ion had
been of old familiar to him."

In looking over his letters at this time (1791), we are startled by a
fierce outburst in one of them, apparently apropos of nothing. He had
been recommending to the protection of an Edinburgh friend a
schoolmaster, whom he thought unjustly persecuted, when all at once he
breaks out: "God help the children of Dependence! Hated and persecuted
by their enemies, and too often, alas! almost unexceptionally, received
by their friends with disrespect and reproach, under the thin disguise
of cold civility and humiliating advice. Oh to be a sturdy savage, (p. 130)
stalking in the pride of his independence, amid the solitary wilds of
his deserts, rather than in civilized life helplessly to tremble for a
subsistence, precarious as the caprice of a fellow-creature! Every man
has his virtues, and no man is without his failings; and curse on that
privileged plain-speaking of friendship which, in the hour of my
calamity, cannot reach forth the helping-hand without at the same time
pointing out those failings, and apportioning them their share in
procuring my present distress.... I do not want to be independent that
I may sin, but I want to be independent in my sinning."

What may have been the cause of this ferocious explosion there is no
explanation. Whether the real source of it may not have lain in
certain facts which had occurred during the past spring, that must
have rudely broken in on the peace at once of his conscience and his
home, we cannot say. Certainly it does seem, as Chambers suggests,
like one of those sudden outbursts of temper which fasten on some mere
passing accident, because the real seat of it lies too deep for words.
Some instances of the same temper we have already seen. This is a
sample of a growing exasperation of spirit, which found expression
from time to time till the close of his life.

Let us turn from this painful subject, to one of the only notices we
get of him from a stranger's hand during the summer of 1791. Two
English gentlemen, who were travelling, went to visit him; one of whom
has left an amusing account of their reception. Calling at his house,
they were told that the poet was by the river-side, and thither they
went in search of him. On a rock that projected into the stream, they
saw a man employed in angling, of a singular appearance. He had a cap
of fox's skin on his head, a loose great coat fixed round him by a (p. 131)
belt, from which depended an