Scotland was, at the same time, rising under a faint sunshine of prosperity—a sort of reflection of that enjoyed by France. The connection of the poor with the rich country was becoming ever more close, but at the same time it was acquiring an unwholesome character. The two could not fuse into each other as England and Scotland did; and, for all the pride of the Scots, and their strong hold over France, as the advanced-guard mounted upon England, the connection could not but lapse into a sort of clientage—the great nation being the patron, the small nation the dependant. Whether for good or evil, France infused into Scotland her own institutions, which, being those of the Roman Empire, as practised throughout the Christian nations of the Continent, made Scotsmen free of those elements of social communion, that _amitas gentium_, from which England excluded herself in sulky pride. This is visible, or rather audible, at the present day, in the Greek and Latin of the Scotsmen of the old school, who can make themselves understood all over the world; while the English pronunciation, differing from that of the nations which have preserved the chief deposits of the classic languages in their own, must as assuredly differ from the way in which these were originally spoken. The Englishman disdained the universal Justinian jurisprudence, and would be a law unto himself, which he called, with an affectation of humility, “The Common Law.” It is full, no doubt, of patches taken out of the ‘Corpus Juris,’ but, far from their source being acknowledged, the civilians are never spoken of by the common lawyers but to be railed at and denounced; and when great draughts on the Roman system were found absolutely necessary to keep the machine of justice in motion, these were entirely elbowed out of the way by common law, and had to form themselves into a separate machinery of their own, called Equity. Scotland, on the other hand, received implicitly from her leader in civilisation the great body of the civil law, as collected and arranged by the most laborious of all labouring editors, Denis Godefroi. We brought over also an exact facsimile of the French system of public prosecution for crime, from the great state officer at the head of the system to the Procureurs du Roi. It is still in full practice and eminently useful; but it is an arrangement that, to be entirely beneficial, needs to be surrounded by constitutional safeguards; and though there has been much pressure of late to establish it in England, one cannot be surprised that it was looked askance at while the great struggles for fixing the constitution were in progress.