bling as to the mode of taking the votes. It seems there is a practice in some establishments in Scotland, contrary to the universal custom in this part of the country, of voting several times; so that first, second, third, and even sixth votes, come to be of consequence. The gentleman, who is at the head of the poll at the first vote, is any thing but certain of an ultimate majority. The advantage of this method is said to be, that the candidate who has absolutely the greatest number of suffrages, secures the election; while the plain disadvantage is, that the candidate who has the greatest number of votes at first, and while all the competitors are in the field, and who therefore is probably the most deserving,-is ultimately last. I do not pretend to be learned in the mystery of this matter; but the common sense of it seems to be that at which the assembly eventually arrived,—to give the place to the candidate having the greatest number of votes when the list is called. The point was somewhat knotty; and the young lawyers made a merit of offering all the light upon it which their legal experience could afford. Lord Moncrieff put an end to this nonsense, which occupied the house for some time; and in one of his nervous, straight-forward speeches, every word of which is like the blow of a sledge-hammer, divested the question of all trouble, and carried the house at once to a vote. Principal Macfarlane, who was the proposer of Mr. Whigham, relied in a great measure on his connection with the family of Dundas; not but that he put forth other grounds; unhappily, however, this was in relievo. So great a want of tact is rarely imputable to this reverend divine. The time is past when the name of Dundas could operate as a spell. I am one of those, who, despite the clamour against this family, think that it has deserved highly of its country. I look to the first Lord Melville as one of the powerful few to whom the conservation of his country, in the season of its greatest peril, may be most justly ascribed this is not the popular opinion; and it is idle to conceal, that for years past the name of Dundas has been going down, and is now at a very great discount. By the mass of the people the name is associated with nothing but corrupt jobs for family advancement, As an humble observer of the times, I am satisfied that this error, however popular and widely spread, however irradicable for a long time to come,-like all such popular fallacies, will wear away; and neither the influence which this family has exercised, nor the remuneration which it has received, will be the subject of grudge. In this existing state of feeling, it was not well-judged of his friend to mingle up Mr. Whigham with the subject of the Dundases, and it did no good; perhaps it may have done harm.

One of the candidates was Mr. Grant, the son of a respectable divine, and a gentleman of great qualifications for this office. He was proposed, in a speech replete with excellent sense, by the Lord President. This learned judge put the pretensions of his nominee on very solid grounds; and there is no doubt that his exertions would have been successful, had the friends of the candidates who were supported by the same interest, played into their own instead of their enemies' hands. It is not easy to describe the appearance of the president Hope: he exhibits more of the great parts of an orator

than of a judge: I know of no one to whom I can compare him. Those of our readers who remember the Lord of the Admiralty, Sir William Hope, may have an exact idea of the man. He spoke with much ease, exceedingly graceful action, and with a depth of tone which gives the auditor a strong impression that the speaker is of a manly and intrepid character. I should wander a little from the subject of these notes, which is to tell of what I saw and not of what should be, if I were to dwell on a question which is sometimes started whether the judges should ever appear in this assemblage: let me therefore hint at it merely. Those of the learned body who take a part in its business, are generally the men, who, in their younger days, had pleasure in showing forth as disputants, or profit by their calling as pleaders. There are others who think that the affairs of the church are best left to churchmen, and take no further charge of the business, than what their duties as lords of the Tiend Court impose on them. Those who do come may be men of the highest talent, but they are there at the greatest disadvantage. It is rare that the subjects are of sufficient importance, compared with those which fall under their daily cognizance, to rouse them into action. By the habits of their lives judges soon cease to have much regard for a popular tribunal, and in this they are perfectly right. When they descend from the vantage of the bench-they place themselves on a level with men, who are probably their inferiors in talents, but greatly their superiors in knowledge of the matters which are the subject of strife. It is accordingly remarked that a judge does not sustain the character in this forum which he elsewhere bears: his faculties are not unbiassed; he must be on a side, and he is viewed only as a debater. To be on a level with his antagonist, he should not only have all the stores of argument, but, it may be, even of raillery or buffoonery, at command. But who would come to see a judge struggling after a broad laugh, or enjoying the merriment which might be raised, by floundering an unhappy speechifier, through the means of a coarse joke? A judge is deprived of al such means of warfare, while he is not protected against its assault. In all large bodies of popular constitution, there will be men who seek fame in attacking authority: in such places the minister of justice is any thing but safe. The law, and its administration, has ever been, and ever will be, the most fertile subject of abuse. An attack upon lawyers is as sure a clap-trap as any trash about the wooden walls to the gods at Wapping. It was nothing remarkable to hear even Chalmers assailing the law, as a mere maze of bad language. He could see nothing in it, but-whereas, heretofore, you the said, as aforesaid, whereupon, all and every, &c. After this it is not surprising, that to the simple and Solon-like mind of Mr. Carment of Rosskeen, it should appear expedient, that law should be abolished, and justice, which is of course irreconcilable with law, should be established in its stead, with this improvement; that there should be nobody to administer it. Any one who should make a proposal of this kind would not succeed. This, it is admitted, would be too much but, depend upon it, he would be an exceedingly popular person. Dr. Inglis might be of opinion that he was a fool

he would not be asked to the Moderator's breakfast; and Mr. Thomas Burnet would not care, though he did not come to the Commissioner's dinner: still he would have a large meed of applause, and it would be with the greatest difficulty that Dr. Thomas Macknight would be able to repress the rushing in the gallery. It is not in such an assemblage that a judge ought to be found. God forbid that this should be spoken to the disparagement of the general assembly! The same might be said of every popular body of equal numbers, the House of Commons in not one whit wiser or better. If Lord Ten terden was to sit in the Commons, and take the liberty of respectfully submitting that any given speech of Mr. Hunt did not evince absolute wisdom, he would be told that the King's Bench was as bad as the Inquisition-that "the people of England" wanted no chief-justices-no law-no lawyers-no Ilchester jails-nothing but cheap bread. His lordship would be told that he was a humbug. Nobody cares for attacks on the lawyers. These people should be able to give as much as they get. It gives one no distress to find Sir Edward Sugden obliged to defend the Court of Chancery against the charge of being a bottomless pit, or some such accusation equally naïve and original. Mr. Alderman Waithman facetiously tells Sir Charles Wetherell that lawyers are known to have no consciences—that it is notorious in lawyers that they will take a fee on either side that he has known honest tradesmen ruined by the lawyers, who are therefore to be abominated. Sir Charles is of course at much pains to repel the insinuations: nobody cares whether he is successful or not. These are the sort of things which almost necessarily happen in large places. Directed against judges, they are of evil example and worse effect; but so long as judges are there, they will inevitably occur. Sir Ilay Campbell had a great fancy to be a leader amongst the clergy, and, being a man of place and influence, he was adulated by very many of them. He was, however, just as hotly soused by those who had no respect for authority: the democracy had great pleasure in running amuck against him; and, the truth to say, he was often very roughly, and some folks say, very justly pommelled. Without a particle of his father's talent, but on the strength of having been much employed by the clergy,-a circumstance which was solely attributable to his father having been Lord President of the Court,-Lord Succoth essayed to keep up the same influence among the clergy. There never was a more miserable mistake. It being admitted that Succoth was a feeble person, he was abandoned on all hands to all manner of attacks. The topics of the church soon became the topics of the country: they were in truth the same subject in every manse-in every parish; so that general assembly people soon became well known, whether for good or ill, throughout all rural Scotland. It thus chanced that the jokes of Cockburn-the long but the beautifully-wound speeches of Jeffrey -are as familiar among all the better classes of the country population, as if this population were concentrated in Edinburgh. For the same reason it happened, that, according to the collective intelligence of the parishes, Succoth was admitted to be a bore-and it was deereed conformably. In the latter days of his duty in the assembly,

he was thought very small game: the business of putting him down was rarely assumed by any of the leaders. The duty was generally left to Mr. William Inglis, or some of the other and lesser combatants; and upon the whole it was achieved without very great difficulty.

He

Coming down to the present times, the late Dr. Andrew Thomson may be mentioned as a remarkable instance of a churchman who entertained a strong wish to punish the judges: on several occasions his castigations were regular slashers. Thomson moved amongst a class of men, who were known to pay much deference to the bench in public, but to malign the individual judges with rough pleasantry and malevolence in private. These men were restrained alike by duty and interest from making open war with the bench; but Thomson had no such restraint. The assembly offered an admirable opportunity of assaulting them, with the certainty of being victorious in any rencontre to which they might be provoked. was put up to this by the people of the Parliament House, and it must be recorded that he did not fail to profit by their instructions. He lay in wait for a judge: when some learned lord supposed that he had carried the same conviction to his auditory which he invariably does to the party for whom he decides in the court, outsprung Thomson, and inflicted every devisable species of torture in the form of a reply. By turns, he was witty, sarcastic, eloquent, argumentative, pathetic, and fantastical: his auditors were convulsed, and the palm was for the instant unanimously conceded to his diatribes : reason was forgotten, till the votes came; when people bethought themselves of acting on the little sense that remained, unaffected by the art of the debater: but the chance was, that, in consequence of the harangue, the judge was voted a pitiful pigeon, whom any one might pluck. Surely this is not a plight in which the judges of the land ought to be viewed. Were they to descend to the same arena, I have no doubt, they might be far more successful. Can any one doubt, for example, that if Lord Gillies were to fling about him those engines of destruction, by which the sophists in his court are shivered to atoms, he might soon make a clear field even in the assembly? but his lordship judges more wisely; and though he is always a member, he is never a speaker. It could do no service to find a speech from Lord Gillies answered by a pathetic reply from the Reverend Mr. Wightman of Kirkmahoe, or some flippant abuse from Dr. Fleming of Aulston, who would probably take this opportunity of venting his spleen against the latest judgment not in his favour by attacking its author. The conclusion to which I therefore come shortly is, that the judges would better preserve that dignity which is inseparable from their usefulness, by abstaining from all share in the concerns of the assembly.

But to hear these points of controversy, let us now enter on the business of the assembly. The election of Procurator being ended, the House proceeded with the remainder of the business, which was merely routine, and adjourned at an early hour. The commissioner gave the first of his dinners.

The second day. is almost exclusively occupied in prayer. This

part of the business is not a little striking, and had its origin in those perilous times when the leaders of the church and their devoted auditors were in use to appeal to the Deity for immediate direction in their troubles. It was anciently an affair of great moment, and the diet for prayer was appointed with much solemnity. In many of the acts, I find the ministers are ordained" to meet at aught hours in the morning" for prayer; and it appears that they not unfrequently continued their devotions till two or three in the afternoon. No business of any sort was mingled with the prayers. In these backsliding times, the attendance of the clergy at the diets for prayer is not very numerous, and I am aware of the proceedings from report merely. The Moderator commences, and calls on some father of the church to follow him: in like manner several others are invited to pray. The whole being extemporaneous, and at times neither very reverent nor coherent, is felt even by the most faithful attenders to be fatiguing. From the censure, which will be considered as implied in this description of the addresses, must be exempted many whom it is unnecessary to name;-but Dr. Wallace, the Moderator of the last assembly, may certainly be mentioned. I know not what may be the general excellences of this gentleman's pulpit exercises-for of them I have had no specimen; but of his devotional invocations of the Almighty I can speak with much satisfaction. Nothing could exceed the decent solemnity of manner, or the rich vein of scriptural eloquence, which pervaded all those addresses which he offered up in the court of this assembly. The merit of the reverend doctor in this particular is the more signal, that, as he is now considerably advanced in life, his tuition must have been received at a time when this department of pulpit duty was not the subject of much cultivation. To the credit of the Scottish schools, it has been found that very great improvement has taken place in this particular, during the whole of the present century. Still some of the most eminent preachers in the church are remarkably inattentive to those graces of which their solemn duty admits. Strangers, accustomed to the better practice of the south, were often repelled by the bad style of Dr. Chalmers in prayer. No man ever carried a more humble, meek, or Christian-like spirit into his devotions: it may be doubted however, whether, in appearance, these qualities were ever more totally absent. The name of the Almighty is often pronounced in a tone, which is by turns careless-familiar-irreverent. The thanksgiving comes forth with a freedom and volubility, which bespeaks any thing but that which truly exists-a most thankful spirit. The badness of manner, which is thus characteristic of so many, and is now passing away--is distinctly ascribable to that source from which all the chief characteristics of Presbytery have sprung-a deep abhorrence of every thing Popish, whether truly deserving of abhorrence or not. In the worst times of the Catholic church in Scotland, where the profligacies of the clergy seem to have excelled even the wickedness of Rome-the public worship was always performed with the solemnity which the holy office most sacredly demands. Well knowing that this exterior decency was no true type of that frame of soul in which the service was really conducted-that the apparent devotion