the Muses. He had already got ranked on
the list as supervisor, an appointment that he reckoned might be worth
one hundred or two hundred pounds a year; and this determined him to
quit the farm entirely, and to try to make a living by one profession.
As farmer, exciseman, and poet he had tried too much, and even a man of
his great capacity for work was bound to have succumbed under the
strain. Even had the farm not proved the ruinous bargain it did, we
imagine that he must have been compelled sooner or later to relinquish
one of the two, either his farm or his Excise commission. Circumstances
decided for him, and in December 1791 he sold by auction his stock and
implements, and removed to Dumfries, 'leaving nothing at Ellisland but a
putting-stone, with which he loved to exercise his strength; a memory of
his musings, which can never die; and three hundred pounds of his money,
sunk beyond redemption in a speculation from which all augured
happiness.'

CHAPTER VIII

DUMFRIES

When Burns removed from Ellisland to Dumfries, he took up his abode in a
small house of three apartments in the Wee Vennel. Here he stayed till
Whitsunday 1793, when the family removed to a detached house of two
storeys in the Mill Vennel. A mere closet nine feet square was the
poet's writing-room in this house, and it was in the bedroom adjoining
that he died.

The few years of his residence in Dumfries have been commonly regarded
as a period of poverty and intemperance. But his intemperance has always
been most religiously exaggerated, and we doubt not also that the
poverty of the family at this time has been made to appear worse than it
was. Burns had not a salary worthy of his great abilities, it is true,
but there is good reason to believe that the family lived in comparative
ease and comfort, and that there were luxuries in their home, which
neither father nor mother had known in their younger days. Burns liked
to see his Bonnie Jean neat and trim, and she went as braw as any wife
of the town. Though we know that he wrote painfully, towards the end of
his life, for the loan of paltry sums, we are to regard this as a sign
more of temporary embarrassment than of a continual struggle to make
ends meet. The word debt grated so harshly on Burns's ears that he
could not be at peace with himself so long as the pettiest account
remained unpaid; and if he had no ready money in his hands to meet it,
he must e'en borrow from a friend. His in