rly and down late, for he was nothing of a sluggard; daily
ear-wigging influential men, for he was a master of ingratiation. In
that slender and silken fellow there must have been a rare vein of
courage, that he should thus have died at his employment; and doubtless
ambition spoke loudly in his ear, and doubtless love also, for it seems
there was a marriage in his view had he succeeded. But he died, and his
paper died after him; and of all this grace, and tact, and courage, it
must seem to our blind eyes as if there had come literally nothing.

These three students sat, as I was saying, in the corridor, under the
mural tablet that records the virtues of Macbean, the former secretary.
We would often smile at that ineloquent memorial, and thought it a poor
thing to come into the world at all and leave no more behind one than
Macbean. And yet of these three, two are gone and have left less; and
this book, perhaps, when it is old and foxy, and some one picks it up in
a corner of a book-shop, and glances through it, smiling at the old,
graceless turns of speech, and perhaps for the love of _Alma Mater_
(which may be still extant and flourishing) buys it, not without
haggling, for some pence--this book may alone preserve a memory of James
Walter Ferrier and Robert Glasgow Brown.

Their thoughts ran very differently on that December morning; they were
all on fire with ambition; and when they had called me in to them, and
made me a sharer in their design, I too became drunken with pride and
hope. We were to found a University magazine. A pair of little, active
brothers--Livingstone by name, great skippers on the foot, great rubbers
of the hands, who kept a book-shop over against the University
building--had been debauched to play the part of publishers. We four
were to be conjunct editors, and, what was the main point of the
concern, to print our own works; while, by every rule of
arithmetic--that flatterer of credulity--the adventure must succeed and
bring great profit. Well, well: it was a bright vision. I went home that
morning walking upon air. To have been chosen by these three
distinguished students was to me the most unspeakable advance; it was my
first draught of consideration; it reconciled me to myself and to my
fellow-men; and as I steered round the railings at the Tron, I could not
withhold my lips from smiling publicly. Yet, in the bottom of my heart,
I knew that magazine would be a grim fiasco; I knew it would not