tiresome"; and the thought, far from being precocious, is distinctly
commonplace, e.g. the letter to Robert Mitchell on the fall of Napoleon;
or the following to his parents: "There are few things in this world more
valuable than knowledge, and youth is the season for acquiring it"; or
to James Johnstone the trite quotation, "Truly pale death overturns with
impartial foot the hut of the poor man and the palace of the king."
Several are marred by the egotism which in most Scotch peasants of
aspiring talent takes the form of perpetual comparison of themselves
with others; refrains of the ambition against which the writer elsewhere
inveighs as the "kettle tied to the dog's tail." In a note to Thomas
Murray he writes:--

Ever since I have been able to form a wish, the wish of being known
has been the foremost. Oh, Fortune! bestow coronets and crowns and
principalities and purses, and pudding and power, upon the great and
noble and fat ones of the earth. Grant me that, with a heart unyielding
to thy favours and unbending to thy frowns, I may attain to literary
fame.

That his critical and literary instincts were yet undeveloped there is
ample proof. Take his comment, at the age of nineteen, on the verses of
Leyden :--

Shout, Britons, for the battle of Assaye,
For that was a day
When we stood in our array
Like the lion's might at bay.

"Can anything be grander?" To Johnstone (who with Mitchell consumes
almost a volume) he writes: "Read Shakespeare. If you have not, then I