again; and Jack from Dover, after a fortnight of
misery, used to appear with the ordinary bulk of merchandise at his
back, and continue thriving until he again got drunk. He had a turn for
buying and reading curious books, which, after mastering their contents,
he always sold again; and he learned to bring them, when of a kind which
no one else would purchase, to my mother, and recommend them as suitable
for me. Poor Jack was always conscientious in his recommendations. I
know not how he contrived to take the exact measure of my tastes in the
matter, but suitable for me they invariably were; and as his price
rarely exceeded a shilling per volume, and sometimes fell below a
sixpence, my mother always purchased, when she could, upon his judgment.
I owed to his discrimination my first copy of Bacon's "Wisdom of the
Ancients," "done into English by Sir Arthur Gorges," and a book to which
I had long after occasion to refer in my geological writings--Maillet's
"Telliamed"--one, of the earlier treatises on the development
hypothesis; and he had now procured for me a selection, in one volume,
of the Poems of Gawin Douglas and Will Dunbar, and another collection
in a larger volume, of "Ancient Scottish Poems," from the MSS. of George
Bannatyne. I had been previously almost wholly unacquainted with the
elder Scotch poets. My uncle James had introduced me, at a very early
age, to Burns and Ramsay, and I had found out Fergusson and Tannahill
for myself; but that school of Scotch literature which nourished between
the reigns of David the Second and James the Sixth had remained to me,
until now, well-nigh a _terra incognita_, and I found no little pleasure
in exploring the antique recesses which it opened up. Shortly after, I
read Ramsay's "Evergreen," the "King's Quair," and the true "Actes and
Deides of ye illuster and vailyeand campioun Shyr Wilham Wallace," not
modernized, as in my first copy, but in the tongue in which they had
been recited of old by Henry the Minstrel: I had previously gloated over
Harbour's Bruce; and thus my acquaintance with the old Scots poets, if
not very profound, became at least so respectable, that not until many
years after did I meet with an individual who knew them equally well.

The strange picturesque allegories of Douglas, and the terse sense and
racy humour of Dunbar, delighted me much. As I had to con my way slowly
amid the difficulties of a language which was no longer that spoken by
my country