lever, witty, not without some
tincture of letters, and some turn for verse-making. She and her
husband welcomed the poet to Woodley Park, where for two years he was
a constant and favourite guest. The lady's wit and literary taste
found, it may be believed, no other so responsive spirit in all the
south of Scotland. In the third year came a breach in their
friendship, followed by a savage lampoon of Burns on the lady, because
she did not at once accept his apology; then, a period of
estrangement. After an interval, however, the Riddels forgave the
insult, and were reconciled to the poet, and when the end came, Mrs.
Riddel did her best to befriend him, and to do honour to his memory
when he was gone.
It ought perhaps to have been mentioned before, that about the time of
Burns's first settling at Dumfries, that is towards the close of 1791,
he paid his last visit to Edinburgh. It was occasioned by the news
that Clarinda was about to sail for the West Indies, in search of the
husband who had forsaken her. Since Burns's marriage the silence
between them seems to have been broken by only two letters to Clarinda
from Ellisland. In the first of these he resents the name of
"villain," with which she appears to have saluted him. In the second
he admits that his past conduct had been wrong, but concludes by
repeating his error and enclosing a song addressed to her in the most
exaggerated strain of love. Now he rushed to Edinburgh to see her once
more before she sailed. The interview was a brief and hurried one, and
no record of it remains, except some letters and a few impassioned
lyrics which about that time he addressed to her. The first letter is
stiff and formal, as if to break the ice of long estrangement. The
others are in the last strain of rapturous devotion--language (p. 141)
which, if feigned, is the height of folly; if real, is worse. The
lyrics are some of them strained and artificial. One, however, stands
out from all the rest, as one of the most impassioned effusions that
Burns ever poured forth. It contains that one consummate stanza in
which Scott, Byron, and many more, saw concentrated "the essence of a
thousand love-tales,"--
Had we never loved so kindly,
Had we never loved so blindly;
Never met, or never parted,
We had ne'er been broken-hearted.
After a time Mrs. M'Lehose returned from the West Indies, but without
having recovered her truant husband.
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