. His associates seem to have been
rather confined to men of the Ainslie and Nicol stamp. He would seem
also to have amused himself with flirtations with several young
heroines, whose acquaintance he had made during the previous summer.
The chief of these were two young ladies, Miss Margaret Chalmers and
Miss Charlotte Hamilton, cousins of each other, and relatives of his
Mauchline friend, Gavin Hamilton. These he had met during the two
visits which he paid to Harvieston, on the river Devon, where they
were living for a time. On his return to Edinburgh he continued to
correspond with them both, and to address songs of affection, if not
of love, now to one, now to another. To Charlotte Hamilton he
addressed the song beginning,--

How pleasant the banks of the clear winding Devon;

To Miss Chalmers, one with the opening lines,--

Where, braving angry winter's storms,
The lofty Ochils rise;

And another beginning thus,--

My Peggy's face, my Peggy's form.

Which of these young ladies was foremost in Burns's affection, it is
not easy now to say, nor does it much signify. To both he wrote some
of his best letters, and some of not his best verses. Allan (p. 081)
Cunningham thinks that he had serious affection for Miss Hamilton. The
latest editor of his works asserts that his heart was set on Miss
Chalmers, and that she, long afterwards in her widowhood, told Thomas
Campbell the poet, that Burns had made a proposal of marriage to her.
However this may be, it is certain that while both admitted him to
friendship, neither encouraged his advances. They were better "advised
than to do so." Probably they knew too much of his past history and
his character to think of him as a husband. Both were soon after this
time married to men more likely to make them happy than the erratic
poet. When they turned a deaf ear to his addresses, he wrote: "My
rhetoric seems to have lost all its effect on the lovely half of
mankind; I have seen the day, but that is a tale of other years. In my
conscience, I believe, that my heart has been so often on fire that it
has been vitrified!" Well perhaps for him if it had been so, such
small power had he to guide it. Just about the time when he found
himself rejected, notwithstanding all his fine letters and his verses,
by the two young ladies on Devon banks, he met with an accident
through the upsetting of a hackney coach by a drunken driver. The