are the lineal descendants of Burns's correspondent. The additional letters of the Poet are those retained by Gilbert Burns and Mrs Dunlop when jointly selecting those they considered suitable for the Currie edition of 1800. There are a few obvious gaps in the collection now set before us, which suggest the loss of a few items from Mrs Dunlop's total-nine are said to have been lost or destroyed by Burns, and three have been located elsewhere*-but, compared with the bulk left, the few blanks are immaterial. There is much that is fresh in the addenda to Burns's side of the correspondence; while, on the other, a flood of light is thrown upon many incidents in the Poet's life, his methods of composition, and contemporary opinion of him, personal and literary. The relations between Burns and Mrs Dunlop are without a parallel in the annals of literature. At the date of her first letter to Burns she was fifty-six years of age, and the mother of thirteen children. She was neither a Beatrice, a Stella, nor even a Clarinda; hence we are spared, and we need not regret it, the verbal lava of the improvised Sylvander volcano. The fact that her marriage was a run-away one with an elderly suitor, is a proof of the sentimental vein that was in her; but at the date of her acquaintance with Burns she was long past the impressionable age-a staid, strict, yet kindly matron, endowed with an inexhaustible fund of practical commonsense; of exceptional abilities and literary tastes in an age when a woman of that kind, in her position, was the exception and not the rule; conservative in all her beliefs, yet fairly tolerant; severely critical of conduct, yet capable of the strongest and most enduring friendship-in short, a country gentlewoman head and shoulders above the commonplace environment to which she had voluntarily consigned herself on the death of her husband, and from * Two of Mrs Dunlop's letters (dated 23rd November, 1792, and 14th April, 1793) were shown at the Glasgow Exhibition, and we have noted a third, dated 24th January, 1794. These will be found, along with others, in the Burns Chronicle (1904), Vol. XIII, which she was roused and rescued by the genius of Burns. Socially the superior of Burns, she never assumed the airs of a patron; on the contrary, she invariably treated him as an equal, and never tired of dwelling on his intellecttual superiority. Her feeling towards Burns was akin to that of a mother for a supremely gifted son. She counselled, advised, reproved, and occasionally scolded him in unmeasured terms. Very early in their acquaintanceship she did not scruple to tell him, on the autho ity of Mr Alexander, of Ballochmyle, that Gilbert was the better farmer, and had ten times more sense than he possessed. This, perhaps, hit the nail on the head, for Burns himself confesses that he was a wretched man of business; on the other hand, the possession of that desirable quality did not enable Gilbert to overcome the want of capital coupled with the poor quality of the soil on which he was doomed to operate. She had appreciation and taste, but her critical faculties lacked acumen, and this often led her wide of the mark in estimating the merits of the Poet's productions. Her ambition was to become the corrector of the Poet's proofs, and she expressly requested him to appoint her to that office. "I have been told," she wrote him, "that Voltaire read all his manuscripts to an old woman, and printed nothing but what she approved. I wish you would name me to her office." A stickler for the proprieties, she was no prude; still it is evident from the very beginning of the correspondence that Burns's freedom of expression and masculinity of diction grated on her feminine prejudices and high-tensioned canons of taste. Even the "Haggis" was too highly-spiced for her palate, which disposes of all wonder at her ineptitude as a Burns critic. It was her ultra-developed ideas of deportment and supersensitiveness to printed words and phrases, in conjunction with her inbred conservative outlook on all things, which led her to prefer what she calls the "chaste" style of Thomson to that of Burns, and which rendered her blind to the merits of "Tam o' Shanter," and the humour of "The 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 to upbraid him for designedly ignoring their contents. "I 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 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 wes a sad falling-off during the years which followed. It is the general belief that Mrs Dunlop deserted Burns towards In the close of his life, but this is not quite so certain as some "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. 1 1 66 "all its beauties 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 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. 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. 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 |