ANDREW CROSBIE, ESQ.
(Counsellor Pleydell.)
We feel no little pleasure in presenting the original of a character so important as the facetious Pleydell. He is understood to be the representative of Mr. Andrew Crosbie, who flourished at the head of the Scottish bar about the period referred to in the novel. Many circumstances conspire to identify him with the lawyer of the novel. Their eminence in their profession was equally respectable; their habits of frequenting taverns and High Jinks parties on Saturday nights was the same, and both were remarkable for that antique politeness of manner so characteristic of old Scottish gentlemen. It may be allowed that Pleydell is one of the characters most nearly approaching to generic that we have attempted to identify with real life; but it is nevertheless so strenuously asserted by all who have any recollection of Mr. Crosbie, that Pleydell resembles him in particular, that we feel no hesitation in assigning him as the only true specific original. We therefore lay the following simple facts before the public, and leave the judicious reader to his own discrimination.
Mr. Crosbie was in the prime of life about the middle of the last century, and, from that period till the year 1780, enjoyed the highest reputation in his profession. He came of a respectable family in the county of Galloway—the district, the reader will remember, in which the principal scenes of the novel are laid, and probably the shire of which Paulus Pleydell, Esq., is represented (vol. ii. chap, xvi.) as having been, at an early period of his life, the sheriff-depute.
The residence of Mr. Crosbie, in the early periods of his practice, exactly coincides with that of Pleydell, whom, if we recollect rightly, Colonel Mannering found in a dark close on the north side of the High Street, several storeys up a narrow common stair. Mr. Crosbie lived first in Lady Stair’s Close, a steep alley on the north side of the Lawnmarket; afterwards in the Advocate’s Close, in the Luckenbooths; and finally in a self-contained and well-built house of his own, at the foot of Allan’s Close, still standing, and lately inhabited by Richard Cleghorn, Esq., Solicitor before the Supreme Courts. All these various residences are upon the north side of the High Street, and the two first answer particularly to the description in the novel. The last is otherwise remarkable as being situated exactly behind and in view of the innermost penetralia of Mr. Constable’s great publishing warehouse,[10]—the sanctum sanctorum in which Captain Clutterbuck found the Eidolon of the Author of “Waverley,” so well described in the introduction to “Nigel.”
At the period when Mr. Crosbie flourished, all the advocates and judges of the day dwelt in those obscure wynds or alleys leading down from the High Street, which, since the erection of the New Town, have been chiefly inhabited by the lower classes of society. The greater part, for the sake of convenience, lived in the lanes nearest to the Parliament House—such as the Advocate’s Close, Writer’s Court, Lady Stair’s Close, the West Bow, the Back Stairs, the President’s Stairs in the Parliament Close, and the tenements around the Mealmarket. In these dense and insalubrious obscurities they possessed what were then the best houses in Edinburgh, and which were considered as such till the erection of Brown’s Square and the contiguous suburbs, about the beginning of the last king’s reign, when the lawyers were found the first to remove to better and more extensive accommodations, being then, as now, the leading and most opulent class of Edinburgh population. This change is fully pointed out in “Redgauntlet,” where a writer to the signet is represented as removing from the Luckenbooths to Brown’s Square about the time specified—which personage, disguised under the name of Saunders Fairford, we have no doubt was designed for Sir Walter Scott’s own father, a practitioner of the same rank, who then removed from the Old Town to a house at the head of the College Wynd, in which his distinguished son, the Alan Fairford of the romance, was born and educated.
Living as they did so near the Parliament House, it was the custom of both advocates and senators to have their wigs dressed at home, and to go to court with their gowns indued, their wigs in full puff, and each with his cocked hat under his arm.[11] About nine in the morning, the various avenues to the Parliament Square used to be crowded with such figures. In particular, Mr. Crosbie was remarkable for the elegance of his figure, as, like his brethren, he emerged from the profundity of his alley into the open street. While he walked at a deliberate pace across the way, there could not be seen among all the throng a more elegant figure. He exhibited at once the dignity of the counsellor high at the bar and the gracefulness of the perfect gentleman. He frequently walked without a gown, when the fineness of his personal appearance was the more remarkable. His dress was usually a black suit, silk stockings, clear shoes, with gold or silver buckles. Sometimes the suit was of rich black velvet.
Mr. Crosbie, with all the advantages of a pleasing exterior, possessed the more solid qualifications of a vigorous intellect, a refined taste, and an eloquence that has never since been equalled at the bar. His integrity as a counsel could only be surpassed by his abilities as a pleader. In the first capacity, his acute judgment and great legal knowledge had long placed him in the highest rank. In the second, his thorough and confident acquaintance with the law of his case, his beautiful style of language, all “the pomp and circumstance” of matchless eloquence, commanded the attention of the bench in no ordinary degree; and while his talents did all that could be done in respect of moving the court, the excelling beauty of his oratory attracted immense crowds of admirers, whose sole disinterested object was to hear him.
It is recorded of him that he was one day particularly brilliant—so brilliant as even to surprise his usual audience, the imperturbable Lords themselves. What rendered the circumstance more wonderful was, that the case happened to be extremely dull, common-place and uninteresting. The secret history of the matter was to the following effect:—A facetious contemporary, and intimate friend of Mr. Crosbie, the celebrated Lord Gardenstone, in the course of a walk from Morningside, where he resided, fell into conversation with a farmer, who was going to Edinburgh in order to hear his cause pled that forenoon by Mr. Crosbie. The senator, who was a very homely and rather eccentric personage, on being made acquainted with the man’s business, directed him to procure a dozen or two farthings at a snuff-shop in the Grassmarket—to wrap them separately up in white paper, under the disguise of guineas—and to present them to his counsel as fees, when occasion served. The case was called: Mr. Crosbie rose; but his heart not happening to be particularly engaged, he did not by any means exert the utmost of his powers. The treacherous client, however, kept close behind his back, and ever and anon, as he perceived Mr. C. bringing his voice to a cadence, for the purpose of closing the argument, slipped the other farthing into his hand. The repeated application of this silent encouragement so far stimulated the advocate, that, in the end, he became truly eloquent—strained every nerve of his soul in grateful zeal for the interests of so good a client—and, precisely at the fourteenth farthing, gained the cause. The denouement of the conspiracy took place immediately after, in John’s Coffee-house, over a bottle of wine, with which Mr. Crosbie treated Lord Gardenstone from the profits of his pleading; and the surprise and mortification of the barrister, when, on putting his hand into his pocket in order to pay the reckoning, he discovered the real extent of his fee, can only be imagined.
Within the last forty years, a curious custom prevailed among the gentlemen of the long robe in Edinburgh—a custom which, however little it might be thought of then, would certainly make nine modern advocates out of ten shudder at every curl just to think of it. This was the practice of doing all their business, except what required to be done in the court, in taverns and coffee-houses. Plunged in these subterranean haunts, the great lawyers of the day were to be found, surrounded with their myrmidons, throughout the whole afternoon and evening of the day. It was next to impossible to find a lawyer at his own abode, and, indeed, such a thing was never thought of. The whole matter was to find out his tavern, which the cadies upon the street—those men of universal knowledge—could always tell, and then seek the oracle in his own proper hell, as Æneas sought the sibyl. At that time a Directory was seldom applied to; and even though a stranger could have consulted the celebrated Peter Williamson’s (supposing it then to have been published), he might, perhaps, by dint of research, have found out where Lucky Robertson lived, who, in the simple words of that intelligencer, “sold the best twopenny;” or he might have been accommodated, more to his satisfaction, with the information of who, through all the city, “sett lodgings” and “kept rooms for single men;” but he would have found the Directory of little use to him in pointing out where he might meet a legal friend. The cadies, who, at that time, wont to be completely au fait with every hole and bore in the town, were the only directories to whom a client from the country, such as Colonel Mannering or Dandie Dinmont, could in such a case apply.