Benjamin Constant

common: among other members of Dalzel’s ‘classis provectiorum’ with

Scott in December 1784 were Charles Ross, James Johnstone and James

Wauchope, all future members of the Speculative Society, but Wauchope
in particular a member of a family well known to Constant.^5 One of the

greatest ironies and missed opportunities of literary history, no doubt, is

the fact that after Constant left Edinburgh, Walter Scott became a member

of the Speculative Society and the Secretary of that distinguished debating

club:
6
his minutes of its proceedings are deposited in the Society’s
archives and his death mask still stands on a table in its debating hall.

Benjamin Constant and Sir Walter Scott lived parallel lives, certainly

worthy of the attention of a modern Plutarch. Insufficient attention, then,

has been paid to the people Constant could have met or did meet in

Edinburgh, Scott being among those Constant may have met, though there
is no evidence that he ever did. There are still large areas of Constant’s

Edinburgh experiences that remain obscure and unmapped, but there are

too some significant remains in the form of letters and documents that,

surprisingly, have been overlooked by literary archaeologists, and which

enable us to form a clearer idea of Constant’s activities, to identify those
people he did know well, and even to understand their significance in his

life.
According to Ma Vie Constant arrived in Edinburgh with his father on 8 July 1783
where they were welcomed by old friends of Juste de Constant.^7 It had been in Juste’s
mind for some months that his son would profit from studying at a Scottish university,
and on 18 April 1783 he had written to an old friend, Sir Robert Murray Keith, British
Ambassador in Vienna:

I am sending my son to Scotland to finish his studies there.... He is

only 15 and his one passion is literature. Being in the company of

the learned men of your country can only reinforce his preference.

If he can get to know some of them, he will be able to acquire what

he still lacks.^8

But Juste de Constant had other reasons for sending Benjamin to

Edinburgh, as he confessed more candidly in a further letter to Keith dated

2 June 1783. He was worried about a son ‘born with all the talents

imaginable, but also with the most violent emotions which cannot be
tamed’ and continued:

I had hoped that his liking for study—which I worked hard to instil

in him—would act as the most effective brake on him. He is

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