es--an
attitude which altogether bewildered the good people, who were willing
to give him every kind of education, to excuse any rudeness or roughness
or imperfection, but not to see a man at his ease, appearing among them
as if he were of them, requiring no allowance to be made for him,
holding his head high as any man he met. All the accounts we have of his
appearance in Edinburgh agree in this. He was neither abashed nor
embarrassed; no rustic presumption or vulgarity, but quite as little any
timidity or awkwardness, was in the Ayrshire ploughman. His shoulders a
little bent with the work to which he had been accustomed, his dress
like a countryman, a rougher cloth perhaps, a pair of good woollen
stockings rig and fur, his mother's knitting, instead of the silk which
covered limbs probably not half so robust--but so far as manners went,
nothing to apologise for or smile at. The accounts all agree in this. If
he never put himself forward too much, he never withdrew with any
unworthy shyness from his modest share in the conversation. Sometimes he
would be roused to eloquent speech, and then the admiring ladies said he
carried them "off their feet" in the contagion of his enthusiasm and
emotion. But this was a very strange phenomenon for the Edinburgh
professors and men of letters to deal with: a novice who had not come
humbly to be taught, but one who had come to take up his share of the
inheritance, to sit down among the great, as in his natural place. He
was not perhaps altogether unmoved by their insane advices to him, one
of the greatest of lyrical poets, a singer above all--to write a
tragedy, to give up the language he knew and write his poetry in the
high English which, alas! he uses in his letters. Not unmoved, and
seriously inclining to a more lofty measure, he compounded addresses to
Edinburgh:

"Edina, Scotia's darling seat!"

and other such intolerable effusions. One can imagine him roaming
through the fields between the old town and the new, and looking up to
the "rude rough fortress," and on the other side to the brand-new
regular lines of building, where

"Architecture's noble pride
Bids elegance and splendour rise,"

and musing in his mind how to celebrate them in polished verse so that
even the critics may be satisfied--

"Thy sons, Edina! social, kind,
With open arms the stranger hail;
Their views enlarged, their liberal mind,
Above the narrow, rural vale;