farmer in a home of his own, busied with healthy rural work, and finding
in the happy fireside clime which he was making for wife and weans "the
true pathos and sublime" of human duty. He has still, however, time and
inclination to write on the average one letter a week. For each of the
next three years the average number is thirty-six. In 1793 the number
suddenly goes up to sixty-six: the increase is due to the heartiness
with which he took up the scheme of George Thomson to popularise and
perpetuate the best old Scottish airs by fitting them with words worthy
of their merits. He wrote, in this year, twenty-six letters in support
of the scheme.

There is a sad falling off in Burns's ordinary correspondence in the
last three years of his life. The amount of it scarcely touches twenty
letters per year. Even the correspondence with Thomson, though on a
subject so dear to the heart of Burns, rousing at once both his
patriotism and his poetry, sinks to about ten letters per year, and is
irregular at that. Burns was losing hope and health, and caring less and
less for the world's favour and the world's friendships. He had lost
largely in self-respect as well as in the respect of friends. The loss
gave him little heart to write.

Burns's correspondents, as far as we know them, numbered over a hundred
and fifty persons. The number is large and significant. Neither Gray,
nor Cowper, nor Byron commanded so wide a circle. They had not the
far-reaching sympathies of Burns. They were all more or less fastidious
in their choice of correspondents. Burns, on the contrary, was as
catholic, or as careless, in his friendships as his own _Caesar_--who

"Wad spend an hour caressin'
Ev'n wi' a tinkler gipsy's messan."