PUBLIC DINNER. 209 



I feel myself among them, and feel that I am not to be among 

 them long. My heart is full when I think of the kindness you have 

 shown me, and the honour you have done me so unmerited on my 

 part ; yet I do feel proud and gratified when I reflect that the kindness 

 and honour I have experienced have been rendered by individuals for 

 whom I have ever cherished the kindest feelings, and entertained the 

 highest respect. There is, I believe, no mind, however humble its 

 powers or its views, that does not cherish some spark of ambition, and 

 I have cherished my own particular wishes and hopes. They were 

 not fixed very high. Burns tells us of an ambition which had animated 

 him from his earliest days an ambition founded on intense love of his 

 country the love which led him when he saw " the rough burr thistle 

 spreading wide " to " spare the symbol dear." (Cheers.) His character- 

 istic wish was 



" That he, for puir auld Scotland's sake, 

 Some useful plan or book might make, 

 Or sing a sang at least." 



My wish was of a more humble kind, and more in accordance with my 

 powers. Even at that early age when our estimates of ourselves are 

 highest, and our hopes most sanguine, it rose no higher than that I 

 might be able to give some name in literature to the interesting dis- 

 trict of country in which we live, of which scarce any one had written 

 before. (Cheers.) I found it a new and untrodden field, full of those 

 interesting vestiges of past times which are to be found not in the 

 broken remains of palaces and temples, but in the traditional recollec- 

 tions of the common people. These traditions formed my earliest 

 literature. (Cheers.) My humble wish of making this district of Scot- 

 land known in literature has been but partially accomplished ; but my 

 enjoyment has been great, if not my success. I have found literature 

 to be truly its own reward. My advice to every one desirous to 

 increase, his happiness would be, Cultivate your mind. (Cheers.) It is 

 natural for man to look beyond his present circumstances. It is no 

 doubt, in its original integrity, an instinct of his constitution, bearing 

 reference to his spiritual nature, arid to a future state. Both his 

 imagination and his hope and we are all, in some degree, creatures of 

 hope and imagination have their seat, not in the present time or the 

 existing circumstances, but in the past or in the future. In the field 

 of literature, above every other, this principle finds its fullest scope. 

 The shepherd in Ramsay boasts that, when tending his flock upon the 

 hills, he could converse with kings. It is, indeed, no small privilege 

 to be admitted to the converse of the true kings of the human race, 

 the men of the most comprehensive minds and the most exalted senti- 

 ments to the profundities of a Bacon or a Locke, the high imaginings 

 of a Shakspeare and a Milton. (Cheers.) There is another principle to 

 which I would advert. The love of novelty is inherent in man, and it 

 is natural for him to go on in acquirement, adding idea to idea, and one 

 species of knowledge to another. This is one of the grand distinctions 



VOL. II. 14 



