No. XXXIX. To MR. ROBERT AINSLIE. Ellisland, Nov. 1, 1789. MY DEAR FRIEND, I HAD written you long ere now, could I have guessed where to find you, for I am sure you have more good sense than to waste the precious days of vacation time in the dirt of business and Edinburgh.-Wherever you are, God bless you, and lead you not into temptation, but deliver you from evil! I do not know if I have informed you that I am now appointed to an excise division, in the middle of which my house and farm lie. In this I was extremely lucky. Without ever having been an expectant, as they call their journeymen excisemen, I was directly planted down to all intents and purposes an officer of excise; there to flourish and bring forth fruits-worthy of repentance. I know not how the word éxciseman, or still: more opprobrious, gauger, will sound in your ears. I too have seen the day when my auditory nerves would have felt very delicately on this subject; but a wife and children are things which have a wonderful power in blunting these kind of sensations. Fifty pounds a year for life, and a provision for widows and orphans, you will allow is no bad settlement for a poet. For the ignominy of the profession, I have the encouragement which I once heard a recruiting sergeant give to a numerous, if not a respectable audience, in the streets of Kilmarnock."Gentlemen, for your further and better encouragement, I can assure you that our regiment "is the most blackguard corps under the crown, "and consequently with us an honest fellow "has the surest chance for preferment." You need not doubt that I find several very unpleasant and disagreeable circumstances in my business; but I am tired with and disgusted at the language of complaint against the evils of life. Human existence in the most favorable situations does not abound with pleasures, and has its inconveniences and ills; capricious foolish man mistakes these inconveniences and ills as if they were the peculiar property of his particular situation; and hence that eternal fickleness, that love of change, which has ruined, and daily does ruin many a fine fellow, as well as many many a blockhead; and is almost, without exception, a constant source of disappointment and misery. I long to hear from you how you go on-not so much in business as in life. Are you pretty well satisfied with your own exertions, and tolerably at ease in your internal reflections? "Tis much to be a great character as a lawyer, but beyond comparison more to be a great character as a man. That you may be both the one and the other is the earnest wish, and that you will be both is the firm persuasion of, My dear Sir, &c. No. XL. TO MR. PETER HILL, Bookseller, Ellisland, Feb. 2, 1790. No! I will not say one word about apologies or excuses for not writing-I am a poor, rascally gauger, condemned to gallop at least 200 miles every week to inspect dirty ponds ponds and yeasty barrels, and where can I find time to write to, or importance to interest any body? The upbraidings of my conscience, nay the upbraidings of my wife, have persecuted me on your account these two or three months past. I wish to God I was a great man, that my correspondence might throw light upon you, to let the world see what you really are; and then I would make your fortune, without putting my hand in my pocket for you, which, like all other great men, I suppose I would avoid as much as possible. What are you doing, and how are you doing? Have you lately seen any of my few friends? What is become of the BOROUGH REFORM, or how is the fate of my poor namesake Mademoiselle Burns decided? O man! but for thee and thy selfish appetites, and dishonest artifices, that beauteous form, and that once innocent and still ingenuous mind, might have shone conspicuous and lovely in the faithful wife, and the affectionate mother; and shall the unfortunate sacrifice to thy pleasures have no claim on thy humanity! I saw lately in a Review, some extracts from a new poem, called the Village Curate; send it me. I want likewise a cheap copy of The World. Mr. Armstrong, the young poet, who does me the honor to mention me so kindly in his his works, please give him my best thanks for the copy of his book-I shall write him, my first leisure hour. I like his poetry much, but I think his style in prose quite astonishing. Your book came safe, and I am going to trouble you with farther commissions. I call it troubling you-because I want only, BOOKS; the cheapest way, the best; so you may have to hunt for them in the evening auctions. I want Smollett's Works, for the sake of his incomparable humor. I have already Roderick Random, and Humphrey Clinker.-Peregrine Pickle, Launcelot Greaves, and Frederick, Count Fathom, I still want; but as I said, the veriest ordinary copies will serve me. I am nice only in the appearance of my poets. I forget the price of Cowper's Poems, but, I believe, I must have them. I saw the other day, proposals for a publication, entitled, "Banks's new and complete Christian's Family Bible," printed for C. Cooke, Paternoster-row, London. He promises at least, to give in the work, I think it is three hundred and odd engravings, to which he has put the names of the first artists in London.* -You Perhaps no set of men more effectually avail themselves of the easy credulity of the public, than a certain description |