Our young master accepted the task.
He took an apartment in the Temple, turned his back on his friends, and became an inaccessible hermit.
For three years he lived only for his books, consecrating to them that which, at his age, is generally consecrated to pleasure and comfort.
Nothing could turn him from the end he had in view.
One after another he read all the Greek authors. Nothing that had been written by poet, philosopher, historian, or grammarian, escaped him.
At the end of three years, he reappeared, wasted by the vigils and privations of this life of study; but the last touches had been put to the manuscript of a book, which, when it appeared three months later, was pronounced a masterpiece of scholarship, and made quite a revolution in the Greek world.
To-day this young Scotchman is one of the brightest lights in the higher walks of literature in Great Britain.
The students of the great Universities of Scotland offer, perhaps, the most striking proofs of perseverance to be found.
At Oxford and Cambridge, you find all sorts of students, especially students who do not study.