RECOLLECTIONS OF FERGUSON.[a][3]
CHAPTER I.
"Of Ferguson, the bauld and slee."—Burns.
[3] The perusal of this paper, written at an early period by the lamented Hugh Miller, cannot fail to suggest some reflections on the fate of the author himself and that of the poet he describes. It would be simply fanciful to draw from his choice of subject, and the sympathy he manifests for the victim of insanity, any conclusion of a felt affinity of mental type on his part. We would presently get into the obscure subject of presentiments. It is true that Hugh Miller wrote poetry, and was thus subject to the Nemesis; but we insist for no more than a case of coincidence, leaving to psychologists to settle the question of the alleged connection between certain poetical types of mind and eventual madness—cases of which are so plentifully recorded in Germany.—Ed.
I have, I believe, as little of the egotist in my composition as most men; nor would I deem the story of my life, though by no means unvaried by incident, of interest enough to repay the trouble of either writing or perusing it, were it the story of my own life only; but, though an obscure man myself, I have been singularly fortunate in my friends. The party-coloured tissue of my recollections is strangely interwoven, if I may so speak, with pieces of the domestic history of men whose names have become as familiar to our ears as that of our country itself; and I have been induced to struggle with the delicacy which renders one unwilling to speak much of one's self, and to overcome the dread of exertion natural to a period of life greatly advanced, through a desire of preserving to my countrymen a few notices, which would otherwise be lost to them, of two of their greatest favourites. I could once reckon among my dearest and most familiar friends, Robert Burns and Robert Ferguson.
It is now rather more than sixty years since I studied
for a few weeks at the University of St. Andrew's. I was the son of very poor parents, who resided in a seaport town on the western coast of Scotland. My father was a house-carpenter, a quiet, serious man, of industrious habits and great simplicity of character, but miserably depressed in his circumstances, through a sickly habit of body: my mother was a warm-hearted, excellent woman, endowed with no ordinary share of shrewd good sense and sound feeling, and indefatigable in her exertions for my father and the family. I was taught to read at a very early age, by an old woman in the neighbourhood—such a person as Shenstone describes in his "Schoolmistress;" and, being naturally of a reflective turn, I had begun, long ere I had attained my tenth year, to derive almost my sole amusement from books. I read incessantly; and after exhausting the shelves of all the neighbours, and reading every variety of work that fell in my way—from "The Pilgrim's Progress" of Bunyan, and the Gospel Sonnets of Erskine, to a treatise on fortification by Vauban, and the "History of the Heavens" by the Abbé Pluche—I would have pined away for lack of my accustomed exercise, had not a benevolent baronet in the neighbourhood, for whom my father occasionally wrought, taken a fancy to me, and thrown open to my perusal a large and well-selected library. Nor did his kindness terminate until, after having secured to me all of learning that the parish school afforded, he had settled me, now in my seventeenth year, at the University.
Youth is the season of warm friendships and romantic wishes and hopes. We say of the child, in its first attempts to totter along the wall, or when it has first learned to rise beside its mother's knee, that it is yet too weak to stand alone; and we may employ the same language in describing a young and ardent mind. It is, like the child, too weak to stand alone, and anxiously seeks out some kindred mind on which to lean. I had had my intimates at school,