Sydney Smith’s allusion to “the enlightened and cultivated understandings” he encountered amid such roughish surroundings, suggests the mention of what was, all in all, the most characteristic feature of Edinburgh society at the close of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth—its _intellectualism_. In a community composed in so large a measure of practitioners of the learned professions, it was inevitable that there should be more of interest in matters intellectual than is common, more of a habit of reasoning and discussion, more play and variety in the choice of topics for conversation. What mattered it that many of the most intellectual men and women gave expression to their ideas in broad Scotch? Ideas may be expressed in broad Scotch, and yet be the ideas of cultivated minds; at all events, it was so then in Edinburgh, where many excellent lawyers, University professors, and medical men kept up the broad Scotch in their ordinary conversation, though the majority had gone over to the English in all save accent, and some were sedulous in trying to Anglicise themselves even in that. But, whether the dialect was English or Scotch, there was a great deal of very pleasant and very substantial talk. True, in Sydney Smith’s recollection of the conversation of the Edinburgh people at the time he moved among them, two great faults are specified. It ran too much, he records, to that species of jocosity, perfectly torturing to an Englishman, which the Scotch themselves called _wut_; and it also ran too much, he records, into disputation and dialectics. “Their only idea of wit,” he says, speaking of the Scotch generally, but of the Edinburgh people in particular, “or rather of that inferior variety of the electric talent which prevails occasionally in the North, and which, under the name of _wut_, is so infinitely distressing to people of good taste, is laughing immoderately at stated intervals.” And again—“They are so imbued with metaphysics that they even make love metaphysically: I overheard a young lady of my acquaintance, at a dance in Edinburgh, exclaim, in a sudden pause of the music, ‘What you say, my lord, is very true of love in the _abstract_, but——,’ here the fiddlers began fiddling furiously, and the rest was lost.” This is somewhat unfair. _Wut_, in its place, is as good as _wit_, and may be a great deal heartier. As practised in the north, it corresponds more with what is properly _humour_. It consists in a general openness to the ludicrous view of things, a general disposition to call each other Tam and Sandy, a general readiness to tell and to hear Scottish stories the fun of which lies in the whole series of conceptions (often too local) that they call up, rather than in any sudden flash or quip at the close. At all events, the Scotch like their _wut_, and find it satisfying. As for the dialectics, there _is_, perhaps, too much of that. The excess in