bar I would wish also to be a partaker: not to
digest his spleen, for that he laughs off, but to digest his last
night's wine at the last field-day of the Crochallan corps.[185]

Among our common friends I must not forget one of the dearest of
them--Cunningham. The brutality, insolence, and selfishness of a world
unworthy of having such a fellow as he is in it, I know sticks in his
stomach, and if you can help him to anything that will make him a
little easier on that score, it will be very obliging.

As to honest J---- S----e, he is such a contented, happy man, that I
know not what can annoy him, except, perhaps, he may not have got the
better of a parcel of modest anecdotes which a certain poet gave him
one night at supper, the last time the said poet was in town.

Though I have mentioned so many men of law, I shall have nothing to do
with them professedly--the faculty are beyond my prescription. As to
their clients, that is another thing; God knows they have much to
digest!

The clergy I pass by; their profundity of erudition, and their
liberality of sentiment; their total want of pride, and their
detestation of hypocrisy, are so proverbially notorious as to place
them far, far above either my praise or censure.

I was going to mention a man of worth whom I have the honour to call
friend, the Laird of Craigdarroch; but I have spoken to the landlord
of the King's-Arms inn here, to have at the next county meeting a
large ewe-milk cheese on the table, for the benefit of the
Dumfries-shire Whigs, to enable them to digest the Duke of
Queensberry's late political conduct.

I have just this moment an opportunity of a private hand to Edinburgh,
as perhaps you would not digest double postage.

R. B.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 184: Printer of the _Edinburgh Evening Courant._]

[Footnote 185: A club of choice spirits.]

* * * * *

CXXVIII.

TO ROBERT GRAHAM, ESQ.,

OF FINTRAY.

[The filial and fraternal claims alluded to in this letter were
satisfied with about three hundred pounds, two hundred of which went
to his brother Gilbert--a sum which made a sad inroad on the money
arising from the second edition of his Poems.]

SIR,

When I had the honour of being introduced to you at Athole-house, I
did not think so soon of asking a favour of you. When Lear, in
Shakspeare, asked Old Kent why he wished to be in his service, he
answers, "Because you have that in your face which