Page:The Poetical Works of William Motherwell, 1849.djvu/35

 the full measure of elementary classical instruction, including in the fifth year the rudiments of Greek, which it was then customary to give to boys in Scotland. One of his surviving school companions informs me that, in conjunction with the late Mr William Bain, advocate, and a Mr Lymburn, also deceased, he was a dux boy, and there seems to be no reason to doubt that he exhibited the same quickness of apprehension and readiness of parts in the Paisley Academy which he had displayed in other schools; but as his tastes were never scholastic, and as his knowledge of the dead tongues was always limited, the presumption is that he followed the prominent bias of his mind, and devoted to works of imagination the hours that should have been given to school exercises. I am fortified in this belief by the recollections of Mr Crawford, who says, 'What Motherwell was most remarkable for was his gift of spinning long yarns about castles, and robbers, and strange out-of-the-way adventures, with which, while Mr Peddie imagined he was assisting his class-fellows with their lessons, he would entertain them for hours, day after day, like some of the famous story-tellers in the Arabian Nights; and these stories were retailed at second-hand by his class-fellows to those who had not the privilege of hearing them from the author himself.'

In the year 1811, his mother died at Edinburgh, and after that melancholy event, his father, accompanied by his daughter Amelia, retired to the village of Kilsyth, in