BURNS IN FLEET STREET.

Manawatu Standard, Volume XLVIII, Issue 148, 23 May 1928, Page 11

BURNS IN FLEET STREET.

Many of. the greater masters of our literature have “taken a walk down Fleet Street,” but it would never have been guessed that Robert Burns was tempted that way. The evidence is in a letter of his own (says a London journal. About 1794 Burns was not happy in the Excise service. His superiors objected to bis sending guns as a present to flic French Legislature. He complained of “dark insinuations of hellish groundless envy,” swore that be was attached to the British Constitution, and joined the Volunteers. But there . was more trouble about bis giving a toast, “Alay our success in the war be equal to the justice-of our cause.” A friend of his, Peter Miller, passed the'word to James Perry, editor and owner of the Alorning Chronicle, that Burns s position was poor and uncertain, and the result was the offer of a place on the Alorning Chronicle’s staff. It was not the first time- he had been sought for by London, editors. The Star of those days had offered a salary “quite as large as his Excise emoluments,” which wore something less than £SO • a year. The Alorning Chronicle could do better than that." It was the official Whig paper, it had the best Parliamentary reports, it sola (a 1 little later) 7.000 copies a day. Perry, tho editor, was himself a Scot, adroit, a man of the world, with a will of his own. He fought the Government in political libel actions three times and went to Newgate for a paragraph which stated that to vindicate the importance of the House of Lords “the dresses of the opera dancers are regulated there.” For printing a statement that tho successor of George XU would have “the finest opportunity of becoming nobly popular, ’ a jury would not convict him. It is dreadful to imagine what lampoons Burns in one of his Whigish or Republican moods might have written for such a terrible paper as this. ■ But Perry- had great men on his staff. Hazlitt was a reporter and afterwards- dramatic critic. His articles were too long for the editor. Coleridge wrote for the Alorning Chronicle, and so did that industrious freelance, Charles Lamb. Campbell sent poems, and so did Aloore. But Burns preferred- Ins trials as an excise-man and his poverty