ne thought I had
injured him, he would have done well to ask an explanation in a more
private manner. As it is, I fairly own, that though I like many of you
very much, and have long done so, I think William Clerk well worth you
all put together." The senior in the chair was wise enough to laugh,
and the evening passed off without further disturbance.

As one effect of his office education, Scott soon began to preserve in
regular files the letters addressed to him; and from the style and
tone of such letters, as Mr. Southey observes in his Life of Cowper, a
man's character may often be gathered even more surely than from those
written by himself. The first series of any considerable extent in his
collection includes letters dated as far back as 1786, and proceeds,
with not many interruptions, down beyond the period when his fame had
been established. I regret, that from the delicate nature of the
transactions chiefly dwelt upon in the earlier of these
communications, I dare not make a free use of them; but I feel it my
duty to record the strong impression they have left on my own mind of
high generosity of affection, coupled with calm judgment, and
perseverance in well-doing, on the part of the stripling Scott. To
these indeed every line in the collection bears pregnant testimony. A
young gentleman, born of good family, and heir to a tolerable fortune,
is sent to Edinburgh College, and is seen partaking, along with Scott,
through several apparently happy and careless years, of the studies
and amusements {p.141} of which the reader may by this time have
formed an adequate notion. By degrees, from the usual license of his
equal comrades, he sinks into habits of a looser description--becomes
reckless, contracts debts, irritates his own family almost beyond hope
of reconciliation, is virtually cast off by them, runs away from
Scotland, forms a marriage far below his condition in a remote part of
the sister kingdom--and, when the poor girl has made him a father,
then first begins to open his eyes to the full consequences of his mad
career. He appeals to Scott, by this time in his eighteenth year, "as
the truest and noblest of friends," who had given him "the earliest
and the strongest warnings," had assisted him "the most generously
throughout all his wanderings and distresses," and will not now
abandon him in his "penitent lowliness of misery," the result of his
seeing "virtue and innocence involved in the punishment of his