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LETTER XXXVIII.

TO THE SAME.

TILL within these few years, it was the custom for the whole of the Judges of whom the Court of Session is composed, to sit together upon the same bench, and Scottish litigants had thus the advantage of submitting their causes to the joint decision of a much greater number of arbiters than those of England ever had to do with. The enormous increase of litigation, however, which resulted from the extended population, and, above all, from the extended commerce of Scotland, joined, perhaps, with sufficient experience that this multitude of counsellors brought disadvantages, as well as advantages along with it, gave rise to a separation of the Civil Court into two Divisions, each of which now exercises the full powers formerly vested in the whole body; the Lord President of the Session retaining his place as President of the First,

and the Lord Justice-Clerk (who acts also, as his title denotes, as head of the Criminal Court,) being President of the Second of these Divisions. From all that I can hear, this arrangement has been productive of the happiest effects; an infinitely greater quantity of business being of course discussed, and no business whatever being less thoroughly, or less satisfactorily discussed, than when each individual case was at once, as the popular phrase ran, " ta'en before the Fife

teen."

The nature of the causes with which these two courts have been chiefly occupied since I began to attend their sittings, has been such, that although I have had great amusement in hearing the particular sides of many questions set forth to the best advantage, by the ingenuity of the particular pleaders, there has been much less to amuse me, a stranger to the technicalities of the Scottish law, in the more concise and more abstruse disquisitions wherein the several Judges have delivered their opinions concerning the legal merits of the arguments employed in my hearing. The external appearance of the Courts, however, is abundantly dignified and impressive; and, without being able to understand most of what was delivered from the Bench,

I have heard more than enough to satisfy me that there is no want of talent in the Judges who take the principal direction and conduct of the business brought before them. The President of the Second Division, in particular, seems to be possessed of all the discernment and diligence which it is pleasing to see a Judge display ; and he possesses, moreover, all that dignity of presence and demeanour, which is scarcely less necessary, and which is infinitely more rare, in those to whom the high duties of such stations are entrusted. In his other Court, (the Criminal, or Justiciary Court, of which also I have witnessed several sittings,) I could better understand what was going forward, and better appreciate the qualities by which this eminent Judge is universally acknowledged to confer honour upon his function.

In his Division of the Civil Court, one of his most respected assessors is Lord Robertson, son to the great historian; nor could I see, without a very peculiar interest, the son of such a man occupying and adorning such a situation, in the midst of a people in whose minds his name must be associated with so many feelings of gratitude and admiration. It is perhaps the finest and most precious of all the rewards which a man of

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virtue and genius receives, from the nation to whose service his virtue and his genius havè ministered, that he establishes for his children à true and lofty species of nobility in the eyes of that people, and secures for all their exertions, (however these may differ in species from his own,) a watchful and a partial attention from generations long subsequent to that on which the first and immediate lustre of his own reputation and his own presence may have been reflected. The truth is, that a great national author connects himself for ever with all the better part of his nation, by the ties of an intellectual kinsmanship,-ties which, in his own age, are scarcely less powerful than those of the kinsmanship of blood, and which, instead of evaporating and being forgotten in the course of a few generations, as the bonds of blood must inevitably be, are only rivetted the faster by every year that passes over them. It is not possible to imagine that any lineal descendant of Shakespeare, or Milton, or Locke, or Clarendon, or any one of the great authors of England, should have borne, in the present day, the name of his illustrious progenitor, and seen himself, and his great name, treated with neglect by his countrymen. The son of such a man as the Historian of Scotland, is

well entitled to share in these honourable feelings of hereditary attachment among the people of Scotland;-and he does share in them. Even to me, I must confess it afforded a very genuine delight, to be allowed to contemplate the features of the father, as reflected and preserved in the living features of his son. A more careless observer would not, perhaps, be able to trace any very striking resemblance between the face of Lord Robertson and the common portraits of the historian; but I could easily do so. In those of the prints which represent him at an early period of his life, the physiognomy of Robertson is not seen to its best advantage. There is, indeed, an air of calmness and tastefulness even in them, which cannot be overlooked or mistaken; but it is in those later portraits which give the features, after they had been divested of their fulness and smoothness of outline, and filled with the deeper lines of age and comparative extenuation, that one traces, with most ease and satisfaction, the image of genius, and the impress of reflection. And it is to those last portraits that I could perceive the strongest likeness in the general aspect of the Judge,-but, most of all, in his grey and over-hanging eye-brows, and