ROBERT BURNS. 1759-1796. THE loves and heroines of Burns, were as numberless, and some, it is whispered, as light, "As the gay motes that people the sun-beams.” I shall not attempt to write their history, which might easily be extended to a volume, but content myself with a brief sketch of two or three of the most prominent, beginning with Bonnie Jean. Jean Armour, afterwards Mrs. Burns, was the daughter of a mastermason who resided in Mauchline. The Burns family removed thither, or to speak with more exactness, removed to the farm of Mossgiel, in the parish of Mauchline, in March, 1784. In April the acquaintance of Burns and Jean commenced. "There was a race at Mauchline in the end of April," says Mr. Chambers in his excellent biography of the poet, "and there it was customary for the young men, with little ceremony, to invite such girls as they liked off the street into a humble dancing-hall, where a fiddler had taken up his station to give them music. The payment of a penny for a dance was held by the minstrel as guerdon sufficient. Burns and Jean happened to be in the same dance, but not as partners, when some confusion and a little merriment was excited by his dog tracking his footsteps through the room. He playfully remarked to his partner that 'he wished he could get any of the lasses to like him as well as his dog did.' A short while after, he passed through the Mauchline washing-green, where Jean, who had overheard his remark, was bleaching clothes. His dog running over the clothes, the young maiden desired him to call it off, and this led them into conversation. Archly referring to what passed at the dance, she asked if he had yet got any of the lasses to like him as well as his dog? From that time their intimacy commenced." We know nothing of their courtship, which was doubtless like that of most rural lovers, except that it gave birth to one or two songs of no great merit, and ended in disgrace to Jean, who found herself, in the winter of 1786, in the way that ladies wish to be, who love their lords. It was a dark day with Burns, for the farm which he and his brother Gilbert had taken at Mossgiel, had proved a failure; but he made Jean all the reparation he could at the time by acknowledging her as his wife. He gave her a document in writing, sufficient, according to the Scottish laws, to constitute an irregular though valid marriage. This, he hoped, would satisfy Jean's father, but it had the contrary effect, for instead of mending the matter it made it worse in his eyes. Burns came forward and proposed to emigrate to the West Indies to better his fortune, and when he should have accomplished that, to return, and claim Jean as his wife. He was even willing to become a common labourer, in order to maintain her and her expected child. Mr. Armour rejected all his proposals, and declared that he would annul the marriage, such as it was. He compelled Jean to give him her marriage certificate, which he placed in the hands of a lawyer, and made her believe that he was her only friend. She clung to him in her weakness, to the surprise of Burns, who was filled with indignation. He now determined to emigrate, and agreed with a Mr. Douglas to go out to Jamaica as a book-keeper on his estate; and, not having money to pay his passage, printed proposals for publishing his poems by subscription. This was in the beginning of April, 1786. Between that time and the middle of May a new character appeared on the scene. It was Highland Mary. A great deal of obscurity hangs over her, owing to Burns' reserve and mystification concerning this episode of his life, but the researches of his editors have discovered a few facts, which will serve for landmarks to guide us through the mist. Her name was Mary Campbell. She was of Highland parentage, from the neighbourhood of Dunoon, on the Firth of Clyde. Her father was a sailor in a revenue cutter, the station of which was at Campbelton in Kintyre, where his family then resided. Nothing is known of Mary before her affair with Burns, except that she had lived for several years in the family of a clergyman in Arran, and afterwards as a servant in Ayrshire. If she could be traced in Ayrshire before the autumn of 1785, at which time she was a nursemaid in the family of Mr. Gavin Hamilton, in Mauchline, I have no doubt but we should find her somewhere in the neighbourhood of Lochlea, when the Burns family was residing there. I prefer to think that she was an early flame of Burns, as he himself declared-an old love whose acquaintance he renewed after the estrangement of Jean, rather than that he met her after he knew Jean, and courted her and Jean at the same time. It is more creditable to him as a man, and till there is a stronger reason to believe it false than any I have yet seen, it shall be an article in my creed. But be the facts what they may, Burns now turned to Mary Campbell, and found her willing to marry him. It was agreed between them that she should give up her place, and go home for a short time to her friends in the Highlands, in order to arrange her marriage with Burns. They had a farewell meeting on the second Sunday in May (the 14th of the month), in a sequestered spot on the banks of the Ayr. It would be pleasant to know what passed on that occasion-to read the sacred volume of their hearts, illuminated with the light of love, and stained with the tears of parting, but it cannot be the volume is closed forever, and they are gone. All that remains is tradition, and a leaf or two from the Book of Song, written from memory years after, when Mary was in Heaven, and Burns the husband of Jean. They brought their Bibles to the place of meeting, and exchanged them reverently. Mary's copy was small and plain, Robert's was large and elegant, and in two volumes. On a blank leaf of the first he had written the text, “And ye shall not swear by my name falsely. I am the Lord;" and on the second, “Thou shalt not forswear thyself, but shalt perform unto the Lord thine oath." “Their adieu was performed with all those simple and striking ceremonials which rustic sentiment has devised to prolong tender emotions, and to impose awe. The lovers stood on each side of a small purling brook-they laved their hands in the limpid stream-and holding a Bible between them, pronounced their vows to be faithful to each other." They parted at the gloaming, never to meet again! Burns returned to Mossgiel and Mary to the Highlands. She spent the summer at Campbelton with her family, and in the early part of the autumn accepted a situation which had been procured for her in Glasgow. Her term of service was to commence at Martinmas (11th of November). She started from Campbelton about the first of October, with her father, and her younger brother Robert, who was on the eve of learning the trade of a ship-carpenter with a relative in Greenock. This relative, whose name was Peter Macpherson, gave the lad a feast on his being admitted into the craft, and Mary served the company. They made a night of it, and in the morning Master Robert was not able to go to his work. When Macpherson came home to breakfast, he asked what had kept him from the yard, and Mary replied that he had probably taken a little too much after supper. "It is just as well, then, in case of the worst," said Macpherson, "that I have agreed to purchase that lair in the kirk-yard," referring to a burying-place which he had recently secured for his family. Mary attended upon her brother in his illness, which lasted several days, and as he was beginning to recover, was taken sick herself. Her friends believed that she was suffering from the cast of an evil eye, and advised her father to go to a cross-burn, and select seven smooth stones, and boil them in new milk, and then give her the milk to drink. This superstitious prescription was followed, but without effect, for her sickness proved to be a malignant fever, which soon carried her off. She was buried in the lair of which Macpherson had jestingly spoken. He had purchased it just in time. Her death took place about the middle of October, five months after her parting with Burns in the woods of Ayr. It must have seemed a long time to him, whatever it did to her, for it was crowded with incidents, some of them painful enough. IIe had visited the Armours to see Jean, "not from the least view of reconciliation," he wrote to a friend, "but merely to ask for her health," but was forbidden the house by her mother, and not very well received by Jean herself. He had tried to forget her, and had run into all kinds of dissipation and riots, (I am quoting his own words,) mason-meetings, drinkingmatches, and other mischiefs, to drive her out of his head, but all in vain. He had submitted to the censure of the church, by standing in his pew before the congregation for five successive Sundays, receiving, on the last, a rebuke from the minister, after which he was declared a bachelor. He had skulked from Mauchline to avoid being thrown into jail at the instance of Mr. Armour, who threatened to prosecute him to obtain a guarantee for the maintenance of Jean's expected child. He had published his poems, and the noise they were making through the country was soon to be heard in Edinburgh. Jean had given birth to twins, (September 3d,) and one of them, a boy, was now at Mossgiel, to gladden and grieve him. Joy and sorrow, shame and glory, had been pressed into his cup until it was full to overflowing. It ran over with the last bitter drop-the death of Mary Campbell. He was at Mossgiel, one day, in the midst of his family, brooding over his prospects, and perhaps humming a tune to the monotonous whir of the old spinning-wheel which his sister was turning, when a letter containing the intelligence of her death was handed in to him. He went to the window and opened it: a look of agony came into his face as he read it: he folded it up when he had finished, and went out without speaking a word. A month later he was in Edinburgh-the wonder and glory of his nation! His triumphant career in Edinburgh—a career without a parallel in the history of poets-is too well known to need a description here, so I shall pass over it, and come to his next love-affair-the curious episode of Clarinda. Her name was Agnes M'Lehose, and she was the wife of Mr. James M'‘Lehose, a gentleman of a roving disposition, who had as good as abandoned her and his children, to seek his fortune in the West Indies. Burns met her for the first time at a tea-party, at the house of a mutual friend, in the beginning of December, 1787. They were so much pleased with each other--she with his genius, and he with her voluptuous beauty -that a second party was proposed, to come off at her own house on the ensuing Saturday evening. Burns accepted the proposal with avidity, having acquired on the sudden a mighty relish for tea, but the night before the drinking was to have taken place, he was overset by a drunken coachman, and carried to his lodgings with a bruised knee. He wrote Mrs. M'Lehose a letter, stating the circumstance, and expressing his regret, and paid her some high-flown compliments which tickled her amazingly. She answered in the same strain, and inclosed him a poem which she had written. They kept up a brisk fire of small notes, charged with friendship and flattery. The fifth discharge of Burns brought down the colours of his "sweet enemy," but he gallantly destroyed his own, and they hoisted a new set, and continued their loving encounter, masked as Sylvander and Clarinda. They met a second time shortly after the New Year, and exchanged confidences, Clarinda giving Sylvander a history of her past life and troubles, and receiving his own in return. It is not easy to see what they proposed to themselves as the end of all this meeting and letter-writing; it could not have been marriage, for the husband of Mrs. M'Lehose was living, while Jean had a new claim upon Burns; neither does it seem to have been that looser tie, which society sometimes forgives in poets—at least I acquit Clarinda of all guilty intentions. She was young and unfortunate-the abandoned wife of a man whom she could not love-a creature of sentiment and sensibilitythe ardent admirer of Burns, whose fiery temperament she sympathized with-in short, a passionate and imprudent woman. She set her cap at Burns, as the saying is, without thinking of the consequences, and he encouraged her, rake that he was: always the slave of the moment, he gave himself up to the passion she inspired with an energy that startled her. She was for esteem and friendship-a Platonic attachment; his tropical nature demanded a warmer return. The correspondence that passed between them was printed, when the grave had closed over both, and a precious batch of nonsense it was: it is impossible to read it without a smile. Burns must have laughed to himself when he penned a paragraph like this: "You have a heart formed-gloriously formed for all the most refined luxuries of love: why was that heart ever wrung? Oh, Clarinda! shall we not meet in a state, some yet unknown state of being, where the lavish hand of plenty shall minister to the highest wish of benevolence, and where the chill north wind of prudence shall never blow over the flowery fields of enjoyment?" He fooled her to the top of her bent. Their intimacy lasted till he departed from Edinburgh, when it may be said to have terminated, though several letters passed between them afterwards. He started from Edinburgh on the 18th of February, 1788, and arrived at Mossgiel on the 24th. It was time that he came, not only for his own sake as a man, but also for that of Jean, who had been turned out of doors by her father. There were many reasons why he should return to her, and not the least of these was a second pair of twins, who were born shortly after his arrival. In April he acknowledged her as his wife. His marriage made Clarinda furious, though I do not see why it should have done so. She could not marry him, and to keep him from marrying another was beyond her power, as no one should have known better than herself. She entered into her flirtation, or passion, or whatever the reader pleases to call it, with her eyes open, and ought to have foreseen the end. It might have been worse, much worse--for her. She never forgave Burns for deserting her, though she continued to correspond with him at intervals during his life, and after his death preserved his letters with jealous veneration. She died in 1841, at the age of eighty-two. MY NANIE, 0. The heroine of this song, which was written about 1780, was a farmer's daughter, named Agnes Fleming. She lived near Lochlea, when Burns resided there, and afterwards in the family of Mr. Gavin Hamilton, at Mauchline. She is said to have been anything but handsome, though her figure and carriage were good. Behind yon hills where Stinsiar flows The westlin wind blaws loud and shrill; My Nanie's charming, sweet, and young; That wad beguile my Nanie, O! Her face is fair, her heart is true, |