contrast to the Edinburgh dinners of yore. He had then
long given up both the theory and practice of the Brunonians, and took
nothing but light French and German wines, and these in moderation. His
tall, somewhat high-shouldered, massive form; his calm brow, mild,
thoughtful; his dignity of manner; his gentleness to all; his vast
knowledge; his wonderful appreciation of excellence; his discrimination
of faults--all combined to form one of the finest specimens ever seen,
even in that illustrious period, of a philosopher and historian.

Jeffrey and Cockburn were contrasts to one whom they honoured. Jeffrey,
'the greatest of British critics,' was eight years younger than
Mackintosh, having been born in 1773. He was the son of one of the
depute clerks to the Supreme Court, not an elevated position, though one
of great respectability. When Mackintosh and Sydney Smith first knew him
in Edinburgh, he was enduring, with all the impatience of his sensitive
nature, what he called 'a slow, obscure, philosophical starvation' at
the Scotch bar.

'There are moments,' he wrote, 'when I think I could sell myself to the
ministers or to the devil, in order to get above these necessities.'
Like all men so situated, his depression came in fits. Short, spare,
with regular, yet _not_ aristocratic features;--speaking, brilliant, yet
_not_ pleasing eyes;--a voice consistent with that _mignon_ form;--a
somewhat precise and anxious manner, there was never in Jeffrey that
charm, that _abandon_, which rendered his valued friend, Henry Cockburn,
the most delightful, the most beloved of men, the very idol of his
native city.

The noble head of Cockburn, bald, almost in youth, with its pliant,
refined features, and its fresh tint upon a cheek always clear,
generally high in colour, was a strong contrast to the rigid _petitesse_
of Jeffrey's physiognomy; much more so to the large proportions of
Mackintosh; or to the ponderous, plain, and, later in life, swarthy
countenance of Sydney Smith. Lord Webb Seymour, the brother of the late
Duke of Somerset, gentle, modest, intelligent,--Thomas Thomson, the
antiquary,--and Charles and George Bell, the surgeon and the advocate,--
Murray, afterwards Lord Murray, the generous pleader, who gave up to its
rightful heirs an estate left him by a client,--and Brougham--formed the
staple of that set now long since extinct.

It was partially broken up by Sydney Smith's coming, in 1803, to London.
He there took a hou