No More Learning

If ever you have any of these disagreeable sensations, let me
prescribe for you patience; and a bit of my cheese. I know that you
are no niggard of your good things among your friends, and some of
them are in much need of a slice. There, in my eye is our friend
Smellie; a man positively of the first abilities and greatest strength
of mind, as well as one of the best hearts and keenest wits that I
have ever met with; when you see him, as, alas! he too is smarting at
the pinch of distressful circumstances, aggravated by the sneer of
contumelious greatness--a bit of my cheese alone will not cure him,
but if you add a tankard of brown stout, and superadd a magnum of
right Oporto, you will see his sorrows vanish like the morning mist
before the summer sun.

Candlish, the earliest friend, except my only brother, that I have on
earth, and one of the worthiest fellows that ever any man called by
the name of friend, if a luncheon of my cheese would help to rid him
of some of his super-abundant modesty, you would do well to give it
him.

David,[184] with his _Courant_, comes, too, across my recollection, and
I beg you will help him largely from the said ewe-milk cheese, to
enable him to digest those bedaubing paragraphs with which he is
eternally larding the lean characters of certain great men in a
certain great town. I grant you the periods are very well turned; so,
a fresh egg is a very good thing, but when thrown at a man in a
pillory, it does not at all improve his figure, not to mention the
irreparable loss of the egg.

My facetious friend Dunbar I would wish also to be a partaker: not to
digest his spleen, for that he laughs off, but to digest his last
night's wine at the last field-day of the Crochallan corps. [185]

Among our common friends I must not forget one of the dearest of
them--Cunningham. The brutality, insolence, and selfishness of a world
unworthy of having such a fellow as he is in it, I know sticks in his
stomach, and if you can help him to anything that will make him a
little easier on that score, it will be very obliging.

As to honest J---- S----e, he is such a contented, happy man, that I
know not what can annoy him, except, perhaps, he may not have got the
better of a parcel of modest anecdotes which a certain poet gave him
one night at supper, the last time the said poet was in town.

Though I have mentioned so many men of law, I shall have nothing to do
with them professedly--the faculty are beyond my prescription. As to
their clients, that is another thing; God knows they have much to
digest!

The clergy I pass by; their profundity of erudition, and their
liberality of sentiment; their total want of pride, and their
detestation of hypocrisy, are so proverbially notorious as to place
them far, far above either my praise or censure.

I was going to mention a man of worth whom I have the honour to call
friend, the Laird of Craigdarroch; but I have spoken to the landlord
of the King's-Arms inn here, to have at the next county meeting a
large ewe-milk cheese on the table, for the benefit of the
Dumfries-shire Whigs, to enable them to digest the Duke of
Queensberry's late political conduct.
I have just this moment an opportunity of a private hand to Edinburgh,
as perhaps you would not digest double postage.

R. B.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 184: Printer of the _Edinburgh Evening Courant. _]

[Footnote 185: A club of choice spirits. ]

* * * * *




CXXVIII.


TO ROBERT GRAHAM, ESQ. ,

OF FINTRAY.

[The filial and fraternal claims alluded to in this letter were
satisfied with about three hundred pounds, two hundred of which went
to his brother Gilbert--a sum which made a sad inroad on the money
arising from the second edition of his Poems. ]

SIR,

When I had the honour of being introduced to you at Athole-house, I
did not think so soon of asking a favour of you. When Lear, in
Shakspeare, asked Old Kent why he wished to be in his service, he
answers, "Because you have that in your face which I would fain call
master. " For some such reason, Sir, do I now solicit your patronage.
You know, I dare say, of an application I lately made to your Board to
be admitted an officer of Excise. I have, according to form, been
examined by a supervisor, and to-day I gave in his certificate, with a
request for an order for instructions. In this affair, if I succeed, I
am afraid I shall but too much need a patronizing friend. Propriety of
conduct as a man, and fidelity and attention as an officer, I dare
engage for; but with anything like business, except manual labour, I
am totally unacquainted.