.jpg?w=1)
Details
BURNS, Robert (1759–1796). Autograph letter signed (‘Robt. Burns’) to Captain Francis Grose, Ellisland, 1 December 1790, 2 pages, 4to (190 x 121mm), bifolium, docket (traces of paste where tipped into an album)
ABOUT SENDING THE MANUSCRIPT FOR TAM O’SHANTER. Opening with a graceful excuse for a hurried letter (‘I am not, God knows, vain of my composition, & you like intellectual food more substantial than the whipt syllabub of epistolary compliment’), Burns refers to the enclosure which originally accompanied the letter of ‘one of the Aloway Kirk stories, done in Scots verse. Should you think it worthy a place in your Scots Antiquities, it will lengthen not a little the altitude of my Muse’s pride’. He requests Grose’s discretion in reproducing his work, noting that ‘Authors have too often very little to say in the disposal of this world’s affairs, but it would be very hard if they should not be absolute in their own works'. Grose’s ‘draft of Kilwinning is finished, but not come to hand. I shall send it you the minute it reaches me'.
The ‘Scots verse’ referred to is none other than Burns's great mock-heroic narrative poem Tam o’Shanter: a Tale, composed to accompany the entry for Alloway Kirk in the second volume of Antiquities of Scotland published by Grose in 1791. Burns’s ‘kind funny friend’, Francis Grose (d. 1791) – immortalised by the poet in On Captain Grose’s Peregrinations through Scotland – was an early recorder of ruins and archaeological remains north of the border; the extent of the collaboration between the two is apparent from the reference to Kilwinning Abbey, which featured in the same volume. Composed towards the end of Burns’s tenure at Ellisland farm – a creatively fertile period during which he also produced Auld Lang Syne – and marked by Burns’s deft use of Hudibrastic verse and idiosyncratic mixing of Scots and English, Tam o’Shanter is often considered to be his finest poetic creation. A Biography of Robert Burns (1993), p. 463.
ABOUT SENDING THE MANUSCRIPT FOR TAM O’SHANTER. Opening with a graceful excuse for a hurried letter (‘I am not, God knows, vain of my composition, & you like intellectual food more substantial than the whipt syllabub of epistolary compliment’), Burns refers to the enclosure which originally accompanied the letter of ‘one of the Aloway Kirk stories, done in Scots verse. Should you think it worthy a place in your Scots Antiquities, it will lengthen not a little the altitude of my Muse’s pride’. He requests Grose’s discretion in reproducing his work, noting that ‘Authors have too often very little to say in the disposal of this world’s affairs, but it would be very hard if they should not be absolute in their own works'. Grose’s ‘draft of Kilwinning is finished, but not come to hand. I shall send it you the minute it reaches me'.
The ‘Scots verse’ referred to is none other than Burns's great mock-heroic narrative poem Tam o’Shanter: a Tale, composed to accompany the entry for Alloway Kirk in the second volume of Antiquities of Scotland published by Grose in 1791. Burns’s ‘kind funny friend’, Francis Grose (d. 1791) – immortalised by the poet in On Captain Grose’s Peregrinations through Scotland – was an early recorder of ruins and archaeological remains north of the border; the extent of the collaboration between the two is apparent from the reference to Kilwinning Abbey, which featured in the same volume. Composed towards the end of Burns’s tenure at Ellisland farm – a creatively fertile period during which he also produced Auld Lang Syne – and marked by Burns’s deft use of Hudibrastic verse and idiosyncratic mixing of Scots and English, Tam o’Shanter is often considered to be his finest poetic creation. A Biography of Robert Burns (1993), p. 463.
Brought to you by
Eugenio Donadoni