his brother from Edinburgh is more meagre even than his
journal, being simply a catalogue of the places visited. 'Warm as I was
from Ossian's country,' he remarks, 'what cared I for fishing towns or
fertile carses?' Yet although the journal reads now and again like a
railway time-table, we come across references which give proof of the
poet's abounding interest in the locality of Scottish Song; and it was
probably the case, as Professor Blackie writes, that 'such a lover of
the pure Scottish Muse could not fail when wandering from glen to glen
to pick up fragments of traditional song, which, without his sympathetic
touch, would probably have been lost.'

Burns's wanderings were not yet, however, at an end. Probably he had
expected on his return to Edinburgh some settlement with Creech, and was
disappointed. Perhaps he was eager to revisit some places or
people--Peggy Chalmers, no doubt--without being hampered in his
movements by such a companion as Nicol. Anyhow, we find him setting out
again on a tour through Clackmannan and Perthshire with his friend Dr.
Adair, a warm but somewhat injudicious admirer of the poet's genius. It
was probably about the beginning of October that the two left
Edinburgh, going round by Stirling to Harvieston, where they remained
about ten days, and made excursions to the various parts of the
surrounding scenery. The Caldron Linn and Rumbling Bridge were
revisited, and they went to see Castle Campbell, the ancient seat of the
family of Argyle. 'I am surprised,' the doctor ingenuously remarks,
'that none of these scenes should have called forth an exertion of
Burns's muse. But I doubt if he had much taste for the picturesque.' One
wonders whether Dr. Adair had actually read the published poems. What a
picture it must have been to see the party dragging Burns about,
pointing out the best views, and then breathlessly waiting for a torrent
of verse. The verses came afterwards, but they were addressed, not to
the Ochils or the Devon, but to Peggy Chalmers.

From Harvieston he went to Ochtertyre on the Teith to visit Mr. Ramsay,
a reputed lover of Scottish literature; and thence he proceeded to
Ochtertyre in Strathearn, in order to visit Sir William Murray.

In a letter to Dr. Currie, Mr. Ramsay speaks thus of Burns on this
visit: 'I have been in the company of many men of genius, some of them
poets, but never witnessed such flashes of intellectual brightness, the
impulse of the moment, sparks of