Before he was 16 he a dexterous to suffer with fits of depression and headaches after doing a duy's work, most of which the farm. He wi lump and much against his father's wish went to a dancing school and brushed up his manners. His father took a Burns when fits of depression took to the bottle ud became the confidant of all the lovers' affairs of the parish.
ter the family moved to Lach-Jan he went to a school to leora flax-making but another love affair set him off at a tangent. At 20 passion raged like so many devils, finally being vented in poetry. At 22 he wrote his father snying his verses had so weakened his mind that he "neither looked forward or backward" and wa tired of life, The shop which ko had rented was burnt down a few days later after a spree on New Year's Eve and he was penniless. For two or three years before his father's death, whose end was surrounded by misfortune, Burns lived a life of alternate. depression and. dissipation. He had little idea of! making money and less of keeping it, "After the death of his father, and at the age of 25, he managed to scrape enough money together to bay an adjacent farm which he commenced to work with the resolution "Come, go to; I shall be wise," but bad crops for two successive years knocked the bottom out of his good resolution and he returned "like the dog to his vomit, and thessow to her wallow ind. by his recklessness got up against the clergy. His first Piyme was a burlesque against The Promise of Success of his financial troubles and he decided fo go to Jamaica which was the El Dorado of those days. A.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.