We feel no little pleasure in presenting the original of a character so important as the facetious Pleydell. He is understood to be the representative of Mr. Andrew Crosbie, who flourished at the head of the Scottish bar about the period referred to in the novel. Many circumstances conspire to identify him with the lawyer of the novel. Their eminence in their profession was equally respectable; their habits of frequenting taverns and High Jinks parties on Saturday nights was the same, and both were remarkable for that antique politeness of manner so characteristic of old Scottish gentlemen. It may be allowed that Pleydell is one of the characters most nearly approaching to _generic_ that we have attempted to identify with real life; but it is nevertheless so strenuously asserted by all who have any recollection of Mr. Crosbie, that Pleydell resembles _him in particular_, that we feel no hesitation in assigning him as the only true specific original. We therefore lay the following simple facts before the public, and leave the judicious reader to his own discrimination. Mr. Crosbie was in the prime of life about the middle of the last century, and, from that period till the year 1780, enjoyed the highest reputation in his profession. He came of a respectable family in the county of Galloway—the district, the reader will remember, in which the principal scenes of the novel are laid, and probably the shire of which Paulus Pleydell, Esq., is represented (vol. ii. chap, xvi.) as having been, at an early period of his life, the sheriff-depute. The residence of Mr. Crosbie, in the early periods of his practice, exactly coincides with that of Pleydell, whom, if we recollect rightly, Colonel Mannering found in a dark close on the north side of the High Street, several storeys up a narrow common stair. Mr. Crosbie lived first in Lady Stair’s Close, a steep alley on the north side of the Lawnmarket; afterwards in the Advocate’s Close, in the Luckenbooths; and finally in a self-contained and well-built house of his own, at the foot of Allan’s Close, still standing, and lately inhabited by Richard Cleghorn, Esq., Solicitor before the Supreme Courts. All these various residences are upon the north side of the High Street, and the two first answer particularly to the description in the novel. The last is otherwise remarkable as being situated exactly behind and in view of the innermost penetralia of Mr. Constable’s great publishing warehouse,[10]—the _sanctum sanctorum_ in which Captain Clutterbuck found the _Eidolon_ of the Author of “Waverley,” so well described in the introduction to “Nigel.”