TO MR. BEUGO,
Engraver, Edinburgh.
[Mr. Beugo was at well-known engraver in Edinburgh: he engraved Nasmyth’s portrait of Burns, for Creech’s first edition of his Poems; and as he could draw a little, he improved, as he called it, the engraving from sittings of the poet, and made it a little more like, and a little less poetic.]
Ellisland, 9th Sept. 1788.
My dear Sir,
There is not in Edinburgh above the number of the graces whose letters would have given me so much pleasure as yours of the 3d instant, which only reached me yesternight.
I am here on the farm, busy with my harvest; but for all that most pleasurable part of life called social communication, I am here at the very elbow of existence. The only things that are to be found in this country, in any degree of perfection, are stupidity and canting. Prose they only know in graces, prayers, &c., and the value of these they estimate as they do their plaiding webs—by the ell! As for the muses, they have as much an idea of a rhinoceros as of a poet. For my old capricious but good-natured huzzy of a muse—
“By banks of Nith I sat and wept
When Coila I thought on,
In midst thereof I hung my harp
The willow-trees upon.”
I am generally about half my time in Ayrshire with my “darling Jean,” and then I, at lucid intervals, throw my horny fist across my becob-webbed lyre, much in the same manner as an old wife throws her hand across the spokes of her spinning-wheel.
I will send you the “Fortunate Shepherdess” as soon as I return to Ayrshire, for there I keep it with other precious treasure. I shall send it by a careful hand, as I would not for anything it should be mislaid or lost. I do not wish to serve you from any benevolence, or other grave Christian virtue; ’tis purely a selfish gratification of my own feelings whenever I think of you.
If your better functions would give you leisure to write me, I should be extremely happy; that is to say if you neither keep nor look for a regular correspondence. I hate the idea of being obliged to write a letter. I sometimes write a friend twice a week, at other times once a quarter.
I am exceedingly pleased with your fancy in making the author you mention place a map of Iceland instead of his portrait before his works: ’twas a glorious idea.
Could you conveniently do me one thing?—whenever you finish any head I should like to have a proof copy of it. I might tell you a long story about your fine genius; but as what everybody knows cannot have escaped you, I shall not say one syllable about it.
R. B.