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 Mr Wastle, 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 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.