rgest
collection in the country of tales and songs concerning devils, ghosts,
fairies, brownies, witches, warlocks, spunkies, kelpies, elf-candles,
dead-lights, wraiths, apparitions, cantraips, giants, enchanted towers,
dragons, and other trumpery. This cultivated the latent seeds of
poetry; but had so strong an effect on my imagination that to this hour
in my nocturnal rambles I sometimes keep a sharp lookout in suspicious
places; and though nobody can be more sceptical than I am in such
matters, yet it often takes an effort of philosophy to shake off these
idle terrors.

The earliest composition that I recollect taking pleasure in was "The
Vision of Mirza," and a hymn of Addison's beginning, "How are thy
servants blest, O Lord!" I particularly remember one half-stanza which
was music to my boyish ear--

For though on dreadful whirls we hung
High on the broken wave--

I met with these pieces in Mason's English Collection, one of my
schoolbooks. The first two books I ever read in private, and which
gave me more pleasure than any two books I ever read since, were "The
Life of Hannibal" and "The History of Sir William Wallace." Hannibal
gave my young ideas such a turn that I used to strut in raptures up and
down after the recruiting drum and bagpipe and wish myself tall enough
to be a soldier; while the story of Wallace poured a Scottish prejudice
into my veins, which will boil along there till the floodgates of life
shut in eternal rest.

Polemical divinity about this time was putting the country half mad,
and I, ambitious of shining in conversation parties on Sundays, between
sermons, at funerals, etc., used a few years afterward to puzzle
Calvinism with so much heat and indiscretion that I raised a hue and
cry of heresy against me, which has not ceased to this hour.

My vicinity to Ayr was of some advantage to me. My social disposition,
when not checked by some modifications of spirited pride, was like our
catechism definition of infinitude, without bounds or limits. I formed
several connections with other younkers, who possessed superior
advantages; the youngling actors who were busy in the rehearsal of
parts, in which they were shortly to appear on the stage of life,
where, alas! I was destined to drudge behind the scenes. It is not
commonly at this green age that our young gentry have a just sense of
the immense distance between them and their ragged playfellows. It
takes a few dashes into the wor