wont to utter with reverence, and before whose glance his eye had been accustomed to fall abashed, were the most easy, familiar, and communicative companions possible--that scarcely one of them was so severe in their morality as his old father--that they listened to his opinions with attention, and replied to them with respect. Then, again, among the satellites of these literary luminaries--those whom, till now, in the reflected light of their primaries, he had been wont to behold with respect, and almost with envy--he presently perceived weakness, dimness, and aberration; and he perceived, also, how capable he was of outshining them all; or, to speak in less metaphorical phrase, he found among the less distinguished literary persons who haunted the tables of the great, a degree of ignorance on subjects of general science, a slavishness of demeanour, and a petty jealousy, which he could not but despise, and which it required very little penetration to perceive that the great man despised also. He soon acquired, therefore, a confidence in his own powers, and a conscious respect for, I had almost said pride in, the rectitude of his feelings, to which, till now, he had been an entire stranger. And if such was his success with the men, his conquest over his own timidity, in the presence of women, struck him with yet greater surprise. He who had been accustomed to blush and look down before a peasant girl, presently found himself able to gaze steadily into the eyes of a noble matron or maiden, undazzled by the jewelled coronet upon her head, or yet more brilliant charms in which nature and art had arrayed her brow, and neck, and bosom. The witchery of woman in all her loveliness, instead of, as he had often imagined, causing his heart to sink, and his cheek to burn, and his tongue to be dumb in his mouth, awoke the latent powers of his nature--it thrilled his heart with exulting admiration, and filled his eyes with a bold, steady radiance, and poured from his lips the eloquence which female loveliness can alone call forth. His nature was changed--that is, the external development of his nature, for his heart remained the same; and often, amid crowded assemblies and rich peals of concerted music, it called on his imagination to portray the old solitary shepherd, amid the hills of his boyhood, or to recall the simple strains which his father had taught him to play upon the rude Scottish pipe.