ich vein of humour. Charles ---- was the recognised hero of the squad;
but he differed considerably from the men who admired him most. Burns
tells us that he "often courted the acquaintance of the part of mankind
commonly known by the ordinary phrase of _blackguards_;" and that,
"though disgraced by follies, nay, sometimes stained with guilt, he had
yet found among them, in not a few instances, some of the noblest
virtues--magnanimity, generosity, disinterested friendship, and even
modesty." I cannot say with the poet that I ever courted the
acquaintance of blackguards; but though the labouring man may select his
friends, he cannot choose his work-fellows; and so I have not
unfrequently _come in contact_ with blackguards, and have had
opportunities of pretty thoroughly knowing them. And my experience of
the class has been very much the reverse of that of Burns. I have
usually found their virtues of a merely theatric cast, and their vices
real; much assumed generosity in some instances, but a callousness of
feeling, and meanness of spirit, lying concealed beneath. In this poor
fellow, however, I certainly did find a sample of the nobler variety of
the genus. Poor Charles did too decidedly belong to it. He it was that
projected the Sunday party to Roslin; and he it was that, pressing his
way into the recesses of a disreputable house in the High Street, found
the fast-bound wight choking in an apron, and, unloosing the cords, let
him go. No man of the party squandered his gains more recklessly than
Charles, or had looser notions regarding the legitimacy of the uses to
which he too often applied them. And yet, notwithstanding, he was a
generous-hearted fellow; and, under the influence of religious
principle, would, like Burns himself, have made a very noble man.

In gradually forming my acquaintance with him, I was at first struck by
the circumstance that he never joined in the clumsy ridicule with which
I used to be assailed by the other workmen. When left, too, on one
occasion, in consequence of a tacit combination against me, to roll up a
large stone to the sort of block-bench, or _siege_, as it is technically
termed, on which the mass had to be hewn, and as I was slowly succeeding
in doing, through dint of very violent effort, what some two or three
men usually united to do, Charles stepped out to assist me; and the
combination at once broke down. Unlike the others, too, who, while they
never scrupled to take odds agains