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within him like a bruised adder. His coward eye was fascinated by the glance that killed him, and he durst not look for a moment from the face of his chastiser. He did look for a mo ment; at one terrible word he looked wildly round, as if to seek for some whisper of protection, or some den of shelter. But he found none. And even after the rebuke was at an end, he stood like the statue of Fear, frozen in the same attitude of immoveable desertedness.

This Judge was formerly President of the Criminal Court; and after being present at this scene, I have no difficulty in believing what I hear from every one, that, in pronouncing sentence, he far surpassed every Judge whom the present time has witnessed, or of whom any memory survives. Had any gone before him, his equal in the "terrible graces" of judicial eloquence, it is not possible that he should soon have been forgotten. Feelings such as this man possesses, when expressed as he expresses them, produce an effect, of which it is not easy to say whether the impression may be likely to abide

longest in the bosoms of the good, or in those of the wicked.

As I came away through the crowd, I heard a pale, anxious-looking old man, who, I doubt not, had a cause in Court, whisper to himself— "God be thanked-there's one true GENTLEMAN at the head of them all."

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LETTER XXXIX.

TO THE SAME.

I HAVE endeavoured to give you some notion of the present state of the Bar and Bench of Scotland-and I have done so, it may be, at greater length than you were prepared to expect. The individuals whom I have pourtrayed are all, however, men of strong and peculiar intellectual conformation; and therefore, without taking their station or functions into view, they cannot be unworthy of detaining, as individuals, some considerable portion of a traveller's attention. In our age, when so much oil is poured upon the whole surface of the ocean of life, that one's eye can, for the most part, see nothing but the smoothness and the flatness of uniformity, it is a most refreshing thing to come upon some

sequestered bay, where the breakers still gambol along the sands, and leap up against the rocks as they used to do. I fear, that ere long such luxury will be rarer even in Scotland than it now is; and, indeed, from all I hear, nothing can be more distinct and remarkable than the decrease in the quantum of it, which has occurred within the memory even of persons of my own time of life. The peculiarities, which appear to me so strong and singular in the present worthies of the Parliament-House, are treated with infinite disdain by my friend W, for example, who ridicules them as being only the last feeble gleanings of a field, which he himself remembers to have seen bending beneath the load of its original fertility.

The Bench of former days, he represents to have been a glorious harvest of character, and he deplores its present condition, as, with scarcely more than a single exception, one of utter and desolate barrenness. He himself remembers the Lord Justice Clerk Macqueen of Braxfield, and he assures me, that, since his death, the whole exterior of judicial deportment has been quite altered and I verily believe he thinks it has been altered for the worse, although there are

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few of his opinions, probably, in which he is more singular than in this. Over the mantlepiece of his study, he has a very fine print of this old Judge, in his full robes of office, which he seldom looks at without taking occasion to introduce some strange grotesque anecdote of its original. If the resemblance of the picture be exact, as he says it is, old Braxfield must indeed have been a person, whom nobody could for an instant suppose to be one of the ordinary race of mortals. His face is broad, and the whole of its muscles appear to be firm and ponderous in their texture-you cannot suppose that such were ever nourished upon kickshaws-they have obviously borrowed their substance from a stintless regimen of beef, brandy, and claret. His nose is set well into his forehead, as if Nature, in making him, had determined to grudge no expenditure of bone. His mouth wears a grin of ineffable sagacity, derision, and coarse uncontrollable humour, all mingled with a copious allowance of sensuality. He must have had a most tyrannical quantity of Will, to judge from the way in which the wig sits on the top of his head; and nothing, indeed, can be more expressive of determined resolution than the glance of his light eyes beneath their pent-house brows,

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