polished, and sarcastic. Rutherfurd, of a rather later date, but in power and attainments inferior to none of them. Sometimes William Clerk (the brother of John Clerk) joined in with his caustic pleasantry, or Mackenzie, a willing truant from his friends of the hostile camp, would bring to the lively conclave the resources of his quaint but accomplished mind. Six years, alas, have swept them almost all away with the exception of John Murray (Lord Murray), who still survives, reaping, in the universal respect of his countrymen, the reward of his consistent, generous, and honourable life. We speak of them as a younger generation knew them in the bright autumn of their career; but the recollection of such evenings will long survive to cheer, and animate, and instruct in every graceful pursuit and noble aspiration. Cockburn was the very life of these parties. He made amusement himself, and was the cause of it in others; bantered the grave and more pretentious members of the fraternity, and launched his humorous shafts at the great Jupiter of criticism himself, dispelling with well-pointed pleasantry the slightest pedantic cloud which might threaten to overshadow them. A professed talker he abhorred, nor had he the least idea of allowing one man to usurp conversation which was the privilege or all. Even Jeffrey's volubility, if it broke bounds, or occupied more than its due share, would he effectually cut short by a timely jest, or the sudden intrusion of a grotesque illustration. He came to be happy, and anything which palled or fatigued, even if it were learning or intellect in excess, found him a formidable and merciless foe. His own powers of conversation, however, were of a high and rare order, and the book before us conveys a very just impression of them. So was he wont to talk, by his Christmas fireside, in his tower by the Pentlands, and to tell his younger friends how their grandfathers lived. He was a most acute observer of men and manners, gifted with a lively fancy, a refined taste, and a flow of native wit of singular quaintness and pungency. Under a certain affectation of contempt for book-worms and big wigs, he concealed varied reading and considerable acquaintance with many branches of literature. He was, despite the woes of his High School life, a fair classic, and had studied the contents as well as the condition of a library, which he had collected with the judgment of a scholar and the skill of a bibliographer. In his profession he deserves, as an orator, to be classed at the very head. Nature and art combined to bestow graces on his eloquence. He had a finely modulated voice, an unlimited choice of happy and concise expression, and a com mand of the human passions in all their phases altogether peculiar to himself. He could touch with a strong and certain hand any chord, from uproarious merriment to the deepest pathos, or the most terrible invective; and, the sure type of an orator, he seemed to feel himself all the emotions which he was anxious to inspire. Before a Scottish jury he was all but irresistible, and the vigorous logic of Moncreiff, or the eloquent versatility of Jeffrey, his chief rivals in that field, suffered frequent discomfiture at his hands. He presented himself to a jury with such an air of simplicity and innocence, a plain man like themselves, speaking a language they could understand, and not so much an advocate as a friend of the injured, telling a truthful tale; his appearance, his accent, his gestures, were so redolent of sincerity, and bespoke so feelingly the wrongs of a guileless wayfarer who had fallen among legal thieves, that the heart of his audience opened and admitted him at once. When he had possession of the citadel, he fortified it with all that the most dexterous reasoning and the most accomplished rhetoric could furnish. No one who ever heard him will consider this description over-coloured. His most celebrated efforts of which a record is preserved, are his speech for Stuart of Duncarn, on his trial for killing Sir Alexander Boswell in a duel, and that for Helen Macdougal on the trial of the murderer Burke. Cockburn on the last occasion reached a height of indignant invective, which even in the published report conveys a vivid impression of his style, but the effect of the defence when spoken, in the grey winter dawn in which it was delivered, those who heard it describe as overwhelming. As a lawyer it is no disparagement to say that, living at a time when great lawyers flourished, he had his superiors. He had no pretensions to rank with Clerk, Cranstoun, Moncreiff, or Fullerton in legal knowledge or in juridical power. But even on that field he maintained his ground, against such rivals, with firmness and success. His practice was considerable, his apprehension quick, and his strong grasp of reason and common sense often supplied the place and got the better of the profounder erudition of his great contemporaries. On the Bench his reputation and efficiency were unequal. In the Criminal Court he was one of the most distinguished of its occupants, master of the criminal law in all its branches, and a model of judicial clearness, quick apprehension, and capacity for elucidating truth. He was little of a feudalist, nor did his opinions on these questions carry much weight. On the other hand, in cases of evidence, of contract, and matters more properly belonging to the common law, his experience and powers of discri mination were frequently most happily exercised. It is but justice to his memory to say that in a great many instances his judgments, after being overruled by his brethren, have been adopted and sanctioned by the House of Lords: a result of which he was naturally and reasonably proud, as a testimony to his command of the great principles of jurisprudence from the highest legal tribunal. His courtesy, kindness, and never-failing good temper made him as popular with the Bar as he was with the rest of his countrymen. Such was Cockburn when we knew him a more remarkable man than many whose fame has spread farther. His natural endowments were rare in quality as well as strong and powerful, and greater than those of some who passed him in the competition for public or professional distinction. Partly from sensibilities of a finer fibre, and partly from a genuine love of the 'fallentis semita vita,' he was content to take the race for renown and the struggle for wealth easily: not indeed with indifference, but with the measured exertion of a man who found his happiness in simpler things,-in pleasant scenes and friendly faces. In what he wished for he succeeded. His professional labours brought him easy independence at the Bar, and raised him to the Bench; and in his country-seat of Bonaly, at the foot of the Pentlands, where on one side the hills rise abruptly, and on the other is seen the whole extent of the Firth of Forth, terminating with the crags below which Edinburgh lies, - at a game at bowls on his fresh shaven green, with the burn wimpling by, and the stern leaders of the Bar, or the grave critics of the Review, unbent, joyous, and uproarious - or strolling through the rugged glens above his house with a troop of youngsters,-lighting a fire with his own hands beside some wild cascade to dress their rustic dinner,—in such scenes as these he found what yielded him more enjoyment than the brightest dreams or the proudest realities of ambition. This volume, however, shows how much observation, reflection, and power lay concealed under his light-hearted exterior. It is a work of high artistic merit; and in those parts of it in which the author felt himself able to write freely, the style is as vivid, graphic, and diverting as anything of the kind in the language. The time when Cockburn first entered public life found Scotland in a very remarkable condition. The Union had destroyed, greatly for her good, the national legislature; and after the first pangs of wounded pride had passed, Scotchmen addressed themselves with the perseverance of their nation to turn it to account. They did so to an extent which produced, in the course VOL. CV. NO. CCXIII. The of a century, a most striking amount of progress and prosperity. Barren moors and plashy marshes were reclaimed to a fertility, which has given celebrity to the districts in which they lay. Wandering forth, under the auspices of the ruling powers, to the golden East, her sons brought back spoils far more solid and substantial than were ever furnished by the campaigns of Gustavus or Louis. But she bought this prosperity, in some measure, at a questionable price. The belief that all hope of progress in life centered in paying court to ministers, at last induced a pervading spirit of national subserviency, which, for the time, trod out every spark of regard for constitutional liberty. Representative freedom she had none. county voters were freeholders, that is to say, a limited knot of lairds, aided by a few fictitious voters, the nominees of some intriguing peer: and the burgh members were chosen by a Town Council who elected themselves also, and who were the centre of cringing, domineering, and jobbing corruption. When Harry Dundas, accordingly, came to rule over them, and a great ruler he was, he found Scottish nobles, lairds, clergy, lawyers, bailies, and beadles prostrate in the dust at his feet. The panic of the French Revolution completed his ascendancy, and reduced those who refused to bow the knee to a very inconsiderable and much disparaged remnant. -- Things were in this state in the year 1800, when Cockburn came to the Bar. He was born, as most men would then have thought, under a star which was the certain presage of good fortune. He was the nephew of Dundas, and the son of one of his most intimate associates. In the house of his father, Baron Cockburn (a Baron of the Exchequer), he was brought up in the strictest ways of Toryism, and became familiar with all that Edinburgh boasted, of rank, distinction, and power. The old school of Edinburgh philosophers was just moving off the stage, along with the old school of Edinburgh dames and damsels; and no part of the Memorials is better executed than the author's reminiscences of both. His recollections of Adam Smith, Ferguson, Black, and Robertson, are exactly those which a schoolboy would have of a philosopher, in which a certain amount of awe mingles with the accurate noting of little personal details so characteristic of the boyish eye. The sketches of the social life and ancient ladies of Edinburgh are among the liveliest efforts of his pencil, and are already well known and popular among all English readers on both sides of the Atlantic. It very soon appeared, however, that the young scion of the Tory house had predilections dangerously liberal. The French revolution had shaken more thrones than those of the Bourbons. Ancient fetters on the mind were giving way in all directions, and new schools of literature, philosophy, and politics beginning to arise. In the celebrated Speculative Society Cockburn found most of the future associates of his life; and in Brougham, Horner, Jeffrey, and the other leaders of debate in that mimic senate, he recognised a spirit of congenial independence. He was soon drawn into the circle which the founders of this journal formed around them, and to the dismay and consternation of his Tory friends, enlisted for good with these Liberal heretics. Once they made a strong effort to reclaim him; and on the assurance that the step implied no political adhesion, he consented, on the solicitation of Lord Melville himself, to become an AdvocateDepute in 1807. The exercise, however, of his stipulated freedom produced a rupture with the Lord Advocate of the day, and he continued, during the twenty years of Whig exclusion which followed, among the foremost and most constant of the Liberal party in Scotland nor was there among the number, one whose advice and counsel exercised more influence on its movements. At last, the rebound came, and he had the rare reward in 1831, as the Solicitor General of the Grey Administration, of preparing the Reform Bill for Scotland along with Jeffrey, and seeing his country freed for ever from the bonds against which he and his friends had so bravely and successfully struggled. The state of subserviency in which he found Scotland on his entrance into public life, Cockburn lashes in his Memorials with an unsparing but most truthful hand. The utter absence of the influence of public opinion on public men-the_want of principle, justice, or sometimes even decency on the Benchthe proscription attempted against political independence — and the fury and bigotry of party, he has described in effective, and we trust enduring colours. The caprices of Macqueen, Lord Braxfield, who was Lord Justice Clerk, and the grotesque absurdities of Lord Eskgrove, who succeeded him, are selected as types of the dominant spirit on the seat of justice; and certainly the picture he draws would be incredible had we not known it to be true. Cockburn himself says of Eskgrove, The things 'that he did and said every day are beginning to be incredible 'to this correct and flat age.' The principle of the social tyranny which then prevailed was a simple one. Pitt and Dundas were the constitution, and must not be opposed; the constitution was perfect, and could not be improved and those who would oppose the one or improve the other, were rebels, traitors, and Jacobins. This broad rule of life was consistently carried out; and the inconsiderable remains of the Whig party were watched, |