my residence in Scotland, I should fill several volumes with instances of the lamentable and ludicrous effects of uninformed zeal in official men: to record such matters would, however, be an attempt to preserve the memory of persons and things which no effort could keep from oblivion. In the peculiar politics of the Athens, it struck me, that though there are only two parties,--the men in office, with their connexions and dependants, and the men who are not in office,--yet that there are several distinct grounds of opposition, some of which neither party are very willing to avow, and therefore they lump them all together in the convenient cant terms of Tory and Whig. Both parties are radically and substantially loyal; and both parties, though in different degrees, and sought for by different measures, may have a regard for the prosperity of their country generally, and for the glory and aggrandizement of the Athens, in a particular and pre-eminent degree; but still, their wars of the tongue, and the unpleasant inroads which these wars make upon domestic prosperity and happiness, are just as unpleasant as though the one party were about to draw the sword for absolute despotism, and the other for blind and indiscriminate democracy. The Athenian Tories are perhaps the most place-devoted race in the British dominions. Office is their god; and, as is sometimes the case with other devotees, their devotion is fervent in proportion to the feeling they have of their own unworthiness. In defence of that which they worship, they have no more variety of voice than the winged warders of the Roman capitol. Hence, as I said of the burghal magistracies, they cling to each other, and by that very means separate themselves more from the people than the necessity of the case requires. Their strength consists, mainly, in those imperfections of the elective franchise, and powers of the law officers of the Crown, to which I have alluded; and as those cannot well be defended in argument, eloquence is of little use to them, and they seem to have no great partiality for those who possess it. When they make an attack as a body, in any other way than through the instrumentality of the law, (which they can employ only when the waters of society are a little troubled,) they do it snugly and covertly,--by letting people feel that they have the dispensing of rewards; by standing between a candidate and an office for which he is qualified, or by something of a similar kind. I was told that, at one period, and that not a very remote one, they would hit a man whose politics they did not like, through the medium of his banker; but latterly, the will or the power, or at any rate the practice of this, has been lessened, if not abolished.