CHAPTER VI ELLISLAND-1788–1791. Future Plans-Ellisland taken-Promised Commission as Exciseman-Shelters Jean Armour-Recognises her as his Wife-His Reasons for this-Last Appearance before the Kirk-session-Life at Ellisland-Friendship with Mrs. Dunlop Captain Riddell - - Burns and Farming Poetic Aims Johnson's Scots Musical Museum As Lyrist - His English Verse-"Tam o' Shanter," etc. - Untoward Circumstances Becomes Exciseman- Farm a Failure-Poetic Studies-Prepares to leave Ellisland-Farm Sales. T was always with much misgiving Burns contemplated the resumption of his old life. Had he been able to discover a more feasible way of living, he would gladly have ceased to be a farmer. That he was willing even to become exciseman shows how little he was enamoured of his old calling, and how slight was his hope of success in it. 66 Searching auld wives' barrels, Och, hon, the day! That clarty barm should stain my laurels ". so he wrote when some sixteen months afterwards he did become exciseman. The Clarinda hallucination also exercised a disturbing influence, and rendered a decisive choice more difficult. Then he may not unnaturally have hoped, and even expected, that his influential friends would succeed in obtaining for him some kind of pleasant sinecure, which would enable him to cultivate the Muses at his leisure without danger of starvation. That no such attempt was made may be attributed partly to their inadequate appreciation of his genius-highly though they may have esteemed his verse; and partly to the fact that he was of too strong and independent personality to win the unmingled approbation of dispensers of patronage. But a nomination to the excise he might, without unduly straining the generosity of his friends, very well aspire to, although even this, we learn from a letter to Clarinda, was not quite to be had for the asking. "I have," he writes, "almost given up the excise idea. I have been just now to wait on a great person, Miss -'s friend. Why will great people not only deafen us with the din of their equipage, and dazzle us with their fastidious pomp, but they must also be so very dictatorially wise? I have been questioned like a child about my matters, and blamed and schooled for my inscription on the Stirling window. Come, Clarinda!— Come, curse me Jacob; come, defy me Israel.' But having obtained from him some kind of apology or promise, his patrons condescended to grant his humble crave; and since it did not occur to them that, in securing such a nomination for him, they were really conspirators in demeaning, and not rewarding, the greatest British poet of his time, he was fain, whatever his personal reflections may have been, to be content with it. About the middle of February, therefore, he wrote that he had almost resolved to alter all his "plans of future life," and instead of taking a farm to become as soon as possible an exciseman. With the intention of paying a short visit to the west, before returning "to Edinburgh for six weeks' instruction in excise duties," he } set out on the 18th February; but after examining the farm of Ellisland, Dumfriesshire, with the help of an old friend, Tennant of Glenconner, deemed "the most intelligent farmer" of Ayrshire, he was so impressed with that friend's favourable, though misleading, opinion of it, that he wrote to Robert Ainslie that in all probability he would become a farmer should Mr. Miller (of Dalswinton, who was proprietor of Ellisland) be in the same favourable disposition as when he saw him last. So much, indeed, was he taken with Ellisland, and especially with its romantic situation on the Nith, that he |