Our poet seems to have kept up an angry correspondence during his confinement with his bookseller, Mr. Creech, whom he also abuses very heartily in his letters to his friends in Ayrshire. The publisher's accounts, however, when they were at last made up, must have given the impatient author a very agreeable surprise; for, in his letter above quoted, to Lord Glencairn, we find him expressing his hopes that the gross profits of his book might amount to "better than £200," whereas, on the day of settling with Mr. Creech, he found himself in possession of £500, if not of £600. Mr. Nicoll, the most intimate friend Burns had, writes to Mr John Lewars, excise officer at Dumfries, immediately on hearing of the poet's death,—“ He certainly told me that he received £600 for the first Edinburgh edition, and £100 afterwards for the copyright."-Dr. Currie states the gross product of Creech's edition at £500, and Burns himself, in one of his printed letters, at £400 only. Nicoll hints, in the letter already referred to, that Burns had contracted debts while in Edinburgh, which he might not wish to avow on all occasions; and if we are to believe this-and, as is probable, the expense of printing the subscription edition, should, moreover, be deducted from the £700 stated by Mr. Nicoll-the apparent contradictions in these stories may be pretty nearly reconciled. There appears to be reason for thinking that Creech subsequently paid more than £100 for the copyright. If he did not, how came Burns to realize, as Currie states it at the end of his Memoir," nearly £900 in all by his poems?" This supply came truly in the hour of need; and it seems to have elevated his spirits greatly, and given him for the time a new stock of confidence; for he now resumed immediately his purpose of taking Mr. Miller's farm, retaining his excise commission in his pocket as a dernier resort, to be made use of only should some reverse of fortune come upon him. His first act, however, was to relieve his brother from his difficulties, by advancing £180 or £200, to assist him in the management of Mossgiel. "I give myself no airs on this," he generously says, in a letter to Dr. Moore, "for it was mere selfishness on my part. I was conscious that the wrong scale of the balance was pretty heavily charged, and I thought that the throwing a little filial piety and fraternal affection into the scale in my favour, might help to smooth matters at the grand reckoning.” • General Correspondence,— No. 66. CHAPTER VII. CONTENTS. - Marries - Announcements, (apologetical), of the event-Remarks-Becomes (1788) Farmer at Elliesland, on the Nith, in a romantic vicinity, six miles from DumfriesThe Muse wakeful as ever, while the Poet maintains a varied and extensive literary correspondence with all and sundry-Remarks upon the correspondence-Sketch of his person and habits at this period by a brother poet, who shows cause against success in farmingThe untoward conjunction of Gauger to Farmer-The notice of the squirearchy, and the calls of admiring visitors, lead too uniformly to the ultra convivial life—Leaves Ellieslana (1791) to be exciseman in the town of Dumfries. "To make a happy fireside clime For weans and wife That's the true pathos and sublime BURNS, as soon as his bruised limb was able for a journey, went to Mossgiel, and went through the ceremony of a Justice-of-Peace marriage with Jean Armour, in the writing-chambers of his friend Gavin Hamilton. He then crossed the country to Dalswinton, and concluded his bargain with Mr. Miller as to the farm of Elliesland, on terms which must undoubtedly have been considered by both parties, as highly favourable to the poet; they were indeed fixed by two of Burns's own friends, who accompanied him for that purpose from Ayrshire. The lease was for four successive terms. of nineteen years each,-in all seventy six years; the rent for the first three years and crops £50; during the remainder of the period £70 per annum. Mr. Miller bound himself to defray the expense of any plantations which Burns might please to make on the banks of the river; and, the farm-house and offices being in a delapidated condition, the new tenant was to receive £300 from the proprietor, for the erection of suitable buildings. Burns entered on possession of his farm at Whitsuntide 1788, but the necessary rebuilding of the house prevented his removing Mrs. Burns thither until the season was far advanced. He had, moreover, to qualify himself for holding his excise commission by six weeks' attendance on the business of that profession at Ayr. From these circumstances, he led all the summer a wandering and unsettled life, and Dr. Currie mentions this as one of his chief misfortunes. The poet, as he says, was continually riding between Ayrshire and Dumfriesshire, and often spending a night on the road," sometimes fell into company, and forgot the resolutions he had formed." What these resolutions were, the poet himself shall tell us. On the third day of his residence at Elliesland, he thus writes to Mr. Ainslie : -"I have all along hitherto, in the warfare of life, been bred to arms, among the light-horse, the piquet guards of fancy, a kind of hussars and Highlanders of the brain; but I am firmly resolved to sell out of these giddy battalions. Cost what it will, I am determined to buy in among the grave squadrons of heavy-armed thought, or the artillery corps of plodding con trivance. Were it not for the terrors of my ticklish situation respecting a family of children, I am decidedly of opinion that the step I have taken is vastly for my happiness." To all his friends he expresses himself in terms of similar satisfaction in regard to his marriage. "Your surmise, Madam," he writes to Mrs. Dunlop," is just. I am indeed a husband. I found a once much-loved, and still much-loved female, literally and truly cast out to the mercy of the naked elements, but as I enabled her to purchase a shelter; and there is no sporting with a fellow-creature's happiness or misery. The most placid goodnature and sweetness of disposition; a warm heart, gratefully devoted with all its powers to love me; vigorous health and sprightly cheerfulness, set off to the best advantage by a more than commonly handsome figure; these, I think, in a woman, may make a good wife, though she should never have read a page but the Scriptures of the Old and New Testament, nor danced in a brighter assembly than a penny-pay wedding. To jealousy or infidelity I am an equal stranger; my preservative from the first, is the most thorough consciousness of her sentiments of honour, and her attachment to me; my antidote against the last, is my long and deeprooted affection for her. In housewife matters, of aptness to learn, and activity to execute, she is eminently mistress, and during my absence in Nithsdale, she is regularly and constantly an apprentice to my mother and sisters in their dairy, and other rural business. You are right, that a bachelor state would have ensured me more friends; but from a cause you will easily guess, conscious peace in the enjoyment of my own mind, and unmistrusting confidence in approaching my God, would seldom have been of the number." + "was not, Some months later he tells Miss Chalmers that his marriage perhaps, in consequence of the attachment of romance,"-(he is addressing a young lady)," but," he continues, "I have no cause to repent it. If I have not got polite tattle, modish manners, and fashionable dress, I am not sickened and disgusted with the multiform curse of boarding-school affectation; and I have got the handsomest figure, the sweetest temper, the soundest constitution, and the kindest heart in the country. Mrs. Burns believes as firmly as her creed, that I am le plus bel esprit et le plus honnête homme in the universe; although she scarcely ever, in her life, except the Scriptures and the Psalms of David in Metre, spent five minutes together on either prose or verse-I must except also a certain late publication of Scots poems, which she has perused very devoutly, and all the ballads of the country, as she has (O the partial lover, you will say), the finest woodnote-wild I ever heard."-It was during this honeymoon, as he calls it, while chiefly resident in a miserable hovel at Elliesland, ‡ and only occasionally spending a day or two in Ayrshire, that he wrote the beautiful song: "Of a' the airts the wind can blaw I dearly like the west, O blaw, ye westlin winds, blaw saft amang the leafy trees, Reliques, p. 63. + See General Correspondence, No. 53; and Reliques, p. 60. Ibid. p. 273. One of Burns's letters, written not long after this, contains a passage strongly marked with his haughtiness of character. "I have escaped,' says he, "the fantastic caprice, the apish affectation, with all the other blessed boarding-school acquirements which are sometimes to be found among females of the upper ranks, but almost universally pervade the misses of the would-be gentry." "A discerning reader," says Mr. Walker, "will perceive that the letters in which he announces his marriage to some of his most respected correspondents, are written in that state when the mind is pained by reflecting on an unwelcome step, and finds relief to itself in seeking arguments to justify the deed, and lessen its disadvantages in the opinion of others." + I confess I am not able to discern any traces of this kind of feeling in any of Burns's letters on this interesting and important occasion. The Rev. Hamilton Paul takes an original view of this business :-" Much praise," says he, has been lavished on Burns for renewing his engagement with Jean when in the blaze of his fame. . . The praise is misplaced. We do not think a man entitled to credit or commendation for doing what the law could compel him to perform. Burns was in reality a married man, and it is truly ludicrous to hear him, aware as he must have been, of the indissoluble power of the obligation, though every document was destroyed, talking of himself as a bachelor." There is no justice in these remarks. It is very true, that, by a merciful fiction of the law of Scotland, the female, in Miss Armour's condition, who produces a written promise of marriage, is considered as having furnished evidence of an irregular marriage having taken place between her and her lover; but in this case the female herself had destroyed the document, and lived for many months not only not assuming, but rejecting the character of Burns's wife; and had she, under such circumstances, attempted to establish a marriage, with no document in her hand, and with no parole evidence to show that any such document had ever existed, to say nothing of proving its exact tenor, but that of her own father, it is clear that no ecclesiastical court in the world could have failed to decide against her. So far from Burns's having all along regarded her as his wife, it is extremely doubtful whether she had ever for one moment considered him as actually her husband, until he declared the marriage of 1788. Burns did no more than justice as well as honour demanded; but the act was one which no human tribunal could have compelled him to perform. 86 To return to our story. Burns complains sadly of his solitary condition, when living in the only hovel that he found extant on his farm. "I am," says he, (September 9th) busy with my harvest, but for all that most pleasurable part of life called social intercourse, I am here at the very elbow of existence. The only things that are to be found in this country in any degree of perfection, are stupidity and canting. Prose they only know in graces, &c., and the value of these they estimate as they do their plaiding webs, by the ell. As for the muses, they have as much idea of a rhinoceros as of a poet." And in another letter (September 16th) he says, "This hovel that I shelter in while occasionally here, is pervious to every blast that blows, and every shower that falls, and I am only preserved from being chilled to death by being suffocated by smoke. You will be pleased to hear that I have laid aside idle eclat, and bind every day after + Morrison, vol. i. p. lxxxvii. • General Correspondence, No. 55. Paul's Life of Burns, p. 45. my reapers." His house, however, did not take much time in building, nor had he reason to complain of want of society long. He brought his wife home to Elliesland about the end of November; and few housekeepers start with a larger provision of young mouths to feed than this couple. Mrs. Burns had lain in this autumn, for the second time, of twins, and I suppose “sonsy, smirking, dear-bought Bess," accompanied her younger brothers and sisters from Mossgiel. From that quarter also Burns brought a whole establishment of servants, male and female, who, of course, as was then the universal custom amongst the small farmers, both of the west and of the south of Scotland, partook, at the same table, of the same fare with their master and mistress. Elliesland is beautifully situated on the banks of the Nith, about six miles above Dumfries, exactly opposite to the house of Dalswinton, of those noble woods and gardens amidst which Burns's landlord, the ingenious Mr. Patrick Miller, found relaxation from the scientific studies and researches in which he so greatly excelled. On the Dalswinton side, the river washes lawns and groves; but over against these the bank rises into a long red scaur, of considerable height, along the verge of which, where the bare shingle of the precipice all but overhangs the stream, Burns had his favourite walk, and might now be seen striding alone, early and late, especially when the winds were loud, and the waters below him swollen and turbulent. For he was one of those that enjoy nature most in the more serious and severe of her aspects; and throughout his poetry, for one allusion to the liveliness of spring, or the splendour of summer, it would be easy to point out twenty in which he records the solemn delight with which he contemplated the melancholy grandeur of autumn, or the savage gloom of winter; and he has himself told us, that it was his custom" to take a gloamin' shot at the muses." The poet was accustomed to say, that the most happy period of his life was the first winter he spent at Elliesland,-for the first time under a roof of his own with his wife and children about him-and in spite of occasional lapses into the melancholy which had haunted his youth, looking forward to a life of well-regulated, and not ill-rewarded, industry. It is known that he welcomed his wife to her rooftree at Elliesland in the song, "I hae a wife o' mine ain, I'll partake wi' naebody; In commenting on this "little lively lucky song," as he well calls it, Mr. A Cunningham says, "Burns had built his house, he had committed his seed-corn to the ground, he was in the prime, nay the morning of life— health, and strength, and agricultural skill were on his side-his genius had been acknowledged by his country, and rewarded by a subscription, more extensive than any Scottish poet ever received before; no wonder, therefore, that he broke out into voluntary song, expressive of his sense of importance and independence." Burns, in his letters of the year 1789, makes many apologies for doing but little in his poetical vocation; his farm, without doubt, occupied much of his attention, but the want of social intercourse, of which he complained on his first arrival in Nithsdale, had by this time totally disappeared. On • POETICAL INVENTORY to Mr. Aiken, February 1786. |