We know of Thomas Pringle's student days mostly from what his friend and fellow lodger Robert Story tells us and from the letters Story found at Morebattle. We can guess the impact of the metropolis on these country boys, sons of a Roxburghshire tenant farmer and of a neighbouring parish schoolmaster. Their metropolis had been Kelso, which Walter Scott, brought up in his barrister father's Edinburgh household and briefly near Kelso, saw as

Beautiful, even made grand and memorable by its Abbey ruin, but a village. Edinburgh, a teeming city, half ‘Auld Reekie’, half the Athens of the North, squalid slums side by side with Robert Adam's New Town, was a place where a rural somebody would feel himself an urban nobody. Pringle took a long time to make the leap. When fame finally made him, briefly, a household name there, it was as a figure of controversy, a victim in a world of sharp tongues and sharper pens. It took 15 years of penurious toil, some achievement but ultimate disappointment, to lead him to hope for a better life and an early dream to be brought to reality.

The first years of study at the university were filled, as Story tells us, with talk, argument, seeking after truth (mainly of religious belief, accepted without question at Blaik law and Morebattle but a subject of intense debate with his student friends) and of a gradual absorption in literature, rather than in the classics, theology and the other subjects he studied.