visit the famous scenes of Scottish history; in these young days he chose a Sunday in summer to explore Leglen Wood, sacred to him as one of the haunts of Wallace. Of the other works enumerated by the poet as having formed his reading during this period, the ones most likely to influence his future bent were the Spectator, Pope, Allan Ramsay, and a collection of English songs (The Lark, 1765). The latter, he says, "was my vade тесит. I pored over them, driving in my cart, or walking to labour, song by song, verse by verse, carefully noting the tender or sublime from affectation and fustian. I am convinced I owe much to this for my critic-craft, such as it is." Towards the end of the stay at Mount Oliphant, the young poet saw a little more of the world and its ways than was to be learned in the family circle. In his seventeenth year (1775) he attended a dancingschool, "in absolute defiance" of his father's commands, and "this instance of rebellion" caused his father, he believed (although Gilbert denied it), to take a kind of dislike to him. Resentment at this led him still further from parental control at the time when he most required it. In that same summer* he went to Kirkoswald on the Ayrshire coast, to learn mensuration and surveying. place was a centre of contraband trade, and among its smugglers he became familiar with new and dangerous features of social life. But what finally ended his geometry was his falling madly in love with a girl, Peggy Kirkoswald. 1775. The *The MS. of the Autobiography says "seventeenth year." Acting on information from Gilbert, Dr. Currie altered it to nineteenth, but it is unlikely that Burns himself would have made the mistake, and Gilbert is incorrect in some other dates. Thomson by name, who lived next door to the school, and who so completely upset his studies that he found it useless to continue there any longer! The song, Now westlin' winds, referred to her, but perhaps belongs to the period when he had a new fit of admiration for her some years later. The general result of this, however, he considered to be satisfactory. He was no longer "the most ungainly, awkward being in the parish." He had seen a new kind of life; he had read Shenstone and Thomson, and had made a number of friends, with whom he kept up a voluminous correspondence. His published letters were thus the work of no prentice hand; and even at that time he was in the habit of keeping copies of such of his epistles as pleased him most. To this time, apparently, belong the songs of Tibbie, I ha'e seen the day, and I dreamed I-lay, etc., in both of which poverty and hardship are met with an expression of that stubborn independence inherited from his father. A sadder note appears in the Ruined Farmer, with its refrain of "O, fickle Fortune, O." The long-gathering cloud of misfortune broke at length on the over-tasked family, and they had to seek a new home. To the poet it was the triumph of tyrannic power over integrity and virtue. "With tears indignant I behold the oppressor, The misfortunes were perhaps natural enough; and in Gilbert's narrative there is none of his brother's bitterness. A high rent, accidental losses, and insufficient labour are good reasons for the failure at Mount Oliphant. Lochlea. 1777-1784. William Burnes now removed to the farm of Lochlea, not far from the village of Tarbolton, and about the same distance from Mauchline. It was a larger farm than his previous one; and although the rent was high, the family seems to have enjoyed more comfort than before. During the early years of this period we know little about the poet. "My life," he writes, "flowed on much in the same tenor till my twenty-third year. Vive l'amour, et vive la bagatelle! were my sole principles of action. The addition of two more authors to my library gave me great pleasure; Sterne and Mackenzie-Tristram Shandy and The Man of Feeling -were my bosom favourites." The latter, indeed, he speaks of as "a book I prize next to the Bible.' "These years," says Gilbert, "were not marked by much literary improvement," but poetry was still "a darling walk" with him, by which he soothed his excited feelings. In It was now that Burns began to love in earnest. earlier days he had been bashful in the society of the fair sex, now he was constantly in love with some girl, or rather with several at once, who possessed his affection in ever-varying degrees. In the songs of The Tarbolton Lasses and The Ronalds of the Bennals he celebrates some of his female acquaintances, and the latter piece bears out Gilbert's statement as to his real loves being seldom of superior station to himself. "He had always a particular jealousy of people who were richer than himself, or who had more consequence in life. His love therefore rarely settled on persons of this description." Among the names connected with this period are those of "Montgomerie's Peggy," who was his "deity for six or eight months" (1779), but was already en gaged to another, and of Ellison Begbie, in whose case his intentions seem to have been serious. Four (perhaps five) letters to her have been preserved through copies kept by Burns himself, and show not only some deep and honest feeling, but a command of language that is surprising. Whether they can well be called love-letters is another question. Several songs seem to belong to the same attachment-The Lass of Cessnock Banks, Bonny Peggy Alison, and Mary Morison. At this time, too, the poet was one of the founders of the Tarbolton "Bachelors' Club," in the regulations of which, and in the questions discussed, much of his hand may be traced. Especially is this the case in the oft-quoted Rule X.-"Every man, proper for a member of this Society, must have a frank, honest, open heart, above anything dirty or mean, and must be a professed lover of one or more of the female sex. No haughty, self-conceited person who looks upon himself as superior to the rest of the club; and especially no mean-spirited, worldly mortal, whose only will is to heap up money, shall, upon any pretence whatever, be admitted."* 1781-1782. In July of 1781 he became a Freemason, and later in the year left home again for Irvine, to learn the art of dressing flax, "partly through,Irvine. whim, and partly that I wished to set about doing something in life." The venture was unfortunate, both in itself and in some of its consequences. "My partner," he says, was a scoundrel of the first water, who made money by the mystery of thieving," and matters ended in the workshop being burnt down during a New Year carouse, leaving Burns, "like a true poet, not worth a sixpence." Ellison Begbie, too, 66 * The same feeling is expressed in several of his poetical epistles in 1785-6. had rejected him, and no doubt a desire to be able to marry her had been one of his incentives. His health also was bad, so bad that his father came to see him at Irvine; and in a letter addressed to him on December 27, 1781, the poet speaks in the most despondent way of his condition and prospects, even looking forward with delight to an early release from all his troubles. In Irvine he met with influences not of the best. His bosom friend was a certain Richard Brown, who had seen much of the world as a sailor. Burns found in him "courage, independence, and magnanimity, and every noble, manly virtue. I loved him, I admired him to a degree of enthusiasm, and I strove to imitate him." In one respect the imitation had been better omitted. "He was the only man I ever saw who was a greater fool than myself where woman was the presiding star;" and his sailor training had led him beyond Burns's limits. It is just possible that the latter over-rated his friend's virtues; a tendency to do so in the case of the unfortunate is evinced by the entry in his Common-place Book for March 1784. Brown, however, recognized the genius of his companion, and to him Burns afterwards attributed his first idea of becoming a poet. His work at this time was but slight, consisting only of some religious pieces, all of them reflecting a depressed state of mind, and agreeing with the tone of his letter to his father. It was falling in with Fergusson's poems that again stirred his real muse within him. If affairs were bad at Irvine, they were not much better at Lochlea, to which he now returned. The conditions of the lease had never been properly fixed, and after four years disputes arose with the landlord. These were submitted to arbitration, and the decision |