the future. The indenture of a fiveyear's clerkship is prepared and engrossed by himself, and signed by the parties with all the due solemnities of law, and he takes his seat at the desk, which has just been left by some other junior manufacturer of legal writs, technically and elegantly denominated hornings, poindings, and captions, who has assumed, or is about to assume, the imposing title of a Writer to his Majesty's Signet.

It now becomes necessary for the nursling lawyer to call into exercise the whole of his abilities, and to apply his acquired knowledge to the business of real life. His master pays little attention to him, and he is left to find his way among the intricacies and mysteries of his future profession, by the information and instruction which can be obtained by dint of observation and inquiry among his companions in the same chambers. Along with a smattering of business, which he learns from these wights, some of whom are probably old stagers on the road of profligacy, he acquires a pretty fair proportion of depraved ideas, at the mere conception of which a few months ago he would have started with horror. At the same time, he gradually attains to some proficiency in the language and practices of young bloods of the town, whose glory is in their shame, and whose greatest boast it is to riot in the orgies of unbridled obscenity, and boundless debauchery. To this state of perfection he does not arrive without various misgivings and occasional annoyances from a wounded sensibility. But if his health and his purse do not fail him, he is almost certain to reach this grand climax some time before the expiry of his denture.

In this manner he reaches his twenty-first or twenty-second year; and having sown his wild oats, and imbibed a little knowledge of business, and a thirst for more, with an unbounded craving for fingering large sums, composed of numerous items, few exceeding three shillings and fourpence, or six shillings and eightpence, he enters on his career with a brass plate on his door, indicating, by the large capitals W. S. annexed to his name, that he vends

all sorts of legal writs at, but not one farthing below, the full sum fixed by the legal body of which he is now an initiated member. He now becomes a staid man of busi ness, perhaps marries, and thus becomes somewhat civilized; but more probably he remains for some years a bachelor, attends very punctually to business in the forenoon, but spends his evenings, now that he has acquired a little pelf, in a more methodical species of debauchery than that to which he accustomed himself during his clerkship. If he becomes the junior partner of some Don in the profession, he will come with great dignity among the now silent clerks in his chambers; he will speak big to them; and perhaps, with the insolence of upstart authority, he will scold the wretches, trembling lest he should carry his petulent caprice so far as to dismiss them entirely from his employment. takes especial care, however, to please his own senior partner, and is a perfect image of gentleness and politeness, in so far as the inbred barbarism of his selfish and vulgar soul will permit him, to all the better order of the clients of the firm.

He

He now takes charge of law-processes, and is regularly seen prowling in the courts, followed by a fag clerk, who conveys to counsel the papers necessary in the debates at the Bar. The thing now looks grave, probably uses a considerable quantity of snuff, and is the last man on earth to advise or to bring about a compromise of any disputed point of a case, although his poor victim of a client is certain to throw away hundreds of gold to secure the chance of obtaining from his adversary a mere particle of chaff. Converse with him upon any subject but such as embraces the miserable jargon of summonses, defences, condescendences, pleas in law, and the opinions and speeches of the Dean of Faculty, and this or t'other sage of the long robe, and you will find his head a mere thing of emptiness. However, he grows up amid this profound ignorance of all that is estimable in human existence, and all that is most deserving to be known in the social condition of man. He becomes rich; and if he does not,

by a miracle, relax a little in his application to business, and learn something of what he ought to have known before he dared to enter on the threshold of a profession called liberal, he will soon degenerate into an inanimate sot, or a scarcely more vital jolterhead squire.

Meet the young pretender in company, and he bores you with law cases past all power of comprehension. Meet him in a stage-coach, and he will equally pester you with his horrible talk about his processes, and with long dissertations on the merit of this or the other judge. Any of the fifteen who may happen to have taken a view of a case different from that of this wise Writer to the Signet, is unsparingly set down as an irreclaimable idiot. This

stage-coach conversation, however, has a chance of being diversified by scraps from the secret history of some of the estates through which you are passing. The prying dog knows to a farthing the sum lent on mortgage over any given property in all broad Scotland; and his eyes sparkle with delight, when he informs you that the gentleman who lives in yonder mansion executed a trust-deed in his favour a few weeks ago, and that he is just on his way to take sasine on the deed. He sees in long vista the fat produce of this transaction, and to him it is the summum bonum of human happiness to dole out a few pounds to the starving proprietor of an ample estate, thus unhappily thrown within the grasp of his harpy talons.

A VERY general notion prevails on this subject, that the main object and direct tendency of the Corn Laws is, to serve the land-owners only, by raising the price of corn to an unnatural height. Nothing can be more unfounded than this notion, notwithstanding its general adoption, not merely among the great body of the populace, but even by many people of rank and supposed superior intelligence.

The object, truly, of these laws is to protect the home-grower of corn; not, as erroneously conceived, by high price, but by a steady market; so that the farmers may be induced to exert an unremitting attention to the cultivation and improvement of the soil, without fear of being driven out of the home-market by an importation from a more fertile country abroad. The following facts shew that this protection has not been productive of evil, but of the greatest good to the community at large.

The first Corn Act for Scotland passed in 1661. Previous to this, there was a fluctuation in the price of corn that set all calculation at defiance. Sometimes so high, that the population, especially in towns, was reduced almost to starvation; and again, at very short intervals, so low, that the farmers were reduced to ruin. The cultivation of the soil in those times was exceedingly rude,

nor could it be otherways under such circumstances. At that time, too, even the average price of corn, compared with the price of labour, was greatly higher than it afterwards became, from the encouragement which the Corn Laws afforded to the culti

vator.

In Arnot's History of Edinburgh, there is a table of the fiars, (or yearly average of prices) of corn in Mid-Lothian, from the year 1645 to the year 1778, when that work was published. This table, conjoined with other circumstances, throws great light on the subject.

In the course of sixteen years from 1645 to 1660, (the year previous to the Corn Act,) the fiars of wheat fluctuated from 22s. 2d. Sterling the boll, to 7s. 6d. (the average was 16s. 1d.) and of oatmeal from 18s. 4d. to 5s. 6d. The average 12s. 6d. These rates are not remarkably lower than those of the present times; certainly not 50 per cent. ; whilst the rate of labour may safely be said to be at least 300 per cent. more.

In a similar extent of time, from 1661 to 1675 inclusive, and now for the first time under the influence of a Corn Act, protecting the homecultivator against foreign corn, there was indeed a considerable fluctuation in price, (as must ever be to a certain extent, from a diversity of seasons,) but to a much less degree

butchers' meat more especially, in an abundance never before known; and all, too, comparing the price of corn with the price of labour, at a cheaper rate than ever; and, (which is also deserving of notice,) during the last seven years in particular, with extremely little importation of corn from abroad.

As to the price of labour, there is very little precise information to be had in any particular period long gone. On that point I can speak only from my own knowledge, so far as it goes. About the year 1773, in which the Corn Act passed that I have quoted, the usual wages of a common labourer was eightpence, or at most ninepence, a-day, without victuals. From that time wages improved by little and little, till about the year 1800, when they reached tenpence a-day in winter, and a shilling in the summer months. I mean in the vicinity of Edinburgh. What they are there just now I have no access to know; but in Ayrshire, where I live, they were, last summer, twentypence a-day. The wages of a mason in 1773, and for two or three years longer, were a merk Scots a-day, or 13 pence Sterling. From this time they improved gradually till the year 1800, when a mason got from two shillings to two and sixpence a-day. They are now three shillings and fourpence. I do not know so precisely what the wages are of other artizans, but there can be no question that they have advanced in a similar propor tion; so that it will not be saying too much, that the price of labour in general is two and a half times more than it was 50 years ago, or at the rate of 150 per cent. in addition.

The price of corn has advanced too, but not in any thing like the same extent. The fiars of MidLothian, for a period of ten years after passing the Corn Act of 1773, were, of wheat 19s. 94d., at an average of these years, and of meal 138. 6 d., the boll. Take wheat and meal in conjunction, (for they are equally the general food of the country,) the medium is 16s. 8d. Again, in a period of ten years from 1815, the date of the last Corn Law, (which it seems has incurred the peculiar execration of the political

economists,) the average fiars of wheat is 27s. 1d., and of meal 18s. ild. The medium betwixt the two is 23s. These are, however, the Ayrshire fiars; but, adding 10 per cent. to them will bring them more than up to those of Mid-Lothian,hence 25s. 4d. as the medium betwixt the two. Thus has the expectation been well fulfilled, as before quoted from the Act itself, that it would afford a cheaper supply to the poor; for, while the price of labour has risen from that time to the present one hundred and fifty per cent., the price of corn has not advanced beyond fifty-two. Properly speaking, perhaps there has been no rise at all in either the one or the other. The difference may have arisen from a fall in the value of money; but that would not alter the relative difference betwixt the value of labour and the price of corn. The daily wages of the poor man now buys more corn than his daily wages would have done 50 years ago. In fact, it is not the poor labourers that are raising the cry; it is those wonderfully wise men, the philosophers, or political economists, as they call themselves, that are making

-All this splutter

And quarrel with their bread and butter.

That beef and mutton, and butter and cheese, and poultry and eggs, have risen in price of late years, is not meant to be denied-even to as great degree as the rate of wages itself. But what then? These articles of luxury are not under the influence of the Corn Laws at all. It does not apply to these in any shape. I should think, too, that it is a fair inference to draw on the subject, that the great improvement in the price of these is wholly imputable to the great improvement that in the same period has taken place in the circumstances of the community at large. That the Corn Laws, however, may indirectly have been the cause that such a profusion of excellently-fed meat is now brought to market, where not many years ago a tenth part of it did not exist, I will not take upon me to deny.

I cannot conclude these remarks without adverting to a wild notion that has of late been very rife among

the political economists, that in Scotland too much barren land has been converted into fruitful fields; and much they deplore the labour that has been bestowed upon it; and fain would they see it all consigned again to its original state of sterility. Another notable dogma of these philosophers is, that it makes no odds to a country (such as Ireland, for example), whether its whole landrents were expended in the country itself, or transmitted ten thousand miles abroad. They talk, too, most sapiently, of the enviable condition of the foreign operatives, who have their bread and their onions so very much cheaper than the good, honest, tax-ridden people of this country, with their beef and their pudding. It never enters into their noddle that the wages there are just so much less in proportion. They are like to

the Orkney-man in London, who was astonished beyond measure to find that a duck was selling there at two shillings, whilst it could (he was ready to depone) be bought in the isle of Sanday for a groat. "But had you a groat there to pay for it?” said a carman, drinking his porter.

They are quite certain, too, that cheap labour will make cheap goods. They are beside the mark in this also. The cheapness of goods arises as much from the dexterity of the workman as from the quantum of his wages. Some workmen at halfa-guinea a-day will furnish goods as cheap as others at eighteen-pence.

We have had our age of reason till we were sick of it. The present seems to be the age of delusions; and the noted Johanna Southcote is not the only old woman that has attempted to bring them forth *.

It was Xerxes, we believe, who, sated with every variety of known enjoyment, offered a prodigious reward to the man, whoever he might be, that should discover a new pleasure. But we do not read that the proffered munificence of the monarch realized the hopes of the voluptuary, or that so much as even an attempt was made to devise a new stimulant for a pallid and sickly appetite. So far the inventive genius of the East was decidedly at fault. We presume there can be little doubt however, that, had the Author of Waverley been, by a slight anachronism, revealed to the world some two thousand odd years earlier, he would have fingered the Persian's gold+; for he not only discovers, but, which is far better, periodically creates a new pleasure: every revolving year he makes some permanent addition to the sum-total of enjoyment, ministering a fresh ingredient to be mingled in the Circean cup: with a most heterodox disdain of the conventional distinctions among men, he opens up" rivers of pleasures," at which the king and the clown

are equally eager and equally delighted to drink: and he works his manifold wonders, not by a laborious interrogation of Nature, or by crucifying her (to use Bacon's phrase) into a disclosure of her secrets, but by an act of violation merely-by evolving a few of those divine forms of things which hover round his own entranced imagination, and, with a magical illusion, clothing them in the garb of truth and reality. But these forms are not altogether, and in every sense, ideal, like those with which the supercelestial mind of Plato loved to converse. They are rather the etherialized essences of the spirits of the Past, over whom he seems invested with an absolute dominion, Hence, by a sorcery hardly less powerful than that which evoked the shade of Samuel before the eyes of the astonished King of Israel, does this great magician conjure up prophets, princes, and martyrs,-warriors, statesmen, and philosophers,― courtiers, fanatics, and usurpers,with a hundred other characters, remarkable for their vices, virtues, follies, or misfortunes, on whom the se