Chapter VII: The Scot 278 (6)

Maria Riddell may have been one reason for Burns’s abrupt closure of the correspondence with Clarinda in 1793. After Clarinda had refused to continue it as an emotional communion he no longer needed it as an intellectual one. He had found a woman friend who surpassed Clarinda as much in intellect as she did in social position, and the only occasion on which he reopened communications with Agnes M’Lehose was during his subsequent estrangement from Mrs. Riddell--when he used the opportunity to send Clarinda copies of the crude lampoons he had composed upon Maria.

Walter Riddell, younger brother of Burns’s friend at Friars Carse, had compressed a good deal of experience into the first twenty-eight years of his life. After a short period in the army he had married an heiress who within a year made him a widower and the owner of an estate in Antigua. In 1790 he met at St. Kitts Maria Banks Woodley, youngest daughter of the governor of the Leeward Islands, and after a brief courtship married her when she still lacked two months of being eighteen. Though Maria’s mother was a native of St. Kitts, the girl had been born and educated in England and soon after their marriage the young couple returned there.

According to one interpretation of a letter from Francis Grose to Burns in January, 1791, they must have proceeded at once to an autumn visit at Friars Carse, where Grose was also a guest. Grose told Burns that ‘after the Scene between Mrs. Riddell Jun^r and your humble Servant, to which you was witness, it is impossible I can ever come under her Roof again.’ The letter also refers to the Governor--‘a spoilt Child with a Number of good Qualities’--whom its editor identifies as Walter Riddell, Mrs. Riddell Junior being Maria. But there was also an extremely senior Mrs. Riddell at Friars Carse, for Robert’s grandmother lived with him. Hence the Junior may equally well have been Mrs. Robert Riddell, and inasmuch as Maria had no roof of her own in Scotland until 1792, it is hard to see how any misconduct of hers could have shut Friars Carse to Grose.

If this was really Maria’s first meeting with Burns it was an inauspicious start. But the early stages of the friendship are obscure. The extant correspondence does not begin until February, 1792, and by that time Maria’s life was so truly invaluable to Burns that to lose her would leave a vacuum in his enjoyments that nothing could fill up. By this time, too, she was the mother of a daughter, born in England in August, 1791. Her husband was again in Dumfries, negotiating for an estate, and Maria had gone to Edinburgh with the double purpose of seeking expert medical advice and finding a printer for her narrative of her voyage to the West Indies. To this latter end Burns introduced her to his old friend Smellie in a letter which paid the highest compliments to her intellectual and literary accomplishments--if it can be called a high compliment to say that her verses ‘always correct, and often elegant’, were ‘very much beyond the common run of Lady Poetesses of the day’. The introduction resulted in a friendship between Smellie and Maria of which the written records, being more decorous than Burns’s own letters to the printer, were published by the latter’s biographer. Maria liked to collect curios, and her interest in Smellie might perhaps be thus explained. But the gruff and erudite printer’s continued interest in Maria is further evidence that she had brains as well as charm, though her letters are evidence enough.

In the spring of 1792 Walter Riddell purchased the estate of Goldielea near Dumfries, renamed it Woodley Park in Maria’s honour, and set up as a country gentleman. More accurately, he paid a small deposit on the purchase price without knowing how he would raise the main sum. Burns visited frequently at Woodley Park, though its master bored him. Walter Riddell apparently shared his brother’s convivial habits without his brother’s modicum of literary and intellectual interests, and the poet’s attitude towards him is more clearly shown by the almost total absence of Walter’s name from his letters to Walter’s wife than even by the crude epitaph which described the man as empty-headed and poisonous-hearted.

In letter-writing at least the friendship with Maria reached perihelion in the autumn of 1793. Walter was then in the West Indies, trying to raise money on his estate there, and Maria was living alone at Woodley Park with her books, her music, and two baby daughters. By this time Burns was ponderously flirtatious. Maria was the first and fairest of critics, the most amiable and most accomplished of her sex, and it was the final proof of his unhappy lot that when he was in love ‘Impossibility presents an impervious barrier to the proudest daring of Presumption, & poor I dare much sooner peep into the focus of Hell, than meet the eye of the goddess of my soul!’ At least one impassioned lyric which originally began ‘The last time I cam o’er the moor And passed Maria’s dwelling’ had been composed and submitted to the lady’s criticism accompanied by a postscript which transparently disclaimed personal application. In Walter’s absence, many of their meetings during this autumn were at the homes of mutual friends or at the little receptions which Maria held between the acts in her box at the theatre. These latter, however, were sometimes subject to interruptions. On at least one occasion Burns found an army officer--‘a lobster-coated puppy’--already in possession, and withdrew without even announcing himself. Maria chided him for his failure to appear and invited him formally to share her box at the next performance; he kept her supplied with all his latest lyrics, including those addressed to Clarinda.

It would be a mistake to take Burns’s impassioned avowals too seriously. Maria was a young and fascinating woman of the type which pleases men better than it does members of her own sex, and Burns thoroughly enjoyed her conversation. To the pleasures of intellectual intercourse her company added a subdued erotic stimulation which he expressed in the only language he knew. The very frankness of his remarks and Maria’s calm acceptance of them is proof that they were neither meant nor taken literally.

And then came the breach seemingly inevitable in Burns’s relations with every woman of higher station. Its details are still obscure. Even its exact date cannot be determined, though it must have been in Christmas week of 1793. The traditional story is that Burns was dining at Woodley Park and that the men’s talk over their wine somehow got round to the Rape of the Sabines. It was drunkenly agreed that on returning to the drawing-room the men should stage a burlesque of the episode. They did, and Burns, singling out his hostess as his prey, put too much ardour into the game. Mrs. Carswell interprets the thing as a deliberate rag on the part of the other men to get Burns to make a fool of himself. Such at any rate was the result. After a stormy scene during which some of the other ladies present tried to intercede for the poet he was ignominiously expelled. The next day he grovelled in contrition before the offended lady in the painfully humiliating ‘letter from Hell’. She refused to be placated and after two more abortive efforts on Burns’s part the breach between them was complete.

This accepted story leaves unexplained several important details. Foremost among them is the fact that in his apology Burns blames his host for constraining him to drink more than he wished to. Maria had told Smellie in November that Walter Riddell was in the West Indies and was not expected back until spring. On January 12th, when the breach with Burns had already occurred, she again mentioned her husband’s absence. If these letters were correctly printed by Smellie’s biographer, Walter Riddell could not have been the host; therefore the scene could not have occurred at Woodley Park. The alternative explanation is that it really happened at Friars Carse, with Robert and Elizabeth Riddell in the roles usually assigned to Walter and Maria. In this case Maria, hearing of Burns’s conduct, must have undertaken to discipline him.

Whatever the circumstances, Burns’s subsequent conduct was inexcusable. During the early spring of 1794 he wrote several epigrams on Maria which are utterly caddish, lacking alike in wit and decent feeling. One of them he even offered to a London newspaper, the editor of which had sense enough to reject it. He also wrote the long, dull, and vulgar parody of Pope which bears the title ‘Esopus to Maria’ and which attacks everything about Mrs. Riddell from her hair to her morals. This last was meant for the ‘quite private’ delectation of John Syme and one or two other intimates, but even if Burns had published it his conduct could not have appeared in much worse light. The epigrams and the ‘Monody on a Lady Famed for Her Caprice’ are enough in themselves to put it beyond condoning.

While Burns was thus exhibiting the worst side of his nature, his victims’ circumstances were changing. Walter Riddell had returned from the Indies without the money he had gone to raise, and in the course of the spring Woodley Park was repossessed by its former owner, Walter forfeiting his £1000 deposit on the purchase price as well as all that he had laid out in improvements. On April 21st Robert Riddell died, and Friars Carse was put on the market, the relations between the two families being so uncordial that Elizabeth Riddell refused any settlement which would leave her brother-in-law in possession of the estate. Walter and Maria attempted the usual expedient of impoverished gentry--a prolonged stay on the Continent--but found their way barred by the armies of the French Revolution. Accordingly after a few months in England they returned to the neighbourhood of Dumfries to resume life on a much reduced scale. They settled at Tinwald House, a tumble-down estate near Lochmaben, or rather Maria settled, for her husband was absent most of the time. In May, 1795, they moved again, this time to Halleaths, between Lochmaben and Lockerbie, where they remained until they left Scotland forever in 1797. How much Maria had heard of Burns’s conduct towards her no one but herself knew, and she never told. When Currie published some of the letters referring to the quarrel she affected complete ignorance of their relation to herself, though it is hard to believe that some kind friend had not shown them to her.

If Burns showed the worst side of his nature in the quarrel, Maria showed the best of hers in the reconciliation. Early in 1795 she made the first move by sending him a book she had heard he wished to read. He replied in a formal note in the third person which nevertheless welcomed the overture and opened the way for further intercourse. By the beginning of May he was writing in his old vein of flirtatious gaiety and even confiding to Maria about the mysterious Reid miniature of himself--mysterious because no one knows for whom he had it painted, nor why. The woman who quarrelled with Burns in 1794 may have been capricious, and have pushed her rigour further than was wise in dealing with a man of Burns’s temperament. After all, twenty-one is not infallible even when feminine and married. But the woman who reinstated Burns in her good graces in 1795, after his caddish attacks upon her, was certainly not petty.

The renewed friendship had not long to live. Shadows of another sort soon began to fall across it, for Burns’s health was breaking. A note written at the end of May to accompany the loan of the Reid miniature mentioned that he was so ill as scarcely to be able to hold pen to paper; a month later he feared that his health was gone forever. The autumn brought further affliction in the death of his little daughter, and it was to Maria that he uttered the only existing record of his grief: ‘That you, my friend, may never experience such a loss as mine, sincerely prays R B.’

And so, through bereavement, illness, and despair, the passionate, irritable poet and the vivacious young woman of the world drew towards their last meeting. The bleak little watering-place, the Brow Well on the Solway, was the scene. Maria’s health also was bad, and she evidently, like Burns, lacked the funds to take her to a better resort. On the 5th of July, 1796, she sent her carriage for Burns: not until she saw him did she realize how serious his condition was.

He was dying, and knew it. His overdriven heart, which had never wholly recovered from the strain of doing a man’s work on insufficient food at the age of fourteen, was giving out, and he was hastening his end according to the best medical advice in Dumfries. A doctor who thought that angina was ‘flying gout’ had ordered sea bathing, and the dying poet was plunging himself daily in the chilly waters of the Solway, as he had earlier in life sought to cure fainting-fits in a tub of cold water at his bedside. Maria was startled by the visible stamp of death on the features of the emaciated man who tottered from her carriage, and her concern was increased by his almost total inability to eat. But the presence of a young and attractive woman could still, as always, rouse Burns to his best efforts, and his talk might even have been gay--after his preliminary, ‘Well, Madam, have you any messages for the other world?’--had Maria been able to forget his haggard countenance long enough to reply in kind.

As it was, they had ‘a long and serious conversation about his present situation, and the approaching termination of all his earthly prospects.’ The man who had never lied about himself, to himself or others, now frankly faced the fact that he was dying. And the presence of a sympathetic and intelligent listener urged him on to speech about the matters nearest his heart. Two things perturbed him on the brink of the grave--anxiety for his family, and anxiety for his fame. His eldest son was not yet ten; there were three younger, and Jean was hourly expecting a fifth; at least two others needed a father’s help to lighten the stigma of illegitimacy. And as for his literary reputation--

‘He said he was well aware that his death would occasion some noise,
and that every scrap of his writing would be revived against him to
the injury of his future reputation: that letters and verses written
with unguarded and improper freedom, and which he earnestly wished
to have buried in oblivion, would be handed about by idle vanity
or malevolence when no dread of his resentment would restrain them
or prevent the censures of shrill-tongued malice or the insidious
sarcasms of envy from pouring forth all their venom to blast his
fame.’

Could Burns have looked into the future, the prospect would have deepened the pain in his harassed soul. His anxiety for his family would have been allayed, to be sure, but not even in his darkest hour could he have visualized the future of his personal and literary fame. He foresaw attacks of his enemies; he did not foresee the cowardice or treachery of his friends. He need not have worried about his trivial or unguarded writings, for time automatically washes away the sand and leaves the gold, if gold there be, and the publication of trifling letters cannot harm their writer if the pattern of his soul itself is not trifling. That spiritual descendants of Holy Willie should deplore his best and strongest work and shake their heads over passions of which their impotent pulses were incapable, that enemies eager for revenge and underlings eager for drink should lie about their relations with him--these things were to be expected. But that Bob Ainslie, turned pious, should exemplify his own piety by preserving and circulating Burns’s worst letters, that George Thomson should not only ignore his dying wishes but even, before his corpse was in the grave, rush into print with a distorted and melodramatic version of his last years which would set the tone of biographies for a century to come, that Gilbert should lack the courage to deny stories which he knew to be false--all this, and much more, was mercifully hidden from him. But it would have warmed his heart to know that the one intimate friend who would come before the world with a truthful account of his character, extenuating nothing, and setting nothing down in malice, was Maria Riddell, on whom he had made unforgivable attacks, and who nevertheless had forgiven him. The woman with whom the dying poet talked that day until the distant bulk of Criffel turned dark against the sunset, and the chill tide in which he had been ordered to bathe ebbed away from the dismal flats of the Solway, was to prove herself the most devoted friend of her sex he had ever had, Jean Armour always excepted.

V

LIVELIHOOD

To Burns in the vigour of his early manhood the question of livelihood seemed easily answered. He was a good enough ploughman to be assured of the porridge and the few shillings a week which a skilled labourer could earn on a Scottish farm. There was no degradation in such service. The labourers, like the hired help on New England farms, ate with the family and took whatever share in the conversation they were capable of. Moreover, anyone, whatever his rank, who was capable of ‘a sensible crack’ was sure of welcome in households which had either to provide their own entertainment or go without. Not even the prospect of dependent old age held any terrors. The tradition of the blue-gowns, or licensed beggars, still persisted in rural Scotland. An old man past work who could talk interestingly could count on a meal and a place by the fire at almost any farmer’s ingle. Burns seriously thought of this as a possible end of his own life. The expression of the idea in several poems might be dismissed as rhetoric had he not repeated it in the sober prose of his letters. He actually pictured himself as spending his manhood in labour, love-making, and poetry and his old age as a sort of Edie Ochiltree.

Such a vision of course was adolescent. To fulfil it a man must have no dependents. Burns seems to have imagined at first that if he could help to keep the home together until his brothers and sisters were able to establish themselves his responsibilities would end. The liberation of his poetic talent entailed among other things a shrinking from the burdens of marriage on narrow means. His rejected proposal to Alison Begbie had come before his realization of his poetic calling; his rejected offer to Jean Armour in 1786 was the result of sympathy for her condition and not of a desire to settle down. But he soon learned that he could not so simply escape responsibility. His children must be provided for somehow even if he did not marry their mothers. Despite the casualness with which he incurred paternity his parental feelings were strong. ‘_Vive l’amour et vive la bagatelle_’ sounded well as a motto until it was confronted by the actual problem of helpless lives which owed their existence to him. As a Man of Feeling he could not, even had he wished to, turn his back on them with Don Juan-like callousness. Besides, the law might have something to say in the matter--as Burns learned in the course of four suits or threatened suits by four different women within two years. Unless he chose to flee the country and repudiate his obligations he had to provide himself with settled livelihood.

For a man of his rank and education the possible choices open in 1786 were limited. He could continue as a farmer; he could attempt to support himself by writing, or he could seek a salaried position at home or in the colonies. Each alternative had its drawbacks. By the beginning of 1786 his reputation in the community was such that he could scarcely continue the partnership at Mossgiel, but he lacked the capital necessary for setting up independently elsewhere. The hope of any large financial returns from his poetry seemed too fantastic for consideration; he lacked the training for journalism or hackwork when Grub Street was crowded with penniless university men. There remained the chance of some salaried position. Yet even if he had been temperamentally fitted for a commercial job he was by this time too old. Merchants’ clerks began their apprenticeship as boys in their teens. Burns was twenty-seven. A post in the Excise Service might be feasible but was not easy to get. All government jobs went by favour, and despite the unpopularity of the service among the people at large the number of aspirants so far exceeded the available places that the endorsement of some influential person was almost essential. The same thing was true of India, where the East India Company’s monopoly gave patronage as large a part as it had in the government services. The United States, not yet united, were in economic chaos; Canada was undeveloped. There remained the West Indies, then at the height of a prosperity built on slave labour, where independent planters with Scottish connexions were numerous enough to make it possible for a Scotsman with the necessary introductions to secure some sort of work. The story of Burns’s struggle for livelihood is the story of his efforts in each of the four possibilities open to him.

The West Indian venture was the only one which never came to actual trial. The documents are lost which would settle the date at which Burns began seriously to consider emigration, but his mind was made up at the very beginning of 1786. Through friends in Ayrshire he obtained the offer of a position at thirty pounds a year as clerk and overseer on a Jamaica plantation. The story is still repeated that he published the Kilmarnock _Poems_ to pay his passage-money, but his own contemporary account of the matter is sufficient refutation. He had already arranged to go to Jamaica, his employer to pay his fare and deduct the sum from his first year’s salary, before he decided to print the poems. For Burns emigration was not only flight but almost a death sentence. He had some justification for his feeling. The West Indian climate helped to insure the financial success of a small minority of white immigrants by killing off most of their rivals. He published his poems because he wished, before saying farewell forever to Scotland, to leave behind some tangible memorial. When the publication proved so unexpectedly successful it immediately cancelled his flight.

Burns’s first extant reference to Jamaica is in a letter to John Arnot of Dalquhatswood, which was written in April, 1786, when the subscription for the _Poems_ was well under way. Negotiations were then almost complete: by June 12th Burns was able to announce that the ship was on her way home that was to take him out; on August 14th he explained that he was entering the employ of Charles Douglas of Port Antonio and all that remained to settle was the route by which he was to travel. In view of the time required for exchange of letters between Scotland and the West Indies it is certain that the correspondence with Douglas must have begun in the winter, before the Kilmarnock volume was planned and while a considerable part of it was still unwritten. As the troubles with the Armours thickened during the summer so did Burns’s references to his impending emigration. During July and the first part of August he was announcing that he had booked passage from Greenock to Savannah-la-Mar in the _Nancy_, sailing about September 1. Then returned Jamaicans advised him that the route was too roundabout, and when the captain of the _Nancy_ notified him that the ship was about to sail, Burns decided that the notice was too abrupt. The _Nancy_ sailed without him, and he transferred his booking to the _Bell_, which was to sail direct to Port Antonio at the end of September.

The truth was that he was already wavering. The enthusiastic reception of his poems, the interest which influential gentlemen began to take in his welfare, were changing his opinion of himself and his prospects in Scotland. Moreover, the Armours were calming down; friends had promised to help him should Jean’s father renew the effort to execute his warrant. Nevertheless he did not immediately abandon the Jamaica plan. Though the _Bell_ in her turn sailed without him, he still watched the shipping news as he collected his subscriptions and set his affairs in order. Jean’s twins, born on September 3rd, increased the need for settled livelihood, but increased also his reluctance to leave Scotland.

Most of his letters of the autumn of 1786 have perished. As late as October he was still talking of emigration, though he had again postponed it after actually packing his trunk and starting for Greenock at the end of September. He still feared, he told Robert Aiken, that ‘the consequences of his follies’ might banish him; in other words, Betty Paton was threatening to sue him. The Armour affair had already been compromised by dividing the responsibility for the care of the twins between the two families. When the extant correspondence resumes a month later, Jamaica had been discarded. By November 1st the poet had decided to try his luck in Edinburgh. For this reversal the Kilmarnock volume was directly responsible.

When Burns had begun in April to solicit subscriptions for a volume of his poems he had had no idea of making it a commercial success. The book was intended as a memento of himself--a souvenir for his friends and a final and unanswerable fling at his enemies. He probably hoped for no more material return than would cover the expenses of publication. Its success therefore was all the more intoxicating. Six hundred and twelve copies were printed, of which about half were subscribed for in advance, thanks mainly to Robert Aiken. When the book came out at the beginning of August it furnished the first literary sensation Ayrshire had ever known. The subscribers’ copies were passed from reader to reader, creating such a demand that the entire edition was sold within three months. When Mrs. Dunlop ordered six copies in mid-November only five were left. At the end of July Burns had been a fugitive with a warrant out against him, to escape which he was shifting from one friend’s house to another. Two weeks later he was a celebrity. His journeys through the country as he collected his subscriptions became a sort of royal progress. The fact that he was making a profit out of the book meant far less to him than the applause of all sorts and conditions of men. People of influence assured him that something could be done for him at home, though they were vague as to precisely what. After the printer’s bills were paid the volume showed a profit of more than £50, though forfeited deposits on passage money and a substantial payment to Betty Paton reduced his net gain to about twenty. But Burns still had no wish to write poetry for money. He considered that ‘downright Sodomy of Soul’. Poetry was his calling, but he refused to think of it as his livelihood.

Another man for other reasons doubted the commercial prospects of poetry. In spite of the handsome balance-sheet of the first edition, John Wilson, the Kilmarnock printer, declined to undertake a second without advance payment for all labour and materials. He felt that the first had glutted the market. His timidity helped to transform Burns from a local celebrity into a national figure. When friends in Mauchline and Ayr suggested republishing the poems in Edinburgh Burns thought it an attractive but impractical dream. But when copies of the book reached people of influence in the capital and they repeated the suggestion it wore a different look. By October the hope of a favourable reception in the city had come to Burns from at least three different sources. His friend, the Rev. George Lawrie of Loudoun, had sent a copy of the book to Thomas Blacklock, the blind poet; Blacklock had commended it warmly and had even promised--not so warmly--to bring it to the attention of Hugh Blair. The famous professor of rhetoric, Blacklock thought, was too refined in his taste to relish it. Another eminent professor was not so finicky. Dugald Stewart, whose country home was at Catrine a few miles from Mauchline, read and enjoyed the poems, invited the poet to dinner, and added his personal encouragement to the Edinburgh venture. Finally the book reached even the peerage.

On November 1st Alexander Dalziel, steward of the Earl of Glencairn’s estates, wrote that he had showed the poems to the Earl and that the Earl had expressed his pleasure in them and his desire to befriend their author. This approbation was heartening as Blacklock’s and even Dugald Stewart’s could not be. The Earl had a reputation for generosity and for keeping his word; he was one of the most popular and influential peers in Scotland and his endorsement would have weight with the people of wealth and fashion on whom the success of a subscription would have to depend. But the Earl had nothing to do with the abandonment of Jamaica. The same letter which brought the news of the Earl’s interest also brought Dalziel’s congratulations on Burns’s giving up his plans for leaving the country. What Glencairn really did was to confirm the poet in his determination to offer his poems to a larger audience.

Undoubtedly Burns realized before he went to Edinburgh that he was setting out on the old and painful quest of patronage--a quest which had broken the hearts of more poets than it had ever freed from penury. But it was still fame more than money that he looked for from his poems. He continued to hope for some means of modest livelihood independent of his writing; if his subscription brought a little capital to help him on his way, so much the better. When he reached Edinburgh he made no effort to appear more than he was; he even sought deliberately to appear less. He dressed as a plain young farmer, and finding that the metropolitan critics were praising his work as that of an unlettered ploughman who wrote from pure inspiration he did his best to act the part. When Robert Anderson pointed out in private conversation some evidence of extensive knowledge of other poets Burns readily admitted his indebtedness, but in public he would not permit his claims to pure inspiration to be challenged. If an unlettered bard was what his patrons wanted he would do his best to be one. Many times, however, his role was trying, especially when stupider people than himself condescended, and gave him good advice.

Undoubtedly there were matters in which he needed good advice, but he did not get it even from the patrons who did not condescend. Among all his new friends there was no one to take his part as Sir Walter Scott later took Southey’s in seeing that he got a fair contract with his publisher. Glencairn had been as good as his word in securing fashionable subscriptions. The Countess of Eglinton made the Earl subscribe ten guineas; the entire membership of the aristocratic Caledonian Hunt put down their names, but altered the first proposal that they give two guineas each to a mere subscription at the regular price. But Glencairn knew nothing about the business end of publishing. In introducing Burns to William Creech, his brother’s former tutor and the best-known publisher in the city, Glencairn no doubt felt that he had done his best. He had, up to that point, but at that point a good contract lawyer was needed. Unfortunately Henry Mackenzie and the other men of letters in the city still adhered to the convention of the writing gentleman who was supposed to disdain pecuniary rewards. A few years earlier, when David Hume was alive, Burns might have been secured better terms; a few years later under the leadership of Scott he would certainly have secured them. Burns’s perverse pride would not allow him to haggle over a contract which in any case offered more ready money than he had handled in all his previous life. What he needed and did not have was a hard-boiled business friend to do his haggling for him.

As it was, Creech made an agreement which left Burns to bear all the immediate risks and perhaps to receive a modest immediate profit, but which reserved the long-term earnings for the publisher alone. As was often the case with books published by subscription, the man whose name appeared on the title-page was not the publisher in the modern sense, but merely the author’s agent. He provided the facilities for collecting the subscriptions and distributing the books, but took none of the financial responsibility. The author received the entire payment for the subscribers’ copies, but out of these receipts had to pay the printer, the bookbinder, and also, presumably, the transportation charges on copies delivered out-of-town. Furthermore, the agents who distributed the books naturally expected to be paid. Hence Burns, wherever possible, enlisted his friends for this service--Alexander Pattison at Paisley, for instance, and Robert Muir at Kilmarnock--and when that was not feasible still sought to avoid the regular booksellers because they took ‘no less than the unconscionable, Jewish tax of 25 p^r Cent. by way of agency’.

The price to subscribers was set at the modest sum of five shillings, and close to three thousand subscriptions were obtained. Burns objected to printing the names of the subscribers--quite naturally, for the thirty-eight pages meant money out of his pocket merely to gratify the vanity of people yearning to see their names in print as patrons of literature--but was overborne by some friends whom he did not ‘chuse to thwart’. Professor Snyder calculates Burns’s utmost possible gross receipts from the subscription at £750. But after all charges were paid the net profit cannot have been more than half that sum. He told Mrs. Dunlop that he cleared about £540, but there, as in a similar statement to John Moore, he was reckoning in Creech’s payment of 100 guineas for the copyright.

That was the sum agreed on when, just as his book was ready for delivery, Burns decided, ‘by advice of friends’ to dispose of his copyright. Once more he had sought the advice of others, and once more they told him the wrong thing. In this instance, the person most at fault was Henry Mackenzie, to whom Burns and Creech referred the question. Mackenzie was a lawyer, and ought to have warned Burns against the absolute sale of his rights in a potentially valuable piece of property. Instead Mackenzie contented himself with naming one hundred guineas as his idea of a fair price. That was on April 17. Creech delayed his acceptance until the 23rd, on the pretence of waiting to hear if Cadell and Davies would buy a share for their London trade, but finally consented to ‘take the whole matter upon himself, that Mr. Burns might be at no uncertainty in the matter.’ Thereupon Creech left town, without either paying the money or giving his note for it. A few days later Burns himself started on his Border tour, still without any legal contract with Creech, but with his hands full for the time being with the task of arranging deliveries, collecting subscriptions, and paying the printer and the binder. Had not Peter Hill, then Creech’s chief clerk, taken a good part of the burden on himself, Burns would have been swamped under the worry of larger transactions than he had known in all his life before.

In August Burns returned to Edinburgh, but Creech was either again absent or again coy. Not until October 23 did the publisher at last set his hand to a note promising to pay the sum ‘on demand’. How soon Burns began to ask for payment is uncertain, but by January Creech had delayed and evaded so often that Burns ‘broke measures with [him], and ... wrote him a frosty keen letter. He replied in forms of chastisement’, promised payment on a set date--and broke his promise. To add to the poet’s anxiety, rumours were afloat. It was hinted that Creech was on the verge of bankruptcy; it was also hinted that he had cheated Burns by secretly printing additional copies of the _Poems_, which he sold for his own profit. Burns bewailed his own fate as a ‘poor, d-mned, incautious, duped, unfortunate fool’; two months later ‘that arch-rascal Creech’ was still making promises, and still reneguing. Not until May 30, more than seven months after he had agreed to pay ‘on demand’, did Creech at last part with his hundred guineas. And even then Burns’s troubles were not over. Still another visit to Edinburgh, at the end of February, 1789, was necessary before Creech paid over the final sums due the poet for subscription copies, so that at last he could report to Jean: ‘I have settled matters greatly to my satisfaction with Mr. Creech.--He is certainly not what he should be nor has he given me what I should have, but I am better than I expected.’

The estimate of Creech was temperate enough; indeed, it erred, like Burns’s statement to John Moore that Creech had ‘been amicable and fair’ with him, on the side of charity. It is easy to condone Mackenzie’s blunder and Creech’s sharp bargain on the ground that neither of them could guess the future value of the copyright, but it is impossible to excuse Creech’s postponements of the day of reckoning. Prompt settlement of accounts after the book was published would have sent Burns back to the country with his pockets comfortably lined and with some of the glowing enthusiasm of his first season in Edinburgh still undimmed. By his paltry delays Creech kept the poet in the city until the interest of his fashionable ‘patrons’ had waned, until all the pleasure of publication and fame had evaporated in bitterness and disgust, and until the mere necessities of living must have made considerable inroads on his irreplaceable capital.

Indeed one of the extraordinary facts about Burns’s life in Edinburgh is that he emerged from it without greater depletion of his capital. Contemporary report calls him dissipated. Yet somehow Burns managed to spend nearly a year and a half either in residence in Edinburgh or in journeying to and fro, and still came out with about four hundred and fifty pounds. So far as is known he had no income from July, 1786, when he assigned his rights in Mossgiel to Gilbert, until he reaped his harvest, such as it was, at Ellisland in the autumn of 1788. Even then he netted little, for the outgoing tenant exacted a price of £72 for the standing crops. However great his experience in the distracting ‘task of the superlatively Damn’d--making one guinea do the business of three’--his twenty pounds from the Kilmarnock volume cannot have lasted long, and if there were any gifts except the Earl of Eglinton’s ten guineas and the same sum from Patrick Miller he nowhere mentions them. If Burns dissipated heavily he managed somehow to do it without heavy expenditure, an art few people have ever learned.

The possibility that he received funds from Gilbert even after the deed of assignment must be ruled out. The flow of funds in fact was the other way. The supposedly careful and efficient Gilbert was in constant difficulties at Mossgiel. Robert sent him ten pounds from Edinburgh in the spring of 1787; during the following winter he authorized John Ballantine to pay over to Gilbert about thirty pounds of subscription money then in Ballantine’s hands. And this was only the beginning. The letter to Gavin Hamilton already quoted indicates that Gilbert was so far in arrears with his rent in March, 1788, that Hamilton wanted Burns to sign some sort of a note for him. This Burns refused to do, because he had already lent Gilbert £200--nearly half his receipts from the Edinburgh edition. Whether the previous payments were counted as part of this loan or not is uncertain; probably they were not, for after the poet’s death John Syme declared that Gilbert owed £300, though the legal accounting sets the figure at £200. It seems likely therefore that Gilbert regarded the earlier payments as gifts, and that the sum which Gilbert at last repaid to his brother’s family represented the final loan in 1788. As part of the interest on the loan Burns arranged that Gilbert should pay his mother an annuity of £5 a year and should continue to care for Betty Paton’s daughter. The result was that Gilbert made no cash payment during Burns’s life, and never was able to pay off the principal until he undertook to re-edit the _Poems_ in 1820. Burns had given most substantial proof of his loyalty to his family and in doing so had destroyed his only hope of success in his own venture at Ellisland.

Gilbert and his mother and sisters were not the whole of Burns’s responsibilities. His younger brother William was approaching manhood and turned naturally for support to the celebrity of the family. He appears to have been an amiable but ineffective youth. He had served at least part of an apprenticeship as a saddler, and in the autumn of 1787 Burns made some fruitless efforts to find him a job in Edinburgh. A year or so later William set out to look for employment and held jobs briefly in Longtown, in Newcastle, and finally in London, where he died of typhus and where his funeral was arranged by John Murdoch and paid for by Burns. Burns’s letters to this brother during his year of wandering consist in about equal proportion of exhortations to brace up and be a man and of enumerations of gifts--shoes and shirts and waistcoats and above all money. Burns’s position as family capitalist was no sinecure.

While he was struggling with Creech and trying to keep Mossgiel afloat, Burns was constantly harried by the problem of his own future. The only two possibilities he could see were a farm of his own or a post in the Excise, and for a long time there seemed little chance of achieving either. He had no intention of trying again for public aid through his writing. One subscription might be regarded as a public tribute; a repetition would look like begging. Besides, his common sense told him that a second subscription would have little hope of success unless it came at a long interval after the first and for work of a different character. He had not exhausted his talents, but he had exhausted his novelty. For the rest of his life he steadfastly refused to accept payment for anything he wrote and actually gave away poems which make up two-thirds of the bulk of his collected works. His sole payment for ‘Tam o’ Shanter’ was a dozen copies of the proof-sheets; his payment for Creech’s second edition in 1793--which included ‘Tam’ and a score of other new poems--was twenty presentation copies grudgingly allowed him. His fondness for making gestures of gallant but unwise generosity can hardly be better illustrated than by his dealings with Creech over this edition. The publisher wrote to him in 1791, proposing a reissue of the work and asking Burns to contribute some new poems to it, but without suggesting payment for them. Burns told Cunningham that he had taken a damned revenge of Creech by ignoring his letter. Yet a few months later he relented, and after reminding Creech that the new poems were his own absolute property, turned them over to him without asking any payment except the twenty gift copies. Such a gesture might have shamed some publishers, but Creech merely accepted it as his right. In the same spirit Burns hotly resented George Thomson’s payment of £5 for his contributions to the first number of the _Select Scotish Airs_, and Thomson, like Creech, felt no compunction at accepting the poet’s quixotic generosity.

On at least two occasions, moreover, Burns was offered pay for journalistic writing in party newspapers. The origin, extent, and duration of his relations with Peter Stuart of the London _Star_ are all obscure, but it is plain that Stuart as a zealous Whig tried to get Burns as a regular contributor. The poet refused. When he struck off a satirical skit he was willing to give it to Stuart, but the only pay he accepted was a free subscription to the paper. Thus he managed to acquire the reputation, injurious to his hopes in government employ, of being a partisan writer without any reward except notoriety. Again in 1794 Patrick Miller, Jr., his landlord’s son who had been put into Parliament at the age of twenty-one, persuaded James Perry of the London _Chronicle_ to offer Burns what for those days was a fair salary if he would come to London and devote his talents to the press. Again Burns refused. He realized well enough that the prosperity of a newspaper was often short-lived and he feared to jeopardize his children’s future by exchanging an assured though meagre income for the chances of the journalistic profession. Besides, the writer in a partisan paper in 1794 was risking jail as well as economic insecurity, as the sedition trials then in progress had proclaimed to all the kingdom.

But if he was not to support himself by writing how was he to support himself? That question hammered in his mind from the time he abandoned the Jamaica project until the early spring of 1788. Even before he went to Edinburgh he had thought of the Excise. But he found his Edinburgh patrons cold to all hints. These gentlemen reasoned simply. Burns was the ploughman poet: ergo, he should continue to plough. The only definite gesture made towards getting him government work was Mrs. Dunlop’s. She offered an introduction to Adam Smith in the hope that Smith might help him to a job in the customs, but the philosopher had left for London the day before Burns presented his letter. Moreover Smith no longer took an interest in much except his own health, and if Burns sought later to renew his application nothing came of it. His most favourable opportunity to cultivate the acquaintance of high officials was lost when he allowed William Nicol to drag him away from Blair Athole, where Robert Graham of Fintry, Commissioner of Excise, was one of the guests, and where Henry Dundas was shortly to appear.

Meanwhile an offer of another sort was being pressed upon him. He had been in Edinburgh only a few weeks when the prosperous and enthusiastic Patrick Miller sought his acquaintance. Miller, after a varied career, at sea and as a banker, had retired from business with a comfortable fortune and was devoting himself to miscellaneous experiments. He was the sort of capitalist who is a godsend to struggling inventors, for his enthusiastic imagination enabled him both to visualize the inventor’s aims and to overlook all the practical details and delays which intervene between a project and its fulfilment. His strongest enthusiasm at the moment was the improvement of navigation, but his interests also included agriculture. Not long before Burns came to Edinburgh Miller had bought the run-down estate of Dalswinton near Dumfries, and it was Ellisland, one of the farms on this estate, which he urged upon Burns.

The poet was afraid of it from the start, and for good reason. Miller, he said, was no judge of land, and what Miller thought was an advantageous offer might ruin his tenant. Had Burns been gifted with second-sight he could not have prophesied more accurately. Yet the difficulty he always found in saying ‘No’ to people whose intentions were friendly combined with his own inclinations to keep him from refusing Miller’s offer outright. Farming was the business he knew best, and a farmer’s life he held was the best of lives--if one could live by it--but Mount Oliphant, Lochlie, and Mossgiel had been a triple lesson on the fate of the tenant who undertook a lease without capital enough to stock a farm profitably. Even if the Dalswinton farm were all that Miller thought it, Burns doubted if his literary profits would suffice to give him a start. However, he agreed to look at Ellisland when he reached Dumfries at the end of his Border tour. When he did so he could scarcely have been in the mood for a really critical examination. The savage hospitality he had experienced for the past three weeks had left him jaded and depressed, and the annoyance of being greeted at Dumfries by Meg Cameron’s letter would not sharpen his critical faculties. Even so he could see at a glance that the soil was exhausted and would require long and careful nursing. In fact the only thing to be said for Miller’s offer was that, recognizing the run-down condition of the property, he was offering it at a low rental for the first three years. Fifty pounds per annum for a farm of more than a hundred acres contrasted favourably with the prices in East Lothian, where landlords were asking as much as thirty shillings an acre. Burns went home to Mossgiel without having made up his mind; if discussion with the cautious Gilbert contributed to any decision it was a negative one. Ellisland was too big a risk. He returned to Edinburgh in the fall with his mind made up. He would renew his efforts to secure an Excise commission and would bank the profits of his poems as a reserve fund for the education and security of his children.

But Miller was not easily discouraged. He had evidently decided that the poet as a tenant would be an asset to Dalswinton. Accordingly he urged Burns to go down again and have a more critical look at the place. A severe cold which confined him to the house enabled Burns again to evade committing himself and not long afterwards came the injury to his knee which laid him up for weeks and involved him in the Clarinda affair. But meanwhile his endeavours for an Excise commission were not prospering. Glencairn disapproved; Mrs. Dunlop disapproved; apparently everyone who might have exerted the necessary influence disapproved. In January Miss Nimmo sent him to a Mrs. Stewart who was supposed to have influence with the commissioners. The interview was not a success. Burns came away from it boiling with helpless rage. He had been questioned like a child about his most private affairs and Mrs. Stewart had further improved the occasion by rebuking him for the Jacobite sentiments he had scratched on the window of the inn at Stirling. If the quest for an Excise job was to expose him to this sort of thing Burns was ready to throw up the whole project.

Just when the matter appeared most hopeless his chance came from an unexpected quarter. The surgeon who had treated his injured knee was Alexander Wood, better known to his fellow-citizens as Lang Sandy Wood, who after a wild youth had become one of the most respectable characters, in both senses of that word, in Edinburgh. Wood learned of his patient’s desire and offered to do what Glencairn and the others had refused or evaded--to bring Burns’s case directly and personally before the Board. The result was that before he left Edinburgh Burns found himself, ‘without any mortifying solicitation’ on his own part, equipped with the official order for the six-weeks’ course of special instructions which would entitle him to an Excise commission. It came none too soon. One of the rules of the service was that no man could enter it who was in debt, who was more than thirty years old, or who had more than three children. Burns’s time for meeting these two latter qualifications was getting very short indeed.