LIFE AND WORKS

OF

ROBERT BURNS.

CHAPTER I.

AUTOBIOGRAPHY.

N the course of his brief, but full and intensely selfconscious life, Robert Burns wrote several fragmentary chapters of autobiography, in the form of letters to friends, common-place books, and journals. Of these, by far the most important is the letter he wrote from Mauchline, on the 2d August 1787, to Dr John Moore, the physician and novelist, who had manifested a warm interest in his works and career. It covers the most important period in Burns's

life-from his birth to his 'éclatant return' to Mauchline from Edinburgh, at the age of twenty-nine. Although written from 'whim,' and to divert his spirits in a 'miserable fog of ennui,' it purports to be 'an honest narrative,' and 'a faithful account of what character of man I am, and how I came by that character.' The portion of this letter which is strictly autobiographical runs thus:

'I have not the most distant pretence to what the pyecoated guardians of Escutcheons call a Gentleman. When at Edinburgh last winter, I got acquainted at the Herald's Office; and, looking thro' the granary of honors, I there found almost every name in the kingdom; but for me,

My ancient but ignoble blood

Has crept thro' scoundrels since the flood.

Gules, purpure, argent, &c., quite disowned me. My forefathers rented land of the famous, noble Keiths of Marshal, and had the honor to share their fate. I do not use the word "honor" with any reference to political principles: loyal and disloyal I take to be merely relative terms in that ancient and formidable court known in this country by the name of "club-law." Those who dare welcome Ruin and shake hands with Infamy, for what they believe sincerely to be the cause of their God or their King, are -as Mark Antony in Shakespear says of Brutus and Cassius"honorable men." I mention this circumstance because it threw my Father on the world at large; where, after many years' wanderings and sojournings, he picked up a pretty large quantity of observation and experience, to which I am indebted for most of my pretensions to Wisdom. I have met with few who understood Men, their manners and their ways, equal to him; but stubborn, ungainly Integrity, and headlong, ungovernable Irascibility, are disqualifying circumstances; consequently, I was born a very poor man's son.

'For the first six or seven years of my life, my Father was gardener to a worthy gentleman of small estate in the neighbourhood of Ayr.* Had my Father continued in that situation, I must have marched off to have been one of the little underlings about a farmhouse; but it was his dearest wish and prayer to have it in his power to keep his children under his own eye, till they could discern between good and evil; so, with the assistance of his generous Master, he ventured on a small farm in that gentleman's estate. At these years, I was by no means a favourite with anybody. I was a good deal noted for a retentive memory, a stubborn, sturdy something in my disposition, and an enthusiastic idiot-piety. I say "idiot-piety," because I was then but a child. Though I cost the schoolmaster some thrashings, I made an excellent English scholar; and against the years of ten or eleven, I was absolutely a critic in substantives, verbs, and particles. In my infant and boyish days, too, I owed much to an old maid. of my mother's, remarkable for her ignorance, credulity, and

* Mr William Fergusson of Doonholm, a retired London physician, who was at that time Provost of Ayr. On this estate, which he had acquired from the town in 1755, and which is now (1896) the property of Lord Blackburn, long one of the most eminent judges in the Court of Appeal, is an avenue of elins, the planting of which is attributed by tradition to William Burues.

superstition. She had, I suppose, the largest collection in the country, of tales and songs concerning devils, ghosts, fairies, brownies, witches, warlocks, spunkies, kelpies, elf-candles, deadlights, wraiths, apparitions, cantraips, enchanted towers, giants, dragons, and other trumpery. This cultivated the latent seeds of Poesy; but had so strong an effect on my imagination, that to this hour, in my nocturnal rambles, I sometimes keep a sharp look-out in suspicious places; and though nobody can be more sceptical in these matters than I, yet it often takes an effort of philosophy to shake off these idle terrors. The earliest thing of composition that I recollect taking pleasure in, was The Vision of Mirza, and a hymn of Addison's, beginning, "How are thy servants blest, O Lord!" I particularly remember one halfstanza which was music to my boyish ears:

For though in dreadful whirls we hung

High on the broken wave.

*

I met with these pieces in Mason's English Collection, one of my school-books. The first two books I ever read in private, and which gave me more pleasure than any two books I ever read again, were The Life of Hannibal, and The History of Sir William Wallace. Hannibal gave my young ideas such a turn, that I used to strut in raptures up and down after the recruiting drum and bag-pipe, and wish myself tall enough that I might be a soldier; while the story of Wallace poured a Scottish prejudice in my veins, which will boil along there till the flood-gates of life shut in eternal rest.

'Polemical Divinity about this time was putting the country halfmad, and I, ambitious of shining on Sundays, between sermons, in conversation parties, at funerals, &c., in a few years more, used to puzzle Calvinism with so much heat and indiscretion, that I raised a hue-and-cry of heresy against me, which has not ceased to this hour.

'My vicinity to Ayr was of great advantage to me. My social disposition, when not checked by some modification of spited pride,

'Mason' is a mis-spelling for Masson.' The full title of the book is A Collection of English Prose and Verse for the Use of Schools. By Arthur Masson, M.A., late Teacher of Languages in Edinburgh and Aberdeen. An interesting analysis of the volume, under the title of ‘Burns's School Reading-book,' is given in Furth in Field, a collection of essays on the life, language, and literature of old Scotland, from the pen of 'Hugh Haliburton' (Mr J. Logie Robertson), which was published in 1894.

like our Catechism's definition of Infinitude, was "without bounds or limits." I formed many connexions with other younkers who possessed superior advantages—the youngling actors who were busy with the rehearsal of parts, in which they were shortly to appear on that stage, where, alas! I was destined to drudge behind the scenes. It is not commonly at these green years that the young Noblesse and Gentry have a just sense of the immense distance between them and their ragged play-fellows. It takes a few dashes into the world, to give the young Great Man that proper, decent, unnoticing disregard for the poor, insignificant, stupid devils, the mechanics and peasantry around him, who perhaps were born in the same Village. My young superiors never insulted the clouterly appearance of my plough-boy carcase, the two extremes of which were often exposed to all the inclemencies of all the seasons. They would give me stray volumes of books; among them, even then, I could pick up some observations; and one, whose heart I am sure not even the "Munny Begum's" scenes have tainted, helped me to a little French. Parting with these my young friends and benefactors, as they dropped off for East or West Indies, was often to me a sore affliction; but I was soon called to more serious evils.* My Father's generous Master died; the farm proved a ruinous bargain; and to clench the curse, we fell into the hands of a Factor, who sat for the picture I have drawn of one in my tale of "Twa Dogs." My Father was advanced in life when he married; I was the eldest of seven children; and he, worn out by early hardship, was unfit for labor. My Father's spirit was soon irritated, but not easily broken. There was a freedom in his lease in two

*My brother,' says Gilbert Burns, 'seems to set off his early companions in too conse. quential a manner. The principal acquaintance we had in Ayr, while boys, were four sons of Mr Andrew M'Culloch, a distant relation of my mother's, who kept a tea-shop, and had made a little money in the contraband trade, very common at that time. He died while the boys were young, and my father was nominated one of the tutors. The two eldest were bred shopkeepers; the third, a surgeon; and the youngest, the only surviving one, was bred in a counting-house in Glasgow, where he is now a respectable merchant. I believe all these boys went to the West Indies. Then there were two sons of Dr Malcolm, whom I have mentioned in my letter to Mrs Dunlop. The eldest, a very worthy young man, went to the East Indies, where he had a commission in the army; he is the person whose heart, my brother says, the Munny Begum's scenes could not corrupt. The other, by the interest of Lady Wallace, got an ensigncy in a regiment raised by the Duke of Hamilton during the American war. I believe neither of them is now (1797) alive. We also knew the present Dr Paterson of Ayr, and a younger brother of his, now in Jamaica, who were much younger than us. I had almost forgot to mention Dr Charles of Ayr, who was a little older than my brother, and with whom we had a longer and closer intimacy than with any of the others, which did not, however, continue in after-life.'