"A lowly muse!
She sings of reptiles yet in song unknown."
I returned to the vessel with a heavy heart; and it was nearly three
months from this time ere I again set foot in Edinburgh. Alas! for my
unfortunate friend! He was now an inmate of the asylum, and on the verge
of dissolution. I was thrown, by accident, shortly after my arrival at
this time, into the company of one of his boon companions. I had gone
into a tavern with a brother sailor--a shrewd, honest skipper, from the
north country; and, finding the place occupied by half a dozen young
fellows, who were growing noisy over their liquor, I would have
immediately gone out again, had I not caught, in the passing, a few
words regarding my friend. And so, drawing to a side-table, I sat down.
"Believe me," said one of the topers, a dissolute-looking young man,
"it's all over with Bob Ferguson--all over; and I knew it from the
moment he grew religious. Had old Brown tried to convert me, I would
have broken his face."
"What Brown?" inquired one of his companions.
"Is that all you know?" rejoined the other. "Why, John Brown of
Haddington, the Seceder. Bob was at Haddington last year, at the
election; and, one morning, when in the horrors, after holding a rum
night of it, who should he meet in the churchyard but old John
Brown?--he writes, you know, a big book on the Bible. Well, he lectured
Bob at a pretty rate, about election and the call, I suppose; and the
poor fellow has been mad ever since. Your health, Jamie. For my own
part, I'm a freewill man, and detest all cant and humbug."
"And what has come of Ferguson now?" asked one of the others.
"Oh, mad, sir, mad," rejoined the toper--"reading the Bible all day, and
cooped up in the asylum yonder. 'Twas I who brought him to it.--But,
lads, the glass has been standing for the last half-hour.--'Twas I and
Jack Robinson who brought him to it, as I say. He was getting wild; and
so we got a sedan for him, and trumped up a story of an invitation for
tea from a lady, and he came with us as quietly as a lamb. But, if you
could have heard the shriek he gave when the chair stopped, and he saw
where we had brought him! I never heard anything half so horrible--it
rang in my ears for a week after; and then, how the mad people in the
upper rooms howled and gibbered in reply, till the very roof echoed!
People say he is getting better; but, when I last saw him, he was as
religious as ever, and spoke so much about heaven, that it was
uncomfortable to hear him. Great loss to his friends, after all the
expense they have been at with his education."
"You seem to have been intimate with Mr. Ferguson," I said.
"Oh, intimate with Bob!" he rejoined; "we were hand and glove, man. I
have sat with him in Lucky Middlemass's, almost every evening, for two
years; and I have given him hints for some of the best things in his
book. 'Twas I who tumbled down the cage in the Meadows, and began
breaking the lamps.
'Ye who oft finish care in Lethe's cup,
Who love to swear and roar, and _keep it up_,
List to a brother's voice, whose sole delight
Is sleep all day, and riot all the night.'
There's spirit for you! But Bob was never sound at bottom; and I have
told him so. 'Bob,' I have said, 'Bob, you're but a hypocrite after all,
man--without half the spunk you pretend to. Why don't you take a pattern
by me, who fear nothing, and believe only the agreeable? But, poor
fellow, he had weak nerves, and a church-going propensity that did him
no good; and you see the effects. 'Twas all nonsense, Tom, of his
throwing the squib into the Glassite meeting-house. Between you and I,
that was a cut far beyond him in his best days, poet as he was. 'Twas I
who did it, man, and never was there a cleaner row in auld Reekie."
"Heartless, contemptible puppy!" said my comrade, the sailor, as we left
the room. "Your poor friend must be ill, indeed, if he be but half as
insane as his quondam companion. But he cannot: there is no madness like
that of the heart. What could have induced a man of genius to associate
with a thing so thoroughly despicable?"
"The same misery, Miller," I said, "that brings a man _acquainted with
strange bedfellows_."