this direction is due, doubtless, in part to the omnipresence of the lawyers. But _wut_ and _dialectics_ make a very good mixture; and, dashed as this mixture is and always has been in Edinburgh with finer and higher ingredients, there has been no town in Britain for the last century and a half of greater deipnosophistic capabilities, all things considered. One element which Englishmen who do not know Edinburgh always imagine as necessarily wanting in it never has been wanting. Whether from the influence of the lawyers, and of the relics of the old Scottish baronage and baronetage, acting conjointly as a counterpoise to the influence of the clergy, or from other less obvious causes, there has always been in Edinburgh a freer undercurrent of speculative opinion, a tougher traditional scepticism, a greater latitude of jest at things clerical and Presbyterian, than in other Scottish towns. From the early part of the eighteenth century, when Allan Ramsay, Dr. Archibald Pitcairn, and others, did battle with the clergy in behalf of theatrical entertainments and other forms of the festive, there has never been wanting a strong anti-clerical and even free-thinking clique in Edinburgh society; and towards the end of the century, when David Hume and Hugo Arnot were alive or remembered, no city in Britain sheltered such a quantity of cosy infidelity. Of hundreds of stories illustrative of this, take one of the mildest:—Pitcairn, going about the streets one Sunday, was obliged by a sudden pelt of rain to take refuge in a place he was not often in,—a church. The audience was scanty; and he sat down in a pew where there was only another sitter besides,—a quiet, grave-looking countryman, listening to the sermon with a face of the utmost composure. The preacher was very pathetic; so much so that at one passage he began to shed tears copiously, and to use his pocket-handkerchief. Interested in this as a physiological phenomenon for which the cause was not apparent, Pitcairn turned to the countryman, and asked in a whisper, “What the deevil gars the man greet?” “Faith,” said the man, slowly turning round, “ye wad maybe greet yoursel’ if ye was up there and had as little to say.” Pitcairn was the type of the avowed Edinburgh infidel; of which class there were not a few whose esoteric talk when they met together was of an out-and-out kind; but the countryman was the type of a still more numerous class, who kept up exterior conformity, but tested all shrewdly enough by a pretty tough interior instinct. Indeed, long after Pitcairn’s time, a kind of sturdy scepticism, quite distinct from what would be called “infidelity,” was common among the educated classes in Edinburgh. Old gentlemen who went duly to church, who kept their families in great awe, and who preserved much etiquette in their habits towards each other, were by no means strait-laced in their beliefs; and it was not till a considerably later