Edinburgh
Edinburgh. Image by VerseVend
In the winter of 1786 Robert Burns travelled from Ayrshire to Edinburgh. He was famous before he arrived. His book, ‘Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect’, was hugely popular and the great and good of Edinburgh society wanted to meet ‘the heaven-born ploughman’ poet.
Burns was moved to write:
With awe-struck thought, and pitying tears,
I view that noble, stately Dome,
Where Scotia's kings of other years,
Fam'd heroes! had their royal home…
...Edina! Scotia's darling seat!
All hail thy palaces and tow'rs;
Where once, beneath a Monarch's feet,
Sat Legislation's sovereign pow'rs:
From marking wildly-scatt'red flow'rs,
As on the banks of Ayr I stray'd,
And singing, lone, the ling'ring hours,
I shelter in thy honour'd shade.
Robert Burns, Address to Edinburgh, 1786
Grand ladies invited Burns into their homes. The poet made illustrious friends including the Earl of Glencairn, Lord Daer, William Smellie (first editor of Encyclopaedia Britannica) and Henry Erskine, an Edinburgh lawyer. At a Freemasonic meeting Burns was toasted as ‘Caledonia’s Bard’.
A young Walter Scott met Robert Burns in Adam Ferguson's house, in Sciennes. Forty-one years later Sir Walter Scott recalled the meeting:
'As for Burns… I was a lad of fifteen in 1786-7, when he came first to Edinburgh, but had sense and feeling enough to be much interested in his poetry, and would have given the world to know him…
His person was strong and robust: his manners rustic, not clownish; a sort of dignified plainness and simplicity, which received part of its effect perhaps from one's knowledge of his extraordinary talents…
I would have taken the poet, had I not known what he was, for a very sagacious country farmer of the old Scotch school - i.e. none of your modern agriculturists, who keep labourers for their drudgery, but the douce gudeman who held his own plough…
Among the men who were the most learned of their country, he expressed himself with perfect firmness, but without the least intrusive forwardness; and when he differed in opinion, he did not hesitate to express it firmly, yet at the same time with modesty.’
Burns did not accept every invitation he received. When one particular lady invited him to a party Burns replied that he would attend if the ‘Learned Pig’ from the Grassmarket could come too. The Learned Pig was a great attraction of the 1780s. It became a celebrity in Dublin before being taken to the stage in London and touring France and Britain. The pig wore a red waistcoat and made appearances with a cat opera, a hare that could play a drum and some waltzing turkeys. It could bow, kneel, spell out names using cardboard letters, do arithmetic, and was thought by some to be able to read minds. Burns did not like to be treated as a novelty act.
Burns stayed in Baxter's Close near the Lawnmarket in Edinburgh’s Old Town. The Old Town was a maze of closes, cobbled streets and wynds. The narrow streets were an open sewer - people emptied their chamberpots from their windows shouting ‘Gardy Loo!’ to warn passers-by. When Burns first arrived in Edinburgh the New Town was being built to the north and the gentry were beginning to leave the Old Town.
Burns spent some of his time in Edinburgh writing a collection of bawdy songs known as ‘The Merry Muses of Caledonia’. Burns dedicated them to the members of the ‘Crochallan Fencibles’, a notorious drinking club that met in a tavern in Anchor Close in the High Street. Burns also contributed songs to the three volumes of ‘The Scots Musical Museum’.
William Creech published a new edition of Burns’s ‘Poems, chiefly in the Scottish Dialect’ in April 1787. Burns added 17 poems and five new songs to the revised edition. Three thousand copies of the Edinburgh Edition were sold at five shillings for subscribers and six shillings for non-subscribers.
The Edinburgh Edition was so popular that Creech had to publish second and third editions. The third edition is often known as ‘the stinking edition’ as the word ‘skinking’ was misspelt in ‘Address To A Haggis’:
Auld Scotland wants nae stinking ware,
That jaups in luggies;
But if ye wish her gratfu' prayer,
Gie her a Haggis!