ter he was
further gratified, by being permitted to exchange it for the
professorship of Moral Philosophy and Logic, for which he thought
himself better fitted. In discharge of the duties belonging to his new
function, he immediately entered on a course of lectures, which, as
appears from his diary in the possession of Sir William Forbes, he
repeated with much diligence for more than thirty years.

This occupation could not have been very favourable to his poetical
propensity. He had, since his twentieth year, been occasionally a
contributor of verse to the Scots Magazine; and in 1760, he published a
collection of poems, inscribed to the Earl of Erroll, to whose
intervention he had been partly indebted for the office he held in the
college. Though the number of these pieces was not considerable, he
omitted several of them in subsequent editions, and among others a
translation of Virgil's Eclogues, some specimens of which, adduced in a
letter written by Lord Woodhouselee, author of the Principles of
Translation, will stand a comparison with the parallel passages in
Dryden and Warton.

In the summer of 1763, his curiosity led him for the first time to
London, where Andrew Millar the bookseller, was almost his only
acquaintance. Of this journey no particular is recorded but that he
visited Pope's house at Twickenham.

In 1765, having sent a letter of compliment to Gray, then on a visit to
the Earl of Strathmore, he was invited to Glammis Castle, the residence
of that nobleman, to meet the English poet, in whom he found such a
combination of excellence as he had hitherto been a stranger to. This
appears from a letter written to Sir William Forbes, his faithful friend
and biographer, with whom his intimacy commenced about the same time.

I am sorry you did not see Mr. Gray on his return; you would have been
much pleased with him. Setting aside his merit as a poet, which,
however, in my opinion, is greater than any of his contemporaries can
boast, in this or in any other nation, I found him possessed of the
most exact taste, the soundest judgment, and the most extensive
learning. He is happy in a singular facility of expression. His
conversation abounds in original observations, delivered with no
appearance of sententious formality, and seeming to arise
spontaneously, without study or premeditation. I passed two very
agreeable days with him at Glammis, and found him as easy in his
manners, and as co