of your favourite air, I
shall be highly pleased. "The last time I came o'er the moor" I cannot
meddle with, as to mending it; and the musical world have been so long
accustomed to Ramsay's words, that a different song, though positively
superior, would not be so well received. I am not fond of choruses to
songs, so I have not made one for the foregoing.

R. B.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 234: Song CCIV.]

* * * * *

CCLXVIII.

TO MR. THOMSON.

["Cauld kail in Aberdeen, and castocks in Strabogie," are words which
have no connexion with the sentiment of the song which Burns wrote for
the air.]

_August_, 1793.

SONG.

Now rosy May comes in wi' flowers.[235]

So much for Davie. The chorus, you know, is to the low part of the
tune. See Clarke's set of it in the Museum.

N.B. In the Museum they have drawled out the tune to twelve lines of
poetry, which is ---- nonsense. Four lines of song, and four of chorus,
is the way.[236]

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 235: Song CCV.]

[Footnote 236: See Song LXVII.]

* * * * *

CCLXIX.

TO MISS CRAIK.

[Miss Helen Craik of Arbigland, had merit both as a poetess and
novelist: her ballads may be compared with those of Hector M'Neil: her
novels had a seasoning of satire in them.]

_Dumfries, August_, 1793.

MADAM,

Some rather unlooked-for accidents have prevented my doing myself the
honour of a second visit to Arbigland, as I was so hospitably invited,
and so positively meant to have done.--However, I still hope to have
that pleasure before the busy months of harvest begin.

I enclose you two of my late pieces, as some kind of return for the
pleasure I have received in perusing a certain MS. volume of poems in
the possession of Captain Riddel. To repay one with an _old song_, is
a proverb, whose force, you, Madam, I know, will not allow. What is
said of illustrious descent is, I believe, equally true of a talent
for poetry, none ever despised it who had pretensions to it. The fates
and characters of the rhyming tribe often employ my thoughts when I am
disposed to be melancholy. There is not, among all the martyrologies
that ever were penned, so rueful a narrative as the lives of the
poets.--In the comparative view of wretches, the criterion is not what
they are doomed to suffer, but how they are formed to bear. Take a
being of our kind, give him a stronger imagination and a more delic