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of my youthful days, and I own that I should be much flattered to see the verses set to an air which would insure celebrity. Perhaps, after all, 'tis the still glowing prejudice of my heart that throws a borrowed lustre over the merits of the composition.

I have partly taken your idea of Auld Rob Morris. I have adopted the two first verses, and am going on with the song on a new plan, which promises pretty well. I take up one or another, just as the bee of the moment buzzes in my bonnet-lug; and do you, sans cérémonie, make what use you choose of the productions. Adieu, &c.

In those days, the little theatre of Dumfries was pretty regularly open each winter, under the care of a Mr Sutherland, whom we have already seen Burns patronising while he resided at Ellisland. In the corps dramatique was a Miss Fontenelle, a smart and pretty little creature, who played Little Pickle in the Spoiled Child, and other such characters. Burns admired the performances of Miss Fontenelle, and was disposed to befriend her. We find him taxing his Muse in her behalf.

THE RIGHTS OF WOMAN,

AN OCCASIONAL ADDRESS SPOKEN BY MISS FONTENELLE ON HER BENEFIT-NIGHT

[Nov. 26, 1792.]1

While Europe's eye is fixed on mighty things,

The fate of empires and the fall of kings;

While quacks of state must each produce his plan,
And even children lisp the Rights of Man;
Amid this mighty fuss just let me mention,
The Rights of Woman merit some attention.

First, in the sexes' intermixed connection,
One sacred Right of Woman is-Protection.
The tender flower that lifts its head, elate,
Helpless, must fall before the blasts of fate,
Sunk on the earth, defaced its lovely form,
Unless your shelter ward th' impending storm.

Our second Right-but needless here is caution,
To keep that right inviolate's the fashion,
Each man of sense has it so full before him,

He'd die before he'd wrong it 'tis Decorum.

'The bill of the night announces The Country Girl as the play, and that, thereafter, 'Miss Fontenelle will deliver a new Occasional Address, written by Mr Robert Burns, called The Rights of Woman.'-Dumfries Times Newspaper.

There was, indeed, in far less polished days,
A time when rough rude man had naughty ways;
Would swagger, swear, get drunk, kick up a riot,
Nay, even thus invade a lady's quiet.

Now, thank our stars! these Gothic times are fled;
Now, well-bred men-and you are all well-bred-
Most justly think (and we are much the gainers)
Such conduct neither spirit, wit, nor manners.'

For Right the third, our last, our best, our dearest,
That right to fluttering female hearts the nearest,
Which even the Rights of Kings in low prostration
Most humbly own-tis dear, dear Admiration!
In that blest sphere alone we live and move;
There taste that life of life-immortal love.
Smiles, glances, sighs, tears, fits, flirtations, airs,
'Gainst such an host what flinty savage dares-
When awful Beauty joins with all her charms,
Who is so rash as rise in rebel arms?

But truce with kings and truce with constitutions,
With bloody armaments and revolutions,
Let majesty your first attention summon,
Ah! ça ira! THE MAJESTY OF WOMAN!

TO MISS FONTENELLE.

MADAM-In such a bad world as ours, those who add to the scanty sum of our pleasures are positively our benefactors. To you, madam, on our humble Dumfries boards, I have been more indebted for entertainment than ever I was in prouder theatres. Your charms as a woman would insure applause to the most indifferent actress, and your theatrical talents would insure admiration to the plainest figure. This, madam, is not the unmeaning or insidious compliment of the frivolous or interested; I pay it from the same honest impulse that the sublime of nature excites my admiration, or her beauties give me delight.

Will the foregoing lines be of any service to you in your approaching benefit-night? If they will, I shall be prouder of my Muse than ever. They are nearly extempore: I know they have no great merit; but though they should add but little to the entertainment of the evening, they give me the happiness of an opportunity to declare how much I have the honour to be, &c.

R. B.

'An ironical allusion to the annual saturnalia of the Caledonian Hunt at Dumfries.

TO MISS FONTENELLE, ON SEEING HER IN A
CHARACTER.

FAVOURITE

Sweet naïveté of feature,

Simple, wild, enchanting elf,
Not to thee, but thanks to Nature,
Thou art acting but thyself.

Wert thou awkward, stiff, affected,
Spurning nature, torturing art;
Loves and graces all rejected,

Then indeed thou 'dst act a part.

The November of this year-the time when his daughter was given to him, and when he found leisure and spirits to attend the theatre and confer on a favourite actress the help of his penappears to have been a period of darkness with Burns. We can see in some of his letters of this period the contortions of a spirit which felt itself under an unworthy bondage, and altogether out of harmony with circumstances.

Mrs Riddel was about to bespeak a play at the theatre:

TO MRS RIDDE L.

I am thinking to send my Address to some periodical publication, but it has not got your sanction; so pray look over it.

As to the Tuesday's play, let me beg of you, my dear madam, to give us The Wonder, a Woman keeps a Secret! to which please add the Spoiled Child-you will highly oblige me by so doing.

Ah, what an enviable creature you are! There now, this cursed gloomy blue-devil day, you are going to a party of choice spiritsTo play the shapes

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Of frolic fancy, and incessant form

Those rapid pictures, an assembled train

Of fleet ideas, never joined before,
Where lively wit excites to gay surprise;

Or folly-painting humour, grave himself,

Calls laughter forth, deep shaking every nerve.'

But as you rejoice with them that do rejoice, do also remember to weep with them that weep, and pity your melancholy friend,

R. B.

Another lady had agreed to honour a benefit with her patronage :

то

MADAM-You were so very good as to promise me to honour my friend with your presence on his benefit-night. That night is fixed for Friday first: the play a most interesting one-The Way to Keep

Him. I have the pleasure to know Mr G. well. His merit as an actor is generally acknowledged. He has genius and worth which would do honour to patronage: he is a poor and modest man; claims which, from their very silence, have the more forcible power on the generous heart. Alas, for Pity! that from the indolence of those who have the good things of this life in their gift, too often does brazen-fronted Importunity snatch that boon, the rightful due of retiring, humble Want! Of all the qualities we assign to the Author and Director of Nature, by far the most enviable is, to be able to wipe away all tears from all eyes.' O what insignificant, sordid wretches are they, however Chance may have loaded them with wealth, who go to their graves, to their magnificent mausoleums, with hardly the consciousness of having made one poor honest heart happy!

But I crave your pardon, madam; I came to beg, not to preach.

R. B.

The actor for whom Burns thus pleaded was a Mr Grant. The bard testified the esteem which glows in these lines, by giving him as a present the masonic apron which he had got from Mr Sharpe of Hoddam. One can readily understand how Burns would sympathise with the wandering children of Thespis, fellow-soldiers in the guerilla bands of Poverty fighting with Fortune. He seems at all times to have fallen easily and kindly into their society.

TO MRS RIDDE L.

I will wait on you, my ever-valued friend, but whether in the morning, I am not sure. Sunday closes a period of our curst revenue business, and may probably keep me employed with my pen until noon. Fine employment for a poet's pen! There is a species of the human genius that I call the gin-horse class: what enviable dogs they are! Round, and round, and round they go. Mundell's ox, that drives his cotton-mill," is their exact prototype-without an idea or wish beyond their circle-fat, sleek, stupid, patient, quiet, and contented; while here I sit, altogether Novemberish, a dmelange of fretfulness and melancholy; not enough of the one to rouse me to passion, nor of the other to repose me in torpor; my soul flouncing and fluttering round her tenement, like a wild-finch,

1

Grant, while acting at Whitehaven in 1810, gave the apron to Mr Edwin Holwell Heywood, solicitor there, nephew of the Peter Heywood of celebrity in the affair of the mutiny of the Bounty. The son of this gentleman, resident in the Isle of Man, now possesses it.

A small cotton-mill, belonging to a Mr Mundell, was at this time in full activity in Dumfries.

caught amid the horrors of winter, and newly thrust into a cage. Well, I am persuaded that it was of me the Hebrew sage prophesied, when he foretold—' And, behold, on whatsoever this man doth set his heart, it shall not prosper!' If my resentment is awaked, it is sure to be where it dare not squeak; and if— *

*

Pray that Wisdom and Bliss be more frequent visitors of

R. B.

It is somewhat startling to find this sudden access of melancholy in the midst of a bustling routine of business which left little time for meditation, and while the Muse was eager to use every spare moment for those pastoral effusions which so much gratified Mr Thomson. The source of the evil does not seem to have been in any part of the external lot of Burns. Again 'MOI-MEME' was his worst enemy.

In the summer of 1790, as well as in that of the subsequent year, Mrs Burns had left her husband for several weeks, while she visited her father and mother at Mauchline. It was natural for the young wife to desire to spend a little time with her own relations, and to shew them her thriving young brood; but it was an injudicious step for the wife of such a husband: it tended to break the good domestic habits which for some time our poet had been forming. His sister Agnes, who had been at Ellisland from the beginning superintending the dairy, used to say that she never knew him fail to keep good hours at night till the first unlucky absence of her sister-in-law in Ayrshire. When there is no loved one at the fireside to be pleased by a husband's carly return to that region of connubial happiness, one great reason for regularity in the life of the husband is wanting. When a wife is long absent, the loyalty of the most devoted husbands will be apt in some degree to abate. These dangers were particularly great in the case of a social-spirited, impressionable man like Robert Burns, of whom we have seen his brother state, with regard to his bachelor loves, that 'while one was reigning paramount in his affections, he was frequently encountering other attractions, which formed so many under-plots in the drama of his love.' That openness to a succession of new and supervening passions which had been closed since his marriage two years before, appears to have been renewed during the absence of the legitimate divinity. Burns, in short-and it scems best to be at once brief and explicit-forgot on this occasion a sacred obligation, and established what was to him a source of distressful recollection for the remainder of his life. The story is one of bitterness and humiliation to all the admirers

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