OLLEGEie^AYS .^^nnSENBi «^ \ \ xlw^^ ,x\^^ XvX ':Ss; HIBM'M.OF COi^GRESSJI §■ LB ^l?i 0%^' JMef ^l'.4. UNITED STATES OK AM'eUICA ^ r; ;Ay 2e:' / "S^'^Jl- ?^1»< . i »,'", '^*-«ir•''''• ■■■■ ' ^ ■''■a""',^'^ ■-.•'■ '\ •?>'' /• ^\''*^.'w5'''v'^>ia'iCt3''fr.'X/' » "'^^'■' ' '•« V' - ■•1 MY COLLEGE DAYS BY EOBEET TOMES NEW YORK HARPER & BROTHERS, FRANKLIN SQUARE 1 880 Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1880, by HARPER & BROTHERS, In the Office of the Librarian of Congress, at Washington. CONTENTS. CHAPTER I. Preparing for College. — The Grammar-school of Columbia College. — Rector Ogilby. — Discharge. — New Rector. — Dignity and Severity. — Pedantic Jocularity. — Elephantine Banter. — Its Victims. — Anthon. — Author. — Scholar. — Teacher. — His Personal Appearance and Manner. — Mc and the Higher Mathematics. — His Successor. — A Slashing Teacher. — My Destiny. — An Episcopal Strong- hold. — Examination for College Page 9 CHAPTER II. Travelling to Hartford. — First Sight of College. — Admis- sion. — ^A Dungeon. — College Precincts. — A Scientific Irishman. — The Neighborhood. — The Boarding-houses. — The Hog River. — The City. — The Students. — Religiosi. — The Independents. — The Roysterers. — Old Traditions. — Southern Students. — The Southern Society. — Character of Southern Students 24 CHAPTER III. My Class. — Standing. — Classmates. — Brilliant Writers. — Bishop Williams. — Archbishop Bayley. — Hon. John Bige- low. — Literary Genius. — Libraries. — Book Appropriation. 4 CONTENTS. — Sham Professor. — Miscellaneous Talent. — A Brief Val- edictory . Page 37 CHAPTER IV. The Faculty. — The Sham Professors. — The Real Teachers. — Sleepy David. — Old Caloric. — The President. — Higli Jinks. — A Change. — The New President. — Holland. — Professor Jim. — Habits of Exercise. — Vacations. — Chol- era in New York. — A Speech of Henry Clay. — Governor Ellsworth. — Isaac Touce}'. — Gideon Welles. — Hunger- . ford, the Lawyer 50 CHAPTER V. Graduation. — An old Diploma. — Its Suggestions. — Choice of Profession. — The Bells and Mason Good's Works. — Enter University of Pennsylvania. — Professor Horner. — The Mysteries and Horrors of Dissecting-room. — Dr. Hare. — Chemical Displays. — Surgery at Blocksley Hospital. — Professor Gibson. — Other Professors. — Doctors made Easy. — Passage to Liverpool. — A Jolly Voyage. —Dr. Hawks. — Arrival in Liverpool. — Departure for Edin- burgh 62 CHAPTER VL Arrival in Edinburgh. — The Summer Session at the Univer- sity. — My First Quarters. — A Disorderly Household. — Historical, Romantic, and Personal Associations. — The High Street of Edinburgh. — The Little Chapel. — Alison on "Taste." — Mackay the Actor. — Holyrood Palace. — Arthur's Seat and Salisbury Crag. — Heriot's Hospital. — The Meadows. — The Links and Golfers. — Convent. — The Site of the College. — Murder of Darnley. — The Univer- sity and its Associations . 73 CONTENTS. 5 CHAPTER VII. Contrasts. — Hume's Monument. — Ambrose's. — Scott's and Hume's Houses. — Jeffrey at Home and at Court. — Mur- chiston. — Hawtliornden. — Dr. Chalmers. — Guthrie. — A Visit from Dr. Hawks. — His Companion. — Sydney Smith. — Surgeon's Square. — Burke and Hare. — Dr. Knox. — Allen Thompson. — "Never Touched the Ground." — Por- trai^of Knox. — De Quincey and his Daughter. — Macau - lay. — Dr. Abercrombie Page 82 CHAPTER Vlir. My First Invitation. — A Jolly Dinner. — Edinburgh Conviv- iality. — A Surprise. — Religious Topics. — J. Shank More. — Edinburgh Society. — A Disputed Child. — Mr. Craig. — Bishop Ravenscroft. — From Slave- whip to Crosier. — A Change of Quarters. — Mr. Ainslie. — A Friend of Burns. — Clurinda. — A Genial Neighbor. — Marriage at Three-score- and-ten. — A Festival. — Campbell the Poet in the Chair. — Genius in Eclipse. — Professor Blackie in Youth . . 96 CHAPTER IX. The Winter Session. — Rush of Students. — The Classes. — Students from Everywhere. — The Full-blooded Negro. — Social Inversion. — Distinguished Students. — W of Nottingham. — G of Newcastle. — Charles Maitland. — Faith in Chemistry. — Samuel Brown. — Poet and Philoso- pher. — Unity of Matter. — Professor Anderson of Glas- gow 110 CHAPTER X. A Band of Revellers.— Making a Night of it.— The Two Brothers R . — Their Historv, — A Mother, and not a 6 CONTENTS. Mother. — A Victim to Slavery. — The Third Brother's Fate.— Description of the R 's.— The Eldest R . —A Fancy Ball.— The End of the Eldest.— The Younger R in Paris. — Incidents of his Career. — Adventures in England. — His Return to the United States. — Disap- pearance Page 123 CHAPTER XI. The Brothers F . — An American Claimant for a Scotch Title. — A Retired and Happy Life. — Sudden Aspirations. — Lord Lovat. — Devotion of a Clan. — A Long Suit in Ed- inburgh. — Luxury and the Jews. — A Day of Reckoning. — An Adverse Decision. — Family Ruin. — The Eldest Son. — The Survivors of a Wreck, — Another American Claim- ant. — Precocious Benevolence. — A Triumph. — Final Re- sult 134: CHAPTER XII. General Disunion of Students. — A Remarkable Exception. — Political Unanimity. -^Prevalence of Toryism. — Influ- ence of Tory Professors. — Professor Wilson's Example and Teachings. — Royal Medical Society. — Its Traditions. — Sir James Mackintosh. — The Brunonian Controversy. — Speculative Society. — Botanical and Geological Tours. — Exercises. — New Haven. — Huntsmen and Horsemen. — The Theatre. — Church Intolerance. — Studies for a De- gree. — Examinations. — Defence of Thesis. — An Exami- nation Passed. — The Three Munros 144 CHAPTER XIIL Munro Tertius. — A Nonchalant Professor. — Calling Cards. — A Personal Description. — Strange Illustration of Filial Affection. — First Sight of Pickwick. — A Dignified Pro- CONTENTS. 7 fessor. — Hope. — Resplenden t Demonstration s. — Kemp. — Compression of Gases. — A Great Chemical Feat. — Antic- ipation of Modern Discovery. — The Eclipse of a Man of Genius Page 158 CHAPTER XIV. Professor Alison, — The Good Physician, — " Om- Doctor." — Robust and Gentle, — Sir Robert Christison, — Hard Weiker, — Powers of Endurance. — Personal Appearance. — Sir William Hamilton. — Author of "Cyril Thornton." — Hundreds of Skulls. — A Death-blow to Phrenology. — Professor Wilson. — His Works. — Personal Appearance. — As a Lecturer. — The Dogs. — How a Professor was Appointed. — Pillans 169 CHAPTER XV. Close of Winter Session. — Vacations. — To Glasgow by Canal. — A Jolly Archdeacon, — Glenarbuck. — Blantyre House. — A Noble Fee. — A Tragic End. — A Winter Voy- age. — Illness at Sea, — A Gentle Seafaring Man, — The North Atlantic in Winter. — A Victim. — Hoisting Sail. — Detection. — Arrival in New York, — A Mitigated Wel- come 180 CHAPTER XVI. INfy First Visit to Washington, — Appearance of the Capital. —The Old Gadsby's.--A Visit from Ogden Hoflfman.— A Sight of Daniel Webster. — The Hon. Edward Stanley. — A Call upon Van Buren. — The Joke of the Treasury. — Jesuits' College. — Wine for Boys. — Alexandria. — Horse- back Ride to Mount Vernon. — A Deserted Home. — Re- turn to Edinburgh. — An Unfortunate Petition. — First Medical Examination 192 8 ' CONTENTS. CHAPTER XVII. The Last Academic Year. — Disability of Professors. — Sir Charles Bell. — Supplementary Teachers. — Disgraceful In- eflScienc3^ — Infirmary. — Heroic Practice. — High-pressure. — Breaking Down. — The Last Examination^ — Dr. (Sir James Y.) Simpson. — Dr. Sawneyson's Testimonials. — A Severe Calling to Account. — Defence of Thesis. — Capping. —Exit Page 200 MY COLLEGE DAYS. CHAPTER I. Preparing for College. — The Grammar-school of Columbia College. — Rector Ogilby. — Discharge. — New Rector. — Dignity and Severity. — Pedantic Jocularity. — Elephantine Banter. — Its Victims. — Anthon. — Author. — Scholar. — Teacher. — His Personal Appearance and JVIanner. — Mc and the Higher Mathematics. — His Successor. — A Slashing Teacher. — My Destiny. — An Episcopal Strong- hold. — Examination for College. As the Grammar-school of Columbia College in New York was the last elementary classical academy of which I was a pupil, it may be re- garded as the place where I was. prepared for college. This Grammar-school, when I entered it, was in Murray Street, New York, in the rear of Columbia College, upon a part of the grounds of which it, a plain, square brick structure, was built. There was no access, however, from the school to the park of the college, for fear, perhaps, that we rude boys might trample down its greensward, 10 MY COLLEGE DAYS. and commit havoc in its smootli paths and trim shrubbery. We, therefore, during the brief in- termissions between school-hours, confined our- selves within the contracted court-yard, or over- flowed, in our races and rough-and-tumble games of "tag" and "prisoner's base," into the neigh- boring streets, John D. Ogilby was then rector of the school, Avhich, as far as its business management and financial responsibility were concerned, was en- tirely under the control of the trustees of Colum- bia College. The general conduct of the school, and the especial teaching of the head or " Rec- tor's class," fell to the duty of Ogilby, who at the time could not have been older than eighteen or nineteen years of age. He had been transfer- red, I think, even before he had graduated, from his place as a student of the senior class to the important position of rector of the school. With a precocious dignity, not only of character and manner but of personal appearance, his extreme youth did not appear in any way an obstacle to his management. He was remarkably tall for his age, and so strenuously erect in his bearing that his back bent in and his chest curved for- ward to such an extent that he actually seemed crooked. He had a pair of piercing black eyes, and the most serious if not stern expression I COLUMBIA COLLEGE GRAMMAR-SCHOOL. 11 have ever noticed upon so young a face. He was evidently earnest to enthusiasm in his work, and he was the first teacher I had yet encoun- tered for whom I had any respect. He was a rigid disciplinarian, and no sparer of the rod; and, though I often felt its smart, I bear him no grudge, for I have no doubt it was well-deserved. He had great sympathy with any mark of con- scientiousness he might discover in a boy. I recollect, on one occasion, on his leaving the room, a tumult arose in the class. On return- ing, he asked each one of a number of suspected boys, who had been guilty of this breach of dis- cipline? Every one denied it until he came to me, when I boldly confessed my fault. In a mo- ment of angry impulse he dismissed me from the room, and ordered me to take a place in a lower class; but I had hardly fulfilled his command when he hurried to me, with an unusual expres- sion of kindness in his face, and said, in his gen- tlest tone of voice, " T , you told the truth, and therefore I forgive you ; return to your class." He then searched out the other offend- ers who had deceived him, and, upon detection, punished them with the utmost severity. I had been so wretchedly schooled before, and though I had nominally gone over a large sur- face of study, had penetrated so little into its 12 MY COLLEGE DAYS. depths, that I felt myself to be very deficient, and found it impossible to take a very high po- sition in my class, of which most of the boys had long enjoyed the advantage of a more thorough drilling. I, however, sustained myself with tol- erable credit, and managed to make such prog- ress as would have enabled me to enter college with the best of my comrades, in the autumn of the next year. It was, however, thought advis- able to postpone (as I was very young) my en- trance ; and, being able to spare the time, I left the school and travelled in Europe for several months. On my return, after my absence,! resumed my studies at the Grammar-school in Murray Street. As- the class of which I had been a member for a few months had entered college, I joined that which succeeded it. As this now became the rector's class in turn, I was again under the im- mediate tuition of Mr. Ogilby. CThis gentleman, however, was soon discharged from his office, in consequence of some innovations, of German ori- gin, which he had introduced into the system of education at the school, and the trustees of the antiquated institution in our rear by no means approved of. ) Charles Anthon, LL.D., professor of Greek and Latin in Columbia College, succeeded Mr. Ogilby DR. ANTHON. 13 as the Rector of the Grammar-school, retaining, at the same time, his former position. He took great care, however, not to derogate from his professorial dignity, by delegating all the less dignified duties of the school-master to his hum- ble subordinates. He never wielded the cane, or deigned even so much as to box a boy's ears, but the pains and penalties vicariously inflicted were none the less severe. He established a Draconian code — one law of which, I recollect, though not from personal experience of the penalty, was that the last four boys of each class should be daily whipped. Dr. Anthon reserved for himself, as his espe- cial duty, the teaching of Greek and Latin to the first, or Rector's class, and exercised a general supervision over the whole school. He appointed all the teachers, who, mostly young men taught and disciplined by him in the college, were very submissive executors of his arbitrary will, and showed, especially in the department of admin- istering punishment, much zeal. The w^ork of teaching our class was elementary and easy for the learned professor, who seemed to regard it rather as a distraction from his more severe pur- suits than as a serious labor in itself. He sport- ed with it as if it were a toy, and performed a variety of strange antics in the course of his 14 MY COLLEGE DAYS. playful treatment of us. His humors and eccen- tricities were of a heavy and pedantic sort. He insisted upon us boys, who were of his, the Rec- tor's, class, answering the roll-call with the Greek word jji^u), I am. come — reminding us at the same time, with that fulness of definition characteris- tic of him, that the term meant not only " I am come," but that " I am come, and I remain ;" in a word, that " I am here." The boys belonging to the lower classes of the classical department were allowed the use of the Latin adsum, while those who were merely studying English and the modern languages were restricted to the simple vernacular, " Here." He affected a ludicrous re- spect for the dignity of his especial class, and I recollect that he once pretended to take great of- fence at my calling the foot of it the tail, which he declared to be an appellation derogatory to even the terminal end of a body of pupils hon- ored by the charge of so august a personage as himself. The first boy in the class he dignified with the title of Imperator, ?ind the second Dux; and he had a variety of other marks of distinc- tion and also of degradation for the rest, accord- ing to their position. Anthon was a terribly persistent banterer in his own peculiar, elephantine way. One poor lad, who had made a bad show at recitation, being BANTER. 15 asked what he had been doing at home instead of learning his lesson, conscientiously answered that he had been reading " Oliver Twist," and was ever after called, by the professor, Oliver Twist.* " Now," he would say, '' let Oliver Twist try his hand ;" " Wake up, Oliver Twist ;" " That will do, Oliver Twist;" and so on, until the poor lad was so v/orried by this bantering, and took it so much to heart, that his health and cheer- fulness were seriously impaired, and his parents were obliged to remove him to another school. There was a heavy fellow of the name of De Witt, who, from the beginning, had precipitated by the mere weight of dulness to the bottom of the class, and remained there to the last. He became the especial object of the professor's ban- ter. He had remarkably large, bushy eyebrows, and he was constantly reminded that this had been always regarded as a sign of intelligence until now, when it was manifestly proved by his case to be quite the reverse. He was also ask- ed, again and again, whether the famous Dutch statesman, De Witt, was an ancestor of his; while, at the same time, the poor youth Avho bore the name was told that if he were, he was a dread- fully degenerate descendant. Our class-fellow, * This was some time after I left the school. 16 MY COLLEGE DAYS. however, was of sterner stuff than poor " Oliver Twist," and bore all this banter without even a sensible twitch of his copious eyebrows, and re- mained immovable in his destined place at the foot of the class. Anthon was, undoubtedly, a good but not a great and liberal scholar. He pursued the tra- ditional methods of studying and teaching the Greek and Latin, and had a comprehensive and thorough knowledge of the verbal significations and construction of those languages. He was an industrious compiler of school and college text-books, and made a considerable fortune by his publications, which obtained a wide sale, not exclusively due to their excellence but greatly owing to his prominent position as a professor of an institution which at that time ranked high in the United States, and gave a considerable prestige to any educational work emanating from it. He was an indefatigable worker, and allowed nothing to interfere with his habits of industry. He was hardly ever seen out of the precincts of his college, and checked every intrusion upon his retirement. Over the mantel-piece of his study he had inscribed, in large letters, " Short visits MAKE LONG FRIENDS." His productious had no claim to origipality, and he freely appropriated to his own use the researches of foreign scholars, VERBAL SCHOLARSHIP. 17 especially of Germany, with an iinscrnpulous dis- regard, it was charged, of due acknowledgment. He greatly prided himself upon his Horace, which was a very bulky volume principally remarkable for its profuse translations, which made it very acceptable to the superficial American student. These translations, which were given in rather turgid words and phrases, he seemed to regard with much self-satisfaction, and that pupil who repeated them with the most verbal exactness in his recitations was sure of the highest favor and commendation. He would frequently translate to the class their lessons in Homer or other clas- sical work in the course of study, and insist next day at the recitation upon the precise English expressions he had used ; so it became a habit with the boys, who were sufficiently brisk as scribes, to note down each word as he uttered it. Anthon was undoubtedly an excellent teacher of his kind, and he was the first one I ever was under who succeeded in giving me an interest in classical study. He made, I recollect, even the Greek Testament a pleasure ; and I can recall some of his comments and interpretations which, though new to me, were undoubtedly familiar to scholars. They revealed to me, for the first time, the meaning of that sacred Volume, and greatly excited my interest in its study. His 2 18 MY COLLEGE DAYS. derivations of Jesus and Christ from iaof.iai, to heal, and xP'^j to anoint, and baptism from /3aw, to go — " go down into the water " — showing ap- parently, as he used to say, that adult baptism by dipping was the original form, struck me, in my youthful ignorance, with an agreeble surprise. His statement that, whenever our Saviour is al- luded to in the IsTew Testament, ekeivoq, which sig- nifies merely he, implying delegated power, was never used, but always avroq, he of his own au- thority; and his inference that this proved the divinity of Christ, was also new to me, and a sat- isfactory confirmation of the religious belief in which I had been brought up. I remember the fulness which the professor gave to his transla- tions of some words and phrases, and how he in- sisted upon our repeating them in every detail ; for example, in the well-known lines of Virgil, Facilis descensus Averno sed revocare gradum, etc., he would render the Ilic labor, hoc opus est, " this is the labor ; m this consists the diffi- culty,^'' puffing his cheeks and blowing out the latter phrase with all the force his breath was capable of. The TrpoiaTrcrey, at the beginning of Homer, was a word upon which he was especial- ly fond of dwelling, telling us how Pope had erroneously translated the vrpo as "premature- ly," while he reminded us that it simply meant PERPETUAL MOTION. 19 "down;" '^ dotcm, doton to hellP'' he would bel- low out with his habitual emphatic burst. The professor was a portly man, with a large, square Teutonic head and shoulders — his par- ents were German — and a naturally sturdy body, though his flesh seemed unduly soft and pallid from want of exercise and close confinement to his studies. He, however, was full of life and activity, and, never at re.^t himself, kept his class in a perpetual state of animation and movement. He was constantly tossing about on his seat in the rostrum, his hands in motion twirling a large silver pencil-case, which he held loosely between the thumb and finger of the left hand and struck with the forefinger of the right, and his head ever turning as he scanned us from top to bot- tom, and bottom to top, while he never ceased talking and shouting to the boys as he correct- ed their translations and substituted his own, or sent down a question to run the gauntlet of the class, crying out in quick succession, Imiyera- tor! Dux! Smith ! Jones ! Brown ! that's it ! up, Robinson ! He used frequently to digress from the lesson under consideration, and test the boys' information upon some subject which bore not the least relation to it. I remember that on one occasion the form of a Maltese cross was asked, and the question passed rapidly down 20 MY COLLEGE DAYS. without meeting an answer until near the bot- tom of the class, when a fortunate possessor of the knowledge promptly replied, and much to his surprise was suddenly transferred to the top, an elevated region to which he had never aspired. A pompous, assuming young Irishman of the name of Mc was, or ought to have been, our teacher of arithmetic ; but anything so elementa- ry was quite too lowly for his lofty self-appre- ciation, and he persisted in lecturing upon the higher mathematics to a set of boys who hardly knew the nmltiplication table, and did not under- stand a word of his abstruse cogitations. He was soon discharged as impracticable, and I rec- ollect seeing him for many years afterward stalk- ing about the streets of New York in a shabby half-military coat, buttoned close to the chin to hide, apparently, the want of a shirt. His successor was an Hibernian like himself; tall, gaunt, and strong, with an arm as long as that of a gorilla — an animal he not -only resem- bled in appearance but ferocity. He was down- right and practical enough, and never lost him- self in the vague abstractions of Mc . He wielded a cane of his own length, and slashed with it right and left all along the benches where we poor lads sat cowering over our slates, strik- ing indiscriminately, regardless whom it might AN EPISCOPAL STRONGHOLD. 21 hit, if offender or not, like a drunken Irislinian dealing his miscellaneous blows in a row. I was destined for Washington College, in Hartford, an institution lately established by the Right Rev. Dr. Brownell, Bishop of Connecti- cut, in the interests of the Protestant Episcopal Church. A number of young and enthusiastic divines, among whom Doane, the Bishop of New Jersey, Potter, Bishop of New York, and the Rev. Dr. Hawks were, in their youth, the most prominent, had leagued together to wage a cru- sade against the predominating influence of Pres- byterianism in Ncav England. They according- ly rallied around the bishop in his collegiate stronghold, in the very midst of the Puritanical enemy, as a favorable point whence to carry on their war in behalf of prelacy. They were all enrolled either as actual or nominal ofiicers, but most of them, taking no part in the internal man- agement of the establishment, exercised their ef- forts in doing their best to strengthen it from without. These dispersing, went about the whole United States like so many begging friars, though by no means reduced to scrip and wallet, for they found a ready welcome at some of the most sumptuous tables and luxurious houses of the country, stirring up the faithful of the Episcoi^al Church, and soliciting alms for the holy cause. 22 MY COLLEGE DAYS. They obtained a good deal of money, but might have obtained a good deal more had they not been distracted from their rather Quixotic enter- prise by the inducements of the practical advan- tages to themselves and to their Church of a per- manent settlement, in the opulent and extensive spheres of parochial duty, in the large cities. The Bishop of Connecticut, accordingly, was soon left to shift alone as best he could in his isolated de- fence, which w^as reduced to such a state of weak- ness as to be hardly capable of suj^porting itself, much less of destroying the enemy. My father's benevolence was among the first evoked by the earnest appeals of the clerical beg- gars, and he contributed a certain sum of money (I do not know the amount), which carried with it the privilege of the presentation of a student. Thus paid for, as it were, in advance, I was des- tined to become a member of the college in Hart- ford. In the mean time, I remained a pupil of the Grammar-school, and when the time came for our (the Rector's) class to pass the examina- tion for admission into Columbia College, I, feel- ing, like a brave soldier on the eve of war, that it would not be honorable to desert my comrades, underwent the terrible ordeal with the rest. We were examined together in a body, and the pro- ceeding was very much like that of an ordinary SLIDING INTO COLLEGE. 23 recitation, though, of course, there was no set les- son for the occasion. We passed up and down, according to our answers, as usual, and I found myself at the close of the examination in the sat- isfactory position of No. 2 in Greek, and No. 3 in Latin, in a class of between thirty and forty. A lazy fellow chuckled with delight when he heard of the way in which the class was to be examined, and said that to enter college would be like sliding down an inclined and well-slush- ed board, placed between the school -house and college buildings, which were contiguous. His bright anticipations, however, were for a moment clouded when a wag suggested that there might be a nail in the board to catch him in the de- scent. The examination in a body was, no doubt, much easier for the dull and backward boys than if each had been forced to submit to an individ- ual test of his fitness ; so that the lazy fellow, who slipped into college with the tail of the class, without being asked a single question, was fully justified in his droll comparison. 24 MY COLLEGE DAYS. CHAPTER 11. Travelling to Hartford.— First Sight of College. ^Admis- sion. — A Dungeon. — College Precincts. — A Scientific Irishman. — The Neighborhood. — The Boarding-houses. — The Hog River. — The Cit3\ — The Students. — Religiosi. —The Independents. — The Eoysterers. — Old Traditions. — Southern Students. — The Southern Society — Character of Southern Students. I WENT alone to Hartford, in the suburbs of which Washington College was situated. I had begged hard to have a companion, but was stern- ly refused, not from any want of tenderness, but because, doubtless, as I was no longer a school- boy, and had reached the mature age of fourteen years, it was thought desirable that I should be thrown, as it were, on my own responsibility, with the view of giving me a practical lesson in self- reliance. In those days there were no railways ; and the only means of travel from New York to Hartford were by the steamboat and mail-coach, or " stage." As it was in the fine season of the autumn or fall when I set out, I took ray depart- ure in the steamboat. Sailing through Long Isl- and Sound and up the Connecticut River, we FIRST SIGHT OF COLLEGE. 25 landed at the wooden pier of the little capital city, where we were greeted on our arrival by a large concourse of curious people and noisy boys ; for in those days the coming in of the boat from New York, two or three times a week, was an event which awakened the interest of the whole population. The first sight of the college buildings, built of rough-hewn stone, was by no means cheerful, and the attempt which had been made, by the addi- tion of tall columns of wood to the front of the chapel, and a gi-^at impending architrave of the same material to the roof of the main structure, all painted of a staring white color, to give an academic look to the whole, only gave it a more severe appearance, and increased the sad aspect of my future residence. The examination for admission to college, which had been formidable enough in anticipation, but by no means so in reality, being over, I was duly matriculated, and a room assigned to me. This, as I was a freshman only, was on the ground- floor, the higher rooms, which were regarded as better, having been already appropriated by the students of the upper classes. As I passed through the low portal, with its rough battered posts and doors, into the hall on which my room opened, every footfall sounding loud and dismal- 26 MY COLLEGE DAYS. ly — for sill, steps, and passage-way were all of stone — I could not help feeling as if I were being immured as a prisoner within the heavy walls of the ugly structure. As I turned the key, grating harshly in the rusty, unused lock, and the door opened, a draft of damp, mouldy air blew in my face, and such an aspect of solitary blankness was presented by the rudely planked floor, and the stained and broken plaster of the ceiling and walls of the long empty and neglected room, that it required no great stretch of the fancy to suppose that I had reached the dungeon in which I was to be confined. I was to be in solitary confinement too, for I did not know a single soul in the college, and had at that time no room- mate. Repairing at once to the convenient shop near by, the "proprietor of which was ever ready to provide anything that might be wanted by the student, from a bookcase to an oyster-stew, I purchased a set of old furniture, which had served I don't know how many generations of students before me. This consisted of a bed- stead, or rather bunk, a table, a couple of chairs, and some shelves, all shining and sticky with fresh varnish. So I installed myself, before the day was over, in my room, thus made habitable, if not very genial or comfortable. My first even- ing was lonesome, and I longed for home, but THE COLLEGE SURROUNDINGS. 2t soon became reconciled, and bore up manfully enough, for there was no alternative but submis- sion to my fate. The immediate grounds about the college were extensive and of picturesque capability, but very much neglected ; and the scattered gravel of the walk, irregularly laid and rough with fragments of stone and large pebbles, and the great field of coarse, un^ut grass and tall weeds trodden down in every direction by the chance steps of those coming and going, and the whole space bare of all trees or the least growth of shrubbery, in- creased the sombre and uninviting aspect in front of the rude academic buildings. In the rear there was the remnant of a garden, originally destined for botanical instruction, and a shattered conservatory, in the charge of an ignorant Irish- man, but who, in virtue of his collegiate appoint- ment, felt himself bound to make pretensions to some scientific knowledge. It used to be an amusement to us youths to ask him the name of a rare plant, in order to elicit his only and unfail- ing answer: '^Cactus grandljlorus, ivom Sene- gal, or some other part of South America," which he would utter with the most pompous self-as- surance, and in the broadest Tipperary brogue. In the neighborhood of the college premises there were some scattered houses of plank and 28 MY COLLEGE DAYS. sbiiiglG, painted white, most of which were mere cottages, although there were a few more preten- tious residences, in one of which Bishop Brown- ell, the president of the college, lived. The small- er tenements were generally occupied by humble people, some of whom were poor widows, licensed by the authorities to board the students, for whom no meals were provided within the college. For one dollar and seventy-five cents a week, the high- est price charged, these hungry youths were sup- plied daily with three substantial meals, at every one of which there was a satisfactory allowance of meat, while in addition there never was want- ing a plenitude of mush and milk, buckwheat, Indian cakes and slap-jacks, ai3ple, pumpkin, and mince pies, codfish balls, and all the other delec- table contrivances of the ingenious culinai-y art of New England. The college was situated in a beautiful part of the country near the banks of the " Little River," as I believe it is termed in respectful geographi- cal language, but which w^e students and the in- habitants generally called '' The Hog," an appel- lation strangely at variance with the lofty aspi- rations of an academic resort. Whatever may be its name, it was at that time a very pretty, clear stream, winding along through banks alter- nately of smooth pasture-land, knolls tufted with OLD HAETFORD. 29 wild growth, and forest woods. I became, with a college comrade, joint owner of a small skiff, and we often navigated together the " Little Riv- ei*," which in the course of time we thoroughly- explored. In the summer we bathed in it, and in the winter skated on it, and it seems to me that without this stream my college life would have been dull and stagnant enough. On a bank of this river, near the city across which it flows in its course to the Connecticut, where it empties, Mrs. Sigourney, who at that time was regarded as a great literary personage, conferring much distinction upon the place she had honored with her abode, lived, in a pretty house almost hid from view in a thick grove of hickory and chestnut trees. Over " The Hog," where it traverses the centre of Hartford, there was a curious old wood- en bridge, with shops or booths built close to- gether on each side of it; so it looked like the fragment of an ordinary street. Hartford in those days was very different, no doubt, from what it is now, but I have never had an opportunity of seeing it in its modern aspect. It was then one of the most picturesque little cit- ies I had ever seen, with much that was rural in its appearance, though some of its structures were not wanting in indications of the opulence and dignity becoming a capital of the State. It re- 30 MY COLLEGE DAYS. tained so much regard for its traditional Puri- tanism as to begin the Sabbath, according to the Jewish model, on the Saturday evening — when the shops were all closed, and every amusement as well as business suddenly ceased — and end it on the Sunday at sundown, when each one resumed his ordinary daily pursuits. There was, more- over, no theatre, and the repealed demands made for the establishment of one were severely re- fused by the public authorities, and strenuously opposed by the general sentiment of the inhab- itants. I found my new comrades very different from those I had just left at the Grammar-school. All of them were much older ; not only the members of the higher classes, as was to be naturally ex- pected, but those that were in the same class as myself. Many of theai were full-grown men, who had already been engaged in various trades and pursuits of life, as is not uncommon in the New England colleges. This was especially the case with those students who were " preparing," as it was said, " for the ministry " — young men who, rather late in life, having taken a serious turn, had abandoned their original vocations to begin a collegiate course preliminary to studying the- ology, and becoming clergymen of the Episcopal Church. MY COLLEGE COMRADES. 31 Many of these youths, who were poor, were from country towns and villages and the coun- try itself, and were humbly if not shabbily clad, rustic in appearance, and uncouth in manners. We called these incipient divines the religiosi, and felt for them a barely concealed contempt, giving them no credit for their pious professions, and uncharitably charging them wdth being actu- ated by interested motives in changing their vo- cations. We used to say that they had left their previous pursuits because they wanted the capac- ity successfully to follow them. Of one who was known to have been a shoemaker, it was said, that having tried in vain to make two shoes alike, he had cast aside the awl and the last in despair, and, assuming a convenient conversion, had thrown himself upon the charity of the col- lege, and been made a recipient of one of the nu- merous scholarships with which it was endowed for those intending to become clergymen. There were doubtless some truly sincere converts among these transformed mechanics and tradesmen, but there were many who gave little indication of having abandoned the worldliness of their pre- vious lives, while most had retained such habits and manners from their past associations as made their companionship hardly acceptable to the well- bred and refined. 32 MY COLLEGE DAYS. The habits and dress of these students were as distinctive as their bearing and manners. They used to lounge in their rooms, or even attend chapel and the lectures, and go about the col- lege grounds and neighborhood in a negligence of person and attire that greatly shocked me at first siglit. Their habitual dress was a long, loose, and almost shapeless gown of thin printed calico, such as is seldom seen outside of a sick- room, hanging in scant folds from their stooping shoulders down to the heels of their slipshod feet. This they wore on almost every occasion. They went to prayers in it, morning and evening, to recitation, and their daily meals. Their hab- its were very sedentary — acquired probably in the course of their former vocations at the tailor's board, the cobbler's, the joiner's bench, and be- hind the counter of the shopman. They seldom left (except in case of urgent necessity) their rooms, in which they passed hour after hour, ly- ing at full length upon their beds or vibrating to and fro, with their bodies crouching in a cheap New England rocking-chair. None of them, as far as I can recollect, though they had the ad- vantage of maturity and experience, and the pro- fessed motive of a high aim in life, ever excelled in collegiate study, or reached in after years dis- tinction in the Church. THE COLLEGE ROISTERERS. 33 Besides the " charity " students there were sev- eral young men who, like them, were advanced in years and preparing for the ministry, but who differed in the important particular of being self- supporting. For this purpose they were permit- ted to absent themselves from the college during the whole winter session, when they taught in the district schools of the State. Thus, with the salaries received, they were enabled to meet the expenses of their support, and of such portions of the collegiate course as they were enabled to avail themselves of. These young men were of more independent and elevated character than the beneficiaries, and not only took a better stand in their classes but were held in higher general esteem. The college not being in a very prosperous state, there were not more than sixty or seventy students in all, among whom there was a suffi- cient number of sons of thriving parents from the various large cities and other flourishing communities to give a certain air of external re- spectability, at least, to the institution. These, however, if they had more seeming polish than their rustic fellow -students, were by no means so subdued and decorous in their behavior. To them, as they had given no pledges in a profess- ed conversion and devotedness to religion, and 3 34 MY COLLEGE DAYS. consequently were more free to act in accord- ance with juvenile tendencies, naturally fell the part of sustaining the traditional reputation of the roistering student. These, few as they were in number, were quite equal to the occasion, and the college scrape flourished as vigorously in the young and puny Washington College as among its older and sturdier contemporaries. Hazing and smoking of freshmen, blocking up chapel doors and breaking locks, infecting recitation- rooms and rendering them uninhabitable, bar- ring out president and professors, transferring tin signs and sign- boards from town shops to college walls, and other ancient observances were duly honored. The roisterers quorum pars mag- na fai^ as I am bound to confess in this frank revelation of myself, were a small but very effec- tive band, and, while we were doing no good to ourselves, did much mischief and gave great tor- ment to others. There was a fair proportion of Southern stu- dents, to whose companionship I had been espe- cially commended, being told that I should find them to be the most gentlemanly and desirable associates. I, accordingly, joined their society, which was known as the Phi Beta, or Beta Phi; but what these characters w^ere intended to sig- nify I do not remember. It was already in a THE SOUTHERN STUDENTS. 35 state of incipient dissolution when I entered, and although a great effort was made by us to revive it, by incurring a large expense for the decora- tion of the room in which we met, and the print- ing of a vast number of circulars, which we sent to all the old members throughout the Southern States, inviting them to pay our bills — an invita- tion they naturally cared not to avail themselves of — we failed to avert the catastrophe. The soci- ety dissolved ; and as we were responsible for its debts, and, as I hope and believe, paid them, we divided the somewhat extensive library among us by way of compensation. I have some of the books to this day ; among them a Philadelphia edition of " Lingard's History of England," with the Greek symbols of the old Phi Beta society scrawled on the fly-leaf of each volume. I must say that the dictum of those who commended the companionship of the Southern students to me was open to question ; for, though tliey had many qualities w^iich some might pronounce " gentlemanly," they hardly possessed any which could be regarded as very "desirable." fThey were the idlest fellows in the whole college — self- indulgent, profuse in expenditure, always ready to incur and seldom scrupulous in paying debts, habitually dirty in person, and negligent in the care of their clothes, though occasioually expeq- 36 MY COLLEGE DAYS. sively and showily dressed. They resembled in this respect the negroes, among whom the great- est part of their lives had been spent, and whose habits they had acquired ; who, after grovelling six days of the week in filth and rags, spend all their money in purchasing bright-colored clothes and ribbons to decorate themselves on Sundays and holidays. , The rooms of these Southern stu- dents were generally in such a plight that few of ordinary nasal sensibility could venture to enter them, and a view of the ragged and dirty shirts > ^^ they generally wore would throw any establish- ment of laundresses and sewing-women into de- spair. They were the least orderly, obedient, and industrious of all the students; but, though they did no good at college, some of them became af- terward of prominence in their own States, and members of Congress. MY CLASS. 37 CHAPTER III. My Class. — Standing. — Classmates. — Brilliant "Writers. — Bishop Williams. — Archbishop Bayley. — Hon. John Bige- low, — Literary Genius. — Libraries.— Book Appropriation. — Sham Professor. — Miscellaneous Talent. — A Brief Val- edictory. There were only seventeen students in the freshman chiss when I entered, and these dwin- dled down, during the four years of the collegi- ate course, to the small number of ten. They all towered high above me, for not one of them was a boy, and several were full-grown men. I was not only much younger than the rest, but appear- ed, from the smallness of my size, of less age than I was. From the very first recitation I proved a superiority to all my fellows, which I bore easily to the end of the collegiate course, being acknowledged, without dispute, the head of my class. I attribute this pre-eminence not to any remarkable natural talents possessed by me, or to severe application to my studies, but simply to the better discipline to which I had been subject- ed, especially during the last year at the Gram- 38 MY COLLEGE DAYS. mar- school, under that most excellent teacher, Dr. Anthon. My comrades were mostly from country schools, where, evidently, they had re- ceived but scant and imperfect instruction. They had never been well grounded in the elements — a deficiency in their education, now that they were in college, it seemed too late to supply, for it was presumed they knew what they most required to be taught. They were called upon to construe Homer and Horace, while they were hardly fa- miliar enough with their Greek and Latin gram- mars to conjugate rvTrrcj and amo. My advanced and thorough knowledge of these elements gave me a speed and bottom which enabled me to take the lead easily from the first, and to keep it to the last. It might, however, seem somewhat surprising tliat I was also enabled to surpass, as was the fact, my comrades in the various oth- er studies, in all of which, with the exception of English composition and declamation, I was generally the best. It was owing to the circum- .stimce that the older members of the class, some of whom had already been engaged in the ac- tive duties of life before beo-innino; the collegiate course, were not only naturally backward in ele- mentary knowledge, but very slow in developing their faculties and applying them to new and ad- vanced studies. A BISHOP IN EMBRYO. 39 All my classmates appeared to me to be in- finitely my superiors in English composition. While they wrote whole essays, page after page, I could only succeed with very hard work in coupling together two or three barely consecu- tive sentences, puerile in thought and simple in expression. I listened with wonder, and not a little envy, to their long effusions swelling with full phrases, and sparkling with impossible tropes. I thought there was a scope of thought, an ex- panse of style, and a flight of the imagination in those wondrous productions to which it was hopeless to aspire. I was a poor writer, but prob- ably a worse critic, and was admiring, doubtless, in the compositions of my envied comrades, a diffuseness of treatment and a turgidity of ex- pression which were by no means preferable to my own costive efforts. Though none of the members of my class gave any indication, while in college, of possessing re- markable talents, three of them, at least, have arisen to very prominent positions in the world. One has been a minister plenipotentiary to France; another was Archbishop of Baltimore; and a third is Bishop of Connecticut. The last, my old com- rade John Williams, now the Right Rev. Dr. Williams, was the only one of the three for whom the possibility of such an elevation as he has 40 MY COLLEGE DAYS. reached could have been predicted with any show of reason. He, although his parents were Uni- tarians of Deerfield, Massachusetts, had, while a student at Harvard — for he did not enter our class until the second (sophomore) year — imbibed a strong preference for the Episcopal Church, and determined to take orders in it. He, accord- ingly, after much resistance on the part of his father and 'New England friends, abandoned the college at Cambridge for the more orthodox in- stitution, as he regarded it, of Hartford. He was only seventeen or eighteen years of age when I first knew him ; and yet, with his tall, stiff figure, his long serious face and high composed brow, his mild blue eyes, the natural fire of which, if they had any, was subdued by the spectacles he always wore, his sobriety of demeanor and meas- ured talk, the old-fashioned cut of his black coat, and his gaitered shoes, he had already the look and manner of a settled parish clergyman. We always called him " Parson Williams." He ap- peared much older than his age, and his conduct was not only in harmony with his apparent ma- turity of years but with his ardent profession of piety. He was a great admirer in those days of the arbitrary High-Churchman Laud ; but I never heard that the New England diocese of Connecti- cut which he administers has ever had occasion AN ARCHBISHOP TO BE. 41 to complain of any undue prelatical pretensions on his part. James Roosevelt Bayley an archbishop ! I should sooner have thought of old James, the negro janitor of the college, who pretended to make our beds and sweep our rooms, becoming President of the United States ! Bayley was no student, and, in fact, seemed to think of nothing but the care, inside and out, of his own lusty, handsome person, and of the cigar he was per- petually puffing. He had a broad and ruddy face, and was always of a jovial humor. He strolled about with a rollicking gait and devil- may-care manner, which was perhaps the reason we gave him tlie nickname, by which he was uni- versally known, of "The Commodore;" or it is possible he may have expressed some predilec- tions for the quarter-deck, for which he seemed not ill-adapted, as far, at any rate, as appearances went. His grandfather was a Presbyterian — a very rich man, from whom he had great expecta- tions. His father and mother were both dead ; and as they had been, as his relatives generally were, Presbyterians of the strictest sect, I do not know how it happened that he had strayed into the fold of the " prelatics." On graduating from the college, he followed for a short period the profession of his father, who, Dr. Guy Carleton 42 MY COLLEGE DAYS. Bnyley, had been a physician of some prominence in New York, and for a time the chief medical officer of the Quarantine. Our cLass-fellow Bay- ley, however, did not long practise as a doctor, but, studying theology, was ordained a clergy- man, first, I think, in the Presbyterian, and after- ward in the Protestant Episcopal Church. While settled as the rector of a small parish at Harlem, he became very intimate with the resident Cath- olic priest, who is said to have exercised a good deal of influence over him. However this may be, much to the surprise of his friends generally, and greatly to the vexation of his Presbyterian grandfather, who cut him off without even the traditional shilling, he became suddenly a con- vert to Roman Catholicism, and in due course of time, after a residence as an acolyte in the semi- nary of St. Sulpice, in Paris, was consecrated a priest. He seems to have been an especial pro- tege of Archbishop Hughes, whom he served a long time as secretary, and was subsequently, through his influence, made Bishop of Newark, New Jersey. His final promotion was to the Archbishopric of Baltimore, where he died in an odor of great sanctity, and left a memory much revered by that powerful hierarchy of which he was regarded as one of the most zealous cham- pions. TUE DESTINED PLENIPOTENTIARY. 43 The minister plenipotentiary that was destined to be, John Bigelow, was a boisterous, overgrown, awkward boy, to whom the indefinable nickname Rigdum Funidos, which some of us gave him, seemed not inappropriate. He was one of the youngest of the students, and remained so short a time at our college that it would have been difficult to form any idea of his probable future. He left after the second year, and became a stu- dent of Union College, in Schenectady, where he developed a taste for study. After graduating, he studied law in the city of New York, partly supporting himself in the mean time by teaching. With the younger Daponte (son of tlie Italian patriot), Parke Godwin, Eames, Tilden, Butler, Clarke, and others, mostly old fellow-students at Union College, he formed a society called " The Column," for the purpose of improvement in lit- erature and debate. These young men all be- came, more or less, writers for the various jour- nals; and Godwin and Bigelow established a week- ly paper. The Pathfinder^ on their own account. It did not prosper, though great credit was awarded by the critics to the articles, and es- pecially to some remarkable ones attributed to Bigelow. After the demise of The Pathfinder^ Bigelow, nothing discouraged with literature, gave up the law and devoted himself exclusively 44 MY COLLEGE DAYS. to the pursuit of letters, writing constantly for the papers and magazines, editing and compiling, and doing other miscellaneous work for the book- sellers. For a long time a contributor to the iV. Y. Evening Posty he at last became an edi- tor and proprietor conjointly with Mr. Bryant. Through the influence of this devoted republi- can paper Bigelow obtained the appointment of United States Consul to Paris. On the sudden death of Dayton, the American minister to the Imperial Court, and in consequence of the sup- posed incompetency of the Secretary of Lega- tion, Bigelow was immediately transferred by President Lincoln from the consulate to the em- bassy, with the title of charge cVaffaires. Sub- sequently he was appointed minister plenipoten- tiary, and upon him devolved the arduous and responsible duty of conducting the negotiations with the Imperial Court for the purpose of in- ducing France to withdraw its army of invasion from Mexico. The successful result was not a little due to the persistent and judicious energy with which Bigelow co-operated with the reso- lute policy of the Secretary of State, Seward, and the Cabinet at Washington. On his return from Paris, Bigelow settled in New York, and, resum- ing his old alliance with the democratic party, which had been temporarily severed during the LITERARY FACILITY. 45 agitation of the Slavery question and the pvog- ress of the war, was elected Secretary of State of New York. Bis^elow has been an industrious publicist and author. He is the writer of a work on Jamaica, W. I. ; a statistical account of the United States, written in French ; and the editor of the best edition of the autobiography of Ben- jamin Franklin. While in Paris, he fell in with the original manuscript, and published it, with a completion of the life by himself, and the work is now acknowledged to be the standard biogra- phy of the patriot and philosopher. The article "Franklin," in the new edition of the JSnci/clo- pmdia Sritayinica, now in the course of publica- tion, was written by Mr. Bigelow. The unquiet, almost shapeless college youth has developed into the sedate and portly man of six feet in height, with an appearance of much personal dignity and distinction. Besides these three notabilities — the minister plenipotentiary, the archbishop, and the bishop — our little class supplied Michigan with a Secre- tary of State, and Connecticut with a Lieutenant- Governor. There was some literary facility among the students, as was shown by the publication of a few numbers of a college magazine with this title, characteristic of juvenile pedantry: The Herm- 46 MY COLLEGE DAYS. athenicm. I regarded it as a wonderful per- formance, and would have gladly contributed to it had I'deemed myself capable. There was one of the migratory teacher-students who had writ- ten the prize story for a country newspaper, upon whom I looked with great admiration as undoubt- edly the genius of the college, and likely in fut- ure times to rival in reputation Scott and Coop- er. I have forgotten his name. Such, alas, is fame ! The societies, with their weekly debates and essays, kept alive a certain interest among us all, in the literary, social, and political topics of the day; and their libraries as well as those of the college supplied us abundantly with books, of which I continued to be, as I had always been, a great but miscellaneous and indiscriminate read- er. Besides the college library there was in the same room or hall, covering one whole side of it, a large collection of volumes, to which additions were being constantly made by the frequent ar- rivals of great foreign-looking cases crammed full of books, directed to Professor Samuel Farmar Jarvis. This personage, though his name was very familiar to us all — for it had always for many years headed the list of the Faculty in the annu- al catalogue — was, like a good many of his sham colleagues, no more a reality to iis than Mrs. FORBIDDEN FRUIT. 47 Gamp's shadowy friend, Mrs. 'Arris. Ho was nominally a professor of Ecclesiastical Polity, or something of that sort ; and I question, as he had been for a very long time living in Europe, wheth- er he had ever seen the college, or even thought of it but as a convenient place where to send his books, and thus avoid the payment of Custom- house dues and the expense of storage. It was expressly stated that the collection belonged to Samuel Farmar Jarvis, D.D., LL.D., S.T.D., etc., Professor of Ecclesiastical Polity, etc., etc., to give him his full title as set down in the college catalogue, and was reserved for his exclusive use, while every student was w^arned off from touch- ing a single book. The shelves, however, remain- ing quite open, and the librarian, a short-sighted, blinking tutor, who could not see further than his nose, being the only one to guard them, the students finding some of the works of a tempt- ing kind, with, moreover, the additional attrac- tion of being forbidden fruit, helped themselves without scruple. I, while admiring the good- taste of the owner for not confining his selection to theology, availed myself freely of the choice miscellaneous literature I found on his shelves, and carried off, I recollect, at different times, all the works of Fielding, Smollett, and Sterne, as well as of other authors. I must do myself the 48 MY COLLEGE DAYS. justice to state, however, that I never failed to take good care of every vohirae, and scrupulously to return it ; but I fear, with some, what was in- tended only as temporary appropriation, became permanent larceny. Among the collection was a copy of the first edition of " Junius," with cor- rections in the handwriting of the author, as was stated on a fly-leaf of the volume. This would have been, to any investigator of the authorship of the work, of immense value; and I recollect having carried off the priceless volume, and kept it lying about my room in my careless possession for several weeks ; but I can honestly affirm that it was finally replaced by me on the same shelf whence I had taken it. There seemed to be a sufficiency of miscella- neous talent among the students for every occa- sion of college requirement, and the annual jun- ior exhibitions and commencements were never without their traditional comedy and poems of the usual merit, or rather want of merit, of such eifusions. At the end of the year it was cus- tomary for the students to get up a mock exhibi- tion, when the recognized wag of the class was generally selected to deliver a humorous valedic- tory. On one of these occasions, when all were assembled in great expectation of an evening's entertainment — for the chosen speaker was cred- A SHORT VALEDICTORY. 49 ited with an unusual endowment of the vis comi- ca — he, after having demurely presented himself and bowed to the audience, said, "Good-bye, fel- Iow^s !" and disappeared. 4 50 MY COLLEGE DAYS. CHAPTER ly. The Faculty. — The Sham Professors. — The Real Teachers. — Sleepy David. — Old Caloric. — The President. — Higli Jinks. — A Change. — The New President. — Holland. — Professor Jim. — Habits of Exercise. — Vacations. — Chol- era in New York.~A Speech of Henry Clay. — Governor Ellsworth. — Isaac Toucey. — Gideon Welles. — Hunger- ford, the Lawyer. Though our Faculty was nominally large and imposing, it was in reality very small and insig- nificant. The names of many highly-titled Rev- erends, and Right Reverends, and Honorables, and Chief-justices, and Governors — with all the alphabetical letters our colleges and universities distribute so profusely, attached — figured as those of professors of impossible sciences and unheard- of branches of learning, in the circulars and an- nual catalogues. They themselves, granting their existence, which might not unreasonably be doubt- ed, never showed their faces, to my knowledge, within the precincts of the college, or evinced the least interest in what was going on there. The teaching devolved upon two or three quasi SLEEPY DAVID. 51 professors or tutors, wlio were supposed to give instruction in Greek, Latin, matheinatics, chem- istry, and philosophy — tlie only branches taught. Our instructors were mostly young clergymen, who had sought their tutorships and professor- ships merely as resting-places, on their way to something better which they were hopeful might turn up. They were perpetually shifting, so that it was seldom that the Faculty remained the same for two consecutive sessions. The professors seemed to me in the recitations as if they only had an hour's start of the pupils, who were, evidently, always pressing close upon their heels. Some were absurdly unfit for their places. There was one I particularly remember ; we used to call him " Sleepy David ;" I am sorry that I have forgotten his real name, for I should have liked to pillory and expose him here to the scorn of all honest teachers and lovers of sound education. He undertook to teach us geometry, and, of course, at the end of the session we knew no more of it than at the beginning. As, how- ever, there was to be a public examination, we became anxious as to the possible consequences of our ignorance ; so we went in a body, every one of the class without a single exception, and audaciously declared to the professor, or tutor, or whatever he was — to " Sleepy David," as we 52 MY COLLEGE DAYS. termed him — that he must tell us in advance the proposition he would call upon each of us to dem- onstrate, and he did so! One professor, a retired physician and a man of fortune, lived during the summer in a hand- some country residence near the college, and, as a pleasant distraction to him in his leisure, un- dertook to teach chemistry to the students. We called him " Old Caloric ;" for, take what time he would, he resolutely stuck to that elementary branch of the science, leaving us to suspect, and justly, I firmly believe, that he dared not vent- ure farther, for fear of getting out of his depth. His services, however, were said to be gratuitous, and, upon such cheap terms, perhaps we got as much as we were entitled to, and should have been grateful for being allowed to flounder about in the shallows without expecting the privilege of diving into the profundities of science. The president, the Right Rev. Dr. Brownell, Bishop of Connecticut, was a venerable, amiable man, who performed his collegiate duties in a very perfunctory manner. Contenting himself with a good-natured smile to every student he met, and an occasional homily on some general moral obligation, delivered in his peculiarly bland manner from the chapel rostrum or pulpit, he left the rest to his incompetent subordinates, who HIGH JINKS. 53 were equally remiss in fulfilling their duties as guardians and teachers. There was some pretence of visiting the stu- dents' rooms every evening; but this show of su- }3ervision did not hinder us from absenting our- selves with impunity whenever we pleased, and we frequented at will each other's apartments or sallied out into the town at any hour of the day or night. We were left undisturbed in our high jinks, both inside and outside of the college walls. We had our frequent symposiums in our rooms, eating and drinking to any excess without much fear of check, and I attribute much of my own subsequent ill-health to these irregular indul- gences. We were eating doughy mince and ap- ple pies, and washing them down with cggnog and punch, which we mixed in our wash-basins, stirred with the handles of our tooth-brushes, and drank out of our soap-boats, during the night and throuojhout the small hours of the morninfr, when we should have been fast asleep in our beds. If not in our college rooms, we were prob- ably in the town taverns and confectionaries, do- ing worse. There was some improvement in the discipline and teaching on the appointment of the Rev. Dr. Wheaton as president, in the place of Bishop Brownell, and of William Holland as professor of 54 MY COLLEGE DAYS. the Latin and Greek languages. The new presi- dent was a prim Puritanical-looking person, of a severe countenance and resolute conduct, but he wanted tact, and could not reform without dis- organizing. Holland, the new professor, had been a tutor in Yale College, and had a greater mastery over the subjects he pretended to teach than some of his predecessors, but his heart was not fiilly in his business, and he preferred the political forum to the groves of Academus. He often made speeches at the democratic town-meetings, and so identi- fied himself with the cause of Van Buren, when nominated for President of the United States, as to write a popular and flattering biography of him, and travel about the country on an election- eering tour, commending him to the suffrage of the people. He, after leaving the college, settled in New York as a lawyer, but died before he was able to accomplish much, either in his profession or political life. There was one member of the Faculty, perhaps the most notable one of the whole set, who is en- titled to a remembrance. He, too, like the rest, performed his vocations in rather a perfunctory manner, but he was a faithful fellow withal, and stuck more closely to his duties than any of the others. He had been at least constant to his PROFESSOR JIM. 55 profession, for he had served the college ever since its establishment. This was " Professor Jim" — as we called him — our negro janitor, whose special duty it was to sweep out daily some thirty rooms, and make at least sixty beds, which he undertook to do and did in a manner. Though he, probably from necessity, was somewhat re- miss in the performance of his duties, he nega- tively was of considerable benefit to us all ; for, what he neglected to do, we were forced to do for ourselves, and thus became by compulsion practically useful and self-reliant. We made our own fires, cleaned our own shoes, brought up our own water, and got rid, in some way or other, of our own slops. Many of us, besides, sawed our own wood, and carried it up into our rooms. Professor Jim had a history, which he was fond of relating. He had been a sailor on board the Shannon during the famous fight with the Ches- apeake, having been impressed into the service of the English Navy, and thus may be regarded as having shared in the honor of causing that little war of 1812, of which we are so patriotical- ly proud. He used to assure us that, on the ap- proach of the engagement between Lawrence and Brook, he had been caught in the act of spiking the cannon of the Shannon, and kept in irons during the famous fight. He died a few years 56 MY COLLEGE DAYS. since, at a very advanced age ; and it is pleasant to know that his last days were consoled and comforted with a pension — a liberal one, it is hoped — from the college. The students were not very enterprising in ex- ploration of the country around Hartford. We took no long walks, or, in fact, systematic bodily exercise of any kind. We played no out-door games, regarding cricket and foot and base ball, and other such invigorating pastimes, as quite below the dignity of collegiate students. In sum- mer, however, some of the younger and more ad- venturous swam both the " Little " and Connecti- cut rivers, and in winter skated upon them. None but myself and fellow-proprietor of our little skiff ever thought of taking a spirt at rowing. We occasionally, however, took a drive to Wads- worth's Tower, some ten miles from Hartford, or a sleigh-ride en masse to Wethersfield, famous for its onions, its pretty girls, and delicious "flip." I was an occasional companion in a drive of an old New York friend, who had entered the col- lege at my earnest solicitation, for which I hope he may have forgiven me. He was no more dis- posed to study at Hartford than he had been at the Grammar-school in Murray Street, and pass- ed the whole week doinoi; nothino- but exercisins: his patience in waiting for the coming round of A SAD VACATION. 57 the Saturday, when, loaded with his gun and fish- ing-rod, he used to set off in a buggy for Wind- sor. I do not recollect that he ever, when I ac- companied him, filled his creel or shooting-bng, but I shall never forget the savory trout and plump quails -with which the sporting host of the Windsor Hotel used to regale us at table, and more than compensate us for our own ill- luck in the brook and the woods. During the whole four years I was at college, I never failed to spend each of the three annual vacations at home ; and sometimes in the winter I have gone the whole way from Hartford to New York in an open sleigh, when the snow and snow-drifts made the roads impassable for the Boston mail-coach or stage, which was the usual means of conveyance by land. It w^as during a summer vacation (1832) that the cholera in New York was at its height. I went home even then, but gradually, as it were, stopping on the route at Greenfield Farms, where some friends had fled for refuge. I recollect, as I presented myself among the group, how each one, thinking that I might have come from some infected district, shrunk back and withheld his hand; while an old gentleman, whom I knew ^vell, fairly turned his back upon me and took to his heels, ramming, at the same time, great fingers- 58 ' MY COLLEGE DAYS. ful of snuff into his nostrils. I did not stay long at Greenfield Farms, but soon went, in spite of the cholera, to New York, where I remained with my family during the whole summer. We lived on a diet and regimen that were supposed suita- ble for warding off any attack of the pestilence. We ate no fruit or vegetables of any kind, not even potatoes, and drank regularly at our dinners pretty strong potations of port-wine and water. We all escaped without even a premonitory symp- tom of the cholera. I have never spent, however, a more terrible time — one more " full with hor- rors " — for each moment of the day we were re- minded of the dreadful pestilence which was rav- aging the city in which we dwelt. There was no other topic of conversation in-doors and out. The daily number of attacks and deaths, of which there were printed slips issued from the newspa- per offices, was reiterated by every one we met, with probably a supplementary account, with all the sickening details of some specially sudden case of horror, of jDrivate experience. There was hardly a person who had not his story to tell of this friend or that neighbor who had died — one after eating a peach, another after eating a pota- to, or some article of food deemed generally not only innocuous but most wholesome. It was the last thing the poor victim ate which was HENRY CLAY. 59 always regarded as the teterrima causa of his death. We had occasional visits at the college from the presidents and other great men on their periodical tours over the country. Henry Clay was received by the whole body of the students, headed by college president and professors, and, being addressed by one of them, responded in a speech. I cannot recall what he said on that oc- casion ; but, during the same visit, when I heard him address the citizens of Hartford, I can re- member the conclusion of his speech, which was singularly inappropriate, I thought, to his sober- sided New England audience: "I did not," he said, " come here to be treated with any form or ceremony, but to see you as friends ; in a word, to take a drink andacheio of tobacco with youP'' This might have been a welcome peroration to a throng of his jolly constituents assembled about a Western tavern, where the deed would, no doubt, have quickly followed upon the word; but it was like a sudden dash of cold water into the faces of his Puritanical friends of the East, after the soul-stirring orator had first warmed them into sympathy with his genial eloquence. The students visited occasionally in Hartford, and I became more or less familiar with some of the notabilities of the place. There was Ells- 60 MY COLLEGE DAYS. worth, the Governor of the State, a tall, broad- shouldered, simply attired, and dignified-looking man, who received a salary of only one thousand dollars a year, and lived upon it— -his daugh- ters serving at his table and doing other homely household duties, as was customary in those days in the best New England families, when women contrived to be useful without a tarnish to their refinement. The governors of Connecticut used to wear a small black cockade on the side of their beaver hats, near the top, like the cockades worn by Eu- ropean footmen. I have not seen any governor for many a year, and I wonder whether they wear cockades, and live on one thousand dollars per annum, nowadays ! I saw Isaac Toucey often, subsequently Secre- tary of the Navy, under Pierce. He was a statu- esque-looking man, with a great projecting fore- head, as square, smooth, and white as a block of marble. He, either if walking or rather stalking, or standing, bore himself as stiff and erect as a column of the State House, and when he spoke, his sentences were uttered with the slowness and emphasis of not-to-be-questioned oracles. It was edifying to us young folks to behold so dignified a personage regularly in his place in the Episco- pal Church where we attended, and to see him NOTABILITIES. 61 humbly soliciting, Avitli the plate in his hand, at each pew -door the alms of the charitable; for he was one of the wardens or vestrymen, whose duty it was to make the collection. Gideon Welles, the editor of the Hartford Times, and at one time Secretary of the Navy, was a slouchy man with a shock head of hair, as full and scattered as the twirling mop of a serv- ing-raaid. Hungerford, the leading lawyer of Hartford, a really able and eloquent man, had a peculiarity that no one who ever observed it could easily forget. As soon as he began to speak, his nose would begin to wrinkle, the movement increas- ing, and the furrows deepening more and more, as he warmed in his discourse. I never noticed a habit of more ludicrous effect. 62 MY COLLEGE DAYS. CHAPTER V. Graduation. — An old Diploma. — Its Suggestions. — Choice of Profession. — The Bells and Mason Good's Works. — Enter University of Pennsylvania. — Professor Horner. — The Mysteries and Horrors of Dissecting-room. — Dr. Hare. — Chemical Displays. — Surgery at Blocksley Hospital. — Professor Gibson. — Other Professors. — Doctors made Easy. — Passage to Liverpool. — A Jolly Voyage. — Dr. Hawks. — Arrival in Liverpool. — Departure for Edinburgh. On the 6th of August, 1835,1 spoke my com- mencement speech on the text, Ingenuas artes didicisse, emollit mores nee sinit esset feros, not that I knew much theoretically or practically of the influence of the arts, for I believe that I was as insensible of their refining effects as a Zulu warrior. I then received my degree of B.A. (bachelor of arts). I have the diploma before me at this moment. The parchment has turned yellow with age, but the view of the college at the top is clearly discernible, with the projected wing, that was never built, added, to give com- pleteness to the picture, but which to me is only a symbol of the sham establishment whose pre- tensions were always in advance of its perform- LEAVING COLLEGE. 63 ances. The seal has melted into a shapeless mass of red wax, with not a line of the original stamp left; while the once bright blue ribbon to which it is attached has lost all its original color, and faded to a dingy white. These, too, may be sym- bolical, and serve to remind me of the effects of time and age, the obliterated impressions and vanished hopes of youth. I have had the bit of parchment for nearly half a century, but I know not why I have kept it, for I have never looked at it during those many years until now, and it has never been of any other use than to point the sentences I have just written. I left the college, for it was no alma mater or benign mother to me, without a regretful feeling or reverential remembrance. I would have glad- ly dropped a veil of oblivion over those impor- tant but wasted four years. I do not wholly blame myself; for I was eager for knowledge and amenable to discipline, and I am sure that, if those whose duty it was to guide and govern me had better fulfilled their obligations,! should have been less recreant to mine. Washington is now Trinity College, and, with its fresh baptism, it is hoped that it has been inspired with a new and better life — it could not be worse. Before leaving college, I had taken a fancy — I can hardly call it by so strong a term as a reso- 64 MY COLLEGE DAYS. liition — to become a physician. I do not know that I had any peculiar fitness or even a taste for the profession, but I was not any better adapted or more inclined for the bar or the pulpit, and I had to make a choice of one of the three. The motive which induced me, I think, to settle on the medical profession was the no more serious one than that my last chum in college had se- lected it, and I thought it would be pleasant to continue my companionship with him as a fel- low-student in our new studies. He was going to the Medical School of the University of Penn- sylvania at Philadelphia, and it was arranged that I should join him there on the opening of the session in ISTovember. I do not recollect very well how I spent the interval of three months. I may have been for some time in the country, and, no doubt, I read a good deal in my usual desultory way. With the kindly intention of giving me a foretaste of my medical studies, some of my friends had provided me with copies of the "Anatomy," by John and Charles Bell, the two celebrated Edinburgh sur- geons, and of the " Study of Medicine," by John Mason Good. I could not have had two works better calculated to enamor me with the profes- sion I had resolved upon pursuing. Medical sci- ence has brought to life and buried whole libra- UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA. 65 ries of text-books since tliose clays; but the vol- umes of the Bells aucl Good, though they may now be scorned as guides, have never lost their literary interest, and will always be welcomed as the most charming companions for a leisure hour. My friend and'fellow-student had selected his lodgings in Philadelphia before I arrived, and I felt bound, out of good comradeship, to join him ; but they were in a boarding-house, cheap even for those times — three dollars a week — and the style of living, as well as the company, was so little to my liking, that I felt uneasy during the whole time of my stay. I attended all the lectures pretty regularly, but gave my chief attention to those on anatomy and chemistry. Professor Horner was a clear dem- onstrator, though little else, and under him I ac- quired a fair elementary knowledge of anatomy; and by the daily sight of the dead subject on his table, and the occasional dissection of "a part" by myself, became so familiarized with these pro- fessional horrors as greatly to overcome my first natural repugnance. Tlie dissecting-room was only accessible at night, and those who were allowed to frequent it were enjoined to keep the fact a secret from all but the initiated. This may have been necessa- ry; for the laws of Pennsylvania either did not 5 66 MY COLLEGE DAYS. recognize as legal the dissection of the human body, or public opinion was so opposed to it that it was not safe to practise it openly. This secre- cy, and the precautions which were taken to pre- serve it, the nightly visitation, the whispered com- munications between the knowing ones, and the guarded silence to all others, cast over the whole business such an air of mystery, and made it so much a deed of darkness, that I never went to this simple performance of my duty without feel- ing somewhat as must feel the assassin going in the night with stealthy steps to his act of murder. Dr. Hare, the Professor of Chemistry, amused me, as he did every one else, with his various fire- works, his flashy and explosive displays of elec- tricity, and his exhibitions of the eccentric effects of the gases, oxygen, and protoxide of nitrogen, upon himself and some of the more adventurous students, but he succeeded in teaching very little of the principles of his science to any of us. At Blocksley Hospital, Dr. Gibson, the Profes- sor of Surgery, showed us each week bloody work enough to have quickly familiarized the most in- experienced ; but I could never witness his bru- tality without a severe shock to my feelings, and he hardly ever lectured without sending away from the amphitheatre several students in faint- A SURGICAL PROFESSOR. 67 iiig fits. Many of his exhibitions were unneces- sarily demonstrative ; for he seemed to take a great dehglit in accumulating as large a number of horrible cases as he could, and displaying them in public without regard to the feelings of the poor sufferers or the sympathy of the pitying spectators. He at one time, I recollect, ordered all the patients — and there must have been nearly fifty of them in the hospital — affected with chorea., or St.Vitus's dance, to be brought together into the pit of the amphitheatre, for no other purpose, apparently, than to exhibit the eccentric move- ments of the poor creatures thus afflicted. To me it was one of the most painful scenes I ever Avitnessed ; for I could not but think how much the sad consciousness to each of his dreadful malady must be increased by witnessing its hor- rid distortions and convulsive movements in the others, and how greatly intensified the sense of an affliction thus made manifest to the gaze of a crowd of gaping spectators. Professor Gibson was a sturdy man, with a stout muscular arm, short cropped iron-gray hair, a hard aquiline nose, and cold blue eyes. He was always equipped, when about to operate, in a sort of butcher's apron and sleeves of a black water, or, rather, blood-proof cloth. He prided himself, and justly — for it was a great operation 68 MY COLLEGE DAYS. — on a successful performance of the Csesarean section, where both the woman and the child who " Was from his mother's womb Untimely ripp'd," survived. The professor must have been in his element during this heroic operation — up to his elbows in blood ! Of the rest of the Faculty I know but little. Wood, the Professor of Materia Medica, the joint author with Bache of the standard " United States Dispensatory," had the peculiarity of being with- out a single natural hair on any part of his body. He, however, by the aid of a flowing wig and well-designed artificial eyebrows, made, with his pale sculptured face and tall dignified person, one of the most presentable members of the whole professorial corps. Chapman, the Profes- sor of the Practice of Medicine, was a great far- cem% and cared much more to amuse than instruct his class. Jackson, the Professor of Physiology, speculating instead of experimenting, went on, session after session, mystifying himself more and more, and becoming less and less intelligible to ns. I, for one, confess that I never could un- derstand a word he said. Hodges, the Professor of Midwifery, was an earnest, conscientious man, who did his best to cram all that was known of MURDEROUS IGNORANCE. 69 his science into tlie crania of three hmulrecl raw students in the space of four months, but it was shishing work. Eight months of study in all, or two sessions of four months each, were required for admission to the examination for a degree. No prelimina- ry education of any kind was necessary, and hun- dreds of young men without the least knowledge of Latin and Greek, and to whom, consequently, each technical word of the sciences they professed to learn and master must have remained a per- petual puzzle, and with hardly any other acquire- ment beyond a superficial acquaintance with the elements of learning, were — after listening for eight months to the various courses of lectures which they could not possibly understand, even if they had time enough — annually authorized by the University of Pennsylvania to practise as physicians, to whose murderous ignorance any one might fall a victim. It was understood that, on my leaving Phila- delphia at the end of the first term, I was to go to Edinburgh, in Scotland, for the completion of my medical studies. I do not recollect how or with whom the idea originated, but I gladly wel- comed the prospect, as most young men of my age naturally would, of a change, and the oppor- tunity of travel into foreign lands. 70 MY COLLEGE DAYS. I, accordingly, set sail for Liverpool in the packet-ship St. Andrew, Captain William Thomp- son, in the spring of 1836. It was probably ear- ly in the month of May, but I cannot recall the exact date. The captain, an Irishman of good family and education, was a great favorite with his countrymen of the North of Ireland, of whom there was a considerable number in New York, in the enjoyment of wealth and high social posi- tion. Several of these with whom he was very intimate were our fellow-passengers, and the cap- tain regarded them very much in the light of his guests ; and, entertaining them accordingly, they and we were regaled right royally. The poop hung with saddles of venison, fat turkeys, canvas- back ducks, plump fowls, and succulent game of all kinds, and, festooned with gigantic bunches of celery, gave us, as soon as we stepped on board, a promise of dainty abundance, which was ful- filled most sumptuously on each day to the last of the three weeks' voyage. In those times the large sum of forty guineas, or two hundred dol- lars, was paid for a passage. This included a daily supply of wine — port, sherry, and madeira at discretion, and champagne twice or three times a week. With this gratuitous flow of drinkables, the more convivial habits of those days, and the greater length of the voyages by sailing vessels, ACROSS THE ATLANTIC. 71 a passage across the Atlantic in a first-class pack- et-ship, particularly under the circumstances of a company of intimate friends, and those a set of merry Irishmen, in charge of the captain, was sure to be a continued jollification. We all be- came intimately acquainted, and each dinner was prolonged into a session like that of a club of merry fellows, where the bottle circulated, and the speech, the song, and the quips and cranks went round until a late hour of the night. Dr. Hawks, of New York, who was a passen- ger, was a great favorite with every one on board ; and the services he read, and the short, simple addresses he delivered from the capstan-head on the Sunday, were as well appreciated by all, from captain to Ducks, as his more elaborate discourses from the pulpit of St. Thomas had been by its imposing crowds. The doctor, moreover, in our less serious mo- ments, was the most cheerful of companions, tak- ing part readily in the drolleries of the occasion, whatever they might be. He performed, I rec- ollect, the part of judge in a burlesque court, on the trial of one of the passengers for having sur- reptitiously taken, and disposed of by eating, the remains of a Stilton cheese. He showed infinite humor in his grave affectation of gravity, and every word of his charge was followed by peals V2 MY COLLEGE DAYS. of laughter, not only from jury and counsel but even from the prisoner himself. From Liver- pool, where we arrived after a passage of from eighteen to twenty-one days or so, I proceeded to Edinburgh. Although the first of the railways^ — the Liver- pool and Manchester — had been for some time in regular operation, and the whole of England was in course of being cut up to make way for oth- ers, I then had no clioice in going to Edinburgh but between a long and tedious ride of days and nights by stage-coach and a sea-voyage. I chose the latter, taking the steamer from Liverpool to Glasgow, and the mail thence to Edinburgh. ARRIVAL IN EDINBURGH. 73 CHAPTER VI. Arrival in Edinburgh. — The Summer Session at the Univer- sity. — My First Quarters. — A Disorderly Household. — Historical, Romantic, and Personal Associations. — The High Street of Edinburgh.— The Little Chapel.— Alison on "Taste." — Mackay the Actor. — Holy rood Palace. — Arthur's Seat and Salisbury Crag. — Heriot's Hospital. — The Meadows. — The Links and Golfers. — Convent. — The Site of the College.— Murder of Darnley. — The Univers- ity and its Associations. I ARRIVED ill Edinburgh in time to attend the summer session (1836), during which the profes- sor of botany delivered a course of lectures, and the various private schools of anatomy and chem- istry were open. Attendance at the university during tlie summer sessions was not obligatory, and there were, consequently, but few students in comparison with the large number in winter. The university building was closed ; but the pro- fessor of botany delivered his course of lectures at the beautiful botanical garden situated in the suburbs, at the opposite extremity of the city. Having duly matriculated, I took the "ticket" for this course, and at the same time became a 74 MY COLLEGE DAYS. student of the private anatomical school taught by Dr. Sharpey, afterward the eminent professor of the University of London. I was commended to a Dr. Y , who agreed to give me board and lodging, and such contin- gent advantages as a youthful medical student could derive from his professional practice, for sixty pounds a year. The doctor was what is called a general practitioner — a plain, practical man, with no pretensions whatsoever to scientific or general culture. His business was among the small tradesmen and mechanics, of whom there were many in the neighborhood of George's Square, where he lived. His patients, though generally of the humbler classes, were numerous and remunerative enough to justify him in keep- ,ing a horse and gig, or drosky, rather, as it was always called, and to enable him to support his large family plainly but in tolerable comfort. His household was conducted on the strictest principles of economy, and his table was neither liberally supplied nor elegantly served. There was always, however, a fair allowance of parritch and pease-brose, baps, broth, and caller baddies, those peculiar Scotch dainties with which I then became first and fully acquainted, though only by dint of hard scrambling for them with my numerous hungry competitors of the Y fam- THE ROMANCE OF EDINBURGH. 75 ily. The house was in a continual state of dis- order, the chief elements of which were a squall- ing baby, a tumbling child, pugnacious brothers and sisters, a scolding mistress, and a grumbling servant-maid. I made my escape in the course of a few months. In the mean time the summer was spent by me agreeably enough, and I found no difficulty in disposing of the long days of that Northern lati- tude. A few hours of the early morning were ample for my lectures and studies ; and I had abundant leisure for a thorough investigation of every street, nook, and corner of the picturesque old city in which I had taken up my abode, and all its interesting neighborhood. I was sufficiently well-read to appreciate the historical, romantic, and personal associations in which Edinburgh is so rich. The halo of Sir Walter Scott's genius, which was then in its ef- fulgence, had thrown such a brightness over the old town, that every spot it touched seemed to me to have as much of the clearness of reality as the most authentic scene of history, and I traced the humble steps of Jeannie Deans with the same assurance of faith as the stately progress of the beautiful Queen Mary. The memories of beau- ty, passion, guilt, and suffering were as distinctly awakened bv the sisjht of Tolbooth Church and TG MY COLLEGE DAYS. the Parliament House as by Holy rood Palace and the chapel ; and certainly it was no more difficult to hear the " piercing shriek" of poor Effie Deans among the echoes of the old " close," or square, than to see the blood of David Rizzio on the stained floor of the royal bedchamber. The old town was full of interest to me, and day after day I paced its steep and winding streets, lingered about its irregular squares, and peered into its grimy closes. My favorite walk was along the High Street, from the craggy heights of the Castle through every turn of its tortuous and precipitous course between walls of towering and impending structures — whose jag- ged outlines and uneven surfaces looked, in the deep shade they threw, not unlike the steep and rugged banks of some mountain-torrent — down to Holyrood Palace and the low and level ex- panse of meadow -land which stretches around and beyond, and finally rises into those remarka- ble eminences, Salisbury Crag and Arthur's Seat. Every house and each step of ground have their historical or romantic associations so blend- ed as to be difficult of distinction ; and as I saun- tered along in their contemplation, I seemed to be in a confused dream of fact and fiction. I must confess, however, that my memory was more quick to respond to the gentle hints of fan- THE HIGH STREET. 11 cy than to the bhint reminders of truth. Heed- less of all that Scottish history might tell me of authentic sieges and defences, I recollect that the old Castle only suggested to me the desper- ate struggle described by the writer of a romance. As I gazed upon the Grassmarket, the steep and crooked Bow, the Tolbooth Church, and the Par- liament House, I was recurring to the pages of Sir Walter Scott's "Heart of Midlothian," and not to the annals of Scotland; in my attempts to revive the past, and for what I could recollect of the Porteous mob and its ill-fated victim, I was more indebted to the novelist than historian. In fact, I should have probably cared little to look upon Bow or Grassmarket, and thought no more of Porteous than any other fellow who had been strangled by the hangman's noose, if Scott's mag- ic touch had not painted scene and character ou my memory. There w^as one association which required no art of the romancer to call to the mind. Trust- ing to my senses, I might have well dispensed with my recollection of Smollett's graphic ac- count in "Humphry Clinker" of the foul habits of the denizens of the High Street; for the pass- er-by, as of old, was still startled by the cry of "gardy loo" {gardezreau),an(\ forced to dodge, as best he might, the oft-repeated torrents of filth 78 MY COLLEGE DAYS. from the windows of tlie many-storied houses impending over his head. I left nothing unseen or unvisited. I stared again and again at the old Tolbooth Church, which, with its grimy walls, heavy square tower, and iron-barred gates and windows, seemed to me no less sombre than must have been its for- mer neighbor, the Tolbooth Jail, in spite of its light crown-topped spire, and the merry succes- sion of tunes chimed by its bells at the noonday hour. I, of course, knew well the little old house at the corner, with its projecting upper story, and painted effigies of John Knox holding forth from his pulpit. I was equally familiar with the imposing residence of the regent Murray, and every other structure in the street to which either history, romance, or tradition had hung a tale. I went every Sunday to the little English chapel in Carubber's Close, on account of its nearness to my residence, and was well pleased to hear that it was the place where Alison, the author of the work on " Taste," had held forth in his choice Addisonian style every week half a century before, and no less charmed to discover that the devout, bald-headed, sturdy little man on his knees by my side was Mackay the actor, the representative of the Baillie Nicol Jarvie of HISTORY AND ROMANCE. 79 the stage, and the close friend of the autlior of " Rob Roy." I was often within the deserted courts of Holy- rood, and treading in the steps of Darnley and his conspirators from the chapel — a lovely ruin, reverentially wrapped in ivy — up the few narrow winding steps into the bedchamber of Queen Mary, where Rizzio was rudely torn from the protecting embrace of his royal mistress, and slaughtered at her feet. From Holyrood I often wandered beyond, past Mushat's Cairn, where Jeanie Deans held the nocturnal rendezvous Avith her sister's seducer, past the ruins of St. Anthony's Chapel, close by, to which the ready-witted woman pointed, and thus secured the escape of her companion from arrest, and herself from brutality at the hands of the villanous Ratcliffe ; and going around and above the cliffs of Salisbury Crag, I would de- scend into the green meadows of St. Leonards, where I could place, at the caprice of my fan- cy, the cottage of the Deans or the croft of the Dumbiedykes. At other times I would ascend Arthur's Seat, which lies crouching like a colossal lion in guar- dianship of the city, and from its summit take in that unequalled view of city, country, sea, and mountains. There was the gray old town, 80 MY COLLEGE DAYS. with all its picturesque irregularities of width and height; the Pentland and Grampian Hills, on which " my father feeds his flock, a frugal swain;" the Frith of Forth, and the sea-beaten Ailsa Crag; all varying every moment to the sight with the shifting hghts and shades of that unsettled climate. A favorite walk of mine was through the long, straight avenues in the " Meadows," passing on my way Heriot's Hospital, a beautiful Gothic structure, the founder of which is said to be the original of King James's goldsmith, in Scott's " Fortunes of Nigel," to the pleasant, airy, rolling ground of the "Links." Here I would follow for hours the earnest golfers, or stand staring at the convent close by, where, within its high walls, bar- red gates and windows, was immured a full bevy of nuns. I wondered how this piece of the oc- cult mechanism of the Roman Church could ever have been established within the sound of the old bells of the Tron, and in out-spoken Presbyterian Scotland. Turn where I might, both in the old and new town, as the ancient and modern parts of the city of Edinburgh are called,! had not far to go to find places of interest from their association with notable personages and events. The site itself of the stately structure of the University was A LIST OF WORTHIES. 81 that of the lonely house, the Kirk o' Field, where Darnley was left on his sick-bed after a traitor- ous kiss by his queen, a few hours before that fatal midnight when an awful explosion shook the whole city, " and the burghers rushed out from the gates to find the house of Kirk o' Field destroyed, and Darnley's body dead beside the ruins, though ' with no sign of fire on it.' " Both- well certainly did the deed ; for he looked upon, and directed his servants as they laid the pow- der beneath the royal bedchamber; and who can doubt that Mary was an accomplice, if not the instigator of the crime ? To name the great men in science, literature, or public affairs who are associated with the his- tory of the University, either as teachers or stu- dents, would be almost like calling the British roll of fame. In the profession of which I was a humble student, what a list of worthies from CuUen to Thompson ! In science, from Black to Christison ! In philosopliy, Reid, Dugald Stew- art, Brown, and Sir William Hamilton ! In lit- erature, Hume, Robertson, Blair, Goldsmith, Mac- kenzie, Jeffrey, Scott, and Wilson ! In theology, Chalmers ! In public affairs, Brougham, Mack- intosh, Horner, and Lord John Russell ! and a host of others in every department of intellect- ual pursuit. •6 82 MY COLLEGE DAYS. CHAPTER VII. Contrasts. — Hume's Monument. — Ambrose's. — Scott's and Hume's Houses. — Jeffrey at Home and at Court. — Mur- chiston. — Hawthornden. — Dr. Chalmers. — Guthrie. — A Visit from Dr. Hawks. — His Companion. — Sydney Smith. — Surgeon's Square. — Burke and Hare. — Dr. Knox. — Allen Thompson^ — "Never Touched the Ground," — Por- trait of Knox. — De Quincey and his Daughter. — Macau- lay. — Dr. Abercrombie. My researches carried rae into strangely op- posite places. I was one day meditating among the tombs in a church -yard, and on the next regaling myself, and making merry in a tavern. Now I was contemplating Hume's monument, a huge, ugly, round structure of masonry, which looked so unlike any of the surrounding Chris- tian memorials in the old burial-place on the Cal- ton Hill, that I thought it must be a tool-house, or anything, in fact, but what it was, until I no- ticed the simple inscription : DAVID HUME, Born 1711; Died 1776. "LeaviDg it to posterity to add the rest." LORD JEFFREY. 83 Then I was eating a chop, and drinking a pot of "half-and-half " in Ambrose's eating-house — a humble establishment enough, up a narrow pas- sage-way leading from Princes Street (close by, as far as I recollect) to the Register House. Chris- topher North, Tickler, and the Shepherd may Iiave occasionally met, and eaten a broiled bone, and mixed their toddies in one of Ambrose's alcoves ; but few, if any, such " Noctes Ambro- sianaj" as we read of in Blackicood were passed by them in the place. The title was probably assumed from the name of the proprietor lend- ing itself so happily to the Latin adjective, and suggesting the word "Ambrosial," supposed to be particularly appropriate as applied to such ofod-like feasts of reason and flow of soul. I hunted out every house where a distinguish- ed man was born or lived, and discovered Sir Walter Scott's homes in the old and new towns, and the sceptical Hume's residence in St. David's Street. I walked out as far as Craig-crook, the pretty villa where Jeffrey, with his American wife (formerly Miss Wilkes of New York), lived an equable and happy existence, and tracked him to his seat of justice in the Parliament House. Here I often peeped through the green curtain which hung before his contracted judicial stall, and watched the wondrous little man unravelling, 84 MY COLLEGE DAYS. in his quick, impatient way, the tangle of Scotch law. His restless person was in a state of per- petual movement; his eyes turning here, there, and everywhere ; his features in constant play ; his forehead rippling in quick successive wrin- kles, as if striving to throw off his close-fitting judicial wig, which seemed to grasp his diminu- tive head painfully, almost down to his eyebrows, and with its 2:reat stiff curls of white horse hair heavily to oppress him with its weight. His arms, too, he was ever moving with an uneasy action, thrusting them out, and shaking them, as if he would rid himself of the encumbrance of his official robe of scarlet, which covered his shoulders and hung in loose folds from his neck to his wrists. Murchiston Castle came often within my ob- servation, for it was quite near — a modern Goth- ic structure in the suburbs of Edinburgh, the for- mer residence of Napier, the inventor of the loga- rithms, and the ancestor of the present Lord Na- pier and Murchiston, formerly the English minis- ter plenipotentiary to the United States. It was an unsuccessful attempt at a gentleman's man- sion, which had resulted in an ugly jail-like build- ing, which was then used as school-house. I extended my walk sometimes as far as Haw- thornden, a flourishing-looking country-seat with THE GREAT PREACHERS. 85 a park of lordly extent, and an ancient mansion, where the poet Drunimond had lived and re- ceived Ben Jonson on his memorable visit, when he walked the whole way from London. Near by was the beautiful ruin of Roslyn Chapel, which, of course, I did not fail to inspect. There was another fine ruin much nearer Edinburgh — Craigmillar — each stone of whose broken arches and crumbling walls I was as familiar with as the threshold of my own door. I went to hear the great preachers. Dr. Chal- mers was then professor of the University, and had no parish of his own, but occasionally held forth at a small church at Liberton, I think it was called, in the suburbs of Edinburgh, and here I was one of the larcje crowd which thronojed in and about the contracted building. Not very familiar with the Scotch brogue which Chalmers spoke, of the rudest Glasgow kind, and finding it not only difficult to understand but painful to listen to, I was Httle disposed, at first, to give much heed to his sermon. His appearance and manner in the pulpit, moreover, were by no means attractive. His face and features were coarse and large; his lank gray hair fell carelessly about a narrow forehead, and he kept his head bent, and his blinking eyes close to his manuscript ; while his only action was an up and down or 86 MY COLLEGE DAYS. sawing movement with bis right arm, from the elbow. In spite of all these personal disadvan- tages, which, at the beginning, were very repul- sive to me, I was soon so interested in his fer- vid utterances, and absorbed by the quick alter- nations of emotion with which my feelings re- sponded to his earnest appeals, that I unresist- ingly yielded to the torrent of his eloquence. The man, in the mean time, seemed transfigured, and my tearful eyes saw, as it were through a sacred halo, the prophet or apostle. Dr. Guthrie was at Grayfriar's Church,! think, and was already, although he had not been long in Edinburgh, regarded as one of its notable men. It was strange to observe how this tall, gaunt, broad-shouldered man, with the physical strength of a Hercules, would thrill with emotion as he recalled the wretchedness of vice, and suffering of poverty, and to what tender accents he toned his rude Scotch dialect, as he appealed to the sympathy of his listeners. He had, besides, ex- ceedingly graphic powers of description; and Wilkie, with his brush and colors, could not have produced a more distinct and impressive picture of the humble life of Scotland than Guthrie, witli his fervid words and glowing imagination, did of the lowly scenes of his experience in the grimy closes and wynds of the old town of Edinburgh. AN AMERICAN VISITOR. 87 My fellow-passenger across the Atlantic, Dr. Hawks, in the course of his tour came to Edin- burgh, and was glad to avail himself of my guid- ance, and complimented me on the fulness of my knowledge of the various f)laces and associations of interest ill and about the city. He was as ready to follow as I was to guide, and as will- ing to listen as I to discourse. Not so, however, his companion — a reverend gentleman like him- self — who was then a prominent clergyman of the Protestant Episcopal Church in New York ; subsequently a Catholic priest; and now again is, or was when last I heard of him, of his original creed. He seemed to regard all our talk about the old town and its associations as a great bore, and it was impossible to get him out of the snug parlor of the Royal Hotel, or beyond Princes Street or South Bridge, where he passed much of his time with his nose flattened against the plate-glass of the shop-windows, contemplating, in an ecstasy of delight, the brilliancy of their displays. He was especially enamored of the Scotch stuffs, and bought whole pieces of vel- vet, and rolls of ribbon of the plaid of a clan to which he professed to belong ; and in whose an- nals, traditions, associations, and especially cos- tume, his entire interest, as far as Scotland was concerned, seemed absorbed. 88 MY COLLEGE DAYS. Dr. HawkSj during his stay in London, had met Sydney Smith, and brought away with him some reminiscences of the talk characteristic of that witty divine, which he narrated with humorous aj^preciation. I knew Buccleugh Place, in an eighth or ninth flat of which Jeffrey once had his elevated residence, and where he, Brougham, and Sydney Smith, happening to meet, the last proposed to set up a Bevieio. This was acceded to, although the motto proposed by Smith, I'e- nui iniisam meditamur avetid — "We cultivate literature on a little oatmeal" — being too near the truth, was not admitted. Sydney Smith, as a long resident of Edinburgh, and first proposer and editor of its famous Hevieio, seems thus as much one of the celebrities of the Scotch me- tropolis as of London. Reminiscences of him, therefore, fall naturally into any description of Edinburgh. I wish that I could reproduce the words and manner with which Dr. Hawks, in re- calling, gave expression to them. Sydney Smith asked the Doctor to what extent he thought a stranger of good appearance, but of no pecun- iary means whatsoever, could get into debt in London? He answered tlie question at once himself, by estimating the amount at forty thou- sand pounds; and went on by describing how such a person — a Major Sharper, for example — SYDNEY smith's TALK. 89 might proceed : going to the best hotel on arri- val ; renting a handsome house, subsequently, on the strength of the respectability of his hotel ; obtaining the furniture on the credit of the im- posing appearance and genteel position of his mansion ; establishing an account with butcher, baker, grocer, wine-merchant, fruiterer, and huck- sterer without difficulty, on no other basis than his flourishing style of living; and so on, using one roguery as the foundation for another, until finally, after exhausting his own ingenuity of de- vice, or the credulity of the tradesmen, making his escape from the toppling structure of fraud he had raised, and leaving to his creditors the debt of forty thousand pounds to be divided ^ro rata among them. Another subject of the witty dean's conversa- tion was the Rev. Dr. Wainwright, subsequently the Bishop of New York, who was at that time in England. His aspirations to ecclesiastical dis- tinction were well known to his intimate acquaint- ances in New York; but Sydney Smith — who had met him casually, once or twice only, in London society — seems with wonderful acuteness to have discerned at first sight the ruling desire of the ambitious divine, wliich was, in fact, to be a bish- op. After dwelling upon the excessive priestly unction and manner of Dr. Wainwright, his punc- 90 MY COLLEGE DAYS. tilioiis attention to the minutest detail of all the varieties of clerical costume, and his fond fre- quentation of the society of ecclesiastical digni- taries, the witty dean concluded, "And, loould you believe it ? it is said (lowering his voice to a whisper) that he has been seen trying on a bish- op's apron before his looMng-glass P'' Dr. Hawks went to hear Sydney Smith preach at St. Paul's, but heard Dr. Adam Clarke, the old Bible com- mentator, instead ; for it was one of his sermons that the clever but not over-scrupulous divine delivered as his own. Attendance upon Dr. Sharpey's course of Prac- tical Anatomy took me daily to Surgeon's Square, which opened just opposite to the University, and terminated in a cid de sac, within which were the Royal Medical Society building, and most of the private lecture and dissecting rooms. Among these was the hall of Dr. Knox. It was the largest in the whole Square, and, but a few years before, it daily filled to overflowing ; for the doctor, not only as a popular demonstrator but as the pro- prietor of a well-supplied dissecting-room, at a time when dead bodies for anatomical purposes were scarce, commended himself to students from every quarter, of whom he had the most numer- ous class in Europe. When, however, I first went to Edinburgh, Knox, thoug^h he had lost none of HORRID MERCHANDISE. 91 his characteristic energy or skill as a ready lecturer and clear demonstrator, held forth to almost empty benches, the scattered students upon which hardly amounted to the average of a score. The doctor, notwithstanding, had by no means become any less, but, in fact, much more of a celebrity. He was far better and wider known than ever. His reputation had extended beyond the precincts of the colleges to the extremities of the civilized world ; and his name was now no longer uttered with praise by medical students everywhere — who at most were but few — but with detestation by all mankind. The cause was evident, for Dr. Knox was the anatomical lecturer who had received and paid for all the dead bodies of those whom Burke and Hare and their confederates had murdered ! His, flourishing dissecting-room in Surgeon's Square was the market whence arose the de- mand that created the supply for the horrid merchandise, of which those bloody ruffians took care that there should be always an abundant stock on hand. Dr. Allen Thompson, now the eminent Profes- sor of Physiology in the University of Glasgow, whose acquaintance I made soon after my first arrival in Edinburgh — upon the question, which 92 MY COLLEGE DAYS. was then a frequent topic of discussion, coming up, as to the extent of Dr. Knox's connivance — told me that he was his student at the time of the murders; and one morning, on entering the dissecting-room, Knox met him in an unusually gleeful mood, and leading him to a table, threw off the sheet and disclosed a fresh body, saying, at the same time, with that peculiar puckering of the mouth characteristic of him whenever he was pleased, like a man gloating over something good to eat, "iVeyer toadied the ground! Nev- er touched the ground H He thus repeated the phrase over and over again, evidently wishing it to be well understood by his listener that the subject before them was not one of those ordi- nary bodies which had been disinterred, as such were the only kind usually to be obtained at that time ; for, previous to Burke and Hare, no one had ventured to murder the living, though there were many who were ready to steal the dead, in order to supply the dissecting-room with its nec- essary material. Knox was tried and acquitted of all complici- ty ; and his lawyer, whom I knew well, told me that he was firmly persuaded that his client was guiltless of any connivance whatsoever with the dreadful crime of Burke and Hare. Dr. Knox, however, remained under a cloud of suspicion PORTRAIT OF KNOX. 93 and obloquy to the end of bis life. Finding his school in Edinburgh deserted, he was forced to seek a livelihood elsewhere. He passed the re- mainder of his days as a literary vagrant — now holding forth as an itinerant lecturer, and again scribblino^ here and there as a hack writer for the publishers and newspaper proprietors. Knox was a man of a most viHanous aspect. His face was corrugated all over with deep scars of the small-pox, and he had a leer or squint of one of his eyes which drew up the whole cheek, which was further deformed by a puckering of the mouth, habitual to him. He had a squat, coarse person, the ugliness of which was made more noticeable by his vulgar, dressy costume, consisting of a shiny silk hat, a green Newmar- ket cutaway coat with brass buttons, a full over- lapping striped waistcoat, and a flashy red neck- erchief. He had the look of a fictitious sporting character, such as may be seen enacting the part of a decoy at the thimblerig stand on a race- course. He was an eager, bustling person, seem- ing always on the alert for business. I often met De Quincey in my walks, general- ly, I recollect, in the open meadow-land near the Palace of Holyrood, whicli was included in what is known as the " Liberties " or Jail Limits, to which the freedom of debtors was restricted. 94 MY COLLEGE DAYS. He was a little, meagre, sharp-eyed old man. His daughter was his constant companion — a ruddy, pretty-faced young woman of about the height of her diminutive father. I did not know, but I daily saw in the streets of Edinburgh, Dr. Abercrombie, the author of the once popular books, " Intellectual Powers " and "Moral Feelings." His practice as a jDhysician was enormous, and, kept him ever on the go. His carriage was to be seen at every hour from early morning to late at night, as he drove over the whole circuit of the city. He was so absorb- ed in the practical duties of his profession that he had never a moment to spare for any society but that of his numerous patients, and he barely found time even for the pursuit of his favorite studies. Whenever I caught a glimpse of the busy doctor, he was poring intently over some book, which I never saw him without during the many years I was familiar with his person. He stood his hard work well, for his full rotund body and cheerful, ruddy face were indications of sat- isfied ease and happy contentment. Macaulay I once saw on the hustings in the High Street, and, showing himself in the " nap- less vesture of humility" to the people, heard him "beg their stinking breaths." I did not recognize in him then the great man he after- MACAULAY. 95 ward proved to be; and there was nothing in hiis heavy manner and puny voice to tempt me to linger among the throng of his dirty and tur- bulent supporters, and endure their rough elbow- ing and noisome presence. 96 MY COLLEGE DAYS. CHAPTER YIII. My First Invitation. — A Jolly Dinner. — Edinburgh Conviv- iality. — A Surprise. — Religious Topics. — J. Shank More. — Edinburgh Society. — A Disputed Child. — Mr. Craig. — Bishop Ravenscroft. — From Slave-whip to Crosier. — A Change of Quarters. — Mr. Ainslie. — A Friend of Burns. — Clarinda. — A Genial Neighbor. — Marriage atThree-score- and-ten. — A Festival. — Campbell the Poet in the Chair. — Genius in Eclipse. — Professor Blackie in Youtli. Having delivered ray letters of introduction, I received my first invitation from Mr. F , a flourishing wine-merchant, and one of the wealth- iest and most influential of the burghers of Ed- inburgh. He was then, or had been shortly be- fore, the Lord Provost or Mayor of the city. He had a handsome villa in Newington, on the out- skirts of the old town, showily furnished, where he entertained most liberally. His wife was a charming, intellectual person — a dark brunette, with black piercing eyes, full flowing hair of the same color, and the regularly-cut features of a handsome Italian, though she was a Scotswoman. Her husband was of the extreme opposite type —a sandy-haired, blue -eyed, light- complexioned FIRST DINNER IN EDINBURGH. 97 Scot. Both of them were the most genial, kind- hearted people in the world, and to their friend- ship and generous hospitality I was indebted for many of the pleasantest hours of my stay in Edinburgh. My first dinner at their house was on the an- niversary of their wedding-day. It was a jovial occasion. The guests were magnates and offi- cials of the town, and, as hearty feeders and deep drinkers, sustained the traditional reputation of the civic dignitary. I had heard a good deal of the convivial habits of the Scotch folk generally, and of the old Edinburgh burghers in particular; but at the same time I was led to believe that, a great reformation having taken place, the gener- ation I was among, if not absolutely abstemious, was comparatively temperate. If what I wit- nessed was temperance, what could have been the excess of a former time ? After the soup every one, of course, drank off his bumper of sherry or madeira; and after the fish no one, equally of course, refused his full liqueur-glass of raw whiskey; for " whiskey," every one exclaimed, as he gulped it down, "is Scotch for salmon" — a standing joke of the na- tive unfathomable kind. Then began the wine " taking," as it was termed, which was continued with great briskness throughout the whole din- 98 MY COLLEGE DAYS. ner, but greater still during the intervals between the courses. The host first pledged the lady on his right in a bumper, and then every other lady in succession, saying to each, "Mrs.," or "Miss," or whatever might be the title, " shall I have the pleasure of a glass of wine with you ?" iSText, each gentleman, in turn, pledged the hostess, repeating the same formula of words, " Shall I have," etc. ; then took wine with the ladies on each side of him. Now the host went thro ug-h with the same ceremony with all the gentlemen, who afterward repeated it to each other, every one filling his glass afresh whenever he asked or was asked to take wine. On this set occasion two or three bottles of champagne were, in addition, distrib- uted by the servants among all the guests. Thus a good deal of wine, and strong wine too, was drunk during the many and prolonged courses of the dinner. All this, however, was regarded as purely pre- liminary, and so trifling as hardly worthy of com- putation in the quantity of wine consumed on the occasion. It was only when the table-cloth was removed, and the mahogany was left bare, that the serious drinking began. Fresh glasses by the half-dozen were set before each guest, and a row of tall decanters and claret-pitchers, full to LIVELY DRINKING. 99 their stoppers, were arrayed in front of the host, who took care to keep tliem in brisk circula- tion. After one or two rounds the ladies were bow- ed out of the room, and the gentlemen set to work in earnest. The host, never forgetful of his duty as the moving force, was always quick to start the decanters and to keep them in brisk circulation, by stirring up every dilatory raeaiber of the company with the reminder, " Now, Mr. Smith, the bottle is with you!" or, " Mr. Jones, your glass is empty; fill up, and pass the wine!" or, "Brown, my good fellow, your neighbor is thirsty; pass the claret, please !" This went on for hour after hour, the company in the mean time frequently emptying the decanters, which were replenished again and again. On this oc- casion, in addition to the usual decanters and wdne-pitchers, a magnum of port — an immense bottle, of the capacity of a gallon — was brought in in honor of the wedding anniversary, and be- ing soon whirled into the general orbit of the smaller satellites of Bacchus, kept revolving un- til it too, like them, was lost in vacuity. When sherry, pale, brown, and golden ; port, old, dry, and crusty; madeira, sweet and mel- low ; claret, delicate and full-bodied, failed any longer to stimulate the jaded tongue or titillate 100 MY COLLEGE DAYS. the palled palate, the whiskey-bottles, the boil- ing tea-kettle, the sugar-bowl, the glasses and ladles were called for, and the more pungent tod- dy again awakened the thirst of the wine-sated revellers. The door of the dining-room was now lock- ed ; and mindful of the stories I had heard of the practice of Scotch convivialists, I feared that I was destined, in common with my companions, to fall, and pass the night under the table. I was, however, soon relieved from my alarm when our host, opening a compartment in the side- board, disclosed to our view an indispensable ar- ticle of convenience, ordinarily found nowadays shut up in a table de omit, or hidden under a bed. It was a welcome sight to the saturated company. I did not know then how we managed to as- scend the many stairs, and face the ladies in the drawing - room, after this prolonged debauch- ery, so I can hardly be expected to remember now. However deep in his potations, the Scotchman has always a sober thought and word for relig- ious matters. The Church, or rather the Kirk, always a topic of talk of oppressive prevalence to the uninterested stranger in Scotland, was em- phatically so at this time, and here at my friend's THE AUCHTERADER CASE. 101 dinner-table, as everywhere else, the Auchterader case,* as it was termed, was discussed in all its wearisome details. Another family to whose intimacy I was free- ly admitted was that of J. Shank More, and to them and himself I was indebted for many kind hospitalities. Mr. More was an eminent advo- cate of Edinburgh, and lived, with his wifc^, two grown-up sons, and several daughters, in a hand- some residence in Great King Street. I met the best of company at their house, chiefly the dis- tinguished professional men of Edinburgh and their families. Dr. Chalmers and other promi- nent clergymen of the Established Church of Scotland ; an occasional law lord ; a military of- * The Auchterader was the crucial case which led to the disruption of the Scotch Established Church, and to the sep- aration and organization of that important ecclesiastical body now known as the Free Church of Scotland. The patron of the Auchterader living had, notwithstanding the protest of the parishioners, insisted upon forcing the minister of his choice upon the parish. Thence arose the cry of non-intru- sion, as it was termed, and the appeal to the courts for a re- versal of the appointment. After several years of passionate discussion, which agitated the religious sentiment of Scotland as it had not been since the persecution of the Covenanters, the action of the patron was finally confirmed, and the non- intrusionists, forming far the larger portion of its lay and clerical force, seceded from the Established Church. 102 MY COLLEGE DAYS. ficer from the Castle or the barracks ; a goodly number of advocates and physicians; a chance country " laird and his leddy ;" and now and then a merchant or manufacturer from Glasgow, were the staple guests at the table of Mr. More, to which I was often invited. Mr. More, though the son of a dissenting min- ister of the most liberal political views, was him- self a staunch member of the established Church of Scotland, and a confirmed Tory. Such, how- ever, was the sweetness of his temper, that it was proof against even the bitterness of Edinburgh's political partisanship ; and Mr. More was beloved alike by Churchman and Dissenter, Whig and Tory. It was universally admitted that he was destined to fill the first vacancy on the bench in the gift of his party whenever it might be in power. He, however, never became a law lord, but ended his long and honorable career as pro- fessor, in the University of Edinburgh, of Scotch law — a department of his profession in which he was acknowledged to be pre-eminent. One of Mr. More's daughters married an Eng- lish ofiicer, and went to India with him. She soon died there, leaving an only child — a little girl of three years of age — who Avas sent to Ed- inburgh, and placed under the charge of Mr. and Mrs. More. They doted upon the child with A STOLEN CHILD. 103 more than tlie characteristic fondness of grand- parents. Mr. More, especially, delighted in pet- ting and caressing the little girl, and during his rare moments of leisure seemed never contented without her companionship. At dinner-time — it mattered not who were his guests — he always sent for his little "Ailsie," saying, as soon as the cloth was removed, " Come, we must have the Scotchman's dessert !" and as she came in run- ning to his arms, he would snatch her up, give her a fond hug and a kiss, and place her upon the dining-table, where she was left awiiile tod- dling about on the slippery mahogany, to be ad- mired by the surrounding guests, while the grand- father regarded her with eyes sparkling with pride and delight. The little girl's father, in the mean time, mar- ried again, when a question arose between his parents and the Mores as to who should have the charge of the child. The Mores would listen to no proposition which would deprive them of the little Ailsie, to whom they clung with all the fibres of their hearts. Her other grand-parents, though fortified with the permission of her own father, failing to obtain the little girl by any fair means, resorted to foul ; and, lying in wait one day, with a carriage at hand, snatched her from the side of her nurse in the street, and drove off 104 MY COLLEGE DAYS, with her, never to be seen again by the broken- hearted Mores. There was a gentleman of the name of Craig, to whom I was also indebted for many kind- nesses. His wife was sister of Ravenscroft, the Protestant Episcopal Bishop of North Carolina; and this close association with the United States made him and his family always ready to extend a warm welcome to every American, and I re- ceived the full benefit in many generous hospi- talities of this friendly bias toward my country- men. Bishop Ravenscroft was a Scotchman by birth, and had wandered away, in his youth, from his Presbyterian home in Scotland, carrying with him, as a ne'er do loeel, the saddest forebodings of his future fate. After many vicissitudes of fortune — sinking at one time even so low as to wield the whip of a negro -driver or overseer over the backs of a gang of crouching slaves — he finally bloomed forth in all the sacred fulness of Episcopal lawn, as a distinguished prelate of the Church. It may be suspected, however, notwith- standing his unquestionable eminence as an ec- clesiastical dignitary in the United States, that his Presbyterian fi'iends in Scotland rather re- garded his prelatical elevation as a fulfilment of their prophecy of the evil end to which they had predestined the unpromising lad. Mr. Craig A FRIEND OF BURNS. lOo told me that he had found, in the pubhslied col- lection of Bishop Ravenscroft's writings, two un- acknowledged sermons by divines of repute, but whose names I have forgotten. Driven away from Dr. Y by the anarchy and turbulence of his domestic establishment, I was soon comfortably domiciled in snug quar- ters in the lodgings in Graham Street, kept by a buxom, canny Scotchwoman, of the name of Munro. Next door to us lived a very old gen- tleman — a Mr. Ainslie. He had been a writer to the signet, or solicitor and attorney of some mark in his prime ; but his chief distinction came from the fact of his having been in his youth an intimate friend of Burns, the poet, of whom, no doubt, he had a great deal to say, but I can recall little of what I heard from him. He used, I know, to defend warmly the memo- ry of the poet, and declare that the ordinary im- pression of his irregular habits was a greatly ex- aggerated one, saying that he wixs no worse than most young men of his day, and that he had an ardent sentiment, as we may well believe, of virtue and piety. Ainslie himself, in his old age at least, was a very religious man. He was the author of a lit- tle devotional book, " The Reasons of the Faith that is in Us," or some such title — a work which 106 MY COLLEGE DAYS. was very popular, and has given much consola- tion to pious people of the evangelical sort. In all the biographies of Burns, Ainslie's name is mentioned ; and some of the letters addressed to him by the poet are given, which, as far as I recollect, are of a kind which indicate that their sympathies were of a more worldly character than the pious old gentleman would have had me believe. Mr. Ainslie, in the occasional visits he received from a Mrs. McLahose, kept up his old associations with Burns; for she was one of the survivors of the numerous claimants to be a Highland Marj'-, or some other bonnie Scotch las- sie,* who had the honor of having had in her youth the poet for an admirer, and minstrel of her heaux yeiix. She was a very old little wom- an of more than fourscore years, with an arti- ficial front of hair to conceal her baldness, gray * Mrs. McLahose was the Clarinda, I believe, to whom these verses were addressed: "We part — ^but, by those precious drops That fill thy lovely eyes ! No other light shall guide my steps Till thy bright beams arise. " She, the fair sun of all her sex, Has blessed my glorious day ; And shall a glimmering planet fix My worship to its ray ?" THE POET CAMPBELL IX THE CHAIR. 107 eyebrows masked in dye, and her once "lovely eyes" hid behind a pair of goggles. Our landlady made herself a very genial neigh- bor to the forlorn old bachelor next door, for he had patiently endured his threescore years and ten or more in solitude; but at last, before he was many months older, he found Mrs. Munro and her consoling possets, and other delicate at- tentions, irresistible, and married her. I suspect that the canny Scotchwoman was prudently alive to the fact of Mr. Ainslie's enjoyment of a snug- pension from the society of the Writers to the Signet of Edinburgh, and of its reversion to his widow. The old gentleman was fond of keeping np his associations with literature and literary men, and took every opportunity of taking a part in any public manifestation of which they were the object. There was a printers' festival of some kind, at wdiich Thomas Campbell had promised to preside. Mr. Ainslie, who had taken a ticket, urged me to take one, too, which I did gladly, eager to see the famous poet, and expecting a great gathering of all that were notable for gen- ius and talent in Edinburgh. We went, and found the printers in full force, ranged on each side of long wooden tables or narrow deal boards on trestles, facing little black 108 MY COLLEGE DAYS. bottles of slierry-wine, and plates of " cookies," and almonds, and raisins ; for these were all the material refreshments we had in exchange for our payment of five shillings each. There was not a distinguished personage to be pointed out to me, much to the disappointment of my venerable companion, and especially of my- self, until the poet himself came, or rather was brought, for he w^as accompanied by two per- sons, each of whom seemed to be holding on to an arm, and lifting him to his place. As soon as his chair on the dais was reached, he sunk down in it, and there remained like a log the whole evening, giving no heed, apparently, to any per- son or thing, except to the black bottles before him. He may possibly have made a few inco- herent attempts to speak, but there was no intel- ligible speech from him ; and, as far as I recol- lect, the whole festival collapsed into a free-and- easy chat and private pledging of healths, which the printers had all to themselves, striving to be as merry as they could under the sad constraint of the presence of the great genius in his eclipse. On the appointment of Dr. Sharpey to a pro- fessorship in the London University, I attend- ed the anatomical lectures of his successor. Dr. Handyside, and was occasionally a guest at his house. At an evening party to which he invited PROFESSOR BLACKIE IN YOUTH. 109 me I met Blackie, the present eminent Professor of Greek in tlie University of Edinburgh. He was then a very young man, just fresh from the German Universities. All regarded him as an eccentric genius, and he gave us proof at least of the odd side of his character. He went striding about the room, with his long black hair stream- ino^ down to his shoulders, and his arms movinir with all sorts of strange gesticulations, bawling out German songs, and declaiming German verses. As he strode backward and forward, with his lit- tle meagre body all in commotion, and his voice hoarse with his recitations in a language unintel- ligible to any person present, he seemed to be a man possessed, and caused, evidently, great con- sternation among the ladies, who anxiously drew in their skirts, and shrunk behind the gentlemen. 110 MY COLLEGE DAYS. CHAPTER IX. The Winter Session. — Rush of Students. — The Classes. — Students from Everywhere. — The Full-blooded Negro.— Social Inversion. — Distinguished Students. — W of Nottingham. — G of Newcastle. — Charles Maitland. — ■ Faith in Chemistry. — Samuel Brown. — Poet and Philoso- pher. — Unity of Matter. — Professor Anderson of Glasgow. There was an interval, no doubt, between the close of the summer and opening of the winter session of the University, but I do not recollect how long it was, and in what way I passed it. With the beginning of the winter or regular session of six months, the attendance upon which alone was obligatory, there was a great rush of students from all parts of the world, but chiefly from Scotland. The heavy gates of the Univer- sity building were thrown wide open, and through them thronged, at every hour of the day, lai'ge crowds of youth, filHng the wide quadrangle, be- fore so deserted, and, as they rushed in and out of the lecture-rooms, making the stone walls echo with the hum of their voices and the pattering of their feet. The number attending the vari- ous departments of study must have been near- STUDENT LORDS. Ill ly two thousand, of whom seven or eight hundred were medical students. The " Humanity " classes, as the Greek and Latin were termed, were principally composed of Scotch youth — mostly a set of rough, rustic, shabbily -dressed lads, with the true grit, how- ever, of patient perseverance and hardy endur- ance of sons of the manse, farm-house, counter and shop, from the small towns and rural dis- tricts. Among them was a small scattering — ea- sily distinguished by a more dapper dress and manner — of city -bred scions of landed gentry and professional gentlemen. The philosophical classes were mainly of the same ; though the lingering tradition of the fame of old teachers like Reid and Dugald Stewart, and the increasing renown of the Professor of Logic and Metaphysics, Sir William Hamilton, attracted other students from England and vari- ous parts of Europe. There were several of the English aristocracy among them ; a Lord Al- tamont, son of the Marquis of Sligo, and two young men of rank of the name of Paget, I can only recollect, though, no doubt, there were oth- ers. Times, however, had greatly changed since those days when no aspiring young English statesman — of Whig proclivities, at any rate — regarded his preparation for public life complete 112 MY COLLEGE DAYS. without a session or so at the University of Ed- inburgh; and Lords Dudley and Webb Sey- mour, the Horners, and Lord John Russell en- rolled themselves as puj^ils of that eloquent and suggestive teacher, the refined and philosophical Dugald Stewart. The medical classes, though still numerously attended, had no longer the reputation of the days of the two elder Munros and the Gregorys, when students came in crowds from the extrem- ities of the civihzed world to witness their clear and accurate demonstrations, and through their convincing deductions learn the truths of the healing art. There were, however, still among the medical students a few from the remote parts of the earth. I myself, from distant New York, was a proof of the fact that was self-evident; and there was another obvious to all — a full-blooded negro from St. Domingo. I looked upon him with es- pecial wonder, for I had come from a land where creatures of his color were regarded as mere beasts of burden, to be bought, sold, and ex- changed as chattels, and if not incapable of ed- ucation, deemed unworthy of it; and to behold this coal-black fellow holding up his head as high as the best of us — much higher, in fact, than most, for he was very proud in his bearing, and NEGRO STUDENTS. 113 self-conscious of his importance, ns the son and heir of some Duke of Marmalade, Marquis of Pineapple, or Baron Mango of his native land, was a shock to mv then obscured sense of the proprieties. He had a white valet in livery al- ways at his heels — a curious inversion, as it then seemed to me, of the social order — and if he kicked repeatedly, and otherwise ill-treated him, as he was said to have done, the poor wretch was only suffering vicariously for the wrongs and cruelties inflicted by his own race upon that of his master. I recollect that there was a student of African blood at the college in Hartford, Connecticut, under very different circumstances of respect from our negro comrade at the University of Edinburgh. He was a modest, bright mulatto, who by some academic artifice or other was sup- posed to be pursuing his studies at the college, though he never made his appearance in any of the classes. He used to come out at night, and at night only, from the back door and stairs of a house of one of the professors near by, with whom he was probably picking up some surrepr titious scraps of learning. Although he passed many years in the collegiate neighborhood, took his degree, and finally, I think, became a clergy- man of the Protestant Episcopal Church, he nev- 8 114 MY COLLEGE DAYS. er exchanged a single word with any of the stu- dents, or ventured to show himself except in the shades of the evening. We had no more fel- lowship with hini than if he had been a gorilla of his aboriginal wilds, and we deigned only to cast a glance of suspicion at the poor fellow whenever we caught a rare sight of his shrink- ing shadow. There were a good many roisterers among the students ; but it must be acknowledged that, though convivial habits were far too pi'evalent, the great majority of my comrades at the Uni- versity fairly carried out their purposes of study. There were several young men whom I knew, who showed a remarkable zeal for scientific pur- suit, and some of them rose subsequently to dis- tinction. Dr. Carpenter, the author of the "Phys- iology," and professor in the University of Lon- don, was my fellow-student; so was Reid, also a professor, and famous for his physiological re- searches ; and Day, the Chemist ; and Wilson, the Professor of Technology; and Forbes, the Pro- fessor of N^atural History ; and Brown, the au- thor of "Rab and his Friends." These all gave promise, even while students, of the eminence to which they subsequently reached. There were .others, however, of whom equally high, if not higher, hopes were entertained, but who failed to A SUCCESSFUL STUDENT. 115 accomplish the lofty aims of their youth ; some from the inevitable fiat of fate, but more, alas ! in consequence of their self-chosen and perverse ways of life. W , of Nottingham, gave such proofs of power while a student in Edinburgh, that it was thought by all who knew him there was nothing in the world worth having that he was not ca- pable of acquiring. I hardly ever saw him in a lecture -room, but he always passed his exami- nations with great credit, and won all the prizes for which he competed. He read the best pa- pers, and was the ablest debater of the Royal Medical Society, of which he became president. He was a tall, raw-boned, bold-faced fellow, with short, bristly hair, a broad, knotty forehead, and flaming black eye ; and with his general defiant air, and the habit he had of turning up the cuffs of his coat-sleeves, seemed always as if he were ready for a set-to with the whole world. After taking his degree, he married and set- tled in a large provincial town in England, where he was appointed professor of the Medical Col- lege, and continued those medico -chemical re- searches to w^hich he was ardently devoted. Al- ready recognized and quoted everywhere as an authority in science, he promised to obtain a place among the highest on the roll of English 116 MY COLLEGE DAYS. worthies, when the brilliant genius was suddenly obscured, and finally lost forever in the self-in- flicted ruin of the man. He had always, even while a student, been fond of an occasional con- vivial bout, and won a reputation for being as deep a drinker as he was a thinker. These hab- its of his youth, continued into his more mature age, finally obtained the mastery over him, and led him to perdition. The career of G , of Newcastle, was an- other illustration of blasted hopes. He evinced, while a student, a great aptitude for physical research, and became prominent as a winner of prizes, and member of the Royal Medical Socie- ty. He was ambitious, vain, and poor, and seem- ed always to have an uneasy consciousness of his threadbare coat, which made him very sensitive to the proud man's contumely. He took his re- venge by a boastful profession of extreme rad- ical opinions, and a defiant bearing toward his social superiors. After graduating, he made a meteor-like start in his native town, but seeking in London a wider field of display, and meeting with disappointment, he was soon extinguished in the vortex of the dark abominations of the great metropolis; for, with all his unquestioned ability and lofty aspirations, he was ever gravi- tating toward the lowest vice. A GENIUS. 11 Y Charles Maitland, of Brighton, impressed nie more than any other of ray Edinburgh comrades with the idea of a genius. He seemed to know everything by intuition. I never saw liim with a book in his hand, and he seldom attended a lecture. He, notwithstanding, appeared to be well up in every subject connected with his pro- fession, and always passed his examinations with great credit. He must, however, at some time have industri- ously pursued analytical cliemistry, in which he was a great proficient. While a student of Pro- fessor Turner, in London, he discovered a test for morphia (nitric acid?), for which he is credited in the work of his teacher, once the universal manual of chemistry. He had quite a museum of the results of his investigations as an analyst, and, among others, a large glass bottle full of su- gar, which he had obtained from the urine of a diabetic patient. To show his faith in chemical unity, or his superiority to all prejudice from ac- cidental association, or his unwavering confidence in his own skill as a manipulator, he used, much to my disgust, to take lump after lump of this sugar into his mouth, and suck it with more a|> parent gusto than if it had been a French bon- bon. To my protest, and expressions of horror, he would reply, " It is chemically pure — it is gen- 118 MY COLLEGE DAYS. nine sugar — C, H, O in due elementary propor- tion as any other sugar ; and, as it is that, it does not matter whether it is derived from a vegeta- ble or animal secretion. Come, taste it !" I was not philosopher enough for that; and while I conceded to him the best of the argument, I also yielded to him the whole of the sugar. He was never at rest, and passed most of his days wandering over the hills and the mountains, all alone. He used always to carry with him, strapped to his back, a portable barometer, nomi- nally for measuring heights, but I think, in reali- ty, only to give an appearance of purjDOse to what was nothing more than a vagrant mood. Maitland belonged to a remarkable family. His father was one of four brothers, all of whom were officers of the English Army, and fought at Waterloo. The eldest. Sir Peregrine Maitland, a soldier of renown, had acquired great notoriety in society by running away with the daughter of the Duke of Richmond, and marrying her. He, after undergoing some penance of supercilious neglect from his noble father and mother in law, was finally rewarded for his audacity in becom- ing the husband of a Lenox, by elevation to a baronetcy, and a succession of governorships. The three other brothers, among whom was my friend's father, were discharged simultane- A HETERODOX PROFESSOR. 119 ously from tlie army for disobedience of orders, having refused, when serving as officers in Mal- ta, to give the command of " Present arms !" to the soldiers under them, on the passing of the " Host " in a procession of Roman Catholics. They all became, I think, clergymen of the Es- tablished Church of England. The father of my friend, at any rate, took orders, and was well- known as the fervid evangelical preacher of Brighton. Young Maitland, while in Edinburgh, was very ardent in his expression of devotional sentiment, but it was of a heterodox kind ; for he professed the peculiar tenets of one Campbell of Row (?), whom, and some of his wealthy followers, he of- ten visited. He was fond of asserting his be- lief in what he called " assurance," and used to illustrate it by saying that if he fell down dead on the instant, he was sure of going to heaven — a doctrine which the Church of Scotland pro- nounced heretical, and excommunicated my friend Maitland's apostle (Campbell) for holding. Maitland, soon after taking his degree, wrote a work on the catacombs of Rome, which was well received both by critics and readers. He has given no further public evidence of vitality. He seemed to have the capacity for great things, but was too erratic and unsteadfjist for the concen- 120 MY COLLEGE DAYS. tratiou of purpose «nnd continuousness of effort necessary to accomplish them. Samuel Brown, a lineal descendant of Brown the metaphysician, who succeeded Dugald Stew- art as Professor of Mental Philosophy in the Uni- versity of Edinburgh, was a remarkable youth. He seemed to combine in his nature both the poet and natural philosopher. He composed sonnets and analyzed chemical compounds. He was a philosophical dreamer as well as a practical experimentalist; but the conceptions of his fancy were impatient of the operations of his hand. Brown's dominant idea was the unity of mat- ter; and he announced to the world that he had found, in the course of his manipulations in the laboratory, a link in the chain of proof which could not fail to lead to the establishment of the fact. He had converted, he said, albumen into iodine, or iodine into albumen, or something of the kind, and contributed an elaborate paper, giv- ing all the details of his experiments, to one of the scientific journals or societies. His trustful friends hailed him triumphantly at once as the apostle of a new revelation in science. Some sceptical chemists, however, among whom was Liebig, repeated Brown's experin:ients, and, finding that albumen remained albumen, and io- dine iodine, in spite of all their manipulations, A DELUSION. 121 declared that the world had been deceived by a false teacher. Brown defended himself, reassert- ing his former statement, and declaring that a repetition of his experiments had given precisely the same results as before, showing that albumen was iodine, and iodine albumen. Met anew by denials and counter-statements of experimental results, he still adhered pertinaciously to his orig- inal assertion, until finally summoned to give a convincing proof of its truth by a public exhi- bition of his processes, he remained silent, and slunk away into an obscure retirement, no longer seen or heard of but by a few personal friends. He soon died — it was thought of a broken heart. His friends, who believed him to be the very soul of truth, never doubted that he was sincere in his repeated assertions of the results of his experi- ments ; but as they could not refuse to accept the obvious proofs of their falsity, were fain to reconcile their faith in Brown's veracity with the evidence of scientific fact, by the supposition that the imaginary had gained such a mastery over the practical element of his character, that he had been made unconsciously the victim of a delusion. Brown was, undoubtedly, a youth of great abil- ity. His knowledge and practical investigations of chemistry were extensive. He was an elo- quent speaker in the Speculative, Physical, and 122 MY COLLEGE DAYS. Medical Societies, a clear demonstrative lecturer, and no contemptible poet, even while still a youth- ful student. He had the mark of distinction in his personal appearance. A neat, orderly person, clothed in sober black, tall, delicately organized, with a soft, almost tearful, abstracted eye, a pale, expansive forehead, and a certain shadowy air of remoteness in his whole manner and appearance, he had the look of a spiritually-minded poet, and abstract philosopher. He was respected by us all, and by his personal friends he was worshipped. I must not forget, while recalling the embryo philosophers, my friend, Robert Anderson, of Leith — a curly, light- haired, blue -eyed, ruddy- faced, laughing youth, when I first knew him, and whose acquaintance I afterward renewed when he was a bald-headed, austere-looking Pro- fessor of Chemistry in the University of Glasgow. He w^as already distinguished, while a student, as a skilful, practical chemist, and obtained the prize for the most beautiful specimen I ever saw of some crystals of a rare and difficult comj)psition — the kind and name of which I have forgotten — due entirely to his own cunning manipulation. THE REVELLERS. 123 CHAPTER X. A Band of Revellers.— Making a Night of it.— The Two Brothers R . — Their History. — A Mother, and not a Mother.— A Victim to Slavery. —The Third Brother's Fate. — Description of the R 's. — The Eldest R . — A Fancy Ball. — The End of the Eldest. — The Younger R in Paris. — Incidents of his Career. — Adventures in England. — His Return to the United States. — Disap- pearance. " I DID not seek companionship solely among the young philosophers, but also, too frequently,! am ashamed to be forced to acknowledge, in the society of the wild roisterers and revellers of the University. There was a full band of these liv- ing together in the house of an old retii-ed naval surgeon, whose own habits, formed in the ward- room and cockpit aboard ship, during many a long cruise about the world, were not of the most rigid sort. Most of these jovial fellows were from the AYestern world — Newfoundland, Nova Scotia, and New Brunswick; and two of the wildest, the brothers R , were credited to my own portion of the Continent, being natives 124 MY COLLEGE DAYS. of New Orleans. I never, by chance, saw any of tliem at a lecture but two, who were advanced students, and working hard for the last exami- nation. The half-dozen others, including my two coun- trymen, were as idle at their studies as they were busy in mischief and dissipation. They used to sally out every night systematically for a de- . bauch, after they had passed the whole of the day in sleeping off the effects of a previous one. Sometimes they began with a lounge at the thea- tre, and sometimes with a match in the billiard- room, but always closed with a drinking-bout at the " Rainbow," or some other equally favored place of convivial resort, whose patience of cred- it their long unpaid scores had not yet exhaust- ed. They never went home till morning, and not always then. Fired with whiskey, they provoked any late loiterers like themselves — or early labor- ers going to their work — they might meet, by an assault of some kind, either striking or hustling them, or crushing their hats down over their eyes. The result, of course, was a fight, and the natural consequence, bruised shins and black eyes in abundance, and frequent nights at the watch- house. They all, or some of them, at least, were never free from a very evident show of the ef- fects of these nocturnal collisions, and looked THE BROTHERS R . 125 mostly like well -mauled prize -fighters after a regular set-to. The two young countrymen of my own, the brothers R , were not the least distinguished of these wild revellers. Their father, who at the time was regarded as one of the wealthiest mer- chants in the United States, supplied his sons with a most profuse allowance of money, and, in their reckless expenditure of it, they were only following his own example of prodigality. He brought his boys the whole way from Liverpool to Edinburgh in a post-chaise and four, throwing away handfuls of gold on his right and left dur- ing the route, and installing himself, on his ar- rival, in the most expensive apartments of the Royal Hotel, where, during his stay, he lived like a prince. His sons had been, for some time previous to coming to Edinburgh, living in Liverpool in a handsome residence, under the charge of a dark woman — a quadroon from New Orleans. She, though undoubtedly the mother of the three boys under her care, was, by a cruel prohibition, prevented from making the fact known to any one, even to her own children ; who, being so taught, continued to regard and treat lier always as a hired attendant. They had from her all tlie care, tenderness, and devotion of maternal love. 126 MY COLLEGE DAYS. while she, poor creature, had from them neither filial affection nor even the acknowledgment of the name of mother. She lived and died thus be- reaved, and never ventured to whisper in words her natural claims, though she vindicated them hourly by the perpetual sacrifice of self, even to the denial of her own personality, to the sup- posed interests of her children. Slavery then existed in the United States, and she, born a slave, sold and bought a slave, lived in perpet- ual torture, and died a victim to this monstrous cruelty. The third son — for there were three — I never saw; but I heard that he was an unmanageable lad. On running away from school, he enlisted as a hussar in the English army. He went to India with his regiment, and was never heard of again, being lost, possibly, in the jungle, or the jaws of a tiger. The other two sons were my fellow-students in Edinburgh. They were tall, well-proportioned, good-looking young fellows, of fair complexions, with the shghtest possible tint of brown, and of long, silky, and rather light curly hair. Their features gave to the ordinary observer no indication of their African origin through their quadroon mother, but there was a dilatation of the nostrils, a fulness of the upper lip, and a certain heaviness of step, due to their THE FANCY BALL. 127 large, spreading feet, whicli would have revealed it to an expert. They were born slaves, and by the laws of their native State of Louisiana might have been sold, and bought, or seized for debt, as any other exchangeable commodity. They were evidently, however, unconscious of any legal deg- radation, and bore themselves with as much grace, freedom, and independence as any of tlie sons of gentlemen with whom they daily associated. The eldest was fond of society, and frequented some of the highest circles in Edinburgh. He always dressed in the height of fashion, and his annual tailor's bill would more than have paid for a year's support of some of the by no means least thriving of his fellow-students. I accom- panied him, I recollect, to the fancy ball at the Assembly Rooms, where he made his appearance in the costume of a courtier of the time of Fran- cis the First of France — slashed velvet doublet, satin hose, plumed bonnet, and gold-hiUed sword complete, the whole of which cost him sixty pounds, or three hundred dollars. The fancy ball was for the benefit of the In- firmary, and was a very exclusive affair. I did not venture to appear in a character costume, but in a dress which certainly would now be regard- ed as an eminently fanciful one, although it was such as was generally worn on the occasion. My 128 MY COLLEGE DAYS. black dress-coat de rigueur had the inside of its tails lined with white satin, my waistcoat was embroidered silk of divers bright colors, and I w^orc pumps and white silk stockings. No one could obtain a ticket of admission to the ball without having secured a preliminary guarantee of his social fitness, in the form of a " voucher," as it was termed, of respectability, signed by a dozen " Lady Patronesses." Every tradesman of the town was rigorously ruled out. The expenses of the eldest R became final- ly so inordinate that even his prodigal father pro- tested against, though he paid them. He insist- ed, however, that he should leave Edinburgh, Avhich he accordingly did, and went to Dublin. Here he met his good angel, in the form of the daughter of the surgeon with whom he was dom- iciled. He fell in love with her, and, through her influence, devoting himself seriously to his stud- ies, succeeded in passing his examination as a surgeon. He then married and went to Canada • — the only refuge, at that time, of his wronged race — where he became a respectable practitioner of medicine. The brother remained in Edinburgh, finding, unfortunately, no kind providence in sweetheart, wife, or indeed in any form, to interpose and check his reckless career of dissipation. I left A DISSIPATED CAREER. 129 him still lingering at the University when I de- parted, liopeful of a degree, but seemingly mak- ing no efforts to obtain it. When I had been a year or more in Paris, I met him accidentally, and he told me that, after several unsuccessful attempts, he had finally grad- uated. I induced him to take up his quarter in the lodging-house where I lived. He came ; but, try as I might, I could not prevail upon him to reform his habits of dissipation, for the indul- gence of which, with a more confirmed inclina- tion, he met in the French capital greater facili- ties than ever. His father was no longer the rich man of 1836 and 1837, for the mercantile crash of 1838 and 1839 had come, and, having overwhelmed the once flourishing house of which he was the chief part- ner, left him, on his escape from its ruins, noth- ing but the refuge of a small cotton plantation in Mississippi, which had been conceded to him by the indulgence of his creditors. He, however, managed to allow his son from his greatly re- duced income the sum of eight hundred dollars a year. With each quarter's remittance came a letter of urgent appeal to a reformation of life, and a reminder of the limits of paternal forbear- ance and supply, but it was all in vain. The young fellow persisted in his perverse 9 130 MY COLLEGE DAYS. ways, until, finally, his father, provoked to extrem- ities, revealed to him his birth, and at the same time, while diminishing his allowance, threatened to cut him off entirely. The effect was the re- verse of what it is hoped his father intended. The poor youth cried out to me in despair, "I am a bastard ! I am a bastard ! and I will de- stroy myself." It would have been better, per- haps, if, in carrying out his resolution, he had swallowed some quick active poison. He took the no less certain but slower means of drinking himself to death — a process with which he had been daily growing more familiar. On each quarter's day, as soon as he received his remittance and exchanged his draft at the banker's, he would cram his jDOckets with the large silver five-franc pieces, which were then in general currency in France, and sally out to the cafes and worse resorts, until he spent all to the last sou, when he was generally brought home in a fit of insensibility from drunkenness. On one occasion he stumbled into my room when intoxicated, and observing that his coat, waistcoat, and all his other pockets were cram- med with five-franc pieces, I emptied them out, and locked up the money in my drawer. He did not resist in the least, and perhaps was totally unconscious of what I had done. Several weeks EFFECT OF A REMITTANCE. 131 afterward I found him in a state of great discon- solation, grieving over his poverty, and telling me piteously that his landlady threatened to put him out-of-doors if he did not immediately pay her the last quarter's board. I bade him send for the woman, and I would settle with her. When I had paid the bill, which amounted to several hundred francs, and he was in the full expression of his gratitude for my apparent gen- erosity, I told him the money was his own, and how I happened to possess it. He could hard- ly be made to believe me, for he had not the least recollection of my having taken it from his person. On another occasion, while he was in his high jinks just after having received a remittance, the landlady appealed to me, in the middle of the night, to go to his room to do what I could to allay the frightful noises which were issuing from it. I no sooner rapped at the locked door and mentioned my name, for I was always a privileged person with him, than I was let in — and such a sight ! My young friend R , in the full costume of a Turk, but "disguised" in liquor like any Christian, stood holding on to the door of the disordered room, where bedding, bolsters, pillows, sheets and coverlets, table and chairs, were heaped up together in confusion. 132 MY COLLEGE DAYS. while two women, all bedizened with paint and masked-ball finery, were crouching under the bed- stead, where they had tried to hide themselves* on becoming aware of ray approach. There had been a fracas in consequence of jealousy, or dis- satisfaction of some kind, and one of the females, in her fury, had begun to toss about the contents of the room. Hence the noise. I persuaded the Grand Turk to dismiss his harem, and the house was again restored to its habitual quietude. Young R, remained a long time in Paris, with the single advantage of acquiring a thor- ough knowledge of the French tongue. I met him several years afterward in New York, and in such a state of flourishing vitality as showed that his chosen process of self-destruction had been thus far very slow in operating. He gave me some account of the vicissitudes of life through which he had passed since I parted with him in Paris. Destitute of means, for his father had cut off his allowance, he had wandered into Eng- land, where he gained a precarious livelihood for some time in teaching French in a country town. Subsequently he had made the acquaintance of an English banker, who had taken such a fancy to him that he appointed him a clerk in his bank- ing-house. My friend was in the full tide of prosperity, with a fair hope of a future partner- A TRAGEDY. 133 sliip, when, some defalcation having occurred, he became the object for a time, though unjustly so, as he told me and I sincerely believe, of sus- picion, and was forced to leave. After leaving England, he paid a visit to a former college comrade living at St. Johns, New Brunswick. This was B , whom I knew w^ell, a congenial companion of R in his wild moods at Edinburgh. The visit had a tragic termination ; for, during a sporting expedition, B was accidentally shot, and fell dead. R seemed to carry with him a malignant in- fluence wherever he went. When I saw him in New York, he had just returned from a visit to his father on the plan- tation in Mississippi, where he found a cousin in full possession of the favor and recognized as the heir-to-be of a property to which he thought he himself had the higher claim. Quarrelling with this cousin, and dissatisfied with the conduct of his father, he parted with them in anger, and was once more adrift in the wide world. On taking leave of me, he proposed to visit his brother in Canada. I never saw or heard of him again. 134 MY COLLEGE DAYS« CHAPTER XI. The Brothers F . — An American Claimant for a Scotch Title. — A Eetired and Happy Life. — Sudden Aspirations. — Lord Lovat. — Devotion of a Clan. — A Long Suit in Ed- inburgh.— Luxury and the Jews. — A Day of Reckoning. — An Adverse Decision. — Family Ruin. — The Eldest Son. — The Survivors of a Wreck. — Another American Claim- ant. — Precocious Benevolence. — A Triumph. — Final Re- sult. There were three young Americans, the broth- ers F , who were picking up a miscellaneous education at the University. They occasionally attended the classes, and always frequented the company of the students. I made their acquaint- ance, and through them that of their family, who were living at Edinburgh. The father, if not a Scotchman by birth, of Scottish origin, was a clergyman of the Presby- terian Church of the United States. While set- tled in some part of South Carolina, in the per- formance of the ordinary parochial duties of his profession, he was suddenly convinced of the fea- sibility of his claim to the barony and estate of Lovat of Scotland, which had been escheated on A CONTENTED PASTOR. 135 the execution of Simon, Lord Lovat, for taking part with Prince Charles in the Scotch rebellion of 1746. The Rev. Mr. F had always boasted him- self a lineal descendant of this famous rebel, but, notwithstanding the long proclaimed amnesty and restoration in England of forfeited titles and estates, had hitherto showed no inclination to substantiate his pretensions, but seemed content- ed with the obscure position of a rural pastor, the duties of which, moreover, he performed with fidelity, and to the full satisfaction of his humble cliarge. He had married an American whom I knew — a woman still retaining, in advanced life, much of the beauty for which she was remarka- ble in her youth, and all that refined amiability of manner and character which ever distinguished her. With three promising sons and two hand- some daughters, they lived a simple but content- ed life, happy themselves, and with a fair pros- pect of future happiness and prosperity for their children. In the mean time, the Lovat estate in Inverness- shire, in Scotland — a very extensive and valuable property — had been ceded by the English Com- missioners or Scotch courts, or whomsoever the authority was held, to a Mr. Eraser, an influential Catholic gentleman, on his claim as the nearest 136 MY COLLEGE DAYS. living descendant of the executed Simon, Lord Lovat. He, accordingly, was in the possession and full enjoyment of the estate, and no one ap- peared to dispute his right, not even the boasted lineal offshoot in South Carolina. It is possible that the modest clergyman, in his far Western retreat, in happy unconsciousness of amnesty or restoration of estates, may have known nothing of the splendid property of his boasted ances- tors being in abeyance. At any rate, the Scotch Fraser was met by no opposing claim, from the American at least, and entered into the posses- sion of the Lovat estate without a protest from him. The fortunate possessor, however, not content with the estate alone, claimed also the title. He failed, however, from some break in his line of descent, to satisfy the full requirements of the courts or the House of Lords, and his claim was rejected. l!»J"otwithstanding this defeat, he be- came Lord Lovat, but not the Lord Lovat. The Whigs were then in power, and, as Mr. Fraser of Lovat was an influential adherent of their party, they conferred upon him an English peerage with the same title — Lord Lovat — with the addition, however, of an earldom, as he would have borne had he been successful in his claim to the Scotch barony. CLAIMING AN ESTATE. 137 The American preteuder had become cogni- zant of these facts by the chance perusal of a paragraph in an English or Scotch paper, which had drifted into the remote corner of the world where he lived, or in some other hap-hazard way, and his aspirations to rank and wealth were at once awakened. Convinced, no doubt, of his right, and believing that he could prove it, he re- solved to go to Scotland without delay, to prose- cute his claim to the Scotch barony and estate of Lovat. He accordingly, on the instant, resigned his church, severed his long connection wdth his flock, abandoned the ministry, broke asunder all his associations of friendship and country, turn- ed what little available property he had into ready money, and embarked with his wife and family for Europe. His first visit, on arriving in Scotland, was to Inverness-shire, where the Lovat estate lies. Here he was received, I was told, with great demon- strations of devotion by all the tenants and the members of the clan Eraser, who hailed him as the genuine laird, and accepted him as their au- thentic chief. In earlier days, this intuitive rec- ognition, backed by the claymores of a host of stalwart Highlanders, might have seated him in the hall of his fathers, in spite of any rival in pos- session, though sustained by law and authority. 138 MY COLLEGE DAYS. Times, however, had changed, and the pretend- er could only make good his claims through the slow and costly processes of the legal courts. He therefore repaired to Edinburgh, where he settled with his family, and began the tedious suit at law which was to end, as he hoped, in making him not only the possessor of all the ti- tles, hereditaments, and possessions appertaining to the true Lord of Lovat, but of the mesne prof- its in addition, for which the false incumbent was responsible. The mere preliminary expenses and retainers to counsel soon exhausted the small supj)ly of funds brought from America, and the poor client was forced to have recourse to the Jews ; and when I first made the acquaintance of his family, they were living luxuriously on means derived, it was said, from that fatal source. Year after year passed without a decision of the main question, though, now and then, some collateral issues were settled, which bore adverse- ly, however, on the case of the American client. He and his family still kept up a vague hope of a distant accession to rank and wealth, while the approach of the day of reckoning, by no means so remote, was sure and certain. The money- lenders becoming more and more extortionate, and their grudging supplies so small, that the AN ADVERSE DECISION. 139 claimant found it difficult to meet bot^h the de- mands of the lawyers and the requirements of living of his family. They were, in consequence, soon reduced to such straits that the would-be Lord Lovat would have gladly exchanged all his splendid hopes of rank and wealth for the sim- plest station and competence, and no doubt bit- terly regretted his abandonment of the happy though obscure home in Carolina. After many years of wearying expectation and exhausting expense, there was a decision of the case of F versus Lord Lovat. It was adverse to F . The ruin of himself and family was finally con- summated. The long-deferred hope had already shown its fatal effects. The wife had died of a broken heart; the eldest daughter, a beautiful girl, unable, in the uncertainty of her position, to fix her affections, became a victim of disappointment, and did not long survive her mother ; the third son, careless and irregular, met with an early death ; and the father, seeking relief from the enforced idleness of his changed position, and the depression of his spirits, induced by the fre- quent fluctuations of hope and despair, resorted to means which soon brouoht his life to an m- nominious close. The eldest son was a youth of much talent, 140 MY COLLEGE DAYS. and, being fond of study, might, if he had been able to concentrate his attention in the pursuit of any particular profession, have arisen to dis- tinction. Led, however, from an early period of his life to believe that he was probable heir to a title and great estate, he could not devote him- self to the necessary work for any special voca- tion of a humbler life. His taste for study was consequently w^asted in desultory reading, and his unquestionable abilities were exhausted in the mere conversational and social triumphs of the hour. After the disappointment of his high hopes in Scotland he repaired to New York, where I occasionally met him by hazard, as, with increasing poverty and diminishing self-respect, he was shy of recognition by his former friends. After occasional glances of him as he flitted round the corners, or passed rapidly through the by-streets, looking, in his meagre habiliments, like a fitful ghost of his former respectability, I finally lost sight of him altogether. On this wreck of a family, there were two so fortunate as to secure a harbor of safety. The second son studied theology, and, becoming a clergyman of the established Church of Scot- land, received the appointment of minister of the Scotch Church in Bombay. The only surviving daughter married a young physician, and went ANOTHER AMERICAN CLAIMANT. 141 also to India with her husband, who had received some good medical appointment there. I met in Edinburgh another American claim- ant to an estate in Scotland, Ferdinand Campbell Stewart. I recognized in him a former fellow- student in Philadelphia, where he was the assist- ant of the chemical professor, Dr. Hare. Though, of course, very familiar with his looks, I had had no personal acquaintance with him until first rec- ognizing him in the botanical class in Edin- burgh I became, in the course of time, his inti- mate friend. He and I were frequently in each other's rooms, dining and supping together. Stewart was a diligent attendant at the med- ical lectures, though the principal object of his visit to Edinburgh was business in connection with the lawsuit he was then prosecuting in the Scotch courts. He had often his lawyer with him, a writer of the signet ; and I recollect meet- ing this gentleman and his little daughter at my friend's chambers one morning at breakfast. We had an abundant supply of those large and lus- cious strawberries for which Edinburgh is fa- mous. I, either having eaten my full share of them and had enough, or, being too modest to accept of more, resisted the pressing solicita- tions of my friend, who, however, continued them Vr'ith such urgency, that the little girl, who could 142 MY COLLEGE DAYS. not have been more than seven or eight years old, interposed in my behalf, saying, in a very gentle, compassionate tone, " Oh ! dinna press the laddie." We all burst into a hearty laugh, much to the poor child's discomfiture, at this preco- cious exhibition of considerate sympathy. My friend's father was the younger son of a Scotch laird, and, obliged to shift for himself, had emigrated to the United States ; and, being a man of considerable scientific acquirements, was ap- pointed professor of chemistry in William and Mary College, of Virginia. His elder brother had inherited and was in the enjoyment of the patrimonial estate, Ascog, a handsome property in the Isle of Bute. He married a widow, with a daughter by a former husband, but never had any children by her himself. On the prospect of death, during his last illness he made a will by which he bequeathed the estate of Ascog, the entail of which had expired, to his wife and her child. Without any direct issue himself, and without any special legal devise on his part, the estate would have descended in course to the father of my friend. This the brother, the Laird of As- cog, strove to prevent by his will ; but, as his will was executed during an illness which resulted in death, it became, according to Scotch law, void A SUCCESSFUL SUITOR. 143 and of no effect. Upon this ground my friend's father laid his cLaini, nnd instituted proceedings in the courts of Edinburgh to estabhsli it. As he, however, was incapacitated by indisposition, caused, it was said, in consequence of the sudden j)rospect of wealth on the death of his brother, iny acquaintance, his eldest son, was represent- ing his interests and those of his family in the prosecution of the case. I sat by him when the decision was rendered by the Scotch law-lords. It was in his favor, and he was so moved with excitement and de- light that I could hardly hold him down in his seat; in fact, he seemed ready to leap out of his clothes in the convulsive tumult of his joy. Tliis decision, however, was not final, for the defeat- ed defendants appealed to the House of Lords. Here, however, my friend again triumphed. Stew- art, subsequently, lived and practised his profes- sion as a doctor with success in the city of New York, while at the same time he seemed to be in the enjoyment of the means of a man of fortune, the proceeds, no doubt, of the Scotch estate for which he had been a successful suitor. 144 MY COLLEGE DAYS. CHAPTER XII. General Disunion of Students. — A Kemarkable Exception. — Political Unanimity. — Prevalence of Toryism. — Influ- ence of Tory Professors. — Professor Wilson's Example and Teachings. — Royal Medical Society. — Its Traditions. — Sir James Mackintosh. — The Brunonian Controversy. — Speculative Society.- — Botanical and Geological Tours. — Exercises. — New Haven. — Huntsmen and Horsemen. — The Theatre. — Church Intolerance. — Studies for a De- gree. — Examinations. — Defence of Thesis. — An Exami- nation Passed. — The Three Munros. The students were scattered all about the town, generally living in i^rivate lodgings — many, no doubt, very scantily provided for in lofty quar- ters and with low diet, perched eight or nine flats high, and cultivating literature on the tenui ave- nd — the little oat-meal of Sydney Smith. They only met together in large numbers while attend- ing the classes, and then divided into sections, according to their studies, and for no more than an hour at a time, at different periods of the day. The students did not, therefore, form a very homogeneous body, and I cannot recall but one occasion when they were united together in the ENTHUSIASM EXHIBITED. 145 manifestation of a common sentiment or motive. This, curiously enough, was for an object quite remote from all academic interests, and of a kind which would have hardly been thought to move at all, and much less with any unanimity, hun- dreds of youth socially and nationally so diverse. They met together in full force to protest against some measure of the Whig ministry. There was hardly a single student absent from the gathering, and the speeches and resolutions were received with a demonstration of enthusi- asm of which the voice and muscles of robust youth are alone capable. My countryman, the elder F , presided on the occasion, and, rising and coming forward boldly on the platform, de- livered a long speech explanatory of the object of the meeting. He, Avith his erect audacious presence as he faced the large audience, his black fj'ock-coat buttoned up to the throat, his hair turned defiantly back from his forehead, and hat in hand, looked, and with his loud peremptory voice, his sledge-hammer action, his positive state- ments, and his emphatic expression of them, ac- quitted himself, like a practised parliamentary orator addressing his constituents from the hust- ings. American though he was, he, of course, had forgotten all the traditional sentiments of his republican native land, and, yielding himself 10 146 MY COLLEGE DAYS. up entirely to the inspiration of the hoped-for barony and domain of Lovat, his speech was as anti-progressive as any Tory lord or landed proprietor in the country might have delivered. There is no doubt, if my friend had been the Con- servative candidate for Parliament, and an elec- tion had taken place, he would have been at the head of the poll,- with an overwhelming majority of the votes in his favor, and the Liberal candi- date nowhere. The Edinburgh students of all classes were, at that time, Tories to a man — to a boy, I might say, for most of them were not out of their teens. It seems strange that it should be so, for most youth, with the natural hopefulness of their inexperi- enced age, are inclined toward change and prog- ress. In France, Italy, Germany, and Russia, the students, if interested in public affairs at all, have always been ranged on the Liberal side. The mutterings of an impending political storm are generally first heard in the coffee and beer houses of the French and German students, while they are ever the most forward to expose themselves to the buffetings of the revolutionary outburst, and the earliest to suffer and die among the vic- tims of its ravages. The Conservative sentiments of the Edinburgh students were attributable, perhaps, to the fact INFLUENCE OF PROFESSOR WILSON. 147 that a m.'ijority of the professors were Tories; and some of the most popidar ones were not merely passive adherents, but active partisans of their cause. Wilson, the Professor of Moral Plii- losophy and Political Economy — the Christopher North o{ Blackwood — was the most prominent of these, and as he was universally admired and be- loved by the students, his example and opinions exercised a great influence over them. To think as he thought, and to do as he did, seemed at that time the very acme of good-sense and right con- duct. If this influence had been merely polit- ical, it might have hardly deserved a passing comment, for whether college lads are Whigs or Tories, Conservatives or Radicals, is probably of little importance to themselves, and certainly of none to the State. Their political opinions are nothing else than a caprice of the moment, to be varied by the interests of their future settled position in life. The Tory germ of blue may burst forth into the full-blown Radical flower of red ; or, as is more probable, will wither and die away altogether for want of stimulus to growth. It was the more permanent influence of the writings of Christopher North upon the habits of intellectual young men which was a serious evil, for, by a curious antithesis of destiny, the professor of moral philosophy became an incul- 148 MY COLLEGE DAYS. cator of immoralities. His JVoctes Amhrosicmce and other editorial rha^jsodies, " Christopher with his Rod and Creel," " Christopher in his Shoot- ing-jacket," " Christopher on the Moors," "Chris- topher on Colonsay," and such -like, however much they may have been inspired by genius, were never free from a strong flavor of whiskey ; and it is not astonishing that the young students, who delighted in their perusal, should have con- founded the effect of the one with that of the other. Finding literary effort so constantly as- sociated with sensual indulgence, they began to think the two inseparable ; and with the example of their favorite professor ever before them, sel- dom drank of the Pierian spring without a large admixture of Glenlivet or Islay in their potations. I am convinced that many young men of prom- ise thus acquired habits of indulgence which not only proved fatal to the bright hopes their tal- ents had awakened, but led to their final ruin and disgrace. The various societies served, to a certain de- gree, as a bond of union among some of the stu- dents, but only the few sui:>erior youth, and those zealous for improvement, were members of them. The Royal Medical Society, as it was grandly termed, had some traditions of which it was just- ly proud. Among its associates there had been THE BRUXONIAN CONTROVERSY, 149 several who had risen to great distinction in the world. Sir James Mackintosh, who had begnn his career as a student of medicine, and gradu- ated from the University of Edinburgh as a phy- sician, was one of the presidents of the society, and most active members. He used to say that, long before he knew the difference between Ep- som salts and common table salt, he discussed all medical questions, and gave his opinion with the authority of an Hippocrates. The youth, in my time, were hardly less oracular in their enuncia- tions, though it is hoped they were based upon a more extensive foundation of knowledge. The great Brunonian controversy, as it was called, which had so stirred the medical circles of Edinburgh a century ago, was still remember- ed as associated with the medical society, where its controversies raged with more fierceness than elsewhere. The members were generally ranged on the side of Brown ; but one daring youth, then a president of the society, ventured to profess himself an adherent of Cullen, his opponent. He was provoked, in consequence, to a duel, and sac- rificed his life to his opinions. Brown and his followers were all for stimulants in the treatnTent of disease, while Cullen and his were all against them. Brown finally died a victim to his doc- trine; for, having the courage of his opinions, he 150 MY COLLEGE DAYS. drank himself to death. He never lectured with- out a bottle of brandy before him, as modern lect- urers have their decanter of water. He was a very plausible man, and succeeded in establish- ing a system of practice which a hundred years ago held wide sway, the effects of which were still evident in my day. The business of the medical society was the reading of papers on medical or cognate sub- jects, and subsequently discussing them. There was a good library of reference, and a reading- room with a w^ell-spread table of scientific and other periodicals, among which the Tory Black- icood was conspicuous. After each weekly ses- sion the members hurried into the refreshment- room below, and over their chocolate and cakes became college boys again, joyous in their relief from the formalities of the little senate above. Some few of the medical students, ambitious of oratorical distinction, joined the Speculative Society, but it was principally composed of the more advanced law students and aspiring young advocates of the Parliament House. This was the society of which Brougham, Horner, and Jef- frey in their youth were members, and where they first essayed their wings before venturing on lof- tier fligjhts. There were other associations of a scientific — as the " Physical " — and of a literary BOTANICAL AND GEOLOGICAL TOURS. 151 kind; but the mass of students took no interest in them, finding in the requirements of college studies sufficient exercise for all the mental ac- tivity to which they were disposed. The professors of botany and natural history, including geology and mineralogy, used to bring- together, on an occasional Saturday, a goodly number of the members of their classes, and lead them, equipped with hammers, geological sacks, and botanical boxes, on long stretches of many miles about the country in search of stones, weeds, and fossils. These walks, which often, especially under the guidance of the indefatiga- ble Graham, Professor of Botany, extended to a length of forty miles or more, were the only ex- ercises of a systematic kind much practised by the students, who never banded together for any sort of athletic game. They skated, however, when the season rare- ly permitted, on Duddingstone Loch, a beautiful stretch of deep water on the outskirts of Edin- burgh, upon the W'Ooded bank of which was sit- uated the picturesque cottage manse of Thomp- son, the artist-clergyman. The loch was exces- sively deep, and it was only during a very severe winter that it was frozen sufficiently hard for any to venture upon the ice. When it was in safe condition, it became a scene of great gfiyety, 152 MY COLLEGE DAYS. all the fasliioDable peoj^le of Edinburgh turning out to look at the skaters and curlers, who were always in great force. In summer there was oc- casional bathing from the sands of Portobello. Voluntary walks, of course, w^ere frequently taken to Leith and Granton Pier, and oftener still to the famous tavern in ISTew Haven, where dinners were served through half a dozen courses of fish exclusively, with free admission, however, at each remove, of wine and whiskey. At New Haven is the ancient settlement of thd fishing colony, said to have come originally from Hol- land, whose men are so daring on the sea, and women so enticing on land, and all brave, hon- est, and true. It is from here come those pict- uresque-looking fish-women with laced caps, gay- ly striped petticoats, and blue bodices, who are seen and their voices heard in every street of Edinburgh, crying, " Caller baddies!" "Caller hose !" (fresh haddocks, fresh oysters). In a word. New Haven was the home of Christie Johnson, a genuine fish-wife, whose portrait Reid has so charmingly and truthfully painted. Some few of the students occasionally follow- ed the hounds, and I recollect a young English- man attending the anatomy class in full hunts- man's rig of scarlet coat, white cords, top-boots, and spurs, and, on coming out, mounting his nag COLLEGE SPORTSMEN. 153 at the Uuiversity gates, where his groom had been walking the animal about during the lect- ure. There was now and then a tandem to be seen, but merely turned out for the occasion from the shabby resources of a livery-stable. Only one student, of whom I knew, kept his horse ; he was a young East Indian, of a milk-and-molasses com- plexion, a showily dressed, ostentatious fellow. He was fond of parading his animal — a diminu- tive cob, with a close-shaven hide and a brush tail — up and down the principal streets, with the smallest possible boy, " Tiger,'' as he was called, perched on the saddle, with black beaver hat and cockade, white cravat, gray livery coat, leather breeches, belt, and yellow-topped boots, all com- plete. The theatre was, of course, a constant resource of diversion. The manager was that clever act- or and most worthy citizen, Murray. His wife was the sister of the great Mrs. Siddons's hus- band. There were two ladies, one of the name of Siddons, and the other Kemble, who were joint occupants with me of a pew in the York Place church, where, after leaving the little chapel in Carubbers Close, I became a regular attendant. It was always in the English church where act- ors and actresses congregated ; for the Scotch Kirk, with a disgraceful intolerance, would not 154 MY COLLEGE DAYS. admit any of the dramatic profession to the priv- ileges of its communion. It was in the httle old theatre of Edinburgh that Home's "Douglas" was first represented, which representation near- ly cost the reverend author his pulpit, for he barely escaped excommunication ; though he re- ceived a severe reprimand from his Church, not because he had written a tragedy, but that the wicked folk of that abomination of abominations, the theatre, had ventured to put it on the stage. There was, of course, in a capital city like that of Edinburgh, every opportunity for the gratifi- cation of individual tastes, Avhatever they might be, and this was freely availed of; but it may be said of the students generally that they devoted themselves with fair attention to the main pur- pose of their residence in Edinburgh, without being greatly distracted from it by the pursuits of pleasure. To obtain the degree of doctor of medicine in the University of Edinburgh, a course of study of four years' duration was required. In each year there were two sessions — a winter one of six, and a summer one of three months. Attendance during the winter sessions was alone obligatory ; although two summer sessions, at least, were at- tended by almost every student, as being most convenient for the pursuits of botany and natu- DIFFERENT COURSES OF LECTURES. 155 ral history. There were eleven different courses of lectures upon these various subjects : Chemis- try, Anatomy, Physiology, Materia Medica, Prac- tice of Medicine, Pathology, Midwifery, Surgery, Medical Jurisprudence, Botany, and Natural His- tory. All of these courses had to be attended or paid for, at least, at the rate of about five guineas, or twenty-five dollars each, twice during the whole course of study of four years. At- tendance was also required for at least six months at a laboratory of practical chemistry, the dissecting-room, the hospital, and disj^ensary. There were three examinations ; the prelimi- nary one to test the candidate's knowledge of the Latin language, which might be passed at any time at the discretion of the student, before the first medical examination which took place at the end of the third year, and consisted of Botany, Natural History, Chemistry, Anatomy, and Physiology. The final examination on Ma- teria Medica, Practice of Medicine, Pathology, Midwifery, Surgery, and Medical Jurisprudence was at the end of the fourth vear, when the stu- dent, having presented his thesis on some medi- cal or cognate subject, and " defended " it, as it was technically termed, was admitted to the de- gree of M.D. (Doctor of Medicine). These exam- inations, always in the presence of at least three 156 MY COLLEGE DAYS. of the professors, were in the English language, and viva voce; although but a few years before I joined the University they had been conduct- ed in Latin, as also the " defence " of the thesis, which, too, was required to be written in that language. The " defence " of the thesis, as it was grand- ly called, was little more, as far as I recollect, in my time than an exchange of courtesies with the pi'ofessor, and mutual congratulations upon the termination of an affair which had really never begun ; in fact, a mere ceremonial which each regarded as a bore, and was glad to be rid of. No one, of course, was admitted to the second without having passed the first examination, nor to the third without having passed the second. At the close of each examination, the manner in which the student had passed it was indicated by the marks M (ma^e, badly), SB {satis Jene, suffi- ciently well),B (Jene, well), and VB (valde bejie, very well). As I was fearful what little Latin I had brought away from college might give me the slip, I hastened to make the best use of it I could while it remained in my keeping, so I im- mediately offered myself for the first examina- tion, which I had no difficulty in passing. I was merely called upon to construe a few passages WINTER LECTURES. 157 selected indiscriminately from Cicero's De Na- turd Deorum^ Celsius, and Gregory's Conspectus, all easy of translation by the average school-boy. Daring my first winter session I attended four courses of lectures — Anatomy, Physiology, Chem- istry, and Materia Medica. The Professor of Anatomy was Munro tertius, as he was called — being the third of the three Munros, father, son, and grandson, who had been professors in the same department. 158 MY COLLEGE DAYS. CHAPTER XIII. Mnnro Tertius. — A Nonchalant Professor. — Calling Cards. — A Personal Description. — Strange Illustration of Filial Aifection. — First Sight of Pickwick. — A Dignified Pro- fessor. — Hope. — Resplendent Demonstrations. — Kemp. — Compression of Gases. — A Great Chemical Feat. — Antic- ipation of Modern Discovery. — The Eclipse of a Man of Genius. MuNEO primus was great, Munro secundiis greater, and Monro tertius the least; so much so, in fact, and at such a distance from his two fa- mous predecessors, as not to be thought of for a moment in comparison with them. Munro ter- tius was very proud of his name, as well he might be, for it had been everything to him, as without it he certainly never would have had his professorship, or been held in any consideration whatsoever. He was totally inefficient as a lect- urer and teacher; and if he had ever known much of anatomy, he had forgotten the better part of it. His lectures were attended but by a very few, and would have been by none, had it not been for the fun of it. He seemed to be quite indif- MUNEO " TERTIUS." 159 ferent wliether the students came or not. They were obliged, he knew, to buy his tickets ; and happy, as he put the money in his pocket, in tlie consciousness of this fact, he cared not where they went for their anatomy, which he must have known he himself could not supply. Every student, without exception, while com- pelled to pay for two courses of Munro's lect- ures, where he certainly could learn nothing, took lessons, at no small cost, from some private teach- er of anatomy, by whom there was a chance of being taught something. This created a great demand for private anatomical lecturers, of whom there were always several holding forth under the very eaves of the college buildings to Uni- versity students, at the same moment that Mun- ro tertius, the appointed professor, was mumbling his inaudible words to benches made empty by their desertion. It was one of the duties of the professors to ascertain how far the students were regular in their attendance at the classes by "calling cards," as it was termed. This should have been done twice a week, and on days unexpected by the student. Miinro, on the contrary, conscious that any enforcement of regularity at his lectures was impracticable, always took care to " call cards " on the same day, and at the opening of the lect- 160 MY COLLEGE DAYS. lire; so the students came in full force at the expected time, and after popping into the room for a moment, and complying with the order to leave their names or cards, popped immediately out again, and hurried off to attend to such du- ties or pleasures as they might have elsewhere. Munro tertius was an odd-looking man, with a contracted shrivelled face, small j^eeping eyes, short stubby nose, and pursed -up mouth, com- pressed, as it were, between an impending wrin- kled forehead above, the height of which seemed unnaturally great from being lost in the expan- sive baldness of the head, and a full double chin below, which overlapped his dirty white cravat. He was always very carelessly and shabbily dressed ; for, though rich, he had the reputa- tion of being very mean and miserly. He had a large, gross, and flabby person, and moved it with a shuflling gait and languid carriage. He did everything with an air of indolent in- difference, and performed all his duties as a pro- fessor in the most perfunctory manner. He hard- ly took the pains to articulate his words, and drawled out what he had to say in such a muf- fled tone that it was scarcely audible. He al- v/ays carried in his hand a light willow wand, or stick of some kind, with which he carelessly pointed out the object of demonstration — a bone, STRANGE FILIAL AFFECTION. 161 a muscle, or whatever it might be — for he never deigned to touch them with a finger. He, ordi- narily, contented himself with the mere announce- ment of the name of an anatomical part, for he was either unable or too indolent to describe it, or its relations to the human body. Seemingly very proud of the museum collected by his father, which he had good reason to rev- erence — for by its gift to the University he was said to have secured his professorship — he was very fond of bringing out and displaying its va- rious objects. The manner in which he did this was very peculiar and amusing. He would point with his wand to a crumbling osseous specimen, and fondly say, " This was my father's collar- bone ;" or, " This was my father's thigh ;" or, "This was my father's occiput," or whatever it might be. If some anatomical part preserved in spirits, he would take up the glass which con- tained it, and, stroking it tenderly with his hand, evoke the attention of the class with the affec- tionate announcement, " This was my father's stomach;" or, "This was my father's liver;" or, " This was my father's gullet," and so forth. This droll resurrection of paternal remains al- ways caused, in spite of all due respect for filial piety, a general titter among the few students scattered about the benches. On one occasion, 11 162 MY COLLEGE DAYS, I recollect, there was an irresistible burst of -loud laughter, which, small in number as we were, shook the benches and filled the almost empty hall with its sonorous vibrations. The professor had brought out an enormous circular glass jar, like the tank of an aquarium, in which was float- ing, in a sea of alcohol, a great swollen fcetus, and, with more than usual filial tenderness in his tone, declared, " This was my fatlier's baby !" Pastime was the sole object of the student in attending Munro's class, and if he did not find it in the eccentricities of the professor, he took care to provide it for himself. It was common, ac- cordingly, to take with him some amusing book, or to seek entertainment by keeping up a lively conversation with his comrades. Hearing, one day, behind me a sound of convulsive tittering, which seemed to indicate a great effort to sup- press what, at every moment, threatened to burst out into loud and uncontrollable laughter, I turn- ed round, and, confronting the merry face of one of my friends, I asked him the cause of his mer- riment. He pointed to a green-covered pamphlet before him, and said it was a number of " Pick- wick." It was the first time I had ever heard of it ; but it was not long after that I, too, in com- mon with all the world, became familiar with that famous work, which had just begun to be THE DIGNIFIED DE. HOPE. 163 issued, and could appreciate the difficulty that my friend must have had in his attempts to keep his laughter within the limits of public decorum. Among his many manifestations of eccentric- ities, Munro tertiics, after marrying and having twelve children, took, on the death of his first wife, a second ; but of the amount of offspring by her there is no record. The most dignified personage of the whole University was Dr. Hope, the Professor of Chem- istry. We all looked upon him with awe and admiration, as, just touching with his gloved hand the gold-laced cuff of his tall footman, he alight- ed at the college gates from his handsome equi- page, and walked, with stately step, across the quadrangle to the lecture-room. He was a vigorous old man of seventy years of age, with an eftlorescent face telling of a long life of good cheer. His portly frame was attired with scrupulous nicety and elegance. He was al- ways dressed in black, with a broad-flapped dress- coat, knee breeches, silk stockings, and low shoes with wide silver buckles. He had nothing of the look of a manipulator of retorts and cruci- bles, but altogether the air of. a church dignitary, replete with rich benefices. In his early days he had been regarded as a biilliant lecturer, and attracted daily a large class 164 MY COLLEGE DAYS. to witness his experimental displays. He never made, so far as I know, any substantial contribu- tion to the progress of the science he professed to teach, and at my time he had already been left far in the rear by his rapidly advancing contemporaries, seeming hardly conscious of the fruitful labors of Berzelius, Dumas, and Faraday. He continued faitlifully in the track of the old chemists of half a century before, and startled us tyros with the same resplendent demonstrations of the effects of chemical combination, and the evolution of heat and cold, as those with which he had astonished our predecessors for the pre- vious fifty years. He took great pleasure in making experimen- tal exhibitions on a large scale, and of a showy, obvious kind, being more anxious, apparently, to surprise the senses than to awaken the intelli- gence of his youthful and inexperienced audi- ence. The well-known rapidity of the combina- tion of iron and sulphur, with the brilliant effect which ensues, he would illustrate with an enor- mous mass of red-hot iron as big as a crow-bar, and a roll of sulphur as large and thick as his arm. When he brought the two together in contact, and the heated particles from the quick- dissolving metal flew off in a shower of splendid scintillations, and the whole room was in a glow, AN ACTIVE ASSISTANT. 1G5 illuminating each face, there was none whicli glistened with more brightness, and exhibited more delight, than that of the old professor. He would cause mercury to be frozen by the hun- dred pounds at a time, and exhibit, with an air of great self-satisfaction, large vases, forms, and figures of the congealed metal. Hope was very fortunate in the possession of a very clever and active assistant, without whose aid the old man, already very shaky, would have been unable to indulge in his favorite exhibition of fireworks, and other entertaining illustrations of chemical action. Kemp, Dr. Hope's assistant, was of very hum- ble birth, and his tone, speech, manner, and ap- pearance all indicated his low origin; but he was a man of unquestionable genius. He was the first to prove by experiment the compressibility of many of the gases. He had a whole arsenal of bent glass tubes, containing these in their liquid foi-m, which he used to handle and dis- play with a fearlessness w^hich he did not impart to the rest of us when made aware of the force imprisoned in those brittle vessels. There was explosive power enough, had it once, by hazard, gained a vent, to blow up the whole college structure and every soul in it, and leave its ruins the scene of a catastrophe more fatal, if less 16G MY COLLEGE DAYS. memorable, than that which had given the site of Kirk o' Fields, upon which the University was built, its tragic historical interest as the spot where Bothwell and his royal paramour had murdered Darnley. Kemp's great feat was the conversion of car- bonic acid gas into a solid by means of some enormous and incalculable amount of pressure. He often repeated the experiment with no un- usual precaution, as far as I recollect, beyond carrying his apparatus for the purpose into the open quadrangle, possibly with the view, in case of an explosion, that there might be more space for the scattei'ing of the remains of its unfail- ing victims. His apparatus consisted of an iron sphere of enormous thickness, and of the size and capacity of a keg or small barrel, divided transversely into two equal parts, in one of which there was a nozzle with a stop-cock. After the materials for generating the gas were placed in one of these hemispheres, the other was set upon it like a lid, and fastened closely and firmly in po- sition by several powerful brass nuts and screws. After it was supposed a sufficient quantity of the gas had been generated and immensely com- pressed by its own elastic atmosphere, kept from expansion by the strong vessel in which it was confined, the cock was suddenly opened, and the THE TELEGRAPH ANTICIPATED. 1G7 carbonic acid gas burst forth in a shower of white particles or flakes. This we collected and rolled together like a snowball, but soon dropped it from the hand, for it seemed, after holding it awhile, to bite the flesh like a nip of sharp frost. This experiment has, no doubt, been frequently repeated since those days, but in my time it was so rare that chemists came from various parts of the world to Kemp's laboratory to witness it. Kemp had a wire of five miles in length coil- ed over the ceiling of his lecture-room, through which he often passed a current of electricity ; and, bidding us remark the rapidity and sureness of its passage, would say that here was a means of transmitting intelligence between points, how- ever mutually distant, from one end of Europe to the other, and, in fact, around the whole earth ; for, as he said, no water — river, lake, or even the ocean itself — could interrupt the course of the swift, subtle, penetrating electric fluid. He never failed to add that some of us would live to see it practically applied for this purpose. He thus anticipated telegraphic communication by means of electricity, now so familiar to us all, long bcr fore any one had conceived the idea of its possir bility. We students, and every one else, regarded Kemp at that time as a wild enthusiast, and siiSr IGS MY COLLEGE DAYS. pected that his mind was distempered by his increasing habit of indulgence in strong drink; which, alas ! daily becoming more evident, final- ly brought him to ruin and disgrace, and thus early extinguished a genius which gave great promise to science. Kemp delivered a course of what he termed Practical Chemistry, which we all attended. The price was much less than that of the lectures of the dignified Professor Hope, but the value in- finitely greater. What we learned of chemistry was not acquired in the great hall above, where the stately and prescribed University lecturer so magniloquently pronounced his commonplaces, but in the dark, diminutive, stone -paved room below, where the uncouth, half-educated, and oft- besotted little Scotchman blurted out, in his rude brogue, the inspirations of genius. PROFESSOR ALISOJSr. 1G9 CHAPTER XIV. Professor Alison. — The Good Physician. — "Our Doctor." — Robust and Gentle. — Sir Robert Christison. — Hard Worker. — Powers of Endurance. — Personal Appearance. — Sir William Hamilton. — x\uthor of "Cyril Thornton." — Hundreds of Skulls. — A Death-blow to Phrenology. — Professor Wilson. — His Works. — Personal Appearance. — As a Lecturer. — The Dogs. — How a Professor was Appointed. — Pillans. The professor of Physiology, whose class I at- tended, was the brother of Archibald Alison, the historian, and son of the Rev. Mr. Alison, the author of the celebrated essay on " Taste." Dr. William P. Alison, the professor, was a writer of no little merit himself, and the author of a work on Physiology, which in those remote days, be- fore the science had emerged from the misty at- mosphere of speculative conjecture into the clear light of experimental research, was regarded as an ingenious and suggestive help to theoretical inquiry. He had a far nobler fame, however, than that of writer or author, though from its very nature it was restricted to narrower bounds. He was 170 MY colleg:e days. known and beloved by all the poor and wretch- ed of Edinburgh, by whom he was affectionately termed " Oar Doctor." One of the most emi- nent physicians of his day, the great and the rich eagerly sought his advice, and would gladly have secured it at any cost ; but he scorned their hon- orariums and rewards, and devoted his services to the humble and the destitute. He was con- stantly in the grimy " wynds " and filthy " closes " of the old town, the crowded haunts of disease and misery, exercising all his skill to heal the sick, and the full resources of his benevolence and generosity to encourage and support the needy and despairing. Dr. Alison's poor dependents tracked him all over the city, following him to his home, and to the college halls. The door of his lecture-room was daily besieged by a great throng of these miserable creatures —men, women, and children — who, as soon as he made his appearance, sur- rounded and clung to him so closely that it was impossible for him to move a step. Nor did he exhibit the least sign of impatience, or show any desire to avoid their importunities; but, compos- ing them with a few gentle words, gave each one an attentive hearing, and satisfying, apparently, the behests of all, sent them away hap[)ier and more contented for the interview. PRACTICAL BENEVOLENCE. I7l The door-steps of his house were perpetually beset in the same way by a crowd of poor peo- ple awaiting his going in or coming out. He always went afoot; for he gave away so much of his income that he could not afford to keep a carriage, notwithstanding his large resources from his professorship and a considerable pri- vate fortune. He was as great a favorite with the students as with the poor people, and when- ever any one of them was taken seriously ill, he was sure to send for Professor Alison, and he always came; for there was no awaiting fee to exclude him from a claim to the good doctor's services. Dr. Alison was one of the physicians of the Infirmary, and his presence in the ward which he daily visited was like a radiance from heav- en, bringing hope and patience to every sufferer. His looks corresponded with his deeds, and ev- ery feature of his face beamed with an expres- sion of benevolence. He was a large, tall man, over six feet in height, with broad shoulders nnd ruddy cheeks, and every indication, in fact, of a strong body and good digestion. He had a pe- culiarly gentle voice ; and to hear, as he bent over the bed of a patient, upon whose head his broad hand was softly laid, his habitual words, "My poor woman," or, " My good man," as it might 172 MY COLLEGE DAYS. be, was as if a chord of sweet music had been touched, awakening all the tender emotions of the heart. The most earnest, hard- working man in the University was Dr., now Sir Robert Christison, the professor of Materia Medica. Besides giving his regular course of lectures, he was an indefat- igable experimentalist in the laboratory ; one of the attendant physicians of the Infirmary ; an ac- tive member of the Royal Society, where he fre- quently read papers ; the president of the Phar- maceutical Society; a public analyst; and an elab- orate author, of the excellence of whose works the " Edinburgh Pharmacopoeia," and his stand- ard book on Poisons, are unquestioned proofs. His personal appearance indicated the ener- getic spirit and laborious life of the man. His body was worn bare almost to the skeleton ; his face was shrivelled, and had a bilious tint and haggard expression. He had a remarkable sus- ceptibility of disease. He could not enter the fever wards of the hospital without catching that malignant typhus whose victims always abound- ed there. After having been laid prostrate by six or more attacks in succession, he was finally forced by his colleagues, though against his own strenuous protest, to withdraw forever from all attendance on patients afflicted with the disease. WHOLESOME EFFECT OF WORK. 173 He was of the American rather than British type — eager, nervous, thin, angular, tendinous, and always on the go. With this fihny struct- ure and apparently exhausting activity of mind and body, he combined, as is not seldom found in our countrymen of the same form and tem- perament, a power of endurance for which no trial seemed too great. Sir Robert Christison was living a few months ago, a hale old man of ninety years of age — a striking example of the wholesome effect of work in promoting health and prolonging hu- man existence. It is hoped he may be living still. Though having all due respect for the men of eminence in my own profession, I took, I must confess, more interest in some members of the faculty of the University of wider celebrity. There was the professor of Logic, Sir William Hamilton, who at that time, however, had not acquired the reputation he has since, of the greatest metaphysician of our age. I do not recollect ever having heard him lect- ure ; for there was nothing in his subject, or in his reputed manner of treating it, greatly to at- tract me at that early period of my life. At the time, I think, I was more interested in him from the fact of his beino- the brother of Colonel Ham- 174 MY COLLEGE DAYS. ilton, the author of that interesting novel, " Cy- ril Thornton," and of a rather saucy book on the United States, where, in the more sensitive days of our immaturity, he was classed with the Trol- lopes, Fiddlers, and others whom we then re- garded as critics who had reached the height of impudence, in venturing to say frankly what they thought of us and our country. I saw, however, in the class-room of the pro- fessor of physiology, an interesting reminder of Sir William Hamilton, who used the same hall for the delivery of his lectures. Behind the ros- trum there was a number of shelves fastened to the wall, upon which were ranged the hundreds of skulls which gave such Aveight to the death- blow that Sir William Hamilton dealt, in his famous article in the Edinburgh Hevieic, to the pseudo- science of Gall and Spurzheim. Each one of the skulls had an artificial opening above the sockets of the eyes, exhibiting the cavity call- ed the frontal sinus, and showing that such space existed between the two plates of bone which formed the receptacle of the brain, that its con- volutions could not possibly correspond with any prominences which might be found on the ex- terior surface or plate of the skull. The idea, therefore, that an examination of the head could indicate any special development of separate ADMIRATION FOR TROFESSOR WILSON. 1V5 parts of the brain was thus proved to be mani- festly absurd. There was no one I was so eager to see as John Wilson, professor of Moral Philosophy and Political Economy in the University — the Chris- topher North of Blackwood — then in the full vigor of life and genius, and at the height of re- nown ; for I had, in common with all my com- rades who possessed the least literary sympathy, a strong youthful admiration for the author of the luxuriant verses of the " Isle of Palms," and the pathetic stories of the "Lights and Shadows of Scottish Life ;" while I held in reverential awe the Jvpiter Tonans of literature, who wielded the critical thunder-bolts of" Old Ebony." I was then too young, perhaps, to fully ap- preciate the masculine vigor and high-spiced hu- mor with which life, manners, and literature were treated in the JVoctes Ambrosiance/ and as I have arisen with advanced age to a more capable ap- preciation of these, my taste, I must confess, has more and more rebelled against the virulence of political partisanship, the coarse jocularity, and the flavor of sensual indulgence which always accompany and degrade them. While admiring the sympathetic insight and generous toleration of Christopher North in many of the later pa- pers of his editorship, I find them so smothered I'ZG MY COLLEGE DAYS. in rhapsody as to be difficult and hardly worth the effort of resuscitation. There was no difficulty for any one living in Edinburgh to see Professor Wilson; for, if he was anywhere within the field of vision, the eye was sure to be attracted and fixed upon him. I saw hira almost every day going to his class and coming from it. I can well recall his gigan- tic figure striding along the North and South bridges at such a pace that his three or four little short-legged Scotch terriers, which always followed at his heels, run as fast as they might, could hardly keep up with him. Professor Wilson has been often described, but never so accurately as in this hasty sketch of him by Dickens : " A tall, burly, handsome man of eight-and-forty (1841), with a gait like O'Connell's, the bluest eyes you can imagine, and long hair — longer than mine" (says Dickens) — " falling down in a wild way, under the broad brim of his hat. He had on a surtout coat; a blue -checked shirt, the collar standing up, and kept in its place with a wisp of black necker- chief; no waistcoat; and a large pocket-handker- chief thrust into his breast, which was all broad and open. At his heels followed a wiry, sharp- eyed, shaggy devil of a terrier, dogging his steps as he went slashing up and down, now with one PERSONAL APPEARANCE. 177 man beside him, now with another, and now quite alone, but always at a fast, rolling pace, with his head in the air, and his eyes as wide open as he could get them. I guessed it was Wilson, and it was. A bright, clean-complexioned, mountain- looking fellow, he looks as though he had just come down from the Highlands, and had never in his life taken pen in hand." There is not the least exaggeration in this de- scription by Dickens of the carelessness of Wil- son's dress. He always looked to me as if he had slept in his clothes, and, having been sud- denly awakened, had been forced to hurry away, without having time to put them and his person in order. I used occasionally to follow the professor to his lecture-room, where, as he ascended the ros- trum, he was greeted by his large class with such demonstrations of welcome as evinced the hearty and sincere affection by which he was regarded by every student. He evidently appreciated this daily expression of fondness, and always acknowl- edged it with a kindly smile, and a gentle depre- catory shake of his long yellow locks. Silence immediately ensued among the stu- dents, each one of whom seemed eager to catch every sound of their favorite professor's voice. He took out of one of his side-pockets a tumbled 12 178 MY COLLEGE DAYS. conglomeration of manuscripts, with no more reg- ularity of form and order than so much waste paper, and, throwing them down scattered before him, began to hold forth. What he said he evi- dently did not read from the writing lying about, for he never looked at, and only touched it to give it an occasional crumple with his hand, in the course of the energy of his action. He knew but little,! fancy, of moral philosophy, and much less of political economy ; but his lectures, pleas- antly discursive, w^ere always interesting. His little terriers, in the mean time, were crouching under his desk ; and sometimes the professor, in the stir of his eloquence moving heedlessly about, would happen to tread upon the leg or tail of one of the poor little creatures, and a sharp yelp would be heard, piercing at once some oratori- cal wind-bag in course of inflation by the lecturer, and causing a sudden collapse and universal mer- riment, in which Wilson would join as heartily as the rest. Wilson was entirely indebted to political par- tisanship for his appointment of professor. No one ever regarded him as a fit successor of Du- gald Stewart, and a proper teacher of moral phi- losophy, unless his rabid Toryism and free-and- easy convivial habits were deemed qualifications. His intimate associates must have laughed in PROFESSOR PILLANS. 179 their sleeves at his appointment as a good joke. Walter Scott, his friend and a brother Tory, when promising him all his great influence, felt it nec- essary to exhort him to "eschew sack, and live cleanly." Among the professors was Pillans, of the Hu- manity — the Scotch for Latin class. He was a painstaking, high-minded teacher, who did not merit in any way the mud with which Byron, to gratify a boyish grudge when at Harrow, be- spattered him in this dirty line of his "English Bards and Scotch Reviewers," "And paltry Pillans traduce his friend." 180 MY COLLEGE DAYS. CHAPTER XV. Close of Winter Session. — Vacations. — To Glasgow by Canal. — A Jolly Archdeacon. — Glenarbuck. — Blantyre House. — A Noble Fee. — A Tragic End. — A Winter Voy- age. — Illness at Sea. — A Gentle Seafaring Man. — The North Atlantic in Winter. — A Victim. — Hoisting Sail. — Detection. — Arrival in New York. — A Mitigated Wel- come. After the close of the winter session of six months, I had always half of the year to dispose of. I usually occupied three months of this in attending the summer session of the University, and the rest of the time in various holiday ex- cursions. There were two friends of mine, then bachelors — one a retired merchant from N"ew York, and the other his brother, an eminent law- yer — who always offered and gave me a hearty welcome. I spent much of my leisure time with them ; now in their luxurious town residence in Blythswood Square, in Glasgow ; and again at a picturesque country-place they rented for several summers. I used often to go to Glasgow by the canal, on which there was a passenger boat, which, by ARCHDEACON WILLIAMS. 181 frequent relays of post-horses and postilions, was able to compete with the fast mail-coach between Glasgow and Edinburgh. The railway has, of course, long since made this an impossible mode of travel for modern impatience, but in my day it was a favorite, and really a very agreeable, mode of journeying. The boats were handsome- ly fitted up, and the company was always the best, of which the freedom of communication and ease of movement permitted a full enjoyment. I recollect having once, as my fellow -passengers, Archdeacon Williams and his charming family of daughters. These bright, black -eyed girls were in great glee, and amused themselves pluck- ing wild plants and flowers from the banks of the canal as we rapidly skimmed them in our fast-going boat. They were good botanists, and had the. name ready for every insignificant grass or weed they saw or caught, but it was always the English one; for their father, they said, for- bade them using the scientific Latin terms as too pedantic for young ladies. While the daughters were thus occupied in botanizing, and I in ob- serving them, there was suddenly a great burst of laughter from the father, who sat reading in the bow of the boat. It shook our tremulous vessel, and fairly rippled the water with its hearty reverberations. On ascertaining the cause 182 MY COLLEGE DAYS. of this uproarious raerriment, I found that the archdeacon was reading " Pickwick ;" and, show- ing me the illustration by Phiz, where old Wel- ler is pointing significantly with his thumb over his left shoulder to Samivel's sweetheart, the pret- ty chamber-maid, Mary, he imitated the gesture, and burst out again in an uncontrollable fit of laughter. This was the second time that my at- tention had been drawn to a book I had not yet read, by a public manifestation of the immense delight it gave. Archdeacon Williams was the author of rather a dull book — Life of Alexander the Great; but Professor Wilson, of Blackwood, always spoke of him as the most learned and wittiest of arch- deacons; he certainly was the joUiest — a stout, broad -faced, merry parson, whose cheerfulness not even the cocked hat and sombre suit of clerical black he wore could repress. He had been a great friend of Sir Walter Scott, and had charge of his son Charles when a parish clergy- man in Wales. When I knew him, he was the head-master of the Edinburgh Academy, which the Tories and aristocrats had established as a rival to the democratic High School. After spending a few days in Glasgow, I ac- companied my friends to their country -place. This was Glenarbuck, situated on the right bank BLAXTYRE HOUSE. 183 of the Clyde, about ten miles from the city of Glasgow. The house was a pretty Italian villa, with a considerable sweep of varied park -like grounds, the lawns of which spread almost down to the river, while the rich growth of wood, shad- ing the sides and the rear of the dwelling, ex- tended in the distance behind to the hills which bordered Loch Lomond, and hid it from view. Within a few steps from the park gate rose the old Castle of Dumbarton. It and the great rock upon which it is built almost touched, with their deep, jagged shades of crag and buttress, the smooth lawns of Glenarbuck. The place is now the property of Lord Blantyre, and was, I be- lieve, a wedding-gift from the Duke of Suther- land, whose daughter he married. In my day, so great was the seclusion of the house, that I have often seen of a morning, from the bow-window of the breakfast-parlor, wild deer, whose home was among the hills, bounding across the lawn, and even at times pausing to nibble the tender grass. Directly opposite, on the other side of the Clyde, was the imposing structure of Blantyre House, which, with its great park of century-old trees, and wide pastures covering a long stretch of the bank of the river, and coming down to its very brink, presented such an oasis of refreshing 1 84 MY COLLEGE DAYS. beauty that it always attracted and fascinated the eye of the traveller as he passed, wearied with an almost endless scene of country blasted and stained with the fire and smoke of human energy. From the woods in the rear of Blantyre House rose a church spire, and by the side of it the manse— a more pretentious structure than most Scotch parsonages. In it lived two of my fel- low-students. Their father had been a humble rural practitioner of medicine, but had the good fortune to be called in an emei'gency to attend a daughter of the great house of Blantyre. The case was pronounced by the most erudite of the profession to be consumption, and of a desperate nature ; but the country doctor, who was a man of plain common -sense, thought otherwise, and undertook to cure it. He succeeded. His treat- ment was simple enough — consisting only, it is said, of beefsteak and porter; but the doctor was well rewarded, receiving as his fee the hand and fortune of his noble patient. His lordship of Blantyre thinking it deroga- tory to his rank and dignity to have a humble practitioner of medicine for a brother-in-law, or the doctor himself concluding that in the en- joyment of the transcendent fee he had earned there was nothing beyond to hope for in his pro- ox THE ATLANTIC. 185 fessioiijit was resolved that the pestle and mor- tar should be laid aside, and he take to pound- ing the pulpit. He, accordingly, became a cler- gyman of the Established Church of Scotland ; and receiving from his noble brother-in-law the gift of the living on the Blantyre estate, and ex- panding and beautifying the manse by means of his wife's fortune, was thus possessed of the lit- tle kirk and comfortable manse, whose spire and roof were to be seen peeping out of the woods across the water. His brother-in-law. Lord Blantyre, met with a tragic fate. While travelling on the Continent, he took up his quarters for a short time in a hotel in Paris, and one day hearing a tumult in the street, he opened his window, and, looking out, was shot dead. It was on the first of the three revolutionary days of July, 1830. The vacation being over, and the winter ses- sion of the University beginning, I should, in the ordinary course, have gone to Edinburgh ; but suffering somewhat from ill-health — the result of my many irregularities of diet and regimen, and other sins against nature during the early days of my collegiate life — and being greatly afflicted with home-sickness, I had sought and obtained permission to go to New York. I sailed from Liveri^ool, in the packet -ship 186 MY COLLEGE DAYS. Europe^ Captain Edward Marshall, early in No- vember. I began the voyage in great glee, for I was a good sailor, and did not dread the North Atlantic Ocean, even in its tumultuous winter humors ; and w^as, moreover, cheered by the near- ing though distant prospect of my home. For the first ten days everything seemed pleasant enough, notwithstanding the constant succession of gales and storms, which, blowing in our teeth, made the expectation of eating my plum -pud- ding in New York almost hopeless. On the eleventh day of the voyage I was suf- fering from a raging fever, and in a week after it was manifest that I had an attack of small- pox. Fortunately, there were but few cabin- passengers on board, although the steerage was crowded. Great alarm, however, prevailed, and it became a matter of serious deliberation how to dispose of me ; for the contagious disease I had might spread, and, becoming general, affect not only the passengers but the crew, and dis- able them from working the ship. They dis- cussed whether it would be better to deposit me where I should be a fellow-lodger with the cow, in a compartment of the long-boat, amidships, made vacant by the daily slaughter of sheep and swine, rapidly disappearing in saddles of mutton and legs of pork at the cabin table; or in the TERRIBLE SUFFERING. 187 captain's gig, hanging at the poop, where, as I tossed, suspended in the air, I might be venti- lated by every breeze and gale, and washed and purified by perpetual showers of spray and fre- quent dashes of the stormy stern-chasers. As I grew sicker and sicker, I felt more and more indifferent as to the result of their delib- erations ; and the only request I made, though none more unlikely to be granted whatever their promises, was that, in case of my death, my body should not be thrust into a potato-sack, weighted with coal, and hurled into the sea. It is curious that, during the worst paroxysms of my disease, I was less anxious about the cure of my sick body than of the disposition of my dead carcass. Perhaps it was that I desj^aired of the one, while I fondly hoped that there was some chance that my wishes might control the other. It was humanely resolved at last that, as there were no female passengers, the lady's cabin should be cleared of the freight and stores with which it had been crammed, and prepared for my re- ception. Here, accordingly, I was deposited, and lay prostrate for many a day, with a disease which made me not only loathsome to others but to myself. My pains and soreness of body were greatly increased by the motion of the ves- sel, every pitch, roll, and lurch of which seemed 188 MY COLLEGE DAYS. to rend apart my flesh, and tear it out by piece- meal. There was no surgeon or physician on board, and I, a student of but a year, only knew enough of the science of medicine to be frightened at my condition. There was, however, an old gen- tleman among the cabin passengers who, having had the small-pox, felt no fear ; and being a deal- er in drugs and paints, or something of the kind, thought himself, as the nearest approximation to a doctor, entitled to treat me. He had, unfortu- nately, he said, bat I think fortunately, brought with him no assortment of the articles he dealt in ; but fastening on the jalap and laudanum bot- tles among the ship's medicines, he dosed me alternately with the one and the other. It was hazardous treatment; but as his opiates were strong and frequent, my sensibility to the pains of the drug with which he was drenching me, and of the disease, was much dulled, and, in spite of all, I got well. The captain, a rough man to look at, with his face deeply seamed and quilted with the scars of the small-pox, and regarded by his officers and sailors as a severe task-mastei", whose rude voice of command and angry utterances of censure I could hear even where I lay, rising above the noise of the boisterous wind and the rattle of A GENTLE SKIPPER. 189 the shrouds, was as kind and gentle to me as a woman during my whole illness. He not only came to see me almost hourly each day, but re- mained frequently a long time by the side of my bunk, giving me an account of the progress of the vessel, and the occurrences on board. On Sunday he never failed to bring with him his Bible and read to me a chapter, although no one in the ship ever suspected that he had the least inclination to pious sentiments ; but I am per- suaded that he was a sincere Christian in faith, as he proved himself to be in works — in his con- duct toward me. As I lay in my bunk tossing and suffering, the ship, at the mercy of the constant winter storms, kept beating about the ocean, and, with perpet- ual head winds, sailing in every direction but on the right course. The sailors had a hard time of it; and after they had been for eight hours or more at a stretch on the yard-arm reefing a sail, during a dreadfully cold and stormy day of December, one poor fellow, exhausted with fa- tigue and benumbed by frost, let go his hold and dropped into the sea. He was a Maltese, and, fresh from the calm and milder regions of the Mediterranean, was unable to endure the boisterous winds and severe cold of the North- ern Atlantic in the winter-time. 190 MY COLLEGE DAYS. Thus we were driven about with hardly a sin- gle hour's fair breeze, day after day, week after week, and even month after month ; for, although we left Liverpool early in November, we did not arrive in New York until late in December. We took fifty-five days to cross the Atlantic — a pas- sage that is now not unfrequently made in eight. I felt perfectly well on my arrival, but the dis- ease still showed its full ugly efflorescence on my face, made still more visible by the frosty winter air. In spite of the great studding-sails I had hoisted by the advice of the captain, in the shape of a very high and broad standing collar, then the fashion, raised to my ears and extended beyond both of my cheeks, I found that I had not suc- ceeded in concealing my identity; for as soon as I made my appearance on deck, the first time since ray illness, just as we were about to land, the throng of steerage passengers, who had not seen me before, stared with amazement ; and I overheard them remarking to each other, "There's the gintelman, shure, who had the pock." My satisfaction at arriving was much dimin- ished by the surprise with which each old friend looked me in the face; and while it w^as natural enough that none was over-eager to take me by the hand, I felt sad, for I seemed to be thus de- prived of my due share of welcome. In a few MYSELF AGAIN. 191 months, however, I was myself agaui, with hard- ly any indication left of the ugly disease, and what there was, my friends politely assured me, only improved my former appearance, thus sug- gesting an inference certainly not very flattering to my previous looks. 192 MY COLLEGE DAYS. CHAPTER XVI. My First Visit to Washington. — Appearance of the Capital. — The Old Gadsby's. — A Visit from Ogden Hoffman. — A Sight of Daniel Webster. — The Hon. Edward Stanley. — A Call upon Van Buren. — The Joke of the Treasury. — Jesuits' College. — Wine for Boys. — Alexandria. — Horse- back liide to Mount Vernon. — A Deserted Home. — Ee- turn to Edinburgh. — An Unfortunate Petition. — First Medical Examination. The most memorable incident of my visit to the United States was a trip to Washington — the first time in my life that I had been there. Evert A. Duyckinck, my dearest friend, from his early youth to the last day of his life, then a young man of twenty years of age, like myself, was my companion. It was at his suggestion, in fact, that I made the journey. It was in the spring of 1838 that we set out; and in those days, with no railways to speed the passenger on, and no Pullman car to rock him to sleep and foi-getfulness of time and worry, the tedious travelling by stage-coach and steamboat made a trip of several hundred miles an enter- LIFE IN WASHINGTON. 193 prise of some moment. With our youthful spir- its and sense of freedom, however, there was no weariness too heavy for our endurance, and not an hour passed during our whole journey that did not bring with it an addition to our over- flowing glee and happiness. Washington appeared to me to have much more of the look of a provincial town then; al- though even now it has by no means a very striking metropolitan aspect. Gadsby's Hotel, where we put up, of course, as every one else did — for it was the only inn in the city, I believe — was a great hostelry of the Southern sort, such as used to be found in Richmond, and other large cities of the slave States. It was built on the four sides of a large square, upon which opened a range of interior galleries, three or four stories high. A railing guarded these from the open court-yard on the one side ; and on the other were the entrances to all the apartments or bedrooms. These galleries were the favorite resorts of the members of Congress, and other habitues of the hotel ; and in their frequent moments of leisure they were generally to be seen, if not in the bar- rooms, here poised upon their chairs with their heels upon the railing, puffing cigars or chewing their quids, and alternately sipping mint-juleps and squirting tobacco-juice over the toes of their 13 194 MY COLLEGE DAYS. boots down into the court-yard, apparently care- less on what sooty head of the despised race (the negro slaves who were always thronging in and out below) it might fall. It was in one of these galleries, I recollect, that Ogden Hoffman, then member of Congress from New York, to whom we had brought a letter of introduction, returned our visit. He was a jo- vial, hearty man, and, young as we were, made " hail fellow, well met" with us at once, and soon had his feet upon the rail too, his cigar in his mouth, and his mint-julep at his side. He was very chatty about Congressional men and affairs ; but the only thing I can recollect was, to use his own words, " Daniel Webster is facile princeps?'' We saw this great man, but did not have an opportunity of hearing him speak in the Senate, of which he was a member. He appeared to me then, as he always did whenever I saw him, as an apparition rather than a reality. There was certainly nothing ethereal about him. He was substantial enough, with his massiveness of struct- ure, his great height, his Atlantean shoulders, his ponderous head, with its lofty forehead overhang- ing those wonderful cavernous eyes of his ! but w^ithal he had a spectral look. He shed around such an air of irapressiveness — of awe, I may say — as he stood grand in the solitary distinction of EDWARD STANLEY. 195 his gigantic form, or stalked with majestic step among the ordinary men and women who flut- tered about, that it was difficult to regard hipi as other people who dwindled in his presence, while he in comparison seemed to rise to a su- perhuman height. We had also a letter of introduction to Ed- ward Stanley, a bright young member of Con- gress from North Carolina. He was then rejoic- ing in his triumph over Wise of Virginia in a conflict of personal invective, which in those days was regarded as creditable to the spirit of hon- orable gentlemen and applauded, but w^hich, it is hoped, the better taste of the present times con- demns, and will not tolerate. A duel was thought probable, but by the intervention of friends a hostile meeting was averted. Stanley, however, was regarded as a young hero, who dared to pre- sent a bold front to his formidable antagonist, and for having, though it was his first appear- ance in the Congressional arena, showed a won- derful readiness in fight, striking blow for blow, and giving, at least, as much as he received. Stanley was a pleasant companion, and very kind and attentive to us. He took us to the White House, and introduced us to Martin Van Buren, then President of the United States, who, in his usual bland manner, upon my being pre- 196 MY COLLEGE DAYS. sented to him, said, " Pray, Mr. Jones, to what family of the Joneses in New York do you be- long ?" He might as well, I thought, have asked me to what branch of the human race I apper- tained. He had made a mistake in my name, and I merely answered by correcting it. This is the only circumstance I can recall of an inter- view which was, of course, brief and formal. Mr. Stanley's wife and a niece of his — a Miss Armistead, the daughter of General Armistead — were with him in Washington, and we all paid a visit together to the Treasury, to behold its won- ders. We were shown a diamond-mounted gold snuffbox, among other handsome and valuable gifts which had been presented by foreign po- tentates to American officials, who are allowed to take but not to keep presents. They, accord- ingly, deliver them up to the Secretary of the Treasury, who stores them away in his depart- ment. When it came to Miss Armistead's turn to inspect the box, the official in charge, a gallant old gray-haired gentleman, after showing the dia- monds on the outside, opened and displayed the glistening interior of gold, saying to her, "You will see there the two most magnificent brilliants, look !" Miss Armistead was a very handsome dark brunette, and her pair of beautiful, spark- ling black eyes deserved the compliment; and I THE JESUITS' COLLEGE. 197 must say that I felt my gallantry wounded when her uncle, Mr. Stanley, blurted out to us as we left, "That old fool always says the same thing whenever he shows that box to a lady, be she young or old, ugly or handsome !" I wonder if it is still the standing joke of the Treasury, as it was half a century ago ! We made a visit to the Jesuits' College at Georgetown. It was during the vacation, and we found no one but a jolly priest in charge, who took us all about, showing us the refectory, the kitchen, the dormitories, the library, with its illuminated missals and foreign- looking books bound in vellum, and the grounds. After in- specting the terraces, the conservatories, and flow- er-beds, we came to a large trellis covered with vines, then bursting all over into buds, and giving promise of a plentiful harvest of fruit. " What do you do with the grapes?" one of us asked. " Why, we make wine of them," he said ; " but" — and after a pause, and a very significant twinge of the mouth, added, " we give it to the boys !" It was evident that his own rubicund visage and jolly rotundity of person had ripened under a different vintage. We sailed down the Potomac to Alexandria, and, mounting a pair of nags from the first liv- ery-stable, scampered off with loose rein to Mount 198 MY COLLEGE DAYS. Vernon. It was an early spring day, with a clear, exhilarating atmosphere, neither too warm nor cold; and our horses, as well as our ourselves, stirred to briskness and animation by the cheer- ing influences of the season, we moved rapidly and joyously on. The dogwood was everywhere in full bloom and odor, the fresh tobacco-plants were sprouting, and the grass of the rolling hills and broken banks of the river refreshed the eye with its tender green. We were soon at Mount Vernon, wandering about its deserted grounds, and inspecting with curious but not irreverent eyes the decaying old house and the neglected burial-place of Wash- ington. At that time the whole plantation seem- ed abandoned — the buildings a ruin, and the fields a waste. We could see no human being but one decrepit old negro, who started suddenly out from his lair at the mouth of the tomb, where he had been lying in wait to pounce upon some chance travellers like ourselves, for whose shil- lings he had a lively scent. Soon after this visit to Washington, on my re- turn to New York I sailed for Europe, and on reaching Edinburgh resumed my studies at the University. I had lost a year, and I was induced to make it up in a way that I afterward greatly regretted. I petitioned the Senatus'Academlcus, CONDENSED STUDY. 199 as the corporate body of jDrofessors was callecl, to concede to me one out of the four years of study required for a degree, on the ground of an attendance on a previous course of lectures at the University of Pennsylvania. My petition was granted, unfortunately for nie, I think, for I was thus obliged to crowd into three years all the courses of lectures, for which four, the required number, are hardly adequate. I, therefore, was occupied almost every hour of the day in attending lectures, and at the same time had to j^repare for the first medical exami- nation, to take place at the end of the session. I naturally devoted myself almost exclusively to those subjects upon which I was to be exam- ined, and gave but little heed to the others, be- yond such attendance at the lectures on them as was necessary to comply with the regulations of the University. I passed the examination, and very creditably, I believe, at the end of the win- ter session, on the following subjects : Anatomy, Physiology, Chemistry, Materia Medica, Botany, and Natural History. 200 :' .- ALLEGE DAYS. CHAPTER XYII. The Last Academic Year. — Disability of Professors. — Sir Charles Bell. — Supplementary Teachers. — Disgraceful In- efficiency. — Infirmary. — Heroic Practice. — High-pressure. — Breaking Down. — The Last Examination. — Dr. (Sir James Y.) Simpson. — Dr. Sav/neyson's Testimonials. — A Severe Calling to Account. — Defence of Thesis. — Capping. —Exit. After the usual three months of holiday, I was reduced to my last academic year (1839-'40) at the University, to consist of two sessions, the summer and winter. In nine months, which was all the time left to me, I undertook to do won- ders — not only to attend six courses of lectures — Practice of Medicine, Pathology, Midwifery, Surgery, Clinical Surger}'^, and Medical Jurispru- dence — but the in-door practice of the hospital, and out-door practice of the dispensary as well. I might have dispensed, as far as any good, they did me, with most of the lectures; for, ex- cepting the excellent course of Clinical Surgery by the great surgeon, Syme, there was not a sin- gle one that was efficiently given. Home, the INEFFICIENT PROFESSORS. 201 professor of the Practice of Medicine, was so en- feebled by age and infirmity that, although he continued dailv to mumble somethino' from a manuscript before him, it was so inarticulate and inaudible that no one could discover what it was. Thompson, the professor of Pathology, the au- thor of the standard work on Inflammation, and one of the original founders, with Sydney Smith, Jeffrey, and Brougham, of the Edinburgh Me- view,midi among its earliest and ablest contribu- tors, had been long prostrate on his bed with paralysis. His son — not Allen Thompson, now the Glasgow professor, who might have well rep- resented his father, but the eldest, a very differ- ent man — was acting as his substitute, and had no qualifications whatsoever for the position. Hamilton, the professor of Midwifery, was also a hopeless invalid ; and an old pupil of his was appointed to read his manuscript lectures, which he did in a perfunctory way, as if he regarded it a bore to himself, as certainly it was to those who were forced to listen to him. Sir Charles Bell, who had been lately appoint- ed the successor of Liston, who had gone to London, where he became the greatest surgeon of the metropolis, was, indeed, a very eminent man, but an exceedingly inefiicient lecturer. He had reached that age when, without energy to 202 MY COLLEGE DAYS. struggle and compete with the present, we con- sole ourselves with the triumphs of the past. It was interesting to listen to him as he dilated upon his great discovery of the functions of the spinal cord and nerves, but he became occasion- ally very tedious as he repeated over and over again the details of his ingenious experiments, and the steps of his convincing deductions ; besides, it was not surgery. He, moreover, was quite in- firm, and lectured in a languid manner approach- ing to indifference, seeming as glad as we were when the hour of the lesson was over. The professor of Medical Jurisprudence had put what he knew of his subject in a little book, which was in the- hands of us all; and as he was a dull fellow, no one cared or needed to listen to his tedious repetitions of himself. It was disgraceful to the University that its teaching should have been allowed to remain in such an inefficient state. There were twelve med- ical professors in all, receiving large incomes from their classes, while only two or three out of the whole number could be justly said to lecture in a superior and thoroughly effective manner. All the rest were greatly surpassed by the private teachers, whose services, in fact, it was neces- sary to call into requisition to supplement the University courses and supply their defects, in ATTENDANCE IN THE SURGICAL WARDS. 203 consequence of the superannuation, sickness, and other causes of the disability of the regular pro- fessors. The students were thus forced to pay double, while they received but a single benefit, and more for what they did not get than for what they did. The teachers outside always charged a great deal less for their good lectures than we were obliged to give the professors in- side of the University for their bad ones. The proper remedy for such a condition of things is to place all teachers properly licensed, whether collegiate or not, on the same footing; and as each would thus depend on his merits for com- pensation, only the capable and efficient would be found in the chair of professor or lecturer; for none is likely to be fool enough gratuitously to hold forth, day after day and year after year, to empty benches, as a University dullard does, and is so well paid for doing. I was a daily attendant at the Infirmary, wit- nessing the operations performed by the skil- ful hands of Syme and Ferguson, afterward Sir James Ferguson, the famous surgeon of London. I followed them also in their rounds in the surgi- cal wards, as I also did the various physicians in succession — Drs. Alison, Christison, and Craigie — in the medical services. Those were the heroic days of the practice 204 MY COLLEGE DAYS. of medicine— the days of puking, drenching, and bleeding. In every case of fever, whatever might be its nature, the preUminary measure was a vomit of a kind and of a strength that was al- most capable of making, contrary to nature, a horse sick. Two grains of tartar-emetic and a drachm of ipecacuanha were always given to each poor patient as soon as seen, whose flushed face, heated surface of body, and quickened pulse indicated the possibility of any disease Avhatever which could come within that comprehensive term, fever. It might turn out to be merely a disordered stomach, which a day of abstinence and repose might restore to its healthy condition ; or it might be an eruptive affection, a case of measles or small-pox, which would follow a course as regular and certain as the days of the week; or it might be the malignant typhus, where the virulent poison, corrupting the blood and pros- trating the strength, could only be eliminated by time and the power of endurance. It matter- ed not what disease was vaguely foreboded, the dose was certain ; the tartar-emetic and ipecacu- anha were always given. " The fever," that nev- er was or could be arrested in its natural prog- ress, " must be broken," exclaimed all the doc- tors, as they poured down their nauseous mixt- ures into the unwilling stomachs of their vie- HEROIC MEDICINE. 205 tims, always sickening them, and reducing a strength already prostrated by the disease, and thus lessening the chances of a recovery wholly dependent upon the power of the organization to endure the poison, and finally, by outlasting the malignant effects, to recover its original con- dition of Ileal th. With the same boasted heroism of treatment, as it was then termed — audacious defiance of nat- ure we should now call it — the doctors treated every supposed case of inflammation. Venesec- tio ad deliquiiim — all the orders in the Infirma- ry were given in Latin — " bleeding to fainting," was heard at every bedside. This was followed by a prescription of tartar-emetic, to be taken every hour or so, and continued until the patient became well, as he may have done sometimes, for the resistance of nature is marvellously great, or until — but cirs longa, vita hrevis. There was al- ways, supplementary to this medical heroism of bleeding to fainting and sickening to exhaustion, a frequent purging with large doses of calomel and jalap, to complete the test of human endur- ance. The stimulating treatment in typhus was carried out to an extent that would seem incred- ible to the practitioner of tlie present day. An old disciple of the Brownonian School, one of the most famous doctors of his time in Edinburgh, 206 MY COLLEGE DAYS. was known to give a one quart bottle of brandy and two quart bottles of full-bodied claret to a single patient in the course of four-and-twenty liours ! I learned to flesh, I am sorry to say, my lancet in those heroic days, and to wage war against nature with it, and all the other deadly weapons of ancient art; but I rejoice to know that I liave survived to see these unheroic times, which, though too commonplace in many respects as they may be, have certainly the advantage of being more sensible and less dangerous. With all the many lectures, and the attend- ance upon the hospitals, and out-door and in-door practice of the dispensaries crowded into one short academic year, to which was added the special preparation requiring a great deal of study of numerous text-books for the prospec- tive examination for my degree, which naturally tormented me with anxieties and dismal forebod- ings of possible failure, I became so oppressed with work and worried with care that my health broke down under the pressure. I now felt to the full the imprudence of my proceeding in hav- ing shortened the regular course of study, and, instead of the one year less, which had been con- ceded in accordance with my injudicious peti- tion, I would have been glad to have many years CHAMBER OF HORROKS. 207 more, so overwhelming seemed the burden I had to bear. I thought, at times, of giving up the whole effort in despair. I became nervous and hypochondriacal, and suffered a prostration of mind and body which, at intervals, has continued to afflict me, more or less, throughout the rest of ray life to this day — a prolonged misery which I attribute to the absurd attempt at doing in a few months what could only have been properly done in as many years. I, however, persisted, and offered myself for the examination, but with fear and trembling. On entering the chamber of horrors — the small commonplace room, the plain table covered with green baize holding a business -looking blank- book, some scattered sheets of white paper, and pens and ink — the two or three familiar profess- ors, smiling and chatting at their ease, at one end, while at the other stood an empty horse- hair chair, seemed, by their very simplicity and habitualness, a mockery of my woe, and height- ened my alarms. I could have better endured a more ceremonious reception, a statelier apart- ment, a more solemn conclave. Greater show of official form and severity would have stiffened my relaxed nerves to the firmness of resistance, and compelled self-command. Ceremony, more- over, would have been a diversion, drawing to 208 MY COLLEGE DAYS. itself much that in this cynical simplicity of my examination was concentrated upon me. Every- thing indicated business, and nothing but busi- ness, and a most dreadful business. The first person I confronted was Dr. Simp- son, who had just been elected to the Professor- ship of Midwifery, on the death of Dr. Hamilton. He arose and met me as I entered the door, and shook hands in the most friendly way. I thought it but polite, in return for his civil reception, to be civil too, so I congratulated him upon his ap- pointment. "And you, sir," he answered, with a curl of his Hp, " did everything in your power to prevent it." I knew at once what he referred to, and the knowledge was not calculated to revive my failing courage. During the very active and excited canvass for the election of a Professor of Midwifery, Dr. Simpson had printed a large volume of Testi- monials, and distributed it everywhere. This publication was not in the best taste, and, lend- ing itself obviously to burlesque, I had traves- tied it under the title of " Dr. Sawneyson's Testi- monials." The squib was hawked about in front of the college, read by all the Tory professors, who smiled approvingly upon the reputed au- thor, thrown into every reading-room, and sent to all the newspapers; and a popular medical SIR JAMES Y. SIMPSON. 209 journal in London reprinted it in full in its col- umns. It was a great success, owing to the time- liness of its production, and not to any merit it possessed. Dr. Simpson, who was a brother of a Radical baker of Edinburgh, an influential mem- ber of the Town Council, was opposed by most of the professors, who were Tories, and of great aristocratical pretensions. The students follow- ing in their wake were antagonistic too, and I also; though, as a foreigner, I ought to have expressed no political sympathy, and if I did, it might have been expected that, being a Re- publican, I should not be ranged on the Tory side. Simpson, however, was elected, principal- ly through the influence of his Radical brother of the Common Council, with which the choice rested. He took ample revenge in due course of time upon all the Tory professors, and his other virulent antagonists, by becoming one of the greatest medical teachers in the University, and most eminent accoucheurs and physicians in the world. His speech to me was certainly not very mag- nanimous, and his conduct subsequently still less so, if, as I suspected, he made my examination more severe and difficult than it otherwise would have been. I may, however, have done him in- justice by my suspicion. At any rate, he was 14 210 MY COLLEGE DAYS. entitled to ask me what he pleased, provided it was pertinent to the subject upon which I was to pass an examination, and it was my duty to answer it. I passed, however, by hook or by crook, the Midwifery as well as the other exami- nations. The next step toward obtaining the degree was to defend my thesis ; an operation whicli was soon and easily performed, for it consisted of little more than a polite interchange of courtesies between Dr. Alison, my challenger on the occa- sion, and myself. He shook hands with me, and expressed the hope that I was well, and I return- ed the compliment, shaking him by the hand, and expressing the hope that he was well. He may have added a word or two in regard to ray the- sis, which treated of a subject he was fond, in his lectures, of descanting upon — " The Influence of Mind on Body." I was now ready for the last scene of all, the "capping," as it is termed. I, accordingly, on the day appointed, August 1st, 1840, in order to undergo the operation, passed in a long line of my fellow-graduates, one hundred and eleven in number, in front of the whole body of the Fac- ulty, seated on a dais or platform, and in face of a large number of miscellaneous spectators, who tilled the great hall of the University. Each of GRADUATED. 211 US stopped, first before one of the professors, to sign the Hippocratic oatli, and then before the J^rimariuSj or Principal of tlie University, sit- ting on a raised seat in the centre, who, lifting the cap, which was made of pasteboard covered with black stuff of some kind, and resembled a gigantic extinguisher in form, put and held it on the head of each, while he went through a short Latin formula, pronouncing the candidate a doc- tor, with all the rights and privileges pertaining thereto. Having been thus capped, I passed on, and, receiving my diploma, disappeared from the stage. THE BAZAR BOOKS. 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