With the _levee_ it was otherwise: that was one of the grand acts for which the king had been invited to Scotland; and it is utterly impossible to form even an idea of the hopes that were built upon it. From the very first blush of the business, the regular, thorough-going tories, (which, in Scotland, mean those who will take any public employment, and pocket any public money, however improperly or dirtily got,) fancied that the whole consequence of the land was to be entwined around their capacious heads, and the whole wealth of it crammed into their more capacious pockets; and thus, they had given themselves airs, at which an Englishman would have been perfectly thunderstruck. A very respectable and very independent proprietor of the county of Fife told me that, a personage who had acted as tell-tale of their village during the war, and who, for a long time after the peace, continued to sell plots (perhaps at a handsome discount) to the crown lawyers of Scotland, until the ministry put an end to the unavailing traffic, would occasionally be found pacing over his estate, tasting the soil of the fields, and noting down what he was to have sown in each of them, after the king should have put him in possession. The people were quite full of stories of this kind; and I have no doubt that the desire of seeing how these men of high loyalty and higher hopes would act, was one of the chief causes that brought so many provincial people to the Athens; and that the humiliation that these persons met with was, next to the joy at seeing each other happy, one of the greatest boasts that the whole affair yielded. Without a previous knowledge of the political system of Scotland,--the way in which the few vicegerents in the Athens gobble up the loaves and the fishes, how lesser men over the country snap at the crumbs; and how they all growl, and worry, and snarl at other folks, it is quite impossible to form an idea of the insolence by which the little men of office were actuated. As, however, I shall have to discuss this matter when I come to treat of the politics of the Athens, (for it is there that the centre and focus of the system exists,) it would be both premature and unintelligible to notice them here. Wherefore, I shall confine myself to what I saw and heard as touching the levee.