These he met with in Mason's English Collection, one of his school-books. He next read the Life of Hannibal, which taught him to strut after the recruiting drum and bagpipe; and the Life of Wallace, which made "his veins boil with a Scottish prejudice." From fourteen to sixteen he lived after a most wretched fashion--toiling at the plough, and oppressed by poverty. At sixteen he fell in love, and his own description of the affair is so characteristic that I will quote it. "In my sixteenth autumn, my partner (in the harvest field) was a bewitching creature, a year younger than myself. She was a _bonnie, sweet, sonsie lass_. In short, she, altogether unwittingly to herself, initiated me into that delicious passion, which in spite of acid disappointments, gin-horn prudence, and book-worm philosophy, I hold to be first of human joys--our dearest blessing here below. How she caught the contagion I cannot tell. Yet medical people talk much of infection from breathing the same air, the touch, &c.; but I never expressly said I loved her. Indeed, I did not know myself why I liked so much to loiter behind with her when returning in the evening from our labors; why the tones of her voice made my heart-strings thrill like an Æolian harp; and particularly why my pulse beat such a furious ratan, when I looked and fingered over her little hand, to pick out the cruel nettle stings and thistles. Among her other love-inspiring qualities, she sung sweetly--and it was her favorite reel which I attempted giving an imbodied vehicle in rhyme. I was not so presumptuous as to imagine I could make verses like printed ones, composed by men who had Greek and Latin: but my girl sung a song which was said to be composed by a country laird's son on one of his father's maids with whom he was in love; and I saw no reason why I might not rhyme as well as he--for excepting he could shear sheep and cast peats, his father living in the moorlands, he had no more scholar-craft than myself. Thus with me began love and poetry, which at times have been my only, and till within the last twelve months my highest enjoyment." His nineteenth summer was spent on a smuggling coast, where he learned "mensuration, surveying, dialling," &c. and improved in his knowledge of love and whiskey-drinking. "Yet early ingrained piety and virtue kept him for several years afterward rather within the line of innocence," notwithstanding that _Vive l'Amour et Vive la Bagatelle_ was his sole principle of action.