the first institution of the Jury Court in Scotland, some fifty years ago (1815), the Right Honourable the Lord Chief Commissioner of the Jury Court, with a permanent salary of £4000 per annum. We have seen him frequently in Glasgow in the discharge of his high and important duties, and, after these were over, inquiring earnestly about Muir's friends, and the remnant of his early Reform friends and faithful witnesses, long since gathered to their fathers. Alas, for Muir himself! His fate was now irrevocably sealed in this country. For soon after the decision of Parliament, he was ruthlessly shipped away for Botany Bay. We, of course, lose all sight of him on that long voyage. It was reported that an attempt was made to take away his life on the pretext of some mutiny on board; but whether or not, we find, and need only here observe, that he appears to have arrived safely at Sydney, on the 25th of September, 1794-the first Seditious passenger, or rather we shall declare, the very first gentleman that ever landed under the ban of any sentence in that place. We have not recovered any of his first intercepted and affectionate letters to his parents; but we will give afterwards a most pathetic one from Skirving, to his sad grieving wife, left behind him with their young family in Edinburgh, the recital of which might melt the heart of the hardest stone at this day. While we have given the strong and pointed language employed by Fox and Sheridan in the House of Commons, let us give now the following most agreeable and exquisite tribute applicable to Muir and to Scotland, from the lips of CURRAN, as contained in his brilliant speech for Hamilton Rowand, charged for Sedition, at Dublin, in 1794 : Gentlemen of the Jury,-It is to my mind most astonishing that in such a country as Scotland-a nation cast in the happy medium between the spiritless acquiescence of submissive poverty, and the sturdy credulity of pampered wealth; cool and ardent; adventurous and persevering; winging her eagle flight against the blaze of every science, with an eye that never winks, and a wing that never tires; crowned as she is with the spoils of every art, and decked with the wreath of every muse, from the deep and scrutinizing researches of her Hume, to the sweet and simple, but not less pathetic and sublime morality of her Burns-how, from the bosom of a country like that, genius, and character, and talents, should be banished to a distant barbarous soil, condemned to pine under the horrid communion of vulgar vice and baseborn profligacy, for twice the period that ordinary calculation gives to the continuance of human life. Surely every Scotchman, of whatsoever creed he may be, should feel justly proud of such a compliment, rehearsed now, after the dark vista of so many long years. It stands perhaps unrivalled in the English language; but it reached not the cars, nor did it touch the heart or soothe the bosom of Thomas Muir, whose trial was the means of calling it forth. He was then far away! He was located amongst the first group of banished convicts in that foreign land; and we have to mention this other singular fact, hardly credible, that besides the other convicts already enumerated, there was one amongst them, sent out in the same ship along with him, a notorious person, of the name of Henderson, who had been tried at the Glasgow Assizes three years before, for the capital crime of murder. Strange to say, Thomas Muir had acted as the Counsel for that very man at his trial in the city of Glasgow. There were some extenuating circumstances in the case. Muir ably turned them into good account for the unhappy trembling wretch, and literally saved his neck from the gallows; for the Jury returned, as Muir entreated them to do, the modified verdict of "culpable homicide;" and the culprit received sentence of 14 years' transportation, the exact period, be it observed, of Muir's own sentence for his "Sedition!" Conceive for a moment this wretched prisoner and his amiable Counsel voyaging together, and partaking of the same fare, and ultimately landing as fellow-convicts at Botany Bay! Is there a painter who can sketch this? Yet more singular still: it happened most fortunately for Muir and his companions Skirving, Margarot, Gerald, and Palmer, that the first Governor in the then unexplored colony of New South Wales, was Mr. John Hunter, a Scotchman by birth, who had originally gone thither from the citadel of Leith. We ought really to be somewhat proud of that original Governor, though we never saw him and rarely heard of him, and his reign is long since over. But this good Governor in the year 1795, writes home to his friends at Leith the following rather interesting letter, which shows us what manner of It was originally published in the Edinburgh Advertiser, in the year 1796: man he was. N. S. WALES, 16th Oct., 1795. The four gentlemen, whom the activity of the Magistrates of Edinburgh provided for our Colony, I have seen and conversed with separately, since my arrival here. They seem all of them gifted in the powers of conversation. Muir was the first I saw. I thought him a sensible young man, of a very retired turn, which certainly his situation in this country will give him an opportunity of indulging. He said nothing on the severity of his fate, but seemed to bear his circumstances with a proper degree of fortitude and resignation. Skirving was the next I saw; he appeared to me to be a sensible, well-informed man—not young, perhaps fifty. He is fond of farming, and has purchased a piece of ground, and makes a good use of it, which will, by and by, turn to his advantage. Palmer paid me the next visit; he is said to be a turbulent, restless kind of man. It may be So, but I must do him the justice to say, that I have seen nothing of that disposition in him since my arrival. Margarot seems to be a lively, facetious, talkative man-complained heavily of the injustice of his sentence, in which, however, he found I could not agree with him. I chose to appoint a time for seeing each separately -and on the whole I have to say that their general conduct is quiet, decent, and orderly. If it continues so, they will not find me disposed to be harsh or distressing to them. It may not here be altogether out of place to observe, that the first shipment of convicts from this country to Sydney, or to Botany Bay, or New South Wales, took place we think in the year 1785: in fact, the now great and rapidly extending Colony of Australia, where heaps of gold have latterly been discovered, might then be said to be a vast barren wilderness; for when Muir with his companions were landed at it in 1794, there were only a mere handful-a few dozens of individuals in the Colony altogether; whereas now (1865) it is teeming with its thousands and tens of thousands of free inhabitants under the British Crown, sending home to this mother country of ours, cargoes of gold to an extent hitherto unknown, and perfectly unparalleled in the history of the world. Thomas Campbell, the Bard of Hope, thus depicted it fifty years ago: "Delightful land, in wildness ev'n benign, The lives of Empire in thine infant face. Mr. Hunter, the original good old Governor, seems evidently from the first interviews he had with them, to have formed a favourable opinion of our Scottish exiles; nor is this to be wondered at. They were utterly unlike any of the vile, depraved, daring prisoners sent out in those early days to Botany Bay. They were men of high education and elegant accomplishments, not rogues or vagabonds, or villanous dregs of society; and accordingly we learn that the Governor humanely took it on him not to oppress them with chains, or to yoke them in horrid gangs with others at hard penal labour, but to afford them some rational indulgences in their unexampled situation. We may also observe, that Muir, Palmer, and Skirving, were possessed of small but sufficient sums of money impressed into their hands for all their supposed temporal wants, by their sorrowing relatives, ere they quitted this country: and at Botany Bay they might have drawn for any further supply on their friends at home, if opportunities arose or occasion required it. After being for some little time reconciled as much as possible to their doomed fate, they each purchased under the approval of the Governor, several small tracts of land (now of great value), and Muir, Skirving, and Palmer actually built for the first time in that country, three neat pretty little cottages almost adjoining each other, in which, doubtless, they frequently talked over the vicissitudes they had experienced at home, mingled by the smiles and tears of those loved relations from whom they had been so ruthlessly separated, and whose virtuous countenances depicted with all the shades and sorrows of life, would probably start up before them "in their mind's eye" with tenfold force in that banished land, the wild scenery of |