add, would he have been his father's son ; but (what 
 is worthy of note) his moralisings are to a large extent 
 the moral of his own career. He was among the least 
 impersonal of artists. Except in the Jolly Beggars, he 
 shows no gleam of dramatic instinct. Mr. Carlyle has 
 complained that Tarn d 1 Shanter is, from the absence 
 of this quality, only a picturesque and external piece of 
 work ; and I may add that in the Twa Dogs it is pre- 
 cisely in the infringement of dramatic propriety that a 
 great deal of the humour of the speeches depends for 
 its existence and effect. Indeed, Burns was so full of 
 his identity that it breaks forth on every page ; and 
 there is scarce an appropriate remark either in praise or 
 blame of his own conduct, but he has put it himself 
 into verse. Alasl for the tenor of these remarks! 
 They are, indeed, his own pitiful apology for such a 
 marred existence and talents so misused and stunted; 
 and they seem to prove forever how small a part is 
 played by reason in the conduct of man's affairs. 
 Here was one, at least, who with unfailing judgment 
 predicted his own fate ; yet his knowledge could not 
 avail him, and with open eyes he must fulfil his tragic 
 destiny. Ten years before the end he had written his 
 
io4 
 
 SOME ASPECTS OF BURNS 
 
 epitaph ; and neither subsequent events, nor the critical 
 eyes of posterity, have shown us a word in it to alter. 
 And, lastly, has he not put in for himself the last 
 unanswerable plea ? — 
 
 " Then gently scan your brother man, 
 
 Still gentler sister woman ; 
 Though they may gang a kennin wrang, 
 
 To step aside is human : 
 One point must still be greatly dark " 
 
 One? Alas! I fear every man and woman of us is 
 " greatly dark " to all their neighbours, from the day 
 of birth until death removes them, in their greatest 
 virtues as well as in their saddest faults ; and we, who 
 have been trying to read the character of Burns may 
 take home the lesson and be gentle in our thoughts. 
 
 i I have left the introductory sentences on Principal Shairp, 
 partly to explain my own paper, which was merely supplemental to 
 his amiable but imperfect book, partly because that book appears 
 to me truly misleading both as to the character and the genius of 
 Burns. This seems ungracious, but Mr. Shairp has himself to 
 blame ; so good a Wordsworthian was out of character upon that 
 stage. 
 
 This half apology apart, nothing more falls to be said except 
 upon a remark called forth by my study in the columns of a literary 
 Review. The exact terms in which that sheet disposed of Burns I 
 cannot now recall; but they were to this effect — that Burns was 
 a bad man, the impure vehicle of fine verses ; and that this was the 
 
SOME ASPECTS OF BURNS 
 
 io 5 
 
 view to which all criticism tended. Now I knew, for my own part, 
 that it was with the profoundest pity, but with a growing esteem, 
 that I studied the man's desperate efforts to do right ; and the 
 more I reflected, the stranger it appeared to me that any thinking 
 being should feel otherwise. The complete letters shed, indeed, a 
 light on the depths to which Burns had sunk in his character of 
 Don Juan, but they enhance in the same proportion the hopeless 
 nobility of his marrying Jean. That I ought to have stated this more 
 noisily I now see ; but that any one should fail to see it for himself, 
 is to me a thing both incomprehensible and worthy of open scorn. 
 If Burns, on the facts dealt with in this study, is to be called a bad 
 man, I question very much whether either I or the writer in the 
 Review have ever encountered what it would be fair to call a good 
 one. All have some fault. The fault of each grinds down the 
 hearts of those about him, and — let us not blink the truth — hurries 
 both him and them into the grave. And when we find a man per- 
 severing indeed, in his fault, as all of us do, and openly overtaken, 
 as not all of us are, by its consequences, to gloss the matter over, 
 with too polite biographers, is to do the work of the wrecker dis- 
 figuring beacons on a perilous seaboard ; but to call him bad, with 
 a self-righteous chuckle, is to be talking in one's sleep with Heed- 
 less and Too-bold in the arbour. 
 
 Yet it is undeniable that much anger and distress is raised in 
 many quarters by the least attempt to state plainly, what every one 
 well knows, of Burns's profligacy, and of the fatal consequences of 
 his marriage. And for this there are perhaps two subsidiary 
 reasons. For, first, there is, in our drunken land, a certain privi- 
 lege extended to drunkenness. In Scotland, in particular, it is 
 almost respectable, above all when compared with any " irregularity 
 between the sexes." The selfishness of the one, so much more 
 gross in essence, is so much less immediately conspicuous in its 
 
io6 
 
 SOME ASPECTS OF BURNS 
 
 results that our demiurgeous Mrs. Grundy smiles apologetically on 
 its victims. It is often said — I have heard it with these ears — 
 that " drunkenness may lead to vice." Now I did not think it at 
 all proved that Burns was what is called a drunkard ; and I was 
 obliged to dwell very plainly on the irregularity and the too fre- 
 quent vanity and meanness of his relations to women. Hence, in 
 the eyes of many, my study was a step towards the demonstration 
 of Burns's radical badness. 
 
 But second, there is a certain class, professors of that low 
 morality so greatly more distressing than the better sort of vice, to 
 whom you must never represent an act that was virtuous in itself, 
 as attended by any other consequences than a large family and 
 fortune. To hint that Burns's marriage had an evil influence is, 
 with this class, to deny the moral law. Yet such is the fact. It 
 was bravely done; but he had presumed too far on his strength. 
 One after another the lights of his life went out, and he fell from 
 circle to circle to the dishonoured sickbed of the end. And surely 
 for any one that has a thing to call a soul he shines out tenfold 
 more nobly in the failure of that frantic effort to do right, than if he 
 had turned on his heel with Worldly Wiseman, married a congenial 
 spouse, and lived orderly and died reputably an old man. It is his 
 chief title that he refrained from " the wrong that amendeth 
 wrong." But the common, trashy mind of our generation is still 
 aghast, like the Jews of old, at any word of an unsuccessful virtue. 
 Job has been written and read; the tower of Siloam fell nineteen 
 hundred years ago ; yet we have still to desire a little Christianity, 
 or, failing that, a little even of that rude, old, Norse nobility of 
 soul, which saw virtue and vice alike go unrewarded, and yet was 
 not shaken in its faith. 
 
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