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with a blare of trumpets; the strong, fresh countryman, "looking like a farmer dressed to dine with the laird," was at once the rage, and sported every night with earls and duchesses. Burns bore his triumph outwardly with "a sort of dignified plainness and simplicity" which did him much credit; inwardly it inflicted an irreparable hurt upon his temperament. No man of his years, least of all the ardent Rab of Mossgiel, could yield to "such solicitations and allurements to convivial enjoyment " as were now forced upon the fashionable poet without being ultimately the worse for them. His poems

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were reprinted with additions in Edinburgh in April 1787; this time Burns received something substantial, perhaps £500, but he very foolishly sold the copyright for another £100, and his publisher was a tardy paymaster. At last, in June 1787, Burns was back at Mossgiel for a month, and then he started, by Edinburgh, for his famous tour in the Highlands with Nicol, a neighbour. Two very important friendships with women of the educated class are now to be noted, that with Mrs. Dunlop (1786-95) and that with Mrs. "Clarinda" M'Lehose (1787-91); these were both, in their ways, excellent ladies, to the first of whom the poet was like a son, and to the second like a sort of amatory china shepherd. To the animalism which mainly pursued the adventures of Burns, the sentimental affection of these two correspondents offers a contrast at which we may smile, but which was full of benefit to his better nature. Burns cultivated

their friendship "with the enthusiasm of religion," and in the vocabulary of the younger lady he was always aptly termed "Sylvander." Far less sentimental were Burns's relations with the agreeable females of Mauchline, and early in 1788 Jean Armour, who had forgiven him only too easily for past negligence, was turned by her parents out of house and home, and forced on the poet's protection. Presently-we do not quite know when or how he married her privately, and in August publicly; in order to break with the past, Burns took charge at the same time of the farmstead of Ellisland in Dumfriesshire (which, however, never belonged to him), and thither, or at first to a

Robert Burns

house near by, his wife and he removed in November. Here for some time his life flowed on, after all its mad excitements, in a calm current of farm-work and occasional song-writing; and in some attention to the place as a gauger which Glencairn had secured for him in 1787. In August 1789 Burns was appointed Exciseman for the ten parishes of Dumfriesshire which surround Ellisland. It is not quite plain why the exercise of riding hither and thither over the moors of Nithsdale did not suit the poet's health, but almost immediately he began to age rapidly and to be a chronic sufferer from disease. But it is doubtful whether we have the gauging to blame for any part After the Portrait by Skirving of this; although Burns was but thirty years of age, his constitution was undermined by the fierce zest with which he had drained the bowl of life, greedily, rashly, with lips sucking at the brim. To be colloquial, he had pre-eminently "eaten his cake," and he took no warning -what there was left of it he was eating still. He never cared for Ellisland, or to till another man's acres; he was therefore little disappointed when that charge came to an end. It was thought best that Burns should give up farming and come up to Dumfries, a more convenient centre than Ellisland for his excursions on behalf of the Excise. Accordingly, in December 1791, his wife and he settled in a town house in the Mill Vennel. He was now not writing much poetry, although in 1789 he had printed anonymously The Prayer of Holy Willie, in 1790 had indited the immortal Tam o' Shanter, and ever since 1787 and until his death was contributing songs, some original and some adapted, to "The Scots Musical Museum." Of the last years of Burns's life there is little to record that is agreeable. It was by the worst of mischances that he was led to settle in a little county-town where there was everything to tempt his weaknesses and nothing to stimulate his genius. His discontent found voice in a very unwise championship of the principles of the French Revolution; these Jacobin sentiments alienated him still further from those whose companionship might have been useful to him. He grew moody and hypochondriacal. He forgot that life had ever

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been fire in his veins; he wrote, "I have only known existence by the pressure of sickness and counted time by the repercussions of pain." Yet, as late as 1794, he could write the Address to the Deil, and his songs were tuneable to the very last. But he drank himself into degradation; the vitality in him was "burned to a cinder." His last days were darkened

with the fear of being sent to gaol for debt. On the 21st of July 1796 this great poet and delightful man was released from a world in which he had no longer any place for happiness. The personal appearance of Burns in his prime was manly and attractive, without much refinement of feature, but glowing with health and the ardour of the instincts. Sir Walter Scott, who, when a boy of fifteen, saw Burns"Virgilium vidi tantum"-has preserved a very fine description of him. "His person was robust, his manners rustic, not clownish. There was a strong expression of shrewdness in his lineaments; the eye alone indicated the poetic character and temperament. It was large and of a dark cast, and literally glowed when he spoke with feeling or interest. I never saw such another eye in a human head," not even in that of Byron. His manners to women were exceeding insinuating; the Duchess of Gordon remarked that "his address to females was always deferential, and always with a turn to the pathetic or humorous, which engaged their attention particularly." Both these tributes date from 1786, when the powers and graces of Burns were at their fullest expansion, and had not begun to decay.

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Mrs. Dunlop

After a Portrait by J. Irvine

FROM "TAM O' SHANTER."

The wind blew as 'twad blawn its last;
The rattlin' showers rose on the blast:
The speedy gleams the darkness swallow'd ;
Loud, deep, and lang, the thunder bellow'd;
That night a child might understand,

The deil had business on his hand.

Weel mounted on his grey mare, Meg

A better never lifted leg

Tam skelpit on thro' dub and mire,

Despising wind, and rain, and fire;

Whiles holding fast his guid blue bonnet ;

Whiles crooning o'er some auld Scots sonnet ;
Whiles glow'ring round wi' prudent cares,
Lest bogles catch him unawares ;

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