physician, who practised twenty years among
them, and informs me that few of the richer sort live to be fifty, but
die of a sort of atrophy, their cold blood just stagnating by degrees
among their flabby fat. They eat too much, he says; take little
exercise; and, above all, have no nervous excitement. The affection is
known in this part of the country by the name of _the Quaker's
disease_, and more than one-half of them go out so. I think this
curious, though not worth coming to Liverpool to hear, or writing from
Liverpool, &c.'

He was at this time about to sail for America, in order to marry a
lady of that country. In a letter to Morehead, he recalls his
old-fashioned country residence of Hatton, in West Lothian, and Mr
Morehead's family now resident there. Tuckey was a nickname for one of
Mr Morehead's daughters; Margaret was another. Till the last, he had
pet names for all his own descendants and relatives, having no doubt
felt how much they contribute to the promotion of family affection. 'I
am almost ashamed of the degree of sorrow I feel at leaving all the
early and long-prized objects of my affection; and though I am
persuaded I do right in the step which I am taking, I cannot help
wishing that it had not been quite so wide and laborious a one. You
cannot think how beautiful Hatton appears at this moment in my
imagination, nor with what strong emotion I fancy I hear Tuckey
telling a story on my knee, and see Margaret poring upon her French
before me. It is in your family that my taste for domestic society and
domestic enjoyments has been nurtured and preserved. Such a child as
Tuckey I shall never see again in this world. Heaven bless her, and
she will be a blessing both to her mother and to you.' After touching
upon a volume of poems which Mr Morehead had published--'If I were
you, however, I would live more with Tuckey, and be satisfied with my
gardening and pruning--with my preaching--a good deal of walking and
comfortable talking. What more has life? and how full of vexation are
all ambitious fancies and perplexing pursuits! Well, God bless you!
Perhaps I shall not have an opportunity to inculcate my innocent
epicurism upon you for a long time again. It will do you no harm.'

It will be a new fact to most of the admirers of Jeffrey, that he had
in early life devoted himself to the writing of poetry. Of what he
wrote between 1791 and 1796, the greater part has disappeared from his
repositories. 'But,' says