No More Learning

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CLXXIII.


TO CAPTAIN RIDDEL.

[Robert Riddel kept one of those present pests of society--an
album--into which Burns copied the Lines on the Hermitage, and the
Wounded Hare. ]

_Ellisland, 1789. _

SIR,

I wish from my inmost soul it were in my power to give you a more
substantial gratification and return for all the goodness to the poet,
than transcribing a few of his idle rhymes. --However, "an old song,"
though to a proverb an instance of insignificance, is generally the
only coin a poet has to pay with.

If my poems which I have transcribed, and mean still to transcribe
into your book, were equal to the grateful respect and high esteem I
bear for the gentleman to whom I present them, they would be the
finest poems in the language. --As they are, they will at least be a
testimony with what sincerity I have the honour to be,

Sir,

Your devoted humble Servant,

R. B.

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CLXXIV.


TO MR. ROBERT AINSLIE.

[The ignominy of a poet becoming a gauger seems ever to have been
present to the mind of Burns--but those moving things ca'd wives and
weans have a strong influence on the actions of man. ]

_Ellisland, 1st Nov. 1789.
_

MY DEAR FRIEND,

I had written you long ere now, could I have guessed where to find
you, for I am sure you have more good sense than to waste the precious
days of vacation time in the dirt of business and Edinburgh. --Wherever
you are, God bless you, and lead you not into temptation, but deliver
you from evil!

I do not know if I have informed you that I am now appointed to an
excise division, in the middle of which my house and farm lie. In this
I was extremely lucky. Without ever having been an expectant, as they
call their journeymen excisemen, I was directly planted down to all
intents and purposes an officer of excise; there to flourish and bring
forth fruits--worthy of repentance.

I know not how the word exciseman, or still more opprobrious, gauger,
will sound in your ears. I too have seen the day when my auditory
nerves would have felt very delicately on this subject; but a wife and
children are things which have a wonderful power in blunting these
kind of sensations. Fifty pounds a year for life, and a provision for
widows and orphans, you will allow is no bad settlement for a _poet. _
For the ignominy of the profession, I have the encouragement which I
once heard a recruiting sergeant give to a numerous, if not a
respectable audience, in the streets of Kilmarnock. --"Gentlemen, for
your further and better encouragement, I can assure you that our
regiment is the most blackguard corps under the crown, and
consequently with us an honest fellow has the surest chance for
preferment. "

You need not doubt that I find several very unpleasant and
disagreeable circumstances in my business; but I am tired with and
disgusted at the language of complaint against the evils of life.
Human existence in the most favourable situations does not abound with
pleasures, and has its inconveniences and ills; capricious foolish man
mistakes these inconveniences and ills as if they were the peculiar
property of his particular situation; and hence that eternal
fickleness, that love of change, which has ruined, and daily does ruin
many a fine fellow, as well as many a blockhead, and is almost,
without exception, a constant source of disappointment and misery.

I long to hear from you how you go on--not so much in business as in
life. Are you pretty well satisfied with your own exertions, and
tolerably at ease in your internal reflections? 'Tis much to be a
great character as a lawyer, but beyond comparison more to be a great
character as a man. That you may be both the one and the other is the
earnest wish, and that you _will_ be both is the firm persuasion of,

My dear Sir, &c.