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Rector of the University of Edinburgh. His address to the students on that occasion breathes the spirit of love and encouragement, and portions of it deserve to be engraven on the memory.

ANALOGOUS POSITION.

"Your enthusiasm towards me, I must admit, is very beautiful in itself, however desirable it may be in regard to the object of it. It is a feeling honourable to all men, and one well known to myself when I was in a position analogous to your own. I can only hope that it may endure to the endthat noble desire to honour those whom you think worthy of honour, and come to be more and more select and discriminate in the choice of the object of it; for I can well understand that you will modify your opinions of me and many things else as you go on."

VOICE OF YOUNG SCOTLAND.

"There are now fifty-six years gone last November since I first entered your city, a boy of not quite fourteen-fifty-six years ago-to attend classes here, and gain knowledge of all kinds, I know not what, with feelings of wonder and awe-struck expectation; and now, after a long, long course, this is what we have come to. There is something touching and tragic, and yet at the same time beautiful, to see the third generation, as it were, of my dear old native land, rising up and saying, 'Well, you are not altogether an unworthy labourer in the vineyard: you have toiled through a great variety of fortunes, and have had many judges.' As the old proverb says, 'He that builds by the wayside has many masters.' We must expect a variety of judges; but the voice of young Scotland, through you, is really of some value to me, and I return you many thanks for it, though I cannot describe my emotions to you, and perhaps will be much more conceivable if expressed in silence."

PRESENT DUTY.

AMBITION.

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"When this office was first proposed to me, some of you know that I was not very ambitious to accept it at first. I was taught to believe that there were more or less certain important duties would lie in my power. This, I confess, was my chief motive in going into it-at least in reconciling the objections felt to such things; for if I can do anything to honour you and my dear old Alma Mater, why should I not do so? Well, but on practically looking into the matter when the office actually came into my hands, I find it grows more and more uncertain and abstruse to me whether there is much real duty that I can do at all. I live four hundred miles away from you, in an entirely different state of things; and my weak health—now for many years accumulating upon me—and a total unacquaintance with such subjects as concern your affairs here,―all this fills me with apprehension that there is really nothing worth the least consideration that I can do on that score. You may, however, depend upon it that if any such duty does arise in any form, I will use my most faithful endeavour to do whatever is right and proper, according to the best of my judgment.”

PURSUITS.

"In the meanwhile, the duty I have at present-which might be very pleasant, but which is quite the reverse, as you may fancy—is to address some words to you on some subjects more or less cognate to the pursuits you are engaged in. In fact, I had meant to throw out some loose observations-loose in point of order I mean-in such a way as they may occur to me-the truths I have in me about the business you are engaged in, the race you have started on, what kind of race it is you young gentlemen have begun, and what sort of arena you are likely to find in this world. I ought, I believe, according to custom, to have written all that down on paper and had it read out. That would have been much handier to me at the present moment, but, when I attempted to write, I found that I was not accus

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tomed to write speeches, and that I did not get on very well. So I flung that away, and resolved to trust to the inspiration of the moment-just to what came uppermost. You will, therefore, have to accept what is readiest, what comes direct from the heart, and you must just take that in compensation for any good order of arrangement there might have been in it.”

ADVICE TO YOUNG MEN.

"I will endeavour to say nothing that is not true as far as I can manage, and that is pretty much all that I can engage for. Advices, I believe, to young men—and to all men-are very seldom much valued. There is a great deal of advising, and very little faithful performing. And talk that does not end in any kind of action is better suppressed altogether. I would not, therefore, go much into advising; but there is one advice I must give you. It is, in fact, the summary of all advices, and you have heard it a thousand times, I dare say; but I must, nevertheless, let you hear it the thousand and first time, for it is most intensely true, whether you will believe it at present or not-namely, that above all things the interest of your own life depends upon being diligent now, while it is called to-day. Diligent! That word includes all virtues that a student can have; I mean to include in it all qualities that lead into the acquirement of real instruction and improvement. If you will believe me, you who are young, yours is the golden season of life. As you have heard it called, so it verily is, the seed-time of life, in which, if you do not sow, or if you sow tares instead of wheat, you cannot expect to reap well afterwards, and you will arrive at indeed little; while in the course of years, when you come to look back, and if you have not done what you have heard from your advisers—and among many counsellers there is wisdom-you will bitterly repent when it is too late. At the season when you are in young years the whole mind is, as it were, fluid, and is capable of forming itself into any shape that the owner of the mind

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pleases to order it to form itself into. The mind is in a fluid state, but it hardens up gradually to the consistency of rock or iron, and you cannot alter the habits of an old man, but as he has begun he will proceed to go on to the last. By diligence I mean, among other things-and very chiefly--honesty in all your inquiries into what you are about. Pursue your studies in the way your conscience calls honest. endeavour to do that. Keep, I mean to say, an accurate separation of what you have really come to know in your own minds and what is still unknown. Leave all that on the hypothetical side of the barrier, as things afterwards to be acquired, if acquired at all; and be careful not to stamp a thing as known when you do not yet know it. Count a thing known only when it is stamped on your mind, so that you may survey it on all sides with intelligence.

"There is such a thing as a man endeavouring to persuade himself, and endeavouring to persuade others, that he knows about things when he does not know more than the outside skin of them. There is also a process called cramming in some Universities—that is, getting up such parts of things as the examiner is likely to put questions about. Avoid all that is entirely unworthy of an honourable habit.

Be modest, and

humble, and diligent in your attention to what your teachers tell you, who are profoundly interested in trying to bring you forward in the right way, so far as they have been able to understand it. Try all things they set before you, in order, if possible, to understand them, and to value them in proportion to your fitness for them. Gradually see what kind of work you can do; for it is the first of all problems for a man to find out what kind of work he is to do in this universe. In fact, morality in study is, as in all other things, the primary consideration, and overrides all others."

ON THE CHOICE OF BOOKS.

"Learn to be discriminative in your reading-to read all kinds of things that you have an interest in, and that you find to be

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really fit for what you are engaged in. Of course, at the present time, in a great deal of the reading incumbent on you you must be guided by the books recommended to you by your professors for assistance towards the prelections. And then, when you get out of the University, and go into studies of your own, you will find it very important that you have selected a field, a province in which you can study and work.

"The most unhappy of all men is the man who cannot tell what he is going to do, who has got no work cut out for him in the world, and cannot go into it. For work is the grand cure of all the maladies and miseries that ever beset mankindhonest work, which you intend getting done. If you are in a strait, a very good indication as to choice-perhaps the best you could get is a book you have a great curiosity about. You are then in the readiest and best of all possible conditions to improve by that book. It is analogous to what doctors tell us about the physical health and appetites of patients. You must learn to distinguish between false appetite and real. There is such a thing as a false appetite, which will lead a man into vagaries with regard to diet, will tempt him to eat spicy things which he should not eat at all, and would not, but that they are toothsome, and for the moment, in baseness of mind. A man ought to inquire and find out what he really and truly has appetite for-what suits his constitution; and that, doctors tell him, is the very thing he ought to have in general. And so with books. As applicable to almost all of you, I will say that it is highly expedient to go into history-to inquire into what has passed before you in the families of men. The history of the Romans and Greeks will first of all concern you; and you will find that all the knowledge you have will be extremely applicable to elucidate that. There you have the most remarkable race of men in the world set before you, to say nothing of the languages, which your professors can better explain, and which, I believe, are admitted to be the most perfect orders of speech we have yet found to exist among men. And

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