I have been roving over the country, as the farm[76] I have taken is forty miles from this place, hiring servants and preparing matters; but most of all, I am earnestly busy to bring about a revolution in my own mind. As, till within these eighteen months, I never was the wealthy master of ten guineas, my knowledge of business is to learn. Add to this, my late scenes of idleness and dissipation have enervated my mind to an alarming degree. Skill in the sober science of life is my most serious, and hourly study. I have dropped all conversation and all reading (prose reading) but what tends in some way or other to my serious aim. Except one worthy young fellow[77] I have not a single correspondent in Edinburgh. You have indeed kindly made me an offer of that kind. The world of wits, the _gens comme-il-faut_, which I lately left, and in which I never again will intimately mix--from that port, Sir, I expect your gazette, what the _beaux esprits_ are saying, what they are doing, and what they are singing. Any sober intelligence from my sequestered life is all you have to expect from me. I have scarcely made a single distich since I saw you. When I meet with an old Scots air that has any facetious idea in its name, I have a peculiar pleasure in following out that idea for a verse or two. I trust this will find you in better health than I did the last time I called for you. A few lines from you, directed to me, at Mauchline, were it but to let me know how you are, will settle my mind a good deal. Now, never shun the idea of writing me because, perhaps, you may be out of humour or spirits. I could give you a hundred good consequences attending a dull letter; one, for example, and the remaining ninety-nine some other time--it will always serve to keep in countenance, my much respected Sir, your obliged friend and humble servant, R. B. [Footnote 76: Ellisland, near Dumfries.] [Footnote 77: Robert Ainslie, W.S.] * * * * LXXXVI.--To MRS. DUNLOP. MAUCHLINE, 28_th April_ 1788. MADAM,--Your powers of reprehension must be great indeed, as I assure you they make my heart ache with penitential pangs, even though I was really not guilty. As I commence farming at Whitsunday, you will easily guess I must be pretty busy; but that is not all. As I got the offer of the Excise business without solicitation, and as it costs me only six months' attendance for instructions, to entitle me to a commission --which commission lies by me, and at any future period, on my simple petition, can be resumed--I thought five-and-thirty pounds a-year was no bad _dernier ressort_ for a poor poet, if Fortune in her jade tricks should kick him down from the little eminence to which she has lately helped him up.