CHAPTER II.

CONTENTS. From 17 to 24-Robert and Gilbert Burns work to their Father, as Labourers, at stated Wages-At Rural Work the Poet feared no Competitor-This period not marked by much Mental Improvement-At Dancing-School-Progress in Love and Poetry-At School at Kirkoswald's-Bad Company-At Irvine-Flaxdressing-Becomes there Member of a Batchelors' Club.

"O enviable early days,

When dancing thoughtless pleasure's maze,

To care and guilt unknown!

How ill exchanged for riper times,
To feel the follies or the crimes
Of others or my own!"

As has been already mentioned, William Burnes now quitted Mount Oliphant for Lochlea, in the parish of Tarbolton, where, for some little space, fortune appeared to smile on his industry and frugality. Robert and Gilbert were employed by their father as regular labourers-he allowing them £7 of wages each per annum; from which sum, however, the value of any home-made clothes received by the youths was exactly deducted. Robert Burns's person, inured to daily toil, and continually exposed to every variety of weather, presented, before the usual time, every characteristic of robust and vigorous manhood. He says himself, that he never feared a competitor in any species of rural exertion; and Gilbert Burns, a man of uncommon bodily strength, adds, that neither he, nor any labourer he ever saw at work, was equal to the youthful poet, either in the corn field, or the severer tasks of the thrashing-floor. Gilbert says, that Robert's literary zeal slackened considerably after their removal to Tarbolton. He was separated from his acquaintances of the town of Ayr, and probably missed not only the stimulus of their conversation, but the kindness that had furnished him with his supply, such as it was, of books. But the main source of his change of habits about this period was, it is confessed on all hands, the precocious fervour of one of his own turbulent passions. "In my seventeenth year," says Burns, " to give my manners a brush, I went to a country dancing-school.-My father had an unaccountable antipathy against these meetings; and my going was, what to this moment I repent, in opposition to his wishes. My father was subject to strong passions; from that instance of disobedience in me, he took a sort of dislike to me, which I believe was one cause of the dissipation which marked my succeeding years. I say dissipation, comparatively with the strictness, and sobriety, and regularity of Presbyterian country life; for though the Will-o'-Wisp meteors of thoughtless whim were almost the sole lights of my path, yet early ingrained piety and virtue kept me for several years afterwards within the line of innocence. The great misfortune of my life was to want an aim. I saw my father's situation entailed on me perpetual labour. The only two openings by which I could enter the temple of For

tune, were the gate of nigardly economy, or the path of little chicaning bargain-making. The first is so contracted an aperture, I could never squeeze myself into it; the last I always hated-there was contamination in the very entrance! Thus abandoned of aim or view in life, with a strong appetite for sociability, as well from native hilarity, as from a pride of observation and remark; a constitutional melancholy or hypochondriacism that made me fly solitude; add to these incentives to social life, my reputation for bookish knowledge, a certain wild logical talent, and a strength of thought, something like the rudiments of good sense; and it will not seem surprising that I was generally a welcome guest where I visited, or any great wonder that, always where two or three met together, there was I among them. But far beyond all other impulses of my heart, was un penchant pour l'adorable moitié du genre humain. My heart was completely tinder, and was eternally lighted up by some goddess or other; and as in every other warfare in this world my fortune was various, sometimes I was received with favour, and sometimes I was mortified with a repulse. At the plough, scythe, or reap-hook, I feared no competitor, and thus I set absolute want at defiance; and as I never cared farther for my labours than while I was in actual exercise, I spent the evenings in the way after my own heart. A country lad seldom carries on a love adventure without an assisting confidant. I possessed a curiosity, zeal, and intrepid dexterity, that recommended me as a proper second on these occasions, and I dare say, I felt as much pleasure in being in the secret of half the loves of the parish of Tarbolton, as ever did statesman in knowing the intrigues of half the courts of Europe."

In regard to the same critical period of Burns's life, his excellent brother writes as follows:-" I wonder how Robert could attribute to our father that lasting resentment of his going to a dancing-school against his will, of which he was incapable. I believe the truth was, that about this time he began to see the dangerous impetuosity of my brother's passions, as well as his not being amenable to counsel, which often irritated my father, and which he would naturally think a dancing-school was not likely to correct. But he was proud of Robert's genius, which he bestowed more expense on cultivating than on the rest of the family-and he was equally delighted with his warmth of heart, and conversational powers. He had indeed that dislike of dancing-schools which Robert mentions; but so far overcame it during Robert's first month of attendance, that he permitted the rest of the family that were fit for it, to accompany him during the second month. Robert excelled in dancing, and was for some time distractedly fond of it. And thus the seven years we lived in Tarbolton parish (extending from the seventeenth to the twenty-fourth of my brother's age) were not marked by much literary improvement; but, during this time, the foundation was laid of certain habits in my brother's character, which afterwards became but too prominent, and which malice and envy have taken delight to enlarge on. Though, when young, he was bashful and awkward in his intercourse with women, yet when he approached manhood, his attachment to their society became very strong, and he was constantly the victim of some fair enslaver. The symptoms of his passion were often such as nearly to equal those of the celebrated Sappho. I never indeed knew that he fainted, sunk, and died away; but the agitations of his mind and body exceeded any thing of the kind I ever knew in real life. He had always a particular jealousy of people who were richer than himself, or who had

more consequence in life. His love, therefore, rarely settled on persons of this description. When he selected any one out of the sovereignty of his good pleasure to whom he should pay his particular attention, she was instantly invested with a sufficient stock of charms, out of the plentiful stores of his own imagination; and there was often a great dissimilitude between his fair captivator, as she appeared to others, and as she seemed when invested with the attributes he gave her. One generally reigned paramount in his affections; but as Yorick's affections flowed out toward Madame de L at the remise door, while the eternal vows of Eliza were upon him, so Robert was frequently encountering other attractions, which formed so many under-plots in the drama of his love."

Thus occupied with labour, love, and dancing, the youth "without an aim" found leisure occasionally to clothe the sufficiently various moods of his mind in rhymes. It was as early as seventeen, (he tells us), that he wrote some stanzas which begin beautifully :

"I dream'd I lay where flowers were springing
Gaily in the sunny beam;
Listening to the wild birds singing,

By a fallen crystal stream.

Straight the sky grew black and daring,
Thro' the woods the whirlwinds rave,
Trees with aged arms were warring,
O'er the swelling drumlie wave.

Such was life's deceitful morning," &c.

On comparing these verses with those on "Handsome Nell," the advance achieved by the young bard in the course of two short years, must be regarded with admiration; nor should a minor circumstance be entirely overlooked, that in the piece which we have just been quoting, there occurs but one Scotch word. It was about this time, also, that he wrote a ballad of much less ambitious vein, which, years after, he says, he used to con over with delight, because of the faithfulness with which it recalled to him the circumstances and feelings of his opening manhood.

-"My father was a farmer upon the Carrick Border,
And carefully he brought me up in decency and order.
And bade me act a manly part, tho' I had ne'er a farthing;

For without an honest manly heart, no man was worth regarding.

Then out into the world my course I did determine;
Tho' to be rich was not my wish, yet to be great was charming ;
My talents they were not the worst, nor yet my education;,
Resolved was I at least to try to mend my situation.

No help, nor hope, nor view had I, nor person to befriend me;
So I must toil, and sweat, and broil, and labour to sustain me.
To plough and sow, to reap and mow, my father bred me early;
For one, he said, to labour bred, was a match for fortune fairly.

Thus all obscure, unknown and poor, thro' life I'm doomed to wander ;
Till down my weary bones I lay, in everlasting slumber.

No view, nor care, but shun whate'er might breed me pain or sorrow;
I live to-day, as well's I may, regardless of to-morrow," &c.

These are the only two of his very early productions in which we have nothing expressly about love. The rest were composed to celebrate the charms of those rural beauties who followed each other in the dominion of

Reliques, p. 242.

his fancy-or shared the capricious throne between them; and we may easily believe, that one who possessed, with his other qualifications, such powers of flattering, feared competitors as little in the diversions of his evenings as in the toils of his day.

The rural lover, in those districts, pursues his tender vocation in a style, the especial fascination of which town-bred swains may find it somewhat difficult to comprehend. After the labours of the day are over, nay, very often after he is supposed by the inmates of his own fireside to be in his bed, the happy youth thinks little of walking many long Scotch miles to the residence of his mistress, who, upon the signal of a tap at her window, comes forth to spend a soft hour or two beneath the harvest moon, or, if the weather be severe, (a circumstance which never prevents the Journey from being accomplished), amidst the sheaves of her father's barn. This chappin' out," as they call it, is a custom of which parents commonly wink at, if they do not openly approve, the observance; and the consequences are far, very far, more frequently quite harmless, than persons not familiar with the peculiar manners and feelings of our peasantry may find it easy to believe. Excursions of this class form the theme of almost all the songs which Burns is known to have produced about this period, and such of these juvenile performances as have been preserved, are, without exception, beautiful. They show how powerfully his boyish fancy had been affected by the old rural minstrelsy of his own country, and how easily his native taste caught the secret of its charm. The truth and simplicity of nature breathe in every line--the images are always just, often originally happy-and the growing refinement of his ear and judgment, may be traced in the terser language and more mellow flow of each successive ballad.

The best of the songs written at this time is that beginning,

"It was upon a Lammas night,

When corn rigs are bonnie,

Beneath the moon's unclouded light,

I held awa to Annie.

The time flew by wi' tentless heed,
Till, 'tween the late and early,
Wi' sma' persuasion she agreed
To see me thro' the barley."

We may let the poet carry on his own story. "A circumstance," says he," which made some alteration on my mind and manners, was, that I spent my nineteenth summer on a smuggling coast, a good distance from home, at a noted school (Kirkoswald's) to learn mensuration, surveying, dialling, &c., in which I made a good progress. But I made a greater progress in the knowledge of mankind. The contraband trade was at that time very successful, and it sometimes happened to me to fall in with those who carried it on. Scenes of swaggering riot and roaring dissipation were till this time new to me; but I was no enemy to social life. Here, though I learnt to fill my glass, and to mix without fear in a drunken squabble, yet I went on with a high hand with my geometry, till the sun entered Virgo, a month which is always a carnival in my bosom, when a charming filette, who lived next door to the school, overset my trigonometry, and set me off at a tangent from the sphere of my studies. I, however, struggled on with my sines and co-sines for a few days more; but stepping into the garden one charming noon to take the sun's altitude, there I met my angel, like

"Proserpine, gathering flowers, Herself a fairer flower."

"It was in vain to think of doing any more good at school. The remain. ing week I staid, I did nothing but craze the faculties of my soul about her, or steal out to meet her; and the two last nights of my stay in the country, had sleep been a mortal sin, the image of this modest and innocent girl had kept me guiltless. I returned home very considerably improved. My reading was enlarged with the very important addition of Thomson's and Shenstone's Works; I had seen human nature in a new phasis; and I engaged several of my school-fellows to keep up a literary correspondence with me. This improved me in composition. I had met with a collection of letters by the wits of Queen Anne's reign, and I pored over them mos; devoutly; I kept copies of any of my own letters that pleased me; and comparison between them and the composition of most of my correspon dents flattered my vanity. I carried this whim so far, that though I had not three farthings worth of business in the world, yet almost every pos: brought me as many letters as if I had been a broad plodding son of day, book and ledger. My life flowed on much in the same course till my twenty-third year. Vive l'amour, et vive la bagatelle, were my sole princi ples of action. The addition of two more authors to my library gave me great pleasure; Sterne and Mackenzie-Tristram Shandy and The Man of Feeling-were my bosom favourites. Poesy was still a darling walk for my mind; but it was only indulged in according to the humour of the hour. I had usually half a dozen or more pieces on hand; I took up one or other as it suited the momentary tone of the mind, and dismissed the work as it bordered on fatigue. My passions, once lighted up, raged like so many devils, till they found vent in rhyme; and then the conning over my verses, like a spell, soothed all into quiet."

Of the rhymes of those days, few, when he wrote his letter to Moore, had appeared in print. Winter, a dirge, an admirably versified piece, is of their number; The Death of Poor Mailie, Mailie's Elegy, and John Barleycorn"; and one charming song, inspired by the Nymph of Kirkoswald's, whose at tractions put an end to his trigonometry.

"Now westlin winds, and slaughtering guns,
Bring Autumn's pleasant weather;

The moorcock springs, on whirring wings,
Amang the blooming heather..
-Peggy dear, the evening's clear,
Thick flies the skimming swallow;

The sky is blue, the fields in view,
All fading green and yellow;

Come let us stray our gladsome way," &c.

John Barleycorn is a clever old ballad, very cleverly new-modelled and extended; but the Death and Elegy of Poor Mailie deserve more atten tion. The expiring animal's admonitions touching the education of the "poor toop lamb, her son and heir," and the "yowie, silly thing," her daughter, are from the same peculiar vein of sly homely wit, embedded upon fancy, which he afterwards dug with a bolder hand in the Twa Dogs, and perhaps to its utmost depth, in his Death and Doctor Hornbook. It need scarcely be added, that Poor Mailie was a real personage, though she did not actually die until some time after her last words were written. She had been purchased by Burns in a frolic, and became exceedingly attached to his person.