arks the date--it was
_the Mountain_. Here, as Roger North says of the Court of King's Bench
in his early day, "there was more news than law;"--here hour after
hour passed away, week after week, month after month, and year after
year, in the interchange of light-hearted merriment among a circle of
young men, more than one of whom, in after-times, attained the highest
honors of the profession. Among the most intimate of Scott's daily
associates from this time, and during all his subsequent attendance at
the Bar, were, besides various since-eminent persons that have been
already named, the first legal antiquary of our time in Scotland, Mr.
Thomas Thomson, and William Erskine, afterwards Lord Kinnedder. Mr.
Clerk remembers complaining one morning on finding the group convulsed
with laughter, that _Duns Scotus_ had been forestalling him in a good
story, which he had communicated privately the day before--adding,
moreover, that his friend had not only stolen, but disguised it.
"Why," answered he, skilfully waiving the main charge, "this {p.184}
is always the way with _the Baronet_. He is continually saying that I
change his stories, whereas in fact I only put a cocked hat on their
heads, and stick a cane into their hands--to make them fit for going
into company."

The German class, of which we have an account in one of the Prefaces
of 1830, was formed before the Christmas of 1792, and it included
almost all these loungers of _the Mountain_. In the essay now referred
to Scott traces the interest excited in Scotland on the subject of
German literature to a paper read before the Royal Society of
Edinburgh, on the 21st of April, 1788, by the author of The Man of
Feeling. "The literary persons of Edinburgh," he says, "were then
first made aware of the existence of works of genius in a language
cognate with the English, and possessed of the same manly force of
expression; they learned at the same time that the taste which
dictated the German compositions was of a kind as nearly allied to the
English as their language: those who were from their youth accustomed
to admire Shakespeare and Milton, became acquainted for the first time
with a race of poets, who had the same lofty ambition to spurn the
flaming boundaries of the universe, and investigate the realms of
Chaos and Old Night; and of dramatists, who, disclaiming the pedantry
of the unities, sought, at the expense of occasional improbabilities
and extravagance, to present life