In the eighteenth century we are in a different atmosphere; those in high place did not go in constant fear of their life, they were not so savage, so suspicious, so revengful, they were witty and playful. On the other hand, their ways were strangely different from the monotonous propriety of to-day. Kames and Monboddo are prominent instances, they were both literary lawyers and constant rivals. Once Kames asked Monboddo if he had read his last book; the other saw his chance and took it, “No, my lord, you write a great deal faster than I am able to read.” Kames presently got _his_ chance. Monboddo had in some sense anticipated the Darwinian theory, he was certain at any rate that everybody was born with a tail. He believed that the sisterhood of midwives were pledged to remove it, and it is said he watched many a birth as near as decency permitted but always with disappointing results. At a party he politely invited Kames to enter the room before him. “By no means,” said Kames, “go first, my lord, that I may get a look at your tail.” Kames had a grin between a sneer and a smile, probably here the sneer predominated. But perhaps it was taken as a compliment. “Mony is as proud of his tail as a squirrel,” said Dr. Johnson. He died when eighty-seven. He used to ride to London every year, to the express admiration and delight of George III. One wonders if he ever heard of the tradition that at Strood, in Kent, all children are born with tails—a mediæval jape from the legend of an insult to St. Thomas of Canterbury: he might have found this some support to his theory! On the bench he was like a stuffed monkey, but for years he sat at the clerks’ table. He had a lawsuit about a horse, argued it in person before his colleagues and came hopelessly to grief. You are bound to assume the decision was right, though those old Scots worthies dearly loved a slap at one another, and thus he would not sit with Lord President Dundas again; more likely, being somewhat deaf, he wished to hear better. He was a great classical scholar, and said that no man could write English who did not know Greek, a very palpable hit at Lord Kames, who knew everything but Greek. The suppers he gave at St. John Street, off the Canongate, are still fragrant in the memory, “light and choice, of Attic taste,” no doubt; but the basis you believe was Scots, solid and substantial. And they had native dishes worth eating in quaint eighteenth-century Edinburgh! The grotesque old man had a beautiful daughter, Elizabeth Burnet, whose memory lives for ever in the pathetic lines of Burns. She died of consumption in 1790, and to blunt, if possible, the father’s sorrow, his son-in-law covered up her portrait. Monboddo’s look sought the place when he entered the room. “Quite right, quite right,” he muttered, “and now let us get on with our Herodotus.” For that day, perhaps, his beloved Greek failed to charm. Kames was at least like Monboddo in one thing—oddity.