ot these remarks appear!

But my criticisms on the magistracy, however foolish, were silent
criticisms, and did harm to no one. About the time, however, in which I
was indulging in them, I imprudently exposed myself, by one of those
impulsive acts of which men repent at their leisure, to criticisms not
silent, and of a kind that occasionally _do_ harm. I had been piqued by
the rejection of my verses on the Ness. True, I had no high opinion of
their merit, deeming them little more than equal to the average verses
of provincial prints; but then I had intimated my scheme of getting them
printed to a few Cromarty friends, and was now weak enough to be annoyed
at the thought that my townsfolk would regard me as an incompetent
blockhead, who could not write rhymes good enough for a newspaper. And
so I rashly determined on appealing to the public in a small volume. Had
I known as much as in an after period about newspaper affairs, and the
mode in which copies of verses are often dealt with by editors and their
assistants--fatigued with nonsense, and at once hopeless of finding
grain in the enormous heaps of chaff submitted to them, and too much
occupied to seek for it, even should they believe in its occurrence in
the form of single seeds sparsely scattered--I would have thought less
of the matter. As the case was, however, I hastily collected from among
my piles of manuscripts, some fifteen or twenty pieces in verse, written
chiefly during the preceding six years, and put them into the hands of
the printer of the _Inverness Courier_. It would have been a greatly
wiser act, as I soon came to see, had I put them into the fire instead;
but my choice of a printing-office secured to me at least one
advantage--it brought me acquainted with one of the ablest and most
accomplished of Scotch editors--the gentleman who now owns and still
conducts the _Courier_; and, besides, having once crossed the Rubicon, I
felt all my native obstinacy stirred up to make good a position for
myself, despite of failures and reverses on the further side. It is an
advantage in some cases to be committed. The clear large type of the
_Courier_ office did, however, show me many a blemish in my verse that
had escaped me before, and broke off associations which--curiously
linked with the manuscripts--had given to the stanzas and passages which
they contained charms of tone and colour not their own. I began to find,
too, that my humble accomplishment of verse w