No More Learning

I wish my Lord Duke would pay a proper attention to the Christian
admonition--"Hide not your candle under a bushel," but "let your light
shine before men. " I could name half a dozen dukes that I guess are a
devilish deal worse employed: nay, I question if there are half a
dozen better: perhaps there are not half that scanty number whom
Heaven has favoured with the tuneful, happy, and, I will say, glorious
gift.

I am, dear Sir,

Your obliged humble servant,

R. B.

* * * * *




LXXXV.


TO MR. ROBERT AINSLIE,

EDINBURGH.

["I set you down," says Burns, elsewhere, to Ainslie, "as the staff of
my old age, when all my other friends, after a decent show of pity,
will have forgot me. "]

_Edinburgh, Sunday Morning_,

_Nov. _ 23, 1787.

I Beg, my dear Sir, you would not make any appointment to take us to
Mr. Ainslie's to-night. On looking over my engagements, constitution,
present state of my health, some little vexatious soul concerns, &c. ,
I find I can't sup abroad to-night. I shall be in to-day till one
o'clock if you have a leisure hour.
You will think it romantic when I tell you, that I find the idea of
your friendship almost necessary to my existence. --You assume a proper
length of face in my bitter hours of blue-devilism, and you laugh
fully up to my highest wishes at my good things. --I don't know upon
the whole, if you are one of the first fellows in God's world, but you
are so to me. I tell you this just now in the conviction that some
inequalities in my temper and manner may perhaps sometimes make you
suspect that I am not so warmly as I ought to be your friend.

R. B.

* * * * *




LXXXVI.


TO THE EARL OF GLENCAIRN.

[The views of Burns were always humble: he regarded a place in the
excise as a thing worthy of paying court for, both in verse and
prose. ]

_Edinburgh_, 1787.

MY LORD,

I know your lordship will disapprove of my ideas in a request I am
going to make to you; but I have weighed, long and seriously weighed,
my situation, my hopes and turn of mind, and am fully fixed to my
scheme if I can possibly effectuate it. I wish to get into the Excise;
I am told that your lordship's interest will easily procure me the
grant from the commissioners; and your lordship's patronage and
goodness, which have already rescued me from obscurity, wretchedness,
and exile, embolden me to ask that interest. You have likewise put it
in my power to save the little tie of home that sheltered an aged
mother, two brothers, and three sisters from destruction. There, my
lord, you have bound me over to the highest gratitude.

My brother's farm is but a wretched lease, but I think he will
probably weather out the remaining seven years of it; and after the
assistance which I have given and will give him, to keep the family
together, I think, by my guess, I shall have rather better than two
hundred pounds, and instead of seeking, what is almost impossible at
present to find, a farm that I can certainly live by, with so small a
stock, I shall lodge this sum in a banking-house, a sacred deposit,
expecting only the calls of uncommon distress or necessitous old age.

These, my lord, are my views: I have resolved from the maturest
deliberation; and now I am fixed, I shall leave no stone unturned to
carry my resolve into execution.