of which I cannot boast; but I spent my early years in her neighbourhood, and among her servants and tenants. I know that she was detested with the most heartfelt cordiality. However, in the particular part of her conduct which roused my poetic wrath, she was much less blameable. In January last, on my road to Ayrshire, I had put up at Bailie Whigham's, in Sanquhar, the only tolerable inn in the place. The frost was keen, and the grim evening and howling wind were ushering in a night of snow and drift. My horse and I were both much fatigued with the labours of the day; and just as my friend the Bailie and I were bidding defiance to the storm over a smoking bowl, in wheels the funeral pageantry of the late great Mrs. Oswald, and poor I am forced to brave all the horrors of the tempestuous night, and jade my horse, my young favourite horse, whom I had just christened Pegasus, twelve miles farther on, through the wildest moors and hills of Ayrshire, to New Cumnock, the next inn. The powers of poesy and prose sink under me, when I would describe what I felt. Suffice it to say, that when a good fire at New Cumnock had so far recovered my frozen sinews, I sat down and wrote the enclosed ode. I was at Edinburgh lately, and settled finally with Mr. Creech; and I must own that at last he has been amicable and fair with me.-R. B. No. CLXXVIII. TO MR. HILL. [The "library scheme" here referred to is now-a-days a common institution in almost every village: but it is worth note that Burns appreciated the movement, and interested himself actively in it, at its first beginnings.] ELLISLAND, 2nd April, 1789. I WILL make no excuse, my dear Bibliopolus, (God forgive me for murdering language!) that I have sat down to write you on this vile paper. It is economy, Sir; it is that cardinal virtue, prudence; so I beg you will sit down, and either compose or borrow a panegyric. If you are going to borrow, apply to **** to compose, or rather to compound, something very clever on my remarkable frugality; that I write to one of my most esteemed friends on this wretched paper, which was originally intended for the venal fist of some drunken exciseman, to take dirty notes in a miserable vault of an ale-cellar. O Frugality! thou mother of ten thousand blessings !-thou cook of fat beef and dainty greens !-thou manufacturer of warm Shetland hose and comfortable surtouts!-thou old housewife, darning thy decayed stockings with thy ancient spectacles on thy aged nose !-lead me, hand me in thy clutching palsied fist, up those heights, and through those thickets, hitherto inaccessible and impervious to my anxious, weary feet: not those Parnassian crags, bleak and barren, where the hungry worshippers of fame are, breathless, clambering, hanging between heaven and hell, but those glittering cliffs of Potosi, where the all-sufficient, all-powerful deity, Wealth, holds his immediate court of joys and pleasures; where the sunny exposure of plenty and the hot walls of profusion produce those blissful fruits of luxury, exotics in this world and natives of paradise! Thou withered sybil, my sage conductress, usher me into thy refulgent, adored presence! The power, splendid and potent as he now is, was once the puling nursling of thy faithful care and tender arms! Call me thy son, thy cousin, thy kinsman, or favourite, and adjure the god by the scenes of his infant years no longer to repulse me as a stranger or an alien, but to favour me with his peculiar countenance and protection! He daily bestows his greatest kindness on the undeserving and the worthless : assure him, that I bring ample documents of meritorious demerits! Pledge yourself for me, that for the glorious cause of Lucre I will do anything, be anything-but the horse-leech of private oppression, or the vulture of public robbery! But to descend from heroics. I want a Shakespeare; I want likewise an English dictionary-Johnson's, I suppose, is best. In these and all my prose commissions the cheapest is always the best for me. There is a small debt of honour that I owe Mr. Robert Cleghorn, in Saughton Mills, my worthy friend, and your well-wisher. Please give him, and urge him to take it, the first time you see him, ten shillings' worth of anything you have to sell, and place it to my account. The library scheme that I mentioned to you is already begun, under the direction of Captain Riddel. There is another in emulation of it going on at Closeburn, under the auspices of Mr. Monteith, of Closeburn, which will be on a greater scale than ours. Capt. Riddel gave his infant society a great many of his old books, else I had written you on that subject; but one of these days I shall trouble you with a commission for "The Monkland Friendly Society:" a copy of "The Spectator," “Mirror,” and "Lounger," "Man of Feeling," "Man of the World," "Guthrie's Geographical Grammar," with some religious pieces, will likely be our first order. When I grow richer, I will write to you on gilt post, to make amends for this sheet. At present every guinea has a five guinea errand with, My dear Sir, Your faithful, poor, but honest Friend, R. B. No. CLXXIX. TO MRS. DUNLOP. ELLISLAND, 4th April, 1789. I NO sooner hit on any poetic plan or fancy, but I wish to send it to you and if knowing and reading these give half the pleasure to you that communicating them to you gives to me, I am satisfied. I have a poetic whim in my head, which I at present dedicate, or rather inscribe, to the Right Hon. Charles James Fox; but how long that fancy may hold, I cannot say. A few of the first lines I have just rough sketched as follows: SKETCH. How wisdom and folly meet, mix, and unite; How virtue and vice blend their black and their white; How genius, the illustrious father of fiction, Confounds rule and law, reconciles contradiction- I sing if these mortals, the critics, should bustle, I care not, not I; let the critics go whistle. But now for a patron, whose name and whose glory Thou first of our orators, first of our wits, Yet whose parts and acquirements seem mere lucky hits; With passions so potent, and fancies so bright, No man with the half of 'em e'er went quite right; A sorry, poor misbegot son of the Muses For using thy name offers fifty excuses, &c. [There is about as much again of these verses in the letter, but they are poor stuff.] On the 20th current I hope to have the honour of assuring you, in | person, how sincerely I am―R. B. No. CLXXX. TO MRS. MCMURDO, DRUMLANRIG. MADAM, ELLISLAND, 2d May, 1789. I have finished the piece* which had the happy fortune to be honoured with your approbation; and never did little miss with more sparkling pleasure show her applauded sampler to partial mamma, than I now send my poem to you and Mr. McMurdo, if he is returned to Drumlanrig. You cannot easily imagine what thin-skinned animals, what sensitive plants, poor poets are. How do we shrink into the embittered corner of self-abasement, when neglected or condemned by those to whom we look up! and how do we, in erect importance, add another cubit to our stature on being noticed and applauded by those whom we honour and respect! My late visit to Drumlanrig has, I can tell you, Madam, given me a balloon waft up Parnassus, where on my fancied elevation I regard my poetic self with no small degree of complacency. Surely, with all their sins, the rhyming tribe are not ungrateful creatures. I recollect your goodness to your humble guest, I see Mr. McMurdo adding to the politeness of the gentleman the kindness of a friend, and my heart swells as it would burst, with warm emotions and ardent wishes! It may be it is not gratitude; it may be a mixed sensation. That strange, shifting, double animal man is so generally, at best, * "Bonnie Jean;" the heroine of which was the eldest daughter of Mrs. McMurdo, and sister to Phillis: their charms give lustre to some of the Poet's happiest lyrics. GG but a negative, often a worthless, creature, that we cannot see real goodness and native worth without feeling the bosom glow with sympathetic approbation. With every sentiment of grateful respect, I have the honour to be, Madam, No. CLXXXI. TO MR. CUNNINGHAM. R. B. ELLISLAND, 4th May, 1789. MY DEAR SIR, Your duty-free favour of the 26th April I received two days ago. I will not say I received it with pleasure; that is the cold compliment of ceremony I perused it, Sir, with delicious satisfaction;-in short, it is such a letter, that not you, nor your friend, but the legislature, by express proviso in their postage laws, should frank. A letter informed with the soul of friendship is such an honour to human nature, that they should order it free ingress and egress to and from their bags and mails, as an encouragement and mark of distinction to supereminent virtue. I have just put the last hand to a little poem, which I think will be something to your taste. One morning lately, as I was out pretty early in the fields, sowing some grass seeds, I heard the burst of a shot from a neighbouring plantation, and presently a poor little wounded hare came crippling by me. You will guess my indignation at the inhuman fellow who could shoot a hare at this season, when all of them have young ones. Indeed there is something in that business of destroying for our sport individuals in the animal creation that do not injure us materially which I could never reconcile to my ideas of virtue. Inhuman man! curse on thy barb'rous art, Let me know how you like my poem. I am doubtful whether it would not be an improvement to keep out the last stanza but one altogether. Cruikshank is a glorious production of the Author of man. You, he, and the noble Colonel of the Crochallan Fencibles are to me "Dear as the ruddy drops which warm my heart." I have a good mind to make verses on you all to the tune of "Three guid fellows ayont the glen."-R. B. MY DEAR FRIEND, No. CLXXXII. TO RICHARD BROWN. MAUCHLINE, 21st May, 1789 I was in the country by accident, and hearing of your safe arrival, I could not resist the temptation of wishing you joy on your return, wishing you would write to me before you sail again, wishing you would always set me down as your bosom friend, wishing you long life and prosperity, and that every good thing may attend you, wishing Mrs. Brown and your little ones as free of the evils of this world as is consistent with humanity, wishing you and she were to make two at the ensuing lying-in with which Mrs. B. threatens very soon to favour me, wishing I had longer time to write to you at present, and, finally, wishing that if there is to be another state of existence, Mr. B., Mrs. B., our little ones, and both families, and you and I, in some snug retreat, may make a jovial party to all eternity! My direction is at Ellisland, near Dumfries. DEAR SIR, TO MR. JAMES HAMILTON. Ellisland, 26th May, 1789. I would fain offer, my dear Sir, a word of sympathy with your misfortunes; but it is a tender string, and I know not how to touch it. It is easy to flourish a set of high-flown sentiments on the subjects that would give great satisfaction to a breast quite at ease; but as one observes who was very seldom mistaken in the theory of life, “The heart knoweth its own sorrows, and a stranger intermeddleth not therewith." Among some distressful emergencies that I have experienced in life, I ever laid this down as my foundation of comfort-That he who has lived the life of an honest man has by no means lived in vain! With every wish for your welfare and future success, I am, my dear Sir, Sincerely yours, R. B. SIR, No. CLXXXIV. TO WILLIAM CREECH, ESQ. ELLISLAND, 30th May, 1789. I had intended to have troubled you with a long letter, but at present the delightful sensations of an omnipotent toothache so engross all my inner man, as to put it out of my power even to write nonsense. However, as in duty bound, I approach my bookseller with an offering in my hand-a few poetical clinches and a song:-to expect any other kind of offering from the rhyming tribe would be to know them much less than you do. I do not pretend that there is much merit in these morceaux; but I have two reasons for sending them: primo, they are mostly ill-natured, so are in unison with my present feelings, while fifty troops of infernal spirits are driving post from ear to ear along my jaw-bones; and |