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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 largely from the said ewe-milk cheese, to enable him to digest those-bedaubing paragraphs with which he is eternally larding the lean characters 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 h laughs off, but to digest his last night's wine at the last field-day of the Crochallan corps+.

*Printer of the Edinburgh Evening Courant.

A club of choice spirits..

Among

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 prescription. 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-arms 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.

No. LIII.

To MRS. DUNLOP.

HONOURED MADAM,

Mauchline, 2d August, 1788.

YOUR kind letter welcomed me, yesternight, to Ayrshire. I am indeed seriously angry with you at the quantum of your luckpenny; but, vexed and hurt as I was, I could not help laughing very heartily at the noble lord's apology for the missed napkin.

I would write you from Nithsdale, and give you my direction there, but I have scarce an opportunity of calling at a post-office once in a fortnight. I am six miles from Dumfries, am scarcely ever in it myself, and, as yet, have little acquaintance in the neighbourhood. Besides, I am now very busy on my farm, building a dwelling-house; as at present I am almost

an

an evangelical man in Nithsdale, for I have scarce "where to lay my head."

There are some passages in your last that brought tears in my eyes. "The heart knoweth its own sorrows, and a stranger intermeddleth not therewith." The repository of these

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sorrows of the heart," is a kind of sanctum sanctorum: and 'tis only a chosen friend, and that too at particular sacred times, who dares enter into them.

"Heaven oft tears the bosom-chords

That nature finest strung."

You will excuse this quotation for the sake of the author. Instead of entering on this subject farther, I shall transcribe you a few lines I wrote in a hermitage belonging to a gentleman in my Nithsdale neighbourhood. They are almost the only favours the muses have conferred on me in that country.

Thou whom chance may hither lead,
Be thou clad in russet weed,

Be thou deckt in silken stole,

'Grave these maxims on thy soul.

Life is but a day at most,

Sprung from night, in darkness lost:
Hope not sunshine every hour;

Fear not clouds will ever lour.

VOL. II.

'M

Happiness

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