BY degrees I won my way through several different currents of the crowd, and established myself with my back to the wall, full in the centre of the Advocates’ side of the house. Here I could find leisure and opportunity to study the minutiæ of the whole scene, and in particular to “fill in my foreground,” as the painter's phrase runs, much more accurately than when I was myself mingled in the central tumult of the place. My position resembled that of a person visiting a peristrephic panorama, who, himself immoveable in a darksome corner, beholds the whole dust and glare of some fiery battle pass, cloud upon cloud, and flash upon flash, before his eyes. Here might be seen some of the “Magnanimi Heroes,” cleaving into the mass, like furious wedges, in order to reach their appointed station—and traced in their ulterior progress only by the casual glimpses of “the proud horse-hair nodding on the crest”—while others, equally determined and keen ἐνι προμαχοισι μαχεσθαι, from their stature and agility, might be more properly compared to so many shuttles driven through the threads of an intricate web by some nimble-jointed weaver, Μικροι μεν ἀλλα Μαχηται. On one side might be observed some first-rate champion, pausing for a moment with a grin of bloody relaxation, to breathe after one ferocious and triumphant charge—his plump Sancho Panza busily arranging his harness for the next, no less ferocious. On another sits some less successful combatant, all his features screwed and twisted together, smarting under the lash of a sarcasm—or gazing blankly about him, imperfectly recovered from the stun of a retort; while perhaps some young beardless Esquire, burning for his spurs, may be discovered eyeing both of these askance, envious even of the cuts of the vanquished, and anxious, at all hazards, like Uriah the Hittite, that some letter might reach the directors of the fray, saying, “Set ye this man in the front of the battle.”