Friar's Carse, his former friend, and the two were not reconciled when Robert Riddell died on April 21. All the period seems to have been one of depression for Burns, and to it is probably to be assigned the anecdote, related by Lockhart, of how a friend found Burns on the shady side of the street, unnoticed by the gay gathering across the way, assembled for a country ball.

Not even the idea of Clarinda could rouse him to his old liveliness. A letter to her on June 25 is a tame conclusion to such a record of enthusiastic love,-a complaint of Ainslie's treatment of him, his practice of giving her name as a toast, and one of his insults to Mrs. Riddell are almost its only contents. When with autumn his songs begin again, Clarinda was only a "ci-devant goddess," and a new fair one had Chloris.

taken her place. It is now a Chloris that

is the favoured one, a deity with blue eyes and flaxen hair, whose real name was Jean Lorimer, and who had in the previous year, at the age of eighteen, made a run-away marriage that soon left her worse than a widow. How far Burns was seriously involved with the beautiful and unfortunate woman it is impossible to say. Down to August 1795, she was his idol; by the next February he wrote to Thomson, "in my bypast songs I dislike one thing-the name Chloris. What you mentioned of flaxen locks' is just, they cannot enter into an elegant description of beauty."

Josiah Walker has given an account of a visit he paid to Burns in the end of the year, in which he was a little disappointed. "Although," he says, "I discovered in his conduct no errors which I had not seen in men who stand high in the favour of society, or sufficient to account for the mysterious insinuations which I heard against his character."

About this time the proprietor of the London Morning Chronicle gave Burns the chance to become a regular contributor to that paper. The poet preferred his prospects in the Excise. Both positions he could not hold, and his family demanded the safest course. His outlook was brighter in the very last days of the year, and his “political sins" were condoned by a temporary appointment to a supervisorship. In February 1795, he produced a set of ballads on the parliamentary election for the Stewartry of Kirkcudbright, in which he supported the candidature of Mr. Heron, of Kerroughtree, and libelled the leading gentry on the opposing side. These coming into Mr. Heron's hands, he wrote to Mr. Syme about the poet's interests, and the latter then addressed to him a letter full of the fairest visions of future ease and literary activity. In two or three years he would be a supervisor in the ordinary course of things. Patronage might then put him on the list of collectors, whose salaries ranged from £200 to £1000,-plenty to get and nothing to do. This was Burns's aim: "A life of literary leisure with a decent competence is the summit of my wishes."

To prove his loyalty to the Government he joined a volunteer company in Dumfries, and wrote a song containing some well-known lines, which at once obtained a wide popularity (Does haughty Gaul invasion threat?). But he was too much connected with the Whig party to attract ministerial favour by his verses, and his dreams of promotion were in no hurry to be realized.

The summer passed with no remarkable incident, bringing several songs, of which Last May a braw wooer, etc. is the best. Already his health was beginning to give way under the rapid life he had led. Even on

New Year's Day he had written to Mrs. Dunlop, that he already began to feel "the rigid fibre and stiffening joints of old age coming fast o'er my frame;"-and yet he was only 36. Ill-health and hard work may account for the almost complete cessation of his letters in the closing months of the year. Of this period scarcely any information can be gleaned, songs and everything have ceased.

"Upwards of a year before his death," says Currie, "there was an evident decline in our poet's personal appearance, and though his appetite continued unimpaired, he was himself sensible that his constitution was sinking. His temper now became irritable and gloomy; he fled from himself into society, often of the lowest kind." Currie's darker hints one may willingly pass over, though that biographer must have carefully assured himself of their truth. The repentance is seen in the rhymed note to Collector Mitchell, asking for the loan of a guinea, and promising reformation:

"Then farewell folly, hide and hair o’t,

For ance and aye!"

Soon after this comes the last poem in the old familiar metre, the epistle to Colonel De Peyster, in which his fast-running life is pathetically summed up :

"Dame Life, tho' fiction out may trick her,
And in paste gems and frippery deck her,
Oh! flickering, feeble, and unsicker

I've found her still,

Aye wavering, like the willow-wicker,

'Tween good and ill."

During the closing months of 1795 he was confined to the house, and began to go out again in January of the following year. A few days later he stayed at a

*

tavern-party till three in the morning, and is said to have fallen asleep in the snow on his way home. The chill brought back his rheumatism, and rendered him incapable of exertion. His letters and songs begin again with the opening months of the year, but they are short and scanty. Mrs. Dunlop had long been silent, and he writes to her in sorrowful remonstrance. He was in straits for money, and was fain to borrow a guinea from one Clarke, a school-master in Forfar, whose cause he had once espoused in Dumfries. After six months' silence his correspondence with Thomson was resumed, but the second letter, in April, has only illness to tell of. In this constant state of ill-health he received the kind attentions of Jessie Lewars, sister of a brother-exciseman, whom he repaid by some complimentary verses, and by songs, of which the best known is O wert thou in the cauld blast.

On June 26 he again wrote to Clarke for a guinea, and a week later removed to Brow on the Solway Firth, ten miles from Dumfries, to try the effects of sea-bathing. His condition by this time was pitiable. "Besides my inveterate rheumatism, my appetite is quite gone, and I am so emaciated, as to be scarce able to support myself on my own legs." Mrs. Riddell, who had forgiven him by this time, saw him on the day after his arrival, and has given a feeling account of the interview. He showed great anxiety about his literary remains, particularly those which would tell against his reputation, and regretted that he had not put his papers in order before that time.

Within a week he was in the depths of despair. His

Mrs. Dunlop's sins of omission, wilful or not, were concealed by Gilbert Burns and Currie, who gave wrong dates to several of the poet's letters to her.

wife was approaching her confinement in Dumfries, and a creditor was pressing for payment of a bill. To Thomson he appealed for £5, being apprehensive of the horrors of a jail. With this went his last song, Fairest Maid on Devon banks. Thomson promptly sent the desired amount, which has not saved him from bitter attacks by some admirers of the poet, who think he ought to have sent more. No doubt Thomson remembered the letter of three years before. From his cousin, James Burness in Montrose, he asked for

10. This also came in due course, but of neither kindness was Burns then conscious. To Dumfries he was brought back, at his own request, on July 18, where he penned his last letter, one to summon his mother-in-law to attend his wife. For the rest of the time he was mainly delirious, and Thursday morning, July 21, saw the last hours of Scotland's greatest poet. Four days later, amid a vast concourse of townsmen and strangers, the mortal remains of Robert Burns were deposited with military honours in the churchyard of Dumfries.