1876 RESIDENCE IN EDINBURGH 197 



To say truth, most of the considerations you put so 

 forcibly had passed through my mind but one always 

 suspects oneself of cowardice when one's own interests 

 may be affected. 



At the beginning of May he went to Edinburgh. 

 He writes home on May 8 : 



I am in hopes of being left to myself this time, as 

 nobody has called but Sir Alexander Grant the Principal, 

 Crum Brown, whom I met in the street just now, and 

 Lister, who has a patient in the house. I have been 

 getting through an enormous quantity of reading, some 

 tough monographs that I brought with me, the first 

 volume of Forster's Life of Swift, Goodsir's Life, and a 

 couple of novels of George Sand, with a trifle of Paul 

 Heyse. You should read George Sand's Ce'sarine Dietrich 

 and La Mare au Diable that I have just finished. She 

 is bigger than George Eliot, more flexible, a more 

 thorough artist. It is a queer thing, by the way, that 

 I have never read Consuelo. I shall get it here. When 

 I come back from my lecture I like to rest for an hour 

 or two over a good story. It freshens me wonderfully. 



However, social Edinburgh did not leave him long 

 to himself, but though he might thus lose something 

 of working time, this loss was counterbalanced by 

 the dispelling of some of the fits of depression which 

 still assailed him from time to time, 



On May 25 he writes : 



The General Assembly is sitting now, and I thought 

 I would look in. It was very crowded and I had to 

 stand, so I was soon spied out and invited to sit beside 

 the Lord High Commissioner, who represents the Crown 

 in the Assembly, and there I heard an ecclesiastical row 

 about whether a certain church should be allowed to 



