there are some,—myself among them,—who would willingly take one Walter Scott at any time as a sufficient offset against a Jeffrey, a Horner, a Sydney Smith, a Brougham, an Allen, a Thomas Brown, and a Tom Campbell, all put together. If the standard of judgment, however, is to be that of the right and the wrong in politics, this will hardly be now the general opinion. We do not now associate Whiggism with any idea of the heroic. But in the year 1802 one had to judge otherwise. Whiggism all over Britain, but especially Scottish Whiggism, then required some courage, some spirit of self-sacrifice, in its adherents. The actual creed of the Scottish Whigs was moderate enough. It consisted in believing that there were a great many remediable abuses in the Scottish political and administrative system, that the people had too little power and the lairds too much, that the Revolution in France had not been unmitigated madness, that at any rate the dread of its effects on this country had been monstrously exaggerated, and that, on the whole, the policy of Fox and his associates was a policy to be supported in preference to that of his rival, Pitt. The creed, we say, was moderate; and it was, undoubtedly, in large measure, true. What made it heroism to hold to it was that the holding of it involved serious personal consequences,—exclusion from all share in the good things going, and even, to a considerable extent, from popular confidence and favour; with no prospect either (for who could tell when George III. might die, or how his son might act when he came to the throne?) that this state of things would soon end. That in such circumstances so many men in Scotland, and especially so many men of the legal profession, should have maintained the obnoxious creed, and maintained it with such tenacity and mutual fidelity in spite of all temptation, is a fact of which Scotland may well be proud. As a body, the Scottish Whigs of 1802 seem to have been as courageous and pure-minded a set of men as there were in Great Britain. Theirs, in the most literal sense, was “the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.” Most creditable of all, perhaps, was the persevering Whiggism of so many of the younger men. Beating their heels idly in a particular corner of the Parliament House, where no agents came to them with briefs, and whiling away the rest of their time with essays and debates in the Speculative Society, ambitious dreams in secret, convivial meetings at each others’ houses, and eternal jokes about Esky, those light-hearted young Whig lawyers had not even that sense of social consequence to support them which their seniors on the same side of politics could feel as an inspiration. They formed a little band by themselves, cherishing their Whiggism for its own sake, and not even visited by much countenance from their Whig seniors. And yet upon them, to a greater extent than they or their seniors were aware,