The Canongate Burns (102 page)

John McAdam was an agricultural improver known to Burns (by repute) through his friend David Woodburn, factor of Craigengillan, an estate south of Mauchline. Editors prior to Kinsley suggest the poem was written in 1786, after the publication of the Kilmarnock edition; but Kinsley, on the basis that McAdam only appears in the addenda of the Edinburgh subscription list, takes this as indication that the poet's link with McAdam occurs only in 1787. This appears to be a case of switching one assumption for another, then having to argue that Burns must have misdated the poem in his Glenriddel Manuscript. It is probable Burns wrote it when and where he states, that McAdam's late subscription to the Edinburgh edition has no connection with the above poem, written as a response to a letter.

William Woods (1751–1802), an English actor, moved to Edinburgh during the 1770s and pursued his dramatic career there. He was latterly a friend of the poet Robert Fergusson and is mentioned in Fergusson's
Last Will
. It was probably this connection that drew Burns to Woods, who played ‘Ford' in
The Merry Wives of Windsor
during his benefit night on 16th April, 1787. Stewart (1801) took his text from a newspaper publication, while Henley and Henderson's version is from an early draft.

This poem is far more complicit than
Address to Edinburgh
with the genteel capital's deep but doubtful self-regard in aesthetics and social matters. Ironically, given Woods' friendship with Fergusson, it is the very antithesis of Fergusson's satirical vision of the middle class ‘national' sentimentality of Edinburgh's propertied classes. Ll. 30–1 are also particularly unBurnsian. Consciously or otherwise, the
Scots Prologue
later written for the Dumfries theatre almost exactly reverses what is said here about Scotland and poetry.

These lines were written by Burns in a letter of 30th April, 1787 to William Dunbar, the
Rattlin Roarin Willie
of Burns's song and Colonel of the convivial, radical Enlightenment club, the Crochallan Fencibles. They are introduced ‘… I have a strong fancy that in some future excentric Planet, the Comet of a happier System than any which Astronomy is yet acquainted, you and I, among the harum-scarum Sons of Imagination and Whim, shall recognise OLD AQUAINTANCE –' (Letter 99). There are no quotation marks to indicate they are by another author. Burns normally marks the work of other authors with quotation marks, or applies the poet's name. No editor of the collected letters suggests an author, nor have the lines been identified as the work of Burns or another. The letter first appeared with Hogg and Motherwell's edition in 1835, but since, no one has commented on the lines. As they are in the poet's hand and without quotation marks, it is almost certain they are his.

This work, where Jacobite sympathy is in inverse proportion to anti-Hanoverian antipathy, was addressed to William Tytler (1711–92), Laird of Woodhouselee, a writer to the Signet and author on various subjects, including a defence of Mary Queen of Scots, music and antiquities. It is notorious for, arguably, the worst line Burns ever wrote, ‘Tho' something like moisture conglobes in my eye…' What is forgotten as opposed to such saccharine Jacobitism is the wicked anti-Hanoverian dig of ll. 17–20, edited out by Currie (1800), but restored in Pickering, 1839. It was Tytler, the musician who collected old songs for Johnson's Scots Musical Museum, who gravely upset David Hume with his
A Historical and Critical
Enquiry into the Evidence … against Mary Queen of Scots
. With his examination of the Rev. Dr Robertson's
Dissertation
and Hume's
History
(1760), Hume felt that a ‘sound beating or even a Rope too good for him' and that a ‘Scots Jacobite, who maintains the innocence of Queen Mary must be considered as … beyond the reach of argument or reason, and must be left to his Prejudices' (E.C. Mossner,
David Hume
, 1954, pp. 413–14). The affair is discussed by L.L. Bongie, in ‘The Eighteenth Century Marian Controversy',
Studies in Scottish Literature
, 1964, pp. 236–52). Hume does not emerge from this article as clear winner but, in places, irascible and unconvincing. It also reveals the depth of passion personal and political that Mary Queen of Scots could evoke in eighteenth-century Scotland. Hume would have found Burns at least as invidious as Tytler in this respect. This, for example, is Burns writing to Dr Moore whose novel
Zeluco
contains a duel fought over Mary's reputation:

The poem was sent to Tytler on 4
^th
May 1787, along with an engraving of Burns by Beugo, prior to the poet's departure on his Border tour with Robert Ainslie.

This was composed during the poet's Border tour with Robert Ainslie in 1787. On 6th May, Burns attended church at Duns accompanied by Ainslie and his sister. The story has it that when the minister denounced all sinners, Miss Ainslie appeared agitated; on observing this, Burns used a blank leaf in his bible to write the epigram.