No More Learning

TO ROBERT AINSLIE, ESQ.

[Had Burns written his fine song, beginning "Contented wi' little and
cantie wi' mair," when he penned this letter, the prose might have
followed as a note to the verse; he calls the Excise a luxury. ]

_Ellisland, June 14th, 1788. _

This is now the third day, my dearest Sir, that I have sojourned in
these regions; and during these three days you have occupied more of
my thoughts than in three weeks preceding: in Ayrshire I have several
variations of friendship's compass, here it points invariably to the
pole. My farm gives me a good many uncouth cares and anxieties, but I
hate the language of complaint. Job, or some one of his friends, says
well--"why should a living man complain? "

I have lately been much mortified with contemplating an unlucky
imperfection in the very framing and construction of my soul; namely,
a blundering inaccuracy of her olfactory organs in hitting the scent
of craft or design in my fellow-creatures. I do not mean any
compliment to my ingenuousness, or to hint that the defect is in
consequence of the unsuspicious simplicity of conscious truth or
honour: I take it to be, in some, why or other, an imperfection in the
mental sight; or, metaphor apart, some modification of dulness. In two
or three small instances lately, I have been most shamefully out.

I have all along hitherto, in the warfare of life, been bred to arms
among the light-horse--the piquet-guards of fancy: a kind of hussars
and Highlanders of the brain; but I am firmly resolved to sell out of
these giddy battalions, who have no ideas of a battle but fighting the
foe, or of a siege but storming the town. Cost what it will, I am
determined to buy in among the grave squadrons of heavy-armed thought,
or the artillery corps of plodding contrivance.

What books are you reading, or what is the subject of your thoughts,
besides the great studies of your profession? You said something about
religion in your last. I don't exactly remember what it was, as the
letter is in Ayrshire; but I thought it not only prettily said, but
nobly thought. You will make a noble fellow if once you were married.
I make no reservation of your being well-married: you have so much
sense, and knowledge of human nature, that though you may not realize
perhaps the ideas of romance, yet you will never be ill-married.

Were it not for the terrors of my ticklish situation respecting
provision for a family of children, I am decidedly of opinion that the
step I have taken is vastly for my happiness. As it is I look to the
Excise scheme as a certainty of maintenance! --luxury to what either
Mrs. Burns or I were born to.

Adieu.

R. B.

* * * * *




CXXIV.


TO ROBERT AINSLIE, ESQ.

[The kindness of Field, the profilist, has not only indulged me with a
look at the original, from which the profile alluded to in the letter
was taken, but has put me in possession of a capital copy. ]

_Mauchline, 23d June, 1788. _

This letter, my dear Sir, is only a business scrap. Mr. Miers, profile
painter in your town, has executed a profile of Dr. Blacklock for me:
do me the favour to call for it, and sit to him yourself for me, which
put in the same size as the doctor's.