me more inured to sedentary life, my mind recovered
its spring, and my old ability returned of employing my leisure hours,
as before, in intellectual exertion. Meanwhile my legendary volume
issued from the press, and was, with a few exceptions, very favourably
received by the critics. Leigh Hunt gave it a kind and genial notice in
his _Journal_; it was characterized by Robert Chambers not less
favourably in _his_; and Dr. Hetherington, the future historian of the
Church of Scotland and of the Westminster Assembly of Divines--at that
time a licentiate of the Church--made it the subject of an elaborate and
very friendly critique in the _Presbyterian Review_. Nor was I less
gratified by the terms in which it was spoken of by the late Baron Hume,
the nephew and residuary legatee of the historian--himself very much a
critic of the old school--in a note to a north-country friend. He
described it as a work "written in an English style which" he "had begun
to regard as one of the lost arts." But it attained to no great
popularity. For being popular, its subjects were too local, and its
treatment of them perhaps too quiet. My publishers tell me, however,
that it not only continues to sell, but moves off considerably better in
its later editions that it did on its first appearance.

The branch bank furnished me with an entirely new and curious field of
observation, and formed a very admirable school. For the cultivation of
a shrewd common sense, a bank office is one of perhaps the best schools
in the world. Mere cleverness serves often only to befool its possessor.
He gets entangled among his own ingenuities, and is caught as in a net.
But ingenuities, plausibilities, special pleadings, all that make the
stump-orator great, must be brushed aside by the banker. The question
with him comes always to be a sternly naked one:--Is, or is not, Mr.
---- a person fit to be trusted with the bank's money? Is his sense of
monetary obligations nice, or obtuse? Is his judgment good, or the
contrary? Are his speculations sound, or precarious? What are his
resources?--what his liabilities? Is he facile in lending the use of his
name? Does he float on wind bills, as boys swim on bladders? or is his
paper representative of only real business transactions? Such are the
topics which, in the recesses of his own mind, the banker is called on
to discuss; and he must discuss them, not merely plausibly or
ingeniously, but solidly and truly; seeing that er