No More Learning

It will easily be guessed, that a good deal
of trash would be bought. Among the books, however, of this little
library, were, _Blair's Sermons_, _Robertson's History of Scotland_,
_Hume's History of the Stewarts_, _The Spectator_, _Idler_,
_Adventurer_, _Mirror_, _Lounger_, _Observer_, _Man of Feeling_, _Man
of the World_, _Chrysal_, _Don Quixote_, _Joseph Andrews_, &c. A
peasant who can read, and enjoy such books, is certainly a much
superior being to his neighbour, who perhaps stalks besides his team,
very little removed, except in shape, from the brutes he drives.

Wishing your patriotic exertions their so much merited success,

I am, Sir,

Your humble servant,

A PEASANT.

* * * * *




CLXXXI.


TO CHARLES SHARPE, ESQ. ,

OF HODDAM.

[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.