for the bench were very characteristic:  “Ye see I first read a’ the pleadings, and then, after lettin’ them wamble in my wame wi’ the toddy twa or three days, I gie my ain interlocutor.”  For a moment suppose such anecdotes to be told now of any of our high legal functionaries.  Imagine the feelings of surprise that would be called forth were the present Justice-Clerk to adopt such imagery in describing the process of preparing his legal judgment on a difficult case in his court!

In regard to the wit of the Scottish bar.—­It is a subject which I do not pretend to illustrate.  It would require a volume for itself.  One anecdote, however, I cannot resist, and I record it as forming a striking example of the class of Scottish humour which, with our dialect, has lost its distinctive characteristics.  John Clerk (afterwards a judge by the title of Lord Eldin) was arguing a Scotch appeal case before the House of Lords.  His client claimed the use of a mill-stream by a prescriptive right.  Mr. Clerk spoke broad Scotch, and argued that “the watter had rin that way for forty years.  Indeed naebody kenn’d how long, and why should his client now be deprived of the watter?” etc.  The chancellor, much amused at the pronunciation of the Scottish advocate, in a rather bantering tone asked him, “Mr. Clerk, do you spell water in Scotland with two t’s?” Clerk, a little nettled at this hit at his national tongue, answered, “Na, my Lord, we dinna spell watter (making the word as short as he could) wi’ twa t’s, but we spell mainners (making the word as long as he could) wi’ twa n’s.”

John Clerk’s vernacular version of the motto of the Celtic Club is highly characteristic of his humour and his prejudice.  He had a strong dislike to the whole Highland race, and the motto assumed by the modern Celts, “Olim marte, nunc arte,” Clerk translated “Formerly robbers, now thieves.”  Quite equal to Swift’s celebrated remark on William III.’s motto—­Recepit, non rapuit—­“that the receiver was as bad as the thief.”  Very dry and pithy too was Clerk’s legal opinion given to a claimant of the Annandale peerage, who, when pressing the employment of some obvious forgeries, was warned that if he persevered, nae doot he might be a peer, but it would be a peer o’ anither tree!

The clever author of “Peter’s Letters” gives an elaborate description of Clerk’s character whilst at the bar, and speaks of him as “the plainest, the shrewdest, and the most sarcastic of men.”  Nor could he entirely repress these peculiarities when raised to the bench under the title of Lord Eldin.

His defence of a young friend, who was an advocate, and had incurred the displeasure of the Judges, has often been repeated.  Mr. Clerk had been called upon to offer his apologies for disrespect, or implied disrespect, in his manner of addressing the Bench.  The advocate had given great offence by expressing his “astonishment” at something which had emanated from their Lordships, implying by it his disapproval.  He got Lord Eldin, who was connected with him, to make an apology for him.  But Clerk could not resist his humorous vein by very equivocally adding, “My client has expressed his astonishment, my Lords, at what he had met with here; if my young friend had known this court as long as I have, he would have been astonished at nothing.”