have no superior at the English, or indeed any bar on earth. He is sometimes, however, misled both by his temper and his acuteness. Infinitely ingenious himself, he supposes other people equally cunning, and hence he is often guilty of an error not common to inferior men-excessive refinement. In one department, however, he stands alone, and that is in expiscating the truth from a witness predetermined and pre-sold to conceal it. I saw one specimen only of his terrible powers of cross-examination. He was beaten ; but the case was otherwise so strong, and his exposé of the contradictions of the witness so manifest, that he carried his point, and got a verdict.

And here I cannot help remarking, how greatly superior to the Scotch is the English Bar in general, in the invaluable talent of examining a witness. They seem determined to carry their point, and there is no artifice which they do not put in practice, rather than submit to the humiliation of a defeat. The counsel, too, seem all of them to possess a great knowledge of human nature, and to have studied character carefully. Hence their frequent success, where Scotch barristers would undoubtedly fail. Besides, they are allowed greater latitude by the Court. In Scotland, the judges too frequently interfere to protect a witness who needs no other shield than his own impudence. Not so in England. Very seldom, indeed, does the Bench interfere. The witness is left to stand or fall by himself. This can be no hardship to a witness who means to adhere to the truth; and if any unfair advantage is attempted to be taken, he has only to throw himself on the court, and he is safe.

I am not aware, that, in the whole course of my life, I ever experienced so much pleasure as in witnessing the tactics of Jonathan Raine, with regard to whose frequent success in this way the young barristers are full of anecdotes. But I have also said that Jonathan ranks high as a classic. To this day, "Jonathan Raine and the Classics," is a standard college toast at Oxford. You have only to listen ten minutes to his pleadings to be satisfied, not only that he has the classics at his command, and can, with more than the sorcery of Owen Glendower, evoke "spirits from the vasty deep"

of time, but that his own is a congenial soul, that he has drank deeply at the fountains of classical inspiration, and tasted the imperishable beauties of the everlasting Greek and Roman models. What his attainments are in general literature, I had no means of judging. I should not wonder, if, on all but his favourite subjects, he were inclined to be idle.

In this rapid enumeration, and long as this paper has already swelled under my hand, it would be injustice to omit one of the ablest of the Queen's counsel,

Mr Williams. With the exception of Mr Raine, Mr Williams is decidedly the most acute man at the English Bar, I mean in pursuing a train of reasoning to its consequences, or in piecing together the disjecta membra of a case, when these have been scattered over a vast surface. He wants Raine's wit and animation, however; but I suspect he excels him in legal knowledge, and in capability of a sustained effort. His countenance is eminently intellectual, and his fine aquiline nose gives a peculiar point to the general expression of his very significant features. All the world. has heard of the matchless ingenuity which he displayed in commenting on the evidence regarding the Queen's conduct on board the polacre; a part of the case which Mr Brougham, with his usual tact, reserved for the unequalled analytic powers of his friend, but which some of the miserable ministerial boobies about Edinburgh, with their usual blundering malice supposed he had unintentionally omitted. There is only one thing deserving of regret in this business, and that is, that Mr Williams did not receive that quantum of praise on the above occasion, to which, by the consent of men of all parties, he was so eminently entitled.

Several counsel, eminent in their way, were also visible on the legal horizon. Among others I discerned the broad square phiz or disc of the renowned Serjeant Hullock, of commission celebrity in this country, Mr Littledale, so famous for his extensive legal knowledge, Mr Tindal, a very able and learned counsel, Serjeant Cross, and a few others, (horresco referens,) "unknown to fame."

I had some few more little anecdotes and adventures to chronicle, as gos

You have often heard how the industrious bee trips from flower to flower, collecting their sweets, and by a process of assimilation, making them all his own; and doubtless you have frequently contemplated with delight the produce of this indefatigable insect, as a holiday accompaniment to the loaves of Mr Yeastie, and the fresh butter of Kitty Kirnem ; but be candid, Mr Editor, and say if, with that versatile disposition of yours, evident in the delicious variety of your Magazine, you have not frequently tired of its dull unvarying cloying lusciousness. You have. But let me present you with a more agreeable object, cognizable by another of your senses. In your walks of observation in and about "Auld Reekie," have you never noticed one of those polite gentry who sell a low bow for a penny, a host of God's blessings for sixpence, and who always doff their hats to me as I pass along for-nothing at all? Yes, you have and you have noticed too his coat of many colours vying with each other in the extent of their territories, and thus maintaining a fair balance of power amongst them. There is a field of variety, on which the eye may riot in all the changes of primitive colour, with multitudes of shades, and differences, and approaches to this or that hue! Suppose, if possible, that the original colour of the coat were ascertained to have been of a dark brown, -how pleased and delighted you are to find that sombre hue varied and bedizened with the sprightly green, the martial red, the aerial blue, the dazzling white, * the dashing but for

saken yellow, &c. &c. &c. and how much displeased you would be, were the sombre brown to urge its pretensions to a wider space than the rest, on the ground of its having been the first tenant!

Now, Sir, there subsists between two classes of writers exactly the same difference, as between the beg gar and the bee, and the productions of the one excel the productions of the other, as much as the coat of the former surpasses the honey of the latter, as an object of taste or beauty. The writers of the one class have all their eyes and all their ears about them; all the good things which other people say flow into their mental repository, where they mingle and unite with each other, and with the original trea sures which may be found there, till, by their own fermentation, they force for themselves an outlet, and rush forth a very delicious stream of thought, from the mingling of the ingredients called composition. But the other class, justly thinking this to smell too strongly of the mechanic, and wisely judging that it is a dangerous plan, because it must stand or fall by itself, have pursued a safer path, and procured certain salvation for their works, by a very simple expedient, that of liberal quotation. This spirit hath prevailed very much of late: the authors of the present time have improved upon the system which those of the Augustan age adopted; they stuck together, and supported one another by mutual praise; -we effect the same thing in a different and better way-by mutual quotation. Nothing can be so delightful to a man, as to see his works quoted by another, and nothing so readily induces him to lend his assistance to his humble admirer, by a

that is beautiful in imaginative excellence, and all that is just in description: Nor can it diminish their good humour towards one another, when they observe those to be the readiest to give a circulation to their good things, from whom they had the greatest reason to expect envy or detraction. There is something very friendly in this system of borrowing and lending, which puts the character of an author in a new and more engag ing light. When we read a man's works, we shall no longer think of him arrayed in scarecrow attire, surmounted by a foot long by two inches broad of peevish self-sufficient face, and the "genus irritabile" of Horace will cease to be applicable to the supporters of your Magazine, and the few others in the world who take the trouble to write. When we see an author keeping all his book to himself, and never condescending to mingle in his writings the brilliant sayings of others, we set him down as a churlish invidious wretch, selfish to the exclusion of every generous feeling; but when we observe the generality of the authors of our own day liberally helping themselves, and, at the same time, bringing their neighbours into notice by quotation, we lay aside the consideration of them as a wrangling and self-interested democracy, and give them credit for possessing all the affections, and being capable of all the courtesy, of other men. But nothing can give such an inviting aspect to the writings themselves, as a multitude of quotations. In a well written page, those nice little pieces within inverted commas stand forth, giving a grander effect to the whole: they are the bas relief ornaments of a beautiful structure. In a dull page, again, they are the inns on a dreary road,-they are the watering-places in the desart, they are the stepping-stones over the Red Sea, they are the-everything! I never throw down a book because the writer is stupid, provided he uses plenty of good quotations. Reading such a book is like calling on a dull acquaintance, who introduces you to a number of witty sensible fellows, saying little himself during your visit besides mentioning their names. That quotations, wherever they are found, are favourites with the public, is evident from the avidity with which they are swallowed, as well as from their

VOL. IX.

prevalence in the literature of the day. We have a wonderful degree of facility in accommodating both our memories and our understandings to the features and meaning of a quotation. Nothing comes amiss to our ostrich appetite for inverted commas. Every thing of this kind puts on the familiarity of an old acquaintance, and carries, in its forward friendly stare, the conviction, that we must have met and shaken hands in such a book, and at such a time, or perhaps less definitely, somewhere and sometime or other; so that, though we cannot recollect time and place, and all the et cætera of circumstantiality "ad unguem," it would be equally absurd and unpolite to refuse the familiarity of a nod, or the more friendly intimacy of a smile, to what bears in its whole exterior a claim to a share in our remembrance. Sentences which appear in this shape we conclude to be truths which every body knows and believes, or beauties which every body has seen and admired; else why should they be there? and we are totally ashamed to confess, even to ourselves, that we know nothing at all about them. But the best of it is, that people will travel, with an air of infinite satisfaction, through a dozen lines, of which they can have no notion whatever, because written in a language as little known to them as the Sybilline leaves were to Tarquin, provided the magic recommendation of inverted commas be superadded. A man's countenance, on such an occasion, wears that smile of superlative intelligence, with which we salute our fat long-winded host, when he has just finished a tortuous, fathomless narrative, less interesting to our ears than the clashing of his trenchers and the decanting of his port. The meaning contained in such a passage affects us in some mysterious way like the power of an unintelligible amulet, or as a medicine which once insinuated itself into the bodily system of a sick prince through the handle of a wooden bat which he made use of when taking exercise.

The advantages which a liberal use of quotations affords to authors being thus clearly, though perhaps not amply, illustrated, we would recommend it to all writers, especially when they have come to a ne plus ultra ;" it fills up those unseemly gaps and

chasms, those "hiatus in manuscriptis valdè deflendi," so quaintly and so emphatically denominated by our rustic Critics, holes in the ballad." "Very true," says a nephew of mine, who is looking over my right shoulder while I write this, (a very promising lad, by the by, a true sprig of the Mulberry, who will not disgrace the familybut he blushes,)-"Very true," says my nephew, "quotations are doubtless very convenient things, but then, what a moving mass of memory one must be, what a range of knowledge one must command, to have them cut and dry for every purpose." (Now, you see what a novice he is-but he blushes again.)-No such thing; a mere smattering is quite enough; I could recommend a book for quotations from the Latin Classics, but that it brings along with it some queerish remembrances of the relationship between schoolbooks and school-blows, between the birch and the breech.-One effort at the name and it is over!-I mean the Grammatical Exercises.

It is a pleasant sight to see the motley assemblage of Poets, Philosophers, Historians, Orators, &c. which this book contains. Do you wish to close a declamation with a vengeance? Cicero supplies you with many a pithy period. Excerpts from Horace scattered in every page, will help you to laugh at the follies, and Juvenal will occasionally lend his scourge to lash the vices of men. Seneca now and then starts up to enrich your morality, and Ovid will frequently forward the birth of a fine thought, or drop a tear in the midst of a lugubrious lament. Virgil is ever ready to bolster up a pastoral, or colour a description, and many a morsel of sententious wisdom appears unowned in this admirable little book-in which the whole writing worthies of "Rome at its best" are sitting round, ready to utter each his voice as occasion may require, grave and bearded, not "like the pard," but their own

senators.

As for Greek, if you are at a loss for a quotation of imposing appearance, just turn up Homer or Euripides, and take part of the first line you meet with, which has a wonderful effect; those who can detect it will be dumb on the occasion, as they are often put to such shifts themselves, and those who cannot will receive from it all

the benefit or pleasure it is intended to convey. Were it not for the associations aforementioned, how much would it delight me to see our Mentors, and our Monitors, and our Rainbows, paying due regard to their reminiscences of grammar school literature, and never neglecting their first love, by soaring in quotation beyond the precincts of that ode, oration, chapter, satire, epigram, or epistle, which they parsed on the dux's form. But if you are for a wider range than Latin and Greek afford, apply to Mr Macdonell of the Inner Temple, a person who has indeed "been at a great feast of languages, and stolen the scraps." He has pub lished a Dictionary of Quotations, a string " of shreds and patches," "full of wise saws and modern instances," a bird's-eye view of every thing wise and witty that has been written in foreign tongues, since the time that Noah celebrated the flood in a ballad of alternate eights and sixes: a Babel of knowledge; a Polyglot microcosm of authorship! Here you may drink deep of the "Pierian spring," without danger of falling in and being irrecoverably drowned, or armed with poetic obstinacy against the advice and remonstrances of all sensible people, as Achilles was rendered invulnerable by a single souse over head and ears in a certain muddy Dutch-like river in the Infernal Regions. The only thing to be lamented is, that his budget of beauties contains none of the flowers of literature which embellish the writings in our own language; but this neglect (if neglect it may be called) will easily be accounted for, if we remember what proportion they bear to those of the other languages of the world, what time would be necessary to collect together the mighty mass, what types, what ink, what paper, what toil, what bustling, to compile, print, and publish the stupendous work!what horses, what waggons, what drivers, to transport a single copy to my country residence-Tis overwhelming! In fact, and finally, a power of quoting the beauties of our own language with elegance and grace, is to be acquired only by him who has genius enough to think the search after them a pleasure, and not the task of plodding industry.

OLD MULBERRY.