and which, indeed, bids very fair, in my opinion, to leave no image behind it either on canvass or on copper. A sharp, and, at the same time, very deep-toned voice---a very bad pronunciation, but accompanied with very little of the Scotch accent---a light and careless manner, exchanged now and then for an infinite variety of more earnest expression and address---this is as much as I could carry away from my first visit to "the wee rekit deil," as the Inferno of Altesidora has happily called him. I have since seen a great deal more of him, and have a great deal more to tell you, but my paper is done, P. M. P. S. I am to dine with Jeffrey to-morrow at his country house, about three miles from Edinburgh, and shall give you a full account of the party in my next. LETTER VII. TO THE SAME. DEAR DAVID, SINCE I came to this town the weather has in general been of a very unpleasant kind. When you look out from the windows of your apartment, nothing can be finer than the appearance every thing presents. The air is as clear as amber overhead, and the sun shines with so much power, that in these splendid streets, the division of the bright from the shadowy part, reminds one of the richest effects of a Cuyp, or a Sachtleeven. But when you come out, in the full trust inspired by this brilliant serenity of aspect, you find yourself wofully disappointed. The action of the sun and air upon the nerves, is indeed delightfully stimulant; but the whole charm is destroyed before you have time to enjoy it, by some odious squall of wind which cuts you to the teeth---and what is worse, comes loaded with a whole cloud of flying dust and gravel, which is sure to leave its traces behind it, on still more delicate parts of your physiognomy. As for myself, I am often obliged to walk with a handkerchief held before my eyes and in spite of all my precautions, I have been several times in such a state, that I have absolutely rubbed myself blind. The whole of this arises from the want of watering the streets a thing which might surely be accomplished without the least difficulty, by a subscription among the inhabitants. If this evil be so severe at present, what must it be in the dog-days?—and yet the people submit to it all quietly, in streets, below every one of which they know water is flowing in pipes, ready to be scattered ad libitum, and at an expense not worthy of being mentioned.-" O! cacas homi num mentes !" Yesterday, however, there was an unusual degree of quietness in the state of the atmosphere. A slight shower, which fell in the morning, had laid the most offensive part of the dust, without giving the least appearance of damp to the roads and I drove to C-k, Mr. Jeffrey's villa, mollo gustosamente the expectation of the manifold luxuries I hoped to enjoy there-the prospective delights both of palate and intellect being heightened and improved by the preliminary gratification I tasted, while the shandrydan rolled along between the refreshed green of the meadows and corn-fields. His house is an old turretted mansion, much patched in the whole mass of its structure, and, I believe, much increased in its accommodations since he entered upon possession of it. The situation is extremely beautiful. There are very few trees immediately about the house; but the windows open 'upon the side of a charming bill, which, in all its extent, as far as the eye can reach, is wooded most luxuriantly to the very summit. There cannot be a more delicious rest for the eyes, than such an Arcadian height in this bright and budding time of the year; but, indeed, where, or at what time, can a fine wood be looked upon without delight? Between the wood and the house, there is a good garden, and some fields, in the cultivation of which Mr. Jeffrey seems to take much pleasure; for I had no sooner arrived, than he insisted upon carrying me over his ditches and hedges to show me his method of farming; and, indeed, talked of Swedish turnip, and Fiorin grass, and red blossomed potatoes, in a style that would have done no dishonour to your friend Curwen himself. I had come, thanks to my rustic ignorance, exactly at the hour appointed for dinner, (five o'clock,) so that I had three parts of an hour of the great man entirely to myself-during the whole of which space he continued to talk about rural affairs, and to trot me up one field and down another, till I was weary, without (credite posteri!) making one single allusion to law, politics, or literature. We were joined toward six o'clock by professors Playfair and Lesslie, and one or two young advocates, who had walked out with them. Then came R— Morehead, whom you Rremember at Balliol, a relation and intimate friend of Jeffrey's. He and the celebrated orator Alison officiate together in one of the Episcopalian chapels in Edinburgh. Although we never knew each other at Oxford, yet we immediately recognized each other's old High-Street faces, and began to claim a sort of acquaintance on that score, as all Oxonian contemporaries, I believe, are accustomed to do, when they meet at a distance from their alma mater. There were several other gentlemen, mostly of grave years, so that I was not a little astonished, when somebody proposed a trial of strength in leaping. Nor was my astonishment at all diminished, when Mr. Playfair began to throw off his coat and waistcoat, and to prepare himself for taking his part in the contest. When he did so much, I could have no apology, so I also stripped; and, indeed, the whole party did the same, except Jeffrey alone, who was dressed in a short green jacket, with scarcely any skirts, and, therefore, seemed to consider himself as already sufficiently "accinctus ludo." I used to be a good leaper in my day-witness the thousands of times I have beat you in the Port Meadow, and elsewhere-but I cut a very poor figure among these sinewy Caledonians. With the exception of Lesslie, they all jumped wonderfully; and Jeffrey was quite miraculous, considering his brevity of stride. But the greatest wonder of the whole was Mr. Playfair. He also is a short man, and he cannot be less than seventy, yet he took his stand with the assurance of an athletic, and positively beat every one of usthe very best of us, at least half a heel's breadth. I was quite thunderstruck, never having heard the least hint of his being so great a geometrician-in this sense of the word. I was, however, I must own, agreeably surprised by such a specimen of buoyant spirit and muscular strength in so venerable an old gentleman, and could not forbear from complimenting him on his revival of the ancient peripatetic ideas, about the necessity of cultivating the external as well as the internal energies, and of mixing the activity of the practical with that of the contemplative life. He took what I said with great suavity; and, indeed, I have never seen a better speci men of that easy hilarity and good humour, which sits with so much gracefulness on an honoured old age. I wish I could give you a notion of his face. It is not marked by any very striking features; but the unison of mildness of disposition, and strength of intellect in the expression, is too remarkable to be unnoticed even by a casual observer. His habits of profound thought have drawn some deep lines about his mouth, and given him a custom of bolding his lips very closely shut, otherwise I suspect the whole countenance would have been nothing more than an amiable one; although the light eyes have certainly at times something very piercing in their glance, even through his spectacles. The forehead is very finely developed-singularly broad across the temples, as, according to Spurzheim, all mathematical foreheads must be; but the beauty in that quarter is rather of an ad clerum character, or as Pindar bath it, I, however, who really, in good earnest, began to believe a little of the system, could not help remarking this circumstance; and more particularly so, because I found Mr. Lesslie's skull to possess many of the same features-above all, that of the breadth between the temples. This other great mathematician is a much younger man than Playfair; but his hair is already beginning to be grey. He is a very fat heavy figure of a man, without much more appearance of strength than of activity; and yet, although a bad leaper, by no means a slothful looking person neither. He has very large eyes, in shape not unlike Coleridge's, but without the least of the same mysterious depth of expression. Altogether, his face is one which, at first sight, you would pronounce to be merely a coarse one; but in which, once informed to whom it belongs, you are at no loss to discover a thousand marks of vigorous intellect and fancy too. Of this last quality, indeed, his eyes are at all times full to overflowing. In the midst of the sombre gravity of his usual look, there are always little flashes of enthusiasm breaking through the cloud, and, I think, adorning it; and, in this respect, he forms a striking contrast to the calm, tranquil uniformity of Mr. Playfair's physiognomy and deportment. In thinking of this afterwards, I could not help recollecting a great many pas sages of richly-coloured writing in his scientific Essays in the Edinburgh Review, which, I remember, struck me at the time I first read them, as being rather misplaced. But this, perhaps, may be merely the effect of the sterile way of writing employed by almost all the philosophers of these late times, to which we have now become so much accustomed, that we with difficulty approve of any thing in a warmer taste, introduced into such kinds of disquisition. They managed these things better in Greece. By and bye, we were summoned to the drawing-room, where we found several ladies with Mrs. J. She, you know, is an American, and Jeffrey went across the Atlantic for her a few years ago, while we were at war with her country. She is a very pleasing person; and they have one extremely interesting little girl. Jeffrey made no alteration in his dress, but joined the ladies exactly in his morning costume, the little green jacket aforesaid, grey worsted pantaloons, and Hessian boots, and a black silk handkerchief. How had Grub-street stared to see the prince of reviewers in such a garb! The dinner was excellent-a glorious turbot and oyster-sauce for one thing; and (sitesco referens) there was no want of champaigne the very wine, by the way, which I should have guessed to be Jeffrey's favourite. It is impossible to conceive of him as being a lover of the genuine old black-strap, or even of the quiet balminess of Burgundy. The true reviewing diet is certainly champaigne, and devilled biscuit. Had there been any blue-stocking lady present, she would have been sadly shocked with the material cast of the conversation during dinner-not a single word about "The sweet new poem !" Most of the company, though all men of literary habits, seemed to be as alive to the delights of the table, as if they had been "let in" (to use Dandie's phrase) by Monsieur Viard,knowing in sauces, and delightfully reviewing every glass before they would suffer it to go down. It put me in mind of some lines of my friend W 'Tis a bookseller that speaks "The days of Tonson, Lintot, Curll, are over, |