pology.--Amid all my hurry of business,
grinding the faces of the publican and the sinner on the merciless
wheels of the Excise; making ballads, and then drinking, and singing
them! and, over and above all, the correcting the press-work of two
different publications; still, still I might have stolen five minutes
to dedicate to one of the first of my friends and fellow-creatures. I
might have done as I do at present, snatched an hour near "witching
time of night," and scrawled a page or two. I might have congratulated
my friend on his marriage; or I might have thanked the Caledonian
archers for the honour they have done me (though, to do myself
justice, I intended to have done both in rhyme, else I had done both
long ere now). Well, then, here's to your good health! for you must
know, I have set a nipperkin of toddy by me, just by way of spell, to
keep away the meikle horned deil, or any of his subaltern imps who may
be on their nightly rounds.

But what shall I write to you?--"The voice said cry," and I said,
"what shall I cry?"--O, thou spirit! whatever thou art, or wherever
thou makest thyself visible! be thou a bogle by the eerie side of an
auld thorn, in the dreary glen through which the herd-callan maun
bicker in his gloamin route frae the faulde!--Be thou a brownie, set,
at dead of night, to thy task by the blazing ingle, or in the solitary
barn, where the repercussions of thy iron flail half affright thyself
as thou performest the work of twenty of the sons of men, ere the
cock-crowing summon thee to thy ample cog of substantial brose--Be
thou a kelpie, haunting the ford or ferry, in the starless night,
mixing thy laughing yell with the howling of the storm and the roaring
of the flood, as thou viewest the perils and miseries of man on the
foundering horse, or in the tumbling boat!--or, lastly, be thou a
ghost, paying thy nocturnal visits to the hoary ruins of decayed
grandeur; or performing thy mystic rites in the shadow of the
time-worn church, while the moon looks, without a cloud, on the silent
ghastly dwellings of the dead around thee! or taking thy stand by the
bedside of the villain, or the murderer, pourtraying on his dreaming
fancy, pictures, dreadful as the horrors of unveiled hell, and
terrible as the wrath of incensed Deity!--Come, thou spirit, but not
in these horrid forms; come with the milder, gentle, easy
inspirations, which thou breathest round the wig of a prating
advocate, or the tete of a tea