FOOTNOTES:
[143] This gentleman (the son of an elder brother of my father’s), when he was very young, lost his father, and having discovered in his father’s repositories some of my father’s letters, he requested that the correspondence might be renewed. My father continued till the last year of his life to correspond with his nephew, and it was afterwards kept up by my brother. Extracts from some of my brother’s letters to his cousin are introduced, for the purpose of exhibiting the poet before he had attracted the notice of the public, and in his domestic family relations afterwards.—Gilbert Burns.