but he reasoned himself into toleration in several characteristic epistles. She treated him all along as a social equal and an intellectual superior; that circumstance alone sufficed to put any offensive interpretation of her practice out of the question. The new light upon the subject confirms- if confirmation were necessary - the view that her gifts of money were presents in exactly the same kind as his gifts of books and cognac to her, and in no sense dictated by charity or the notion that he required at any time pecuniary assistance. Mrs. Dunlop, as will be seen, was a fearless critic of Burns. Almost the first subject she exploited in the correspondence was the "undecent" blots she discovered and wished removed in the Kilmarnock edition. He treated her remonstrances on that head and her literary criticisms generally with scant respect. There is very much in these pages illustrative of that well-known saying of his to Mrs. Dunlop "You are right in your guess that I am not very amenable to counsel." His Fescennine excursions he defended in a manner characteristically human. "You may guess," he said, "that the convivial hours of men have their mysteries of wit and mirth, and I hold it a piece of contemptible baseness to detail the sallies of thoughtless merriment, or the orgies of accidental intoxication to the ear of cool sobriety or female delicacy." Burns's "religion of the heart" is expounded anew in several of the Lochryan letters with warm eloquence. What could be choicer in this line than his consolatory epistle of 9th July 1790? Thomson says finely Attach thee firmly to the virtuous deeds And all its transient joys sit loose. And yet, like many other fine sayings, it has, I fear, more of philosophy than human nature in it. Poor David's pathetic cry of grief is much more the language of man: "O Absalom! My son! My son!" A world to Come! is the only genuine balm for an agonising heart, torn to pieces in the wrench of parting for ever (to mortal view) with friends, inmates of the bosom and dear to the soul ! A letter assigned conjecturally to Miss Rachel Dunlop as recipient contains an even more remarkable and interesting protest against original sin. The value of the Lochryan MSS. for textual and critical purposes is very great; it has been to some extent used for these purposes, but a closer study of the documents has revealed several not uhimportant errors in the deductions recently drawn. The dates of quite a number of poems and letters have had to be altered in the light of the Correspondence as here completed. Note, in particular, the establishment of the right date of the "New Year's Day Address" to Mrs. Dunlop (1789 instead of 1790), and the clearing up of the mystery of the date and place of composition of the last of the Ellisland letters, which has yet hitherto seemed to be also one of the first of the Dumfries ones. There are here earlier versions than any hitherto known of various poems, new facts about the building up of "The Poet's Progress," and a valuable contribution to the controversy about "Passion's Cry." There is a notable contribution to Burns apologetics in the fact confirmed by Mrs. Dunlop's letters of the time, that Mrs. Burns spent part of the summer of 1790- the year of the Anne Park episode in Ayrshire. The new Burns letters in the text are exact copies of the originals, spelling and punctuation being adhered to with all but literal precision. Whole letters and parts of letters not previously published are distinguished by a line running down the left side of the letterpress. The text of the four old letters, of which the MSS. are in the Adam collection, has been made to agree with the originals, and for the rest of the old letters the best available revisions have been utilised. Mrs. Dunlop's letters have not been reproduced with quite the same exactitude. Her actual misspellings have been corrected, but an attempt has been made to retain such socalled misspellings as were current at the time, such as "an wound," which affords a graphic illustration of the current pronunciation. She did not punctuate, and that defect has been supplied. Addresses of letters are indicated by Ad. prefixed at the margin; where the superscription is "To Mrs. Dunlop" or "To Burns," no authentic address has been found. Those marked "franked by Kerr" were addressed by the secretary to the Post Office, whose whole-hearted admiration of Burns procured him so frequently the privilege of receiving his letters without the heavy tax of fourpence for a "single" and eightpence for a "double." The numerous notes, as well as the connecting and explanatory narrative, are printed in large type for convenience of reference, and because they are in the great majority of cases comments on the letters which they elucidate. Mrs. Dunlop's letters to Burns, now published for the first time, are almost as essential as his own to a right understanding of the period of his life — the last decade - which they cover. She was a very different woman from Mrs. Maclehose; her portrait suggests capacity and strength of will rather than a tendency to Werterism. But she was in her way as much of a sentimentalist. There are almost innumerable and very pathetic indications in her Correspondence-which is of all the more value that it was never intended for publication - that she regarded the advent of a letter from him as an event of supreme importance. She was in agony when, for some unforeseen reason, he failed to answer her. She studied and commented on every line that he sent her. She was willing to write three letters to his one; and yet she took the most modest view of her own part in the Correspondence. "I deceive myself most egregiously," she says with a sigh and yet almost with a touch of old-fashioned coquetry, "if you would not be melancholy for at least two hours after my demise, whose Correspondence has been to me a varied scene of hope and delight, and an intercourse of that mixture between amusement and esteem to which I believed I was wholly superannuated." Her letters to Burns must be read as carefully as Clarinda's, for though there is absent from them the fascination of a hopeless passion, her almost motherly anxiety concerned itself equally with his character and with his reputation, took stock of every scrap of his verse, and of every action of his life. Thus it is quite impossible to understand Burns's defiant declaration so variously criticised, that he was a stranger alike to jealousy and to infidelity, until one has read the remarkable and mercilessly plain-spoken letter from Mrs. Dunlop which called that assertion forth the letter in which she warns him against thinking lightly of his wife because she had "succumbed" to him before marriage. It is equally impossible to understand the letter of Burns, now published for the first time, in which he almost grandiloquently but effectually disposes in advance of the modern theory that he was "an inspired faun" and "a lewd peasant of genius," without reading the letter in which Mrs. Dunlop, also anticipating certain modern criticism, writes, "A gentleman told me with a grave face the other day that you certainly were a sad wretch, that your works were immoral and infamous, that you lam - |