and honours; and I do not see but that he may gain Heaven as well, (which by the bye is no mean consideration) who steals through the vale of life, amusing himself with every little flower that fortune throws in his way as he who straining straight forward, and perhaps bespattering all about him, gains some of life's little eminences, where, after all, he can only see, and be seen a little more conspicuously, than what, in the pride of his heart, he is apt to term, the poor, indolent devil he has left behind him.

There is a noble sublimity, a heart melting tenderness in some of our ancient ballads, which shew them to be the work of a masterly hand; and it has often given me many a heart-ache to reflect that such glorious old bards--bards who very probably owed all their talents to native genius; yet have described the exploits of heroes, the pangs of disappointment, and the meltings of love, with such fine strokes of nature--that their very names (O how mortifying to a bard's vanity!) are now 'buried among the wreck of things which were.'

O ye illustrious names unknown! who could feel so strongly, and describe so well; the last, the meanest of the muse's train-one who though far inferior to your flights, yet eyes your path, and with trembling wing would sometimes soar after you-a poor rustic bard unknown, pays this sympathetic pang to your memory. Some of you tell us, with all the charms of verse, that you have been unfortunate in the world-unfortunate in

love: he, too, has felt the loss of his little fortune, the loss of friends, and, worst of all, the loss of the woman he adored. Like you, all his consolation was his muse she taught him in rustic measures to complain. Happy, could he have done it with your strength of imagination and flow of verse! May the turf lie lightly on your bones! and may you now enjoy that solace and rest, which this world gives to the heart, tuned to all the feelings of poesy and love!

This is all, worth quoting, in my MSS. and more than all. R. B.

No. 8.

TO MR. AIKEN,

(The Gentleman to whom the Cotter's Saturday Night is

addressed.)

Ayrshire, 1786.

SIR,

I WAS with Wilson, my printer, t'other day, and settled all our by-gone matters between us. After I had paid him all demands, I made him the offer of the second edition, on the hazard of being paid out of the first and readiest, which he declines. By his account, the paper of a thousand copies would cost about twenty-seven pounds, and the printing about fifteen or sixteen: he offers to agree to this for the printing, if I will advance

for the paper, but this, you know, is out of my power; so farewell hopes of a second edition till I grow richer! an epocha, which, I think, will arrive at the payment of the British national debt.

There is scarcely any thing hurts me so much in being disappointed of my second edition, as not having it in my power to shew my gratitude to Mr. Ballantine, by publishing my poem of The Brigs of Ayr. I would detest myself as a wretch, if I thought I were capable in a very long life of forgetting the honest, warm, and tender delicacy, with which he enters into my interests. I am sometimes pleased with myself in my grateful sensations: but, I believe, on the whole, I have very little merit in it, as my gratitude is not a virtue, the consequence of reflection; but sheerly the instinctive emotion of a heart, too inattentive to allow worldly maxims and views to settle into selfish habits.

I have been feeling all the various rotations and movements within, respecting the excise. There are many things plead strongly against it; the uncertainty of getting soon into business; the consequences of my follies, which may perhaps make it impracticable for me to stay at home; and besides I have for some time been pining under secret wretchedness, from causes which you pretty well know the pang of disappointment, the sting of pride, with some wandering stabs of remorse, which never fail to settle on my vitals like vultures, when attention is not called away by the calls of society, or the vagaries of the muse. Even in the hour of social mirth, my gaiety is the madness of an intoxicated criminal under the hands of

the executioner. All these reasons urge me to go abroad, and to all these reasons I have only one answer the feelings of a father. This, in the present mood I am in, overbalances every thing that can be laid in the scale against it.

You may perhaps think it an extravagant fancy, but it is a sentiment, which strikes home to my very soul though sceptical in some points of our current belief, yet, I think, I have every evidence for the reality of a life beyond the stinted bourne of our present existence; if so then, how should I, in the presence of that tremendous Being, the Author of existence, how should I meet the reproaches of those who stand to me in the dear relation of children, whom I deserted in the smiling innocency of helpless infancy? O, thou great unknown power! Thou almighty God! who hast lighted up reason in my breast, and blessed me with immortality! I have frequently wandered from that order and regularity necessary for the perfection of thy works, yet thou hast never left me nor forsaken me!

Since I wrote the foregoing sheet, I have seen something of the storm of mischief thickening over my folly-devoted head. Should you, my friends, my benefactors, be successful in your applications for me, perhaps it may not be in my power, in that way, to reap the fruit of your friendly efforts. What I have written in the preceding pages is the settled tenor of my present resolution; but should inimical circumstances forbid me closing with your kind offer, or enjoying it only threaten to entail farther misery

To tell the truth, I have little reason for this last complaint; as the world in general has been kind to me fully up to my deserts. I was, for some time past, fast getting into the pining, distrustful, snarl of the misanthrope. I saw myself alone, unfit for the struggle of life, shrinking at every rising cloud in the chance-directed atmosphere of fortune, while, all defenceless, I looked about in vain for a cover. It never occurred to me, at least never with the force it deserved, that this world is a busy scene, and man a creature destined for a progressive struggle; and that, however I might possess a warm heart and inoffensive manners, (which last, by the bye, was rather more than I could well boast;) still, more than these passive qualities, there was something to be done. When all my school-fellows and youthful compeers (those misguided few excepted, who joined, to use a Gentoo phrase, the hallachores of the human race) were striking off with eager hope and earnest intent, in some one or other of the many paths of busy life, I was 'standing idle in the market place,' or only left the chace of the butterfly from flower to flower, to hunt from whim to whim.

*

You see, Sir, that if to know one's errors were a probability of mending them, I stand a fair chance: but, according to the reverend Westminster divines, though conviction must precede conversion, it is very far from always implying it.*

* *

This letter was evidently written under the distress of mind occasioned by our poet's separation from Mrs. Burns.