The Letters of Robert Burns
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Robert Burns >> The Letters of Robert Burns
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[Footnote 12a: Proposals for publishing his Scottish Poems by
subscription.]
[Footnote 12b: Writer in Ayr.]
[Footnote 12c: The written acknowledgment of his marriage which Burns
gave to Jean. She, influenced by her father, consented to
destroy it.]
* * * *
XIX.--TO MR. M'WHINNIE, WRITER, AYR.
[MOSSGIEL, 17_th April_ 1786.]
IT is injuring some hearts, those hearts that elegantly bear the
impression of the good Creator, to say to them you give them the trouble
of obliging a friend; for this reason, I only tell you that I gratify my
own feelings in requesting your friendly offices with respect to the
enclosed, because I know it will gratify yours to assist me in it to the
utmost of your power.
I have sent you four copies, as I have no less than eight dozen, which
is a great deal more than I shall ever need.
Be sure to remember a poor poet militant in your prayers He looks
forward with fear[13] and trembling to that, to him, important moment
which stamps the die with--with--with, perhaps, the eternal disgrace of,
my dear Sir, your humble, afflicted, tormented, ROBERT BURNS.
[Footnote 13: Cp. "Something cries _Hoolie! I rede ye, honest man,
tak tent, ye'll show your folly!_"]
* * * *
XX.--TO JOHN ARNOT, ESQUIRE, OF DALQUATSWOOD.
[_April_ 1786.]
SIR,--I have long wished for some kind of claim to the honour of your
acquaintance, and since it is out of my power to make that claim by the
least service of mine to you, I shall do it by asking a friendly office
of you to me.--I should be much hurt, Sir, if any one should view my
poor Parnassian Pegasus in the light of a spur-galled Hack, and think
that I wish to make a shilling or two by him. I spurn the thought.
It may do, maun do, Sir, wi' them who
Maun please the great-folk for a wame-fou;
For me, sae laigh I needna boo
For, Lord be thankit! I can ploo;
And, when I downa yoke a naig,
Then, Lord be thankit! I can beg.
You will then, I hope, Sir, forgive my troubling you with the
enclosed,[14] and spare a poor heart-crushed devil a world of
apologies--a business he is very unfit for at any time, but at present,
widowed as he is of every woman-giving comfort, he is utterly incapable
of. Sad and grievous of late, Sir, has been my tribulation, and many and
piercing my sorrows; and, had it not been for the loss the world would
have sustained in losing so great a poet, I had ere now done as a much
wiser man, the famous Achitophel of long-headed memory, did before me,
when he "went home and set his house in order." I have lost, Sir, that
dearest earthly treasure, that greatest blessing here below, that last,
best gift which completed Adam's happiness in the garden of bliss; I
have lost, I have lost--my trembling hand refuses its office, the
frighted ink recoils up the quill,--I have lost a, a, a wife.
Fairest of God's creation, last and best,
Now art thou lost!
You have doubtless, Sir, heard my story, heard it with all its
exaggerations; but as my actions, and my motives for action, are
peculiarly like myself and that is peculiarly like nobody else, I shall
just beg a leisure moment and a spare tear of you until I tell my own
story my own way.
I have been all my life, Sir, one of the rueful-looking, long-visaged
sons of disappointment. A damned star has always kept my zenith, and
shed its hateful influence in the emphatic curse of the prophet--"And
behold whatsoever he doth, it shall not prosper!" I rarely hit where I
aim, and if I want anything, I am almost sure never to find it where I
seek it. For instance, if my penknife is needed, I pull out twenty
things--a plough-wedge, a horse nail, an old letter, or a tattered
rhyme, in short, everything but my penknife; and that, at last, after a
painful, fruitless search, will be found in the unsuspected corner of an
unsuspected pocket, as if on purpose thrust out of the way. Still, Sir,
I long had a wishing eye to that inestimable blessing, a wife.
... A young fellow, after a few idle commonplace stories from a
gentleman in black ... no one durst say black was his eye; while I ...
only wanting that ceremony, am made a Sunday's laughing-stock, and
abused like a pickpocket. I was well aware, though, that if my
ill-starred fortune got the least hint of my connubial wish, my scheme
would go to nothing. To prevent this I determined to take my measures
with such thought and fore-thought, such cautions and precautions, that
all the malignant planets in the hemisphere should be unable to blight
my designs .... Heaven and Earth! must I remember? my damned star
wheeled about to the zenith, by whose baleful rays Fortune took the
alarm.[15a] ... In short, Pharaoh at the Red Sea, Darius at Arbela,
Pompey at Pharsalia, Edward at Bannockburn, Charles at Pultoway,
Burgoyne at Saratoga--no prince, potentate, or commander of ancient or
modern unfortunate memory ever got a more shameful or more total defeat.
How I bore this can only be conceived. All powers of recital labour far,
far behind. There is a pretty large portion of Bedlam in the composition
of a poet at any time; but on this occasion I was nine parts and nine
tenths, out of ten, stark staring mad. At first I was fixed in
stuporific insensibility, silent, sullen, staring like Lot's wife
besaltified in the plains of Gomorrha. But my second paroxysm chiefly
beggars description. The rifted northern ocean, when returning suns
dissolve the chains of winter, and loosening precipices of
long-accumulated ice tempest with hideous crash the foaming
deep,--images like these may give some faint shadow of what was the
situation of my bosom. My chained faculties broke loose; my maddening
passions, roused to tenfold fury, bore over their banks with impetuous,
resistless force, carrying every check and principle before them.
Counsel was an unheeded call to the passing hurricane; Reason a
screaming elk in the vortex of Malstrom; and Religion a
feebly-struggling beaver down the roarings of Niagara. I reprobated the
first moment of my existence; execrated Adam's folly-infatuated wish for
that goodly-looking but poison-breathing gift which had ruined him and
undone me; and called on the womb of uncreated night to close over me
and all my sorrows.
A storm naturally overblows itself. My spent passions gradually sunk
into a lurid calm; and by degrees I have subsided into the time-settled
sorrow of the sable-widower, who, wiping away the decent tear, lifts up
his grief-worn eye to look-for another wife.
Such is the state of man; to-day he buds
His tender leaves of hope; to-morrow blossoms
And bears his blushing honours thick upon him;
The third day comes a frost, a killing frost,
And nips his root, and then he falls as I do.[15]
Such, Sir, has been the fatal era of my life. And it came to pass that
when I looked for sweet, behold bitter; and for light, behold darkness.
But this is not all: already the holy beagles begin to snuff the scent,
and I expect every moment to see them cast off, and hear them after me
in full cry; but as I am an old fox, I shall give them dodging and
doubling for it, and by and by I intend to earth among the mountains
of Jamaica.
I am so struck, on a review, with the impertinent length of this letter,
that I shall not increase it with one single word of apology, but
abruptly conclude with assuring you that I am, Sir, yours and misery's
most humble servant.
ROBERT BURNS.
[Footnote 14: Proposals for publishing.]
[Footnote 15: Misquoted from Shakspeare's _Henry VIII_.]
[Footnote 15a: Reference to the rejection of his acknowledgment of
marriage.]
* * * *
XXI.--To MR. DAVID BRICE, SHOEMAKER, GLASGOW.
MOSSGIEL, _June_ 12_th_, 1786.
DEAR BRICE,--I received your message by G. Paterson, and as I am not
very _throng_ at present, I just write to let you know that there is
such a worthless, rhyming reprobate as your humble servant still in the
land of the living, though I can scarcely say in the place of hope. I
have no news to tell you that will give me any pleasure to mention, or
you to hear.
Poor, ill-advised, ungrateful Armour came home on Friday last. You have
heard all the particulars of that affair, and a black affair it is. What
she thinks of her conduct now I don't know; one thing I do know--she has
made me completely miserable. Never man loved, or rather adored a woman
more than I did her; and, to confess a truth between you and me, I do
still love her to distraction after all, though I won't tell her so if I
were to see her, which I don't want to do. My poor dear unfortunate
Jean! how happy have I been in thy arms! It is not the losing her that
makes me so unhappy, but for her sake I feel most severely: I foresee
she is in the road to, I am afraid, eternal ruin.
May Almighty God forgive her ingratitude and perjury to me, as I from my
very soul forgive her; and may His grace be with her and bless her in
all her future life! I can have no nearer idea of the place of eternal
punishment than what I have felt in my own breast on her account. I have
tried often to forget her; I have run into all kinds of dissipation and
riots, mason-meetings, drinking-matches, and other mischief, to drive
her out of my head, but all in vain. And now for a grand cure; the ship
is on her way home that is to take me out to Jamaica; and then,
farewell, dear old Scotland! and farewell, dear ungrateful Jean! for
never, never will I see you more.
You will have heard that I am going to commence poet in print; and
to-morrow my work goes to the press. I expect it will be a volume of
about two hundred pages--it is just the last foolish action I intend to
do, and then turn a wise man as fast as possible.--Believe me to be,
dear Brice, your friend and well-wisher. R. B.
* * * *
XXII.--To MR. JOHN RICHMOND, EDINBURGH.
MOSSGIEL, 9_th July_ 1786.
With the sincerest grief I read your letter. You are truly a son of
misfortune. I shall be extremely anxious to hear from you how your
health goes on; if it is in any way re-establishing, or if Leith
promises well; in short, how you feel in the inner man.
No news worth anything; only godly Bryan was in the inquisition
yesterday, and half the countryside as witnesses against him. He still
stands out steady and denying; but proof was led yesternight of
circumstances highly suspicious, almost _de facto_; one of the servant
girls made oath that she upon a time rashly entered into the house, to
speak in your cant, "in the hour of cause."
I have waited on Armour since her return home; not from the least view
of reconciliation, but merely to ask for her health, and to you I will
confess it, from a foolish hankering fondness, very ill placed indeed.
The mother forbade me the house, nor did Jean show that penitence that
might have been expected. However, the priest,[15a] I am informed, will
give me a certificate as a single man, if I comply with the rules of the
church, which for that very reason I intend to do.[16]
I am going to put on sackcloth and ashes this day. I am indulged so far
as to appear in my own seat. _Peccavi, pater, miserere mei_. My book
will be ready in a fortnight. If you have any subscribers, return them
by Connell. The Lord stand with the righteous; amen, amen. R. B.
[Footnote 15a: Rev. Mr. Auld--Daddie Auld.]
[Footnote 16: This accordingly he did.]
* * * *
XXIII--To MR. JOHN RICHMOND.
OLD ROME FOREST,[17] 30_th July_ 1786.
MY DEAR RICHMOND,--My hour is now come--you and I will never meet in
Britain more. I have orders, within three weeks at farthest, to repair
aboard the _Nancy_, Captain Smith, from Clyde to Jamaica, and to call at
Antigua. This, except to our friend Smith, whom God long preserve, is a
secret about Mauchline. Would you believe it? Armour has got a warrant
to throw me in jail till I find security for an enormous sum. This they
keep an entire secret, but I got it by a channel they little dream of;
and I am wandering from one friend's house to another, and, like a true
son of the Gospel, "have nowhere to lay my head." I know you will pour
an execration on her head, but spare the poor, ill-advised girl, for my
sake; though may all the furies that rend the injured, enraged lover's
bosom await her mother until her latest hour! I write in a moment of
rage, reflecting on my miserable situation--exiled, abandoned, forlorn.
I can write no more--let me hear from you by the return of the coach. I
will write you ere I go.--I am, dear Sir, yours, here and hereafter,
R. B.
[Footnote 17: In the neighbourhood of Kilmarnock. Here he had
deposited his travelling chest in the house of a relative.]
* * * *
XXIV.-To MR. JOHN KENNEDY.
KILMARNOCK, _August_ 1786.
MY DEAR SIR--Your truly facetious epistle of the 3rd instant gave me
much entertainment. I was only sorry I had not the pleasure of seeing
you as I passed your way; but we shall bring up all our lee way on
Wednesday, the 16th current, when I hope to have it in my power to call
on you, and take a kind, very probably a last adieu, before I go for
Jamaica; and I expect orders to repair to Greenock every day. I have at
last made my public appearance, and am solemnly inaugurated into the
numerous class.[18] Could I have got a carrier, you should have got a
score of vouchers for my authorship; but, now you have them, let them
speak for themselves.--
Farewell, dear friend! may guid luck hit you,
And 'mang her favourites admit you,
If e'er Detraction shore to smit you,
May nane believe him,
And ony Deil that thinks to get you,
Good LORD, deceive him,
R.B.
[Footnote 18: The Kilmarnock Edition of his poems was published on
3ist July.]
* * * *
XXV.--To HIS COUSIN, MR. JAMES BURNESS, WRITER, MONTROSE.
MOSSGIEL, _Tuesday Noon_, 26_th Sept._ 1786.
MY DEAR SIR,--I this moment receive yours--receive it with the honest
hospitable warmth of a friend's welcome. Whatever comes from you always
wakens up the better blood about my heart, which your kind little
recollections of my parental friend carries as far as it will go. 'Tis
there that man is blest! 'Tis there, my friend, man feels a
consciousness of something within him above the trodden clod! The
grateful reverence to the hoary earthly authors of his being, the
burning glow when he clasps the woman of his soul to his bosom, the
tender yearnings of heart for the little angels to whom he has given
existence--these Nature has poured in milky streams about the human
heart; and the man who never rouses them to action by the inspiring
influences of their proper objects loses by far the most pleasurable
part of his existence.
My departure is uncertain, but I do not think it will be till after
harvest. I will be on very short allowance of time indeed, if I do not
comply with your friendly invitation. When it will be I don't know, but
if I can make my wish good I will endeavour to drop you a line some time
before. My best compliments to Mrs. Burness; I should be equally
mortified should I drop in when she is abroad, but of that, I suppose,
there is little chance. What I have wrote, heaven knows. I have not time
to review it, so accept of it in the beaten way of friendship. With the
ordinary phrase, and perhaps rather more than the ordinary sincerity, I
am, dear Sir, ever yours, R. B.
* * * *
XXVI.-To MRS. STEWART, OF STAIR.[19]
[_Oct_. 1786.?]
MADAM,--The hurry of my preparations for going abroad has hindered me
from performing my promise so soon as I intended. I have here sent you a
parcel of songs, etc., which never made their appearance, except to a
friend or two at most. Perhaps some of them may be no great
entertainment to you, but of that I am far from being an adequate judge.
The song to the time of "Ettrick Banks"[20] you will easily see the
impropriety of exposing much even in manuscript. I think, myself, it has
some merit, both as a tolerable description of one of nature's sweetest
scenes, a July evening, and as one of the finest pieces of nature's
workmanship, the finest indeed we know anything of, an amiable,
beautiful young woman; but I have no common friend to procure me that
permission, without which I would not dare to spread the copy.
I am quite aware, Madam, what task the world would assign me in this
letter. The obscure bard, when any of the great condescend to take
notice of him, should heap the altar with the incense of flattery. Their
high ancestry, their own great and godlike qualities and actions, should
be recounted with the most exaggerated description. This, Madam, is a
task for which I am altogether unfit. Besides a certain disqualifying
pride of heart, I know nothing of your connections in life, and have no
access to where your real character is to be found--the company of your
compeers: and more, I am afraid that even the most refined adulation is
by no means the road to your good opinion.
One feature of your character I shall ever with grateful pleasure
remember--the reception I got when I had the honour of waiting on you at
Stair. I am little acquainted with politeness, but I know a good deal of
benevolence of temper and goodness of heart. Surely did those in exalted
stations know how happy they could make some classes of their inferiors
by condescension and affability, they would never stand so high,
measuring out with every look the height of their elevation, but
condescend as sweetly as did Mrs. Stewart of Stair. R. B.
[Footnote 19: Mrs. Stewart, of Stair, was the first person of note to
discover in the Ayrshire ploughman a genius of the first order.]
[Footnote 20: The Bonnie Lass of Ballochmyle]
* * * *
XXVII.--TO MR. ROBERT AIKIN, WRITER, AYR.
[_Oct_. 1786.?]
SIR,--I was with Wilson, my printer, t'other day, and settled all our
by-gone matters between us. After I had paid him all demands, I made him
the offer of the second edition, on the hazard of being paid out of the
first and readiest, which he declines. By his account, the paper of a
thousand copies would cost about twenty-seven pounds, and the printing
about fifteen or sixteen: he offers to agree to this for the printing,
if I will advance for the paper, but this, you know, is out of my power;
so farewell hopes of a second edition 'till I grow richer! an epocha
which, I think, will arrive at the payment of the British national debt.
There is scarcely anything hurts me so much in being disappointed of my
second edition, as not having it in my power to show my gratitude to Mr.
Ballantine, by publishing my poem of "The Brigs of Ayr." I would detest
myself as a wretch, if I thought I were capable in a very long life of
forgetting the honest, warm, and tender delicacy with which he enters
into my interests. I am sometimes pleased with myself in my grateful
sensations; but I believe, on the whole, I have very little merit in it,
as my gratitude is not a virtue, the consequence of reflection, but
sheerly the instinctive emotion of my heart, too inattentive to allow
worldly maxims and views to settle into selfish habits.
I have been feeling all the various rotations and movements within,
respecting the Excise. There are many things plead strongly against it;
the uncertainty of getting soon into business; the consequences of my
follies, which may perhaps make it impracticable for me to stay at home;
and, besides, I have for some time been pining under secret
wretchedness, from causes which you pretty well know--the pang of
disappointment, the sting of pride, with some wandering stabs of
remorse, which never fail to settle on my vitals like vultures, when
attention is not called away by the calls of society, or the vagaries of
the muse. Even in the hour of social mirth, my gaiety is the madness of
an intoxicated criminal under the hands of the executioner. All these
reasons urge me to go abroad, and to all these reasons I have only one
answer--the feelings of a father. This, in the present mood I am in,
overbalances everything that can be laid in the scale against it.
You may perhaps think it an extravagant fancy, but it is a sentiment
which strikes home to my very soul: though sceptical in some points of
our current belief, yet, I think, I have every evidence for the reality
of a life beyond the stinted bourne of our present existence; if so,
then, how should I, in the presence of that tremendous Being, the Author
of existence, how should I meet the reproaches of those who stand to me
in the dear relation of children, whom I deserted in the smiling
innocency of helpless infancy? O, thou great unknown Power!--thou
Almighty God! who has lighted up reason in my breast, and blessed me
with immortality!--I have frequently wandered from that order and
regularity necessary for the perfection of Thy works, yet Thou hast
never left me nor forsaken me!
Since I wrote the foregoing sheet, I have seen something of the storm of
mischief thickening over my folly-devoted head. Should you, my friends,
my benefactors, be successful in your applications for me, perhaps it
may not be in my power, in that way, to reap the fruit of your friendly
efforts. What I have written in the preceding pages, is the settled
tenor of my present resolution; but should inimical circumstances forbid
me closing with your kind offer, or enjoying it only threaten to entail
farther misery---
To tell the truth, I have little reason for this last complaint; as the
world, in general, has been kind to me fully up to my deserts. I was,
for some time past, fast getting into the pining, distrustful snarl of
the misanthrope. I saw myself alone, unfit for the struggle of life,
shrinking at every rising cloud in the chance-directed atmosphere of
fortune, while, all defenceless, I looked about in vain for a cover. It
never occurred to me, at least never with the force it deserved, that
this world is a busy scene, and man, a creature destined for a
progressive struggle; and that, however I might possess a warm heart and
inoffensive manners (which last, by the by, was rather more than I could
well boast) still, more than these passive qualities, there was
something to be done. When all my school-fellows and youthful compeers
(those misguided few excepted who joined, to use a Gentoo phrase, the
"hallachores" of the human race) were striking off with eager hope and
earnest intent, in some one or other of the many paths of busy life, I
was "standing idle in the market-place," or only left the chase of the
butterfly from flower to flower, to hunt fancy from whim to whim.
You see, Sir, that if to know one's errors were a probability of
mending them, I stand a fair chance: but, according to the reverend
Westminster divines, though conviction must precede conversion, it is
very far from always implying it.
* * * *
XXVIII.--TO DR. MACKENZIE, MAUCHLINE; INCLOSING HIM VERSES ON DINING
WITH LORD DAER.
_Wednesday Morning_ [1_st Nov_. 1786].
DEAR SIR,--I never spent an afternoon among great folks with half that
pleasure as when, in company with you, I had the honour of paying my
devoirs to that plain, honest, worthy man, the professor[21] I would be
delighted to see him perform acts of kindness and friendship, though I
were not the object; he does it with such a grace. I think his
character, divided into ten parts, stands thus,--four parts
Socrates--four parts Nathaniel--and two parts Shakespeare's Brutus.
The following verses were really extempore, but a little corrected
since. They may entertain you a little with the help of that partiality
with which you are so good as to favour the performances of, dear Sir,
your very humble servant, R. B.
[Footnote 21: Dugald Stewart, Professor of Moral Philosophy in the
University of Edinburgh.]
* * * *
XXIX.--TO MRS. DUNLOP, OF DUNLOP.
_Nov_. 1786.
MADAM,--I am truly sorry I was not at home yesterday, when I was so much
honoured with your order for my copies, and incomparably more by the
handsome compliments you are pleased to pay my poetic abilities. I am
fully persuaded that there is not any class of mankind so feelingly
alive to the titillations of applause as the sons of Parnassus; nor is
it easy to conceive how the heart of the poor bard dances with rapture,
when those, whose character in life gives them a right to be polite
judges, honour him with their approbation. Had you been thoroughly
acquainted with me, Madam, you could not have touched my darling
heart-chord more sweetly, than by noticing my attempts to celebrate your
illustrious ancestor, the saviour of his country.
Great patriot hero! ill-requited chief!
The first book I met with in my early years which I perused with
pleasure was _The Life of Hannibal_; the next was _The History of Sir
William Wallace_: for several of my early years I had few other authors;
and many a solitary hour have I stole out, after the laborious vocations
of the day, to shed a tear over their glorious, but unfortunate stories.
In those boyish days I remember, in particular, being struck with that
part of Wallace's story, where these lines occur--
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