MIGRATION TO DUMFRIES.
A great change it must have been to pass from the pleasant holms and
broomy banks of the Nith at Ellisland to a town home in the Wee Vennel
of Dumfries. It was, moreover, a confession visible to the world of
what Burns himself had long felt, that his endeavour to combine the
actual and the ideal, his natural calling as a farmer with the
exercise of his gift as a poet, had failed, and that henceforth he
must submit to a round of toil, which, neither in itself nor in its
surroundings, had anything to redeem it from commonplace drudgery. He
must have felt from the time when he first became Exciseman, that he
had parted company with all thought of steadily working out his ideal,
and that whatever he might now do in that way must be by random
snatches. To his proud spirit the name of gauger must have been gall
and wormwood, and it is much to his credit that for the sake of his
wife and children he was content to undergo what he often felt to be a
social obloquy. It would have been well for him if this had been the
only drawback to his new calling. Unfortunately the life into which it
led him, exposed him to those very temptations which his nature was
least able to withstand. If social indulgence and irregular habits had
somewhat impaired his better resolves, and his power of poetic (p. 136)
concentration, before he left Ellisland, Dumfries, and the society
into which it threw him, did with increased rapidity the fatal work
which had been already begun. His biographers, though with varying
degrees of emphasis, on the whole agree, that from the time he settled
in Dumfries, "his moral course was downwards."
The social condition of Dumfries at the time when Burns went to live
in it was neither better nor worse than that of other provincial towns
in Scotland. What that was, Dr. Chambers has depicted from his own
youthful experience of just such another country town. The curse of
such towns, he tells us, was that large numbers of their inhabitants
were either half or wholly idle; either men living on competences,
with nothing to do, or shopkeepers with their time but half employed;
their only amusement to meet in taverns, soak, gossip, and make stupid
personal jokes. "The weary waste of spirits and energy at those
soaking evening meetings was deplorable. Insipid toasts, petty
raillery, empty gabble about trivial occurrences, endless disputes on
small questions of fact, these relieved now and then by a song,"--such
Chambers describes as the items which made up provincial town life in
his younger days. "A life," he says, "it was without progress or
profit, or anything that tended to moral elevation." For such dull
companies to get a spirit like Burns among them, to enliven them with
his wit and eloquence, what a windfall it must have been! But for him
to put his time and his powers at their disposal, how great the
degradation! During the day, no doubt, he was employed busily enough
in doing his duty as an Exciseman. This could now be done with less
travelling than in the Ellisland days, and did not require him as
formerly to keep a horse. When the day's work was over, his small (p. 137)
house in the Wee Vennel, and the domestic hearth with the family
ties gathered round it, were not enough for him. At Ellisland he had
sung,--
To make a happy fire-side clime,
For weans and wife,
Is the true pathos and sublime
Of human life.
But it is one thing to sing wisely, another to practise wisdom. Too
frequently at nights Burns's love of sociality and excitement drove
him forth to seek the companionship of neighbours and drouthy cronies,
who gathered habitually at the Globe Tavern and other such haunts.
From these he was always sure to meet a warm welcome, abundant
appreciation, and even flattery, for to this he was not inaccessible,
while their humble station did not jar in any way on his social
prejudices, nor their mediocre talents interfere with his love of
pre-eminence. In such companies Burns no doubt had the gratification
of feeling that he was, what is proverbially called, cock of the walk.
The desire to be so probably grew with that growing dislike to the
rich and the titled, which was observed in him after he came to
Dumfries. In earlier days we have seen that he did not shrink from the
society of the greatest magnates, and when they showed him that
deference which he thought his due, he even enjoyed it. But now so
bitter had grown his scorn and dislike of the upper classes, that we
are told that if any one named a lord, or alluded to a man of rank in
his presence, he instantly "crushed the offender in an epigram, or
insulted him by some sarcastic sally." In a letter written during his
first year at Dumfries, this is the way he speaks of his daily
occupations:--"Hurry of business, grinding the faces of the (p. 138)
publican and the sinner on the merciless wheels of the Excise, making
ballads, and then drinking and singing them; and over and above all,
correcting the press of two different publications." But besides these
duties by day, and the convivialities by night, there were other calls
on his time and strength, to which Burns was by his reputation
exposed. When those of the country gentry whom he still knew were in
Dumfries for some hours, or when any party of strangers passing
through the town, had an idle evening on their hands, it seems to have
been their custom to summon Burns to assist them in spending it; and
he was weak enough, on receiving the message, to leave his home and
adjourn to the Globe, the George, or the King's Arms, there to drink
with them late into the night, and waste his powers for their
amusement. Verily, a Samson, as has been said, making sport for
Philistines!
To one such invitation his impromptu answer was--
The king's most humble servant, I
Can scarcely spare a minute;
But I'll be with you by-and-by,
Or else the devil's in it.
And this we may be sure was the spirit of many another reply to these
ill-omened invitations. It would have been well if, on these
occasions, the pride he boasted of had stood him in better stead, and
repelled such unjustifiable intrusions. But in this, as in so many
other respects, Burns was the most inconsistent of men.
From the time of his migration to Dumfries, it would appear that he
was gradually dropped out of acquaintance by most of the Dumfriesshire
lairds, as he had long been by the parochial and all other (p. 139)
ministers. I have only conversed with one person who remembered in his
boyhood to have seen Burns. He was the son of a Dumfriesshire baronet,
the representative of the House of Redgauntlet. The poet was
frequently in the neighbourhood of the baronet's country seat, but the
old gentleman so highly disapproved of "Robbie Burns," that he forbade
his sons to have anything to do with him. My informant, therefore,
though he had often seen, had never spoken to the poet. When I
conversed with him, his age was nigh four score years, and the one
thing he remembered about Burns was "the blink of his black eye." This
is probably but a sample of the feeling with which Burns was regarded
by most of the country gentry around Dumfries. What were the various
ingredients that made up their dislike of him, it is not easy now
exactly to determine. Politics most likely had a good deal to do with
it, for they were Tories and aristocrats, Burns was a Whig and
something more. Though politics may have formed the chief, they were
not probably the only element in their aversion. Yet though the
majority of the county families turned their backs on him, there were
some with which he still continued intimate.
These were either the few Whig magnates of the southern counties,
whose political projects he supported by electioneering ballads,
charged with all the powers of sarcasm he could wield; or those still
fewer, whose literary tastes were strong enough to make them willing,
for the sake of his genius, to tolerate both his radical politics and
his irregular life. Among these latter was a younger brother of
Burns's old friend, Glen Riddel, Mr. Walter Riddel, who with his wife
had settled at a place four miles from Dumfries, formerly called
Goldie-lea, but named after Mrs. Riddel's maiden name, Woodley (p. 140)
Park. Mrs. Riddel was handsome, clever, witty, not without some
tincture of letters, and some turn for verse-making. She and her
husband welcomed the poet to Woodley Park, where for two years he was
a constant and favourite guest. The lady's wit and literary taste
found, it may be believed, no other so responsive spirit in all the
south of Scotland. In the third year came a breach in their
friendship, followed by a savage lampoon of Burns on the lady, because
she did not at once accept his apology; then, a period of
estrangement. After an interval, however, the Riddels forgave the
insult, and were reconciled to the poet, and when the end came, Mrs.
Riddel did her best to befriend him, and to do honour to his memory
when he was gone.
It ought perhaps to have been mentioned before, that about the time of
Burns's first settling at Dumfries, that is towards the close of 1791,
he paid his last visit to Edinburgh. It was occasioned by the news
that Clarinda was about to sail for the West Indies, in search of the
husband who had forsaken her. Since Burns's marriage the silence
between them seems to have been broken by only two letters to Clarinda
from Ellisland. In the first of these he resents the name of
"villain," with which she appears to have saluted him. In the second
he admits that his past conduct had been wrong, but concludes by
repeating his error and enclosing a song addressed to her in the most
exaggerated strain of love. Now he rushed to Edinburgh to see her once
more before she sailed. The interview was a brief and hurried one, and
no record of it remains, except some letters and a few impassioned
lyrics which about that time he addressed to her. The first letter is
stiff and formal, as if to break the ice of long estrangement. The
others are in the last strain of rapturous devotion--language (p. 141)
which, if feigned, is the height of folly; if real, is worse. The
lyrics are some of them strained and artificial. One, however, stands
out from all the rest, as one of the most impassioned effusions that
Burns ever poured forth. It contains that one consummate stanza in
which Scott, Byron, and many more, saw concentrated "the essence of a
thousand love-tales,"--
Had we never loved so kindly,
Had we never loved so blindly;
Never met, or never parted,
We had ne'er been broken-hearted.
After a time Mrs. M'Lehose returned from the West Indies, but without
having recovered her truant husband. On her return, one or two more
letters Burns wrote to her in the old exaggerated strain--the last in
June, 1794--after which Clarinda disappears from the scene.
Other Delilahs on a smaller scale Burns met with during his Dumfries
sojourn, and to these he was ever and anon addressing songs of fancied
love. By the attentions which the wayward husband was continually
paying to ladies and others into whose society his wife could not
accompany him, the patience of "bonny Jean," it may easily be
conceived, must have been severely tried.
It would have been well, however, if stray flirtations and Platonic
affections had been all that could be laid to his charge. But there is
a darker story. The facts of it are told by Chambers in connexion with
the earlier part of the Dumfries period, and need not be repeated
here. Mrs. Burns is said to have been a marvel of long-suffering and
forgivingness; but the way she bore those wrongs must have touched her
husband's better nature, and pierced him to the quick. When his calmer
moments came, that very mildness must have made him feel, as (p. 142)
nothing else could, what self-reproach was, and what
Self-contempt bitterer to drink than blood.
To the pangs of that remorse have, I doubt not, been truly attributed
those bitter outpourings of disgust with the world and with society,
which are to be found in some of his letters, especially in those of
his later years. Some samples of these outbreaks have been given, more
might easily have been added. The injuries he may have received from
the world and society, what were they compared with those which he
could not help feeling that he had inflicted on himself? It is when a
man's own conscience is against him that the world looks worst.
During the first year at Dumfries, Burns for the first time began to
dabble in politics, which ere long landed him in serious trouble.
Before this, though he had passed for a sort of Jacobite, he had been
in reality a Whig. While he lived in Edinburgh he had consorted more
with Whigs than with Tories, but yet he had not in any marked way
committed himself as a partisan. The only exception to this were some
expressions in his poetry favourable to the Stuarts, and his avowed
dislike to the Brunswick dynasty. Yet, notwithstanding these, his
Jacobitism was but skin deep. It was only with him, as with so many
another Scot of that day, the expression of his discontent with the
Union of 1707, and his sense of the national degradation that had
followed it. When in song he sighed to see _Jamie come hame_, this was
only a sentimental protest against the existing order of things. But
by the time he came to Dumfries the day of Jacobitism was over, (p. 143)
and the whole aspect of the political heavens seemed dark with
coming change. The French Revolution was in full swing, and vibrations
of it were felt in the remotest corners of Europe. These reached even
to the dull provincial towns of Scotland, and roused the pot-house
politicians with whom Burns consorted, at the Globe and other taverns,
to unwonted excitement. Under this new stimulus, Burns's previous
Jacobitism passed towards the opposite, but not very distant, extreme
of Jacobinism. At these gatherings we may easily imagine that, with
his native eloquence, his debating power, trained in the Tarbolton
Club, and his ambition to shine as a public speaker, the voice of
Burns would be the loudest and most vehement. Liberty, Equality,
Fraternity, these were words which must have found an echo in his
inmost heart. But it was not only the abstract rights of man, but the
concrete wrongs of Scotland that would be there discussed. And wrongs
no doubt there were, under which Scotland was suffering, ever since
the Union had destroyed not only her nationality, but almost her
political existence. The franchise had become very close--in the
counties restricted to a few of the chief families--in the boroughs
thrown into the hands of the Baillies, who were venal beyond
conception. It was the day, too, of Henry Dundas. A prominent member
of the Pitt administration, he ruled Scotland as an autocrat, and as
the dispenser of all her patronage. A patriotic autocrat no doubt,
loving his country, and providing well for those of her people whom he
favoured--still an autocrat. The despotism of Dundas has been
pictured, in colours we may well believe sufficiently strong, by Lord
Cockburn and others bent on inditing the Epic of Whiggery, in which
they and their friends should figure as heroes and martyrs. But
whatever may be said against Dundas's régime, as a permanent (p. 144)
system, it must be allowed that this was no time to remodel it when
England was face to face with the French troubles. When the tempest is
breaking over the ship, the captain may reasonably be excused for
thinking that the moment would be ill chosen for renewing cordage or
repairing timbers. Whatever may have been right in a time of quiet, it
was not unnatural that the Pitt administration should postpone all
thoughts of reform, till the vessel of the State had weathered the
storm which was then upon her.
Besides his conviction as to public wrongs to be redressed, Burns had,
he thought, personal grievances to complain of, which, as is so often
seen, added fuel to his reforming zeal. His great powers, which he
believed entitled him to a very different position, were
unacknowledged and disregarded by the then dispensers of patronage.
Once he had been an admirer of Pitt, latterly he could not bear the
mention of his name. Of the ministry, Addington, we have seen, was
fully alive to his merits, and pressed his claims on Pitt, who himself
was quite awake to the charm of Burns's poetry. The Premier, it is
said, "pushed the bottle on to Dundas, and did nothing,"--to Dundas,
too practical and too prosaic to waste a thought on poets and poetry.
Latterly this neglect of him by public men preyed on the spirit of
Burns, and was seldom absent from his thoughts. It added force, no
doubt, to the rapture with which he, like all the younger poets of the
time, hailed the French Revolution, and the fancied dawn of that day,
which would place plebeian genius and worth in those high places,
whence titled emptiness and landed incapacity would be at length
thrust ignominiously down.
Burns had not been more than three months in Dumfries, before he (p. 145)
found an opportunity of testifying by deed his sympathy with the
French Revolutionists. At that time the whole coast of the Solway
swarmed with smuggling vessels, carrying on a contraband traffic, and
manned by men of reckless character, like the Dirk Hatteraick of _Guy
Mannering_. In 1792, a suspicious-looking brig appeared in the Solway,
and Burns, with other excisemen, was set to watch her motions. She got
into shallow water, when the gaugers, enforced by some dragoons, waded
out to her, and Burns, sword in hand, was the first to board her. The
captured brig "Rosamond," with all her arms and stores, was sold next
day at Dumfries, and Burns became the purchaser of four of her guns.
These he sent, with a letter, to the French Legislative Assembly,
requesting them to accept the present as a mark of his admiration and
sympathy. The guns with the letter never reached their destination.
They were, however, intercepted by the Custom-House officers at Dover,
and Burns at once became a suspected man in the eye of the Government.
Lockhart, who tells this incident, connects with it the song, _The
Deil's awa' wi' the Exciseman_, which Burns, he said, composed while
waiting on the shore to watch the brig. But Mr. Scott Douglas doubts
whether the song is referable to this occasion. However this may be,
the folly of Burns's act can hardly be disputed. He was in the employ
of Government, and had no right to express in this way his sympathy
with a movement, which, he must have known, the Government, under whom
he served, regarded, if not yet with open hostility, at least with
jealous suspicion. Men who think it part of their personal right and
public duty unreservedly to express, by word and deed, their views on
politics, had better not seek employment in the public service. (p. 146)
Burns having once drawn upon himself the suspicions of his superiors,
all his words and actions were no doubt closely watched. It was found
that he 'gat the Gazetteer,' a revolutionary print published in
Edinburgh, which only the most extreme men patronized, and which after
a few months' existence was suppressed by Government. As the year 1792
drew to a close, the political heaven, both at home and abroad, became
ominously dark. In Paris the king was in prison, the Reign of Terror
had begun, and innocent blood of loyalists flowed freely in the
streets; the republic which had been established was threatening to
propagate its principles in other countries by force of arms. In this
country, what at the beginning of the year had been but suspicion of
France, was now turned to avowed hostility, and war against the
republic was on the eve of being declared. There were uneasy symptoms,
too, at home. Tom Paine's _Rights of Man_ and _Age of Reason_ were
spreading questionable doctrines and fomenting disaffection. Societies
named Friends of the People were formed in Edinburgh and the chief
towns of Scotland, to demand reform of the representation and other
changes, which, made at such a time were believed by those in power to
cover seditious aims. At such a crisis any government might be
expected to see that all its officers, from the highest to the lowest,
were well affected. But though the Reign of Terror had alarmed many
others who had at first looked favourably on the Revolution in France,
Burns's ardour in its cause was no whit abated. He even denounced the
war on which the ministry had determined; he openly reviled the men in
power; and went so far in his avowal of democracy that at a social
meeting, he proposed as a toast, "Here's the last verse of the (p. 147)
last chapter of the last Book of Kings." This would seem to be but one
specimen of the freedom of political speech in which Burns at this
time habitually indulged,--the truculent way in which he flaunted
defiance in the face of authority. It would not have been surprising,
if at any time the Government had ordered inquiry to be made into such
conduct, much less in such a season of anxiety and distrust. That an
inquiry was made is undoubted; but as to the result which followed it,
there is uncertainty. Some have thought that the poet received from
his superiors only a slight hint or caution to be more careful in
future. Others believed, that the matter went so far that he was in
serious danger of dismissal from his post; and that this was only
averted by the timely interposition of some kind and powerful friends.
That Burns himself took a serious view of it, and was sufficiently
excited and alarmed, may be seen from two letters which he wrote, the
one at the time of the occurrence, the other soon after it. It was
thus that in December, 1792, he addressed Mr. Graham of Fintray, the
same person whose good offices had at first obtained for the poet his
appointment, and whose kindness never failed him while he lived:--
"Sir,--I have been surprised, confounded, and distracted by Mr.
Mitchell, the collector, telling me that he has received an order from
your Board, to inquire into my political conduct, and blaming me as a
person disaffected to Government.
"Sir, you are a husband and a father. You know what you would feel to
see the much-loved wife of your bosom, and your helpless, prattling
little ones turned adrift into the world, degraded and disgraced from
a situation in which they had been respectable and respected, and left
almost without the necessary support of a miserable existence. (p. 148)
"Alas! sir, must I think that such soon will be my lot! and from the
dark insinuations of hellish, groundless envy, too! I believe, sir, I
may aver it, and in the sight of Omniscience, that I would not tell a
deliberate falsehood, no, not though even worse horrors, if worse can
be, than those I have mentioned, hung over my head; and I say, that
the allegation, whatever villain has made it, is a lie! To the British
Constitution, on revolution principles, next after my God, I am most
devoutly attached. You, sir, have been much and generously my
friend.--Heaven knows how warmly I have felt the obligation, and how
gratefully I have thanked you. Fortune, sir, has made you powerful,
and me impotent--has given you patronage, and me dependence. I would
not, for my single self, call on your humanity; were such my insular,
unconnected situation, I would despise the tear that now swells in my
eye. I would brave misfortune--I could face ruin, for at the worst
Death's thousand doors stand open; but the tender concerns that I have
mentioned, the claims and ties that I see at this moment, and feel
around me, how they unnerve courage and wither resolution! To your
patronage, as a man of some genius, you have allowed me a claim; and
your esteem, as an honest man, I know is my due. To these, sir, permit
me to appeal; by these may I adjure you, to save me from that misery
which threatens to overwhelm me, and which--with my latest breath I
will say it--I have not deserved. R. B."
That this appeal was not without effect may be gathered from a letter
on this same affair, which Burns addressed on the 13th April, 1793, to
Mr. Erskine, of Mar, in which he says one of the supervisors-general,
a Mr. Corbet, "was instructed to inquire on the spot, and to (p. 149)
document me that my business was to act, _not to think_: and that,
whatever might be men or measures, it was for me to be _silent_ and
_obedient_."
Much obloquy has been heaped upon the Excise Board--but on what
grounds of justice I have never been able to discover--for the way in
which they on this occasion dealt with Burns. The members of the Board
were the servants of the Government, to which they were responsible
for the conduct of all their subordinates. To have allowed any of
their subordinates to set themselves up by word or deed in opposition
to the Ministry, and especially at such a crisis, was inconsistent
with the ideas of the time as to official duty. And when called on to
act, it is hard to see how they could have done so with more leniency
than by hinting to him the remonstrance which so alarmed and irritated
the recipient of it. Whatever may be said of his alarm,--his irritation,
if perhaps natural, was not reasonable. No man has a right to expect
that, because he is a genius, he shall be absolved from those rules of
conduct, either in private or in public life, which are held binding
on his more commonplace brethren. About the time when he received this
rebuke, he wrote to Mrs. Dunlop, "I have set, henceforth, a seal on my
lips as to these unlucky politics." But neither his own resolve nor
the remonstrance of the Excise Board seem to have weighed much with
him. He continued at convivial parties to express his feelings freely,
and at one of these, shortly after he had been rebuked by the Excise
Board, when the health of William Pitt was drunk, he followed it by
craving a bumper "to the health of a much better man--General
Washington." And on a subsequent occasion, as we shall see, he brought
himself into trouble by giving an injudicious toast. The (p. 150)
repression brought to bear on Burns cannot have been very stringent
when he was still free to sport such sentiments. The worst effect of
the remonstrance he received seems to have been to irritate his
temper, and to depress his spirits by the conviction, unfounded though
it was, that all hope of promotion for him was over.
But amid all the troubles entailed on him by his conduct, domestic,
social, and political, the chief refuge and solace which he found, was
in exercising his gifts of song. All hope of his ever achieving a
great poem, which called for sustained effort, was now over. Even
poems descriptive of rustic life and characters, such as he had
sketched in his Ayrshire days--for these he had now no longer either
time or inclination. His busy and distracted life, however, left him
leisure from time to time to give vent to his impulses, or to soothe
his feelings by short arrow-flights of song. He found in his own
experience the truth of those words of another poet,--
They can make who fail to find
Short leisure even in busiest days,
Moments to cast a look behind,
And profit by those kindly rays,
Which through the clouds will sometimes steal,
And all the far-off past reveal.
Such breaks in the clouds he eagerly waited for, and turned every
golden gleam to song.
It may be remembered that while Burns was in Edinburgh he became
acquainted with James Johnson, who was engaged in collecting the Songs
of Scotland in a work called the _Musical Museum_. He had at once
thrown himself ardently into Johnson's undertaking, and put all his
power of traditional knowledge, of criticism, and of original
composition at Johnson's disposal. This he continued to do through (p. 151)
all the Ellisland period, and more or less during his residence in
Dumfries. To the _Museum_ Burns from first to last gratuitously
contributed not less than one hundred and eighty-four songs original,
altered, or collected.
During the first year that Burns lived in Dumfries, in September,
1792, he received an invitation from Mr. George Thomson, to lend the
aid of his lyrical genius to a collection of Scottish melodies, airs,
and words, which a small band of musical amateurs in Edinburgh were
then projecting. This collection was pitched to a higher key than the
comparatively humble _Museum_. It was to be edited with more rigid
care, the symphonies and accompaniments were to be supplied by the
first musicians of Europe, and it was to be expurgated from all leaven
of coarseness, and from whatever could offend the purest taste. To
Thomson's proposal Burns at once replied, "As the request you make to
me will positively add to my enjoyment in complying with it, I shall
enter into your undertaking with all the small portion of abilities I
have, strained to their utmost exertion by the impulse of
enthusiasm....
"If you are for English verses, there is, on my part, an end of the
matter. Whether in the simplicity of the ballad, or the pathos of the
song, I can only hope to please myself in being allowed at least a
sprinkling of our native tongue.... As to remuneration, you may think
my songs either above or below price; for they shall be absolutely the
one or the other. In the honest enthusiasm with which I embark in your
undertaking, to talk of money, wages, fee, hire, &c., would be
downright prostitution of soul."
In this spirit he entered on the enterprise which Thomson opened (p. 152)
before him, and in this spirit he worked at it to the last, pouring
forth song after song almost to his latest breath. Hardly less
interesting than the songs themselves, which from time to time he sent
to Thomson, were the letters with which he accompanied them. In these
his judgment and critical power are as conspicuous, as his genius and
his enthusiasm for the native melodies. For all who take interest in
songs and in the laws which govern their movement, I know not where
else they would find hints so valuable as in these occasional remarks
on his own and others' songs, by the greatest lyric singer whom the
modern world has seen.
The bard who furnished the English songs for this collection was a
certain Dr. Wolcot, known as Peter Pindar. This poetizer, who seems to
have been wholly devoid of genius, but to have possessed a certain
talent for hitting the taste of the hour, was then held in high
esteem; he has long since been forgotten. Even Burns speaks of him
with much respect, "The very name of Peter Pindar is an acquisition to
your work," he writes to Thomson. Well might Chambers say, "It is a
humiliating thought that Peter Pindar was richly pensioned by the
booksellers, while Burns, the true sweet singer, lived in comparative
poverty." Hard measure has been dealt to Thomson for not having
liberally remunerated Burns for the priceless treasures which he
supplied to the Collection. Chambers and others, who have thoroughly
examined the whole matter, have shown this censure to be undeserved.
Thomson himself was by no means rich, and his work brought him nothing
but outlay as long as Burns lived. Indeed once, in July, 1793, when
Thomson had sent Burns some money in return for his songs, the bard
thus replied:--
"I assure you, my dear sir, that you truly hurt me with your (p. 153)
pecuniary parcel. It degrades me in my own eyes. However, to return it
would savour of affectation; but, as to any more traffic of that
debtor and creditor kind, I swear, by that honour which crowns the
upright statue of _Robert Burns's Integrity_, on the least motion of
it, I will indignantly spurn the by-pact transaction, and from that
moment commence entire stranger to you. Burns's character for
generosity of sentiment and independence of mind, will, I trust long
outlive any of his wants which the cold, unfeeling ore can supply; at
least I will take care that such a character he shall deserve."
This sentiment was no doubt inconsistent, and may be deemed Quixotic,
when we remember that for his poems Burns was quite willing to accept
all that Creech would offer. Yet one cannot but honour it. He felt
that both Johnson and Thomson were enthusiasts, labouring to embalm in
a permanent form their country's minstrelsy, and that they were doing
this without any hope of profit. He too would bear his part in the
noble work; if he had not in other respects done full justice to his
great gifts, in this way he would repay some of the debt he owed to
his country, by throwing into her national melodies the whole wealth
and glory of his genius. And this he would do, "all for love and
nothing for reward." And the continual effort to do this worthily was
the chief relaxation and delight of those sad later years. When he
died, he had contributed to Thomson's work sixty songs, but of these
only six had then appeared, as only one half-volume of Thomson's work
had then been published. Burns had given Thomson the copyright of all
the sixty songs; but as soon as a posthumous edition of the poet's
works was proposed, Thomson returned all the songs to the poet's
family, to be included in the forthcoming edition, along with (p. 154)
the interesting letters which had accompanied the songs. Thomson's
collection was not completed till 1841, when the sixth and last volume
of it appeared. It is affecting to know that Thomson himself, who was
older than Burns by two years, survived him for more than five-and-fifty,
and died in February, 1851, at the ripe old age of ninety-four.