Two of the biographers of Burns have had the advantage of speaking from personal knowledge of the excellent man whose interposition was thus serviceable. "It was a fortunate circumstance," says Walker, “that the person whom Dr. Lawrie applied to, merely because he was the only one of his literary acquaintances with whom he chose to use that freedom, happened also to be the person best qualified to render the application successful. Dr. Blacklock was an enthusiast in his admiration of an art which he had practised himself with applause. He felt the claims of a poet with a paternal sympathy, and he had in his constitution a tenderness and sensibility that would have engaged his beneficence for a youth in the circumstances of Burns, even though he had not been indebted to him for the delight which he received from his works; for if the young men were enumerated whom he drew from obscurity, and enabled by education to advance themselves in life, the catalogue would naturally excite surprise. . . . He was not of a disposition to discourage with feeble praise, and to shift off the trouble of future patronage, by bidding him relinquish poetry, and mind his plough.": 1 "There was never, perhaps," thus speaks the unfortunate Heron, whose own unmerited sorrows and sufferings would not have left so dark a stain on the literary history of Scotland, had the kind spirit of Blacklock been common among his lettered countrymen-“There was never, perhaps, one among all mankind whom you might more truly have called an angel upon earth, than Dr. Blacklock. He was guileless and innocent as a child, yet endowed with manly sagacity and penetration. His heart was a perpetual 1 Morison, vol. i., p. 9. In the same passage Mr. Walker contrasts Blacklock's conduct to Burns with Walpole's to Chatterton. If the Professor had ever read Walpole's defence of himself, he could not have fallen into this once common, but now exploded, error. spring of benignity. His feelings were all tremblingly alive to the sense of the sublime, the beautiful, the tender, the pious, the virtuous. Poetry was to him the dear solace of perpetual blindness.” 1 Such was the amiable old man, whose life Mackenzie has written, and on whom Johnson "looked with reverence." The writings of Blacklock are forgotten (though some of his songs in "The Museum" deserve another fate), but the memory of his virtues will not pass away until mankind shall have ceased to sympathize with the fortunes of genius, and to appreciate the poetry of Burns. "This morning I saw at breakfast Dr. Blacklock the blind poet, who does not remember to have seen light, and is read to by a poor scholar in Latin, Greek, and French. He was originally a poor scholar himself. I looked on him with reverence."-Letter to Mrs. Thrale, Edinburgh, August 17, 1773. CHAPTER V. "Edina! Scotia's darling seat! : `HERE is an old Scottish ballad which begins thus : THE "As I came in by Glenap, I met with an aged woman, And she bade me cheer up my heart, For the best of my days was coming." This stanza was one of Burns's favourite quotations; and he told a friend1 many years afterwards, that he remembered humming it to himself, over and over, on his way from Mossgiel to Edinburgh. Perhaps the excellent 2 ' David McCulloch, Esq., brother to the laird of Ardwell [whose sister Elizabeth was the wife of Sir Walter Scott's younger brother, Thomas. While a citizen of Dumfries, the poet became intimate with David]. 2 [Dr. Currie, in his first edition, recorded that this journey was performed on foot in the course of two days. In that particular his informant was Gilbert Burns-so little did the one brother, although living in the same house together, know the ways and means of the other. On this occasion the poet was well-mounted and attired—an excellent horse having been lent to him by a brother farmer, who, on observing the error of fact in Currie's "Memoir," immediately commu Blacklock might not have been particularly flattered with the circumstance had it reached his ears. Although he repaired to the capital with such alertness, solely, as has been alleged, in consequence of Blacklock's letter to Lawrie, it appears that he allowed some weeks to pass ere he presented himself to the Doctor's personal notice.' He found several of his old Ayrshire acquaintances established in Edinburgh, and, I suppose, felt himself constrained to give himself up for a brief space to their society. He printed, however, without delay, a prospectus of a second edition of his poems, and being introduced by Mr. Dalrymple of Orangefield to the Earl of Glencairn, that amiable nobleman easily persuaded Creech, then the chief bookseller in Edinburgh (who had once been his own travelling-tator), to undertake the publication. The honourable Henry Erskine, Dean of the Faculty of Advocates, the most agreeable of companions, and the most benignant of wits, took him also, as the poet expresses it, "under his wing." The kind Blacklock received him with all the warmth of paternal affection when he did wait on him, and introduced him to Dr. Blair, and other eminent literati; his subscription lists were soon filled; Lord Glencairn made interest with the Caledonian Hunt (an associa nicated with Gilbert correcting the mistake. Gilbert duly announced the correction to Currie, who, however, took a lazy and ineffectual method of rectifying the gross blunder by merely deleting those six words-" having performed his journey on foot." The consequence was that for half a century thereafter the mistake was perpetuated, and in a famously annotated edition of Currie produced by Chambers in 1838, we are told, on the alleged authority of John Richmond, the bard's bedfellow, this additional "fact: ". "The poet was so knocked up by his walk from Mauchline to Edinburgh, that he could not leave his room for two days!"] 1 Burns reached Edinburgh before the end of November; and yet Dr. Lawrie's letter (General Correspondence, p. 37), admonishing him to vait on Blacklock, is dated December 22. tion of the most distinguished members of the northern aristocracy), to accept the dedication of the forthcoming edition, and to subscribe individually for copies. Several noblemen, especially of the west of Scotland, came forward with subscription-moneys considerably beyond the usual rate. In so small a capital, where everybody knows everybody, that which becomes a favourite topic in one circle of society, soon excites an universal interest; and before Burns had been a fortnight in Edinburgh, we find him writing to his earliest patron, Gavin Hamilton, in these terms :—“ For my own affairs, I am in a fair way of becoming as eminent as Thomas à Kempis or John Bunyan; and you may expect henceforth to see my birthday inscribed among the wonderful events in the Poor Robin and Aberdeen Almanacks, along with the Black Monday, and the Battle of Bothwell Bridge." Dec. 7th, 1786. 66 It will ever be remembered, to the honour of the man who at that period held the highest place in the imaginative literature of Scotland, that he was the first who came forward to avow in print his admiration of the genius, and his warm interest in the fortunes, of the poet. Distinguished as his own writings are by the refinements of classical arts, Mr. Henry Mackenzie was, fortunately for Burns, a man of liberal genius, as well as polished taste; and he, in whose own pages some of the best models of elaborate elegance will ever be recognized, was among the first to feel, and the first to stake his own reputation on the public avowal, that the Ayrshire ploughman belonged to the order of beings whose privilege it is to snatch graces "beyond the reach of art." It is but a melancholy business to trace among the records of literary history, the manner in which most great original geniuses have been greeted on their first appeals to the world, by the contemporary arbiters of taste; coldly and timidly indeed have the sympathies of professional criticism flowed on most such occasions in past |