poor for his poetical pursuits, to his occupation. "A _packman_
is a character which none esteems, and almost every one despises. The
idea that people of all ranks entertain of them is, that they are
mean-spirited loquacious liars, cunning and illiterate, watching every
opportunity, and using every mean art within their power, to cheat."
This is a sad account of the estimation in which a trade was then held
in Scotland, which the greatest of our living poets has attributed to
the chief character in a poem comprehensive of philosophical discussions
on all the highest interests of humanity. But both Wilson and Wordsworth
are in the right: both saw and have spoken truth. Most small packmen
were then, in some measure, what Wilson says they were generally
esteemed to be--peddling pilferers, and insignificant swindlers. Poverty
sent them swarming over bank and brae, and the "sma' kintra touns"--and
for a plack people will forget principle who have, as we say in
Scotland, missed the world. Wilson knew that to a man like himself there
was degradation in such a calling; and he latterly vented his
contemptuous sense of it, exaggerating the baseness of the name and
nature of _packman_. But suppose such a man as Wilson to have been in
better times one of but a few packmen travelling regularly for years
over the same country, each with his own district or domain, and there
can be no doubt that he would have been an object both of interest and
of respect--his opportunities of seeing the very best and the very
happiest of humble life, in itself very various, would have been very
great; and with his original genius, he would have become, like
Wordsworth's Pedlar, a good moral Philosopher.

Without, therefore, denying the truth of his picture of packmanship, we
may believe the truth of a picture entirely the reverse, from the hand
and heart of a still wiser man--though his wisdom has been gathered from
less immediate contact with the coarse garments and clay floors of the
labouring poor.

It is pleasant to hear Wordsworth speak of his own "personal knowledge"
of packmen or pedlars. We cannot say of him in the words of Burns, "the
fient a pride, nae pride had he;" for pride and power are brothers on
earth, whatever they may prove to be in heaven. But his prime pride is
his poetry; and he had not now been "sole king of rocky Cumberland," had
he not studied the character of his subjects in "huts where poor men
lie"--had he not "stooped h