LAST LETTER OF THE POET.
"To Mr. James Armour, Mauchline.
"My Dear Sir—Do, for heaven's sake, send Mrs. Armour here immediately. My wife is hourly expecting to be put to bed. Good God! what a situation for her to be in, poor girl (not yet thirty), without a friend. I returned from sea-bathing quarters to-day, and my medical friends would almost persuade me that I am better; but I think and feel that my strength is so gone, that the disorder will prove fatal to me. Your son-in-law, R. B."
The 19th and 20th pass over. The 21st comes and brings delirium. The children are sent for and stand round the bed. Last word—a curse on the law agent who had written for payment of volunteer uniform. On the 21st July, 1796, Robert Burns is no more. On the 25th he is buried with local honours—idiot volunteers firing three volleys over the grave—and the poet's wife bearing a son on the day of the funeral.
To understand the position of Burns as a poet, he must be placed in relation to the history of his country. He belonged to lowland Scotland and rustic Scotland. He sang the song, therefore, of lowland and rustic Scottish life. But it was the death-song. Lowland Scotland, as a distinct nationality unmingled with extraneous elements, came in with two warriors and went out with two bards. It came in with William Wallace and Robert Bruce, and went out with Robert Burns and Walter Scott. The two first made the history; the two last told the story and sung the song.
As the modern history of England commences at the Norman conquest, so the modern history of Scotland commences at the war which determined whether the Norman conquest should or should not extend to the kingdom of Scotland—that is, at the war carried on by the Anglo-Norman Edwards. On the part of Scotland, that war was maintained by two historic men, the one representing the people, the other the aristocracy; the one representing the Scottish element, properly so called, the other representing the Scoto-Norman element which assumed the reins of power and became predominant. Wallace was a Scotsman, Bruce was a Scoto-Norman. When the Anglo-Norman attempt to conquer the kingdom of Scotland was rolled back by Wallace and Bruce, Scotland entered on a national life distinct from that of England, and in this national life were the two elements of rustic or Saxon Scotland, and aristocratic Scotland. At the Reformation the Saxon element came once more to the surface, and the Norman fashion of things underwent a change. In the parliamentary wars the two parties are pitched against other—the covenanters representing rustic or Saxon Scotland, and the cavaliers representing aristocratic or Norman Scotland. Time flowed, and a union with England came about. The two countries were to merge into one on equal terms, and the distinct and separate life of Scotland was to be merged into a common kingdom. Nominally, the union took place in 1707, but the real admixture and solving of the two countries was little more than commenced at the end of the last century. Before Scotland could disappear, however, she must have her bards, and these appeared not unworthily in Robert Burns and Walter Scott—Burns taking the rustic life and the rustic language; Scott taking the aristocratic life, and, except in dialogue, the aristocratic language. Burns was therefore the national poet of Scotland, exclusive of the Norman element. Knighthood was the theme of Scott—manhood the theme of Burns. With poetic justice both fell victims—Burns to passion, Scott to pride.
For this purpose, and to be the type of Scottish lowland and lowly life, no man ever possessed such qualifications as Burns. He had a vast intellect and a burning nature—the sensibility of a woman and the strength of a giant. Had he chosen the path of duty instead of indulgence, it is impossible to say what he might not have achieved. With regard to intellectual endowment, he has no compeer in the history of his country. His intellect has the flash of intense electric light. He searches out the quintessence of feeling, and distils it off into expressions so concise and admirable, that they burn their way into the innermost existence of those who have the ears to hear. In four lines he paints a drama—
" Had we never loved sae kindly,
Had we never loved sae blindly,
Never met—or never parted,
We had ne'er been broken-hearted."
In one line he sums up the highest and most universal form of all democracy—
" A man's a man for a' that."
In a single verse he prophesies the reign of merit and the advent of human brotherhood—
" Then let us pray that come it may.
As come it will, for a' that,
That sense and worth, o'er a' the earth,
May bear the gree and a' that.
For a' that and a' that.
It's coming yet for a' that,
That man to man, the world o'er,
Shall brothers be for a' that."
Tam o' Shanter, short as it is, is a complete epic, with beginning, middle, end, and moral—a small picture, which, like one of Rembrandt's engravings, exhibits power condensed into the smallest compass.
Burns' language was the lowland Scottish dialect, and in that he wrote naturally. English was, if not a foreign, at least an acquired dialect, and he used it with far less success than his own. And so true is it that Burns wrote the requiem of lowland Scotland, that since his time his very dialect has almost died away. There are very few in the present generation who can read Burns without a glossary, and in the next generation he will be almost as strange to Scotsmen as to Englishmen. His Scottish dialect must ever be a barrier to that universal popularity which he might have attained in a language more widely diffused; but if genius have the inheritance of fame, Robert Burns will never disappear from the literature of the world. To a Scottish ear, his pathos, his power, his inimitable satire, his floods of native feeling, poured forth in words that seem to have been coined expressly for his use; his manly independence, his reverential awe, and the solemn majesty of his religious thought—enshrine him for ever as the poet of his country. But the moral of his life is dark and sad—too dark and too sad to be touched on without the deepest and most serious reflection on the vanity of human genius when severed from moral resolution.
The following description of Burns' personal appearance is from Dr. Currie—"Burns was nearly five feet ten inches in height, and of a form that indicated agility as well as strength. His well-raised forehead, shaded with black ending hair, indicated extensive capacity. His eyes were large, dark, full of ardour and intelligence. His face was well formed, and his countenance uncommonly interesting and expressive. His mode of dressing, which was often slovenly, and a certain fullness and bend of his shoulders, characteristic of his original profession, disguised in some degree the natural symmetry and elegance of his form. The external appearance of Burns was most strikingly indicative of the character of his mind. On a first view his physiognomy had a certain air of coarseness, mingled, however, with an expression of deep penetration, and of calm thoughtfulness, approaching to melancholy. There appeared in his first manner and address perfect ease and self-possession, but a stern and almost supercilious elevation, not indeed incompatible with openness and affability, which, however, bespoke a mind conscious of superior talents. Strangers who supposed themselves approaching an Ayrshire peasant who could make rhymes, and to whom their notice was an honour, found themselves speedily overawed by the presence of a man who bore himself with dignity, and who possessed a singular power of correcting forwardness and of repelling intrusion."
Upwards of a hundred editions of the works of Burns have been published. In addition to the first, published at Kilmarnock by John Wilson in 1786, and the second published in Edinburgh in 1787 by William Creech, the following may be mentioned—The Scots Musical Museum, six vols. 8vo, published between 1787 and 1803 by James Johnson, engraver, Edinburgh; in this are included one hundred and eighty-four songs, written or corrected by Burns. The Works of Robert Burns, with an Account of his Life, Liverpool, 1800, Dr. Currie's first edition; Cromek's Reliques of Burns, 1808; Life of Burns by J. G. Lockhart, Edinburgh, 1828. (The Edinburgh Review, No. 96, for December, 1828, contains a critique on Lockhart's Life of Burns by Thomas Carlyle, the only man who could ever have written a life of Burns with insight both into the man, and into the whole circumstances of Scottish rural life. Properly speaking, Burns' life has not yet been written, and in fifty years it will be impossible.) Works and Life by Allan Cunningham, eight vols., London, 1834; Works, edited by the Ettrick Shepherd and William Motherwell, five vols., Glasgow, 1834; the Correspondence between Burns and Clarinda, with a Memoir of Mrs. M'Lehose (Clarinda), by her Grandson, Edinburgh, 1843; Life
