picturesque oddity in connection with Carlyle’s early Edinburgh life. It is entitled “_Peter Nimmo_,” and was published in Fraser’s Magazine for February 1831, the next number after that containing _Cruthers and Jonson_. Within my own memory, and in fact to as late as 1846, there was known about the precincts of Edinburgh University a singular being called PETER NIMMO, or, by tradition of some jest played upon him, SIR PETER NIMMO. He was a lank, miserable, mendicant-looking object, of unknown age, with a blue face, often scarred and patched, and garments not of the cleanest, the chief of which was a long, threadbare, snuff-brown great-coat. His craze was that of attending the University class-rooms and listening to the lectures. So long had this craze continued that a University session without “Sir Peter Nimmo” about the quadrangle, for the students to laugh at and perpetrate practical jokes upon, would have been an interruption of the established course of things; but, as his appearance in a class-room had become a horror to the Professors, and pity for him had passed into a sense that he was a nuisance and cause of disorder, steps had at last been taken to prevent his admission, or at least to reduce his presence about college to a minimum. They could not get rid of him entirely, for he had imbedded himself in the legends and the very history of the University.——Going back from the forties to the thirties of the present century, we find Peter Nimmo then already in the heyday of his fame. In certain reminiscences which the late Dr. Hill Burton wrote of _his_ first session at the University, viz. in 1830–31, when he attended Wilson’s Moral Philosophy Class, Peter is an important figure. “A dirty, ill-looking lout, who had neither wit himself, nor any quality with a sufficient amount of pleasant grotesqueness in it to create wit in others,” is Dr. Hill Burton’s description of him then; and the impression Burton had received of his real character was that he was “merely an idly-inclined and stupidish man of low condition, who, having once got into practice as a sort of public laughing-stock, saw that the occupation paid better than honest industry, and had cunning enough to keep it up.” He used to obtain meals, Burton adds, by calling at various houses, sometimes assuming an air of simple good faith when the students got hold of the card of some civic dignitary and presented it to him with an inscribed request for the honour of Sir Peter Nimmo’s company at dinner; and in the summer-time he wandered about, introducing himself at country houses. Once, Burton had heard, he had obtained access to Wordsworth, using Professor Wilson’s name for his passport; and, as he had judiciously left all the talk to Wordsworth, the impression he had left was such that the poet had afterwards spoken of his visitor as “a Scotch baronet, eccentric in appearance, but fundamentally one of the most sensible men he had ever met with.”[35]——Burton, however, though