“‘I was wondering one day how many times a lawyer walks backwards and forwards in the outer house[285] in a forenoon,’ said Cosmo Gordon. ‘You must take a compound ratio of his idleness and his velocity.’”
“My wife said it would be much better to give salaries to members of Parliament than to let them try what they can get off their country by places and pensions. Said she, ‘They are like ostlers and postillions, who have no wages, and must support themselves by vails.’”[286]
“One day when causes were called in the Inner House in an irregular manner, and not according to the roll, I said to Crosbie, ‘The English courts run straight out like a fox; ours double like a hare.’”
“The pleasure of seeing Italy chiefly depends on the ideas which a man carries thither. Take an ignorant mechanick or an unlearned country squire to the banks of the Tiber. Show him Mount Soracte, the ruins of Rome, and drive him on to Naples, he will have little enjoyment. But a man whose mind is stored with classical knowledge feels a noble enthusiasm. His ideas uniting with the objects before him catch fire, and a flame is produced as in a chemical process by the mingling of certain substances, while others remain quite tame. A man must have his imagination charged with classical particles.”
“The severe measures taken against the Americans united them firmly by a cement of blood.”
A. Briton, Pub. Advert., 16th Sept., 1775.
“Parliament is now, instead of being the representative of the nation, the echo of the Cabinet; and its acts are only wrappers to the ready prepared pills of the court laboratory for the people to swallow—if they do not stick in their throats.”
A. Briton, Pub. Advert., 16th Sept., 1775.
“I said of a rich man who entertained us luxuriously, that although he was exceedingly ridiculous, we restrained ourselves from talking of him as we might do, lest we should lose his feasts. Said I, ‘he makes our teeth sentinels upon our tongues.’”
“I said that a drunken fellow was not honest. ‘A stick,’ said I ‘kept allways moist becomes rotten.’”