the earth, not merely with the picturesque groups of the soldiers and courts of the past, but with the actors in all the various quaint and homely transactions and puzzlements which the feudal ages had brought forth.  Hence though, as a matter of fact, Scott never made much figure as an advocate, he became a very respectable, and might unquestionably have become a very great, lawyer.  When he started at the bar, however, he had not acquired the tact to impress an ordinary assembly.  In one case which he conducted before the General Assembly of the Kirk of Scotland, when defending a parish minister threatened with deposition for drunkenness and unseemly behaviour, he certainly missed the proper tone,—­first receiving a censure for the freedom of his manner in treating the allegations against his client, and then so far collapsing under the rebuke of the Moderator, as to lose the force and urgency necessary to produce an effect on his audience.  But these were merely a boy’s mishaps.  He was certainly by no means a Heaven-born orator, and therefore could not expect to spring into exceptionally early distinction, and the only true reason for his relative failure was that he was so full of literary power, and so proudly impatient of the fetters which prudence seemed to impose on his extra-professional proceedings, that he never gained the credit he deserved for the general common sense, the unwearied industry, and the keen appreciation of the ins and outs of legal method, which might have raised him to the highest reputation even as a judge.

All readers of his novels know how Scott delights in the humours of the law.  By way of illustration take the following passage, which is both short and amusing, in which Saunders Fairford—­the old solicitor painted from Scott’s father in Redgauntlet—­descants on the law of the stirrup-cup.  “It was decided in a case before the town bailies of Cupar Angus, when Luckie Simpson’s cow had drunk up Luckie Jamieson’s browst of ale, while it stood in the door to cool, that there was no damage to pay, because the crummie drank without sitting down; such being the circumstance constituting a Doch an Dorroch, which is a standing drink for which no reckoning is paid.”  I do not believe that any one of Scott’s contemporaries had greater legal abilities than he, though, as it happened, they were never fairly tried.  But he had both the pride and impatience of genius.  It fretted him to feel that he was dependent on the good opinions of solicitors, and that they who were incapable of understanding his genius, thought the less instead of the better of him as an advocate, for every indication which he gave of that genius.  Even on the day of his call to the bar he gave expression to a sort of humorous foretaste of this impatience, saying to William Clerk, who had been called with him, as he mimicked the air and tone of a Highland lass waiting at the Cross of Edinburgh to be hired for the harvest, “We’ve stood here an