Two long years had to pass from this time ere my young friend and I could be united—for such were the terms on which we had to secure the consent of her mother; but, with our union in the vista, we could meet more freely than before; and the time passed not unpleasantly away. For the first six months of my new employment, I found myself unable to make my old use of the leisure hours which, I found, I could still command. There was nothing very intellectual, in the higher sense of the term, in recording the bank's transactions, or in summing up columns of figures, or in doing business over the counter; and yet the fatigue induced was a fatigue, not of sinew and muscle, but of nerve and brain, which, if it did not quite disqualify me for my former intellectual amusements, at least greatly disinclined me towards them, and rendered me a considerably more indolent sort of person than either before or since. It is asserted by artists of discriminating eye, that the human hand bears an expression stamped upon it by the general character, as surely as the human face; and I certainly used to be struck, during this transition period, by the relaxed and idle expression that had on the sudden been assumed by mine. And the slackened hands represented, I too surely felt, a slackened mind. The unintellectual toils of the labouring man have been occasionally represented as less favourable to mental cultivation than the semi-intellectual employments of that class immediately above him, to which our clerks, shopmen, and humbler accountants belong; but it will be found that exactly the reverse is the case, and that, though a certain conventional gentility of manner and appearance on the side of the somewhat higher class may serve to conceal the fact, it is on the part of the labouring man that the real advantage lies. The mercantile accountant or law-clerk, bent over his desk, his faculties concentrated on his columns of figures, or on the pages which he has been carefully engrossing, and unable to proceed one step in his work without devoting to it all his attention, is in greatly less favourable circumstances than the ploughman or operative mechanic, whose mind is free though his body labours, and who thus finds, in the very rudeness of his employments, a compensation for their humble and laborious character. And it will be found that the humbler of the two classes is much more largely represented in our literature than the class by one degree less humble. Ranged against the poor clerk of Nottingham, Henry Kirke White, and the still more hapless Edinburgh engrossing clerk, Robert Fergusson, with a very few others, we find in our literature a numerous and vigorous phalanx, composed of men such as the Ayrshire Ploughman, the Ettrick Shepherd, the Fifeshire Foresters, the sailors Dampier and Falconer—Bunyan, Bloomfield, Ramsay, Tannahill, Alexander Wilson, John Clare, Allan Cunningham, and Ebenezer Elliot. And I was taught at this time to recognise the simple principle on which the greater advantages lie on the side of the humbler class. Gradually, however, as I became more inured to sedentary life, my mind recovered its spring, and my old ability returned of employing my leisure hours, as before, in intellectual exertion. Meanwhile my legendary volume issued from the press, and was, with a few exceptions, very favourably received by the critics. Leigh Hunt gave it a kind and genial notice in his Journal; it was characterized by Robert Chambers not less favourably in his; and Dr. Hetherington, the future historian of the Church of Scotland and of the Westminster Assembly of Divines—at that time a licentiate of the Church—made it the subject of an elaborate and very friendly critique in the Presbyterian Review. Nor was I less gratified by the terms in which it was spoken of by the late Baron Hume, the nephew and residuary legatee of the historian—himself very much a critic of the old school—in a note to a north-country friend. He described it as a work "written in an English style which" he "had begun to regard as one of the lost arts." But it attained to no great popularity. For being popular, its subjects were too local, and its treatment of them perhaps too quiet. My publishers tell me, however, that it not only continues to sell, but moves off considerably better in its later editions that it did on its first appearance.
The branch bank furnished me with an entirely new and curious field of observation, and formed a very admirable school. For the cultivation of a shrewd common sense, a bank office is one of perhaps the best schools in the world. Mere cleverness serves often only to befool its possessor. He gets entangled among his own ingenuities, and is caught as in a net. But ingenuities, plausibilities, special pleadings, all that make the stump-orator great, must be brushed aside by the banker. The question with him comes always to be a sternly naked one:—Is, or is not, Mr. ---- a person fit to be trusted with the bank's money? Is his sense of monetary obligations nice, or obtuse? Is his judgment good, or the contrary? Are his speculations sound, or precarious? What are his resources?—what his liabilities? Is he facile in lending the use of his name? Does he float on wind bills, as boys swim on bladders? or is his paper representative of only real business transactions? Such are the topics which, in the recesses of his own mind, the banker is called on to discuss; and he must discuss them, not merely plausibly or ingeniously, but solidly and truly; seeing that error, however illustrated or adorned, or however capable of being brilliantly defended in speech or pamphlet, is sure always with him to take the form of pecuniary loss. My superior in the agency—Mr. Ross, a good and honourable-minded man, of sense and experience—was admirably fitted for calculations of this kind; and I learned, both in his behalf, and from the pleasure which I derived from the exercise, to take no little interest in them also. It was agreeable to mark the moral effects of a well-conducted agency such as his. However humbly honesty and good sense may be rated in the great world generally, they always, when united, bear premium in a judiciously managed bank office. It was interesting enough, too, to see quiet silent men, like "honest Farmer Flamburgh," getting wealthy, mainly because, though void of display, they were not wanting in integrity and judgment; and clever unscrupulous fellows, like "Ephraim Jenkinson," who "spoke to good purpose," becoming poor, very much because, with all their smartness, they lacked sense and principle. It was worthy of being noted, too, that in looking around from my peculiar point of view on the agricultural classes, I found the farmers, on really good farms, usually thriving, if not themselves in fault, however high their rents; and that, on the other hand, farmers on sterile farms were not thriving, however moderate the demands of the landlord. It was more melancholy, but not less instructive, to learn, from authorities whose evidence could not be questioned—bills paid by small instalments, or lying under protest—that the small-farm system, so excellent in a past age, was getting rather unsuited for the energetic competition of the present one; and that the small farmers—a comparatively comfortable class some sixty or eighty years before, who used to give dowries to their daughters, and leave well-stocked farms to their sons—were falling into straitened circumstances, and becoming, however respectable elsewhere, not very good men in the bank. It was interesting, too, to mark the character and capabilities of the various branches of trade carried on in the place—how the business of its shopkeepers fell always into a very few hands, leaving to the greater number, possessed, apparently, of the same advantages as their thriving compeers, only a mere show of custom—how precarious in its nature the fishing trade always is, especially the herring fishery, not more from the uncertainty of the fishings themselves, than from the fluctuations of the markets—and how in the pork trade of the place a judicious use of the bank's money enabled the curers to trade virtually on a doubled capital, and to realize, with the deduction of the bank discounts, doubled profits. In a few months my acquaintance with the character and circumstances of the business men of the district became tolerably extensive, and essentially correct; and on two several occasions, when my superior left me for a time to conduct the entire business of the agency, I was fortunate enough not to discount for him a single bad bill. The implicit confidence reposed in me by so good and sagacious a man was certainly quite enough of itself to set me on my metal. There was, however, at least one item in my calculations in which I almost always found myself incorrect: I found I could predict every bankruptcy in the district; but I usually fell short from ten to eighteen months of the period in which the event actually took place. I could pretty nearly determine the time when the difficulties and entanglements which I saw ought to have produced their proper effects, and landed in failure; but I missed taking into account the desperate efforts which men of energetic temperament make in such circumstances, and which, to the signal injury of their friends and the loss of their creditors, succeed usually in staving off the catastrophe for a season. In short, the school of the branch bank was a very admirable school; and I profited so much by its teachings, that when questions connected with banking are forced on the notice of the public, and my brother editors have to apply for articles on the subject to literary bankers, I find I can write my banking articles for myself.
The seasons passed by; the two years of probation came to a close, like all that had gone before; and after a long, and, in its earlier stages, anxious courtship of in all five years, I received from the hand of Mr. Ross that of my young friend, in her mother's house, and was united to her by my minister, Mr. Stewart. And then, setting out, immediately after the ceremony, for the southern side of the Moray Firth, we spent two happy days together in Elgin; and, under the guidance of one of the most respected citizens of the place, my kind friend Mr. Isaac Forsyth, visited the more interesting objects connected with the town or its neighbourhood. He introduced us to the Elgin Cathedral;—to the veritable John Shanks, the eccentric keeper of the building, who could never hear of the Wolf of Badenoch, who had burnt it four hundred years before, without flying into a rage, and becoming what the dead man would have deemed libellous;—to the font, too, under a dripping vault of ribbed stone, in which an insane mother used to sing to sleep the poor infant, who, afterwards becoming Lieutenant-General Anderson, built for poor paupers like his mother, and poor children such as he himself had once been, the princely institution which bears his name. And then, after passing from the stone font to the institution itself, with its happy children, and its very unhappy old men and women, Mr. Forsyth conveyed us to the pastoral, semi-Highland valley of Pluscardine, with its beautiful wood-embosomed priory—one of perhaps the finest and most symmetrical specimens of the unornamented Gothic of the times of Alexander II. to be seen anywhere in Scotland. Finally, after passing a delightful evening at his hospitable board, and meeting, among other guests, my friend Mr. Patrick Duff—the author of the "Geology of Moray"—I returned with my young wife to Cromarty, and found her mother, Mr. Ross, Mr. Stewart, and a party of friends, waiting for us in the house which my father had built for himself forty years before, but which it had been his destiny never to inhabit. It formed our home for the three following years. The subjoined verses—prose, I suspect, rather than poetry, for the mood in which they were written was too earnest a one to be imaginative—I introduce, as representative of my feelings at this time: they were written previous to my marriage, on one of the blank pages of a pocket-Bible, with which I presented my future wife:—
TO LYDIA.
Lydia, since ill by sordid gift
Were love like mine express'd,
Take Heaven's best boon, this Sacred Book,
From him who loves thee best.
Love strong as that I bear to thee
Were sure unaptly told