day more and more eagerly. His crosses and disappointments drove him every day more into dissipation, and his dissipation tended to enhance whatever was disagreeable and by degrees, into the boon companion of mere excisemen, spend his money lavishly in the ale house, could easily command the company of BURNS. The care of his farm was thus neglected, Waste and losses wholly consumed his little capital.39
As with Edinburgh and The Crochallan Fencibles, the political nature of Burns’s affiliations in Dumfries, is not identified. What Heron is mainly referring to here is that Real Whig bibulous bear of a man, Robert Riddell. As we now know, Burns was the middle-man responsible for Riddell’s political essays being published under the pen-name Cato. What, of course, Heron does not narrate is the story of the collapse of Burns’s political hopes under ferocious governmental pressure but a moral fable whereby, in its terminal stage, the sinner is driven to misanthropic blackness. The peculiar fevered tearing apart of Burns’s body, the agony of night sweats and pain wracked joints, is seen as both a consequence of his heavy drinking where, in fact, his rapidly deteriorating health made his tolerance to alcohol ever less. Or, psychosomatically, his bodily agony is seen as a punishing consequence of his sins. In actual fact, a convincing case has been made that medically what was tearing Burns’s body apart in these last terrible months was brucellosis caught from infected milk, although it is generally thought he died of rheumatic heart disorder.40 That alcoholic fornicator Heron, has a quite different ‘spiritual’ diagnosis:
Nor, amidst these agonising reflections, did he fail to look, with an indignation half invidious, half contemptuous, on those, who, with moral habits not more excellent than his, with powers of intellect far inferior, yet basked in the sunshine of fortune, and were loaded in the wealth and honours of the world, while his follies could not obtain pardon, nor his wants an honourable supply. His wit became, from this time, more gloomy sarcastic; and his conversation and writings began to assume something of a tone misanthropical malignity, by which they had not been before, in any eminent degree, distinguished. But, with all these failings; he was still that exalted mind which had raised above the depression of its original condition, with all the energy of the lion, pawing to set free his hinder limbs from the yet encumbering earth: he still appeared not less than an archangel ruined!41
Whether this ‘archangel’ image is knowingly derived from the genuine addict, S.T. Coleridge, the heroic but defeated lion fits perfectly Heron’s sentimentally disguised assassination. Scottish sentimentalists have a penchant for weeping at the gravesides of their victims. Burns’s long-term friend, William Nicol, had other thoughts concerning the death of his once rampantly alive friend. As he wrote almost immediately after Burns’s death to John Lewars:
… it gives me great pain to see the encomiums passed upon him, both in the Scottish and English news-papers are mingled with the reproaches of the most indelicate and cruel nature. But stupidity and idiocy delight when a great and immortal genius falls; and they pour forth their invidious reflections, without mercy, well knowing that the dead Lion, from whose presence they formerly scudded away with terror, and at whose voice they trembled through every nerve, can devour no more.
The fanatics have now got it into their heads, that dreadful bursts of penitential sorrow issued from the breast of our friend, before he expired. But if I am not much mistaken in relation to his firmness, he would disdain to have his dying moments disturbed with sacerdotal gloom, like sacerdotal howls. I knew he would negotiate with God alone, concerning his immortal interests.42
Without the leonine Bard there to protect his manuscripts, the nature of his precipitous, premature death left his papers in disorder. Given that his death coincided exactly with the peak of the scrutiny, censorship and penal repression of the understandably Francophobic Pitt/Dundas security-state such disorder was heavily amplified by his literary executors, mainly anxiety-driven radicals, hiding, dispersing or, at worst, destroying his dissident writings. Some alleged friends, minor Judases like Robert Ainslie, also wished to retrieve their letters or mangle and censor those of the poet’s that they had in their possession.
In his magisterial editorial work of the 1930s, De Lancey Ferguson calculated that 25% of Burns’s epistolary output was irretrievably lost. The poetry undoubtedly suffered similar depredations. There was the difficulty of identifying texts pseudonymously and anonymously published in radical London, Edinburgh and Glasgow newspapers. It seems certain that a key notebook of late, unpublished poems did go to William Roscoe but vanished without trace in 1816. Further, many of the central political poems (e.g. Address of Beelzebub and the Ode on General Washington’s Birthday) appeared erratically and fortuitously in the course of the nineteenth century. A burning of political and erotic material in the 1850s at Lesmahagow by Mr Greenshields (of the stamps fame) may not have been the last instance of genteel Scotland deciding to save the poet’s reputation from himself.
The two men immediately involved in dealing with the manuscripts were the poet’s Dumfries friend John Syme who enlisted a mutual friend, Alexander Cunningham, to help in dealing with the papers and to make an appeal for funds to aid the truly impoverished family. In Edinburgh, enthusiasm had ‘cooled with the corpse’ and Ayrshire proved equally miserly. For such virulent Scotophobes as Hazlitt and Coleridge, this treatment of the nation’s bard gave further evidence, if evidence were needed, of the treacherous, mean-spiritedness of the Scots. As Coleridge wrote in 1796:
Is thy Burns dead?
And shall he die unwept, and sink to earth
‘Without the meed of one melodious tear’?
Thy Burns, and Nature’s own beloved bard,
Who to the ‘Illustrious of his native Land
So properly did look for patronage’
Ghost of Macenas! Hide thy blushing face!
They snatched him from the sickle and the plough—
To gauge ale-firkins.
To be fair to the committee of executors set up in Dumfries, the situation was not only complex but carried real danger with it. Also given the political spirit of the age, much of the material could not be made public far less profitably so. As Ian Hamilton has written:
The Dumfries executors’ committee had already done some preliminary sifting and, fearing piracies, had advertised for any Burns material that was in private hands. The mass of the papers they found at the poet’s house was in ‘utter confusion’ but it took no more than a glance to determine that much of the collection ought probably to be destroyed: ‘viz. Such as may touch on the most private and delicate matters relative to female individuals’. When, in August, a bonfire was arranged, Syme was more hesitant: ‘Avaunt the sacrilege of destroying them and shutting them forever from the light: But on the other hand, can we bring them into the light?’ On this occasion, only a few ‘unimportant’ notes and cards were burnt.43
As well as sexually intimate indiscretions, went political ones. Such were safer out of Scotland given that, comparatively, it was a more politically controlled environment than England.
Establishment Scots were even more zealous than their English masters in hunting down treason in a more demographically controlled environment. The radical English connection that Burns most prided himself on, indeed his intention had been to visit him, was William Roscoe of Liverpool. Roscoe, the centre of a vast web of radical connections was poet, historian and financier. His friend
