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 relation to Scotland, the Auchinleck estate, and his father, and that "implacable" woman, his father's second wife. As Carlyle recognized well enough, the young James was no insolent toad-eating upstart from nowhere. He has the blood of Bruce in his veins, and social position and culture behind him. His father, an eminent member of the Scottish bar and Lord of Auchinleck, can ride ten miles from his front door on his own land. He wants an heir to his profession and his property and to his position in the country, and he gives his boy an Edinburgh education, and tries to make a sound religious Tory and a good Scotsman of him. Sentimentally, the project appeals to James; he always remained sentimentally enthusiastic for his religion, his king, and his family, and he enjoyed drinking port wine and coffee on the 30th of January in honor of the blessed martyr Charles I.

But young James has a pair of the most candid realistic eyes that were ever set in a man's head. At the age of seventeen, precocious, well-read, wide-eyed, he turns his eyes toward London, recognizing that Scotland is going to be more and more irredeemably provincial. With his instinct for the main current, he cannot bear the thought of accepting a Scotch laird's universe, and remaining in the backwater. Edinburgh he knows only too well. He is irked by the study and practise of law as he sees it in the provinces. He loathes the gloom and the dull placidity of country life. His temperamental melancholy craves the stimulation of gay scenes and people. To escape from his manifest destiny and to torment his father, he talks about entering the priesthood and the army. These are but youthful writhings against the study of law. As a disciple of the rational Hume, he has no