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Updated: May 31, 2025
He was summoned back to Edinburgh to reprint them, to make a considerable profit by them, and to be lionised without stint by the society of the Scottish capital. He then settled down, marrying Jean Armour, at Ellisland in Dumfriesshire, on a small farm and a post in the Excise, which, when his farming failed and he moved to Dumfries itself, became his only regular means of support.
I have the honour to be, Sir, your highly obliged, and very humble servant, R. B. ELLISLAND, 23rd Jan. 1789. I must take shame and confusion of face to myself, my dear friend and brother Farmer, that I have not written you much sooner.
Having obtained temporary silence, he was permitted at length to struggle through his narrative, and to place, in their proper lights, all the particulars which Ned Hinkley had obtained at Ellisland. When this was done the discussion was renewed, and raged, with no little violence, for a full hour. At length it ceased through the sheer exhaustion of the parties.
Observing these respective gaits, Brother Stevens rode into Ellisland at a moderately late dinner-hour, and the pursuer followed at an unspeakable, but not great, distance behind him. We will, henceforward, after a brief glance at Ellisland, confine ourselves more particularly to the progress of Brother Stevens.
For when society finally turned the cold shoulder on him he had to go back to farming again, carrying with him a bitter sense of injustice and neglect. He leased a farm at Ellisland, in 1788, and some friends procured his appointment as exciseman for his district.
I have a particular reason for wishing you only to show it to select friends, should you think it worthy a friend's perusal: but if at your first leisure hour you will favour me with your opinion of, and strictures on the performance, it will be an additional obligation on, dear Sir, your deeply indebted humble servant, CLVIIL. To MR. PETER HILL. ELLISLAND, 17th January 1791.
The subject was the more excitingly placed before me, by my seeing every morning, from my bedroom windows, the smiling farmstead of Ellisland, which the poet built, and where he spent more than four years of his life. Daily beholding his simple home, and the fields he had tilled, I felt a revived interest in his sad history and everything associated with it.
On his return to Ayrshire he renewed his relations with Jean Armour, whom he ultimately married, took the farm of Ellisland near Dumfries, having meanwhile taken lessons in the duties of an exciseman, as a line to fall back upon should farming again prove unsuccessful. At Ellisland his society was cultivated by the local gentry.
Forgive me, my dear Sir, for this long silence. To make you amends, I shall send you soon, and more encouraging still, without any postage, one or two rhymes of my later manufacture. ELLISLAND, 21st June 1789. Dear Madam, Will you take the effusions, the miserable effusions of low spirits, just as they flow from their bitter spring?
Though his hopes of preferment were never realised, he tried his best on this slender income 'to make a happy fireside clime to weans and wife, and in a sense succeeded. What he must have felt more keenly than anything else in leaving Ellisland was, that in giving up farming he was making an open confession of failure in his ideal of combining in himself the farmer, the poet, and the exciseman.
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