The Letters of Robert Burns by Robert Burns

R >> Robert Burns >> The Letters of Robert Burns

Pages:
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 | 22 | 23 | 24 | 25 | 26 | 27

ROBERT BURNS.

[Footnote 78: A well-known rock in the Firth of Clyde, frequented by
innumerable sea-fowl.]

* * * *

XCI.--To MR. JAMES JOHNSON, ENGRAVER, EDINBURGH.

MAUCHLINE, 25_th May_ 1788.

MY DEAR SIR,--I am really uneasy about that money which Mr. Creech owes
me per note in your hand, and I want it much at present, as I am
engaging in business pretty deeply both for myself and my brother. A
hundred guineas can be but a trifling affair to him, and'tis a matter of
most serious importance to me.[79] To-morrow I begin my operations as a
farmer, and so God speed the plough!

I am so enamoured of a certain girl.... To be serious, I found I had a
long and much-loved fellow-creature's happiness or misery in my hands;
and though pride and seeming justice were murderous king's advocates on
the one side, yet humanity, generosity, and forgiveness were such
powerful, such irresistible counsel on the other, that a jury of all
endearments and new attachments brought in a unanimous verdict of _not
guilty_. And the panel, be it known unto all whom it concerns, is
installed and instated into all the rights, privileges, etc., that
belong to the name, title, and designation of wife.

[Footnote 79: Creech paid the amount five days after the date of this
letter.]

* * * *

XCII.--To MR. ROBERT AINSLIE.

MAUCHLINE, _May_ 26_th_, 1788.

MY DEAR FRIEND,--I am two kind letters in your debt; but I have been
from home, and horridly busy, buying and preparing for my farming
business, over and above the plague of my Excise instructions, which
this week will finish.

As I flatter my wishes that I foresee many future years' correspondence
between us, 'tis foolish to talk of excusing dull epistles! a dull
letter may be a very kind one. I have the pleasure to tell you that I
have been extremely fortunate in all my buyings and bargainings
hitherto, Mrs. Burns not excepted; which title I now avow to the world.
I am truly pleased with this last affair. It has indeed added to my
anxieties for futurity, but it has given a stability to my mind and
resolutions unknown before; and the poor girl has the most sacred
enthusiasm of attachment to me, and has not a wish but to gratify my
every idea of her deportment. I am interrupted. Farewell! my dear
Sir. R. B.

* * * * *

XCIII.--To MRS. DUNLOP.

27_th_ _May _1788.

MADAM,--I have been torturing my philosophy to no purpose to account for
that kind partiality of yours, which has followed me, in my return to
the shade of life, with assiduous benevolence. Often did I regret, in
the fleeting hours of my late will-o'-wisp appearance, that "here I had
no continuing city;" and, but for the consolation of a few solid
guineas, could almost lament the time that a momentary acquaintance with
wealth and splendour put me so much out of conceit with the sworn
companions of my road through life--insignificance and poverty.

There are few circumstances relating to the unequal distribution of the
good things of this life that give me more vexation (I mean in what I
see around me) than the importance the opulent bestow on their trifling
family affairs, compared with the very same things on the contracted
scale of a cottage. Last afternoon I had the honour to spend an hour or
two at a good woman's fireside, where the planks that composed the floor
were decorated with a splendid carpet, and the gay table sparkled with
silver and china. 'Tis now about term-day, and there has been a
revolution among those creatures who, though in appearance partakers,
and equally noble partakers, of the same nature with Madame, are from
time to time--their nerves, their sinews, their health, strength,
wisdom, experience, genius, time, nay, a good part of their very
thoughts--sold for months and years, not only to the necessities, the
conveniences, but the caprices of the important few. We talked of the
insignificant creatures; nay, notwithstanding their general stupidity
and rascality, did some of the poor devils the honour to commend them.
But light be the turf upon his breast who taught "Reverence thyself!" We
looked down on the unpolished wretches, their impertinent wives, and
clouterly brats, as the lordly bull does on the little dirty ant-hill,
whose puny inhabitants he crushes in the carelessness of his ramble, or
tosses in the air in the wantonness of his pride.

R. B.

* * * * *

XCIV.--TO MRS. DUNLOP, AT MR. DUNLOP'S, HADDINGTON.

ELLISLAND, 13_th June_ 1788.

Where'er I roam, whatever realms I see,
My heart, untravell'd, fondly turns to thee;
Still to my friend it turns with ceaseless pain,
And drags, at each remove, a lengthen'd chain.
GOLDSMITH.

This is the second day, my honoured friend, that I have been on my farm.
A solitary inmate of an old smoky spence; far from every object I love,
or by whom I am beloved; nor any acquaintance older than yesterday,
except Jenny Geddes, the old mare I ride on; while uncouth cares and
novel plans hourly insult my awkward ignorance and bashful inexperience.
There is a foggy atmosphere native to my soul in the hour of care;
consequently the dreary objects seem larger than the life. Extreme
sensibility, irritated and prejudiced on the gloomy side by a series of
misfortunes and disappointments, at that period of my existence when the
soul is laying in her cargo of ideas for the voyage of life, is, I
believe, the principal cause of this unhappy frame of mind.

The valiant, in himself, what can he suffer?
Or what need he regard his _single_ woes?

Your surmise, Madam, is just: I am indeed a husband.

I found a once much-loved and still much-loved female, literally and
truly cast out to the mercy of the naked elements--but there is no
sporting with a fellow-creature's happiness or misery.... The most
placid good-nature and sweetness of disposition; a warm heart,
gratefully devoted with all its powers to love me; vigorous health and
sprightly cheerfulness, set off to the best advantage by a more than
common handsome figure--these, I think, in a woman may make a good wife
though she should never have read a page but the Scriptures of the Old
and New Testaments, nor have danced in a brighter assembly than a penny
pay wedding.

R. B.

* * * * *

XCV.-TO MR. ROBERT AINSLIE.

ELLISLAND, _June 14th_, 1788.

This is now the third day, my dearest Sir, that I have sojourned in
these regions; and during these three days you have occupied more of my
thoughts than in three weeks preceding: in Ayrshire I have several
variations of friendship's compass, here it points invariably to the
pole. My farm gives me a good many uncouth cares and anxieties, but I
hate the language of complaint. Job, or some one of his friends, says
well--"Why should a living man complain?"

I have lately been much mortified with contemplating an unlucky
imperfection in the very framing and construction of my soul; namely, a
blundering inaccuracy of her olfactory organs in hitting the scent of
craft or design in my fellow-creatures. I do not mean any compliment to
my ingenuousness, or to hint that the defect is in consequence of the
unsuspicious simplicity of conscious truth and honour: I take it to be,
in some way or other, an imperfection in the mental sight; or, metaphor
apart, some modification of dulness. In two or three instances lately, I
have been most shamefully out.

I have all along, hitherto, in the warfare of life, been bred to arms
among the light horse--the piquet-guards of fancy; a kind of hussars and
Highlanders of the brain; but I am firmly resolved to sell out of these
giddy battalions, who have no ideas of a battle but fighting the foe, or
of a siege but storming the town. Cost what it will, I am determined to
buy in among the grave squadrons of heavy-armed thought, or the
artillery corps of plodding contrivance.

What books are you reading, or what is the subject of your thoughts,
besides the great studies of your profession? You said something about
religion in your last. I don't exactly remember what it was, as the
letter is in Ayrshire; but I thought it not only prettily said, but
nobly thought. You will make a noble fellow if once you were married. I
make no reservation of your being well-married; you have so much sense,
and knowledge of human nature, that though you may not realise perhaps
the ideas of romance, yet you will never be ill-married.

Were it not for the terrors of my ticklish situation respecting
provision for a family of children, I am decidedly of opinion that the
step I have taken is vastly for my happiness.[80] As it is, I look to
the Excise scheme as a certainty of maintenance; a maintenance!--luxury
to what either Mrs. Burns or I were born to. Adieu.

R. B.

[Footnote 80: This alludes to his marriage.]

* * * *

XCVI.-TO MR. ROBERT AINSLIE.

ELLISLAND, _30th June_ 1788.

MY DEAR SIR,--I just now received your brief epistle; and, to take
vengeance on your laziness, I have, you see, taken a long sheet of
writing-paper, and have begun at the top of the page, intending to
scribble on to the very last corner.

I am vexed at that affair of the ..., but dare not enlarge on the
subject until you send me your direction, as I suppose that will be
altered on your late master and friend's death.[81] I am concerned for
the old fellow's exit, only as I fear it may be to your disadvantage in
any respect--for an old man's dying, except he have been a very
benevolent character, or in some particular situation of life that the
welfare of the poor or the helpless depended on him, I think it an event
of the most trifling moment to the world. Man is naturally a kind,
benevolent animal, but he is dropped into such a needy situation here in
this vexatious world, and has such a hungry, growling, multiplying pack
of necessities, appetites, passions, and desires about him, ready to
devour him for want of other food, that in fact he must lay aside his
cares for others that he may look properly to himself. You have been
imposed upon in paying Mr. Miers for the profile of a Mr. H. I did not
mention it in my letter to you, nor did I ever give Mr. Miers any such
order. I have no objection to lose the money, but I will not have any
such profile in my possession.

I desired the carrier to pay you, but as I mentioned only 15s. to him, I
will rather inclose you a guinea-note. I have it not, indeed, to spare
here, as I am only a sojourner in a strange land in this place; but in a
day or two I return to Mauchline, and there I have the bank-notes
through the house like salt permits.

There is a great degree of folly in talking unnecessarily of one's
private affairs. I have just now been interrupted by one of my new
neighbours, who has made himself absolutely contemptible in my eyes, by
his silly, garrulous pruriency. I know it has been a fault of my own,
too; but from this moment I abjure it as I would the service of hell!
Your poets, spendthrifts, and other fools of that kidney, pretend,
forsooth, to crack their jokes on prudence; but'tis a squalid vagabond
glorying in his rags. Still, imprudence respecting money matters is much
more pardonable than imprudence respecting character, I have no
objection to prefer prodigality to avarice, in some few instances; but I
appeal to your observation if you have not met, and often met, with the
same disingenuousness, the same hollow-hearted insincerity, and
disintegritive depravity of principle, in the hackneyed victims of
profusion, as in the unfeeling children of parsimony. I have every
possible reverence for the much talked-of world beyond the grave, and I
wish that which piety believes, and virtue deserves, may be all matter
of fact. But in things belonging to, and terminating in this present
scene of existence, man has serious and interesting business on hand.
Whether a man shall shake hands with welcome in the distinguished
elevation of respect, or shrink from contempt in the abject corner of
insignificance: whether he shall wanton under the tropic of plenty, at
least enjoy himself in the comfortable latitude of easy convenience, or
starve in the arctic circle of dreary poverty; whether he shall rise in
the manly consciousness of a self-approving mind, or sink beneath a
galling load of regret and remorse--these are alternatives of the
last moment.

You see how I preach. You used occasionally to sermonise too; I wish you
would, in charity, favour me with a sheet full in your own way. I admire
the close of a letter Lord Bolingbroke writes to Dean Swift:--"Adieu,
dear Swift! with all thy faults I love thee entirely: make an effort to
love me with all mine!" Humble servant, and all that trumpery, is now
such a prostituted business, that honest friendship, in her sincere way,
must have recourse to her primitive, simple--farewell!

R. B.

[Footnote 81: Samuel Mitchelson, W.S., with whom young Ainslie served
his apprenticeship.]

* * * *

XCVII--TO MRS. DUNLOP.

MAUCHLINE, _July_ 10_th_, 1788.

MY MUCH HONOURED FRIEND,--Yours of the 24th June is before me. I found
it, as well as another valued friend--my wife, waiting to welcome me to
Ayrshire: I met both with the sincerest pleasure.

When I write you, Madam, I do not sit down to answer every paragraph of
yours, by echoing every sentiment, like the faithful Commons of Great
Britain in Parliament assembled, answering a speech from the best of
kings! I express myself in the fulness of my heart, and may, perhaps, be
guilty of neglecting some of your kind inquiries; but not from your very
odd reason, that I do not read your letters. All your epistles, for
several months, have cost me nothing except a swelling throb of
gratitude, or a deep-felt sentiment of veneration.

When Mrs. Burns, Madam, first found herself "as women wish to be who
love their lords," as I loved her nearly to distraction, we took steps
for a private marriage. Her parents got the hint; and not only forbade
me her company and their house, but, on my rumoured West Indian voyage,
got a warrant to put me in jail, till I should find security in my
about-to-be paternal relation. You know my lucky reverse of fortune. On
my _éclatant_ return to Mauchline, I was made very welcome to visit my
girl. The usual consequences began to betray her; and, as I was at that
time laid up a cripple in Edinburgh, she was turned, literally turned,
out of doors, and I wrote to a friend to shelter her till my return,
when our marriage was declared. Her happiness or misery were in my
hands, and who could trifle with such a deposit?

To jealousy or infidelity I am an equal stranger. My preservative
against the first is the most thorough consciousness of her sentiments
of honour and her attachment to me; my antidote against the last is my
long and deep-rooted affection for her. I can easily _fancy_ a more
agreeable companion for my journey of life; but, upon my honour, I have
never _seen_ the individual instance.

In household matters, of aptness to learn and activity to execute, she
is eminently mistress; and during my absence in Nithsdale, she is
regularly and constantly apprentice to my mother and sisters in their
dairy, and other rural business.

The muses must not be offended when I tell them, the concerns of my wife
and family will, in my mind, always take the _pas_; but I assure them
their ladyships will ever come next in place.

You are right that a bachelor state would have insured me more friends;
but, from a cause you will easily guess, conscious peace in the
enjoyment of my own mind, and unmistrusting confidence in approaching my
God, would seldom have been of the number.

Circumstanced as I am, I could never have got a female partner for life
who could have entered into my favourite studies, relished my favourite
authors, etc., without probably entailing on me at the same time
expensive living, fantastic caprice, perhaps apish affectation, with all
the other blessed boarding-school acquirements, which (_pardonnez moi_,
_Madame_) are sometimes to be found among females of the upper ranks,
but almost universally pervade the misses of the would-be gentry.[82]

I like your way in your churchyard lucubrations. Thoughts that are the
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.

Pages:
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 | 22 | 23 | 24 | 25 | 26 | 27