outstanding Edinburgh students, Charles Hope^14 and John Wilde. It was
through their sponsorship that Constant became a member of the
Speculative Society, a remarkable institution which deserves a few words
of description. ‘The Spec’, as it is still affectionately known to its
members, was founded by six Edinburgh students in 1764 as a debating
society, and built its own hall in which to hold its meetings. When, in the
early nineteenth century, its hall had to be demolished, it was given rooms
in the new University buildings, and there it still holds its meetings weekly
between October and March. Although its premises are no longer those
that Constant would have known, it remains essentially the same Society
with the same purpose. Nowadays, however, the Speculative Society’s
members tend to be mainly young advocates, whereas in Constant’s day
they were undergraduates. In the atmosphere of enthusiastic intellectual
inquiry of late-eighteenth-century Edinburgh, student societies—medical,
scientific, theological and literary—proliferated: the Speculative Society
has outlived almost all of them, and has been as exceptional in the calibre
of its members—Constant, Sir Walter Scott, Robert Louis Stevenson
among many others—as in its longevity.
15
The Speculative Society’s Minute Book records that at the first meeting of the 1783–4
session held on Tuesday 11 November 1783, with Charles Hope in the chair, there were
received: ‘Petitions from Baron Constant, attested & presented by Mr. Hope & Mr.
Wylde, and Allen Dalzel, attested & presented by Mr. Wylde & Mr. Js. Clerk praying to
be admitted members.’^16 According to the usual practice a ballot of members was held
the following week and we read in the Minutes for the meeting of Tuesday 18 November
1783 that The Society agree[d] to admit Mr. Dalzel & Baron Constant Members, & the
latter was received accordingly’.^17 From that date the Society was to be one of the main
focuses of Constant’s life in Edinburgh. As students did not live in the University but in
lodgings, and as many could ill afford to heat their rooms in the winter months, student
societies were an obvious solution both to the unconvivial isolation and the cold.^18 While
it is doubtful whether Constant ever experienced such privations, his life became likewise
centred on at least two societies and the friendships that he made there. At the same time
that autumn of 1783 he was beginning his University courses in Greek and History, and
by the end of the year his name was on the Matriculation Roll of the University among
the ‘Discipuli D. And. Dalzel, Ling. Graecae Professoris’ in the ‘classis provectiorum’
and among the ‘Discipuli D.Alex: Tytler Fraser, Historiae Civil: Profess.’ As one would
expect, fellow students were often fellow members of societies: in Constant’s History
group, for example, there was a Russian, Dimitri Poltoratski, who joined the Speculative
Society shortly after him.^19
These, then, are the salient facts about Constant’s first months in Scotland. By
themselves, however, they tell us few of the things we would most like to know about his
highly formative period in Edinburgh. Fortunately there are other and more valuable
sources of information which, taken together with the chronological framework we have
established, enable us to enter into Constant’s world in an altogether more vivid way. The
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