V.—­Closing Years of the Poet’s Life

Towards the close of 1791 he gave up his farm, and procuring an excise appointment to the Dumfries division, removed to the county town.  His moral course from this time was downwards.  “In Dumfries,” says Heron, speaking from personal knowledge, “his dissipation became still more deeply habitual.  He was here exposed more than in the country to be solicited to share the riot of the dissolute and idle.”  His intemperance was, as Heron says, in fits; his aberrations were occasional, not systematic; they were all to himself the sources of exquisite misery in the retrospect; they were the aberrations of a man whose moral sense was never deadened, of one who encountered more temptations from without and from within than the immense majority of mankind, far from having to contend against, are even able to imagine; of one, finally, who prayed for pardon, where alone effectual pardon could be found.

In how far the “thoughtless follies” of the poet did actually hasten his end, it is needless to conjecture.  They had their share, unquestionably, along with other influences which it would be inhuman to characterise as mere follies.  In these closing years of his life he had to struggle constantly with pecuniary difficulties, than which nothing could have been more likely to pour bitterness intolerable into the cup of his existence.  His lively imagination exaggerated to itself every real evil; and this among, and perhaps above, all the rest; at least, in many of his letters we find him alluding to the probability of his being arrested for debts, which we now know to have been of very trivial amount.

In 1795 he was greatly upset by the death, in his absence, of his youngest child.  Writing in January, 1796, he says:  “I had scarcely begun to recover from that shock, when I became myself the victim of a most severe rheumatic fever, and long the die spun doubtful, until, after many weeks of a sick-bed, it seems to have turned up life, and I am beginning to crawl across my room, and once indeed have been before my own door in the street.”

But a few days after this Burns was so imprudent as to join a festive circle at a tavern dinner, where he remained till about three in the morning.  The weather was severe, and he, being too much intoxicated, took no precaution in thus exposing his debilitated frame to its influence.  It has been said that he fell asleep upon the snow on his way home.  The result was an acute return of his rheumatism, and his health gradually got worse.  He went to the Solway for sea-bathing, but came back to Dumfries “visibly changed in his looks, being with difficulty able to stand upright and reach his own door.”