After such a letter—withheld from complete publication until 1938—it is plain enough why the friendship went into a swift decline. For another year or two Burns continued to write, gaily or confidentially, but got small response. Ainslie’s last letter, early in 1794, ‘was so dry, so distant, so like a card to one of his clients’, that the poet ‘could scarce bear to read it’, and never answered it. The lawyer was already on his way, via the fashionable Werther melancholy, back to the orthodox piety which led him, early in the nineteenth century, to compose a couple of devotional pamphlets. But neither piety nor loyalty sufficed to make him protect the memory of the friend whose name has kept his alive. Preserving the reckless letters Burns had written him, he allowed them to pass into circulation, once at least accompanied by a formal docket certifying that Burns was the author of a letter signed with a humorous pen-name. The mutilations which so many of the manuscripts have suffered were the work of later owners.

Ainslie’s chief injury to Burns’s fame was inflicted after the poet’s death; William Nicol, Latin master in Edinburgh High School, harmed him in life. A coarse, egotistical, drunken man of violent temper, Nicol was also one of the foremost Latin scholars of his day. In his bawdy violence of language Burns saw wit; his emphatic dislike of his superiors Burns interpreted as proof of an independent spirit. No great harm might have come of the friendship had it been confined to drinking bouts in Edinburgh and to correspondence thereafter. Unfortunately Burns took Nicol as his travelling companion on the tour of the Highlands in September, 1787. This tour was Burns’s chance to meet influential folk in their homes and to show himself at his best. Thanks to Nicol he came near to showing himself at his worst. Among the people from whom he had invitations were the Duke and Duchess of Athole. Their reception of him at Blair Athole was all the touchy poet could desire. The Duke and Duchess were cordiality itself; among the guests was Robert Graham of Fintry, Commissioner of Excise, whose friendship and influence could be of the utmost importance to Burns; a still more influential person, Henry Dundas, dispenser of patronage for all Scotland, was expected next day on one of his periodical inspections of his political fences. Everything seemed to be going well for Burns when Nicol, the ‘most unprincipled savage’, intervened. The boorish schoolmaster, finding himself neglected in favour of his companion, decided to move on at once, and insisted on Burns’s going with him. The poet’s pride made him guilty of outrageous bad manners. In reply to Nicol’s insistence, Burns should have bidden him go to the devil his own gait. But that might have been interpreted as subservience to the Great. Through what can only be described as inverted snobbery, Burns allowed Nicol to drag him away. The scene was repeated at Castle Gordon, where the merry Duchess, who had declared in Edinburgh that Burns swept her off her feet, pleaded in vain against Nicol’s urgings. Though he afterwards wrote complimentary and apologetic letters, and cursed the ‘obstinate son of Latin Prose’, Burns could not efface the impression he had made. He never saw the Atholes or the Gordons again.

Throughout the trip Nicol’s conduct was the same; he even snatched Burns away before breakfast from the home of his cousin, James Burness of Montrose. The Highland tour, though he did not then realize it, was Burns’s last opportunity to enlist the active friendship of people whose influence might have changed his life. His failure was largely Nicol’s fault. Reports of his abrupt and ungracious conduct undoubtedly came back to Edinburgh and contributed to the comparative neglect he suffered during his second winter in the city. Edinburgh was too small a place for misconduct to hide in; every lawyer in the old Parliament House would have heard that a servant girl had brought suit against the Ayrshire Bard; the stories from the Highlands, losing nothing in the telling, would add to the swelling tide of hostile gossip. The talk, indeed, reached so far, and was believed so implicitly, that not even death could alter Edinburgh opinion. Cunningham’s efforts to interest prominent citizens in the subscription for Burns’s widow and children met repeated snubs and refusals; to this day, despite the monument on the Calton Hill, the city pays only a half-hearted tribute to his memory.

Of course all blame for the hostile talk cannot be shifted to Nicol, or even to Meg Cameron and Jenny Clow. Burns was indiscreet enough to start plenty of tales without help. But his too long stay unfortunately predisposed many people to believe the worst not only of his conduct in the city but afterwards. Henry Mackenzie and Dugald Stewart, for instance, both accepted at face value the second-hand reports of Burns’s alleged misdoings in Dumfries, and wrote him off their books. For years anecdotes showing Burns in an absurd or discreditable light circulated in Edinburgh. Some may have been true; others were malicious distortions which point the direction taken by city opinion. Thus Lockhart told how Hugh Blair had suggested, when a party of gentlemen were discussing possible changes in the Kilmarnock Poems, that ‘tidings of salvation’ might advantageously be emended to ‘tidings of damnation’. Thereupon the poet, according to Lockhart, embarrassed the professor by asking permission to acknowledge his improvement in a footnote. The basis of the story is truth; its details are not. Blair did suggest the change; Burns did, in conversation with other people, acknowledge his help. But Blair’s suggestion came in writing, as a carefully veiled hint amid other criticisms of the poems. The episode as Lockhart told it is city gossip intended to display Blair as the urbane professor and patron and Burns as a clumsy rustic. Of no importance in itself, the story is symptomatic of the attitude of cultured Edinburgh after the first enthusiasm over Burns had waned.

But no realization of the trouble Nicol was helping to make, no recognition of the schoolmaster’s real character, affected Burns. He continued, after he left the city, to correspond with Nicol; when the obstinate son of Latin Prose got into the row which finally led to his resignation from the High School, Burns championed him against his amiable principal, Dr. Alexander Adam. By christening one of his sons William Nicol, Burns proclaimed his friendship to the world at large, and during the years at Ellisland performed such services as getting appraisals of a farm Nicol was buying, and maintaining a broken-down mare which a horse-coper had passed off on the schoolmaster. The friendship lasted until February, 1793, when Burns was suffering from the rage and humiliation which followed the official inquiry into his revolutionary sympathies. Some report of the matter having reached Nicol, he undertook to rebuke Burns in a would-be facetious vein. The poet was in no mood for rebuke or good advice, facetious or not, and with his heavily satirical reply to Nicol their correspondence ended—too late.

In any case Edinburgh friendships, good or bad, however much he might try to maintain them by correspondence, could not supply companionship when Burns moved to Ellisland. Though on his first visit to Dumfries he had professed himself enchanted with the company he met, he was lonely enough when he actually settled there. He made acquaintances, no doubt ‘men of talent and humour’, among the tradesfolk and professional men of the town, but people like Dr. James Mundell, Walter Auld the saddler, Henry Clint of the King’s Arms, William Hyslop of the Globe Inn, and Thomas Boyd, the contractor who built Ellisland, are names and little more. Apart from his landlord, Patrick Miller, with whom his relations were soon strained, the most congenial friend he had during the three years on the farm was Robert Riddell of Glenriddell, whose estate of Friars Carse marched with Ellisland.

Riddell was a country gentleman turned amateur antiquarian. He had embellished his grounds with a ‘Druid Circle’ and a ‘Hermitage’; he dabbled in numismatics and church architecture. These would scarcely have interested Burns—though he remained in the hermitage long enough to inscribe some verses on the window with Glencairn’s diamond-pointed pencil—but Riddell was also a musician in a small way. Besides composing a few commonplace airs of his own he professed great interest in the traditional music of his country. Here Burns shared his enthusiasm and far excelled his knowledge. The laird, perhaps at Burns’s suggestion, subscribed for Johnson’s Museum and had his set bound with blank interleaves for notes on the songs, their authors, and their history. The number of his annotations gives the measure of his knowledge. Out of four hundred songs, one hundred and seventy have notes. Of these, one hundred and fifty-two were written by Burns, who must have spent many evenings at the task in his friend’s library; eighteen were by Riddell himself or an amanuensis. Sir Walter Scott summed up the laird’s prose writings as ‘truly the most extravagant compositions that ever a poor Man abandoned by providence to the imaginations of his own heart had the misfortune to devise.’

The company which sometimes came to Carse, including as it did men like Joseph Farington the painter—who noted that ‘Mr. Burns the Scottish Poet’ was ‘a middle-sized man, ... black complexioned, and his general appearance that of a tradesman or mechanick’, had ‘a strong expressive manner of delivering himself in conversation’, and knew no Latin—and Francis Grose, the antiquary whose inspiring enthusiasm was the real source of ‘Tam o’ Shanter’, was more important than Riddell himself. The laird’s real tastes and aptitudes were convivial. A man of powerful physique and a rather overwhelming robustiousness of manner—William Smellie spoke of ‘his immense fist and stentorian voice’—he succeeded, like so many gentlemen of his day, in wrecking his health at an early age. The notorious ‘Whistle’ contest, in which Riddell and his kinsmen Sir Robert Laurie and Alexander Fergusson of Craigdarroch undertook to drink each other under the table for the possession of a family heirloom, was probably more typical of the laird’s true aptitudes than the annotations were. Even at that, though, he was outdone by Craigdarroch, who won the whistle by drinking ‘upds. of 5 Bottles of Claret’. Burns, like most of the friends of the contestants, found the incident vastly amusing; Burns’s biographers have argued the question of his real presence at Friars Carse with an almost theological fervour; nevertheless its only interest or value for posterity lies in the light it sheds on Robert Riddell’s character. According to biographical tradition, Robert Riddell was the staid member of the family and his brother Walter the wild one; actually such distinction between them seems as baseless as the kindred legend that Gilbert Burns was a better farmer than his brother. But whether Glenriddell led or followed in the events which for a time estranged the poet from the whole Riddell family, the circumstances of the breach resemble with painful clarity many other episodes in Burns’s contacts with the gentry.

The full story of the ‘Rape of the Sabines’ is Maria Riddell’s more than her brother-in-law’s, but Robert Riddell had a share in the trouble. During 1792 and 1793, when Walter Riddell and his wife Maria were occupying the estate of Goldielea or Woodley Park, family relations were not always harmonious. At a guess, Walter wanted to borrow from his elder brother the funds to complete payment for Woodley Park; at a guess, the wives failed to charm each other. Whatever the causes, by the autumn of 1792 Burns had to assure Maria that he would listen to no stories about her from Glenriddell—and presumably also from Glenriddell’s wife. Yet for another year or more the poet managed to stay on good terms with both families. The year 1793 was, poetically and flirtatiously, the highest point of Burns’s friendship with Maria; the same year produced asseverations of friendship as ‘ardent & grateful’ on Burns’s part as Robert Riddell’s was ‘kind and generous’. In leisure moments the poet was transcribing a collection of his letters as a companion volume to the collection of unpublished verse he had given the laird in 1791. On Christmas day he was still transcribing. On January 12, 1794, his quarrel with Maria had reached its climax. Somewhere between those two dates had occurred the mysterious brawl in which Robert Riddell’s part is still a matter of controversy.

If Robert Riddell was the host, who, by compelling Burns to drink more than he wished to, reduced the poet to a state in which he insulted his hostess, the laird’s conduct admits of small excuse; if, as report has it, the scene occurred at Woodley Park and Robert Riddell subsequently took up the quarrel, he is even less excusable. Whichever version one accepts, Riddell was displaying innate snobbishness towards a man he considered, after all, a social inferior. If he was the host, realization of his own share in the matter should have made him charitable; if his brother was the host, Glenriddell was indulging in violent and uncalled-for partisanship. He held, it would seem, the same theory of a gentleman’s privileges as was enunciated a few years later by Sir John Graham Dalyell: ‘I am a gentleman, and I will be treated as such; and if any person presumes to pervert my meaning in any way whatever, if his rank is not equal to mine I will kick him; and if it is equal I will shoot him.’ Burns, as a plebeian, was kicked. There is a little satisfaction in knowing that the poet held to his resolution not to apologize to his host. The ‘Remorseful Apology’ supposed to have been addressed to a Riddell was really sent, early in 1796, to a Mr. S. Mackenzie. Four months after the quarrel Glenriddell was dead, still unreconciled to the poet who had done more for him than he could ever have done for the poet. A loud blustering squire, a hollow and unsubstantial mind; that was Robert Riddell.

For the last five years of his life Burns’s social world centred in Dumfries. About it cluster dark stories and darker hints, in the effort to refute which the poet’s defenders have sometimes been led to dangerous extremities of special pleading. The truth is that Burns in Dumfries was neither better nor worse than Burns in Tarbolton and Mauchline. Such a report as James Gray’s of finding Burns reading poetry with his children and hearing the older boys recite their lessons does not refute the tales of boisterous revelry in taverns; both are true. The sole difference is that Burns in Tarbolton was an unimportant young man amid a group of other youths; in Edinburgh he was partly lost in the crowds; in Dumfries he was a prominent figure whose every action was noted. He did not degenerate in Dumfries, but neither did he become a chocolate seraph.

Fortunately it is no longer necessary to rely on conjecture and second-hand reports in studying Burns’s last years. The letters which passed between two of his most intimate friends, John Syme of Dumfries and Alexander Cunningham of Edinburgh, are now available to replace guess-work with facts. Of all the friends of Burns’s last years, Syme is now the one who emerges most clearly, and with most credit to himself. A man of good education, a college friend of Dr. James Currie, the poet’s first biographer, Syme regarded Dumfries as a place of exile in which Burns’s society was almost the only redeeming feature. Having lost his small paternal estate of Barncailzie near Kirkcudbright, he had managed to recoup his fortunes by getting appointed to the sinecure post of Collector of Stamps at Dumfries. He first met Burns in 1788, but not until two years later did they become intimate. Syme was a man of sentiment in the best tradition of Henry Mackenzie and The Sorrows of Werther. He went into raptures over thunderstorms and desolate scenery; he read Zimmermann’s Treatise on Solitude; he thought Clarinda’s the finest love-letters ever written. Rhapsodic and absent-minded, he was the sort who could set off on a long-planned hunting-trip and find on arriving at his destination that he had forgotten his dogs. Maria Riddell paid warm tribute to his good head and excellent heart, but added that in matters of business he wanted method: ‘He is always in a labyrinth of papers and accounts, and, somewhat like the cuttlefish, he obscures himself altogether in a mist of his own creating.’

Burns admired Syme’s education and literary taste; Syme thought the poet ‘a noble fellow’, admired his wit and brilliant conversation, but could not admire his wife. ‘Methinks he has exhibited his poetical genius when he celebrated her’, he said to Cunningham after his first sight of Jean. Before long Burns was submitting his new poems to Syme and expressing implicit confidence in his judgement, though Syme avowed that he scarcely dared to touch a line of them. Sometimes the two would meet in a boisterous crowd at a tavern; again they would spend a quiet evening over a single bottle of wine in the little croft of Ryedale which Syme regarded as his refuge ‘from the frivolous and dissipated society’ of Dumfries. Without Burns, said Syme, his life in the town would be ‘a dreary blank’. Syme had set himself up as a clearing-house for humorous and satirical verses written or collected by his friends, and Burns quickly became the chief contributor to the hoard. Some of the verses compelled caution in sharing them. Of the epigram on the Loyal Natives Club, for instance, Syme told Cunningham that, though he and Burns were ‘far from differing from them on sentiments of loyalty, we differ on sentiment, abstractly considered. They scarcely know the meaning of the word Sentiment, & their Society consists in roaring & drinking.’ ‘Don’t,’ he added after quoting the epigram, ‘let any Dumfries person see this, for one of the Savages, if he heard it, might cut Robin’s pipe.’

Syme’s letters abundantly illustrate what he meant by ‘frivolous and dissipated society’. When the Caledonian Hunt met at Dumfries in November, 1794, ‘Baker, one of the knowing english Squires on the Turf, made an elegant appearance by insulting in the grossest manner Squire Walter Riddel of this place, who pursued him to Durham and made him ask pardon, which is published in our papers of last week.’ On the same occasion the Honourable Ramsay Maule of Panmure showed that for once at least Burns was justified in the tone of a satirical epigram, for Panmure and some drunken companions smeared a helpless underling’s hair with mustard and stuck it full of toothpick quills, ‘by way of hedgehogging him’. That Burns gnashed his teeth and passed by on the other side when he encountered such members of the organization to which he had dedicated his Edinburgh Poems, is no ground for wonder. He had larded the Caledonian Hunt with flattery, and they were behaving like cads and bullies.

But though Burns shrank from the Caledonian Hunt he did not always avoid similar company. There were meetings at which he and Syme drank bumpers out with wild Irishmen—such meetings as led Thomas Telford the engineer jovially to warn Burns that if he went on ‘in his old way, not even a she Devil will be able to meet with a Milt in him.’ There was a drunken brawl with one Captain Dods, who took hot exception to the poet’s toast, ‘May our success in the present war be equal to the justice of our cause.’ That Burns escaped a duel only because he was not the Captain’s social equal did not lessen his humiliation. Most biographers have held that such a toast in the presence of gentlemen holding the King’s commission was a huge breach of the proprieties, and so it was—if Burns was not goaded into giving it. Nothing in the record as it stands forbids belief that Dods, or some other officer who knew that Burns was suspected of sympathy with the French, may have called for a round of loyal toasts with the deliberate intention of embarrassing the poet. In that case, nothing could have been neater than Burns’s evasion, and since nothing came of the episode it is to be presumed that Samuel Clarke succeeded in making the sobered Dods realize what his objection to the sentiment implied.

But there were other similar episodes which cannot be so favourably explained, and which multiply proof that Burns had never acquired finesse, whether in toasting, flattering, or sinning. Whatever he did was done so forthrightly that it attracted attention. And the moment he attracted attention his companions recollected that after all he was a peasant received on sufferance into gentle company. The outcome might be expulsion from the house for conduct which a gentleman born need not even have apologized for, it might be a verbal attack like Captain Dods’s, or it might be merely a tacit resolve to drop him forthwith. The Edinburgh experience repeated itself in Dumfries. Burns’s ill-repute in certain quarters during his life and after his death was not owing to his being a sinner above the other Caledonians, but simply to his lack of the social standing which enabled Kames and Braxfield and Boswell to misbehave without penalty, and which would have tempered the sting of his satirical outbursts.

Occasional public drunken squabbles are not the only evidence that during these last years Burns’s nerves were often exacerbated. The loyal Syme once undertook to rebuke him for some of his wild doings and sayings. His language was too strong—telling the story afterwards he admitted, ‘I may have spoken daggers, but I meant none.’ The poet, his face black with anger, fumbled with his sword-cane. Syme, half laughing, half serious, exclaimed, ‘What! and in my own house, too!’ The conscience-stricken Burns flung away the cane, burst into tears, and positively grovelled in contrition on the flagstone floor. It is not a pleasant scene, and though the vividness with which it stayed in Syme’s memory is indication enough that it was exceptional, it cannot be ignored. No man, drunk or sober, whose nerves were normal could have behaved so.

Fortunately the vividness of Syme’s memory is not the only proof that such conduct was exceptional. Others besides Syme who were nearest to Burns in his last years concur in their loyalty and affection. At the end of 1790 Alexander Findlater reported to his official superior, Supervisor Corbet, that Burns was ‘an active, faithful & zealous officer’, gave ‘the most unremitting attention to the duties of his office (which, by the bye is more than I at first looked for from so eccentric a Genius)’, and might ‘be considered a credit to the profession’. And the judgment which Findlater thus expressed at the beginning of the poet’s Excise career he reaffirmed after his death. Others testified to their regard in deeds as well as words. Though Burns continued to display his life-long preference for the company of extravagant and outré sorts of people the best men in the Excise were the ones who esteemed him most. John Lewars, for example, brother of the Jessie of the songs, was a man of some education, and above the level of the common riding-officer. His father had been Collector at Dumfries, and thus a man of standing in the community. Burns called Lewars ‘a young fellow of uncommon merit—indeed, by far the cleverest fellow I have met with in this part of the world’, and Lewars reciprocated the poet’s affection by service to him and his family during his illness and after his death. And that Burns’s long absence from duty did not bear more heavily on him was due to the kindness of Adam Stobbie, a young expectant who throughout the spring of 1796 performed Burns’s rounds without pay, that the poet might continue to draw his full salary.

Fortunately, too, Syme records bright passages as well as dark in the last years. There were evenings at Ryedale when they consumed more cups of tea than bottles of wine, and when ‘Robin’s confounding wit’ played as sharply as it ever did over a punchbowl. In 1793 and 1794 there were brief excursions with Burns into Kirkcudbright on which the mercurial poet displayed every facet of his nature, bursting into furious rage over a spoiled pair of boots, fulminating brilliantly satirical epigrams against the Earl of Galloway, announcing that he would dine nowhere where he could not ‘eat like a Turk, drink like a fish and swear like the Devil’, and anon proving a decorous and fascinating houseguest at St. Mary’s Isle, seat of the Earl of Selkirk, whose son Lord Daer had given Burns his first glimpse of the peerage. Burns still shrank from the ordeal of encountering such exalted folk—‘I am indeed ill at ease whenever I approach your Honorables & Right Honorables’—though now for a different reason. In 1786 the consciousness of his own rusticity had been uppermost; in 1794 he did not wish to be laid open either to a fresh snub or renewed condescension. But his last recorded intercourse with the peerage was as pleasant—and as dangerous—as his first. The Earl of Selkirk was one of the few Scottish peers who were Whigs at a time when all power belonged to the Tories; thus meeting Burns on congenial grounds he helped to draw him into the last of his ill-advised meddlings with politics by interesting him in the parliamentary campaign of Patrick Heron of Heron. So to the last the peerage influenced Burns against his own best interests. Nevertheless this visit to St. Mary’s Isle is refutation enough of the charge that in his last years Burns had sunk so low that gentlefolk shunned him. The man who so charmed the Earl’s young daughter, Lady Mary Douglas, that she lent him a volume of music and entered into correspondence about his task of fitting Scottish airs with words, can scarcely have been the social outcast some biographers have portrayed. In fact, he strikingly resembles the man who in 1787 swept the Duchess of Gordon off her feet, and won the esteem of Lady Harriet Don and the Dowager Countess of Glencairn.

Despite their intimacy, it would be false to claim that Syme shared all Burns’s interests. No one man could do that. The very topic on which Burns and Lady Mary found common ground was outside Syme’s range. He never could understand what Burns saw in the crude and half-literate James Johnson, because he never understood the bond of fellowship established by mutual devotion to Scottish folk-song. Nevertheless, Syme was probably the closest to Burns of all his Dumfries friends, and knew—as certain impassioned defenders like Anna Dorothea Benson could not—the worst as well as the best in his later conduct. The man who noted that ‘Robin’s temper is not cold and frugal’, and who did not hesitate to record the sword-cane story and certain other episodes, cannot be charged with allowing affection to obscure the full truth about his friend. Hence Syme’s deeds and words at the time of Burns’s death give as reliable a verdict on the poet’s last years as can now be reached.

As Burns’s health failed in 1796 Syme watched him with increasing anxiety. As long as he could he hoped for recovery, but when the poet returned from the Brow Well his ‘cadaverous aspect and shaken frame’ told the truth which the doctors confirmed. On July 17 Syme wrote to warn Cunningham and to urge him to press their friend’s petition to the Commissioners of Excise that they continue his full salary. Two days later, when Syme called at the little house in Mill Street, he saw the hand of Death visibly fixed on Burns:

Syme was already consulting with Patrick Miller, John M’Murdo, Dr. Maxwell, and other Dumfries friends to set measures afoot for the welfare of Jean and the children; when he wrote again on the 21st, shaken by the ‘variety of distressful emotions’ stirred by Burns’s death, he gave further details of their plans, and urged Cunningham to launch a similar plan in Edinburgh and to see that a proper obituary was prepared. Here Cunningham blundered. He entrusted the obituary to George Thomson, and the latter’s remark that Burns’s ‘extraordinary endowments were accompanied with frailties which rendered them useless to himself and his family’ roused the Dumfries friends to indignation. ‘We were much hurt at this,’ said Syme, ‘& reckoned it indelicate, if not unfeelingly superfluous on that occasion.’

These feelings were intensified by the appearance in the London Chronicle of a longer article, also by Thomson, which included assertions that Burns’s ‘talents were often obscured and finally impaired by excess,’ that ‘his conduct and his fate afford[ed] but too melancholy proofs’ of his possessing the failings as well as the powers of genius, and that, ‘like his predecessor Fergus[s]on, though he died at an early age, his mind was previously exhausted.’ Thomson had never been in Dumfries, and had never met Burns. The friends in Dumfries who read his article did not concur. Syme’s comment was brief and pointed. These statements were ‘d——d illiberal lies’. On that comment, by the man who knew him best in his last years, the case for the defence of Burns against the stories of his deterioration in Dumfries may be allowed to rest.