When you can spare a few moments I should be proud of a letter from you, directed for me, Gerrard Street, Soho.

No. CXXVII.

TO MR. CUNNINGHAM,

IN ANSWER TO THE FOREGOING.

MY DEAR SIR,

THE hurry of a farmer in this particular season, and the indolence of a poet at all times and seasons, will, I hope, plead my excuse for neglecting so long to answer your obliging letter of the 5th of August.

That you have done well in quitting your laborious concern in .. . I do not doubt ; the weighty reasons you mention were, I hope, very, and deservedly indeed, weighty ones, and your health is a matter of the last importance; but whether the remaining proprietors of the paper have also done well, is what I much doubt. The so far as I was a reader, exhibited such a brilliancy of point, such an elegance of paragraph, and such a variety of intelligence, that I can hardly conceive it possible to continue a daily paper in the same degree of excellence; but if there was a man who had abilities equal to the task, that man's assistance the proprietors have lost.

་་

When I received your letter I was transcribing for. my letter to the magistrates of the Canongate, Edinburgh, begging their permission to place a tomb-stone over poor Fergusson, and their edict in consequence of my petition; but now I shall send them to

Poor Fergusson! If there be a life beyond the grave, which I trust there is; and if there be a good God presiding over all nature, I cannot express my happiness sufficiently which I am sure there is; thou art now enjoyat the instance of your attachment to my late ing existence in a glorious world, where worth inestimable friend, Bob Fergusson, who was of the heart alone is distinction in the man; particularly intimate with myself and relations.* where riches, deprived of all their pleasure-purWhile I rcollect with pleasure his extraordinary chasing powers, return to their native sordid talents, and many amiable qualities, it affords matter: where titles and honours are the disreme the greatest consolation, that I am honoured garded reveries of an idle dream; and where with the correspondence of his successor in na- that heavy virtue, which is the negative consetional simplicity and genius. That Mr. Burns quence of steady dulness, and those thoughtless, has refined in the art of poetry, must readily be though often destructive follies, which are the admitted; but notwithstanding many favourable unavoidable aberrations of frail human nature, representations, I am yet to learn that he in-will be thrown into equal oblivion as if they had herits his convivial powers.

never been!

There was such a richness of conversation, Adieu, my dear Sir! so soon as your present such a plenitude of fancy and attraction in him, views and schemes are concentred in an aim, I that when I call the happy period of our inter-shall be glad to hear from you: as your welcourse to my memory, I feel myself in a state of fare and happiness is by no means a subject indelirium. I was then younger than him by different to eight or ten years; but his manner was so feli

citous, that he enraptured every person around him, and infused into the hearts of the young and old, the spirit and animation which operated on his own mind.

I am, dear Sir, yours, &c.

The erection of a monument to him.

Yours, &c.

tion and return for all your goodness to the poet, than transcribing a few of his idle rhymes.However," an old song," though to a proverb an instance of insignificance, is generally the only coin a poet has to pay with.

If my poems which I have transcribed, and mean still to transcribe into your book, were equal to the grateful respect and high esteem I bear for the gentleman to whom I present them, they would be the finest poems in the language. -As they are, they will at least be a testimony with what sincerity I have the honour to be, Sir,

Your devoted humble servant.

ish man mistakes these inconveniences and ills as if they were the peculiar property of his particular situation; and hence that eternal fickleness, that love of change, which has ruined, and daily does ruin many a fine fellow, as well as many a blockhead; and is almost, without exception, a constant source of disappointment and misery.

I long to hear from you how yon go on-not so much in business as in life. Are you pretty well satisfied with your own exertions, and tolerably at ease in your internal reflections? 'Tis much to be a great character as a lawyer, but beyond comparison more to be a great character as a man. That you may be both the one and the other is the earnest wish, and that you will be both is the firm persuasion of, My dear Sir, &c.

No. CXXXIII.

TO MR. ROBERT AINSLIE.

Ellisland, Nov. 1, 1789.

MY DEAR FRIEND,
I HAD written you long ere now, could I have
guessed where to find you, for I am sure you
have more good sense than to waste the precious
days of vacation time in the dirt of business and
Edinburgh. Wherever you are, God bless you,
and lead you not into temptation, but deliver
you from evil!

I HAVE a good while had a wish to trouble you with a letter, and had certainly done it long ere now-but for a humiliating something that throws cold water on the resolution, as if one I do not know if I have informed you that I should say, "You have found Mr. Grahım a am now appointed to an excise division, in the very powerful and kind friend indeed, and that middle of which my house and farm lie. In this interest he is so kindly taking in your concerns, I was extremely lucky. Without ever having you ought by every thing in your power to keep been an expectant, as they call their journeymen alive and cherish." Now though, since God excisemen, I was directly planted down to all in-has thought proper to make one powerful and tents and purposes an officer of excise; there to another helpless, the connexion of obliger and flourish and bring forth fruits--worthy of re-obliged is all fair; and though my being under pentance.

your patronage is to me highly honourab e, yet, Sir, allow me to flatter myself, that, as a poet and an honest man, you first interested yourself in my welfare, and principally as such still, you permit me to approach you.

I know not how the word exciseman, or still more opprobrious, gauger, will sound in your ears. I too have seen the day when my auditory nerves would have felt very delicately on this subject; but a wife and children are things I have found the excise business go on a great which have a wonderful power in blunting these deal smoother with me than I expected; owing kind of sensations. Fifty pounds a year for a good deal to the generous friendship of Mr. life, and a provision for widows and orphans, Mitchell, ny collector, and the kind assistance you will allow is no bad settlement for a poet. of Mr. Findlater, my supervisor. I dare to be For the ignominy of the profession, I have the honest, and I fear no labour. Nor do I find encouragement which I once heard a recruiting my hurried life greatly inimical to my corressergeant give to a numerous, if not a respec-pondence with the Muses. Their visits to me, table audience, in the streets of Kilmarnock. indeed, and I believe to most of their acquaint"Gentlemen, for your further and better en-ance, like the visits of good angels, are short and couragement, I can assure you that our regiment far between; but I meet them now and then as is the most blackguard corps under the crown, I jog through the hills of Nithsdale, just as I and consequently with us an honest fellow has used to do on the banks of Ayr. I take the Bthe surest chance for preferment.' berty to enclose you a few bagatelles, all of them the productions of my leisure thoughts in my excise rides.

You need not doubt that I find several very unpleasant and disagreeable circumstances in my business; but I am tired with and disgusted at the language of complaint against the evils of life. Human existence in the most favourable situations does not abound with pleasures, and nas its inconveniences and ills; capricious fool- spaper.

If you know or have ever seen Captain Grose, the antiquarian, you will enter into any bumour that is in the verses on him. Perhaps you have seen them before, as I sent them to a London Though I dare say you have none

of the solemn-league-and-covenant fire, which only to curse him with life which gives him no shone so conspicuous in Lord George Gordon, pleasure; and yet the awful, dark termination and the Kilmarnock weavers, yet I think you of that life, is a something at which he recoils. must have heard of Dr. M'Gill, one of the cler

What 'tis you are, and we must shortly be ! 'tis no matter:

A little time will make us learn'd as you are."

gymen of Ayr, and his heretical book. God" Tell us, ye dead; will none of you in pity help him, poor man! Though he is one of the Disclose the secretworthiest, as well as one of the ablest of the whole priesthood of the Kirk of Scotland, in every sense of that ambiguous term, yet the poor Doctor and his numerous family are in imminent danger of being thrown out to the mercy of the winter-winds. The enclosed ballad on that business is, I confess, too local, but I laughed myself at some conceits in it, though I am convinced in my conscience, that there are a good many heavy stanzas in it too.

The election ballad, as you will see, alludes to the present canvass in our string of boroughs, I do not believe there will be such a hard run match in the whole general election.

I am too little a man to have any political attachments; I am deeply indebted to, and have the warmest veneration for, individuals of both parties; but a man who has it in his power to be the father of a country, and who is a character that one cannot

speak of with patience.
Sir J. J. does "what man can do," but yet
I doubt his fate.

No. CXXXV.

TO MRS. DUNLOP.

Ellisland, 13th December, 1789.

19

Can it be possible, that when I resign this frail, feverish being, I shall still find myself in conscious existence! When the last gasp of agony has announced, that I am no mere to those that knew me, and the few who loved me: when the cold, stiffened, unconscious, ghastly corse is resigned into the earth, to be the prey of unsightly reptiles, and to become in time a trodden clod, shall I yet be warm in life, seeing and seen, enjoying and enjoyed? Ye venerable sages, and holy flamens, is there probability in your conjectures, truth in your stories of another world beyond death or are they all alike, baseless visions, and fabricated fables? If there is another life, it must be only for the just, the benevolent, the amiable, and the humane; what a flattering idea, then, is the world to come? Would to God I as firmly believed it, as I ardently wish it! There I should meet an aged parent, now at rest from the many buffetings of an evil world, against which he so long and so bravely struggled. There should I meet the friend, the disinterested friend of my early life; the man who rejoiced to see me, because he loved me and could serve me. -Muir! thy weaknesses were the aberrations of human nature, but thy heart glowed with every thing generous, manly, and noble; and if ever emanation from the All-good Being animated a human form, it was thine!-There should I with speechless agony of rapture, again recognize my lost, my ever dear Mary! whose bosom was

My Mary, dear departed shade!

Where is thy place of heavenly rest?
Seest thou thy lover lowly laid?

Hear'st thou the groans that rend his breast?

MANY thanks, dear Madam, for your sheet-fraught with truth, honour, constancy, and love. ful of Rhymes. Though at present I ain below the veriest prose, yet from you every thing pleases. I am groaning under the miseries of a diseased nervous system; a system, the state of which is most conducive to our happinessor the most productive of our misery. For Jesus Christ, thou amiablest of characters! now near three weeks I have been so ill with I trust thou art no impostor, and that thy rea nervous head-ache, that I have been obliged to give up, for a time, my excise books, being velation of blissful scenes of existence beyond scarce able to lift my head, much less to ride death and the grave, is not one of the many once a-week over ten muir parishes. What is impositions which time after time have been Man! To-day, in the luxuriance of health, ex- palmed on credulous mankind. I trust that in alting in the enjoyment of existence; in a few thee," shall all the families of the earth be days, perhaps in a few hours, loaded with conscious painful being, counting the tardy pace of the lingering moments by the repercussions of anguish, and refusing or denied a comforter, Day follows night, and night comes after day,

This alludes to the contest for the borough of

Dumfries, between the Duke of Queensberry's interest and that of Sir James Johnstone.

blessed," by being yet connected together in better world, where every tie that bound heart to heart, in this state of existence, shall be, far beyond our present conceptions, more endearing.

who maintain, that what are called nervous af I am a good deal inclined to think with those

fections are in fact diseases of the mind. I can

not reason, I cannot think; and but to you I would not venture to write any thing above an