affectation or fustian; and I am convinced I owe to this practice much of my critic-craft, such as it is." He derived, during this period, considerable advantages from the vicinity of Mount Oliphant to the town of Ayr-a place then, and still, distinguished by the residence of many respectable gentlemen's families, and a consequent elegance of society and manners, not common in remote provincial situations. To his friend, Mr Murdoch, he no doubt owed, in the first instance, whatever attentions he received there from people older as well as higher than himself: some such persons appear to have taken a pleasure in lending him books, and surely no kindness could have been more useful to him than this. As for his coevals, he himself says, very justly, "It is not commonly at that green age that our young gentry have a just sense of the distance between them and their ragged playfellows. My young superiors," he proceeds, "never insulted the clouterly appearance of my plough-boy carcass, the two extremes of which were often exposed to all the inclemencies of all the seasons. They would give me stray volumes of books: among them, even then, I could pick up some observation; and one, whose heart I am sure not even the Munny* Begum scenes have tainted, helped me to a little French. Parting with these, my young friends and benefactors, as they occasionally went off for the East or West Indies, was often to me a sore affliction,-but I was soon called to more serious evils."-(Letter to Moore.) The condition of the family during the last two years of their residence at Mount Öliphant, when The allusion here is to one of the sons of Dr John Malcolm, afterwards highly distinguished in the service of the East India Company. the struggle which ended in their removal was rapidly approaching its crisis, has been already described; nor need we dwell again on the untimely burden of sorrow, as well as toil, which fell to the share of the youthful poet, and which would have broken altogether any mind wherein feelings like his had existed, without strength like his to control them. The removal of the family to Lochlea, in the parish of Tarbolton, took place when Burns was in his sixteenth year. He had some time before this made his first attempt in verse, and the occasion is thus described by himself in his letter to Moore. "This kind of life-the cheerless gloom of a hermit, with the unceasing moil of a galley-slave, brought me to my sixteenth year; a little before which period I first committed the sin of Rhyme. You know our country custom of coupling a man and woman together as partners in the labours of harvest. In my fifteenth autumn my partner was a bewitching creature, a year younger than myself. My scarcity of English denies me the power of doing her justice in that language; but you know the Scottish idiom-she was a bonnie, sweet, sonsie lass. In short, she, altogether unwittingly to herself, initiated me in that delicious passion, which, in spite of acid disappointment, gin-horse prudence, and book-worm philosophy, I hold to be the first of human joys, our dearest blessing here below! How she caught the contagion, I cannot tell you medical people talk much of infection from breathing the same air, the touch, &c.; but I never expressly said I loved her. Indeed, I did not know myself why I liked so much to loiter behind with her, when returning in the evening from our labours; why the tones of her voice made my heart-strings thrill like an Æolian harp; and particularly why my pulse beat such a furious ratan, when I looked and fingered over her little hand, to pick out the cruel nettle-stings and thistles. Among her other love-inspiring qualities, she sung sweetly; and it was her favourite reel, to which I attempted giving an embodied vehicle in rhyme. I was not so presumptuous as to imagine that I could make verses like printed ones, composed by men who had Greek and Latin; but my girl sung a song, which was said to be composed by a small country laird's son, on one of his father's maids, with whom he was in love; and I saw no reason why I might not rhyme as well as he; for, excepting that he could smear sheep, and cast peats, his father living in the moorlands, he had no more scholar-craft than myself. "Thus with me began love and poetry; which at times have been my only, and till within the last twelve months, have been my highest enjoyment." The earliest of the poet's productions is the little ballad, "O once I loved a bonnie lass, Ay, and I love her still, And whilst that honour warms my breast, I'll love my handsome Nell," &c. Burns himself characterises it as "a very puerile and silly performance;" yet it contains here and there lines of which he need hardly have been ashamed at any period of his life :— "She dresses aye sae clean and neat, And then there's something in her gait "Silly and puerile as it is," said the poet, long afterwards, "I am always pleased with this song, as it recalls to my mind those happy days when my heart was yet honest, and my tongue sincere. . . I composed it in a wild enthusiasm of passion, and to this hour I never recollect it but my heart melts, my blood sallies, at the remembrance." (MS. Memorandum book, August 1783.) In his first epistle to Lapraik (1785) he says“Amaist as soon as I could spell, I to the crambo-jingle fell, Tho' rude and rough; Yet crooning to a body's sell And in some nobler verses, entitled "On my Early Days," we have the following passage :— "I mind it weel in early date, An' wi' the lave ilk merry morn The tither stookit raw, Wearing the day awa E'en then a wish, I mind its power, Shall strongly heave my breast: The rough bur-thistle spreading wide I turn'd the weeder-clips aside, He is hardly to be envied who cancontemplate without emotion, this exquisite picture of young nature and young genius. It was amidst such scenes that this extraordinary being felt those first indefinite stirrings of immortal ambition, which he has himself shadowed out under the magnificent image of "the blind gropings of Homer's Cyclops, around the walls of his cave.' * Letter to Dr Moore. |