Wolfe would fain have gone abroad (England affording no schools) to complete his military and general education; but the Duke of Cumberland's only notion of military education was drill; so Wolfe had to remain with his regiment. It was quartered in Scotland, and besides the cankering inaction to which the gallant spirit was condemned, Scotch quarters were not pleasant in those days. The country was socially as far from London as Norway. The houses were small, dirty, unventilated, devoid of any kind of comfort; and habits and manners were not much better than the habitations. Perhaps Wolfe saw the Scotch society of those days through an unfavourable medium, at all events he did not find it charming. "The men here," he writes from Glasgow, "are civil, designing, and treacherous, with their immediate interest always in view; they pursue trade with warmth and a necessary mercantile spirit, arising from the baseness of their other qualifications. The women coarse, cold and cunning, for ever enquiring after men's circumstances; they make that the standing of their good breeding." Even the sermons failed to please. "I do several things in my character of commanding officer which I should never think of in any other; for instance, I'm every Sunday at the Kirk, an example justly to be admired. I would not lose two hours of a day if it would not answer some end. When I say 'lose two hours,' I must complain to you that the generality of Scotch preachers are excessive blockheads, so truly and obstinately dull, that they seem to shut out knowledge at every entrance." If Glasgow and Perth were bad, still worse were dreary Banff and barbarous Inverness. The Scotch burghers, their ladies, and the preachers are entitled to the benefit of the remark that the Scotch climate greatly affected Wolfe's sensitive frame, and that he took a wrong though established method of keeping out the cold and damp. When there is nothing in the way of action to lift the soul above the clay his spirits, as he admits rise and fall with the weather and his impressions vary with them. "I'm sorry to say that my writings are greatly influenced by the state of my body or mind at the time of writing and I'm either happy or ruined by my last night's rest or from sunshine or light and sickly air; such infirmity is the mortal frame subject to."