examinations as we now say) for the Scottish Bar, beheld the Parliament
Close open and had a vision of the mouth of Hell. This, and small
wonder, was the means of his conversion. Nor was the vision unsuitable
to the locality; for after an hospital, what uglier piece is there in
civilization than a court of law? Hither come envy, malice, and all
uncharitableness to wrestle it out in public tourney; crimes, broken
fortunes, severed households, the knave and his victim, gravitate to
this low building with the arcade. To how many has not St. Giles's bell
told the first hour after ruin? I think I see them pause to count the
strokes, and wander on again into the moving High Street, stunned and
sick at heart.

A pair of swing doors gives admittance to a hall with a carved roof,
hung with legal portraits, adorned with legal statuary, lighted by
windows of painted glass, and warmed by three vast fires. This the
_Salle des pas perdus_ of the Scottish Bar. Here, by a ferocious custom,
idle youths must promenade from ten till two. From end to end, singly or
in pairs or trios, the gowns and wigs go back and forward. Through a hum
of talk and footfalls, the piping tones of a Macer announce a fresh
cause and call upon the names of those concerned. Intelligent men have
been walking here daily for ten or twenty years without a rag of
business or a shilling of reward. In process of time, they may perhaps
be made the Sheriff-Substitute and Fountain of Justice at Lerwick or
Tobermory. There is nothing required, you would say, but a little
patience and a taste for exercise and bad air. To breathe dust and
bombazine, to feed the mind on cackling gossip, to hear three parts of a
case and drink a glass of sherry, to long with indescribable longings
for the hour when a man may slip out of his travesty and devote himself
to golf for the rest of the afternoon, and to do this day by day and
year after year, may seem so small a thing to the inexperienced! But
those who have made the experiment are of a different way of thinking,
and count it the most arduous form of idleness.

More swing doors open into pigeon-holes where Judges of the First
Appeal sit singly, and halls of audience where the supreme Lords sit by
three or four. Here, you may see Scott's place within the bar, where he
wrote many a page of Waverley novels to the drone of judicial
proceeding. You will hear a good deal of shrewdness, and, as their
Lordships do not altogether disdain pl