easantry, a fair proportion of dry
fun. The broadest of broad Scotch is now banished from the bench; but
the courts still retain a certain national flavour. We have a solemn
enjoyable way of lingering on a case. We treat law as a fine art, and
relish and digest a good distinction. There is no hurry: point after
point must be rightly examined and reduced to principle; judge after
judge must utter forth his _obiter dicta_ to delighted brethren.

Besides the courts, there are installed under the same roof no less than
three libraries: two of no mean order; confused and semi-subterranean,
full of stairs and galleries; where you may see the most
studious-looking wigs fishing out novels by lantern light, in the very
place where the old Privy Council tortured Covenanters. As the
Parliament House is built upon a slope, although it presents only one
story to the north, it measures half-a-dozen at least upon the south;
and range after range of vaults extend below the libraries. Few places
are more characteristic of this hilly capital. You descend one stone
stair after another, and wander, by the flicker of a match, in a
labyrinth of stone cellars. Now, you pass below the Outer Hall and hear
overhead, brisk but ghostly, the interminable pattering of legal feet.
Now, you come upon a strong door with a wicket: on the other side are
the cells of the police office and the trap-stair that gives admittance
to the dock in the Justiciary Court. Many a foot that has gone up there
lightly enough, has been dead-heavy in the descent. Many a man's life
has been argued away from him during long hours in the court above. But
just now that tragic stage is empty and silent like a church on a
week-day, with the bench all sheeted up and nothing moving but the
sunbeams on the wall. A little farther and you strike upon a room, not
empty like the rest, but crowded with _productions_ from bygone criminal
cases: a grim lumber: lethal weapons, poisoned organs in a jar, a door
with a shot hole through the panel, behind which a man fell dead. I
cannot fancy why they should preserve them, unless it were against the
Judgment Day. At length, as you continue to descend, you see a peep of
yellow gaslight and hear a jostling, whispering noise ahead; next moment
you turn a corner, and there, in a whitewashed passage, is a machinery
belt industriously turning on its wheels. You would think the engine had
grown there of its own accord, like a cellar fungus, and would