Page:A biographical dictionary of eminent Scotsmen, vol 9.djvu/199

Rh business," he writes to his friend Macnish, "has ramified itself so much in all directions of the compass, save the north, where we are bounded by the sea, that on an average I have sixteen or eighteen miles' daily riding; nor can this be commenced before three or four hours of pedestrian exercise has been hurried through. I seldom get from horseback till five o'clock, and by half-past six I must be out to the evening rounds, which never terminate till after nine. Add to this the medical casualties occurring between sunset and sunrise, and you will see how much can be reasonably set down to the score of my leisure." The wonder is, that with such a harassing amount of occupation, and almost total want of leisure, Moir should have continued to write so much as he did, or even that he should have written at all.

In February, 1838, affliction visited the happy home of Delta, and bereaved him of two children, the eldest four-and-a-half years old, the other only fifteen months. The first of these, Charles Bell, who named himself in childish frolic, Casa Wappy, is well known to the world, and especially to many a mother's tender heart, by the touching poetical commemoration of his grieving father, who lamented him in an elegy which he never surpassed, or perhaps even equalled. Who can read unmoved the following stanzas?

Of his five children he could still remember that three were left to him, and he consoled himself with the thought; but only a year after he was bereaved of a third child, David Macbeth Moir, his little namesake. "Three blessed beings," he thus exclaims—

In this manner Delta was wont to express and chronicle the chief feelings of his own private life, and at first they were only circulated among his friends. But the approbation they called forth from Wordsworth, Tennyson, and Montgomery among the poets; from Jeffrey and Lockhart among the critics, and