Lines 9-12. Cf. Shenstone (Seventh Elegy):

Stranger, amidst this pealing rain,

Benighted, lonesome, whither wouldst thou stray?
Does wealth or power thy weary step constrain? &c.

1. 34. Cf. Shenstone (Eleventh Elegy):

Not all the force of manhood's active might, &c.

1. 39. Cf. Shakespeare (As You Like It, ii. 7.) :

Oppressed with two weak evils, Age and Hunger.

Cf. also Gray (Ode on Eton College) :

Poverty.. and slow consuming Age.

1. 50. From Young: 'By skill divine inwoven in our frame' (Night Thoughts, Bk. vii).

II. 55, 56. The idea was caught from Young (Night Thoughts, iii):

Man hard of heart to man

Man is to man the sorest, surest ill.

See also Night Thoughts, Bk. v:

and again, Bk. ix :

Inhumanity is caught from man;

Turn the world's history-what find we there?

Man's revenge....

And inhumanities on man.

11. 77-82. Cf. Young (Night Thoughts, Bk. v):

Death is the crown of life;

Were death denied poor man would live in vain.

P. 113. To a Mountain Daisy. This poem was composed in April 1786. It probably suggested to Wordsworth his image of Burns walking

In glory and in joy

Behind the plough upon the mountain side.

(Resolution and Independence.)

Lines 31-36. Cf. Goldsmith (The Deserted Village, 11. 329–336) :

Her modest looks the cottage might adorn,
Sweet as the primrose peeps beneath the thorn;
Now lost to all, her friends, her virtue fled,

Near her betrayer's door she lays her head, &c.

11. 49, 50. Cf. Gray (The Elegy) :

For thee, who mindful of the unhonoured dead, &c.

11. 51, 52. Cf. Young (Night Thoughts, Bk. ix) :

Final Ruin fiercely drives

Her ploughshare o'er creation.

P. 118. Address to Edinburgh.

Written in Edinburgh, Dec. 1786.

1. 4. The Scots Parliament was abolished in 1707. 11. 9-12. Cf. Goldsmith:

Proud swells the tide with loads of freighted ore, &c.

(Deserted Village.)

1. 29. Miss Burnet, daughter of Lord Monboddo.

11. 34-44. Edinburgh Castle and Holyrood Palace.

1. 52. A red lion rampant in a yellow field is the Scots blazon.

The Lament was

P. 120. Lament for James, Earl of Glencairn. written in the autumn of the year 1791. The Earl had died at Falmouth in January of that year, shortly after his return from the South of Europe, whither he had gone in the hope of recruiting his health. He was the fourteenth Earl of Glencairn, and was nearly ten years the senior of Burns.

1. 36. This line will be found in Paraphrase xv. of the Scottish Bible.

1. 46. Cf. Goldsmith (The Deserted Village):

For all the bloomy flush of life is fled,

1. 77. See Isa. xlix. 15.

P. 122. Lament of Mary Queen of Scots.

11. 1-6. Cf. Leader Haughs and Yarrow, by 'Minstrel Burn,'--familiar to Burns in Ramsay's Tea-Table Miscellany:

and

When Phoebus bright the azure skies

With golden rays enlight'neth, &c.

Then Flora queen, with mantle green, &c.

1. 33. The false woman is Queen Elizabeth.

P. 124. The Twa Herds. The sub-title of this poem is The Holy Tulzie. It belongs to the year 1786. Burns described it as a burlesque lamentation on a quarrel between two reverend Calvinists.' The two 'shepherds' were the Rev. John Russel, Kilmarnock, and the Rev. Alexander Moodie, Riccarton.

P. 127. On the late Captain Grose's Peregrinations. Burns first met Grose, the antiquary, at the table of his friend and Nithsdale neighbour, Robert Riddell, of Friars Carse, in the Summer of 1789. In his youth Grose had been a captain in the Surrey militia.

1. 1. Oatmeal cakes are meant. Johnson's description of oats is

U

well known. The expression 'Land o' Cakes' was first applied to Scotland by Fergusson (The King's Birthday in Edinburgh) :

Oh soldiers! for your ain dear sakes,

For Scotland's, alias Land o' Cakes, &c.

1. 3. Cf. Shakespeare (King Henry V, iii. 6): 'If I [Fluellen] find a hole in his coat, I will tell him my mind.'

1. 47. Named from the maker, Jacques de Liège.

P. 129. On Pastoral Poetry. If Burns did not write this poem, it is Fergusson's; but Fergusson could scarcely have known of Barbauld -a very indifferent Sappho rediviva.

11. 1-6. Cf. Goldsmith's Deserted Village, 11. 407-414: 'Sweet Poesy, thou loveliest maid! . . . dear, charming Nymph! . . . thou source of all my bliss and all my woe,' &c.

1. 19. The answer is Nobody.

1. 20. That is, they are artificial pastorals.

1. 32. Allan Ramsay, periwig-maker and poet, author of The Gentle Shepherd. Ramsay died a few months before the birth of Burns.

1. 35. Tantallon Castle, now a mere ruin, an ancient stronghold of the Earls of Angus, on the coast of East Lothian.

P. 131. The Humble Petition of Bruar Water. Composed by Burns in the course of his tour in the Highlands in the autumn of 1787. The Bruar, in Blair Atholl, is an affluent of the Garry, the chief tributary of Tay. The poem is constructed on the lines of Ramsay's Edinburgh's Salutation to Lord Carnarvon, in regard both to manner and

measure.

1. 70. Cf. Blair's Grave: 'Moonshine chequering thro' the trees.'

11. 87, 88. These lines contain Burns's toast at the table of the Duke of Atholl, at Blair Atholl, where the poet spent the first two days of September, 1787,-'the happiest days of his life,' as he said. The toast gave great delight to the ducal family.

P. 133. To a Haggis.

11. 45-48. The contrast here drawn is between their liquid fare, such as is favoured by foreigners, and the solid and substantial home haggis. Skink is not 'skinking ware': it is a species of soup, or rather broth, of unusual strength, made from the shank, or shin, of an ox. The name is still in common use in Buchan. Shakespeare refers to the waiters and potboys of the Boar's Head, Eastcheap, as 'skinkers'that is, drawers of ale or wine; so called from drawing the liquor through a pipe resembling a hollow shank-bone.

William Creech was the

These lines were

P. 136. On Creech the Bookseller. publisher of Burns's Poems (Edinburgh Edition). addressed to him in 1787; next year he became one of the city magistrates, and was elected Lord Provost in 181I. He resented the poet's familiarity, and was subsequently satirized in the Sketch, printed on p. 276 of this edition.

11. 37-39. The literati of Edinburgh. Mackenzie, sometimes known as the Scottish Addison, wrote The Man of Feeling; Stewart (Professor Dugald Stewart) filled the chair of Moral Philosophy in the University.

P. 138. To a Louse.

1. 17. A 'bane' is a bone-comb.

1. 35. Lunardi means bonnet. It appears that Vincent Lunardi, the aeronaut, had been performing in Edinburgh in 1785; he was a subject of general talk.

P. 140. The Whistle.

'As the authentic prose history of the Whistle is curious,' writes Burns, 'I shall here give it :-In the train of Anne of Denmark, when she came to Scotland with our James the Sixth, there came over also a Danish gentleman of gigantic stature and great prowess, and a matchless champion of Bacchus. He had a little ebony whistle, which at the commencement of the orgies he laid on the table; and whoever was last able to blow it, everybody else being disabled by the potency of the bottle, was to carry off the whistle as a trophy of victory. The Dane produced credentials of his victories, without a single defeat, at the courts of Copenhagen, Stockholm, Moscow, Warsaw, and several of the petty courts in Germany; and challenged the Scots' Bacchanalians to the alternative of trying his prowess, or else acknowledging their inferiority. After many overthrows on the part of the Scots, the Dane was encountered by Sir Robert Lawrie of Maxwelton, ancestor of the present worthy baronet of that name, who after three days' and three nights' hard contest, left the Scandinavian under the table,

And blew on the whistle his requiem shrill.

'Sir Walter, son to Sir Robert before mentioned, afterwards lost the whistle to Walter Riddel of Glenriddel, who had married a sister of Sir Walter's. On Friday, the 16th October, 1690, at Friars Carse, the whistle was once more contended for, as related in the ballad, by the present Sir Robert Lawrie of Maxwelton; Robert Riddel, Esq., of Glenriddel, lineal descendant and representative of Walter Riddel, who won the whistle, and in whose family it had continued; and Alexander Ferguson, Esq., of Craigdarroch, likewise descended of the

great Sir Robert; which last gentleman carried off the hard-won honours of the field.' R. B.

The poem belongs to the year 1789.

P. 142. The Kirk's Alarm. Written in 1789; and annotated by Burns himself, as under :

1. 5. Dr. M'Gill, Ayr. (He was author of an Essay on the Death of Christ, believed to contain heretical opinions; and was proceeded against accordingly. The ministers and elders satirized in the poem were all against M'Gill.)

1. 11. John Ballantine.

1. 12. Robert Aiken.

1. 13. Dr. Dalrymple, Ayr.

1. 17. John Russel, Kilmarnock.

1. 21. James Mackinlay, Kilmarnock.

1. 25. Alexander Moodie, of Riccarton.

1. 29. William Auld, Mauchline; for the clerk, see Holy Willie's Prayer.

1. 33. David Grant, Ochiltree.

1. 37. James Young, in New Cumnock, who had lately been foiled in an ecclesiastical prosecution against a Lieutenant Mitchell.

1. 41. William Peebles, in Newtown-upon-Ayr, a poetaster, who, among many other things, published an ode on the centenary of the Revolution, in which was the line

And bound in Liberty's endearing chain.

1. 45. Dr. Andrew Mitchel, Monkton.

1. 49. Stephen Young, of Barr.

1. 53. (In one version of this poem we find 'Cessnock-side' for 'Irvine Side,' and Burns notes that the minister of Galston, George Smith, is meant.)

1. 57. John Shepherd, Muirkirk.

1. 61. Holy Will was William Fisher, elder, Mauchline. Vide the 'Prayer' of this saint.

P. 149. Despondency.

11. 57-70. Cf. Gray's Ode on Eton College:

To each his sufferings. All are men, &c.

P. 156. Epistle to Davie. Written in the early part of 1785, at Mossgiel. The poet's correspondent was David Sillar, the son of a crofter, in Burns's own parish of Tarbolton, Ayrshire. The stanza of this poem was a favourite measure with Allan Ramsay (The Vision, 1724) and of Alexander Montgomery (The Cherry and the Slae, 1597).