Lord Jeffrey--his judicial designation in advanced life--was of respectable, but not exalted parentage. After a careful education at Edinburgh, Glasgow, and Oxford, he entered at the bar in 1793, when not yet much more than twenty years of age. His father, being himself a Tory, desired the young lawyer to be so too, seeing that it would be favourable to his prospects; but he could not yield in this point to paternal counsel. The consequence was, that this able man practised for ten years without gaining more than L. 100 per annum. All this time, he cultivated his mind diligently, and was silently training himself for that literary career which he subsequently entered upon. His talents were at that time known only to a few intimates: there were peculiarities about him, which prevented him from being generally appreciated up to his deserts. His figure, to begin with, was almost ludicrously small. Then, in his anxiety to get rid of the Scottish accent, he had contracted an elocution intended to be English, but which struck every one as most affected and offensive. His manners were marked by levity, and his conversation to many seemed flippant. His literary musings also acted unfavourably on the solicitors, the leading patrons of young counsellors. Reduced by dearth of business almost to despair, he had at one time serious thoughts of flinging himself upon the London press for a subsistence. The first smile of fortune beamed upon him in 1802, when the _Edinburgh Review_ was started--a work of which he quickly assumed the management. That it brought him income and literary renown, we gather from Lord Cockburn's pages; but we do not readily find it explained how. While more declaredly a literary man than ever, he now advanced rapidly at the bar, and quickly became a man of wealth and professional dignity. We suspect that, after all that is said of the effect of literary pursuits on business prospects, the one success was a consequence in great measure of the other.