her's flocks on 'the heathy hill.' With
the greater number of persons in the district possessing literary tastes
I became more or less intimate. The schoolmasters I found friendly and
obliging; one of these, in particular (now holding a higher office in
the same locality), I often visited. His high poetic taste convinced me
more and more of the value of mental culture, and tended to subdue me
from those more rugged modes of expression in which I took a pride in
conveying my conceptions. With this interesting friend I sometimes took
excursions into rural regions more or less remote, and once we journeyed
to the south, when I had the pleasure of introducing him to the Ettrick
Shepherd. But of my acquaintances, I valued few more than my modest and
poetic friend, the late James Brown of Symington.[2] Though humble in
station, he was high in virtuous worth. His mind, imbued with and
regulated by sound religious and moral principle, was as ingenious and
powerful as his heart was 'leal, warm, and kind.'

"Entering the University of Edinburgh, I took for the first session the
Greek and Latin classes. Attending them regularly, I performed the
incumbent exercises much after the manner that others did--only, as I
have always understood it to be a rare thing with the late Mr Dunbar,
the Greek Professor, to give much praise to anything in the shape of
poetry, I may mention that marked merit was ascribed to me in his class
for a poetical translation of one of the odes of Anacreon. I had laid
the translation on his desk, in an anonymous state, one day before the
assembling of the class. He read it and praised it, expressing at the
same time his anxiety to know who was the translator; but the translator
having intended not to acknowledge it, kept quiet. He returned to it,
and praising it anew, expressed still more earnestly his desire to know
the author; and so I made myself known, as all _great unknowns_ I think,
with the exception of Junius, are sooner or later destined to do.

"Of the philosophical classes, those that I liked best were the Logic
and Moral Philosophy--particularly the latter. I have often thought that
it is desirable, could it be possibly found practicable, to have all the
teachers of the higher departments of education not merely of high
scholastic acquirements, but of acknowledged genius. Youth reveres
genius, and delights to be influenced by it; heart and spirit are kept
awake and refreshed by it, and everything c