the bar of the House of Commons was not more respectful towards the senate than that of Dr. Johnson: 'Be as impudent as you can, as merry as you can, and say whatever comes uppermost. Jack Lee is the best heard there of any counsel, and he is the most impudent dog, and always abusing us.'

We are willing, then, to allow a barrister a very great latitude in addressing a committee of the House of Commons ; still we are always pained to hear accusations of this nature, and yet more grieved to think there should be good ground for them. And we fear that in this instance they are not entirely without foundation. The bar has been always, and will be always, probably, a money-getting body; but as all other persons will make money when they can do so, they are, at all events, no worse in this respect than their neighbours. Still other motives in most other departments of the profession mingle with the lust for gold. But a counsel who takes parliamentary business as his sole pursuit has little else but money to stimulate his exertions. He cannot respect the tribunal before which he practises: he may occasionally meet a member who can appreciate his exertions; but as a general rule, his best argument is to the great majority of his hearers "as utter foolishness." He is not improving himself — he is not advancing in the true professional road. He may be making money; but he is doing nothing else. It is to this department of the profession, therefore, to which, as it appears to us, this charge fairly applies.

1 Mr. Croker's note on Jack Lee is as follows:

“Mr. Lee, afterwards solicitor-general in the Rockingham administration. 'He was a man of strong parts, though of warm manners, and who never hesitated to express, in the coarsest language, whatever he thought.'- Wraxall's Mem. vol. ii. p. 237. He was particularly distinguished by the violence of his invectives against the person and administration of Lord Shelburne in 1782." 2 Vol. VII. p. 52. ed. 1835. Johnson, however, was disgusted with the election committees of his time. "His notion of the duty of a member of parliament sitting on an election committee was very high; and when he was told of a gentleman upon one of those committees who read the newspapers part of the time, and slept the rest, while the merits of a vote were argued by counsel, as an excuse, when challenged by the chairman for such behaviour, bluntly answered, 'I had made up my mind upon that case,' Johnson, with an indignant contempt, said, If he was such a rogue as to make up his mind upon a case without hearing it, he should not have been such a fool as to tell it.' I think Mr. Dudley Long said, 'The doctor has pretty plainly made him out to be both rogue and fool."" Vol. VIII. p. 48.

The true remedy is to improve the constitution of the committees. A good committee will soon cut down the number of days' sitting taken up by parliamentary committees. For this we must again cite the Duke of Richmond. Let us see his Grace's account of the manner in which the Lords' Committee disposed of some contested bills. After mentioning several, he goes on thus:—

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'Fishguard Harbour was the next; Lord Hatherton was chairman, with the Earl of Morton, the Earl of Effingham, Lord Sheffield and Lord Rayleigh; they sat for three days, and passed the Bill, with compensation to the petitioners, and some other amendments. That Bill is now, I believe, in the House of Commons. There was no adjournment at all. The next is the Wadsley and Langset Roads Bill; the Marquis of Salisbury was in the chair; Lord Abingdon was one of the members of the committee, Lord Sondes was the third, Lord Foley was the fourth, and Lord Gage was the fifth; but it adjourned the second day without proceeding, and reported specially that Lord Sondes was unable to attend this day in consequence of the illness of his son; his son met with an accident, and was very nearly killed, at Eton; he left town immediately, believing his son to be very dangerously ill. The committee therefore applied for leave to sit in his absence, which they did, leave being given; they sat two days, and also prayed leave to adjourn the next day, which was Saturday, at three o'clock; the reason was not given, but the House allowed it. Lord Foley was originally appointed on this committee, but it was found that he was either out of town or on duty as one of the household of her Majesty, and Lord Carberry was therefore substituted. The next was the Lough Foyle Drainage Bill; Lord Brougham and Vaux was in the chair, Earl of Leven and Melville, Earl of Dartmouth, Earl Cowper, and Earl of Camperdown; they sat one day, and obtained leave of the House the first day to adjourn for an hour, Lord Brougham being in attendance on an appeal case; the committee sat that day and reported the Bill; it was re-committed to the same committee to take consents, and the committee was ordered to meet again the next day, at two o'clock, for that purpose; in point of fact it was one day, and a short portion of a day; they then committed it to take some consents which were necessary."

If there is a good chairman and a committee who will support him; above all, if there be not one side in the committee which wishes for delay, we think this matter may be left to right itself.

While these sheets are passing through the press, we perceive that the Railway Committee, by their Second Report, has endeavoured to curtail the length of counsel's speeches by a specific resolution, that "counsel appearing before Railway Committees shall be entitled to open the case, but not sum up the evidence." The proposed resolution, however, did not meet with much favour from the House, and was withdrawn by the Committee. We are quite satisfied that the feeling of the House was right. Any overt attempt to restrain counsel in this respect would be, as we think, exceedingly ill-judged, the esprit de corps would be roused, and rightly roused. We have already expressed our opinion on the subject; and we would hope that the whole will be left to the discretion and proper feeling of the Bar, which we are satisfied will not be appealed to in vain.1

ART. V.-A MEMOIR OF ALLAN LORD MEADOWBANK. THERE have been few more eminent lawyers on the Bench of either country, perhaps of any country, than the late Lord Meadowbank, nor was his learning confined to the studies of his profession; he was a man of universal information; his reading was, during his whole life, extensive; his knowledge accurate; nor did his ardour in pursuit of it terminate but with his life.

Allan Maconochie was the eldest son of a country gentleman, whose family had been driven from Argyleshire, their original habitation, during the Covenanting troubles of the seventeenth century, and settled in Mid-Lothian, where they acquired the estate of Meadowbank, near Kirk Newton. The great grandfather is mentioned in Baillie, (Letters, iii. 365.) as one of Argyle's friends, who had instigated his proceedings, and "was forfaulted," at the time of the murder of that chief, so

It is curious that in the same Session in which this restriction on the speeches of counsel was proposed, a motion was made by Mr. Ewart (March 6th) to give an additional speech to the defendant's counsel at nisi prius, and in criminal cases on the close of the evidence for the prisoner or defendant; thus following the existing practice of Committees of the House of Commons. The subject was referred, at the request of the Attorney-General, to the Criminal Law Commissioners.

beautifully described by Mr. Fox in his Historical Fragment, as having "expiated his virtues on the scaffold." The son, grandfather of the Judge, received some indemnity at the Revolution, with which he purchased the estate in Mid-Lothian, with other property, which the possessor sold in 1709, under the alarm then prevalent, that Scotland was ruined by the union. The part of the purchase which was retained proved then to be unsaleable, in consequence of that unaccountable popular opinion.

Allan, the Judge, was born 26th May, 1748, and his father being himself in the profession, took care that his education should be carefully attended to. With this view he obtained for him the assistance of Dr. Adam, afterwards so celebrated as a teacher, and as a writer upon the antiquities and geography of ancient Italy. The young man was the only pupil to whom this eminent and excellent person ever acted as private tutor; and the result of his care was, that the scholar obtained a familiar acquaintance with the ancient languages and the classical writers, very unusual in those days and in that country. Being destined for the bar, under the advice of his kinsman Principal Robertson, who was left one of his guardians upon his father's death, he studied for some time the Civil and the Scottish law, at the University of Edinburgh; and, in order to complete his education, he entered himself apprentice at the age of fifteen with an eminent writer to the signet (conveyancer), Mr. Thomas Tod, and actually served out his time. But that his studies were never confined to the drudgery of the profession, appears very clearly, for he attended both the class of Divinity and that of Church History; and also the medical classes: nay, so well was he versed in this branch of science, that Dr. Gregory, his intimate friend, used to relate, that a part of his celebrated thesis on taking his degree was the work of Mr. Maconochie. It may safely be asserted that so liberal an education has fallen to the lot of very few men, and of no other lawyer; but he was also improved by foreign travel; and was sent abroad, when he resided for some time at Paris. On his return, in 1769, he entered at Lincoln's Inn, and kept his terms with the intention of being called to our Bar. Lord Thurlow had taken a liking to him, which continued through life, and strongly urged him to this

pursuit; but his subsequent marriage with Miss Wellwood, a lady of that well-known Scottish family, induced him to settle in Edinburgh. While he resided in London, however, he very diligently studied the English law, and was a regular attendant upon the Court in which Lord Mansfield presided. The decisions, and the whole judicial conduct of that great magistrate, made a deep impression upon his mind, the rather, as the enlarged views and truly liberal spirit in which he administered our technical system of jurisprudence fell in with his own learned and enlightened views of the science.

He was now called to the Bar, or, as it is said in Scotland, admitted a member of the Faculty of Advocates; but as practice to young men in the Scottish branch of the profession comes slowly, from there being none of the helps and introductions known among us, of Pleading below the Bar, Sessions, and Circuits, he again went abroad, before his marriage, and fixing his residence in Edinburgh, and remained for between one and two years, diligently attending the proceedings of the Parliament of Paris, and he also spent a considerable time at Rheims, where, and in other provinces, he attended the parliaments or high courts of justice. The copious notes which he wrote both in these countries and during his studies in London, and during his attendance on Lord Mansfield's court, remain a monument of his extraordinary industry; and a proof that his own great legal learning had been obtained from every

source.

On his return to Edinburgh, the first causes that brought him into notice were the great question of literary property in which he was engaged, and the celebrated case of the negro, Knight v. Wedderburn, which excited the greatest interest, and called forth all the abilities of the Bar. No questions could be more congenial to his feelings and his tastes, to his principles, above all, for these were eminently liberal and enlarged. He was, with his family, a steady friend of the rights and liberties of the people, as established at the Revolution; and only became, with Mr. Burke and Mr. Windham, averse to popular courses when these became in this country wedded to sedition, and in France to massacre and anarchy. He not only distinguished himself at the Bar in those celebrated cases which we have mentioned, but on the Bench in all the ques