Life of Burns - Everyman's Library Author:Lockhart Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER II. " 0 enviable early days, When dancing thoughtless pleasure's maze, To care and guilt unknown! How ill exchang'd for riper times, To feel the... more » follies or the crimes Of others—or my own ! " AS has been already mentioned, William Burnes now quitted Mount Oliphant for Lochlea, in the parish of Tarbolton, where, for some little space, fortune appeared to smile on his industry and frugality. Robert and Gilbert were employed by their father as regular labourers—he allowing them £7 of wages each per annum; from which sum, however, the value of any home-made clothes received by the youths was exactly deducted. Robert Burns'a person, inured to daily toil, and continually exposed to all varieties of weather, presented, before the usual time, every characteristic of robust and vigorous manhood. He says himself, that he never feared a competitor in any species of rural exertion; and Gilbert Burns, a man of uncommon bodily strength, adds, that neither he, nor any labourer he ever saw at work, was equal to the youthful poet, either in the corn-field, or the severer tasks of the thrashing-floor. Gilbert says, that Robert's literary zeal slackened considerably after their removal to Tarbolton. He was separated from his acquaintances of the town of Ayr, and probably missed not only the stimulus of their conversation, but the kindness that had furnished him with his supply, such as it was, of books. But the main source of his change ofhabits about this period was, it is confessed on all hands, the precocious fervour of one of his own turbulent passions. "In my seventeenth year,"1 says Burns, "to give my manners a brush, I went to a country dancing-school. My father had an unaccountable antipathy against these meetings ; and my going was, what to this moment I repent, in op...« less