conduct reached her ears, she at once called him to book. As early as January, 1788, she thus warned him :

"Above all, don't let the devil drive, as it is alledged you sometimes do. We are told you are in prison for writing not only Jacobite, but blackguard verses against the King. Perhaps it would have been as well so. Pain is a hard jailer, and a prison might have saved you a crutch."*

Again, in the same year, when she heard of his marriage to Jean, she writes him in these plain terms:

'Yet, if report has not done you great injury, you have indulged in a freedom of life that poisons a man's mind for a husband by leading him to measure his ideas of every woman by the standard of the very worst among whom he has connected himself."

In November of the same year she is even more candid :

"A gentleman told me with a grave face the other day that you certainly were a sad wretch, that your works were immoral and infamous; you lampooned the clergy, and laught at the ridiculous parts of religion, and he was told you were a scandalous free liver in every sense of the word. I said I was certain he must be misinformed, and asked if he knew you. He told me he had been in your company and knew it was the case. 'I beg pardon,' said I, I could not have guessed you had ever seen him, or read his book, by the character you give of either.' Another of the company asked me if I knew you. I said I thought so, and would be exceedingly sorry to be convinced I did not. What did I think of your religion? 'That it was too exalted and sublime to have any ridiculous parts capable of being laughed at.'"

And so on, like the staunch friend she was. Who this sneak was who produced for drawing-room consumption this patent amalgam of one ounce of personal knowledge to a hundredweight of hearsay we are left to guess, but the passage proves how ancient is this method of attack on the Poet. Towards the end of 1788, she treated him to this gossiping budget of improbabilities— this time in the role of the candid friend in excelsis. If

* A reference to his accident in Edinburgh.

there is any truth in the story, Burns must have been giving an object-lesson to his buckship who narrated it :

6

One day

'I don't

"I must tell you a little incident in confirmation of the parts the world allow you for relishing the sweets of affluence. your works were the subject of discourse. I had not then seen so many proofs that the author's tastes soar'd above these pleasures gold can buy, and, all curiosity, asked if any of the company knew, or had ever seen him. Yes,' says one gentleman, 'I was once accidentally two days with him.' 'And,' cries I, 'what kind of a man is he in company? What did you think of him?' know,' says he, what he might have been once, but they have quite spoilt him now at Edinburgh. If ever he was good for anything, he is the damnedest bundle of self-conceit and insolence I ever saw.' Insolence,' says I, surprised, for self-conceit I can readily forgive that, for surely he has an infinite deal to found it on ; but for Codsake tell me how did he show it? What did he say or do? Why, he talked loud and more than came to his share. In the morning could not breakfast without confections; at dinner found nothing good enough for him, nothing but what was detestable, curst the cook, damned the waiters, and despised drinking port. He had been drunk with port the night before, and ree or crop-sick in the morning.' 'No,' says he, 'twas all airs; he was vife, and ate a very hearty dinner.' You'll allow this was a very strong sketch. Had Beugo hit if off no better I don't think I should have discovered the original by the picture.”

If she meant to amuse Burns with this "little incident," we need not say that in all likelihood she successfully achieved her object.

His ode on Mrs Oswald, of Auchencruive, she hits off very effectively :

"I have just been reading your infusion of gall, wormwood, and aquafortis.... Are you not a sad, wicked creature to send the poor old wife straight to the devil because she gave you a ride in a cold night? I am sure your wrath had need of a cooler too, but few of us know our own necessities."

Further on, in the same letter, and firing in the dark, she scores & palpable hit :—

"I heard a man say lately he has seen a poem of yours so grossly indelicate he was ashamed to read it alone on a braeside.*

* Perhaps an echo from the Crochallan Club.

Could

I have believed this, I would blush to write you or call you my acquaintance and a friend I valued. I hope, if it is the case that you have once been so far to blame, that it was at least before we had ever met, and that this is one of the follies long cast to air and polished off by mine, if not by better company."

She cherished vain hopes, it will be observed, of taming the eagle and transforming him into a dickie-bird within a gilded cage, but she soon discovered, to her grievous disappointment, that there was not sufficient make-believe in Burns to ensure even a decent start. But he was ever careful not to wound her susceptibilities in the pieces he forwarded for her perusal. Conscious of this, he lost no time in replying to the charge brought against him— one of the few occasions on which he did so :

"I am very sorry that you should be informed of my supposed guilt in composing, in some midnight frolic, a stanza or two not quite for a clergyman's reading to a company of ladies. That I am the author of the verses alluded to in your letter is what I much doubt. You may guess that the convivial hours of men have their mysteries of wit and mirth; and I hold it a piece of contemptible baseness to detail the sallies of thoughtless merriment or the orgies of accidental intoxication to the ear of cool sobriety or female delicacy."

In November, 1790, she touches, but with a lighter hand, rumours of a different kind :

(1)

"You may remember I once advised you to drink yourself out of a fever. I am told you have lately reversed that plan, and along with your friend Nicol, got into one, which, however, I was glad to hear from Mr A. Lawrie" was not incurable, since it did not prevent you traversing the farm with him, and being at Dumfries, to all appearance hale and hearty-an account which I truly rejoiced in, more especially when he added that you had this season the finest crop the land has carried this twenty years. I was more pleased with this than with your encounter with the schoolmaster, who, the world says, has already damned you as an author, and now well-nigh killed you as a man. As to the first, I believe it impossible; as to the other, Heaven forfend it, at least in my time."

(1) Wm. Nicol, of the High School, Edinburgh.

(2) Son of the Minister of Loudon.

This is the only compliment on record, so far as we know, to Burns's skill as a farmer, on which subject his biographers are usually silent. The reference to Nicol's sinister influence on Burns's habits, though much exeggerated, conveys a hint that Mrs Dunlop had been at some pains to discover the character of his chief associates.

The impassable gulf between her poetic standard and that of Burns can best be made apparent by taking note of her own summation of the particulars in which he fell short of her ideals. She does not say in so many words that his language vulgarised his themes, but we can infer from what she does say that he would have been better employed on an improved version of Thomson's Seasons than in composing "Tam o' Shanter"; further, we misconstrue many passages in her letters if they do not mean that she preferred Burns in English to Burns in Scots. If "Tam o' Shanter " could not "extort one word of praise from her," what would she have said of that masterpiece, the "Jolly Beggars," which, in all likelihood, she did not see in print, and never in manuscript for certain? We hazard the opinion that it would have proved such a heavy counterpoise to the "Cottar's Saturday Night" that she would have broken off the friendship ere it had well begun. In November, 1787, she forwarded the following from Dr Moore* to Burns, under cover of one of her own epistles:

of it.

I am

"In your letter you hint at your scarcity of English. far from thinking that this is the case. On the contrary, I am convinced you already possess that language in an uncommon degree, and with a little attention you will become entirely master In several of your poems there is a striking richness and variety of expression-for which reason I hope you will use it in most of your future productions. If there actually existed a language called the Scotch language, which had a grammar, and which was used by the best writers of Scotland, I would perhaps prefer it to the English. But unfortunately there is no such thing. The Scotch is as provincial a dialect of English as the Somersetshire

or Yorkshire.

And therefore no serious work can be written in it

*Father of Sir John Moore.

to advantage, although it must be owned in works of humour and naiveté it sometimes gives additional force and beauty. Some of your humorous poems have gained by it, and it gives a fresh charm to the beautiful simplicity of some of your songs."

Of course we cannot set down this rank heresy in her name; she well knew that Scotland had a literature of her own, as some of her quotations testify; still, we cannot shut our eyes to the fact that she valued Dr Moore's opinions in superlative degree. They were intimate friends before Burns was born; she frequently sent Burns extracts from his letters; and a large number of her own contain familiar references to him and his family. At the very beginning of the correspondence, she thus speaks of him :

"I have only this moment yours, and at the same moment the inclosed from Dr Moore, now of London, to whom I had sent a copy of your poems as the most acceptable present I could make to that person whose taste I valued most, and from whose friendship I have reaped most instruction as well as infinite pleasure."

What follows affords a hint of his influence on her judgment:

'I believe I told you once before that my friend, the Doctor, thought broad Scots, though very proper for Queen Mary to speak while she lived, not majestic enough for her to sing so long after she was dead."

66

Her sensitiveness seems to have been begot of this majestic" idea of hers in connection with literary composition, and these further extracts emphasise our contention:

"There are some words which, although in themselves perfectly innocent, when uttered in the rustic simplicity of a peasant, custom has wholly prescribed in upper life, so that an author should have some very strong temptation before he introduce what it would be an insult to his company for a gentleman to read aloud."

"You ought to take off a few patches which consummate beauty has no use for, which in a polite and enlightened age one seldom wore, and which a delicate, manly mind cannot regret the want of. Forgive my saying that every indecency is below you, and sinks the voice of your fame by putting to silence your female admirers."