Volume 1 - Electric Scotland

THE SNELL SCHOLAR. 183
forming part of the ordinary studies in Glasgow of
theological students, from whom this daring young
joker had no doubt picked up a knowledge of the
characters. Dons are not good people generally to
joke with, but it would seem that no particular harm
came of this mystification. On leaving Oxford, which
he did at a very early age, he came to Edinburgh to
study law, and was duly called to the bar in 1816,
and began with other young men those fruitless per-
ambulations of the Parliament House which have
wearied out so many aspirants, and sent them off
into the paths of literature and others as precarious.
Here, with the instinctive forgathering of like to
like, he made close friends with John Wilson, a young
man only like him in the fine fantastic distinction of
genius, which naturally nobody knew of in these days,
and in the external circumstances of life. Wilson
was of the nouveaux riches, not such a phalanx then
as now. He had gone long before Lockhart's time
as a gentleman-commoner to Magdalen, the most ex-
pensive thing to be done, of which the Snell Scholar
would no doubt be scornful. But the instincts of
youth ignore such distinctions, and Wilson's university
record was also brilliant. They became inseparable,
the one stirring up the other to all kinds of glorious
designs. Wilson was already a poet, author of the
" Isle of Palms " and various other copies of verses, of
which his companion probably thought nothing, and
he himself not much. It is curious, however, that by
right of this production Wilson continued for many
years to be named at the tail of the so-called Lake
poets as one of their school.
These two young men soon acquired a daily habit