LONDON: SIMPKIN, MARSHALL, HAMILTON, KENT & CO., LMD. PRINTED BY ALEXANDER GARDNER, PAISLEY BODLEIAR 15.10 1906 FOREWORD I AM not editorially responsible for this book, and with some of the inferences from facts and Ayrshire gossip which it contains I do not agree. But it is a pleasure to say an appreciative word of the patient industry with which Mr. ROBERT FORD collected from authentic history and from tradition all that is at present known about the group of women to whom he has given the designation of Burns's "heroines," and of the good temper with which he has discussed subjects that have led to controversy almost Marian in its bitterness. Burns, like everybody and everything else in literature, is being specialised. Some years ago a book -an excellent little book it was-was published dealing with the doctors with whose names, fortunately and also unfortunately, his was associated. Burns regarded members of the Faculty as the bloodletters of humanity, and they were little more in his day. Women he regarded, on the other hand, as the blood-royal of humanity. A book, therefore, on his "heroines," though they were not all sweethearts actual or potential, specialises him in his "dearest part." * *Robert Burns and the Medical Profession. A I was in the habit of meeting Mr. FORD at the pleasant excursions and other meetings of the Glasgow Ballad Club, of which he had been elected a member for reasons the validity of which was admitted by everybody, and I had been elected for reasons the validity of which has never been admitted by anybody. Then the fundamental Burnsism of the man came out the kindliness, the sociability, the hopefulness, the toleration, the love of everything human except cant and oppression. He failed to amass wealth; I doubt whether the view that the sole life worth living is that in virtue of which it is resolutely regarded as a donkey race for carrots appealed to him at all. Perhaps he may have occasionally felt what the Minister of (English) Education calls "divine dissatisfaction" with the way in which things are shared in our planet. But he uttered no whines and he laboured no phrases of discontent, but courageously made the most and the happiest of events as they came. The many friends he secured must miss the contagious cheeriness of his outlook, of which they have been deprived by death, as much as the fervid patriotism which he threw into song, story, and recitation. WILLIAM Wallace. |