A man may, now and then, adopt a change of liquor with advantage; but, upon the whole, I like better to see people "stick to their vocation." I think nothing can be a more pitiable sight than a French count on his travels, striving to look pleased over a bumper of strong port; and an Oxford doctor of divinity looks almost as much like a fish out of water, when he is constrained to put up with the best claret in the world. In like manner, it would bave tended very much to have disturbed my notions of propriety, bad I found the Ettrick Shepherd drinking Champaigne or Hock. It would have been a sin against keeping with such a face as he has. Although for some time past he has spent a considerable portion of every year in excellent, even in refined society, the external appearance of the man can have undergone but very little change since he was a herd on Yarrow." His face and hands are still as brown as if he lived entirely sub dio. His very hair has a coarse stringiness about it, which proves beyond dispute its utter ignorance of all the arts of the friseur; and hangs in playful whips and cords about his ears, in a style of the most perfect innocence imaginable. His mouth, which, when he smiles, nearly cuts the totality of his face in twain, is an object that would make the Chevalier Ruspini die with indignation; for his teeth have been allowed to grow where they listed, and as they listed, presenting more resemblance, in arrangement (and colour too), to a body of crouching sharp-shooters, than to any more regular species of array. The effect of a forehead, towering with a true poetic grandeur above such features as these, and of an eye that illuminates their surface with the genuine lightnings of genius,—

66

an eye that, under brows

Shaggy and deep, has meanings which are brought
From years of youth,-

these are things which I cannot so easily transfer to my paper. Upon the whole, his exterior reminded me very much of some of Wordsworth's descriptions of his pedlar :

Indeed, I can scarcely help suspecting, that that great poet, who was himself thought so much

"On Man, on Nature, and on Human Life,
Musing in solitude".

must have thought more than once of the intellectual history of the Ettrick Shepherd when he drew that noble sketch, which no man can ridicule, unless from a vicious want of faith in the greatness of human nature. Neither is there any thing unlikely in the supposition in another point of view, for W tells me the two poets have often met, and always expressed the highest admiration for each other. He says,

"From his sixth year, the boy of whom I speak,
In summer tended cattle on the hills."

I believe poor Hogg tended 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 travelled 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:

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's 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. R, 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 every thing 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 punch-steam, (for even the chair had by this time got enough of the justice 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 yours,

P. M.

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 a university from Oxford and Cambridge. In these places, the university is every thing; 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; if you see a man pull off his hat in the street, 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 a 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 himself. And yet, from all I can hear, the number of resident members of this university

is seldom below two thousand, and among those by whom their education is conducted, there are unquestionably some, whose names, in whatever European university they might be placed, could not fail to be regarded as among the most illustrious of its ornaments.

The first and most obvious cause of the smallness of attention attracted to the University of Edinburgh, is evidently the want of any academical dress. There are no gownsmen here, and this circumstance is one which, with our Oxford ideas, would alone be almost sufficient to prove the non-existence of a university. This, however, is a small matter after all, and rather an effect than a cause. The members of the university do not reside, as ours do, within the walls of colleges; they go once or twice every day, as it may happen, to hear a discourse pronounced by one of their professors; but beyond this, they have little connexion of any kind with the locale of the academical buildings; and it follows very naturally, that they feel themselves to have comparatively a very slight connexion with academical life. They live in their fathers' houses, (for a great proportion of them belong to the city itself,) or they inhabit lodgings in whatever part of the city they please; and they dine alone or together, just as it suits them; they are never compelled to think of each other beyond the brief space of the day in which they are seated in the same lecture-room; in short, the whole course and tenor of their existence is unacademical, and by persons thinking and living in a way so independent of each other, and so dispersed among the crowds of a city such as Edinburgh, any such badges of perpetual distinction as our cap and gown, could scarcely fail to be regarded as very absurd and disagreeable incumbrances. The want of these, however, has its disadvantages as well as its advantages, even in regard to their own individual comfort.

So far as I comprehend the first part of the general system of University education in this place, it is as follows. The students enter at fourteen, fifteen, or even much earlier-exactly as used to be the case in our own universities two centuries ago; for I remember it is mentioned in Lord Herbert of Cherbury's Memoirs, (and that, too, as a matter by no means out of the common course,) that he was not twelve years old when he came to reside at Oxford. When they enter, they are far less skilled in Latin than boys of the same