It is most natural to

copies of your verses. give a few to confidential friends, particularly to those who are connected with the subject, or who are perhaps themselves the subject, but this ought to be done under promise not to give other copies. Of the poem you sent me on Queen Mary, I refused every solicitation for copies, but I lately saw it in a newspaper. My motive for cautioning you on this subject, is, that I wish to engage you to collect all your fugitive pieces, not already printed, and after they have been re-considered, and polished to the utmost of your power, I would have you publish them by another subscription: in promoting of which, I will exert myself with plea

sure.

In your future compositions, I wish you would use the modern English. You have shewn your powers in Scottish sufficiently. Although in certain subjects it gives additional zest to the humour, yet it is lost to the English; and why should you write only for a part of the island, when you can command the admiration of the whole.

If you chance to write to my friend Mrs. Dunlop, of Dunlop, I beg to be affectionately remembered to her. She must not judge of the warmth of my sentiments respecting her by the number of my letters; I hardly ever write a line but on business; and I do not know that

I should have scribbled all this to you, but for the business part, that is, to instigate you to a new publication; and to tell you, that when you think you have a sufficient number to make a volume, you should set your friends on getting subscriptions. I wish I could have a few hours conversation with you-I have many things to say, which I cannot write. If I ever go to Scotland, I will let you know, that you may mect me at your own house, or my friend Mrs. Hamilton's, or both.

Adieu, my dear Sir, &c.

No. 101.

TO THE REV. ARCH. ALISON.

Ellisland, near Dumfries, 14th. Feb. 1791.

SIR,

You must, by this time, have set me down as one of the most ungrateful of men. You did me the honour to present me with a book which does honour to science and the intellectual powers of man, and I have not even so much as acknowledged the receipt of it. The fact is, you yourself are to blame for it. Flattered as I was by your telling me that you wished to have my opinion of the work, the old spi

ritual enemy of mankind, who knows well that vanity is one of the sins that most easily beset me, put it into my head to ponder over the performance with the look out of a critic, and to draw up forsooth a deep learned digest of strictures, on a composition, of which, in fact, until I read the book, I did not even know the first principles. I own, Sir. that at first glance, several of you propositions startled me as paradoxical. That the martial clangor of a trumpet had something in it vastly more grand, heroic, and sublime, than the twingle twangle of a jew's-harp; that the delicate flexure of the rosetwig, when the half-blown flower is heavy with the tears of the dawn, was infinitely more beautiful and elegant than the upright stub of a burdock; and that from something innate and independent of all association of ideas;-these I had set down as irrefragable, orthodox truths, until perusing your book shook my faith.-In short, Sir, except Euclid's Elements of Geometry, which I made a shift to unravel by my father's fire-side, in the winter evening of the first season I held the plough, I never read a book which gave me such a quantum of information, and added so much to my stock of ideas as your Essays on the Principles of Taste." One thing, Sir, you must forgive my mentioning, as an uncommon merit in the work, I mean the language. To clothe abstract philosophy in

66

elegance of style, sounds something like a contradiction in terms; but you have convinced me that they are quite compatible.

I inclose you some poetic bagatelles of my late composition. The one in print is my first essay in the way of telling a tale.

I am, Sir, &c.

No. 102.

EXTRACT OF A LETTER

To MR. CUNNINGHAM.

12th. March, 1791.

IF the foregoing piece be worth your strictures let me have them. For my own part, a thing that I have just composed, always appears through a double portion of that partial medium in which an author will ever view his own works. I believe in general, novelty has something in it that inebriates the fancy, and not unfrequently dissipates and fumes away like other intoxication, and leaves the poor patient, as usual, with an aching heart. A striking instance of this might be adduced, in the revolution of many a hymeneal honey-moon. But lest I sink into stupid prose, and so sacrilegiously intrude on the office of my parish priest, I shall

fill up the page in my own way, and give you another song of my late composition, which will appear perhaps in Johnston's work, as well as the former.

You must know a beautiful Jacobite air, There'll never be peace 'till Jamie comes hame. When political combustion ceases to be the object of princes and patriots, it then, you know, becomes the lawful prey of historians and poets.

"By yon castle wa' at the close of the day," See Poems, p. 535. If you like the air, and if the stanzas hit your fancy, you cannot imagine, my dear friend, how much you would oblige me, if, by the charms of your delightful voice, you would give my honest effusion to "the memory of joys that are past," to the few friends whom you indulge in that pleasure. But I have scribbled on till I hear the clock has intimated the near approach of

"That hour o' night's black arch the key-stane."—

So good night to you! Sound be your sleep, and delectable your dreams! Apropos, how do you like this thought in a ballad, I have just now on the tapis?

I look to the west, when I gae to rest,

That happy my dreams and my slumbers may be ; For far in the west, is he I lo'e best,

The lad that is dear to my babie and me!

Good night, once more, and God bless you!