Indian Cupid, having a bow that is made of flowers, and a bowstring which is a string of bees. Industrious as he was, his history is full of abandoned and half-executed projects. While his name reflects credit on poetical biography, his secondary fame as a composer shows that the palm of poetry is not likely to be won, even by great genius, without exclusive devotion to the pursuit.* 6 Αλλὰ οὔπως ἅμα πάντα δυνήσεαι αὐτὸς ἑλέσθαι ; ROBERT BURNS. [Born, 1758. Died, 1796.] ROBERT BURNS was born near the town of Ayr, within a few hundred yards of "Alloway's auld haunted kirk," in a clay cottage, which his father, who was a small farmer and gardener, had built with his own hands. A part of this humble edifice gave way when the poet was but a few days old; and his mother and he were carried, at midnight, through the storm, to a neighbour's house that gave them shelter. After having received some lessons in his childhood from the schoolmaster of the village of Alloway, he was, at seven years of age, put under a teacher of the name of Murdoch, who instructed him in reading and English grammar. This good man, who is still alive, and a teacher of languages in London, boasts, with a very natural triumph, of having accurately instructed Burns in the first principles of composition. At such an age, Burns's study of principles could not be very profound; yet it is due to his early instructor to observe that his prose style is more accurate than we should expect even from the vigour of an untutored mind, and such as would lead us to suppose that he had been early initiated in the rules of grammar. His father's removal to another farm in Ayrshire, at Mount Oliphant, unfortunately deprived him of the benefit of Murdoch as an instructor, after he had been about two years under his care; and for a long time he received no other lessons * [It is not Sir William Jones's poetry that can perpetuate his name.Southey, Quar. Rev., vol. xi. p. 502.] † [Murdoch died about the year 1822, respected and poor.] than those which his father gave him in writing and arithmetic, when he instructed his family by the fireside of their cottage in winter evenings. About the age of thirteen he was sent, during a part of the summer, to the parish school in Dalrymple, in order to improve his handwriting. In the following year he had an opportunity of passing several weeks with his old friend Murdoch, with whose assistance he began to study French with intense ardour and assiduity. His proficiency in that language, though it was wonderful considering his opportunities, was necessarily slight; yet it was in showing this accomplishment alone that Burns's weakness ever took the shape of vanity. One of his friends, who carried him into the company of a French lady, remarked, with surprise, that he attempted to converse with her in her own tongue. Their French, however, was soon found to be almost mutually unintelligible. As far as Burns could make himself understood, he unfortunately offended the foreign lady. He meant to tell her that she was a charming person, and delightful in conversation; but expressed himself so as to appear to her to mean that she was fond of speaking: to which the Gallic dame indignantly replied, that it was quite as common for poets to be impertinent, as for women to be loquacious.* At the age of nineteen he received a few months' instruction in land-surveying.-Such is the scanty history of his education, which is interesting simply because its opportunities were so few. and precarious, and such as only a gifted mind could have turned to any account. Of his early reading, he tells us, that a Life of Hannibal, which Murdoch gave him when a boy, raised the first stirrings of his enthusiasm; and he adds, with his own fervid expression, "that the Life of Sir William Wallace poured a tide of Scottish prejudices into his veins, which would boil along there till the floodgates of life were shut in eternal rest." In his sixteenth year he had read some of the plays of Shakspeare, the works of Pope and Addison, and of the Scottish poets Ramsay and Fergusson. From the volumes of Locke, Ray, Derham, and Stackhouse, he also imbibed a smattering of natural history and theology; but his brother assures us that, until the time of his being known as *[This story is in no account of Burns's life that we have ever seen, before or since Mr. Campbell wrote.] From his letter to Dr. Moore. 66 an author, he continued to be but imperfectly acquainted with the most eminent of our English writers. Thanks to the songs and superstition of his native country, his genius had some fostering aliments, which perhaps the study of classical authors might have led him to neglect. His inspiration grew up like the flower, which owes to heaven, in a barren soil, a natural beauty and wildness of fragrance that would be spoiled by artificial culture. He learned an infinite number of old ballads, from hearing his mother sing them at her wheel; and he was instructed in all the venerable heraldry of devils and witches by an ancient woman in the neighbourhood, "the Sybelline nurse of his Muse," who probably first imparted to him the story of Tam o'Shanter.' Song was his favourite and first pursuit." "The song-book," he says, "was my Vade Mecum: I pored over it constantly, driving my cart, or walking to labour." It would be pleasing to dwell on this era of his youthful sensibility, if his life had been happy; but it was far otherwise. He was the eldest of a family buffeted by misfortunes, toiling beyond their strength, and living without the support of animal food. At thirteen years of age he used to thresh in his father's barn; and at fifteen was the principal labourer on the farm. After the toils of the day, he usually sank in the evening into dejection of spirits, and was afflicted with dull headaches, the joint result of anxiety, low diet, and fatigue. "This kind of life," he says, "the cheerless gloom of a hermit, with the unceasing moil of a galley-slave, brought me to my sixteenth year, when love made me a poet." The object of his first attachment was a Highland girl named Mary Campbell, who was his fellow-reaper in the same harvest-field.* She died very young; and when Burns heard of her death, he was thrown into an ecstacy of suffering much beyond what even his keen temperament was accustomed to feel. Nor does he seem ever to have forgotten her. His verses' To Mary in Heaven ;' his invocation to the star that rose on the anniversary of her death; his description of the landscape that was the scene of their day of love and parting vows, where "flowers sprang wanton to be press'd;" the whole luxury and exquisite passion of that strain, evince that her image had survived many important changes in himself. [Mr. Campbell is mistaken in this: Burns's first love was his handsome Nell; his Mary Campbell an after acquaintance.] From his seventeenth to his twenty-fourth year he lived as an assistant to his father, on another farm in Ayrshire, at Lochlea, to which they had removed from Mount Oliphant. During that period his brother Gilbert and he, besides labouring for their father, took a part of the land on their own account, for the purpose of raising flax; and this speculation induced Robert to attempt establishing himself in the business of flax-dressing in the neighbouring town of Irvine. But the unhealthiness of the business, and the accidental misfortune of his shop taking fire, induced him at the end of six months to abandon it. Whilst his father's affairs were growing desperate at Lochlea, the poet and his brother had taken a different farm on their own account, as an asylum for the family in case of the worst; but from unfavourable seasons and a bad soil, this speculation proved also unfortunate, and was given up. By this time Burns had formed his connexion with Jean Armour, who was afterwards his wife, a connexion which could no longer be concealed at the moment when the ruinous state of his affairs had determined him to cross the Atlantic, and to seek his fortune in Jamaica. He had even engaged himself as assistant overseer to a plantation. He proposed, however, to legalise the private contract of marriage which he had made with Jean, and, though he anticipated the necessity of leaving her behind him, he trusted to better days for their being re-united. But the parents of Jean were unwilling to dispose of her to a husband who was thus to be separated from her, and persuaded her to renounce the informal marriage. Burns also agreed to dissolve the connexion, though deeply wounded at the apparent willingness of his mistress to give him up, and overwhelmed with feelings of the most distracting nature. He now [1786] prepared to embark for Jamaica, where his first situation would, in all probability, have been that of a negro-driver, when, before bidding a last adieu to his native country, he happily thought of publishing a collection of his poems. By this publication he gained about 207., which seasonably saved him from indenting himself as a servant for want of money to procure a passage. With nine guineas out of this sum he had taken a steerage passage in the Clyde for Jamaica; and to avoid the terrors of a jail he had been for some time skulking from covert to covert. He had taken a last leave of his friends, and had composed the last song which he thought he should ever measure to Caledonia,* when the contents of a letter from Dr. Blacklock of Edinburgh to one of his friends, describing the encouragement which an edition of his poems would be likely to receive in the Scottish capital, suddenly lighted up all his prospects, and detained him from embarking. "I immediately posted," he says, "to Edinburgh, without a single acquaintance or letter of introduction. The baneful star which had so long shed its blasting influence on my zenith, for once made a revolution to the nadir." Though he speaks of having had no acquaintance in Edinburgh, he had been previously introduced in Ayrshire to Lord Daer, to Dugald Stewart, and to several respectable individuals, by the reputation which the first edition of his poems had acquired. He arrived in Edinburgh in 1786, and his reception there was more like an agreeable change of fortune in a romance than like an event in ordinary life. His company was everywhere sought for; and it was soon found that the admiration which his poetry had excited was but a part of what was due to the general eminence of his mental faculties. His natural eloquence, and his warm and social heart expanding under the influence of prosperity-which with all the pride of genius retained a quick and versatile sympathy with every variety of human character-made him equally fascinating in the most refined and convivial societies. For a while he reigned the fashion and idol of his native capital. The profits of his new edition enabled him in the succeeding year, 1787, to make a tour through a considerable extent both of the south and north of Scotland. The friend who accompanied him in this excursion gives a very interesting description of the impressions which he saw produced in Burns's mind from some of the romantic scenery which they visited. "When we came," he says, "to a rustic hut on the river Till, where the stream descends in a noble waterfall, and is surrounded by a woody precipice that commands a most beautiful view of its course, he threw himself on a heathy seat, and gave himself up to a tender, abstracted, and voluptuous indulgence of imagination." It may be conceived with what enthusiasm he visited the field of Bannockburn. After he had been caressed and distinguished so much in "The gloomy night is gathering fast." |