drawing of Alloway Kirk in Captain Grose's Antiquities of Scotland.

The Lament of Mary, Queen of Scots, in the beginning of 1791, pleased him "beyond any effort of my muse for a good while past." His noble patron, the Earl of Glencairn, also died in January of that year, and Burns lamented his death in tones worthy of his earlier muse, and resonant with the chords of Man was made to

mourn.

His family was steadily increasing. A son had been born in August 1789, and a third came on April 9 of this year, whom he named after William Nicol. Ten days earlier a less welcome addition had been made by Anne Park, niece to the hostess of the Globe Tavern, Dumfries, and heroine of some of Burns's most luxurious verses, who on March 31 gave birth to a daughter, afterwards named Elizabeth Burns.* Such an event was all the more unwelcome that the farm had at last to be given up, many causes uniting to this end,poverty of soil, want of management, the amount of waste and excess of hospitality. A bitter passage on the "children of dependence," in a letter written in June of this year, shows that many things were rankling in the poet's heart. He made arrangements to give up the farm, and in August his standing crops were sold by auction, bringing a fair price; "but such a scene of drunkenness was hardly ever seen in this country."

Before finally leaving Ellisland he paid his last visit to Edinburgh, where he had an interview with Clarinda, then about to join her husband in the West Indies. The parting took place on December 6, a parting immortalized in Ae fond kiss and then we sever. They

* These two children of the poet survived till 1872 and 1873 respectively.

met no more, though Clarinda was not long absent from the country.*

Dumfries.

Burns was now to act as exciseman in Dumfries at a salary of £70, with hopes of rising in his profession. To Dumfries therefore he removed in December 1791, after three and a half years in Ellisland, in the soil of which lay buried the larger half of the profits of his poems. His home was now an upper flat of a small house in the Wee Vennel (the present Bank Street), but he enjoyed good society. Chief among his new acquaintances was Mr. Walter Riddell of Woodley Park, four miles to the south of Dumfries, and especially his very young and charming wife, Maria, who had a taste for literature and poetry.

1792.

Little happened till late in the year. In August appeared Johnson's fourth volume, containing some fifty songs, either entirely or in part by Burns, among them being Ae fond kiss; O for ane and twenty; Flow gently, Sweet Afton; The Whistle; The Posie; Kenmure's on and awa'; O leeze me on my spinnin' wheel, and Ye banks and braes o' Bonnie Doon.

Thomson's

In September he was asked to assist in another work of the same nature as Johnson's, the chief mover in which was George Thomson, an Edinburgh musical amateur. The work was meant to be an advance on Johnson's in the elegance of both words and music. "We will esteem your poetical assistance a particular favour," wrote Thomson to Burns, "besides paying any reasonable

songs. 1792.

* She returned in August 1792. Burns only heard of this later on, and in March 1793 wrote her a most extravagant letter, which he copied into his collection, excusing it as "the fustian rant of enthusiastic youth" (!).

E

price you shall please to demand for it." The poet replied at once, and accepted the former proposal with the utmost alacrity, on condition of not being hurried, and of being allowed to keep a Scottish element in his verses. "As to remuneration, you may think my songs either above or below price, for they shall absolutely be the one or the other. In the honest enthusiasm with which I embark in your undertaking, to talk of money, wages, fee, hire, etc. would be downright prostitution of soul." His contributions to Thomson's collection begin in the following month with The Lea-rig, and continue till within a few days of his death, being made all the more interesting by the preservation of the series of letters that accompanied them.

During 1792 sympathy with revolution politics had been rapidly spreading in the country, and Burns, who had all along admired the French nation, was unguarded in expressing his feelings on the subject. In December, information regarding this was given to his superiors by some envious malicious devil," and Burns immediately appealed to his old friend Graham, of Fintry, to save him from the consequences. In this stronglyworded letter it is mainly the prospect of ruin to his family that inspires the writer; in a later one he enters more calmly into the subject. The accusation, although the storm blew over at the time, was one calculated to damage his chances of promotion, and to Mrs. Dunlop he promises amendment in the way of politics, as well as of hard drinking. "Against this I have again and again bent my resolution, and have greatly succeeded. Taverns I have totally abandoned; it is the private parties in the family way, among the hard-drinking gentlemen of this country, that do me the mischief,—

The

but even this I have more than half given over." testimony of witnesses is at variance as to Burns's actual intemperance in the later years of his life,-the one side giving the lie to the other-but that he was too often at convivial parties can hardly be doubted, as even some of his defenders admit it.

In February 1793, a new edition of his poems appeared in two volumes. It contained only a score of pieces additional to those in the Edinburgh one of 1787, most of which have already been mentioned under their proper dates. The only song is one of eight lines, addressed to "Anna" *; all the rest of his lyric muse went to Johnson and Thomson.

At Whitsunday, 1793, Burns removed to a small detached house in the Mill Vennel, now Burns Street, a step which may indicate a favourable condition of finances. In July, when Thomson, on the appearance of the first part of his work, sent him five pounds, Burns blazed up in indignant remonstrance. "It degrades me in my own eyes. . . As to any more traffic of that debtor and creditor kind, I swear by the HONOR which crowns the upright statue of ROBERT BURNS'S INTEGRITY-on the least motion of it, I will indignantly spurn the by-past transaction, and from that moment commence entire stranger to you." It is strange, if true, that at this time Burns wrote to some of his friends for the loan of three or four guineas.

In the end of July he made an excursion through Galloway, and the spirited account of this given by his companion, John Syme, shows the poet in a most irritable mood, perhaps, as Chambers says, an indication of discontent with the times and with himself. The autumn of the year was fairly prolific in songs for * Possibly written for his friend Cunningham.

Thomson's work, and later on he also finished the copying of his letters into one of the volumes now known as the Glenriddell MSS., preserved in the Athenæum Library, Liverpool. The other volume, containing poems then unpublished, had been written some time before.

Burns's good resolutions in the beginning of the year against hard drinking were not carried out. In January 1794, we find him nearly involved in a duel with a military officer because of proposing the toast,

May our success in the present war be equal to the justice of our cause." Little wonder that "" some of our folks about the Excise Office, Edinburgh, had, and perhaps still have, conceived a prejudice against me as being a drunken, dissipated character,”—even though Burns himself denied the accuracy of the conception. His friend Mr. Walter Riddell was perhaps not quite guiltless in the poet's excesses, and the result of some act of rudeness to Mrs. Riddell was an estrangement between her and Burns, who before this had been her devoted admirer. He at once tried reconciliation, in a letter full of remorse and bombast, but as neither this nor other overtures were successful, he finally vented his spleen in undeserved satire, of which, perhaps the Epistle from Esopus to Maria is the only one that has any merit. Helped, perhaps, by officious acquaintances, the breach was soon beyond all closing for the time. Its effect may be seen in the letter to Cunningham of February 25, in which he seeks to minister to his own "mind diseased" by reflections on his favourite topic, Religion, in a strain which Lockhart adduces as conclusive proof that Burns was not "ever a degraded being." Unfortunately the quarrel with the Riddells extended to the owner of