THERE is another class of Lawyers, however, who have no ambition of rivalling the Cranstouns and the Jeffreys—who walk in a totally different course from them—and attain in their own walk, if not to an equally splendid, certainly to an almost as lucrative species of reputation. These are the class of your plain, thorough-going, jog-trot Lawyers, who are seldom employed in cases of the very highest importance, but whose sober, regular, business-like manner of doing every thing that is entrusted to them, procures for them an even, uninterrupted, unvarying life of well-paid labour. It is upon these men that the ordinary run of your common-place litigation scatters its constantly refreshing, but seldom brightening dew. The lungs of these men are employed, for a certain number of hours every morning, in pleading, and every evening in dictating. With them, the intellectual mill-horse never stops a moment in his narrow round, unless it be to allow time for eating, drinking, and sleeping. The natural attitude of these men, is that of labouring at a sidebar. Their heads do not feel comfortable when their wigs are off. If they call for a glass of ale during dinner, they astound the lackey with a big phrase from the Style-book. If you carry one of them into the midst of the most magnificent scenery of Nature, his thoughts will still tarry behind him within the narrow and dusty precincts of the Parliament-House of Edinburgh. You shall see him pluck a Condescendence from his pocket, and con over its sprawling pages, although the grandest of mountains be behind, and the most beautiful of lakes before him.

These are the true plodders of the profession—nothing can be more genuine than their obscure devotion—“they and the other slaves of the Lamp.”

During one of my earliest visits to the Parliament-House, when I was picking up from various quarters the first rudiments of that information which I have now been retailing for your benefit, an elderly lawyer, by name Mr Forsyth, was pointed out to me, I forget by whom, as standing at the head of this class.