The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. / With a New Life of the Poet, and Notices, Critical and Biographical by Allan Cunningham, Volume 3 Papyras Classics

← The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. / With a New Life of the Poet, and Notices, Critical and Biographical by Allan Cunningham, Volume 3

Chapter 99

XCIX. To Mrs. Dunlop

[The levity with which Burns sometimes spoke of things sacred, had been obliquely touched upon by his good and anxious friend Mrs. Dunlop: he pleads guilty of folly, but not of irreligion.]

Edinburgh, February 12, 1788.

Some things in your late letters hurt me: not that you say them, but that you mistake me. Religion, my honoured Madam, has not only been all my life my chief dependence, but my dearest enjoyment. I have, indeed, been the luckless victim of wayward follies; but, alas! I have ever been “more fool than knave.” A mathematician without religion is a probable character; an irreligious poet is a monster.

R. B.