As to the representation in Parliament, the freeholders in the whole of the Counties of Scotland, who had the power of returning the County Members, were, in 1823, for example, just under three thousand in number. These were mostly gentlemen of position living on their estates, with a sprinkling of professional men; the former being, from their want of business training, ill suited, one would suppose, for conducting the business of a nation. The Town Councils were self-elective—hotbeds of corruption; and the members of these Town Councils were intrusted with the power of returning the Members for the boroughs. The people at large were not directly represented, if in strictness represented at all.

B.

Francis, afterwards Lord Jeffrey, in a letter of the 20th September 1799, describes the discomfort of a journey by mail from Perth to Edinburgh, when the coach had broken down, and he was carried forward by the guard by special conveyance. His graphic description is as follows:—"I was roused carefully half an hour before four yesterday morning, and passed two delightful hours in the kitchen waiting for the mail. There was an enormous fire, and a whole household of smoke. The waiter was snoring with great vehemency upon one of the dressers, and the deep regular intonation had a very solemn effect, I can assure you, in the obscurity of that Tartarean region, and the melancholy silence of the morning. An innumerable number of rats were trottin and gibberin in one end of the place, and the rain clattered freshly on the windows. The dawn heavily in clouds brought on the day, but not, alas! the mail; and it was long past five when the guard came galloping into the yard, upon a smoking horse, with all the wet bags lumbering beside him (like Scylla's water-dogs), roaring out that the coach was broken down somewhere near Dundee, and commanding another steed to be got ready for his transportation. The noise he made brought out the other two sleepy wretches that had been waiting like myself for places, and we at length persuaded the heroic champion to order a postchaise instead of a horse, into which we crammed ourselves all four, with a whole mountain of leather bags that clung about our legs like the entrails of a fat cow all the rest of the journey. At Kinross, as the morning was very fine, we prevailed with the guard to go on the outside to dry himself, and got on to the ferry about eleven, after encountering various perils and vexations, in the loss of horse-shoes and wheel-pins, and in a great gap in the road, over which we had to lead the horses, and haul the carriage separately. At this place we supplicated our agitator for leave to eat a little breakfast; but he would not stop an instant, and we were obliged to snatch up a roll or two apiece and gnaw the dry crusts during our passage to keep soul and body together. We got in soon after one, and I have spent my time in eating, drinking, sleeping, and other recreations, down to the present hour."

On going north from Edinburgh, on the same tour apparently, Jeffrey had previous experience of the difficulties of travel, as described in a letter from Montrose, date 26th August 1799.

"We stopped," says he, "for two days at Perth, hoping for places in the mail, and then set forward on foot in despair. We have trudged it now for fifty miles, and came here this morning very weary, sweaty, and filthy. Our baggage, which was to have left Perth the same day that we did, has not yet made its appearance, and we have received the comfortable information that it is often a week before there is room in the mail to bring such a parcel forward."

Writing from Kendal, in 1841, Jeffrey refers to a journey he made fifty years before—that is, about 1791—when he slept a night in the town. His description of the circumstances is as follows:—

"And an admirable dinner we have had in the Ancient King's Arms, with great oaken staircases, uneven floors, and very thin oak panels, plaster-filled outer walls, but capital new furniture, and the brightest glass, linen, spoons, and china you ever saw. It is the same house in which I once slept about fifty years ago, with the whole company of an ancient stage-coach, which bedded its passengers on the way from Edinburgh to London, and called them up by the waiter at six o'clock in the morning to go five slow stages, and then have an hour to breakfast and wash. It is the only vestige I remember of those old ways, and I have not slept in the house since."

C.

The discomfort of a long voyage in a vessel of this class is well set forth in the correspondence of Jeffrey. In 1813 he crossed to New York in search of a wife; and in describing the miseries of the situation on board, he gives a long list of his woes, the last being followed by this declaration: "I think I shall make a covenant with myself, that if I get back safe to my own place from this expedition, I shall never willingly go out of sight of land again in my life."

D.

A notable instance of an attempt to shut the door in the face of an able man is recorded in the Life of Sir James Simpson, who has made all the world his debtors through the discovery and application of chloroform for surgical operations. Plain Dr. Simpson was a candidate for a professorship in the University of Edinburgh, and had his supporters for the honour; but there was among the men with whom rested the selection a considerable party opposed to him, whose ground of opposition was that, on account of his parents being merely tradespeople, Dr. Simpson would be unable to maintain the dignity of the chair. To their eternal discredit, the persons referred to did not look to the quality and ring of the "gowd," but were guided by the superficial "guinea stamp." The spread of public opinion is gradually putting such distinctions, which have their root and being in privilege and selfishness, out of court.

Printed by T. and A. Constable, Printers to Her Majesty,
at the Edinburgh University Press.