Robert Burns | Page 6

the persons of this sort whom he met in Irvine were
probably few. More numerous were the smugglers and rough-living
adventurers with which that seaport town, as Kirkoswald, swarmed.
Among these he contracted, says Gilbert, "some acquaintance of a freer
manner of thinking and living than he had been used to, whose society
prepared him for over-leaping the bonds of rigid virtue which had
hitherto restrained him." One companion, a sailor-lad of wild life
(p. 014) and loose and irregular habits, had a wonderful fascination for
Burns, who admired him for what he thought his independence and
magnanimity. "He was," says Burns, "the only man I ever knew who
was a greater fool than myself, where woman was the presiding star;
but he spoke of lawless love with levity, which hitherto I had regarded
with horror. Here his friendship did me a mischief."
Another companion, older than himself, thinking that the religious
views of Burns were too rigid and uncompromising, induced him to
adopt "more liberal opinions," which in this case, as in so many others,
meant more lax opinions. With his principles of belief, and his rules of
conduct at once assailed and undermined, what chart or compass
remained any more for a passionate being like Burns over the
passion-swept sea of life that lay before him? The migration to Irvine
was to him the descent to Avernus, from which he never afterwards, in
the actual conduct of life, however often in his hours of inspiration,
escaped to breathe again the pure upper air. This brief but disastrous
Irvine sojourn was brought to a sudden close. Burns was robbed by his
partner in trade, his flax-dressing shop was burnt to the ground by fire
during the carousal of a New Year's morning, and himself, impaired in
purse, in spirits, and in character, returned to Lochlea to find
misfortunes thickening round his family, and his father on his
death-bed. For the old man, his long struggle with scanty means, barren
soil, and bad seasons, was now near its close. Consumption had set in.

Early in 1784, when his last hour drew on, the father said that there was
one of his children of whose future he could not think without fear.
Robert, who was in the room, came up to his bedside (p. 015) and
asked, "O father, is it me you mean?" The old man said it was. Robert
turned to the window, with tears streaming down his cheeks, and his
bosom swelling, from the restraint he put on himself, almost to bursting.
The father had early perceived the genius that was in his boy, and even
in Mount Oliphant days had said to his wife, "Whoever lives to see it,
something extraordinary will come from that boy." He had lived to see
and admire his son's earliest poetic efforts. But he had also noted the
strong passions, with the weak will, which might drive him on the
shoals of life.
MOSSGIEL.--Towards the close of 1783, Robert and his brother,
seeing clearly the crash of family affairs which was impending, had
taken on their own account a lease of the small farm of Mossgiel, about
two or three miles distant from Lochlea, in the parish of Mauchline.
When their father died in February, 1784, it was only by claiming the
arrears of wages due to them, and ranking among their father's creditors,
that they saved enough from the domestic wreck, to stock their new
farm. Thither they conveyed their widowed mother, and their younger
brothers and sisters, in March, 1784. Their new home was a bare
upland farm, 118 acres of cold clay-soil, lying within a mile of
Mauchline village. Burns entered on it with a firm resolution to be
prudent, industrious, and thrifty. In his own words, "I read farming
books, I calculated crops, I attended markets, and, in short, in spite of
the devil, the world, and the flesh, I should have been a wise man; but
the first year from unfortunately buying bad seed--the second, from a
late harvest, we lost half our crops. This overset all my wisdom, and I
returned like the dog to his vomit, and the sow that was washed to her
wallowing in the mire." Burns was in the beginning (p. 016) of his
twenty-sixth year when he took up his abode at Mossgiel, where he
remained for four years. Three things those years and that bare
moorland farm witnessed,--the wreck of his hopes as a farmer, the
revelation of his genius as a poet, and the frailty of his character as a
man. The result of the immoral habits and "liberal opinions" which he
had learnt at Irvine were soon apparent in that event of which he speaks

in his Epistle to John Rankine with such unbecoming levity. In the
Chronological Edition