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Secretary, hesitated to hold that office under Lord Goderich on Herries's appointment; and the difficulty was not settled until after, what Lord Cockburn truly calls, a few weeks of fearful 'doubt.' Canning died on the 7th August. Lord Lansdowne eventually consented to retain the Home Secretary's seals about the 1st of September. * So that there was a period of uncertainty and alarm among the Scotch Whigs, not only at the time when Mr. Canning's administration was formed, but also when that administration was shaken by Mr. Canning's premature death; it is obviously to this later crisis that Lord Cockburn refers.

The Law Reviewer, however, not only despises dates, but forgets and cannot forgive what he has told the public through his own pages. He bitterly complains that Cockburn attributes to Professor Play fair a character of Lord President Blair, which in reality was written by another hand. But the mistake, if it be one, is not Cockburn's. For not only is Playfair named as the author in our 139th number, p. 281, which Cockburn quotes from, but did not write, but if the critic will turn back to the second volume of his own journal, p. 341, he will find an article on President Blair, in which, quoting the very character in question, he himself, the Law Reviewer, says 'a celebrated 'writer, Professor Playfair, tells us the President was accus'tomed, emphatically to declare, &c.'!

These are but instances. We shall probably deal with most of them all before we have done. But we stop for a moment to ask- For what object and to what end all this laborious and unfortunate criticism? We could indeed understand, that those who during the period of which Lord Cockburn writes, calmly and gently as he does write, were the supporters of the system he describes, and are now unwilling captives of a more liberal generation, might rebel at the violence thus done to the shrine at which their earliest vows were paid. We should not have suspected our contemporary of being of the number, but we are not disposed to unlearn history at his bidding; for these Memorials are neither a common

* Lord Cockburn may not have recollected that Lord Lansdowne was gazetted to the Home Office under Canning, on the 18th Julyno great blunder. Mr. Twiss in his Life of Lord Eldon, thus states the matter, with greater, but still pardonable inaccuracy: Mr. 'Sturges Bourne,' he says, speaking of Lord Goderich's government, 'removing to the Woods and Forests, made way for Lord Lans'downe' (vol. iii. p. 10.). The truth is, that Lord Lansdowne had declined to take the Home Office under Mr. Canning until a suitable provision had been made for the chancellorship of Ireland.

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place book, nor do they deal with things done in a corner. They were written to commemorate, to strangers and to another generation, a state of society and of politics known to all the Scottish world. Lord Cockburn was but one of a vigorous brotherhood, and no one who knew any of them is ignorant of the truth of the record. The anecdotes he relates only illustrate notorious facts; a system happily gone by, but still worthy to be remembered; not for the purpose of stirring the embers of extinguished strife, but to point a moral as well as to adorn a tale. Many things, we know, which everybody has considered to be true, have found somebody to try to prove them false. There are people who believe that Richard II. was not slain in Pontefract Castle; that his third namesake was handsome and tender-hearted; that the princes were not murdered in the Tower; and that Mary of England was not Bloody.' The time may come, no doubt, when Fox and Sheridan for fools shall pass," and future antiquarians may prove that Burke was the founder of a Jacobin Club, and that Eldon sacrificed his prospects to his devotion to Catholic Emancipation. But it is too soon as yet. We refuse to believe that Braxfield was not coarse, truculent, and brutal; that the sedition trials of 1793 were not an outrage on law, humanity, and decency; or that the system of the Dundas domination in Edinburgh was not one of exclusion and proscription such as disgraced no other part of the kingdom. We refuse to believe that the Whigs of Edinburgh had no battle to fight, and fought none; no victory to gain, and that none was gained. The 'Edinburgh Review' is not a mere myth; nor were Brougham, Jeffrey, Horner, Cranstoun, Moncreiff, Cockburn, Murray, and Abercromby, men who simply sailed down the stream with fostering gales behind them. If Cockburn had never written a line, we in the North know the story of the conflict too well not to cherish the remembrance of their courage and constancy, and to resent the affected incredulity which would disparage their exertions.

As to Braxfield, whom the reviewer labours fruitlessly to represent as he was not, there is not a shade in Lord Cockburn's picture which is too dark. His reputation for strong, massive intellect and profound legal knowledge was not more universal than his shameful notoriety for coarseness and want of principle. I never,' says a friend we have already quoted,

saw

Braxfield on the Bench; but I well remember that every story 'told of him by Lord Cockburn, and many more, were currently believed in the Parliament House (1804).' Nothing can more strikingly illustrate the general opinion of him than the fact of Lockhart in his Life of Sir Walter Scott, attributing

to him the brutal remark which was truly made by Lord Kames to Hay, who was tried for murder at Ayr. Braxfield

got the credit of it entirely on the faith of his reputation.

The story relative to Lord Kames there is no doubt of. Matthew Hay was a farmer who was tried, as Lord Cockburn explains, at the Ayr circuit, for murder by poison. He was an old friend of Lord Kames, who used to play chess with him. Kames, who might have devolved the duty on his colleague, chose to try his friend himself, and on the verdict of guilty being returned, exclaimed, That's checkmate to you, Matthew.' The story rests on the evidence of George Ferguson, afterwards Lord Hermand, who was counsel for Hay, heard the observation, and told the circumstance to Cockburn himself. We may add to this testimony that of our correspondent, mentioned above, who says, Hermand told me the story himself, and added, "I thank my God there was not a pistol beside me: I should have shot "him where he sat." The Caldwell papers prove that Kames tried the man; and but for Lockhart's fixing it on Braxfield, the anecdote was never questioned.

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Of Braxfield's brutality no better illustration need be given -none more conclusive could exist- than the instance admitted by the Law Reviewer. On Gerald's trial for sedition, the prisoner having said that Our Saviour himself was a Reformer, Braxfield said,Muckle he made o' that.' Whether or not he added the words, he was hangit,' which Lord Cockburn attributes to him-though we have no doubt he did-will neither heighten nor extenuate the ruffianism of the observation. It was no jest: and the memory of it long survived to make the younger denizens of the Outer House' shudder at the 'manners and customs' of the generation which preceded them. The remark of the reviewer as to the impression of the Scotch Bar at the time is, as usual, the very converse of what we have reason to know it to have been.

We have read with regret, and with not less surprise, the attempt made by the Law Review' to palliate the enormities of the sedition trials, and to make light of the political bigotry and intolerance of those nefarious times. It was the last quarter in which we should have expected to find such views; and no more reprehensible violence could be done to truth or to history. For the actors in these scenes there was the excuse a poor one of a great national panic. We were a' mad, sir,' as old Mr. Horner used to say, when reminded of the part he took as one of the jury that convicted Muir. But there is no course more unworthy or mischievous than, after a long period of successful exertion has swept away intolerable abuse, to look back with a milk-and

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water charity on the sinners and their sins-to hint that 'white's not so white, nor black so very black;' and thus not only rob the labourers of that fame which is their hire, but deprive posterity of the lesson which they ought to learn.

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We have not space here to enter on the subject of the sedition trials with the detail they well deserve. Their history has never yet been written, nor do the published reports disclose half their iniquity. But we are indignant that any man should be found, at this day, to defend the sentences on Muir and Palmer, either on legal or on constitutional grounds. The reviewer says of the sentence of fourteen years' transportation for sedition, there can be no question that the law of Scotland visited sedition with that heavy penalty.' No question! Who is it who affects to say there is no question of a proposition in Scottish law denied by the best lawyers in Scotland? The sentences have been all but universally regarded as illegal as well as outrageous. The reviewer seems to be entirely ignorant that the crime of sedition had never been punished in Scotland with transportation until these cases occurred; so much so, that one of the judges at the trial was obliged to recur to the Roman law, and finding that the appropriate punishments, in that system, were the gallows, wild beasts, or transportation, he mercifully selected the mildest! Lord Swinton, in proposing sentence on Muir, said,

By

the Roman Law, which is held to be our Common Law where 'there is no statute, the punishment was various, and transport'ation was among the mildest mentioned. Paulus, lib. 38, D. de 'Panis, writes, Actores seditionis et tumultus, populo concitato, pro qualitate dignitatis, aut in furcam tolluntur, aut bestiis ob'jiciuntur, aut in insulam deportantur !' If this astounding specimen of the judicial mind had escaped his notice, we wonder the reviewer did not recollect Mr. Gillies'* pleasant observation, in his speech for Gerald, on the signification of the word banishment, on the identity of which term with transportation the defence of these sentences was rested. He quoted the lines, 'Banish business, banish sorrow,

To the gods belongs to-morrow ;'

and suggested that if their lordships could banish business, and sorrow with it, to Botany Bay, they would be all greatly obliged to them.

Braxfield's demeanour throughout these cases was discreditably indecent. We give in a note, his charge in Muir's case,

* Afterwards Lord Gillies.

which is quite enough of itself to justify much more than Cockburn has said of him.

Charge by Lord Justice Clerk (Braxfield), August 30–31. 1703, on Muir's Trial.

'The Lord Justice Clerk, in summing up the evidence, said, that the indictment was the longest he had ever seen; but it was not necessary to prove the whole, in order to find the Pannel guilty; for the jury had only to look at the concluding sentence of the indictment, from which it was plain, that if any one part of the libel was proven, it established the guilt of the Pannel the same as if the whole was substantiated.

Now, this is the question for consideration. Is the Pannel guilty of sedition, or is he not? Now, before this question can be answered, two things must be attended to that require no proof: First, that the British Constitution is the best that ever was since the creation of the world, and it is not possible to make it better; for, is not every man secure? Does not every man reap the fruits of his own industry, and sit safely under his own fig-tree? The next circumstance is, that there was a spirit of sedition in this country last winter, which made every good man very uneasy. And his Lordship coincided in opinion with the master of the Grammar School of Glasgow, who told Mr. Muir, that he thought proposing a reform was very ill-timed. Yet Mr. Muir had, at that time, gone about among ignorant country people, making them forget their work, and told them that a reform was absolutely necessary for preserving their liberty, which, if it had not been for him, they would never have thought was in danger. His Lordship did not doubt that this would appear to them, as it did to him, to be sedition.

The next thing to be attended to was the outlawry.-Running away from justice, that was a mark of guilt. And what could he do in France at that period? pretending to be an ambassador to a foreign country without lawful authority, that was rebellion; and he pretends to have had influence with those wretches, the leading men there. And what kind of folks were they? His Lordship never liked the French all his days, but now he hated them.

'The Pannel's haranguing such multitudes of ignorant weavers about their grievances, might have been attended with the worst consequences to the peace of the nation and the safety of our glorious

constitution.

'Mr. Muir might have known that no attention could be paid to such a rabble. What right had they to representation? He could have told them that the Parliament would never listen to their

petition. How could they think of it? A government in every country should be just like a corporation; and in this country it is made up of the landed interest, which alone has a right to be represented as for the rabble, who have nothing but personal property, what hold has the nation of them? What security for the payment of their taxes? they may pack up all their property on their backs,