You are a good, worthy, honest fellow, and have a good right to live in this world--because you deserve it. Many a merry meeting this publication has given us, and possibly it may give us more, though, alas! I fear it. This protracting, slow, consuming illness which hangs over me will, I doubt much, my dear friend, arrest my sun before he has well reached his middle career, and will turn over the poet to far more important concerns than studying the brilliancy of wit, or the pathos of sentiment! However, hope is the cordial of the human heart, and I endeavour to cherish it as well as I can. I am ashamed to ask another favour of you, because you have been so very good already; but my wife has a very particular friend, a young lady who sings well, to whom she wishes to present the _Scots Musical Museum_. If you have a spare copy, will you be so obliging as to send it by the very first fly, as I am anxious to have it soon.--Yours ever, R. B.[135] [Footnote 134: Of the _Musical Museum_.] [Footnote 135: "In this humble manner did poor Burns ask for a copy of a work to which he had contributed, gratuitously, not less than 184 original, altered, and collected songs!"--CROMEK.] * * * * * CCI--TO MR. CUNNINGHAM. BROW, _Sea-bathing quarters, 7th July_ 1796. My Dear Cunningham,--I received yours here this moment, and am indeed highly flattered with the approbation of the literary circle you mention; a literary circle inferior to none in the two kingdoms. Alas! my friend, I fear the voice of the bard will soon be heard among you no more! For these eight or ten months I have been ailing, sometimes bedfast and sometimes not; but these last three months I have been tortured with an excruciating rheumatism, which has reduced me to nearly the last stage. You actually would not know me if you saw me. Pale, emaciated, and so feeble, as occasionally to need help from my chair-- my spirits fled! fled!--but I can no more on the subject--only the medical folks tell me that my last and only chance is bathing and country quarters, and riding. The deuce of the matter is this--when an exciseman is off duty, his salary is reduced to L35 instead of L50. What way, in the name of thrift, shall I maintain myself, and keep a horse in country quarters, with a wife and five children at home, on 35 pounds? I mention this, because I had intended to beg your utmost interest, and that of all the friends you can muster, to move our Commissioners of Excise to grant me the full salary; I dare say you know them all personally. If they do not grant it me, I must lay my account with an exit truly _en poete_; if I die not of disease, I must perish with hunger.[136]