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 house in Doughty Street, being partial to legal society, which was chiefly to be found in that neighbourhood.

Here Sir Samuel Romilly, Mackintosh, Scarlett (Lord Abinger), the eccentric and unhappy Mr. Ward, afterwards Lord Dudley, ‘Conversation’ Sharp, Rogers, and Luttrell, formed the circle in which Sidney delighted.  He was still very poor, and obliged to sell the rest of his wife’s jewels; but his brother Robert allowed him L100 a year, and lent him, when he subsequently removed into Yorkshire, L500.

He had now a life of struggling, but those struggles were the lot of his early friends also; Mackintosh talked of going to India as a lecturer; Smith recommended Jeffrey to do the same.  Happily, both had the courage and the sense to await for better times at home; yet Smith’s opinion of Mackintosh was, that ’he never saw so theoretical a head which contained so much practical understanding;’ and to Jeffrey he wrote: 

’You want nothing to be a great lawyer, and nothing to be a great speaker, but a deeper voice—­slower and more simple utterance—­more humility of face and neck—­and a greater contempt for esprit than men who have so much in general attain to.’