On her return, one or two more
letters Burns wrote to her in the old exaggerated strain--the last in
June, 1794--after which Clarinda disappears from the scene.

Other Delilahs on a smaller scale Burns met with during his Dumfries
sojourn, and to these he was ever and anon addressing songs of fancied
love. By the attentions which the wayward husband was continually
paying to ladies and others into whose society his wife could not
accompany him, the patience of "bonny Jean," it may easily be
conceived, must have been severely tried.

It would have been well, however, if stray flirtations and Platonic
affections had been all that could be laid to his charge. But there is
a darker story. The facts of it are told by Chambers in connexion with
the earlier part of the Dumfries period, and need not be repeated
here. Mrs. Burns is said to have been a marvel of long-suffering and
forgivingness; but the way she bore those wrongs must have touched her
husband's better nature, and pierced him to the quick. When his calmer
moments came, that very mildness must have made him feel, as (p. 142)
nothing else could, what self-reproach was, and what

Self-contempt bitterer to drink than blood.

To the pangs of that remorse have, I doubt not, been truly attributed
those bitter outpourings of disgust with the world and with society,
which are to be found in some of his letters, especially in those of
his later years. Some samples of these outbreaks have been given, more
might easily have been added. The injuries he may have received from
the world and society, what were they compared with those which he
could not help feeling that he had inflicted on himself? It is when a
man's own conscience is against him that the world looks worst.

During the first year at Dumfries, Burns for the first time began to
dabble in politics, which ere long landed him in serious trouble.
Before this, though he had passed for a sort of Jacobite, he had been
in reality a Whig. While he lived in Edinburgh he had consorted more
with Whigs than with Tories, but yet he had not in any marked way
committed himself as a partisan. The only exception to this were some
expressions in his poetry favourable to the Stuarts, and his avowed
dislike to the Brunswick dynasty. Yet, notwithstanding these, his
Jacobitism was but skin deep. It was only with him, as with so many
another Scot of that day, the expression of his discontent with the
Union of 1707,