Laards, if he will do this when he is drunk, what will he not do when he is sober!'"

As an elder, this worthy representative of the old school was no less extraordinary than as a judge. The humour of Goldsmith has been described as hurrying him into mere unnatural farce when he describes his incarcerated debtor as remarking from his prison, in the prospect of a Gallican invasion-"The greatest of my apprehensions is for our freedom!" and the profane soldier, very much a Protestant, as chiming in with the exclamation, "May the devil sink me into flames, if the French should come over, but our religion would be utterly undone." But from the real history of Lord Hermand, similar examples might be gleaned quite extreme enough to justify Goldsmith. We find Lord Cockburn thus describing his zeal for what he deemed sound views in the famous Sir John Leslie

case:

de la robe." And then he goes on to show, that there is too much reason to fear that Burns, who had tasted but rarely of such excesses in Ayrshire, caught harm from his new companions, and became nearly as lax in his habits, and nearly as reprehensible in his morals, as most respectable judges of the Supreme Court and influential elders of the General Assembly. And the work before us shows how very much may be involved in the remark. Certainly, if Burns ever drank half so hard as some of the leading lawyer elders, who, laudably alarmed lest the foundations of our faith should be undermined by the metaphysics of Sir John Leslie, took most decided part against the appointment of that philosopher, he must have been nearly as bad as he has been represented by his severer censors. The late Lord Hermand may be regarded as no unmeet representative of the class. "He had acted," says Lord Cockburn-his nephew, by the way-"in more of the severest "Hermand was in a glorious frenzy. Spurnscenes of old Scotch drinking than any man at ing all unfairness, a religious doubt, entangled least living. Commonplace topers think drink- with mystical metaphysics, and countenanced by ing a pleasure, but with Hermand it was a virtue. his party, had great attractions for his excitable It inspired the excitement by which he was ele-head and Presbyterian taste. What a figure, as vated, and the discursive jollity which he loved to promote. But beyond these ordinary attractions, he had a sincere respect for drinking; in- | deed, a high moral approbation, and a serious compassion for the poor wretches who could not indulge in it. but due contempt of those who could but did not. He groaned over the gradual disappearance of the Fineat days of periodical festivity, and prolonged the observance, like a hero fighting amidst his fallen friends, as long as he could. The worship of Bacchus, which softened his own heart, and seemed to him to soften the hearts of his companions, was a sacred duty. No carouse ever injured his health. Two young gentlemen, great friends, went together to the theatre in Glasgow, supped at the lodgings of one of them, and passed a whole summer night over their punch. In the morning a kindly wrangle broke out about their separating or not separating, when, by some rashness, if not accident, one of them was stabbed, not violently, but in so vital a part that he died on the spot. The survivor was tried at Edinburgh, and was convicted of culpable homicide. It was one of the sad cases where the legal guilt was greater than the moral, and, very properly, he was sentenced to only a short imprisonment. Hermand, who felt that discredit had been brought on the cause of drinking, had no sympathy with the tenderness of his temperate brethren, and was vehement for transportation. We are told that there was no malice, and that the prisoner must have been in liquor. In liquor! Why, he was drunk! And yet he murdered the very man that had been drinking with him! They had been carousing the whole night, and yet he stabbed him after drinking a whole bottle of rum with him! Good God, my

he stood on the floor declaiming and screaming amidst the divines !-the tall man, with his thin powdered locks and long pigtail, the long Court of Session cravat flaccid and streaming with the heat and the obtrusive linen. The published report makes him declare that the 'belief of the being and perfections of the Deity is the solace and delight of my life.' But this would not have been half intense for Hermand, and, accordingly, his words were: Sir, I sucked in the being and attributes of God with my mother's milk.' His constant and affectionate reverence for his mother exceeded the devotion of any Indian for his idol; and under the feeling, he amazed the house by maintaining (which was his real opinion) that there was no apology for infidelity, or even for religious doubt, because no good or sensible man had anything to do except to be of the religion of his mother, which, be it what it might, was always best. A sceptic, sir, I hate! With my whole heart I detest him. But, Moderator, I love a Turk.'"

Such was one of the characters of Edinburgh not more than half a century ago, and yet he be longs as entirely to an extinct state of things as the oldest fossils of the geologist. And there are many such in this volume, drawn with all the breadth, and in some instances all the pic turesque effect, of the best days of the drama. But though a thoroughly amusing volume, it is also something greatly better; and there is, we doubt not, a time coming when the student of history will look to it much rather than to works professedly historic for the true portraiture of Edinburgh society during the periods in which it maintained its place most efficiently in the worlds of literature and of science. And yet, as may be seen from the sketch just given, all was

not admirable in the ages in which our capital excited admiration most; and we must just console ourselves by the reflection that, though we live in a more mediocre time, it is in the main a more quietly respectable one.

AN UNSPOKEN SPEECH.

essays, to Mr Bellowsmender and the Cateaton Club. The philosopher begins, it will be remembered, by telling his imaginary audience, that though Nathan Ben Funk, the rich Jew, might feel a natural interest in the state of the stocks, it was nothing to them, who had no money; and concludes by quoting the "famous author called Lilly's Grammar."

"Members of the Scottish Young Men's Society," we said, "it is rather late in life for the individual who now addresses you to attempt acquiring the art of the public speaker. Those who have been most in the habit of noticing the effect of the several mechanical professions on character and intellect, divide them into two classes-the sedentary and the laborious; and they remark, that while in the sedentary, such as the printing, weaving, tailoring, and shoe

We enjoyed the honour on Wednesday last of being present as a guest at the annual soiree of the Scottish Young Men's Society, and derived much pleasure from the general appearance of the meeting, and the addresses of the members and their friends. The body of the great Waterloo Room was crowded on the occasion with a respectable, intellectual-looking audience, including from about a hundred and fifty to two hundred members of the Society, all of them young men banded together for mutual improve-making trades, there are usually a considerable ment, and most of them in that important decale of life-by far the most important of the appointed seven-which intervenes between the fifteenth and the five-and-twentieth year. The platform was equally well filled, and the Sheriff of Edinburgh occupied the chair. We felt a particular interest in the objects of the society, and a deep sympathy with its members; for, as we listened to the various speakers, and our eyes glanced over the intelligent countenances that thronged the area of the apartment, we thought of past difficulties encountered in a cause similar to that which formed the uniting bond of the society, and of not a few wrecks which we had witnessed of men who had set out in life from the humbler levels, with the determination of pressing their way upwards. And feeling somewhat after the manner that an old sailor would feel who saw a crew of young ones setting out to thread their ways through some dangerous strait, the perils of which he had already encountered, or to sail round some formidable cape, which, after many an unsuccessful attempt, he had doubled, we fancied ourselves in the position of one qualified to give them some little advice regarding the navigation of the seas on which they were just entering. But, be the fact of qualification as it may, we found ourselves, after leaving the room, addressing them, in imagination, in a few plain words, regarding some of the rocks, and shoals, and insidious currents, which we knew lay in their course. Men whose words come slowly and painfully when among their fellows, can be quite fluent enough when they speak inwards without breaking silence, and have merely an imaginary assemblage for their audience; and 80 our short address went off glibly, without break or interruption, in the style of ordinary conversational gossip. There are curious precedents on record for the printing of unspoken speeches. Rejecting, however, all the higher ones, we shall be quite content to take our precedent from the famous speech which the "indigent philosopher" addresses, in one of Goldsmith's

proportion of fluent speakers, in the laborious trades, on the other hand, such as those of the mason, ship-carpenter, ploughman, and blacksmith, one generally meets with but taciturn, slow-speaking men. We need scarce say in which of these schools we have been trained. You will at once see-to borrow from one of the best and most ancient of writers-that we are not eloquent,' but a man of slow speech, and of a slow tongue.' And yet we think we may venture addressing ourselves, in a few plain words, to an association of young men united for the purpose of mutual improvement. We ought and we do sympathise with you in your object; and we congratulate you on the facilities which your numbers, and your library, and your residence in one of the most intellectual cities in the world, cannot fail to afford you in its pursuit. We ourselves have known what it is to prosecute in solitude, with but few books, and encompassed by many difficulties, the search after knowledge; and we have seen year after year pass by, and the obstacles in our way remaining apparently as great as at first. And were we to sum up the condensed result of our experience in two brief words of advice, it would amount simply to this, 'Never despair.' We are told of Commodore Anson-a man whose sense and courage ultimately triumphed over a series of perhaps the most appalling disasters man ever encountered, and who won for himself, by his magnanimity, sagacity, and cool resolution, the applauses of even his enemies, so that Rousseau and Voltaire eulogised him, the one in history, the other in romance-we are told, we say, of this Anson, that when raised to the British peerage, he was permitted to select his own motto, and that he chose an eminently characteristic one- Nil Desperandum.' By all means let it be your motto also-not as a thing to be paraded on some heraldic label, but to be engraved upon your hearts. We wish that, amid the elegancies of this hall, we could bring up before you some of the scenes of our

Some relish; till, the sum exactly found
In all directions, he begins again.'

opportunities of observation; you may be a
butcher's boy in body, but in mind you may
become an adept in one of the profoundest of the
sciences, that of comparative anatomy;-think
of yourself as not in a prison, but in a school,
and there is no fear but you will rise. There
is another delusion of that 'natural drunken-
ness' referred to, against which you must also
be warned. Never sacrifice your independence
to a phantom. We have seen young men utterly
ruin themselves through the vain belief that
they were too good for their work. They were
mostly lads of a literary turn, who had got a
knack of versifying, and who, in the fond belief
that they were poets and men of genius, and
that poets and men of genius should be above
the soil and drudgery of mechanical labour, gave
up the profession by which they had lived,
poorly mayhap, but independently, and got
none other to set in its place. A mistake of
this character is always a fatal one; and we
trust all of you will ever remember, that though
a man may think himself above his work, no
man is, or no man ought to think himself, above
the high dignity of being independent. In truth,
he is but a sorry, weak fellow who measures
himself by the conventional status of the labour
by which he lives. Our great poet formed a
correcter estimate:

What though on hamely fare we dine,
Wear hodden grey, and a' that?

Gle fools their silks, and knaves their wine,
A man's a man for a' that."

It was idle work; for to reckon up the doorstuds never so often was not the way of opening up the door. But in carefully examining and recording for our own use the appearances of the stony bars of our prison, we were greatly more profitably employed. Nay, we had stumbled on one of the best possible modes of escaping from our prison. We were in reality getting hold of its bolts and its stancheons, and converting them into tools in the work of breaking out. We remember once passing a whole season in one of the dreariest districts of the north-western Highlands,-a district included in that unhappy tract of country, doomed, we fear, to poverty and suffering, which we find marked in the rain-map of Europe with a double shade of blackness. We had hard work, and often soaking rain, during the day; and at night our damp fuel filled the turf hut in which we sheltered with suffocating smoke, and afforded no light by which to read. Nor-even ere the year got into its wane, and when in the long evenings we had light had we any books to read by it, or a single literary or scientific friend with whom to exchange an idea. We remember at another time living in an agricultural district in the low country, in a hovel that was open along the ridge of the roof from gable to gable, so that as we lay a-bed we could tell the hours of the night by the stars that were passing overhead across the chasm. There were about half-a-dozen farm-servants, victims to the bothie system, that ate and slept in the same place; and often, long after mid- There is another advice which we would fain night, a disreputable poacher used to come give you, though it may be regarded as of a stealthily in, and fling himself on a lair of straw somewhat equivocal kind: Rely upon yourthat he had prepared for himself in a corner. selves. The man who sets his hopes upon Now, both the Highland hut and the Lowland patronage, or the exertions of others in his hovel, with their accompaniments of protracted behalf, is never so respectable a man, and, save and uncongenial labour, might be regarded as in very occasional instances, rarely so lucky a dreary prisons; and yet we found them to be in man, as he who bends his exertions to compel reality useful schools, very necessary to our fortune in his behalf, by making himself worthy education. And now, when we hear about the of her favours. Some of the greatest wrecks we state of the Highlands, and the character of our have seen in life have been those of waiters on poor Highlanders, and of the influence of the patronage; and the greatest discontents which bothie system and of the game-laws, we feel that we have seen in corporations, churches, and we know considerably more about such matters states, have arisen from the exercise of patronthan if our experience had been of a more lim- age. Shakespeare tells us, in his exquisite vein, ited or more pleasant kind. There are few such of a virtue that is twice blessed-blessed in prisons in which a young man of energy and a those who give, and blessed in those who receive. brave heart can be placed, in which he will not Patronage is twice cursed-cursed in the ingain more by taking kindly to his work, and competency which it places where merit ought looking well about him, than by wasting himself to be, and in the incompetency which it creates in convulsive endeavours to escape. If he but among the class who make it their trust. But learn to think of his prison as a school, there is the curse which you have mainly to avoid is that good hope of his ultimately getting out of it. which so often falls on those who waste their Were a butcher's boy to ask us-you will not time and suffer their energies to evaporate in deem the illustration too low, for you will re-weakly and obsequiously waiting upon it. We member that Henry Kirke White was once a therefore say, Rely upon yourselves. But there butcher's boy-were he to ask us how we thought is One other on whom you must rely; and imhe could best escape from his miserable employ-plicit reliance on Him, instead of inducing weakment, we would at once say, You have rare ness, infinitely increases strength. Bacon has