ich I have spent many a laborious hour. My
first pieces were rather stiffly written, somewhat on the perilous model
of Junius; but as it was hardly possible to write so ill as my opponent,
I could appeal to even his friends whether it was quite right of him to
call me illiterate and untaught, in prose so much worse than my own.
Chiefly by getting the laughers now and then on my side, I succeeded in
making him angry; and he replied to my jokes by _calling names_--a
phrase, by the way, which, forgetting his Watts' Hymns, and failing to
consult his Johnson, he characterized as not English. I was, he said, a
"shallow, pretending ninny;" an "impudent illiterate lad;" "a fanatic"
and a "frantic person;" the "low underling of a faction," and "Peter the
Hermit;" and, finally, as the sum-total of the whole he assured me that
I stood in _his_ "estimation the most ignoble and despised in the whole
range of the human species." This was frightful! but I not only outlived
it all, but learned, I fear, after in this way first tasting blood, to
experience a rather too keen delight in the anger of an antagonist. I
may add, that when, some two or three years after the period of this
controversy, the General Assembly admitted what were known as the
Parliamentary ministers, and the ministers of chapels of ease, to a seat
in the church courts, neither my townsmen nor myself saw aught to
challenge in the arrangement. It contained none of the elements which
had provoked our hostility in the Cromarty chapel case: it did not make
over the people of one minister to the charge of another, whom they
would never have chosen for themselves; but, without encroaching on
popular rights, equalized, on the Presbyterian scheme, the standing of
ministers and the claims of congregations.

The next matter which engaged my townsfolk was a considerably more
serious one. When, in 1831, cholera first threatened the shores of
Britain, the Bay of Cromarty was appointed by Government one of the
quarantine ports; and we became familiar with the sight, at first deemed
sufficiently startling, of fleets of vessels lying in the upper
roadstead, with the yellow flag waving from their mast-tops. The
disease, however, failed to find its way ashore; and, when, in the
summer of the following year, it was introduced into the north of
Scotland, it went stalking around the town and parish for several
months, without visiting either. It greatly more than decimated the
villages of