I tell him, through the medium of his nephew's influence, that Mr Clarke is a gentleman who will not disgrace even his patronage. I know the merits of the cause thoroughly, and say it, that my friend is falling a sacrifice to prejudiced ignorance, and . God help the children of Dependence! Hated and persecuted by their enemies, and too often, alas! almost unexceptionably, received by their friends with disrespect and reproach, under the thin disguise of cold civility and humiliating advice. O to be a sturdy savage, stalking in the pride of his independence, amid the solitary wilds of his deserts, rather than in civilised life helplessly to tremble for a subsistence, precarious as the caprice of a fellow-creature! Every man has his virtues, and no man is without his failings; and curse on that privileged plain-dealing of friendship which, in the hour of my calamity, cannot reach forth the helping-hand without at the same time pointing out those failings, and apportioning them their share in procuring my present distress. My friends-for such the world calls ye, and such ye think yourselves to be-pass by my virtues, if you please, but do also spare my follies: the first will witness in my breast for themselves, and the last will give pain enough to the ingenuous mind without you. And since deviating more or less from the paths of propriety and rectitude must be incident to human nature, do thou, Fortune, put it in my power, always from myself and of myself, to bear the consequence of those errors! I do not want to be independent that I may sin, but I want to be independent in my sinning. To return in this rambling letter to the subject I set out with, let me recommend my friend, Mr Clarke, to your acquaintance and good offices-his worth entitles him to the one, and his gratitude will merit the other. I long much to hear from you. Adieu! R. B. There is something arresting in this letter. While merely recommending a persecuted schoolmaster to a friend's protection, thus to launch out into a general apology for hurtful failings, and an indignant protest against the friendship which would preach upon them even while redeeming their consequences, powerfully claims our attention amidst the obscurity which prevails regarding the details of Burns's private life, and the varying current of his feelings at different times. We know that the poet was now convinced that his farming scheme was a failure, and that much of the little capital arising from the profits of his poems was irretrievably gone. But the suffering from that cause could never, alone, have wrung from him such an outpouring of bitter feeling, It is the more remarkable as the commencement of a series of such tirades, which extended at intervals through the remainder of his life. From this time forth, indeed, we are to see a chronic exasperation of spirit, affecting the life and conversation of the luckless bard. We get but slight and casual glimpses of the cause of all this acrimony; but I am assured that it would be a great mistake to attribute it wholly, or in any considerable part, to a mere jarring between the sensitive spirit of the poet and the rude contact of the worldly scene into which he was plunged. Burns did not want for a certain worldly wisdom and hardiness. His poetical powers had not in themselves exposed him to any serious evils. On the contrary, he was indebted to them for any advance in the social scene which he ever made, and even for such endowments of fortune as had befallen him. Neither was Burns so unworthily regarded by either high or low in his own day and place, as to have much occasion for complaint on that score. On the contrary, he had obtained the respectful regard of many of the very choicest men and women of his country. Whenever he appeared in aristocratic circles, his acknowledged genius, and the charms of his conversation, gave him a distinction not always readily yielded to mere wealth and rank. No; we have to look elsewhere for an explanation of the mystery: it seems to have mainly lain in the reckless violence of some of his passions, by the consequences of which he was every now and then exposed to humiliations galling to his pride. It was a refuge to his wounded feelings, to suppose that these passions were essentially connected with his poetical character. But we shall have hereafter to consider this subject more fully. There is a condition of great suffering, when, though the main source of grief cannot be spoken of, smaller evils will be denounced with a superfluity of splenetic effusion not a little startling to the bystander. Burns appears about this time to have been subjected, either in public or private, to a searching hypercriticism, probably of a kind beneath his notice. The following fragment was perhaps designed as part of a private reply to the critic: [LITERARY SCOLDING.] Thou eunuch of language: thou Englishman, who never was south the Tweed: thou servile echo of fashionable barbarisms: thou quack, vending the nostrums of empirical elocution: thou marriage-maker between vowels and consonants, on the Gretna Green of caprice : thou cobbler, botching the flimsy socks of bombast oratory: thou blacksmith, hammering the rivets of absurdity: thou butcher, imbruing thy hands in the bowels of orthography: thou arch-heretic in pronunciation: thou pitch-pipe of affected emphasis: thou carpenter, mortising the awkward joints of jarring sentences: thou squeaking dissonance of cadence: thou pimp of gender: thou Lion Herald to silly etymology: thou antipode of grammar: thou executioner of construction: thou brood of the speech-distracting builders of the Tower of Babel: thou lingual confusion worse confounded: thou scape-gallows from the land of syntax: thou scavenger of mood and tense: thou murderous accoucheur of infant learning: thou ignis fatuus, misleading the steps of benighted ignorance: thou pickle-herring in the puppet-show of nonsense: thou faithful recorder of barbarous idiom: thou persecutor of syllabication: thou baleful meteor, foretelling and facilitating the rapid approach of Nox and Erebus.' The same petty subject of resentment rides through an epistle to his patron Graham, while, in reality, his anguished bosom acknowledged deeper sources of wo: THIRD EPISTLE TO MR GRAHAM OF FINTRY. [Summer, 1791.] Late crippled of an arm, and now a leg, Thou, Nature, partial Nature! I arraign; One shakes the forests, and one spurns the ground: Her tongue and eyes, her dreaded spear and darts ; 1 This singular composition made its appearance in the Gentleman's Magazine for August 1832, without date or signature. The original manuscript was in the possession of the late Mr Andrew Henderson, surgeon, Berwick-upon-Tweed, one of the sons of the Rose-bud. 1 But, oh! thou bitter stepmother and hard, And half an idiot, too, more helpless still: Critics!-appalled I venture on the name, His heart by causeless wanton malice wrung, He heeds or feels no more the ruthless critic's rage! So, by some hedge, the generous steed deceased, Alluding to the eminent anatomist, Professor Alexander Monro, of the Edinburgh University. The grave sage hern thus easy picks his frog, Not such the workings of their moon-struck brain; By turns in soaring heaven or vaulted hell. I dread thee, Fate, relentless and severe, As the summer moved on, Burns seems to have recovered from both bruises and vexations, and to have regained some degree of equanimity. TO [MR PETER HILL.] [DUMFRIES, 13th July 1791.'] MY DEAR FRIEND-I take Glenriddel's kind offer of a corner for a postscript to you, though I have nothing particular to tell you. It is with the greatest pleasure I learn from all hands, and particularly from your warm friend and patron, the Laird here, that you are going on, spreading and thriving like the palm-tree that shades the fragrant vale in the Holy Land of the Prophet. May the richest juices from beneath, and the dews of heaven from above, foster your root and refresh your branches, until you be as conspicuous among your fellows as the stately Goliah towering over the little pigmy Philistines around him! Amen, so be it!!! The date is supplied in a different hand. A post-mark indicates 'Ju. 14.' R. B. |