ed all his motions when he had any new project
in his head, to form an acquaintance with the minister of St. Ronan's,
whom, while he walks down the street to the Manse, we will endeavour to
introduce to the reader.

The Rev. Josiah Cargill was the son of a small farmer in the south of
Scotland; and a weak constitution, joined to the disposition for study
which frequently accompanies infirm health, induced his parents, though
at the expense of some sacrifices, to educate him for the ministry. They
were the rather led to submit to the privations which were necessary to
support this expense, because they conceived, from their family
traditions, that he had in his veins some portion of the blood of that
celebrated Boanerges of the Covenant, Donald Cargill,[I-G] who was slain
by the persecutors at the town of Queensferry, in the melancholy days of
Charles II., merely because, in the plenitude of his sacerdotal power,
he had cast out of the church, and delivered over to Satan by a formal
excommunication, the King and Royal Family, with all the ministers and
courtiers thereunto belonging. But if Josiah was really derived from
this uncompromising champion, the heat of the family spirit which he
might have inherited was qualified by the sweetness of his own
disposition, and the quiet temper of the times in which he had the good
fortune to live. He was characterised by all who knew him as a mild,
gentle, and studious lover of learning, who, in the quiet prosecution of
his own sole object, the acquisition of knowledge, and especially of
that connected with his profession, had the utmost indulgence for all
whose pursuits were different from his own. His sole relaxations were
those of a retiring, mild, and pensive temper, and were limited to a
ramble, almost always solitary, among the woods and hills, in praise of
which, he was sometimes guilty of a sonnet, but rather because he could
not help the attempt, than as proposing to himself the fame or the
rewards which attend the successful poet. Indeed, far from seeking to
insinuate his fugitive pieces into magazines and newspapers, he blushed
at his poetical attempts even while alone, and, in fact, was rarely so
indulgent to his vein as to commit them to paper.

From the same maid-like modesty of disposition, our student suppressed a
strong natural turn towards drawing, although he was repeatedly
complimented upon the few sketches which he made, by some whose judgment
was generally ad