e, "Behind yon hills where
Stinchar (afterwards Lugar) flows," when in 1781 he went to Irvine to learn
the trade of a flax-dresser. "It was," he says, "an unlucky affair. As we
were giving a welcome carousal to the New Year, the shop took fire and
burned to ashes; and I was left, like a true poet, without a sixpence." His
own heart, too, had unfortunately taken fire. He was poring over
mathematics till, in his own phraseology,--still affected in its prose by
the classical pedantries caught from Pope by Ramsay,--"the sun entered
Virgo, when a charming _fillette_, who lived next door, overset my
trigonometry, and set me off at a tangent from the scene of my studies." We
need not detail the story, nor the incessant repetitions of it, which
marked and sometimes marred his career. The poet was jilted, went through
the usual despairs, and resorted to the not unusual sources of consolation.
He had found that he was "no enemy to social life," and his mates had
discovered that he was the best of boon companions in the lyric feasts,
where his eloquence shed a lustre over wild ways of life, and where he was
beginning to be distinguished as a champion of the New Lights and a
satirist of the Calvinism whose waters he found like those of Marah.

In Robert's 25th year his father died, full of sorrows and apprehensions
for the gifted son who wrote for his tomb in Alloway kirkyard, the fine
epitaph ending with the characteristic line--

"For even his failings leaned to virtue's side."

For some time longer the poet, with his brother Gilbert, lingered at
Lochlea, reading agricultural books, miscalculating crops, attending
markets, and in a mood of reformation resolving, "in spite of the world,
the flesh and the devil, to be a wise man." Affairs, however, went no
better with the family; and in 1784 they migrated to Mossgiel, where he
lived and wrought, during four years, for a return scarce equal to the wage
of the commonest labourer in our day. Meanwhile he had become intimate with
his future wife, Jean Armour; but the father, a master mason,
discountenanced the match, and the girl being disposed to "sigh as a
lover," as a daughter to obey, Burns, in 1786, gave up his suit, resolved
to seek refuge in exile, and having accepted a situation as book-keeper to
a slave estate in Jamaica, had taken his passage in a ship for the West
Indies. His old associations seemed to be breaking up, men and fortune
scowled, and "hungry ruin had him in th