While the courts are sitting it is usually as crowded as the Royal Exchange at four o’clock, and the hum, and bustle, and eagerness, are vastly more interesting than the solemn faces and demure looks of the dealers in tallow and tapioca, who stand under the shadow of the Grasshopper, with their jaws distended like a trap for foxes, and their hands up to their elbows in their pockets, as if they could not abstain from fumbling money, even when the precise minute of bargain has not arrived.
It is true that you meet with no Rothschild, or any other pawnbroker for kings, in this ancient apartment of the Scottish Parliament; but, if you be more a lover of mind than of money, you are sure to meet with what will please you a great deal better. Before the Judges have taken their places in the Inner Courts, you cannot miss the tall figure, the gleesome grey eye, the snub nose, and all the other characteristics of the spirit of the wizard and the soul of the man, that mark Sir Walter Scott. A dozen of chosen friends, some Whig and some Tory, hang about him; and, as he limps along with wonderful vigour, considering the irregularity of his legs, peals of laughter ring at every word which he utters, and a score of fledgling Tory barristers, who have not yet got either a place or a brief, stretch out their goose necks, huddle round, and cackle at the echo of that which they cannot possibly hear. In another place, or rather in all places, the Editor of the Edinburgh Review starts about like wildfire; and unless it be when an attorney ever and anon brings him up with the sheet-anchor of a fee and a brief, there is no possibility of arresting his motion. He darts aside like lightning, runs over the brief with such rapidity that you would think he were merely counting the pages of an article for the Edinburgh Review, and having handed it to his clerk, who seems as heavy as himself is agile, he again darts into the throng, like an otter into the waters, and is seen no more till he bring up another gudgeon.
Wherever you meet with this highly-gifted personage, you are never at a loss to distinguish him from every body else. His writings, his speeches, and his face, have the most remarkable family likeness that I ever met with. All the three seem cut into little faucettes and angles, which glitter and sparkle in every possibility of light, both direct and oblique. In the speech and the writing, rich as is the play of genius on the surface, it bears no proportion to the mass of intellect which it covers and dazzles; and keen, acute, and purged of all grossness and obesity, as is the lower part of the face, it bears no proportion to the expansion of forehead that towers above. Jeffrey has the most wonderful pair of eyes that ever illuminated a human visage. Even when he is shooting along like a small but swift meteor through the crowd in the Parliament-House, they are beaming so as to force you to turn away your eyes, and if he looks at you, you find yourself utterly unable to withstand it. When that look is darting for any important purpose, such as to ascertain whether a witness be or be not speaking the truth, it is more searching than that of Garrow even in his best days, so that the most hardened tremble before it, and are instantly divested of all power of concealing the truth. If, however, you attempt to repay Jeffrey in his own coin, by working into his mind with that sharp and anatomical glance which he employs in dissecting the minds of other people, you find that you are woefully mistaken. Those eyes, which can penetrate to the bottom of any other man’s heart, and expose even that part of it which he studies with the greatest assiduity to conceal, are a perfect sealed book to you; you cannot see beyond their external surface, and they give you not so much as a hint of what the owner is thinking, or what he may be disposed to say or do next. Wonderful as the eyes are, they are perhaps exceeded by the eyebrows, and certainly two such intellectual batteries were never alternately masked and displayed in a manner so singular. They range over a greater extent of surface, and twist themselves into a more endless variety of curves than is almost possible to conceive, and while they do so, they express all manner of thoughts, and utter all descriptions of sentences. Few men have more eloquence in their speech than Jeffrey, and I have met with none who had half as much in his face.
Another character in this reeling crowd, which never fails to attract the attention of a stranger, is that of Robert Forsyth. As far as one man can be unlike another, he is the very antipodes of Jeffery. He is large, square, and muscular, more intended by nature, you would think, for breaking stones on the high road, than for breaking syllogisms before their Lordships. His face is coarse, broad and flat, and as immovable in all its muscles as though it had been chiselled out of a block of granite. As he moves along, he turns his head neither to the one side nor to the other; and indeed he does not require it, for his eyes have that divergent squint which enables him at once to scan both sides of the horizon. The lines of labour are so ploughed across and across every part of his ample countenance, and they give it so knotted and so corrugated an appearance, that you can easily perceive he has followed more occupations, and been attached to more sides of politics than one. Still there is by no means the quiescence of a mind at ease upon the strong picture of his visage; the lower part of it is fixed in something between a half laugh and a half grin, and the upper part has a firmness about it which tells you he is a through-going lawyer, whom it will not be easy to turn from his purpose.
The throng is so great, however, and the variety of faces, gowned and ungowned, wigged and unwigged, beaming forth every shade of mind, and betokening every degree of mental vacuity, is so perplexing, that your eye and your imagination are completely bewildered, and you cannot attend either to individuals or single groups, while the buz of voices of so many different tones and pitches give your ears the impression of a very Babel.
Business commences; the Lords Ordinary take their seats—in places which make them look more like as if they were standing in the pillory than any thing else. But even there, advocates are drudging in their vocations; agents running backwards and forwards with briefs; clients watching the result with palpitating hearts; and the Athenian loungers hanging about, anticipating their Lordships in the decision of the several cases. The well-employed advocates now put you very much in mind of shuttle-cocks. They run from bar to bar, making motions here and speeches there, in the most chaos-looking style that can be imagined. Of the whole gown and wig mass, it is but a small portion, however, who are thus occupied; four-fifths of the whole keep trudging on from end to end of the hall, and seem never to expect or even to get a fee; while the bar clerks collected round the fire-places keep up a continual titter at the repetition of all the good jokes of the day; and the same scene continues day after day, and month after month. You are astonished that a place, the real business of which is so dull and so dry, should have charms for so many idle people; but except this Parliament-house there is not another in-door lounge in the whole Athens; and as the business of the courts forms the chief topic of the evening’s conversation, many attend for the purpose of qualifying themselves for displays upon a very different arena. It is long before a stranger can bring himself to relish this first and most favourite of all Athenian pleasures. I, for one, got tired of it in two or three days, and began to be of opinion that, however much this fondness for legal proceedings may sharpen the wits of the Athenian idlers, it is but a sorry treat for those who have no wish either to get rich by the acting, or wise by the suffering of the law.
When the business of the day is over, you can perceive the veteran barristers taking council together as to where they may be joyous for the night; and the younger legal men of all descriptions hurrying off toward Princes Street, in order that they may show themselves to the Athenian fair, before they retreat to drown the daily badgerings in the nightly bowl.