for the improvement of his situation."

He left Edinburgh with very mixed feelings, for he hated the place and
loved its inhabitants. He called it "that energetic and unfragrant city."
He dwelt in memory on its "odious smells, barbarous sounds, bad suppers,
excellent hearts, and most enlightened and cultivated understandings."

"No nation," he said, "has so large a stock of benevolence of heart,
as the Scotch. Their temper stands anything but an attack on their
climate. They would have you even believe they can ripen fruit; and,
to be candid, I must own in remarkably warm summers I have tasted
peaches that made most excellent pickles; and it is upon record that
at the Siege of Perth, on one occasion the ammunition failing, their
nectarines made admirable cannon-balls. Even the enlightened mind of
Jeffrey cannot shake off the illusion that myrtles flourish at Craig
Crook.[22] In vain I have represented to him that they are of the
genus _Carduus_, and pointed out their prickly peculiarities....
Jeffrey sticks to his myrtle illusions, and treats my attacks with as
much contempt as if I had been a wild visionary, who had never
breathed his caller air, nor lived and suffered under the rigour of
his climate, nor spent five years in discussing metaphysics and
medicine in that garret of the earth--that knuckle-end of
England--that land of Calvin, oatcakes, and sulphur."

As soon as he reached England, he wrote to his friend Jeffrey:--

"I left Edinburgh with great heaviness of heart; I knew what I was
leaving, and was ignorant to what I was going. My good fortune will be
very great, if I should ever again fall into the society of so many
liberal, correct, and instructed men, and live with them on such terms