Forsyth's birth might be, I know not; but so it was, that the admission of the young licentiate, against whose character no one could say one word, was opposed most stiffly in the Faculty meetings, and he did not succeed in his object till after repeated applications had testified the firmness of his purpose, and time had produced its proper effect, in making his opponents ashamed of contradicting it.

He became an Advocate, therefore; and, by degrees, the same inflexible pertinacity of will which had procured his admission into the Faculty, elevated him to a considerable share of practice. Without making any one appearance that could ever be called splendid, and in the teeth of a great number of men that did make such appearances, Mr. Forsyth was resolved that he should make a fortune at the Bar, and that was enough. From day to day, and from hour to hour, he was at his post. He came to the Court earlier than any one else, and he staid there later. His sagacious countenance was never amissing; and they who saw that countenance perpetually before them, could not fail to read its meaning. Other men laboured by fits and starts, and always with a view to some particular and immediate object of ambition; this man laboured continually, because it was his principle and his belief that he could not be happy without labouring, and because he knew and felt that it was impossible a man of his talents should labour long without being appreciated and rewarded in the end.

If he had no brief, he did not care for that want, or allow himself to take advantage of any pretence for idleness. His strong intellect could no more do without work, than his robust body could subsist without food. If he had not enough to occupy him in the affairs of individual men, he had always the species, and its concerns, on which to exercise his strength. And at a time when nobody suspected him of possessing either ambition or ability for any thing more than the drudg ery of his profession, he published a book on the Principles of Moral Science, coarse indeed in many of its conceptions, and coarse in its language, but overflowing everywhere with the marks of most intense observation, and most masculine originality. From this time, the stamp of his intellect was ascertained, and those who had been most accustomed to speak slightingly of him, found themselves compelled to confess his power.

His natural want of high eloquence has prevented him from being the rival of the great lawyers I have described, in their finest field; and a certain impatience of all ornament, has prevented him from rivalling them in writing. Neither, as I am informed, has he ever been able to penetrate into the depths of legal arguments with the same clear felicity which some of those remarkable men have displayed. But he has been willing to task the vigour of an Herculean understanding to a species of work which these men would have thought themselves entitled to despise, and to slur over, if it did come into their hands, with comparative inattention; and it is thus that his fortune has been made. He cannot do what some of his brethren can do; but whatever he can do, he will do. While they reserve the full exertion of their fine energies for occasions that catch their fancy, and promise opportunity of extraordinary display, he allows his fancy to have nothing to say in the matter; and display is a thing of which he never dreams. He has not the magical sword that will shiver steel, nor the magical shield that will dazzle an advancing foe into blindness; but he is clothed cap-a-pee in harness of proof, and he has his mace always in his hand. He is contented to be ranged with the ordinary class of champions; but they who meet him, feel that his vigour might well entitle him to exchange thrusts with their superiors.

It would surely argue a very strange degree of obstinacy, to deny that all this speaks of an intellect of no ordinary cast. There is no walk of exertion which may not be dignified; and I imagine it is not often that such a walk as that of Mr. Forsyth has found such an intellect as his willing to adorn it.

There are still several of the Scottish Advocates whom I ought to describe to you; but I reserve them, and their peculiarities, for matter of oral communication. My object was, in the mean time, to give you some general notion of those who at present make the most conspicuous figure among an order of men whose name is familiar to you, and celebrated everywhere, but of which very little is, in general, known accurately by such as have not personally visited the scene

of their exertions. I suppose I have already said enough to convince you that the high reputation enjoyed by the Scottish jurisconsults is far from being an unmerited reputation; and that, taking the size and population of the country into view, Scotland has at least as much reason to be proud of her Bar as any country in Europe.

*

P.M.

LETTER XXXVII.

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 com→ posed, 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 counsellers 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 bis 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 Fifeteen.'

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 bis 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 virtue and genius receives, from the nation to whose service his virtue and his genius have ministered, that he establishes for his children a 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 intel

lectual 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 Shakspeare, 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 bis 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 bistorian; 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 devested 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 Judgebut, most of all, in his grey and over-hanging eye-brows, and eyes, eloquent equally of sagacity of intellect, and gentleness of temper.

In the other Division of the Court, I yesterday heard, without exception, the finest piece of judicial eloquence delivered in the finest possible way by the Lord President Hope. The requisites for this kind of eloquence are of course totally different from those of accomplished barristership—and I think they are in the present clever age infinitely more uncommon. When possessed in the degree of perfection in which this Judge possesses them, they are calculated assuredly to produce a yet nobler species of effect, than even the