Lamentation. Why may not I sing in the person of her great-great-great grandson.*

Any skill I have in country business you may truly command. Situation, soil, customs of countries may vary from each other, but Farmer Attention

*Our Poet took this advice. The whole of this beautiful song, as it was afterwards finished, is below:

THE CHEVALIER'S LAMENT.

THE small birds rejoice in the green leaves returning,
The murmuring streamlet winds clear thro' the vale;
The hawthorn trees blow in the dews of the morning,

And wild scattered cowslips bedeck the green dale:

But what can give pleasure, or what can seem fair?
While the lingering moments are number'd by care?

No flowers gaily springing, nor birds sweetly singing,
Can sooth the sad bosom of joyless despair.

The deed that I dar'd could it merit their malice,
A king and a father to place on his throne?

His right are these hills and his right are these valleys,
Where the wild beasts find shelter, but I can find none.

But 'tis not my sufferings thus wretched, forlorn,
My brave gallant friends, 'tis your ruin I mourn;
Your deeds prov'd so loyal in hot bloody trial,
Alas! can I make you no sweeter return!

E.

Attention is a good farmer in every place. I beg to hear from you soon. Mrs. Cleghorn joins me in best compliments.

I am, in the most comprehensive sense of the word, your very sincere friend,

ROBERT CLEGHORN.

No.

No. XLVIII.

To MRS. DUNLOP.

Mauchline, 28th April, 1788.

MADAM,

YOUR

Our powers of reprehension must be great indeed, as I assure you they made my heart ache with penitential pangs, even though I was really not guilty. As I commence farmer at Whitsunday, you will easily guess I must be pretty busy; but that is not all. As I got the offer of the excise business without solicitation; and as it costs me only six months' attendance for instructions, to entitle me to a commission; which commission lies by me, and at any future period on my simple petition can be resumed; I thought five and thirty pounds a year was no bad dernier resort for a poor poet, if fortune in her jade tricks should kick him down from the little eminence to which she has lately helped

him up.

For this reason, I am at present attending these

these instructions, to have them completed before Whitsunday. Still, Madam, I prepared with the sincerest pleasure to. meet you at the Mount, and came to my brother's on Saturday night, to set out on Sunday; but for some nights preceding I had slept in an apartment, where the force of the winds and rains was only mitigated by being sifted through numberless apertures in the windows, walls, &c. In consequence I was on Sunday, Monday, and part of Tuesday, unable to stir out of bed, with all the miserable effects of a violent cold.

You see, Madam, the truth of the French maxim, Le vrai n'est pas toujours le vrai-semblable; your last was so full of expostulation, and was something so like the language of an offended friend, that I began to tremble for a correspondence, which I had with grateful pleasure set down as one of the greatest enjoyments of my future life.

Your books have delighted me: Virgil, Dryden, and Tasso, were all equally strangers to me; but of this more at large in my next.

No.

No. XLIX.

FROM

The Reverend JOHN SKINNER,

Linsheart, 28th April, 1788.

DEAR SIR,

I RECEIVED your last with the curious present you have favored me with, and would have made proper acknowledgments before now, but that I have been necessarily engaged in matters of a different complexion. And now that I have got a little respite, I make use of it to thank you for this valuable instance of your good-will, and to assure you that, with the sincere heart of a true Scotsman, I highly esteem both the gift and the giver: as a small testimony of which I have herewith sent you for

VOL. II.

L

your