CORRESPONDS WITH MR CHAMBERS. 113 



if you can be content with the love of a virtuous woman 

 in a place where you have the chief requisites and a 

 little of the luxuries of life, and where, exempt from the 

 excitements and sordid bustle of a town, you can employ 

 those contemplative powers of mind which I believe to 

 be your highest gifts, you are probably better as you are. 

 Wordsworth has been much laughed at for keeping so con- 

 stantly in the country, but I believe he is right. There is 

 everything certainly in town that can make the mind 

 active, but it is not the place for doing anything great, and 

 it is not the place for a pure and morally satisfactory life.' 



Hugh was gladly welcomed as a contributor to the 

 Journal. 



As usual, he replies promptly to Mr Chambers's 

 ' kind and truly friendly letter/ Having stated that Mr 

 Ross had been absent in London, he proceeds : ' Since 

 he left me now rather more than a month ago I have 

 been a busier man than I was ever in all my life before ; 

 for though the business of the office here is perhaps not 

 very extensive for that of a branch bank, it is sufficiently 

 so for the employment of a single person, and I have 

 been left in charge of the whole without clerk or assist- 

 ant. How strangely flexible the human mind ! Three 

 years ago I was hewing tombstones in a country church- 

 yard, with perhaps a little architectural knowledge, and 

 rather more than the average skill of my brother me- 

 chanics, but totally unacquainted with business. And 

 now here I am among day-books and ledgers, deciding 

 upon who are and who are not safe to be trusted with 

 the bank's money, and doing business sometimes to the 

 amount of five hundred pounds per day. 



' I have some legendary stories lying by me, which 

 I wrote about a twelvemonth ago, with the intention of 

 giving them to the public in a volume, but the Journal 



VOL. II. 8 



