The vigorous wisdom of the advice was amply proved by subsequent events, and its courage nobody will doubt who knows anything of what Scotland was at the time. In office, if not in intellect, the Tories were supreme. A single one of the Dundases named the sixteen Scots peers, and forty-three of the Scots commoners; nor was it an impossible farce, that the sheriff of a county should be the only freeholder present at the election of a member to represent it in Parliament, should as freeholder vote himself chairman, should as chairman receive the oaths and the writ from himself as sheriff, should as chairman and sheriff sign them, should propose himself as candidate, declare himself elected, dictate and sign the minutes of election, make the necessary indenture between the various parties represented solely by himself, transmit it to the Crown-office, and take his seat by the same night’s mail to vote with Mr. Addington! We must recollect such things, when we would really understand the services of such men as Jeffrey. We must remember the evil and injustice he so strenuously laboured to remove, and the cost at which his labour was given. We must bear in mind that he had to face day by day, in the exercise of his profession, the very men most interested in the abuses actively assailed, and keenly resolved as far as possible to disturb and discredit their assailant. ‘Oh, Mr. Smith,’ said Lord Stowell to Sydney, ‘you would have been a much richer man if you had come over to us!’ This was in effect the sort of thing said to Jeffrey daily in the Court of Session, and disregarded with generous scorn. What it is to an advocate to be on the deaf side of ‘the ear of the Court,’ none but an advocate can know; and this, with Jeffrey, was the twenty-five years’ penalty imposed upon him for desiring to see the Catholics emancipated, the consciences of dissenters relieved, the barbarism of jurisprudence mitigated, and the trade in human souls abolished.