--"an ambition," adds Dr. Glennie, in the
communication with which he favoured me a short time before his death,
"which I have remarked to prevail in general in young persons
labouring under similar defects of nature."[23]

Having been instructed in the elements of Latin grammar according to
the mode of teaching adopted at Aberdeen, the young student had now
unluckily to retrace his steps, and was, as is too often the case,
retarded in his studies and perplexed in his recollections, by the
necessity of toiling through the rudiments again in one of the forms
prescribed by the English schools. "I found him enter upon his tasks,"
says Dr. Glennie, "with alacrity and success. He was playful,
good-humoured, and beloved by his companions. His reading in history
and poetry was far beyond the usual standard of his age, and in my
study he found many books open to him, both to please his taste and
gratify his curiosity; among others, a set of our poets from Chaucer
to Churchill, which I am almost tempted to say he had more than once
perused from beginning to end. He showed at this age an intimate
acquaintance with the historical parts of the Holy Scriptures, upon
which he seemed delighted to converse with me, especially after our
religious exercises of a Sunday evening; when he would reason upon the
facts contained in the Sacred Volume with every appearance of belief
in the divine truths which they unfold. That the impressions," adds
the writer, "thus imbibed in his boyhood, had, notwithstanding the
irregularities of his after life, sunk deep into his mind, will
appear, I think, to every impartial reader of his works in general;
and I never have been able to divest myself of the persuasion that, in
the strange aberrations which so unfortunately marked his subsequent
career, he must have found it difficult to violate the better
principles early instilled into him."

It should have been mentioned, among the traits which I have recorded
of his still earlier years, that, according to the character given of
him by his first nurse's husband, he was, when a mere child,
"particularly inquisitive and puzzling about religion."

It was not long before Dr. Glennie began to discover--what instructors
of youth must too often experience--that the parent was a much more
difficult subject to deal with than the child. Though professing
entire acquiescence in the representations of this gentleman, as to
the propriety of leaving her son to pursue