social talents, neglect of
duty; and have accused him of every vice. Then he gives his testimony:
'My connection with Robert Burns commenced immediately after his
admission into the Excise, and continued to the hour of his death. In
all that time the superintendence of his behaviour as an officer of the
revenue was a branch of my especial province; and it may be supposed I
would not be an inattentive observer of the general conduct of a man and
a poet so celebrated by his countrymen. In the former capacity, so far
from its being impossible for him to discharge the duties of his office
with that regularity which is almost indispensable, as is palpably
assumed by one of his biographers, and insinuated, not very obscurely
even, by Dr. Currie, he was exemplary in his attention as an Excise
officer, and was even jealous of the least imputation on his vigilance.'

But a glance at the poems and songs of this period would be a sufficient
vindication of the poet's good name. There are considerably over a
hundred songs and poems written during his stay at Ellisland, many of
them of his finest. The third volume of Johnson's Museum, published in
February 1790, contained no fewer than forty songs by Burns. Among the
Ellisland songs were such as, _Ye Banks and Braes o' Bonnie Doon_,
_Auld Lang Syne_, _Willie brewed a Peck o' Maut_, _To Mary in Heaven_,
_Of a' the Airts the Wind can blaw_, _My Love she's but a Lassie yet_,
_Tam Glen_, _John Anderson my Jo_, songs that have become the property
of the world. Of the last-named song, Angellier remarks that the
imagination of the poet must have indeed explored every situation of
love to have led him to that which he in his own experience could not
have known. Even the song _Willie brewed a Peck o' Maut_, the first of
bacchanalian ditties, is the work of a man of sane mind and healthy
appetite. It is not of the diseased imagination of drunken genius. But
the greatest poem of this period, and one of Burns's biggest
achievements, is _Tam o' Shanter_. This poem was written in answer to a
request of Captain Grose that the poet would provide a witch story to be
printed along with a drawing of Alloway Kirk, and was first published in
Grose's _Antiquities of Scotland_. We have been treated by several
biographers to a private view of the poet, with wild gesticulations,
agonising in the composition of this poem; but where his wife did not
venture to intrude, we surely need not seek to desecrate. 'I