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I have been questioned like a child about my matters, and blamed and schooled for my inscription on the Stirling window." Thus did his Jacobitism, which was more a sentiment than a serious conviction, tend to damage his interests, as his politics did in later years. For the present it was no serious bar to his design, and by February 17 he writes that he has entered the Excise, "after mature deliberation." It seemed the only course open to him. "I was not likely to get anything to do. I wanted un bût, which is a dangerous, an unhappy situation. I got this without any hanging on or mortifying solicitation; it is immediate bread; and though poor in comparison of the last eighteen months of my existence, 'tis luxury in comparison of all my preceding life."

Leaving Edinburgh on February 18, and travelling by way of Glasgow and Kilmarnock, Burns reached home on the twenty-third. Immediately thereafter, accompanied by his father's friend, John Tennant of Glenconner, he proceeded to Dumfries to inspect Mr. Miller's farms, and was advised to select Ellisland. This unsettled his resolution to stick to the Excise. "I have the two plans of life before me," he writes to Clarinda, "and I wish to adopt the one most likely to procure me independence."

At this point Jean Armour again comes upon the stage of Burns's life. In Edinburgh he had virtually engaged himself to Clarinda; in Mauchline he found his old love about to become a mother for the second time. The romance of the capital fitted in awkwardly with the annals of the parish. During the winter Jean had been turned out of her father's house, and Burns had procured her a shelter with William Muir, the

miller at Tarbolton.

He now lodged her in Mauchline, after a visit to her, his impressions of which are recorded in a letter to Clarinda. "I am disgusted with herI cannot endure her." He found in her only "tasteless insipidity, vulgarity of soul, and mercenary fawning

I have done with her, and she with me." In another letter to Ainslie, there is a strain of burlesque, painfully reminding us of the one to Arnot on the events of March, 1786,-two years before. About March 13 twin girls were born, who only lived a few days.

By this time Burns was again in Edinburgh, where he signed the lease of Ellisland on March 13, obtained an order from the Board of Excise to be instructed in his profession, and settled accounts with Creech. Of that gentleman he conceived some very strong opinions, and had not forgiven him nine months later. "I could, not a tale, but a detail unfold; but what am I that I should speak against the Lord's anointed Bailie of Edinburgh ?" The exact sum which he finally received from his publisher cannot now be ascertained, but apparently it was about £500. Of this he afterwards gave £180 to Gilbert, to enable him to keep on the farm at Mossgiel. "I give myself no airs for this," he wrote to Dr. Moore, "for it was mere selfishness on my part; I was conscious that the wrong scale of the balance was pretty heavily charged, and I thought that throwing a little filial piety and fraternal affection into the scale in my favour might help to smooth matters at the grand reckoning."

After some interviews with Clarinda he again left Edinburgh on March 22, to look forward to settling at Ellisland, and begin the laborious life he had been so little used to of late. “I determine .

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be laid aside for some time: my mind has been vitiated by idleness, and it will take a good deal of effort to habituate it to the routine of business."

He first went home in order to get his Excise instructions carried out before Whitsunday, and now beyond the immediate spell of Clarinda, his affections began to revert to Jean Armour. On April 7 he writes to Miss Chalmers, "I have lately made some sacrifices, for which, were I vivâ voce with you to paint the situation and recount the circumstances, you would applaud me." The first plain intimation of the step he had taken is in a letter to his friend James Smith of April 28. "There is a certain clean-limbed, handsome, bewitching young hussy of your acquaintance, to whom I have lately and privately given a matrimonial title to my corpus." A month later he announces the marriage to Johnson in not the most delicate language, after which he proceeds-" To be serious, I found that I had a long and much-loved fellow-creature's happiness or misery in my hands; and though Pride and seeming Justice were murderous King's Advocates on the one side, yet Humanity, Generosity and Forgiveness were such powerful, such irresistible counsel on the other side, that a Jury of all Endearments, and new attachments, brought in a unanimous verdict of Not Guilty." By this time Jean Armour was avowed to the world as Mrs. Burns, but evidently the poet was in no hurry to communicate the fact to all his friends, and the reasons subsequently alleged by him were perhaps not the primary ones. Over no step in his life have his biographers been more exercised than this. To Clarinda he did not attempt to defend himself for nearly a year, and then his defence is only "all the powerful circumstances that omnipotent necessity was busy laying in

wait for me," which is vague enough. To other correspondents he usually says that he could not trifle with "such a sacred deposit" as another's happiness for life, a phrase which recurs time after time. Legally there can be little doubt that Burns was all the time married to Jean Armour, ever since he gave her the paper in the beginning of 1786.

CHAPTER III.

DUMFRIESSHIRE.

WHEN Burns arrived at Ellisland on June 13, 1788, there was much for him to do. A new

1788-1791.

Ellisland. house was needed, and until this was provided he could not bring his wife to the farm. The uncomfortable surroundings he now found himself in were by no means calculated to encourage him to persevere in the industrious course he had resolved on, and he was in no hopeful mood. He was "a solitary inmate of an old smoky spence, far from every object I love, or by whom I am beloved. ... Extreme sensibility, irritated and prejudiced on the gloomy side by a series of misfortunes and disappointments, at that period of my existence when the soul is laying in her cargo of ideas for the voyage of life, is, I believe, the principal cause of this unhappy frame of mind." his Journal he is even more gloomy; "I am such a coward in life, so tired of the service, that I would almost at any time, with Milton's Adam, gladly lay me in my mother's lap and be at peace." When on the same day he took a solemn farewell of all his "giddy follies" and "varnished vices," his intentions were better than his strength. To "sit and count his sins by chapters" was for him a profitless employment. He was much better occupied when in one of his "wonted rhymin' raptures" his fancy reverted to his

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