By a childish misconception, the little boy seems to have confused the real valley that interested him so with Scott's ideal Glendearg, and, partly for this reason, to have found a greater pleasure in "The Monastery," which he thereupon undertook to paraphrase in verse.
There remain some hundreds of doggerel rhymes; but his affection for that particular novel survived the fatal facility of his octosyllabics, and reappears time after time in his later writings.
Next year, 1828, their tour was stopped at Plymouth by the painful news of the death of his aunt Jessie, to whom they were on their way.

It was hardly a year since the bright little cousin, Jessie of Perth, had died of water on the brain.

She had been John's especial pet and playfellow, clever, like him, and precocious; and her death must have come to his parents as a warning, if they needed it, to keep their own child's brain from over-pressure.

It is evident that they did their best to "keep him back"; they did not send him to school for fear of the excitement of competitive study.

His mother put him through the Latin grammar herself, using the old Adam's manual which his father had used at Edinburgh High School.