It is now rather more than sixty years since I studied for a few weeks at the University of St. Andrew's. I was the son of very poor parents, who resided in a seaport town on the western coast of Scotland. My father was a house-carpenter, a quiet, serious man, of industrious habits and great simplicity of character, but miserably depressed in his circumstances, through a sickly habit of body: my mother was a warm-hearted, excellent woman, endowed with no ordinary share of shrewd good sense and sound feeling, and indefatigable in her exertions for my father and the family. I was taught to read at a very early age, by an old woman in the neighbourhood--such a person as Shenstone describes in his "Schoolmistress;" and, being naturally of a reflective turn, I had begun, long ere I had attained my tenth year, to derive almost my sole amusement from books. I read incessantly; and after exhausting the shelves of all the neighbours, and reading every variety of work that fell in my way--from "The Pilgrim's Progress" of Bunyan, and the Gospel Sonnets of Erskine, to a treatise on fortification by Vauban, and the "History of the Heavens" by the Abbé Pluche--I would have pined away for lack of my accustomed exercise, had not a benevolent baronet in the neighbourhood, for whom my father occasionally wrought, taken a fancy to me, and thrown open to my perusal a large and well-selected library. Nor did his kindness terminate until, after having secured to me all of learning that the parish school afforded, he had settled me, now in my seventeenth year, at the University.