This is the veritable voice of Mrs. Grundy crying out for Quaker costumes for all stage-players, and draperies for the naked marbles of the sculptor-a written confession quite as suggestive of mental obliquity of vision as the pretentious ignorance of Dr Moore's advice to a master in what the Spectator in a recent issue styled the Burns school of Anglian poets.

If it is too much to say that Mrs Dunlop did not consider broad Scots a proper vehicle for the expression of high poetic thought, the reader can judge for himself to what extent and in what directions she found fault with Burns's use of it, by perusing her letter to him, of date 12th July, 1791, which is too long for reproduction here. In this lengthy communication she says she is "writing to a friend to whom she has the habit of saying all she thinks,' -quite a redundancy in view of its very candid languagethe result being that, consciously or unconsciously, she reveals the working of her mind more fully than in any other single letter of the series. She was disappointed at the obstinacy of Burns in sticking to the letter of his printed text notwithstanding her repeated protests; and she felt sore at the blasting of her hopes of a reformation "from the refinements of the last five or six years, more extensive acquaintance with polite scenes, polite authors, and those female companies to which your own merit has introduced you." As early as April, 1787, Burns thus bluntly defined his attitude towards her suggestions, by way of explanation and defence :

"Your criticisms, Madam, I understand very well, and would have wished to have pleased you better. You are right in your guess that I am not very amenable to counsel. Poets, much my superiors, have so flattered those who possessed the adventitious qualities of wealth and power, that I am determined to flatter no created being, either in prose or verse."

One of the instances she adduces is what she calls a "blot" on the otherwise admirable "Twa Dogs." In the Kilmarnock edition (1786) occurs this couplet, which

may be taken as a sample of the licence claimed by authors and publishers in that century:

"Till tir'd at last wi' mony a farce,

They set them down upon their arse,"

upon which she comments in this amusing fashion :—

"Whether that temptation subsists where you describe a dog sitting in the only way a dog could sit, or rather two dogs sitting as they could not possibly sit, both on one tail, I submit to your own opinion. Mine would have led me rather to fix the place where than the manner how, as capable of more variety. Would it hurt the spirit of the piece much had it only been :

Till tir'd at last wi' mony a race,

or

They set them down on a brae face,'

'They sat down by a quarry face.""

Burns, unmoved by this thrust at his grammar and terminology, retained the offending couplet in the edition of 1793, as he had already done in the Edinburgh edition of 1787, nor did he do sacrifice to the proprieties or the grammarians, till the 1794 edition, in which he altered it to :

"Until wi' daffin weary grown,

Upon a knowe they sat them down,"

which has been adopted as the amended reading ever since. His consistent disregard of her suggested emendations now and again called forth ebullitions like the following:

"You severely mortified me, nor did I ever in my life feel more degraded in my own eye than by the utter contempt you have shown for those hints which it cost me a great deal to give, and which I now heartily wish I had left alone. Friendly advice when wholly overlooked makes one feel themselves mean, officious, and in the present case, indelicate."

We remember reading, many years ago, an appreciative article on Burns, written by a woman and published in a Scottish newspaper, in which the writer said much in praise of Burns's kind-heartedness, because, though a poacher (at least on one occasion), he mourned in touching language over a poor partridge which had fallen to his gun,

the details of which were to be found in the " Epistle to John Rankin." The purity of mind which this innocent interpretation of the simile employed by Burns to explain to Rankin the reason for his appearance before the Kirk authorities is very refreshing; nay more, it is proof positive that many stanzas of Burns which have been decried by the strait-laced can be read by youth and innocence without any of the dreadful consequences so confidently predicted. Of passages of this nature Mrs Dunlop writes in more serious vein, as could only be expected from an old-world chaperon with notions so strict that she would not allow her daughters to accept presents from any source whatever outside the family circle.

"Indeed, dear Burns," she wrote, you must forgive me telling you how oft I have felt the mortifying truth that no lady could be justified in acknowledging that your book, spite of the many unspeakable advantages it possesses, had been a mean of recommending its author to her acquaintance or esteem while it contains six stanzas to be found in the Edinburgh edition at pages 26, 39, 97, 258, 283. Nay more, if you abstract the Psalms and Prayers, and insert these in a new corrected version, I will not be able to vindicate to my own heart that intimacy it has been so long my highest ambition and most unwearied endeavour to establish."

It is sufficient to say here that the stanzas pilloried are the twelfth in "Scotch Drink "; the last of the postscript to the "Earnest Cry" (original version); the eleventh of the "Address to the Deil"; the fourth of a "Scotch Bard"; and the seventeenth of the " First Epistle to Lapraik." Granting to the full the validity of her objections, the sweeping judgment in the foregoing is out of all proportion to the fault; and it proceeds upon grounds so narrow, so utterly foreign to the generous mind revealed in the rest of the correspondence, that we would fain believe she did not mean all she said; that she was still the same woman who wrote these words :

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'Forgive me if here I have said too much. I never mean, believe me, that a thorn of mine should scratch your little finger. Were it to wound my friend, I would bathe the hurt with as sincere

a tear as ever woman shed, and I trust the balsam would remove every sense of the pain from his breast which my friendly candour could occasion."

And again :

"I can only say there is no piece in the whole I would vote to leave out, tho' severals where I would draw my pen over lines, or spill the ink-glass over a verse, from the esteem which I nevertheless entertain for the author."

Divested of her robes of state, here stands the real woman-the woman whose beauty of soul Burns worshipped. She meant well, and Burns knew it. In taking full advantage of the privileges of the candid friend, she forestalled the critics who came after her, for there is scarce a loose joint in his harness she did not do her best, according to her light, to mend and strengthen.

The truth is, Mrs Dunlop could not, and never did, realise that Burns came not to fulfil but to destroy the artificial school of poetry in which she had been reared; that he was a solid reality, and not a veneered article; that his genius would have drooped and died within the prison walls to which she and Dr Moore would have consigned him. To reply to all her letters he knew right well would be the beginning of acrid controversy; he therefore systematically ignored all contentious questions, preferring to exasperate her by silence rather than risk a quarrel by asserting himself. But though he thus treated the critic with scant courtesy, for the woman he ever retained the profoundest respect. Whether or not her friendship waxed dim in the gloaming of Dumfries, certain it is that it shone bright in the after darkness. Burns's reverential regard for her never wavered to the last hour of his existence. The moving

words in the last letter he wrote to her, a few days before he died, despite their dignified and distant tone, sound like a stifled sob:

I have written you so often, without receiving any answer, that I would not trouble you again but for the circumstances in which I am. An illness which has long hung about me, in all probability

will speedily send me beyond that bourne whence no traveller returns. Your friendship, with which for many years you honoured me, was a friendship dearest to my soul. Your conversation, and especially your correspondence, were at once highly entertaining and instructive. With what pleasure did I use to break up the seal! The remembrance yet adds one pulse more to my poor palpitating heart! Farewell!!!

10th July, 1796."

ROBERT BURNS.

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last post

Probably ere she read this the for him had sounded; the rest was silence-silence eternal. On the 20th of July, the day before he died, she penned the following note, from Dunlop, to Gilbert Burns at Mossgiel* :

SIR,

It gives me real concern to hear your brother has been in a bad state of health for some time past. Will you forgive me taking the liberty to beg you will be so good as let me know what were your last accounts of him, when you heard, and what was the nature of his complaints, which I sincerely hope are not of the nature to be attended with any danger? I shall also be happy to learn that your own family are as well as I can wish them, and your cousin Fanny, to whom pray remember me. From, Sir, Your most humble servt. FRAN. A. DUNLOP."

From what source did she learn of his bad state of health, and why were her enquiries not made direct to Dumfries? We cannot tell. This letter, however, is another proof of the unreliability of the Currie narrative. It also establishes beyond doubt that Mrs Dunlop's friendship for the Poet continued unabated to the last.

Mrs Dunlop was born twenty-nine years before Burns, and outlived him nineteen years, dying in 1815, at the age of eighty-five. She was only daughter of Sir Thomas Wallace, of Craigie, advocate, and his spouse, Dame Eleanora Agnew, of Lochryan, Wigtownshire.

* Burns Chronicle, 1904, No. XIII.

Craigie