The school of Cromarty produced, like most of the other schools of the kingdom, its Latinists who caught fish and made shoes; and it is not much more than thirty years since the race became finally extinct. I have heard stories of an old house-painter of the place, who, having survived most of his schoolfellows and contemporaries, used to regret, among his other vanished pleasures, the pleasure he could once derive from an inexhaustible fund of Latin quotation, which the ignorance of a younger generation had rendered of little more value to him than the paper-money of an insolvent bank; and I have already referred to an old cabinetmaker whom I remember, who was in the practice, when his sight began to fail him, of carrying his Latin New Testament with him to church, as it chanced to be printed in a clearer type than any of his English ones. It is said, too, of a learned fisherman of the reign of Queen Anne, that when employed one day among his tackle, he was accosted in Latin by the proprietor of Cromarty, who, accompanied by two gentlemen from England, was sauntering along the shore, and that, to the surprise of the strangers, he replied with no little fluency in the same language. The old castle rose, I have said, direct in front of the old school, about three hundred yards away; and, tall itself, and elevated by the green hill on which it stood, it formed, with all its timeworn turrets, and all its mouldering bartisans, a formidable spectre of the past. Little thought the proud hereditary sheriffs of the stern old tower, that the humble building at the foot of the hill was a masked battery raised against their authority, which was to burst open their dungeon door and to beat down their gallows. But a very formidable battery it proved. There is a class of nature’s aristocracy that has but to arise from among the people, in order that the people may become influential and free; and the lowly old school did its part in separating from the general mass its due proportion of these, as mercury separates gold from the pulverized rock in which it is contained. If, in passing along the streets, we see a handsomer domicile than the low tenements around it, we may safely conclude that the builder spent his boyhood in the old school; that if he went out to some of the colonies, he carried with him as his stock in trade a knowledge of figures and the pen, and returned with both that and a few thousands on which to employ it; or if his inclination led him to sea, that he became, through his superior intelligence, the commander of a vessel; if to London, that he rose into wealth as a merchant; or if he remained at home, that he gained a competency as a shopkeeper, general trader, or master mechanic. I am not making too much of my subject when I affirm, that the little thatched hovel at the foot of the Castle-hill gave merchants to the Exchange, ministers to the Church, physicians to the Faculty, professors to Colleges, and members to Parliament.