Hermand’s reply to the exculpatory plea of intoxication: “Good Gad, my Laards, if he did this when he was drunk, what would he not do when he’s sober?” but imagination boggles at it all, and I pass to a more decorous generation. The names of two distinguished men serve to bridge the two periods. The early days of Jeffrey and Cockburn have a delightful flavour of old Edinburgh. The last years are within living memory. Jeffrey’s accent was peculiar. It was rather the mode in old Edinburgh to despise the south, the last kick, as it were, at the “auld enemy”; Jeffrey declared, “The only part of a Scotsman I mean to abandon is the language, and language is all I expect to learn in England.” The authorities affirm his linguistic experience unfortunate. Lord Holland said that “though he had lost the broad Scots at Oxford, he had only gained the narrow English.” Braxfield put it briefer and stronger. “He had clean tint his Scots, and found nae English.” Thus his accent was emphatically his own; he spoke with great rapidity, with great distinctness. In an action for libel, the object of his rhetoric was in perplexed astonishment at the endless flow of vituperation. “He has spoken the whole English language thrice over in two hours.” This eloquence was inconvenient in a judge. He forgot Bacon’s rule against anticipating counsel. Lord Moncreiff wittily said of him, that the usual introductory phrase “the Lord Ordinary having heard parties’ procurators” ought to be, in his judgment, “parties’ procurators having heard the Lord Ordinary.” Jeffrey, on the other hand, called Moncreiff “the whole duty of man,” from his conscientious zeal. All the same, Jeffrey was an able and useful judge, though his renown is greater as advocate and editor. Even he, though justly considerate, did not quite free himself from the traditions of his youth. He “kept a prisoner waiting twenty minutes after the jury returned from the consideration of their verdict, whilst he and a lady who had been accommodated with a seat on the bench discussed together a glass of sherry.” Cockburn, his friend and biographer, the keenest of wits, and a patron of progress, stuck to the accent. “When I was a boy no Englishman could have addressed the Edinburgh populace without making them stare and probably laugh; we looked upon an English boy at the High School as a ludicrous and incomprehensible monster:” and then he goes on to say that Burns is already a sealed book, and he would have it taught in the school as a classic. “In losing it we lose ourselves,” says the old judge emphatically. He writes this in 1844, nearly seventy years ago. We do not teach the only Robin in the school. Looked at from the dead-level of to-day his time seems picturesque and romantic: were he to come here again he would have some very pointed utterances for us and our ways, for he was given to pointed sayings. For instance, “Edinburgh is as quiet as the grave, or even Peebles.” A tedious counsel had bored