Page:A biographical dictionary of eminent Scotsmen, vol 2.djvu/158

452 Burns, with his Jane, whom he now married, took up their residence upon his farm. The neighbouring farmers and gentlemen, pleased to obtain for an inmate among them, the poet by whose works they had been delighted, kindly sought his company, and invited him to their houses. He found an inexpressible charm in sitting down beside his wife, at his own fireside; in wandering over his own grounds; in once more putting his hand to the spade and the plough; in forming his inclosures; and managing his cattle. For some moments he felt almost all that felicity which fancy had taught him to expect in his new situation. He had been, for a time, idle; but his muscles were not yet unbraced for rural toil. He had been admitted to flatter ladies of fashion; but he now seemed to find a joy in being the husband of the mistress of his affections; in seeing himself the father of her children, such as might promise to attach him for ever to that modest, humble, and domestic life, in which alone he could hope to be permanently happy. Even his engagements in the service of the excise did not, at the very first, threaten necessarily to debase him, by association with the mean, the gross, and the profligate, to contaminate the poet, or to ruin the farmer.

But, it could not be: it was not possible for Burns now to assume that soberness of fancy and passions, that sedateness of feeling, those habits of earnest attention to gross and vulgar cares, without which, success in his new situation was not to be expected. A thousand difficulties were to be encountered and overcome, much money was to be expended, much weary toil was to be exercised, before his farm could be brought into a state of cultivation, in which its produce might enrich the occupier. The prospect before him was, in this respect, such as might well have discouraged the most stubbornly laborious peasant, the most sanguine projector in agriculture; and much more, therefore, was it likely, that this prospect should quickly dishearten Burns, who had never loved labour, and who was, at this time, certainly not at all disposed to enter into agriculture with the enthusiasm of a projector. Beside all this, I have reason to believe, that the poet had made his bargain rashly, and had not duly availed himself of his patron's generosity. His friends, from Ayrshire, were little acquainted with the soil, with the manures, with the markets, with the dairies, with the modes of improvement, in Dumfries-shire. They had set upon his farm rather such a value of rental, as it might have borne in Ayrshire, than that which it could easily afford in the local circumstances in which it was actually placed. He himself had inconsiderately submitted to their judgment, without once doubting whether they might not have erred against his interests, without the slightest wish to make a bargain artfully advantageous to himself. And the necessary consequence was, that he held his farm at too high a rent, contrary to his landlord's intention. The business of the excise too, as he began to be more and more employed in it, distracted his mind from the care of his farm, led him into gross and vulgar society, and exposed him to many unavoidable temptations to drunken excess, such as he had no longer sufficient fortitude to resist. Amidst the anxieties, distractions, and seducements, which thus arose to him, home became insensibly less and less pleasing; even the endearments of his Jane's affection began to lose their hold on his heart; he became every day less and less unwilling to forget in riot those gathering sorrows which he knew not to subdue.

Mr Miller, and some others of his friends, would gladly have exerted an