234 TRANSACTIONS. 
Allan Cunningham, of date 14th January, 1823, writes to the 
secretary : 
I will thank 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 
welcome. 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. Iam 
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 sub:ime 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 mark 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 poetry 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 Room 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. 
