and criticism, I got from the
_Spectator_. These, with Pope's Works, some Plays of Shakespeare,
Tull, and Dickson on Agriculture, The "Pantheon," Locke's "Essay on the
Human Understanding," Stackhouse's "History of the Bible," Justice's
"British Gardener's Directory," Boyle's "Lectures," Allan Ramsay's
Works, Taylor's "Scripture Doctrine of Original Sin," "A Select
Collection of English Songs," and Hervey's "Meditations," had formed
the whole of my reading. The collection of songs was my companion, day
and night. I pored over them driving my cart, or walking to labour,
song by song, verse by verse; carefully noting the true, tender, or
sublime, from affectation and fustian. I am convinced I owe to this
practice much of my critic-craft, such as it is.

In my seventeenth year, to give my manners a brush, I went to a country
dancing-school. My father had an unaccountable antipathy against these
meetings, and my going was, what to this moment I repent, in opposition
to his wishes. My father, as I said before, was subject to strong
passions; from that instance of disobedience in me he took a sort of
dislike to me, which, I believe, was one cause of the dissipation which
marked my succeeding years. I say dissipation, comparatively with the
strictness, and sobriety, and regularity of Presbyterian country life;
for though the will-o'-wisp meteors of thoughtless whim were almost the
sole lights of my path, yet early ingrained piety and virtue kept me
for several years afterward within the line of innocence. The great
misfortune of my life was to want an aim. I had felt early some
stirrings of ambition, but they were the blind gropings of Homer's
Cyclops round the walls of his cave. I saw my father's situation
entailed on me perpetual labour. The only two openings by which I
could enter the temple of fortune were the gate of niggardly economy or
the path of little chicaning bargain-making. The first is so
contracted an aperture I never could squeeze myself into it; the last I
always hated--there was contamination in the very entrance! Thus
abandoned of aim or view in life, with a strong appetite for
sociability, as well from native hilarity as from a pride of
observation and remark; a constitutional melancholy or hypochondriasm
that made me fly solitude; add to these incentives to social life my
reputation for bookish knowledge, a certain wild, logical talent, and a
strength of thought, something like the rudiments