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LETTER XXXIX.

TO THE SAME.

I HAVE endeavoured to give you some notion of the present state of the Bar and Bench of Scotland-and I have done so, it may be, at greater length than you were prepared to expect. The individuals whom I have pourtrayed are all, however, men of strong and peculiar intellectual conformation; and therefore, without taking their station or functions into view, they cannot be unworthy of detaining, as individuals, some considerable portion of a traveller's attention. In our age, when so much oil is poured upon the whole surface of the ocean of life, that one's eye can, for the most part, see nothing but the smoothness and the flatness of uniformity, it is a most refreshing thing to come upon some

sequestered bay, where the breakers still gambol along the sands, and leap up against the rocks as they used to do. I fear, that ere long such luxury will be rarer even in Scotland than it now is; and, indeed, from all I hear, nothing can be more distinct and remarkable than the decrease in the quantum of it, which has occurred within the memory even of persons of my own time of life. The peculiarities, which appear to me so strong and singular in the present worthies of the Parliament-House, are treated with infinite disdain by my friend W, for example, who ridicules them as being only the last feeble gleanings of a field, which he himself remembers to have seen bending beneath the load of its original fertility.

The Bench of former days, he represents to have been a glorious harvest of character, and he deplores its present condition, as, with scarcely more than a single exception, one of utter and desolate barrenness. He himself remembers the Lord Justice Clerk Macqueen of Braxfield, and he assures me, that, since his death, the whole exterior of judicial deportment has been quite altered and I verily believe he thinks it has been altered for the worse, although there are

few of his opinions, probably, in which he is more singular than in this. Over the mantlepiece of his study, he has a very fine print of this old Judge, in his full robes of office, which he seldom looks at without taking occasion to introduce some strange grotesque anecdote of its original. If the resemblance of the picture be exact, as he says it is, old Braxfield must indeed have been a person, whom nobody could for an instant suppose to be one of the ordinary race of mortals. His face is broad, and the whole of its muscles appear to be firm and ponderous in their texture-you cannot suppose that such were ever nourished upon kickshaws-they have obviously borrowed their substance from a stintless regimen of beef, brandy, and claret. His nose is set well into his forehead, as if Nature, in making him, had determined to grudge no expenditure of bone. His mouth wears a grin of ineffable sagacity, derision, and coarse uncontrollable humour, all mingled with a copious allowance of sensuality. He must have had a most tyrannical quantity of Will, to judge from the way in which the wig sits on the top of his head; and nothing, indeed, can be more expressive of determined resolution than the glance of his light eyes beneath their pent-house brows,

although from the style in which they are set, one sees that they must have been accustomed to roll about, more than the eyes of stedfast and masculine men are commonly used to do. I should think it impossible that any joke could have been too coarse for this man's digestion ; he must have experienced sensations of paradisiacal delight in reading Swift's description of the dalliance between Gulliver and Glumdalclitch. Even the Yahoos neighing by the riverside, must have been contemplated by him with the most unmingled suavity.-It is, by the way, a strange enough thing, how many of our great English authors seem to have united the utmost activity and shrewdness of intellect, and commanding thorough-going pertinacity of character, with an intolerable relish for all the coarser kinds of jests. The breed of such men was continued uninterruptedly from Echard to Swift and his brethren, and from Swift to Warburton and his brethren. These were all churchmen; had Braxfield been in the church, he must have been an author, and I doubt not he would have caught the falling mantle. I should like to see a portrait of the Cardinal, for whose edification Poggio compiled his Facetia; I dare say, there