Robert Burns

LC name authority rec. 78088009

LC Heading: Burns, Robert, 1759-1796

Biography:

Burns, Robert (1759–1796), poet, was born on 25 January 1759 in a two-room clay cottage built by his father (and now restored as Burns's Cottage) at Alloway, Ayrshire, the eldest of the four sons and three daughters of William Burnes (1721–1784), gardener and tenant farmer, and his wife, Agnes Brown (1732–1820), of Maybole, Ayrshire.

Ancestry and childhood

Burns's grandfather Robert Burnes (c.1685–c.1760) had worked as gardener to the Earl Marischal at Inverugie Castle, Aberdeenshire. Burns believed that this Robert Burnes had suffered for his Jacobite sympathies at the time of the 1715 Jacobite rising; afterwards he became a struggling farmer in Kincardineshire, and his third son, William (born at Clochnahill farm, Dunnottar, Kincardineshire), headed south, working as a gardener first in Edinburgh and then in Ayrshire. In 1754 William engaged himself for two years to work as gardener for John Crawford of Doonside House, near Alloway, 2 miles south of Ayr. By 1756 he had feued from Dr Alexander Campbell of Ayr 7½ acres of land near Alloway with the intention of setting up a market garden. There he began to build his cottage while also working as head gardener for Provost William Fergusson of Doonholm, Alloway. In the summer of 1756 William Burnes met Agnes Brown at Maybole fair; they married on 15 December 1757. William Burnes was comparatively well educated for a Scottish peasant. He valued learning and sought to procure education for his sons and daughters; later he prepared a short catechism for the instruction of his children, and instigated attempts to care for the historic local church, Kirk Alloway. Agnes Brown could not write but had a good knowledge of ballads and songs, having come from an extended family in which such lore was valued.

Burns was born into a small, Scots-speaking, west-of-Scotland rural community in which vernacular culture was strong. Betty Davidson (widow of Agnes's cousin) lived with the Burnes family and, as the poet put it later, ‘cultivated the latent seeds of Poesy’ in the wee boy Robert (Letters, 1.135). Superstitious and unlettered, Betty entertained the children with what Burns recalled in his 1787 autobiographical letter to the London Scottish novelist Dr John Moore as ‘the largest collection in the county of tales and songs concerning devils, ghosts, fairies, brownies, witches, warlocks, spunkies, kelpies, elf-candles, dead-lights, wraiths, apparitions, cantraips, giants, inchanted towers, dragons and other trumpery’ (ibid.). Such accounts preoccupied the young boy, who also heard from his mother frankly erotic traditional Scots songs and ballads. Although local vernacular culture was strong the community was linked to the wider world and to English-language culture through church, education, and other channels. William Burnes became a private subscriber to Ayr Library (founded in 1762). Moreover William and Agnes were friendly with, for instance, William Paterson, Latin master of Ayr's grammar school, and with that school's writing master, while William Dalrymple, the young Ayr minister who baptized Robert on 26 January 1759, went on to become moderator of the Church of Scotland. By the age of seven Robert had been taught some reading and writing, having been enrolled by his father in William Campbell's short-lived school at Alloway Mill in 1765; when Campbell left William Burnes obtained a tutor for his children and those of four other local families. This was John Murdoch (1747–1824), an Ayr man, who worked with William Burnes to teach Robert to comprehend and to commit to memory passages of English. Robert was sometimes punished by Murdoch for pranks, but he and his younger brother Gilbert (1760–1827) were usually near the top of Murdoch's class in spelling and parsing. Murdoch recalled how he taught his young pupils ‘to turn verse into its natural prose order; and sometimes to substitute synonimous expressions for poetical words’ (Mackay, 34). Among the schoolbooks used were the Bible and Arthur Masson's A Collection of Prose and Verse, from the Best English Authors, in which Robert particularly enjoyed passages of Addison. He also read ‘in private’ for the first time, devouring accounts of Hannibal and of Sir William Wallace, whose narrative ‘poured a Scottish prejudice in my veins’ (Letters, 1.135–6).

Late in 1765 Burns's father, seeking a larger house, took out a lease on Provost Fergusson's farm at the more isolated, less easily cultivated Mount Oliphant, near Alloway, but William Burnes had to keep paying the lease of his Alloway land too, since he could find no taker for it. So began a series of financial struggles that were to affect the Burnes family. By 1768, when John Murdoch moved to Dumfries, William and Agnes Burnes were living at Mount Oliphant with five children and no school nearby. William worked on the farm by day and taught the children arithmetic by candlelight, talking to his sons as if they were fellow men. In 1768 John Murdoch visited and reduced the family to tears with his reading from Titus Andronicus. Robert's father borrowed and passed to his sons such improving volumes as William Derham's Astro-Theology (1714) and John Ray's Wisdom of God Manifest in the Works of Creation (1691). The young boy began to take a sometimes puzzled and sceptical interest in questions of Calvinist theology, much debated in the local area, where (as elsewhere in Scotland) the more extreme faction of Auld Licht presbyterians was in contention with the more moderate New Licht wing of the Church of Scotland; he also devoured a collection of ‘Letters by the most eminent writers’ and was inspired to imitate their English-language eloquence (Mackay, 43).

By his early teens Burns was familiar with the work of ploughing, though for a time his father also sent him and Gilbert ‘week about during a summer quarter’ to the parish school of Dalrymple, near Maybole (Mackay, 45). About this time Robert also encountered a version of Richardson's Pamela and some fiction by Smollett. By 1772 he had access to the Edinburgh Magazine and (thanks to a gift from Murdoch) the works of Pope. In 1773 his father sent him to Ayr for some sporadic teaching from Murdoch, including lessons in French and an amount of Latin. He was also acquainted with the more vernacular chapbooks and broadsheets of printed ballads sold by rural hawkers. Like several other Scottish writers Burns was in important ways bicultural, brought up on traditional (largely oral) Scots-language songs and narratives, as well as on English-language book culture.

Early compositions

By 1774 Burns was beginning to compose songs. In his autobiographical letter to Dr Moore in 1787 he recalled that in his ‘fifteenth autumn’ he ‘first committed the sin of RHYME’ by making a song for a ‘bewitching’ girl with whom he had been partnered at harvest time, and for whom he had conceived a reciprocated passion: ‘'twas her favourite reel to which I attempted giving an embodied vehicle in rhyme’ (Letters, 1.137). Though Burns lacked any formal musical education the sense here of a traditional Scottish tune underlying the poet's words, which become an ‘embodied vehicle’ for it, is important to much of his work, as is his linking of poetry with the ‘bewitching’, the erotic, and a mercurial consciousness of ‘sin’. His earliest songs were not ‘like printed ones, composed by men who had Greek and Latin’ but were suited to those ‘living in the moors’ (ibid., 137–8). This may have been so but Burns's first poems often appear exercises in the rhetoric of eighteenth-century book-verse:

Avaunt, away! the cruel sway,

Tyrannic man's dominion.

(R. Burns, ‘Song, Composed in August’)

By 1775 Burns was at school again, for a time studying ‘Mensuration, Surveying, Dialling, &c.’ under Hugh Rodger (1726–1797), the parish dominie in Kirkoswald, not far from the farm of Shanter, in Carrick, on the Firth of Clyde (Letters, 1.140). There he had a passionate encounter with a local girl, thirteen-year-old Peggy Thomson, with whom he kept in touch for some years; he also larked, and debated Calvinist theology with local lads. In Kirkoswald he read Thomson and Shenstone, and developed his own, studied epistolary eloquence.

Dr Fergusson, William Burnes's landlord, died in 1776 and the struggling Burnes moved inland from Mount Oliphant to the windswept, boggy 130-acre farm of Lochlie, in the nearby parish of Tarbolton. There the young Burns romanced local girls and read the works of Allan Ramsay, alongside a collection of English songs, while he developed his own poetic gifts in the composition of songs to local girls and celebrations of the local terrain. As a young man he developed a great fondness for dancing and assumed a slightly dandified appearance. His teenage friend David Sillar recalled the young Burns attending kirk in Tarbolton regularly with his family, when he ‘wore the only tied hair in the parish; and in the church, his plaid, which was of a particular colour, I think fillemot, he wrapped in a particular manner round his shoulders’ (Mackay, 76). Reading theology and (by 1781) Tristram Shandy, confident with women, and maturing as a poet, Burns was sociable and popular in the local community. Working hard on his father's farm, he also found time to practise the fiddle. Though he never became adept at this instrument he learned to read music with some competence, and later attempted to play the German flute. As well as Scots songs addressed to various sweethearts the young Burns was turning verses of the psalms into quatrains, and several early English-language poems reflect a concern with the precariousness of existence (‘To Ruin’, for instance, and ‘A Prayer, under the Pressure of Violent Anguish’). While such works may have the quality of exercises they represent a fear of despair that dogged Burns, counterpointing his normal joviality. So among his early works the dark and the jaunty are often hand in hand.

On 11 November 1780 in a top-floor room in John Richards's alehouse in the Sandgate, Tarbolton (a room also used for masonic meetings), Burns founded the Tarbolton Bachelors' Club, perhaps the earliest Scottish rural debating society. This all-male fraternity, whose rules were drafted by Burns, swore its members to secrecy and demanded that each ‘must be a professed lover of one or more of the female sex’. Swearing was forbidden, social drinking encouraged, and haughtiness prohibited, so that ‘the proper person for this society is a cheerful, honest-hearted lad’. Topics debated by the club included suitable marriage partners and ‘Whether is the savage man or the peasant of a civilized society in the most happy situation’ (Mackay, 82–3). Such a topic is at one with the Scottish Enlightenment interest in the progress of ‘civil society’, and it is evident that the young Burns was developing an interest in such works as Adam Smith's Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759), with its ethic of sympathy as a social bond. By 1781 he was also praising Henry Mackenzie's novel of sympathetic sentimentality, The Man of Feeling (1771), which he carried so frequently on his person that his copy disintegrated and had to be replaced. In 1783 he described Mackenzie's novel as ‘a book I prize next to the Bible’ (Letters, 1.17).

Sometimes happy, but also sometimes hurt and rebuffed in his own affairs of the heart, Burns in 1781 decided to strike out in a new direction and become a flax-dresser in the Ayrshire town of Irvine; this venture failed, the shop in which he worked burned down, and Burns suffered a bout of depression in late 1781. At this time he also read with great appreciation the Scots and English poems of Robert Fergusson (1750–1774), who had died in Edinburgh's madhouse. While in Irvine, Burns enjoyed a very close ‘bosom-friendship’ with the sailor Captain Richard Brown (1753–1833), with whom he walked in Eglinton Woods, where Brown suggested to the still unpublished poet that he send his poems to a magazine (Letters, 1.142). Though Burns does not seem to have acted on this suggestion he sent Brown one of the very few personal presentation copies of the first, Kilmarnock, edition of his poems when that volume appeared in 1786.

During 1781 Burns had also become a freemason, having been ‘entered an Apprentice’ in the combined Lodge St David, Tarbolton, on 4 July (Mackay, 119). He became an active mason, rising to depute master of St James Lodge, Tarbolton, by 1784. During Burns's deputy mastership Professor Dugald Stewart of Catrine, who later championed the poet's work, was made an honorary member of the lodge. Through masonic contacts Burns also came to know Sir John Whitefoord (1734–1803), the agricultural improver, whose own contacts were later of use to the aspiring poet. Burns returned to Lochlie in 1782 to find matters there deteriorating. Struggling with the farm's acidic soil, William Burnes was facing severe financial problems. By 1783 his property had been sequestrated, and he was being pursued through the courts for rent arrears. Bad summers in 1782 and 1783 added to William's troubles and, though he succeeded in winning his law case before Lord Braxfield, the disastrous harvest of 1783 saw him a broken man, fighting tuberculosis; he died on 13 February 1784, and his body was taken for burial at the ruined Kirk Alloway. Burns's admiration for his father was great and is reflected in ‘The Cotter's Saturday Night’, with its portrait of noble paternal concern and undaunted domestic virtue.

In April 1783 Burns at Lochlie began to keep a commonplace book of ‘Observations, Hints, Songs, Scraps of Poetry, etc.’, including his own shrewd critical appraisals of his verse. He was conscious of the curious interest that a ploughman's literary concerns might have for future readers. As well as reworking comic and erotic song and ballad materials he composed several poems relating to his father's death; a strange fusion of the comic and elegiac is evident in ‘The Death and Dying Words of Poor Mailie, the Author's Only Pet Yowe: an Unco Mournfu' Tale’, which builds on earlier works such as ‘The Last Dying Words of Bonnie Heck’ (a greyhound) by Allan Ramsay's friend William Hamilton of Gilbertfield (c.1665–1751). Appearing in his commonplace book along with several mock epitaphs, Burns's poem treats with a tenderly comic voice the anxieties of death and the agricultural grind; at once mock-elegy and genuine lament, this poem led to another, ‘Poor Mailie's Elegy’ (composed about 1785), which uses the six-line ‘Standard Habbie’ verse form inherited from the comic elegy ‘The Life and Death of Habbie Simson, the Piper of Kilbarchan’ by Robert Sempill of Beltrees (c.1595–c.1665). Burns's verse artistry led him to give new life to several Scottish stanza forms, making them ‘crucial to the national spirit of his poetry’ (Crawford, 84). He made such great use of the Standard Habbie stanza form in such works as ‘Holy Willie's Prayer’ (1785), which mocks Calvinist hypocrisy, and in his verse letters that it acquired the name ‘Burns stanza’. Its flicking short lines towards the end of each stanza lend themselves to speedy nods and winks:

Maybe thou lets this fleshy thorn

Buffet thy servant e'en and morn,

Lest he o'er proud and high should turn,

That he's sae gifted;

If sae, thy hand maun e'en be borne

Untill thou lift it.

(R. Burns, ‘Holy Willie's Prayer’)

Burns comes to use this stanza form in the period in the mid-1780s when he clearly blossoms as a poet. The form, already over a century old, transmits metrically an impulse to fuse the solemn and the lightly risible, the dark and the boisterous, which Burns inherited, developed, and transmitted with mischievous grace. Many of his finest poems delight in juxtaposing or blending uneasily defended respectability with gleefully subversive energy. His commonplace book functioned as a literary laboratory in this regard, and by about 1785 most elements of his literary personality had been assembled, including a humorous and purposeful tendency to view himself as what Robert Fergusson had called a ‘Bardie’—at once an ambitious poet of his people in full flight and a snook-cocking belittler of the grandiose tendencies in himself and others.

Burns knew about bards from his enthusiastic reading of the poems of Ossian, but his own mundane struggles were far removed from the nobly misty realms of that bard. In 1784, following their father's death, Gilbert and Robert took a lease on another farm, at Mossgiel, in the neighbouring parish of Mauchline. Drainage there was poor, and for all the brothers' efforts they were beset with problems of bad seed, hard frosts, and late harvests. During that summer and autumn, troubled by ‘a kind of slow fever’ and ‘langor of my spirits’ (Letters, 1.23), Burns seems to have suffered another bout of depressive or psychosomatic illness, though he was also enjoying the ‘honours masonic’ and the ‘big-belly'd bottle’ of the lodge (R. Burns, ‘No churchman am I’). On 22 May 1785 an uneducated servant woman in her early twenties, Elizabeth Paton, gave birth to Burns's daughter Elizabeth (1785–1817)—‘Dear-bought Bess’ (Mackay, 137). Burns had made no promise to wed his lover, who later married a farmworker and widower, John Andrew, in 1788, after the poet and ‘handsome Betsey’ had apparently paid a fine and done penance for fornication before Tarbolton Kirk Session (R. Burns, ‘The Fornicator’). Burns's poem ‘The Fornicator’ details these events, but was not published in his lifetime.

Styling himself Rab Mossgiel, Burns wrote flirtatious as well as satirical verse at this time, when he was paying court to Jean Armour (1765–1834), the literate daughter of a Mauchline stonemason, though he also dallied with other local girls. By summer 1785, recovered from his illness and fired up by the poetry of those whom he called in his first commonplace book ‘the excellent Ramsay, and the still more excellent [Robert] Fergus[s]on’, Burns was committing himself to a concentrated and ambitious aesthetic of the local, eager to write poems that celebrated his native ground (Mackay, 156). His sense of himself as a Scottish poet was developing, and Gilbert was encouraging him to go into print, though the shock of the death of his youngest brother, John (aged sixteen), on 1 November 1785 meant that his awareness of tribulation also remained heightened. To this period belong some of Burns's major verse epistles as well as ‘Holy Willie's Prayer’, a spirited and sly dramatic monologue that satirizes the Calvinist doctrine of predestination and its hypocritical exponent William Fisher (1737–1809), an elder in the parish of Mauchline who had been involved in a series of vigorously prosecuted kirk disputes with Burns's Mossgiel landlord and friend, the lawyer Gavin Hamilton (1751–1805). In his prefatory headnote, setting out the argument of ‘Holy Willie's Prayer’, Burns describes Holy Willie as ‘justly famed for that polemical chattering which ends in tippling Orthodoxy, and for that Spiritualized Bawdry which refines to Liquorish Devotion’; the poem that follows is equally devastating. This work is one of a group of contemporary satires on local kirk politics and arguments featuring neighbouring ministers and worthies; these poems include ‘The Holy Fair’, ‘The Twa Herds, or, The Holy Tulzie’, and ‘Death and Dr Hornbook’. 1785 was also the year of the composition of Burns's ‘Address to the Deil’, in which the devil (hailed variously as ‘auld Cloots’, ‘Hornie’, and ‘Nick’) is spoken to with confident wonder as well as familiar vernacular directness; as in ‘Hallowe'en’ this is one of the poems in which Burns clearly delights in his repertory of folklore and superstitious tales. A mischievously confident tone married to a sense of inexhaustible and undeflected purposefulness characterizes these poems, as it does such different works as ‘The Twa Dogs: a Tale’ (about social inequality), ‘The Vision’ (presenting Burns's local muse in Ossianic ‘duans’), and a superb series of verse epistles in Standard Habbie. These poetic letters were actually sent, and should be seen as reinforcing Burns's emphasis on vernacular communion and on the local as paramount. This poetic outpouring in 1785 shows a determined confidence, though poems of the same period such as ‘To a Mouse’ demonstrate a continuing sense of vulnerability and the need for social sympathy.

By early 1786, when Burns was composing such works as ‘The Cotter's Saturday Night’ (that pious celebration of impoverished domestic virtue), it became evident that Jean Armour was going to have Burns's child. He was reluctant to marry her but seems to have given her some documentary assurance (now lost) that he would stick by her. Jean Armour's father reacted angrily, had resort to law, and had this ‘unlucky paper’ mutilated, sending off his daughter to Paisley (Letters, 1.30). While the kirk investigated the affair Burns was well advanced with arranging for the publication (by subscription) of his first volume of poems. With Jean in Paisley he made eyes at Margaret Campbell (‘another wife’, who appears to have died young and is remembered as the shadowy ‘Highland Mary’), though when Jean returned in early summer 1786 Burns protested that he adored her and had tried to forget her by running into ‘all kinds of dissipation and riot, Mason-meetings, drinking matches, and other mischief’ (ibid., 37, 39). Emotionally upset, he resolved to sail as an emigrant to Jamaica (‘farewel dear old Scotland, and farewel dear, ungrateful Jean’), but was called to do public penance on the stool of repentance (‘the creepy chair’) at Mauchline kirk on 25 June 1786, with further public rebukes on 23 July and on 3 August, when Burns, Jean Armour, and three other fornicators were ‘absolved from scandal’ by the Auld Licht minister, the Revd William (‘Daddy’) Auld (ibid., 39; Mackay, 191). On 22 July Burns had made over his share in Mossgiel and all his property to his brother Gilbert. Jean Armour's father took out a writ for damages against Burns, threatening him with imprisonment. Burns fled towards Kilmarnock, wrote letters to friends about his forthcoming volume of poems, and planned his emigration to Jamaica on 1 September. Backed by local Kilmarnock businessmen and published by John Wilson of Kilmarnock, Burns's Poems appeared at the end of July, and during August he collected money from subscribers to the book. His departure for Jamaica from Greenock was now rescheduled for the end of September. On 3 September he received news of the birth of his twins: a son, Robert, and a daughter, Jean. Paternal emotions and the possibility of a second edition of his book seem to have led him to abandon his Jamaica plans, though he arranged for a ticket that would have allowed him to emigrate in October.

Book publication and visits to Edinburgh

Burns's preface to the 240-page Kilmarnock Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect, published in 1786, presents the author as one who lacked ‘all the advantages of learned art’ and who, being ‘Unacquainted with the necessary requisites for commencing Poet by rule’, instead ‘sings the sentiments and manners, he felt and saw in himself and his rustic compeers around him, in his and their native language’. The book, published in an edition of just over 600 copies, contained forty-four poems, in Scots and in English, including such substantial recent works as ‘Scotch Drink’, ‘The Twa Dogs’, ‘The Vision’, and ‘The Cotter's Saturday Night’. Thanks not least to the large number of subscribers obtained by Gilbert Burns and the poet's friends, the edition sold out in a month, making Burns a profit of over £50. John Wilson wished Burns to advance money for a second edition, but the poet was reluctant to hazard this. The book had won him intense local admiration among the common people and gentry. A local minister, the Revd George Lawrie of Loudoun, sent Burns's Poems to an Edinburgh literary friend, the blind poet the Revd Thomas Blacklock, who asked his friend Professor Dugald Stewart to read some of the poems aloud to him. Blacklock wrote enthusiastically to Lawrie, hoping that there would be a second edition of the poems, and his letter was passed on to Burns, who soon gave up his emigration plans. In autumn 1786 he visited the Lawries, lent George's son Archibald a two-volume edition of Ossian and some books of songs and Scottish poetry, and got on well with the family. By 23 October he was dining with Lord Daer (recently returned from France, where he had met leading revolutionaries) and Dugald Stewart at the latter's house near Mauchline. Stewart recalled Burns then and later as ‘simple, manly, and independent’, noting that:

Nothing, perhaps, was more remarkable among his various attainments than the fluency, and precision, and originality of his language, when he spoke in company; more particularly as he aimed at purity in his turn of expression, and avoided, more successfully than most Scotchmen, the peculiarities of Scottish phraseology. (Mackay, 243)

Burns and his poetry also appealed to other local figures, including the widowed grandmother Frances Anna Wallace, Mrs Dunlop of Dunlop, who began to correspond with the poet. By November, encouraged by his new acquaintances, Burns was proposing to visit Edinburgh, with plans for a second edition of his poems to be published there. He was also exploring the possibility of earning his living as an excise officer, a plan that would later bear fruit.

Late in November 1786 Burns rode to Edinburgh, fêted along the way by lowland farmers who had read his verse. On arrival he shared lodgings in the house of a Mrs Carfrae (‘a flesh-disciplining, godly Matron’) in a tenement, now demolished, at Baxter's Close, Lawnmarket (Letters, 1.83). Using his network of masonic connections, as well as other supporters, Burns investigated the likelihood of a new edition of his Poems. Dugald Stewart had given a copy of the Kilmarnock edition to the novelist and Edinburgh man of letters Henry Mackenzie, who reviewed the book in his magazine, The Lounger, on 9 December 1786, calling attention to Burns as a ‘Heaven-taught ploughman’ whose ‘neglected merit’ Scotland should recognize. Other Edinburgh reviewers also praised Burns in November and December 1786, while the influential earl of Glencairn secured the agreement of the hundred or so gentlemen of the Caledonian Hunt that they would all subscribe to a second edition of Burns's Poems, which (with its dedication to the Caledonian Hunt) was published by subscription on 17 April 1787 by the famous and tight-fisted Edinburgh bookseller William Creech, who eventually paid Burns £100 for the copyright. The typesetter was William Smellie, one of the founders of the Encyclopaedia Britannica; he introduced Burns to the all-male club that he had founded, the Crochallan Fencibles, for which Burns collected bawdy songs and where he met several of his fellow masons. Published in an edition of about 3000 copies, the 408-page Edinburgh volume of his poems was an immediate success, with ploughman Burns cannily presenting what his preface called ‘my wild, artless notes’. Among the new poems added to the volume were the vigorous, slyly modulated Scots poems ‘Address to the Unco Guid’ and ‘Death and Dr Hornbook’, as well as the ‘Address to Edinburgh’, in which Burns on his best behaviour delivers a paean to ‘Edina! Scotia's darling seat!’

During winter 1786–7 Burns seems to have engaged in several dalliances (resulting in at least one child) but also met many of Edinburgh's distinguished literati, and was given star treatment. At the house of the philosopher and historian Professor Adam Ferguson (1723–1816) he met the scientists James Hutton and William Black, along with the playwright John Home and the sixteen-year-old Walter Scott. Scott recalled that Burns wept on seeing a print of a soldier lying dead in the snow beside his widow, with a child in her arms. According to Scott the twenty-eight-year-old Burns (5 feet 10 inches tall) ‘was strong and robust: his manners rustic, not clownish’; he had ‘a sort of dignified plainness and simplicity’ that made Scott think of:

a very sagacious country farmer of the old Scotch school—i.e. none of your modern agriculturists, who keep labourers for their drudgery, but the douce gudeman who held his own plough. There was a strong expression of sense and shrewdness in all his lineaments; the eye alone, I think, indicated the poetical character and temperament. It was large, and of a dark cast, and glowed (I say literally glowed) when he spoke with feeling or interest. (Lockhart, 115–17)

Scott recalled also that Burns, who talked of Allan Ramsay and Robert Fergusson ‘with too much humility as his models’, was at that time ‘much caressed in Edinburgh, but (considering what literary emoluments have been since his day) the efforts made for his relief were extremely trifling’ (ibid.). For the young Scott, Burns's conversation:

expressed perfect self-confidence, without the slightest presumption. Among the men who were the most learned of their time and country, he expressed himself with perfect firmness, but without the least intrusive forwardness; and when he differed in opinion, he did not hesitate to express it firmly, yet at the same time with modesty ... his dress corresponded with his manner. He was like a farmer dressed in his best to dine with the laird ... his address to females was extremely deferential, and always with a turn either to the pathetic or humorous, which engaged their attention particularly. (Mackay, 267)

The Revd Hugh Blair, the elderly professor of rhetoric and belles-lettres at Edinburgh University, pronounced himself ‘a great friend to Mr. Burns's Poems’ and made suggestions about what Burns should include and exclude from his second, Edinburgh, edition, judging that his rollicking cantata ‘Love and Liberty’ (‘The Jolly Beggars’) was ‘too licentious’ and ‘altogether unfit’ for publication (Low, 82). This spirited work of 1785 is set in Poosie (that is, Pussy) Nancie's doss-house (then disreputable, now splendidly preserved) for the ‘lowest orders’ in Mauchline, and it is hard to think of Hugh Blair warming to a text one of whose boozy singers proclaims:

A fig for those by LAW protected

LIBERTY's a glorious feast!

COURTS for Cowards were erected,

CHURCHES built to please the Priest.

Burns excluded ‘Love and Liberty’ from the Edinburgh edition, and it was not published until 1799. While he respected Blair, Burns got on better with Blair's younger colleague and professorial successor, the Revd William Greenfield, who became moderator of the Church of Scotland but was later dismissed after a homosexual scandal. Promoted in Edinburgh society by such figures as the duchess of Gordon, Burns was also toasted at Edinburgh's St Andrew's masonic lodge as ‘Caledonia's bard, brother Burns’ (Letters, 1.83). In Edinburgh he made friends not only with noble patrons but also with people such as the printer Smellie and the borders law clerk Robert Ainslie (1766–1838), who became a close companion and confidant.

Burns composed comparatively little verse during his six-month stay in Edinburgh, but one of his most revealing acts was to write to the bailies of the Canongate to complain that the remains of the poet Robert Fergusson, ‘a man whose talents for ages to come will do honor to our Caledonian name’, lay buried in the Canongate churchyard ‘unnoticed and unknown’; the bailies granted Burns permission to erect a headstone on Fergusson's grave (ibid., 90). Though the clerkly Fergusson, educated at St Andrews University, came from a background rather different from that of Burns he was the Scottish poet to whom Burns felt closest. Early in 1787 Burns wrote three poems to Fergusson's memory, calling him:

my elder brother in Misfortune,

By far my elder Brother in the muse.

Fer