success. I must have had some disposition to learn; for I clear-
sightedly condemned my own performances. I liked doing them

indeed; but when they were done, I could see they were rubbish. In
consequence, I very rarely showed them even to my friends; and such

friends as I chose to be my confidants I must have chosen well, for
they had the friendliness to be quite plain with me, "Padding,"

said one. Another wrote: "I cannot understand why you do lyrics so
badly." No more could I! Thrice I put myself in the way of a more

authoritative rebuff, by sending a paper to a magazine. These were
returned; and I was not surprised nor even pained. If they had not

been looked at, as (like all amateurs) I suspected was the case,
there was no good in repeating the experiment; if they had been

looked at - well, then I had not yet learned to write, and I must
keep on learning and living. Lastly, I had a piece of good fortune

which is the occasion of this paper, and by which I was able to see
my literature in print, and to measure experimentally how far I

stood from the favour of the public.
II

The Speculative Society is a body of some antiquity, and has
counted among its members Scott, Brougham, Jeffrey, Horner,

Benjamin Constant, Robert Emmet, and many a legal and local
celebrity besides. By an accident, variously explained, it has its

rooms in the very buildings of the University of Edinburgh: a hall,
Turkey-carpeted, hung with pictures, looking, when lighted up at

night with fire and candle, like some goodly dining-room; a
passage-like library, walled with books in their wire cages; and a

corridor with a fireplace, benches, a table, many prints of famous
members, and a mural tablet to the virtues of a former secretary.

Here a member can warm himself and loaf and read; here, in defiance
of Senatus-consults, he can smoke. The Senatus looks askance at

these privileges; looks even with a somewhat vinegaraspect on the
whole society; which argues a lack of proportion in the learned

mind, for the world, we may be sure, will prize far higher this
haunt of dead lions than all the living dogs of the professorate.

I sat one December morning in the library of the Speculative; a
very humble-minded youth, though it was a virtue I never had much

credit for; yet proud of my privileges as a member of the Spec.;
proud of the pipe I was smoking in the teeth of the Senatus; and in

particular, proud of being in the next room to three very
distinguished students, who were then conversing beside the

corridor fire. One of these has now his name on the back of
several volumes, and his voice, I learn, is influential in the law

courts. Of the death of the second, you have just been reading
what I had to say.

And the third also has escaped out of that battle of in which he
fought so hard, it may be so unwisely. They were all three, as I

have said, notable students; but this was the most conspicuous.
Wealthy, handsome, ambitious, adventurous, diplomatic, a reader of

Balzac, and of all men that I have known, the most like to one of
Balzac's characters, he led a life, and was attended by an ill

fortune, that could be properly set forth only in the COMEDIE
HUMAINE. He had then his eye on Parliament; and soon after the

time of which I write, he made a showy speech at a political
dinner, was cried up to heaven next day in the COURANT, and the day

after was dashed lower than earth with a charge of plagiarism in
the SCOTSMAN. Report would have it (I daresay, very wrongly) that

he was betrayed by one in whom he particularly trusted, and that
the author of the charge had learned its truth from his own lips.

Thus, at least, he was up one day on a pinnacle, admired and envied
by all; and the next, though still but a boy, he was publicly

disgraced. The blow would have broken a less finely tempered
spirit; and even him I suppose it rendered reckless; for he took

flight to London, and there, in a fast club, disposed of the bulk
of his considerable patrimony in the space of one winter. For

years thereafter he lived I know not how; always well dressed,
always in good hotels and good society, always with empty pockets.

The charm of his manner may have stood him in good stead; but
though my own manners are very agreeable, I have never found in

them a source of livelihood; and to explain the miracle of his
continued existence, I must fall back upon the theory of the

philosopher, that in his case, as in all of the same kind, "there
was a sufferingrelative in the background." From this genteel

eclipse he reappeared upon the scene, and presently sought me out
in the character of a generous editor. It is in this part that I

best remember him; tall, slender, with a not ungraceful stoop;
looking quite like a refined gentleman, and quite like an urbane

adventurer; smiling with an engaging ambiguity; cocking at you one
peaked eyebrow with a great appearance of finesse; speaking low and

sweet and thick, with a touch of burr; telling strange tales with
singular deliberation and, to a patient listener, excellent effect.

After all these ups and downs, he seemed still, like the rich
student that he was of yore, to breathe of money; seemed still

perfectly sure of himself and certain of his end. Yet he was then
upon the brink of his last overthrow. He had set himself to found

the strangest thing in our society: one of those periodical sheets
from which men suppose themselves to learn opinions; in which young

gentlemen from the universities are encouraged, at so much a line,
to garble facts, insult foreign nations and calumniate private

individuals; and which are now the source of glory, so that if a
man's name be often enough printed there, he becomes a kind of

demigod; and people will pardon him when he talks back and forth,
as they do for Mr. Gladstone; and crowd him to suffocation on

railway platforms, as they did the other day to General Boulanger;
and buy his literary works, as I hope you have just done for me.

Our fathers, when they were upon some great enterprise, would
sacrifice a life; building, it may be, a favourite slave into the

foundations of their palace. It was with his own life that my
companion disarmed the envy of the gods. He fought his paper

single-handed; trusting no one, for he was something of a cynic; up
early and down late, for he was nothing of a sluggard; daily ear-

wigging influential men, for he was a master of ingratiation. In
that slender and silken fellow there must have been a rare vein of

courage, that he should thus have died at his employment; and
doubtlessambition spoke loudly in his ear, and doubtless love

also, for it seems there was a marriage in his view had he
succeeded. But he died, and his paper died after him; and of all

this grace, and tact, and courage, it must seem to our blind eyes
as if there had come literally nothing.

These three students sat, as I was saying, in the corridor, under
the mural tablet that records the virtues of Macbean, the former

secretary. We would often smile at that ineloquent memorial and
thought it a poor thing to come into the world at all and have no

more behind one than Macbean. And yet of these three, two are gone
and have left less; and this book, perhaps, when it is old and

foxy, and some one picks it up in a corner of a book-shop, and
glances through it, smiling at the old, graceless turns of speech,

and perhaps for the love of ALMA MATER (which may be still extant
and flourishing) buys it, not without haggling, for some pence -

this book may alone preserve a memory of James Walter Ferrier and
Robert Glasgow Brown.

Their thoughts ran very differently on that December morning; they
were all on fire with ambition; and when they had called me in to

them, and made me a sharer in their design, I too became drunken
with pride and hope. We were to found a University magazine. A

pair of little, active brothers - Livingstone by name, great
skippers on the foot, great rubbers of the hands, who kept a book-

shop over against the University building - had been debauched to
play the part of publishers. We four were to be conjunct editors

and, what was the main point of the concern, to print our own
works; while, by every rule of arithmetic - that flatterer of

credulity - the adventure must succeed and bring great profit.
Well, well: it was a bright vision. I went home that morning

walking upon air. To have been chosen by these three distinguished
students was to me the most unspeakable advance; it was my first

draught of consideration; it reconciled me to myself and to my
fellow-men; and as I steered round the railings at the Tron, I

could not withhold my lips from smiling publicly. Yet, in the