present; and, finally, wishing that, if there | of infernal spirits are driving post from ear is to be another state of existence, Mr. B., to ear along my jaw-bones; and, secondly, Mrs. B., our little ones, and both families, they are so short, that you cannot leave off and you and I, in snug retreat, may make a retreat, may make a in the middle, and so hurt my pride in te jovial party to all eternity! idea that you found any work of mine too My direction is at Ellisland, near Dum- heavy to get through. fries. Yours, R. B. NO. CLXXI. TO MR. JAMES HAMILTON. Ellisland, May 26th, 1789. DEAR SIR-I send you by John Glover, carrier, the above account for Mr. Turnbull, as I suppose you know his address. I would fain offer, my dear Sir, a word of sympathy with your misfortunes: but it is a tender string, and I know not how to touch it. It is easy to flourish a set of high-flown sentiments on the subjects that would give great satisfaction to—a breast quite at ease; but as ONE observes who was very seldom mistaken in the theory of life, "The heart knoweth its own sorrows, and a stranger intermeddleth not therewith." I have a request to beg of you, and I not only beg of you, but conjure you, by all your wishes and by all your hopes, that the muse will spare the satiric wink in the moment of your foibles; that she will warble the song of rapture round your hymeneal couch; and that she will shed on your turf the honest tear of elegiac gratitude! Grant my request as speedily as possible-send me by the very first fly or coach from this place, three copies of the last edition of my poems, which place to my account. prose, Now may the good things of and the good the good things of verse, come among thy hands, until they be filled with the good things of this life, prayeth R. B. NO. CLXXIII. Among some distressful emergencies that TO MR. M'AULEY, OF DUMBARTON. I have experienced in life, I ever laid this down as my foundation of comfort-That he who has lived the life of an honest man, has by no means lived in vain! With every wish for your welfare and future success, I am, my dear Sir, sincerely yours, R. B. NO. CLXXII. TO WILLIAM CREECH, Esq. Ellisland, June 4th, 1789. DEAR SIR-Though I am not without my fears respecting my fate, at that grand, universal inquest of right and wrong, commonly called The Last Day, yet I trust there is one sin, which that arch-vagabond, Satan, who I understand is to be king's evidence, cannot throw in my teeth,-I mean ingratitude. There is a certain pretty large quantum of kindness for which I remain, and from inability, I fear must still remain, your debtor; but though unable to repay the debt, I assure you, Sir, I shall ever warmly remember the obligation. It gives me the sincerest pleasure to hear by my old acquaintance, Mr. Kennedy, that you are, in immor living;" and that your charming family are well, and promising to be an amiable and respectable addition to the company of performers, whom the Great Manager of the Drama of Man is bringing into action for the succeeding age. Ellisland, May 30th, 1789. SIR-I had intended to have troubled you with a long letter; but at present the delightful sensation of an omnipotent tooth-tal Allan's language, "Hale, and weel, and ache so engrosses all my inner man, as to put it out of my power even to write nonsense. However, as in duty bound, I approach my bookseller with an offering in my hand -a few poetic clinches, and a song:-to expect any other kind of offering from the rhyming tribe would be to know them much With respect to my welfare, a subject in less than you do. I do not pretend that which you once warmly and effectively inthere is much merit in these morceaux, butterested yourself, I am here in my old way, I have two reasons for sending them; primo, they are mostly ill-natured, so are in unison with my present feelings, while fifty troops holding my plough, marking the growth of my corn, or the health of my dairy; and at times sauntering by the delightful windings of the Nith, on the margin of which I have built my humble domicile, praying for seasonable weather, or holding an intrigue with the Muses, the only gipsies with whom I have now any intercourse. As I am entered into the holy state of matrimony, I trust my face is turned completely Zion-ward; and as it is a rule with all honest fellows to repeat no grievances, I hope that the little poetic licences of former days will, of course, fall under the oblivious influence of some good-natured statute of celestial prescription. In my family devotion, which, like a good Presbyterian, I occasionally give to my household folks, I am extremely fond of the psalm, "Let not the errors of my youth," &c., and that other, "Lo! children are God's heritage," &c., in which last Mrs. Burns, who, by the bye, has a glorious "wood-note wild" at either old song or psalmody, joins me with the pathos of Handel's Messiah. NO. CLXXIV. R. B. TO MR. ROBERT AINSLIE. Ellisland, June 8th, 1789. MY DEAR FRIEND-I am perfectly ashamed of myself when I look at the date of your last. It is not that I forget the friend of my heart and the companion of my peregrinations; but I have been condemned to drudgery beyond sufferance, though not, thank God, beyond redemption. I have had a collection of poems by a lady put into my hands to prepare them for the press; which horrid task, with sowing corn with my own hand, a parcel of masons, wrights, plasterers, &c., to attend to, roaming on business through Ayrshire-all this was against me, and the very first dreadful article was of itself too much for me. 13th. I have not had a moment to spare from incessant toil since the 8th. Life, my dear Sir, is a serious matter. You know, by experience, that a man's individual self is a good deal, but believe me, a wife and a family of children, whenever you have the honour to be a husband and a father, will show you that your present and most anxious hours of solitude are spent on trifles. The welfare of those who are very dear to us, whose only support hope and stay we are this, to a generous mind, another sort of more important object of care than any concerns whatever which centre merely in the individual. On the other hand, let no young, unmarried, rakebelly dog among you, make a song of his pretended liberty and freedom from care If the relations we stand in to king, country, kindred, and friends, be any thing but the visionary fancies of dreaming metaphysicians; if religion, virtue, magnanimity, generosity, humanity, and justice, be ought but empty sounds; then the man who may be said to live only for others, for the beloved, honourable female, whose tender faithful embraces endears life, and for the helpless little innocents who are to be the men and women, the worshippers of his God, the subjects of his king, and the support, nay the very vital existence, of his COUNTRY, in the ensuing age-compare such a man with any fellow whatever, who, whether he bustle and push in business among labourers, clerks, statesmen; or whether he roar and rant, and drink and sing in tavernsfellow over whose grave no one will breathe a single heigh-ho, except from the cobweb-tie of what is called good fellowship-who has no view nor aim but what terminates in himself if there be any grovelling earthborn wretch of our species, a renegade to common sense, who would fain believe that the noble creature man is no better than a sort of fungus, generated out of nothing, nobody knows how, and soon dissipating in nothing nobody knows where; such a stupid beast, such a crawling reptile, might balance the foregoing unexaggerated comparison, but no one else would have the patience. -a Forgive me, my dear Sir, for this long silence. To make you amends, I shall send you soon, and more encouraging still, without any postage, one or two rhymes of my later manufacture. R. B NO. CLXXV. Ellisland, June 19th, 1789. SIR-A poet and a beggar are, in so many points of view, alike, that one might take them for the same individual character under different designations; were it not that though, with a trifling poetic licence, most poets may be styled beggars, yet the converse of the proposition does not hold, that every beggar is a poet. In one particular, however, they remarkably agree; if you help either the one or the other to a mug of ale, or the picking of a bone, they will very willingly repay you with a song. This occurs to me at present, as I have just dispatched a deportment of this creature which he has well-lined rib of John Kirkpatrick's High-made-these are, I think, self-evident propolander-a bargain for which I am indebted to you, in the style of our ballad printers, "Five excellent new songs." The enclosed is nearly my newest song, and one that has cost me some pains, though that is but an equivocal mark of its excellence. Two or three others, which I have by me, shall do themselves the honour to wait on your after leisure: petitioners for admittance into favour, must not harass the condescension of their benefactor. You see, Sir, what it is to patronise a poet. 'Tis like being a magistrate in a petty borough; you do them the favour to preside in their council for one year, and your name bears the prefatory stigma of bailie for life. With, not the compliments, but the best wishes, the sincerest prayers of the season for you, that you may see many and happy years with Mrs. M'Murdo, and your family; wo blessings, by the bye, to which your Tank does not, by any means, entitle youa loving wife and fine family being almost the only good things of this life to which the farm-house and cottage have an exclusive right. I have the honour to be, Sir, your much indebted and very humble servant, R. B. sitions. That there is a real and eternal distinction between virtue and vice, and consequently, that I am an accountable creature; that from the seeming nature of the human mind, as well as from the evident imperfection, nay, positive injustice, in the administration of affairs, both in the natural and moral worlds, there must be a retributive scene of existence beyond the grave-must, I think, be allowed by every one who will give himself a moment's reflection. I will go farther, and affirm, that from the sublimity, excellence, and purity of his doctrine and precepts, unparalleled by all the aggregated wisdom and learning of many preceding ages, though, to appearance, he himself was the obscurest and most illiterate of our species-therefore Jesus Christ was from God. Whatever mitigates the woes, or increases the happiness of others, this is my criterion of goodness; and whatever injures society at large, or any individual in it, this is my measure of iniquity. What think you, Madam, of my creed? I trust that I have said nothing that will lessen me in the eye of one whose good opinion I value almost next to the approbation of my own mind. R. B NO. CLXXVI. TO MRS. DUNLOP. Ellisland, June 21st, 1789. DEAR MADAM-Will you take the effusions, the miserable effusions of low spirits, just as they flow from their bitter spring? I know not of any particular cause for this worst of all my foes besetting me; but for some time my soul has been beclouded with a thickening atmosphere of evil imaginations and gloomy presages. Monday Evening. I have just heard Mr. Kirkpatrick preach a sermon. He is a man famous for his benevolence, and I revere him; but, from such ideas of my Creator, good Lord, deliver me! Religion, my honoured friend, is surely a simple business, as it equally concerns the ignorant and the learned, the poor and the rich. That there is an incomprehensible Great Being, to whom I owe my existence, and that he must be intimately acquainted with the operations and progress of the internal machinery, and consequent outward NO. CLXXVII. TO MISS WILLIAMS. (90) Ellisland, 1789. MADAM-Of the many problems in the nature of that wonderful creature, man, this is one of the most extraordinary that he shall go on from day to day, from week to week, from month to month, or perhaps from year to year, suffering a hundred times more in an hour from the impotent consciousness of neglecting what he ought to do, than the very doing of it would cost him. I am deeply indebted to you, first, for a most elegant poetic compliment; then, for a polite, obliging letter; and, lastly, for your excellent poem on the slave-trade; and yet, wretch that I am! though the debts were debts of honour, and the creditor a lady, I have put off and put off even the very acknowledgment of the obligation, until you must indeed be the very angel I take you for, if you can forgive me. Your poem I have read with the highest pleasure. I have a way whenever I read a book-I mean a book in our own trade, Madam, a poetic one-and when it is my own property, that I take a pencil and mark at the ends of verses, or note on margins and odd paper, little criticisms of approbation or disapprobation as I peruse along. I will make no apology for presenting you with a few unconnected thoughts that occurred to me in my repeated perusals of your poem. I want to show you that I have honesty enough to tell you what I take to be truths, even when they are not quite on the side of approbation; and I do it in the firm faith that you have equal greatness of mind to hear them with pleasure. I had lately the honour of a letter from Dr. Moore, where he tells me that he has sent me some books; they are not yet come to hand, but I hear they are on the way. Wishing you all success in your progress in the path of fame, and that you may equally escape the danger of stumbling through incautious speed, or losing ground through loitering neglect. R. B. (91) NO. CLXXVIII. TO MR. JOHN LOGAN. (92) Ellisland, near Dumfries, Aug. 7th, 1789. DEAR SIR-I intended to have written you long ere now, and, as I told you, I had gotten three stanzas and a half on my way in a poetic epistle to you; but that old enemy of all good works, the devil, threw me into a prosaic mire, and for the soul of me I cannot get out of it. I dare not write you a long letter, as I am going to intrude on your time with a long ballad. I have, as you will shortly see, finished "The Kirk's Alarm;" but now that it is done, and I have laughed once or twice at the conceits in some of the stanzas, I am determined not to let it get into the public; so I send you this copy, the first I have sent to Ayrshire, except some few of the stanzas, which I wrote off in embryo, for Gavin Hamilton, under the express provision and request that you will only read it to a few of us, and do not on any account give, or permit to be taken, any copy of the ballad. If I could be of any service to Dr. M'Gill, I would do it, though it should be at a much greater expense than irritating a few bigoted priests; but I am afraid serving him in his present embarras is a task too hard for me. I have enemies enow, God knows, though I do not wantonly | add to the number. Still, as I think there is some merit in two or three of the thoughts, I send it to you as a small, but sincero testimony how much, and with what respectful esteem, I am, dear Sir, your obliged humble servant, R. B. NO. CLXXIX. Ellisland, Sept. 6th, 1789. DEAR MADAM-I have mentioned in my last, my appointment to the Excise, and the birth of little Frank; who, by the bye, I trust will be no discredit to the honourable name of Wallace, as he has a fine manly countenance, and a figure that might do credit to a little fellow two months older and likewise an excellent good temper, though when he pleases he has a pipe, only not quite so loud as the horn that his immortal namesake blew, as a signal to take out the pin of Stirling bridge. ; I had some time ago an epistle, part poetic and part prosaic, from your poetess, Mrs. J. Little, a very ingenious, but modest composition. I should have written her as she requested, but for the hurry of this new business. I have heard of her and her com positions in this country; and, I am happy to add, always to the honour of her character. The fact is, I know not well how to write to her; I should sit down to a sheet of paper that I knew not how to stain. I am no dab at fine-drawn letter-writing; and, except when prompted by friendship or gratitude, or, which happens extremely rarely, inspired by the muse (I know not her name) that presides over epistolary writing, I sit down, when necessitated to write, as I would sit down to beat hemp. Some parts of your letter of the 20th August, struck me with the most melancholy concern for the state of your mind at present. Would I could write you a letter of comfort, I would sit down to it with as much pleasure as I would to write an epic poem of my own composition, that should equal the Iliad. Religion, my dear friend, is the true comfort! A strong persuasion in a future state of existence; a proposition so obviously probable, that, setting revelation aside, every nation and people, so far as investigation has reached, for at least near four thousand years, have, in some mode or other, firmly believed it. In vain would we reason and pretend to doubt. I have myself done so to a very daring pitch; but when I reflected that I was opposing the most ardent wishes, and the most darling hopes of good men, and flying in the face of all human belief, in all ages, I was shocked at my own conduct. I know not whether I have ever sent you the following lines, or if you have ever seen them; but it is one of my favourite quotations, which I keep constantly by me in my progress through life, in the language of the book of Job: Against the day of battle and of warspoken of religion: “Tis this, my friend, that streaks our morning bright, "Tis thus that gilds the horror of our night. When wealth forsakes us, and when friends are few; When friends are faithless, or when foes pursue: "Tis this that wards the blow, or stills the smart, Disarms affliction, or repels his dart; I have been busy with Zeluco. The doctor is so obliging as to request my opinion of it; and I have been revolving in my mind. some kind of criticisms on novel-writing, but it is a depth beyond my research. I shall, however, digest my thoughts on the subject as well as I can. Zeluco is a most sterling performance. Farewell! A Dieu, le bon Dieu, je vous commende! matter very quietly; they did not even usher The man that won the whistle, &c. Wha last beside his chair shall fa', He is the king amang us three. To leave the heights of Parnassus, and come to the humble vale of prose. I have some misgivings that I take too much upon me, when I request you to get your guest, Sir Robert Lawrie, to frank the two enclosed covers for me, the one of them to Sir William Cunningham, of Robertland, Bar+ at Kilmarnock-the other, to Mr. Allan Masterton, Writing-Master, Edinburgh. The first has a kindred claim on Sir Robert, as being a brother baronet, and likewise a keen Foxite: the other is one of the worthiest men in the world, and a man of real genius! so, allow me to say, he has a fraternal claim on you. I want them franked for to-morrow, as I cannot get them to the post to-night. I shall send a servant again for them in the evening. Wishing that your head may be crowned with laurels to-night, and free from aches to-morrow, I have the honour to be, Sir, your deeply indebted humble servant, R. B. NO. CLXXX. TO CAPTAIN RIDDEL, CARSE. SIR-Big with the idea of this important day at Friars Carse, I have watched the elements and skies in the tull persuasion that they would announce it to the astonished world by some phenomena of terrific portent. Yesternight until a very late hour did I wait with anxious horror for the appearance of some comet firing half the sky; or aërial armies of sanguinary Scandinavians, darting athwart the startled heavens, rapid as the ragged lightning, and horrid as those convulsions of nature that bury nations. NO. CLXXXI. Ellisland, 1789. SIR-I wish from my inmost soul it were in my power to give you a more substantial gratification and return for all the 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 The elements, however, seem to take the equal to the grateful respect and high esteem |