There was at least one branch of the better sort of Edinburgh society which never manifested any disinclination to her acquaintance. This was the class of loose young men of good birth, who daily paraded at the Cross with flowing periwigs and glancing canes, and nightly drowned their senses in a vulgar debauch, from which they occasionally awoke in the morning with the duty of settling scores by a rencontre in St Ann’s Yards, or at St Leonard’s Crags. This set of brawlers, the proper successors of those drunken cavaliers who disgraced a preceding age, subsisted in a state of pure antagonism to the stayed and decorous habits of the general community; many of them were literally the children of cavaliers, and indebted in a great measure for their idle way of life to the circumstances of the government, which dictated an exclusive distribution of its patronage among its own adherents, and of course left the poor Jacobites exposed to all the temptations of idleness. Dicing and golfing were the employments of their forenoons; in the evening they would stagger from table into Heriot’s Green, or Lady Murray’s garden in the Canongate, where they would make a point of staring out of countenance such sober citizens and their daughters as ventured to frequent those fashionable promenades. According to a Presbyterian writer of the day, they sent to London regularly for the last fashions and the newest oaths; but perhaps the latter part of the report is only a scandal. If such personages were to revive now-a-days, and appear some forenoon among the modern _beaux esprits_ of Prince’s Street, they would be looked upon, with their long wide-skirted coats, and buckles, and cravats, as a set of the most solemn looking gentlemen; but in their own time, there were no ideas associated with them but those of reckless, hot-headed youth, and daily habits the most opposite to those of decency and virtue.