spontaneous result of accidental situations, either respecting health,
place, or company, have often a strength, and always an originality,
that would in vain be looked for in fancied circumstances, and studied
paragraphs. For me, I have often thought of keeping a letter, in
progression by me, to send you when the sheet was written out. Now I
talk of sheets, I must tell you, my reason for writing to you on paper
of this kind is my pruriency of writing to you at large. A page of post
is on such a dis-social, narrow-minded scale, that I cannot abide it;
and double letters, at least in my miscellaneous reverie manner, are a
monstrous tax in a close correspondence. R. B.
[Footnote 82: In Burns's private memoranda are these words:--"I am
more and more pleased with the step I took respecting my Jean. A
wife's head is immaterial compared with her heart; and Virtue's (for
wisdom, what poet pretends to it?) 'ways are ways of pleasantness,
and all her paths are peace.'"]
* * * * *
XCVIII.--To MR. PETER HILL, BOOKSELLER, EDINBURGH.
MY DEAR HILL,--I shall say nothing to your mad present--you have so long
and often been of important service to me, and I suppose you mean to go
on conferring obligations until I shall not be able to lift up my face
before you. In the meantime, as Sir Roger de Coverley, because it
happened to be a cold day in which he made his will, ordered his
servants great-coats for mourning, so, because I have been this week
plagued with an indigestion, I have sent you by the carrier a fine old
ewe-milk cheese.[83]
Indigestion is the devil: nay, 'tis the devil and all. It besets a man
in every one of his senses. I lose my appetite at the sight of
successful knavery, and sicken to loathing at the noise and nonsense of
self-important folly. When the hollow-hearted wretch takes me by the
hand, the feeling spoils my dinner; the proud man's wine so offends my
palate that it chokes me in the gullet; and the _pulvilised_, feathered,
pert coxcomb, is so disgustful in my nostril that my stomach turns.
If ever you have any of these disagreeable sensations, let me prescribe
for you patience, and a bit of my cheese. I know that you are no niggard
of your good things among your friends, and some of them are in much
need of a slice. There, in my eye, is our friend Smellie; a man
positively of the first abilities and greatest strength of mind, as well
as one of the best hearts and keenest wits that I have ever met with;
when you see him, as, alas! he too is smarting at the pinch of
distressful circumstances, aggravated by the sneer of contumelious
greatness--a bit of my cheese alone will not cure him, but if you add a
tankard of brown stout, and superadd a magnum of bright Oporto, you will
see his sorrows vanish like the morning mist before the summer sun.
Candlish, the earliest friend, except my only brother, that I have on
earth, and one of the 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,[84] 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 Dunbar, I would wish also to be a partaker: not to
digest his spleen, for that he laughs off, but to digest his last
night's wine at the last field-day of the Crochallan corps.[85]
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 anything that will make him a little
easier on that score, it will be very obliging.
As to honest John Sommerville, 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 oif 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.
R. B.
[Footnote 83: In return for some valuable books.]
[Footnote 84: Printer of the _Edinburgh Evening Courant_.]
[Footnote 85: A club of boon companions.]
* * * * * * *
XCIX.--To MRS. DUNLOP.
MAUCHLINE, _August_ 2_nd_, 1788.
HONOURED MADAM,--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 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 "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 favour the muses have conferred
on me in that country.[86]
Since I am in the way of transcribing, the following were the production
of yesterday as I jogged through the wild hills of New Cumnock. I intend
inserting them, or something like them, in an epistle I am going to
write to the gentleman on whose friendship my Excise hopes depend, Mr.
Graham of Fintray, one of the worthiest and most accomplished gentlemen,
not only of this country, but, I will dare to say it, of this age. The
following are just the first crude thoughts "unhousel'd, unanointed,
unanneal'd:"[87]--
Here the muse left me. I am astonished at what you tell me of Anthony's
writing me. I never received it. Poor fellow I you vex me much by
telling me that he is unfortunate. I shall be in Ayrshire ten days from
this date. I have just room for an old Roman FAREWELL.
R. B.
[Footnote 86: Lines written in Friar's Carse Hermitage.]
[Footnote 87: First Epistle to Robert Graham.]
* * * * * * *
C.--To MRS. DUNLOP.
ELLISLAND, 16_th August_ 1788.
I am in a fine disposition, my honoured friend, to send you an elegiac
epistle; and want only genius to make it quite Shenstonian:--
Why droops my heart with fancied woes forlorn?
Why sinks my soul beneath each wintry sky?
My increasing cares in this, as yet, strange country--gloomy
conjectures in the dark vista of futurity--consciousness of my own
inability for the struggle of the world--my broadened mark to misfortune
in a wife and children;--I could indulge these reflections, till my
humour should ferment into the most acid chagrin, that would corrode the
very thread of life.
To counterwork these baneful feelings, I have sat down to write to you;
as I declare upon my soul I always find that the most sovereign balm for
my wounded spirit.
I was yesterday at Mr. Miller's to dinner, for the first time. My
reception was quite to my mind: from the lady of the house quite
flattering. She sometimes hits on a couplet or two, _impromptu_. She
repeated one or two to the admiration of all present. My suffrage as a
professional man was expected: I for once went agonising over the belly
of my conscience. Pardon me, ye, my adored household gods, independence
of spirit, and integrity of soul! In the course of conversation,
_Johnsorfs Musical Museum_, a collection of Scottish songs with the
music, was talked of. We got a song on the harpsichord, beginning
Raving winds around her blowing.
The air was much admired: the lady of the house asked me whose were the
words. "Mine, Madam--they are indeed my very best verses;" she took not
the smallest notice of them! The old Scottish proverb says well, "King's
caff is better than ither folks' corn." I was going to make a New
Testament quotation about "casting pearls," but that would be too
virulent, for the lady is actually a woman of sense and taste.
After all that has been said on the other side of the question, man is
by no means a happy creature. I do not speak of the selected few,
favoured by partial heaven, whose souls are tuned to gladness amidst
riches and honours, and prudence and wisdom. I speak of the neglected
many, whose nerves, whose sinews, whose days are sold to the minions
of fortune.
If I thought you had never seen it, I would transcribe for you a stanza
of an old Scottish ballad, called "The Life and Age of Man;"
beginning thus:--
'Twas in the sixteenth hundred year
Of God and fifty-three
Frae Christ was born, that bought us dear,
As writings testifie.
I had an old grand-uncle, with whom my mother lived a while in her
girlish years; the good old man, for such he was, was long blind ere he
died, during which time his highest enjoyment was to sit down and cry,
while my mother would sing the simple old song of "The Life and Age
of Man."
It is this way of thinking; it is these melancholy truths, that make
religion so precious to the poor, miserable children of men. If it is a
mere phantom, existing only in the heated imagination of enthusiasm,
What truth on earth so precious as the lie?
My idle reasonings sometimes make me a little sceptical, but the
necessities of my heart always give the cold philosophisings the lie.
Who looks for the heart weaned from earth; the soul affianced to her
God; the correspondence fixed with heaven; the pious supplication and
devout thanksgiving, constant as the vicissitudes of even and morn; who
thinks to meet with these in the court, the palace, in the glare of
public life? No; to find them in their precious importance and divine
efficacy, we must search among the obscure recesses of disappointment,
affliction, poverty, and distress.
I am sure, dear Madam, you are now more than pleased with the length of
my letters. I return to Ayrshire middle of next week: and it quickens my
pace to think that there will be a letter from you waiting me there. I
must be here again very soon for my harvest.
R. B.
* * * *
CI.--To MR. BEUGO, ENGRAVER, EDINBURGH.
ELLISLAND, 9_th Sept._ 1788.
MY DEAR SIR,--There is not in Edinburgh above the number of the graces
whose letters would have given so much pleasure as yours of the 3rd
instant, which only reached me yesternight.
I am here on my farm, busy with my harvest; but for all that most
pleasurable part of life called SOCIAL COMMUNICATION, I am here at the
very elbow of existence. The only things that are to be found in this
country, in any degree of perfection, are stupidity and canting. Prose
they only know in graces, prayers, etc., and the value of these they
estimate, as they do their plaiding webs, by the ell! As for the muses,
they have as much an idea of a rhinoceros as of a poet. For my old,
capricious, but good-natured hussy of a muse,
By banks of Nith I sat and wept
When Coila I thought on,
In midst thereof I hung my harp
The willow trees upon.
I am generally about half my time in Ayrshire with my "darling Jean,"
and then I, at lucid intervals, throw my horny fist across my
becobwebbed lyre, much in the same manner as an old wife throws her hand
across the spokes of her spinning-wheel.
I will send you the "Fortunate Shepherdess" as soon as I return to
Ayrshire, for there I keep it with other precious treasure. I shall send
it by a careful hand, as I would not for anything it should be mislaid
or lost. I do not wish to serve you from any benevolence, or other grave
Christian virtue; 'tis purely a selfish gratification of my own feelings
whenever I think of you.
If your better functions would give you leisure to write me, I should be
extremely happy; that is to say, if you neither keep nor look for a
regular correspondence. I hate the idea of being obliged to write a
letter. I sometimes write a friend twice a week; at other times once
a quarter.
I am exceedingly pleased with your fancy in making the author you
mention place a map of Iceland, instead of his portrait, before his
works; 'twas a glorious idea.
Could you conveniently do me one thing?--whenever you finish any head, I
should like to have a proof copy of it. I might tell you a long story
about your fine genius; but, as what everybody knows cannot have escaped
you, I shall not say one syllable about it.
R. B.
* * * * *
CII.--To MR. ROBERT GRAHAM, OF FINTRAY.
SIR,--When I had the honour of being introduced to you at Athole House,
I did not think so soon of asking a favour of you. When Lear, in
Shakespeare, asked Old Kent why he wished to be in his service, he
answers, "Because you have that in your face which I would fain call
master." For some such reason, Sir, do I now solicit your patronage. You
know, I dare say, of an application I lately made to your Board to be
admitted an officer of the Excise. I have, according to form, been
examined by a supervisor, and today I gave in his certificate, with a
request for an order for instructions. In this affair, if I succeed, I
am afraid I shall but too much need a patronising friend. Propriety of
conduct as a man, and fidelity and attention as an officer, I dare
engage for; but with anything like business, except manual labour, I am
totally unacquainted.
I had intended to have closed my late appearance on the stage of life in
the character of a country farmer; but, after discharging some filial
and fraternal claims, I find I could only fight for existence in that
miserable manner, which I have lived to see throw a venerable parent
into the jaws of a jail, whence death, the poor man's last and often
best friend, rescued him.
I know, Sir, that to need your goodness, is to have a claim on it; may
I, therefore, beg your patronage to forward me in this affair, till I be
appointed to a division, where, by the help of rigid economy, I will try
to support that independence so dear to my soul, but which has been too
often so distant from my situation.
R. B.
* * * * * *
CII.--To His WIFE, AT MAUCHLINE.
ELLISLAND, _Friday_, 12_th Sep._ 1788.
MY DEAR LOVE,--I received your kind letter with a pleasure which no
letter but one from you could have given me. I dreamed of you the whole
night last; but alas! I fear it will be three weeks yet ere I can hope
for the happiness of seeing you. My harvest is going on. I have some to
cut down still, but I put in two stacks to-day, so I'm as tired as
a dog.
You might get one of Gilbert's sweet-milk cheeses, and send it to.... On
second thoughts I believe you had best get the half of Gilbert's web of
table linen and make it up; though I think it damnable dear, but it is
no outlaid money to us, you know. I have just now consulted my old
landlady about table linen, and she thinks I may have the best for two
shillings a yard; so, after all, let it alone till I return; and some
day soon I will be in Dumfries and ask the price there. I expect your
new gowns will be very forward or ready to make, against I be home to
get the _baiveridge._[88]
I have written my long-thought-on letter to Mr. Graham, the Commissioner
of Excise; and have sent a sheetful of poetry besides.
[Footnote 88: On her first appearance in public in a new dress a
young woman was subject to this tax, if claimed by the young man who
happened first to meet her. ]
* * * * *
CIV.--To Miss CHALMERS, EDINBURGH.
ELLISLAND, NEAR DUMFRIES, _Sept_. 16_th_, 1788.
Where are you? and how are you? and is Lady Mackenzie recovering her
health? for I have had but one solitary letter from you. I will not
think you have forgot me, Madam and, for my part,
When thee, Jerusalem, I forget,
Skill part from my right hand!
"My heart is not of that rock, nor my soul careless as that sea." I do
not make my progress among mankind as a bowl does among its
fellows-rolling through the crowd without bearing away any mark or
impression, except where they hit in hostile collision.
I am here, driven in with my harvest-folks by bad weather; and as you
and your sister once did me the honour of interesting yourselves much _à
l' egard de moi_, I sit down to beg the continuation of your goodness. I
can truly say that, all the exterior of life apart, I never saw two
whose esteem flattered the nobler feelings of my soul--I will not say
more, but so much, as Lady Mackenzie and Miss Chalmers. When I think of
you--hearts the best, minds the noblest of human kind--unfortunate even
in the shades of life--when I think I have met with you, and have lived
more of real life with you in eight days than I can do with almost
anybody I meet with in eight years--when I think on the improbability
of meeting you in this world again--I could sit down and cry like a
child! If ever you honoured me with a place in your esteem, I trust I
can now plead more desert. I am secure against that crushing grip of
iron poverty, which, alas! is less or more fatal to the native worth and
purity of, I fear, the noblest souls; and a late important step in my
life has kindly taken me out of the way of those ungrateful iniquities,
which, however overlooked in fashionable licence, or varnished in
fashionable phrase, are indeed but lighter and deeper shades
of villainy.
Shortly after my last return to Ayrshire, I married "my Jean." This was
not in consequence of the attachment of romance, perhaps; but I had a
long and much-loved fellow-creature's happiness or misery in my
determination, and I durst not trifle with so important a deposit. Nor
have I any cause to repent it. If I have not got polite tattle, modish
manners, and fashionable dress, I am not sickened and disgusted with the
multiform curse of boarding-school affectation; and I have got the
handsomest figure, the sweetest temper, the soundest constitution, and
the kindest heart in the county. Mrs. Burns believes, as firmly as her
creed, that I am _le plus bel esprit, et le plus honnête homme_ in the
universe; although she scarcely ever in her life, except the Scriptures
of the old and New Testament, and the Psalms of David in metre, spent
five minutes together on either prose or verse. I must except also from
this last a certain late publication of Scots poems, which she has
perused very devoutly; and all the ballads in the country, as she has (O
the partial lover! you will cry) the finest "wood note wild" I ever
heard. I am the more particular in this lady's character, as I know she
will henceforth have the honour of a share in your best wishes. She is
still at Mauchline, as I am building my house; for this hovel that I
shelter in, while occasionally here, is pervious to every blast that
blows, and every shower that falls; and I am only preserved from being
chilled to death, by being suffocated with smoke. I do not find my farm
that pennyworth I was taught to expect, but I believe, in time, it may
be a saving bargain. You will be pleased to hear that I have laid aside
the idle _éclat_, and bind every day after my reapers.
To save me from that horrid situation of at any time
going down, in a losing bargain of a farm, to misery, I
have taken my Excise instructions, and have my commission
in my pocket for any emergency of fortune. If I could set
all before your view, whatever disrespect you, in common
with the world, have for this business, I know you would
approve of my idea.
I will make no apology, dear Madam, for this egotistic detail; I know
you and your sister will be interested in every circumstance of it. What
signify the silly, idle gew-gaws of wealth, or the ideal trumpery of
greatness! When fellow-partakers of the same nature fear the same God,
have the same benevolence of heart, the same nobleness of soul, the same
detestation at everything dishonest, and the same scorn at everything
unworthy--if they are not in the dependence of absolute beggary, in the
name of common sense, are they not equals? And if the bias, the
instinctive bias of their souls run the same way, why may they not
be friends?
When I may have an opportunity of sending you this, Heaven only knows.
Shenstone says, "When one is confined idle within doors by bad weather,
the best antidote against _ennui_ is to read the letters of, or write
to, one's friends;" in that case then, if the weather continues thus, I
may scrawl you half a quire.
I very lately--to wit, since harvest began--wrote a poem, not in
imitation, but in the manner of Pope's Moral Epistles. It is only a
short essay, just to try the strength of my Muse's pinion in that way. I
will send you a copy of it, when once I have heard from you. I have
likewise been laying the foundation of some pretty large poetic works;
how the superstructure will come on, I leave to that great maker and
marrer of projects, time. Johnson's collection of Scots songs is going
on in the third volume; and, of consequence, finds me a consumpt for a
great deal of idle metre. One of the most tolerable things I have done
in that way, is two stanzas I made to an air a musical gentleman of my
acquaintance composed for the anniversary of his wedding-day, which
happens on the seventh of November. Take it as follows:--
The day returns--my bosom burns--
The blissful day we twa did meet, etc.
I shall give over this letter for shame. If I should be seized with a
scribbling fit, before this goes away, I shall make it another letter;
and then you may allow your patience a week's respite between the two. I
have not room for more than the old, kind, hearty farewell!
* * * * *
To make some amends, _mes chères Mesdames_, for dragging you on to this
second sheet; and to relieve a little the tiresomeness of my unstudied
and uncorrectible prose, I shall transcribe you some of my late poetic
bagatelles; though I have, these eight or ten months, done very little
that way. One day, in a hermitage on the banks of Nith, belonging to a
gentleman in my neighbourhood, who is so good as give me a key at
pleasure, I wrote as follows; supposing myself the sequestered,
venerable inhabitant of the lonely mansion.
LINES WRITTEN IN FRIARS-CARSE HERMITAGE.
Thou whom chance may hither lead,
Be thou clad in russet weed, etc.
R. B.
* * * *
CV.--To MR. MORISON, WRIGHT, MAUCHLINE.
Ellisland, _September_ 22_nd_ 1788.
MY DEAR SIR,--Necessity obliges me to go into my new house, even before
it be plastered. I will inhabit the one end until the other is finished.
About three weeks more, I think, will at farthest be my time, beyond
which I cannot stay in this present house. If ever you wish to deserve
the blessing of him that was ready to perish; if ever you were in a
situation that a little kindness would have rescued you from many evils;
if ever you hope to find rest in future states of untried being-get
these matters of mine ready.[89] My servant will be out in the beginning
of next week for the clock. My compliments to Mrs. Morison. --I am,
after all my tribulation, Dear Sir, yours,
R. B.
[Footnote 89: The letter refers to chairs and other articles of
furniture which the Poet had ordered.]
* * * *
CVI.--To MRS. DUNLOP, OF DUNLOP.
Mauchline, 27_th Sept_. 1788.
I have received twins, dear Madam, more than once; but scarcely ever
with more pleasure than when I received yours of the 12th instant. To
make myself understood; I had wrote to Mr. Graham, enclosing my poem
addressed to him, and the same post which favoured me with yours brought
me an answer from him. It was dated the very day he had received mine;
and I am quite at a loss to say whether it was most polite or kind.