to await Burns wherever his coming was known. If such welcomes were
pleasing to his ambition, they must have been trying both to his
bodily and his mental health.

Burns reached Edinburgh on the 28th of November, 1786. The one man of
note there with whom he had any acquaintance was Professor Dugald
Stewart, whom, as already mentioned, he had met in Ayrshire. But it
was not to him or to any one of his reputation that he first turned;
but he sought refuge with John Richmond, an old Mauchline acquaintance,
who was humbly lodged in Baxter's Close, Lawnmarket. During the whole
of his first winter in Edinburgh, Burns lived in the lodging of this
poor lad, and shared with him his single room and bed, for which they
paid three shillings a week. It was from this retreat that Burns was
afterwards to go forth into the best society of the Scottish capital,
and thither, after these brief hospitalities were over, he had to
return. For some days after his arrival in town, he called on no
one--letters of introduction he had none to deliver. But he is said to
have wandered about alone, "looking down from Arthur's Seat, (p. 044)
surveying the palace, gazing at the castle, or looking into the
windows of the booksellers' shops, where he saw all books of the day,
save the poems of the Ayrshire Ploughman." He found his way to the
lowly grave of Fergusson, and, kneeling down, kissed the sod; he
sought out the house of Allan Ramsay, and, on entering it, took off
his hat. While Burns is thus employed, we may cast a glance at the
capital to which he had come, and the society he was about to enter.

Edinburgh at that time was still adorned by a large number of the
stars of literature, which, although none of those then living may
have reached the first magnitude, had together made a galaxy in the
northern heavens, from the middle till the close of last century. At
that time literature was well represented in the University. The Head
of it was Dr. Robertson, well known as the historian of Charles V.,
and as the author of other historic works. The chair of Belles Lettres
was filled by the accomplished Dr. Hugh Blair, whose lectures remain
one of the best samples of the correct and elegant, but narrow and
frigid style, both of sentiment and criticism, which then flourished
throughout Europe, and nowhere more than in Edinburgh. Another still
greater ornament of the University was Dugald Stewart, the Professor
of Moral Philosophy, whose works,