rship is, at lowest, an honourable _gagne-pain_. But Murray, like
the majority of students endowed with literary originality, did not share
these rather old-fashioned ideas. The clever Scottish student is apt to
work only too hard, and, perhaps, is frequently in danger of exhausting
his powers before they are mature, and of injuring his health before it
is confirmed. His ambitions, to lookers-on, may seem narrow and school-
boyish, as if he were merely emulous, and eager for a high place in his
'class,' as lectures are called in Scotland. This was Murray's own view,
and he certainly avoided the dangers of academic over-work. He read
abundantly, but, as Fitzgerald says, he read 'for human pleasure.' He
never was a Greek scholar, he disliked Philosophy, as presented to him in
class-work; the gods had made him poetical, not metaphysical.

There was one other cause of his lack of even such slender commercial
success in letters as was really necessary to a man who liked 'plain
living and high thinking.' He fell early in love with a city, with a
place--he lost his heart to St. Andrews. Here, at all events, his critic
can sympathise with him. His 'dear St. Andrews Bay,' beautiful alike in
winter mists and in the crystal days of still winter sunshine; the quiet
brown streets brightened by the scarlet gowns; the long limitless sands;
the dark blue distant hills, and far-off snowy peaks of the Grampians;
the majestic melancholy towers, monuments of old religion overthrown; the
deep dusky porch of the college chapel, with Kennedy's arms in wrought
iron on the oaken door; the solid houses with their crow steps and
gables, all the forlorn memories of civil and religious feud, of
inhabitants saintly, royal, heroic, endeared St. Andrews to Murray. He
could not say, like our other poet to Oxford, 'Farewell, dear city of
youth and dream!' His whole nature needed the air, 'like wine.' He
found, as he remarks, 'health and happiness in the German Ocean,'
swimming out beyond the 'lake' where the witches were dipped; walking to
the grey little coast-towns, with their wealth of historic documents,
their ancient kirks and graves; dreaming in the vernal woods of Mount
Melville or Strathtyrum; rambling (without a fishing-rod) in the charmed
'dens' of the Kenley burn, a place like Tempe in miniature: these things
were Murray's usual enjoyments, and they became his indispensable needs.
His peculiarly shy and, as it were, silvan nature, m