ittle of the egotist in my composition as most
men; nor would I deem the story of my life, though by no means unvaried
by incident, of interest enough to repay the trouble of either writing
or perusing it, were it the story of my own life only; but, though an
obscure man myself, I have been singularly fortunate in my friends. The
party-coloured tissue of my recollections is strangely interwoven, if I
may so speak, with pieces of the domestic history of men whose names
have become as familiar to our ears as that of our country itself; and I
have been induced to struggle with the delicacy which renders one
unwilling to speak much of one's self, and to overcome the dread of
exertion natural to a period of life greatly advanced, through a desire
of preserving to my countrymen a few notices, which would otherwise be
lost to them, of two of their greatest favourites. I could once reckon
among my dearest and most familiar friends, Robert Burns and Robert
Ferguson.

It is now rather more than sixty years since I studied for a few weeks
at the University of St. Andrew's. I was the son of very poor parents,
who resided in a seaport town on the western coast of Scotland. My
father was a house-carpenter, a quiet, serious man, of industrious
habits and great simplicity of character, but miserably depressed in his
circumstances, through a sickly habit of body: my mother was a
warm-hearted, excellent woman, endowed with no ordinary share of shrewd
good sense and sound feeling, and indefatigable in her exertions for my
father and the family. I was taught to read at a very early age, by an
old woman in the neighbourhood--such a person as Shenstone describes in
his "Schoolmistress;" and, being naturally of a reflective turn, I had
begun, long ere I had attained my tenth year, to derive almost my sole
amusement from books. I read incessantly; and after exhausting the
shelves of all the neighbours, and reading every variety of work that
fell in my way--from "The Pilgrim's Progress" of Bunyan, and the Gospel
Sonnets of Erskine, to a treatise on fortification by Vauban, and the
"History of the Heavens" by the Abbe Pluche--I would have pined away for
lack of my accustomed exercise, had not a benevolent baronet in the
neighbourhood, for whom my father occasionally wrought, taken a fancy to
me, and thrown open to my perusal a large and well-selected library. Nor
did his kindness terminate until, after having secured to me all of
learning that t