554 530 352 423 508 495 561 358 416 490 Ye Jacobites by name, give an ear, give an ear.. Ye banks and braes o' bonnie Doon... Ye flowery banks o' bonnie Doon. Ye gallants bright, I red you right. Ye sons of old Killie, assembled by Willie. Yestreen I met you on the moor.. Yon wandering rill, that marks the hill.. Yon wild mossy mountains so lofty and wide. Young Jamie, pride of a' the plain Young Jockey was the blythest lad. Young Peggy blooms our bonniest lass. You're welcome to despots, Dumourier LIFE OF BURNS. BY JAMES CURRIE, M.D. ABRIDGED. ROBERT BURNS was born on the 29th day of January, 1759, in a small house about two miles from the town of Ayr, and within a few hundred yards of Alloway Church, which his poem of Tam o? Shanter has rendered immortal.* The name, which the poet and his brother modernized into Burns, was originally Burnes, or Burness. Their father, William Burnes, was the son of a farmer in Kincardineshire, and had received the education common in Scotland to persons in his condition of life; he could read and write, and had some knowledge of arithmetic. His family having fallen into reduced circumstances, he was compelled to leave his home in his nineteenth year, and turned his steps towards the south in quest of a livelihood. He undertook to act as a gardener, and shaped his course to Edinburgh, where he wrought hard when he could obtain employment, passing through a variety of difficulties. From Edinburgh William Burnes passed westward into the county of Ayr, where he engaged himself as a gardener to the laird of Fairly, with whom he lived two years; then changed his service for that of Crawford of Doonside. At length, being desirous of settling in life, he took a perpetual lease of seven acres of land from Dr. Campbell, physician in Ayr, with the view of commencing nurseryman and public gardener, and, having built a house upon it with his own hands, married in December, 1757, Agnes Brown. The first fruit of this marriage was Robert, the subject of these memoirs. Before William Burnes had made much progress in preparing his nursery, he was withdrawn from that undertaking by Mr. Ferguson, who purchased the estate of Doonholm, in the immediate neighborhood, * This house is on the right-hand side of the road from Ayr to Mayhole, which forms a part of the road from Glasgow to Port-Patrick. It is now a country alehouse. and engaged him as his gardener and overseer, and this was his situation when our poet was born. When in the service of Mr. Ferguson, he lived in his own house, his wife managing her family, and her little dairy, which consisted of two, sometimes of three, milch cows; and this state of unambitious content continued till the year 1766. His son Robert was sent by him, in his sixth year, to a school at Alloway Miln, about a mile distant, taught by a person of the name of Campbell; but this teacher being in a few months appointed master of the workhouse at Ayr, William Burnes, in conjunction with some other heads of families, engaged John Murdoch in his stead. The education of our poet, and of his brother Gilbert, was in common; and whilst under Mr. Murdoch, they learned to read English tolerably well, and to write a little. He also taught them the elements of English grammar, in which Robert made some proficiency—a circumstance which had considerable weight in the unfolding of his genius and character; as he soon became remarkable for the fluency and correctness of his expression, and read the few books that came in his way with much pleasure and improvement. It appears that William Burnes approved himself greatly in the service of Mr. Ferguson, by his intelligence, industry, and integrity. In consequence of this, with a view of promoting his interest, Mr. Ferguson leased to him the farm of Mount Oliphant, in the parish of Ayr; consisting of upwards of seventy acres (about ninety, English Imperial measure), the rent of which was to be forty pounds annually for the first six years, and afterwards fortyfive pounds. Mr. Ferguson also lent him a hundred pounds to assist in stocking the farm, to which he removed at Whitsuntide, 1766. But this, in place of being of advantage to William Burnes, as it was intended by his former master, was the commencement of much anxiety and distress to the whole family, which is forcibly described by his son, Gilbert, in a letter to Mrs. Dunlop: it "Mount Oliphant, the farm my father possessed in the parish of Ayr, is almost the very poorest soil I know of in a state of cultivation, A stronger proof of this I cannot give, than that, notwithstanding the extraordinary rise in the value of lands in Scotland, was, after a considerable sum laid out in improving it by the proprietor, let a few years ago five pounds per annum lower than the rent paid for it by my father thirty years ago. My father, in consequence of this, soon came into difficulties, which were increased by the loss of several of his cattle by accidents and disease. To the buffetings of misfortune, we could only oppose hard labor and the most rigid economy. We lived very sparingly. For several years butcher's meat was a stranger in the house, while all the members of the family exerted themselves to the utmost of their strength, and rather beyond it, in the labors of the farm. My brother, at the age of thirteen, assisted in thrashing the crop of corn, and at fifteen was the principal laborer on the farm, for we had no hired servant, male or female. The anguish of mind we felt at our tender years, under these straits and difficulties, was very great. To think of our father growing old (for he was now above fifty) broken down with the long-continued fatigues of his life, with a wife and five other children, and in a declining state of circumstances, these reflections produced in my brother's mind and mine sensations of the deepest distress. I doubt not but the hard labor and sorrow of this period of his life, was in a great measure the cause of that depression of spirits with which Robert was so often afflicted through his whole life afterwards. At this time he was almost constantly afflicted in the evenings with a dull headache, which, at a future period of his life, was exchanged for a palpitation of the heart, and a threatening of fainting and suffocation in his bed, in the night-time. "By a stipulation in my father's lease, he had a right to throw it up, if he thought proper, at the end of every sixth year. He attempted to fix himself in a better farm at the end of the first six years, but failing in that attempt, he continued where he was for six years more. He then took the farm of Lochlea, of 130 acres, at the rent of twenty shillings an acre, in the parish of Tarbolton, of Mr. then a merchant in Ayr, and now (1797) a merchant at Liverpool. He removed to this farm at Whitsuntide, 1777, and possessed it only seven years. No writing had ever been made out of the conditions of the lease; a misunderstanding took place respecting them; the subjects in dispute were submitted to arbitration, and the decision involved my father's affairs in ruin. He lived to know of this decision, but not to see any execution in consequence of it. He died on the 13th of February, 1784." Of this frugal, industrious, and good man, the following beautiful character has been given by Mr. Murdoch:-"He was a tender and affectionate father; he took pleasure in leading his children in the path of virtue; not in driving them, as some parents do, to the performance of duties to which they themselves are averse. He took care to find fault but very seldom; and therefore, when he did rebuke, he was listened to with a kind of reverential awe. A look of disapprobation was felt; a reproof was severely so; and a stripe with the tawz, even on the skirt of the coat, gave heartfelt pain, produced a loud lamentation, and brought forth a flood of tears. “He had the art of gaining the esteem and good-will of those that were laborers under him. I think I never saw him angry but twice the one time it was with the foreman of the band, for not reaping the field as he was desired; and the other time it was with an old man, for using smutty inuendoes and double entendres. Were every foul-mouthed old man to receive a seasonable check in this way, it would be to the advantage of the rising generation. As he was at no time overbearing to inferiors, he was equally incapable of that passive, pitiful, paltry spirit, that induces some people to keep booing and booing in the presence of a great man. He always treated superiors with a becoming respect; but he never gave the smallest encouragement to aristocratical arrogance. But I must not pretend to give you a description of all the manly qualities, the rational and Christian virtues, of the venerable William Burnes. Time would fail me. I shall only add, that he carefully practised every known duty, and avoided every thing that was criminal; or, in the apostle's words, 'Herein did he exercise himself, in living a life void of offence towards God and towards men.' Oh for a world of men of such dispositions! We should then have no wars. I have often wished, for the good of mankind, that it were as customary to honor and perpetuate the memory of those who excel in moral rectitude, as it is to extol what are called heroic actions: then would the mausoleum of the friend of my youth overtop and surpass most of the monuments I see in Westminster Abbey !" Under the humble roof of his parents, it appears indeed that our poet had great advantages; but his opportunities of information at school were more limited as to time than they usually are among his countrymen, in his condition of life; and the acquisitions which he made, and the poetical talent which he exerted, under the pressure of early and incessant toil, and of inferior, and perhaps scanty nutriment, testify at once the extraordinary force and activity of his mind. In his frame of body he rose nearly five feet ten inches, and assumed the proportions that indicate agility as well as strength. In the various labors of the farm he excelled all his competitors. Gilbert Burns declares that in mowing, the exercise that tries all the muscles most severely, Robert was the only man that, at the end of a summer's day, he was ever obliged to acknowledge as his master. But though our poet gave the powers of his body to the labors of the farm, he refused to bestow on them his thoughts or his cares. While the ploughshare under his guidance passed through the sward, or the grass fell under the sweep of his scythe, he was humming the songs of his country, musing on the deeds of ancient valor, or rapt in the illusions of Fancy, as her enchantments rose on his view. Happily the Sunday is yet a sabbath, on which man and beast rest from their labors. On this day, therefore, Burns |