CHAPTER VIII.

Inaugural address.-Political feelings of the poet.-Death of the poet's friend, Dugald Stewart.-Banim's verses. -Lord Dillon and the symposium.-Characteristic abstractions.-Dinner parties.-Cavaliers and Roundheads. -Prizes distributed at Glasgow.-A breakfast in Seymour Street.-The Bishop of Toronto.-Sir Robert Peel.

HE poet, upon his arrival at Glasgow, proised the students anew that he would abide by them and fill the rectorship, if, on due consideration, they could find no one more likely to unite their suffrages, who satisfied them better. A new election took place, and Campbell was voted lord rector by a larger majority of the students than before, and by three out of the four nations.

On the 5th of December, 1828, at three o'clock, no exclusion of the public happening, a great assemblage of persons took place at the Hall, and when the doors were thrown open, the building,

galleries and all, was filled to an overflow. For some time a noise and uproar prevailed, which were silenced by the principal. The oath being administered to the new lord rector, and having signed it, he addressed the students to the following effect:

"GENTLEMEN,-It is an understood conventional propriety among all civilised elective bodies, than when the tumult of election has subsided, there should be an amnesty proclaimed as to past hostile feeling, and an abstinence observed, on the one side, from all hostile language, and, on the other, from any ungentlemanlike expression of discontent. I come not to break up any such amnesty. I am not capable of degrading myself on this bench by an insidious insinuation against any man's motives or conduct. You, in the free exercise of your elective franchise, had a more than ordinary right to be divided in your opinions; and this division would have been to me, if I needed it, only a fresh incentive to my desire of making you all my constituents in your hearts, by the faithful performance of my duty. But contrary to what would otherwise be my wish, I shall be obliged, for a few moments, to speak of myself; for there are some circumstances respecting my motives and conduct in the present affair that may be unknown to, or misapprehended by many individuals in this assembly. It may not be gene

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rally known, that, before I suffered myself to be proposed for this high mark of your favour, I had ascertained the entire improbability of Lord John Russell's being able to accept of your rectorship, if it had been offered to him. It is also a fact, that I knew not a single popular name, except this nobleman's, that was likely to have divided your suffrages, at the time when I received and answered a first letter, from a large portion of the students, asking me to say explicitly, whether, in the event of being elected, I would come and take the oath for the third and last time. Now, a twelvemonth had not elapsed since, in the eye of day, and with emotions as justifiable as they were fervid and sincere, I had declared to the assembled students of Glasgow, assembled, not at my bidding, but by their own spontaneous enthusiasm, that whilst I lived, I should never forget the manifestations of their attachment, or refuse them any proof of my interest in their welfare, within the small compass of my power. And now, when they tender me a token of their regard, that was palpably meant to be the last of its kind,—and now that they urge their token on my acceptance, by my sympathy in their own interests,-I ask, in the name of consistency and warmheartedness, what was the most natural and proper answer I should send? That I was in bad health, I could not say; that it was impossible for me to come, I could not

say; that it would be inconvenient for me to come, I disdained to say. For I should thus have shown myself a friend weighing the duty of friendship like a light or suspected coin in the little scale of my own convenience. Truly enough, indeed, I might have pleaded my apology for not coming, that I had already shown some proofs of my good-will in having come last year, merely from anxiety to say a few good words in your behalf to the commissioners—a journey that cost me my health, and literally put my life itself into peril. But the business between us now, was not a matter of sentimental argumentation, but a practical question, whether I should fulfil your wishes, and attempt to serve, what you at least considered to be your interests. And if I had spoken of my former services, the simplest youth among you would have had a right to ask, 'If our rector's zeal last year was so ardent, what has become of it now? and if he could come to us in sickness, why can he not come to us in health?" Besides, all your shrewder students know, as well as I know, that, not from any fault or indolence of mine, but from absolute necessity, and from due caution not to moot certain points prematurely, I had, all but the journey in bad health, a comparatively easy and placid rectorship; but that a crisis was now coming, likely to render the rectorship of this year both a trying and a

troublesome post. By what honourable tie was I then bound to insist on leaving that post against your general wish, just at the time when it might be feared that it would become a little more irksome? Was I to have sailed with you all smiles and affection through the calm, but the moment the water was a little ruffled, was I to show my romantic interest in you by resolutely going on shore and shuddering at the prospect of keeping you company for another year? Was I to send you a fine declaration, forsooth, that my soul and zeal were still yours as much as ever; but to let it out after all, that my zeal was of a delicate constitution, that it could not brook any agitation, and that it would catch its death of cold on the first exposure to the slightest breath of censorious opposition? No! I thought it more like a man to answer, that, if elected, I should regard it as my bounden duty to come. And if I had sent you any other answer, you might have been generally satisfied with me, but I should never have been satisfied with myself. I should never have ceased to have a secret misgiving, that I had tainted some young and ingenuous mind among you with a suspicion, that when men speak fervently of their attachment to any public cause, they are not to be literally understood as meaning all that they say. I should not have been satisfied that I had acted up to my declarations. By-and