138 MEMOIR OF GEORGE WILSON. CHAP. Ill, 



" April 7th, 1838. 



" I did not expect to have had the pleasure of writing, except, 

 perhaps, a few lines at the bottom of some other person's letter, 

 but I studied this last week till I gave myself a headache that 

 drove me from the college to wander away and inhale the spring 

 breezes. 



" And this day being Saturday, and Sam Brown having come 

 into town yesternight, I shall just take a holiday, hoping the 

 better on Monday to assail all the recondite and abstruse sub- 

 jects which must be made at present my daily fare. 



" Many and many a choice thought you should have had and 

 have lost, because, not having an amanuensis, they were all given 

 to the winds and lost for ever ; now and then only did an idea 

 seem deserving enough of treasuring up, to be thought of a 

 second time, and commissioned southwards. There was, for 

 instance, a declaration of Professor Jameson, that leather, espe- 

 cially that from the sow's back, was of great use to ' saddlers, 

 trunkmakers, and other artists' which I thought could not fail 

 to give you a pleasing idea of the category to which your fellow - 

 worker and friend belonged. 



" Owen has been here with his wild vagaries of a new moral 

 world, and his living in parallelograms of harmony. D. is 

 smitten ; came to me telling that he had had very few antipa- 

 thies before, but he had none now ; and explaining to me how 

 foolish and absurd it was of me to be angry, seeing the object of 

 my anger was possessed of the character he had because society 

 had made him so, and a great deal more in that strain. He left 

 me Owen's book, desiring me to read it. I tried a page or two, 

 and found it as you may imagine, just such a tissue of nonsense 

 as Whitelaw, the vapour-bath man, wrote in his Buttercup 

 theories of disease. You had just to change the subject-matter, 

 and the mode of reasoning would have served either. I ex- 

 pounded a page to him, forcing his assent to the proposition ; I 

 built upon it, by obliging him to confess that he could not 

 understand it, and he of course replied, in his own characteristic 

 way, that Moses and David and Job did not know of a future 

 world, and sundry other equally cogent arguments ; and when I 

 proceeded to prove to him that Job and his friends did, he 



