Page:A biographical dictionary of eminent Scotsmen, vol 9.djvu/77

Rh his opportunities of superior instruction, the young student devoted himself with earnestness to his successive tasks, and appears, even then, to have indicated not only his future bent, but the eminence he would attain in it. His note-books at the different classes were not merely memoranda, but regular digests of the lectures; he was already a keen critic both of sentiment and composition; and in the debating society of the students, of which he was a member, he was soon distinguished as one of its most ready speakers. These aptitudes, however, were still more distinctly exhibited in his private studies from May 1789, when he left the college of Glasgow, till September 1791, when he went to Oxford. This interval of a home life, which so many youths of seventeen regard as a season of rest, or spend they know not how, was with Jeffrey anything but a period of repose or frivolity, as his piles of manuscript written between these dates sufficiently attested. Seated by the light of his "dear, retired, adored little window," as he called it, of the garret of his father's house in the Lawnmarket, he handled his already indefatigable pen upon subjects of poetry, history, criticism, theology, metaphysics; and the result of his diligence is attested by twelve letters in the manner of the "Spectator," and thirty-one essays, the latter being written within the compass of six months, while his criticisms alone comprise fifty authors, chiefly French and English. Even then, too, the voice of prophecy was not wanting to predict his future renown. One night, while taking his "walk of meditation," he found James Boswell, the biographer of Johnson, utterly prostrated upon the pavement by intoxication. It was a fresh case of that Quare adhcesit pavimento, for which Boswell, on awakening from one of his bivouacs in the street, found in his right hand a brief and retainer. Jeffrey, aided by some lads, carried the fallen worshipper of Paoli and Johnson to his home, and put him into bed. On the following morning Boswell, on learning who had been his benefactor, clapped young Jeffrey's head, and among other compliments said, "If you go on as you have begun, you may live to be a Bozzy yourself yet."

At the close of the last century a conviction or prejudice was prevalent in Scotland, that the education of an English university was necessary to complete that of a Scottish one. It was deemed essential, therefore, that Francis Jeffrey, after having ended his curriculum at Glasgow, should amplify and confirm it at Queen's College, Oxford; and thither, accordingly, he repaired at the close of September, 1791. But there he found neither the happiness nor improvement he had expected. His hopes, perhaps, had been raised too high to be fulfilled; and to this disappointment was superadded such a pining consumption of homesickness as would have been enough for either Swiss or Highlander. It is no wonder, therefore, if, among his letters of this period, we find such a lugubrious sentence as the following:—"I feel I shall never be a great man, unless it be as a poet." In the following month he writes: "Whence arises my affection for the moon? I do not believe there is a being, of whatever denomination, upon whom she lifts the light of her countenance, who is so glad to see her as I am!" A poet, it is evident, he was in danger of becoming, instead of a censor and scourge of poets; and this melancholy and moon-staring was but the commencement of a hopeful apprenticeship. With the same morbid feelings he contemplated the society around him, and characterized them all as drunkards, pedants, or coxcombs. Few men depended more upon locality for happiness than Jeffrey, and Scotland was not only his native country, but his native element. To this, therefore, and not to any inherent defects in the education or students of Ox-