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 beca