HIS VISIT TO FORRES. 339 



This may, perhaps, be thought wild doctrine ; but I 

 know it to be favourable to the exercise of those charities 

 which bind us to our species, and opposed to that idola- 

 try of our nature which prompts us to prostrate our- 

 selves before some poor faulty thing like ourselves ; and 

 besides, did not He act upon it who, though repeatedly 

 accused of being the friend of publicans and sinners, 

 never once rebutted the charge ? I got home about six 

 o'clock, without being nearly so much fatigued with my 

 journey of thirty miles, as when I had travelled it in the 

 opposite direction ; and my friends were all as glad to see 

 me as if I had been away from them for a much longer 

 period. I am, I believe, richer in true friends than any 

 other person I know, and my only secret regarding 

 them is the very simple one of being sincerely attached 

 to them. 



' I look back on my visit to Forres with great and 

 unmixed pleasure. I really love my friends, and indeed 

 mankind in general, all the better for it ; it has added, 

 too, to the stock of my ideas, and enriched the little 

 mental studio, in which I have stored up my conceptions 

 of the good and the beautiful, with a series of images 

 superior to most of the others. I have read of a cele- 

 brated Italian master who was so exclusively a painter 

 of landscape, that he could not so much as introduce 

 figures into his pieces. The scenes he portrayed seemed 

 to be scenes of the infant world at the close of the fifth 

 day's creation, ere there were animals on the plains or 

 in the forests, or man had become a living soul. Now, 

 this is not at all the way with my landscapes ; There are 

 a few figures in the foreground of every one of them, and 

 the same figures, too. You yourself I have introduced 

 into every scene. Here you stand on the brink of a 

 precipice, there on the verge of a stream, yonder amid 



