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 free in Scotland until 1780, was indeed beginning to be a luxury; it was no longer the ordinary beverage, as it was when as Mackenzie, the author of the ‘Man of Feeling,’ described—­it used, upon the arrival of a cargo, to be sent through the town on a cart with a horse before it, so that every one might have a sample, by carrying a jug to be filled for sixpence:  still even at the end of the eighteenth century it was in frequent use.  Whisky toddy and plotty (red wine mulled with spices) came into the supper-room in ancient flagons or stoups after a lengthy repast of broiled chickens, roasted moorfowl, pickled mussels, flummery, and numerous other good things had been discussed by a party who ate as if they had not dined that day.  ‘We will eat,’ Lord Cockburn used to say after a long walk, ’a profligate supper,’—­a supper without regard to discretion, or digestion; and he usually kept his word.