on the stage in its scenes of
wildest contrast, and in all its boundless variety of character....
Their fictitious narratives, their ballad poetry, and other branches
of their literature, which are particularly apt to bear the stamp of
the extravagant and the supernatural, began also to occupy the
attention of the British literati. In Edinburgh, where the remarkable
coincidence between the German language and the Lowland Scottish
encouraged young men to approach this newly discovered spring of
literature, a class was formed of six or seven intimate friends, who
proposed to make themselves acquainted {p.185} with the German
language. They were in the habit of being much together, and the time
they spent in this new study was felt as a period of great amusement.
One source of this diversion was the laziness of one of their number,
the present author, who, averse to the necessary toil of grammar, and
the rules, was in the practice of fighting his way to the knowledge of
the German by his acquaintance with the Scottish and Anglo-Saxon
dialects, and of course frequently committed blunders which were not
lost on his more accurate and more studious companions." The teacher,
Dr. Willich, a medical man, is then described as striving with little
success to make his pupils sympathize in his own passion for the
"sickly monotony" and "affected ecstasies" of Gessner's Death of Abel;
and the young students, having at length acquired enough of the
language for their respective purposes, as selecting for their private
pursuits, some the philosophical treatises of Kant, others the dramas
of Schiller and Goethe. The chief, if not the only _Kantist_ of the
party, was, I believe, John Macfarlan of Kirkton; among those who
turned zealously to the popular belles-lettres of Germany were, with
Scott, his most intimate friends of the period, William Clerk, William
Erskine, and Thomas Thomson.

These studies were much encouraged by the example, and assisted by the
advice, of an accomplished person, considerably Scott's superior in
standing, Alexander Fraser Tytler, afterwards a Judge of the Court of
Session by the title of Lord Woodhouselee. His version of Schiller's
Robbers was one of the earliest from the German theatre, and no doubt
stimulated his young friend to his first experiments in the same walk.

The contemporary familiars of those days almost all survive; but one,
and afterwards the most intimate of them all, went before him; and I