in making up more quarrels than most country
lawyers have an opportunity of fomenting--for the age was a rude and
combative one, and the merchant ever a peace-maker--he lived long enough
to see Liberty-and-Equality Clubs and Processions, and died about the
close of the first war of the French Revolution. It was an important
half-century in Scotland--though it exhibits but a narrow, inconspicuous
front in the history of the country--that intervened between the times
of the hereditary jurisdictions and the Liberty-and-Equality Clubs. It
was specially the period during which popular opinion began to assume
its potency, and in which the Scotland of the past merged, in
consequence, into the very dissimilar Scotland of the present. And I
derived much pleasure in tracing some of the more striking features of
this transition age in the biography of Mr. Forsyth. My little work was
printed, but not published, and distributed by Mr. Forsyth of Elgin
among the friends of the family, as perhaps a better and more adequate
memorial of a worthy and able man than could be placed over his grave.
It was on the occasion of the death of his last-surviving child--the
late Mrs. Mackenzie of Cromarty, a lady from whom I had received much
kindness, and under whose hospitable roof I had the opportunity afforded
me of meeting not a few superior men--that my memoir was undertaken; and
I regarded it as a fitting tribute to a worthy family just passed away,
at once deserving of being remembered for its own sake, and to which I
owed a debt of gratitude.

In the spring of 1839, a sad bereavement darkened my household, and for
a time left me little heart to pursue my wonted amusements, literary or
scientific. We had been visited, ten months after our marriage, by a
little girl, whose presence had added not a little to our happiness;
home became more emphatically such from the presence of the child, that
in a few months had learned so well to know its mother, and in a few
more to take its stand in the nurse's arms, at an upper window that
commanded the street, and to recognise and make signs to its father as
he approached the house. Its few little words, too, had a fascinating
interest to our ears;--our own names, lisped in a language of its own,
every time we approached; and the simple Scotch vocable "awa, awa,"
which it knew how to employ in such plaintive tones as we retired, and
that used to come back upon us in recollection, like an echo from the