His conversation is very much like his countenance and his voice, of immense variety; sometimes plain and unpretending even to flatness; sometimes whimsically brilliant and rhetorical almost beyond the license of private discourse.  He has many interesting anecdotes, and tells them very well.  He is a shrewd observer; and so fastidious that I am not surprised at the awe in which many people seem to stand when in his company.  Though not altogether free from affectation himself, he has a peculiar loathing for it in other people, and a great talent for discovering and exposing it.  He has a particular contempt, in which I most heartily concur with him, for the fadaises of bluestocking literature, for the mutual flatteries of coteries, the handing about of vers de societe, the albums, the conversaziones, and all the other nauseous trickeries of the Sewards, Hayleys, and Sothebys.  I am not quite sure that he has escaped the opposite extreme, and that he is not a little too desirous to appear rather a man of the world, an active lawyer, or an easy careless gentleman, than a distinguished writer.  I must own that, when Jeffrey and I were by ourselves, he talked much and very well on literary topics.  His kindness and hospitality to me were, indeed, beyond description, and his wife was as pleasant and friendly as possible.  I liked everything but the hours.  We were never up till ten, and never retired till two hours at least after midnight.  Jeffrey, indeed, never goes to bed till sleep comes on him overpoweringly, and never rises till forced up by business or hunger.  He is extremely well in health; so that I could not help suspecting him of being very hypochondriac; for all his late letters to me have been filled with lamentations about his various maladies.  His wife told me, when I congratulated her on his recovery, that I must not absolutely rely on all his accounts of his own diseases.  I really think that he is, on the whole, the youngest-looking man of fifty that I know, at least when he is animated.

His house is magnificent.  It is in Moray Place, the newest pile of buildings in the town, looking out to the Forth on one side, and to a green garden on the other.  It is really equal to the houses in Grosvenor Square.  Fine, however, as is the new quarter of Edinburgh, I decidedly prefer the Old Town.  There is nothing like it in the island.  You have been there, but you have not seen the town, and no lady ever sees a town.  It is only by walking on foot through all corners at all hours that cities can be really studied to good purpose.  There is a new pillar to the memory of Lord Melville; very elegant, and very much better than the man deserved.  His statue is at the top, with a wreath on the head very like a nightcap drawn over the eyes.  It is impossible to look at it without being reminded of the fate which the original most richly merited.  But my letter will overflow even the ample limits of a frank, if I do not conclude.  I hope that you will be properly penitent for neglecting such a correspondent when you receive so long a dispatch, written amidst the bellowing of justices, lawyers, criers, witnesses, prisoners, and prisoners’ wives and mothers.