ndering the marriage null and void. This was the
circumstance, what he regarded as Jean's desertion, which brought Burns,
as he has said, to the verge of insanity.

Now it was that he finally resolved to leave the country. It was not the
first time he had thought of America. Poverty, before this, had led him
to think of emigrating; the success of others who had gone out as
settlers tempted him to try his fortune beyond the seas, even though he
'should herd the buckskin kye in Virginia.' Now, imprudence as well as
poverty urged him, while, wounded so sorely by the action of the
Armours both in his love and his vanity, he had little desire to remain
at home. There is no doubt that, prior to the birth of his twin children
and the publication of his poems, he would have quitted Scotland with
little reluctance. But he was so poor that, even after accepting a
situation in Jamaica, he had not money to pay his passage; and it was at
the suggestion of Gavin Hamilton that he began seriously to prepare for
the publication of his poems by subscription, in order to raise a sum
sufficient to buy his banishment. Accordingly we find him under the date
April 3, 1786, writing to Mr. Aitken, 'My proposals for publishing I am
just going to send to press.'

But what a time this was in the poet's life! It was a long tumult of
hope and despair, exultation and despondency, poetry and love; revelry,
rebellion, and remorse. Everything was excitement; calmness itself a
fever. Yet through it all inspiration was ever with him, and poem
followed poem with miraculous, one might almost say, unnatural rapidity.
Now he is apostrophising Ruin; now he is wallowing in the mire of
village scandal; now he is addressing a mountain daisy in words of
tenderness and purity; now he is scarifying a garrulous tailor, and
ranting with an alien flippancy; now it is Beelzebub he addresses, now
the King; now he is waxing eloquent on the virtues of Scotch whisky,
anon writing to a young friend in words of wisdom that might well be
written on the fly-leaf of his Bible.

This was certainly a period of ageing activity in Burns's life. It
seemed as if there had been a conspiracy of fate and circumstance to
herald the birth of his poems with the wildest convulsions of labour and
travail. The parish of Tarbolton became the stage of a play that had all
the makings of a farce and all the elements of a tragedy. There were
endless complications and daily developments, all deepe