were all decently surprised, etc., one of them in the midst of the _Is it possibles? Not-possibles!_ and _Can it be possibles?_ incidental to the occasion, summed up his elegy, by trivially exclaiming, “Lord! is Rab dead at last! Weel, that’s strange indeed!—not a week since I drank six half-mutchkins wi’ him down at _Amos’s_! Ah! he was a good bitch! (Then raising his voice) Bring us in a biscuit wi’ the next gill, mistress! Rab was ay fond o’ bakes!” And they ate a biscuit to his memory! It is somewhat remarkable that the deaths of Crosbie and H—— should have been produced by causes and attended by circumstances nearly the same, though a period of full twenty years had intervened between the events. Both were men of great learning and abilities,—they were drawn down from the height in which their talents entitled them to shine by the same unfortunate propensities,—and while, in their latter days, both experienced the reverse of fortune invariably attendant upon imprudence, they at length left the scene of their notoriety, equally despised, deserted, and miserable. Both cases are well calculated to illustrate the lesson so strenuously inculcated by Johnson,—that to have friends we must first be virtuous, as there is no friendship among the profligate. Mr. Crosbie’s death presents the more trite moral of the two—for in it we see little more than the world forsaking an unfortunate man, as crowds fly from the falling temple, to avoid being crushed in the ruins. But the moral of Mr. H——’s death is striking and valuable. In him we see a man of the brightest genius gradually losing that self-respect, so necessary, even when it amounts to pride, for the cultivation and proper enjoyment of superior mental powers,—becoming in time unsettled in his habits, and careless of public estimation,—losing the attachment of friends of his own rank, and compensating the loss by mixing with associates of the lowest order:—next, become incapable of business, we see him dejected and forlorn as poverty itself, by turns assuming every colour and every aspect of which the human countenance and figure is susceptible, till the whole was worn down to a degree of indiscriminate ruin—the _ne plus ultra_ of change:—at length, when every vulgar mode of enjoyment had been exhausted, and when even the fiercest stimulants had grown insipid, we see him lost at once to sensibility and to sensation, encountering the last evils of mortality in wretchedness and obscurity, unpitied by the very persons for whom he had sacrificed so much, and leaving a name for which he expected to acquire the fame of either talent or misfortune, “To point a moral and adorn a tale!”[15] SOUTH COUNTRY FARMERS. (_Dandie Dinmont._)