of those so harmonious, as to add to the beauty: for what poet would not prefer gloaming to twilight.

I imagine, that by carefully keeping, and occasionally polishing and correcting those verses, which the muse dictates, you will, within a year or two, have another volume as large as the first, ready for the press; and this, without diverting you from every proper atten. tion to the study and practice of husbandry, in which I understand you are very learned, and which I fancy you will choose to adhere to as a wife, while poetry amuses you from time to time as a mistress. The former, like a prudent wife, must not show ill humour, although you retain a sneaking kindness to this agreeable gipsey, and pay her occasional visits, which in no manner alienates your heart from your lawful spouse, but tends on the contrary to promote her interest.

I desired Mr Cadell to write to Mr Creech to send you a copy of Zeluco. This performance has had great success here, but I shall be glad to have your opinion of it, because I know you are above saying what you do not think.

I beg you will offer my best wishes to my very good friend, Mrs Hamilton, who I understand is your neighbour. If she is as happy as I wish her, she is happy enough. Make my compliments also to Mrs Burns, and believe me to be, with sincere esteem,

SIR,

Dear Sir, yours, &c.

No. LXXXII.

FROM MISS J. L

I

Loudon-House, 12th July, 1789. THOUGH I have not the happiness of being personally acquainted with you, yet amongst the number of those who have read and admired your publications, may I be permitted to trouble you with this. You must know, sir, I am somewhat in love with the Muses, though I cannot boast of any favours they have deigned to confer upon me as yet; my situation in life has been very much against me as to that. have spent some years in and about Ecclefechan (where my parents reside), in the station of a servant, and am now come to Loudon- House, at present possessed by Mrs H-: she is daughter to Mrs Dunlop, of Dunlop, whom I understand you are particularly acquainted with. As I had the pleasure of perusing your poems, I felt a partiality for the author, which I should not have experienced had you been in more dignified station. I wrote a few verses of address to you, which I did not then think of ever presenting: but as fortune seems to have favoured me in this, by bringing me into a family by whom you are well known and much esteemed, and where perhaps I may have an opportunity of seeing you; I shall, in

hopes of your future friendship, take the liberty to transcribe them.

FAIR fa' the honest rus ic swain,
The pride o' a' our Scottish plain :
Thou gi'es us joy to hear thy strain,
And notes sae sweet:

Old Ramsay's shade revived again
In thee we greet.

Loved Thalia, that delightfu' muse, Seem'd lang shut up as a recluse ; To all she did her aid refuse,

Since Allan's day:

'Till Burns arose, then did she chuse To grace his lay.

To hear thy sang all ranks desire,
Sae weel you strike the dormant lyre;
Apollo with poetic fire

Thy breast does warm;
And critics silently admire
Thy art to charm.

Cæsar and Luath weel can speak, 'Tis pity e'er their gabs should steek, But into human nature keek,

And knots unravel: To hear their lectures once a-week, Nine miles I'd travel.

Thy dedication to G. H.

An unco bonnie hamespun speech,
Wi' winsome glee the heart can teach
A better lesson,

Than servile bards, who fawn and fleech
Like beggar's messon.

When slighted love becomes your theme,
And women's faithless vows you blame;
With so much pathos you exclaim,
In your lament;

But glanced by the most frigid dame,
She would relent.

The daisy too ye sing wi' skill;
And weel ye praise the whisky gill;
In vain 1 blunt my feckless quill,
Your fame to raise;
While echo sounds from ilka hill,
To Burns's praise.

Did Addison or Pope but hear,
Or Sam, that critic most severe,
A ploughboy sing with throat sae clear,
They in a rage,
Their works would a' in pieces tear,
And curse your page.

Sure Milton's eloquence were faint,
The beauties of your verse to paint,
My rude unpolish'd strokes but taint
Their brilliancy;
Th' attempt would doubtless vex a saint,
And weel may me.

The task I'll drop with heart sincere, To heaven present my humble pray'r That all the blessings mortals share, May be by turns,

Dispensed by an indulgent care To Robert Burns.

Sir, I hope you will pardon my boldness in this; my hand trembles while I write to you, conscious of my unworthiness of what I would most earnestly solicit, viz. your favour and friendship; yet hoping you will show yourself possessed of as much generosity and goodnature as will prevent your exposing what may justly be found liable to censure in this measure, I shall take the liberty to subscribe my self,

Sir,

Your most obedient humble servant,

J

P. S.-If you would condescend to honour me with a few lines from your hand, I would take it as a particular favour, and direct to me at Loudon-House, near Galslock.

No. LXXXIII.

FROM MR

MY DEAR SIR, London, 5th August, 1789. EXCUSE me when I say, that the uncommon abilities which you possess, must render your correspondence very acceptable to any one. I can assure you, I am particularly proud of your partiality, and shall endeavour, by every method in my power, to merit a continuance of your politeness.

When you can spare a few moments I should be proud of a letter from you, directed for me, Gerrard Street, Soho.

I cannot express my happiness sufficiently at the instance of your attachment to my late inestimable friend, Bob Fergusson, who was particularly intimate with myself and relations.* While I recollect with pleasure his extraordinary talents, and many amiable qualities, it affords me the greatest consolation, that I am honoured with the correspondence of his successor in national simplicity and genius. That Mr Burns has refined in the art of poetry, must readily be admitted; but notwithstanding many favourable representations, I am yet to learn that he inherits his convivial powers.

There was such a richness of conversation, such a plenitude of fancy and attraction in him, that when I call the happy period of our intercourse to my memory, I feel myself in a state of delirium. I was then younger than

The erection of a monument to him.

him by eight or ten years; but his manner was so felicitous, that he enraptured every person around him, and infused into the hearts of the young and old, the spirit and animation which operated on his own mind.

I am, dear Sir, yours, &c.

No. LXXXIV

TO MR

IN ANSWER TO THE FOREGOING.

MY DEAR SIR,

THE hurry of a farmer in this particular season, and the indolence of a poet at all times and seasons, will, I hope, plead my excuse for neglecting so long to answer your obliging letter of the fifth of August.

That you have done well in quitting your laborious concern in . . . . . I do not doubt; the weighty reasons you mention were, I hope, very, and deservedly indeed, weighty ones, and your health is a matter of the last importance; but whether the remaining proprietors of the paper have also done well, is what I much doubt. The . . . . ., so far as I was a reader, exhibited such a brilliancy of point, such an elegance of paragraph, and such a variety of intelligence, that I can hardly conceive it possible to continue a daily paper in the same degree of excellence; but if there was a man who had abilities equal to the task, that man's assistance the proprietors have lost.

When I received your letter I was transcrib ing, for. . . . ., my letter to the Magistrates of the Canongate, Edinburgh, begging their permission to place a tomb-stone over poor Fergusson, and their edict in consequence of my petition; but now I shall send them to

Poor Fergusson! If there be a life beyond the grave, which I trust there is; and if there be a good God presiding over all nature, which I am sure there is; thon art now enjoying existence in a glorious world, where worth of the heart alone is distinction in the man; where riches, d: prived of all their pleasure-purchasing powers, return to their native sordid matter: where titles and honours are the disregarded reveries of an idle dream; and where that heavy virtue, which is the negative consequence of steady dulness, and those thoughtless, though often destructive follies, which are the unavoidable aberrations of frail human nature, will be thrown into equal oblivion as if they had never been!

Adieu, my dear Sir! so soon as your present views and schemes are concentred in an aim, I shall be glad be hear from you as your welfare and happiness is by no means a subject indifferent to

Yours, &c.

ill

No. LXXXVII.

TO DR BLACKLOCK.

Ellisland, 21st October, 1789. Wow, but your letter made me vauntie ! And are ye hale, and weel, and cantie? I ken'd it still your wee bit jauntie,

Wad bring ye to:
Lord send you aye as weel's I want ye,
And then ye'll do.

The ill-thief blaw the Heron south!
And never drink be near his drouth!
He tauld mysel by word o' mouth,
He'd tak my letter;
I lippen'd to the chiel in trouth,
And bade nae better.

But aiblins honest Master Heron,
Had at the time some dainty fair one,
To ware his theologic care on,

And holy study; And tired o' sauls to waste his lear on, Een tried the body.*

But what d'ye think, my trusty fier,
I'm turn'd a gauger-Peace be here!
Parnassian queens, I fear, I fear,

Ye'll now disdain me,
And then my fifty pounds a-year
Will little gain me.

Ye glaiket, gleesome, dainty damies,
Wha by Castalia's wimplin streamies,
Lowp, sing, and lave your pretty limbies,
Ye ken, ye ken,
That strang necessity supreme is
’Mang sons o men.

I hae a wife and twa wee laddies,
They maun hae brose and brats o' duddies:
Ye ken yoursel my heart right proud is,
I needna vaunt,

But I'll sned besoms-thraw saugh woodies,
Before they want.

Lord help me thro' this warld o' care!
I'm weary sick o't late and air!
Not but I hae a richer share

Than mony ithers;
But why should ae man better fare,
And a' men brithers!

Come FIRM RESOLVE take thou the van,
Thou stalk o' carl-hemp in man!
And let us mind, faint heart ne'er wan
A lady fair:
Wha does the utmost that he can,
Will whyles do mair.

But to conclude my silly rhyme,
(I'm scant o' verse, and scant o' time,)
To make a happy fire-side clime

To weans and wife,
That's the true pathos and sublime
Of human life.

* Mr Heron, author of the History of Scotland, lately published; and among various other works, of a respectable life of our poet himself.

I HAVE a good while had a wish to trouble you with a letter, and had certainly done it long ere now-but for a humiliating something that throws cold water on the resolution, as if one should say, "You have found Mr Graham a very powerful and kind friend indeed, and that interest he is so kindly taking in your concerns, you ought by every thing in your power to keep alive and cherish." Now though, since God has thought proper to make one powerful and another helpless, the connexion of obliger and obliged is all fair; and though my being under your patronage is to me highly honourable, yet, sir, allow me to flatter myself, that, as a poet and an honest man, you first interested yourself in my welfare, and principally as such still, you permit me to approach you.

I have found the excise business go on a great deal smoother with me than I expected; owing a good deal to the generous friendship of Mr Mitchell, my collector, and the kind assistance of Mr Findlater, my supervisor. I dare to be honest, and I fear no labour. Nor do I find my hurried life greatly inimical to my correspondence with the Muses. Their visits to me, indeed, and I believe to most of their acquaintance, like the visits of good angels, are short and far between; but I meet them now and then as I jog through the hills of Nithsdale, just as I used to do on the banks of Ayr. I take the liberty to inclose you a few bagatelles, all of them the productions of my leisure thoughts in my excise rides.

If you know or have ever seen Captain Grose, the antiquarian, you will enter into any humour that is in the verses on him. Perhaps you have seen them before, as I sent them to a London newspaper. Though I dare say you have none of the solemn-league-and-covenant fire, which shone so conspicuous in Lord George Gordon, and the Kilmarnock weavers, yet I think you must have heard of Dr M'Gill, one of the clergymen of Ayr, and his heretical book. God help, him poor man! Though he is one of the worthiest, as well as one of the ablest of the whole priesthood of the Kirk of Scotland, in every sense of that ambiguous term, yet the poor Doctor and his numerous family are in imminent danger of being thrown out to the mercy of the winter-winds. The inclosed ballad on that business is, I confess,

Ellisland, 13th December, 1789. MANY thanks, dear madam, for your sheetful of rhymes. Though at present I am below the veriest prose, yet from you every thing pleases. I am groaning under the miseries of a diseased nervous system; a system, the state of which is most conducive to our happinessor the most productive of our misery. For now near three weeks I have been so ill with a nervous head-ache, that I have been obliged to give up, for a time, my excise books, being scarce able to lift my head, much less to ride once a-week over ten muir parishes. What is Man! To-day, in the luxuriance of health, exulting in the enjoyment of existence; in a few days, perhaps in a few hours, loaded with conscious painful being, counting the tardy pace of the lingering moments by the repercussions of anguish, and refusing or denied a comforter. Day follows night, and night comes after day, only to curse him with life which gives him no pleasure; and yet the awful, dark termination of that life, is a something at which he recoils.

"Tell us, ye dead; will none of you in pity Disclose the secret

What 'tis you are, and we must shortly be! 'tis no matter:

A little time will make us learn'd as you are."

Can it be possible, that when I resign this frail, feverish being, I shall still find myself in

*This alludes to the contest for the borough of Dumfries, between the Duke of Queensberry's interest and that of Sir James Johnstone.

conscious existence! When the last gasp of agony has announced, that I am no more to those that knew me, and the few who loved me: when the cold, stiffened, unconscious, ghastly corse is resigned into the earth, to be the prey of unsightly reptiles, and to become in time a trodden clod, shall I yet be warm in life, seeing and seen, enjoying and enjoyed? Ye venerable sages, and holy flamens, is there probability in your conjectures, truth in your stories of another world beyond death or are they all alike, baseless visions, and fabricated fables? If there is another life, it must be only for the just, the benevolent, the amiable, and the humane; what a flattering idea, then, is the world to come? Would to God I as firmly believed it, as I ardently wish it! There I should meet an aged parent, now at rest from the many buffetings of an evil world, against which he so long and so bravely struggled. There should I meet the friend, the disinterested friend of my early life; the man who rejoiced to see me, because he loved me and could serve me.- -Muir! thy weaknesses were the aberrations of human nature, but thy heart glowed with every thing generous, manly, and noble; and if ever emanation from the All-good Being animated a human form, it was thine!-There should I with speechless agony of rapture, again recognize my lost, my ever dear Mary! whose bosom was fraught with truth, honour, constancy and love.

My Mary, dear departed shade!

Where is thy place of heavenly rest? Seest thou thy lover lowly laid? Hear'st thou the groans that rend his breast?

Jesus Christ, thou amiablest of characters I trust thou art no impostor, and that thy revelation of blissful scenes of existence beyond death and the grave, is not one of the many impositions which time after time have been palmed on credulous mankind. I trust that in thee, "shall all the families of the earth be blessed," by being yet connected together in a better world, where every tie that bound heart to heart, in this state of existence, shall be, far beyond our present conceptions, more endearing.

I am a good deal inclined to think with those who maintain, that what are called nervous affections are in fact diseases of the mind. I cannot reason, I cannot think; and but to you I would not venture to write any thing above an order to a cobbler. You have felt too much of the ills of life not to sympathize with a diseased wretch, who is impaired more than half of any faculties he possessed. Your goodness will excuse this distracted scrawl, which the writer dare scarce. ly read, and which he would throw into the fire, were he able to write any thing better, or indeed any thing at all.

Rumour told me something of a son of yours who was returned from the East or Ꭰ ?