LITERARY AND DOMESTIC LIFE. 321 



if Tuesday be a bad day, so that Mr. Gibb cannot draw, and tbe 

 distance be such as I can accomplish, I will exert some of my activ- 

 ity, a little impaired now, though not to any melancholy extent, and 

 appear at Rayrig at five o'clock. 



" It would have been pleasant had the three friends met, in a 

 quiet way, at Rayrig ; and I do not doubt that, in spite of all, we 

 might have been even happy. But our meeting was prevented. 

 Watson, I am sure, regretted it ; and as for myself, I trust you 

 will believe in the warmth and sincerity of my affection. 



" With regard to the conversation of Calgarth about the Edin- 

 burgh murderers,* I had quite forgotten it, till the allusion to it in 

 your kind letter recalled it to my memory. I do not believe that 

 there is any difference of opinion in our minds respecting those 

 hideous transactions, that might not be reconciled in three minutes' 

 uninterrupted conversation. But I never yet recollect a single con- 

 versation in a mixed company, on any subject on which some differ- 

 ence of opinion between two parties had been expressed or inti- 

 mated, where it was not rendered impossible to reconcile it by the 

 interposition of a third or fourth party taking up some point con- 

 nected with, perhaps, but not essentially belonging to the point at 

 issue. The argument, if there has been one, is thus broken in 

 upon, new topics introduced, and, without tedious explanations, it 

 is scarcely possible to get back to the real question. Something of 

 this kind occurred, I remember, at Calgarth. Watson and Lord 

 De Tabley joined in with certain remarks — right enough, perhaps, 

 in their way — but such as involved and entangled the thread of our 

 discourse. And thus you and I appeared, I am disposed to think, 

 to have adopted different views of the matter ; whereas, had we 

 been left to ourselves, we should either have agreed, or at least had 

 an opportunity of letting each other clearly understand what the 

 point was on which we disagreed, and the grounds of that disagree- 

 ment. In early life I fear that my studies were not such as habitu- 

 ated my mind to the very strictest and closest reasonings ; nor 

 perhaps is it the natural bent . . . ." 



The artist, Mr. Gibb, whose incapacity in travelling is thus hu- 



* Burke and Hare, who were tried in Edinburgh, in 1829, for a series of murders perpetrated 

 for the purpose of supplying the medical school with anatomical subjects.: — See Nodes Ambro- 

 aiance, 1U0. 



