which horrid task, with sowing corn with my own hand, a
parcel of masons, wrights, plasterers, &c., to attend to, roaming on
business through Ayrshire--all this was against me, and the very first
dreadful article was of itself too much for me.

13th. I have not had a moment to spare from incessant toil since the 8th.
Life, my dear Sir, is a serious matter. You know by experience that a man's
individual self is a good deal, but believe me, a wife and family of
children, whenever you have the honour to be a husband and a father, will
show you that your present and most anxious hours of solitude are spent on
trifles. The welfare of those who are very dear to us, whose only support,
hope and stay we are--this, to a generous mind, is another sort of more
important object of care than any concerns whatever which centre merely in
the individual. On the other hand, let no young, unmarried, rakehelly dog
among you, make a song of his pretended liberty and freedom from care. If
the relations we stand in to king, country, kindred, and friends, be
anything but the visionary fancies of dreaming metaphysicians; if religion,
virtue, magnanimity, generosity, humanity and justice, be aught but empty
sounds; then the man who may be said to live only for others, for the
beloved, honourable female, whose tender faithful embrace endears life, and
for the helpless little innocents who are to be the men and women, the
worshippers of his God, the subjects of his king, and the support, nay the
vital existence of his COUNTRY in the ensuing age;--compare such a man with
any fellow whatever, who, whether he bustle and push in business among
labourers, clerks, statesmen; or whether he roar and rant, and drink and
sing in taverns--a fellow over whose grave no one will breathe a single
heigh-ho, except from the cobweb-tie of what is called good-fellowship--who
has no view nor aim but what terminates in himself--if there be any
grovelling earth-born wretch of our species, a renegado to common sense,
who would fain believe that the noble creature man, is no better than a
sort of fungus, generated out of nothing, nobody knows how, and soon
dissipated in nothing, nobody knows where; such a stupid beast, such a
crawling reptile, might balance the foregoing unexaggerated comparison, but
no one else would have the patience.

Forgive me, my dear Sir, for this long silence. _To make you amends_,
I shall send you soon, and more encouraging still, without any