he and I are quits. He had the hardiesse to ask me interest on the sum; but, considering that the money was due by one Poet for putting a tomb-stone over the grave of another, he may, with grateful surprise, thank Heaven that ever he saw a farthing of it. delight of the godly, like the illustrious lord of Laggan's many hills?+ As for him, his works are perfect: never did the pen of calumny blur the fair page of his reputation, nor the bolt of hatred fly at his dwelling. Thou mirror of purity, when shall the elfine lamp of my glimmerous understanding, purged from sensual appetites and gross desires, shine like the constellation of thy intellectual powers! With the remainder of the money pay yourself for the "Office of a Messenger," that I bought of you; and send me by Mr. Clark a note of its price. Send me, likewise, the fifth-As for thee, thy thoughts are pure, and thy volume of the "Observer," by Mr. Clark; and if any money remain let it stand to account. My best compliments to Mrs. Hill. I sent you a maukin by last week's fly, which I hope you received.* Yours most sincerely, ROBERT Burns. No. CCXVII. TO MR. W. NICOL. 20th February, 1792. O THOU, wisest among the wise, meridian blaze of prudence, full moon of discretion, and chief of many counsellors! How infinitely is thy puddle-headed, rattle-headed, wrong-headed, round-headed slave indebted to thy supereminent goodness, that from the luminous path of thy own right-lined rectitude, thou lookest benignly down on an erring wretch, of whom the zig-zag wanderings defy all the powers of calculation, from the simple copulation of units, up to the hidden mysteries of fluxions! May one feeble ray of that light of wisdom which darts from thy sensorium, strait as the arrow of heaven, and bright as the meteor of inspiration, may it be my portion, so that I may be less unworthy of the face and favour of that father of proverbs, and master of maxims, that antipode of folly, and magnet among the sages, the wise and witty Willie Nicol! Amen! Amen! Yea, so be it! For me! I am a beast, a reptile, and know nothing! From the cave of my ignorance, amid the fogs of my dulness, and pestilential fumes of my political heresies, I look up to thee, as doth a toad through the iron-barred lucerne of a pestiferous dungeon, to the cloudless glory of a summer sun! Sorely sighing in bitterness of soul, I say, when shall my name be the quotation of the wise, and my countenance be the [The original of the above curious letter of the Poet was given to Mr. Cochrane by his old friend and school-fellow, David Constable; the eldest and talented son of the late Archibald Constable-the prince of Edinburgh Publishers. It was afterwards in the possession of the late Geo. H. King, Esq., of Glasgow, who died on the 17th of January, 1840.] [Mr. Nicol had purchased a small piece of ground called Laggan, on the Nith. There took place the Bacchanalian scene which called forth "Willie brew'd a peck o' Maut."] (This strain of irony was occasioned by a letter from Mr. Nicol, containing good advice. The poet seems to have lips are holy. Never did the unhallowed breath of the powers of darkness, and the pleasures of darkness, pollute the sacred flame of thy skydescended and heaven-bound desires: never did the vapours of impurity stain the unclouded serene of thy cerulean imagination. O that like thine were the tenor of my life, like thine the tenor of my conversation!-then should no friend fear for my strength, no enemy rejoice in my weakness! Then should I lie down and rise up, and none to make me afraid.-May thy pity and thy prayer be exercised for, O thon lamp of wisdom and mirror of morality! thy devoted slave, R. B. I BELIEVE among all our Scots literati you have not met with Professor Dugald Stewart, who fills the moral philosophy chair in the University of Edinburgh. To say that he is a man of the first parts, and, what is more, a man of the first worth, to a gentleman of your general acquaintance, and who so much enjoys the luxury of unencumbered freedom and undisturbed privacy, is not perhaps recommendation enough:-but when I inform you that Mr. Stewart's principal characteristic is your favou rite feature; that sterling independence of mind, which, though every man's right, so few men have the courage to claim, and fewer still the magnanimity to support:-When I teil you that, unseduced by splendour, and undisgusted by wretchedness, he appreciates the merits of the various actors in the great drama of life, merely as they perform their parts-in short, he is a man after your own heart, and I comply with his earnest request in letting you know that he wishes above all things to meet been reading the love-letter written by the schoolmaster at the request of Mr. Thomas Pipes.-CUNNINGHAM. [Mr. Grose, in the introduction to his "Antiquities of lowing paragraph, some of the terms of which will scarcely Scotland," acknowledges his obligations to Burns in the fol fail to amuse the modern reader :- "To my ingenious friend, Mr. Robert Burns, I have been seriously obligated; he was not only at the pains of making out what was most worthy of notice in Ayr-shire, the country honoured by his birth, but he also wrote, expressly tar this work, the pretty tale annexed to Alloway Church."' This "pretty tale" being "Tam o'Shanter !''] with you. His house, Catrine, is within less than a mile of Sorn Castle, which you proposed visiting; or, if you could transmit him the enclosed, he would with the greatest pleasure meet you any where in the neighbourhood. I write to Ayr-shire to inform Mr. Stewart that I have acquitted myself of my promise. Should your time and spirits permit your meeting with Mr. Stewart, 'tis well; if not, I hope you will forgive this liberty, and I have at least an opportunity of assuring you with what truth and respect, I am, Sir, Your great admirer, No. CCXIX. TO THE SAME. Dumfries, 1792. AMONG the many witch stories I have heard, relating to Alloway kirk, I distinctly remember only two or three. home, where it remained long in the family, a living evidence of the truth of the story. Another story, which I can prove to be equally authentic, was as follows: On a market day in the town of Ayr, a farmer from Carrick, and consequently whose way lay by the very gate of Alloway kirk-yard, in order to cross the river Doon at the old bridge, which is about two or three hundred yards farther on than the said gate, had been detained by his business, till by the time he reached Alloway it was the wizard hour, between night and morning. Though he was terrified with a blaze streaming from the kirk, yet it is a well-known fact that to turn back on these occasions is running by far the greatest risk of mischief,—he prudently advanced on his road. When he had reached the gate of the kirk-yard, he was surprised and entertained, through the ribs and arches of an old Gothic window, which still faces the highway, to see a dance of witches merrily footing it round their old sooty blackwith the power of his bag-pipe. The farmer, guard master, who was keeping them all alive stopping his horse to observe them a little, could plainly descry the faces of many old women of his acquaintance and neighbourhood. not say, but that the ladies were all in their How the gentleman was dressed tradition does smocks: and one of them happening unluckily to have a smock which was considerably too short to answer all the purpose of that piece of dress, our farmer was so tickled that he involuntarily burst out, with a loud laugh, "Weel Upon a stormy night, amid whistling squalls of wind, and bitter blasts of hail; in short, on such a night as the devil would choose to take the air in; a farmer or farmer's servant was plodding and plashing homeward with his plough-irons on his shoulder, having been getting some repairs on them at a neighbouring smithy. His way lay by the kirk of Alloway, and, being rather on the anxious look out in approaching a place so well known to be a favour-luppen, Maggy wi' the short sark!" and, recolite haunt of the devil, and the devil's friends and emissaries, he was struck aghast by discovering through the horrors of the storm and stormy night, a light, which on his nearer approach plainly showed itself to proceed from the haunted edifice. Whether he had been fortified from above on his devout supplication, as is customary with people when they suspect the immediate presence of Satan; or whether, according to another custom, he had got courageously drunk at the smithy, I will not pretend to determine; but so it was that he ventured to go up to, nay, into, the very kirk. As luck would have it, his temerity came off unpunished. The members of the infernal junto were all out on some midnight business or other, and he saw nothing but a kind of kettle or caldron, depending from the roof, over the fire, simmering some heads of unchristened children, limbs of executed malefactors, &c., for the business of the night. It was in for a penny, in for a pound, with the honest ploughman: so without ceremony he unhooked the caldron from off the fire, and pouring out the damnable ingredients, inverted it on his head, and carried it fairly the top of his speed. I need not mention the lecting himself, instantly spurred his horse to universally known fact that no diabolical power can pursue you beyond the middle of a farmer that the river Doon was so near, for running stream. Lucky it was for the poor notwithstanding the speed of his horse, which of the arch of the bridge, and consequently was a good one, against he reached the middle the middle of the stream, the pursuing, vengethem actually sprung to seize him; but it was ful hags, were so close at his heels that one of too late, nothing was on her side of the stream but the horse's tail, which immediately gave way at her infernal grip, as if blasted by a stroke of lightning; but the farmer was beyond condition of the vigorous steed was, to the last her reach. However, the unsightly, tail-less hour of the noble creature's life, an awful warning to the Carrick farmers not to stay too late in Ayr markets. The last relation I shall give, though equally true, is not so well identified as the two former, with regard to the scene; but, as the best authorities give it for Alloway, I shall relate it. On a summer's evening, about the time that nature puts on her sables to mourn the expiry of the cheerful day, a shepherd boy belonging to a farmer in the immediate neighbourhood of Alloway Kirk had just folded his charge, and was returning home. As he passed the kirk, in the adjoining field, he fell in with a crew of men and women, who were busy pulling stems of the plant Ragwort. He observed that, as each person pulled a Ragwort, he or she got astride of it, and called out, "Up horsie!" on which the Ragwort flew off, like Pegasus, through the air with its rider. The foolish boy likewise pulled his Ragwort, and cried with the rest, Up horsie!" and, strange to tell, away he flew with the company. The first stage at which the cavalcade stopt was a merchant's wine cellar in Bourdeaux, where, without saying By your leave, they quaffed away at the best the cellar could afford, until the morning, foe to the imps and works of darkness, threatened to throw light on the matter, and frightened them from their carousals. 66 MR. BURNS begs leave to present his most respectful compliments to Mr. Clarke.-Mr. B. some time ago did himself the honour of writing Mr. C. respecting coming out to the country, to give a little musical instruction in a highly respectable family, where Mr. C. may have his own terms, and may be as happy as indolence, the devil, and the gout will permit him. Mr. B. knows well how Mr. C. is engaged with another family; but cannot Mr. C. find two or three weeks to spare to each of them? Mr. B. is deeply impressed with, and awfully conscious of, the high importance of Mr. C.'s time, whether in the winged moments of symphonious exhibition, at the keys of harmony, while listening seraphs cease their own less de¦ lightful strains; or in the drowsy arms of slumb'rous repose, in the arms of his dearly beloved elbow chair, where the frowsy, but potent power of indolence circumfuses her vapours round, and sheds her dews on the head of her darling son. But half a line conveying half a meaning from Mr. C. would make Mr. B. the happiest of mortals. No. CCXXI. TO MRS. DUNLOP. Annan Water Foot, 22nd August, 1792. Do not blame me for it, Madam-my own conscience, hackneyed and weather-beaten as it is, in watching and reproving my vagaries, follies, indolence, &c., has continued to punish me sufficiently. Do you think it possible, my dear and honoured friend, that I could be so lost to gratitude for many favours, to esteem for much worth, and to the honest, kind, pleasurable tie of now old acquaintance, and I hope and am sure of progressive, increasing friendship-as for a single day not to think of you to ask the Fates what they are doing and about to do with my much loved friend and her wide scattered connexions, and to beg of them to be as kind to you and yours as they possibly can? Apropos (though how it is apropos, I have not leisure to explain) Do you know that I am almost in love with an acquaintance of yours?-Almost! said I-I am in love, souse, over head and ears, deep as the unfathomable abyss of the boundless ocean; but the word Love, owing to the intermingledoms of the good and the bad, the pure and the impure in this world, being rather an equivocal term for expressing one's sentiments and sensations, I must do justice to the sacred purity of my at tachment. Know, then, that the heart-struck awe; the distant humble approach; the delight we should have in gazing upon and listening to a Messenger of Heaven, appearing in all the unspotted purity of his celestial home, among the coarse, polluted, far inferior sons its being read with great interest. It were 'burning day. light' to point out to a reader (and who is not a reader of Burns?) the thoughts he afterwards transplanted into the rythmical narrative."] [The family to whom this letter refers was that of M'Murdo, then of Drumlanrig, now of Dumfries. The remarks on the Poet's songs have already intimated with what success the musician exerted his talents, and how Burna aided him by composing lyrics in honour of the chaims of the family.] of men, to deliver to them tidings that make "My bonnie Lizzie Baillie I'll rowe thee in my plaidie," &c. So I parodied it as follows, which is literally the first copy, "unanointed, unanneal'd;" as Hamlet says.~ "O saw ye bonny Lesley As she gaed o'er the border? To spread her conquests farther." See page 446. Dumfries, 10th September, 1792. No! I will not attempt an apology.-Amid all my hurry of business, grinding the faces of the publican and the sinner on the merciless wheels of the Excise; making ballads, and then drinking, and then singing them; and, over and above all, the correcting the press-work of two different publications; still, still I might have stolen five minutes to dedicate to one of the first of my friends and fellow-creatures. I might have done, as I do at present, snatched an hour near 66 witching time of night," and scrawled a page or two. I might have congratulated my friend on his marriage; or I might have thanked the Caledonian archers for the honour they have done me (though to do myself justice, I intended to have done both in Well, then, here is to your good health! for rhyme, else I had done both long ere now). you must know I have set a nipperkin of toddy by me, just by way of spell, to keep away the meikle-horned deil, or any of his subaltern imps who may be on their nightly rounds. But what shall I write to you?_"The voice said cry," and I said, "what shall I cry?"— So much for ballads. I regret that you are gone to the east country, as I am to be in Ayrshire in about a fortnight. This world of ours, notwithstanding it has many good things in it, yet it has ever had this curse, that two or three people, who would be the happier the oftener they met together, are, almost without exception, always so placed as never to meet but once or twice a-year, which, considering the few years of a man's life, is a very great evil, thou spirit! whatever thou art, or wherever under the sun," which I do not recollect that Solomon has mentioned in his catalogue of the miseries of man. I hope and believe that there is a state of existence beyond the grave, where the worthy of this life will renew their former intimacies, with this endearing addition, that, we meet to part no more!" 66 "Tell us, ye dead, Will none of you in pity disclose the secret A thousand times have I made this apostrophe by the eerie side of an auld thorn, in the dreary thou makest thyself visible! be thou a bogle glen through which the herd-callan maun bicker in his gloamin route frae the faulde!be thou a brownie, set, at dead of night, to barn, where the repercussions of thy iron flail thy task by the blazing ingle, or in the solitary half affright thyself, as thou performest the work of twenty of the sons of men, ere the cock-crowing summon thee to thy ample cog of substantial brose-be thou a kelpie, haunting the ford or ferry, in the starless night, mixing thy laughing yell with the howling of the storm and the roaring of the flood, as thou viewest the perils and miseries of man on the foundering horse, or in the tumbling boat!— or, lastly, be thou a ghost, paying thy nocturnal visits to the hoary ruins of decayed grandeur; or performing thy mystic rites in the shadow of the time- worn church, while the moon looks, without a cloud, on the silent, ghastly dwellings of the dead around thee; or taking thy stand by the bedside of the villain, or the murderer, pourtraying on his dreaming fancy, pictures, dreadful as the horrors of unveiled hell, and terrible as the wrath of incensed Deity!-Come, thou spirit, but not in these horrid forms; come with the milder, gentle, easy inspirations, which thou breathest round the wig of a prating advocate, or the tête of a tea-sipping gossip, while their tongues run at the light-horse gallop of clish-ma-claver for ever and ever-come and assist a poor devil who is quite jaded in the attempt to share half an idea among half a hundred words; to fill up four quarto pages, while he has not got one single sentence of recollection, information, or remark, worth putting pen to paper for. I feel, I feel the presence of supernatural assistance! circled in the embrace of my elbowchair, my breast labours, like the bloated Sybil on her three-footed stool, and like her, too, labours with Nonsense.-Nonsense, auspicious name! Tutor, friend, and finger-post in the mystic mazes of law; the cadaverous paths of physic; and particularly in the sightless soarings of SCHOOL DIVINITY, who, leaving Common Sense confounded at his strength of pinion, Reason, delirious with eyeing his giddy flight; and Truth creeping back into the bottom of her well, cursing the hour that ever she offered her scorned alliance to the wizard power of Theologic Vision-raves abroad on all the winds. "On earth Discord! a gloomy Heaven above, opening her jealous gates to the nineteen thousandth part of the tithe of mankind! and below, an inescapable and inexorable hell, expanding its leviathan jaws for the vast residue of mortals!!!"-O doctrine! comfortable and healing to the weary, wounded soul of man! Ye sons and daughters of affliction, ye pauvres miserables, to whom day brings no pleasure, and night yields no rest, be comforted! ""Tis but one to nineteen hundred thousand that your situation will mend in this world;" so, alas, the experience of the poor and the needy too often affirms; and 'tis nineteen hundred thousand to that one, by the dogmas of * you will be damned eternally in the world to come! * conceive it possible that a noble lord could be a fool, or a godly man could be a knave.- How ignorant are plough-boys!-Nay, I have since discovered that a godly woman may de a But hold-Here's t'ye again-this rum is generous Antigua, so a very unfit menstruum for scandal. Apropos, how do you like, I mean really like, the married life? Ah, my friend! matrimony is quite a different thing from what your love-sick youths and sighing girls take it to be! But marriage, we are told, is appointed by God, and I shall never quarrel with any of his institutions. I am a husband of older standing than you, and shall give you my ideas of the conjugal state (en passant; you know I am no Latinist, is not conjugal derived from jugum, a yoke?) Well then, the scale of good wifeship I divide into ten parts.-Goodnature, four; Good Sense, two; Wit, one; Personal Charms, viz., a sweet face, eloquent eyes, fine limbs, graceful carriage (I would add a fine waist too, but that is so soon spoilt, you know), all these, one; as for the other qualities belonging to, or attending on a wife, such as Fortune, Connexion, Education (I mean education extraordinary), Family blood, &c., divide the two remaining degrees among them as you please; only, remember that all these minor properties" must be expressed by fractions, for there is not any one of them, in the aforesaid scale, entitled to the dignity of an integer. As for the rest of my fancies and reverieshow I lately met with Miss Lesley Baillie, the¦' most beautiful, elegant woman in the worldhow I accompanied her and her father's family fifteen miles on their journey, out of pure devotion, to admire the loveliness of the works of God, in such an unequalled display of themhow, in galloping home at night, I made a ballad on her, of which these two stanzas make a part Thou, bonnie Lesley, art a queen, The hearts o' men adore thee. The very Deil he could na scathe chronicles of my imagination, and shall be read by thee, my dear friend, and by thy beloved spouse, my other dear friend, at a more convenient season. But of all Nonsense, Religious Nonsense is the most nonsensical; so enough, and more than enough of it. Only, by the bye, will you, or can you, tell me, my dear Cunningham, why a-behold all these things are written in the sectarian turn of mind has always a tendency to narrow and illiberalize the heart? They are orderly; they may be just; nay, I have known them merciful: but still your children of sanctity move among their fellow-creatures with a Now, to thee, and to thy before-designed nostril-snuffing putrescence, and a foot-spurning bosom-companion, be given the precious things filth, in short, with a conceited dignity that brought forth by the sun, and the precious your titled or any other of things brought forth by the moon, and the beyour Scottish lordlings of seven centuries stand-nignest influences of the stars, and the living ing display, when they accidentally mix among streams which flow from the fountains of life, the many-aproned sons of mechanical life. I and by the tree of life, for ever and ever! Amen! remember, in my plough-boy days, I could not * R. B. |