Excerpt from Literary Recollections and Sketches In the days of my boyhood there may have been several denizens of Edinburgh, my native city, who knew and remembered Burns; but I was aware of the existence of only two such, and both of them belonged to the gentler sex. One of them played a prominent part in the poet's biography, being no other than the Clarinda of his fervid love-letters, the 'Nancy' of several of his songs and other poems, especially of the exquisite and impassioned 'Ae fond kiss, and then we sever!' When I was a boy and first heard of her as alive and in Edinburgh, the Clarinda of Burns's rapturous prose and verse was an old and invalid lady of eighty, living in solitude and seclusion in a quiet little street just round the south-western corner of the Calton Hill. There a short walk would take her to the monument erected, opposite the southern boundary of the High School of Edinburgh, to the poet whose memory she appears to have cherished to the last. She was the widow of a husband who was unworthy of her and whose name, M'Lehose, she has made familiar to all worshippers of Burns. Among these, in a boyish way, I might then be reckoned. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.