the fine arts, in papering rooms and lobbies, and in
painting railings and wheel-barrows. There are, I believe, a few
instances on record of house-painters rising to be artists: the history
of the late Mr. William Bonnar, of the Royal Academy of Edinburgh,
furnishes one of these; but the fact that the cases are not more
numerous serves, I fear, to show how much oftener a turn for drawing is
a merely imitative, than an original, self-derived faculty. Almost all
the apprentices of our neighbour the house-painter had their turn for
drawing decided enough to influence their choice of a profession; and
what was so repeatedly the case in Cromarty must, I should think, have
been the case in many similar places; but of how few of these embryo
limners have the works appeared in even a provincial exhibition-room!

At the time my intimacy with William became most close, both his
grandmother and aunt were dead, and he was struggling with great
difficulty through the last year of his apprenticeship. As his master
supplied him with but food and lodging, his linen was becoming scant,
and his Sabbath suit shabby; and he was looking forward to the time
when he should be at liberty to work for himself, with all the anxiety
of the voyager who fears that his meagre stock of provisions and water
may wholly fail him ere he reaches port. I of course could not assist
him. I was an apprentice like himself, and had not the command of a
sixpence; nor, had the case been otherwise, would he in all probability
have consented to accept of my help; but he lacked spirits as much as
money, and in that particular my society did him good. We used to beat
over all manner of subjects together, especially poetry and the fine
arts; and though we often differed, our differences served only to knit
us the more. He, for instance, deemed the "Minstrel" of Beattie the most
perfect of English poems; but though he liked Dryden's "Virgil" well
enough, he could find no poetry whatever in the "Absalom and Ahithophel"
of Dry den; whereas I liked both the "Minstrel" and the "Ahithophel,"
and, indeed, could hardly say, unlike as they were in complexion and
character, which of the two I read oftenest or admired most. Again,
among the prose writers, Addison was his especial favourite, and Swift
he detested; whereas I liked Addison and Swift almost equally well, and
passed without sense of incongruity, from the Vision of Mirza, or the
paper on Westminster Abbey, to the true a