burst. In a letter by Robert Forbes, bishop of the Scottish Episcopal Church at Leith, to Bishop Gordon of London, and of which a copy, under Forbes's hand, rests before us, is the following passage-"You know the famous Dr Johnson has been among us. Several anecdotes could I give you of him; but one is most singular. Dining one day at the table of one of the Lords of Session, the company stumbled upon characters, particularly, it would appear, of kings. Well,' said the bluff Doctor, George I. was a robber, George II. a fool, and George III. is an idiot!' How the company stared I leave you to judge. It was far from being polite, especially considering the table at which he was entertained, and that he himself is a pensioner at £300 a-year." It is just, indeed, possible that no such saying was ever uttered, but much more likely that it was.

If Burns's guilt was great, it was soon repented of. Coming back in a few weeks, and finding that the verses had given offence, he broke the pane on which they were inscribed.

BRAES OF BALLOCH MYLE.

THE scene here depicted is that of the song entitled, "The Bonny Lass of Ballochmyle,” with which a well-known anecdote of the poet is connected. In an evening of July, 1786, he had wandered out to these braes, "to view nature," he says, "in all the gaiety of the vernal year:* it was a golden moment for a poetic heart." He here saw, like a passing vision, a famed beauty, sister of the proprietor of the grounds, and the result was, that during his homeward walk, he composed his glowing stanzas

"Twas even-the dewy fields were green,
On ilka blade the pearls hang;
The zephyr wantoned round the bean,
And bore its fragrant sweets alang.

In every glen the mavis sang,

All nature listening seemed the while,
Except where greenwood echoes rang,
Amang the braes o' Ballochmyle.

"With careless step I onward strayed,
My heart rejoiced in nature's joy,
When, musing in a lonely glade,

A maiden fair I chanced to spy:
Her look was like the morning's eye,
Her air like nature's vernal smile,
Perfection whispered, passing by,

Behold the lass o' Ballochmyle.

"O had she been a country maid,

And I the happy country swain,
Though sheltered in the lowest shade
That ever rose on Scotland's plain,
Through weary winter's wind and rain,
With joy, with rapture, I would toil,
And nightly to my bosom strain

The lovely lass o' Ballochmyle."

• Burns speaks thus in a letter of the ensuing November, when he had forgotten that the time was summer, not spring.

In the ensuing November, he addressed a letter to this young lady, in which he enclosed a copy of the song. It is added, by Dr Currie, that the fair heroine did not take any notice of the letter or its enclosure, and thus appears to have offended the self-love of the poet, who complains of her silence in his common-place book.

To these circumstances, which are familiar to the public from their being detailed in all the memoirs of the poet, we have to add a few particulars which may tend to satisfy any further curiosity which may be entertained on the subject.

The braes of Ballochmyle extend along the right or north bank of the Ayr, between the village of Catrine and Howford Bridge, and are situated at the distance of about two miles from Burns's farm of Mossgiel. They form the most important part of the pleasuregrounds connected with Ballochmyle House, the seat of Claud Alexander, Esq. of Ballochmyle. Bending in a concave form, a mixture of steep bank and precipice, clothed with the most luxuriant natural wood, while a fine river sweeps round beneath them, they form a scene of bewildering beauty, exactly such as a poet would love to dream in, during a July eve. A short while before the incident which gave rise to the song, Ballochmyle, its broad lands, and lovely braes, had been parted with, in consequence of declining circumstances, by the representative of an old and once powerful Ayrshire family, Sir John Whitefoord. Burns had sung this incident also, in a set of plaintive verses, referring to the grief of Maria Whitefoord, now Mrs Cranston, on the occasion of her leaving her family inheritance

“Through faded groves Maria sang,

Hersel in beauty's bloom the while,
And aye the wild-wood echoes rang,
Fareweel the braes o' Ballochmyle."

Caleb Whitefoord, who, if remembered for nothing else, would be immortal from Goldsmith's description of him, as "the best-natured man with the worst-natured muse," was uncle of Sir John Whitefoord; and the family has further claims to classic distinction, in consequence of an earlier representative, Colonel Allan Whitefoord, being the real hero of the circumstances related in the novel of Waverley, under the name of Colonel Talbot. Ballochmyle was purchased from Sir John Whitefoord, by Claud Alexander, Esq., a gentleman well connected in the west of Scotland, who had realized a large fortune as paymaster-general of the H. E. I.C.'s forces in Bengal.

Mr Alexander had recently taken possession of the mansion, when, one summer evening, his sister, Miss Wilhelmina Alexander, a young lady distinguished by every grace of person and mind, walking out along the braes, after dinner, encountered a plainlooking man in rustic attire, who appeared to be musing, with his shoulder placed against one of the trees. The grounds being forbidden to unauthorised strangers-the evening being far advanced-and the encounter very sudden-she was startled, but instantly recovered herself, and passed on. She thought no more of the matter till, some months after, she received a letter from Robert Burns, recalling the circumstance to her mind, and enclosing the rich descriptive stanzas just quoted. The exact or direct purpose of

this letter has been disguised wilfully or mistakingly by Dr Currie, in consequence of the omission of a concluding sentence, in which the poet requested Miss Alexander's permission to print the verses in the second edition of his poems. If we advert to a letter of about the same date, to Mrs Stewart of Stair, [No. IX. in the General Correspondence in Dr Currie's Edition,] we shall see that this was an object to which the poet attached some importance, and that he regretted the want of a friend who might have mediated with Miss Alexander for the purpose of obtaining her consent to the dissemination of the verses. Probably despairing at length of gaining his point by this delicate means, and being then on the wing either for Jamaica or Edinburgh, he seems to have ultimately made up his mind to prefer the request in a direct form. We are therefore to consider his resentment of the lady's silence as not altogether based on the supposition of her having slighted his poetical powers. Burns would probably feel chagrined at not receiving either her permission to print the poem, or a statement of reasons for the contrary, besides, perhaps experiencing some mortification under the reflection that his talents did not appear sufficient, in the eyes of this young lady, even when employed in celebrating her own charms, to entitle him to the honour of her correspondence. Miss Alexander has been blamed by various writers for her reserve; and certainly it is now to be regretted that she was not so fortunate as to cultivate the friendship of the poet. But, when the plain fact is known, all such commentaries appear vain. Burns, though he wrote poetry which no contemporary, gentle or semple, approached, was, at this time at least, locally known chiefly for an unusual share of some of the failings of humanity. His character had been reported to Miss Alexander in terms which caused her to shrink from his correspondence, and while she did not fail to appreciate the beauty of his poetry, and the value of the compliment he had paid to her, she deemed it best, both for her own sake, and for the feelings of her poetical admirer, to allow the affair to rest at the point which it had already reached.

The heroine of the braes of Ballochmyle has since displayed no imperfect sense of the honour which the genius of Burns has conferred upon her. She preserves the original manuscript of the poem and letter with the greatest care; and she some years ago pointed out, as nearly as she could recollect, the exact spot where she had met the poet, in order that it might be distinguished by an appropriate ornament in the form of a rustic grotto or moss-house. The ornamented twig-work of this rustic monument, contains some appropriate devices; and on a tablet in the back there is inscribed a fac-simile of two of the verses of the poem, as it appears in the holograph of the author. The spirit which has dictated the construction and decoration of this grot is a right one. The lord of a piece of territory may justly value its fertility, its beauty, and its importance in his rent-roll; but what character can be attached to a piece of nature's soil, compared to that which the poet can confer upon it? Burns perhaps entered these grounds without the "bauld baron's leave," and was liable at the moment to be snarled away from them by some churlish minister of the baron's pleasure; and now the noblest and the proudest

F

of the land will come to visit them for his sake, and deem that, rich as they are in natural loveliness, and still further beautified by all the ornament that wealth can confer, they would have been nothing more than thousands of other river sides, if he had not been once there, to behold, to enjoy, and to celebrate them.

GEORGE THOMSON, ESQ.

RESPECTING this distinguished friend and correspondent of Burns, the following letter will probably be satisfactory to the reader:

DEAR SIR,

TRUSTEES' OFFICE, EDINBURGH, 29th March, 1838.

"I have been favoured with your note, in regard to a work which you tell me is about to appear, relative to the Land of Burns, in which it is proposed to give some memoirs of the Poet's friends, and of me among the rest. To your request, that I should furnish you with a few particulars respecting my personal history, I really know not well what to say, because my life has been too unimportant to merit much notice. It is in connection with national Music and Song, and my correspondence on that subject with Burns, chiefly, that I can have any reasonable hope of being occasionally spoken of; and I presume it is chiefly on my connection with the Poet, that you wish me to speak. I shall therefore content myself with a brief Sketch of what belongs to my personal history, and then proceed to the subject of Scottish Music and Burns.

"I was born at Limekilns in Fife, about the year 1759, as I was informed, for I can scarce believe I am so old. My father taught a school there, and having been invited in that capacity to the town of Banff, he carried me thither in my very early years, instructed me in the elementary branches of knowledge, and sent me to learn the dead languages at what was called the grammar school. He had a hard struggle to maintain an increasing family, and, after trying some mercantile means of enlarging his income, without success, he moved with his family to Edinburgh, when I was about 17. In a short time I got into a writer to the signet's office as a clerk, and remained in that capacity with him and another W. S., till the year 1780, when, through the influence of Mr John Home, author of Douglas, with one of the members of the honourable Board of Trustees, I was recommended to that Board, and became their junior clerk. Not long after, upon the death of their principal clerk, I succeeded to his situation, Mr Robert Arbuthnot being then their secretary; under whom, and afterwards under Sir William, his son and successor, I have served the Board for half a century; enjoying their fullest confidence, and the entire approbation of both secretaries, whose gentlemanly manners and kind dispositions were such, (for I never