mourning; so because I have been this week plagued with an in digestion, I have sent you by the carrier a fine old ewe-milk cheese.

Indigestion is the devil-nay, 'tis the devil and all. It besets a man in every one of his senses. I loose 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 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 right 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 best 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 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.

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 Somerville, 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 professionally: the faculty are beyond my prescription. As to their clients, that is another thing—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. So God bless you. R. B.

CLXXXV.

TO DR MOORE.

ELLISLAND, 23d March 1789.

SIR,-The gentleman who will deliver this is a Mr Nielson, a worthy clergyman in my neighbourhood, and a very párticular acquaintance of mine. As I have troubled him with this packet, I must turn him over to your goodness, to recompense him for it in a way in which he much needs your assistance, and where you can effectually serve him. Mr Nielson is on his way for France, to wait on his Grace of Queensberry, on some little business of a good deal of importance to him; and he wishes for your instructions respecting the most eligible mode of travelling, &c., for him when he has crossed the Channel. I should not have dared to take this liberty with you, but that I am told, by those who have the honour of your personal acquaintance, that to be a poor honest Scotchman is a letter of recommendation to you, and that to have it in your power to serve such a character gives you much pleasure.

The enclosed Ode is a compliment to the memory of the late Mrs Oswald of Auchencruive. You probably knew her personally, an honour of which I cannot boast; but I spent my early years in her neighbourhood, and among her servants and tenants. I know that she was detested with the most heartfelt cordiality. However, in the particular part of her conduct which roused my poetic wrath she was much less blameable. In January last, on my road to Ayrshire, I had put up at Bailie Whigham's, in Sanquhar, the only

tolerable inn in the place. The frost was keen, and the grim evening and howling wind were ushering in a night of snow and drift. My horse and I were both much fatigued with the labours of the day; and just as my friend the bailie and I were bidding defiance to the storm, over a smoking bowl, in wheels the funeral pageantry of the late great Mrs Oswald, and poor I am forced to brave all the horrors of the tempestuous night, and jade my horse -my young favourite horse, whom I had just christened Pegasus -twelve miles farther on, through the wildest moors and hills of Ayrshire, to New Cumnock, the next inn. The powers of poesy and prose sink under me when I would describe what I felt. Suffice it to say, that when a good fire at New Cumnock had so far recovered my frozen sinews, I sat down and wrote the enclosed Ode (p. 139).

I was at Edinburgh lately, and settled finally with Mr Creech; and I must own that at last he has been amicable and fair with me. R. B.

CLXXXVI.

TO MR PETER HILL.

ELLISLAND, 2d April 1789.

I WILL make no excuse, my dear Bibliopolus, that I have sat down to write you on this vile paper, stained with the sanguinary scores of "thae horse-leeches o' the Excise."

It is economy, sir-it is that cardinal virtue, prudence; so I beg you will sit down, and either compose or borrow a panegyric. If you are going to borrow, apply to our friend Ramsay for the assistance of the author of the pretty little buttering paragraphs of eulogium on your thrice-honoured and never-enough-to-be-praised MAGISTRACY-how they hunt down a housebreaker with the sanguinary perseverance of a bloodhound-how they outdo a terrier in a badger-hole in unearthing a resetter of stolen goodshow they steal on a thoughtless troop of night-nymphs as a spaniel winds the unsuspecting covey-or how they riot over a ravaged * * as a cat does o'er a plundered mouse-nest-how they new vamp old churches, aiming at appearances of piety, plan squares and colleges, to pass for men of taste and learning, &c., &c., &c.; while Old Edinburgh, like the doting mother of a parcel of wild prodigals, may sing Hooly and fairly, or cry Wae's me that e'er I saw ye but still must put her hand in her pocket, and pay whatever scores the young dogs think proper to contract.

I was going to say-but this parenthesis has put me out of breath-that you should get that manufacturer of the tinselled crockery of magistratial reputations, who makes so distinguished and distinguishing a figure in the Evening Courant, to compose,

or rather to compound, something very clever on my remarkable frugality; that I write to one of my most esteemed friends on this wretched paper, which was originally intended for the venal fist of some drunken exciseman, to take dirty notes in a miserable vault of an ale-cellar.

O Frugality! thou mother of ten thousand blessings-thou cook of fat beef and dainty greens! thou manufacturer of warm Shetland hose and comfortable surtouts! thou old housewife, darning thy decayed stockings with thy ancient spectacles on thy aged nose-lead me, hand me in thy clutching palsied fist, up those heights and through those thickets hitherto inaccessible and impervious to my anxious, weary feet-not those Parnassian crags, bleak and barren, where the hungry worshippers of fame are, breathless, clambering, hanging between heaven and hell, but those glittering cliffs of Potosi, where the all-sufficient, all-powerful deity, Wealth, holds his immediate court of joys and pleasures; where the sunny exposure of plenty, and the hot walls of profusion, produce those blissful fruits of luxury, exotics in this world, and natives of paradise! Thou withered sibyl, my sage conductress, usher me into thy refulgent, adored presence! The power, splendid and potent as he now is, was once the puling nursling of thy faithful care and tender arms! Call me thy son, thy cousin, thy kinsman, or favourite, and adjure the god by the scenes of his infant years no longer to repulse me as a stranger or an alien, but to favour me with his peculiar countenance and protection! He daily bestows his greatest kindness on the undeserving and the worthless-assure him that I bring ample documents of meritorious demerits! Pledge yourself for me, that, for the glorious cause of lucre, I will do anything, be anything, but the horse-leech of private oppression, or the vulture of public robbery !

But to descend from heroics-what have you done with my trunk? Please let me have it by the first carrier.

I want a Shakspeare: let me know what plays your used copy of Bell's Shakspeare wants. I want likewise an English dictionary -Johnson's, suppose, is best. In these, and all my prose commissions the cheapest is always the best for me. There is a small debt of honour that I owe Mr Robert Cleghorn, in Saughton Mills, my worthy friend and your well-wisher. Please give him, and urge him to take it, the first time you see him, ten shillings worth of anything you have to sell, and place it to my account.

The library scheme that I mentioned to you is already begun under the direction of Captain Riddel and me. There is another in emulation of it going on at Closeburn, under the auspices of Mr Monteath of Closeburn, which will be on a greater scale than ours. I have likewise secured it for you. Captain Riddel gave his infant society a great many of his old books, else I had written you on that subject; but one of these days, I shall trouble you

with a commission for the Monkland Friendly Society. A copy of The Spectator, Mirror, and Lounger, Man of Feeling, Man of the World, Guthrie's Geographical Grammar, with some religious pieces, will likely be our first order.

When I grow richer I will write to you on gilt-post, to make amends for this sheet. At present every guinea has a five-guinea errand with, my dear sir, your faithful, poor, but honest friend, R. B.

CLXXXVII.

TO MRS M'MURDO, DRUMLANRIG.

ELLISLAND, 2d May 1789.

MADAM, I have finished the piece which had the happy fortune to be honoured with your approbation; and never did little miss with more sparkling pleasure shew her applauded sampler to partial mamma, than I now send my poem to you and Mr M'Murdo, if he is returned to Drumlanrig. You cannot easily imagine what thin-skinned animals, what sensitive plants, poor poets are. How do we shrink into the imbittered corner of self-abasement when neglected or condemned by those to whom we look up!-and how do we, in erect importance, add another cubit to our stature on being noticed and applauded by those whom we honour and respect! My late visit to Drumlanrig has, I can tell you, madam, given me a balloon waft up Parnassus, where on my fancied elevation I regard my poetic self with no small degree of complacency. Surely, with all their sins, the rhyming tribe are not ungrateful creatures. I recollect your goodness to your humble guest. I see Mr M'Murdo adding to the politeness of the gentleman the kindness of a friend, and my heart swells as it would burst with warm emotions and ardent wishes! It may be it is not gratitude; it may be a mixed sensation. That strange, shifting, doubling animal MAN is so generally, at best, but a negative, often a worthless creature, that we cannot see real goodness and native worth without feeling the bosom glow with sympathetic approbation. With every sentiment of grateful respect, I have the honour to be, madam, your obliged and grateful, humble servant,

R. B.

CLXXXVIII.

TO MR CUNNINGHAM.

ELLISLAND, 4th May 1789.

MY DEAR SIR,-Your duty-free favour of the 26th April I received two days ago: I will not say I perused it with pleasurethat is the cold compliment of ceremony-I perused it, sir, with