BOOK OF EDINBURGH ANECDOTE

The Parliament House has always had a reputation for good anecdote. There are solid reasons for this. It is the haunt of men, clever, highly educated, well off, and the majority of them with an all too abundant leisure. The tyranny of custom forces them to pace day after day that ancient hall, remarkable even in Edinburgh for august memories, as their predecessors have done for generations. There are statues such as those of Blair of Avontoun and Forbes of Culloden, and portraits like those of “Bluidy Mackenzie” and Braxfield,—all men who lived and laboured in the precincts,—to recall and revivify the past, while there is also the Athenian desire to hear some new thing, to retail the last good story about Lord this or Sheriff that.

So there is a great mass of material. Let me present some morsels for amusement or edification. Most are stories of judges, though it may be of them before they were judges. A successful counsel usually ends on the bench, and at the Scots bar the exceptions are rare indeed. The two most prominent that occur to one are Sir George Mackenzie and Henry Erskine. Now, Scots law lords at one time invariably, and still frequently, take a title from landed estate. This was natural. A judge was a person with some landed property, which was in early times the only property considered as such, and in Scotland, as everybody knows, the man was called after his estate. Monkbarns of the Antiquary is a classic instance, and it was only giving legal confirmation to this, to make the title a fixed one in the case of the judges. They never signed their names this way, and were sometimes sneered at as paper lords. To-day, when the relative value of things is altered, they would probably prefer their paper title. According to tradition their wives laid claim to a corresponding dignity, but James V., the founder of the College of Justice, sternly repelled the presumptuous dames, with a remark out of keeping with his traditional reputation for gallantry. “He had made the carles lords, but wha the deil made the carlines leddies?” Popular custom was kinder than the King, and they got to be called ladies, till a newer fashion deprived them of the honour. It was sometimes awkward. A judge and his wife went furth of Scotland, and the exact relations between Lord A. and Mrs. B. gravelled the wits of many an honest landlord. The gentleman and lady were evidently on the most intimate terms, yet how to explain their different names? Of late the powers that be have intervened in the lady’s favour, and she has now her title assured her by royal mandate.

Once or twice the territorial designation bore an ugly purport. Jeffrey kept, it is said, his own name, for Lord Craigcrook would never have done. Craig is Scots for neck, and why should a man name himself a hanging judge to start with? This was perhaps too great a concession to the cheap wits of the Parliament House, and perhaps it is not true, for in Jeffrey’s days territorial titles for paper lords were at a discount, so that Lord Cockburn thought they would never revive, but the same thing is said of a much earlier judge. Fountainhall’s Decisions is one of those books that every Scots advocate knows in name, and surely no Scots practising advocate knows in fact. Its author, Sir John Lauder, was a highly successful lawyer of the Restoration, and when his time came to go up there was one fly in the ointment of success. His compact little estate in East Lothian was called Woodhead. Lauder feared not unduly the easy sarcasms of fools, or the evil tongues of an evil time. Territorial title he must have, and he rather neatly solved the difficulty by changing Woodhead to Fountainhall, a euphonious name, which the place still retains.

When James VI. and I. came to his great estate in England, he was much impressed by the splendid robes of the English judges. His mighty Lord Chancellor would have told him that such things were but “toys,” though even he would have admitted, they influenced the vulgar. At any rate Solomon presently sent word to his old kingdom, that his judges and advocates there were to attire themselves in decent fashion. If you stroll into the Parliament House to-day and view the twin groups of the Inner House, you will say they went one better than their English brothers.

A Scots judge in those times had not seldom a plurality of offices: thus the first Earl of Haddington was both President of the Court of Session and Secretary of State. He played many parts in his time, and he played them all well, for Tam o’ the Coogate was nothing if not acute. There are various stories of this old-time statesman. This shows forth the man and the age. A highland chief was at law, and had led his men into the witness-box just as he would have led them to the tented field. The Lord President had taken one of them in hand, and sternly kept him to the point, and so wrung the facts out of him. When Donald escaped he was asked by his fellow-clansman whose turn was to follow, how he had done? With every mark of sincere contrition and remorse, Donald groaned out, that he was afraid he had spoken the truth, and “Oh,” he said, “beware of the man with the partridge eye!” How the phrase brings the old judge, alert, keen, searching, before us! By the time of the Restoration things were more specialised, and the lawyers of the day could give more attention to their own subject. They were very talented, quite unscrupulous, terribly cruel; Court of Justice and Privy Council alike are as the house of death. We shudder rather than laugh at the anecdotes. Warriston, Dirleton, Mackenzie, Lockhart, the great Stair himself, were remarkable men who at once attract and repel. Nisbet of Dirleton, like Lauder of Fountainhall, took his title from East Lothian—in both cases so tenacious is the legal grip, the properties are still in their families—and Dirleton’s Doubts are still better known, and are less read, if that be possible, than Fountainhall’s Decisions. You can even to-day look on Dirleton’s big house on the south side of the Canongate, and Dirleton, if not “the pleasantest dwelling in Scotland,” is a very delightful place, and within easy reach of the capital. But the original Nisbet was, I fear, a worse rascal than any of his fellows, a treacherous, greedy knave. You might bribe his predecessor to spare blood, it was said, “but Nisbet was always so sore afraid of losing his own great estate, he could never in his own opinion be officious enough to serve his cruel masters.” Here is the Nisbet story. In July 1668, Mitchell shot at Archbishop Sharp in the High Street, but, missing him, wounded Honeyman, Bishop of Orkney, who sat in the coach beside him. With an almost humorous cynicism some one remarked, it is only a bishop, and the crowd immediately discovered a complete lack of interest in the matter and in the track of the would-be assassin. Not so the Privy Council, which proceeded to a searching inquiry in the course whereof one Gray was examined, but for some time to little purpose. Nisbet as Lord Advocate took an active part, and bethought him of a trick worthy of a private inquiry agent. He pretended to admire a ring on the man’s finger, and asked to look at it; the prisoner was only too pleased. Nisbet sent it off by a messenger to Gray’s wife with a feigned message from her husband. She stopped not to reflect, but at once told all she knew! this led to further arrests and further examinations during which Nisbet suggested torture as a means of extracting information from some taciturn ladies! Even his colleagues were abashed. “Thow rotten old devil,” said Primrose, the Lord Clerk Register, “thow wilt get thyself stabbed some day.” Even in friendly talk and counsel these old Scots, you will observe, were given to plain language. Fate was kinder to Dirleton than he deserved, he died in quiet, rich, if not honoured, for his conduct in office was scandalous even for those times, yet his name is not remembered with the especial detestation allotted to that of “the bluidy advocate Mackenzie,” really a much higher type of man. Why the unsavoury epithet has stuck so closely to him is a curious caprice of fate or history. Perhaps it is that ponderous tomb in Old Greyfriars, insolently flaunting within a stone-throw of the Martyrs’ Monument, perhaps it is that jingle which (you suspect half mythical) Edinburgh callants used to occupy their spare time in shouting in at the keyhole, that made the thing stick. However, the dead-and-gone advocate preserves the stony silence of the tomb, and is still the most baffling and elusive personality in Scots history. The anecdotes of him are not of much account. One tells how the Marquis of Tweeddale, anxious for his opinion, rode over to his country house at Shank at an hour so unconscionably early that Sir George was still abed. The case admitted of no delay, and the Marquis was taken to his room. The matter was stated and the opinion given from behind the curtains, and then a woman’s hand was stretched forth to receive the fee! The advocate was not the most careful of men, so Lady Mackenzie deemed it advisable to take control of the financial department. Of this dame the gossips hinted too intimate relations with Claverhouse, but there was no open scandal. Another brings us nearer the man. Sir George, by his famous entail act, tied up the whole land of the country in a settlement so strict that various measures through the succeeding centuries only gradually and partially released it. Now the Earl of Bute was the favoured lover of his only daughter, but Mackenzie did not approve of the proposed union. The wooer, however ardent, was prudent; he speculated how the estate would go if they made a runaway match of it. Who so fit to advise him as the expert on the law of entail? Having disguised himself—in those old Edinburgh houses the light was never of the clearest—he sought my lord’s opinion on a feigned case, which was in truth his own. The opinion was quite plain, and fell pat with his wishes; the marriage was duly celebrated, and Sir George needs must submit. All his professional life Mackenzie was in the front of the battle, he was counsel for one side or the other in every great trial, and not seldom these were marked by most dramatic incidents. When he defended Argyll in 1661 before the Estates, on a charge of treason, the judges were already pondering their verdict when “one who came fast from London knocked most rudely at the Parliament door.” He gave his name as Campbell, and produced what he said were important papers. Mackenzie and his fellows possibly thought his testimony might turn the wavering balance in their favour—alas! they were letters from Argyll proving that he had actively supported the Protectorate, and so sealed the fate of the accused. Again, at Baillie of Jerviswood’s trial in 1684 one intensely dramatic incident was an account given by the accused with bitter emphasis of a private interview between him and Mackenzie some time before. The advocate was prosecuting with all his usual bluster, but here he was taken completely aback, and stammered out some lame excuse. This did not affect the verdict, however, and Jerviswood went speedily to his death. The most remarkable story about Mackenzie is that after the Estates had declared for the revolutionary cause in April 1689, and his public life was over, ere he fled southward, he spent a great part of his last night in Edinburgh in the Greyfriars Churchyard. The meditations among the tombs of the ruined statesmen were, you easily divine, of a very bitter and piercing character. Sir George Lockhart, his great rival at the bar and late Lord President of the Court of Session, had a few days before been buried in the very spot selected by Mackenzie for his own resting-place, where now rises that famous mausoleum. Sir George was shot dead on the afternoon of Sunday 31st March in that year by Chiesly of Dalry in revenge for some judicial decision, apparently a perfectly just one, which he had given against him. Even in that time of excessive violence and passion Chiesly was noted as a man of extreme and ungovernable temper. He made little secret of his intention; he was told the very imagination of it was a sin before God. “Let God and me alone; we have many things to reckon betwixt us, and we will reckon this too.” He did the deed as his victim was returning from church; he said he “existed to learn the President to do justice,” and received with open satisfaction the news that Lockhart was dead. “He was not used to do things by halves.” He was tortured and executed with no delay, his friends removed the body in the darkness of night and buried it at Dalry, so it was rumoured, and the discovery of some remains there a century afterwards was supposed to confirm the story. The house at Dalry was reported to be haunted by the ghost of the murderer; it was the fashion of the time to people every remarkable spot with gruesome phantoms.

An anecdote, complimentary to both, connects the name of Lockhart with that of Sir James Stewart of Goodtrees (pronounced Gutters, Moredun is the modern name), who was Lord Advocate both to William III. and Queen Anne. An imposing figure this, and a man of most adventurous life. In his absence he was sentenced to death by the High Court of Justiciary. This was in 1684. The Lord Advocate (Bluidy Mackenzie to wit), after sentence, electrified the court by shouting out, that the whole family was sailing under false colours, “these forefault Stewarts are damned Macgregors” (the clan name was proscribed). And yet Mackenzie ought to have felt kindly to Stewart, as perhaps he did, and possibly gave him a hint when to make himself scarce. One curious story tells of Mackenzie employing him in London with great success in a debate about the position of the Scots Episcopal Church. Both Lockhart and Mackenzie confessed him their master in the profound intricacies of the Scots law. A W.S. once had to lay a case before Lockhart on some very difficult question. Stewart was in hiding, but the agent tracked him out, and got him to prepare the memorial. Sir George pondered the paper for some time, then he started up and looked the W.S. broad in the face, “by God, if James Stewart is in Scotland or alive, this is his draft; and why did you not make him solve your difficulty?” The agent muttered that he wanted both opinions. He then showed him what Stewart had prepared; this Lockhart emphatically accepted as the deliverance of the oracle. Stewart had a poor opinion of contemporary lawyers. Show me the man and I’ll show you the law, quoth he. Decisions, he said, went by favour and not by right. Stewart made his peace with James’s government, near the end, and though he did so without any sacrifice of principle, men nicknamed him Jamie Wilie. It seemed a little odd that through it all he managed to keep his head on his shoulders. A staunch Presbyterian, he was yet for the time a liberal and enlightened jurist, and introduced many important reforms in Scots criminal law. That it fell to him to prosecute Thomas Aikenhead for blasphemy was one of fate’s little ironies; Aikenhead went to his death on the 8th January 1697. The Advocate’s Close, where Stewart lived, and which is called after him, still reminds us of this learned citizen of old Edinburgh.

In the eighteenth century we are in a different atmosphere; those in high place did not go in constant fear of their life, they were not so savage, so suspicious, so revengful, they were witty and playful. On the other hand, their ways were strangely different from the monotonous propriety of to-day. Kames and Monboddo are prominent instances, they were both literary lawyers and constant rivals. Once Kames asked Monboddo if he had read his last book; the other saw his chance and took it, “No, my lord, you write a great deal faster than I am able to read.” Kames presently got his chance. Monboddo had in some sense anticipated the Darwinian theory, he was certain at any rate that everybody was born with a tail. He believed that the sisterhood of midwives were pledged to remove it, and it is said he watched many a birth as near as decency permitted but always with disappointing results. At a party he politely invited Kames to enter the room before him. “By no means,” said Kames, “go first, my lord, that I may get a look at your tail.” Kames had a grin between a sneer and a smile, probably here the sneer predominated. But perhaps it was taken as a compliment. “Mony is as proud of his tail as a squirrel,” said Dr. Johnson. He died when eighty-seven. He used to ride to London every year, to the express admiration and delight of George III. One wonders if he ever heard of the tradition that at Strood, in Kent, all children are born with tails—a mediæval jape from the legend of an insult to St. Thomas of Canterbury: he might have found this some support to his theory! On the bench he was like a stuffed monkey, but for years he sat at the clerks’ table. He had a lawsuit about a horse, argued it in person before his colleagues and came hopelessly to grief. You are bound to assume the decision was right, though those old Scots worthies dearly loved a slap at one another, and thus he would not sit with Lord President Dundas again; more likely, being somewhat deaf, he wished to hear better. He was a great classical scholar, and said that no man could write English who did not know Greek, a very palpable hit at Lord Kames, who knew everything but Greek. The suppers he gave at St. John Street, off the Canongate, are still fragrant in the memory, “light and choice, of Attic taste,” no doubt; but the basis you believe was Scots, solid and substantial. And they had native dishes worth eating in quaint eighteenth-century Edinburgh! The grotesque old man had a beautiful daughter, Elizabeth Burnet, whose memory lives for ever in the pathetic lines of Burns. She died of consumption in 1790, and to blunt, if possible, the father’s sorrow, his son-in-law covered up her portrait. Monboddo’s look sought the place when he entered the room. “Quite right, quite right,” he muttered, “and now let us get on with our Herodotus.” For that day, perhaps, his beloved Greek failed to charm. Kames was at least like Monboddo in one thing—oddity. On the bench he had “the obstinacy of a mule and the levity of a harlequin,” said a counsel; but his broad jokes with his broad dialect found favour in an age when everything was forgiven to pungency. He wrote much on many themes. If you want to know a subject write a book on it, said he, a precept which may be excellent from the author’s point of view, but what about the reader?—but who reads him now? Yet it was his to be praised, or, at any rate, criticised. Adam Smith said, we must all acknowledge him as our master. And Pitt and his circle told this same Adam Smith that they were all his scholars. Boswell once urged his merits on Johnson. “We have at least Lord Kames,” he ruefully pleaded. The leviathan frame shook with ponderous mirth, “Keep him, ha, ha, ha, we don’t envy you him.” In far-off Ferney, Voltaire read the Elements of Criticism, and was mighty wroth over some cutting remarks on the Henriade. He sneered at those rules of taste from the far north “By Lord Mackames, a Justice of the Peace in Scotland.” You suspect that “master of scoffing” had spelt name and office right enough had he been so minded. Kames bid farewell to his colleagues in December 1782 with, if the story be right, a quaintly coarse expression. He died eight days after in a worthier frame of mind—he wrote and studied to his last hour. “What,” he said, “am I to sit idle with my tongue in my cheek till death comes for me?” He expressed a stern satisfaction that he was not to survive his mental powers, and he wished to be away. He was curious as to the next world, and the tasks that he would have yet to do. There is something heroic about this strange old man.

We come a little later down, and in Braxfield we are in a narrower field, more local, more restricted, purely legal. Such as survive of the Braxfield stories are excellent. The locus classicus for the men of that time is Lord Cockburn’s Memorials. Cockburn, as we have yet to see, was himself a wit of the first water, and the anecdotes lost nothing by the telling. Braxfield was brutal and vernacular. One of “The Fifteen” had rambled on to little purpose, concluding,” Such is my opinion.” “Your opeenion” was Braxfield’s sotto voce bitter comment, better and briefer even than the hit of the English judge at his brother, “what he calls his mind.” Two noted advocates (Charles Hay, afterwards Lord Newton, was one of them) were pleading before him—they had tarried at the wine cup the previous night, and they showed it. Braxfield gave them but little rope. “Ye may just pack up your papers and gang hame; the tane o’ ye’s riftin’ punch and the ither belchin’ claret” (a quaint and subtle distinction!) “and there’ll be nae guid got out o’ ye the day.” As Lord Justice-Clerk, Braxfield was supreme criminal judge; his maxims were thoroughgoing. “Hang a thief when he is young, and he’ll no’ steal when he is auld.” He said of the political reformers: “They would a’ be muckle the better o’ being hangit,” which is probably the truer form of his alleged address to a prisoner: “Ye’re a vera clever chiel, man, but ye wad be nane the waur o’ a hanging.” “The mob would be the better for losing a little blood.” But his most famous remark, or rather aside, was at the trial of the reformer Gerrald. The prisoner had urged that the Author of Christianity himself was a reformer. “Muckle He made o’ that,” growled Braxfield, “He was hangit.” I suspect this was an after-dinner story, at any rate it is not in the report; but how could it be? It is really a philosophic argument in the form of a blasphemous jest. He had not always his own way with the reformers. He asked Margarot if he wished a counsel to defend him. “No, I only wish an interpreter to make me understand what your Lordship says.” The prisoner was convicted and, as Braxfield sentenced him to fourteen years’ transportation, he may have reflected, that he had secured the last and most emphatic word. Margarot had defended himself very badly, but as conviction was a practical certainty it made no difference. Of Braxfield’s private life there are various stories, which you can accept or not as you please, for such things you cannot prove or disprove. His butler gave him notice, he could not stand Mrs. Macqueen’s temper; it was almost playing up to his master. “Man, ye’ve little to complain o’; ye may be thankfu’ ye’re no married upon her.” As we all know, R. L. Stevenson professedly drew his Weir of Hermiston from this original. One of the stories he tells is how Mrs. Weir praised an incompetent cook for her Christian character, when her husband burst out, “I want Christian broth! Get me a lass that can plain-boil a potato, if she was a whüre off the streets.” That story is more in the true Braxfield manner than any of the authentic utterances recorded of the judge himself, but now we look at Braxfield through Stevenson’s spectacles. To this strong judge succeeded Sir David Rae, Lord Eskgrove. The anecdotes about him are really farcical. He was grotesque, and though alleged very learned was certainly very silly, but there was something irresistibly comical about his silliness. Bell initiated a careful series of law reports in his time. “He taks doun ma very words,” said the judge in well-founded alarm. Here is his exhortation to a female witness: “Lift up your veil, throw off all modesty and look me in the face”; and here his formula in sentencing a prisoner to death: “Whatever your religi-ous persua-sion may be, or even if, as I suppose, you be of no persuasion at all, there are plenty of rever-end gentlemen who will be most happy for to show you the way to yeternal life.” Or best of all, in sentencing certain rascals who had broken into Sir James Colquhoun’s house at Luss, he elaborately explained their crimes; assault, robbery and hamesucken, of which last he gave them the etymology; and then came this climax—“All this you did; and God preserve us! joost when they were sitten doon to their denner.”

The two most remarkable figures at the Scots bar in their own or any time were the Hon. Henry Erskine and John Clerk, afterwards Lord Eldin. Erskine was a consistent whig, and, though twice Lord Advocate, was never raised to the bench; yet he was the leading practising lawyer of his time, and the records of him that remain show him worthy of his reputation. He was Dean of the Faculty of Advocates, but he presided at a public meeting to protest against the war, and on the 12th January 1796 was turned out of office by a considerable majority. A personal friend of Erskine, and supposed to be of his party, yielded to the storm and voted against him. The clock just then struck three. “Ah,” murmured John Clerk, in an intense whisper which echoed through the quiet room, “when the cock crew thrice Peter denied his Master.” But most Erskine stories are of a lighter touch. When Boswell trotted with Johnson round Edinburgh, they met Erskine. He was too independent to adulate the sage but before he passed on with a bow, he shoved a shilling into the astonished Boswell’s hand, “for a sight of your bear,” he whispered. George III. at Windsor once bluntly told him, that his income was small compared with that of his brother, the Lord Chancellor. “Ah, your Majesty,” said the wit, “he plays at the guinea table, and I only at the shilling one.” In a brief interval of office he succeeded Henry Dundas, afterwards Lord Melville. He told Dundas he was about to order the silk gown. “For all the time you may want it,” said the other, “you had better borrow mine.” “No doubt,” said Harry, “your gown is made to fit any party, but it will never be said of Henry Erskine that he put on the abandoned habits of his predecessor.” But he had soon to go, and this time Ilay Campbell, afterwards Lord President, had the post, and again the gown was tossed about in verbal pleasantries. “You must take nothing off it, for I will soon need it again,” said the outgoer. “It will be bare enough, Henry, before you get it,” was the neat reply. Rather tall, a handsome man, a powerful voice, a graceful manner, and more than all, a kindly, courteous gentleman, what figure so well known on that ancient Edinburgh street, walking or driving his conspicuous yellow chariot with its black horses? Everybody loved and praised Harry Erskine, friends and foes, rich and poor alike. You remember Burns’s tribute: “Collected, Harry stood awee.” Even the bench listened with delight. “I shall be brief, my Lords,” he once began. “Hoots, man, Harry, dinna be brief—dinna be brief,” said an all too complacent senator—a compliment surely unique in the annals of legal oratory. And if this be unique, almost as rare was the tribute of a humble nobody to his generous courage. “There’s no a puir man in a’ Scotland need to want a friend or fear an enemy, sae long as Harry Erskine’s to the fore.” Not every judge was well disposed to the genial advocate. Commissary Balfour was a pompous official who spoke always ore rotundo: he had occasion to examine Erskine one day in his court, he did so with more than his usual verbosity. Erskine in his answers parodied the style of the questions to the great amusement of the audience; the commissary was beside himself with anger. “The intimacy of the friend,” he thundered, “must yield to the severity of the judge. Macer, forthwith conduct Mr. Erskine to the Tolbooth.” “Hoots! Mr. Balfour,” was the crushing retort of the macer. On another occasion the same judge said with great pomposity that he had tripped over a stile on his brother’s property and hurt himself. “Had it been your own style,” said Erskine, “you certainly would have broken your neck.”

Alas! Harry was an incorrigible punster. When urged that it was the lowest form of wit, he had the ready retort that therefore it must be the foundation of all other kinds. Yet, frankly, some of those puns are atrocious, and even a century’s keeping in Kay and other records has not made them passable. Gross and palpable, they were yet too subtle for one senator. Lord Balmuto, or tradition does him wrong, received them with perplexed air and forthwith took them to Avizandum. Hours, or as some aver, days after, a broad smile relieved those heavy features. “I hae ye noo, Harry, I hae ye noo,” he gleefully shouted; he had seen the joke! All were not so dull. A friend pretended to be in fits of laughter. “Only one of your jokes, Harry,” he said. “Where did you get it?” said the wit. “Oh, I have just bought ‘The New Complete Jester, or every man his own Harry Erskine.’ ” The other looked grave. He felt that pleasantries of the place or the moment might not wear well in print. They don’t, and I refrain for the present from further record. When Lord President Blair died suddenly on 27th November 1811, a meeting of the Faculty of Advocates was hastily called. Blair was an ideal judge, learned, patient, dignified, courteous. He is the subject of one of those wonderful Raeburn portraits (it hangs in the library of the Writers to the Signet), and as you gaze you understand how those who knew him felt when they heard that he was gone forever. Erskine, as Dean, rose to propose a resolution, but for once the eloquent tongue was mute: after some broken sentences he sat down, but his hearers understood and judged it “as good a speech as he ever made.” It was his last. He was neither made Lord President nor Lord Justice-Clerk, though both offices were open. He did not murmur or show ill-feeling, but withdrew to the little estate of Almondell, where he spent six happy and contented years ere the end.

Clerk was another type of man. In his last years Carlyle, then in his early career, noted that “grim strong countenance, with its black, far projecting brows.” He fought his way slowly into fame. His father had half humorously complained, “I remember the time when people seeing John limping on the street were told, that’s the son of Clerk of Eldin; but now I hear them saying, ‘What auld grey-headed man is that?’ and the answer is, ‘That is the father of John Clerk.’ ” He was a plain man, badly dressed, with a lame leg. “There goes Johnny Clerk, the lame lawyer.” “No, madam,” said Clerk, “the lame man, not the lame lawyer.” Cockburn says that he gave his client his temper, his perspiration, his nights, his reason, his whole body and soul, and very often the whole fee to boot. He was known for his incessant quarrels with the bench, and yet his practice was enormous. He lavished his fees on anything from bric-à-brac to charity, and died almost a poor man. In consultation at Picardy Place he sat in a room crowded with curiosities, himself the oddest figure of all, his lame foot resting on a stool, a huge cat perched at ease on his shoulder. When the oracle spoke, it was in a few weighty Scots words, that went right to the root of the matter, and admitted neither continuation nor reply. His Scots was the powerful direct Scots of the able, highly-educated man, a speech faded now from human memory. Perhaps Clerk was princeps but not facile, for there was Braxfield to reckon with. On one famous occasion, to wit, the trial of Deacon Brodie, they went at it, hammer and tongs, and Clerk more than held his own, though Braxfield as usual got the verdict. They took Clerk to the bench as Lord Eldin, when he was sixty-five, which is not very old for a judge. But perhaps he was worn out by his life of incessant strife, or perhaps he had not the judicial temperament. At any rate his record is as an advocate, and not as a senator. He had also some renown as a toper. There is a ridiculous story of his inquiring early one morning, as he staggered along the street, “Where is John Clerk’s house?” of a servant girl, a-“cawming” her doorstep betimes. “Why, you’re John Clerk,” said the astonished lass. “Yes, yes, but it’s his house I want,” was the strange answer. I have neither space nor inclination to repeat well-known stories of judicial topers. How this one was seen by his friend coming from his house at what seemed an early hour. “Done with dinner already?” queried the one. “Ay, but we sat down yesterday,” retorted the other. How this luminary awakened in a cellar among bags of soot, and that other in the guard-house; how this set drank the whole night, claret, it is true, and sat bravely on the bench the whole of next day; how most could not leave the bottle alone even there; and biscuits and wine as regularly attended the judges on the bench as did their clerks and macers. The pick of this form is Lord Hermand’s reply to the exculpatory plea of intoxication: “Good Gad, my Laards, if he did this when he was drunk, what would he not do when he’s sober?” but imagination boggles at it all, and I pass to a more decorous generation.

The names of two distinguished men serve to bridge the two periods. The early days of Jeffrey and Cockburn have a delightful flavour of old Edinburgh. The last years are within living memory. Jeffrey’s accent was peculiar. It was rather the mode in old Edinburgh to despise the south, the last kick, as it were, at the “auld enemy”; Jeffrey declared, “The only part of a Scotsman I mean to abandon is the language, and language is all I expect to learn in England.” The authorities affirm his linguistic experience unfortunate. Lord Holland said that “though he had lost the broad Scots at Oxford, he had only gained the narrow English.” Braxfield put it briefer and stronger. “He had clean tint his Scots, and found nae English.” Thus his accent was emphatically his own; he spoke with great rapidity, with great distinctness. In an action for libel, the object of his rhetoric was in perplexed astonishment at the endless flow of vituperation. “He has spoken the whole English language thrice over in two hours.” This eloquence was inconvenient in a judge. He forgot Bacon’s rule against anticipating counsel. Lord Moncreiff wittily said of him, that the usual introductory phrase “the Lord Ordinary having heard parties’ procurators” ought to be, in his judgment, “parties’ procurators having heard the Lord Ordinary.” Jeffrey, on the other hand, called Moncreiff “the whole duty of man,” from his conscientious zeal. All the same, Jeffrey was an able and useful judge, though his renown is greater as advocate and editor. Even he, though justly considerate, did not quite free himself from the traditions of his youth. He “kept a prisoner waiting twenty minutes after the jury returned from the consideration of their verdict, whilst he and a lady who had been accommodated with a seat on the bench discussed together a glass of sherry.” Cockburn, his friend and biographer, the keenest of wits, and a patron of progress, stuck to the accent. “When I was a boy no Englishman could have addressed the Edinburgh populace without making them stare and probably laugh; we looked upon an English boy at the High School as a ludicrous and incomprehensible monster:” and then he goes on to say that Burns is already a sealed book, and he would have it taught in the school as a classic. “In losing it we lose ourselves,” says the old judge emphatically. He writes this in 1844, nearly seventy years ago. We do not teach the only Robin in the school. Looked at from the dead-level of to-day his time seems picturesque and romantic: were he to come here again he would have some very pointed utterances for us and our ways, for he was given to pointed sayings. For instance, “Edinburgh is as quiet as the grave, or even Peebles.” A tedious counsel had bored him out of all reason. “He has taken up far too much of your Lordship’s time,” sympathised a friend. “Time,” said Cockburn with bitter emphasis, “Time! long ago he has exhaustit Time, and has encrotch’d upon—Eternity.” A touch of Scots adds force to such remarks. This is a good example.