S it ever will be, one's tastes definitely formed, one's favourites already chosen. As long as we live we hope to read, but we never can "recapture the first fine careless rapture."
Besides, one begins to write, and that is fatal. My own first essays were composed at school--for other boys. Not
long ago the gentleman who was then our English master wrote to me, informing

me he was my earliest public, and that he had never credited my younger
brother with the essays which that unscrupulous lad ("I speak of him but brotherly") was accustomed to present for his consideration. On

leaving school at seventeen I went to St. Leonard's Hall, in the University of St. Andrews. That is the oldest of Scotch universities, and was founded by a papal bull. St. Leonard's Hall, after

having been a _hospitium_ for pilgrims,
a home for old ladies (about 1500), and a college in the University, was now a kind of cross between a master's house at school, and, as
before 1750, a college. We had more liberty than schoolboys, less than English undergraduates. In the Scotch universities the men live

scattered, in lodgings, and only recently, at St. Andrews, have they begun to dine together in hall. We had a common roof, common dinners, wore scarlet gowns, possessed football and cricket clubs, and started, of course, a kind of weekly magazine. It
was only a manuscript affair, and was profusely illustrated. For