has shed intellectual light over the North of Scotland, especially among the Celts in the Highlands. At King’s College one sees a miniature Oxford almost under the shadow of the Grampians. Perhaps Reid’s temperament was too prosaic to contemplate his new surroundings with the sentiment which the city at the mouth of the Don afterwards called forth in Thackeray, who, in ‘a delightful tour in the north, was charmed with Inverness, and fell in love with Old Aberdeen—an elderly decayed mouldering old beauty who lives quietly on the seashore, near her grand new granite sister of a city.’ The affectionate recollection with which Sir James Mackintosh recalled his student days at King’s College, and the companionship there of Robert Hall, is another testimony to its charms. The arena in which these two, called by their fellow-students ‘Plato and Herodotus,’ encountered one another most frequently was in morals and metaphysics. ‘After having sharpened their weapons by reading, they often repaired to the spacious sands upon the seashore, and still more to the picturesque scenery on the banks of the Don above the old town and the Brig of Balgownie, to discuss with eagerness the problems of existence. There was scarcely an important position in Berkeley’s _Minute Philosopher_, in Butler’s _Analogy_, or in _Edwards on the Will_, over which they did not debate with the utmost intensity.’ From these discussions in the environs of the ‘old university town,’ Mackintosh was wont to say that he ‘learned more than from all the books he ever read.’ It was in the canonist’s manse, pleasantly placed nearly in front of the College, immediately north of the Snow Church, at the entrance to Powis House, that Reid found himself in the winter of 1751.[7] It was rented by him from the University. The quaint manse, nestled among trees, with its low thatched roof,[8] has disappeared, and with it other picturesque old houses, which added charm to the neighbourhood when Reid taught in King’s College nearly a hundred and fifty years ago. The crown tower of the College chapel rose almost in front of the manse, the rival of St. Giles’s at Edinburgh and of St. Nicholas’s at Newcastle, unique in Scottish academical architecture. Eastwards in the quadrangle was the Hall in which the students dined, a memorial of Bishop Elphinstone, and the dormitories of the students, which were of later date. General Monk’s tower stood in the eastern corner; behind the Hall was the kitchen, and near it the College well, whence the links stretched to the shore, ‘the grey sand dunes’ in those days unbroken by tame streets and modern villas. * * * * *