as my foundation of comfort-That he who has lived the life of an honest man, has by no means lived in vain!

all my

I

HAD intended to have troubled you with a long letter, but at present the delightful sensations of an omnipotent Toothach so engross 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 and a song:-To expect any other kind of offering from

the

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

ROBT. BURNS.

No.

No. XXXVI.

To MR. ROBERT AINSLIE.

MY DEAR FRIEND,

Ellisland, June 8, 1789.

AM perfectly ashamed of myself when I look at the date of your last. It is not that I forget the friend of my heart and the companion of my peregrinations; but I have been condemned to drudgery beyond sufferance, though not, thank God, beyond redemption. I have had a collection of poems by a lady put into my hands to prepare them for the press; which horrid task, with sowing my corn with my own hand, a parcel of masons, wrights, plaisterers, &c. to attend to, roaming on business through Ayrshireall this was against me, and the very first dreadful article was of itself too much for me.

13th. I have not had a moment to spare from incessant toil since the 8th. Life, my dear Sir, is a serious matter. You know by experience that a man's individual self is a good deal, but believe

me,

me, a wife and family of children, whenever you have the honor to be a husband and a father, will shew you that your present most anxious hours of solicitude are spent on trifles. The welfare of those who are very dear to us, whose only support, hope and stay we are-this, to a generous mind, is another sort of more important object of care than any concerns whatever which center merely in the individual. On the other hand, let no young, unmarried, rakehelly dog among you, make a song of his pretended liberty and freedom from care. If the relations we stand in to king, country, kindred, and friends, be any thing but the visionary fancies of dreaming metaphysicians; if religion, virtue, magnanimity, generosity, humanity and justice be aught but empty sounds; then the man who may be said to live only for others, for the beloved, honorable female whose tender faithful embrace endears life, and for the helpless little innocents who are to be the men and women, the worshippers of his God, the subjects of his king, and the support, nay the very vital existence of his COUNTRY, in the ensuing age;-compare such a man with any fellow whatever, who, whether he bustle and push in business among laborers, clerks, statesmen; or whether he roar and rant, and drink and sing in taverns-a fellow over whose grave no one will breathe a single heigh-ho,

heigh-ho, except from the cobweb-tie of what is called good fellowship-who has no view nor aim but what terminates in himself-if there be any grovelling earthborn wretch of our species, a renegado to common sense, who would fain believe that the noble creature, man, is no better than a sort of fungus, generated out of nothing, nobody knows how, and soon dissipating in nothing, nobody knows where; such a stupid beast, such a crawling reptile might balance the foregoing unexaggerated comparison, but no one else would have the patience.

Forgive me, my dear Sir, for this long silence. To make you amends, I shall send you soon, and more encouraging still, without any postage, one or two rhymes of my later manufacture.

No.