328 THE JOURNEYMAN. 



' We of Cromarty have narrowly missed losing our 

 minister, and to the thinking part of us a shrewd loss 

 it would have been. Mr Stewart would have proved 

 himself second to none, or I am much mistaken, in even 

 the pulpit once occupied by Dr Chalmers ; but who, 

 alas ! could we have got to fill his ? And I much sus- 

 pect that, in less than a twelvemonth, he himself would 

 not have found the amount of his happiness at all in- 

 creased by the change. He has too little of the work- 

 ing-day world about him for the bustle of public life, 

 and his mind, with all its powers, is not of the kind 

 best fitted for a regular routine of business. It is said 

 of the lion that with all his immense strength and activ- 

 ity, he is a slow-paced and sluggish sort of animal, and 

 that though on extraordinary occasions he can leap 

 twenty feet at a bound, and carry off a buffalo with as 

 much ease as a horse carries its rider, he can yet lie for 

 whole days in his lair half asleep, half awake, too indo- 

 lent to move head or limb. There is something of this 

 disposition in Mr Stewart ; not that he wills to have it, 

 but because he has been born with it. When fresh and 

 in heart he can make amazing lion-like efforts ; but he 

 is no steam-engine, and must be indulged with long 

 breathing spaces in which to recover himself. With all 

 his eccentricity he is an excellent sort of fellow, eloquent, 

 pious, an original thinker, and singularly fortunate, if he 

 but knew it, in both his friends and his enemies ; a 

 person of spirit, you know, would like to have the choos- 

 ing of the one as certainly as that of the other ; but Mr 

 Stewart somehow does not seem to be aware of this. It 

 so happens that we are much infested in Cromarty by a 

 kind of vermin called Radicals, and have not yet got an 

 act of parliament for knocking them on the head. To Mr 

 Stewart they bear a decided antipathy ; very naturally 



