Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 07.djvu/440

 Burns had some prospect of preferment. After the first outbreak of the war, the extreme suspicions declined, and though he wrote election ballads on the whig side, he seems to have been at least tolerated. A supervisorship, he says (letter to Heron, 1795), would bring from 120l. to 200l. a year; and he might look forward to a collectorship, which varied from 200l. to 1,000l. a year. This, however, depended on the very doubtful possibility of political patronage. At the same time he clearly gave way to indulgences of a discreditable kind. His friends, James Gray, a schoolmaster, and Findlater, his superior officer, declare (in letters first published by A. Peterkin in 1815) that he never became openly reckless or degraded. Gray speaks of his extreme interest in the education of his children. Burns had formerly been made an honorary burgess of Dumfries, and was now allowed the privilege of sending his sons to the school on the footing of a real freeman of the town. He was also admitted a member of the town library, to which he presented some books. Burns was often received on equal terms by the respectable inhabitants, and his friends testify that they never saw him drunk. He continued to perform his official duties with zeal and regularity (see, iii. 83, 147; , ii. App. xxxi.). But his friends have also to admit that he frequently went beyond the bounds of prudence; and he was apparently often in company of a disreputable kind, and gave way to very mischievous indulgences. On 31 Dec. 1792 he tells Mrs. Dunlop that hard-drinking is ‘the devil to him.’ He has given up taverns—for the time—but the private parties among the hard-drinking gentlemen of the country do the mischief. At the end of 1793 he was at such a party at Walter Riddel's, became scandalously drunk, and was brutally rude to Mrs. Riddel. Although he expressed the bitterest remorse next day, the Riddels broke with him for some time, and Burns wrote some bitter lampoons on the lady. The quarrel extended to the Riddels of Glenriddel. Captain Riddel died the next April (1794) still unreconciled, when Burns wrote a sonnet expressing his regret. A year or so later Mrs. Walter Riddel became partly reconciled. She saw him before his death, and wrote an appreciative obituary notice of him soon after in the ‘Dumfries Journal.’ It is clear that, though Burns was neither so poor nor so neglected as is sometimes said, his weaknesses had injured his reputation, and were trying his constitution.

Burns's poetical activity occasionally slackened, but never quite ceased. In September 1792, George Thomson, clerk to the trustees for the encouragement of Scotch manufactures, had designed a new collection of Scotch songs, to be more carefully edited and more elegantly got up than Johnson's ‘Museum.’ Thomson and his collaborator, Andrew Erskine, applied to Burns to write songs for melodies which they would send him. Burns took up the project enthusiastically. He wrote songs at intervals and sent them to Thomson with many interesting letters originally published in the fourth volume of Currie's work. Among them are some of his most popular songs. ‘Scots, wha hae wi' Wallace bled’ is said by Syme to have been composed during a tour which they made at the end of July 1793, while riding in a storm across the wilds of Kenmure. Burns sends it to Thomson in the following September, saying that he composed it ‘in my yester-night's evening walk.’ It seems, however, to have been already in the hands of Johnson; and the last statement may refer to a final redaction. As Burns occasionally indulged in little mystifications, the date must remain uncertain. ‘Auld Lang Syne’ had been sent just before, as taken down from ‘an old man’ singing. Other songs, such as ‘O, my Luve's like a Red, Red Rose,’ and ‘A Vision,’ the last of which refers to a favourite walk of Burns, near the ruins of Lincluden Abbey, appeared in the fifth volume of Johnson's ‘Museum’ (December 1796, after Burns's death), but had been sent to Johnson in 1794. Several songs addressed to Chloris were written in 1794–5. Chloris, or the ‘Lassie wi' the lint-white locks,’ was a Mrs. Whelpdale, daughter of a farmer named Lorimer, who had been married and deserted at the age of seventeen. The homage in this case appears to have been purely poetical. Burns adopted the phraseology of a lover in celebrating any woman; even Jessie Lewars, who helped to nurse him in his last illness, and to whom (in 1796) he addressed ‘Oh, wert thou in the cauld blast,’ written on the spur of the moment to a tune which she played to him, and which was afterwards set to music by Mendelssohn.

For all these poems Burns absolutely refused to accept money. He told Thomson at starting that his songs were ‘either above or below price,’ and only kept 5l. sent to him by Thomson in 1793 because a return would ‘savour of affectation,’ declaring that, if any more were sent, he would be henceforth a stranger. He had some correspondence with London journalists, having sent to the ‘Star,’ then edited by Peter Stuart, a letter, dated 8 Nov. 1788, protesting against a sermon in which a Mr. Kirkpatrick of Dunleath had spoken ungenerously of the Stuart dynasty,