encourage a plan for each part of the
year; but with us, he that has settled himself to study in the college is
soon tempted into the country, and he that has adjusted his life in the
country, is summoned back to his college.

Yet when I have allowed to the universities of Scotland a more rational
distribution of time, I have given them, so far as my inquiries have
informed me, all that they can claim. The students, for the most part,
go thither boys, and depart before they are men; they carry with them
little fundamental knowledge, and therefore the superstructure cannot be
lofty. The grammar schools are not generally well supplied; for the
character of a school-master being there less honourable than in England,
is seldom accepted by men who are capable to adorn it, and where the
school has been deficient, the college can effect little.

Men bred in the universities of Scotland cannot be expected to be often
decorated with the splendours of ornamental erudition, but they obtain a
mediocrity of knowledge, between learning and ignorance, not inadequate
to the purposes of common life, which is, I believe, very widely diffused
among them, and which countenanced in general by a national combination
so invidious, that their friends cannot defend it, and actuated in
particulars by a spirit of enterprise, so vigorous, that their enemies
are constrained to praise it, enables them to find, or to make their way
to employment, riches, and distinction.

From Glasgow we directed our course to Auchinleck, an estate devolved,
through a long series of ancestors, to Mr. Boswell's father, the present
possessor. In our way we found several places remarkable enough in
themselves, but already described by those who viewed them at more
leisure, or with much more skill; and stopped two days at Mr. Campbell's,
a gentleman married to Mr. Boswell's sister.

Auchinleck, which signifies a stony field, seems not now to have any
particular claim to its denomination. It is a district generally level,
and sufficiently fertile, but like all the Western side of Scotland,
incommoded by very frequent rain. It was, with the rest of the country,
generally naked, till the present possessor finding, by the growth of
some stately trees near his old castle, that the ground was favourable
enough to timber, adorned it very diligently with annual plantations.

Lord Auchinleck, who is one of the Judges of Scotland, and therefore not
wholly at leisure for