“we shall be able to acquit him yet;” and the judge relaxed a little of the lofty severity of his countenance. Another cause why the people of the Athens, and of Scotland generally, set so high a value upon the Athenian advocates, may be that they are the only class of persons among whom public speaking is so much as known. I do not mean to say that the Scotch have no talents for this kind of display. Quite the reverse; for instead of taciturnity, which their supposed cautious character would lead one to set down as their leading propensity, they are the most loquacious people,--I mean the longest-winded people that ever I met with; having, in their common conversation, ten times as much _badinage_ and ornament as the English, and ten times more concatenation of ideas than the Irish. But they have no subject to excite public speaking, and no occasion upon which to exercise it. Elections they have none, not even so much as a parish-meeting, or a wardmote. The only persons among them that have the privilege of electing even their own local managers, are “the Trades,” or little corporations of artificers, in the royal burghs, who annually choose “deacons;” but they usually do this more by the eloquence of liquor than of words, and as the deacons are commonly a sort of pack-horses to the burghal corporation, they fall into most of the sensual and senseless vulgarity which are the characteristics of it. Churches and hospitals supported by voluntary contribution, at the annual festivals of which the contributors may make speeches, there are none. Indeed, unless a Scotchman were to stand on a hill-side and address the wind, or on the sea-shore and address the waves, he has no scope for oratory; and thus, come from what part of the country he may, the pleadings before the courts at the Athens, are quite a novelty to him, and he runs after and admires them as such. Thus the total absence of all eloquence throughout the country, makes a very small portion of it obtain distinction in the Athens. Curious as it is to find a city where every soul is so much absorbed by the law, that men and women, girls and boys, of all ages and all conditions of life, season their common speech with the slang of legal phrases, and destructive of not only all literary and liberal taste, but of all the joyous intercourse of life, as it is to hear every night a rehearsal of Jeffrey’s sarcasm, or Cockburn’s joke of the morning; yet the Parliament-house of the Athens is a spirit-stirring scene, and very delightful, compared with the gloomy desolation of Westminster-hall.