What a life of solicitude is the life of a parent! You interested me much in your young couple.

I would not take my folio paper for this epistle, and now I repent it. I am so jaded with my dirty long journey that I was afraid to drawl into the essence of dulness with anything larger than a quarto, and so I must leave out another rhyme of this morning’s manufacture.

I will pay the sapientipotent George, most cheerfully, to hear from you ere I leave Ayrshire.

R. B.

FOOTNOTES:

[190] [Poem XCII.]

CXXXVII.

TO MR. PETER HILL.

[“The ‘Address to Lochlomond,’ which this letter criticises,” says Currie in 1800, “was written by a gentleman, now one of the masters of the High-school of Edinburgh, and the same who translated the beautiful story of ‘The Paria,’ published in the Bee of Dr. Anderson.”]

Mauchline, 1st October, 1788.