---
title: "To The Rev. G. Baird"
author: "Robert Burns"
recipient: "The Rev. G. Baird"
letter_number: 214
roman: "CCXIV"
date: "1791"
place: "Ellisland"
source: "Project Gutenberg #18500 — The Complete Works of Robert Burns (ed. Allan Cunningham)"
editor: "Allan Cunningham"
source_url: "https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/18500/pg18500.txt"
canonical_url: "https://robert-burns.com/letters/214-to-the-rev-g-baird/"
---

# To The Rev. G. Baird

## Editor's note
It was proposed to publish a new edition of the poems of Michael Bruce, by subscription, and give the profits to his mother, a woman eighty years old, and poor and helpless, and Burns was asked for a poem to give a new impulse to the publication.

— Allan Cunningham

## Letter
REVEREND SIR,

Why did you, my dear Sir, write to me in such a hesitating style on the business of poor Bruce? Don't I know, and have I not felt, the many ills, the peculiar ills that poetic flesh is heir to? You shall have your choice of all the unpublished poems I have; and had your letter had my direction, so as to have reached me sooner (it only came to my hand this moment), I should have directly put you out of suspense on the subject. I only ask, that some prefatory advertisement in the book, as well as the subscription bills, may bear, that the publication is solely for the benefit of Bruce's mother. I would not put it in the power of ignorance to surmise, or malice to insinuate, that I clubbed a share in the work from mercenary motives. Nor need you give me credit for any remarkable generosity in my part of the business. I have such a host of peccadilloes, failings, follies, and backslidings (anybody but myself might perhaps give some of them a worse appellation), that by way of some balance, however trifling, in the account, I am fain to do any good that occurs in my very limited power to a fellow-creature, just for the selfish purpose of clearing a little the vista of retrospection.

R. B.

---

Source: [Project Gutenberg #18500 — The Complete Works of Robert Burns (ed. Allan Cunningham)](https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/18500/pg18500.txt), edited by Allan Cunningham  
Canonical HTML: https://robert-burns.com/letters/214-to-the-rev-g-baird/