The Canongate Burns (104 page)

These lines were written on 26th August 1787, when Burns left Falkirk and travelled to Carron Ironworks, but was refused admittance.

These imprudent lines were answered, very petulantly, by somebody, I believe a Revd. Mr Hamilton. – In a M.S.S. where I met with the answer I wrote below – R.B.

This couplet, based on the public reaction to the poet's
Lines on
Seeing the Royal Palace at Stirling in Ruins,
is included in Kinsley (no. 166B) but omitted from the canon by Mackay (1993).

This appears in Kinsley, but is missing from Mackay. This
seeming
self-reproof was written on the window of the same Stirling Inn where he had dangerously diamond-inscribed his pro-Stuart anti-Hanoverian lines. He is really, of course, re-asserting his anti-Hanoverian position. William Murray (1705–93), the Earl of Mansfield, was a friend of Graham of Fintry. Burns met the Earl and his sons sometime after writing these lines. Kinsley remarks that there is no manuscript authority for these lines. The current editors were allowed to view these lines and the associated anti-Hanoverian Stirling verses in a privately owned transcript collection and have no doubt of their provenance.

Burns is supposed to have met William Michie, according to Chambers-Wallace, in Edinburgh. The story goes that Michie fell asleep drunk at a party in Burns's Edinburgh lodgings. Chambers gives Michie's first name as Ebenezer, not William and in line 1, his version reads ‘Eben Michie' (Chambers-Wallace, Vol. IV, p. 304).

This song is based on a traditional work (See Kinsley, Vol. III, p. 1245). The song is a robust defence of Scottish bagpipe and fiddle music, in contrast to ‘foreign squeels' of Italian and German music, then popular among many aristocrats of Scotland. The ‘royal ghaist' refers to King James I. Kinsley suggests that the song is a compliment to the brilliant Scots fiddler Neil Gow, ‘fir'd' or inspired by King James I. Burns met the great musician at Dunkeld, 31st August, 1787. It was Neil's son, Nathaniel Gow, who met Burns in Dumfries in 1793. Burns was a competent fiddler of slow airs, as Mrs Burns has recollected, but unable to play reels, jigs or strath-speys with any skill. This association of music with the national spirit was partly derived from Fergusson and Burns's letters are replete with his keen awareness for the ethnic identity of national music.

The poet's headnote reads ‘A verse composed and repeated by
Burns
, to the Master of the House, on taking leave at a place in the Highlands, where he had been hospitably entertained'. It was written on 2nd September, 1787, during the poet's Highland tour, when, accompanied by William Nicol, they dined at Dalnacardoch or Dalwhinnie.

This song appeared in the London
Morning Chronicle
just prior to being printed in Currie's edition. The political content of the first two stanzas may have led the
Chronicle
to print it. During his time in Edinburgh, Burns was invited to Castle Gordon by Jane Maxwell, the Duchess of Gordon. His visit occurred on 7th September, 1787. William Nicol did not attend the meeting with Alexander, Duke of Gordon, but stayed at the Inn in Fochabers and later refused to accompany Burns back to the Duke's castle. Burns sent the Duke this song as an apology for their non-appearance.

This work was supposed to have appeared with
Where
,
Braving
Angry Winter Storms
, in the second Volume of Johnson's S.M.M.
Margaret (Peggy) Chalmers did not want either song published and in this case, was successful. Burns appears, in so far as he was able, to have had a Platonic devotion to Peggy Chalmers which she did not reciprocate. Alluding to the awe he felt towards her he wrote, ‘I look on the sex [women in general] with something like the admiration with which I regard the starry sky in a frosty December night. I admire the beauty of the Creator's workmanship; I am charmed with the wild but graceful eccentricity of their motions, and – wish them, good night' (Letter 143). This was probably an apt metaphor for their relationship.

William Nicol (1744–97) was the classics master of Edinburgh High School. Originally from Annan, Nicol was one of the versatile and able sons of the people who educated themselves into the new professional middling classes of Edinburgh, having studied theology and medicine. He toured the Highlands with Burns and, being one of the poet's intimate friends, was honoured that Burns named one of his sons after the wayward Latin teacher. Scott Douglas makes the error of stating that Nicol outlived Burns by ‘some years' (Vol. 2, p. 332). Douglas meddled with the text and his amended text survives in Henley and Henderson (1896) and Mackay (1993).

Robert Dundas of Arniston (1713–87), Lord Advocate in 1754 and Lord President from 1760, died on 13th December, 1787. He was a brother of Henry Dundas, Lord Melville who ruled Scotland during the political storm of the 1790s. It was Alexander Wood, an Edinburgh surgeon who asked Burns to write an elegy on the death
of Dundas, not, as Scott Douglas suggests, Charles Hay, advocate. Aware that such an act might be seen to be a coded request for patronage from the Dundas dynasty, the poet felt considerable anxiety at the request but complied. He wrote, in retrospect to Alexander Cunningham, on 11th March, 1791:

There is a terrible historical and personal irony present in Burns's ill-judged, sycophantic, if unpublished, poem. Dundas's death, Scotland's perhaps ‘mortal wound', turns flood water into blood. In this stormy, apocalyptic landscape we see the degenerate breakdown of civil order due to political oppression, collapse of legality, criminality, and chronic poverty. It is perhaps, in theme and language, closest to
A Winter's Night
. For Burns and the radicals, this nightmare was to become, in the 1790s, not the consequence of this Dundas's death, but the very creation of his successors in the Dundas dynasty. Sadly the true Dundas poem of the 1790s,
The
Lucubrations of Henry Dundass
, exists only in its asinine title as the page was torn from Riddell's copy of the Interleaved S.M.M.