No More Learning

If you are so very kind as to grant my request, it will certainly be a
constant incentive to me to strain every nerve where I can officially
serve you; and will, if possible, increase that grateful respect with
which I have the honour to be,

Gentlemen,

Your devoted humble servant,

R. B.

* * * * *




CCCXXVIII.


TO MRS. RIDDEL.

[Mrs. Riddel was, like Burns, a well-wisher to the great cause of
human liberty, and lamented with him the excesses of the French
Revolution. ]

_Dumfries, 20th January, 1796. _

I cannot express my gratitude to you, for allowing me a longer perusal
of "Anacharsis. " In fact, I never met with a book that bewitched me so
much; and I, as a member of the library, must warmly feel the
obligation you have laid us under. Indeed to me the obligation is
stronger than to any other individual of our society; as "Anacharsis"
is an indispensable desideratum to a son of the muses.

The health you wished me in your morning's card, is, I think, flown
from me for ever. I have not been able to leave my bed to-day till
about an hour ago. These wickedly unlucky advertisements I lent (I did
wrong) to a friend, and I am ill able to go in quest of him.

The muses have not quite forsaken me.
The following detached stanza I
intend to interweave in some disastrous tale of a shepherd.

R. B.

* * * * *




CCCXXIX.


TO MRS. DUNLOP.

[It seems that Mrs. Dunlop regarded the conduct of Burns, for some
months, with displeasure, and withheld or delayed her usual kind and
charming communications. ]

_Dumfries, 31st January, 1796. _

These many months you have been two packets in my debt--what sin of
ignorance I have committed against so highly-valued a friend I am
utterly at a loss to guess. Alas! Madam, ill can I afford, at this
time, to be deprived of any of the small remnant of my pleasures. I
have lately drunk deep in the cup of affliction. The autumn robbed me
of my only daughter and darling child, and that at a distance too, and
so rapidly, as to put it out of my power to pay the last duties to
her. I had scarcely begun to recover from that shock, when I became
myself the victim of a most severe rheumatic fever, and long the die
spun doubtful; until, after many weeks of a sick bed, it seems to have
turned up life, and I am beginning to crawl across my room, and once
indeed have been before my own door in the street.

"When pleasure fascinates the mental sight,
Affliction purifies the visual ray,
Religion hails the drear, the untried night,
And shuts, for ever shuts!