Principal Shairp And His Friends

a few holidays at Christmas, six hours of each day, for five days of the week, were spent in school during nearly ten months of the year. Nearly as many hours each evening were devoted to the work of preparation for the classes next day. Writing to his father from Oxford in after years he said that, during these four years at the Edinburgh Academy, the basis of any scholarship he had was laid. He retained a real affection for the Academy to the very end of his life; and, as will be seen in a subsequent chapter, his interest in it was publicly expressed in a speech, at a dinner of old Academy pupils, in its jubilee year of 1875. The occasional monotony of his school work was broken, and his life brightened, by holiday visits to Houstoun, which he reached from Edinburgh by coach or canal-boat. During one entire winter he remained at Houstoun, and was there tutored along with his brother Norman; but they returned to the Academy in the following year, leaving it finally in 1834, and spending the next winter in Edinburgh, where they took some private classes. It was during this winter of 1835 that Shairp first came under the influence of the poetry of Wordsworth. To no one have I been more indebted, in the preparation of this Memoir, than to Professor Sellar of the University of Edinburgh; and his account of those early years, at the Academy and at Houstoun, I must detach from the rest of his paper, and insert it at this stage. I much regret that the continuity o...