I have just this moment an
opportunity
of a private hand to Edinburgh,
as perhaps you would not digest double postage.
as perhaps you would not digest double postage.
Robert Burns
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.