No More Learning

First, there came a contest far the representation of the Dumfries
district of boroughs, between Patrick Miller, younger, of Dalswinton,
and Sir James Johnstone, of Westerhall, and some two years afterwards,
a struggle for the representation of the county of Kirkcudbright,
between the interest of the Stewarts, of Galloway, and Patrick Heron,
of Kerroughtree. In the first of these the poet mingled discretion
with his mirth, and raised a hearty laugh, in which both parties
joined; for this sobriety of temper, good reasons may be assigned:
Miller, the elder, of Dalswinton, had desired to oblige him in the
affair of Ellisland, and his firm and considerate friend, M'Murdo, of
Drumlanrig, was chamberlain to his Grace of Queensbury, on whoso
interest Miller stood. On the other hand, his old Jacobitical
affections made him the secret well-wisher to Westerhall, for up to
this time, at least till acid disappointment and the democratic
doctrine of the natural equality of man influenced him, Burns, or as a
western rhymer of his day and district worded the reproach--Rob was a
Tory. His situation, it will therefore be observed, disposed him to
moderation, and accounts for the milkiness of his Epistle to Fintray,
in which he marshals the chiefs of the contending factions, and
foretells the fierceness of the strife, without pretending to foresee
the event. Neither is he more explicit, though infinitely more
humorous, in his ballad of "The Five Carlins," in which he
impersonates the five boroughs--Dumfries, Kirkcudbright, Lochmaben,
Sanquhar, and Annan, and draws their characters as shrewd and
calculating dames, met in much wrath and drink to choose a
representative.

But the two or three years which elapsed between the election for the
boroughs, and that for the county adjoining, wrought a serious change
in the temper as well as the opinions of the poet. His Jacobitism, as
has been said was of a poetic kind, and put on but in obedience to old
feelings, and made no part of the man: he was in his heart as
democratic as the kirk of Scotland, which educated him--he
acknowledged no other superiority but the mental: "he was disposed,
too," said Professor Walker, "from constitutional temper, from
education and the accidents of life, to a jealousy of power, and a
keen hostility against every system which enabled birth and opulence
to anticipate those rewards which he conceived to belong to genius and
virtue. " When we add to this, a resentment of the injurious treatment
of the dispensers of public patronage, who had neglected his claims,
and showered pensions and places on men unworthy of being named with
him, we have assigned causes for the change of side and the tone of
asperity and bitterness infused into "The Heron Ballads. " Formerly
honey was mixed with his gall: a little praise sweetened his censure:
in these election lampoons he is fierce and even venomous:--no man has
a head but what is empty, nor a heart that is not black: men descended
without reproach from lines of heroes are stigmatized as cowards, and
the honest and conscientious are reproached as miserly, mean, and
dishonourable. Such is the spirit of party. "I have privately," thus
writes the poet to Heron, "printed a good many copies of the ballads,
and have sent them among friends about the country. You have already,
as your auxiliary, the sober detestation of mankind on the heads of
your opponents; find I swear by the lyre of Thalia, to muster on your
side all the votaries of honest laughter and fair, candid ridicule. "
The ridicule was uncandid, and the laughter dishonest. The poet was
unfortunate in his political attachments: Miller gained the boroughs
which Burns wished he might lose, and Heron lost the county which he
foretold he would gain. It must also be recorded against the good
taste of the poet, that he loved to recite "The Heron Ballads," and
reckon them among his happiest compositions.
From attacking others, the poet was--in the interval between penning
these election lampoons--called on to defend himself: for this he
seems to have been quite unprepared, though in those yeasty times he
might have expected it. "I have been surprised, confounded, and
distracted," he thus writes to Graham, of Fintray, "by Mr. Mitchell,
the collector, telling me that he has received an order from your
board to inquire into my political conduct, and blaming me as a person
disaffected to government. Sir, you are a husband and a father: you
know what you would feel, to see the much-loved wife of your bosom,
and your helpless prattling little ones, turned adrift into the world,
degraded and disgraced, from a situation in which they had been
respectable and respected. I would not tell a deliberate falsehood,
no, not though even worse horrors, if worse can be than those I have
mentioned, hung over my head, and I say that the allegation, whatever
villain has made it, is a lie! To the British constitution, on
Revolution principles, next after my God, I am devotedly attached. To
your patronage as a man of some genius, you have allowed me a claim;
and your esteem as an honest man I know is my due. To these, sir,
permit me to appeal: by these I adjure you to save me from that misery
which threatens to overwhelm me, and which with my latest breath I
will say I have not deserved. " In this letter, another, intended for
the eye of the Commissioners of the Board of Excise, was enclosed, in
which he disclaimed entertaining the idea of a British republic--a
wild dream of the day--but stood by the principles of the constitution
of 1688, with the wish to see such corruptions as had crept in,
amended. This last remark, it appears, by a letter from the poet to
Captain Erskine, afterwards Earl of Mar, gave great offence, for
Corbet, one of the superiors, was desired to inform him, "that his
business was to act, and not to think; and that whatever might be men
or measures, it was his duty to be silent and obedient. " The
intercession of Fintray, and the explanations of Burns, were so far
effectual, that his political offense was forgiven, "only I
understand," said he, "that all hopes of my getting officially forward
are blasted. " The records of the Excise Office exhibit no trace of
this memorable matter, and two noblemen, who were then in the
government, have assured me that this harsh proceeding received no
countenance at head-quarters, and must have originated with some
ungenerous or malicious person, on whom the poet had spilt a little of
the nitric acid of his wrath.

That Burns was numbered among the republicans of Dumfries I well
remember: but then those who held different sentiments from the men in
power, were all, in that loyal town, stigmatized as democrats: that he
either desired to see the constitution changed, or his country invaded
by the liberal French, who proposed to set us free with the bayonet,
and then admit us to the "fraternal embrace," no one ever believed. It
is true that he spoke of premiers and peers with contempt; that he
hesitated to take off his hat in the theatre, to the air of "God save
the king;" that he refused to drink the health of Pitt, saying he
preferred that of Washington--a far greater man; that he wrote bitter
words against that combination of princes, who desired to put down
freedom in France; that he said the titled spurred and the wealthy
switched England and Scotland like two hack-horses; and that all the
high places of the land, instead of being filled by genius and talent,
were occupied, as were the high-places of Israel, with idols of wood
or of stone. But all this and more had been done and said before by
thousands in this land, whose love of their country was never
questioned. That it was bad taste to refuse to remove his hat when
other heads were bared, and little better to refuse to pledge in
company the name of Pitt, because he preferred Washington, cannot
admit of a doubt; but that he deserved to be written down traitor, for
mere matters of whim or caprice, or to be turned out of the unenvied
situation of "gauging auld wives' barrels," because he thought there
were some stains on the white robe of the constitution, seems a sort
of tyranny new in the history of oppression.