From the way in which the Scottish courts of law are regulated, there is hardly a suit from the Solway Firth to the Pentland, or from Peterhead to the remotest of the Hebudæ, which does not look toward the Athens, the moment that the litigiousness of a client, or the machinations of an attorney, call it into existence. I hinted already, that there is no one thing in which the Athens can now retain a superiority except the practice of Scotch law; and, as Scotland increases in wealth, that law is so constructed, that the portion which the scribes and spouters of the Athens shall be enabled to levy upon their countrymen must always increase in a greater ratio. Scotchmen are apt to be proud of the Athens,--to regard her with a portion at least of that admiration which subjects pay to the pomp of their kings. There is propriety in this; for there is scarcely a stone in the walls of the Athenian palaces, or a decent coat in her streets, which has not been squeezed out of some litigious or unfortunate man of the provinces, in the shape of a lawyer’s fee. I noticed the power which the crown lawyers of Scotland have over the liberties and lives of the people; and the power which lawyers of another class have over the fortunes of the Scotch lairds, is every jot as ruinous and humiliating. There are complaints in England, that when once property gets into chancery, the “infant” becomes grey before he can enjoy it; but the Scottish chancery is incalculably worse; for the moment that a Scotch proprietor allows his lands to pass into the keeping of an Edinburgh agent, from that moment he must lay his account either with losing them altogether, or purchasing them anew; and to enumerate the heirs of Scottish families, who are at any time pining away in heart-broken obscurity, or toiling under the burning suns of the East or the West, in the hope of winning back a poor fragment of the ample heritage to which they were born, would require no trifling succession of pages.