DEAR DAVID,

I BELIEVE I have already hinted to you, that the students in this University are very fond of Debating Societies, and, indeed, the nature of their favourite studies might prepare one abundantly to find it so. They inhale the very atmosphere of doubt, and it is in the course of nature that they should exhale the very breath of disputation. They are always either actually struggling, vi et armis, to get over some quagmire or another, or, after establishing themselves once more on what they conceive to be a portion of the Terra Firma, falling out among themselves, which of the troop had picked his way along the neatest set of stepping-stones, or made his leap from the firmest knot of rushes. Before they have settled this mighty quarrel, it is possible they may begin to feel the ground giving way beneath their feet, and are all equally reduced once again to hop, stride, and scramble, as they best may for themselves.

The first of the institutions, however, which I visited, is supposed to be frequented by persons who have already somewhat allayed their early fervour for disputation, by two or three years’ attendance upon Debating Societies, of an inferior and of a far more ephemeral character. While he attends the prælections of the Professor of Logic, the student aspires to distinguish himself in a club, constituted chiefly or entirely of members of that class. The students of Ethics and of Physics are, in like manner, provided with separate rooms, in which they canvass at night the doctrines they have heard promulgated in the lecture of the morning. It is not till all this apprenticeship of discipline has been regularly gone through, that the juvenile philosopher ventures to draw up a petition, addressed to the president and members of the Speculative Society of Edinburgh, which humbly sheweth forth, that he would fain be permitted to give to his polemical and oratorial faculties the last finish of sharpness and elegance under the high auspices of their venerable body.