heart than Clarinda? Not even prejudice will dare to say so; for penetration and discernment, Clarinda sees far beyond her. To wit, Miss Nimmo dare make no pretence: to Clarinda's wit, scarce any of her sex dare make pretence. Personal charms, it would be ridiculous to run the parallel; and for conduct in life, Miss Nimmo was never called out, either much to do, or to suffer. Clarinda has been both; and has performed her part, where Miss Nimmo would have sunk at the bare idea. Away, then, with these disquietudes! Let us pray with the honest weaver of Kilbarchan, 'Lord, send us a guid conceit o' oursel'!' or in the words of the auld sang 'Who does me disdain, I can scorn them again, And I'll never mind any such foes.' There is an error in the commerce of intimacy. Happy is our lot, indeed, when we meet with an honest merchant, who is qualified to deal with us on our own terms; but that is a rarity with almost everybody we must pocket our pearls, less or more, and learn, in the old Scots phrase, To gie sic like as we get.' For this reason we should try to erect a kind of bank or storehouse in our own mind; or, as the Psalmist says, 'We should commune with our own hearts and be still.' * I wrote you yesternight, which will reach you long before this can. I may write Mr Ainslie before I see him, but I am not sure. Farewell! and remember SYLVANDER. то MR RICHARD BROWN. MAUCHLINE, 7th March 1788. I have been out of the country, my dear friend, and have not had an opportunity of writing till now, when I am afraid you will be gone out of the country too. I have been looking at farms, and after all, perhaps I may settle in the character of a farmer. I have got so vicious a bent to idleness, and have ever been so little a man of business, that it will take no ordinary effort to bring my mind properly into the routine; but you will say a 'great effort is worthy of you.' I say so myself, and butter up my vanity with all the stimulating compliments I can think of. Men of grave, geometrical minds, the sons of 'which was to be demonstrated,' may cry up reason as much as they please; but I have always found an honest passion, or native instinct, the truest auxiliary in the warfare of this world. Reason almost always comes to me like an unlucky wife to a poor devil of a husband-just in sufficient time to add her reproaches to his other grievances. [He goes on to speak of Jean, as having been found by him in a desolate state, and of his having obtained for her a safe harbourage, where she might remain till a certain event should take place. In nautical metaphor, he has 'taken command of her, not ostensibly, but for a time in secret.'] I am gratified with your kind inquiries after her; as, after all, I may say with Othello Excellent wretch ! Perdition catch my soul, but I do love thee!' I go for Edinburgh on Monday. Yours, R. B. TO MR ROBERT MUIR. MOSSGIEL, 7th March 1788. DEAR SIR-I have partly changed my ideas, my dear friend, since I saw you. I took old Glenconner with me to Mr Miller's farm; and he was so pleased with it, that I have wrote an offer to Mr Miller, which, if he accepts, I shall sit down a plain farmer— the happiest of lives when a man can live by it. In this case I shall not stay in Edinburgh above a week. I set out on Monday, and would have come by Kilmarnock, but there are several small sums owing me for my first edition about Galston and Newmills, and I shall set off so early as to despatch my business and reach Glasgow by night. When I return, I shall devote a forenoon or two to make some kind of acknowledgment for all the kindness I owe your friendship. Now that I hope to settle with some credit and comfort at home, there was not any friendship or friendly correspondence that promised me more pleasure than yours; I hope I will not be disappointed. I trust the spring will renew your shattered frame, and make your friends happy. You and I have often agreed that life is no great blessing on the whole. The close of life, indeed, to a reasoning age, is 'Dark as was chaos, ere the infant sun Was rolled together, or had tried his beams But an honest man has nothing to fear. If we lie down in the grave, the whole man a piece of broken machinery, to moulder with the clods of the valley, be it so; at least there is an end of pain, care, woes, and wants: if that part of us called Mind does survive the apparent destruction of the man-away with old-wife prejudices and tales! Every age and every nation has had a different set of stories; and as the many are always weak, of consequence they have often, perhaps always, been deceived. A man conscious of having acted an honest part among his fellow-creatures-even granting that he may have been the sport at times of passions and instincts-he' goes to a great unknown Being, who could have no other end in giving him existence but to make him happy; who gave him those passions and instincts, and well knows their force. These, my worthy friend, are my ideas; and I know they are not far different from yours. It becomes a man of sense to think for himself, particularly in a case where all men are equally interested, and where, indeed, all men are equally in the dark. Adieu, my dear sir. God send us a cheerful meeting! R. B. TO MRS DUNLOP. MOSSGIEL, 7th March 1788. MADAM-The last paragraph in yours of the 30th February affected me most, so I shall begin my answer where you ended your letter. That I am often a sinner, with any little wit I have, I do confess; but I have taxed my recollection to no purpose to find out when it was employed against you. I hate an ungenerous sarcasm a great deal worse than I do the devil-at least as Milton describes him; and though I may be rascally enough to be sometimes guilty of it myself, I cannot endure it in others. You, my honoured friend, who cannot appear in any light but you are sure of being respectable-you can afford to pass by an occasion to display your wit, because you may depend for fame on your sense; or, if you choose to be silent, you know you can rely on the gratitude of many and the esteem of all; but God help us who are wits or witlings by profession: if we stand not for fame there, we sink unsupported! I am highly flattered by the news you tell me of Coila.' I may say to the fair painter who does me so much honour, as Dr Beattie says to Ross the poet of his muse Scota, from which, by the by, I took the idea of Coila ('tis a poem of Beattie's in the Scottish dialect, which perhaps you have never seen) : 'Ye shake your head, but o' my fegs Ye've set auld Scota on her legs : Her fiddle wanted strings and pegs, Waes me, poor hizzie.' R. B. Burns, if he held by his intention, left Mauchline on the 10th of March, on his return to Edinburgh. A letter to Miss Chalmers speedily announces a notable event in his career: TO MISS CHALMERS. EDINBURGH, March 14, 1788. I know, my ever dear friend, that you will be pleased with the news when I tell you I have at last taken a lease of a farm. Yesternight I completed a bargain with Mr Miller, of Dalswinton, for the 1 A daughter of Mrs Dunlop was now engaged in painting a sketch of Coila. farm of Ellisland, on the banks of the Nith, between five and six miles above Dumfries. I begin at Whitsunday to build a house, drive lime, &c.; and Heaven be my help! for it will take a strong effort to bring my mind into the routine of business. I have discharged all the army of my former pursuits, fancies, and pleasures -a motley host!-and have literally and strictly retained only the ideas of a few friends, which I have incorporated into a life-guard. I trust in Dr Johnson's observation, 'Where much is attempted, something is done.' Firmness, both in sufferance and exertion, is a character I would wish to be thought to possess; and have always despised the whining yelp of complaint, and the cowardly, feeble resolve. Poor Miss K.' is ailing a good deal this winter, and begged me to remember her to you the first time I wrote to you. Surely woman, amiable woman, is often made in vain. Too delicately formed for the rougher pursuits of ambition; too noble for the dirt of avarice; and even too gentle for the rage of pleasure; formed indeed for, and highly susceptible of, enjoyment and rapture; but that enjoyment, alas! almost wholly at the mercy of the caprice, malevolence, stupidity, or wickedness of an animal at all times. comparatively unfeeling, and often brutal. R. B. Patrick Miller, banker, brother of the Lord Justice-Clerk of Scotland, had recently become possessed of a beautiful estate in the lower part of the valley of the Nith. The lands and castle of Dalswinton had once been the property of the great family of Cumming, the ruin of which is dated from their opposition to Robert Bruce, by whom the chief was slain in the Greyfriars' Church, at Dumfries. The estate consists partly of some fine holm-land adjacent to the river, and partly of a series of gravelly terraces ascending towards the hills, and partially clothed with wood. Mr Miller, we have seen, had patronised Burns immediately after his arrival in Edinburgh. Besides sending him a present of ten guineas, he had expressed a strong wish to have him for a tenant-partly animated by a belief that farming was the course of life, apart from literature, best suited for the poet, and the most likely to preserve him from the temptations of society. Burns, with some reluctance, had gone at the end of autumn to see 1 Miss Kennedy, sister of Mrs Gavin Hamilton. This lady, who is so frequently alluded to by Burns, survived him about forty years. She was, like most long-lived people, of a cheerful, benevolent disposition. When several years above ninety, she had the misfortune to break her arm by a fall down stairs. Her nephew, a medical man, immediately went to her in great solicitude, thinking that such an accident at such an age must have been very discomfiting indeed. The good old lady was, on the contrary, quite placid and happy. Isn't it,' said she, such a great mercy that it is not my leg; for in that case I might have been lame for life!' the lands which Mr Miller had to offer; he had returned to see them again in March, when, contrary to his expectation, he found reason to hope that a subsistence might be realised out of one of the Dalswinton farms. Three were offered to him-one, named Foregirth, a fine piece of the haugh, bearing heavy crops of wheat; another, called Bankhead, only a little less rich; and one called Ellisland, adjacent to the river, on its right or opposite bank. The factor, father to the late Allan Cunningham, shewed Burns over them all, and explained their various merits. There cannot now be a doubt of the superior eligibility of Foregirth-of which it is related that it yielded £40 an acre in the famine year of 1800, and that the tenant of that period left it a gainer by £3000. Burns, however, was captivated by the fine situation of Ellisland, with its views up and down the river, and of the beautiful pleasure-grounds of Dalswinton; and he made what the factor called a poet's, not a farmer's choice. Allan Cunningham, who was well informed on this point, says: 'Ellisland is beautifully situated on the south side of the Nith, some six miles above Dumfries: it joins the grounds of Friars' Carse on the north-west-the estate of Isle towards the southcast; the great road from Glasgow separates it from the hills of Dunscore; while the Nith, a pure stream running over the purest gravel, divides it from the holms and groves of Dalswinton. The farm amounts to upwards of a hundred acres, and is part holm and part croft land: the former, a deep rich loam, bears fine tall crops of wheat; the latter, though two-thirds stones on a bottom of gravel, yields, when carefully cultivated, good crops both of potatoes and corn; yet to a stranger the soil must have looked unpromising or barren; and Burns declared, after a shower had fallen on a field of new-sown and new-rolled barley, that it looked like a paved street.' That the land really was in a wretched state, and only to be rendered tolerably good by a large expenditure of capital for improvement, fully appears from an acknowledgment by the landlord himself.' There is no reason to suppose that Mr Miller drove a hard 'Mr Miller gives an account of his estate at the time of his purchase, in the General View of the Agriculture, &c., of Dumfriesshire. 8vo, Edin. 1812. His letter is dated 24th September 1810. When I purchased this estate, about five-and-twenty years ago, I had not seen it. It was in the most miserable state of exhaustion, and all the tenants in poverty. Judge of the first when I inform you, that oats ready to be cut were sold at 25s. per acre upon the holm-grounds. When I went to view my purchase, I was so much disgusted for eight or ten days, that I then meant never to return to this county.' |