and the rest of the family desire to enclose their compliments to you, Mrs Burness, and the rest of your family, along with, "Dear Sir, your affectionate cousin, "ROBERT BURNESS." In the second of these letters, the Poet announces the death of his father. It is dated Lochlea, 17th February 1784. "DEAR COUSIN,-I would have returned you my thanks for your kind favour of the 13th Dec. sooner, had it not been that I waited to give you an account of that melancholy event, which, for some time past, we have from day to day expected. On the 13th currt. I lost the best of fathers. Though, to be sure, we have had long warning of the impending stroke, still the feelings of nature claim their part; and I cannot recollect the tender endearments and parental lessons of the best of friends and the ablest of instructors, without feeling what perhaps the calmer dictates of reason would partly condemn. I hope my father's friends in your country will not let their connection in this place die with him. For my part I shall ever with pleasure-with pride, acknowledge my connection with those who were allied by the ties of blood and friendship to a man whose memory I will ever honour and revere. I expect, therefore, my dear Sir, you will not neglect any opportunity of letting me hear from you, which will ever very much oblige, "My dear cousin, yours sincerely, Among other evils from which the excellent William Burness thus escaped, was an affliction that would, in his eyes, have been severe. Our youthful poet had not, as he confesses, come unscathed out of the society of those persons of "liberal opinions" with whom he consorted in Irvine; and he expressly attributes to their lessons, the scrape into which he fell soon after "he put his hand to the plough again." He was compelled, according to the then all but universal custom of rural parishes in Scotland, to do penance in church, before the congregation, in consequence of the birth of an illegitimate child; and whatever may be thought of the propriety of such exhibitions, there can be no difference of opinion as to the culpable levity with which he describes the nature of his offence, and the still more reprehensible bitterness with which, in his Epistle to Ranken, he inveighs against the clergyman, who, in rebuking him, only performed what was then a regular part of the clerical duty, and a part of it that could never have been at all agreeable to the worthy man whom he satirizes under the appellation of "Daddie Auld." The Poet's Welcome to an Illegitimate Child was composed on the same occasion-a piece in which some very manly feelings are expressed, along with others which it can give no one pleasure to contemplate. There is a song in honour of the same occasion, or a similar one about the same period, The rantin' Dog the Daddie o't-which exhibits the poet as glorying, and only glorying, in his shame. * There is much humour in some of the verses; as, "'Twas ae night lately, in my fun, I gaed a roving wi' my gun, An brought a paitrick to the grun', And, as the twilight was begun, Thought nane wad ken," &c. When I consider his tender affection for the surviving members of his own family, and the reverence with which he ever regarded the memory of the father whom he had so recently buried, I cannot believe that Burns has thought fit to record in verse all the feelings which this exposure excited in his bosom. "To wave (in his own language) the quantum of the sin," he who, two years afterwards, wrote the Cottar's Saturday Night, had not, we may be sure, hardened his heart to the thought of bringing additional sorrow and unexpected shame to the fireside of a widowed mother. But his false pride recoiled from letting his jovial associates guess how little he was able to drown the whispers of the still small voice; and the fermenting bitterness of a mind ill at ease within itself, escaped (as may be too often traced in the history of satirists) in the shape of angry sarcasms against others, who, whatever their private errors might be, had at least done him no wrong. It is impossible not to smile at one item of consolation which Burns proposes to himself on this occasion: 66 The mair they talk, I'm kend the better; This is indeed a singular manifestation of "the last infirmity of noble minds." THREE months before the death of William Burnes, Robert and Gilbert took the farm of Mossgiel, * in the neighbouring parish of Mauchline, with the view of providing a shelter for their parents in the storm, which they had seen gradually thickening, and knew must soon burst; and to this place the whole family removed on William's death. "It was stocked by the property and individual savings of the whole family (says Gilbert), and was a joint concern among us. Every member of the family was allowed ordinary wages for the labour he performed on the farm. My brother's allowance and mine was L.7 per annum each. And during the whole time this family concern lasted, as well as during the preceding period at Lochlea, Robert's expenses never, in any one year, exIceeded his slender income. "I entered on this farm," says the poet, † "with a full resolution, Come, go, I will be wise. I read farming books, I calculated crops, I attended markets; and, in short, in spite of the devil, and the world, and the flesh, I believe I should have been *The farm consisted of 119 acres, and the rent was L.90. Letter to Dr Moore. a wise man; but the first year, from unfortunately buying bad seed, the second, from a late harvest, we lost half our crops. This overset all my wisdom, and I returned like the dog to his vomit, and the sow that was washed, to her wallowing in the mire. "At the time that our poet took the resolution of becoming wise, he procured," says Gilbert, "a little book of blank paper, with the purpose expressed on the first page, of making farming memorandums. These farming memorandums are curious enough," Gilbert slyly adds, " and a specimen may gratify the reader. "-Specimens accordingly he gives; as, "O why the deuce should I repine I'm twenty-three, and five foot nine- "O leave novells, ye Mauchline belles, The four years during which Burns resided on this cold and ungrateful farm of Mossgiel, were the most important of his life. It was then that his genius developed its highest energies; on the works produced in those years his fame was first established, and must ever continue mainly to rest : it was then also that his personal character came out in all its brightest lights, and in all but its darkest shadows; and indeed from the commencement of this period, the history of the man may be traced, step by step, in his own immortal writings. |