forgot to do a thing which he was under an obligation to perform. Many of the most judicious modern authors also favour this opinion. Addison makes his Cato, sometime before his fatal exit, express himself thus, “What means this _heaviness_ that hangs upon me?” Shakspeare also makes Banquo exclaim, when he is about to set out on his journey, “A heavy summons hangs like lead upon me.” De Foe makes an instance of this kind the means of saving the life of Crusoe, at the same time admonishing his readers not to make light of these emotions of the mind, but to be upon their guard, and pray to God to assist them and bear them through, and direct them in what may happen to their prejudice in consequence thereof. “To what, then, are we to attribute these singular emotions? Shall we impute them to the agency of spiritual beings called guardian Angels, or more properly to the “Divinity that stirs within us, and points out an _hereafter_?” However it may be, it is our business to make the best of such hints, which I am confident every man has experienced, perhaps more frequently than he is aware of. “In great towns the hurry and dissipation that attend the opulent, and the little leisure that the poor have, from following the avocations which necessity drives them to, prevent them from taking any notice of similar instances to the foregoing, which may happen to themselves. But the case is quite different in the Highlands of Scotland, where they live solitary, and have little to do, or see done, and consequently, comparatively have but few ideas. When any thing of the above nature occurs, they have leisure to brood over it, and cannot get it banished from their minds, by which means it gains a deep and lasting impression, and often various circumstances may happen by which it may be interpreted, just like the ancient oracles by the priests of the heathen deities. This solitary situation of our neighbours is also productive of an opinion of a worse tendency—I mean the belief in spirits and apparitions, to which no people on earth are more addicted than the Scotch Highlanders: this opinion they suck in with their mother’s milk, and it increases with their years and stature. Not a glen or strath, but is haunted by its particular _goblins_ and _fairies_. And, indeed, the face of the country is in some places such, that it wears a very solemn appearance, even to a philosophic eye. The fall of cataracts of water down steep declivities, the whistling of the wind among heath, rocks and caverns, a loose fragment of a rock falling from its top, and in its course downward bringing a hundred more with it, so that it appears like the wreck of nature; the hooting of the night-owl, the chattering of the heath-cock, the pale light of the moon on the dreary prospect, with here and there a solitary tree on an eminence, which fear magnifies to an unusual size; all these considered, it is not to be wondered at, that