REPLY TO FINLAY. 197 



on the wrong side of thirty-five, can't be as foolish and 

 happy for a day or two as when they were twenty years 

 younger. My wife, whom I dare say you will deem 

 worth liking, is nearly as anxious to see you as I am 

 myself. She knows all about our early intimacy. I have 

 shown her the cave in which we have had so many 

 happy days' experience of the ease with which man can 

 lay down the usages of civilized life and take up the 

 savage. I have told her of the little closet in which 

 we used to draw vile, libellous landscapes without 

 knowing they were libellous, and read foolish books ; 

 and of the deep pit which we dug in one of the thickets 

 of the hill when we intended becoming robbers, and 

 were furnishing ourselves with bloody-minded daggers, 

 fashioned out of table-knives, to frighten the girls who 

 came to the wood for sticks. You, I presume, are still a 

 single man, and the married have but one advice for 

 such ; but I am not a giver of advices, nor a taker of 

 them neither, and so I spare you. There is little 

 danger of men becoming too happy in any state. It 

 was only last week I placed a tombstone over the grave 

 of my infant daughter, a sweet little girl, who in less 

 than two years had found means to lay strong hold on 

 the hearts of both her parents, and who left us when our 

 hopes for her were at the highest. But we must just 

 live on, thinking as much of duty and as little of enjoy- 

 ment as we can ; which, after all, is, I believe, the way 

 in which most is to be enjoyed. Philosophy, however, is 

 of no use on such occasions ; it just serves now and then 

 to point a sentence, and that is all. 



' It is probable that in little more than two months I 

 shall leave Cromarty for Edinburgh, where I am invited by 

 a most respectable and influential body of men to conduct 

 a Whig newspaper on the side of the Church. I do feel 



