10 SKETCH OF THE AUTHORS LIFE. 



The era of the false alarm, originating in the 

 juncture of Buonaparte's threatened invasion, was a 

 period of vivid sensations to the subject of our notice, 

 as it was to most at that time. He was strutting on 

 the top of his teens, and shouldered a firelock as a 

 member of the Militia Corps. This he did with a 

 perfect consciousness expressed all through life, that 

 fighting was the most abject of all human occu- 

 pations. The trade of soldiering was abhorrent to 

 his moral sense and the habits of his mind ; and no 

 member of the peace society could have more 

 scrupulously examined the motives under which he 

 appeared as a defender of his country. In one of 

 his opinions on the subject, afterwards recorded, he 

 says, " it is very distressing for the human mind to 

 contemplate the dire movement of congregated 

 masses of flesh and blood, dragged out in the train 

 of hellish ambition for the most horrible purposes, 

 following individuals who shew themselves so utterly 

 unworthy of even personal existence." On the night 

 on which the beacons were lighted, the 31st January, 

 1804, when the heart of the nation heaved in one 

 fiery swell of patriotic feeling, John marched to the 

 place of rendezvous, ten miles distant, and tore his 

 trousers in scaling the palisades of Kelso bridge toll- 

 house. The grotesque features of his night's adven- 



