him like a thunder-clap. Urged by a very proper feeling, he resolved to make the unhappy young woman all the reparation in his power, and accordingly he placed in her hands a written acknowledgment of marriage-a document sufficient by the law of Scotland to legalize their connexion, though after a somewhat irregular fashion. When Mr. Armour heard of Jean's intimacy with Burns and its miserable result, he was moved with indignation, and he finally persuaded her to deliver into his hands Burns's written paper, and this document he destroyed, although, for anything he knew, he destroyed along with it his daughter's good fame. feelings at this crisis may be imagined. Pride, love, anger, despair, strove for mastery in his breast. Weary of his country, almost of his existence, and seeing ruin staring him in the face at Mossgiel, he resolved to seek better fortune and solace for a lacerated heart, in exile. He accordingly arranged with Dr. Douglas to act as book-keeper on his estate in Jamaica. In order to earn the passage

Burns's

money, he was advised to publish the wonderful verses then lying in the drawer of the deal table at Mossgiel. This advice jumped pleasantly enough with his own wishes, and without loss of time he issued his subscription papers and began to prepare for the press. He knew that his poems possessed merit; he felt that applause would sweeten his "good night." It is curious to think of Burns's wretched state-in a spiritual as well as a pecuniary sense—at this time, and of the centenary the other year which girdled the planet as with a blaze of festal fire and a roll of triumphal drums! Curious to think that the volume which Scotland regards as the most precious in her possession should have been published to raise nine pounds to carry its author into exile!

All the world has heard of Highland Mary—in life a maid-servant in the family of Mr. Hamilton, after death to be remembered with Dante's Beatrice and Petrarch's Laura. How Burns and Mary became acquainted we have little means of knowing-indeed the whole relationship is somewhat obscure-but Burns loved her as he loved no other woman, and her memory is preserved in the finest expression of his love and grief. Strangely enough, it seems to have been in the fierce rupture between himself and Jean that this white flower of love sprang up, sudden in its growth, brief in its passion and beauty. It was arranged that the lovers should become man and wife, and that Mary should return to her friends to prepare for her wedding. Before her departure there was a farewell scene. "On the second Sunday of May," Burns writes to Mr. Thomson, after an historical fashion which has something touching in it, "in a sequestered spot on the banks of the Ayr the interview took place." The lovers met and plighted solemn troth. According to popular statement, they stood on either side of a brook, they dipped their hands in the water, exchanged Bibles-and parted. Mary died at Greenock, and was buried in a dingy churchyard hemmed by narrow streets-beclanged now by innumerable hammers, and within a stone's throw of passing steamers. Information of her death was brought to Burns at Mossgiel; he went to the window to

read the letter, and the family noticed that on a sudden his face changed. He went out without speaking; they respected his grief and were silent. On the whole matter Burns remained singularly reticent; but years after, from a sudden geysir of impassioned song, we learn that through all that time she had never been forgotten. Jean was approaching her confinement, and having heard that Mr. Armour was about to resort to legal measures to force him to maintain his expected progenyan impossibility in his present circumstances-Burns left Mauchline and went to reside in the neighbourhood of Kilmarnock, where, in gloomy mood enough, he corrected his proof sheets. The volume appeared about the end of July, and, thanks to the exertions of his friends, the impression was almost immediately exhausted. Its success was decided. All Ayrshire rang with its praise. His friends were of course anxious that he should remain in Scotland; and as they possessed some influence, he lingered in Ayrshire, loth to depart, hoping that something would turn up, but quite undecided as to the complexion and nature of the desired something. Wronged as he considered himself to have been by the Armour family, he was still conscious of a lingering affection for Jean. The poems having made a conquest of Ayrshire, began to radiate out on every side. Professor Dugald Stewart, then resident at Catrine, had a copy of the poems, and Dr. Blair, who was on a visit to the professor, had his attention drawn to them, and expressed the warmest admiration. Mrs. Dunlop of Dunlop on opening the book had been electrified by the Cotter's Saturday Night, as Gilbert had been before her, and immediately sent an express to Burns at Mossgiel with a letter of praise and thanks. All this was pleasant enough, but it did not materially mend the situation. Burns could not live on praise alone, and accordingly, so soon as he could muster nine guineas from the sale of his book, he took a steerage passage in a vessel which was expected to sail from Greenock at the end of September. During the month of August he seems to have employed himself in collecting subscriptions, and taking farewell of his friends. Burns was an enthusiastic mason, and we can imagine that his last meeting with the Tarbolton Lodge would be a thing to remember. was remembered, we learn from Mr. Chambers, by a surviving brother, John Lees. John said, "that Burns came in a pair of buckskins, out of which he would always pull the other shilling for the other bowl, till it was five in the morning. An awfu' night that." Care left outside the door, we can fancy how the wit would flash, and the big black eyes glow, on such an occasion!

It

The first edition of his poems being nearly exhausted, his friends encouraged him to produce a second forthwith; but on application, it was found that the Kilmarnock printer declined to undertake the risk, unless the price of the paper was advanced beforehand. This outlay Burns was at this time unable to afford. On hearing of the circumstance, his friend Mr. Ballantyne offered to advance the money, but urged him to proceed to Edinburgh and publish the second edition there. This advice commended itself to Burns's ambition, but for a while he

remained irresolute. Jean, meanwhile, had been confined of twins, and from one of his letters we learn that the "feelings of a father" kept him lingering in Ayrshire. News of the success of his poems came in upon him on every side. Dr. Lawrie, minister of Loudon, to whose family he had recently paid a visit, had forwarded a copy of the poems, with a sketch of the author's life, to Dr. Thomas Blacklock, and had received a letter from that gentleman, expressing the warmest admiration of the writer's genius, and urging that a second and larger edition should at once be proceeded with; adding, that "its intrinsic merits, and the exertions of the author's friends, might give the volume a more universal circulation than anything of the kind which has been published in my time." This letter, so full of encouragement, Dr. Lawrie carried at once to Mr. Gavin Hamilton, and Mr. Hamilton lost no time in placing it in Burns's hands. The poems had been favourably reviewed in the Edinburgh Magazine for October, and this number of the periodical, so interesting to all its inmates, would, no doubt, find its way to Mossgiel. Burns seems to have made up his mind to proceed to Edinburgh about the 18th November, a step which was warmly approved by his brother Gilbert; and when his resolution was taken, he acted upon it with promptitude.

He reached Edinburgh on the 28th November, 1786, and took up his residence with John Richmond, a Mauchline acquaintance, who occupied a room in Baxter's Close, Lawnmarket, for which he paid three shillings a week. Burns for some time after his arrival seems to have had no special object; he wandered about the city, looking down from the Castle on Princes Street; haunting Holyrood Palace and Chapel; standing with cloudy eyelid and hands meditatively knit beside the grave of Fergusson; and from the Canongate glancing up with interest on the quaint tenement in which Allan Ramsay kept his shop, wrote his poems, and curled the wigs of a departed generation of Scotsmen. At the time of Burns's arrival, the Old Town towered up from Holyrood to the Castle, picturesque, smoke-wreathed; and when the darkness came, its climbing tiers of lights and cressets were reflected in the yet existing Nor' Loch; and the grey uniform streets and squares of the New Townfrom which the visitor to-day can look down on low wooded lands, the Forth, and Fife beyond--were only in course of erection. The literary society of the time was brilliant but exotic, like the French lily or the English rose. For a generation and more the Scottish philosophers, historians, and poets had brought their epigram from France as they brought their claret, and their humour from England as they brought their parliamentary intelligence. Blair of the Grave was a Scottish Dr. Young; Home of Douglas a Scottish Otway; Mackenzie a Scottish Addison; and Dr. Blair-so far as his criticism was concerned-a sort of Scottish Dr. Johnson. The Scotch brain was genuine enough; the faculty was native, but it poured itself into foreign moulds. The literary grandees wore decorations-honestly earnedbut no one could discover amongst them the Order of the Thistle. These men, too, had done their work, and the burly black-eyed, humorous, passionate

ploughman came up amongst them, the herald of a new day and a new order of things; the first king of a new literary empire, in which he was to be succeeded by Walter Scott, then a lad of sixteen, engrossing deeds in his father's office, with the Tweed murmuring in his ears, and Melrose standing in the light of his opening imagination —with Hogg, Galt, Wilson, Lockhart and the rest, for his satraps and lieutenants.

Burns's arrival in Edinburgh was an historical event, far more important in itself, and in its issues, than either he or than any other person suspected.

He soon got to work, however. In Ayrshire he had made the acquaintance of Mr. Dalrymple, of Orangefield; that gentleman introduced him to his brother-inlaw, the Earl of Glencairn, then resident in Edinburgh; and his lordship introduced him to William Creech, the leading publisher in the city, at whose shop the wits were wont to congregate. Creech undertook the publication of the new edition; and, through the influence of Glencairn, it was arranged that the Caledonian Hunt should subscribe for a hundred copies, and that a guinea should be paid for each. Meantime, Mr. Mackenzie, in the Lounger, of date 9th December, wrote a glowing criticism on the poems, which smoothed a way for them into the politer circles. The new edition, dedicated to the Caledonian Hunt, appeared on the 21st April, 1787, containing a list of subscribers' names extending to more than thirty-eight pages. The Hunt, as we have seen, took one hundred copies, and several gentlemen and noblemen subscribed liberally—one taking twenty copies, a second forty copies, a third forty-two copies. The Scots Colleges in France and Spain are also set down as subscribers among individual names. This was splendid success, and Burns felt it. He was regarded as a phenomenon ; was asked hither and thither, frequently from kindness and pure admiration—often, however, to be merely talked with and stared at:-1 this he felt, too, and his vengeful spleen, well kept under on the whole, corroded his heart like a fierce acid. During the winter preceding the publication of the second edition, he was fêted and caressed. He was patronised by the Duchess of Gordon. Lord Glencairn was his friend, so also was Henry Erskine. He was frequently at Lord Monboddo's, where he admired the daughter's beauty more than the father's philosophy; he breakfasted with Dr. Blair; he walked in the mornings to the Braid Hills with Professor Dugald Stewart; and he frequently escaped from these lofty circles to the Masonic Lodge, or to the supper-tables of convivial lawyers, where he felt no restraint, where he could be wounded by no patronage, and where he flashed and coruscated, and became the soul of the revel. Fashionable and lettered saloons were astonished by Burns's talk; but the interior of taverns-and in Edinburgh tavern life was all but universal at the time-saw the brighter and more constant blaze. This sudden change of fortune-so different from his old life in the Irvine flax heckling-shop, or working the sour Mossgiel lands, or the post of a book-keeper in Jamaica, which he looked forward to, and so narrowly escaped-was not without its giddy and exciting

pleasures, and for pleasure of every kind Burns had the keenest relish. Now and again, too, in the earlier days of his Edinburgh life, when success wore its newest gloss, and applause had a novel sweetness, a spirt of exhilaration escaped him, not the less real that it was veiled in a little scornful exaggeration. In writing to Mr. Hamilton, he says: "For my own affairs, I am in a fair way of becoming as eminent as Thomas à Kempis, or John Bunyan; and you may expect henceforth to see my birthday inserted among the wonderful events in the Poor Robin and Aberdeen Almanacks, along with Black Monday and the battle of Bothwell Bridge." In any case, if he did feel flattered by the attention paid him by society, he had time to cool and strike a balance in his friend Richmond's garret in the Lawnmarket-where he slept, Mr. Lockhart informs us, during the whole of that glittering and exciting winter.

Hitherto, the world had seen but little of Burns personally. It had heard his voice as of one singing behind the scenes, and been moved to admiration; and when he presented himself in the full blaze of the footlights, he became the cynosure of every eye, and the point on which converged every critical opera-glass. Edinburgh and Burns confronted each other. Edinburgh "took stock" of Burns, Burns "took stock" of Edinburgh, and it is interesting to note the mutual impressions. From all that can be gathered from Dr. Blair, Professors Dugald Stewart, Walker, and others, Burns acquitted himself in his new circumstances admirably. He never lost head, he never let a word of exultation escape him, his deportment was everywhere respectful yet self-possessed; he talked well and freely -for he knew he was expected to talk-but he did not engross conversation. His "deferential" address won his way to female favour and the only two breaches of decorum which are recorded of him in society, may be palliated by his probable ignorance of his host's feelings and vanities on the first occasion, and on the second, by the peculiar provocation he received. Asked in Dr. Blair's house, and in Dr. Blair's presence, from which of the city preachers he had derived the greatest gratification, it would have been fulsome had Burns said, turning to the Doctor, "I consider you, Sir, the greatest pulpit orator I have ever heard." The question was a most improper one in the circumstances; and if the company were thrown into a state of foolish embarrassment, and the host's feelings wounded by Burns giving the palm to his colleague-then the company were simply toadies of the sincerer sort, and the host less skilled in the world's ways than Burns, and possessed of less natural good-breeding. In the second instance when, in a sentence more remarkable for force than grace, he extinguished a clergyman who abused Gray's Elegy, but who could not quote a line of it correctly, he merely gave way to a swift and not ungenerous instinct-for which he was, no doubt, sorry the next moment. He cannot be defended altogether, although even here one can hardly help rendering him a sneaking approval. Bad language at a breakfast-table, and addressed to a clergyman, is improper-but, on the other hand, no clergyman has a right to be a