is required than toil
of hand to make a successful farmer, nor will the attention bestowed
only by fits and starts, compensate for carelessness or oversight:
frugality, not in one thing but in all, is demanded, in small matters
as well as in great, while a careful mind and a vigilant eye must
superintend the labours of servants, and the whole system of in-door
and out-door economy. Now, during the three years which Burns stayed
in Ellisland, he neither wrought with that constant diligence which
farming demands, nor did he bestow upon it the unremitting attention
of eye and mind which such a farm required: besides his skill in
husbandry was but moderate--the rent, though of his own fixing, was
too high for him and for the times; the ground, though good, was not
so excellent as he might have had on the same estate--he employed more
servants than the number of acres demanded, and spread for them a
richer board than common: when we have said this we need not add the
expensive tastes induced by poetry, to keep readers from starting,
when they are told that Burns, at the close of the third year of
occupation, resigned his lease to the landlord, and bade farewell for
ever to the plough. He was not, however, quite desolate; he had for a
year or more been appointed on the excise, and had superintended a
district extending to ten large parishes, with applause; indeed, it
has been assigned as the chief reason for failure in his farm, that
when the plough or the sickle summoned him to the field, he was to be
found, either pursuing the defaulters of the revenue, among the
valleys of Dumfrieshire, or measuring out pastoral verse to the
beauties of the land. He retired to a house in the Bank-vennel of
Dumfries, and commenced a town-life: he commenced it with an empty
pocket, for Ellisland had swallowed up all the profits of his poems:
he had now neither a barn to produce meal nor barley, a barn-yard to
yield a fat hen, a field to which he could go at Martinmas for a mart,
nor a dairy to supply milk and cheese and butter to the table--he had,
in short, all to buy and little to buy with. He regarded it as a
compensation that he had no farm-rent to provide, no bankruptcies to
dread, no horse to keep, for his excise duties were now confined to
Dumfries, and that the burthen of a barren farm was removed from his
mind, and his muse at liberty to renew her unsolicited strains.

But from the day of his departure from "the barren" Ellisland,