Then out spak mim-mou❜ed Meg o' Nith, prim-mouthed And she spak up wi' pride, And she wad send the sodger youth, Whatever might betide. For the auld guidman o' Lon'on court1 But she wad send the sodger youth Then up sprang Bess o' Annandale, For far-aff fowls hae feathers fair, Says Black Joan frae Crichton Peel, The auld guidman, and the young guidman, For fools will freit o' right or wrang, Then Whisky Jean spak owre her drink, Ye weel ken, kimmers a', The auld guidman o' Lon'on court And monie a friend that kissed his cup Is now a fremit wight: But it's ne'er be said o' Whisky Jean- Then slow raise Marjory o' the Lochs, Her ancient weed was russet gray, There's some great folks set light by me I set as light by them; But I will send to Lon'on town Wham I like best at hame. austere estranged 'The King. 2 The Prince of Wales. Talk superstitiously. It may not be unworthy of notice that this verse was one in great favour with Sir Walter Scott, who used to recite it with good effect. Sae how this weighty plea may end Towards the close of the year, excessive business application, joined to the usual effects of social life and a poetical temperament, brought Burns to a sick-chamber. TO MRS DUNLOP. ELLISLAND, 13th December 1789. Many thanks, my dear madam, for your sheetful of rhymes. Though at present I am below the veriest prose, yet from you everything pleases. I am groaning under the miseries of a diseased nervous system-a system, the state of which is most conducive to our happiness or the most productive of our misery. For now near three weeks I have been so ill with a nervous headache, that I have been obliged for a time to give up my Excise books, being scarce able to lift my head, much less to ride once a week over ten muir parishes. What is man? To-day, in the luxuriance of health, exulting in the enjoyment of existence; in a few days, perhaps in a few hours, loaded with conscious painful being, counting the tardy pace of the lingering moments by the repercussions of anguish, and refusing or denied a comforter. Day follows night, and night comes after day, only to curse him with life which gives him no pleasure; and yet the awful, dark termination of that life is something at which he recoils. 'Tell us, ye dead; will none of you in pity What 'tis you are, and we must shortly be? 'tis no matter: A little time will make us learned as you are.'1 Can it be possible, that when I resign this frail, feverish being, I shall still find myself in conscious existence? When the last gasp of agony has announced that I am no more to those that knew me and the few who loved me; when the cold, stiffened, unconscious, ghastly corse is resigned into the earth, to be the prey of unsightly reptiles, and to become in time a trodden clod, shall I be yet warm in life, seeing and seen, enjoying and enjoyed? Ye venerable sages and holy flamens, is there probability in your conjectures, truth in your stories, of another world beyond death; or are they all alike baseless visions and fabricated fables? If there is another life, it must be only for the just, the benevolent, the amiable, and the humane: what a flattering idea, then, is a world to come! Would 1 Blair's Grave. to God I as firmly believed it as I ardently wish it! There I should meet an aged parent, now at rest from the many buffetings of an evil world, against which he so long and so bravely struggled. There should I meet the friend, the disinterested friend, of my early life; the man who rejoiced to see me, because he loved me and could serve me. Muir, thy weaknesses were the aberrations of human nature, but thy heart glowed with everything generous, manly, and noble: and if ever emanation from the All-good Being animated a human form, it was thine! There should I, with speechless agony of rapture, again recognise my lost, my ever-dear Mary! whose bosom was fraught with truth, honour, constancy, and love. My Mary, dear departed shade! Where is thy place of heavenly rest? Hear'st thou the groans that rend his breast? Jesus Christ, thou amiablest of characters! I trust thou art no impostor, and that thy revelation of blissful scenes of existence beyond death and the grave, is not one of the many impositions which time after time have been palmed on credulous mankind. I trust that in thee shall all the families of the earth be blessed,' by being yet connected together in a better world, where every tie that bound heart to heart in this state of existence shall be, far beyond our present conceptions, more endearing. I am a good deal inclined to think with those who maintain that what are called nervous affections are in fact diseases of the mind. I cannot reason, I cannot think; and but to you I would not venture to write anything above an order to a cobbler. You have felt too much of the ills of life not to sympathise with a diseased wretch who has impaired more than half of any faculties he possessed. Your goodness will excuse this distracted scrawl, which the writer dare scarcely read, and which he would throw into the fire were he able to write anything better, or indeed anything at all. Rumour told me something of a son of yours who was returned from the East or West Indies. If you have gotten news from James or Anthony, it was cruel in you not to let me know; as I promise you, on the sincerity of a man who is weary of one world and anxious about another, that scarce anything could give me so much pleasure as to hear of any good thing befalling my honoured friend. If you have a minute's leisure, take up your pen in pity to le pauvre misérable R. B. Written four days after a letter to Mr Graham, in which he spoke of a cheerful and alert performance of his Excise duties, one might be apt to suspect some error in the date of this to Mrs Dunlop, wherein he discourses as one reduced by a long illness to the most serious feelings. But no such theory is in reality required to reconcile this epistle either to that to Mr Graham or to one written only a week afterwards to the provost of Lochmaben, in which our bard seems to have carried the jocular a good way beyond the bounds of decorum. A headache of three weeks' standing had now perhaps laid him up from his duties for one or two days; and low spirits were the consequence. Having to write to Mrs Dunlop, a lady of refined sentiments and a deep sense of religion, Burns attuned his mind accordingly, and poured out this sentimental effusion, involving feelings of which we have no reason to doubt that for the moment they were sincere, although very likely the first walk out to the river-side in the eye of the morning sun, or the first ride across the Dunscore Hills in quest of fiscal delinquents, set him off into a totally different strain of emotion. What is very curious, the letter which he describes as a 'distracted scrawl,' composed with only half of his faculties, appears after all to have been a deliberate transcription, with some amplifications, from an entry of his last year's Commonplace Book. (See Volume II., p. 267.) Another of the mystères d'atelier of Burns. Amongst the gentry of Dumfriesshire, Burns would be led by his Jacobitism to single out for especial regard the Lady Winifred Maxwell, grand-daughter of that Earl of Nithsdale who owed his escape from the block for his concern in the insurrection of 1715 solely to the heroism and ingenuity of his wife, with whom he exchanged clothes in the Tower the night before his intended execution. There seems to have been a proposal to introduce the bard to her ladyship; but it had been prevented by the illness alluded to in the letter to Mrs Dunlop: TO LADY WINIFRED MAXWELL CONSTABLE.' ELLISLAND, 16th December 1789. MY LADY-In vain have I from day to day expected to hear from Mrs Young, as she promised me at Dalswinton that she would do me the honour to introduce me at Tinwald; and it was impossible, not from your ladyship's accessibility, but from my own feelings, that I could go alone. Lately, indeed, Mr Maxwell of Carruchan in his usual goodness offered to accompany me, when an unlucky indisposition on my part hindered my embracing the Her ladyship had married William Haggerston Constable, of Everingham, by whom she had several children. |