DEAR DAVID,

WHEN you reproach me with being so long at the seat of a celebrated University, and yet preserving the most profound silence concerning tutors, professors, examinations, degrees, and all the other mighty items of academical life, you do no more than I might have expected from one, who has derived his only ideas of an university from Oxford and Cambridge. In these places, the university is everything; the houses of the town seem merely to be the appendages of the colleges, and the townsmen themselves only a better sort of menials to the gownsmen. If you hear a bell ring there, you may be sure it is meant to call together those whose duty it is to attend in some chapel, hall, or lecture-room; if you see a man pull off his hat in the street, you may be sure it is in honour of some tuft, sleeve, or scarf, well accustomed to such obeisances. Here the case is very different. The academical buildings, instead of forming the bulk and centre of every prospect—instead of shooting up towers and domes and battlements in every direction, far above, not only the common dwellings of the citizens, but the more ancient and more lofty groves of oak and elm, in which, for centuries, they have been embosomed—instead of all this proud and sweeping extent of venerable magnificence, the academical buildings of Edinburgh are piled together in one rather obscure corner of a splendid city, which would scarcely be less splendid than it is, although they were removed altogether from its precincts. In the society among which I have lived since my arrival here, (and I assure you its circle has been by no means a very confined one,) I am convinced there are few subjects about which so little is said or thought, as the University of Edinburgh. I rather think, that a well-educated stranger, who had no previous knowledge that an university had its seat in this place, (if we can suppose the existence of such a person,) might sojourn in Edinburgh for many weeks, without making the discovery for himself.