1818.] Lord Woodhouselee. 405 



(late Lord Craig), of Allan Maconochie (late LordMeadowbank), 

 of William Adam (now Lord Chief-Commissioner), of Robert 

 Liston, of Andrew Dalzel, of William Robertson (now Lord 

 Robertson), of John Play fair, of Dr. Gregory, and of Dugald 

 Stewart,— men, whom in this place it would ill become me to 

 insult with praise, but from whose friendship, I may be permit- 

 ted to say, there is no name so illustrious that would not derive 

 distinction. , 



If the seasons of academical study were thus happily and 

 usefully employed by Mr. Tytler, the seasons of the summer 

 vacation were not less so. Upon these occasions he retired to 

 Woodhouselee, the beautiful seat of his father, near Edinburgh, 

 a scene endeared to him by the remembrances of infancy— by all 

 the ties of domestic affection— by the improvements which his 

 father was then annually adding to it— and, perhaps, by those 

 anticipations of greater embellishment which it was afterwards 

 to receive from his own hands. Amid the solitude and quiet of 

 this romantic residence, and at a distance from the prescribed 

 routine of academical labour, he felt all the happiness that 

 arises from the freedom of study, and was at liberty to follow out, 

 without interruption, those literary pursuits to which inclination 

 and taste most strongly inclined him. The character of his age 

 and of his mind led him naturally to those compositions which, 

 as addressed to the imagination and the heart, constitute the 

 polite literature of every country. His knowledge both of the 

 ancient and the modern languages enabled him to indulge this 

 desire ; and in the course of successive summers, he seems to 

 have formed and to have executed with this view a plan both of 

 comprehensive and of systematic study. 



He began with the great writers of antiquity — the poets, the 

 orators, and the historians of Greece and Rome, to whose works 

 he now returned with that increase of knowledge and that 

 improvement of taste which enabled him more fully to seize and 

 to appreciate their various excellence. He next resumed (though 

 with more enlightened views) the study of Italian literature, and 

 perused with new admiration the writers of that brilliant period 

 which succeeded the revival of letters in Europe, and who, 

 though formed in the great principles of composition upon the 

 models of classic taste, have yet added to them all the splendid 

 courtesy of feudal manners, and all the romantic interest of 

 chivalrous adventure. After the extinction, or (as I trust) only 

 the slumber of Italian genius, he followed the progress of taste 

 into France, and pursued the singular history of composition in 

 that country, from the period that the genius of Corneille first 

 gave to its imperfect language the dignity of poetry to the time 

 that the eloquence of Fenelon, of Buffon, and of Rousseau, rose 

 above the level of its poetic diction, and gave to prose composi- 

 tion all the powers and all the pathos of poetry. 

 The study of foreign literature led Mr. Tytler naturally to that 



