lack of what the musicians call expression, which gives a local and
provincial effect to his conversation, however, in other respects,
learned and intelligent. It is so with his manners; he conducts
himself with equal ease, self-possession, and discernment, but the
flavour of the metropolitan style is wanting.

I have been led to make these remarks by what I noticed in the
guests whom I met on Friday at young Argent's. It was a small
party, only five strangers; but they seemed to be all particular
friends of our host, and yet none of them appeared to be on any
terms of intimacy with each other. In Edinburgh, such a party would
have been at first a little cold; each of the guests would there
have paused to estimate the characters of the several strangers
before committing himself with any topic of conversation. But here,
the circumstance of being brought together by a mutual friend,
produced at once the purest gentlemanly confidence; each, as it
were, took it for granted, that the persons whom he had come among
were men of education and good-breeding, and, without deeming it at
all necessary that he should know something of their respective
political and philosophical principles, before venturing to speak on
such subjects, discussed frankly, and as things unconnected with
party feelings, incidental occurrences which, in Edinburgh, would
have been avoided as calculated to awaken animosities.

But the most remarkable feature of the company, small as it was,
consisted of the difference in the condition and character of the
guests. In Edinburgh the landlord, with the scrupulous care of a
herald or genealogist, would, for a party, previously unacquainted
with each other, have chosen his guests as nearly as possible from
the same rank of life; the London host had paid no respect to any