At Edinburgh we were in the wrong season, and many persons we most wished to see were absent.  We had, however, the good fortune to find Dr. Andrew Combe, who received us with great kindness.  I was impressed with great and affectionate respect, by the benign and even temper of his mind, his extensive and accurate knowledge, accompanied by a large and intelligent liberality.  Of our country he spoke very wisely and hopefully.

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I had the satisfaction, not easily attainable now, of seeing De Quincey for some hours, and in the mood of conversation.  As one belonging to the Wordsworth and Coleridge constellation (he, too, is now seventy years of age), the thoughts and knowledge of Mr. De Quincey lie in the past, and oftentimes he spoke of matters now become trite to one of a later culture.  But to all that fell from his lips, his eloquence, subtle and forcible as the wind, full and gently falling as the evening dew, lent a peculiar charm.  He is an admirable narrator; not rapid, but gliding along like a rivulet through a green meadow, giving and taking a thousand little beauties not absolutely required to give his story due relief, but each, in itself, a separate boon.

I admired, too, his urbanity; so opposite to the rapid, slang, Vivian-Greyish style, current in the literary conversation of the day.  “Sixty years since,” men had time to do things better and more gracefully.

CHALMERS.

With Dr. Chalmers we passed a couple of hours.  He is old now, but still full of vigor and fire.  We had an opportunity of hearing a fine burst of indignant eloquence from him.  “I shall blush to my very bones,” said he, “if the Chaarrch” (sound these two rrs with as much burr as possible, and you will get an idea of his mode of pronouncing that unweariable word,) “if the Chaarrch yield to the storm.”  He alluded to the outcry now raised by the Abolitionists against the Free Church, whose motto is, “Send back the money;” i.e., the money taken from the American slaveholders.  Dr. C. felt, that if they did not yield from conviction, they must not to assault.  His manner in speaking of this gave me a hint of the nature of his eloquence.  He seldom preaches now.

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A Scottish gentleman told me the following story:—­Burns, still only in the dawn of his celebrity, was invited to dine with one of the neighboring so-called gentry, unhappily quite void of true gentle blood.  On arriving, he found his plate set in the servants’ room.  After dinner, he was invited into a room where guests were assembled, and, a chair being placed for him at the lower end of the board, a glass of wine was offered, and he was requested to sing one of his songs for the entertainment, of the company.  He drank off the wine, and thundered forth in reply his grand song “For a’ that and a’ that,” and having finished his prophecy and prayer, nature’s nobleman left his churlish entertainers to hide their heads in the home they had disgraced.