" Command of Language."

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the deep and precise in thought. Nor can we help thinking that, had anything occurred, during Jeffrey's youth, to arrest his native fluency, and to arouse him to the value of that kind of mental effort which seeks for ultimate propositions, and spends itself in framing them, even he would have turned out a more weighty and thoroughgoing writer, after the peculiar Scottish type. But, probably, Jardine's class rather stimulated than repressed his native tendency in this respect; and of neither of the two men who in that day were the best academic representatives of the claims of matter as distinct from those of styleMiller of Glasgow, and Dugald Stewart of Edinburgh-was Jeffrey ever the pupil. What of the Scottish tendency to emphatic thought, therefore, Jeffrey possessed-and much of it he did possess was revealed not so much in a recurrence to, or a gravitation towards, deep formal propositions on various subjects, as in a general salience he always contrived to give to what he accounted important, a kind of sharp decisive ring of the voice on what he believed and you might doubt. On the whole, he had far more of the Scottish tendency to thought as such than Scott, in whom the national turn for emphasis spent itself entirely in sentiment and descriptive expression, and who, as the very form of his head indicated, abode contentedly all his life among the popular sagacities, and eschewed all movement towards the intellectually extreme.

A brief residence by Jeffrey in Oxford in 1791-2, always remembered by him as a time of insupportable loneliness and ennui, had at least one effect upon him which, like his moustache at Glasgow, exposed him to the raillery of his Scottish friends. "Jeffrey," Lord Holland afterwards said, " had lost the broad Scotch at Oxford, but he had gained only the narrow English." No one, indeed, could hear Jeffrey in after life without noting, as something peculiar, his sharp, petulant, high-keyed manner of pronouncing his words, so different from either the broad full sing-song of a genuine Scottish speaker, or the firm and manly speech of an educated Englishman. The change was a bold one for a Scottish youth of that day. As late as fifteen years ago, in most parts of Scotland, a schoolboy that should have presumed to talk English, except on stated occasions within school, or that even then should have exhibited too sedulous a study of the vowel-sounds in Walker's Dictionary, would have been treated as a daw with borrowed feathers, and unmercifully plucked. In Jeffrey's case, however, the little affectation, if such it was, which led him to pick up the English accent, was something pleasantly characteristic. He never really ceased to be a Scotchman. Till his dying day, the amor patriæ was conspicuously strong in him, and he never lost his relish for Scottish humours and Scottish phraseology. He could talk Scotch when he liked, Lord Cockburn says, "as correctly as when the Doric of the Edinburgh Lawnmarket had been only improved in him by that of the Glasgow Rottenrow;" and we have it on undoubted authority that when, among his familiar friends, he took to telling his reminiscences of old Braxy and other notabilities of the Scottish Bench and Bar, no one could beat him as a mimic, and not even Scott could convey a Scotticism better.

Between Jeffrey's return from Oxford and his entry on professional life as a Scottish barrister, there intervened a period of two years, spent in law-studies, in agreeable intercourse with his friends; in brilliant speech-making at the weekly meetings of the famous Speculative Club, then and long afterwards the training school of young celebrities native to Edinburgh, or sent thither from England to attend the University; and in the gratification of his literary propensity by the increase of his private stock of manuscripts on all sorts of subjects. He had serious thoughts, it appears, at one time of trying to become a poet. So convinced, however, is his biographer that this was a hallucination, that, with bundles of Jeffrey's early poetical efforts before him, he has not given us a single specimen. In the extracts given from the prose writings of the same period we recognise, in somewhat more matured combination, the same qualities that were discernible in the earlier productions-extreme fluency in tasteful expression; an intellect, swift, keen, and glancing, rather than deep or heavy; a cutting, unhesitating declaration of opinion for this or against that at a moment's notice; and a decided tendency to the practice of criticism.

It was with all these qualities developed in him in a degree that rendered him notable among the young men who knew him, and with an amount of general culture and knowledge such as was possessed by few of them, that Jeffrey, in the winter of 1794, assumed the gown and wig of a Scottish barrister. It is at this epoch in his life that he may be regarded as having first ceased to be a mere reader and student, and as having come into a position of practical relationship to Scottish polity, and the whole circle of Scottish interests. The population of Scotland may have then amounted to about a million and a half; Edinburgh was the centre of all the political activity of this small population; the lawyers of Edinburgh were its social aristocracy; and Jeffrey, as a young member of this aristocracy, had a more decided part to choose, and a more active future in prospect, than if he had been a mere ordinary citizen. We cannot better introduce the reader to an acquaintance with Jeffrey in this aspect than by quoting from Lord Cockburn's Scotland Fifty Years Ago.

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admirable delineation of the state of Scottish society towards the end of the last and the beginning of the present century.

"Everything was inflamed by the first French Revolution. Even in England all ordinary faction was absorbed by the two partiesof those who thought that that terrible example, by shewing the dangers of wrongs too long maintained, was the strongest reason for the timely correction of our own defects; and of those who considered this opinion as a revolutionary device, and held that the atrocities in France were conclusive against our exciting sympathetic hopes by any admission that curable defect existed.

Never, since our own Revolution, was there a period when public life was so exasperated by hatred, or the charities of private life were so soured by political aversion.

"If this was the condition of England, with its larger population, its free institutions, its diffused wealth, and its old habits of public discussion, a few facts will account for the condition of Scotland. There was then in this country no popular representation, no emancipated burghs, no effective rival of the Established Church, no independent press, no free public meetings, and no better trial by jury, even in political cases, (except high treason,) than was consistent with the circumstances, that the jurors were not sent into Court under any impartial rule, and that, when in Court, those who were to try the case were named by the presiding judge. The Scotch representatives were only forty-five; of whom thirty were elected for counties, and fifteen for towns. Both from its price and its nature (being enveloped in feudal and technical absurdities) the elective franchise in counties, where alone it existed, was far above the reach of the whole lower, and of a great majority of the middle, and of many even of the higher ranks. There were probably not above 1500 or 2000 county electors in all Scotland; a body not too large to be held, hope included, in Government's hand. The return, therefore, of a single opposition member was never to be expected.

Of the fifteen town members, Edinburgh returned one. The other fourteen were produced by clusters of four or five unconnected burghs electing each one delegate, and these four or five delegates electing the representative. Whatever this system may have been originally, it had grown, in reference to the people, into as complete a mockery as if it had been invented for their degradation. The people had nothing to do with it. It was all managed by TownCouncils, of never more than thirty-three members; and every Town-Council was self-elected, and consequently perpetuated its own interests. The election of either the town or the county member was a matter of such utter indifference to the people, that they often only knew of it by the ringing of a bell, or by seeing it mentioned next day in a newspaper; for the farce was generally performed in an apartment from which, if convenient, the public could be excluded. Scotland did not maintain a single opposition newspaper, or Meetings of the adhe

magazine, or periodical publication.

.

rents of Government for party purposes, and for such things as victories and charities, were common enough. But, with ample materials for opposition meetings, they were in total disuse. I doubt if there was one held in Edinburgh between the year 1795 and the year 1820. Attendance was understood to be fatal. The very banks were overawed, and conferred their favours with a very different hand to the adherents of the two parties. Thus, politically, Scotland was dead. It was not unlike a village at a great man's gate. Without a single free institution or habit, opposition was rebellion, submission probable success.

"If there had been any hope of ministerial change, or even any relief by variety of ministerial organs, the completeness of the Scotch subjugation might have been less. But the whole country was managed by the undisputed and sagacious energy of a single native, who knew the circumstances, and the wants, and the proper bait, of every countryman worth being attended to. Henry Dundas, the first Lord Melville, was the Pharos of Scotland. Who steered upon him was safe; who disregarded his light was wrecked. It was to his nod that every man owed what he got, and looked for what he wished. Always at the head of some great department of the public service, and with the indirect command of places in every other department; and the establishments of Scotland, instead of being pruned, multiplying-the judges, the sheriffs, the clergy, the professors, the towncouncillors, the members of parliament and of every public board, including all the officers of the revenue, and shoals of commissions in the military, the naval, and the Indian service, were all the breath of his nostril. This despotism was greatly strengthened by the personal character and manners of the man. Handsome, gentlemanlike, frank, cheerful, and social, he was a favourite with most men, and with all women. Too much a man of the world not to live well with his opponents when they would let him, and totally incapable of personal harshness or unkindness, it was not unnatural that his official favours should be confined to his own innumerable and insatiable partisans. With such means so dispensed, no wonder that the monarchy was absolute. To be at the head of such a system was a tempting and corrupting position for a weak, a selfish, or a tyrannical man. But it enabled a man with a head and a temper like Dundas's to be absolute without making his subjects fancy that they ought to be offended. He was the very man for Scotland at that time, and is a Scotchman of whom his country may be proud. Skilful in Parliament, wise and liberal in Council, and with an almost unrivalled power of administration, the usual reproach of his Scotch management is removed by the two facts-that he did not make the bad elements he had to work with, and that he did not abuse them; which last is the greatest praise that his situation admits of.

"In addition to common political hostility, this state of things produced great personal bitterness. The insolence, or at least the confidence, of secure power on the one side, and the indignation of bad usage on the other, put the weaker party, and seemed to justify it,

The Scottish Whig Party.

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under a tacit proscription. It both excluded those of one class from all public trust, which is not uncommon, and obstructed their attempts to raise themselves anyhow. To an extent now scarcely credible, and curious to think of, it closed the doors and the hearts of friends against friends. There was no place where it operated so severely as at the Bar. These facts enable us to appreciate the virtuous courage of those who really sought for the truth, and, having found it as they thought, openly espoused it. The shires, with only a few individual exceptions, were soulless. But, in all towns, there were some thinking, independent men. Trade and manufactures were rising; the municipal population was increasing; the French Revolution, with its excitement and discussion of principles, was exciting many minds. The great question of Burgh Reform, demonstrably clear in itself, but then denounced as revolutionary, had begun that deep and just feeling of discontent, which operated so beneficially on the public spirit of the citizens all over Scotland for the next forty years. The people were silent from prudence. A first conviction of simple sedition by a judge-named jury was followed by transportation for fourteen years. They, therefore, left their principles to the defence of the leading Whigs; who, without any special commission, had the moral authority that belongs to honesty and fearlessness. These were chiefly lawyers, whose powers and habits connected them with public affairs;-a bold and united band, without whose steadiness the very idea of independence would, for the day, have been extinguished in Scotland."-Life, pp. 73-81.

To this small but devoted phalanx of Scottish Whigs Jeffrey from the first attached himself. Scott, as was more natural to a man of his predilections, took the other or Tory side. It is a sad thing, if one looks at the matter with any very serious attention, that good men in this world should be obliged thus to take sides at all, or at least to enrol themselves once for all under any one or any other ready-made denomination. One could wish that it were permitted to a man simply to look about for the good things he would like to see done, and to lend his help in time and season to the doing of them, never puzzling his head whether it was Whiggism to do this, or Toryism to do that, or whether the thing to be done had a name at all, provided it were clearly something reasonable in his private view of it. One could wish that what Burns, who still, however, called himself a Whig, once said of his politics, namely, that "he had a few first principles which he would not easily part with, but that, as to all the etiquette, &c., of the thing, he would not have a dissocial word about it with any of God's creatures," could be allowed to pass universally as confession of faith enough in political matters. But unfortunately this is impossible. Old port gathers bees'wing-the more bees'-wing, they say, the better the wine; and so, in all societies that have lasted some time there float about