DEAR DAVID,

ALTHOUGH my sole purpose, or nearly so, in coming to Scotland, was to see and converse with the illustrious men who live here, I have been in Edinburgh for a fortnight, and can scarcely say that I have as yet seen even the faces of most of them. What with lounging about in the mornings with Wastle, and claret in the evening, and routs and balls at night, I fear I am fast getting into a very unprofitable life. The only very great man here, to whom I had letters of introduction, was Mr Scott, and he happened to go out of town for a few weeks, I believe the very day after my arrival. I forwarded my letter to him in the country, however, and he has invited me to pay him a visit there, at the castle he has just built upon the banks of the Tweed. My friends have been so attentive, however, as to send me letters for Mr Mackenzie the Man of Feeling, Mr Jeffrey, Mr Playfair, and several other men of note, on both sides of the question; so that I shall now see as much as I please of all the Dons. I shall take the opportunity of Wastle's absence, to call upon all these gentlemen; for, excepting Mr Scott and Mr Mackenzie, he has no acquaintance with any of them. I believe, indeed, there is little love lost between him and them—and I wish to see things with my own eyes.

Of all the celebrated characters of this place, I rather understand that Jeffrey is the one whom travellers are commonly most in a hurry to see—not surely, that the world, in general, has any such deep and abiding feeling of admiration for him, or any such longing to satisfy their eyes with gazing on his features, as they have with regard to such a man as Scott, or even Stewart; but I think the interest felt with respect to him is of a more vivacious and eager kind, and they rush with all speed to gratify it—exactly as men give immediate vent to their petty passions, who have no difficulty, or rather, indeed, who have a sort of pleasure, in nursing silently, and concealing long, those of a more serious and grave importance.