TO COL. FULLARTON.
OF FULLARTON.
[This letter was first published in the Edinburgh Chronicle.]
Ellisland, 1791.
Sir,
I have just this minute got the frank, and next minute must send it to post, else I purposed to have sent you two or three other bagatelles, that might have amused a vacant hour about as well as “Six excellent new songs,” or, the Aberdeen ‘Prognostication for the year to come.’ I shall probably trouble you soon with another packet. About the gloomy month of November, when ‘the people of England hang and drown themselves,’ anything generally is better than one’s own thought.
Fond as I may be of my own productions, it is not for their sake that I am so anxious to send you them. I am ambitious, covetously ambitious of being known to a gentleman whom I am proud to call my countryman; a gentleman who was a foreign ambassador as soon as he was a man, and a leader of armies as soon as he was a soldier, and that with an eclat unknown to the usual minions of a court, men who, with all the adventitious advantages of princely connexions and princely fortune, must yet, like the caterpillar, labour a whole lifetime before they reach the wished height, there to roost a stupid chrysalis, and doze out the remaining glimmering existence of old age.
If the gentleman who accompanied you when you did me the honour of calling on me, is with you, I beg to be respectfully remembered to him.
I have the honour to be,
Sir,
Your highly obliged, and most devoted
Humble servant,
R. B.