Jeffrey had indeed taken a taste of Oxford, but liked it not. His biographer carefully says that “his College was not distinguished by study and propriety alone.” This shocked Jeffrey, and he left it. But in any case these were the golden days of Edinburgh. It was then unrivalled as an intellectual centre, unrivalled in a sense that it can never be again. Some will say that all that is gone. Well, as for the intellectual supremacy, that could not survive in the general awakening of the world. But what I also fear has gone, is the resident, inherent originality which then distinguished our city. Railways and the Press have made that impossible; for, after all, true originality can scarcely exist but in the backwaters of life. The great ocean of life smooths and rolls its pebbles to too much the same shape and texture. Those famous judges of whom we read, with something between a smile and a tear,--Braxfield and Eskgrove and Newton and Hermand,--are just as impossible in these days as the black bottles with which they stimulated their judicial attention on the bench. They are as impossible as that cry of “Gardez-loo” which meant so much to the passer-by on the streets. Well, after all, we must take the rough with the smooth, and the good with the bad. “Gardez-loo” itself was only the symbol of hideous physical impurities, which we none of us should regret; and perhaps even some of those social glories, over which we are so accustomed to gloat in the past, might not have been entirely agreeable had we to realize them in the present. Take these old judges whom I mentioned. They are very picturesque and interesting figures; but I am not sure that any of us could have faced them in the character of a defendant or an accused person without a qualm, more especially if we were opposed to them in politics, and even--if tradition lies not--even if we were their opponents at chess. And if we were in that unfortunate and perhaps discreditable position, we should go and seek our legal adviser, not, as now, in the decorous recesses of Queen Street or of George Street, but, as Colonel Mannering went to seek him, at Clerihugh’s, enjoying “high jinks” in the midst of a carousal, from which he could hardly tear himself for matters of the most vital import to his client.