CONTENTS. Page. Mrs Dunlop : ... ... Burns's Songs and their Tunes-J. M'Bain Death of a Granddaughter of Robert Burns ... Death of Sir James Sivewright, K.C.M.G. ... ... 64 86 Graham of Fintry: The Friend and Correspondent of Burns-William Harvey... 123 133 150 160 ... ... ... ... 163 167 176 PREFACE. ANOTHER year has passed, and the end-the sure and certain victorious end of the fiery ordeal which Britain and her Allies have been called upon to undergo-is not yet. Since we last wrote, the Huns, maddened by frustration of their long-cherished plot against the liberties of Europe, have sounded the lowest depths of savagery and infamy; and humanity everywhere stands aghast at the accumulated horrors. But the portents indicate that the day of reckoning is at hand, when the full bill will be presented as the necessary preliminary of a peace whose terms will be dictated by the victors in this deadly and unprovoked struggle, the last phase of which may demand from us still greater effort and heart-rending sacrifice. In our Roll of Honour in this issue will be found the names of the heroes, affiliated with us, who have already fallen; to each and all of whose relatives and friends our sympathies go forth in unstinted measure. A solace for the sorrowing is the assurance that their loved ones have died the noblest death a man can die. That the Roll be not further extended, and that we may endure patiently to the end, is, I am sure, the fervent prayer of us all. In the untoward circumstances, the Editor and his contributors have done their best to make this volume an interesting and readable one. D. M'NAUGHT. BENRIG, KILMAURS, January 1st, 1917. MRS DUNLOP : BURNS'S CANDID FRIEND. IN N comparison with the many who have more or less acquaintance with the poetry of Burns, there are few who possess more than an elementary knowledge of his prose productions. So far as the masses are concerned, the scant and disconnected quotations to be found in the numerous biographies of the Poet represent almost all they know of the prose side of Burns; the rest is to them a sealed book, for the cheap edition has its necessary limitations, to exceed which, and yet preserve handiness of size and clearness of type, is a problem still awaiting solution by the publishers. This is not as it should be, for no one can pretend to know what manner of man Burns was without a careful study of his correspondence, for his prose, with small exception, took the form of letters to his friends and acquaintances. Ardent admirer of his poetry as Mrs Dunlop was, she was even more delighted with his prose. "read "I confess," she wrote after receiving his first two letters, ing the most compleat volume ever fell in my hand in verse did not impress my mind with that esteem for the author which was the instantaneous effect of my reading your letter in prose. The sentiments were delicate, noble, and well-exprest, and more particularly addrest to myself." "Yours are the letters of a Poet, breathed from the heart of a Christian, and transcribed by the hand o fa man who writes strong, full text, and there is no mood in which I do not find them delightful, even when they are querulous and inconsistent.' ... The value of these communications as indices to his character and habits of thought is in proportion to the Poet's estimate of the individual qualities of his correspondents, the degree of intimacy between him and them, and the extent to which he was inspired by them to exchange confidences and opinions. Of all his correspondents, Mrs Dunlop, of Dunlop, most completely fulfilled these conditions. Burns, from first to last, held this remarkable woman in the highest esteem, and had the most unbounded admiration for her virtues and accomplishments. Her friendship, spontaneously offered when he was on the threshold of his fame, continued with little interruption to the end; and to no other correspondent did he so freely unbosom himself on all subjects of human thought, as well as on the affairs of his family and household. Το follow intelligently the interchange of ideas between two such strong personalities, it is imperative that both sides of the record be set before us, as has been done from the beginning with the Johnson and the Thomson correspondence, a one-sided publication of which would have rendered Burns's replies more or less a series of conundrums. Burns's letters to Mrs Dunlop have been common property since the publication of Dr Currie's edition of 1800, in which thirty-nine of them appeared, in whole or in partnot always correctly, for Currie, influenced by the reprehensible methods of his contemporaries, held curious views on the duties and responsibilities of an editor. Three more were added by Cromek in 1808, and a fourth was printed by Scott Douglas in 1877, making forty-three in all. Mrs Dunlop steadfastly refused to allow her letters to Burns to be printed during her lifetime; and so the record stood till the Lochryan MSS. were entrusted to the editorship of Dr Wm. Wallace, which resulted in the publication, in 1898, of that most valuable addition to Burns literature, Robert Burns and Mrs Dunlop. In this work both sides of the correspondence are given in chronological order, accompanied by notes and elucidations of the text by the accomplished editor. These MSS., now in the possession of Mr Adam, of Buffalo, contain thirty-eight additional holograph letters from Burns to Mrs Dunlop, and ninety-six from Mrs Dunlop to Burns, the latter appearing in print for the first time, after their long seclusion in the family repositories of the Dunlop-Wallaces, of Lochryan, who 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. |