a respectable shoemaker in the place. A portion of his school
education was conducted under the care of one Norval, a teacher in the
Montrose Academy, whose mode of infusing knowledge he has not unjustly
satirised in his poem, entitled "Recollections of Auld Lang Syne."
Norval was a model among the tyrant pedagogues of the past; and as an
illustration of Scottish school life fifty years since, we present our
author's reminiscences of the despot. "Gruesome in visage and deformed
in body, his mind reflected the grim and tortuous aspects of his person.
The recollection of his monstrous cruelties,--his cruel flagellations,--is
still unaccountably depressing. One day of horrors I shall never cease
to remember. Every Saturday he caused the pupils to repeat a prayer
which he had composed for their use; and in hearing which he stood over
each with a paper ruler, ready, in the event of omission of word or
phrase, to strike down the unfortunate offender, who all the while
drooped tremblingly before him. On one of these days of extorted prayer,
I was found at fault in my grammar lesson, and the offence was deemed
worthy of peculiar castigation. The school was dismissed at the usual
time, but, along with a few other boys who were to become witnesses of
my punishment and disgrace, I was detained in the class-room, and
dragged to the presence of the tyrant. Despite of his every effort, I
resisted being bound to the bench, and flogged after the fashion of the
times. So the punishment was commuted into 'palmies.' Horrible
commutation! Sixty lashes with leather thongs on my right hand,
inflicted with all the severity of a tyrant's wrath, made me scream in
the anguish of desperation. My pitiless tormentor, unmoved by the sight
of my hand sorely lacerated, and swollen to twice its natural size,
threatened to cut out my tongue if I continued to complain; and so
saying, laid hold on a pair of scissors, and inflicted a deep cut on my
lip. The horrors of the day fortunately emancipated me from the further
control of the despot."

At another seminary Smart completed his education. He was now
apprenticed to a watchmaker in his native town, his hours of leisure
being sedulously devoted to the perusal of the more distinguished
British poets. It was his delight to repeat his favourite passages in
solitary rambles on the sea beach. In 1819, on the completion of his
apprenticeship, he proceeded to Edinburgh, where, during a period of six
months, he