o meet the
men who were praising him in the capital, and to try his powers in
that wider arena. It might be that in that new scene something might
occur which would reverse the current of his fortunes, and set him
free from the crushing poverty that had hitherto kept him down.
Anyhow, he was conscious of strong powers, which fitted him to shine,
not in poetry only, but in conversation and discussion; and, ploughman
though he was, he did not shrink from encountering any man or any set
of men. Proud, too, we know he was, and his pride often showed itself
in jealousy and suspicion of the classes who were socially above him,
until such feelings were melted by kindly intercourse with some
individual man belonging to the suspected orders. He felt himself to
surpass in natural powers those who were his superiors in rank and
fortune, and he could not, for the life of him, see why they should be
full of this world's goods, while he had none of them. He had not yet
learned--he never did learn--that lesson, that the genius he had
received was his allotted and sufficient portion, and that his wisdom
lay in making the most of this rare inward gift, even on a meagre
allowance of the world's external goods. But perhaps, whether he knew
it or not, the greatest attraction of the capital was the secret hope
that in that new excitement he might escape from the demons of remorse
and despair which had for many months been dogging him. He may have
fancied this, but the pangs which Burns had created for himself (p. 041)
were too deep to be in this way permanently put by.

The secret of his settled unhappiness lay in the affections that he
had abused in himself and in others who had trusted him. The course he
had run since his Irvine sojourn was not of a kind to give peace to
him or to any man. A coarse man of the world might have stifled the
tender voices that were reproaching him, and have gone on his way
uncaring that his conduct--

Hardened a' within,
And petrified the feeling.

But Burns could not do this. The heart that had responded so feelingly
to the sufferings of lower creatures, the unhoused mouse, the shivering
cattle, the wounded hare, could not without shame remember the wrongs
he had done to those human beings whose chief fault was that they had
trusted him not wisely but too well. And these suggestions of a
sensitive heart, conscience was at hand to enforce--a conscience
wonderfully cle