the Nith. When he returned
home with a set of verses, he listened attentively to his wife singing
them, and if she happened to find a word that was harsh in sound, a
smoother one was immediately substituted; but he would on no account
ever sacrifice sense to sound.

During the earlier part of this year Burns had taken his full share in
the political contest that was going on, and fought for Heron of Heron,
the Whig candidate, with electioneering ballads, not to be claimed as
great poems nor meant to be so ranked, but marked with all his
incisiveness of wit and satire, and with his extraordinary deftness of
portraiture. Heron was the successful candidate, and his poetical
supporter again began to indulge in dreams of promotion: 'a life of
literary leisure with a decent competency was the summit of his wishes.'
But his dreams were not to be realised.

In September his favourite child and only daughter, Elizabeth, died at
Mauchline, and he was prostrated with grief. He had also taken very much
to heart the inexplicable silence of his old friend, and for many years
constant correspondent, Mrs. Dunlop. To both these griefs he alludes in
a letter to her, dated January 31, 1796: 'These many months you have
been two packets in my debt. What sin of ignorance I have committed
against so highly valued a friend I am utterly at a loss to guess. Alas!
madam, I can ill afford at this time to be deprived of any of the small
remnant of my pleasures. I have lately drunk deep of the cup of
affliction. The autumn robbed me of my only daughter and darling child,
and that at a distance, too, and so rapidly as to put it out of my power
to pay my last duties to her. I had scarcely begun to recover from that
shock when I became myself the victim of a severe rheumatic fever, and
long the die spun doubtful, until, after many weeks of a sickbed, it
seems to have turned up life.'

There was an evident decline in the poet's appearance, Dr. Currie tells
us, for upwards of a year before his death, and he himself was sensible
that his constitution was sinking. During almost the whole of the winter
of 1795-96 he had been confined to the house. Then follows the
unsubstantiated story which has done duty for Shakspeare and many other
poets. 'He dined at a tavern, returned home about three o'clock in a
very cold morning, benumbed and intoxicated. This was followed by an
attack of rheumatism.' It is difficult to kill a charitable myth,
especially one that