exhibit, appeared somewhat ruffled. "I
have no acquaintance," he said, "with the editor of the _Courier_; we
take opposite sides on very important questions; and I cannot recommend
your verses to him; but call on Mr. ----; he is one of the proprietors;
and, with _my compliments_, state your case to him; he will be perhaps
able to assist you. Meanwhile, I wish you all success." The minister
hurried me out, and one of the withered old women was called in. "This,"
I said to myself, as I stepped into the street, "is the sort of
patronage which letters of introduction procure for one. I don't think
I'll seek any more of it."

Meeting on the street, however, with, two Cromarty friends, one of whom
was just going to call on the gentleman named by the minister, he
induced me to accompany him. The other said, as he took his separate
way, that having come to visit an old townsman settled in Inverness, a
man of some influence in the burgh, he would state my case to him; and
he was sure he would exert himself to procure me employment. I have
already referred to the remark of Burns. It is recorded by his brother
Gilbert, that the poet used often to say, "That he could not well
conceive a more mortifying picture of human life, than a man seeking
work;" and that the exquisite dirge, "Man was made to mourn," owes its
existence to the sentiment. The feeling is certainly a very depressing
one; and as on most other occasions work rather sought me than I the
work, I experienced more of it at this time than at any other period of
my life. I of course could hardly expect that people should die off and
require epitaphs merely to accommodate me. That demand of employment as
a right in all cases and circumstances, which the more extreme
"claims-of-labour men" do not scruple to urge, is the result of a sort
of indignant reaction on this feeling--a feeling which became poetry in
Burns and nonsense in the Communists; but which I experienced neither as
nonsense nor poetry, but simply as a depressing conviction that I was
one man too many in the world. The gentleman on whom I now called with
my friend was a person both of business habits and literary tastes; but
I saw that my poetic scheme rather damaged me in his estimation. The
English verse produced at this time in the far north was of a kind ill
fitted for the literary market, and usually published, or rather
printed--for published it never was--by that teasing subscription scheme
which so ofte