elegant manner, and acute remark, lest I should be thought to balance my orientalisms of applause over-against the finest quey* in Ayrshire, which he made me a present of to help and adorn my farmstock. As it was on hallow-day, I am determined annually as that day returns, to decorate her horns with an ode of gratitude to the family of Dunlop.

So soon as I know of your arrival at Dunlop, I will take the first conveniency to dedicate a day, or perhaps two, to you and friendship, under the guarantee of the Major's hospitality. There will soon be three score and ten miles of permanent distance between us; and now that your friendship and friendly correspondence is entwisted with the heartstrings of my enjoyment of life, I must indulge myself in a happy day of the "The feast of reason and the flow of soul."

R. B.

*Heifer.

No. CXXIV.

TO MR. JAMES JOHNSON,

ENGRAVER.

MY DEAR SIR:

Mauchline, November 15th, 1788.

I HAVE sent you two more songs. If you have got any tunes, or any thing to correct, please send them by return of the carrier.

I can easily see, my dear friend, that you will very probably have four volumes. Perhaps you may not find your account lucratively in this business; but you are a patriot for the music of your country; and I am certain posterity will look on themselves as highly indebted to your public spirit. Be not in a hurry; let us go on correctly, and your name shall be immortal.

I am preparing a flaming preface for your third volume. I see every day new musical publications advertised; but what are they? Gaudy, hunted butterflies of a day, and then vanish for ever: but your work will outlive the momentary neglects of idle fashion, and defy the teeth of time.

Have you never a fair goddess that leads you a wild-goose chase of amorous devotion? Let me

know a few of her qualities, such as whether she be rather black, or fair; plump, or thin; short, or tall, &c.; and choose your air, and I shall task my muse to celebrate her.

R. B.

[James Johnson, proprietor of the "Musical Museum," was a kindly sort of person, and indulged his correspondent, the Bard, with many a flowing bowl during their studies on the mystic art of uniting music and poetry. The engraved copper-plates of the work became, after his death, the property of Mr. Blackwood; and it is the wonder of many that a publisher so shrewd and enterprising has hitherto refrained from giving a new edition of a work so truly characteristic and national to the world: a copy of "The Scots Musical Museum" is one of the rarest of all rare things in the public market.-ED.]

No. CXXV.

TO DR. BLACKLOCK.

Mauchline, November 15th, 1788.

REVEREND AND DEAR SIR:

As I hear nothing of your motions, but that you are, or were, out of town, I do not know where this may find you, or whether it will find you at all. I wrote you a long letter, dated from the land of matrimony, in June; but either it had not found you, or, what I dread more, it found you or Mrs. Blacklock in too precarious a state of health and spirits to take notice of an idle packet.

I have done many little things for Johnson, since I had the pleasure of seeing you; and I have finished one piece, in the way of Pope's "Moral Epistles;" but, from your silence, I have every thing to fear, so I have only sent you two melancholy things, which I tremble lest they should too well suit the tone of your present feelings.

In a fortnight I move, bag and baggage, to Nithsdale; till then, my direction is at this place; after that period, it will be at Ellisland, near Dumfries. It would extremely oblige me were it but half a line, to let me know how you are, and where you are. Can I be indifferent to the fate of a man to whom I owe so much? A man whom I not only esteem, but venerate.

My warmest good wishes and most respectful compliments to Mrs. Blacklock, and Miss Johnston, if she is with you.

I cannot conclude without telling you that I am more and more pleased with the step I took respecting my Jean." Two things, from my happy experience, I set down as apophthegms in life. A wife's head is immaterial, compared with her heart; and Virtue's (for wisdom what poet pretends to it?)ways are ways of pleasantness, and all her paths are peace." Adieu! R. B.

Tere follow The mother's lament for the loss of her son," and the song beginning "The lazy mist hangs from the brow of the hill." See Vol. 11 p. 82; and Vol. IV., p. 133.]

It was little that Blacklock had in his power to do for a brother poet-but that little he did with a fond alacrity, and with a modest grace." There was, perhaps, never one among all mankind," says Heron, in his memoir of Burns, whom you might more truly have called an angel upon earth than Dr. Blacklock: he was guileless and innocent as a child, yet endowed with manly sagacity and penetration his heart was a perpetual spring of overflowing benignity, his feelings were all tremblingly alive to the sense of the sublime, the beautiful, the tender, the pious, the virtuous-poetry was to him the dear solace of perpetual blindness; cheerfulness, even to gaiety, was, notwithstanding that irremediable misfortune, long the predominant colour of his mind. In his latter years, when the gloom might otherwise have thickened around him, hope, faith, devotion the most fervent and sublime, exalted his mind to heaven, and made him maintain his wanted cheerfulness in the expectation of a speedy dissolution. ED.]