Sydney Smith found Jeffrey and Cockburn rising barristers.  Horner, on leaving Edinburgh, had left to Jeffrey his bar wig, and the bequest had been lucky.  Jeffrey was settled at Craigcrook, a lovely English-looking spot, with wooded slopes and green glades, near Edinburgh; and Cockburn had, since 1811, set up his rural gods at Bonally, near Colinton, just under the Pentland Hills, and he wrote, ’Unless some avenging angel shall expel me, I shall never leave that paradise.’  And a paradise it was.  Beneath those rough, bare hills, broken here and there by a trickling burn, like a silver thread on the brown sward, stands a Norman tower, the addition, by Playfair’s skill, to what was once a scarcely habitable farmhouse.  That tower contained Lord Cockburn’s fine library, also his ordinary sitting-rooms.  There he read and wrote, and received such society as will never meet again, there or elsewhere—­amongst them Sydney Smith.  Beneath—­around the tower—­stretches a delicious garden, composed of terraces, and laurel-hedged walks, and beds of flowers, that bloomed freely in that sheltered spot.  A bowling-green, shaded by one of the few trees near the house, a sycamore, was the care of many an hour; for to make the turf velvety, the sods were fetched from the hills above—­from ‘yon hills,’ as Lord Cockburn would have called them.  And this was for many years one of the rallying points of the best Scottish society, and, as each autumn came round, of what the host called his Carnival.  Friends were summoned from the north and the south—­’death no apology.’  High jinks within doors, excursions without.  Every Edinburgh man reveres the spot, hallowed by the remembrance of Lord Cockburn.  ’Every thing except the two burns, he wrote, ’the few old trees, and the mountains, are my own work.  Human nature is incapable of enjoying more happiness than has been my lot here.  I have been too happy, and often tremble in the anticipation that the cloud must come at last.’  And come it did; but found him not unprepared, although the burden that he had to bear in after-life was heavy.  In their enlarged and philosophic minds, in their rapid transition from sense to nonsense, there was an affinity in the characters of Sydney Smith and of Lord Cockburn which was not carried out in any other point.  Smith’s conversation was wit—­Lord Cockburn’s was eloquence.

From the festivities of Edinburgh Sydney Smith returned contentedly to Foston-le-Clay, and to Bunch.  Amongst other gifted visitors was Mrs. Marcet.  ‘Come here, Bunch,’ cries Sydney Smith one day; ’come and repeat your crimes to Mrs. Marcet.’  Then Bunch, grave as a judge, began to repeat:  ’Plate-snatching, gravy-spilling, door-slamming, blue-bottle-fly-catching, and curtsey-bobbing.  ‘Blue-bottle-fly-catching,’ means standing with her mouth open, and not attending; and ‘curtsey-bobbing’ was curtseying to the centre of the earth.