married some time ago

-a vague expression, which would not have been used had the marriage taken place in the same year as it was registered. We have purposely re

frained from founding anything on what is said by the biographers, for reasons which we have already indicated. Not all of them, however, procured their information as Robert Chambers did his, viz., by personal visit and interview on many doubtful points of which he gives full particulars, which renders his narrative all the more worthy of credence. He flatly contradicts Lockhart's statement regarding a second marriage in Gavin Hamilton's house, giving as his authority the eldest daughter of Gavin Hamilton (Mrs Adair), who informed him that she remembered Burns giving the first intimation of his marriage to her family at her father's breakfast table, in 1788, by casually referring to Jean as "Mrs Burns."

The conclusion from the evidence the only one possible, in our opinion-is, that there was one marriage ceremony, and one only; and the Mauchline Session and its Moderator assured themselves of that fact before proceeding to deal with the case in the tangled condition in which it was brought under their notice on Burns's return from Edinburgh crowned with the laurels of fame.

It may be said that the space we have devoted to this question is out of proportion to its importance. We need not say we do not agree with that view. Burns's marriage with Jean Armour is so interwoven with the great turningpoint of his career that they cannot be separated. It was the immediate cause of the publication of the volume which brought him into fame, and sent him post-haste to take his natural place amongst the literati of Edinburgh; and it came very near being responsible for sending him into tropical exile. Had Jean remained faithful to her vows of 1786 and clung to her husband, her constancy would undoubtedly have influenced the years which immediately followed. This much we are justified in saying-it is a great deal in view of some recent biographies-there would have been no Highland Mary and no Clarinda to point

the barbs of unkindly and half-read critics. On the other hand, the world would have been deprived of the deathless lyrics which these experiences inspired.

In the two years of his life we have been examining, however opinion of his conduct during that trying period may differ, few will be inclined to deny that he was as much sinned against as sinning. As he says himself in his defence to Mrs M'Lehose, it is the story "of an honest man struggling successfully with temptations the most powerful that ever beset humanity," while conscious that he was guilty" of high imprudence and egregious folly."

EDITOR

*Letter dated March 9th, 1789.

LOCKHART ON CRABBE AND BURNS.

W

HEN J. G. Lockhart, LL.B., son-in-law and biographer of Sir Walter Scott, came to write his Life of Burns, the performance of Dr Currie, "Burns's first and kindest biographer," as Carlyle not altogether untruthfully calls him, had been already before the world for two or three decades, and, to the lasting credit of the Wordsworth and Lamb group of literati, and to Mr Gray of the Dumfries Academy, and Mr Findlater Burns's superior officer in the Excise, had been condemned for its treatment of the life and character problem of the Scottish Poet. There was even a movement set on foot to rectify the alleged injustice (see Earnock MSS. in Annual Burns Chronicle for 1898), but it came to nothing, as Mr Roscoe and other friends of Currie-the latter being now deadinterfered in the interest of the doctor's honour it did not, of course, matter about the reputation of poor Burns.

It is perhaps asking too much in consideration of all the complicated circumstances and interests involvednot the least of them being that Burns himself was constantly referring to his own errors in humorous or remorseful vein coloured as often as not with the hues of exaggeration, though, like the rest of us when in the confessional mood, not intending what he said to be taken too literally -but I cannot help thinking that if Currie had only had the courage, as presumably he could not be wanting in the intellectual insight, to let the private faults and failings of Burns alone in his treatment of the Poet's biography, he would have rendered a distinct service to mankind, and saved the world a deal of labour in adjusting matters with which, according to Wordsworth, it really had no concern ; a labour apparently not yet ended when we find the Rev. Principal of a Scottish University, in an article entitled "Burns and Present Distress," in the Glasgow Herald

(25th January, 1917), stooping to take the Poet's alleged alcoholic declensions of over a century ago as a text for the exploitation of his own prohibitionist propaganda of to-day. In the opinion of that great and wise poetical genius Wordsworth, whose own life and conduct, it is worthy of remark, was as distinguished for its purity as his poetry for its high and noble quality, a biographer has nothing to do with the private life of an author, and more especially of a poet, unless he has also been a public man and borne a certain part in the affairs of the world, when such knowledge might then be necessary to explain his public actions. "Nothing of this," he says, "applies to authors, considered merely as authors. Our business is with their books, to understand and to enjoy them. And of poets more especially it is true that, if their works be good, they contain within themselves all that is necessary to their being comprehended and relished." But I don't think it is unfair to Dr Currie to say that, in view of the different interests he thought it his duty to conserve, his extremist advocacy of the cause of temperance was to a greater extent responsible for his action than perhaps even he himself realised at the time. It made him feel it incumbent on him to touch this subject, however lightly and kindly, yet with candour, as he puts it himself, believing that if he did not do so, others would, and perhaps less tenderly; a subject, moreover, be it noted, of which he himself had no personal knowledge, and was consequently indebted for his information to the hearsay statements of outsiders, a very dangerous kind of evidence to handle under any circumstances, or at any time. The result has therefore been that almost all subsequent biographers have followed in Currie's footsteps; the very respectability, apparent frankness, and generosity of his achievement contributing to that end, That the mind of Lockhart was largely influenced by the work of Currie must be obvious to every unbiased reader of his Life of Burns, In spite of his evident intention to be just, and even moderately generous, as well as highly judicial, amounting to a con

fession, on careful examination of all the evidence, that the truth about Burns's drinking delinquencies probably lay midway between the statements of his accusers and defenders, it is nevertheless perfectly plain that he cannot divorce himself from the exceedingly reasonable and respectable hearsay testimony of the distinguished Liverpool physician.

But my business in this brief note is not so much to criticise at any length Currie's, or even Lockhart's, biographical performance-the evidence for forming a judgment being accessible in the archives of the Poet's bibliography to every Burns student who cares to take the trouble to look into the matter for himself—but to bring to the notice of the reader certain, I should fancy, not too well-known observations on Crabbe and Burns; and in particular, to a wantonly indiscreet expression of Lockhart's, which has a relevant bearing on the preceding introductory remarks. It is a long way from Ayrshire to Suffolk, more particularly at the end of the eighteenth century, but, in the same year that Burns was learning flax-dressing with his cousin Peacock in Irvine, Crabbe, after an unsuccessful attempt at medical practice in his native village of Aldborough, and departure to London as a literary adventurer with a bundle of MSS. and three pounds of money in his pocket, a box of clothes, and a case of surgical instruments, was just saved from starvation by the kindness of the great statesman, Edmund Burke, who also assisted him in the publication of "The Library," and afterwards of "The Village," which at once established his fame as a new and original poet. They were therefore not only contemporaries, but, along with Cowper, who was about the same period busy at Olney writing "The Task," all unknown to each other; and, with Wordsworth and Coleridge, may be said to have been pioneers in the revolt against the artificial school of poetry and the return to nature. At what time Crabbe became acquainted with the works of Burns there is, so far as I am aware, no record; but his son informs us in his father's biography, that "he was as enthusiastic an admirer