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six; except a few minutes that we went out to pay our devotions to the glorious lamp of day peering over the towering top of Benlomond. We all kneeled; our worthy landlord's son held the bowl, each man a full glass in his hand; and I, as priest, repeated some rhyming nonsense, like Thomas-a-Rhymer's prophecies I suppose. After a small refreshment of the gifts of Somnus, we proceeded to spend the day on Loch Lomond, and reached Dumbarton in the evening. We dined at another good fellow's house, and consequently pushed the bottle; when we went out to mount our horses, we found ourselves 'No vera fou, but gaylie yet. My two friends and I rode soberly down the Loch side, till by came a Highlandman at the gallop, on a tolerably good horse, but which had never known the ornaments of iron or leather. We scorned to be out-gallopped by a Highlandman, so off we started, whip and spur. My companions, though seemingly gaily mounted, fell sadly astern; but my old mare, Jenny Geddes, one of the Rosinante family, strained past the Highlandman in spite of all his efforts with the hair-halter. Just as I was passing him, Donald wheeled his horse, as if to cross before me, to mar my progress, when down came his horse, and threw his breekless rider in a clipt hedge; and down came Jenny Geddes over all, and my bardship between her and the Highlandman's horse. Jenny Geddes trode over me with such cautious reverence, that matters were not so bad as might well have been expected; so I came off with a few cuts and bruises, and a thorough resolution to be a pattern of sobriety for the future.

I have yet fixed on nothing with respect to the serious business of life. I am, just as usual, a rhyming, mason-making, raking, aimless, idle fellow. However, I shall somewhere have a farm soon. I was going to say a wife too; but that must never be my blessed lot. I am but a younger son of the house of Parnassus, and, like other younger sons of great families, I may intrigue, if I choose to run all risks, but must not marry.

I am afraid I have almost ruined one source, the principal one, indeed, of my former happiness-that eternal propensity I always had to fall in love. My heart no more glows with feverish rapture. I have no paradisical evening interviews stolen from the restless cares and prying inhabitants of this weary world. I have only **** This last is one of your distant acquaintances, has a fine figure, and elegant manners, and, in the train of some great folks whom you know, has seen the politest quarters in Europe. I do like her a good deal; but what piques me is her conduct at the commencement of our acquaintance. I frequently visited her when I was in -; and after passing regularly the intermediate degrees between the distant formal bow and the familiar grasp round the waist, I ventured, in my careless way, to talk of friendship in rather ambiguous terms; and after her return to, I wrote to her in the same style. Miss, construing my words farther, I suppose, than even I intended, flew off in a tangent of female dignity and reserve, like a mounting lark in an April morning; and wrote me an answer which

HIGHLAND HOSPITALITY.

103

measured me out very completely what an immense way I had to travel before I could reach the climate of her favour. But I am an old hawk at the sport; and wrote her such a cool, deliberate, prudent reply, as brought my bird from her aërial towerings pop down at my foot like Corporal Trim's hat.

As for the rest of my acts, and my wars, and all my wise sayings, and why my mare was called Jenny Geddes, they shall be recorded in a few weeks hence, at Linlithgow, in the chronicles of your memory, by ROBERT BURNS.

Could it be at the hospitable mansion here indicated, and by way of a ruing amende for the Inverary epigram, that Burns penned his well-known quatrain ?—

COMPOSED ON LEAVING A PLACE IN THE HIGHLANDS WHERE HE HAD
BEEN KINDLY ENTERTAINED.

When Death's dark stream I ferry o'er-
A time that surely shall come-
In Heaven itself I'll ask no more

Than just a Highland welcome!

Respecting the love affair alluded to, there is no further light, unless we are to consider a stray letter which has found its way into print without a superscription, as connected with it. No safe conjecture can be formed as to the person meant, beyond that of her being an Ayrshire lady, which the phrase 'countrywoman' implies:

TO MISS

MY DEAR COUNTRY WOMAN-I am so impatient to shew you that I am once more at peace with you, that I send you the book I mentioned directly, rather than wait the uncertain time of my seeing you. I am afraid I have mislaid or lost Collins's Poems, which I promised to Miss Irvine. If I can find them, I will forward them by you; if not, you must apologise for me.

I know you will laugh at it when I tell you that your piano and you together have played the deuce somehow about my heart. My breast has been widowed these many months, and I thought myself proof against the fascinating witchcraft; but I am afraid you will 'feelingly convince me what I am. I say I am afraid, because I am not sure what is the matter with me. I have one miserable bad symptom: when you whisper or look kindly to another, it gives me a draught of damnation. I have a kind of wayward wish to be with you ten minutes by yourself, though what I would say, Heaven above knows, for I am sure I know not. I have no formed design in all this, but just, in the nakedness of my heart, write you down a mere matter-of-fact story. You may perhaps give yourself airs of distance

on this, and that will completely cure me; but I wish you would not; just let us meet, if you please, in the old beaten way of friendship.

I will not subscribe myself your humble servant, for that is a phrase, I think, at least fifty miles off from the heart; but I will conclude with sincerely wishing that the Great Protector of innocence may shield you from the barbed dart of calumny, and hand you by the covert snare of deceit. R. B.

Dr Currie states that, returning from this tour to Mossgiel, he there spent the month of July, 'renewing his friendships, and extending his acquaintance throughout the country, where he was now very generally known and admired.*

TO MR JOHN RICHMOND.

MOSSGIEL, 7th July 1787.

MY DEAR RICHMOND-I am all impatience to hear of your fate since the old confounder of right and wrong has turned you out of place by his journey to answer his indictment at the bar of the other world. He will find the practice of the court so different from the practice in which he has for so many years been thoroughly hackneyed, that his friends, if he had any connections truly of that kind, which I rather doubt, may well tremble for his sake. His chicane, his left-handed wisdom, which stood so firmly by him, to such good purpose, here, like other accomplices in robbery and plunder, will, now the piratical business is blown, in all probability turn king's evidence, and then the devil's bagpiper will touch him off 'Bundle and Go!

If he has left you any legacy, I beg your pardon for all this; if not, I know you will swear to every word I said about him.

I have lately been rambling over by Dumbarton and Inverary, and running a drunken race on the side of Loch Lomond with a wild Highlandman; his horse, which had never known the ornaments of iron or leather, zig-zagged across before my old spavin'd hunter, whose name is Jenny Geddes, and down came the Highlandman, horse and all, and down came Jenny and my bardship; so I have got such a skinful of bruises and wounds, that I shall be at least four weeks before I dare venture on my journey to Edinburgh.

Not one new thing under the sun has happened in Mauchline since you left it. I hope this will find you as comfortably situated as formerly, or, if Heaven pleases, more so; but at all events I trust you will let me know of course how matters stand with you, well or ill. "Tis but poor consolation to tell the world when matters go wrong; but you know very well your connection and mine stands on a different footing. I am ever, my dear friend, yours, R. B.

1 Alluding to the recent decease of Richmond's master.

ACQUAINTANCE WITH M'LEODS OF RAASAY.

105

TO MR ROBERT AINSLIE.

MAUCHLINE, 23d July 1787.

MY DEAR AINSLIE-There is one thing for which I set great store by you as a friend, and it is this—that I have not a friend upon earth, besides yourself, to whom I can talk nonsense without forfeiting some degree of his esteem. Now to one like me, who never cares for speaking anything else but nonsense, such a friend as you is

an invaluable treasure. I was never a rogue, but have been a fool all my life; and in spite of all my endeavours, I see now plainly that I shall never be wise. Now it rejoices my heart to have met with such a fellow as you, who, though you are not just such a hopeless fool as I, yet I trust you will never listen so much to the temptations of the devil as to grow so very wise that you will in the least disrespect an honest fellow because he is a fool. In short, I have set you down as the staff of my old age, when the whole list of my friends will, after a decent share of pity, have forgot me.

Though in the morn comes sturt and strife,

Yet joy may come at noon;

And I hope to live a merry merry life

When a'thir days are done.

Write me soon, were it but a few lines just to tell me how that good sagacious man your father is that kind dainty body your mother that strapping chiel your brother Douglas-and my friend Rachel, who is as far before Rachel of old, as she was before her blear-eyed sister Leah.

R. B.

Burns had in spring formed an acquaintance with the M'Leods of Raasay, doubtless through the medium of his Ayrshire friends, the Campbells of Loudoun, the young Countess of Loudoun's mother being a member of that Hebridean family. A lady of rank living in Perthshire tells me that she remembers meeting Burns at an evening party in the house of an aunt of M'Leod of Raasay in St John Street, where he seemed to be on easy terms. He had been on the previous night at a ball in Dunn's Rooms (now the National Bank, St Andrew Square), and he spoke in high terms of the beauty of the ladies, as well as of the witchery of the music. His manner, however, was not prepossessing-scarcely, she thinks, manly or natural. It seemed as if he affected a rusticity or landertness, so that when he said the music was 'bonnie, bonnie,' it was like the expression of a child. This gives a curious idea of the nature of that ultra-deference of tone which Sir Walter Scott reports Burns as having used among ladies during his residence in Edinburgh.

On the 20th of July, died John M'Leod, youngest son of the

E

Laird of Raasay, and on this melancholy subject the muse of Burns became eloquent :

ON READING IN A NEWSPAPER

THE DEATH OF JOHN M'LEOD, ESQ.,

BROTHER TO A YOUNG LADY, A PARTICULAR FRIEND OF THE AUTHOR'S.

Sad thy tale, thou idle page,

And rueful thy alarms

Death tears the brother of her love
From Isabella's arms.

Sweetly decked with pearly dew
The morning rose may blow,
But cold successive noontide blasts
May lay its beauties low.

Fair on Isabella's morn

The sun propitious smiled,

But, long ere noon, succeeding clouds
Succeeding hopes beguiled.

Fate oft tears the bosom cords
That nature finest strung;
So Isabella's heart was formed,
And so that heart was wrung.

Were it in the poet's power,
Strong as he shares the grief
That pierces Isabella's heart,
To give that heart relief!

Dread Omnipotence, alone,

Can heal the wound he gave-
Can point the brimful grief-worn eyes
To scenes beyond the grave.

Virtue's blossoms there shall blow,

And fear no withering blast;
There Isabella's spotless worth
Shall happy be at last.

It was during this brief stay at Mossgiel that Burns penned his autobiographical letter to Dr Moore, of which the introduction and termination were as follows:

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