many of whom he lived on terms of the most perfect familiarity-the style of private life generally adopted by the principal Judges and Advocates, and the style in which the public intercourse between these two sets of worthies was carried on, were both, as might be conjectured, as remote as possible from the decorum at present in fashion. Not that there was in either any licence productive of seriously bad effects to the people of the country, but there certainly must have been something as different as possible from any thing that has been witnessed in our English Courts of Law for these many centuries past. Braxfield was very fond of cards and of claret, and it was no very unusual thing to see him take his seat upon the Bench, and some of his friends take theirs at the Bar, within not a great many minutes of the termination of some tavern-scene of common devotion to either of these amusements. I have never heard, that any excesses committed by Braxfield had the least power to disturb him in his use of his faculties; but it is not to be supposed, that all his associates had heads as strong as his, nor to be wondered at, although many extraordinary things may have occurred on such trying occasions. I have heard of an advocate coming to the Parliament-House fresh from the tavern, with one stocking white and the other black, and insisting upon addressing the Judges, exactly as ten minutes before he had been addressing the chairman of his debauch. One yet living is said to have maintained a stout battle on one occasion with the late President Dundas, (father to Lord Melville,) who refused to listen to him when he made his appearance in this condition. The check given to him seemed to have the effect of immediately restoring him to the possession of some moiety of his faculties ; and, without being able to obtain one glimpse of the true reason which made the Judge reluctant to listen, or the true nature of the cause on which he conceived himself entitled to expatiate, he commenced a long and most eloquent harangue upon the dignity of the Faculty of Advocates, ending with a formal protest against the manner in which he had been used, and interspersing every paragraph with copious repetitions of these words," It is our duty and our privilege to speak, my Lord; and it is your duty and your privilege to hear." Another Advocate, also yet living, is said, in a similar state of haziness, to have forgotten for which party, in a particular cause, he had been re tained; and, to the unutterable amazement of the agent that had fee'd him, and the absolute horror of the poor client behind, to have uttered a long and fervent speech exactly in the teeth of the interests he had been hired to defend. Such was the zeal of his eloquence, that no whispered remonstrance from the rear, no tugging at his elbow could stop him in medio gurgite dicendi. But just as he was about to sit down, the trembling writer put a slip of paper into his hands, with these plain words,-"You have plead for the wrong party;" whereupon, with an air of infinite composure, he resumed the thread of his oration, saying," Such, my Lord, is the statement which you will probably hear from my brother on the opposite side of this case. I shall now beg leave, in a very few words, to show your Lordship how utterly untenable are the principles, and how distorted are the facts, upon which this very specious statement has proceeded." And so he went once more over the same ground, and did not take his seat until he had most energetically refuted himself from one end of his former pleading to another. The race, however, of Judges, Advocates, and, of course, of Clients, among whom such things passed without remark or reproach, is now fast expiring. In spite of the authority of Blackstone, it seems to be generally believed now-a-days, that no man will study a point of law the better for drinking a bottle of port, while he is engaged at this work. The uniform gravity of the Bench has communicated a suitable gravity to the Bar,-the greater number of practitioners at the Bar, having, indeed, necessarily very much diminished the familiarity with which the Bench and the Bar were of old accustomed to treat each other; while the general change that has every where occurred in the mode of life, has almost entirely done away with that fashion of high conviviality in private, for which of old, the members of the legal profession in this place were celebrated to a proyerb. In short, it seems as if the business of all parties were now regarded in a much more serious point of view than formerly, and as if the practice of the Barristers, in particular, were every day getting more and more into a situation similar to that in which the practice of their southern brethren has long been,-a situation which, as you well know, admits of very little of such indulgences as these old Scotch Advocates seem to have considered quite in the light of indispensables. There is still, however, one Judge upon the bench whom W- has a pleasure in bidding me look at, because in him, he assures me, may still be seen a genuine relic of the old school of Scottish Lawyers, and Scottish Judges. This old gentleman, who takes his title from an estate called Hermand, is of the Ayrshire family of the Fergusons of Kilkerran; the same family of which mention is frequently made in Burns's Poems, one of whose ancestors, indeed, was the original winner of the celebrated "Whistle of Worth," about which the famous song was written. Three joyous good fellows, with hearts clear of flaw; Craigdarroch began, with a tongue smooth as oil, &c. &c. in a strain equally delectable. He is now, I suppose, with one exception, the senior Judge of the whole Court, for I see he sits immediately on the left hand of the President in the First Division. There is something so very striking in bis appearance, that I wonder I did not take notice of it in an earlier letter. His face is quite thin and extenuated, and he has lost most of his teeth; but instead of taking away from the vivacity of his countenance, these very circumstances seem to me to have given it a degree of power, and fire of expression, which I bave very rarely seen rivalled in the countenance of any young man whatever. The absence of the teeth has planted lines of furrows about the lower part of his face, which convey an idea of determination and penetration too, that is not to be resisted; and the thin covering of flesh upon the bones of his cheeks, only gives additional effect to the fine, fresh, and healthful complexion which these still exhibit. As for bis eyes, they are among the most powerful I have seen. While in a musing attitude, he keeps his eye-lids well over them, and they peep out with a swimming sort of languor; but the moment he begins to speak, they dilate, and become full of animation, each grey iris flashing as keenly as a flint. His fore head is full of wrinkles, and his eye-brows are luxuriant; and bis voice has a hollow depth of tone about it, which all furnish a fine relief to the hot and choleric style in which be expresses himself, and, indeed, to the very lively way in which he seems to regard every circumstance of every case that is brought before him. Although very hasty and impatient at times in his temper and demeanour, and not over-scrupulous in regard to the limits of some of his sarcasms, this old Judge is a prodigious favourite with all classes who frequent the Courts, and, above all, with the Advocates, at whose expense most of his spleen effervesces. He is a capital lawyer, and he is the very soul of honour; and the goodness of his warm heart is so well understood, that not only is no offence taken with any thing he says, but every new sarcasm he utters endears him more, even to the sufferer. As for the younger members of the profession,-when he goes a circuit, you may be sure, in whatever direction he moves, to meet with an extraordinary array of them in the train of Lord Hermand. His innocent peculiarities of manner afford an agreeable diversity to the surface of the causes carried on under his auspices, while the shrewdness and diligence of his intellect completely provide for the safety of their essential merits. And then, when the business of the Court is over, he is the very "prince of good fellows, and king of old men ;" and you are well aware what high delight all young men take in the company of their seniors, when these are pleased to enter, bona fide, into the spirit of their convivialities. He has an infinite fund of dry, caustic, original humour; and, in addition to this, he cannot fail to possess an endless store of anecdotes; so that it is no wonder his company should be so fascinating to the young jurisconsults. In him they are no doubt too happy to have an opportunity of seeing a noble living specimen of a very fine old school, which has now left little behind it but the tradition of its virtues, and its talents, and its pleasantries;-a school, the departure of many of whose peculiarities was perhaps rendered necessary in a great measure by the spirit of the age, but of which it may be suspected not a little has been allowed to expire, which might have been better worth preserving than much that has come in its place. It is not, I assure you, from W— alone that I hear lamentations over the decay of this antique spirit. It is sighed over by many that witnessed its manifestations ere they had yet come to be rare, and will long be remembered with perhaps still greater affection by those who have seen the last of its relics in the person of this accomplished gentleman and excellent judge. There would be no end of it, were I to begin telling you anecdotes about Lord Hermand. I hear a new one every day; for he alone furnishes half the materials of conversation to the young groupes of stove-school wits, of which I have already said a word or two in describing the Outer-House. There is one, however, which I must venture upon. When Guy Mannering came out, the Judge was so much delighted with the picture of the life of the old Scottish lawyers in that most charming novel, that he could talk of nothing else but Pleydell, Dandie, and the High Jinks, for many weeks. He usually carried one volume of the book about with him, and one morning, on the bench, his love for it so completely got the better of him, that he lugged in the subject, head and shoulders, into the midst of a speech about some most dry point of law; nay, getting warmer every moment he spoke of it, he at last fairly plucked the volume from his pocket, and, in spite of all the remonstrances of all his brethren, insisted upon reading aloud the whole passage for their edification. He went through the task with his wonted vivacity, gave great effect to every speech, and most appropriate expression to every joke; and when it was done, I suppose the Court would have no difficulty in confessing that they had very seldom been so well entertained. During the whole scene, Mr. W Swas present, seated, indeed, in his official capacity, close under the Judge. Like almost all the old Scottish lawyers, Lord Hermand is no less keen in farming than in law, and in the enjoyment of good company. Formerly it was looked upon as quite inconsistent with the proper character of an Advocate, to say nothing of a Judge, to want some piece of land, the superintendance of the cultivation of which might afford an agreeable, no less than profitable relaxation, from the toils of the profession. In those days, it was understood that every lawyer spent the Saturday and Sunday of every week, in the milder part of the year, not in Edinburgh, but at his farm, or villa; and the way they went about this was sufficiently characteristic. In order that no time might be lost in town after the business of the Court on Saturday, the lawyers had established themselves in the privilege of going to the Parliament-House, on that morning, in a style of dress, which |