against society or against the state, has been committed, or when a person is suspected of the one or the other description of crime, the procurator fiscal of the district or burgh, (who, in many instances, is an ignorant and bungling attorney, whose friends, or whose secret services, have procured that office for him, as much on account of his incapacity for making a decent living by the ordinary practice of his profession, as for any other reason,) takes “a precognition,” that is, a secret and inquisitorial examination of _ex-parte_ evidence, which he transmits to the lord advocate as the ground upon which that officer may or may not proceed, just as he pleases. If it please the lord advocate that the party thus accused shall be indicted, he prepares the necessary instruments; and the trial must be begun, if the party accused shall petition the court for it, within forty days of his being imprisoned, and held to bail, and finished within other forty days; but in all cases which come before the lords of justiciary, either in their sessional court in the Athens, or at their periodical circuits in the different counties, the lord advocate is substantially both the public prosecutor and the grand jury that sends the case to trial. Where a special commission of _oyer_ and _terminer_ is issued for the trial of persons accused of high treason, a grand jury, of not fewer than seventeen, and not more than twenty-one, have a power of returning as true, or ignoring the bills of indictment, if twelve of their number shall be of that opinion. But, even with this limitation, the power of the lord advocate, more especially as relates to political offences, is such as to heighten the animosity, which the state of the elective franchise is calculated to produce, between the comparatively small portion of the Scottish people who are influenced by the hope or possession of office, and the much larger portion who are under no such influence. The distance of the Athens from the seat of the executive and legislative powers of the empire; and the colouring which it is possible that a representation may receive from those who carry it to headquarters, also tend to lessen the confidence which the people of Scotland might otherwise be disposed to place in the men who form as it were the official links of connexion between them and their King; and when it is considered how much connexion and influence can do even at headquarters, it is easy to imagine how much greater their extent must be at such an outpost as the Athens.