although from the style in which they are set, one sees that they must have been accustomed to roll about, more than the eyes of stedfast and masculine men are commonly used to do. I should think it impossible that any joke could have been too coarse for this man's digestion ; he must have experienced sensations of paradisiacal delight in reading Swift's description of the dalliance between Gulliver and Glumdalclitch. Even the Yahoos neighing by the riverside, must have been contemplated by him with the most unmingled suavity.-It is, by the way, a strange enough thing, how many of our great English authors seem to have united the utmost activity and shrewdness of intellect, and commanding thorough-going pertinacity of character, with an intolerable relish for all the coarser kinds of jests. The breed of such men was continued uninterruptedly from Echard to Swift and his brethren, and from Swift to Warburton and his brethren. These were all churchmen; had Braxfield been in the church, he must have been an author, and I doubt not he would have caught the falling mantle. I should like to see a portrait of the Cardinal, for whose edification Poggio compiled his Facetiæ; I dare say, there

must be a family likeness between it and this of Braxfield.

In the days, when the strong talents of this original gave him a great ascendency over the whole of his brethren of the coif, and a still greater over the gentlemen of the Bar, with 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 anything 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 their's 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 ex

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cesses 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