But my criticisms on the magistracy, however foolish, were silent criticisms, and did harm to no one. About the time, however, in which I was indulging in them, I imprudently exposed myself, by one of those impulsive acts of which men repent at their leisure, to criticisms not silent, and of a kind that occasionally do harm. I had been piqued by the rejection of my verses on the Ness. True, I had no high opinion of their merit, deeming them little more than equal to the average verses of provincial prints; but then I had intimated my scheme of getting them printed to a few Cromarty friends, and was now weak enough to be annoyed at the thought that my townsfolk would regard me as an incompetent blockhead, who could not write rhymes good enough for a newspaper. And so I rashly determined on appealing to the public in a small volume. Had I known as much as in an after period about newspaper affairs, and the mode in which copies of verses are often dealt with by editors and their assistants—fatigued with nonsense, and at once hopeless of finding grain in the enormous heaps of chaff submitted to them, and too much occupied to seek for it, even should they believe in its occurrence in the form of single seeds sparsely scattered—I would have thought less of the matter. As the case was, however, I hastily collected from among my piles of manuscripts, some fifteen or twenty pieces in verse, written chiefly during the preceding six years, and put them into the hands of the printer of the Inverness Courier. It would have been a greatly wiser act, as I soon came to see, had I put them into the fire instead; but my choice of a printing-office secured to me at least one advantage—it brought me acquainted with one of the ablest and most accomplished of Scotch editors—the gentleman who now owns and still conducts the Courier; and, besides, having once crossed the Rubicon, I felt all my native obstinacy stirred up to make good a position for myself, despite of failures and reverses on the further side. It is an advantage in some cases to be committed. The clear large type of the Courier office did, however, show me many a blemish in my verse that had escaped me before, and broke off associations which—curiously linked with the manuscripts—had given to the stanzas and passages which they contained charms of tone and colour not their own. I began to find, too, that my humble accomplishment of verse was too narrow to contain my thinking;—the thinking ability had been growing, but not the ability of poetic expression; nay, much of the thinking seemed to be of a kind not suited for poetic purposes at all;—and though it was of course far better that I should come to know this in time, than that, like some, even superior men, I should persist in wasting, in inefficient verse, the hours in which vigorous prose might be produced, it was at least quite mortifying enough to make the discovery with half a volume of metre committed to type, and in the hands of the printer. Resolving, however, that my humble name should not appear in the title-page, I went on with my volume. My new friend the editor kindly inserted, from time to time, copies of its verses in the columns of his paper, and strove to excite some degree of interest and expectation regarding it; but my recent discovery had thoroughly sobered me, and I awaited the publication of my volume not much elated by the honour done me, and as little sanguine respecting its ultimate success as well might be. And ere I quitted Inverness, a sad bereavement, which greatly narrowed the circle of my best-loved friends, threw very much into the background all my thoughts regarding it.
On quitting Cromarty, I had left my uncle James labouring under an attack of rheumatic fever; but though he had just entered his grand climacteric, he was still a vigorous and active man, and I could not doubt that he had strength of constitution enough to throw it off. He had failed to rally, however; and after returning one evening from a long exploratory walk, I found in my lodgings a note awaiting me, intimating his death. The blow fell with stunning effect. Ever since the death of my father, my two uncles had faithfully occupied his place; and James, of a franker and less reserved temper than Alexander, and more tolerant of my boyish follies, had, though I sincerely loved the other, laid stronger hold on my affections. He was of a genial disposition, too, that always remained sanguine in the cast of its hopes and anticipations; and he had unwittingly flattered my vanity by taking me pretty much at my own estimate—overweeningly high, of course, like that of almost all young men, but mayhap necessary, in the character of a force, to make headway in the face of obstruction and difficulty. Uncle James, like Le Balafré in the novel, would have "ventured his nephew against the wight Wallace." I immediately set out for Cromarty; and, curious as it may seem, found grief so companionable, that the four hours which I spent by the way seemed hardly equal to one. I retained, however, only a confused recollection of my journey, remembering little more than that, when passing at midnight along the dreary Maolbuie, I saw the moon in her wane, rising red and lightless out of the distant sea; and that, lying, as it were, prostrate on the horizon, she reminded me of some o'ermatched wrestler thrown helplessly on the ground.
On reaching home, I found my mother, late as the hour was, still up, and engaged in making a dead-dress for the body. "There is a letter from the south, with a black seal, awaiting you," she said; "I fear you have also lost your friend William Ross." I opened the letter, and found her surmise too well founded. It was a farewell letter, written in feeble characters, but in no feeble spirit; and a brief postscript, added by a comrade, intimated the death of the writer. "This," 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 ere 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."
FOOTNOTES:
[11] Loch Ness.
[12] This portrait of the Ness is, I fear, scarce true to the ordinary character of the river. I had visited it during the previous winter, and walked a few miles along its sides, when the tract of country through which it flows lay bleached and verdureless, and steeped in the soaking rain of weeks, and the stream itself, big in flood, roared from bank to brae in its shallower reaches, or boiled sullen and turbid in many a circling eddy in its darker pools. And my description somewhat incongruously unites a sunlit summer landscape, rich in flower and foliage, with the brown wintry river.
CHAPTER XX.
"This while my notion's ta'en a sklent,