seph'] that his
clothes may rot where they are until he chooses to write to me
himself about them. I suppose James will write you a household
statement some time or other soon. If you wish to amuse yourself
with reading the lives I wrote in the last number of the
Biography,[10] they are Archbishop Hamilton, Sir William Hamilton,
Dr Robert Henry, Edward Henryson, J. Bonaventura Hepburn, Roger
Hog, John Holybush, and Henry Home of Kames.... The gooseberries
appear to dwindle as they ripen. I am afraid few will remain for
you, but you will find a sufficient number where you are. I intend
to _walk_ to Dunkeld, and to take two days. Al. Smith may come a
bit with us.... All my little stock of news is exhausted. Pray
remember me to my grand-aunt, Mrs Brown, and my aunts; and I am, my
dear mother, your affectionate son,

"JOHN HILL BURTON."

[Footnote 10: The Cyclopaedia of Universal Biography.]

This letter describes the beginning of the life of literary labour
which John Hill Burton's was to the end. He would not have liked to see
it described as labour. He even disliked the word work as applied to his
own pursuits, and he did indeed work as easily as most men play. He was
unconscious of his own powers of mental application: his mind worked
with as much ease as his lungs breathed. The great bulk of his earlier
writings must be quite irrecoverable now. He wrote school-books,
specially a set of historical abridgments for the use of schools, under
the name of Dr White; he also compiled much of the information in Oliver
and Boyd's 'Almanac,' and almost all the letterpress of Billings's
'Ecclesiastical and Baronial Antiquities.'

Dr Burton's whole resources at this time were derived from his pen. He
has described this mode of life as a somewhat anxious but by no means
unhappy one. The anxiety lay in that in which all sorts of business
share--the finding work, looking for employment. The employment once
found was agreeable to him. He rapidly acquired a power of mastering
almost any subject on which he had to write, though he always looked
forward with hope to the time, which eventually came, when he might live
securely on a fixed income, free to write from the fulness of his mind
and not from outward pressure.

The house in Howard Place was carefully managed by his mother. On a life
spent entirely in town proving unsuitable to her health, Dr Burton took