1995
SCHOLARLY RESEARCH has now uncovered a series of manuscripts, misfiled in the archives of the Scottish Agricultural Extension Office (Dumfries Division) under the general title: Streams and the bodies therein (miscellaneous) -- clearly a clerical misinterpretation of the word "Burns". It now appears that Burns was willing and ready to take the position of Professor of Agriculture at Edinburgh, except for the fact that the position was funded entirely by soft-money, and therefore would have to be supported by grants.
WE HAVE BEEN UNABLE to recover any of the Agricultural grants written by Burns to cover his salary. However, in the Dumfries archives, we did find a series of Extension Publications which suggests he took the prospect of the position quite seriously (examples include "How to grow a red, red rose, and make it flow'r in June"; "The Tam o'Shanter and Cutty Sark: patterns and sewing instructions": a contribution for the pest-control division entitled "To (get rid of) a mouse"; an exercise miscellany entitled:"Rusticity's ungainly form, and how to improve it for only minutes a day") and, of course, "Ten tips to Great Hogmagundie".
WE WERE ALSO LUCKY ENOUGH to find a letter written apparently in response to a governmental move to cut the funding of both the Scottish Endowment for the Arts and the Corporation for Public Broadsheets; we speculate that both were funding sources to which Burns may have been submitting Interdisciplinary Proposals in the general area of Agricultural Poetry. In any case, it appears that none of the grant proposals were successful, which satisfactorily explains why Burns never took the chair at Edinburgh, but it left him a bitter man....
The poem is entitled: To a Newt, someone or thing he apparently didn't like.