LORD PRESIDENT DUNDAS.
This distinguished judge was, in his latter years, extremely subject to gout, and used to fall backwards and forwards in his chair—whence the ungracious expression in the Garland. He used to characterise his six clerks thus: ‘Two of them cannot read, two of them cannot write, and the other two can neither read nor write!’ The eccentric Sir James Colquhoun was one of those who could not read. In former times it was the practice of the Lord President to have a sand-glass before him on the bench, with which he used to measure out the utmost time that could be allowed to a judge for the delivery of his opinion. Lord President Dundas would never allow a single moment after the expiration of the sand, and he has often been seen to shake his old-fashioned chronometer ominously in the faces of his brethren when their ‘ideas upon the subject’ began, in the words of the Garland, to get vague and windy.