Jean in Of a' the airts the winds can blaw. In some ten days he was back at Mauchline, but only for a day or two; June 28 is the date of one of the copies of the verses composed in Friars' Carse Hermitage, to which he had received free access from his neighbour, Robert Riddell of Glenriddell. On July 10 he is back again in Ayrshire, where Jean was qualifying for a farmer's wife under the instruction of his mother and sisters. He had by this time convinced himself of his wisdom in marrying her. "I can easily fancy a more agreeable companion for my journey of life; but upon my honour, I have never seen the individual instance." Meanwhile he orders his Family Bible, along with Smollett's works, and jests with his bookseller, not in the most delicate style, on his becoming a paterfamilias. On August 5 he and Jean appeared before the Session, acknowledged their irregular marriage, and their sorrow for that irregularity, and desired that the marriage should be confirmed, Burns paying a guinea for the poor by way of fine.

This constant oscillation between Ellisland and Mauchline, distant forty-six miles from each other, was no doubt bad for Burns, as Currie says, by giving him an unsettled start on his farm. Dumfriesshire had in itself little to interest him. "I am here at the very elbow of existence. The only things that are to be found in this country in any degree of perfection, are stupidity and canting. . . . They have as much idea of a rhinoceros as a poet. I am generally about half my time in Ayrshire with my darling Jean,' and then I, at lucid intervals, throw my horny fist across my becobwebbed lyre, much in the same manner as an old wife throws her hand across the spokes of her spinning

wheel." Certainly the Fête Champêtre and the Epistle to Graham of Fintry have little of the master-hand about them.

The latter poem was accompanied by a letter more directly to the point (September 10, 1788). The farm, he says, would take some time before it would pay the rent. To Gilbert he had given all his surplus capital, and had nothing to fall back upon. He therefore asked to be appointed to the Excise division in which he lived. The post, he thought, would help him poetically as well as materially. "I am thinking of something in the rural way of the drama kind. Originality of character is, I think, the most striking beauty in that species of composition, and my wanderings in the way of my business would be vastly favourable to my picking up original traits of human nature." Later experience did not justify his anticipations, if these were really serious, but to his request he obtained a favourable answer, which reassured him for the time.

It was the first week of December ere Mrs. Burns came to Dumfriesshire, and even then the farm-house at Ellisland was still unfinished. Her first residence was at "The Isle," a romantic spot about a mile down the Nith. The next year (1789) was pretty well advanced when the pair entered on possession of Ellisland, and before this, in the end of February, Burns had been in Edinburgh, and had effected a settlement with Creech, whose dealings finally satisfied him. He did not see Clarinda, who had told Ainslie that she did not wish even to catch sight of him on the street. It was after his return, that on March 9 he wrote to her, offering a defence of his marriage, which is artistic if not ingenuous. Even this brief visit to the capital served

to renew his discontent with his sphere in life, and reawaken his jealousy of the rich. There were times when he tried to think himself happy as a farmer, and a letter to the town-clerk of Dumbarton gives an idyllic picture of his life as such. "I am here in my old way, holding my plough, marking the growth of my corn, or the health of my dairy; and, at times, sauntering by the delightful windings of the Nith, on the margin of which I have built my humble domicile, praying for seasonable weather, or holding an intrigue with the Muses-the only gipsies with whom I have now any intercourse." Yet in the same month he also writes, "For some time my soul has been beclouded with a thickening atmosphere of evil imaginations and gloomy presages.”

Even the "gipsies" aforesaid were not very gracious to him just then, and the compositions of the first half of this year add but little to his work, most of them being in his new English style. Only in July came a flash of the old fire and humour in The Kirk of Scotland's Alarm, written to ridicule the ecclesiastical persecutors of Dr. McGill of Ayr, and the lines on Captain Grose. There are also one or two notable songs, such as John Anderson and Tam Glen, while Willie brewed a peck o' maut was the outcome of a meeting in autumn at Moffat, with Nicol and Allan Masterton. The Whistle, another bacchanalian composition of some spirit if small poetry, celebrates a drinking match in October of this year, at which, however, notwithstanding hard swearing to the contrary, Burns apparently was not present. A few days later, in all likelihood, saw the composition of To Mary in Heaven, of which striking details were given by Mrs. Burns. These have not passed unquestioned, and certainly all the circumstances

do not quite agree, but it would be strange if she had invented the whole story.*

In August Burns had received an intimation from Mr. Graham that the Board of Excise had re

appointment.

Excise solved to appoint him exciseman in his own district. His immediate object in this was to increase the chances of his farm being able to support himself and family. For the work itself he had no liking, but a wife and children were powerful incentives. In the Epistle to Dr. Blacklock, of October 21, amid some weak verses and expressions not of the happiest, there are lines of real feeling, which show his true purpose in taking this step:

"To make a happy fireside clime

To weans and wife,

That's the true pathos and sublime
Of human life."

The sentiments of the poem are echoed in several letters of the period. He was painfully conscious that his friends would think the position something of a descent, and he felt it necessary to apologize. To Lady Glencairn he wrote: "People may talk as they please of the ignominy of the Excise; £50 a-year will support my wife and children, and keep me independent of the world; and I would much rather have it said that my profession borrowed credit from me, than that I borrowed credit from my profession." That he brought at least a good deal of humanity into his duties, is shown by the various anecdotes of his leniency recorded by Chambers.

* A letter to Mrs. Dunlop, of December 13, 1789, is the first occasion on which Burns says anything of his Mary, and he makes no further mention of her until 1792.

The duties of exciseman, while demanding constant absence from home, also bound him down to the district, which he could not leave, even for a visit to Ayrshire, without permission from Edinburgh. The result was not a happy one. Not only was the farm less likely to succeed than ever, but the Excise proved to be beyond his strength. Within a short time after beginning active duties, the hard work, riding two hundred miles each week, began to tell on him. He suffered from "the miseries of a diseased nervous system," and wrote to Mrs. Dunlop on the prospect of death, in his most exalted style. To Gilbert he writes in the beginning of 1790: "This farm has undone my enjoyment of myself. It is a ruinous affair on all hands. But let it go to hell! I'll fight it out and be off with it." To make " one guinea do the business of three" was never Burns's strong point, and it was now needed more than at any other time.

In February 1790, the third volume of Johnson's Museum appeared, containing forty songs by Burns. He was still determined on higher flights, and in March he orders from Edinburgh copies of dramatists both old and new-Ben Jonson, Congreve, Wycherley, etc., and even Molière, Racine, Corneille and Voltaire in the original. He was preparing to write a drama on a rather unpromising subject—the story of how Rob M'Quechan ran his "elshin," or awl, nine inches into the heel of King Robert the Bruce while mending his boot. Yet the greater part of the year brought no more than an Election Ballad (connected with two of the previous year) and the Elegy on Captain Matthew Henderson, an old Edinburgh theme taken up anew. Only towards the close of the year did Burns excel himself in Tam o' Shanter, written to accompany the