‘He said he was well aware that his death would occasion some noise, and that every scrap of his writing would be revived against him to the injury of his future reputation: that letters and verses written with unguarded and improper freedom, and which he earnestly wished to have buried in oblivion, would be handed about by idle vanity or malevolence when no dread of his resentment would restrain them or prevent the censures of shrill-tongued malice or the insidious sarcasms of envy from pouring forth all their venom to blast his fame.’ Could Burns have looked into the future, the prospect would have deepened the pain in his harassed soul. His anxiety for his family would have been allayed, to be sure, but not even in his darkest hour could he have visualized the future of his personal and literary fame. He foresaw attacks of his enemies; he did not foresee the cowardice or treachery of his friends. He need not have worried about his trivial or unguarded writings, for time automatically washes away the sand and leaves the gold, if gold there be, and the publication of trifling letters cannot harm their writer if the pattern of his soul itself is not trifling. That spiritual descendants of Holy Willie should deplore his best and strongest work and shake their heads over passions of which their impotent pulses were incapable, that enemies eager for revenge and underlings eager for drink should lie about their relations with him--these things were to be expected. But that Bob Ainslie, turned pious, should exemplify his own piety by preserving and circulating Burns’s worst letters, that George Thomson should not only ignore his dying wishes but even, before his corpse was in the grave, rush into print with a distorted and melodramatic version of his last years which would set the tone of biographies for a century to come, that Gilbert should lack the courage to deny stories which he knew to be false--all this, and much more, was mercifully hidden from him. But it would have warmed his heart to know that the one intimate friend who would come before the world with a truthful account of his character, extenuating nothing, and setting nothing down in malice, was Maria Riddell, on whom he had made unforgivable attacks, and who nevertheless had forgiven him. The woman with whom the dying poet talked that day until the distant bulk of Criffel turned dark against the sunset, and the chill tide in which he had been ordered to bathe ebbed away from the dismal flats of the Solway, was to prove herself the most devoted friend of her sex he had ever had, Jean Armour always excepted. V LIVELIHOOD