Well, of course it is impossible to read Lord Cockburn’s “Memorials of His Time”--and I hope that you all do read it, and read it at least once a year, because no resident of Edinburgh can properly enjoy his city without reading Lord Cockburn once a year--it is impossible to read Lord Cockburn without seeing that he was an optimist. But even he says of the Edinburgh of his time--which he says was so unrivalled--even he describes it as “always thirsty and unwashed.” Well, I am not quite sure when I read that description if we should have thought the Edinburgh of 1787 as delightful as he did. I hardly venture to risk myself in this line of conjecture. Should we all have appreciated Jeffrey as much as he did? That must remain in the realms of the unknowable and the unknown. But there is worse behind. There is even treason talked about the divine Sir Walter Scott. In that very delightful book which furnishes so much leisurely reading for the Scotsman or the Scotswoman, or for anybody,--I mean “Memoirs of a Highland Lady,”--I came upon this sentence, which I have never since been able to digest. It says about Sir Walter Scott, “He went out very little,” and, when he did go, that “he was not an agreeable gentleman, sitting very silent, looking dull and listless unless an occasional flash lit up his countenance. It was odd, but Sir Walter never had the reputation in Edinburgh that he had elsewhere.” Gentlemen, I veil my face; I cannot get over that, till I remember that a prophet is never a prophet in his own country, and there may have been people, even in Edinburgh, who did not think of Sir Walter as we do. But I do not mention all these disagreeable considerations as sheer iconoclasm and blasphemy. No, gentlemen, it is in a very different spirit that I lay them before you. I lay them before you as with a sort of inward groan. They are to me a sort of philosophic potsherd with which I scrape myself. It is in the attempt to comfort myself for living in the Edinburgh of the end of the nineteenth century, and not in the Edinburgh of the eighteenth or the seventeenth or the sixteenth centuries, that thus I endeavor to recall these things, and console myself anew.