Scotch Wut


IT requires (says Sydney Smith) a surgical operation to get a joke well

into a Scotch understanding. Their only idea of wit, or rather that

inferior variety of the electric talent which prevails occasionally in

the North, and which, under the name of Wut, is so infinitely

distressing to people of good taste, is laughing immoderately at stated

intervals. They are so imbued with metaphysics that they even make love

metaphysically. I overheard a young lady of my acquaintance, at a dance

in Edinburgh, exclaim, in a sudden pause of the music, What you say, my

lord, is very true of love in the aibstract, but---- Here the

fiddlers began fiddling furiously, and the rest was lost.



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