on
their own account a lease of the small farm of Mossgiel, about two or
three miles distant from Lochlea, in the parish of Mauchline. When
their father died in February, 1784, it was only by claiming the
arrears of wages due to them, and ranking among their father's
creditors, that they saved enough from the domestic wreck, to stock
their new farm. Thither they conveyed their widowed mother, and their
younger brothers and sisters, in March, 1784. Their new home was a
bare upland farm, 118 acres of cold clay-soil, lying within a mile of
Mauchline village. Burns entered on it with a firm resolution to be
prudent, industrious, and thrifty. In his own words, "I read farming
books, I calculated crops, I attended markets, and, in short, in spite
of the devil, the world, and the flesh, I should have been a wise man;
but the first year from unfortunately buying bad seed--the second,
from a late harvest, we lost half our crops. This overset all my
wisdom, and I returned like the dog to his vomit, and the sow that was
washed to her wallowing in the mire." Burns was in the beginning (p. 016)
of his twenty-sixth year when he took up his abode at Mossgiel, where
he remained for four years. Three things those years and that bare
moorland farm witnessed,--the wreck of his hopes as a farmer, the
revelation of his genius as a poet, and the frailty of his character
as a man. The result of the immoral habits and "liberal opinions"
which he had learnt at Irvine were soon apparent in that event of
which he speaks in his _Epistle to John Rankine_ with such unbecoming
levity. In the Chronological Edition of his works it is painful to
read on one page the pathetic lines which he engraved on his father's
headstone, and a few pages on, written almost at the same time, the
epistle above alluded to, and other poems in the same strain, in which
the defiant poet glories in his shame. It was well for the old man
that he was laid in Alloway Kirkyard before these things befell. But
the widowed mother had to bear the burden, and to receive in her home
and bring up the child that should not have been born. When silence
and shame would have most become him, Burns poured forth his feelings
in ribald verses, and bitterly satirized the parish minister, who
required him to undergo that public penance which the discipline of
the Church at that time exacted. Whether this was a wise discipline or
not, no blame attached to the minister, who merely carried out