pitable and generous to an extreme. Anstruther became unpopular with the profession, because he used to hear causes which were not worth the expense of the Supreme Court, in a sort of private cutchery at his own house; but they were chiefly petty matters of litigation, which, if an attorney had got hold of, would have ruined both parties. Now, there were most scandalous practices in the Mayor's Court, which I am old enough to remember; yet, upon the whole, the suitors found substantial justice. The bench consisted of some very intelligent and upright magistrates, and, notwithstanding some suspicions were afloat as to their having been bribed in one or two cases involving a large amount of property, they were suspicions which fell only on one or two, and were, I am inclined to believe, quite groundless. The practitioners there were men of good common wholesome sense: no great lawyers, but for that reason not very adroit in the quirks and quibbles of the profession."

I must again protest against the conclusion likely to be drawn by some of my readers, that, in detailing these conversations, I am identifying the opinions of this excellent old gentleman with my own. On the contrary, I think that his pictures are frequently overcharged, too much shadowed

with the dark Rembrandt hue, in which he has accustomed himself to contemplate that which is bad, to exhibit with sufficient effect those streaks of good, which a more unprejudiced investigation would discover in every institution devised for a beneficial purpose. He was in all probability deeply impregnated with that exclusive corporation spirit, which in different proportions characterizes the civil service of India; for it is notorious that, from the first to the last, the little community appended to the Supreme Court has been considered an heterogeneous infusion into the English society of the presidencies. They never mixed cordially together. The sudden affluence of these legal adventurers, and their immense emoluments, have never been subjects of very complacent contemplation out of the profesional circle; and I have often heard my friend vent his disgust at the wives and daughters of the lawyers, and tell amusing anecdotes of the whole settlement being set together by the ears, when those amiable creatures advanced their foolish pretensions to precedency. In short, it was an ancient grudge, and he had imbibed it in all its bitterness; for during his long residence in India, as he told me, he had made it the rule of his life," to shun all Calcutta lawyers and their women," with one exception only.

I was of course anxious to know who it was that was honoured with such a reservation. "It was Bobus Smith," he said; the only barrister he ever recollected there, who was at once a man of genius, literature, and law. As for the rest, he could not call to mind a single individual of the bar, who had so much as common talent, unless a certain degree and kind of talent must be presumed from the great fortunes they carried home with them. Allowing, however, the weight which these prejudices must have had in his estimates, it would be irrational to deny the almost entire want of adaptation in the Supreme Court to the habits and usages of the native population. If it must remain, it is a luxury fitted only for the English. The technical complication of its procedure; the dilatoriness of its adjudications on the equity side, that part of its jurisdiction to which questions of stupendous magnitude respecting the disposition of property are always referred; the large sums extorted from the suitors in the shape of fees to the officers, and costs to the attornies, not to omit the extravagant remuneration of the counsel; are manifest evils, and would be hideous deformities in any system of judicature; but the evil becomes aggravated tenfold, and the deformity still more heightened, in a judicature intended for a people who have been

taught only to venerate law when it is simple in its forms and prompt in its decisions. The policy of that institution is on other grounds more than doubtful.

For surely the genius of confusion himself must have presided over the counsels of the statesmen, who projected the King's Supreme Court of Judicature for India. Two authorities co-existing and independent were thus erected, as if those notable projectors had made trial of their skill merely to frame a political problem to perplex and astonish. These two authorities, acting harmoniously together, proceeding in the same course towards the same beneficent end for which both were instituted, would have been a problem still more puzzling, by which reason would be set at nought and experience rendered ridiculous. The world has not yet seen, the world will never see, two elements so repugnant in their natures, assimilated in their operations. Strife is the law and condition of their mutual existence; collision is their necessary and inherent tendency, their sure and inevitable result. Was it long before the tendency and the result began to display themselves? Every body acquainted with the history of British India, has heard of the enormous strides of jurisdiction made by Sir Elijah Impey, and his passive and stupid colleagues, in 1782.

It was but the other day (not to mention innumerable intervening instances) that the King's court at Bombay made their very modest attempt to bring all the late Peishwa's territories within the ringfence of its jurisdiction. The battle was as fairly fought out, as, with the evident odds in point of physical strength, it could be; but it was fought. The court demanded obedience to its writ; the government exacted obedience to its power. The "two authorities were up." What dissentions arose between the court at Madras and the local government, in the time of Lord Powis, respecting the immunity of the Nabob of Arcot from the King's process! Those bickerings have broken out in repeated subsequent fits.

But one of the collisions of the Supreme Court at Calcutta, though of a very recent date, has attracted little attention; yet it was one only of those innumerable cases in which that court have exercised their summum jus, so as to make it the summa injuria to the natives; and it involved a most indecent conflict with the Zillah court, a conflict which, in respect of principle, is a conflict with the government.

The house of M*** and Co., in Calcutta, had advanced considerable sums to a mercantile house established at Furruckabad, in the Western provin