Paradise Lost, and the Arabian Nights' Entertainments. Sir Walter Scott tells a characteristic anecdote with reference to the last mentioned work-a work which had no slight influence in tinging his boyish mind with orientalism:

"A companion had met with an old volume of the Arabian Nights' Entertainments, and gave an account of its contents, which excited the curiosity of young Leyden.. This precious book was in the possession of a blacksmith's apprentice, who lived at several miles distance from Denholm, and the season was winter. Leyden, however, waded through the snow, to present himself by daybreak at the forge door, and request a perusal of this interesting book in presence of the owner, for an unlimited loan was scarcely to be hoped for. He was disappointed, was obliged to follow the blacksmith to a still greater distance, where he was employed on some temporary job, and when he found him, the son of Vulcan, with a caprice worthy of a modern collector, was not disposed to impart his treasure, and put him off with some apology. Leyden remained stationary beside him the whole day, till the lad, softened or wearied out by his pertinacity, actually made him a present of the volume, and he returned home by sunset, exhausted by hunger and fatigue, but in triumphant possession of a treasure, for which he would have subjected himself to yet greater privations. This childish history took place when he was about eleven years old; nor is there any great violence in conjecturing that these fascinating tales, obtained with so much difficulty, may have given his youthful mind that decided turn towards oriental learning which was displayed through his whole life, and illustrated by his regretted and too early decease. At least, the anecdote affords an early and striking illustration of the ardour of his literary curiosity, and the perseverance which marked his pursuit of the means for gratifying it."

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His education was not however confined to books. Even at this early age he was strangely susceptible to the influences of outward nature, and to the gloom, the grandeur, and the desolation of the scenery around him. His boyish soul drank in much of the imagination and fear that spring from these, and in after life he seems to have been in the habit of astonishing his friends with his tales of the terrible and the striking, and with his affected or real belief in the superstitious and supernatural. In all respects he was Borderer, and grew up as such, retaining all the features that characterised his ancestors in the days of feud and foray, to the last. Had he lived then he would have buckled on his sword with the best of them, blood and burning would have marked his track, the hated Southron would have been the object of his fury, and the gloomy and terrible have predominated in his stern soul. But all these qualities, that would thus have evidenced their existence in such a state of society, found vent in his mad raids into every realm of knowledge, in

his fierce onslaughts on every eastern tongue, in his indomitable perseverance and unconquerable enthusiasm, in his rough uncouthness of manner, and love of the peculiar and outré, and in his warm affection and demonstrative friendship.

But the boy must go to school, and to school he went-the Parish school of Kirktown, two miles distant from his cottage. In the short space of three years, during which he received instruction within its walls, he had three masters with long interregna between the appointment of each. Luckily they were all good at different studies, with the second he mastered the Latin rudiments, and with the third the intricacies of arithmetic. We fear that to this circumstance, as well as to the natural bent of his disposition, we must look for much of that characteristic of Leyden's mind, which prevented him from reaching the first rank of scholarship. In his early studies he was versatile and desultory, and though his capacious memory prevented him from often falling into the gross and unscholarly sin of inaccuracy, yet the whole build of his attainments was too superficial and extensive. No doubt the frequent change of masters and the long vacations were beneficial to a boy of his temperament in this respect, that they led him to depend more upon himself, to storm the strongholds of knowledge by his own strength, and scale its heights with unaided and daring step. But on the other hand his were the mental and social faults of the self-educated' man, and he lacked the benefits that glorious discipline, that mental training, which, while it does not interfere with the bent of genius, supplements its defects, and guides it in a right path; and the habits of mind thus formed continued with him at College, and, throughout all his career. His principle is thus enunciated in his own favorite expression, "Dash it, man, never mind if you have the scaffolding ready, you can run up the masonry when you please."

The scholastic career of Leyden at this period is eminently characteristic of that of the majority of Scottish students, and admirably illustrates the greatest of the advantages of the Scottish University system, with all its defects. Poor, almost self-educated, by no means a' gentleman' in the social sense of the term, he could never, in those days, have dared to aspire to the society and the teaching of an English University. But to such as he, the Scotch ever open their halls with pleasure, and of such as these they make the men who, as pioneers of civilisation, have built up and consolidated our greatest Colonies and our Indian Empire. Men of action as well as thought, with sufficient scholarship to develope, but not to crush, native genius, with an independence as rugged, an integrity as firm, and a perseverance as enduring as their own glorious hills, they

have paved the way for civilisation, they have filled the intellectual and working market with skilled labour, they have bound firmly to the British throne that which their stout arms have gained for it. Both classes are necessary to the great work of making this earth God's once more, and restoring the race to their allegiance to Him-both the men of intellectual action and intellectual and erudite quiet. The one can grapple with humanity on a large scale, and lift it up to the platform on which civilisation places it, the other may elevate, extend, and adorn that platform. We cannot enter into a comparison between them; we can only say that India wants, emphatically wants, the former.

Leyden's parents, like so many of the homely rustics of Scotland, wished nothing higher for their son than that he should "wag his head in a poopit," that he should enter the Church of Scotland as a Minister. His wondrous appetite for knowledge and his past success in his studies justified them in their anticipations of his success. Previous, however, to going to the University of Edinburgh, from 1786 to 1790 he was under the training of Mr. Duncan, a Cameronian minister at Denholm, which was three miles distant from his home. Here he carried on his studies in Latin with credit, so that in 1790 he set foot within the College walls. He was at this time fifteen years of age, by no means too early, in those days, for beginning a Scotch University education. Andrew Dalzell was at that time Professor of Greek, and through both astonishment and ridicule met the boy when he first stood up in the class with his peculiarities of dress, speech, and manner, he soon won the respect of his fellows, and the approbation of his Professor, by his rapid progress and eager enthusiasm. He soon distanced many, who were ahead of him at the start,' and could then afford to laugh at him. Though he thought and said that "he passed muster pretty well when introduced 'to Dr. Parr,' we have no good ground for believing that his attainments in Latin and Greek corresponded with his love for them. The truth is that his ardent and fickle mind, impelled by an unquenchable craving for a knowledge of something new, soon led him to other studies. He was not in the habit of confining himself to his own classes or his own studies for the session. Like the students of whom St. Augustine in his "Confessions" complains of at both Carthage and Rome, he roamed from lecture-room to lecture-room, but with less noise and more benefit than they. He was throughout all his life a perfect helluo librorum, and in the College library and circulating libraries of the city, and in the very book-stalls that so often tempt the student, he indulged to the full.

The close of the session in May did not bring to him such joys, as to the many whose hearts are more in the rest and quiet of home than in the eager pursuit of study. But he still felt a deep pleasure on his return to his native wilds. He was the same boy, yet in mind how different! He had drunk of the pure streams of knowledge, he had striven to quench his thirst at the fountain-head, and yet he was not sated. He made a bower for himself on the bank of the river with a wild cascade near him, and there, looking down on the scenery he has so well described in his Scenes of Infancy, in quiet he pursued his studies; there too he made a furnace for the purpose of pursuing practically the study of chemistry to which his ardent mind had, for a season, turned itself. Another favourite haunt of his was the Parish Church, which was small and the object of superstitious feelings to the peasantry all around. Here, day after day, he quietly ensconced himself, undisturbed and untroubled, and gained for himself the reputation among the neighbouring rustics of being "no canny." Year after year passed on much in this way, the winter was spent at college, the summer at his own home.

The University had at that time many great names connected with it among its Professors and Students, both of whom had not a little influence on Leyden. Among the former we have, besides Dalzell already mentioned, Playfair, the expounder of Hutton's system and then in the chair of mathematics, and Dugald Stewart who was then at the height of his renown and usefulness. Among the latter, through the Debating Society which he early joined, he came into contact with Brougham and Horner, with Thomas Brown and William Erskine, and with Robert Lundie, William Gillespie, and Dr. Logan who afterwards became distinguished ministers in the Church of Scotland. Many are the anecdotes told of his mistakes and difficulties in attempting to speak in this literary society, but with his usual perseverance he finally overcame them all. He was afterwards a member of the famous" Academy of Physics," which existed but two years, but numbered among its members such men as Brown, Jeffrey and Sydney Smith. It was here that his literary talents were much exercised and improved, by the practice which obtained in the society of writing abstracts of and criticisms on new works, a practice which finally gave rise to the idea and the plan of the Edinburgh Review.

Desultory and various as his studies too often were, throughout the whole of them we see a decided tendency to the linguistic. He loved the study of languages, and he loved, like Mezzofanti, the excitement and triumph of mastering SEPT., 1858.

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new ones. Hence he gradually obtained, during his student career, an acquaintance with the modern languages-French, Spanish, Italian, and German, while his divinity studies led him to Hebrew, and from that to Arabic and Persian. The oriental longings of his mind began to take a more definite shape at this time. In the course of his studies he had hitherto kept himself free from that occupation which consumes so many of the valuable hours of the Scotch student, but on which he is too often forced to depend for subsistence-private tuition. In 1796, at the end of the College session, intead of visiting his father and his home as in former years during the summer vacation, he was engaged in his tutorial work in Edinburgh. No work is harder and none more miserably paid-at the rate of from £1 to £2 a month for an hour daily and yet none is more sought after by the manly and zealous student, whom poverty would otherwise pinch, or at least deprive of his books and opportunities of literary enjoyment. When the successful student meets with much patronage in this way, he too often sacrifices to it the hours that ought to be devoted to study, or, attempting to take his place in the foremost rank of his fellows, falls a prey to sickness and often death; and yet, on the whole, such a life as this raises the best of men, manly, self-dependent, self-denying fellows, who are fitted to do God's work in the earth in their day and generation. Mark Akenside and Thomas Carlyle passed through the same trials.

Leyden soon, through the interest of Professor Dalzell, obtained the permanent situation of tutor in the family of Mr. Campbell of Fairfield, two of whose sons he accompanied to the old University of St. Andrew's. There he formed an acquaintance with the celebrated Scotch Latinist, Dr. Hunter, by intercourse with whom he was not a little benefitted. When at his own studies in the University, as he neared the goal of his parents' ambition, he still pursued his old course of studying all subjects at least superficially. He frequently attended the Medical classes, and there laid in a small stock of knowledge which was afterwards most useful to him. In May 1798, he was finally licensed,' as the Scotch call it, to preach, licensing being distinct from ordination, and entitling the student, who is meanwhile merely a "probationer" only to preach. He is not ordained so as to have power to administer the sacraments, and to perform the rite of marriage, until he receives a "call" from a congregation to be their permanent and regular pastor. And now he was found not unfrequently in the pulpits of the Edinburgh churches, where, as a critic says, on account of the manner of his delivery and the tones of his voice, "he was 'not remarkably successful as a preacher, yet by the judicious