While the courts are sitting it is usually as crowded as the Royal Exchange at four o’clock, and the hum, and bustle, and eagerness, are vastly more interesting than the solemn faces and demure looks of the dealers in tallow and tapioca, who stand under the shadow of the Grasshopper, with their jaws distended like a trap for foxes, and their hands up to their elbows in their pockets, as if they could not abstain from fumbling money, even when the precise minute of bargain has not arrived. It is true that you meet with no Rothschild, or any other pawnbroker for kings, in this ancient apartment of the Scottish Parliament; but, if you be more a lover of mind than of money, you are sure to meet with what will please you a great deal better. Before the Judges have taken their places in the Inner Courts, you cannot miss the tall figure, the gleesome grey eye, the snub nose, and all the other characteristics of the spirit of the wizard and the soul of the man, that mark Sir Walter Scott. A dozen of chosen friends, some Whig and some Tory, hang about him; and, as he limps along with wonderful vigour, considering the irregularity of his legs, peals of laughter ring at every word which he utters, and a score of fledgling Tory barristers, who have not yet got either a place or a brief, stretch out their goose necks, huddle round, and cackle at the echo of that which they cannot possibly hear. In another place, or rather in all places, the Editor of the Edinburgh Review starts about like wildfire; and unless it be when an attorney ever and anon brings him up with the sheet-anchor of a fee and a brief, there is no possibility of arresting his motion. He darts aside like lightning, runs over the brief with such rapidity that you would think he were merely counting the pages of an article for the Edinburgh Review, and having handed it to his clerk, who seems as heavy as himself is agile, he again darts into the throng, like an otter into the waters, and is seen no more till he bring up another gudgeon.