APPENDIX (c) TO VOLUME I.

C. (PAGES 50, 51, 54, AND 57.)
LETTERS TO BRYANTON AND CONTARINE.

I. TO ROBERT BRYANTON.

This letter, to which I have alluded at p. 50, is dated Edinburgh,
Sept. 26, 1753; and is addressed to .Robert Bryauton, Esq. at Bally-
mahon, Ireland:

"Mr DEAR BOB,

"How many good excuses (and you know I was over good at an
" excuse) might I call up to vindicate my past shameful silence 1 I might tell
"how I wrote a long letter on my first coming hither, and seem vastly angry at my
"not receiving an answer; I might allege that business (with business you know I
" was always pestered) had never given me time to finger a pen;—but I suppress
" these and twenty more equally plausible, and as easily invented, since they
'' might be attended with a slight inconvenience of being known to be lies. Let
"me then speak truth : an hereditary indolence (I have it from the mother's side)
"has hitherto prevented my writing to you, and still prevents my writing at least
"twenty-five letters more, due to my friends in Ireland. No turnspit dog gets up
"into his wheel with more reluctance than I sit down to write : yet no dog ever
"loved the roast meat he turns better than I do him I now address. Yet what
"shall I say now I'm entered? Shall I tire you with a description of this
"unfruitful country, where I must lead you over their hills all brown with heath,
" or their vallies scarce able to feed a rabbit ? Man alone seems to be the only
" creature who has arrived to the natural size in this poor soil.—Every part of the
" country presents the same dismal landscape. No grove nor brook, lend their
"music to cheer the stranger, or make the inhabitants forget their poverty : yet
"with all these disadvantages, enough to call him down to humility, a Scotchman
"is one of the proudest things alive.—The poor have pride ever ready to relieve
"them :—if mankind should happen to despise them, they are masters of their
" own admiration; and that they can plentifully bestow upon themselves,

"From their pride and poverty, as I take it, results one advantage this country
'' enjoys, namely, the gentlemen here are much bettor bred than amongst us. No such
" characters here as our fox-hunters j and they have expressed great surprise when
'I informed them, that some men in Ireland of 1000?. a year spend their whole
' lives in running after a hare, drinking to be drunk, and getting every girl that
' will let them with child : and truly, if such a being, equipped in his hunting
' dress, came among a circle of Scotch gentry, they would behold him with the
' same astonishment that a countryman would King Q-eorge on horseback.

"The men here have generally high cheek-bones, and are lean and swarthy, fond
"of action, dancing in particular. Though now I mention dancing, let me say
"something of their balls which are very frequent here. When a stranger enters
"the dancing-hall, he sees one end of the room taken up with the ladies, who sitince their mother's