When he at length began to make serious demonstrations, he found that the heart of Peggy had been for some time engaged to another, and it cost him, as he tells us, some heartaches to get quit of the affair. There is a fourth song, on the history of which a little obscurity rests. It is alluded to by the poet himself as 'the ebullition of that passion which ended the school business' at Kirkoswald. It appears, however, from the style of composition, to have been produced some years after the visit to Kirkoswald, when the acquaintance with the fair fillette who had overset his trigonometry was temporarily renewed. The date of this revived passion may be set down to the summer and autumn of 1784, for there is extant a brief letter written by him in November of that year to Thomas Orr of Park, in which he speaks of an affair of gallantry as embarrassing him, so that he was glad to have had 'Peggy' off his hand, this Peggy being, according to his sister, the same Margaret Thomson whom he had seen as a stripling at Kirkoswald. The song is one presenting some sweet descriptive lines, but not apparently calculated for popular singing : SONG COMPOSED IN AUGUST. TUNE-I had a Horse, I had nae mair. Now westlin winds and slaught'ring guns Now waving grain, wide o'er the plain, And the moon shines bright, when I rove at night The partridge loves the fruitful fells; heron Thus every kind their pleasure find, Some social join, and leagues combine; Avaunt, away! the cruel sway, Tyrannic man's dominion; The sportsman's joy, the murdering cry, But Peggy, dear, the evening's clear, We'll gently walk, and sweetly talk, So dear can be as thou to me, In April of 1783, the poet opened a commonplace-book with the following matters: OBSERVATIONS, HINTS, SONGS, SCRAPS OF POETRY, &c., by ROBERT BURNESS-a man who had little art in making money, and still less in keeping it, but was, however, a man of some sense, a great deal of honesty, and unbounded good-will to every creature, rational and irrational. As he was but little indebted to scholastic education, and bred at a plough-tail, his performances must be strongly tinctured with his unpolished, rustic way of life; but as I believe they are really his own, it may be some entertainment to a curious observer of human nature to see how a ploughman thinks and feels 1 Mrs Begg remembers, about the time of her brother's attachment to Jean Armour, seeing this song freshly written out amongst his papers, with the name Jeanie' instead of 'Peggy,' and the word Armour' instead of 'charmer,' at the end of the first and fifth verses. She therefore suspects that the poet has, through inadvertency, made a mistake in assigning this song to Miss Thomson. The present editor has not deemed himself justified on such a ground to reject so direct a statement of the poet himself. Perhaps he may have written the song for Miss Thomson, and only temporarily dethroned her name for the sake of a newer love. It seems next to impossible that Burns could have ever published the song with a change so calculated to debase its poetical value as the substitution of 'Armour' for 'charmer.' under the pressure of love, ambition, anxiety, grief, with the like cares and passions, which, however diversified by the modes and manners of life, operate pretty much alike, I believe, on all the species. 'There are numbers in the world who do not want sense to make a figure, so much as an opinion of their own abilities to put them upon recording their observations, and allowing them the same importance which they do to those which appear in print.'-SHENSTONE. 'Pleasing, when youth is long expired, to trace The forms our pencil or our pen designed! Such the soft image of our youthful mind.'—Ibid. April 1783. Notwithstanding all that has been said against love, respecting the folly and weakness it leads a young inexperienced mind into, still I think it in a great measure deserves the highest encomiums that have been passed upon it. If anything on earth deserves the name of rapture or transport, it is the feelings of green eighteen in the company of the mistress of his heart, when she repays him with an equal return of affection. The next entry, bearing date August, makes the first allusion we have from him to his literary performances: August. There is certainly some connection between love, and music, and poetry; and therefore I have always thought it a fine touch of nature, that passage in a modern love composition: 'As toward her cot he jogged along, Her name was frequent in his song.'1 For my own part, I never had the least thought or inclination of turning poet till I got once heartily in love, and then rhyme and song were in a manner the spontaneous language of my heart. The following composition was the first of my performances, and done at an early period of life, when my heart glowed with honest warm simplicity, unacquainted and uncorrupted with the ways of a wicked world. The performance is, indeed, very puerile and silly; but I am always pleased with it, as it recalls to my mind those happy days when my heart was yet honest, and my tongue The sun was sleeping in the main, She said she'd something else to do,' &c. The Lark, 1765. Vol. i. p. 89. sincere. The subject of it was a young girl, who really deserved all the praises I have bestowed on her. I not only had this opinion of her then, but I actually think so still, now that the spell is long since broken, and the enchantment at an end 'Oh once I loved a bonnie lass,' &c,' Lest my works should be thought below criticism, or meet with a critic who perhaps will not look on them with so candid and favourable an eye, I am determined to criticise them myself. The first distich of the first stanza is quite too much in the flimsy strain of our ordinary street-ballads; and, on the other hand, the second distich is too much in the other extreme. The expres sion is a little awkward, and the sentiment too serious. Stanza the second I am well pleased with, and I think it conveys a fine idea of that amiable part of the sex-the agreeables—or what, in our Scotch dialect, we call a sweet sonsy lass. The third stanza has a little of the flimsy turn in it, and the third line has rather too serious a cast. The fourth stanza is a very indifferent one; the first line is, indeed, all in the strain of the second stanza, but the rest is mere expletive. The thoughts in the fifth stanza come finely up to my favourite idea-a sweet sonsy lass: the last line, however, halts a little. The same sentiments are kept up with equal spirit and tenderness in the sixth stanza; but the second and fourth lines, ending with short syllables, hurt the whole. The seventh stanza has several minute faults; but I remember I composed it in a wild enthusiasm of passion, and to this hour I never recollect it but my heart melts, my blood sallies, at the remembrance. It has been remarked, that from the time of his coming in contact with the seaport characters of Irvine, the virtuous principles which he had acquired under the guidance of his father no longer held firm sway over him. It is not desirable to draw his frailties too broadly from the dread abode where, in common with his merits, they have gone to their repose; but it is interesting to find that, underneath the proud scorn which he used as a defence against vulgar criticism, he entertained the penitence worthy of a manly and humane heart. We trace this clearly in an entry of the commonplace-book September. I entirely agree with that judicious philosopher, Mr Smith, in his excellent Theory of Moral Sentiments, that remorse is the most painful sentiment that can imbitter the human bosom. Any ordinary pitch of fortitude may bear up tolerably well under those calamities in the procurement of which we ourselves have had no hand; but when our own follies or crimes have made us miserable See ante, the song of Handsome Nell. and wretched, to bear up with manly firmness, and, at the same time, have a proper penitential sense of our misconduct, is a glorious effort of self-command. Of all the numerous ills that hurt our peace, That press the soul, or wring the mind with anguish, This sting is added: Blame thy foolish self!' Lives there a man so firm, who, while his heart Can reason down its agonising throbs; Can firmly force his jarring thoughts to peace? Oh glorious magnanimity of soul! There is something like the same consciousness of staining errors in the next entry, which is dated March 1784 :— I have often observed, in the course of my experience of human life, that every man, even the worst, has something good about him; though very often nothing else than a happy temperament of constitution inclining him to this or that virtue. For this reason, no man can say in what degree any other person, besides himself, can be, with strict justice, called wicked. Let any of the strictest character for regularity of conduct among us, examine impartially how many vices he has never been guilty of, not from any care or vigilance, but for want of opportunity, or some accidental circumstance intervening-how many of the weaknesses of mankind he has escaped, because he was out of the line of such temptation; and what often, if not always, weighs more than all the rest, how much he is indebted to the world's good opinion, because the world does not know all-I say, any man who can thus think, will scan the failings, nay, the faults and crimes, of mankind around him with a brother's eye. I have often courted the acquaintance of that part of mankind commonly known by the ordinary phrase of blackguards, sometimes further than was consistent with the safety of my character; those |