'Once more, O Trent! along thy pebbly marge,
A pensive invalid, reduced and pale,
From the close sick-room newly set at large,
Woos to his woe-worn cheek the pleasant gale.'
It is, in short, one of the common English words of the poetic vocabulary." Could a man in quest of patronage, and actually at the time soliciting a favour, possibly contrive to say anything more imprudent? And this, too, to a gentleman so much accustomed to be deferred to when he took up his ground on the Standards, as sometimes to forget, through the sheer force of habit, that he was not a standard himself! He coloured to the eyes; and his condescending humility, which seemed, I thought, rather too great for the occasion, and was of a kind which my friend Mr. Stewart never used to exhibit, appeared somewhat ruffled. "I have no acquaintance," he said, "with the editor of the Courier; we take opposite sides on very important questions; and I cannot recommend your verses to him; but call on Mr. ——; he is one of the proprietors; and, with my compliments, state your case to him; he will be perhaps able to assist you. Meanwhile, I wish you all success." The minister hurried me out, and one of the withered old women was called in. "This," I said to myself, as I stepped into the street, "is the sort of patronage which letters of introduction procure for one. I don't think I'll seek any more of it."
Meeting on the street, however, with, two Cromarty friends, one of whom was just going to call on the gentleman named by the minister, he induced me to accompany him. The other said, as he took his separate way, that having come to visit an old townsman settled in Inverness, a man of some influence in the burgh, he would state my case to him; and he was sure he would exert himself to procure me employment. I have already referred to the remark of Burns. It is recorded by his brother Gilbert, that the poet used often to say, "That he could not well conceive a more mortifying picture of human life, than a man seeking work;" and that the exquisite dirge, "Man was made to mourn," owes its existence to the sentiment. The feeling is certainly a very depressing one; and as on most other occasions work rather sought me than I the work, I experienced more of it at this time than at any other period of my life. I of course could hardly expect that people should die off and require epitaphs merely to accommodate me. That demand of employment as a right in all cases and circumstances, which the more extreme "claims-of-labour men" do not scruple to urge, is the result of a sort of indignant reaction on this feeling—a feeling which became poetry in Burns and nonsense in the Communists; but which I experienced neither as nonsense nor poetry, but simply as a depressing conviction that I was one man too many in the world. The gentleman on whom I now called with my friend was a person both of business habits and literary tastes; but I saw that my poetic scheme rather damaged me in his estimation. The English verse produced at this time in the far north was of a kind ill fitted for the literary market, and usually published, or rather printed—for published it never was—by that teasing subscription scheme which so often robs men of good money, and gives them bad books in exchange; and he seemed to set me down as one of the annoying semi-beggar class;—rather a mistake, I should hope. He, however, obligingly introduced me to a gentleman of literature and science, the secretary of a society of the place, antiquarian and scientific in its character, termed the "Northern Institution," and the honorary conservator of its museum—an interesting miscellaneous collection which I had previously seen, and in connexion with which I had formed my only other scheme of getting into employment.
I wrote that old English hand which has been revived of late by the general rage for the mediæval, but which at that time was one of the lost arts, with much neatness; and could produce imitations of the illuminated manuscripts that preceded our printed books, which even an antiquary would have pronounced respectable. And, addressing the members of the Northern Institution on the character and tendency of their pursuits, in a somewhat lengthy piece of verse, written in what I least intended to be the manner of Dryden, as exemplified in his middle-style poems, such as the Religio Laici, I engrossed it in the old hand, and now called on the Secretary, to request that he would present it at the first meeting of the Society, which was to be held, I understood, in a few days. The Secretary was busy at his desk; but he received me politely, spoke approvingly of my work as an imitation of the old manuscript, and obligingly, charged himself with its delivery at the meeting: and so we parted for the time, not in the least aware that there was a science which dealt with characters greatly more ancient than those of the old manuscripts, and laden with profounder meanings, in which we both took a deep interest, and regarding which we could have exchanged facts and ideas with mutual pleasure and profit. The Secretary of the Northern Institution at this time was Mr. George Anderson, the well-known geologist, and joint author with his brother of the admirable "Guide-Book to the Highlands," which bears their name. I never heard how my address fared. It would, of course, have been tabled—looked at, I suppose, for a few seconds by a member or two—and then set aside; and it is probably still in the archives of the Institution, awaiting the light of future ages, when its simulated antiquity shall have become real. It was not written in a character to be read, nor, I fear, very readable in any character; and so the members of the Institution must have remained ignorant of all the wisdom I had found in their pursuits, antiquarian and ethnological. The following forms an average specimen of the production:—
"Tis yours to trace
Each deep-fixed trait that marks the human race;
And as the Egyptian priests, with mystery fraught,