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jects seem larger than life. Extreme sensibility, irritated and prejudiced on the gloomy side by a series of misfortunes and disappointments, at that period of my existence when the soul is laying in her cargo of ideas for the voyage of life is, I believe, the principal cause of this unhappy frame of mind.

"The valiant, in himself, what can he suffer?

"Or what need he regard his single woes?" &c.

Your surmise, madam, is just; I am indeed a husband.

I found a once much-loved and still muchloved female, literally and truly cast out to the mercy of the naked elements, but as I enabled her to purchase a shelter; and there is no sporting with a fellow-creature's happiness or misery.

The most placid good-nature and sweetness of disposition; a warm heart, gratefully devoted with all its powers to love me; vigorous health and sprightly cheerfulness, set off to the best advantage, by a more than common handsome figure; these, I think, in a woman, may make a good wife, though she should never have read a page, but the Scriptures of the Old and New Testament, nor have danced in a brighter assembly than a penny-pay wedding.

No. 52.

To MR. P. HILL

MY DEAR HILL,

I SHALL say nothing at all to your mad present-you have so long and often been of important service to me, and I suppose you mean to go on conferring obligations until I shall not be able to lift up my face before you. In the mean time, as Sir Roger de Coverley, because it happened to be a cold day in which he made his will, ordered his servants great coats for mourning; so, because I have been this week plagued with an indigestion, I have sent you by the carrier a fine old ewe-milk cheese.

Indigestion is the devil: nay, 'tis the devil and all. It besets a man in every one of his senses. I lose my appetite at the sight of successful knavery; and sicken to loathing at the noise and nonsense of self-important folly.When the hollow-hearted wretch takes me by the hand, the feeling spoils my dinner; th proud man's wine so offends my palate tha choaks me in the gullet; and the pulvil feathered, pert coxcomb, is so disgustful ir nostril that my stomach turns.

If ever you have any of these disagreeable sensations, let me prescribe for you patience and a bit of my cheese. I know that you are no niggard of your good things among your friends, and some of them are in much need of a slice. There in my eye is our friend, Smellie; a man positively of the first abilities and greatest strength of mind, as well as one of the best hearts and keenest wits that I have ever met with; when you see him, as, alas! he too is smarting at the pinch of distressful circumstances, aggravated by the sneer of contumelious greatness-a bit of my cheese alone will not cure him, but if you add a tankard of brown stout, and superadd a magnum of right Oporto, you will see his sorrows vanish like the morning mist before the summer sun.

Ch, the earliest friend, except my only brother, that I have on earth, and one of the worthiest fellows that ever any man called by the name of friend, if a luncheon of my cheese would help to rid him of some of his superabundant modesty, you would do well to give it him.

David* with his Courant comes, too, across my recollection, and I beg you will help him gely from the said ewe-milk cheese, to enable

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to digest those -bedaubing paragraphs bly, which he is eternally larding the lean cha

*Printer of the Edinburgh Evening Courant.

racters of certain great men in a certain great town. I grant you the periods are very well turned; so, a fresh egg is a very good thing, but when thrown at a man in a pillory it does not at all improve his figure, not to mention the irreparable loss of the egg.

My facetious friend, D-r, I would wish also to be a partaker; not to digest his spleen, for that he laughs off, but to digest his last night's wine at the last field-day of the Crochallan corps.*

Among our common friends I must not forget one of the dearest of them, Cunningham. The brutality, insolence and selfishness of a world unworthy of having such a fellow as he is in it, I know sticks in his stomach; and if you can help him to any thing that will make him a little easier on that score, it will be very obliging.

As to honest JS-e, he is such a contented happy man that I know not what can annoy him, except perhaps he may not have got the better of a parcel of modest anecdotes which a certain Poet gave him one night at supper, the last time the said Poet was in town.

Though I have mentioned so many men of law, I shall have nothing to do with them professedly-the Faculty are beyond my prescrip

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tion. As to their clients, that is another thing; God knows they have much to digest!

The clergy, I pass by; their profundity of erudition, and their liberality of sentiment: their total want of pride, and their detestation of hypocrisy, are so proverbially notorious as to place them far, far above either my praise or censure.

I was going to mention a man of worth, whom I have the honour to call friend, the Laird of Craigdarroch; but I have spoken to the landlord of the King's-arm inn here, to have at the next county meeting a large ewe-milk cheese on the table, for the benefit of the Dumfriesshire whigs, to enable them to digest the Duke of Queensberry's late political conduct.

I have just this moment an opportunity of a private hand to Edinburgh, as perhaps you would not digest double postage.

No. 53.

To MRS. DUNLOP.

Mauchline, 2d. August. 1788.

HONOURED MADAM,

YOUR kind letter welcomed me, yesternight, to Ayrshire. I am indeed seriously angry with you at the quantum of your luckpenny;

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