The Letters of Robert Burns

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P.S.--I shall be in Edinburgh about the latter end of July.

R. B.

* * * * *

LII.-To MR. ROBERT AINSLIE.[38]

ARROCHAR, 28_th June_ 1787.

My dear sir,--I write this on my tour through a country where savage
streams tumble over savage mountains, thinly overspread with savage
flocks, which sparingly support as savage inhabitants. My last stage was
Inverary--to-morrow night's stage Dumbarton. I ought sooner to have
answered your kind letter, but you know I am a man of many sins. R. B.

[Footnote 38: A young writer in Edinburgh.]

* * * * *

LIII.--TO MR. JAMES SMITH, LINLITHGOW, FORMERLY OF MAUCHLINE.

_June 30th_, 1787.

MY DEAR FRIEND,--On our return, at a Highland gentleman's hospitable
mansion, we fell in with a merry party, and danced till the ladies left
us, at three in the morning. Our dancing was none of the French or
English insipid formal movements; the ladies sung Scotch songs like
angels, at intervals; then we flew at _Bab at the Bowster_,
_Tullochgorum_, _Loch Erroch Side_,[39] etc., like midges sporting in
the mottie sun, or craws prognosticating a storm in a hairst day. When
the dear lasses left us, we ranged round the bowl till the good-fellow
hour of six; except a few minutes that we went out to pay our devotions
to the glorious lamp of day peering over the towering top of Benlomond.
We all kneeled; our worthy landlord's son held the bowl; each man a full
glass in his hand; and I, as priest, repeated some rhyming nonsense,
like Thomas-a-Rhymer's prophecies, I suppose. After a small refreshment
of the gifts of Somnus, we proceeded to spend the day on Lochlomond, and
reached Dumbarton in the evening. We dined at another good fellow's
house, and, consequently, pushed the bottle; when we went out to mount
our horses we found ourselves "No vera fou but gaylie yet." My two
friends and I rode soberly down the Loch side, till by came a
Highlandman at the gallop, on a tolerably good horse, but which had
never known the ornaments of iron or leather. We scorned to be
out-galloped by a Highlandman, so off we started, whip and spur. My
companions, though seemingly gaily mounted, fell sadly astern; but my
old mare, Jenny Geddes, one of the Rosinante family, she strained past
the Highlandman in spite of all his efforts with the hair halter: just
as I was passing him, Donald wheeled his horse, as if to cross before me
to mar my progress, when down came his horse, and threw his rider's
breekless a---- in a clipt hedge; and down came Jenny Geddes over all, and
my hardship between her and the Highlandman's horse. Jenny Geddes trode
over me with such cautious reverence, that matters were not so bad as
might well have been expected; so I came off with a few cuts and
bruises, and a thorough resolution to be a pattern of sobriety for
the future.

I have yet fixed on nothing with respect to the serious business of
life. I am, just as usual, a rhyming, mason-making, raking, aimless,
idle fellow. However, I shall somewhere have a farm soon. I was going to
say, a wife too; but that must never be my blessed lot. I am but a
younger son of the house of Parnassus, and like other younger sons of
great families, I may intrigue, if I choose to run all risks, but must
not marry.

I am afraid I have almost ruined one source, the principal one indeed,
of my former happiness; that eternal propensity I always had to fall in
love. My heart no more glows with feverish rapture. I have no
paradisiacal evening interviews, stolen from the restless cares and
prying inhabitants of this weary world. I have only ----. This last is
one of your distant acquaintances, has a fine figure, and elegant
manners; and in the train of some great folks whom you know, has seen
the politest quarters in Europe. I do like her a deal; but what piques
me is her conduct at the commencement of our acquaintance. I frequently
visited her when I was in ----, and after passing regularly the
intermediate degrees between the distant formal bow and the familiar
grasp round the waist, I ventured, in my careless way, to talk of
friendship in rather ambiguous terms; and after her return to ----, I
wrote to her in the same style. Miss, construing my words farther, I
suppose, than even I intended, flew off in a tangent of female dignity
and reserve, like a mounting lark in an April morning; and wrote me an
answer which measured me out very completely what an immense way I had
to travel before I could reach the climate of her favour. But I am an
old hawk at the sport, and wrote her such a cool, deliberate, prudent
reply, as brought my bird from her aerial towerings, pop down at my
foot, like Corporal Trim's hat.

As for the rest of my acts, and my wars, and all my wise sayings, and
why my mare was called Jenny Geddes, they shall be recorded in a few
weeks hence at Linlithgow, in the chronicles of your memory, by

R. B.

[Footnote 39: Scotch tunes.]

* * * * *

LIV.-To MR. JOHN RICHMOND.

MOSSGIEL, 7th _July_ 1787.

MY DEAR RICHMOND,-I am all impatience to hear of your fate since the old
confounder of right and wrong has turned you out of place, by his
journey to answer his indictment at the bar of the other world. He will
find the practice of the court so different from the practice in which
he has for so many years been thoroughly hackneyed, that his friends, if
he had any connections truly of that kind, which I rather doubt, may
well tremble for his sake. His chicane, his left-handed wisdom, which
stood so firmly by him, to such good purpose, here, like other
accomplices in robbery and plunder, will, now the piratical business is
blown, in all probability turn king's evidences, and then the devil's
bagpiper will touch him off "Bundle and go!"

If he has left you any legacy, I beg your pardon for all this; if not, I
know you will swear to every word I said about him.

I have lately been rambling over by Dumbarton and Inverary, and running
a drunken race on the side of Loch Lomond with a wild Highlandman; his
horse, which had never known the ornaments of iron or leather,
zig-zagged across before my old spavin'd hunter, whose name is Jenny
Geddes, and down came the Highlandman, horse and all, and down came
Jenny and my bardship; so I have got such a skinful of bruises and
wounds, that I shall be at least four weeks before I dare venture on my
journey to Edinburgh.

Not one new thing under the sun has happened in Mauchline since you left
it. I hope this will find you as comfortably situated as formerly, or,
if heaven pleases, more so; but, at all events, I trust you will let me
know of course how matters stand with you, well or ill. 'Tis but poor
consolation to tell the world when matters go wrong; but you know very
well your connection and mine stands on a different footing.--I am ever,
my dear friend, yours,

R. B.

* * * *

LV.--TO MR. ROBERT AINSLIE.

MAUCHLINE, _23rd July_ 1787.

MY DEAR AINSLIE,-There is one thing for which I set great store by you
as a friend, and it is this, that I have not a friend upon earth,
besides yourself, to whom I can talk nonsense without forfeiting some
degree of his esteem. Now, to one like me, who never cares for speaking
anything else but nonsense, such a friend as you is an invaluable
treasure. I was never a rogue, but have been a fool all my life; and, in
spite of all my endeavours, I see now plainly that I shall never be
wise. Now it rejoices my heart to have met with such a fellow as you,
who, though you are not just such a hopeless fool as I, yet I trust you
will never listen so much to temptation as to grow so very wise that you
will in the least disrespect an honest fellow because he is a fool. In
short, I have set you down as the staff of my old age, when the whole
list of my friends will, after a decent share of pity, have forgot me.

Though in the morn comes sturt and strife,
Yet joy may come at noon;
And I hope to live a merry, merry life
When a' thir days are done.

Write me soon, were it but a few lines, just to tell me how that good,
sagacious man your father is,--that kind, dainty body your mother,--
that strapping chiel your brother Douglas-and my friend Rachel, who is
as far before Rachel of old, as she was before her blear-eyed
sister Leah.

R. B.

* * * *

LVI-To DR. MOORE.

MAUCHLINE, 2nd August 1787.

SIR,-For some months past I have been rambling over the country, but I
am now confined with some lingering complaints, originating, as I take
it, in the stomach. To divert my spirits a little in this miserable fog
of ennui, I have taken a whim to give you a history of myself. My name
has made some little noise in this country; you have done me the honour
to interest yourself very warmly in my behalf; and I think a faithful
account of what character of a man I am, and how I came by that
character, may perhaps amuse you in an idle moment. I will give you an
honest narrative, though I know it will be often at my own expense; for
I assure you, Sir, I have, like Solomon, whose character, excepting in
the trifling affair of wisdom, I sometimes think I resemble,--I have, I
say, like him, turned my eyes to behold madness and folly, and like him,
too, frequently shaken hands with their intoxicating friendship. After
you have perused these pages, should you think them trifling and
impertinent, I only beg leave to tell you, that the poor author wrote
them under some twitching qualms of conscience, arising from a suspicion
that he was doing what he ought not to do: a predicament he has more
than once been in before.

I have not the most distant pretensions to assume that character which
the pye-coated guardians of escutcheons call a gentleman. When at
Edinburgh last winter, I got acquainted in the herald's office; and,
looking through that granary of honours, I there found almost every name
in the kingdom; but for me,

My ancient but ignoble blood
Has crept thro' scoundrels ever since the flood.

Gules, purpure, argent, etc., quite disowned me.

My father was in the north of Scotland the son of a farmer, and was
thrown by early misfortunes on the world at large, where, afier many
years' wanderings and sojournings, he picked up a pretty large quantity
of observation and experience, to which I am indebted for most of my
little pretensions to wisdom. I have met with few who understood men,
their manners, and their ways, equal to him; but stubborn, ungainly
integrity, and headlong, ungovernable irascibility are disqualifying
circumstances; consequently, I was born a very poor man's son. For the
first six or seven years of my life, my father was gardener to a worthy
gentleman of small estate in the neighbourhood of Ayr. Had he continued
in that station, I must have marched off to be one of the little
underlings about a farm house; but it was his dearest wish and prayer to
have it in his power to keep his children under his own eye, till they
could discern between good and evil; so, with the assistance of his
generous master, my father ventured on a small farm on his estate. At
those years, I was by no means a favourite with anybody. I was a good
deal noted for a retentive memory, a stubborn sturdy something in my
disposition, and an enthusiastic idiot piety. I say idiot piety, because
I was then but a child. Though it cost the schoolmaster some thrashings,
I made an excellent English scholar; and by the time I was ten or eleven
years of age, I was a critic in substantives, verbs, and particles. In
my infant and boyish days, too, I owed much to an old woman who resided
in the family, remarkable for her ignorance, credulity, and
superstition. She had, I suppose, the largest collection in the country
of tales and songs concerning devils, ghosts, fairies, brownies,
witches, warlocks, spunkies, kelpies, elf-candles, dead-lights, wraiths,
apparitions, cantraips, giants, enchanted towers, dragons, and other
trumpery. This cultivated the latent seeds of poetry, but had so strong
an effect on my imagination, that to this hour, in my nocturnal rambles,
I sometimes keep a sharp look out in suspicious places; and though
nobody can be more sceptical than I am in such matters, yet it often
takes an effort of philosophy to shake off these idle terrors. The
earliest composition that I recollect taking pleasure in was "The Vision
of Mirza," and a hymn of Addison's, beginning, "How are thy servants
blest, O Lord!" I particularly remember one half-stanza which was music
to my boyish ear--

"For though on dreadful whirls we hung
High on the broken wave--"

I met with these pieces in Manson's English Collection, one of my
school-books. The first two books I ever read in private, and which gave
me more pleasure than any two books I ever read since, were the _Life of
Hannibal_, and the _History of Sir William Wallace_. Hannibal gave my
young ideas such a turn, that I used to strut in rapture up and down
after the recruiting drum and bag-pipe, and wish myself tall enough to
be a soldier; while the story of Wallace poured a Scottish prejudice
into my veins which will boil along there, till the flood-gates of life
shut in eternal rest.

Polemical divinity about this time was putting the country half mad, and
I, ambitious of shining in conversation parties on Sundays, between
sermons, at funerals, etc., used a few years afterwards to puzzle
Calvinism with so much heat and indiscretion, that I raised a hue and
cry of heresy against me, which has not ceased to this hour.

My vicinity to Ayr was of some advantage to me. My social disposition,
when not checked by some modifications of spirited pride, was like our
catechism definition of infinitude, without bounds or limits. I formed
several connections with other younkers, who possessed superior
advantages; the youngling actors who were busy in the rehearsal of
parts, in which they were shortly to appear on the stage of life, where,
alas! I was destined to drudge behind the scenes. It is not commonly at
this green stage that our young gentry have a just sense of the immense
distance between them and their ragged play-fellows. It takes a few
dashes into the world, to give the young great man that proper, decent,
unnoticing disregard for the poor, insignificant, stupid devils, the
mechanics and peasantry around him, who were, perhaps, born in the same
village. My young superiors never insulted the clouterly appearance of
my plough-boy carcase, the two extremes of which were often exposed to
all the inclemencies of all the seasons. They would give me stray
volumes of books; among them, even then, I could pick up some
observations; and one, whose heart, I am sure, not even the "Munny
Begum" scenes have tainted, helped me to a little French. Parting with
these my young friends and benefactors, as they occasionally went off
for the East or West Indies, was often to me a sore affliction; but I
was soon called to more serious evils. My father's generous master died;
the farm proved a ruinous bargain; and to clench the misfortune, we fell
into the hands of a factor, who sat for the picture I have drawn of one
in my tale of "Twa Dogs." My father was advanced in life when he
married; I was the eldest of seven children, and he, worn out by early
hardships, was unfit for labour. My father's spirit was soon irritated,
but not easily broken. There was a freedom in his lease in two years
more, and to weather these two years, we retrenched our expenses. We
lived very poorly: I was a dexterous ploughman for my age; and the next
eldest to me was a brother (Gilbert), who could drive a plough very
well, and help me to thrash the corn. A novel-writer might, perhaps,
have viewed these scenes with some satisfaction, but so did not I; my
indignation yet boils at the recollection of the scoundrel factor's
insolent threatening letters, which used to set us all in tears.

This kind of life--the cheerless gloom of a hermit with the unceasing
moil of a galley-slave, brought me to my sixteenth year; a little before
which period I first committed the sin of rhyme. You know our country
custom of coupling a man and woman together as partners in the labours
of harvest. In my fifteenth autumn, my partner was a bewitching
creature, a year younger than myself. My scarcity of English denies me
the power of doing her justice in that language, but you know the
Scottish idiom: she was a "bonnie, sweet, sonsie lass." In short, she,
altogether unwittingly to herself, initiated me in that delicious
passion, which, in spite of acid disappointment, gin-horse prudence, and
book-worm philosophy, I hold to be the first of human joys, our dearest
blessing here below! How she caught the contagion I cannot tell; you
medical people talk much of infection from breathing the same air, the
touch, etc.; but I never expressly said I loved her. Indeed, I did not
know myself why I liked so much to loiter behind with her, when
returning in the evening from our labours; why the tones of her voice
made my heart-strings thrill like an Aeolian harp; and particularly why
my pulse beat such a furious ratan, when I looked and fingered over her
little hand to pick out the cruel nettle-stings and thistles. Among her
other love-inspiring qualities, she sung sweetly; and it was her
favourite reel to which I attempted giving an embodied vehicle in rhyme.
I was not so presumptuous as to imagine that I could make verses like
printed ones, composed by men who had Greek and Latin; but my girl sung
a song which was said to be composed by a small country laird's son, on
one of his father's maids, with whom he was in love; and I saw no reason
why I might not rhyme as well as he; for, excepting that he could smear
sheep, and cast peats, his father living in the moorlands, he had no
more scholar-craft than myself.

Thus with me began love and poetry; which at times have been my only,
and till within the last twelve months, have been my highest enjoyment.
My father struggled on till he reached the freedom in his lease, when he
entered on a larger farm, about ten miles farther in the country. The
nature of the bargain he made was such as to throw a little ready money
into his hands at the commencement of his lease, otherwise the affair
would have been impracticable. For four years we lived comfortably here,
but a difference commencing between him and his landlord as to terms,
after three years tossing and whirling in the vortex of litigation, my
father was just saved from the horrors of a jail, by a consumption,
which, after two years' promises, kindly stepped in, and carried him
away, to where the wicked cease from troubling, and where the weary
are at rest!

It is during the time that we lived on this farm that my little story is
most eventful. I was, at the beginning of this period, perhaps the most
ungainly awkward boy in the parish--no _solitaire_ was less acquainted
with the ways of the world. What I knew of ancient story was gathered
from Salmon's and Guthrie's Geographical Grammars; and the ideas I had
formed of modern manners, of literature, and criticism, I got from the
_Spectator_. These, with Pope's Works, some Plays of Shakespeare, Tull
and Dickson on Agriculture, _The Pantheon_, Locke's _Essay on the Human
Understanding_, Stackhouse's _History of the Bible_, Justice's _British
Gardener's Directory_, Boyle's _Lectures_, Allan Ramsays's Works,
Taylor's _Scripture Doctrine of Original Sin_, _A Select Collection of
English Songs_, and Hervey's _Meditations_, had formed the whole of my
reading. The collection of songs was my _vade mecum_. I pored over them,
driving my cart, or walking to labour, song by song, verse by verse;
carefully noting the true tender, or sublime, from affectation and
fustian. I am convinced I owe to this practice much of my critic-craft,
such as it is.

In my seventeenth year, 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, as I said before, 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 had felt early some
stirrings of ambition, but they were the blind gropings of Homer's
Cyclops round the walls of his cave. I saw my father's situation
entailed on me perpetual labour. The only two openings by which I could
enter the temple of fortune were the gate of niggardly economy, or the
path of little chicaning bargain-making. The first is so contracted an
aperture I never could 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 hypochondriasm 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 a l'adorable moitie 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 further
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. The very
goose-feather in my hand seems to know instinctively the well-worn path
of my imagination, the favourite theme of my song, and is with
difficulty restrained from giving you a couple of paragraphs on the
love-adventures of my compeers, the humble inmates of the farm-house and
cottage; but the grave sons of science, ambition, or avarice, baptise
these things by the name of follies. To the sons and daughters of labour
and poverty they are matters of the most serious nature: to them the
ardent hope, the stolen interview, the tender farewell, are the greatest
and most delicious parts of their enjoyments.

Another circumstance in my life which made some alteration in my mind
and manners, was, that I spent my nineteenth summer on a smuggling
coast, a good distance from home, at a noted school, to learn
mensuration, surveying, dialling, etc., in which I made a pretty 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 learned 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 fillette, who lived
next door to the school, overset my trigonometry, and set me off at a
tangent from the spheres of my studies. I, however, struggled on with my
sines and cosines 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 remaining 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 edition of Thomson's and Shenstone's Works; I had
seen human nature in a new phasis; and I engaged several of my
schoolfellows 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 most devoutly. I
kept copies of any of my own letters that pleased me, and a comparison
between them and the composition of most of my correspondents 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 post
brought me as many letters as if I had been a broad plodding son of
day-book and ledger.

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