not my constituents
in Westminster who laid this burthen on me: they kept with remarkable
fidelity to the understanding on which I had consented to serve. I
received, indeed, now and then an application from some ingenuous youth
to procure for him a small government appointment; but these were few,
and how simple and ignorant the writers were, was shown by the fact that
the applications came in about equally whichever party was in power. My
invariable answer was, that it was contrary to the principles on which I
was elected to ask favours of any Government. But, on the whole, hardly
any part of the country gave me less trouble than my own constituents.
The general mass of correspondence, however, swelled into an oppressive
burthen.

[At this time, and thenceforth, a great proportion of all my letters
(including many which found their way into the newspapers) were not
written by me but by my daughter; at first merely from her willingness
to help in disposing of a mass of letters greater than I could get
through without assistance, but afterwards because I thought the letters
she wrote superior to mine, and more so in proportion to the difficulty
and importance of the occasion. Even those which I wrote myself were
generally much improved by her, as is also the case with all the more
recent of my prepared speeches, of which, and of some of my published
writings, not a few passages, and those the most successful, were hers.]

While I remained in Parliament my work as an author was unavoidably
limited to the recess. During that time I wrote (besides the pamphlet on
Ireland, already mentioned), the Essay on Plato, published in the
_Edinburgh Review_, and reprinted in the third volume of _Dissertations
and Discussions_; and the address which, conformably to custom, I
delivered to the University of St. Andrew's, whose students had done me
the honour of electing me to the office of Rector. In this Discourse I
gave expression to many thoughts and opinions which had been
accumulating in me through life, respecting the various studies which
belong to a liberal education, their uses and influences, and the mode
in which they should be pursued to render their influences most
beneficial. The position taken up, vindicating the high educational
value alike of the old classic and the new scientific studies, on even
stronger grounds than are urged by most of their advocates, and
insisting that it is only the stupid inefficiency of the us