CHAPTER VIII. CONTENTS.-Is more beset in town than country-His early biographers, (Dr. Currie not excepted), have coloured too darkly under that head-It is not correct to speak of the poet as having sunk into a toper, or a solitary drinker, or of his revels as other than occasional, or of their having interfered with the punctual discharge of his official duties—He is shown to have been the affectionate and beloved husband, although passing follies imputed; and the constant and most assiduous instructor of his children-Impulses of the French Revolution -Symptoms of fraternizing— The attention of his official superiors is called to them-Practically no blow is inflicted, only the bad name—Interesting details of this period-Gives his whole soul to song making-Preference in that for his native dialect, with the other attendant facts, as to that portion of his immortal lays. "The King's most humble servant, I : THE four principal biographers of our poet, Heron, Currie, Walker, and Irving, concur in the general statement, that his moral course from the time when he settled in Dumfries, was downwards. Heron knew more of the matter personally than any of the others, and his words are these :— "In Dumfries his dissipation became still more deeply habitual. He was here exposed more than in the country, to be solicited to share the riot of the dissolute and the idle. Foolish young men, such as writers' apprentices, young surgeons, merchants' clerks, and his brother excisemen, flocked eagerly about him, and from time to time pressed him to drink with them, that they might enjoy his wicked wit. The Caledonian Club, too, and the Dumfries and Galloway Hunt, had occasional meetings in Dumfries after Burns came to reside there, and the poet was of course invited to share their hospitality, and hesitated not to accept the invitation. The morals of the town were, in consequence of its becoming so much the scene of public amusement, not a little corrupted, and though a husband and a father, Burns did not escape suffering by the general contamination, in a manner which I forbear to describe. In the intervals between his different fits of intemperance, he suffered the keenest anguish of remorse and horribly afflictive foresight. His Jean behaved with a degree of maternal and conjugal tenderness and prudence, which made him feel more bitterly the evils of his misconduct, though they could not reclaim him.”—This picture, dark as it is, wants some distressing shades that mingle in the parallel one by Dr. Currie; it wants nothing, however, of which truth demands the insertion. That Burns, dissipated, ere he went to Dumfries, became still more dissipated in a town, than he had been in the country, is certain. It may also be true, that his wife had her own "The above answer to an invitation was written extempore on a leaf torn from his Excise-book.-Cromek's MSS particular causes, sometimes, for dissatisfaction. But that Burns ever sunk into a toper-that he ever was addicted to solitary drinking-that his bottle ever interfered with his discharge of his duties as an exciseman-or that, in spite of some transitory follies, he ever ceased to be a most affectionate husband-all these charges have been insinuated-and they are all false. His intemperance was, as Heron says, in fits; his aberrations of all kinds were occasional, not systematic; they were all to himself the sources of exquisite misery in the retrospect; they were the aberrations of a man whose moral sense was never deadened;-of one who encountered more temptations from without and from within, than the immense majority of mankind, far from having to contend against, are even able to imagine ;of one, finally, who prayed for pardon, where alone effectual pardon could be found;-and who died ere he had reached that term of life up to which the passions of many, who, their mortal career being regarded as a whole, are honoured as among the most virtuous of mankind, have proved too strong for the control of reason. We have already seen that the poet was careful of decorum in all things during the brief space of his prosperity at Elliesland, and that he became less so on many points, as the prospects of his farming speculation darkened around him. It seems to be equally certain, that he entertained high hopes of promotion in the excise at the period of his removal to Dumfries; and that the comparative recklessness of his later conduct there, was consequent on a certain overclouding of these professional expectations. The case is broadly stated so by Walker and Paul; and there are hints to the same effect in the narrative of Currie. The statement has no doubt been exaggerated, but it has its foundation in truth; and by the kindness of Mr. Train, supervisor at Castle Douglas in Galloway, I shall presently be enabled to give some details which may throw light on this business. Burns was much patronised when in Edinburgh by the Honourable Henry Erskine, Dean of the Faculty of Advocates, and other leading Whigs of the place-much more so, to their honour be it said, than by any of the influential adherents of the then administration. His landlord at Elliesland, Mr. Miller of Dalswinton, his neighbour, Mr. Riddel of Friars-Carse, and most of the other gentlemen who showed him special attention, belonged to the same political party; and, on his removal to Dumfries, it so happened, that some of his immediate superiors in the revenue service of the district, and other persons of standing authority, into whose society he was thrown, entertained sentiments of the same description. Burns, whenever in his letters he talks seriously of political matters, uniformly describes his early jacobitism as mere " matter of fancy." It may, however, be easily believed, that a fancy like his, long indulged in dreams of that sort, was well prepared to pass into certain other dreams, which likewise involved feelings of dissatisfaction with "the existing order of things." Many of the old elements of political disaffection in Scotland, put on a new shape at the outbreaking of the French Revolution; and jacobites became half jacobins, ere they were at all aware in what the doctrines of jacobinism were to end. The Whigs naturally regarded the first dawn of freedom in France with feelings of sympathy, delight, exultation. The general, the all but universal tone of feeling was favourable to the first assailants of the Bourbon despotism; and there were few who more ardently participated in the general sentiment of the day than Burns. The revulsion of feeling that took place in this country at large, when wanton atrocities began to stain the course of the French Revolution, and Burke lifted his powerful voice, was great. Scenes more painful at the time, and more so even now in the retrospect, than had for generations afflicted Scotland, were the consequences of the rancour into which party feelings on both sides now rose and fermented. Old and dear ties of friendship were torn in sunder; society was for a time shaken to its centre. In the most extravagant dreams of the jacobites there had always been much to command respect, high chivalrous devotion, reverence for old affections, ancestral loyalty, and the generosity of romance. In the new species of hostility, every thing seemed mean as well as perilous; it was scorned even more than hated. The very name stained whatever it came near; and men that had known and loved each other from boyhood, stood aloof, if this influence interfered, as if it had been some loathsome pestilence. There was a great deal of stately Toryism at this time in the town of Dumfries, which was the favourite winter retreat of many of the best gentlemen's families of the south of Scotland. Feelings that worked more violently in Edinburgh than in London, acquired additional energy still, in this provincial capital. All men's eyes were upon Burns. He was the standing marvel of the place; his toasts, his jokes, his epigrams, his songs, were the daily food of conversation and scandal; and he, open and careless, and thinking he did no great harm in saying and singing what many of his superiors had not the least objection to hear and applaud, soon began to be considered among the local admirers and disciples of King George the Third and his minister, as the most dangerous of all the apostles of sedition, and to be shunned accordingly. - The records of the Excise-Office are silent concerning the suspicions which the Commissioners of the time certainly took up in regard to Burns as a political offender-according to the phraseology of the tempestuous period, a democrat. In that department, as then conducted, I am assured that nothing could have been more unlike the usual course of things, than that one syllable should have been set down in writing on such a subject, unless the case had been one of extremities. That an inquiry was instituted, we know from Burns's own letters-but what the exact termination of the inquiry was, will never, in all probability, be ascertained. According to the tradition of the neighbourhood, Burns, inter alia, gave great offence by demurring in a large mixed company to the proposed toast, "the health of William Pitt;" and left the room in indignation, because the society rejected what he wished to substitute, namely, "the health of a greater and a better man, George Washington." I suppose the warmest admirer of Mr. Pitt's talents and politics would hardly venture now-a-days to dissent substantially from Burns's estimate of the comparative merits of these two great men. The name of Washington, at all events, when contemporary passions shall have finally sunk into the peace of the grave, will unquestionably have its place in the first rank of heroic virtue, a station which demands the exhibition of victory pure and unstained over temptations and trials extraordinary, in kind as well as strength. But at the time when Burns, being a servant of Mr. Pitt's government, was guilty of this indiscretion, it is obvious that a great deal "more was meant than reached the ear." In the poet's own correspondence, we have traces of another occurrence of the same sort. Burns thus writes to a gentleman at whose table he had dined the day before I was, I know, drunk last night, but I am sober this morning. From the expressions Captain made use of to me, had I had nobody's welfare to care for but my own, we should certainly have come, according to the manner of the world, to the necessity of murdering one another about the business. The words were such as generally, I believe, end in a brace of pistols; but I am still pleased to think that I did not ruin the peace and welfare of a wife and children in a drunken squabble. Farther, you know that the report of certain political opinions being mine, has already once before brought me to the brink of destruction. I dread last night's business may be interpreted in the same way. You, I beg, will take care to prevent it. I tax your wish for Mrs. Burns's welfare with the task of waiting on every gentleman who was present to state this to him; and, as you please, show this letter. What, after all, was the obnoxious toast? May our success in the present war be equal to the justice of our cause—a toast that the most outrageous frenzy of loyalty cannot object to."-Burns, no question, was guilty of unpoliteness as well as indiscretion, in offering any such toasts as these in mixed company; but that such toasts should have been considered as attaching any grave suspicion to his character as a loyal subject, is a circumstance which can only be accounted for by reference to the exaggerated state of political feelings on all matters, and among all descriptions of men, at that melancholy period of disaffection, distrust, and disunion. Who, at any other period than that lamentable time, would ever have dreamed of erecting the drinking, or declining to drink, the health of a particular minister, or the approving, or disapproving, of a particular measure of government, into the test of a man's loyalty to his King? Burns, eager of temper, loud of tone, and with declamation and sarcasm equally at command, was, we may easily believe, the most hated of human beings, because the most dreaded, among the provincial champions of the administration of which he thought fit to disapprove. But that he ever, in his most ardent moods, upheld the principles of those whose applause of the French Revolution was but the mask of revolutionary designs at home, after these principles had been really developed by those that maintained them, and understood by him, it may be safely denied. There is not, in all his correspondence, one syllable to give countenance to such a charge. His indiscretion, however, did not always confine itself to words; and though an incident now about to be recorded, belongs to the year 1792, before the French war broke out, there is reason to believe that it formed the main subject of the inquiry which the Excise Commissioners thought themselves called upon to institute touching the politics of our poet. At that period a great deal of contraband traffic, chiefly from the Isle of Man, was going on along the coasts of Galloway and Ayrshire, and the whole of the revenue officers from Gretna to Dumfries, were placed under the orders of a superintendent residing in Annan, who exerted himself zealously in intercepting the descent of the smuggling vessels. On the 27th of February, a suspicious-looking brig was discovered in the Solway Frith, and Burns was one of the party whom the superintendent conducted to watch her motions. She got into shallow water the day afterwards, and the officers were enabled to discover that her crew were numerous, armed, and not likely to yield without a struggle. Lewars, a brother exciseman, an intimate friend of our poet, was accordingly sent to Dumfries for a guard of dragoons; the superintendent, Mr. Crawford, proceeded himself on a similar errand to Ecclefechan, and Burns was left with some men under his orders, to watch the brig, and prevent landing or escape. From the private journal of one of the excisemen, (now in my hands), it appears that Burns manifested considerable impatience while thus occupied, being left for many hours in a wet salt-marsh, with a force which he knew to be inadequate for the purpose it was meant to fulfil. One of his comrades hearing him abuse his friend Lewars in particular, for being slow about his journey, the man answered, that he also wished the devil had him for his pains, and that Burns, in the meantime, would do well to indite a song upon the sluggard: Burns said nothing; but after taking a few strides by himself among the reeds and shingle, rejoined his party, and chanted to them this well-known ditty :— Lewars arrived shortly afterwards with his dragoons; and Burns, putting himself at their head, waded, sword in hand, to the brig, and was the first to board her. The crew lost heart, and submitted, though their numbers were greater than those of the assailing force. The vessel was condemned, and, with all her arms and stores, sold by auction next day at Dumfries: upon which occasion Burns, whose behaviour had been highly commended, thought fit to purchase four carronades, by way of trophy. But his glee went a step farther;-he sent the guns, with a letter, to the French Convention, requesting that body to accept of them as a mark of his admiration and respect. The present, and its accompaniment, were intercepted at the custom-house at Dover; and here, there appears to be little room to doubt, was the principal circumstance that drew on Burns the notice of his jealous superiors. We were not, it is true, at war with France; but every one knew and felt that we were to be so ere long; and nobody can pretend that Burns was not guilty, on this occasion, of a most absurd and presumptuous breach of decorum. When he learned the impression that had been created by his conduct, and its probable consequences, he wrote to his patron, Mr. Graham of Fintray, the following letter, dated December 1792: "SIR,-I have been surprised, confounded, and distracted by Mr. Mitchell, the collector, telling me that he has received an order from your board to inquire into my political conduct, and blaming me as a person disaffected to government. Sir, you are a husband and a father. You know what you would feel to see the much-loved wife of your bosom, and your helpless, prattling little ones turned adrift into the world, degraded and disgraced, from a situation in which they had been respectable and respected, and left almost without the necessary support of a miserable existence. Alas! Sir, must I think that such soon will be my lot? and from the damned dark insinuations of hellish, groundless envy too? I believe, Sir, I may aver it, and in the sight of Omniscience, that I would not tell a deli |