el. One
cannot read of the "wandering stabs of remorse" of which he speaks,
without thinking of Highland Mary.

Some months before the above letter was written, in the April of the
same year, at the time when he first fell into trouble with Jean
Armour and her father, Burns had resolved to leave his country and
sail for the West Indies. He agreed with a Mr. Douglas to go to
Jamaica and become a book-keeper on his estate there. But how were
funds to be got to pay his passage-money? His friend Gavin Hamilton
suggested that the needed sum might be raised, if he were to publish
by subscription, the poems he had lying in his table-drawer.

Accordingly, in April, the publication of his poems was resolved on.
His friends, Gavin Hamilton of Mauchline, Aiken and Ballantyne of Ayr,
Muir and Parker of Kilmarnock, and others--all did their best to (p. 031)
get the subscription lists quickly filled. The last-named person put
down his own name for thirty-five copies. The printing of them was
committed to John Wilson, a printer in Kilmarnock, and during May,
June, and July of 1786, the work of the press was going forward. In
the interval between the resolution to publish and the appearance of
the poems, during his distraction about Jean Armour's conduct,
followed by the episode of Highland Mary, Burns gave vent to his own
dark feelings in some of the saddest strains that ever fell from
him--the lines on _The Mountain Daisy_, _The Lament_, the Odes to
_Despondency_ and to _Ruin_. And yet so various were his moods, so
versatile his powers, that it was during that same interval that he
composed, in a very different vein, _The Twa Dogs_, and probably also
his satire of _The Holy Fair_. The following is the account the poet
gives of these transactions in the autobiographical sketch of himself
which he communicated to Dr. Moore:--

"I now began to be known in the neighbourhood as a maker of rhymes.
The first of my poetic offspring that saw light was a burlesque
lamentation of a quarrel between two reverend Calvinists; both of them
were _dramatis personae_ in my _Holy Fair_. I had a notion myself, that
the piece had some merit; but to prevent the worst, I gave a copy of
it to a friend who was fond of such things, and told him that I could
not guess who was the author of it, but that I thought it pretty
clever. With a certain description of the clergy as well as the laity,
it met with a roar of applause.

"_Holy Willie's Prayer_ next m