through which the swimming pupil shot faint and languid rays, that were more eloquent than words.

And yet his words, though they came slowly, and fell heavily, were far better than eloquent. The criminal had been the son of respectable parents-and he was yet young and he had no hope but in their mercy; and well did his advocate know what topics to press on men that were themselves sons and fathers-and themselves conscious of weaknesses and errors and transgressions. It was now that I felt, in all its potency, the intense propriety of the native dialect, in which he chose to deliver himself. The feel'ings and sympathies which he wished to nourish -the reverend images which he wished to call up in aid of his failing argument-would have appeared weak and dim in comparison, had they been set forth in any other than the same speech to whose music the ears around him had been taught to thrill in infancy. The operation of translating them into a less familiar tongue, would have chilled the fresh fervour of

"Those common thoughts of Mother Earth,
Her simplest thoughts, her simplest tears."

He knew that "Man's heart is an holy thing," and had no fear of offending by the simplicity of the words in which he clothed his worship.

The person against whom Mr Cockburn is most frequently pitched in the Jury Court for civil cases, is Mr Jeffrey; and after what I have said of both, you will easily believe that it is a very delightful thing to witness the different means by which these two most accomplished speakers endeavour to attain the same ends. It is the wisest thing either of them can do, to keep as wide as possible from the track which Nature has pointed out to the other, and both are in general so wise as to follow implicitly and exclusively her infallible direction, In the play of his wit, the luxuriance of his imagination, the beauty of his expression, Mr Jeffrey is as much beyond his rival, as in the depth of his reasoning, and the ge

neral richness and commanding energy of his whole intellect. In a case where the reason of his hearers alone is concerned, he has faculties which enable him to seize from the beginning, and preserve to the end, a total and unquestioned superiority. There is no speaker in Britain that deals out his illustrations with so princely a profusion, or heaps upon every image and every thought, that springs from an indefatigable intellect, so lavish a garniture of most exquisite and most apposite language. There is no man who generalizes with a tact so masterly as Jeffrey; no multiplicity of facts can distract or dazzle him for a moment; he has a clue that brings him safe and triumphant out of every labyrinth, and he walks in the darkest recesses of his detail, with the air and the confidence of one that is sure of his conclusion, and sees it already bright before him, while every thing is Chaos and Erebus to his bewildered attendants. The delight which he communicates to his hearers, by the display of powers so extraordinary, is sufficient to make them rejoice in the confession of their own inferiority; careless of the point to which his steps are turned, they soon are satisfied to gaze upon his brightness, and be contented that such a star cannot lead them into darkness. A

plain man, who for the first time is addressed by him, experiences a kind of sensation to which he has heretofore been totally a stranger. It is like the cutting off the cataract from a blind man's eye, when the first glorious deluge of light brings with it anything rather than distinctness of vision. He has no leisure to think of the merits of the case before him; he is swallowed up in dumb overwhelming wonder of the miraculous vehicle, in which one side of it is expounded. The rapidity with which word follows word, and image follows image, and argument follows argument, keeps his intellect panting in vain to keep up with the stream, and gives him no time to speculate on the nature of the shores along which he is whirled, or the point towards which he is carried.

But when the object of all this breathless wonder has made an end of speaking, it is not to be doubted that a plain, sensible, and conscientious person, who knows that the sacred cause of justice is to be served or injured by the decision which he himself must give, may very naturally experience a very sudden and a very uncomfortable revulsion of ideas. That distrust of himself, which had attended and grown upon him all the while he listened, may now perhaps give way, in

no inconsiderable measure, to distrust of the orator, whose winged words are yet ringing in his aching ears. The swiftness of the career has been such, that he cannot, on reflection, gather anything more than a very vague and unsatisfactory idea of the particular steps of his progress, and it is no wonder that he should pause a little before he decide with himself, that there is no safer and surer issue to which he might have been conducted in some less brilliant vehicle, and with some less extraordinary degree of speed. Nor can anything be more likely to affect the mind of a person pausing and hesitating in this way, with a delightful feeling of refreshment and security, than the simple, leisurely, and unostentatious manner in which such a speaker as Mr Cockburn may commence an address which has for its object to produce a quite opposite impression. When he sees a face so full of apparent candour and simplicity, and hears accents of so homely a character, and is allowed time to ponder over every particular statement as it is made, and consider with himself how it hinges upon that which has preceded, before he is called upon to connect it with something that is to follow-it is no wonder that he should feel as if he had returned to his own home after a flight in a para