Letters - 1-2 Author:Robert Burns Volume: 1-2 General Books publication date: 2009 Original publication date: 1819 Original Publisher: J. Sharpe Notes: This is a black and white OCR reprint of the original. It has no illustrations and there may be typos or missing text. When you buy the General Books edition of this book you get free trial access to Million-Books.com where ... more »you can select from more than a million books for free. Excerpt: LXX. TO CHARLES SHARPE, ESQ. OF IIODDAM, Under a fictitious Signature, enclosing a Ballad, 1790 or 1791. It is true, sir, you are a gentlemau of rank and fortune, and I am a poor devil: you are a feather in the cap of society, and I am a very hobnail in his shoes ; yet I have the honour to belong to the same family with you, and on that score I now address you. You will perhaps suspect that 1 am going to claim affinity with the ancient and honourable house of Kilpatrick : No, no, sir : I cannot indeed be properly said to belong to any house, or even any province or kingdom ; as my mother, who for many years was spouse to a marching regiment, gave me into this bad world, aboard the packet- boat, somewhere between Donaghadee and Port- patrick. By our common family, I mean, sir, the family of the Muses. I am a fiddler and a poet; and you, I am told, play an exquisite violin, and have a standard taste in'the Belles Lettres. The other day, a brother cat-gut gave me a charming Scots air of your composition. If I was pleased with the tune, I was in raptures with the title you have given it; and, taking up the idea, I have spun it into the three stanzas enclosed. Will you allow me, sir, to present you them, as the dearest offering that a misbegotten son of poverty and rhyme has to give ? I have a longing to take yon by the hand and unburden my heart, by Baying -- " Sir, I ho- " nour you as a man who supports the dignity of " human nature, amid an age when frivolity and " avarice have, between them, debased us below " the brutes that perish !" But, alas, sir! to me ...« less