THE

LIFE OF ROBERT BURNS.

IN ROBERT BURNS, a subject is now before us which exhibits a striking spectacle of the prevalence of genius over situation:-of a man, bursting the impediments of poverty and humble birth, and forcing his way to extended and permanent celebrity. To qualify the human mind for those successful exertions of its powers, which command the attention of the world, some degree of education, which may give a share of the accumulated produce of the human intellect as it is perpetuated by writing, seems to be indispensably necessary. As Nature works upon a uniform plan, it cannot be supposed that she has studiously withheld a fair proportion of her higher gifts of mind from any particular order or class of man; and we may reasonably assure ourselves, that among the millions, which constitute the broad base and strength of every civilized society, are to be found the intellectual materials of the poet, the philosopher, and the statesman. But ignorance, and the toil requisite for subsistence, either suppress the mental energies or direct them to objects which are withdrawn from the general regard. We have, indeed, seen men emerging from the labouring portion of the community, and attracting for a time the gaze of the people: but the result of their ambition (I confine the reference to those who have made poetry VOL. I.

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their object) has been ephemeral; and when the wonder, excited by productions apparently above the condition of the producers, has subsided, and their works have been resigned to their intrinsic merit, the pages of the peasant bards have sunk into oblivion, and their names been erased from the records of Fame. We might illustrate what we thus assert by examples drawn from the past and even from the present age. But to recall the names of the dead on this occasion would be idle; to wound the feelings of the living would be injurious; and, after all, the appositeness of the remark to the poet, whose history we are about to sketch, might properly be questioned. He sprung, it is true, from the rustic labourers of society; and whilst he held the pen with one hand, he directed the plough with the other but he cannot be numbered with the uneducated and ignorant. When he began to write, he was even critically conversant with the principles of composition; and his mind, as we shall soon be made sensible, was richly fraught with the best stores of English literature.

Robert Burns was born in a small house, or more properly a cottage, near Ayr, in Ayrshire, on the 29th of January, 1759. His parents (William Burns and Agnes Brown), who were remarkable for their probity, ingenuity, and industry, were the occupiers at that time of a little farm: but, in consequence of reduced circumstances, the father was soon compelled to accept of a gardener's place in the family of a gentleman of small property in the neighbourhood; and he continued in this situation during the first six or seven years of our author's life. William Burns then took a little tenement belonging to his master; and, uniting with some of his neighbours to provide a schoolmaster for their families, he thus enabled himself to give to his son Robert, the eldest of his seven children, the first rudiments of know

ledge. In his early years, our poet is said to have been distinguished by the retentiveness of his memory, and by a certain intractability of his temper. He soon obtained the mastery of English grammar, and imbibed a passion for reading; which was at first indulged with books, supplied to him by a superstitious old woman in the neighbourhood, filled with legends and with tales of supernatural agency. It was not long, however, before his studies extended to more regular compositions, such as were capable of forming his taste and improving his mind, instead of feeding his imagination into disease with a mass of corrupt and morbid aliment. But his intercourse with books was much interrupted by the necessity which was imposed on him of manual labour. With the increase of his strength, he became an efficient assistant to his father in the cultivation of his fields; and he obtained the reputation of an expert ploughman. At the age nearly of sixteen he conceived a passion for his harvest companion, a girl who was one year younger than himself; and, under the influence of love, he now first adventured upon rhyme, in a song which he addressed to his mistress, and which he had adapted to one of her favourite tunes. Being harassed by the extortion and the insolence of an agent, who managed the property after the death of his master, William Burns removed to a larger farm; and during four years remained comfortably in its occupation. Some disputes, however, then occurring between him and his landlord, his circumstances became so distressed by the expenses of legal litigation that he was saved from a jail only by the intervention of death; an event which happened, from the effects of consumption, on the 13th of February, 1784. In the four calm years which preceded the commencement of this fatal quarrel, the desultory reading of young Robert Burns had extended over a wide field of knowledge; and had been

of a nature to strengthen his intellect, to foster his imagination, to form and polish his taste. Within this happy period of honourable though vulgar industry, when his bodily powers were invigorated, and the faculties of his mind not oppressed by labour, he had made himself acquainted with some of our highest poetry and our most elegant prose; with some also of our works of science, in geography, metaphysics, and divinity. In this time, in short, he had read, as we can assert upon his own authority, together with more than one work on his own immediate business of husbandry, the compositions of Shakspeare, Pope, and Addison, the Geographical Grammars of Salmon and of Guthrie, the Essay of Locke on the Human Understanding, Stackhouse's History of the Bible, Boyle's Lectures, Taylor's Scripture Doctrine of Original Sin, and Harvey's Meditations. From a consciousness of the awkwardness of his person and deportment, he sought, in his seventeenth year, the instructions of a country dancing master; and by this act he incurred the displeasure of his father; a circumstance which supplied him with the subject of much subsequent self reproach, and to which he is disposed to attribute much of the irregularity of his after days. He had now attained his twenty-third year, with manual labour for the occupation of his life, and with love and poetry for its amusements. To love he seems to have been a devotee from the very age of puberty; and poetry he had essayed, as we have already noticed, with his first amour, when he had yet scarcely numbered his fifteenth year.

On the death of his father, he engaged with his second brother as the lessee of a farm. But the ill success of this undertaking proved the ruin of his little fortune; and, to avoid a prison, he determined on embarking for Jamaica. At this crisis, however, he was encouraged by the popularity of his poems

in their dispersion through a wide circuit, to hazard their publication; and the twenty pounds, which he gained by this adventure, were to be applied to the defraying of the expenses of his passage to the new world. But the generous and liberal Mackenzie, in one of the papers of the 'Lounger,' had now made an appeal to the world in favour of the youthful bard; and, when he had made the last preparations for his voyage, and was on the point of embarking, he received a letter from Dr. Blacklock, which induced him to try the experiment of a second edition of his productions. For the accomplishment of this purpose he was brought to Edinburgh; and here, his fame being now widely propagated, he found himself introduced at once into the circles of the literary and the great. In these societies, the powers of his conversation fully established the reputation which had previously resulted from his writings. But this consequence of his genius, by involving him in the dissipation of a gay metropolis, and by thus exposing his ardent temperament to temptations which it was ill disposed to resist, proved ultimately injurious to his character and his fortunes. The profits of the republication of his poems amounted to five hundred pounds; and, resolving with a portion of this money to return to his primitive occupation of farming, he took, in 1788, the tenement of Ellisland, near Dumfries, on the banks of the Nith. From the pursuit, however, of this plan he was unfortunately diverted by his appointment to an exciseman's place, injudiciously obtained for him by his friends; and, resigning his farm, he retired, in the end of the year 1791, on a starving income of fifty, which was subsequently raised to seventy pounds a year, to a small house in Dumfries. He had previously married a young woman, who, in consequence of her intercourse with him, had been turned out of her father's house; and the straitness of his circumstances was