thrown away upon schemes vain, purpose-by a greater number of persons than could less, and frantic, were gathered up and turn- be found in any other street in Europe. Of ed into pursuits which have covered the bar-course this contiguity produced an easy famiren heath with verdure, and exhibited to the iarity and a homely friendliness among neighworld the spectacle of a people enjoying the bours. To read sketches of that old society, is utmost freedom, with the most profound now to read of things as strange to this genesubmission to the law. In the course of ration as the customs of a foreign people. practical improvement, material wealth and Much of it came from our intercourse with substantial freedom, Scotland has far out- France, from which Scotland derived a great stripped nations who could boast of a more portion of her laws. Much of it was native congenial sun, and more fertile territory,--the growth of public events; and much of and she has the more reason to pursue her it had a local origin. Huddled together, onward progress, when she sees the pros- within such a narrow space, the inhabitants trate condition of other peoples, who, with of Edinburgh were acquaintances and friends; less of liberty, were once more formidable rivals; and, with less experience, were better versed in the art of government.

and thus the cultivation of the higher society inter-penetrated and influenced even the lowest. In the ordinary case, the educated portion of a people are far beyond the mass who are doomed to labour, or, as middlemen, are engaged in reselling the products of the crafts. men's industry. They appear frequently to be, not merely persons of a different nation but of a different race. The Plebeians who retired to the Mons Sacer at Rome from the oppressions of the Patricians, and the Athenian cobbler who listened to Demosthenes, spoke Latin and Greek no doubt very bad

Edinburgh, of course, as the capital, felt most prominently the successive changes which have swept over the country. The seat of government-the great focus of the law, and engrossing generally the best educational talent by her university chairs, she long held a pre-eminence-sadly diminished in our time. Before the building of the New Town, Edinburgh consisted of but one principal street, running along the ridge of the hill, leading from the Castle rock, under ly. To Cicero and Demosthenes they might which the houses cowered for protection. with difficulty be intelligible. And so it has From this street diverged others of inferior been with people of the same epoch at parmark, covering an area, the smallest upon ticular periods of their history. The differwhich the capital of a nation, settled for ence was the same and of the same characmany centuries, had ever been built. Now, ter between Macaulay's Highlander, who when Edinburgh has sunk down into the made his savage breakfast from the uncookcharacter of a provincial town, outstripped ed blood he had drawn from his cows, and the in population daily by towns that yesterday contemporary philosophers and literati who were hamlets, inhabited by no wealthy class, and deserted by her native nobility, she yet. retains in the magnificent panorama of natural scenery around her-a source of attraction that no change of manners, fluctuations of trade, or imperial legislation can ever destroy. The architecture of the New Town may be, as Mr. Ruskin tells us, monotonous and in the worst taste; but he has only to recover from the shock-to lift his eyes and view one of the most magnificent pictures of landscape scenery with which the lover of nature was ever gladdened ;-hills and sea all around, followed by rich and cultivated plains, terminated in the far horizon by the dark, abrupt, and barren mountains of the Highlands.

have made their names immortal.

Thus it is that up to a certain stage of every people, the history of one is the history of the rest. What Macaulay states as characteristic of the Scottish Highlanders, was observed by Bruce, as a peculiar custom among the savages of Abyssinia. The characteristics ascribed to a nation, are up to that stage peculiar and personal to a class, and not general and applicable to the whole community. The best-known men of a country, the most prominent spirits of the age in which they live, are erroneously selected as the types of a whole people; from the mass of whom they differ in the degree in which Sir Isaac Newton differed from one of Lovat's gillies. But there are times when, In Cockburn's younger days, the popula- although French history reads like Scotch, tion of the capital was congregated within the epoch or the event inevitably comes, the Old Town, crowded in the lofty tene- which sends the nation away upon its own ments which now give an air of picturesque peculiar track, and leavens the whole mass and medieval grandeur to the deserted quar- of the people with an impress which gives ter; not one, but oftener twenty or thirty families of the higher classes of society burrowed tier upon tier, so that the High Street of Edinburgh in those days was inhabited

them a character of their own. Some striking event that has stirred up society from its depths, some great crisis that has evoked the passions or aroused the torpid attention

of the most miserable serf whose fate con- | at home and alone. It is always some signed him to a life of isolated labour, gives scene of domestic conviviality either in my a direction and a bias which, of course, in- own house or in a friend's.' And this is dividual minds had begun, but which it re- the man who can envy the bibulous capacity quires little of individual interference to of ancient Hermand, and that older school. retain. Here is a solution of Cockburn's scanty law. But the peculiarities of Edinburgh society "When," said Sydney Smith, writing from were such, that the broad line which marks his Yorkshire parsonage many long years off one order of minds from another, was after he had bidden Edinburgh farewellmuch obliterated. The professor found in" when shall I see Scotland again! Never the humble caddie of the street corner an in- shall I forget the happy days I passed there telligent and rational being, for whom edu- amidst odious smells, barbarous sounds, bad cation did something, but for whom local suppers, excellent hearts, and most enlightpeculiarities did more. Bartoline Saddle- ened and cultivated understandings.". tree, with his scraps of Latin and of legal (Smith's Life, vol. ii. p. 115.) And they wisdom, was a type of not a few of the were the most hospitable of men. They Edinburgh shopkeepers. People lived hud- judged a man over his meals. "Here's dled together in such a way that it was im- a new man of genius arrived; put on the possible to preserve that absence of famili- stewpan; fry away; we'll soon get it all arity which separates so widely class from class, in feelings and mode of thought. The lady of fashion in those days had her house in the third story of the tenement in which Saddletree had his shop; and it was difficult to inspire the mercantile mind with awe of the ancestral greatness or lofty position in life of his customer,-all whose vulgar wants and necessities were satisfied at his own door, and whom he familiarly met upon the common stair which took him, when his shop was shut, to his own dwelling in the thirteenth story.

out of him." Such was Sydney's pithy view of it, as Moore records in his Memoirs.

We have fallen upon an iron age since then. We have, at least,-if we have not weaker heads, undoubtedly more imperfect digestions, and contrive now to crush into one feast, over which dulness and formality preside, as much of eating and drinking, as would have procured for Cockburn and his merry set those delightful suppers for a twelvemonth.

We have got rid, however, of filth. A man may pass through the Edinburgh Sydney Smith and Cockburn dwell with wynds, even in the lowest quarter, without rapture upon the joyous entertainments of fear, as Doctor Johnson found it, of seeing Edinburgh suppers; and Cockburn mourns his full flowing periwig moistened into flacover the revolution that has chased from cidity. It is an event now to hear of that civilized society what "has immemoriably which half a century ago was common. It been a favourite Edinburgh repast.' He is not the rule now for a gentleman to get sadly says, "that it is now falling into pal- drunk, even though he does not mean to retry wine and water in many houses. Sup- join the ladies; and if he does go to a tavper is cheaper than dinner; shorter, less ern, he preserves his fame for manliness even ceremonious and more poetical. The busi- when he maintains his sobriety. Yet, says ness of the day is over, and its still fresh Cockburn, "To get drunk in a tavern seemed events interest; it is chiefly intimate asso- to be considered as a natural, if not an inciates that are drawn together at that fami- tended, consequence of going to one. Swearliar hour of which night deepens the social- ing was thought the right, and the mark of ity. If there be any fun, or heart and spirit a gentleman. And tried by this test, noin a man at all, it is then, if ever, it will ap- body who had not seen them could now be pear. So far as I have seen social life, its made to believe how many gentlemen there brightest sunshine has been in the last re- were. Not that people were worse tempast of the day." But what of the morning pered then than now. They were only headache! and what of the morrow's work! coarser in their manners, and had got into a and what of the unprepared counsel who, bad style of admonition and dissent. And with hot and shaking hands and glaring eyes, the evil provoked its own continuance; beunties for the first time in Court the strings cause nobody who was blamed cared for of the case when he is called upon to open it. the censure, or understood that it was seriJudges and clients, and the professional con- ous, unless it was clothed in execration; and science must have been easily satisfied in any intensity even of kindness or of logic those old days when a counsel in full practice that was not embodied in solid commination, could state this fact: "I doubt if from the evaporated, and was supposed to have been year 1811, when I married, I have closed meant to evaporate, in the very uttering."— above one day in the month of my town life (Memorials, p. 32.)

bour of Scotch Appeals. Three, four, and five years did cases drag their slow length along; and even then they failed sometimes to have execution done upon them, but were returned to the Court of Session, to begin upon a better tack. He ingeniously rid himself of appeals upon questions of fact, by getting the judgment of the Court of Session declared final. It was also proposed, with the view of preventing appeals, that an intermediate Court should be established in Scotland-a course which received the sanction of the Faculty of Advocates, which was taken up by the Whig Government of 1806, and which would have been inevitably carried had that Government lived. It received the support of Cockburn, although in his Memorials he condemns it; and it is fortunate for the country at the present day, that a scheme so absurd, ponderous, and expensive, as another Scotch Court, with a Chancellor at its head, was not inaugurated here. It would not have prevented a single appeal, while it undoubtedly would have been productive of irritation and public clamour, that would have reacted upon the law itself.

Lord Cockburn had little opportunity, till he himself became Solicitor-General, of rendering assistance to the cause of legal reform. There was, however, one subject in which he seems to have been greatly interested, and which is now deserving of particular attention -the Court of Appeal. Among the many things of which our favoured age has been able to pluck prolific fruit, there must be included the improvement of the law. On all sides we are surrounded with "earnest" men, who have a mission to accomplish, and who are ever ready to set theories against results. Indeed, there are few things in which there is so little thrift as in the zeal for law reform. It flows on unchecked by obstacles, though twisted into devious windings, to end, for want of good engineering, in a marsh. When its force becomes overwhelming, and obtains an occasional triumph, the result is the laying up in store for those who have to extract clearness from chaos, a burden that only use renders endurable. Each session now holds out its vernal promise, and ends with its autumnal fulfilment of it in the shape of new laws, which tear up by the root the old familiar The House of Lords, as a Supreme Court landmarks, a knowledge of the bearing of of Appeal, is the most singular institution which was the attainment of the slow labour now existing in a country prolific of instituof many years. In old age, the lawyer has tions which have outlived their usefulness. every year to go to school. It is not mere- The great British community is but imperly the acquisition of new knowledge, but the fectly described by any of the terms that more difficult effort to forget the old, that refer it to the constructive industry and wisannually weighs him to the earth. When dom of man. There are few things in this Cockburn and Jeffrey had read Erskine, they country which have been the product of a had acquired all the necessary law of their peremptory decree like that which an autoprofession. When they shut the volume crat, having to consider no will but his own, and laid it on the shelf, their legal studies daily issues on the introduction of new rewere at an end. They had not an annual forms. The institutions of this country recurring volume of statutes, a volume of have grown velut arbor avo; and their reports of civil cases, another of criminal growth has been spontaneous and irregular. cases, another of cases in the House of Lords, They have come down to us from an antiand finally, the decisions in the English Courts, which seem to be quoted as frequently in Scotland as our own. After all these have been read, digested, and noted up, there is little time either for the suppers that Cockburn delighted in, or for labour other than that bought with vulgar hire. It was a proposal of his, that all the books in law which we now possess, and particularly the infinite volumes of decisions, should be heaped together in one vast holocaust, and reduced to dust and ashes, so that we might all start the race afresh, jus facere, which is so much easier than jus dicere.

quity more or less remote; and fulfilling
their purpose well on the aggregate, they
are seldom troubled by that audacious spirit
of organization which has given to other
countries a civil code, clear cut, to meet
every exigency of human life, and to render
legislation unnecessary for ever.
It is only
when public attention is aroused by a public
scandal or in some other startling way, that
an abuse becomes the subject of a popular
outery which will have its victim.

The crisis of the House of Lords recently seemed to be at hand. It did seem incongruous that the supreme tribunal of apIn Lord Eldon's days, the litigiousness of peal of a great nation should be one in which our ancestors was not less than that of their not one of the proceedings, however fitted descendants. A master like that great for a deliberative assembly, was suited for the Judge of the virtue of procrastination, with- administration of positive law, a place out which Courts of justice would cease where the Judges give their opinions as if to be, he did much to save himself the la- they were upon the platform, and use

that the dog's owner shall make reparation; the law of England, that the madness of the dog was an accident, for which its owner was not responsible; and the House of Lords reversed the Scotch Judgment, and gave us a better rule.-The law of Scotland says, that where a number of children born in different parishes become proper objects of parochial relief on the death of their pa rents, each shall be sent to his own parish, -one to Galloway, one to Shetland, one to Lanarkshire; and thus in their misfortune the sacred tie of brotherhood is severed, in all probability never again to be united. This may be law, but certainly it is not humanity. The House of Lords reversed it,

towards each other and to the Courts which justice. A dog peaceful and artless in its they are reviewing the impassioned language usual demeanour, suddenly gets into bad with which, three hours later, they vilify the company, or falls mad, and worries a neighpolitical conduct of each other, where the bour's sheep. The law of Scotland says, whole atmosphere is charged with party spirit and party associations, and in which there has often been exhibited a fierceness of temper from the collision simply of opposing opinion, such as to take away all that respect that one would otherwise feel for a Court guided by exact habits of thought, and moving to its purpose in harmonious action. With regard to Scotland, a still more extraordinary spectacle is exhibited in the circumstance that this High Court of appeal is as ignorant of our laws as of the laws of Otaheite. The Bar of the House of Lords, when a Scotch appeal is on, is, to a Scotch lawyer, the most amusing place in London. The counsel who plead, the judges who hear, make such havoc not merely of the law but kept all the children together, and sent of the legal nomenclature, (which being of them to the parish of their father.-Sir Roman origin ought to be intelligible to George Mackenzie, in the last days of the every person acquainted with general juris- Stuart dynasty, introduced into the Scottish prudence,) that in the hearing of it a Scottish Parliament that statute which has locked up lawyer can find such an amount of sober the land of Scotland under the fetters of enamusement, as renders it unnecessary for that tails, under the operation of which vast tracts day to search out farther diversion in the of country have been accumulated, and are metropolis. The Scotch forms of process, yearly accumulating, in the hands of a few the Scotch judges, their opinions, are treated individuals, bringing in its train many great in a fashion not complimentary to the na-national and social evils. It was impossible tional vanity or to our judicial dignity. for the Courts of law to repeal a legislative Still, while overwhelming us with contempt, enactment, but they could modify its evils; the House of Lords are found asking the and so the House of Lords introduced that meaning of ordinary Scotch legal terms, and principle of strict construction of these deeds, rules and forms of process, of any counsel which treats the intention of the entailer as at the Bar acquainted with Scottish law. of no moment, and which has so often done Of course the result is, that amid the chaos justice by opening up an estate to creditors of unintelligible sounds which ring around or a female line. A master employs a hunthe head of the devoted Chancellor, he takes dred workmen, selected with care and judg. refuge in that which he understands; and if ment; they are all put at their various posts, the English law is applicable, he applies it. -one to dig, another to carry, another to The battle of Bannockburn has been fought build, another to work the steam-engine; in vain! The Treaty of Union which pro- and at a particular moment, through the vides that there shall be no appeal to the carelessness of one, his neighbour's life is Courts of Westminster Hall, has been cun- lost. Shall the master, 100 miles away, be ningly evaded! Scotia has become the answerable pecuniarily to the dead man's bond-maid of her old enemy; and a conquest widow, or shall it be the wrongdoer? The far more effectual has been achieved, not by law of Scotland rejects the master's plea, legal astuteness but by legal ignorance, than that if he is made responsible for a thing he was effected by all the arms of Edward. did not authorize, and which, if not contrary And what is the result? What else could to his express order, was inconsistent with be expected than judgments directly at va- the regulations of his mill, it would be imriance with the law of the country from possible, in the face of such responsibilities, which the case was brought? And yet take to carry on with safety any of these manuit with all its faults, with all its presumption, facturing establishments, in which, from the ignorance, and error, it has proved one of carelessness of the workmen, there is an the greatest blessings that was given to Scot-ever-recurring loss of life. The master is, land by the Union. Its very errors have leant | according to the law of Scotland, liable. It to virtue's side. In many cases where it is otherwise in England; and the case now has thrust upon Scotland the English law, waits reversal in the House of Lords. its decision has leant to common sense and Such are a specimen of these decisions

in which the supreme tribunal assumes to press) is the place which, for generations, itself the power of legislative action. In has been selected for discussing the conduct every one of these cases, and indeed in of English Judges.

every one of the reversals that have been It is not, however, seemly or decorous pronounced for upwards of a century, many that the House of Lords, in the person of of which have been, and are now, submitted its grave Chancellor, should be made to to with restive and ungracious reluctance afford amusement to Scottish lawyers. It by the Scottish Courts, is there a wisdom is not decorous that the great master in and practical good sense highly complimen- Israel should, when called upon to expound tary to the English intellect. But the ben- the law, be engaged in acquiring the eleefit of the House of Lords does not consist ments of knowledge; and as Scotland has so much in its direct action as in its indi- furnished nearly three-fourths of his labour, rect influence. The Scottish Courts are it is right that she should be represented in situated remote from the seat of the legis- the Court. It is said that if a Scotch lawture, and away from the eye of Govern- yer were introduced, he would bring_with ment, and administer a law unintelligible to him the contracted notions of his EdinEnglishmen. The counsel in employment burgh prejudices, and that to his judgment are outnumbered by the very Judges on the other members of the Court would the Bench. The press seldom interferes bend. This result has been arrived at with the proceedings which it does not un- without keeping in view the influence upon derstand; and thus circumstances appear to poor human nature of the change of scene. have been so adjusted as to give to the A few months in a London atmosphere, and Courts that most dangerous of all tempta- upon the dizzy height to which he had been tions, unchecked authority. On a former elevated, would be sufficient to separate a occasion, we defended the appointment of a transplanted Scottish lawyer from the parSheriff not resident in his county, on the tialities supposed to be incident to a provinground that he is not mingled with the cial position. The time would not be long strifes of the practitioners in his court, only when, on occasional journeys to London, casually acquainted with the magnates one would be startled at finding country so within his jurisdiction, and therefore bring- much forgotten, that the voice no longer ing to every case a mind more unbiassed seemed familiar, and the mode of speech than one over whom the sinister influence strange. So far from influencing the Engof social and local spirit operated, and so lish members of the Court, we rather think do we now maintain that a Court of appeal that the opposite would be the case; and in Scotland would be a death-blow to pub- that in endeavouring to acquire their accent, lic confidence in the administration of jus- he would acquire their mode of view. The tice. The observation is made irrespective benefit of his presence there, however, would of times or persons. The same influences, be to save the Court from the infliction of though slower in their operation, would still unnecessary elementary harangues; from work upon the minds of a Scotch Court, every imposition of error upon them as truth; one of whom was a Duncan Forbes, in whose from ridiculous blunders in matters which placid equity and mediating wisdom all men it is not so much a virtue to know, as a discould trust, as upon one composed of mean- grace to be ignorant of; and thus by giving er minds. The fact that there does exist a accuracy to the judgments of the House in Court of review, before which partiality, in- matters of detail, would preserve to it a temperance, or ignorance may be exposed, position of respectability. operates as an invisible but all-powerful This problem will be solved in a manner safeguard. Its main and pre-eminent re- that would have broken Cockburn's heart. commendation is not so much to correct That two nations speaking the same lanerror and supply the defects of native guage-under the Legislature and Sovelearning, as to fortify the feebleness of hu- reign-should be under the government of man resolutions. It matters not that the different laws, is a thing that will not last tribunal of review is ignorant. The fact in all probability beyond this generation. that it exists is enough; and that it will, Consolidation of the two systems on the according to the measure of its knowledge, principle of preferring neither, but of selectdeal justice to the parties irrespective of ing the better parts of both, would be worthose local sinister influences that may have thy of a century the most remarkable in clouded the judgment of the members of history for the number and magnitude of the Court below. Parliament, at a distance its reforms. Of course there will be a of 400 miles, is only a feeble check upon struggle, and many a sad regret, before the proceedings of Courts administering a Scotland surrenders her position of an unforeign law; while Parliament (with the real nationality, and the feeling of a jealous