afterwards, through the
carelessness of a drunken coachman, he was thrown from a carriage, and
had his knee severely bruised. The latter was an accident that kept him
confined to his room for a time, and from which he quickly recovered;
but the meeting with Mrs. Maclehose was a serious matter, and for both,
most unfortunate in its results.

It was while he was 'on the rack of his present agony' that the
Sylvander-Clarinda correspondence was begun and continued. That much
may be said in excuse for Burns. A man, especially one with the passion
and sensitiveness of a poet, cannot be expected to write in all sanity
when he is racked by the pain of an injured limb. Certainly the poet
does not show up in a pleasant light in this absurd interchange of
gasping epistles; nor does Mrs. Maclehose. 'I like the idea of Arcadian
names in a commerce of this kind,' he unguardedly admits. The most
obvious comment that occurs to the mind of the reader is that they ought
never to have been written. It is a pity they were written; more than a
pity they were ever published. It seems a terrible thing that, merely to
gratify the morbid curiosity of the world, the very love-letters of a
man of genius should be made public. Is there nothing sacred in the
lives of our great men? 'Did I imagine,' Burns remarked to Mrs. Basil
Montagu in Dumfries, 'that one half of the letters which I have written
would be published when I die, I would this moment recall them and burn
them without redemption.'

After all, what was gained by publishing this correspondence? It adds
literally nothing to our knowledge of the poet. He could have, and has,
given more of himself in a verse than he gives in the whole series of
letters signed Sylvander. Occasionally he is natural in them, but
rarely. 'I shall certainly be ashamed of scrawling whole sheets of
incoherence.' We trust he was. The letters are false in sentiment,
stilted in diction, artificial in morality. We have a picture of the
poet all through trying to batter himself into a passion he does not
feel, into love of an accomplished and intellectual woman; while in his
heart's core is registered the image of Jean Armour, the mother of his
children. He shows his paces before Clarinda and tears passion to
tatters in inflated prose; he poses as a stylist, a moralist, a
religious enthusiast, a poet, a man of the world, and now and again
accidentally he assumes the face and figure of Robert Burns. We read and
wonde