Page:Biographical and critical studies by James Thomson ("B.V.").djvu/394

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37^ CRITICAL STUDIES which they abounded. I never saw him show the sHghtest appearance even of drink, notwithstanding our wine-drinking, suppers, punch, and smoking in the common-room to very late hours. I never shall forget his figure, sitting with a long earthen pipe, a great //> wig on ; those wigs had descended, I fancy, from the days of Addison (who had been a member of our College), and were worn by us all (in order, I presume, to preserve our hair and dress from tobacco- smoke) when smoking commenced after supper, and a strange appearance we made in them ! " The same gentleman says : " His pedestrian feats were marvellous. On one occasion, having been absent a day or two, we asked him, on his return to the common-room, where he had been. He said, in London. ' When did you return ? ' — ' This morning.' — 'How did you come?' — 'On foot.' As we all ex- pressed surprise, he said : ' Why, the fact is I dined yesterday with a friend in Grosvenor (I think it was) Square, and as I quitted the house a fellow who was passing was impertinent and insulted me, upon which I knocked him down ; and as I did not choose to have myself called in question for a street row, I at once started as I was, in my dinner dress, and never stopped until I got to the College gate this morning, as it was being opened.' Now this was a walk of fifty-eight miles at least, which he must have got over in eight or nine hours at most, supposing him to have left the dinner-party at nine in the evening." Here is another instance ("Memoir," i. 191, 192), when on a pedestrian tour in the Western Highlands with his wife in 1815 : "In Glenorchy his time was much occupied by fishing, and distance was not considered