Γ No. XXIII. To Mr. JAMES SMITH, Avon Printfield, Mauchline, April 28, 1788. BEWARE of your Strasburgh, my good Sir! Look on this as the opening of a correspondence like the opening of a twenty-four gun battery! There is no understanding a man properly, without knowing something of his previous ideas (that is to say, if the man has any ideas; for I know many who in the animal-muster, pass for men, that are the scanty masters of only one idea on any given subject, and by far the greatest part of your acquaintances and mine can barely boast of ideas, 1.25-1.5-1.75, or some such fractional matter) so to let you a little into the secrets of my pericranium, there is, you must know, a certain clean-limbed, handsome, bewitching young hussy of your acquaintance, to whom I have lately and privately given a matrimonial title to my corpus. "Bode à robe and wear it," Says the wise old Scots adage! I hate to presage illluck; and as my girl has been doubly kinder to me than even the best of women usually are to their partners of our sex, in similar circumstances, I reckon on twelve times a brace of children against I celebrate my twelfth wedding day: these twenty-four will give me twenty-four gossippings, twenty-four christenings, (I mean one equal to two) and I hope, by the blessing of the God of my fathers, to make them twenty-four dutiful children to their parents, twenty-four useful Members of Society, and twenty-four approven servants of their God! " Light 's heartsome," quo' the wife when she was stealing sheep. You see what a lamp I have hung up to lighten your paths, when you are idle enough to explore the combinations and * * * * relations of my ideas. 'Tis now as plain as a pike-staff, why a twenty-four gun battery was a metaphor I could readily employ. Now for business.-I intend to present Mrs. Burns with a printed shawl, an article of which I dare say you have variety: 'tis my first present to her since I have irrevocably called her mine, and I have a kind of whimsical wish to get her the said first present from an old and much valued friend of hers and mine, a trusty Trojan, on whose friendship I count myself possessed of a life-rent lease. Look on this letter as a "beginning of sorrows;" I'll write you till your eyes ache with reading non sense. Mrs. Burns ('tis only her private designation) begs her best compliments to you. No. XXIV. To Mr. ROBERT AINSLIE, Mauchline, May 26, 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 bar gainings 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 re solutions, 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 deport ment.* I am interrupted. Farewel! my dear Sir. * A passage has been omitted in a letter to Mrs. Dunlop. (8vo. Edition, Vol. II, No. LIII.) This passage places Mrs. Burns in so interesting a point of view that it must be preserved. "To jealousy or infidelity I am an equal stranger: My preservative from the first is a most thorough consciousness of her sentiments of honor, and her attachment to me; my antidote against the last, is my long and deep-rooted affection for her. In housewife 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 uumistrusting confidence in approaching my God, would seldom Dave been of the number * * * E2 No. XXV. TO THE SAME. Ellisland, June 14, 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 small 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 realize 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. 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. No. XXVI. TO THE SAME. Ellisland, June 30, 1788. MY DEAR SIR, I JUST now received your brief epistle; and to take vengeance on your laziness, I have, you sec, taken a long sheet of writing paper, and have begun at the top of the page, intending to scribble on the very last corner. I am vext 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. I am concerned for the old fellow's exit, only as I fear it may be to your disadvantage |