here were still a sufficient number of peculiarities to gratify one who
had an eye to the ludicrous. Sydney Smith soon discovered that it is a
work of time to impart a humorous idea to a true Scot. 'It requires,' he
used to say, 'a surgical operation to get a joke well into a Scotch
understanding.' 'They are so embued with metaphysics, that they even
make love metaphysically. I overheard a young lady of my acquaintance,
at a dance in Edinburgh, exclaim in a sudden pause of the music, "What
you say, my Lord, is very true of love in the _abstract_, but,--" here
the fiddlers began fiddling furiously, and the rest was lost.' He was,
however, most deeply touched by the noble attribute of that nation which
retains what is so rare--the attribute of being true friends. He did
ample justice to their kindliness of heart. 'If you meet with an
accident,' he said, 'half Edinburgh immediately flocks to your doors to
inquire after your _pure_ hand, or your _pure_ foot.' 'Their temper,' he
observed, 'stands anything but an attack on their climate; even Jeffrey
cannot shake off the illusion that myrtles flourish at Craig Crook.' The
sharp reviewer stuck to his myrtle allusions, and treated Smith's
attempts with as much contempt as if he had been a 'wild visionary, who
had never breathed his caller air,' nor suffered under the rigours of
his climate, nor spent five years in 'discussing metaphysics and
medicine in that garret end of the earth,--that knuckle end of
England--that land of Calvin, oat-cakes, and sulphur,' as Smith termed
Scotland.

During two years he braved the winters, in which he declared
hackney-coaches were drawn by four horses on account of the snow; where
men were blown flat down on the face by the winds; and where even
'experienced Scotch fowls did not dare to cross the streets, but sidled
along, tails aloft, without venturing to encounter the gale.' He
luxuriated, nevertheless, in the true Scotch supper, than which nothing
more pleasant and more unwholesome has ever been known in Christendom.
Edinburgh is said to have been the only place where people dined twice a
day. The writer of this memoir is old enough to remember the true
Scottish _Attic_ supper before its final 'fading into wine and water,'
as Lord Cockburn describes its decline. 'Suppers,' Cockburn truly says,
'are cheaper than dinners,' and Edinburgh, at that time, was the
cheapest place in Great Britain. Port and sherry were the staple wines:
claret, duty