wrote the dying man, with a hand fast forgetting its cunning, “is, to all human probability, my last letter; but the thought gives me little trouble; for my hope of salvation is in the blood of Jesus. Farewell, my sincerest friend!" There is a provision through which nature sets limits to both physical and mental suffering. A man partially stunned by a violent blow is sometimes conscious that it is followed by other blows, rather from seeing than from feeling them: his capacity of suffering has been exhausted by the first; and the others that fall upon him, though they may injure, fail to pain. And so also it is with strokes that fall on the affections. In other circumstances I would have grieved for the death of my friend, but my mind was already occupied to the full by the death of my uncle; and though I saw the new stroke, several days elapsed ere I could feel it. My friend, after half a lifetime of decline, had sunk suddenly. A comrade who lived with him -a stout, florid lad-had been seized by the same insidious malady as his own, about a twelvemonth before; and, previously unacquainted with sickness, in him the progress of the disease had been rapid, and his sufferings were so great, that he was incapacitated for work several months before his death. But my poor friend, though sinking at the time, wrought for both: he was able to prosecute his employments,—which, according to Bacon, "required rather the finger than the arm,"-in even the latter stages of his complaint; and after supporting and tending his dying comrade till he sank, he himself suddenly broke down and died. And thus perished, unknown and in the prime of his days, a man of sterling principle and fine genius. I found employment enough for the few weeks which still remained of the working season of this year, in hewing a tombstone for my Uncle James, on which I inscribed an epitaph of a few lines, that had the merit of being true. It characterized the deceased-" James Wright"—as “an honest, warm-hearted man, who had the happiness of living without reproach, and of dying without fear." CHAPTER XX. "This while my notion's ta'en a sklent, I red you, honest man, tak' tent; BURNS. My volume of verse passed but slowly through the press; and as I had begun to look rather ruefully forward to its appearance, there was no anxiety evinced on my part to urge it on. At length, however, all the pieces were thrown into type; and I followed them up by a tail-piece in prose, formed somewhat on the model of the preface of Pope,-for I was a great admirer at the time of the English written by the "wits of the reign of Queen Anne," in which I gave serious expression to the suspicion that, as a writer of verse, I had mistaken my vocation. "It is more than possible," I said, "that I have completely failed in poetry. It may appear that, while grasping at originality of description and sentiment, and striving to attain propriety of expression, I have only been depicting common images, and embodying obvious thoughts, and this, too, in inelegant language. Yet even in this case, though disappointed, I shall not be without my sources of comfort. The pleasure which I enjoy in composing verses is quite independent of other men's opinions of them; and I expect to feel as happy as ever in this amusement, even though assured that others could find no pleasure in reading what I had found so much in writing. It is no small solace to reflect, that the fable of the dog and shadow cannot apply to me, since my pre dilection for poetry has not prevented me from acquiring the skill of at least the common mechanic. I am not more ignorant of masonry and architecture than many professors of these arts who never measured a stanza. There is also some satisfaction in reflecting that, unlike some would-be satirists, I have not assailed private character, and that though men may deride me as an unskilful poet, they cannot justly detest me as a bad or ill-natured man. Nay, I shall possibly have the pleasure of repaying those who may be merry at my expense, in their own coin. An ill-conditioned critic is always a more pitiable sort of person than an unsuccessful versifier; and the desire of showing one's own discernment at the expense of one's neighbor, a greatly worse thing than the simple wish, however divorced from the ability, of affording him harmless pleasure. Further, it would think, not be difficult to show that my mistake in supposing myself to be a poet is not a whit more ridiculous, and infinitely less mischievous, than many of those into which myriads of my fellow-men are falling every day. I have seen the vicious attempting to teach morals, and the weak to unfold mysteries. I have seen men set up for freethinkers who were born not to think at all. To conclude, there will surely be cause for self-gratulation in reflecting that, by becoming an author, I have only lost a few pounds, not gained the reputation of being a mean fellow, who had teased all his acquaintance until they had subscribed for a worthless book; and that the severest remark of the severest critic can only be, 'a certain anonymous rhymer is no poet." As, notwithstanding the blank in the title page, the authorship of my volume would be known in Cromarty and its neighborhood, I set myself to see whether I could not, meanwhile, prepare for the press something better suited to make an impression in my favor. In tossing the bar or throwing the stone, the competitor who begins with a rather indifferent cast is never very unfavorably judged if he immediately mend it by giving a better; and I resolved on mending my cast, if I could, by writing for the Inverness Courier—which was now open to me, through the kindness of the editor-a series of carefully prepared let ters on some popular subject. In the days of Goldsmith, the herring-fishing employed, as he tells us in one of his essays, "all Grub Street." In the north of Scotland this fishery was a popular theme little more than twenty years ago. The welfare of whole communities depended in no slight degree on its success: it formed the basis of many a calculation, and the subject of many an investment; and it was all the more suitable for mv purpose from the circum stance that there was no Grub Street in that part of the world to employ itself about. It was, in at least all its better aspects, a fresh subject; and I deemed myself more thoroughly acquainted with it than at least most of the men who were skilful enough, as litterateurs, to communicate their knowledge in writing. I knew the peculiarities of fishermen as a class, and the effects of this special branch of their profession on their character: I had seen them pursuing their employments amid the sublime of nature, and had occasionally taken a share in their work; and, further, I was acquainted with not a few antique traditions of the fishermen of other ages, in which, as in the narratives of most seafaring men, there mingled with a certain amount of real incident, curious snatches of the supernatural. In short, the subject was one on which, as I knew a good deal regarding it that was not generally known, I was in some degree qualified to write; and so I occupied my leisure in casting my facts respecting it into a series of letters, of which the first appeared in the Courier a fortnight after my volume of verse was laid on the tables of the northcountry booksellers. I had first gone out to sea to assist in catching herrings about ten years before; and I now described, in one of my letters, as truthfully as I could, those features of the scene to which I had been introduced on that occasion, which had struck me as novel and peculiar. And what had been strange to me proved equally so, I found, to the readers of the Courier. My letters attracted attention, and were republished in my behalf by the proprietors of the paper, "in consequence," said my friend the editor, in a note which he kindly attached to the pamphlet which they formed, "of the interest they had excited in the northern counties." Their modicum of success, lowly as was their subject, compared with that of some of my more ambitious verses, taught me my proper course. Let it be my business, I said, to know what is not generally known;-let me qualify myself to stand as an interpreter between nature and the public: while I strive to narrate as pleasingly, and describe as vividly, as I can, let truth, not fiction, be my walk; and if I succeed in uniting the novel to the true, in provinces of more general interest than the very humble one in which I have now partially succeeded, I shall succeed also in establishing myself in a position which, if not lofty, will yield me at least more solid footing than that to which I might attain as a mere litterateur, who, mayhap, pleased for a little, but added nothing to the general fund. The resolution was, I think, a good one;-would that it had been better kept! The following extracts may serve to show that, humble as my new subject may be deemed, it gave considerable scope for description of a kind not often associated with herrings, even when they employed all Grub Street: "As the night gradually darkened, the sky assumed a dead and leaden hue; the sea, roughened by the rising breeze, reflected its deeper hues with an intensity approaching to black, and seemed a dark uneven pavement, that absorbed every ray of the remaining light. A calm silvery patch, some fifteen or twenty yards in extent, came moving slowly through the black. It seemed merely a patch of water coated with oil; but, obedient to some other moving power than that of either tide or wind, it sailed aslant our line of buoys, a stone-cast from our bows,— lengthened itself along the line to thrice its former extent,-paused as if for a moment,-and then three of the buoys, after erecting themselves on their narrower base, with a sudden jerk, slowly sank. "One-two-three buoys!' exclaimed one of the fishermen, reckoning them as they disappeared;-there are ten barrels for us secure.' A few moments were suffered to elapse; and then, unfixing the haulser from the stem, and bringing it aft to the stern, we commenced hauling. The nets approached the gunwale. The first three appeared, from the phosphoric light of the water, as if bursting into flames of a pale green color. Here and there a herring glittered bright in the meshes, or went darting away through the pitchy darkness, visible for a moment by its own light. The fourth net was brighter than any of the others, and glittered through the waves while it was yet several fathoms away; the pale green seemed as if mingled with broken sheets of snow, that-flickering amid the mass of light-appeared, with every tug given by the fishermen, to shift, dissipate, and again form; and there streamed from it into the surrounding gloom myriads of green rays, an instant seen and then lost, the retreating fish that had avoided the meshes, but had lingered, until disturbed, beside their entangled companions. It contained a considerable body of herrings. As we raised them over the gunwale, they felt warm to the hand, for in the middle of a large shoal even the temperature of the water is raised,—a fact well known to every herring fisherman; and in shaking them out of the meshes, |