To return to the subject of Cunningham's personal knowledge of Burns, he draws from memory a picture of the Poet as Volunteer, in which attention is called to his "indifferent dexterity in the handling of his arms." Can a boy of eleven be accepted as a judge of proficiency in manual exercise and drill? The words, "I remember," are fatal; the featureless and commonplace realism of the portrait is smudged by the shading of fiction. The sentence is also unfortunate in its context. It comes shortly before the condensation of Cunningham's notoriously imaginative account of the Poet's funeral as supplied to Lockhart. It is doubtful if he was in the town of Dumfries at this period, say the year prior to Burns's death. His story points to either continuous residence or very frequent visits. At the age of eleven (Miller, 193) he was "placed under the charge of a brother resident in Dalswinton village, to learn the trade of stone-mason. It is extremely unlikely that the boy-apprentice would be allowed to go into Dumfries to see, as he says, first, the Poet laid out for the grave, and again to take part in the funeral. It is even less likely that he was so familiar with what was going on in Dumfries as to justify him in saying of the talk of the town during the Poet's last illness that "wherever two or three were gathered together, their talk was of Burns, and of him alone." A grown man living among the townsfolk could hardly have said more.

Upon two heads he certainly allowed imagination to lead him astray. He wrote Lockhart of the funeral (p. 295): “The day was a fine one, the sun was almost without a cloud, and not a drop of rain fell from dawn to twilight." This Scott-Douglas pronounces unsurpassed "literary impudence," and (Edinburgh Burns VI., 208) gives the proof, after Dr Waddell, that the forenoon was showery, the afternoon pleasant, the evening and night wet. Again, speaking of the Mausoleum (p. 346 of the Life), Cunningham laments that the indifferent sculpture is not redeemed by the inscription:" The merits of him who wrote 'Tam o' Shanter' and 'The Cottar's Saturday Night' were concealed in Latin." This is unpardonable, for Lock

hart himself, who gives the Latin draft and condemns the structure, adds that the intended inscription was never added to

it."

It is true that, in the Life, "Honest Allan either modifies or is silent upon the more extraordinary features of his letters to Lockhart, but he retains enough to fill with amazement any reader of the Prefatory Notice to his eighth volume. He there mentions among his difficulties:-"I live remote from the land of Burns, and am consequently cut off from all such information as personal application might hope to collect on the Nith and Ayr." It is to be regretted that he did not generalise the application of the plea of local disability, and decide from it to restrain his imagination and curb his recurring tendency towards unveracity. It applies, however, to other matters than those just detailed, or to such an early memory as the recitation of "Tam o' Shanter," which is repeated (I., 249) with all the circumstance of melodious voice and sparkling eye. He says nothing to prevent the stuff he wrote Lockhart being repeated in later editions of that author's Life, plus the aspersion on Burns in obvious connection with "The Merry Muses,' and the libel on "Chloris," which Lockhart reprints from the Songs of Scotland. The enquiry into Cunningham's personal knowledge of Burns, that he ever saw him in life, or looked upon him in death, or saw his body lowered into the grave, thus fizzles out in sundry statements by himself. And he has been shown to have written so recklessly, and to have romanced so freely, that, as a witness, he has simply put himself out of

court.

Conscious of having done his conscienceless best to draw upon Lockhart the odium of offering a work of fiction for a biography of Burns, he began his own Life of the Poet with the avowed intention of making "a clear and judicious narrative," and at the close he flatters himself (VIII., p. vi.) upon having left little that is "dark or mystical in either the Life or Works of the Poet." There is a greatness about such effrontery that almost touches the sublime. The phrases quoted apply to a

work in which no borrowed statement has been verified, which is rank with mistifying annotations, and in which nothing is new but the fabrications and the rash substitutions of the probable for the true. The case is stated broadly. The opening pages of the Life teem with errors, the padding is enormous, and when an incorrect version of eight lines of John Hamilton's addition to "Of a' the airts" is ascribed to Burns, one is disposed to ask if the writer's critical faculty was asleep. No wide-awake critic would surely think of Burns complimenting his Jean upon being personally clean. If, in fine, all that is untrue, all that is dubious, and all that is irrelevantly reflective were extracted from the "clear and judicious" Life, very little would be left to stand for "Honest Allan's assumed candour and accuracy.'

22

Little more can be done here than point the way for any wishing to carry this study further. Cunningham is freely handled, and sometimes deservedly scourged, by Scott-Douglas and Dr Wallace, one subject being his calumnious charge against James Johnson. As a critic of Burns, he is both worthless and disingenuous. In one of his prefaces, reprinted in 1887, he boldly differs from earlier editors in accepting and rejecting certain poems associated with the name of Burns. If the test he applies to "The Tree of Liberty," which he rejects, be turned to "The Vowels-A Tale," which he admits, the result will be found an eloquent commentary upon his critical methods. What he says of Burns's admiration of Peter Pindar, and of his preference of Fergusson to Ramsay, while unimportant as bearing upon Burns's taste and opinions, has no real foundation. In his most deliberate prose utterance-Preface of 1786-Burns gives Ramsay precedence of Fergusson. Cunningham here builds upon a mere obiter dictum in Poem and Common-place Book, purely incidental to the theme occupying Burns's mind. Regarding Pindar, it is ludicrous to find that when Burns thought he was speaking of him in terms of warm praise, he was in fact eulogising the "Lord Gregory" of Dr Walcott, or Wolcot! (See Currie IV., 40.)

Cunningham is yet more disingenuous in his criticism of Burns's expressed view of mangling and adding to the songs and fragmentary ballads of others. He charges the Poet with being mistaken in theory, and inconsistent in practice. (See Letters to Tytler of Woodhouselee, of August, 1787; to Mrs Dunlop, of 13th November, 1788; and to Thomson, April, 1793.) An examination of these entries, taken in connection with Allan's accusation in the Life and in his chapter on "The Ayrshire Ballads," shows that while fully recognising the difference between songs and ballads, he wilfully mixes them up, and misapplies to each one the letters in which Burns is dealing with the other. The case crumbles into fragments, and the only result is to prove Cunningham both inconsistent and tricky. The simple truth is that Burns's theory conflicts with Cunningham's own practice, and that he had no comprehension of Burns's royal way of borrowing an idea from an old chorus, and returning the loan by investing the old "makkar" with the credit for his own verses. In this matter it is necessary to follow Cunningham in both The Songs of Scotland and his Life and Works of Burns. The sum-total of the whole enquiry is that Cunningham is no more to be taken on trust for critical acumen than for either editorial honesty or biographical veracity. Exit, "Honest Allan," the Second.

EDWARD PINNINGTON.

BURNS AND JAMAICA.

TH

HE following article which appeared in July, 1896, in the London monthly Britannia, fairly answers Lord Rosebery's query at the opening of the Auld Brig o' Ayr:

"Had Burns gone to Jamaica' is a subject for speculative writing which has so far escaped the attention of that vast army of scribblers, who, with the near approach of the great centenary as an excuse, have found profitable matter for their pens in dealing with the many might-have-beens' in the career of the Poet. We have been gravely-very gravely-told that had he lived till after the passing of the Reform Bill he most likely would have become the Parliamentary representative of a Scotch burgh—with a tendency, no doubt, to issue his manifestos in verse. Another gentleman has tried to figure out what-might-have-been had the Poet's environment-toujours environment-been changed at the proper psychological moment, his idea, perhaps, being that in such a case there would have been no necessity for the average Burns's Club president feeling called upon to apologise for his character as a man while extolling his work as a bard. Yet a third has endeavoured to give a clear indication of how Burns would have acted under certain contingencies possible only to this century; while a fourth has-but why go on multiplying the might-have-beens evolved in other brains, while there are some in my own that seem to me as well worth the light of day?

"As an Anglo-West Indian who at the present moment has nothing better to do than shiver over the sitting-room fire, nursing the remains of a refractory liver and sighing for a stretch in his cotton hammock, which hangs in the shadiest corner of the verandah of his residence overlooking Port Royal, I protest that after all the sort of thing that has been permitted, it is only fair and proper that the field of imaginative speculation should be so extended as to include that island lying on the fringe of the Caribbean Sea which very nearly played a part in the destiny of Burns, and which was the means of invoking his muse on more than one occasion.

"If this inclusion be granted, I may proceed to say that even to this day it is a matter of the deepest regret to white Jamaicans that the Poet was unable to accept the overseership with its £30 per annum on a sugar estate in the Pearl of the Antilles.' At certain seasons of the year when their ingenuity fails to twist their vocabulary into a satisfactory and soul-relieving expression of physical suffering, this regret intensifies almost to poignant grief.