SCOTTISH POETRY. 187 



furrow." p. 20. William Burness still continued in his great diffi- 

 culties ; and Robert, at the ages of fifteen and sixteen, was obliged to 

 be the chief labourer in the farm, for his father's body was beginning 

 to sink under sickness and sorrow. 



In midsummer, 1781, in his twenty-second year, Robert was 

 sent to learn flax-dressing; he still continued despairing of ever 

 making a figure in the world ; the pursuits he was engaged in little 

 accorded with the talents which nature had given him. He wished 

 to be at the bar, for there he imagined he would shine; indeed, 

 wherever Burns had been placed, his geuius would have broken out 

 in some way or another. Flax dressing could not have suited his 

 " whim ;" but he was soon away from it, for the shop took fire during 

 one of their carousals,, and he was left, as he said, " like a true poet, 

 without a sixpence." His father died about this time. " Stubborn, 

 ungainly integrity, and headlong, ungovernable irascibility," Burns 

 said, " are disqualifying circumstances in the paths of fortune." 



Soon after the death of the elder Burns, Robert and his brother 

 Gilbert took the farm of Mossgiel, near Mauchline of one hundred 

 and eighteen acres " at an annual rent of ninety pounds;" but, as 

 Mr. Cunningham says, 



et He who pens an ode on his sheep when he should be driving them 

 forth to pasture who stops his plough in the half-drawn furrow, to rhyme 

 about the flowers which he buries who sees visions on his way from mar- 

 ket, and makes rhymes on them who writes an ode on the horse he is 

 about to yoke, and a ballad on the girl who shews the whitest hands and 

 brightest eyes among his reapers has no chance of ever growing opu- 

 lent, or of purchasing the field on which he toils." Pp. 25, 26. 



The two brothers met with no success in the farm of Mossgiel 

 though Burns himself tells us that he read " farming-books, calcu- 

 lated crops, and attended markets ;" all this was to no purpose ; the 

 first four years of the farm were wholly unprofitable. The frost lay 

 very long on the ground, and the spring was late ; so that they were 

 obliged to give up the farm with the loss of a considerable portion of 

 their original stock. Mr. Cunningham has a copy of " Small on 

 Ploughs," with " Robert Burns, Poet" written in, but no memo- 

 randa. It is likely thaj he thought more of poetry than farming : in 

 the one he saw distinction, in the other mere quiet undistinguished 

 homeliness ; in those days he delighted in scribbling on bank notes, 

 and writing with a diamond on drinking glasses, on which he boasted 

 of his love for drinking, and desired to be remembered as a great 

 debauchee. His love for distinction was so great, that he joyed in 

 having an illegitimate child, adopting at the same time for his motto, 

 " The mair they talk, Im' kenn'd the better." 



The first pieces which brought Burns into notice were written upon 

 the Old and New Light Controversy. The Poet sided with the 

 " New Light-ites," for, as Mr. Cunningham tells us, " he was not 

 educated closely in the tenets of Calvinism ; and his own good sense 

 taught him that faith without works was folly." Moreover, (( Gavin 

 Hamilton, of whom he held his lands, was a martyr in the cause of 

 free-agency ;" but the greatest reason that can be advanced is, that 



