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for that highly polished mind, that charming delicacy of soul, which is found among the female world in the more elevated stations of life, and which is certainly by far the most bewitching charm in the famous cestus of Venus. It is indeed such an inestimable treasure, that where it can be had in its native heavenly purity, unstained by some one or other of the many shades of affectation, and unalloyed by some one or other of the many species of caprice, I declare to Heaven, I should think it cheaply purchased at the expense of every other earthly good! But as this angelic creature is, I am afraid, extremely rare in any station and rank of life, and totally denied to such a humble one as mine, we meaner mortals must put up with the next rank of female excellence-as fine a figure and face we can produce as any rank of life whatever; rustic, native grace; unaffected modesty, and unsullied purity; nature's motherwit, and the rudiments of taste; a simplicity of soul, unsuspicious of, because unacquainted with, the crooked ways of a selfish, interested, disingenuous world; and the dearest charm of all the rest, a yielding sweetness of disposition, and a generous warmth of heart, grateful for love on our part, and ardently glowing with a more than equal return; these, with a healthy frame, a sound, vigorous constitution, which your higher ranks can scarcely ever hope to enjoy, are the charms of lovely woman in my humble walk of life.

This is the greatest effort my broken arm has Do let me hear, by first post, how cher

yet made.

petit Monsieur comes on with his small-pox. May almighty goodness preserve and restore him!

R. B.

[Homer's description of the Cestus of Venus has been rendered into English by many skilful hands: here are four versions :

"In this was every art and every charm,

To win the wisest and the coldest warm :
Fond love, the gentle vow, the gay desire,
The kind deceit, the still-reviving fire,
Persuasive speech, and more persuasive sighs,
Silence that spoke, and eloquence of eyes."

POPE.

"She spoke, and from her heaving bosom loosed the various girdle with care. There contained were her soul-winning charms: there was love; there melting desire; there, of lovers, the tender Vows the pleasing flattery was there which takes by stealth the souls of the wise."

MACPHERSON.

"It was an ambush of sweet snares, replete
With love, desire, soft intercourse of hearts,
And music of resistless whisper'd sounds,
Which from the wisest win their best resolves."

COWPER.

"Then from her breast unclasped the embroider'd zone,
Where each embellishment divinely shone:
There dwell the allurements, all that love inspire,
There soft seduction, there intense desire,
There witchery of words, whose flatteries weave
Wiles that the wisdom of the wise deceive."

SOTHEBY.

ED.]

No. CXCI.

ΤΟ

Ellisland, 1791.

DEAR SIR,

I AM exceedingly to blame in not writing you long ago; but the truth is, that I am the most indolent of all human beings; and when I matriculate in the herald's office, I intend that my supporters shall be two sloths, my crest a slow-worm, and the motto, "Deil tak the foremost." So much by way of apology for not thanking you sooner for your kind execution of my commission.

I would have sent you the poem ; but somehow or other it found its way into the public papers, where you must have seen it.

I am ever, dear Sir, yours sincerely,

R. B. [The poem to which the poet alludes is the Lament of Mary Queen of Scots: that his works found their way to the newspapers could excite no wonder: he gave copies to many of his friends, and they in their turn distributed copies among their acquaintances. Burns seems never to have surmised that he was injuring his own pocket by this practice: the poems which he wrote at Ellisland, and the songs which he composed for Johnson and Thomson, would have made a volume, and brought him a thousand pounds.-ED.]

No. CXCII.

ΤΟ

Ellisland, 1791.

Thou eunuch of language: thou Englishman, who never was south the Tweed: thou servile echo of fashionable barbarisms: thou quack, vending the nostrums of empirical elocution: thou marriage-maker between vowels and consonants, on the Gretna-green of caprice: thou cobbler, botching the flimsy socks of bombast oratory: thou blacksmith, hammering the rivets of absurdity: thou butcher, embruing thy hands in the bowels of orthography: thou arch-heretic in pronunciation: thou pitch-pipe of affected emphasis: thou carpenter, mortising the aukward joints of jarring sentences: thou squeaking dissonance of cadence: thou pimp of gender: thou Lyon Herald to silly etymology: thou antipode of grammar: thou executioner of construction: thou brood of the speechdistracting builders of the Tower of Babel: thou lingual confusion worse confounded: thou scapegallows from the land of syntax thou scavenger of mood and tense: thou murderous accoucheur of infant learning thou ignis fatuus, misleading the

:

steps of benighted ignorance: thou pickle-herring in the puppet-show of nonsense : thou faithful recorder of barbarous idiom: thou persecutor of syllabication: thou baleful meteor, foretelling and facilitating the rapid approach of Nox and Erebus. R. B.

[This singular letter was, it is believed, sent to a critic who had taken the poet to task about obscure language and imperfect grammar: he delighted in this sort of scolding, and employed it sometimes very happily in conversation to repel petulance and confound those

"Word-catchers who live on syllables,"

The lan

that infested society then as they do now. guage which Burns used in his poetry was new to many: no one had dared to use the mother-tongue with such boldness before, and it has even been surmised by one of his editors that he created words whenever he wanted them. Those who are intimately acquainted with the language of Scotland will acquit Burns of the charge: the words instanced against him, "cootie" and "heugh," are right old Scottish, and current in Ayrshire, Galloway, and the county of Dumfries.-ED.]

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