ildings of
the University of Edinburgh: a hall, Turkey-carpeted, hung with
pictures, looking, when lighted up at night with fire and candle, like
some goodly dining-room; a passage-like library, walled with books in
their wire cages; and a corridor with a fireplace, benches, a table,
many prints of famous members, and a mural tablet to the virtues of a
former secretary. Here a member can warm himself and loaf and read;
here, in defiance of Senatus-consults, he can smoke. The Senatus looks
askance at these privileges; looks even with a somewhat vinegar aspect
on the whole society; which argues a lack of proportion in the learned
mind, for the world, we may be sure, will prize far higher this haunt of
dead lions than all the living dogs of the professoriate.

I sat one December morning in the library of the Speculative; a very
humble-minded youth, though it was a virtue I never had much credit for;
yet proud of my privileges as a member of the Spec.; proud of the pipe I
was smoking in the teeth of the Senatus; and, in particular, proud of
being in the next room to three very distinguished students, who were
then conversing beside the corridor fire. One of these has now his name
on the back of several volumes, and his voice, I learn, is influential
in the law courts. Of the death of the second, you have just been
reading what I had to say. And the third also has escaped out of that
battle of life in which he fought so hard, it may be so unwisely. They
were all three, as I have said, notable students; but this was the most
conspicuous. Wealthy, handsome, ambitious, adventurous, diplomatic, a
reader of Balzac, and of all men that I have known, the most like to
one of Balzac's characters, he led a life, and was attended by an ill
fortune, that could be properly set forth only in the _Comedie Humaine_.
He had then his eye on Parliament; and soon after the time of which I
write, he made a showy speech at a political dinner, was cried up to
heaven next day in the _Courant_, and the day after was dashed lower
than earth with a charge of plagiarism in the _Scotsman_. Report would
have it (I daresay very wrongly) that he was betrayed by one in whom he
particularly trusted, and that the author of the charge had learned its
truth from his own lips. Thus, at least, he was up one day on a
pinnacle, admired and envied by all; and the next, though still but a
boy, he was publicly disgraced. The blow would have broken a less finely
temper