of the University Commissioners in 1854, and each endowed with a stipend of £750 a year. The Chair of Moral and Metaphysical Philosophy, moreover, which closely borders on this side of learning, is one of the best in the University, being maintained by a stipend of £600 a year.

But in both Universities the great defect, obviously, is the want of a Faculty of Law, in the separate and complete sense attached to that member of the body-academical in the continental Universities and, in theory at least, in our own. So long as they confine themselves to preparing their pupils for the special studies which they are to pursue in a different atmosphere, and stimulated by different influences, no action can be more valuable than that of these two ancient seats of learning. But it is with law just as it is with medicine. Oxford and Cambridge can no more produce a jurist, than they can produce a physician, or an operative surgeon. Even the more general branches of professional study, so soon as they undertake to deal with existing human affairs, cannot be pursued apart from the more special. Anatomy and physiology are inseparably bound up with pathology and materia medica. Constitutional and International Law cannot be studied,-and even general Jurisprudence can scarcely be adequately illustrated,apart from Municipal Law, Criminal Law, and forms of Civil procedure. The defect is one which can never be supplied effectually, and which, in our opinion, ought not to be attempted to be supplied at all, at the University towns. The real corrective is the formation of a complete school of law, of a legal University (if we may apply the term, without contradiction, to a single Faculty) in London, in connection with the Inns, Chambers, Courts, and other legal appliances, now about to be gathered together in the neighbourhood of Lincoln's Inn Fields. The formation of such an institution-an institution which should deal with the "Social Sciences" in the largest sense, is a scheme which has long been ardently cherished by some of the most enlightened members of the English Bar and Bench. In our next article we shall endeavour to describe what has been accomplished or is being attempted toward its realization.

THE SHERIFF OF GLASGOW AND SHERIFF

SUBSTITUTES.

SIR ARCHIBALD ALISON has been making a speech-an event not in itself to be considered remarkable; and yet the speech is a very remarkable one. He spoke from the bench, but not in the exercise of judicial functions; therefore, without detriment to his judicial character, he might, if he pleased, ignore his own remark, that "perhaps the most important qualities any judge can have are suavity of manner and gentlemanly demeanour." The occasion of the speech was a sufficiently ordinary one, and we should not have been surprised if even he had allowed to pass in silence such a circumstance as Mr. Archibald Lawrie, advocate, taking his seat as interim Sheriff-Substitute, in room of Mr. Sheriff Smith, who has got leave of absence for some months on account of bad health. But because Mr. Lawrie was an advocate, instead of a Glasgow procurator, Sir Archibald tells us he only refrained from declining to sanction his appointment, because he felt he could not do so "without a slap in the face to Mr. Lawrie." We can assure Sir Archibald that it was a great mistake to refrain from doing what was right out of any delicacy towards Mr. Lawrie, as that gentleman has earned for himself such a position and character at the bar as to make him equally independent of any "slap on the face" he could give, and of his offensive patting on the back, and telling the public that "his manner, his appearance, and general demeanour, are extremely prepossessing."

We have, however, little interest to inquire into the Sheriff's standard of good taste and good feeling, as displayed in his allusions to Mr. Lawrie, and we cannot trust ourselves to deal with, nor do we choose even to quote, the most unbecoming of his references, still more to Mr. Smith, his fellow-labourer on the Glasgow bench for twenty years. But Sir Archibald Alison's speech has a wider than any merely personal interest, for he enunciates a general principle as that which is to guide him in the exercise of the large patronage committed to him for the public good.

"No one knows better than I do that the judicial appointments to this Court in general can best be made in favour of gentlemen who have practised before it. I know perfectly, in my own experience, that a very considerable amount-I would even say a great amount of practice at

the bar in Edinburgh affords hardly any adequate preparation for the business of this Court, and the reason is that the business of the one Court is quite different from that of the other; and that the great qualities here, even required more than legal acumen, are knowledge of the world, knowledge of human nature in all its grades, and knowledge of the wants and necessities of the various classes of society unknown elsewhere, but which have such an important influence upon the business transacted in this place. I have no hesitation in saying, however, that with a view to a permanent appointment, if Mr Smith should be unable to return to his duties in the beginning of October, I shall not look beyond this Faculty; and I have no hesitation in saying that there is a gentleman now in my eye in whose talent and knowledge, and gentlemanlike manner I have the most entire confidence."

Passing over the circumstance that these remarks were called forth by the interim appointment of a gentleman, born in Glasgow and trained for years in a Glasgow writer's office!! we cannot at all sympathise with the view, that among procurators alone are to be found fit occupants of the Sheriff-Substitute bench. Time was when these officials were not necessarily lawyers at all, and were remunerated with pittances of £60 and £70 a year. When the remuneration was increased, the qualification of having at least the knowledge of law implied in being a procurator before some court was required, and the more important substituteships came to be filled by members of the bar, who on the other hand ceased to hold, what used to be, and what even sometimes is, the more lucrative office of sheriff clerk. Now the qualification of membership of the bar has ceased to be the exception, and become the rule, and with such manifest good effect, that there is little danger of progress otherwise than in a direction opposite to that pointed at by Sir Archibald. We do not say

that the Sheriff of Lanarkshire, or of any other county, if predetermined not to seek a fit man, or if he engages in his search with either a man, or a beam, in his eye, may not make an unfortunate selection from the bar; but we do say, that if any one of them comes to the bar with an honest purpose to find a man of proved fitness, he will succeed, and no man knows this better than Sir Archibald, for among the members of the bar who have sat on the Glasgow bench have been, and are, men possessing judicial talent of the very first order. We will go further in our objection to the principle laid down, and say, that if procurators are to be selected to preside over Sheriff Courts, they should be sent to districts other than those in which they have practised, and totally dissevered from their local associations and connections.

It may be said in reply, that the bench in Edinburgh is supplied from the bar, but then the bar is not local any more than the business transacted in the supreme courts. Both are collected from every province of the country. But even assuming the correctness of Sir Archibald's estimate of the value of intimate local knowledge derived from personal associations, there is no part of the country for which the bar cannot supply a substitute with such local knowledge unimpaired-but with his local prejudices rubbed off. We believe, therefore, that generally the safest course, and that most palatable to the highest-toned procurators throughout the country, will be to choose sheriff-substitutes from the bar, as the branch of the legal profession which undoubtedly possesses the highest social status, and the highest culture. From it young men of tried experience may be appointed without the risk of exciting public dissatisfaction or local professional jealousy. But the emoluments of the office ill not tempt the best and most successful men among the local procurators to abandon a lucrative business;—and to take a man of standing, but second rate position is most mischievous, while the difficulty of putting a promising young man from a local society to preside over his brethren and fathers in the law is manifest.

It is really amusing, at this time of day, to hear Sir Archibald announcing as a discovery, "that knowledge of the world, and knowledge of human nature in all its grades," are required for the bench even more than legal acumen. But when he speaks of these qualities as if required only for the Glasgow bench, and capable of being picked up only in a writer's office on the banks of the Clyde, and as necessarily lost by experience, he merely shows the narrowing effect upon the intellect, of being confined too long to one circle, and in that occupying a central position, in which he is necessarily isolated from all equal and unrestrained communication with the men of his own pursuits. We say this, because we believe Sir Archibald to have been speaking in simplicity and honesty. Unwearied devotion to the duties of his office, and unvarying courtesy to all who ever come in contact with him in business, have secured him so well-deserved a popularity with the procurators of his court, as to raise him above the suspicion of having spoken to curry favour with his audience. But the whole tone of the speech exhibits Sir Archibald so completely in a new character, that it is just possible that he was trying on a little waggery with his procurators. We should have liked to have

been present to see whether he embraced the whole procurators present in one comprehensive 'all-in-my-eye' glance, or concentrated his gaze on the "gentleman now in my eye;" but whatever he did, we are much mistaken in the Glasgow procurators generally, and the gentleman whom report names as the "man in my eye" in particular, if they did not, one and all, blush for the exhibition of their Sheriff.

We admit that the Sheriff-substitute bench has, from time to time, been occupied, nay, is now occupied, by members of various societies of procurators, possessing high magisterial and judicial qualities. We deny that present or past experience of that or any other bench, warrants any other presumption than the one which is now well established on both sides of the Tweed, that, as a rule, the bar affords the best training for judicial office. We admit that, as the law at present stands, Sheriffs are not only at liberty, but bound to look through all bodies, with the statutory qualification, in order to find out the best man, and that it is, as a general rule, proper to tell any one holding an interim appointment, that the fact of his doing so confers no title to a permanent one. But, because we object to a Sheriff's choice being hampered, we deny that it is decent for him, as a dispenser of important public patronage, to say, nine months before an expected vacancy, "I have a man in my eye," to the exclusion of others, or another, of whom he can say as he said in this case, "I am quite sure that he will answer all the hopes and expectations of myself and of the faculty." How can Sir Archibald be sure, or expect the public to suppose that he cares to be sure, that the man in my eye" is the best man to be had, if he openly professes to reject trial alike of him and of others as a test of fitness.

66

New Books.

A Treatise on the Law of Partnership and Joint-Stock Companies, according to the Law of Scotland. By FRANCIS WILLIAM CLARK, Advocate. 2 vols. Edinburgh: T. & T.

Clark, 1866.

IN our last number we directed attention to the appearance of this book. We were not then in a position to give any