vergreen, was the first poetry which I
perused. My mother had good natural taste and great feeling: she used
to make me pause upon those passages which expressed generous and
worthy sentiments, and if she could not divert me from those which
were descriptive of battle and tumult, she contrived at least to
divide my attention between them. My own enthusiasm, however, was
chiefly awakened by the wonderful and the terrible--the common taste
of children, but in which I have remained a child even unto this day.
I got by heart, not as a task, but almost without intending it, the
passages with which I was most pleased, and used to recite them aloud,
both when alone and to others--more willingly, however, in my hours of
solitude, for I had observed some auditors smile, and I dreaded
ridicule at that time of life more than I have ever done since.

In [1778] I was sent to the second class of the Grammar School, or
High School of Edinburgh, then taught by Mr. Luke Fraser, a good Latin
scholar and a very worthy man.[28] Though I had received, with my
brothers, in private, lessons of Latin from Mr. James French, now a
minister of the Kirk of Scotland, I was nevertheless rather behind the
class in which I was placed both in years and in progress. This was a
real disadvantage, and one to which a boy of lively temper and talents
ought to be as little exposed as one who might be less expected to
make up his leeway, as it is called. The situation has the unfortunate
effect of reconciling a boy of the former {p.023} character (which
in a posthumous work I may claim for my own) to holding a subordinate
station among his class-fellows--to which he would otherwise affix
disgrace. There is, also, from the constitution of the High School, a
certain danger not sufficiently attended to. The boys take precedence
in their _places_, as they are called, according to their merit, and
it requires a long while, in general, before even a clever boy, if he
falls behind the class, or is put into one for which he is not quite
ready, can force his way to the situation which his abilities really
entitle him to hold. But, in the mean while, he is necessarily led to
be the associate and companion of those inferior spirits with whom he
is placed; for the system of precedence, though it does not limit the
general intercourse among the boys, has nevertheless the effect of
throwing them into clubs and coteries, according to the vicinity of
the seats they hold. A b