Life of Robert Burns by Catherine Carswell

Author:Catherine Carswell [Catherine Carswell]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781847675378
Publisher: Canongate Books
Published: 2008-03-13T16:00:00+00:00

Notes - CHAPTER XIX

1 His French, however, was a failure, so that when he addressed a French lady in that language she could make nothing of it. And he found only too true the Ayr schoolmaster’s warning as to the importance of the classics among persons of culture. So much so that he later took some lessons in both French and Latin.

2 Blair’s junior colleague, a gifted man who later disappeared under a cloud. He fled the country in such circumstances that pious editors of Burns’s letters felt it their duty to mutilate and disguise all references to him. They even went so far, in the case of letters addressed to Dr Greenfield, as to substitute the names of blameless correspondents, such as Mrs Dunlop.

3 Cromek’s Reliques.

4 Burns to the end of his days kept up a correspondence with Smellie. The latter carefully preserved the poet’s letters, but one of his grandsons, who inherited his grandfather’s papers, though not his disposition, destroyed them all because he disapproved of their tone—a literary crime so atrocious that it hardly bears thinking about. Other destroyers ‘On broad moral grounds’ were Greenshields of Kerse and Dr Currie. Thomson shamelessly falsified the letters in his possession for his own ends, and even Clarinda was not blameless. No great figure in literature has suffered more than Burns from posthumous vandalism.

5 It was Burns’s instinctive theory that old dance or ‘Bacchanalian or warlike tunes, taken slow and soft, can be used for amorous or pathetic words.’ In fact many an existing tune to ‘a droll song’ was an ancient Romish chant burlesqued, so that its re-union to serious words was an act (however unconscious) of poetic justice, triumphantly carried out in practice. The tune to that bawdy song, ‘The Grey Goose and the Gled,’ was of such a kind. Burns’s later air to the above, ‘The Banks o’ Doon,’ was a reminiscence from Playford’s old opera, Apollo’s Banquet, which had been modified by nearly a century of ignorant singers till it was become a folk tune.

6 Two years passed before the order was executed, two more before Burns could pay for it. The stonemason then wished to charge interest on the sum, £5 10s. Burns refused. ‘Considering,’ he remarked, ‘that the money was due by one Poet for putting a tombstone over another, he may, with grateful surprise, thank Heaven that he ever saw a farthing of it.’

7 By Shenstone. The well-meant comparison is Mrs Bar-bauld’s.

8 These expressions, written in irony some twenty years later by Francis Jeffrey, express the sentiment current in 1786.

9 A poem now lost.

10 Father of the hero of Corunna.

11 ‘A person whose immense vanity, bordering upon insanity, obscured, or rather eclipsed, very considerable talents… He had a desire to be a great man and a Maecenas à bon marché.’— Sir Walter Scott’s Journal,20 April 1829.

12 Dr Blair replied the same day at great length commending his wisdom and giving much advice upon the importance of humility. This letter from the reverend doctor

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