e a frequent and favored guest. The kind old man opened to me the
stores of his library, and through his recommendation I became
intimate with Ossian and Spenser. I was delighted with both, yet I
think chiefly with the latter poet. The tawdry repetitions of the
Ossianic phraseology disgusted me rather sooner than might have been
expected from my age. But Spenser I could have read forever. Too young
to trouble myself about the allegory, I considered all the knights and
ladies and dragons and giants in their outward and exoteric sense, and
God only knows how delighted I was to find myself in such society. As
I had always a wonderful facility in retaining in my memory whatever
verses pleased me, the quantity of Spenser's stanzas which I could
repeat was really marvellous. But this memory of mine was a very
fickle ally, and has through my whole life acted merely upon its own
capricious motion, and might have enabled me to adopt old Beattie of
Meikledale's answer, when complimented by a certain reverend divine on
the strength of the same faculty:--"No, sir," answered the old
Borderer, "I have no command of my memory. It only retains what hits
my fancy; and probably, sir, if you were to preach to me for two
hours, I would not be able when you finished to {p.031} remember a
word you had been saying." My memory was precisely of the same kind:
it seldom failed to preserve most tenaciously a favorite passage of
poetry, a playhouse ditty, or, above all, a Border-raid ballad; but
names, dates, and the other technicalities of history, escaped me in a
most melancholy degree. The philosophy of history, a much more
important subject, was also a sealed book at this period of my life;
but I gradually assembled much of what was striking and picturesque in
historical narrative; and when, in riper years, I attended more to the
deduction of general principles, I was furnished with a powerful host
of examples in illustration of them. I was, in short, like an ignorant
gamester, who kept a good hand until he knew how to play it.

I left the High School, therefore, with a great quantity of general
information, ill arranged, indeed, and collected without system, yet
deeply impressed upon my mind; readily assorted by my power of
connection and memory, and gilded, if I may be permitted to say so, by
a vivid and active imagination. If my studies were not under any
direction at Edinburgh, in the country, it may be well imagined, they
were less so. A