It is not, however, as a speaker, that Mr. Moncrieff has his greater game before him. Mr. Clerk has past his grand climacteric; and unless universal rumour say falsely, Mr. Cranstoun is about to retire. There is no question, whenever either of these leaders is removed, his baton of command must come into the strenuous grasp of Mr. Moncrieff. Already he is a great and profound lawyer, so far as knowledge is concerned, and the natural energy of his intellect will by every-day's practice increase its power of throwing new light upon what is known to himself and to others. Moreover, in these Scottish Courts, a very great proportion' of the most important pleadings are carried on in writing—a department in which Mr. Moncrieff has few rivals at present, and in all probability will, ere long, have none. For it is not to be supposed, that either Mr. Jeffrey or Mr. Cockburn, or any other barrister who possesses the more popular and fascinating kinds of elocution, will ever choose to interfere, to any considerable extent, with a style of practice so much more laborious. It is quite evident, that Mr. Moncrieff is within sight of the very summit of his profession; and it does not seem as if there were any one lower down the hill, who might be likely, by any bold and sudden movement, to reach the post of honour before him.

Another speaker of considerable note is Mr. Murray, the sanie gentleman of whom I spoke as presiding at the Burns's Dinner last month. This barrister is in some respects so very near the point of excellence, that the first time one hears bim, one cannot help wondering that he should not be more talked of than he is. Of all his brother advocates, with the single exception of Mr. Cranstoun, he has the most courtly presence and demeanour. His features are good, although not striking; his smile has something very agreeable in it; and bis gestures are as elegant as Mr. Cranstoun's, and infinitely. more easy. When he gets upon a sarcastic key, he keeps dallying with it in a very light, loving, and graceful manner, and is altogether very much calculated for delighting any popular audience in an ordinary case. As pleasantry, however, is his chief forte, it cannot be expected that he should attain through that alone to the first-rate eminence of favour and reputation, so long as he has to enter the lists with the far more pure and classical wit of Mr. Cranstoun, the more copious and brilliant wit of Mr. Jeffrey, and the more effectual, irresistible, sheer humour of Mr. Clerk or Mr. Cockburn.

As for pathos, I hope he will never attempt it; if he does adventure upon such an Icarian flight, it will certainly be, like his prototype, mox daturus nomina ponto.

These are all that are ever in the present time talked of as great speakers at the Scottish Bar. At whatever corner of the Parliament-House you may happen to take your stand, you are almost sure to be within hearing of one or other of them, or within the rush of listeners setting in towards the quarter where one or other of them is expected shortly to make his appearance. There are several, however, who would very fain be supposed to belong to the same class with these, and some, no doubt, who may hereafter belong to it. Among the former, conspicuous and loud, I found my old acquaintance, Mr. J. P. Grant, for he has deserted WestminsterHall, and resumed of late the advocate's gown he had worn here in the days of his youth; chiefly, I am told, with an eye to the new Jury Court in civil causes, where he expected his English practice would be of great service to him. I do not discover, however, that his return to the Edinburgh Bar has borne much resemblance either

"To a re-appearing star,
Or a glory from afar."

His extravagant vehemence of gesture, and his foaming cataract of words, seem to be regarded with rather a mortifying kind of indifference by the Juries; and as for the Judges, nothing can be less likely to prove effective in demolishing their quiet and resolute defensiveness, than that incessant crash of ill-directed artillery which is levelled against them by Mr. Grant. He quite mis-calculates his elevation; there is a most mistaken curve in his parabolas; and the shot of this noisy engineer are all spent before they reach the point at which they are aimed. In short, Mr. Grant is by no means listened to here in Edinburgh with the same attention which he is used to receive from the House of Commons; so that the rule about lawyers making bad speakers in Parliament may be considered as exactly contradicted in this instance. Not that Mr. Grant is a good speaker even in Parliament, but there he certainly is a useful one, and apparently an acceptable one. It would be too much for poor human nature to meet with equal success in every thing. But although I am no admirer of Mr. Grant's eloquence, I assure you I was very

glad to meet once more with an old acquaintance, for whose character, as a gentleman, no one can have a higher respect, and for whose good company over a bottle of good claret, nobody can have a more sincere relish than myself. I spent a very pleasant evening with him yesterday at Mr. J's, where we talked over a thousand old Temple stories, and were as happy as kings. He used to be continually about poor Tom Harris's Chambers, when he lived in Fig-tree Court-I won't say how many years ago.

P. M.

LETTER XXXVII,

TO THE SAME.

THERE is another class of Lawyers, however, who have no ambition of rivalling the Cranstouns and the Jeffreys-who walk in a totally different course from them-and attain in their own walk, if not to an equally splendid, certainly to an almost as lucrative species of reputation. These are the class of your plain, thorough-going, jog-trot Lawyers, who are seldom employed in cases of the very highest importance, but whose sober, regular, business-like manner of doing every thing that is entrusted to them, procures for them an even, uninterrupted, unvarying life of well-paid labour. It is upon these men that the ordinary run of your common-place litigation scatters its constantly refreshing, but seldom brightening dew. The lungs of these men are employed, for a certain number of hours every morning, in pleading, and every evening in dictating. With them, the intellectual mill-borse never stops a moment in his narrow round, unless it be to allow time for eating, drinking, and sleeping. The natural attitude of these men, is that of labouring at a side-bar. Their heads do not feel comfortable when their wigs are off. If they call for a glass of ale during dinner, they astound the lackey with a big phrase from the Style-book. If you carry one of them into the midst of the most magnificent scenery of nature, his thoughts will still tarry behind him within the narrow and dusty precincts of the Parliament-House of Edinburgh. You shall see him pluck a Condescendence from his pocket, and con over its sprawling pages, although the grand

est of mountains be behind, and the most beautiful of lakes

These are the true plodders of the profession-nothing can be more genuine than their obscure devotion-" they and the other slaves of the Lamp!"

During one of my earliest visits to the Parliament-House, when I was picking up from various quarters the first rudiments of that information which I have now been retailing for your benefit, an elderly lawyer, by name Mr. Forsyth, was pointed out to me, I forget by whom, as standing at the head of this class. On talking over these matters with my friend Mr. W―, however, I found reason to doubt whether this person might not be well entitled to take his place among those of a higher order, and the result of my own subsequent observation and diligent attendance on these Courts of Justice, has certainly been to confirm me in this notion of the matter. There is, indeed, something so very singular and characteristic in the whole appearance of Mr. Forsyth, that, even at first sight, I should scarcely have been persuaded, without some difficulty, to set him down as a mere ordinary drudge of his profession. I am so deeply imbued with the prejudices of a physiognomist and a craniologist, that I could not be easily brought to think there was nothing extraordinary in one on whom nature had stamped so very peculiar a signet.

I have never seen a countenance that combined, in such a strange manner, originality of expression with features of common-place formation. His forehead is indeed massy and square, so far as it is seen; but his wig comes so low down, as to conceal about the whole of its structure. His nose is large and firm, but shaped without the least approach to one beautiful line. His mouth is of the widest, and rudely-fashioned; but whether he closes it entirely, or, what is more common, holds it slightly open with a little twist to the left, it is impossible to mistake its intense sagacity of expression, for the common-place archness of a mere practised dealer in litigation. His cheeks are ponderous, and look as if they had

been cast in brass, and his chin projects with an irresistible air of ungullibility. But the whole of this would be nothing without his eyes. The one of these is black as jet, and looks out clearly from among a tangled and ever-twinkling web of wrinkles. The other is light in hue, and glimmers through a large and watery surface, contracted by no wrinkles-(the lids on that side being large, smooth, and oily)--generally in a direction as opposite as possible from that which its more vivacious neighbour happens to be following for the moment. It has not, however, the appearance of being blind, to one who views it disconnected from the other, and nothing, indeed, can be more striking than the total difference of effect which the countenance produces, according as it is viewed in sinistral or in dextral profile. On the one side, you have the large, glazed, grey eye, reflecting an air of unutterable innocence and suavity on all the features it seems to be illuminating. On the other, you have the small black iris, tipped in the centre with an unquenchable dazzling flame, and throwing on every thing above and below it a lustre of acumen, that Argus might have been proud to rival with all his ubiquity of glances. Such a face as this was never meant to be the index of any common mind. "Nihil inutile, nihil vanum, nihil supervacaneum in Naturâ," as the Prince of English intellect has well expressed it.

My friend Winforms me, that the history of this gentleman has been no less peculiar than is his physiognomy. In his youth he was destined for the Kirk, and proceeded so far in that way as to be dubbed a licentiate, or preacher, which is the nearest approach in the Scottish Church to our deacon's orders. But-from causes, it is probable, of no uncommon nature-he soon became disgusted with the idea of the Presbyterian career, and determined to become an Advocate. In those days, however, that was not quite so easy a matter of attainment as it has since come to be. The Advocates at that time were accustomed to exercise a discretionary right, of excluding from their Faculty whomsoever they chose to consider as unfit to enter-not merely on the score of learning or talent, (for, in regard to these, the pretence still lingers)-but, if it so pleased their fancy, on the score of want of birth, or status in society--a notion, the revival of which, if attempted now-a-days, would probably be scouted by a very triumphant majority of their body. What Mr.