320 MAN OF SCIENCE. 



humblest English class of a parish school ; and I had 

 kept up the acquaintance ever since. There, too, was 

 Addison, whom I had known so long, and, in his true 

 poems, his prose ones, had loved so much ; and there 

 were Gay, and Prior, and Cowley, and Thomson, and 

 Chaucer, and Spenser, and Milton ; and there, too, on a 

 slab on the floor, with the freshness of recent interment 

 still palpable about it, as if to indicate the race at least 

 not long extinct, was the name of Thomas Campbell. I 

 had got fairly among my patrons and benefactors. How 

 often, shut out for months and years together from all 

 literary converse with the living, had they been almost 

 my only companions, my unseen associates, who, in 

 the rude work-shed, lightened my labours by the music 

 of their numbers, and who, in my evening walks, that 

 would have been so solitary save for them, expanded my 

 intellect by the solid bulk of their thinking, and gave 

 me eyes, by their exquisite descriptions, to look at 

 nature ! How thoroughly, too, had they served to break 

 down in my mind at least the narrow and more illiberal 

 partialities of country, leaving untouched, however, all 

 that was worthy of being cherished in my attachment to 

 poor old Scotland ! I learned to deem the English poet 

 not less my countryman than the Scot, if I but felt the 

 true human heart beating in his bosom ; and the intense 

 prejudices which I had imbibed, when almost a child, 

 from the fiery narratives of Blind Harry and of Barbour, 

 melted away, like snow-wreaths from before the sun, 

 under the genial influences of the glowing poesy of Eng- 

 land. It is not the harp of Orpheus that will effectually 

 tame the wild beast which lies ambushing in human 

 nature, and is ever and anon breaking forth on the 

 nations, in cruel, desolating war. The work of giving 

 peace to the earth awaits those Divine harmonies which 



