in the latter tract alone that he acquired the materials of all his better poetry; and I feel as if, for at least one brief evening, I was admitted to the privileges of a class-fellow, and sat with him on the same form. The company broke up a little after ten; and I did not again hear of John Hogg till I read his elegy, about four years after, among the poems of my friend. It is by no means one of the happiest pieces in the volume, nor, it strikes me, highly characteristic; but I have often perused it with an interest very independent of its merits.
CHAPTER III.
"But he is weak—both man and boy
Has been an idler in the land."—Wordsworth.
I was attempting to listen, on the evening of the following Sunday, to a dull, listless discourse—one of the discourses so common at this period, in which there was fine writing without genius, and fine religion without Christianity—when a person who had just taken his place beside me, tapped me on the shoulder, and thrust a letter into my hand. It was my newly-acquired friend of the previous evening; and we shook hands heartily under the pew.
"That letter has just been handed me by an acquaintance from your part of the country," he whispered; "I trust it contains nothing unpleasant."
I raised it to the light, and on ascertaining that it was sealed and edged with black, rose and quitted the church, followed by my friend. It intimated, in two brief lines that my patron, the baronet, had been killed by a fall from his horse a few evenings before; and that, dying intestate the allowance which had hitherto enabled me to prosecute
my studies necessarily dropped. I crumpled up the paper in my hand.
"You have learned something very unpleasant," said Ferguson. "Pardon me—I have no wish to intrude; but, if at all agreeable, I would fain spend the evening with you."
My heart filled, and grasping his hand, I briefly intimated the purport of the communication, and we walked out together in the direction of the ruins.