As they sit in their chairs nowadays to the very end of the feast, there is doubtless joined with modern sobriety a soupçon of modern dullness and discretion.
To an American the great charm of Edinburgh is its leisurely atmosphere: "not the leisure of a village arising from the deficiency of ideas and motives, but the leisure of a city reposing grandly on tradition and history; which has done its work, and does not require to weave its own clothing, to dig its own coals, or smelt its own iron."
We were reminded of this more than once, and it never failed to depress us properly. If one had ever lived in Pittsburg, Fall River, or Kansas City, I should think it would be almost impossible to maintain self-respect in a place like Edinburgh, where the citizens "are released from the vulgarizing dominion of the hour." Whenever one of Auld Reekie's great men took this tone with me, I always felt as though I were the germ in a half-hatched egg, and he were an aged and lordly cock gazing at me pityingly through my shell. He, lucky creature, had lived through all the struggles which I was to undergo; he, indeed, was released from "the vulgarizing dominion of the hour;" but I, poor thing, must grow and grow, and keep pecking at my shell, in order to achieve existence.
Sydney Smith says in one of his letters, "Never
