2 ‘THE CHARMS OF FRIENDSHIP’ (1783–1785)
My father only remained in Scotland for three weeks. After
he left, I began studying with great enthusiasm, and then
began the most agreeable year of my life. Among the young
students of Edinburgh it was the accepted thing to work. They
had set up several literary and philosophical societies: I
attended the meetings of some of them, and I made a name
for myself there as a writer and orator, even though I was
working in a language that was not my own.
(Ma Vie, entry under 1783–4^1 )When, in November 1783, Benjamin Constant enrolled at Edinburgh
University as a member of Professor Andrew Dalzel’s advanced Greek
class, the ‘classis provectiorum’, another student, formidably precocious
like Constant, was registering as a member of the beginners’ class, the
‘classis tyronum’. The University Matriculation list gives his name as
‘Gualterus Scott’.
2
This curious fact is worth recording not in an attempt
to rewrite the history of Franco-British literary relations, but merely to
illustrate the lack of research on Constant’s period as an Edinburgh
undergraduate until recent years. Too many commentators were content
with Gustave Rudler’s statements on the question—detailed and largely
accurate as they admittedly are
3
—and with those of Constant himself in
Ma Vie. The loss of all of Constant’s correspondence with his Edinburgh
friends compounded the mischief and led critics to suppose that there was
nothing more to be said on the matter. And yet no one to my knowledge
ever remarked on the fact that Constant and Sir Walter Scott were students
at Edinburgh at the same time, albeit in somewhat different circumstances,
Scott being 12 years of age and living at his parents’ house near the
University and Constant, now 16, lodging with the Professor of Medicine,
Andrew Duncan,^4 and living the altogether more independent life of a
student in a foreign city. They may even have had acquaintances in
The charms of friendship 43