demeanour. "His manner was not prepossessing - scarcely, she
thinks, manly or natural. It seemed as if he affected a

rusticity or LANDERTNESS, so that when he said the music was
`bonnie, bonnie,' it was like the expression of a child."

These would be company manners; and doubtless on a slight
degree of intimacy the affectation would grow less. And his

talk to women had always "a turn either to the pathetic or
humorous, which engaged the attention particularly."

The Edinburgh magnates (to conclude this episode at once)
behaved well to Burns from first to last. Were heaven-born

genius to revisit us in similar guise, I am not venturing too
far when I say that he need expect neither so warm a welcome

nor such solid help. Although Burns was only a peasant, and
one of no very elegantreputation as to morals, he was made

welcome to their homes. They gave him a great deal of good
advice, helped him to some five hundred pounds of ready

money, and got him, as soon as he asked it, a place in the
Excise. Burns, on his part, bore the elevation with perfect

dignity; and with perfect dignity returned, when the time had
come, into a country privacy of life. His powerful sense

never deserted him, and from the first he recognised that his
Edinburgh popularity was but an ovation and the affair of a

day. He wrote a few letters in a high-flown, bombastic vein
of gratitude; but in practice he suffered no man to intrude

upon his self-respect. On the other hand, he never turned
his back, even for a moment, on his old associates; and he

was always ready to sacrifice an acquaintance to a friend,
although the acquaintance were a duke. He would be a bold

man who should promise similar conduct in equally exacting
circumstances. It was, in short, an admirable appearance on

the stage of life - socially successful, intimately self-
respecting, and like a gentleman from first to last.

In the present study, this must only be taken by the way,
while we return to Burns's love affairs. Even on the road to

Edinburgh he had seized upon the opportunity of a flirtation,
and had carried the "battering" so far that when next he

moved from town, it was to steal two days with this anonymous
fair one. The exact importance to Burns of this affair may

be gathered from the song in which he commemorated its
occurrence. "I love the dear lassie," he sings, "because she

loves me;" or, in the tongue of prose: "Finding an
opportunity, I did not hesitate to profit by it, and even

now, if it returned, I should not hesitate to profit by it
again." A love thus founded has no interest for mortal man.

Meantime, early in the winter, and only once, we find him
regretting Jean in his correspondence. "Because" - such is

his reason - "because he does not think he will ever meet so
delicious an armful again;" and then, after a brief excursion

into verse, he goes straight on to describe a new episode in
the voyage of discovery with the daughter of a Lothian farmer

for a heroine. I must ask the reader to follow all these
references to his future wife; they are essential to the

comprehension of Burns's character and fate. In June, we
find him back at Mauchline, a famous man. There, the Armour

family greeted him with a "mean, servile compliance," which
increased his former disgust. Jean was not less compliant; a

second time the poor girl submitted to the fascination of the
man whom she did not love, and whom she had so cruelly

insulted little more than a year ago; and, though Burns took
advantage of her weakness, it was in the ugliest and most

cynical spirit, and with a heart absolutelyindifferent judge
of this by a letter written some twenty days after his return

- a letter to my mind among the most degrading in the whole
collection - a letter which seems to have been inspired by a

boastful, libertine bagman. "I am afraid," it goes, "I have
almost ruined one source, the principal one, indeed, of my

former happiness - the eternal propensity I always had to
fall in love. My heart no more glows with feverish rapture;

I have no paradisiacal evening interviews." Even the process
of "battering" has failed him, you perceive. Still he had

some one in his eye - a lady, if you please, with a fine
figure and elegant manners, and who had "seen the politest

quarters in Europe." "I frequently visited her," he writes,
"and after passing regularly the intermediate degrees between

the distant formal bow and the familiar grasp round the
waist, I ventured, in my careless way, to talk of friendship

in rather ambiguous terms; and after her return to - , I
wrote her in the same terms. Miss, construing my remarks

further than even I intended, flew off in a tangent of female
dignity and reserve, like a mounting lark in an April

morning; and wrote me an answer which measured out very
completely what an immense way I had to travel before I could

reach the climate of her favours. But I am an old hawk at
the sport, and wrote her such a cool, deliberate, prudent

reply, as brought my bird from her aerial towerings, pop,
down to my foot, like Corporal Trim's hat." I avow a carnal

longing, after this transcription, to buffet the Old Hawk
about the ears. There is little question that to this lady

he must have repeated his addresses, and that he was by her
(Miss Chalmers) eventually, though not at all unkindly,

rejected. One more detail to characterise the period. Six
months after the date of this letter, Burns, back in

Edinburgh, is served with a writ IN MEDITATIONE FUGAE, on
behalf of some Edinburgh fair one, probably of humble rank,

who declared an intention of adding to his family.
About the beginning of December (1787), a new period opens in

the story of the poet's random affections. He met at a tea
party one Mrs. Agnes M'Lehose, a married woman of about his

own age, who, with her two children, had been deserted by an
unworthy husband. She had wit, could use her pen, and had

read WERTHER with attention. Sociable, and even somewhat
frisky, there was a good, sound, human kernel in the woman; a

warmth of love, strong dogmatic religious feeling, and a
considerable, but not authoritative, sense of the

proprieties. Of what biographers refer to daintily as "her
somewhat voluptuous style of beauty," judging from the

silhouette in Mr. Scott Douglas's invaluableedition, the
reader will be fastidious if he does not approve. Take her

for all in all, I believe she was the best woman Burns
encountered. The pair took a fancy for each other on the

spot; Mrs. M'Lehose, in her turn, invited him to tea; but the
poet, in his character of the Old Hawk, preferred a TETE-A-

TETE, excused himself at the last moment, and offered a visit
instead. An accident confined him to his room for nearly a

month, and this led to the famous Clarinda and Sylvander
correspondence. It was begun in simple sport; they are

already at their fifth or sixth exchange, when Clarinda
writes: "It is really curious so much FUN passing between two

persons who saw each other only ONCE;" but it is hardly safe
for a man and woman in the flower of their years to write

almost daily, and sometimes in terms too ambiguous, sometimes
in terms too plain, and generally in terms too warm, for mere

acquaintance. The exercise partakes a little of the nature
of battering, and danger may be apprehended when next they

meet. It is difficult to give any account of this remarkable
correspondence; it is too far away from us, and perhaps, not

yet far enough, in point of time and manner; the imagination
is baffled by these stilted literary utterances, warming, in

bravura passages, into downright truculent nonsense.
Clarinda has one famous sentence in which she bids Sylvander

connect the thought of his mistress with the changing phases
of the year; it was enthusiastically admired by the swain,

but on the modern mind produces mild amazement and alarm.
"Oh, Clarinda," writes Burns, "shall we not meet in a state -

some yet unknown state - of being, where the lavish hand of
Plenty shall minister to the highest wish of Benevolence, and