We enjoyed the honour on Wednesday last of being present as a guest at the annual soiree of the Scottish Young Men’s Society, and derived much pleasure from the general appearance of the meeting, and the addresses of the members and their friends. The body of the great Waterloo Room was crowded on the occasion with a respectable, intellectual-looking audience, including from about a hundred and fifty to two hundred members of the Society, all of them young men banded together for mutual improvement, and most of them in that important decade of life––by far the most important of the appointed seven––which intervenes between the fifteenth and the five-and-twentieth year. The platform was equally well filled, and the Sheriff of Edinburgh occupied the chair. We felt a particular interest in the objects of the Society, and a deep sympathy with its members; for, as we listened to the various speakers, and our eyes glanced over the intelligent countenances that thronged the area of the apartment, we thought of past difficulties encountered in a cause similar to that which formed the uniting bond of the Society, and of not a few wrecks which we had witnessed of men who had set out in life from the humbler levels, with the determination of pressing their way upwards. And feeling somewhat after the manner that an old sailor would feel who saw a crew of young ones setting out to thread their way through some dangerous strait, the perils of which he had already encountered, or to sail round some formidable cape, which, after many an unsuccessful attempt, he had 270 doubled, we fancied ourselves in the position of one qualified to give them some little advice regarding the navigation of the seas on which they were just entering. But, be the fact of qualification as it may, we found ourselves, after leaving the room, addressing them, in imagination, in a few plain words, regarding some of the rocks, and shoals, and insidious currents, which we knew lay in their course. Men whose words come slowly and painfully when among their fellows, can be quite fluent enough when they speak inwards without breaking silence, and have merely an imaginary assemblage for their audience; and so our short address went off glibly, without break or interruption, in the style of ordinary conversational gossip. There are curious precedents on record for the printing of unspoken speeches. Rejecting, however, all the higher ones, we shall be quite content to take our precedent from the famous speech which the ‘indigent philosopher’ addresses, in one of Goldsmith’s Essays, to Mr. Bellowsmender and the Cateaton Club. The philosopher begins, it will be remembered, by telling his imaginary audience, that though Nathan Ben Funk, the rich Jew, might feel a natural interest in the state of the stocks, it was nothing to them, who had no money; and concludes by quoting the ‘famous author called Lilly’s Grammar.’

‘Members of the Scottish Young Men’s Society,’ we said, ‘it is rather late in life for the individual who now addresses you to attempt acquiring the art of the public speaker. Those who have been most in the habit of noticing the effect of the several mechanical professions on character and intellect, divide them into two classes––the sedentary and the laborious; and they remark, that while in the sedentary, such as the printing, weaving, tailoring, and shoemaking trades, there are usually a considerable proportion of fluent speakers, in the laborious trades, on the other hand, such as those of the mason, ship-carpenter, 271 ploughman, and blacksmith, one generally meets with but taciturn, slow-speaking men. We need scarce say in which of these schools we have been trained. You will at once see––to borrow from one of the best and most ancient of writers––that we are “not eloquent,” but “a man of slow speech, and of a slow tongue.” And yet we think we may venture addressing ourselves, in a few plain words, to an association of young men united for the purpose of mutual improvement. We ought and we do sympathize with you in your object; and we congratulate you on the facilities which your numbers, and your library, and your residence in one of the most intellectual cities in the world, cannot fail to afford you in its pursuit. We ourselves have known what it is to prosecute in solitude, with but few books, and encompassed by many difficulties, the search after knowledge; and we have seen year after year pass by, and the obstacles in our way remaining apparently as great as at first. And were we to sum up the condensed result of our experience in two brief words of advice, it would amount simply to this, “Never despair.” We are told of Commodore Anson––a man whose sense and courage ultimately triumphed over a series of perhaps the most appalling disasters man ever encountered, and who won for himself, by his magnanimity, sagacity, and cool resolution, the applauses of even his enemies, so that Rousseau and Voltaire eulogized him, the one in history, the other in romance,––we are told, we say, of this Anson, that when raised to the British peerage, he was permitted to select his own motto, and that he chose an eminently characteristic one––“Nil Desperandum.” By all means let it be your motto also––not as a thing to be paraded on some heraldic label, but to be engraved upon your hearts. We wish that, amid the elegancies of this hall, we could bring up before you some of the scenes of our past life. They would form a curious panorama, and might serve to teach that 272 in no circumstances, however apparently desperate, should men lose hope. Never forget that it is not necessary, in order to overcome gigantic difficulties, that one’s strength should be gigantic. Persevering exertion is much more than strength. We owe to shovels and wheelbarrows, and human muscles of the average size and vigour, the great railway which connects the capitals of the two kingdoms. And the difficulties which encompass the young man of humble circumstances and imperfect education, must be regarded as coming under the same category as difficulties of the purely physical kind. Interrupted or insulated efforts, however vigorous, will be found to be but of little avail. It is to the element of continuity that you must trust. There is a world of sense in Sir Walter Scott’s favourite proverb, “Time and I, gentlemen, against any two.” But though it be unnecessary, in order to secure success, that one’s efforts in the contest with gigantic difficulties should be themselves gigantic, it is essentially necessary that they should employ one’s whole strength. Half efforts never accomplish anything. “No man ever did anything well,” says Johnson, “to which he did not apply the whole bent of his mind.” And unless a man keep his head cool, and his faculties undissipated, he need not expect that his efforts can ever be other than half efforts, or other than of a desultory, fitful, non-productive kind. We do not stand here in the character of a modern Rechabite. But this we must say: Let no young man ever beguile himself with the hope that he is to make a figure in society, or rise in the world, unless, as the apostle expresses it, he be “temperate in all things.” Scotland has produced not a few distinguished men who were unfortunately not temperate; but it is well known that of one of the greatest of them all––perhaps one of the most vigorous-minded men our country ever produced––the intemperate habits were not formed early. Robert Burns, up till his twenty-sixth year, when 273 he had mastered all his powers, and produced some of his finest poems, was an eminently sober man. Climbing requires not only a steady foot, but a strong head; and we question whether any one ever climbed the perilous steep, where, according to Beattie, “Fame’s proud temple shines afar,” who did not keep his head cool during the process. So far as our own experience goes, we can truly state, that though we have known not a few working men, possessed some of them of strong intellects, and some of them of fine taste, and even of genius, not one have we ever known who rose either to eminence or a competency under early formed habits of intemperance. These indeed are the difficulties that cannot be surmounted, and the only ones. Rather more than thirty years ago, the drinking usages of the country were more numerous than they are now. In the mechanical profession in which we laboured they were many: when a foundation was laid, the workmen were treated to drink; they were treated to drink when the walls were levelled; they were treated to drink when the building was finished; they were treated to drink when an apprentice joined the squad; treated to drink when his apron was washed; treated to drink when his “time was out;” and occasionally they learned to treat one another to drink. At the first house upon which we were engaged as a slim apprentice boy, the workmen had a royal founding-pint, and two whole glasses of whisky came to our share. A full-grown man might not deem a gill of usquebhae an over-dose, but it was too much for a boy unaccustomed to strong drink; and when the party broke up, and we got home to our few books––few, but good, and which we had learned at even an earlier period to pore over with delight––we found, as we opened the page of a favourite author, the letters dancing before our eyes, and that we could no longer master his sense. The state was perhaps a not very favourable one for forming a 274 resolution in, but we believe the effort served to sober us. We determined in that hour that never more would we sacrifice our capacity of intellectual enjoyment to a drinking usage; and during the fifteen years which we spent as an operative mason, we held, through God’s help, by the determination. We are not sure whether, save for that determination, we would have had the honour of a place on this platform to-night. But there are other kinds of intoxication than that which it is the nature of strong drink or of drugs to produce. Bacon speaks of a “natural drunkenness.” And the hallucinations of this natural drunkenness must be avoided if you would prosper. Let us specify one of these. Never let yourselves be beguiled by the idea that fate has misplaced you in life, and that were you in some other sphere you would rise. It is true that some men are greatly misplaced; but to brood over the idea is not the best way of getting the necessary exchange effected. It is not the way at all. Often the best policy in the case is just to forget the misplacement. We remember once deeming ourselves misplaced, when, in a season of bad health and consequent despondency, we had to work among labourers in a quarry. But the feeling soon passed, and we set ourselves carefully to examine the quarry. Cowper describes a prisoner of the Bastile beguiling his weary hours by counting the nail-studs on the door of his cell, upwards, downwards, and across,––

It was idle work; for to reckon up the door-studs never so often was not the way of opening up the door. But in carefully 275 examining and recording for our own use the appearances of the stony bars of our prison, we were greatly more profitably employed. Nay, we had stumbled on one of the best possible modes of escaping from our prison. We were in reality getting hold of its bolts and its stancheons, and converting them into tools in the work of breaking out. We remember once passing a whole season in one of the dreariest districts of the north-western Highlands,––a district included in that unhappy tract of country, doomed, we fear, to poverty and suffering, which we find marked in the rain-map of Europe with a double shade of blackness. We had hard work, and often soaking rain, during the day; and at night our damp fuel filled the turf hut in which we sheltered with suffocating smoke, and afforded no light by which to read. Nor––even ere the year got into its wane, and when in the long evenings we had light––had we any books to read by it, or a single literary or scientific friend with whom to exchange an idea. We remember at another time living in an agricultural district in the low country, in a hovel that was open along the ridge of the roof from gable to gable, so that as we lay a-bed we could tell the hours of the night by the stars that were passing overhead across the chasm. There were about half-a-dozen farm-servants, victims to the bothie system, that ate and slept in the same place; and often, long after midnight, a disreputable poacher used to come stealthily in, and fling himself down on a lair of straw that he had prepared for himself in a corner. Now, both the Highland hut and the Lowland hovel, with their accompaniments of protracted and uncongenial labour, might be regarded as dreary prisons; and yet we found them to be in reality useful schools, very necessary to our education. And now, when we hear about the state of the Highlands, and the character of our poor Highlanders, and of the influence of the bothie system and of the game-laws, we 276 feel that we know considerably more about such matters than if our experience had been of a more limited or more pleasant kind. There are few such prisons in which a young man of energy and a brave heart can be placed, in which he will not gain more by taking kindly to his work, and looking well about him, than by wasting himself in convulsive endeavours to escape. If he but learn to think of his prison as a school, there is good hope of his ultimately getting out of it. Were a butcher’s boy to ask us––you will not deem the illustration too low, for you will remember that Henry Kirke White was once a butcher’s boy––were he to ask us how we thought he could best escape from his miserable employment, we would at once say, You have rare opportunities of observation; you may be a butcher’s boy in body, but in mind you may become an adept in one of the profoundest of the sciences, that of comparative anatomy;––think of yourself as not in a prison, but in a school, and there is no fear but you will rise. There is another delusion of that “natural drunkenness” referred to, against which you must also be warned. Never sacrifice your independence to a phantom. We have seen young men utterly ruin themselves through the vain belief that they were too good for their work. They were mostly lads of a literary turn, who had got a knack of versifying, and who, in the fond belief that they were poets and men of genius, and that poets and men of genius should be above the soil and drudgery of mechanical labour, gave up the profession by which they had lived, poorly mayhap, but independently, and got none other to set in its place. A mistake of this character is always a fatal one; and we trust all of you will ever remember, that though a man may think himself above his work, no man is, or no man ought to think himself, above the high dignity of being independent. In truth, he is but a sorry, weak fellow who measures himself by the conventional status of 277 the labour by which he lives. Our great poet formed a correcter estimate:

There is another advice which we would fain give you, though it may be regarded as of a somewhat equivocal kind: Rely upon yourselves. The man who sets his hopes upon patronage, or the exertions of others in his behalf, is never so respectable a man, and, save in very occasional instances, rarely so lucky a man, as he who bends his exertions to compel fortune in his behalf, by making himself worthy of her favours. Some of the greatest wrecks we have seen in life have been those of waiters on patronage; and the greatest discontents which we have seen in corporations, churches, and states, have arisen from the exercise of patronage. Shakespeare tells us, in his exquisite vein, of a virtue that is twice blessed,––blessed in those who give, and blessed in those who receive. Patronage is twice cursed,––cursed in the incompetency which it places where merit ought to be, and in the incompetency which it creates among the class who make it their trust. But the curse which you have mainly to avoid is that which so often falls on those who waste their time and suffer their energies to evaporate in weakly and obsequiously waiting upon it. We therefore say, Rely upon yourselves. But there is One other on whom you must rely; and implicit reliance on Him, instead of inducing weakness, infinitely increases strength. Bacon has well said, that a dog is brave and generous when he believes himself backed by his master, but timid and crouching, especially in a strange place, when he is alone and his master away. And a human master, says the philosopher, is as a god to the dog. It certainly does inspire a man with strength to believe that his great Master 278 is behind him, invigorating him in his struggles, and protecting him against every danger. We knew in early life a few smart infidels––smart but shallow; but not one of them ever found their way into notice; and though we have not yet lived out our half century, they have in that space all disappeared. There are various causes which conspire to write it down as fate, that the humble infidel should be unsuccessful in life. In the first place, infidelity is not a mark of good sense, but very much the reverse. We have been much struck by a passage which occurs in the autobiography of a great general of the early part of the last century. In relating the disasters and defeats experienced in a certain campaign by two subordinate general officers, chiefly through misconduct, and a lack of the necessary shrewdness, he adds, “I ever suspected the judgment of these men since I found that they professed themselves infidels.” The sagacious general had inferred that their profession of infidelity augured a lack of sense; and that, when they got into command, the same lack of sense which led them to glory in their shame would be productive, as its necessary results, of misfortune and disaster. There is a shrewd lesson here to the class who doubt and cavil simply to show their parts. In the second place, infidelity, on the principle of Bacon, is a weak, tottering thing, unbuttressed by that support which gives to poor human nature half its strength and all its dignity. But, above all, in the third and last place, the humble infidel, unballasted by right principle, sets out on the perilous voyage of life without chart or compass, and, drifting from off the safe course, gets among rocks and breakers, and there perishes. But we must not trespass on your time. With regard to the conduct of your studies, we simply say, Strive to be catholic in your tastes. Some of you will have a leaning to science; some to literature. To the one class we would say, Your literature will be all 279 the more solid if you can get a vein of true science to run through it; and to the other, Your science will be all the more fascinating if you temper and garnish it with literature. In truth, almost all the greater subjects of man’s contemplation belong to both fields. Of subjects such as astronomy and geology, for instance, the poetry is as sublime as the science is profound. As a pretty general rule, you will perhaps find literature most engaging in youth, and science as you grow in years. But faculties for both have been given you by the great Taskmaster, and it is your bounden duty that these be exercised aright. And so let us urge you, in conclusion, in the words of Coleridge: