to make
good his claim. And, having a quarrel with the kirk-session, in a
certain delicate department, he had joined the processionists, and
celebrated their achievements in a ballad entirely worthy of them. And
it was perhaps the severest cut of all, that the recognised leader of
the band pronounced Chaucer the younger a greatly better poet than me.
There were representations, too, made to my superiors in the banking
department at Edinburgh, which procured me a reprimand, though a gentle
one; but my superior in Cromarty--Mr. Ross--as wise and good a man as
any in the direction, and thoroughly acquainted with the merits of the
case, was wholly on my side. I am afraid the reader may deem all this
very foolish, and hold that I would have been better employed among the
rocks, in determining the true relations of their various beds, and the
character of their organisms, than in bickering in a petty village
quarrel, and making myself enemies. And yet, man being what he is, I
fear an ability of efficient squabbling is a greatly more marketable one
than any ability whatever of extending the boundaries of natural
science. At least so it was, that while my geological researches did
nothing for me at this time, my letter in the procession controversy
procured for me the offer of a newspaper editorship. But though, in a
pecuniary point of view, I should have considerably bettered my
circumstances by closing with it, I found I could not do so without
assuming the character of the special pleader, and giving myself to the
advocacy of views and principles which I really did not hold; and so I
at once declined the office, as one for which I did not deem myself
suited, and could not in conscience undertake.

I found about this time more congenial employment, though, of course, it
occupied only my leisure hours, in writing the memoir of a townsman--the
late Mr. William Forsyth, of Cromarty--at the request of his relation
and son in-law, my friend Mr. Isaac Forsyth, of Elgin. William Forsyth
had been a grown man ere the abolition of the hereditary jurisdictions;
and from the massiveness and excellence of his character, and his high
standing as a merchant, in a part of the country in which merchants at
the time were few, he had succeeded, within the precincts of the town,
to not a little of the power of the hereditary Sheriff of the district;
and after acting for more than half a century as a laborious Justice of
the Peace, and succeeding