No. CXLIII.

TO MR. SAMUEL BROWN.

DEAR UNCLE,

Mossgiel, 4th May, 1789.

THIS, I hope, will find you and your conjugal yoke-fellow in your good old way; I am impatient to know if the Ailsa fowling be commenced for this season yet, as I want three or four stones of feathers, and I hope you will bespeak them for me. It would be a vain attempt for me to enumerate the various transactions I have been engaged in since I saw you last, but this know, I am engaged in a smuggling trade, and God knows if ever any poor man experienced better returns, two for one, but as freight and delivery have turned out so dear, I am thinking of taking out a license and beginning in fair trade. I have taken a farm on the borders of the Nith, and in imitation of the old Patriarchs, get men-servants and maid-servants, and flocks and herds, and beget sons and daughters.

Your obedient Nephew,

R. B.

[Samuel Brown was brother to the poet's mother, and seems to have been a joyous and tolerant sort of person, for his nephew shews little of that understrapping virtue called delicacy in relating his fortunes. He seems to have been somewhat ignorant too of the poet's motions, for certainly the license to which he alludes was taken out nearly a twelvemonth before the letter was written. -ED.]

No. CXLIV.

TO RICHARD BROWN.

MY DEAR FRIEND,

Mauchline, 21st May, 1789.

I was in the country by accident, and hearing of your safe arrival, I could not resist the temptation of wishing you joy on your return, wishing you would write to me before you sail again, wishing you would always set me down as your bosom friend, wishing you long life and prosperity, and that evey good thing may attend you, wishing Mrs. Brown and your little ones as free of the evils of this world, as is consistent with humanity, wishing you and she were to make two at the ensuing lying-in, with which Mrs. B. threatens very soon to favour me, wishing I had longer time to write to you at present; and, finally, wishing that if there is to be another state of existence, Mr. B., Mrs. B., our little ones, and both families, and you and I, in some snug retreat, may make a jovial party to all eternity! My Direction is at Ellisland, near Dumfries.

No. CXLV.

TO MR. JAMES HAMILTON.

DEAR SIR,

Ellisland, 26th May, 1789.

I SEND you by John Glover, Carrier, the above account for Mr. Turnbull, as I suppose you know his address.

I would fain offer, my dear Sir, a word of sympathy with your misfortunes; but it is a tender string, and I know not how to touch it. It is easy to flourish a set of high-flown sentiments on the subjects that would give great satisfaction to—a breast quite at ease; but as ONE observes, who was very seldom mistaken in the theory of life, “The heart knoweth its own sorrows, and a stranger intermeddleth not therewith."

Among some distressful emergencies that I have experienced in life, I ever laid this down as my foundation of comfort-That he who has lived the life of an honest man, has by no means lived in vain ! With every wish for your welfare and future

success,

I am, my dear Sir,

Sincerely yours,

R. B.

[James Hamilton was a grocer in Glasgow, and interested himself early in the fame and fortunes of the poet. That he had not the success in life which his friend imagined he merited, seems plain by this letter, and perhaps there are few who will not feel that Burns has, with uncommon delicacy, condoled with him in his misfortunes, and suggested a topic of consolation at once rational and religious.-ED.]

SIR,

No. CXLVI.

TO WILLIAM CREECH, ESQ.

Ellisland, 30th May, 1789.

I HAD intended to have troubled you with a long letter, but at present the delightful sensations of an omnipotent tooth-ache so engross all my inner man, as to put it out of my power even to write nonsense. However, as in duty bound, I approach my bookseller with an offering in my hand-a few poetic clinches, aad a song:-To expect any other kind of offering from the Rhyming Tribe would be to know them much less than you do. I do not pretend that there is much merit in these morceaux, but I have two reasons for sending them; primo, they are mostly ill-natured, so are in unison with my present feelings, while fifty troops of infernal spirits are driving post from ear to ear along my jaw bones; and secondly, they are so short, that you cannot leave

off in the middle, and so hurt my pride in the idea that you found any work of mine too heavy to get through.

I have a request to beg of you, and I not only beg of you, but conjure you, by all your wishes and by all your hopes, that the muse will spare the satiric wink in the moment of your foibles; that she will warble the song of rapture round your hymeneal couch; and that she will shed on your turf the honest tear of elegiac gratitude! Grant my request as speedily as possible-send me by the very first fly or coach for this place three copies of the last edition of my poems, which place to my

account.

Now may the good things of prose, and the good things of verse, come among thy hands, until they be filled with the good things of this life, prayeth

R. B.

[The poetic address to "The Tooth-ache" seems to be the offspring of this period. The "venomed stang" was fully felt during the composition of the epistle: but no one, save a sufferer under this "hell of a' diseases," can sympathize in the expression that fifty troops of infernal spirits were driving post from ear to ear along his jaw-bones! This letter may be taken as another proof of the poet's desire to render himself acceptable to his friends: he seldom folded up one without enclosing in it, or inserting in one of the pages, a short poem or one of his sweetest lyrics.—ED.]