No More Learning

I enclose you two of my late pieces, as some kind of return for the
pleasure I have received in perusing a certain MS. volume of poems in
the possession of Captain Riddel. To repay one with an _old song_, is
a proverb, whose force, you, Madam, I know, will not allow. What is
said of illustrious descent is, I believe, equally true of a talent
for poetry, none ever despised it who had pretensions to it. The fates
and characters of the rhyming tribe often employ my thoughts when I am
disposed to be melancholy. There is not, among all the martyrologies
that ever were penned, so rueful a narrative as the lives of the
poets. --In the comparative view of wretches, the criterion is not what
they are doomed to suffer, but how they are formed to bear. Take a
being of our kind, give him a stronger imagination and a more delicate
sensibility, which between them will ever engender a more ungovernable
set of passions than are the usual lot of man; implant in him an
irresistible impulse to some idle vagary, such as arranging wild
flowers in fantastical nosegays, tracing the grasshopper to his haunt
by his chirping song, watching the frisks of the little minnows in the
sunny pool, or hunting after the intrigues of butterflies--in short,
send him adrift after some pursuit which shall eternally mislead him
from the paths of lucre, and yet curse him with a keener relish than
any man living for the pleasures that lucre can purchase; lastly, fill
up the measure of his woes by bestowing on him a spurning sense of his
own dignity, and you have created a wight nearly as miserable as a
poet. To you, Madam, I need not recount the fairy pleasures the muse
bestows to counterbalance this catalogue of evils. Bewitching poetry
is like bewitching woman; she has in all ages been accused of
misleading mankind from the councils of wisdom and the paths of
prudence, involving them in difficulties, baiting them with poverty,
branding them with infamy, and plunging them in the whirling vortex of
ruin; yet, where is the man but must own that all our happiness on
earth is not worthy the name--that even the holy hermit's solitary
prospect of paradisiacal bliss is but the glitter of a northern sun
rising over a frozen region, compared with the many pleasures, the
nameless raptures that we owe to the lovely queen of the heart of man!

R. B.

* * * * *




CCLXX.


TO LADY GLENCAIRN.

[Burns, as the concluding paragraph of this letter proves, continued
to the last years of his life to think of the composition of a
Scottish drama, which Sir Walter Scott laments he did not write,
instead of pouring out multitudes of lyrics for Johnson and Thomson.
]

MY LADY,

The honour you have done your poor poet, in writing him so very
obliging a letter, and the pleasure the enclosed beautiful verses have
given him, came very seasonably to his aid, amid the cheerless gloom
and sinking despondency of diseased nerves and December weather. As to
forgetting the family of Glencairn, Heaven is my witness with what
sincerity I could use those old verses which please me more in their
rude simplicity than the most elegant lines I ever saw.

"If thee, Jerusalem, I forget,
Skill part from my right hand.

My tongue to my mouth's roof let cleave,
If I do thee forget,
Jerusalem, and thee above
My chief joy do not set. "--

When I am tempted to do anything improper, I dare not, because I look
on myself as accountable to your ladyship and family. Now and then,
when I have the honour to be called to the tables of the great, if I
happen to meet with any mortification from the stately stupidity of
self-sufficient squires, or the luxurious insolence of upstart nabobs,
I get above the creatures by calling to remembrance that I am
patronized by the noble house of Glencairn; and at gala-times, such as
new-year's day, a christening, or the kirn-night, when my punch-bowl
is brought from its dusty corner and filled up in honour of the
occasion, I begin with,--_The Countess of Glencairn! _ My good woman
with the enthusiasm of a grateful heart, next cries, _My Lord! _ and so
the toast goes on until I end with _Lady Harriet's little angel! _
whose epithalamium I have pledged myself to write.

When I received your ladyship's letter, I was just in the act of
transcribing for you some verses I have lately composed; and meant to
have sent them my first leisure hour, and acquainted you with my late
change of life. I mentioned to my lord my fears concerning my farm.
Those fears were indeed too true; it is a bargain would have ruined
me, but for the lucky circumstance of my having an excise commission.

People may talk as they please, of the ignominy of the excise; 50_l. _
a year will support my wife and children, and keep me independent of
the world; and I would much rather have it said that my profession
borrowed credit from me, than that I borrowed credit from my
profession. Another advantage I have in this business, is the
knowledge it gives me of the various shades of human character,
consequently assisting me vastly in my poetic pursuits. I had the most
ardent enthusiasm for the muses when nobody knew me, but myself, and
that ardour is by no means cooled now that my lord Glencairn's
goodness has introduced me to all the world.