you

To old Bald-pate smooths his wrinkled brow,
And humbly begs you'll mind the important-Now!
To crown your happiness he asks your leave,
And offers, bliss to give and to receive.

For our sincere, tho' haply weak endeavours, With grateful pride we own your many favours; And howsoe'er our tongues may ill reveal it, Believe our glowing bosoms truly feel it.

I can no more. If once I was clear of this **** farm, I should respire more at ease.

No.

No. XCI.

To MRS. DUNLOP.

Ellisland, 25th January, 1790.

IT has been owing to unremitting hurry of business that I have not written to you, Madam, long ere now. My health is greatly better, and I now begin once more to share in satisfaction and enjoyment with the rest of my fellow-creatures.

Many thanks, my much esteemed friend, for your kind letters; but why will you make me run the risk of being contemptible and mercenary in my own eyes? When I pique myself on my independent spirit, I hope it is neither poetic licence, nor poetic rant; and I am so flattered with the honour you have done me, in making me your compeer in friendship and friendly correspondence, that I cannot without pain, and a degree of mortification, be reminded of the real inequality between our situations.

Most

Most sincerely do I rejoice with you, dear Madam, in the good news of Anthony. Not only your anxiety about his fate, but my own esteem for such a noble, warm-hearted, manly young fellow, in the little I had of his acquaintance, has interested me deeply in his fortunes.

Falconer, the unfortunate author of the Shipwreck which you so much admire, is no more. After witnessing the dreadful catastrophe he so feelingly describes in his poem, and after weathering many hard gales of fortune, he went to the bottom with the Aurora frigate! I forget what part of Scotland had the honour of giving him birth, but he was the son of obscurity and misfortune.* He was one of those daring ad

venturous

Falconer was in early life a sea-boy, to use a word of Shakespear, on board a man of war, in which capacity he attracted the notice of Campbell, the author of the satire on Dr. Johnson, entitled Lexiphanes, then purser of the ship. Campbell took him as his servant, and delighted in giving him instruction; and, when Falconer afterwards acquired celebrity, boasted of him as his scholar. The Editor had this information from a surgeon of a man of war, in 1777, who knew both Campbell and Falconer, and who himself perished soon after by shipwreck on the coast of America.

Though

venturous spirits which Scotland, beyond any other country, is remarkable for producing. Little does the fond mother think, as she hangs delighted over the sweet little leec hat her bosom, where the hereafter wanfellow poor der, and what may be his fate. I remember a stanza in an old Scottish ballad, which, notwithstanding its rude simplicity, speaks feelingly to the heart:

may

"Little did my mother think,
That day she cradled me,
What land I was to travel in,

Or what death I should die!"

Old Scottish songs are, you know, a favourite

Though the death of Falconer happened so lately as 1770 or 1771, yet in the biography prefixed by Dr. Anderson to his works, in the complete edition of the Poets of Great Britain, it is said-" Of the family, birth"place, and education of William Falconer, there are no "memorials." On the authority already given, it may be mentioned, that he was a native of one of the towns on the coast of Fife; and that his parents, who had suffered some misfortunes, removed to one of the sea-ports of England, where they both died soon after of an epidemic fever, leaving poor Falconer, then a boy, forlorn and destitute. In consequence of which he entered on board a man of war, These last circumstances are, however, less certain. E,

ite study and pursuit of mine; and, now I am on that subject, allow me to give you two stanzas of another old simple ballad, which I am sure will please you. The catastrophe of the piece is a poor ruined female lamenting her fate. She concludes with this pathetic wish:

"O that my father had ne'er on me smil'd;

O that my mother had ne'er to me sung!
O that my cradle had never been rock'd;
But that I had died when I was young!

O that the grave it were my bed;

My blankets were my winding sheet;
The clocks and the worms my bedfellows a';
And O sae sound as I should sleep!"

I do not remember in all my reading to have met with any thing more truly the language of misery than the exclamation in the last line. Misery is like love; to speak its language truly, the author must have felt it.

I am every day expecting the doctor to give your little godson* the small pox. They are rife in the country, and I tremble for his fate. By the way, I cannot help congratulating you

VOL. II.

U

*The Bard's second son, Francis.

E.

on