It was somewhere about the year 1798, that a sharp-faced, youngish Englishman--who had been curate of a small country parish down in Wiltshire--drove, upon a pleasant June day, on a coach-top, into the old city of Edinboro’. This clergyman had a young lad seated beside him, whom he was tutoring; and this tutoring business enabled the curate to take a respectable house in the city. And by reason of the respectable house, and his own pleasant humor and intelligence, he came after a year or two to know a great many of the better folk in Edinboro’, and was invited to preach an occasional sermon at a small Episcopal chapel in his neighborhood. But all the good people he met did not prevent his being a-hungered after a young person whom he had left in the south of England. So he took a vacation presently and fetched her back, a bride, to the Scottish capital--having (as he said) thrown all his fortune in her lap. This fortune was of maternal inheritance, and consisted of six well-worn silver teaspoons. There was excellent society in Edinboro’ in that day, among the ornaments of which was Henry Mackenzie,[26] a stately gentleman--a sort of dean of the literary coteries, and the author of books which it is well to know by name--_The Man of Feeling_ and _Julia de Roubigné_--written with great painstaking and most exalted sentiment, and--what we count now--much dreariness. Then there was a Rev. Archibald Alison--he too an Episcopal clergyman, though Scotch to the backbone--and the author of an ingenious, but not very pregnant book, still to be found in old-fashioned libraries, labelled, _Alison on Taste_. Dugald Stewart was then active, and did on one or two occasions bring his honored presence to the little chapel to hear the preaching of the young English curate I spoke of. And this young curate, poor as he is and with a young wife, has an itch for getting into print; and does after a little time (the actual date being 1800) publish a booklet, which you will hardly find now, entitled _Six Sermons preached at Charlotte Chapel, Edinboro, by Rev. Sydney Smith_.[27] But it was not so much these sermons, as his wit and brightness and great range of information, which brought him into easy intimacy with the most promising young men of the city. Walter Scott he may have encountered odd whiles, though the novelist was in those days bent on his hunt after Border Minstrelsy, and would have been shy of the rampant liberalism ingrained with Smith.