his circumstances during his later years rendered
simply impossible. From the first he had seen that his farm would (p. 127)
not pay, and each succeeding year confirmed him in this conviction. To
escape what he calls "the crushing grip of poverty, which, alas! I
fear, is less or more fatal to the worth and purity of the noblest
souls," he had, within a year after entering Ellisland, recourse to
Excise work. This he did from a stern sense of duty to his wife and
family. It was, in fact, one of the most marked instances in which
Burns, contrary to his too frequent habit, put pride in his pocket,
and sacrificed inclination to duty. But that he had not accepted the
yoke without some painful sense of degradation, is shown by the
bitterness of many of his remarks, when in his correspondence he
alludes to the subject. There were, however, times when he tried to
take a brighter view of it, and to persuade himself, as he says in a
letter to Lady Harriet Don, that "one advantage he had in this new
business was the knowledge it gave him of the various shades of
character in man--consequently assisting him in his trade as a poet."
But, alas! whatever advantages in this way it might have brought, were
counteracted tenfold by other circumstances that attended it. The
continual calls of a responsible business, itself sufficient to occupy
a man,--when divided with the oversight of his farm, overtasked his
powers, and left him no leisure for poetic work, except from time to
time crooning over a random song. Then the habits which his roving
Excise life must have induced were, even to a soul less social than
that of Burns, perilous in the extreme. The temptations he was in this
way exposed to, Lockhart has drawn with a powerful hand. "From the
castle to the cottage, every door flew open at his approach; and the
old system of hospitality, then flourishing, rendered it difficult
for the most soberly inclined guest to rise from any man's board (p. 128)
in the same trim that he sat down to it. The farmer, if Burns was seen
passing, left his reapers, and trotted by the side of Jenny Geddes,
until he could persuade the bard that the day was hot enough to demand
an extra libation. If he entered an inn at midnight, after all the
inmates were in bed, the news of his arrival circulated from the
cellar to the garret; and ere ten minutes had elapsed, the landlord
and all his guests were assembled round the ingle; the largest
punch-bowl was produce