have aught to keep or remember. His mother, and others of his family and friends, were still living. Cromek returned with well-filled wallet; though he too, squeamish as Currie, must needs keep back The Jolly Beggars and Holy Willie's Prayer. Of these gleanings he made an octavo volume, supplementary to Currie's four, entitling it The Reliques of Burns. It was published by Cadell and Davies in 1808,—the year in which the Blair came out,—and is a volume on which subsequent editors and biographers of Burns have freely drawn. It had the peculiar fortune of calling forth memorable manifestations of bad feeling towards the poet, of tepid taste and supercilious vulgarity, from two persons high in the world of letters,—the articles of Jeffrey in the Edinburgh, of Walter Scott in the Quarterly.
Here, again, Cromek's well-directed industry bore off, I fear, the profits, to part of which another—Burns's widow—was entitled. Cromek might, indeed, plead in self-defence, the lapse of ten years during which no one else had had the pious zeal to glean the open field.
The following summer, which was that of Blake's exhibition, Cromek, encouraged by the success of his first literary venture, revisited Dumfries, with Stothard as a companion and with new schemes in his head. One was an enlarged and illustrated edition of Burns's works, for which materials and drawing were now to be got together; an enterprise which, in the sequel, failing health prevented his carrying out. The other was a Collection of Old Scottish Songs, such, especially, as had been the favourites of Burns, together with the poet's notes already printed in the Reliques, and any other interesting scraps that could be picked up, could be begged, borrowed, or filched from various contributors. Two duodecimo volumes were got together, and, in the summer of 1810, published under the above title, with three vignettes after Stothard, characteristically cut on wood by clever, hapless Luke Clennell, hereafter the tenant of a madhouse.
