Meanwhile, meeting Jean, he yielded to her tears, and gave her a written acknowledgment of marriage, valid according to Scottish law.  Her father’s wrath was not appeased thereby.  Burns, confessing himself unequal to the support of a family, proposed to go immediately to Jamaica in search of better fortunes.  He offered, if this were rejected, to abandon his farm, already a hopeless concern, and earn at least bread for his wife and children as a day labourer at home.  But nothing would satisfy Armour, who, in his indignation, made his daughter destroy the written evidence of her “marriage.”

III.—­Burns at His Zenith

Such was his poverty that he could not satisfy the parish officers; and the only alternative that presented itself to him was America or a gaol.  A situation was obtained for him in Jamaica, but he had no money to pay his passage.  It occurred to him that the money might be raised by publishing his poems; and a first edition, printed at Kilmarnock in 1786, brought him nearly L20, out of which he paid for a steerage passage from the Clyde.  “My chest was on the road to Greenock,” he tells; “I had composed the last song I should ever measure in Caledonia, ‘The gloomy night is gathering fast,’ when a letter from Dr. Blacklock to a friend of mine overthrew all my schemes, by opening new prospects to my poetic ambition.”

Blacklock, the blind divine upon whom Johnson “looked with reverence,” had read the newly published poems, and it was his praise of them that directly prevented Burns from expatriating himself.  “His opinion that I would meet with encouragement in Edinburgh fired me so much that away I posted for that city, without a single acquaintance, or a single letter of introduction.  The baneful star that had so long shed its blasting influence in my zenith for once made a revolution to the nadir.”  In Edinburgh, which Burns reached in November, 1786, he was introduced by Blacklock to all the literati, and within a fortnight he was writing to a friend:  “I am in a fair way of becoming as eminent as Thomas a Kempis or John Bunyan; and you may expect to see my birthday inscribed among the wonderful events in the Poor Robin and Aberdeen Almanacks, along with the Black Monday and the Battle of Bothwell Bridge.”

But he bore his honours in a manner worthy of himself.  “The attentions he received,” says Dugald Stewart, “from all ranks and descriptions of persons were such as would have turned any head but his own.  I cannot say that I could perceive any unfavourable effect which they left on his mind.”  Scott, then a lad of fifteen, met him, and wrote a vivid description of his appearance: