Scotland/Scots > Life of Robert Burns

LIFE OF
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eight or ten months I have been ailing, sometimes
bedfast and sometimes not; but these last three
months I have been tortured with an excruciating
rheumatism, which has reduced me to nearly the
last stage. You actually would not know me if
you saw me—pale, emaciated, and so feeble, as
occasionally to need help from my chair.—My
spirits fled ! fled ! But I can no more on the sub-
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ject.
This last letter was addressed to Mr Cunning¬
ham of Edinburgh, from the small village of Brow
on the Solway Firth, about ten miles from Dum¬
fries, to which the poet removed about the end of
June; “ the medical folks,” as he says, “ having
told him that his last and only chance was bathing,
country quarters, and riding. ” In separating him¬
self by their advice from his family for these pur¬
poses, he carried with him a heavy burden of care.
“ The deuce of the matter, ” he writes, “ is this;
when an exciseman is off duty, his salary is redu¬
ced. What way, in the name of thrift, shall I
maintain myself and keep a horse in country quar¬
ters on L.35 ? ” He implored his friends in Edin¬
burgh, to make interest with the Board to grant
him his full salary; “ if they do not, I must lay
my account with an exit truly en poete—if I die
not of disease, I must perish with hunger. ” The
application was, I believe, successful; but Burns
lived not to profit by the indulgence, or the justice,
of his superiors.
Mrs Riddell of Glenriddel, a beautiful and very
accomplished woman, to whom many of Burns’s
most interesting letters, in the latter years of his
life, were addressed, happened to be in the neigh¬
bourhood of Brow when Burns reached his bathing
quarters, and exerted herself to make him as com-