After recovering from this illness his constitution changed, and he became unusually robust, and capable of enduring great bodily and mental fatigue; even his lameness occasioning no serious inconvenience. He then applied himself in earnest to the study of law, and, to acquire a thorough knowledge of its technicalities, went through the duties of a clerk in his father’s office. He completed the usual course of legal education, and was called to the bar in July, 1792. He seemed however little anxious for business; and as usual, business unsought came slowly: in his legal capacity he acquired neither wealth nor distinction. But, in amends for this, in those days of volunteer corps, he made an admirable quarter-master to the Edinburgh Light Dragoons; and his zeal and skill, and the popularity which his high powers of social entertainment procured, recommended him to the friendship of the Duke of Buccleugh, by whose interest he obtained, in December, 1799, the appointment of Sheriff of Selkirkshire, with a salary of 300_l._ He had married in 1797 Miss Carpenter, a lady of foreign birth but English parentage, possessed of fortune sufficient, when added to the salary of his office, and his own patrimonial inheritance, to release him from the necessity of labouring at the bar for a livelihood. This was a step on which his mind had been some time bent. “My profession and I,” he says, “came to stand nearly on the footing which honest Slender consoled himself on having established with Mistress Anne Page—‘There was no great love between us at the beginning, and it pleased Heaven to decrease it on farther acquaintance.’ I became sensible that the time was come when I must either buckle myself resolutely to ‘the toil by day, the lamp by night,’ renouncing all the Dalilahs of my imagination, or bid adieu to the profession of the law, and hold another course.”