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LETTER XXXVII.

TO THE SAME.

THERE is another class of Lawyers, however, who have no ambition of rivalling the Cranstouns and the Jeffreys-who walk in a totally different course from them and attain in their own walk, if not to an equally splendid, certainly to an almost as lucrative species of reputation. These are the class of your plain, thorough-going, jog-trot Lawyers, who are seldom employed in cases of the very highest importance, but whose sober, regular, business-like manner of doing every thing that is entrusted to them, procures for them an even, uninterrupted, unvarying life of wellpaid labour. It is upon these men that the ordinary run of your common-place litigation scatters its constantly refreshing, but seldom brightening dew. The lungs of these men are employed, for

a certain number of hours every morning, in pleading, and every evening in dictating. With them, the intellectual mill-horse never stops a moment in his narrow round, unless it be to allow time for eating, drinking, and sleeping. The natural attitude of these men, is that of labouring at a side-bar. Their heads do not feel comfortable when their wigs are off. If they call for a glass of ale during dinner, they astound the lackey with a big phrase from the Style-book. If you carry one of them into the midst of the most magnificent scenery of Nature, his thoughts will still tarry behind him within the narrow and dusty precincts of the Parliament-House of Edinburgh. You shall see him pluck a Condescendence from his pocket, and con over its sprawling pages, although the grandest of mountains be behind, and the most beautiful of lakes before him.

These are the true plodders of the profession

nothing can be more genuine than their obscure

devotion" they and the other slaves of the Lamp!"

During one of my earliest visits to the Parliament-House, when I was picking up from various quarters the first rudiments of that information which I have now been retailing for your benefit, an elderly lawyer, by name Mr Forsyth, was pointed out to me, I forget by whom, as standing at the head of this class. On talking over these matters with my friend Mr W.

however, I found reason to doubt whether this person might not be well entitled to take his place among those of a higher order, and the result of my own subsequent observation and diligent attendance on these Courts of Justice, has certainly been to confirm me in this notion of the matter. There is, indeed, something so very singular and characteristic in the whole appearance of Mr Forsyth, that, even at first sight, I should scarcely have been persuaded, without some difficulty, to set him down as a mere ordinary drudge of his profession. I am so deeply imbued with the prejudices of a physiognomist and a craniologist, that I could not be easily brought to think there was nothing extraordinary in one on whom Nature had stamped so very peculiar a signet.

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I have never seen a countenance that combined, in such a strange manner, originality of expression with features of common-place formation. His forehead is indeed massy and square, so far as it is seen; but his wig comes so low down, as to conceal about the whole of its structúre. His nose is large and firm, but shaped without the least approach to one beautiful line. His mouth is of the widest, and rudely-fashioned; but whether he closes it entirely, or, what is more common, holds it slightly open with a little twist to the left, it is impossible to mistake its intense sagacity of expression, for the commonplace archness of a mere practised dealer in litigation.. His cheeks are ponderous, and look as if they had been cast in brass, and his chin projects with an irresistible air of ungullibility. But the whole of this would be nothing without his eyes. The one of these is black as jet, and looks out clearly from among a tangled and evertwinkling web of wrinkles. The other is light in hue, and glimmers through a large and watery surface, contracted by no wrinkles-(the lids on that side being large, smooth, and oily)-generally in a direction as opposite as possible from that which its more vivacious neighbour happens to be following for the moment. It has not, however,

the appearance of being blind, to one who views it disconnected from the other, and nothing, indeed, can be more striking than the total difference of effect which the countenance produces, according as it is viewed in sinistral or in dextral profile. On the one side, you have the large, glazed, grey eye, reflecting an air of unutterable innocence and suavity on all the features it seems to be illuminating. On the other, you have the small black iris, tipped in the centre with an unquenchable dazzling flame, and throwing on every thing above and below it a lustre of acumen, that Argus might have been proud to rival with all his ubiquity of glances. Such a face as this was never meant to be the index of any common mind. "Nihil inutile, nihil vanum, nihil supervacaneum in Naturâ," as the Prince of English intellect has well expressed it,

My friend W. informs me, that the history of this gentleman has been no less peculiar than is his physiognomy. In his youth he was destined for the Kirk, and proceeded so far in that way as to be dubbed a licentiate, or preacher, which is the nearest approach in the Scottish Church to our deacon's orders. But-from causes, it is probable, of no uncommon nature, he soon