James Boswell.
LETTER XXXVI.
Kelly, July 5, 1762.
Dear Boswell,—Vanity has, in all former ages, been reckoned the characteristic of poets; in our time, I think they are more particularly distinguished by modesty; I have carefully perused their works, and I have never once found them throwing out either thought, sentiment, or reflection of their own; convincing proof of their humility; they seem all to allow that the ancients, and some few of the earlier moderns, were much better writers than themselves; therefore they beg, borrow, and steal from them, without the smallest mercy or hesitation. In some things, however, they are quite original; their margins and prices are larger than any ever known before; and they advertise their pieces much oftener in the newspapers than any of their predecessors. You compliment me highly on my elegies, and tell me that I have even dared to be original now and then; and you ask me very seriously, how I come to be so well acquainted with the tender passion of love.—Ah, Sir, how deceitful are appearances! under a forbidding aspect and uncouth form, I conceal the soul of an Oroondates, a soul that thrills with the most sensible emotions at the sight of beauty. Love easily finds access where the mind is naturally inclined to melancholy; we foster the pleasing delusion, it grows up with our frame, and becomes a part of our being; long have I laboured under the influence of that passion; long vented my grief in unavailing sighs. Besides, your thin meagre man is always the most violent lover; a thousand delusions enter his paper-skull, which the man of guts never dreams of. In vain does Cupid shoot his arrows at the plump existence, who is entrenched in a solid wall of fat: they are buried like shrimps in melted butter; as eggs are preserved by mutton-tallow, from rottenness and putrefaction, so he, by his grease, is preserved from love. Pleased with his pipe, he sits and smokes in his elbow-chair; totally unknown to him is the ardent passion that actuates the sentimental soul: alas! unhappy man! he never indulged in the pleasing reverie which inspires the spindle-shanked lover, as he strays through nodding forest by gliding stream; if he marries, he chooses a companion fat as himself; they lie together, and most musical is their snore, they melt like two pounds of butter in one plate in a sunshiny-day.
Pray, Boswell, remember me kindly to honest Johnston. Let me know if his trees are growing well, at his paternal estate of Grange; if he is as fond of Melvil's Memoirs[55] as he used to be; and if he continues to stretch himself in the sun upon the mountains near Edinburgh.
I ever am,
Yours most affectionately,
Andrew Erskine.