The Letters of Robert Burns | Page 4

wrote, in this year, twenty-six letters
in support of the scheme.
There is a sad falling off in Burns's ordinary correspondence in the last
three years of his life. The amount of it scarcely touches twenty letters
per year. Even the correspondence with Thomson, though on a subject
so dear to the heart of Burns, rousing at once both his patriotism and
his poetry, sinks to about ten letters per year, and is irregular at that.
Burns was losing hope and health, and caring less and less for the
world's favour and the world's friendships. He had lost largely in
self-respect as well as in the respect of friends. The loss gave him little
heart to write.
Burns's correspondents, as far as we know them, numbered over a
hundred and fifty persons. The number is large and significant. Neither
Gray, nor Cowper, nor Byron commanded so wide a circle. They had
not the far-reaching sympathies of Burns. They were all more or less
fastidious in their choice of correspondents. Burns, on the contrary, was
as catholic, or as careless, in his friendships as his own Cæsar--who
"Wad spend an hour caressin' Ev'n wi' a tinkler gipsy's messan."
He moved freely up and down the whole social scale, blind to the
imaginary distinctions of blood and title and the extrinsic differences of
wealth, seeing true superiority in an honest manly heart, and bearing
himself wherever he found it as an equal and a brother. His
correspondents were of every social grade--peers and peasants; of every

intellectual attainment--philosophers like Dugald Stewart, and simple
swains like Thomas Orr; and of almost every variety of calling, from
professional men of recognised eminence to obscure shopkeepers,
cottars, and tradesmen. They include servant-girls, gentlewomen, and
ladies of titled rank; country schoolmasters and college professors; men
of law of all degrees, from poor John Richmond, a plain law-clerk with
a lodging in the Lawnmarket, to the Honourable Henry Erskine, Dean
of the Faculty; farmers, small and large; lairds, large and small;
shoemakers and shopkeepers; ministers, bankers, and doctors; printers,
booksellers, editors; knights, earls--nay, a duke; factors and
wine-merchants; army officers, and officers of Excise. His female
correspondents were women of superior intelligence and
accomplishments. They can lay claim to a large proportion of his letters.
Mrs. McLehose takes forty-eight; Mrs. Dunlop, forty-two; Maria
Riddell, eighteen; Peggy Chalmers, eleven. These four ladies received
among them rather more than one-fourth of the whole of his published
correspondence. No four of his male correspondents can be accredited
with so many, even though George Thomson for his individual share
claims fifty-six.
It is rather remarkable that so few of the letters are addressed to his
own relatives. His cousin, James Burness of Montrose, and his own
younger brother William receive, indeed, ten and eight respectively; but
to his other brother Gilbert, with whom he was on the most affectionate
and confidential terms, there fall but three; to his wife only two; one to
his father; and none to either his sisters or his mother. A maternal uncle,
Samuel Brown, is favoured with one--if, indeed, the old man was not
scandalised with it--and there are two to James Armour, mason in
Mauchline, his somewhat stony-hearted father-in-law.
Burns's letters exhibit quite as much variety of mood--seldom, of
course, so picturesquely conveyed--as his poems. He is, in promiscuous
alternation, refined, gross, sentimental, serious, humorous, indignant,
repentant, dignified, vulgar, tender, manly, sceptical, reverential, rakish,
pathetic, sympathetic, satirical, playful, pitiably self-abased,
mysteriously self-exalted. His letters are confessions and revelations.
They are as sincerely and spontaneously autobiographical of his inner

life as the sacred lyrics of David the Hebrew. They were indited with as
much free fearless abandonment. The advice he gave to young Andrew
to keep something to himsel', not to be told even to a bosom crony, was
a maxim of worldly prudence which he himself did not practice. He did
not "reck his own rede." And, though that habit of unguarded
expression brought upon him the wrath and revenge of the Philistines,
and kept him in material poverty all his days, yet, prompted as it
always was by sincerity, and nearly always by absolute truth, it has
made the manhood of to-day richer, stronger, and nobler. The world
to-day has all the more the courage of its opinions that Burns exercised
as a right the freedom of sincere and enlightened speech--and suffered
for his bravery.
The subjects of his letters are numerous, and, to a pretty large extent, of
much the same sort as the subjects of his poems. Often, indeed, you
have the anticipation of an image or a sentiment which his poetry has
made familiar. You have a glimpse of green buds which afterwards
unfold into fragrance and colour. This is an interesting connection, of
which one or two examples may be given. So