prejudice that could have been spared, bound them together with that strong nationality of feeling which forms the only safe link to connect a man with his country and his kind. An impression of this sort, tempered by the harmonies of a happier period, is found in every page of Lord Cockburn's book, showing him to be a Scotsman who, while he lived, exerted himself to preserve our individuality as a nation, and who though now dead yet speaketh.

Henry Cockburn was born in 1779. His father was a member of the College of Justice, and filled successively the now extinct offices of Judge Admiral and a Baron of the Court of Exchequer. His mother was a daughter of Captain Rannie of Melville, a scion of the house of Arniston, and her sister was the wife of Henry Dundas, the first Viscount Melville. "My mother," says Lord Cockburn, was the best woman I have ever known. If I were to survive her for a thousand years, I should still have a deep and grateful recollection of her kindness, her piety, and her devotion to her family." Cockburn's earliest recollections of the outward world are connected with Cockpen, a hamlet about eight miles from Edinburgh. This place, of which his father was proprietor, was soon after sold to Lord Dalhousie, and the family for the next twenty-two or twenty-three years, resided at Hope Park in the suburbs of Edinburgh. The ground was then almost wholy unenclosed from that place to the Pentlands and the Peeblesshire moors. Blackford Hill was then open and unfenced as in the days of Marmion. An east gable of an ancient chapel dedicated to St Rocque stood at its northern base. It was on a pond close to this dilapidated building that Cockburn first learned to skate -an amusement of which he was passionately fond during the rest of his life, as might have been known any morning when hard frost was in the ascendant, when many a long roll of cases has been called up in double quick time, and continued till a more fitting opportunity, that the Lord Ordinary might get to the ice. These winter amusements seem always to have been looked on with much favour by the lawyers of the Court of Session. It is recorded of James Miller, an eminent advocate who began his career in the same year that Cockburn was born, that he was so much devoted to the winter game of curling, as to leave town to pursue his favourite amusement, notwithstanding his being engaged to plead a cause of some urgency before Lord Newton the same morning. When his opponent pressed for judgment in absence, against Mr Miller's client, the good-natured judge said, "No, no, the cause may wait till tomorrow, but there is no security the ice will wait for Mr Miller."

Notwithstanding his love for all outdoor pursuits, Cockburn, although healthy, was never a robust person. In early youth, according to his own account, he was rather a timid, nervous boy, and had a strong dislike to the boisterous riotousness of his class-fellows of the High School, to which he was sent at eight years of age. His first schoolmaster was a bad teacher. He had none of that art which allures boys, but drove them on with indiscriminate and constant harshness. "I was driven stupid," says Cockburn; "O! the bodily

and mental wearisomeness of sitting six hours a day staring idly at a page, without motion and without thought, and trembling at the gradual approach of the merciless giant. I never got a single prize, and once sat booby at the annual public examination. The beauty of no Roman word, or thought, or action ever occurred to me, nor did I ever fancy that Latin was of any use except to torture boys." He was constantly flogged: happily this crushed state of feeling was removed after he passed to the rector's class. Dr Alexander Adam, who held this situation, must have been a good man. One after another of his pupils have left to the world their testimony as to the enthusiasm with which he contrived to inoculate his pupils. His heart was in his calling, and "he was born to teach Latin, some Greek, and all virtue." Cockburn remarks "that the art of teaching has been so immensely improved in good Scotch schools since his time, that we can scarcely estimate his merits now." Francis Horner and Henry Brougham were pupils in the High School at this time, though not in the same class with Cockburn, who describes Horner as a grave, quiet, and persevering student. Brougham was then as he has been all along an impetuous daring spirit. He differed from Luke Frazer, the teacher in whose class he was, and who was about the same time the master of Francis Jeffrey and Walter Scott, on some classical reading-Brougham was punished, and Frazer, in crushing the rebellion, asserted, as he believed, his own infallibility. Regardless of the punishment, Brougham came next day loaded with his authorities, and compelled the master to acknowledge he was wrong. This we believe to be about the earliest instance on record of that indomitable tenacity with which Brougham has all his life held to the object in view till he succeeded. Cockburn afterwards relates of Brougham how he set himself to torment Lord Justice Clerk Eskgrove, the most prosy and absurd of judges. "The Justice liked passive Counsel who let him dawdle on with culprits and juries in his own way, and consequently he hated the talent, the eloquence, the energy, and all the discomposing qualities of Brougham. At last it seemed as if a conrt day was to be blessed with his absence, and Eskgrove was delighting himself with the prospect of being allowed to deal with things as he chose, when lo! his enemy appeared-tall, cool, and resolute. "I declare," said the Justice, "that man Broom, or Brough-ham, is the torment of my life."

Cockburn seems to have held all his life a poor opinion of tuition as carried on in our Scotch seminaries. He says, "The hereditary evils of the system and the place," (the Edinburgh High School,) "were too great for correction, even by Adams, and the general tone of the school was vulgar and harsh. Among the boys coarseness of language and manners was the only fashion. An English boy was so rare that his accent was openly laughed at-no lady could be seen within the walls-nothing evidently civilised was safe. Two of the masters particularly were so savage, that any master doing now what they did every hour would certainly be transported."

It is pleasant for less brilliantly gifted youths to know that a man

who speaks thus sensibly of the errors apparent in the Scotch system of tuition during his youth, was no prize-taker himself. As we have already shown, he is not ashamed to confess that he was booby at the annual examination. In remarking on the after career of his schoolmates, he says, "the same powers that raise a boy high in a school, make it probable that he will rise high in life; but in bad schools it is nearly the very reverse, and even in the most rationally conducted academy, superiority affords only a gleam of hope for the future-men change, and still more boys. The High School distinctions very speedily vanished, and fully as much by the sinking of the luminaries who had shone in the zenith, as by the rising of those who had been lying on the horizon. I have ever since had a distrust of duxes and thought boobies rather hopeful."

This want of encouragement at school, and consequent distaste for erudition, coloured the whole of Cockburn's life. Perhaps no man among his compeers, either at the bar, or afterwards on the bench, set so little store by a show of learning, legal or classical, as be did. We do not recollect of his ever making a single classical quotation, either in his address to the Bench or from it. While his Jury Court speeches were most successful, just from the want of that pedantry and affectation of learning which some other Counsel pretended. His pleadings, even when most earnest, were homely and natural, and never beyond the capacity of the twelve honest men before him-it was this which gave him weight with a Scotch jury;— even in his pronunciation he formed a complete contrast to his friend Jeffrey, who adopted an affected mode in his youth which never deserted him. So much was this the case, that Braxfield is reported to have asked of those about his desk after Jeffrey had been heard on some matter, "Does ony o' ye ken what the young man wants?" The matter was explained and granted. When Jeffrey had retired, Braxfield asked who he was? On being informed that he was the son of old Mr Jeffrey the Clerk of Session, and that he had just returned from Oxford, the judge exclaimed, "Dear me! can that be my auld frien' Mr Jamfrey's son? The lad's lost his mither tongue and got an awfu' ill ane in the south." Cockburn stuck to the tongue he had spoken in the yards of the High School, where an English pronounciation was laughed at, and where he says he never voluntarily read fifty pages of any book all the time.

"That

This uncongeniality and restraint made the holidays the more blessed. For many years of his boyhood, every Saturday, Sunday, and holiday was passed at Niddrie, the seat of Mr Wauchope, a relative of his family; and here he was first initiated into the pleasures of a garden—a thing he loved to the last day of his life. unrivalled flat space of only four or five acres contained absolutely everything that a garden could supply for 'man's delightful use.' Peaches and oaks; gravel walks and a wilderness grotesque and wild; a burn and a bowling green; shade and sun; covert and lawn; vegetables and glorious holly hedges-everything delightful either to the young or the old." So strong did this oasis of his youthful days

take hold on his memory, that in 1811, when he married and set up his rural household gods at Bonally, close by the base of the Pentland Hills, which he had climbed in his childhood, he resolved to emulate the scene he had felt so much pleasure in at Niddrie. He began by an annual lease of a ruinous farm house, and a few square yards of garden ground. "But realizing the profanations of Auburn," says he, "I have destroyed a village, and erected a tower, and reached the dignity of a twenty-acred laird. Everything except the two burns, the few old trees, and the mountains, is my own work, and to a great extent the work of my own hands. Human nature," he continues, "is incapable of enjoying more happiness than has been my lot here; where the glories of the prospect, the luxuries of the wild retirement have been all enhanced by the progress of my improvements, of my children and of myself. Warburton says there was not a bush in his garden on which he had not hung a speculation-there is not a recess in the valleys of the Pentlands, nor an eminence on their summits that is not familiar to my solitude. One summer I read every word of Tacitus, in the sheltered crevice of a rock, called 'My Seat,' about 800 feet above the level of the sea, with the most magnificent of scenes stretched out before me."

Here Cockburn remained to the end of his life-his love of nature never deserted him; and to the interest he took in his improvements, which kept him much in the open air, and the exercise he had in walking in and out between Bonally and his court may be ascribed much of the unbroken health he enjoyed. He used to tell that he climbed one of the Pentlands every morning. If the weather was misty, he went to a hill higher than usual, and if so wet that no view could be obtained from the lower range, he climbed the highest of all. Unlike most persons who have created their own paradise, Cockburn was no niggard of its beauties. The dusty wayfarer and the snug citizen were alike permitted to range through his grounds, and a longing eye at the bright blooming parterre which glowed through the gateway, was sure to obtain an invitation to enter, if either the master or the gardener was at hand.

men.

This fixity of site made Cockburn better known to two generations of the inhabitants of Edinburgh, than almost any other of its public For many years he was prominently engaged in the discussion of every social question that arose during a period more fertile in that class of things than any that can ever again occur. He had listened as a boy to almost the first of the modern state trials which occurred in Scotland since the rebellion of 1745. He was the most active of that small band who, fighting in the hope of obtaining civil and religious liberty for their countrymen, stood out against corruption in high places, and who, although for many years virtually ostracised by the party in power, who had both place and emolument to dispose of, yet never bowed the knee to Baal. While Brougham and Romilly in the senate, Jeffrey and Mackintosh through the press, by their indefatigable efforts, were assuring the people that the cause would yet be triumphant, Cockburn was the working man who

organised the meetings in this quarter of the island-who kept the desponding in good humour, repressed the too forward impetuosity of the unwary, and by his prudence and sagacity, glued the party together till it became victorious, when there could be no reason to fear the lack of friends.

The position Cockburn occupied in this respect gave him peculiar facilities for the observation of character in every grade of Edinburgh society, and as was to be expected, his Memorials are full of reminiscences of the heroes of other years. The portraits he gives us are treated somewhat differently from those of any other writer we know. He indulges in no metaphysical shadowings of character or theories of mind; but boldly gives, in a few rough touches, the outward man in his habit as he lived-throws in a word or two of his kindness of heart, or mentions some redeeming trait of character, and there leaves the reader to form his own opinion. There is something so Isaak Waltonish in this mode of treatment, that like a truly painted portrait on canvas, we feel assured of the fidelity of the likeness, although we have never seen the original.

While his portraits of individuals are excellent, his sketches of society such as flourished in Edinburgh sixty or seventy years ago, are not less interesting and lifelike. He assures us of what we suspected long ago, that in these days, with all the formality then existing, there was far more coarseness than exists now with all the unrestricted freedom we possess. Swearing and drunkenness were very prevalent, if not universal among the higher ranks. Swearing was thought the right and mark of a gentleman. "Not that people were worse tempered than now. They were only coarser in their manners, and had got into a bad style of admonition and dissent. Lord Bouxfield apologised to a lady whom he had damned at whist for bad play by declaring that he had taken her for his wife." In those days it was a sin for a gentleman to allow his guest to leave his board sober, or if either he or his guests did so through sheer strength of brain, the fault was remedied by a carouse at the nearest hostlery. Cockburn remarks, "people sometimes say that there is no probability in Scott making the party in Waverley retire from the castle to the howf; but these people were not with me at the inn at Middleton, about forty (seventy) years ago. The Duke of Buccleuch was living at Dalkeith, Henry Dundas at Melville, Robert Dundas, the Lord-Advocate, at Arniston, Hepburn of Clinkinton, at Middleton, and several of the aristocracy of Midlothian within a few miles-all with their families and luxurious houses; yet had they to the number of twelve or sixteen congregated in this alehouse for a day of freedom and jollity. We found them roaring, and singing, and laughing in a low-roofed room, scarcely big enough to hold them, with wooden chairs and a sanded floor. When their own lacqueys, who were carrying on high life in the kitchen, did not choose to attend, their masters were served by two women. There was plenty of wine, particularly claret, in rapid circulation on the table, but my eye was chiefly attracted by a large bowl of hot whisky punch, the steam of which was almost dropping