No More Learning

[The family of Hoddam is of old standing in Nithsdale. It has mingled
blood with some of the noblest Scottish names; nor is it unknown
either in history or literature--the fierce knight of Closeburn, who
in the scuffle between Bruce and Comyne drew his sword and made
"sicker," and my friend Charles Kirkpatrick Sharpe, are not the least
distinguished of its members. ]

[1790. ]

It is true, Sir, you are a gentleman of rank and fortune, and I am a
poor devil: you are a feather in the cap of society, and I am a very
hobnail in its shoes; yet I have the honour to belong to the same
family with you, and on that score I now address you. You will perhaps
suspect that I am going to claim affinity with the ancient and
honourable house of Kirkpatrick. No, no, Sir: I cannot indeed be
properly said to belong to any house, or even any province or kingdom;
as my mother, who, for many years was spouse to a marching regiment,
gave me into this bad world, aboard the packet-boat, somewhere between
Donaghadee and Portpatrick. By our common family, I mean, Sir, the
family of the muses. I am a fiddler and a poet; and you, I am told,
play an exquisite violin, and have a standard taste in the Belles
Lettres. The other day, a brother catgut gave me a charming Scots air
of your composition. If I was pleased with the tune, I was in raptures
with the title you have given it; and taking up the idea I have spun
it into the three stanzas enclosed. Will you allow me, Sir, to present
you them, as the dearest offering that a misbegotten son of poverty
and rhyme has to give? I have a longing to take you by the hand and
unburthen my heart by saying, "Sir, I honour you as a man who supports
the dignity of human nature, amid an age when frivolity and avarice
have, between them, debased us below the brutes that perish! " But,
alas, Sir! to me you are unapproachable. It is true, the muses
baptized me in Castalian streams, but the thoughtless gipsies forgot
to give me a name.
As the sex have served many a good fellow, the Nine
have given me a great deal of pleasure, but, bewitching jades! they
have beggared me. Would they but spare me a little of their
cast-linen! Were it only in my power to say that I have a shirt on my
back! but the idle wenches, like Solomon's lilies, "they toil not,
neither do they spin;" so I must e'en continue to tie my remnant of a
cravat, like the hangman's rope, round my naked throat, and coax my
galligaskins to keep together their many-coloured fragments. As to the
affair of shoes, I have given that up. My pilgrimages in my
ballad-trade, from town to town, and on your stony-hearted turnpikes
too, are what not even the hide of Job's Behemoth could bear. The coat
on my back is no more: I shall not speak evil of the dead. It would be
equally unhandsome and ungrateful to find fault with my old surtout,
which so kindly supplies and conceals the want of that coat. My hat
indeed is a great favourite; and though I got it literally for an old
song, I would not exchange it for the best beaver in Britain. I was,
during several years, a kind of factotum servant to a country
clergyman, where I pickt up a good many scraps of learning,
particularly in some branches of the mathematics. Whenever I feel
inclined to rest myself on my way, I take my seat under a hedge,
laying my poetic wallet on the one side, and my fiddle-case on the
other, and placing my hat between my legs, I can, by means of its
brim, or rather brims, go through the whole doctrine of the conic
sections.

However, Sir, don't let me mislead you, as if I would interest your
pity. Fortune has so much forsaken me, that she has taught me to live
without her; and amid all my rags and poverty, I am as independent,
and much more happy, than a monarch of the world. According to the
hackneyed metaphor, I value the several actors in the great drama of
life, simply as they act their parts. I can look on a worthless fellow
of a duke with unqualified contempt, and can regard an honest
scavenger with sincere respect.