Journals of Dorothy Wordsworth, Vol. 1 (of 2)

Reached Dumfries at about nine o'clock--market-day; met crowds of people on the road, and every one had a smile for us and our car.... The inn was a large house, and tolerably comfortable; Mr. Rogers and his sister, whom we had seen at our own cottage at Grasmere a few days before, had arrived there that same afternoon on their way to the Highlands; but we did not see them till the next morning, and only for about a quarter of an hour. Thursday, August 18th.--Went to the churchyard where Burns is buried. A bookseller accompanied us. He showed us the outside of Burns's house, where he had lived the last three years of his life, and where he died. It has a mean appearance, and is in a bye situation, whitewashed; dirty about the doors, as almost all Scotch houses are; flowering plants in the windows. Went on to visit his grave. He lies at a corner of the churchyard, and his second son, Francis Wallace, beside him. There is no stone to mark the spot; but a hundred guineas have been collected, to be expended on some sort of monument. "There," said the bookseller, pointing to a pompous monument, "there lies Mr. Such-a-one"--I have forgotten his name,--"a remarkably clever man; he was an attorney, and hardly ever lost a cause he undertook. Burns made many a lampoon upon him, and there they rest, as you see." We looked at the grave with melancholy and painful reflections, repeating to each other his own verses:--