No. CXXVIIL

TO MRS. DUNLOP,

Ellisland, 6th September, 1789.

DEAR MADAM,

I HAVE mentioned in my last, my appointment to the excise, and the birth of little Frank; who, by the bye, I trust will be no discredit to the honourable name of Wallace, as he has a fine manly countenance, and a figure that might do credit to a little fellow two months older; and likewise an excellent good temper, though when he pleases he has a pipe, only not quite so loud as the horn that his immortal namesake blew as a signal to take out the pin of Stirling bridge.

Farewell! A Dieu, le bon Dieu, je vous

I have been very busy with Zeluco. The Doctor is so obliging as to request my opinion of it; and I have been revolving in my mind I had some time ago an epistle, part poetic, some kind of criticisms on novel writing, but and part prosaic, from your poetess, Mrs. J. it is a depth beyond my research. I shall howL; a very ingenious, but modest compo- ever digest my thoughts on the subject as well aition. I should have written her as she re- as I can. Zeluco is a most sterling perforquested, but for the hurry of this new business.mance. I have heard of her and her compositions in this country: and I am happy to add, always to the commende ! honour of her character. The fact is, I know not well how to write to her; I should sit down to a sheet of paper that I knew not how to stain. I am no daub at fine drawn letter'writing; and except when prompted by friendship or gratitude, or which happens extremely rarely, inspired by the Muse (I know not her name), that presides over epistolary writing, I sit down, when necessitated to write, as I would sit down to beat hemp.

Some parts of your letter of the 20th August struck me with melancholy concern for the state of your mind at present.

I

Would I could write you a letter of comfort! would sit down to it with as much pleasure, as I would to write an epic poem of my own composition, that should equal the Iliad. Religion, my dear friend, is the true comfort! A strong persuasion in a future state of existence; a proposition so obviously probable, that, setting revelation aside, every nation and people, so far as investigation has reached, for at least near four thousand years, have, in some mode or other, firmly believed it. In vain would we reason and pretend to doubt. I have myself done so to a very daring pitch; but when I reflected, that I was opposing the most ardent wishes, and the most darling hopes of good men, and flying in the face of all human belief, in all ages, I was shocked at my own conduct.

I know not whether I have ever sent you the following lines, or if you have ever seen them; but it is one of my favourite quotations, which I keep constantly by me in my progress through life, in the language of the book of Job,

"Against the day of battle and of war.”— spoken of religion.

No. CXXIX.

FROM DR. BLACKLOCK.

Edinburgh, 24th August, 1789.
DEAR BURNS, thou brother of my heart,
Both for thy virtues and thy art:
If art it may be call'd in thee,
Which nature's bounty, large and free,
With pleasure on thy breast diffuses,
And warms thy soul with all the Muses.
Whether to laugh with easy grace,
Thy numbers move the sage's face,
Or bid the softer passions rise,
And ruthless souls with grief surprise,
'Tis nature's voice distinctly felt,
Through thee her organ, thus to melt.

Most anxiously I wish to know,
With thee of late how matters go;
How keeps thy much-loved Jean her health?
What promises thy farm of wealth?
Whether the Muse persists to smile,
And all thy anxious cares beguile?
Whether bright fancy keeps alive?
And how thy darling infants thrive?

For me, with grief and sickness spent,
Since I my journey homeward bent,
Spirits depress'd no more I mourn,
But vigour, life, and health return.
No more to gloomy thoughts a prey,
I sleep all night, and live all day;
By turns my book and friend enjoy,
And thus my circling hours employ;
Happy while yet these hours remain,
If Burns could join the cheerful train,

tion and return for all your goodness to the poet, ish man mistakes these inconveniences and ille than transcribing a few of his idle rhymes.as if they were the peculiar property of his parHowever," an old song," though to a proverb ticular situation; and hence that eternal ficklean instance of insignificance, is generally the only coin a poet has to pay with.

If my poems which I have transcribed, and mean still to transcribe into your book, were equal to the grateful respect and high esteem I bear for the gentleman to whom I present them, they would be the finest poems in the language. -As they are, they will at least be a testimony with what sincerity I have the honour to be,

Sir,

Your devoted humble servant.

No. CXXXIII.

ness, that love of change, which has ruined, and daily does ruin many a fine fellow, as well as 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.

TO MR. ROBERT AINSLIE.

Ellisland, Nov. 1, 1789.

MY DEAR FRIEND,

No. CXXXIV.

I HAD written you long ere now, could I have TO R. GRAHAM, ESQ. OF FINTRY. 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!

SIR, 9th December, 1789. 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 I do not know if I have informed you that I should say, "You have found Mr. Graham a am now appointed to an excise division, in the very powerful and kind friend indeed, and that middle of which my house and farm lie. In this interest he is so kindly taking in your concerns, I was extremely lucky. Without ever having you ought by every thing in your power to keep been an expectant, as they call their journeymen alive and cherish." Now though, since God excisemen, I was directly planted down to all in- has thought proper to make one powerful and tents and purposes an officer of excise; there to another helpless, the connexion of obliger and flourish and bring forth fruits--worthy of re-obliged is all fair; and though my being under pentance.

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 know not how the word exciseman, 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 I have found the excise business go on a great which have a wonderful power in blunting these deal smoother with me than I expected; owing kind of sensations. Fifty pounds a year for a good deal to the generous friendship of Mr. life, and a provision for widows and orphans, Mitchell, my collector, and the kind assistance you will allow is no bad settlement for a poet. of Mr. Findlater, my supervisor. I dare to be For the ignominy of the profession, I have the honest, and I fear no labour. Nor do I find encouragement which I once heard a recruiting my hurried life greatly inimical to my corressergeant give to a numerous, if not a respec-pondence with the Muses. Their visits to me, table audience, in the streets of Kilmarnock. indeed, and I believe to most of their acquaint-"Gentlemen, for your further and better en-ance, like the visits of good angels, are short and couragement, I can assure you that our regiment far between; but I meet them now and then as is the most blackguard corps under the crown, I jog through the hills of Nithsdale, just as I and consequently with us an honest fellow has used to do on the banks of Ayr. I take the l the surest chance for preferment." berty to enclose you a few bagatelles, all of them the productions of my leisure thoughts in my excise rides.

You need not doubt that I find several very unpleasant and disagreeable circumstances in my business; but I am tired with and disgusted If you know or have ever seen Captain Grose, at the language of complaint against the evils of the antiquarian, you will enter into any humour life. Human existence in the most favourable that is in the verses on him. Perhaps you have situations does not abound with pleasures, and seen them before, as I sent them to a London nas its inconveniences and ills; capricious fool-newspaper. Though I dare say you have nonq

of the solemn-league-and-covenant fire, which only to curse him with life which gives him no shone so conspicuous in Lord George Gordon, pleasure; and yet the awful, dark termination and the Kilmarnock weavers, yet I think you of that life, is a something at which he recoils. must have heard of Dr. M'Gill, one of the cler

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

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

gymen of Ayr, and his heretical book. God" Tell us, ye dead; will none of you in pity help him, poor man! Though he is one of the Disclose the secretworthiest, 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 enclosed ballad on frail, feverish being, I shall still find myself in that business is, I confess, too local, but I laughed myself at some conceits in it, though I am convinced in my conscience, that there are a good many heavy stanzas in it too.

The election ballad, as you will see, alludes to the present canvass in our string of boroughs. I do not believe there will be such a hard run match in the whole general election.*

I am too little a man to have any political attachments; I am deeply indebted to, and have the warmest veneration for, individuals of both parties; but a man who has it in his power to be the father of a country, and who is a character that one cannot

speak of with patience.
Sir J. J. does "what man can do," but yet
I doubt his fate.

No. CXXXV.

TO MRS. DUNLOP.

Ellisland, 13th December, 1789.

Can it be possible, that when I resign this

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

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?

MANY thanks, dear Madam, for your sheet-fraught with truth, honour, constancy, and love. ful of Rhymes. Though at present 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 Jesus Christ, thou amiablest of characters! now near three weeks I have been so ill with I trust thou art no impostor, and that thy rea nervous head-ache, that I have been obliged to give up, for a time, my excise books, being velation of blissful scenes of existence beyond death and the grave, is not one of the many scarce able to lift my head, much less to ride once a-week over ten muir parishes. What is impositions which time after time have been Man! To-day, in the luxuriance of health, ex- palmed on credulous mankind. I trust that in ulting in the enjoyment of existence; in a few thee, shall all the families of the earth be blessed," by being yet connected together in a days, perhaps in a few hours, loaded with conscious painful being, counting the tardy pace of better world, where every tie that bound heart the lingering moments by the repercussions of to heart, in this state of existence, shall be, far anguish, and refusing or denied a comforter. beyond our present conceptions, more endearing. Day follows night, and night comes after day,

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

who maintain, that what are called nervous afI am a good deal inclined to think with those

fections 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 of books at the commencement. What authors the ills of life not to sympathize with a diseased they were to purchase, was always decided by wretch, who has impaired more than half of any the majority. At every meeting, all the books, faculties he possessed. Your goodness will ex-under certain fines and forfeitures, by way of cuse this distracted scrawl, which the writer penalty, were to be produced; and the memdare scarcely read, and which he would throw bers had their choice of the volumes in rotation. into the fire, were he able to write any thing He whose name stood, for that night, first on better, or indeed any thing at all. the list, had his choice of what volume he pleas ed in the whole collection; the second had his choice after the first; the third after the second, and so on to the last. At next meeting, he who had been first on the list at the preceding meeting, was last at this; he who had been second was first; and so on through the whole three years. At the expiration of the engagement, the books were sold by auction, but only among the members themselves: and each man had his share of the common stock, in money or in books, as he chose to be a purchaser or not.

Rumour told me something of a son of yours who was returned from the East or West Indies. If you have gotten news of James or Anthony, it was cruel in you not to let me know; as I promise you, on the sincerity of a man, who is weary of one world and anxious about another, that scarce any thing could give me so much pleasure as to hear of any good thing befalling my honoured friend.

If you have a minute's leisure, take up your pen in pity to le pauvre miserable. R. B.

No. CXXXVI.

TO SIR JOHN SINCLAIR.'

THE following circumstance has, I believe, been omitted in the statistical account, transmitted to you, of the parish of Dunscore, in Nithedale. I beg leave to send it to you, beeause it is new and may be useful. How far it is deserving of a place in your patriotic publication, you are the best judge.

To store the minds of the lower classes with useful knowledge, is certainly of very great importance, both to them as individuals, and to society at large. Giving them a turn for reading and reflection, is giving them a source of innocent and laudable amusement; and besides raises them to a more dignified degree in the scale of rationality. Impressed with this idea, a gentleman in this parish, Robert Riddel, Esq. of Glenriddel, set on foot a species of circulating liberary, on a plan so simple as to be practicable in any corner of the country; and so useful, as to deserve the notice of every country gentleman, who thinks the improvement of that part of his own species, whom chance has thrown into the humble walks of the peasant and the artizan, a matter worthy of his attention.

Mr. Riddel got a number of his own tenants, and farming neighbours, to form themselves into a society for the purpose of having a library among themselves. They entered into a legal engagement to abide by it for three years; with a saving clause or two, in case of removal to a distance, or of death. Each member, at his entry, paid five shillings, and at each of their meetings, which were held every fourth Saturday, sixpence more. With their entry-money, and the credit which they took on the faith of their future funds, they laid in a tolerable stock |

At the breaking up of this little society, which was formed under Mr. Riddel's patronage, what with benefactions of books from him, and what with their own purchases, they had collected together upwards of one hundred and fifty volumes. It will easily be guessed, that good deal of trash would be bought. Among the books, however, of this little library, were Blair's Sermons, Robertson's History of Scotland, Hume's History of the Stuarts, the Spee tator, Idler, Adventurer, Mirror, Lounger, Observer, Man of Feeling, Man of the World, Chrysal, Don Quixotte, Joseph Andrews, fe. A peasant who can read, and enjoy such books, is certainly a much superior being to his neighbour, who perhaps stalks beside his team, very little removed, except in shape, from the brate he drives.

Wishing your patriotic exertions their so much merited success, I am,

Sir,

Your humble servant,
A PEASANT.•

The above is extracted from the third volume of Sir John by Mr. Riddel himself in the following Sir John Sinclair's Statistics, p. 598.-It was enclosed letter, also printed there:

to

"SIR JOHN,

"I enclose you a letter, written by Mr. Burns as an addition to the account of Dunscore parish. It con good (at my desire), as to set on foot, in the barony of tains an account of a small library which he was so Monkland, or Friar's Carse, in this parish. As its utility has been felt, particularly among the younger tablished, in the different parishes of Scotland, It class of people, I think, that if a similar plan were eswould tend greatly to the speedy improvement of the tenantry, trades people, and work people. Mr. Buras concern. was so good as to take the whole charge of this small He was treasurer, librarian, and censor to this little society, who will long have a grateful sense of his public spirit and exertions for their improve "I have the honour to be, Sir John, "Yours most sincerely, "ROBERT RIDDEL

ment and information.

To Sir John Sinclair,
of Ulbster, Bart.