During the time of his continuance in Jedburgh and its vicinity, he evinced a becoming regard to the external duties of religion; but nothing of that sublime devotion which cheered the evening of his days, and which caused such astonishing contentment in the midst of manifold privations. My own belief is, from all the circumstances of the case, that the pious efforts of his worthy mother did not succeed in the first instance, but were blessed for his benefit at an advanced period of life. The extreme poverty to which he was reduced, and the corporal ailments under which he had laboured for a long time, were like breaking up the fallow ground, and causing the seed which had been sown to vegetate.
We must here part from “the Scottish Wanderer.” Some, perhaps, may think he might have been dismissed before—“for what was he?” He was not renowned, for he was neither warrior nor statesman, but to be guileless and harmless is to be happier than the ruler of the turbulent, and more honourable than the leader of an army. If his life was not illustrious, it was wise; for he could not have been seen, and sojourned in the hamlets of labour and ignorance, without exciting regard and communicating instruction. He might have been ridiculed or despised on his first appearance, but where he remained he taught by the pithy truth of his sayings, and the rectitude of his conduct: if the peripatetic philosophers of antiquity did so much, they did no more. Few among those who, in later times, have been reputed wise, were teachers of practical wisdom: the wisdom of the rest was surpassed by “Cheap Tommy’s.”
NATURALISTS’ CALENDAR.
Mean Temperature 64·07.