Scotland/Scots > Life of Robert Burns

ROBERT BURNS. 95
While his sheets were in the press, (June-July
1786), it appears that his friends, Hamilton and
Aiken, revolved various schemes for procuring him
the means of remaining in Scotland; and having
studied some of the practical branches of mathe¬
matics, as we have seen, and in particular gauging,
it occurred to himself that a situation in the Ex¬
cise might be better suited to him than any other
he was at all likely to obtain by the intervention
of such patrons as he possessed.
He appears to have lingered longer after the
publication of the poems than one might suppose
from his own narrative, in the hope that these
gentlemen might at length succeed in their ef¬
forts in his behalf. The poems were received with
favour, even with rapture, in Ayrshire, and ere
long over the adjoining counties.—“ Old and
young,” thus speaks Robert Heron, “ high and
low, grave and gay, learned or ignorant, were alike
delighted, agitated, transported. I was at that
time resident in Galloway, contiguous to Ayrshire,
and I can well remember how even ploughboys
and maid-servants would have gladly bestowed
the wages they earned the most hardly, and which
they wanted to purchase necessary clothing, if they
might but procure the Works of Burns.”—The
poet soon found that his person also had become
an object of general curiosity, and that a lively
interest in his personal fortunes was excited among
some of the gentry of the district, when the details
of his story reached them, as it was pretty sure to
do, along with his modest and manly preface. *
* Preface to the First Edition.
“ The following trifles are not the production of the
i | poet, who, with all the advantages of learned art, and, per¬
haps, amid the elegancies and idleness of upper life, looks