nd made the
hint out of which a new and original song was woven. At other times
they were entirely original both in subject and in expression, though
cast in the form of the ancient minstrelsy. Among so many and so
rapidly succeeding efforts, it was only now and then, when a happier
moment of inspiration was granted him, that there came forth one song
of supreme excellence, perfect alike in conception and in expression.
The consummate song of this summer, 1789, was _John Anderson my Jo,
John_, just as _Auld Lang Syne_ and _The Silver Tassie_ had been those
of the former year.

During the remainder of the year 1789 Burns seems to have continued
more or less in the mood of mind indicated by the lines _To Mary in
Heaven_. He was suffering from nervous derangement, and this, as usual
with him, made him despondent. This is the way in which he writes to
Mrs. Dunlop on the 13th December, 1789:--

"I am groaning under the miseries of a diseased nervous system--a
system, the state of which is most conducive to our happiness, or the
most productive of our misery. For now near three weeks I have been so
ill with a nervous headache, that I have been obliged for a time to
give up my Excise-books, being scarce able to lift my head, much (p. 115)
less to ride once a week over ten muir parishes. What is man?..."

And then he goes on to moralize in a half-believing, half-doubting
kind of way, on the probability of a life to come, and ends by
speaking of or rather apostrophizing Jesus Christ in a strain which
would seem to savour of Socinianism. This letter he calls "a
distracted scrawl which the writer dare scarcely read." And yet it
appears to have been deliberately copied with some amplification from
an entry in his last year's commonplace book. Even the few passages
from his correspondence already given are enough to show that there
was in Burns's letter-writing something strained and artificial. But
such discoveries as this seem to reveal an extent of effort, and even
of artifice, which one would hardly otherwise have guessed at.

In the same strain of harassment as the preceding extract, but
pointing to another and more definite cause of it, is the following,
written on the 20th December, 1789, to Provost Maxwell of Lochmaben:--

"My poor distracted mind is so torn, so jaded, so racked and
bedevilled with the task of the superlatively damned, to make one
guinea do the business of three, that I detest, abhor, and swoon at
th