234 Transactions. 



Allan Cunningham, of date 14th January, 1823, writes to the 

 secretary : 



I will tliank you to express my acknowledgments to the Burns Club 

 of Dumfries for having elected me an honorary member. Such a dis- 

 tinction was as much beyond my hopes as it was unexpected and 

 welcoine. To obtain the notice of our native place is a pleasure which 

 befalls few, and I have the proverbial intimation of its rarity to warrant 

 me in thanking you with as much warmth as delicacy will allow me to 

 use. To the most gifted it seems honour enough to be named with 

 Burns, and I know not that such honour is enhanced by electing me 

 along with some of our most inspired spirits. Some declaration of my 

 faith in the illustrious subject of your meeting may be necessary. I am 

 proud to name the name of Burns, and I recall his looks and dwell on 

 my remembrance of his person with fondness and enthusiasm. In my 

 youth, when poesy to me was an enchanted and sacred thing, I loved to 

 wander in his haunts and muse on his strains everywhere so full of 

 pathetic tenderness and subiime and moral emotion. I thought then, and 

 1 think now, that capricious and wayward as his musings often were-- 

 mingling the tender with the comic, and the sarcastic with the solemn — 

 that all he said was above the mai'k of other men, that he shed a redeem- 

 ing light on all he touched, and that whatever his eye glanced on rose 

 into life and grace and stood consecrated and imperishable. I saw that 

 his language was familiar yet rich, easy yet dignified, and that he touched 

 on the most perilous themes with a skill so rare and felicitous that his 

 good fortune seemed to unite with his good taste in keeping him buoyant 

 above the mire of homeliness and vulgarity in which so many meaner 

 spirits have wallowed. That in him the love of country, devotion, 

 enthusiasm, love, happiness, and joy appear characterised by a brief and 

 elegant simplicity at once so easy to him and unattainable to others that 

 all those, and they were many, who sought to follow his track among 

 themes of domestic life and homely joy wanted his power to dignify the 

 humble, adorn the plain, and extract sweet and impassioned jjoetry from 

 the daily occurrences of human life. All this and much more than this 

 has been better expressed before, but I know on such a subject I will be 

 indulged in a moderate degree of enthusiasm. I am not sure if you have 

 safe accommodation in your Club Eoom for works of art. I ask this 

 because I wish the Burns Club to accept from me the bust of a poet, one 

 living and likely to live in his chivalrous poems and romantic stories 

 as long, perhaps, as British literature shall live — the production, too, of 

 the first sculptor of the Island — the bust of Sir Walter Scott by my 

 friend Mr Chantrey. If such a thing can be accepted be so good as tell 

 me, and I shall gladly confide its presentation to your hands. 



Allan Cunningham. 

 Eccleston Street, Pimlico, 

 14th January, 1823. 



