The Bard by Robert Crawford

Author:Robert Crawford
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2021-10-15T00:00:00+00:00

V

New World

On 28 November 1786, still with the option of sailing to the New World from Leith, Burns rode into Edinburgh on a borrowed pony. In Scotland’s capital, he wrote, ‘I was in a new world’.1 Approaching from the west, he was presented with a scene recorded by another late eighteenth-century traveller and still recognisable from today’s Princes Street. To his left, still under construction, was Edinburgh’s neoclassical New Town, then a ‘line of modern houses, built of white stone, upon an elegant and uniform plan’. To his right, ‘The castle, on the naked rock, from its bold and exalted situation, its vastness, domineering aspect and picturesque irregularity of parts, its battlements and towers, &c. first seizes the traveller’s sight, and, for some moments, rivets his attention. His eye next slides along the antique and lofty range of buildings, public and private, descending eastward from the castle, and impending over a deep valley, called the North-Loch.’ Burns was seeing for the first time this city whose architecture so strikingly juxtaposed the ancient and the improved. Eighteenth-century eyes were trained to admire the elegant, but also wilder textures. ‘The whole assemblage of objects toward the right exhibits, on the uneven site of this towering rock, an air of antiquity and uncouth grandeur.’2

Burns was ready to enjoy this new world. On his journey he had been fêted by Lowland farmers, carousing with them into the early hours of the morning – ‘a most agreable little party’.3 Ayrshire contacts had helped him plan his journey, loaned him a ‘pownie’ to ride, and had briefed Edinburgh friends about the bard’s imminent arrival.4 Immediately he was a celebrity. Within a week he met Dugald Stewart, the literary authority Hugh Blair, and Blair’s younger assistant teacher of belles-lettres, the Reverend William Greenfield, whom Burns found warmer, more quick-witted. The Ayrshire poet also met his favourite novelist, ‘Author of The man of feeling’, Henry Mackenzie, a lawyer in his early forties.5 Mackenzie was impressed. Encouraged by Stewart, he began reviewing Burns for his genteel periodical, The Lounger: ‘Mr Burns’, a ‘Heaven-taught ploughman’, exemplified ‘Original Genius’. Mackenzie was well intentioned, but, Anglicised in his polite upper-class tastes, not quite on Burns’s vernacular wavelength: ‘Even in Scotland, the provincial dialect which Ramsay and he have used, is now read with a difficulty which greatly damps the pleasure of the reader.’

Ignoring the vernacular energy of his work, Mackenzie still admired this ‘rustic bard’ so perceptive about ‘men and manners’. The lawyer-novelist had been talking to people who knew Burns’s Ayrshire ‘grief and misfortunes’. Pointing out that Burns ‘has been obliged to form the resolution of leaving his native land, to seek under a West Indian clime that shelter and support which Scotland has denied him’, Mackenzie hoped Burns would now find sustaining native ‘patronage’.6

By the time Mackenzie’s words appeared in the 9 December Lounger, Burns was well and truly patronised. ‘An unknown hand,’ he told Ballantine, ‘left ten guineas for the Ayrshire Bard.’7 The donor turned out to be Patrick Miller, brother of the Lord Justice Clerk whose house at Barskimming was close to Mauchline.

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