ambitious of the fame of mere
scholarship, and yet I cannot express to you the triumph of that day. I
had seen my poor father labouring, far, far beyond his strength, for my
brother and myself--closely engaged during the day with his duties in
the bank, and copying at night in a lawyer's office. I had seen, with a
throbbing heart, his tall wasted frame becoming tremulous and bent, and
the grey hair thinning on his temples; and I now felt that I could ease
him of at least part of the burden. In the excitement of the moment, I
could hope that I was destined to rise in the world--to gain a name in
it, and something more. You know how a slight success grows in
importance when we can deem it the earnest of future good fortune. I
met, too, with a kind and influential friend in one of the professors,
the late Dr. Wilkie. Alas! good, benevolent man! you may see his tomb
yonder beside the wall; and, on my return from St. Andrew's, at the
close of the session, I found my father on his deathbed. My brother
Henry--who had been unfortunate, and, I am afraid, something worse--had
quitted the counting-house and entered aboard of a man-of-war as a
common sailor; and the poor old man, whose heart had been bound up in
him, never held up his head after.

"On the evening of my father's funeral, I could have lain down and died.
I never before felt how thoroughly I am unfitted for the world--how
totally I want strength. My father, I have said, had intended me for the
Church; and, in my progress onward from class to class, and from school
to college, I had thought but little of each particular step, as it
engaged me for the time, and nothing of the ultimate objects to which it
led. All my more vigorous aspirations were directed to a remote future
and an unsubstantial shadow. But I had witnessed, beside my father's
bed, what had led me seriously to reflect on the ostensible aim for
which I lived and studied; and the more carefully I weighed myself in
the balance, the more did I find myself awanting. You have heard of Mr.
Brown of the Secession, the author of the "Dictionary of the Bible." He
was an old acquaintance of my father's; and, on hearing of his illness,
had come all the way from Haddington to see him. I felt, for the first
time, as kneeling beside his bed, I heard my father's breathings
becoming every moment shorter and more difficult, and listened to the
prayers of the clergyman, that I had no business in the Church. And thus
I still