My task has been in part a task of selection. Many of the old Poets
whose frequent beauties I have acknowledged, (at no time more than
when occupied in the compilation of these papers,) have been passed
over in silence. Herrick, the "honey-bee of letters"--Rare Drummond,
hight "of Hawthornden"--Lovelace, whose Althea will live with Surry's
Geraldine--and many other "names noble and bright" have met with bare
mention. It cannot be expected then that I should rake up from the
dung-hill of the day the Tennysons, the Montgomeries, the
Blessingtons, etc. etc. with whose writings magazine readers are so
conversant. These are "bad bardlings." But many will be passed by for
whom I entertain much respect, and more love. Mrs. Norton, the elder
Montgomery, Miss Landon, gentle and sad Grahame, are lights of no mean
magnitude. But "in looking upon the moon the dimmer orbs are
forgotten." I avail myself of this introductory paragraph to say, that
this paper will be unlike those which have preceded it. Accurate
research, and close examination into points of literary history,
although necessary in treating of English Poetry in its earlier
stages, are scarcely so in treating of the same subject in its later.
The reason of this is evident. I shall therefore content myself with
brief critical remarks, (_too_ brief, perhaps, to excite interest) and
as a matter of less importance than in my former papers--with snatches
of biography. This being the case, I fear that these papers will be
thought trivial.
My last chapter ended with Pope. Passing over Swift and a few others,
we come at once upon a worthy name.
I. James Thomson, the author of the _Seasons_ and other Poems of
merit, was born in Roxburgshire, Scotland, in September, 1700. His
father, a clergyman of small estate, died while the Poet was yet a
boy; and, after a few years spent in obscurity, the son went to London
as a literary adventurer. "By what gradation of indigence he became
reduced to a Poet it would be vain to inquire." He did become
"_reduced to a Poet_," however, and, after a season of want, he
succeeded in selling his "Winter." Mr. Wheatley and Aaron Hill took
active parts in his advancement, and Thomson was so blinded by
gratitude for the kindness of the latter gentleman, that he flattered
him without stint,--for which our poet no doubt underwent the
repentance of Caliban on discovering the earthly quality of Stephano.
----------"What a thrice double ass
Was I to take the drunkard for a God,
And worship this dull fool."
His "Winter" was dedicated to Sir Spencer Compton, afterwards Viscount
Pevensey--and twenty guineas were the price of the compliment. This
poem soon became popular; so much so, that he was induced to publish
his "Summer"--after which, "Spring" and "Autumn" followed in the order
in which I write them. In 1727 he wrote "Britannia," a satirical poem,
and "Sophonisba," a tragedy.[1] Other plays followed, several of which
were suppressed by the licenser. Then came "Liberty," an elaborate and
heavy poem. Thomson, at this stage of his affairs, was without funds
or patronage. The Prince of Wales, however, having reduced his own
fortunes to a condition almost as desperate as the Poet's, either from
sympathy or from a supposition that the patronage of literature would
be one means of gaining popular favor, employed Mr. Lyttleton to
enlist Thomson. Our Poet, when the Prince on his first introduction
familiarly inquired into his affairs, answered that 'they were in a
more poetical posture than formerly'--whereupon he was presented with
a yearly pension of 100_l_. After this he produced Agamemnon, a
tragedy--Edward and Eleonora, a tragedy--Alfred, a mask--and the
tragedy of Tancred and Sigismunda. Mr. Lyttleton having come into
office, appointed him {102} surveyor general of the Leeward Islands.
The salary appertaining to this office was something more than
300_l_., and then it was that, unharassed by petty troubles, he
finished his "Castle of Indolence."
[Footnote 1: Now only remembered from a rough parody on one of its
verses. The play had excited high expectation, and was well received;
but when the actor came to repeat--"O, Sophonisba, Sophonisba, O," a
voice from the audience chimed in--"O, Jemmie Thomson, Jemmie Thomson,
O," which for a time was a mouth-verse throughout the city.]
To this Poem I will confine myself in treating hurriedly of the
writings of Thomson. His Seasons are too well known to call for
comment--and his other works are (perhaps deservedly) out of the
public recollection. The "Castle of Indolence" then, is a renewal of
Spenser's best pictures--a renewal not only in its dreamy
voluptuousness of character, but in its stanzaic peculiarities. It has
been said that no other writers ever succeeded in acquiring the
peculiar flow of Milton's blank verse, or the singular play of
Spenser's old time rhythm. This is true with an exception. One half of
the Castle of Indolence, if a little more antiquated, might be
inserted among the cantos of the Faery Queene without detection. And
this I hold to be no slight compliment to the later poet.
The Castle of Indolence was the work in which the idle Thomson gave
words to his individual mood. A sluggard, he had a sluggard's visions.
His visions of nature were of nature lulled into quietude. His
landscapes sleep under quiet skies--his winds come from "the land of
Drowsy Head." He reared shadowy battlements, and planted
"sleep-soothing groves," under which lay
"Idlesse in her dreaming mood."
And in such pictures the Poet rejoiced. But with this drowsy
enchantment he mingled all the freshness of that age which, from its
far distance in the past, takes upon itself the hue of far
clouds--becoming in the eyes of men an age of gold. The freshness of
which I speak is of the patriarchal age--
"What time Dan Abraham left the Chaldee land,
And pastured on from verdant stage to stage,
Where fields and fountains fresh could best engage."
And this freshness retrieves the swooning and too sickly tone of a
poem, all in all, inimitable.
If, reader, you wish an hour of forgetfulness, go to some quiet
hollow, in the pleasant summer time, and after working thought and
heart into the mood which can
"Pour all the Arabian heaven upon our nights,"
hum such sleep-begetting verses as these:
"Joined to the prattle of the purling rills
Were heard the lowing herds along the vale,
And flocks were bleating from the distant hills,
_And vacant shepherds piping in the dale_:
And now and then sweet Philomel would wail,
Or stock-doves plain amid the forest deep,
That drowsy rustled to the sighing gale;
And _still a coil the grasshopper did keep_:
Yet all these sounds yblent inclined all to sleep.
* * * * *
And up the hills, on either side, a wood
Of blackening pines aye waving to and fro,
Sent forth _a sleepy horror thro' the blood_;
And where this valley winded out below,
_The murmuring main was heard, and scarcely heard, to flow_.
A pleasing land of drowsy-head it was,
Of _dreams that wave before the half-shut eye_;
And of gay castles in the clouds that pass,
Forever flushing round a summer sky:
There, eke _the soft delights that witchingly
Instill a wanton sweetness through the breast_,
And the calm pleasures always hovered nigh."
Such soporific verses are of more worth than all the narcotics ever
squeezed from the pores of the poppy. They sound like the trickle of
rain from the eaves, or like the hum of bees about a tulip-tree in
early summer.
Thomson died in August 1748, and was buried in the church of Richmond.
He is said to have been above the middle stature; somewhat corpulent;
of a stupid look and repulsive appearance; taciturn in strange
company, but sociable among his intimate friends; fixed in his
attachments, and fervid in his benevolence. But he was too fat to be
active; and often failed to bestow as well as obtain a favor through
mere indolence. We have already seen that he wrote one poem on this
vice; and reflecting upon its effects in his own affairs, he is said
to have designed an eastern tale 'of the man who loved to be in
distress.'
He has a cenotaph in Westminster Abbey.
II. The father of Edward Young was chaplain to William and Mary, and
afterwards to Queen Anne--the latter of whom, when Princess royal,
stood godmother to the Poet. Young, early in life, lost his father,
and having fallen in with the wild Duke of Wharton, went with him to
Ireland, where he remained long enough to acquire many of that young
nobleman's dissipated habits. The impressions however of his childhood
still had influence upon him, and in his worst hours he defended the
Christian belief against the atheistical Tindall, and his cavilling
companions.
In the least religious years of his life, he wrote a poem called "The
Last Day." Indeed his mind was at all times rather dark and visionary.
It is told of him that "while a mere boy, at Oxford, he would close
his windows at mid-day, and compose by lamp light,"--with a skull upon
his table.
Not lingering upon his many minor works--works now of no interest to
the reader--we will pass on to his three greater ones--"Revenge," a
tragedy--the "Night Thoughts"--and "Love of Fame," a series of
satirical poems. Of the first it will be unnecessary to say more than
that it still keeps possession of the stage. Of the "Night Thoughts,"
Blair and Johnson have both spoken in high terms. These, say they, are
great poems, abounding with "rich and fervid thought expressed in a
manner seldom turgid--often noble." And with this very brief notice,
mindful of the long path before me, I will content myself and proceed
to his satires. These, it strikes me, perhaps singularly, are our
poet's best works. Swift has said of them that they should have been
either "more merry or more severe," and the sententious brevity of
this criticism has made it a popular one. Boileau sacrificed Tasso to
an antithesis; wits suffer an epigrammatic point to outweigh real
merit. We must make allowance therefore for the Dean's professional
indifference to truth of criticism. Young's satires were much labored.
They show it,--_ars_ NON _celat artem_; but this in satire is hardly a
fault. We distrust the severity which we believe born of the hour's
anger: we say the poet will repent of this hollow and unmerited
invective when cool. But when a work bears about it the mark of labor,
we hold it to be the offspring of a judicious and settled hatred of
all that it castigates. Such a work oftenest has truth upon its face.
This exposure of the laboring hand, then, is a merit in the satires
before us. Of their epigrammatic {103} sententiousness, the reader may
judge from a distich or two which I mean now to select from an
indifferent page. Speaking of noblemen:
"These stand for fame on their forefathers' feet,
By heraldry proved valiant or discreet."
* * * * *
"Men should press forward in fame's glorious chase--
Nobles look backward, and so lose the race."
* * * * *
"Titles are marks of honest men and wise--
The fool or knave that wears a title lies."
* * * * *
"They that on glorious ancestors enlarge,
Produce their debt, instead of their discharge."
These are perhaps too frigid and naked. They have the cold insulation
of the blocks in Mosaic. This in satire may be called "the being
meritorious to a fault."
Young was something of an improvisatore, and almost the prettiest
thing that I remember is a little sketch of a garden-scene during his
courtship. One of the ladies referred to was Elizabeth, daughter of
Lee, Earl of Litchfield; she afterwards became his wife.
"Sometime before his marriage, the poet walking in his garden at
Welwyn, with his lady and another, a servant brought him word that a
great person wished to speak with him. 'Tell him,' said the doctor, 'I
am too happily engaged to change my situation.' The ladies insisted he
should go, as his visitor was a man of rank, his patron and his
friend; and as persuasion had no effect on him, they took him, one by
the right hand, the other by the left, and led him to the garden gate.
He then laid his hand upon his heart, and in the expressive manner for
which he was so remarkable, uttered the following lines:
"Thus Adam looked when from the garden driven,
And thus disputed orders sent from heaven;
Like him I go, but yet to go am loth--
Like him I go, for angels drove us both.
Hard was his fate, but mine still more unkind--
His Eve went with him, but mine stays behind."
Passages occurred between our Poet and Voltaire while the latter was
in England, and in these his powers of improvisation stood him in good
stead. I will not quote instances.
Dr. Young has been reckoned an example of primeval piety, but gloom
was mingled with it. When at his house in the country, he spent many
hours among the tombs of his own churchyard. I have noticed his mode
of study while at Oxford. These peculiarities betokened gloominess of
temper, in spite of his occasional fondness for hunting and the
bowling-green. "His wit was" more crushing than "poignant"--his poetic
faculties were rather strong than beautiful.--Indeed his works often
display a dark, stern roughness. In a word, he was a writer of a vast
and sombre imagination--full of metaphor--rather
metaphysical--sometimes obscure, and this rather from idea than
expression; for his diction (as that of most great writers is,) was
simple and healthy. He had the force of the later Pollock, without his
extravagance--the melancholy of Kirke White, without his proneness to
inane complaint; and in a word, possessed many merits with few
failings.
Edward Young died in April, 1765, aged eighty-four years, and was
buried beside his wife under the altarpiece of the church at Welwyn.
III. William Shenstone, of the Leasowes, in Hales Owen, a detached
portion of Shropshire, was born in November, 1714. In early youth he
manifested a great fondness for books--a fondness which increased upon
him with years.
Shenstone did not write from necessity; and until summoned by the
death, in 1745, of Mr. Dolman--a gentleman who appears to have been
_in loco parentis_--to the management of his own estate, he lived "a
restless life, flying to places of fashionable resort, and from one to
another of these."
Four years before the death of Mr. Dolman, he had published two
poems--The Judgment of Hercules, and The Schoolmistress--the latter of
considerable merit. After retiring to his estate in Hales Owen, he
wrote his elegies, odes, ballads, levities, &c. &c, the first of which
have, more than any thing else, gained him his renown as a poet.
Shenstone passed many years of his life in embellishing his grounds at
the Leasowes. Improving on the admirable lessons of Lord Bacon, he
formed an Utopia at the foot of the Wrekin, and "became famous even on
the continent for his taste in gardening." But with Shenstone as a
gardener I have nothing to do. Of his poems, the Schoolmistress is the
most amiable and natural. We find the simplicity of this combined with
a querulous tenderness in his elegies. I scarcely know of any thing in
the elegiac order so pretty and touching as the little poem in which
he refers to the murder of Kenelm the Saxon boy, by a sister who had
been his nurse, and who had doted on him--until an ambitious yearning
after the crown of Mercia, and the words of a paramour, made her,
while hunting among the Clent hills, "do murder on him"--on him whom
an old chronicler has quaintly yet touchingly styled "the sunnye
hayred brotherr of her hearte."
Shenstone was a poet of refined tastes. His fancy was polished, and he
had trained himself well in the art of expression--if expression can
be called an art. Like his brother poets, he worshipped at the shrine
of love--often mingling the myrtle with the cypress. His Delia was no
creature of the imagination. And like the Althea of Lovelace--like the
nameless bringer of "wilde unrest" to Shakspeare--like her who was as
a long-toothed viper at the heart of poor Lope de Vega; in fine,
without multiplying "likes," Delia, if we are to judge from the poet's
tone and life, did not love where she was best loved. Alas! when was
woman as the rose which the nightingale serenades? When opened she her
heart to song? Dante sung to Beatrice--Tasso made the name of Leonora
D'Este famous on earth--Petrarch spun his heart into melody, and
immortalized his Laura--Wyatt rhymed to Anne Boleyn. And how ended
their wooings? Some worse--none better than that of Shenstone.
The letters of our author were thought by himself his best writings.
Those to his friend Mr. Whistler, which he wrote with most care, were
(to the poet's bitter regret) destroyed by Whistler's brother, "a Goth
of a fellow."
William Shenstone died in February, 1763.
He is said to have been a man above the middle stature; somewhat
clumsy in his appearance; careless in his dress, "as in every thing
else but his grounds and his hair," which latter he adjusted in a
particular {104} manner in defiance of fashion; kind to his domestics;
generous to strangers; slow to take offence, and slow to forgive it.
His tomb is in the churchyard of Hales Owen.
IV. "Thomas Gray, eminent for a few poems that he has left, was born
in London in 1716, and died in 1771. He was perhaps the most learned
man in Europe, equally acquainted with the elegant and profound parts
of science. A new arrangement of his poems, with notes and additions,
was made and printed in 8vo. in 1799."
V. I pass over several great names, and come to one whose life was too
short for the attainment of the fame to which nature gave him a title.
Thomas Chatterton, "the marvellous boy," realized the fable of the
nightingale, and sang with his breast against a thorn; but he grew
weary of the world at eighteen, and removed himself from it. And we
can hardly wonder that he should have done so, when we remember the
sad end to which his boyish dreamings came among the garrets and
filthy alleys of London. To fall at once from the high atmosphere,
whither a poet's early longings draw him as with a golden chain--to
find one's castles in air tumbling about one's ears--to feel the veins
ache for want of a little bread--to be driven by that ache to the very
cellars and stews of literature--to rake from some foul corner
wherewithal to support life--are enough to break a spirit stouter even
than that of Chatterton. It did break his spirit, and subvert the pure
principles with which he began life. What stronger proof do we need of
this, than that most amusing yet villainous instance of his
calculating powers, in which he feels "thirteen shillings and sixpence
worth of joy at the Lord Mayor's death?" A charity student in Bristol;
an apprentice sleeping up in an attic with a foot-boy--"the marvellous
youth" had dreams, and adventured to London in search of their
fulfilment. Here he published a volume of poems purporting to be the
remains of "one Rowley." These were full of crabbed spelling and
black-letter phrases, and had so much the appearance of genuine
antiquity, that the world was long divided upon the question of their
origin. These poems are certainly known at the present day to have
been forgeries by Chatterton. He wrote many other poems, chiefly
characterized by a reckless and fiery tone of feeling--by a restless
yearning after "a something to fill the void of a hurt spirit
withal"--and by a dark melancholy, only at rare times lighted up by a
gleam of his wild heart's yet wilder hopes. In London he entered upon
the field of politics, and soon became a caterer for a party
newspaper. Then followed the grinding meanness of booksellers and
editors; and maddened by the consciousness that his genius was poured
out only as water on the dust--that the exertions which he had trusted
would make him great among men, did not suffice to clothe him and
allay hunger,--maddened with the knowledge of these sad truths, are we
to marvel that poor Chatterton should "have done his own death?"
Chatterton was not unlike Byron. The morbid misanthropy hanging
unfixedly about the former--fully developed in the latter--was in both
but a retort upon their fellows. Both had hearts which only detraction
or cold neglect could harden into a hatred of humanity. Both threw out
venom against their enemies. But whence came this venom? The
affections of both were at one time as pure as the sap of the fabled
honey-tree. It was only by a fermentation produced by the hot
atmosphere of hostility or cruel slight, that the sap, once blander
than honey, became a bitter poison.
Chatterton was like Byron too in many other respects,--in his hunger
after immortality--in his alternations of excess and abstinence--in
his self-consciousness of genius--and in the most dark and deistic
views of death. Need I, after all that I have said of his ambition,
his struggles, and his most reckless tone of writing, say that
Chatterton's was a fiery and determined spirit? "His affections were
subordinate to the sterner leanings of the brain. He had the stout
soul and the tender heart of the old-time troubabour; but his heart
was less tender than his soul was stout."
Chatterton could never have been happy. The presence of ambition--that
brain-ache--would have made him miserable, had he lived beyond the
green season of youth even to its gratification. But why do I say that
he could have never been happy? There are surely more kinds of
happiness than the one quiet kind of which Darby and Joan are a fit
instance. Is there _not_ a thunder-storm kind? The mysterious joy
which we see thrown from the heart to the face in the picture of
"Byron on the sea-shore," is surely a species of happiness.
Chatterton, with hope to support him, might have been happy in the
darkest struggles of a dark career. With hope to support him! But
"that was the misery." Despair came to him and he died, (not out of
his boyhood) with no thought of future renown--with no thought but of
present obscurity and present wretchedness.
But although he committed suicide with "no thought of future renown,"
he had scarcely been buried in a shell in the burying-ground of
Shoe-lane Workhouse, before "honors began to gather about his memory."
The famous Tyrwhitt published his poems, with a preface, introduction
and glossary; a few years after, a very splendid edition was published
by Dr. Mills, Dean of Exeter, with a dissertation and commentary; more
lately, Southey, the best biographer of the age, has collected his
works and written his life--and incidental tributes, without number,
have been offered by great names at the pauper-shrine of "the boy of
Bristol." There are some verses of his minstrel's song in "Ella,"
which may be considered as a personal elegy.
"O sing unto my roundelay--
O drop the briny tears with me;
Dance no more at holiday--
Like a running river be.
My love is dead,
Gone to his death-bed,
All under the willow tree.
Black his hair as the summer night,
White his brow as the winter snow,
Red his face as the morning light,
Cold he lies in the grave below.
My love is dead,
Gone to his death-bed,
All under the willow tree.
Sweet his tongue as the throstle's note,
Quick in the dance as thought can be--
Deft his tabor--cudgel stout--
O he lies by the willow tree.
My love is dead,
Gone to his death-bed,
All under the willow tree. {105}
Hist, the raven flaps his wing
To the night-mares as they go,
And the death-owl hoarse doth sing,
From the briared dell below.
My love is dead,
Gone to his death-bed,
All under the willow tree."
I have little or no more to say of Thomas Chatterton; I have already
said too much. But the heart rules the head when we look upon the
wretched career--least wretched in its wretched end--of one fitted for
the loftiest achievements. A rocket with "the wide sky" before it--the
blaze and the flight of his genius was scarcely beyond the fogs that
lie near earth. It fell, blackened, and scorched, and lightless, to
the dust. Had "the marvellous boy" feared death more than he had been
taught to fear life, the rocket would have been in "the wide sky," not
in the dust--the wonder of men, not their pity.
Thomas Chatterton died in 1770, aged seventeen years and nine months.
VI. From the days of old Thomas the Rhymer the barren glens and bleak
hills of Scotland have been holy earth. An essence strong and mystic,
an invisible presence, a something undefined, but powerful, hangs
above and rests upon them. "The mantle of _historic poetry_ is upon
her soil!" and the floating and fragmentary images on this mantle--in
their influence, like those upon the Arras tapestry in the haunted
chamber of Monkbarns--fashion the dreams of one looking upon it
rarely. The dreamer dreams of Wallace wight, and of the deeds of the
Bruce--of Douglas "tender and true," and of the hardy feats of the
moss troopers, whose homes were from Inck Colm to the Solway.
But the mantle of a milder poesy is too upon the Scottish valleys and
hills! Shepherds have tuned the pipe to love among the hollows of
Ettrick Wood--on the levels beside Yarrow--down by the shores of Loch
Lomond, Loch Katrine, Loch Leven and Loch ---- Apollo knows what! A
poet has sat on Eildon hill, and forgotten the hand of Michael the
conjurer in a vision of love. Move where you may you will see the
marks of these. Their songs ring in your ears, as the voices of the
musical doves of the Bahamas haunt him who visits their pebbly islets.
I have now to speak of one who wound these two mantles
together:--mingling the spirit of _martial frolic_[2] with the softer
one of Eros.
[Footnote 2: There is a dash of merry _rattlingsomeness_ in the old
Scottish spirit--that spirit which carried the Kerr and the Scott into
the cattle lands South of the Tweed--rendering it a spirit rather of
_martial frolic_ than of chivalry.]
Most readers are familiar with the life as well as poetry of Robert
Burns. The son of a gardener--brought up to "the plough, scythe and
reap-hook"--his mind took upon itself the sturdy simplicity of his
occupation. Scarcely a moderate English scholar, unversed in "lore of
books," he won himself a place as an author among the greatest men of
his time. Burns, like Scott, was much indebted to the nursery tales of
his childhood for his success in after life. The oak springs from an
acorn--and an old crone's vagaries had a great share in making our
ploughman a poet. "She had," he tells us in his brief autobiography,
"the largest collection in the country of tales and songs concerning
devils, ghosts, fairies, brownies, witches, warlocks, spunkies,
kedyers, elf-candles, dead-lights, wraiths, apparitions, cantraips,
giants, enchanted towers, dragons, and other trumpery."
The earliest composition that he read with pleasure was the Vision of
Mirza, and a hymn of Addison's, beginning
"How are thy servants blest, O Lord."
These he met with in Mason's English Collection, one of his
school-books. He next read the Life of Hannibal, which taught him to
strut after the recruiting drum and bagpipe; and the Life of Wallace,
which made "his veins boil with a Scottish prejudice." From fourteen
to sixteen he lived after a most wretched fashion--toiling at the
plough, and oppressed by poverty.
At sixteen he fell in love, and his own description of the affair is
so characteristic that I will quote it. "In my sixteenth autumn, my
partner (in the harvest field) was a bewitching creature, a year
younger than myself. She was a _bonnie, sweet, sonsie lass_. In short,
she, altogether unwittingly to herself, initiated me into that
delicious passion, which in spite of acid disappointments, gin-horn
prudence, and book-worm philosophy, I hold to be first of human
joys--our dearest blessing here below. How she caught the contagion I
cannot tell. Yet medical people talk much of infection from breathing
the same air, the touch, &c.; 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 labors; why the tones
of her voice made my heart-strings thrill like an Æolian 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 favorite reel which I attempted giving an
imbodied vehicle in rhyme. I was not so presumptuous as to imagine 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
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 he could shear 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 my highest enjoyment."
His nineteenth summer was spent on a smuggling coast, where he learned
"mensuration, surveying, dialling," &c. and improved in his knowledge
of love and whiskey-drinking. "Yet early ingrained piety and virtue
kept him for several years afterward rather within the line of
innocence," notwithstanding that _Vive l'Amour et Vive la Bagatelle_
was his sole principle of action.
Harassed at length by pecuniary difficulties, and driven to the border
of despair, Burns determined on running off to Jamaica to avoid "the
horrors of a jail." Before putting this resolve into execution, he
published a small edition of his poems by subscription. He cleared by
this 20_l_. and gained some reputation. This sum came very seasonably,
as without it he would have been compelled to indent himself for want
of money to pay his passage. He had taken his place in a ship about to
sail from the Clyde, when a letter from Dr. Blacklock, by "opening new
prospects to {106} his poetic ambition," overthrew his runaway
schemes, and led him to Edinburgh. There the Earl of Glencairn became
his patron. His after life is well known.
Burns died in July 1796, and was buried with much state in the
southern church yard of Dumfries.
The great misfortune of our poet's life was to want an aim. Without
this, with a strong appetite for sociability, as well from native
hilarity as from a pride of observation and remark, a constitutional
melancholy or hypochondriasm made him shun solitude. Add to these
incentives to social life, a reputation for bookish knowledge,
(comparatively) a certain wild logical talent, and a strength of
thought something like the rudiments of good sense, and it will seem
no great wonder that "he was ever one in each companie where jollity
and pleasaunce were held in esteeme."
Burns was full of a seeming independence of spirit. He breaks out into
the most fiery expressions of contempt for the rich and the great. But
we recognize in these rather the man of genius than the man of real
independence. If in his real feelings he had been independent of the
rich and the great, they might have gone their way and he would have
gone his, we should have heard nothing of his scorn and disdain. These
were dictated, not as they professed to be, by a spirit of
independence, but by that which, wherever it exists, comes in
abatement of independence--by pride.[3]
[Footnote 3: "A keen desire of aggrandizement in the eyes of others, a
sensitive apprehension of humiliation in their eyes are the
constituents of pride."]
Scotland has had an Allan Ramsay to revive the pastoral visions of
Colin Clout--an earlier Drummond to transmit to posterity the _fresh
philosophy_ of the olden time--a Leyden to haunt the "far east
countries" with the pleasant traditions of Teviotdale--an Allan
Cunningham to embody the spirit of the ancient Scottish romaunt in the
sturdiest language of our own day--a Hogg to fill the Ettrick valleys
with the echoes of his "trueful song"--a Scott to restore to the hills
of Moffat and to the banks of the Annan the lance and the eye-haunting
plume--a Scott to restore knight and monk, to castle and abbey, from
the Skye to Melrose--a Scott to tell of old-time woes by Gallawater
and by Yarrow--but Robert Burns has no master among these. The "Robin
of Ayr had the richest song of them all."