Lordship had said as a judge what he could not justify as a gentleman.” The President appealed to his brethren as to what was fit to be done, who unanimously resolved that Mr Wedderburn should retract his words and make an humble apology, on pain of deprivation. All of a sudden Wedderburn seemed to have subdued his passion, and put on an air of deliberate coolness; when, instead of the expected retractation and apology; he stripped off his gown, and holding it in his hands before the Judge, he said, “My Lords, I neither retract nor apologise, but I will save you the trouble of deprivation; there is my gown, and I will never wear it more; virtute me involvo.” He then coolly laid his gown upon the bar, made a low bow to the Judges, and before they had recovered from their amazement he left the court, which he never again entered. That very night he set off to London. I know not whether he had any apprehension of the steps which the Judges might have taken to vindicate their dignity, or whether he was ashamed to meet his friends of the Parliament House, but he had formed a resolution, which he faithfully kept, to abandon his native country, and never more to revisit it.—‘Lord Campbell’s Lives of the Chancellors.’ ANTIQUITY OF THE INFLUENZA.—Of this now universally prevailing malady we have (says the ‘Glasgow Constitutional’) the following account, in a letter from Randolph, the English Ambassador at the Court of Mary, Queen of Scots, to Cecil (afterwards Lord Burghley,) dated Edinburgh, 30th November, 1562. “May it please your Honour. Immediately upon the Queen’s arrival here she fell acquainted with a new disease that is common in this town, called the ‘New Acquaintance,’ which passed also through her whole Court, neither sparing lord, lady, nor damsel, nor so much as French or English. It is a pain in their head that have it, and a soreness in their stomachs, with a great cough; it remaineth with some longer, with others shorter time, as it findeth apt bodies for the nature of the disease. The Queen kept her bed six days; there was no appearance of danger, nor many that die of the disease except some old folks. My Lord of Murray is now presently in it, and I am ashamed to say that I have been free of it, seeing it seeketh acquaintance at all men’s hands.” The letter is printed pp. 105-7 of the “Selections from Unpublished Manuscripts Illustrating the reign of Mary Queen of Scotland,” presented to the Maitland Club, in 1837, by the late Mr Kirkman Finlay, of Castle Toward. The last freak of the distemper, according to the ‘Edinburgh Register,’ was the seizure of the master of the Duddingston Mills, and at the same time all his millers, and the mill stood still. To complete the adage that misfortunes never come single, the millers’ wives were almost all ill, and unable to nurse their husbands.