r factors more than
counterbalanced this relief. Burns had never been a slave to drink for
its own sake; it had always been the accompaniment--in those days an
almost inevitable accompaniment--of sociability. Some of his
wealthier friends in the vicinity were in this respect rather
excessive in their hospitality; in Dumfries the taverns were always at
hand; and as Burns came to realize the comparative failure of his
career as a man, he found whisky more and more a means of escape for
depression. Even if we distrust the local gossip that made much of the
dissipations of his later years, it appears from the evidence of his
physician that alcohol had much to do with the rheumatic and digestive
troubles that finally broke him down. In July, 1796, he was sent, as a
last resort, to Brow-on-Solway to try sea-bathing and country life;
but he returned little improved, and well-nigh convinced that his
illness was mortal. His mental condition is shown by the fact that
pressure from a solicitor for the payment of a tailor's debt of some
seven pounds, incurred for his volunteer's uniform, threw him into a
panic lest he should be imprisoned, and his last letters are pitiful
requests for financial help, and two notes to his father-in-law urging
him to send her mother to Jean, as she was about to give birth to
another child. In such harassing conditions he sank into delirium, and
died on July 21, 1796. The child, who died in infancy, was born on
the day his father was buried.

With Burns's death a reaction in popular opinion set in. He was given
a military funeral; and a subscription which finally amounted to one
thousand two hundred pounds was raised for his family. The official
biography, by Doctor Currie of Liverpool, doubled this sum, so that
Jean was enabled to bring up the children respectably, and end her
days in comfort. Scotland, having done little for Burns in his life,
was stricken with remorse when he died, and has sought ever since to
atone for her neglect by an idolatry of the poet and by a more than
charitable view of the man.

CHAPTER II

INHERITANCE: LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE

Three forms of speech were current in Scotland in the time of Burns,
and, in different proportions, are current to-day: in the Highlands,
north and west of a slanting line running from the Firth of Clyde to
Aberdeenshire, Gaelic; in the Lowlands, south and east of the same
line, Lowland Scots; over the whole country, among the more edu