enclose you are worth nothing, I will not endeavour to recommend them
by personal flattery, as a bad cook pours rancid butter upon stale
fish. No, sir! what I respect in you is the light you have
occasionally thrown on national antiquities, a study which I have
commenced rather late in life, but to which I am attached with the
devotions of a first love, because it is the only study I ever cared a
farthing for.

You shall have my history, sir, (it will not reach to three volumes,)
before that of my manuscript; and as you usually throw out a few lines
of verse (by way of skirmishers, I suppose) at the head of each
division of prose, I have had the luck to light upon a stanza in the
schoolmaster's copy of Burns which describes me exactly. I love it the
better, because it was originally designed for Captain Grose, an
excellent antiquary, though, like yourself, somewhat too apt to treat
with levity his own pursuits:

'Tis said he was a soldier bred,
And ane wad rather fa'en than fled;
But now he's quit the spurtle blade,
And dog-skin wallet,
And ta'en the--antiquarian trade,
I think, they call it.

I never could conceive what influenced me, when a boy, in the choice
of a profession. Military zeal and ardour it was not, which made me
stand out for a commission in the Scots Fusiliers, when my tutors
and curators wished to bind me apprentice to old David Stiles, Clerk
to his Majesty's Signet. I say, military zeal it was _not_; for
I was no fighting boy in my own person, and cared not a penny to