I believe poor Hetended them in winter

also.

"From that bleak tenement,

He many an evening to his distant home
In solitude returning, saw the hills
Grow larger in the darkness, all alone
Beheld the stars come out above his head,

And travell❜d through the wood, with no one near
To whom he might confess the things he saw.
So the foundations of his mind were laid.
In such communion, not from terror free,
While yet a child, and long before his time,
He had perceived the presence and the power
Of greatness; and deep feeling had impressed
Great objects on his mind, with portraiture
And colour so distinct, that on his mind
They lay like substances, and almost seemed
To haunt the bodily sense."

Those who have read the Shepherd's latest writings, as I fear you have not done, would find still stronger confirmation of my idea in what follows:

"Thus informed,

He had small need of books; for many a tale,
Traditionary round the mountains hung,
And many a legend, peopling the dark woods,
Nourished imagination in her youth.

The life and death of Martyrs, who sustained,
With will inflexible, those fearful pangs
Triumphantly displayed in records left,

Of persecution and the Covenant-Times

Whose echo rings through Scotland to this hour."

But I must not think of discussing the Ettrick Shepherd in a single letter. As for the Burns' dinner, I really cannot in honesty pretend to give you any very exact history of the latter part of its occurrences, As the night kept advancing, the company kept diminishing, till about one o'clock in the morning, when we found ourselves reduced to a small staunch party of some five-and-twenty, men not to be shaken from their allegiance to King Bacchus, by any changes in his administration in other words, men who by no means considered it as necessary to leave the room, because one, or even because two presidents had set them such an example, The last of these presidents, Mr P. Rob a young counsellor of very rising reputation and most pleasant manners, made his approach to the chair amidst such a thunder of acclamation as seems to be issuing from the cheeks of the Bacchantes, when Silenus gets astride on his ass, in the famous picture of Rubens. Once in the chair, there was no fear of his quitting it while any remained to pay homage due to his authority. He made speeches, one chief merit of which consisted (unlike Epic poems) in their

having neither beginning, middle, nor end. He sung songs in which music was not. He proposed toasts in which meaning was not-But over everything that he said there was flung such a radiance of sheer mother-wit, that there was no difficulty in seeing the want of meaning was no involuntary want. By the perpetual dazzle of his wit, by the cordial flow of his good humour, but above all, by the cheering influence of his broad happy face, seen through its halo of punchsteam (for even the chair had by this time got enough of the juice of the grape,) he contrived to diffuse over us all, for a long time, one genial atmosphere of unmingled mirth, How we got out of that atmosphere, I cannot say I remember, but am, notwithstanding,

Ever your's,

P. M.

144

LETTER XIII.

TO THE SAME.

DEAR DAVID,

WHEN you reproach me with being so long at the seat of a celebrated University, and yet preserving the most profound silence concerning tutors, professors, examinations, degrees, and all the other mighty items of academical life, you do no more than I might have expected from one, who has derived his only ideas of an university from Oxford and Cambridge. In these places, the university is everything; the houses of the town seem merely to be the appendages of the colleges, and the townsmen themselves only a better sort of menials to the gownsmen. If you hear a bell ring there, you may be sure it is meant to call together those whose duty it is to attend in some chapel, hall, or lecture-room; you see a man pull off his hat in the street,

if

you may be sure it is in honour of some tuft, sleeve, or scarf, well accustomed to such obeisances. Here the case is very different. The academical buildings, instead of forming the bulk and centre of every prospect-instead of shooting up towers and domes and battlements in every direction, far above, not only the common dwellings of the citizens, but the more ancient and more lofty groves of oak and elm, in which, for centuries, they have been embosomed -instead of all this proud and sweeping extent of venerable magnificence, the academical buildings of Edinburgh are piled together in one rather obscure corner of a splendid city, which would scarcely be less splendid than it is, although they were removed altogether from its precincts. In the society among which I have lived since my arrival here, (and I assure you its circle has been by no means a very confined one,) I am convinced there are few subjects about which so little is said or thought, as the University of Edinburgh. I rather think, that a well-educated stranger, who had no previous knowledge that an university had its seat in this place, (if we can suppose the existence of such a person,) might sojourn in Edinburgh for many weeks, without making the discovery for him