Ordination," and "The Calf."

The warp and woof of her linen required to be spotless or she rejected the whole web. To put it in few words, her temperament and training made her the estimable woman she was, and the bad Burns critic she proved herself to be. That Burns soon

came to the conclusion that there was little in common between them when his own compositions were in question is evident from this remark in a letter of Mrs Dunlop's at the beginning of 1789:-" Sometimes I fear lest any expression or omission of mine has verified in your mind a prediction you long ago uttered that I would not have delicacy to carry on a correspondence without hurting you." Her own efforts in the poetic line rise to no higher level than respectable mediocrity; her prose, however, is on a much higher level, notwithstanding its provoking prolixity, occasional loose syntax, and arbitrary spelling, which is by no means so faulty as in the average epistle of that day. Letter-writing was, with her, a painfully laborious art, requiring not hours, but days and sometimes weeks of elaboration; the modern telegram style would have shocked her like slatternly work in her laundry; and she apparently considered it unpardonable wastrie unless every available inch of the paper was covered with writing. Her letters consequently are, for the most part, unconscionably long-so long, indeed, that we find her repeatedly accusing Burns of reading them perfunctorily, or not reading them at all. He certainly was far from punctual in replying to them, and when he did so, she took occasion upbraid him for designedly ignoring their contents. thankfully rejoice," she wrote him on one occasion, at sight of your hand, although you never answer one word I say to you. Indeed, I am still of opinion you do

to

"I

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not read my letters." Burns was always on the debtor side of the epistolary account; in 1791, for instance, he received nearly thrice the letters from Dunlop compared with the number he sent there, the natural result of which was a sad falling-off during the years which followed. is the general belief that Mrs Dunlop deserted Burns towards

It

the close of his life, but this is not quite so certain as some commentators would make it. If there was an estrangement, it is not all clear that she was entirely to blame. In her last letter, dated from London (12th January, 1795), there is no perceptible change in the tone of friendship, though it begins with this somewhat suggestive passage :

-

"I write you from this Lethe of the world, you who seemed to forget me before I quitted the Land of Cakes, that poor retreat of friendly remembrance, you who were so unkind as to leave unnoticed my last enquiries for your child, about whose fate you had awakened my most earnest anxieties by what you said of his then situation, and those consequent feelings that prevented my being able to shake you by the hand and at least take a kind farewell. ... I would again beg your alleviating the pang by letting me hear at 410 miles distance how you and yours are, and whether you ever recollect such a creature as I was once an inhabitant of the county in which you reside."*

Less than a year before this, she thus addresses him :

"This is now the fifth time I have wrote you since I have been able to draw one line in return. What have I done to deserve this? ... Could I think you were as much in earnest to send me the letters you once spoke of, and which I am sure I need not say how much I would delight in reading, it would be a hope that would cheer my very soul to look forward to. But instead of this, I now almost despair of ever getting another line from you, nor guess to what I should impute the change, whether to my own insipidity or the unsteadiness of you men, among whom I dare say there are very few indeed that can boast of acknowledging the same friends seven years, which is now about the period since you allowed me the pride of reckoning my own name on the list of those you called your friends."

Again and again she writes in this strain, which leaves no doubt that she resented Burns's culpable negligence in answering her letters. True, he was sometimes sorely tried by their contents, containing, as they did, most candid recitals of all the gossip she heard concerning him, as we shall see in the extracts we give further on. Besides, she was strangely regardless in her strictures on some of

*The spelling has been here and there modernised.

Burns's compositions--strictures which, as often as not, expressed mere prejudice or threats of dropping his acquaintance. Her ruthless condemnation of "Tam o' Shanter highly offended Burns, and no wonder, for he prided himself.on that poem as his standard performance in the poetical line," and frankly told her so. "Had I seen the

66

"all its beauties

whole of that performance," she says, could not have extracted one word of mine in its praise, notwithstanding you were its author." The flaw in the sample-and we can guess what it was in this instancecondemned the whole piece. The overflowing measure of praise she repeatedly bestowed on the "Cotter's Saturday Night" betokens a confirmed conviction on her part that in that composition Burns reached the high-water-mark of his genius.

For

When there is a sense of unkindness on the one side and latent anger on the other, the atmosphere of friendship becomes electrical. Mrs Dunlop may have heard rumours in London to the discredit of Burns which pique prevented her from putting to the accustomed test, while Burns may have inadvertently helped to widen the breach by pigeonholing her letters till he found himself in a fitting frame of mind to reply to them. A thoroughly satisfactory explanation of Mrs Dunlop's silence during the last eighteen months of the Poet's life cannot now be looked for. the greater part of 1795 she was tending Mrs Pechoron, her sick daughter, in London, and she had many family cares and anxieties besides to engage her attention. We have the unsupported statement of Dr Currie that " Burns, before he died, had the pleasure of receiving a satisfactory explanation of his friend's silence," but Currie's unaccountable alteration of the dates of certain of Burns's later letters to her, the effect of which was the concealment of the real date of the rupture, does not go well with the statement referred to. Notwithstanding all real or supposed short-comings, we agree with Dr Wallace's verdict, that Mrs Dunlop was the truest, most sympathetic, and wisest of all the Poet's friends. Estrangement or not, her

motherly interest in him and his never ceased, her admiration of his intellectual powers never waned. After his death, she took the warmest interest in the welfare of his widow and children, and exerted herself to the utmost to make the Currie edition a financial success, the proceeds of which were destined for the benefit of Jean and her family. Her appointment of Gilbert Burns as factor or grieve on the Lothian family property is another proof of her regard for the Poet's memory, for, worthy and deserving man as Gilbert undoubtedly was, he would have died a struggling farmer but for the patronage of his deceased brother's friend.

Scattered through the correspondence we find many paragraphs containing much information that is new or corroborative on certain biographical points which formerly were more or less in doubt. Erroneous opinions have long been prevalent on the subject of Burns's emoluments as an exciseman, which may now be said to be authoritatively corrected. As Port Officer in Dumfries his salary was £90 per annum, besides as much rum and brandy, he tells us, as would easily supply an ordinary family. In addition, he received one-half the money value of all contra band goods he seized, which, as Mr M'Fadzean has proved from the Excise Records, in some years came very near the amount of his salary. His settlement with his Edinburgh publisher yielded him £450, according to his own account. Of this sum, he lent his brother Gilbert £180, which was not repaid during his lifetime. The greater part of the balance was invested in Ellisland; his estimated loss in that unfortunate venture he put at £108-hence, allowing for all contingencies, he took up house in Dumfries with something like £100 in hand. The displenishing sale at Ellisland was a good one, and we have Jean's word for it that they did not leave the farm empty-handed. In December, 1794, he acted as Supervisor at Dumfries, but his income apparently did not keep pace with his outlay, for we find him occasionally borrowing small sums, and in September, 1794, he informed Mrs Dunlop that “a bad

debt of ten pounds excepted, my brother has every shilling I am worth in the world among his hands, and I am nearly certain that I have done with it for ever." Gilbert, however, did pay the debt to his trustees, out of the sum allowed him for the disappointing issue of the Poet's works which he edited for Caddel and Davies, in 1820.

That there were two separate issues of the Edinburgh (1787) edition, the "skinking" and the "stinking,"* is put beyond a doubt, for the Poet speaks in March, 1787, of "having both a 2nd and 3rd edition going on, as the second was begun with too small a number of copies."

Mrs Dunlop was unwearied, at the beginning of the acquaintance, in trying to improve the worldly fortunes of Burns, and it may surprise many to learn that she first thought of a military career for him, perhaps because she might be able to exert some family influence in that direction. Nothing came of the proposal, though Burns himself favoured it, and would have purchased a commission had his funds permitted. She next directed her efforts to secure for him the appointment of first occupant of the Chair of Agriculture in the University of Edinburgh, but as the donor of the endowment insisted on his right of patronage this also miscarried. It is also probable that it was her solicitations which induced Professor Adam Smith, author of the Wealth of Nations, to endeavour to secure for him a post as Salt Officer in the Customs, at a salary of £30 per annum, compared with which the Excise appointment he ultimately secured may be considered positive affluence. In addition to the foregoing, there are constant allusions to her attempts to influence her friends on the Board of Excise in favour of the professional promotion of Burns. Yet she never forgot to season these acts of kindness with reproof and correction, and occasionally with commendation when she thought he deserved it. When a damaging report concerning his character or *So-called from a misprint in the last stanza of the “ Haggis' -“ stinking skinking." In the London edition (1787) the error appears in all the copies.

for "