the blow of calumny should dash it to the ground, with all the eagerness of vengeful triumph. Your patronising me, and interesting yourself in my fame and character as a poet, I rejoice in-it exalts me in my own idea-and whether you can or can not aid me in my subscription, is a trifle. Has a paltry subscription-bill any charms to the heart of a bard, compared with the patronage of the descendant of the immortal Wallace! R. B. TO DR MOORE. EDINBURGH [January 16th or 17th ?] 1787. SIR-Mrs Dunlop has been so kind as to send me extracts of letters she has had from you, where you do the rustic bard the honour of noticing him and his works. Those who have felt the anxieties and solicitudes of authorship, can only know what pleasure it gives to be noticed in such a manner by judges of the first character. Your criticisms, sir, I receive with reverence; only I am sorry they mostly come too late; a peccant passage or two that I would certainly have altered, were gone to the press. The hope to be admired for ages is, in by far the greatest part of those even who are authors of repute, an unsubstantial dream. For my part, my first ambition was, and still my strongest wish is, to please my compeers, the rustic inmates of the hamlet, while everchanging language and manners shall allow me to be relished and understood. I am very willing to admit, that I have some poetical abilities; and as few, if any writers, either moral or poetical, are intimately acquainted with the classes of mankind among whom I have chiefly mingled, I may have seen men and manners in a different phasis from what is common, which may assist originality of thought. Still, I know very well the novelty of my character has by far the greatest share in the learned and polite notice I have lately had; and in a language where Pope and Churchill have raised the laugh, and Shenstone and Gray drawn the tear; where Thomson and Beattie have painted the landscape, and Lyttleton and Collins described the heart-I am not vain enough to hope for distinguished poetic fame. R. B. To this letter Dr Moore sent the following answer :— CLIFFORD STREET, January 23, 1787. SIR-I have just received your letter, by which I find I have reason to complain of my friend Mrs Dunlop, for transmitting to you extracts from my letters to her, by much too freely and too carelessly written for your perusal. I must forgive her, however, in consideration of her good intention, as you will forgive me, I hope, for the freedom I use with certain expressions, in consideration of my admiration of the poems in general. If I may judge of the author's disposition from his works, with all the other good qualities of a poet, he has not the irritable temper ascribed to that race of men by one of their own number, whom you have the happiness to resemble in ease and curious felicity of expression. Indeed the poetical beauties, however original and brilliant, and lavishly scattered, are not all I admire in your works; the love of your native country, that feeling sensibility to all the objects of humanity, and the independent spirit which breathes through the whole, give me a most favourable impression of the poet, and have made me often regret that I did not see the poems, the certain effect of which would have been my seeing the author last summer, when I was longer in Scotland than I have been for many years. I rejoice very sincerely at the encouragement you receive at Edinburgh, and I think you particularly fortunate in the patronage of Dr Blair, who, I am informed, interests himself very much for you. I beg to be remembered to him; nobody can have a warmer regard for that gentleman than I have, which, independent of the worth of his character, would be kept alive by the memory of our common friend, the late Mr George B[annatyn]e. Before I received your letter, I sent, enclosed in a letter to a sonnet by Miss Williams, a young poetical lady,' which she wrote on reading your Mountain Daisy; perhaps it may not displease you : "While soon "the garden's flaunting flowers" decay, And scattered on the earth neglected lie, The "Mountain Daisy," cherished by the ray 'Mid Penury's bare soil and bitter gale; By Genius in her native vigour nurst, On Nature with impassioned look he gazed; His heaven-taught numbers Fame herself will guard.' I have been trying to add to the number of your subscribers, but find that many of my acquaintance are already among them. I have only to add, that, with every sentiment of esteem, and the most cordial good wishes, I am, your obedient humble servant, J. MOORE. Burns, in his letter of 15th January to Mrs Dunlop, speaks of additional stanzas of The Vision, of which he was to publish only 1 Miss Helen Maria Williams was a notable contributor to popular literature at that time and for many years later. a part in the new edition. I have seen a copy in the bard's handwriting of the entire poem as it had then stood. It is a curious and valuable document, but for an unexpected reason-namely, its proving, what might otherwise have been doubted, that Burns was not incapable of writing weakly. The whole of the inedited stanzas are strikingly of this character. Most of them are panegyrical of country gentlefolks who had shewn him some degree of kindness, or whose ancestral history interested him. Perhaps there is, after all, a second and a greater importance in the document, as shewing how, with the capability to write ineffectively, his taste was so unerring as to prevent him from publishing a single line that was not fitted to command respect, for every one of the poor stanzas has been thrown out on his sending the poem to the press. TO JOHN BALLANTYNE, ESQ. [January 1787.]* While here I sit, sad and solitary, by the side of a fire in a little country inn, and drying my wet clothes, in pops a poor fellow of a sodger, and tells me he is going to Ayr. By Heavens! say I to myself, with a tide of good spirits which the magic of that sound, auld toon o' Ayr, conjured up, I will send my last song to Mr Ballantyne. Here it is This date is given on conjecture by Allan Cunningham; it is probably very near the truth. Aft hae I roved by bonnie Doon, To see the woodbine twine, Wi' lightsome heart I pu'd a rose And my fause luver staw the rose, This song referred to the same unhappy love-tale, which had been the subject of conversation at Mr Lawrie's table some months previously. Burns then took an unfavourable view of the conduct of the young lady, but he had now learned to look upon it with the tenderness and pity which alone could make it a fit subject for verse. The heroine was a member of a most respectable family, and ultimately became heiress of her father's estate in Carrick. I am afraid that a full recital of the circumstances would leave the reader little choice between the opinion of Burns as a man of the world and Burns as a poet. It may only be remarked, in behalf of the lady, that her errors commenced in the years of youth and inexperience, and under circumstances that might have been expected to protect her from such evil. Captain M., her lover, was the son of a wealthy Wigtonshire proprietor, and though only twenty-five years of age, representative of his county in parliament. Although now, at the distance of two years from the commencement of their intimacy, we find a ballad from the pen of Burns bewailing the falsehood of the lover, it does not really appear that any charge of this kind could be brought against him. Certain it also is, that the connection was not finally broken off till after the birth of an infant in 1794, when at length the unfortunate lady instituted a declarator of marriage and legitimacy in behalf of herself and child in the Consistorial Court, with a subsidiary conclusion for damages in case of failure. She died not long after, probably the victim of anguished feelings; but the process went on in behalf of her infant. The consistorial judges pronounced in 1798 for the marriage of the pair, and the consequent legitimacy of the child; but the Court of Session, on review, reversed this judgment, with an order for the payment of £3000 to the daughter. Upon the whole, this story 1 Another copy of this song, considerably altered, is afterwards introduced. 2 The case is detailed in Fergusson's Consistorial Law Reports. does not breathe the present tone of British aristocratic society, and one cannot help believing it to be characteristic of its own age-one in which, in several respects, there seems to have been a momentary retrogression towards the licentiousness of a wellknown period in the preceding century. What has been previously advanced as to Dr Blacklock's letter to Mr Lawrie having only been partially the means of bringing Burns to Edinburgh, is supported by the fact, that Burns allowed several weeks to elapse before he saw the blind poet. About the 11th or 12th of December, Blacklock wrote to Mr Lawrie, to recommend that Mackenzie's criticism should be prefixed to the new edition of the Poems, instead of his letter of the 4th September, which had all the disadvantages of an extempore effusion. He added: 'By the by, I hear that Mr Burns is, and has been, some time in Edinburgh. These news I am sorry to have heard at second-hand; they would have come much more welcome from the bard's own mouth. I have, however, written to Mr Mackenzie, the Man of Feeling, to beg the favour that he would bring us together.' On Friday, the 22d December, Mr Lawrie informed Burns that he had last week had a letter from Dr Blacklock, expressing a desire to see the Ayrshire Ploughman. 'I write this to you,' says Lawrie, 'that you may lose no time in waiting upon him, should you not yet have seen him.' The excellent minister of Loudon adds some advice on the score of a modest diffidence and an invincible temperance, as necessary to sustain him in the new scenes into which he had been so suddenly introduced. Burns appears to have now hastened to visit Blacklock; yet he allows several weeks to clapse before answering Mr Lawrie's letter-also a fact speaking somewhat for the view we take of the immediately-prompting causes of the poet's migration from Ayrshire: 1 2 EDINBURGH, February 5, 1787. REVEREND AND DEAR SIR-When I look at the date of your kind letter, my heart reproaches me severely with ingratitude in neglecting so long to answer it. I will not trouble you with any account, by way of apology, of my hurried life and distracted attention; do me the justice to believe that my delay by no 1 From the original in possession of the Rev. Mr Balfour Graham, North Berwick. |