This statement with only slight variations he used to half-a-dozen different correspondents. Whether he used it to Clarinda or not is uncertain; he may have entrusted Ainslie with the delicate task of breaking the news. However the news reached her, it quite naturally angered her. If Burns wrote it to her she destroyed the letter, and we know that he destroyed her reply calling him a Villain and accusing him of perfidious treachery. When he visited Edinburgh again in February, 1789, she refused to see him and told Ainslie that she intended to keep away from her windows while he was in town lest she catch a glimpse of him in the street.

In the fall of 1791, however, she had a chance to reopen the correspondence. Jenny Clow in June, 1788, had undertaken some sort of legal action against Burns and one purpose of his return to Edinburgh in the following February had been to settle with her. Whatever the nature of the settlement it had not helped much. When in 1791 Jenny somehow communicated with Clarinda, the latter found the girl ill, destitute, and friendless, in a miserable lodging. Clarinda’s discovery of the means whereby Sylvander had managed to keep his courtship on so lofty a plane must have been humiliating and disillusioning, but she was woman enough to turn her discovery to account. Her letter to Burns described Jenny’s condition briefly and effectively and suggested that there was a striking contrast between his practice and the high principles of generosity and humanity which he professed. She meant her letter to sting, and it did. Burns begged her to relieve Jenny’s immediate needs and promised personal action at the first opportunity. At this point Jenny vanishes from the record. What Burns did, whether Jenny lived or died, whether her son lived or died, if he lived what became of him—all these are questions without answers.

Meanwhile Clarinda had been attempting to re-establish her own life. Her husband had sought a reconciliation, and she was planning to join him in Jamaica. When Burns made his last visit to Edinburgh in November, 1791, her departure was already arranged. She was fully reconciled to Sylvander now, and for the first time their relationship revealed simple and genuine emotion. The Arcadian names vanished in the correspondence; she became ‘my dearest Nancy’ instead of Clarinda, and when Burns returned to Dumfries, fully convinced that he had said farewell forever, he produced the one really first-rate lyric Clarinda ever inspired—‘Ae Fond Kiss, and Then We Sever’.

The sequel was the last of the anti-climaxes which marked the affair. Clarinda reached Jamaica to find James M’Lehose’s disposition not sweetened by time, and a brood of mulatto children proved that he had not suffered by her absence. She returned to Scotland on the same ship which took her out. For some time after her return she did not communicate with Burns. When she did so it was in terms of cautious esteem which inspired him to so bombastic a reply that he shortly afterwards tried to disguise its date by describing a transcript of it as ‘the fustian rant of enthusiastic youth’. The first part of the description is accurate. For Burns the episode was closed, and closed, as it had opened, in posturing affectation of emotion. But Clarinda lived on it for the rest of her long life, exhibiting his letters to her friends after his death until some of them were worn to tatters. Her caution, however, equalled her vanity. After some of the letters had been surreptitiously transcribed and published in 1802 she went over the manuscripts, destroying the addresses, scoring out or clipping away proper names and erasing some of the more ardent love-making, and being reduced at last in senile old-age to selling some of them for a few shillings each. Sylvander’s was the happier fate after all.

Meanwhile, whatever bombast or adoration her husband was addressing to Clarinda, the ‘certain woman’ was lavishing on Burns the devotion he had wished for at his first meeting. Various stories are told of how and when he acknowledged Jean as his wife. The probability is that he never did so, in the sense of going through a formal marriage service. On April 28th he confided to James Smith that ‘Mrs. Burns’ was Jean’s ‘private designation’; a month later, in a letter to Ainslie, he avowed the title ‘to the World’. By Scots law, avowal in the presence of witnesses constituted a legal, though irregular, marriage; a peculiar letter to Smith at the end of June suggests that Burns even evaded this legal requirement:

In other words, he was asking Smith—who had not lived in Mauchline for two years—to testify, but not on oath, that Burns had acknowledged the marriage in his presence. Armed with Smith’s letter, and another, he then presented himself again before the minister, who overlooked the doubtful legality of the evidence as two years before he had allowed Burns’s doubtful status as a bachelor. On August 5th Burns and Jean made their formal appearance before the Kirk Session, avowed their marriage as of 1786, and were readmitted to the communion after ‘Mr. Burns gave a Guinea note for the behoof of the Poor.’

All this time Burns was alternating between Mauchline and Ellisland, to the detriment of his interests in each place. A man absent from his farm every other fortnight could scarcely expect work to go forward quickly, but there were no living accommodations for Jean and young Robert until in October a neighbour, moving into Dumfries for the winter, offered Burns the use of his house. But the periods of absence roused Burns once more to lyric fervour for Jean, and the man who six months earlier had pledged undying devotion to Clarinda composed ‘Of a’ the airts’ in tribute to his wife.

But it was the last song that can with complete certainty be connected with Jean. She sank before long to the status of a hard-working, child-bearing domestic fixture, losing her good looks—at first sight of her in 1790 John Syme concluded that Burns’s lyrics in her praise were poetic licence—but keeping her equable temper and her devotion to her husband. Of all the women who had loved Burns more or less, and whom he, more or less, had loved, she alone had to live with him. And yet she continued to love him, not weighing his merits, but pardoning his offences. She had things to pardon, though when he married her Burns thought he had shaken himself ‘loose of a very bad failing.’ Eighteen months after this announcement of reformation, Jean went home to Ayrshire for a visit, and her husband strayed into the arms of Anne Park at the Globe Inn. When the blonde barmaid in due course bore him a child, and died in doing it, Jean took in the little girl and reared her with ‘no distinction shown between that and the rest of their children.’ Maria Riddell, whose words are just quoted, added that Burns told her the story ‘with much sensibility’.

Burns could not take Jean into the society to which he was himself admitted, so she remained unnoticed at home, tending the children and keeping the house in slatternly Scots fashion, but with a sober Scots thrift which probably accounted for her husband’s living within his income and at last dying with little more than the debts incurred during his final illness. Burns seldom spoke of her in his last years, but when he did so it was ‘with a high tribute of respect and esteem’. Maria Riddell—perhaps a prejudiced witness—states that ‘he did not love her, but he was far from insensible to the indulgence and patience, “the meekness with which she bore her faculties” on many occasions very trying to the tempers of most individuals of our sex.’ One suspects, sometimes, that Burns would never have continued to love any woman after he had won her; that no matter who she was, he might still have summed up his marriage as he did to John Beugo:

Maria Riddell may have been one reason for Burns’s abrupt closure of the correspondence with Clarinda in 1793. After Clarinda had refused to continue it as an emotional communion he no longer needed it as an intellectual one. He had found a woman friend who surpassed Clarinda as much in intellect as she did in social position, and the only occasion on which he reopened communications with Agnes M’Lehose was during his subsequent estrangement from Mrs. Riddell—when he used the opportunity to send Clarinda copies of the crude lampoons he had composed upon Maria.

Walter Riddell, younger brother of Burns’s friend at Friars Carse, had compressed a good deal of experience into the first twenty-eight years of his life. After a short period in the army he had married an heiress who within a year made him a widower and the owner of an estate in Antigua. In 1790 he met at St. Kitts Maria Banks Woodley, youngest daughter of the governor of the Leeward Islands, and after a brief courtship married her when she still lacked two months of being eighteen. Though Maria’s mother was a native of St. Kitts, the girl had been born and educated in England and soon after their marriage the young couple returned there.

According to one interpretation of a letter from Francis Grose to Burns in January, 1791, they must have proceeded at once to an autumn visit at Friars Carse, where Grose was also a guest. Grose told Burns that ‘after the Scene between Mrs. Riddell Jun^r and your humble Servant, to which you was witness, it is impossible I can ever come under her Roof again.’ The letter also refers to the Governor—‘a spoilt Child with a Number of good Qualities’—whom its editor identifies as Walter Riddell, Mrs. Riddell Junior being Maria. But there was also an extremely senior Mrs. Riddell at Friars Carse, for Robert’s grandmother lived with him. Hence the Junior may equally well have been Mrs. Robert Riddell, and inasmuch as Maria had no roof of her own in Scotland until 1792, it is hard to see how any misconduct of hers could have shut Friars Carse to Grose.

If this was really Maria’s first meeting with Burns it was an inauspicious start. But the early stages of the friendship are obscure. The extant correspondence does not begin until February, 1792, and by that time Maria’s life was so truly invaluable to Burns that to lose her would leave a vacuum in his enjoyments that nothing could fill up. By this time, too, she was the mother of a daughter, born in England in August, 1791. Her husband was again in Dumfries, negotiating for an estate, and Maria had gone to Edinburgh with the double purpose of seeking expert medical advice and finding a printer for her narrative of her voyage to the West Indies. To this latter end Burns introduced her to his old friend Smellie in a letter which paid the highest compliments to her intellectual and literary accomplishments—if it can be called a high compliment to say that her verses ‘always correct, and often elegant’, were ‘very much beyond the common run of Lady Poetesses of the day’. The introduction resulted in a friendship between Smellie and Maria of which the written records, being more decorous than Burns’s own letters to the printer, were published by the latter’s biographer. Maria liked to collect curios, and her interest in Smellie might perhaps be thus explained. But the gruff and erudite printer’s continued interest in Maria is further evidence that she had brains as well as charm, though her letters are evidence enough.

In the spring of 1792 Walter Riddell purchased the estate of Goldielea near Dumfries, renamed it Woodley Park in Maria’s honour, and set up as a country gentleman. More accurately, he paid a small deposit on the purchase price without knowing how he would raise the main sum. Burns visited frequently at Woodley Park, though its master bored him. Walter Riddell apparently shared his brother’s convivial habits without his brother’s modicum of literary and intellectual interests, and the poet’s attitude towards him is more clearly shown by the almost total absence of Walter’s name from his letters to Walter’s wife than even by the crude epitaph which described the man as empty-headed and poisonous-hearted.

In letter-writing at least the friendship with Maria reached perihelion in the autumn of 1793. Walter was then in the West Indies, trying to raise money on his estate there, and Maria was living alone at Woodley Park with her books, her music, and two baby daughters. By this time Burns was ponderously flirtatious. Maria was the first and fairest of critics, the most amiable and most accomplished of her sex, and it was the final proof of his unhappy lot that when he was in love ‘Impossibility presents an impervious barrier to the proudest daring of Presumption, & poor I dare much sooner peep into the focus of Hell, than meet the eye of the goddess of my soul!’ At least one impassioned lyric which originally began ‘The last time I cam o’er the moor And passed Maria’s dwelling’ had been composed and submitted to the lady’s criticism accompanied by a postscript which transparently disclaimed personal application. In Walter’s absence, many of their meetings during this autumn were at the homes of mutual friends or at the little receptions which Maria held between the acts in her box at the theatre. These latter, however, were sometimes subject to interruptions. On at least one occasion Burns found an army officer—‘a lobster-coated puppy’—already in possession, and withdrew without even announcing himself. Maria chided him for his failure to appear and invited him formally to share her box at the next performance; he kept her supplied with all his latest lyrics, including those addressed to Clarinda.

It would be a mistake to take Burns’s impassioned avowals too seriously. Maria was a young and fascinating woman of the type which pleases men better than it does members of her own sex, and Burns thoroughly enjoyed her conversation. To the pleasures of intellectual intercourse her company added a subdued erotic stimulation which he expressed in the only language he knew. The very frankness of his remarks and Maria’s calm acceptance of them is proof that they were neither meant nor taken literally.

And then came the breach seemingly inevitable in Burns’s relations with every woman of higher station. Its details are still obscure. Even its exact date cannot be determined, though it must have been in Christmas week of 1793. The traditional story is that Burns was dining at Woodley Park and that the men’s talk over their wine somehow got round to the Rape of the Sabines. It was drunkenly agreed that on returning to the drawing-room the men should stage a burlesque of the episode. They did, and Burns, singling out his hostess as his prey, put too much ardour into the game. Mrs. Carswell interprets the thing as a deliberate rag on the part of the other men to get Burns to make a fool of himself. Such at any rate was the result. After a stormy scene during which some of the other ladies present tried to intercede for the poet he was ignominiously expelled. The next day he grovelled in contrition before the offended lady in the painfully humiliating ‘letter from Hell’. She refused to be placated and after two more abortive efforts on Burns’s part the breach between them was complete.

This accepted story leaves unexplained several important details. Foremost among them is the fact that in his apology Burns blames his host for constraining him to drink more than he wished to. Maria had told Smellie in November that Walter Riddell was in the West Indies and was not expected back until spring. On January 12th, when the breach with Burns had already occurred, she again mentioned her husband’s absence. If these letters were correctly printed by Smellie’s biographer, Walter Riddell could not have been the host; therefore the scene could not have occurred at Woodley Park. The alternative explanation is that it really happened at Friars Carse, with Robert and Elizabeth Riddell in the roles usually assigned to Walter and Maria. In this case Maria, hearing of Burns’s conduct, must have undertaken to discipline him.

Whatever the circumstances, Burns’s subsequent conduct was inexcusable. During the early spring of 1794 he wrote several epigrams on Maria which are utterly caddish, lacking alike in wit and decent feeling. One of them he even offered to a London newspaper, the editor of which had sense enough to reject it. He also wrote the long, dull, and vulgar parody of Pope which bears the title ‘Esopus to Maria’ and which attacks everything about Mrs. Riddell from her hair to her morals. This last was meant for the ‘quite private’ delectation of John Syme and one or two other intimates, but even if Burns had published it his conduct could not have appeared in much worse light. The epigrams and the ‘Monody on a Lady Famed for Her Caprice’ are enough in themselves to put it beyond condoning.

While Burns was thus exhibiting the worst side of his nature, his victims’ circumstances were changing. Walter Riddell had returned from the Indies without the money he had gone to raise, and in the course of the spring Woodley Park was repossessed by its former owner, Walter forfeiting his £1000 deposit on the purchase price as well as all that he had laid out in improvements. On April 21st Robert Riddell died, and Friars Carse was put on the market, the relations between the two families being so uncordial that Elizabeth Riddell refused any settlement which would leave her brother-in-law in possession of the estate. Walter and Maria attempted the usual expedient of impoverished gentry—a prolonged stay on the Continent—but found their way barred by the armies of the French Revolution. Accordingly after a few months in England they returned to the neighbourhood of Dumfries to resume life on a much reduced scale. They settled at Tinwald House, a tumble-down estate near Lochmaben, or rather Maria settled, for her husband was absent most of the time. In May, 1795, they moved again, this time to Halleaths, between Lochmaben and Lockerbie, where they remained until they left Scotland forever in 1797. How much Maria had heard of Burns’s conduct towards her no one but herself knew, and she never told. When Currie published some of the letters referring to the quarrel she affected complete ignorance of their relation to herself, though it is hard to believe that some kind friend had not shown them to her.

If Burns showed the worst side of his nature in the quarrel, Maria showed the best of hers in the reconciliation. Early in 1795 she made the first move by sending him a book she had heard he wished to read. He replied in a formal note in the third person which nevertheless welcomed the overture and opened the way for further intercourse. By the beginning of May he was writing in his old vein of flirtatious gaiety and even confiding to Maria about the mysterious Reid miniature of himself—mysterious because no one knows for whom he had it painted, nor why. The woman who quarrelled with Burns in 1794 may have been capricious, and have pushed her rigour further than was wise in dealing with a man of Burns’s temperament. After all, twenty-one is not infallible even when feminine and married. But the woman who reinstated Burns in her good graces in 1795, after his caddish attacks upon her, was certainly not petty.

The renewed friendship had not long to live. Shadows of another sort soon began to fall across it, for Burns’s health was breaking. A note written at the end of May to accompany the loan of the Reid miniature mentioned that he was so ill as scarcely to be able to hold pen to paper; a month later he feared that his health was gone forever. The autumn brought further affliction in the death of his little daughter, and it was to Maria that he uttered the only existing record of his grief: ‘That you, my friend, may never experience such a loss as mine, sincerely prays R B.’

And so, through bereavement, illness, and despair, the passionate, irritable poet and the vivacious young woman of the world drew towards their last meeting. The bleak little watering-place, the Brow Well on the Solway, was the scene. Maria’s health also was bad, and she evidently, like Burns, lacked the funds to take her to a better resort. On the 5th of July, 1796, she sent her carriage for Burns: not until she saw him did she realize how serious his condition was.

He was dying, and knew it. His overdriven heart, which had never wholly recovered from the strain of doing a man’s work on insufficient food at the age of fourteen, was giving out, and he was hastening his end according to the best medical advice in Dumfries. A doctor who thought that angina was ‘flying gout’ had ordered sea bathing, and the dying poet was plunging himself daily in the chilly waters of the Solway, as he had earlier in life sought to cure fainting-fits in a tub of cold water at his bedside. Maria was startled by the visible stamp of death on the features of the emaciated man who tottered from her carriage, and her concern was increased by his almost total inability to eat. But the presence of a young and attractive woman could still, as always, rouse Burns to his best efforts, and his talk might even have been gay—after his preliminary, ‘Well, Madam, have you any messages for the other world?’—had Maria been able to forget his haggard countenance long enough to reply in kind.

As it was, they had ‘a long and serious conversation about his present situation, and the approaching termination of all his earthly prospects.’ The man who had never lied about himself, to himself or others, now frankly faced the fact that he was dying. And the presence of a sympathetic and intelligent listener urged him on to speech about the matters nearest his heart. Two things perturbed him on the brink of the grave—anxiety for his family, and anxiety for his fame. His eldest son was not yet ten; there were three younger, and Jean was hourly expecting a fifth; at least two others needed a father’s help to lighten the stigma of illegitimacy. And as for his literary reputation—

Could Burns have looked into the future, the prospect would have deepened the pain in his harassed soul. His anxiety for his family would have been allayed, to be sure, but not even in his darkest hour could he have visualized the future of his personal and literary fame. He foresaw attacks of his enemies; he did not foresee the cowardice or treachery of his friends. He need not have worried about his trivial or unguarded writings, for time automatically washes away the sand and leaves the gold, if gold there be, and the publication of trifling letters cannot harm their writer if the pattern of his soul itself is not trifling. That spiritual descendants of Holy Willie should deplore his best and strongest work and shake their heads over passions of which their impotent pulses were incapable, that enemies eager for revenge and underlings eager for drink should lie about their relations with him—these things were to be expected. But that Bob Ainslie, turned pious, should exemplify his own piety by preserving and circulating Burns’s worst letters, that George Thomson should not only ignore his dying wishes but even, before his corpse was in the grave, rush into print with a distorted and melodramatic version of his last years which would set the tone of biographies for a century to come, that Gilbert should lack the courage to deny stories which he knew to be false—all this, and much more, was mercifully hidden from him. But it would have warmed his heart to know that the one intimate friend who would come before the world with a truthful account of his character, extenuating nothing, and setting nothing down in malice, was Maria Riddell, on whom he had made unforgivable attacks, and who nevertheless had forgiven him. The woman with whom the dying poet talked that day until the distant bulk of Criffel turned dark against the sunset, and the chill tide in which he had been ordered to bathe ebbed away from the dismal flats of the Solway, was to prove herself the most devoted friend of her sex he had ever had, Jean Armour always excepted.