Burns's Clarinda. Compiled by John D. Ross, LL.D. (John Grant,
Edinburgh.)—This may be a harmless, but is not at all a necessary, book. A certain interest, no doubt, attaches to the lively grass-widow, who was such a curious compound of coquetry and Calvinism—or what she understood to be Calvinism—that enlivened and distracted Burns's second winter in Edinburgh, and made him wiite letters full, as the late Principal Shairp said, "of such fustian, such extravagant bombast, as Burns or any man beyond twenty might well have been ashamed to write." But Clarinda can be studied to most advantage—if she can be studied to advantage at all—in connection with her remarkable relations with Burns, and it seems superfluous to devote a whole volume to her. Mr. Ross has shown a certain amount of industry, however, in collecting stories about Mrs. MeLehose, and the views expressed about her and her connection with the poet by such writers as Principal Shairp and Dr. Hately Waddell. He has also reprinted Burns's letters to her and the poems in which he praised—and in one case immortalised—her. But why has he not given the letters of Mrs. McLehose to Burns in which she reveals and portrays herself ? Such a case of Hamlet with the Prince of Denmark left out of the cast has not of late come under our notice.
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