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lly desired professional advancement, and this of course could not be attained in presbyterian Scotland. "I could not hold myself justified to my wife and family if I were to sacrifice any longer to the love of present ease, those exertions which every man is bound to make for the improvement of his situation." He left Edinburgh with very mixed feelings, for he hated the place and loved its inhabitants. He called it "that energetic and unfragrant city." He dwelt in memory on its "odious smells, barbarous sounds, bad suppers, excellent hearts, and most enlightened and cultivated understandings." "No nation," he said, "has so large a stock of benevolence of heart, as the Scotch. Their temper stands anything but an attack on their climate. They would have you even believe they can ripen fruit; and, to be candid, I must own in remarkably warm summers I have tasted peaches that made most excellent pickles; and it is upon record that at the Siege of Perth, on one occasion the ammunition failing, their nectarines made admirable cannon-balls. Even the enlightened mind of Jeffrey cannot shake off the illusion that myrtles flourish at Craig Crook.[22] In vain I have represented to him that they are of the genus _Carduus_, and pointed out their prickly peculiarities.... Jeffrey sticks to his myrtle illusions, and treats my attacks with as much contempt as if I had been a wild visionary, who had never breathed his caller air, nor lived and suffered under the rigour of his climate, nor spent five years in discussing metaphysics and medicine in that garret of the earth--that knuckle-end of England--that land of Calvin, oatcakes, and sulphur." As soon as he reached England, he wrote to his friend Jeffrey:-- "I left Edinburgh with great heaviness of heart; I knew what I was leaving, and was ignorant to what I was going. My good fortune will be very great, if I should ever again fall into the society of so many liberal, correct, and instructed men, and live with them on such terms of friendship as I have done with you, and you know whom, at Edinburgh." On arriving in London, in the autumn of 1803, the Sydney Smiths lodged for a while at 77 Upper Guilford Street, and soon afterwards established themselves at 8 Doughty Street. Sydney's dearest friend, Francis Horner,[23] had preceded him to London, and was already beginning to make his mark at
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