In Edinburgh, Sydney Smith formed the intimate acquaintance of Lord Jeffrey, and that acquaintance ripened into a friendship only closed by death.  The friendship of worthy, sensible men he looked upon as one of the greatest pleasures in life.

The ‘old suns,’ Lord Cockburn tells us, ’were setting when the band of great thinkers and great writers who afterwards concocted the “Edinburgh Review,” were rising into celebrity.’  Principal Robertson, the historian, had departed this life in 1793, a kindly old man.  With beaming eyes underneath his frizzed and curled wig, and a trumpet tied with a black ribbon to the button-hole of his coat, for he was deaf, this most excellent of writers showed how he could be also the most zealous of diners.  Old Adam Ferguson, the historian of Rome, had ‘set,’ also:  one of the finest specimens of humanity had gone from among his people in him.  Old people, not thirty years ago, delighted to tell you how ‘Adam,’ when chaplain to the Black Watch, that glorious 42nd, refused to retire to his proper place, the rear, during an action, but persisted in being engaged in front.  He was also gone; and Dugald Stewart filled his vacant place in the professorship of moral philosophy.  Dr. Henry, the historian, was also at rest; after a long laborious life, and the compilation of a dull, though admirable History of England, the design of which, in making a chapter on arts, manners, and literature separate from the narrative, appears to have suggested to Macaulay his inimitable disquisition on the same topics.  Dr. Henry showed to a friend a pile of books which he had gone through, merely to satisfy himself and the world as to what description of trousers was worn by the Saxons.  His death was calm as his life.  ’Come out to me directly,’ he wrote to his friend, Sir Harry Moncrieff:  ’I have got something to do this week; I have got to die.’

It was in 1801, that Dugald Stewart began his course of lectures on political economy.  Hitherto all public favour had been on the side of the Tories, and independence of thought was a sure way to incur discouragement from the Bench, in the Church, and from every Government functionary.  Lectures on political economy were regarded as innovations; but they formed a forerunner of that event which had made several important changes in our literary and political hemisphere:  the commencement of the ‘Edinburgh Review.’  This undertaking was the work of men who were separated from the mass of their brother-townsmen by their politics; their isolation as a class binding them the more closely together by links never broken, in a brotherhood of hope and ambition, to which the natural spirits of Sydney Smith, of Cockburn, and of Jeffrey, gave an irresistible charm.

Among those who the most early in life ended a career of promise was Francis Horner.  He was the son of a linen-draper in Edinburgh; or, as the Scotch call it, following the French, a merchant.  Homer’s best linen for sheets, and table-cloths, and all the under garments of housekeeping, are still highly esteemed by the trade.