The Prologue.

I have led but a rigmarole life, and in preparing to give the world some account of it, I feel myself considerably embarrassed. If I commence with my childhood and school-boy days, assuredly it will oblige me to repeat many things that have been a hundred times better told by as many others; so much alike is the early history of all men. Only monsters and princes are objects of wonder at their birth; and I happen to be neither the one nor the other; but in capacity and in all my characteristics a very ordinary man, distinguished, however, I must say, by a few strange adventures, and, without having an eye in my neck, a little able to discern something within the bosoms of others.

I will in consequence properly begin the history of myself about the period when I attained the years of discretion. Perhaps it may be thought in that case it will be a short work, and that I should have better consulted the innate modesty of my nature, had I merely said, leaving all the tale of pleasing sports and boyish days behind, I intend to commence with the æra at which, according to our Scottish law, I exercised the rights of judgment, and chose my curators—those worthies who are known in vernacular parlance by the style and title of doers.