hrie's Geographical Grammars; and
the ideas I had formed of modern manners, of literature, and
criticism, I got from the Spectator. These, with Pope's Works, some
Plays of Shakspeare, Tull and Dickson on Agriculture, the Pantheon,
Locke's Essay on the Human Understanding, Stackhouse's History of the
Bible, Justice's British Gardener's Directory, Boyle's Lectures, Allan
Ramsay's Works, Taylor's Scripture Doctrine of Original Sin, A Select
Collection of English Songs, and Hervey's Meditations, had formed the
whole of my reading. The collection of Songs was my _vade mecum._ I
pored over them, driving my cart, or walking to labour, song by song,
verse by verse; carefully noting the true tender, or sublime, from
affectation and fustian. I am convinced I owe to this practice much of
my critic craft, such as it is.

In my seventeenth year, to give my manners a brush, I went to a country
dancing-school. My father had an unaccountable antipathy against these
meetings, and my going was, what to this moment I repent, in opposition
to his wishes. My father, as I said before, was subject to strong
passions; from that instance of disobedience in me, he took a sort of
dislike to me, which, I believe, was one cause of the dissipation which
marked my succeeding years. I say dissipation, comparatively with the
strictness, and sobriety, and regularity of Presbyterian country life;
for though the will-o'-wisp meteors of thoughtless whim were almost the
sole lights of my path, yet early ingrained piety and virtue kept me for
several years afterwards within the line of innocence. The great
misfortune of my life was to want an aim. I had felt early some
stirrings of ambition, but they were the blind gropings of Homer's
Cyclops round the walls of his cave. I saw my father's situation
entailed on me perpetual labour. The only two openings by which I could
enter the temple of fortune were the gate of niggardly economy, or the
path of little chicaning bargain-making. The first is so contracted an
aperture I never could squeeze myself into it--the last I always
hated--there was contamination in the very entrance! Thus abandoned of
aim or view in life, with a strong appetite for sociability, as well
from native hilarity as from a pride of observation and remark; a
constitutional melancholy or hypochondriasm that made me fly solitude;
add to these incentives to social life, my reputation for bookish
knowledge, a certain wild logical talent, and a st