entered, I shall plead guilty to any other indictment with which you shall please to charge me. After I parted from you, for many months my life was one continued scene of dissipation. Here at last I am become stationary, and have taken a farm and--a wife. The farm is beautifully situated on the Nith, a large river that runs by Dumfries, and falls into the Solway frith. I nave gotten a lease of my farm as long as I pleased; but how it may turn out is just a guess, and it is yet to improve and inclose, &c.; however, I have good hopes of my bargain on the whole. My wife is my Jean, with whose story you are partly acquainted. I found I had a much loved fellow-creature's happiness or misery among my hands, and I durst not trifle with so sacred a deposite. Indeed I have not any reason to repent the step I have taken, as I have attached myself to a very good wife, and have shaken myself loose of every bad failing. I have found my book a very profitable business, and with the profits of it I have begun life pretty decently. Should fortune not favour me in farming, as I have no great faith in her fickle ladyship, I have provided myself in another resource, which, however some folks may affect to despise it, is still a comfortable shift in the day of misfortune. In the heyday of my fame, a gentleman, whose name at least I dare say you know, as his estate lies somewhere near Dundee, Mr Graham of Fintry, one of the commissioners of Excise, offered me the commission of an exciseofficer. I thought it prudent to accept the offer; and, accordingly, I took my instructions, and have my commission by me. Whether I may ever do duty, or be a penny the better for it, is what I do not know; but I have the comfortable assurance, that, come whatever ill fate will, I can, on my simple petition to the excise-board, get into employ. We have lost poor uncle Robert this winter. He has long been very weak, and with very little alteration on him, he expired 3d January. His son William has been with me this winter, and goes in May to be an apprentice to a mason. His other son, the eldest, John, comes to me I expect in summer. They are both remarkably stout young fellows, and promise to do well. His only daughter, Fanny, has been with me ever since her father's death, and I purpose keeping her in my family till she be quite woman grown, and fit for better service. She is one of the cleverest girls, and has one of the most amiable dispositions I have ever seen. All friends in this country and Ayrshire are well. Remember me to all friends in the north. My wife joins me in compliments to Mrs B. and family. I am ever, my dear cousin, Yours, sincerely, R. B.* No. CXLV. TO MRS DUNLOP. ELLISLAND, 4th March, 1789. HERE am I, my honoured friend, returned safe from the capital. To a man who has a home, however humble or remote-if that home is like mine, the scene of domestic comfort—the bustle of Edinburgh will soon be a business of sickening disgust. "Vain pomp and glory of this world, I hate you!" "Fanny Burns, the poet's relation, merited all the commendations he has here bestowed. I remember her while she lived at Ellisland, and better still as the wife of Adam Armour, the brother of bonnie Jean; she went with her husband to Mauchline, and lived long and respectably. Her son is now with his paternal uncle, pursuing successfully the honourable calling of a London merchant."- Cunningham. When I must skulk into a corner, lest the rattling equi page of some gaping blockhead should mangle me in the mire, I am tempted to exclaim-"What merits has he had, or what demerit have I had, in some state of pre-existence, that he is ushered into this state of being with the sceptre of rule, and the key of riches in his puny fist, and I am kicked into the world, the sport of folly, or the victim of pride?" I have read somewhere of a monarch, (in Spain I think it was,) who was so out of humour with the Ptolomean system of astronomy, that he said, had he been of the Creator's council, he could have saved him a great deal of labour and absurdity. I will not defend this blasphemous speech; but often, as I have glided with humble stealth through the pomp of Princes'-street, it has suggested itself to me, as an improvement on the present human figure, that a man, in proportion to his own conceit of his consequence in the world, could have pushed out the longitude of his common size, as a snail pushes out his horns, or as we draw out a perspective. This trifling alteration, not to mention the prodigious saving it would be in the tear and wear of the neck and limb-sinews of many of his majesty's liege-subjects, in the way of tossing the head and tiptoe strutting, would evidently turn out a vast advantage, in enabling us at once to adjust the ceremonials in making a bow, or making way to a great man, and that too within a second of the precise spherical angle of reverence, or an inch of the particular point of respectful distance, which the important creature itself requires; as a measuring-glance at its towering altitude would determine the affair like instinct. You are right, Madam, in your idea of poor Mylne's poem, which he has addressed to me. The piece has a good deal of merit, but it has one great fault-it is, by far, too long. Besides, my success has encouraged such a shoal of ill-spawned monsters to crawl into public notice, under the title of Scottish Poets, that the very term Scottish Poetry borders on the burlesque. When I write to Mr Carfrae, I shall advise him rather to try one of his deceased friend's English pieces. I am prodigiously hurried with my own matters, else I would have requested a perusal of all Mylne's poetic performances, and would have offered his friends my assistance in either selecting or correcting what would be proper for the press. What it is that occupies me so much, and perhaps a little oppresses my present spirits, shall fill up a paragraph in some future letter. In the mean time, allow me to close this epistle with a few lines done by a friend of mine. I give you them, that, as you have seen the original, you may guess whether one or two alterations I have ventured to make in them, be any real improvement. * "Like the fair plant that from our touch withdraws, Be all a mother's fondest hope can dream, And all you are, my charming * * * seem. Straight as the fox-glove, ere her bells disclose, R. B.* "These beautiful lines, we have reason to believe, are the production of the lady to whom this letter is addressed."— Currie. Burns never writ truer word than when he alludes to the monstrous spawn of poetasters which inundated the public immediately after the merits of his muse were universally acknowledged. It is amusing to read the effusions of some of these blockheads, many of whom affect to hold in sovereign contempt the genius of that great one who had the sin upon his head of calling into existence so vast a crowd of wretched scribblers, and self-satisfied but truly contemptible imitators. A collection of the choicest flowers, culled from the numerous works of these obscure Scottish rhymsters, would be no mean contribution to whatever can amuse, if not delight and instruct the age.—M. N 2 No. CXLVI. TO THE REV. P. CARFRAE. REV. SIR, 1789. I Do not recollect that I have ever felt a severer pang of shame, than on looking at the date of your obliging letter which accompanied Mr Mylne's poem. I am much to blame: the honour Mr Mylne has done me, greatly enhanced in its value by the endearing, though melancholy circumstance, of its being the last production of his muse, deserved a better return. I have, as you hint, thought of sending a copy of the poem to some periodical publication; but, on second thoughts, I am afraid that, in the present case, it would be an improper step. My success, perhaps as much accidental as merited, has brought an inundation of nonsense under the name of Scottish poetry. Subscription-bills for Scottish poems, have so dunned, and daily do dun the public, that the very name is in danger of contempt. For these reasons, if publishing any of Mr Mylne's poems in a magazine, &c. be at all prudent, in my opinion it certainly should not be a Scottish poem. The profits of the labours of a man of genius, are, I hope, as honourable as any profits whatever; and Mr Mylne's relations are most justly entitled to that honest harvest which fate has denied himself to reap. But let the friends of Mr Mylne's fame (among whom I crave the honour of ranking myself,) always keep in eye his respectability as a man and as a poet, and take no measure that, before the world knows any thing about him, would risk his name and character being classed with the fools of the times. I have, Sir, some experience of publishing; and the way in which I would proceed with Mr Mylne's poems, is this: -I will publish, in two or three English and Scottish public papers, any one of his English poems which should, by |