In the year 1828 there was an arousing of public sympathy with the sufferers by a great conflagration at Merimachi in North America. A body of the students who had imbibed from the Professor of Natural Philosophy an enthusiasm about aerostation, proposed to raise money for the sufferers by making and exhibiting a huge fire balloon. The effort was embarrassed by many difficulties and adventures affording opportunity for the satirist.

For instance, a trial trip was attempted, and one of "the committee," who was the son of a clergyman, got hold of the key of his father's church, and put its interior at the disposal of his colleagues. The balloon inflated and ascended. The problem of getting it down again, however, had not been solved. It got itself comfortably at rest in the roof of a cupola, and the young philosophers then had to wait until it became exhausted enough to descend.

The literary ambition of young Aberdeen found for itself a very sedate and respectable looking organ in "The Aberdeen Magazine," published monthly during the years 1831 and 1832, and still visible in two thick octavo volumes. Spalding was not to be tempted into this project, though there was a slight touch in it supposed, solely from internal evidence, to have come from him. A heavy controversy was begun by one calling himself "a classical reformer," who brought up foemen worthy of his steel. At the end of the whole was a sting in a postscript, more effective than anything in the unwieldy body it was attached to. P. S. As I am no great scholar, perhaps your classical Reformer will have the goodness to tell me where I can see The Works of Socrates. He seems to allude to them twice [reference to pages]. As he modestly tells us that he is a much better translator of Homer than Pope was, perhaps he will be kind enough to favour the world with a translation, to use his own words, of "those works which have immortalized the name of Socrates."[xvii:1]

The papers in the Aberdeen Magazine were not all of the sombre cumbrous kind. There was an infusion of fresh young blood, fired perhaps by the influence of Wilson and Lockhart in Blackwood's Magazine, but seeking original forms of its own. For the leader of this school, Spalding had both esteem and admiration, but it was for far other merits than those of the brisk unrestrained writer of fugitive literature. This was Joseph Robertson, afterwards distinguished as an archæologist. He survived Spalding eight years. No lines of study could well be in more opposite directions than those of the two men who respected each other. While Spalding revelled in all that was brightest and best in literature and art, Robertson devoted himself to the development of our knowledge about the period when the higher arts—those of the painter and the sculptor—had been buried with the higher literature, and the classic languages had degenerated, in the hands of those who, as Du Cange, whose ample pages were often turned by Robertson, called them, were "Scriptores mediæ et infimæ Latinitatis." The source of Spalding's admiration was that Robertson's writing was perfect of its kind, and led

to important and conclusive results. It was in this spirit that he wrote his own "Letter." It did not fulfil a high aspiration, but it must be perfect; and it was surely a moment of supreme happiness to him, when he found the unknown author sought for and praised by so cautious and reserved a critic as Hallam.

The "Letter" was published in 1833. It is characteristic of its author's distaste of loud applause, that whenever this, his first achievement in letters, saw the light, he fled, as it were, from the knowledge of what was said of it, and wandered for several months in Italy and Germany. This was an era in his life, for it gave him the opportunity of seeing face to face, and profoundly studying, the great works of art that had hitherto only been imaged in his dreams from copies and engravings. He at the same time studied—or rather enjoyed—nature. In his native north he had been accustomed to ramble among the Grampians at the head of the Dee, where the precipices are from 1500 to 2000 feet high, and snow lies all the year round. In these rambles he encountered hardships such as one would hardly have thought within the capacity of his delicate frame. He took the same method of enjoyable travelling in the Apennines—that of the Pedestrian.

He gave to the world a slight morsel descriptive of his experiences and enjoyments, in the Blackwood's Magazine of November, 1835. They were told in so fine a spirit, so free both from ungraceful levity and solemn pedantry, that the reader only regretted that they were too sparingly imparted. He thus announced his own enjoyment in his pilgrimage: "Among the ruined palaces and temples of Rome, and in the vineyards and orange-groves beside the blue sea of Naples, I had warmed my imagination with that inspiration which, once breathed upon the heart, never again grows cold. It did not desert me now as I entered this upper valley of the Apennines to seek a new colour and form of Italian landscape. Happy and elevating recollections thronged in upon me, and blended with the clear sunshine which slept on the green undulating hills." This fragment is the only morsel of autobiographic information left by its author, and therefore perhaps the following, taken from among many expressions of a genial spirit enjoying itself in freedom, may not be unacceptable. He has crossed the high-lying, bare plain of Rosetto, and reaches the village of Val san Giovanni, where "shelter was heartily welcome, the sun was set, snow-flakes were beginning to whirl in the air, and before we reached the village, a sharp snow-storm had set in." Here he is taking comfort to himself before a huge wood fire, when "a man entered of superior dress and appearance to the

rest, and behind him bustled up a little wretch in the government indirect-tax livery, who, never saying by your leave, pushed a chair to the fire for his master. The gentleman popped down, and turning to me, 'I am the Podestà,' said he. I made my bow to the chief magistrate of the place. 'I am the Potestà,' said he again, and our little squinting spy repeated reproachfully, 'His excellency is the Podestà.'

"I was resolved not to understand what they would be at, and the dignitary explained it to me with a copious use of circumlocution. He said he had no salary from the government—this did not concern me;—that he had it in charge to apprehend all vagabonds; this he seemed to think might concern me. He asked for my passport, which was exhibited and found right; and the Podestà proved the finest fellow possible. These villagers then became curious to know what object I had in travelling about among their mountains. My reader will by this time believe me when I say that the question puzzled me. My Atanasio felt that it touched his honour to be suspected of guiding a traveller who could not tell what he travelled for. He took on him the task of reply. Premising that I was a foreigner, and perhaps did not know how to express myself, he explained that I was one of those meritorious individuals who travel about discovering all the countries and the unknown mountains, and putting all down on paper; and these individuals always ask likewise why there are no mendicant friars in the country, and which the peasants eat oftenest, mutton or macaroni? He added, with his characteristic determined solemnity, that he had known several such inquisitive travellers. This clear definition gave universal satisfaction."