Jeffrey was a year younger than Scott, whom he outlived eighteen years, and with whose career his own had some points of resemblance. They came of the same middle-class stock, and had played together as lads in the High School "yard" before they met as advocates in the Court of Session. The fathers of both were connected with that court; and from childhood, both were devoted to the law. But Scott's boyish infirmity imprisoned him in Edinburgh, while Jeffrey was let loose to Glasgow University, and afterward passed up to Queen's College, Oxford. The boys, thus separated, had no remembrance of having previously met, when they saw each other at the Speculative Society in 1791. The Oxford of that day suited Jeffrey ill. It suited few people well who cared for any thing but cards and claret. Southey, who came just after him, tells us that the Greek he took there he left there, nor ever passed such unprofitable months; and Lord Malmesbury, who had been there but a little time before him, wonders how it was that so many men should make their way in the world creditably, after leaving a place that taught nothing but idleness and drunkenness. But Jeffrey was not long exposed to its temptations. He left after the brief residence of a single term; and what in after life he remembered most vividly in connection with it, seems to have been the twelve days' hard traveling between Edinburgh and London, which preceded his entrance at Queen's. Some seventy years before, another Scotch lad, on his way to become yet more famous in literature and law, had taken nearly as many weeks to perform the same journey; but, between the schooldays of Mansfield and of Jeffrey, the world had not been resting. It was enacting its greatest modern incident, the first French Revolution, when the young Scotch student returned to Edinburgh and changed his College gown for that of the advocate. Scott had the start of him in the Court of Session by two years, and had become rather active and distinguished in the Speculative Society before Jeffrey joined it. When the latter, then a lad of nineteen, was introduced (one evening in 1791), he observed a heavy-looking young man officiating as secretary, who sat solemnly at the bottom of the table in a huge woolen night-cap, and who, before the business of the night began, rose from his chair, and, with imperturbable gravity seated on as much of his face as was discernible from the wrappings of the "portentous machine" that enveloped it, apologized for having left home with a bad toothache. This was his quondam schoolfellow Scott. Perhaps Jeffrey was pleased with the mingled enthusiasm for the speculative, and regard for the practical, implied in the woolen nightcap; or perhaps he was interested by the Essay on Ballads which the hero of the nightcap read in the course of the evening: but before he left the meeting he sought an introduction to Mr. Walter Scott, and they were very intimate for many years afterward.