The Modern Athens 22

The Modern Athens 22

Wherever you meet with this highly-gifted personage, you are never

at a loss to distinguish him from every body else. His writings, his

speeches, and his face, have the most remarkable family likeness that

I ever met with. All the three seem cut into little faucettes and

angles, which glitter and sparkle in every possibility of light, both

direct and oblique. In the speech and the writing, rich as is the

play of genius on the surface, it bears no proportion to the mass of

intellect which it covers and dazzles; and keen, acute, and purged of

all grossness and obesity, as is the lower part of the face, it bears

no proportion to the expansion of forehead that towers above. Jeffrey

has the most wonderful pair of eyes that ever illuminated a human

visage. Even when he is shooting along like a small but swift meteor

through the crowd in the Parliament-House, they are beaming so as to

force you to turn away your eyes, and if he looks at you, you find

yourself utterly unable to withstand it. When that look is darting for

any important purpose, such as to ascertain whether a witness be or

be not speaking the truth, it is more searching than that of Garrow

even in his best days, so that the most hardened tremble before it,

and are instantly divested of all power of concealing the truth. If,

however, you attempt to repay Jeffrey in his own coin, by working into

his mind with that sharp and anatomical glance which he employs in

dissecting the minds of other people, you find that you are woefully

mistaken. Those eyes, which can penetrate to the bottom of any other

man’s heart, and expose even that part of it which he studies with the

greatest assiduity to conceal, are a perfect sealed book to you; you

cannot see beyond their external surface, and they give you not so much

as a hint of what the owner is thinking, or what he may be disposed to

say or do next. Wonderful as the eyes are, they are perhaps exceeded

by the eyebrows, and certainly two such intellectual batteries were

never alternately masked and displayed in a manner so singular. They

range over a greater extent of surface, and twist themselves into a

more endless variety of curves than is almost possible to conceive, and

while they do so, they express all manner of thoughts, and utter all

descriptions of sentences. Few men have more eloquence in their speech

than Jeffrey, and I have met with none who had half as much in his face.

 

Another character in this reeling crowd, which never fails to attract

the attention of a stranger, is that of Robert Forsyth. As far as one

man can be unlike another, he is the very antipodes of Jeffery. He is

large, square, and muscular, more intended by nature, you would think,

for breaking stones on the high road, than for breaking syllogisms

before their Lordships. His face is coarse, broad and flat, and as

immovable in all its muscles as though it had been chiselled out of a

block of granite. As he moves along, he turns his head neither to the

one side nor to the other; and indeed he does not require it, for his

eyes have that divergent squint which enables him at once to scan both

sides of the horizon. The lines of labour are so ploughed across and

across every part of his ample countenance, and they give it so knotted

and so corrugated an appearance, that you can easily perceive he has

followed more occupations, and been attached to more sides of politics

than one. Still there is by no means the quiescence of a mind at ease

upon the strong picture of his visage; the lower part of it is fixed in

something between a half laugh and a half grin, and the upper part has

a firmness about it which tells you he is a through-going lawyer, whom

it will not be easy to turn from his purpose.

 

The throng is so great, however, and the variety of faces, gowned and

ungowned, wigged and unwigged, beaming forth every shade of mind, and

betokening every degree of mental vacuity, is so perplexing, that your

eye and your imagination are completely bewildered, and you cannot

attend either to individuals or single groups, while the buz of voices

of so many different tones and pitches give your ears the impression of

a very Babel.

 

Business commences; the Lords Ordinary take their seats--in places

which make them look more like as if they were standing in the pillory

than any thing else. But even there, advocates are drudging in their

vocations; agents running backwards and forwards with briefs; clients

watching the result with palpitating hearts; and the Athenian loungers

hanging about, anticipating their Lordships in the decision of the

several cases. The well-employed advocates now put you very much

in mind of shuttle-cocks. They run from bar to bar, making motions

here and speeches there, in the most chaos-looking style that can be

imagined. Of the whole gown and wig mass, it is but a small portion,

however, who are thus occupied; four-fifths of the whole keep trudging

on from end to end of the hall, and seem never to expect or even to

get a fee; while the bar clerks collected round the fire-places keep

up a continual titter at the repetition of all the good jokes of the

day; and the same scene continues day after day, and month after month.

You are astonished that a place, the real business of which is so dull

and so dry, should have charms for so many idle people; but except

this Parliament-house there is not another in-door lounge in the whole

Athens; and as the business of the courts forms the chief topic of

the evening’s conversation, many attend for the purpose of qualifying

themselves for displays upon a very different arena. It is long before

a stranger can bring himself to relish this first and most favourite

of all Athenian pleasures. I, for one, got tired of it in two or three

days, and began to be of opinion that, however much this fondness for

legal proceedings may sharpen the wits of the Athenian idlers, it is

but a sorry treat for those who have no wish either to get rich by the

acting, or wise by the suffering of the law.

 

When the business of the day is over, you can perceive the veteran

barristers taking council together as to where they may be joyous for

the night; and the younger legal men of all descriptions hurrying off

toward Princes Street, in order that they may show themselves to the

Athenian fair, before they retreat to drown the daily badgerings in the

nightly bowl.

 

 

 

 

CHAPTER VII.

 

LEARNING OF THE ATHENS.

 

----“As a dog that turns the spit

Bestirs himself, and plies his feet,

To climb the wheel, but all in vain,

His own weight brings him down again,

And still he’s in the self-same place,

Where, at his setting out, he was;

So, in the circle of the arts,

Do they advance their nat’ral parts,

Till falling back still, for retreat,

They fall to juggle, cant, and cheat.”

 

 

IF, in her metropolitan status as the seat of Caledonian law, the

Athens be fixed as the dog-star, as the seat of Caledonian learning,

she has been and must be, changeful as the moon. If the wealth of her

lawyers “swells like the Solway,” the renown of her philosophers “ebbs

like its tide.” The very same cause which raises the one,--which makes

all hearts envy, all eyes admire, all knees worship, and all tongues

speak the Babylonish dialect of special pleaders, comes cold and

curdling as December’s ice over every thing else; and though there

may be an occasional spring of the living water of the mind, which

has its source too deep, or its current too thoroughly imbued with

the immortal fire, for submitting to the cold congelation; yet such

glorious instances must be few and far between. Even in the law itself,

there may be green branches, just as there are green branches on the

Upas; but, like the Upas, the law, or indeed any thing else which is

so overpowering in its influence as the law is in the Athens, must in

itself monopolize all the greenness, and etiolate and wither every

thing that attempts to grow under its broad and gloomy shade. Whatever

promises the chief reward will, under any circumstances, always attract

the chief talent; and the state of the whole British dominions, and of

the Athens not less than any other portion of them, is at present such

as not to be exceedingly favourable to the pursuits of abstract and

recondite philosophy. Luxury has found out for all those who have money

to spend without working for it,--whether they have it as a legitimate

heritage from their natural parents, or as the adopted children of that

great nursery-mother of idlers, the state, abundant employment,--full

occupation from every hour that they can snatch from the pangs of

intemperance and the pillow of sleep, not only without profound

philosophy, but without thought of any description that reaches

beyond the enjoyment of the moment; and the number of these persons,

especially the latter division of them, is so very considerable, that,

of the remaining independent portion of the British people, none can

afford to be philosophic or learned upon any other terms than those

of being paid for it,--taking it up, and following it as a trade,

as much as other men do the boring of cannon, or the building of

bridges. That this is unquestionably true of the whole country, may

be established from the philosophical publications, whether regular

or periodical, which make their appearance at the present day. Of the

regular class, there has not, so far as I know, been published, within

the last thirty years, in any part of the British dominions, a single

original work, that will transmit the name of its author to posterity.

There have indeed been books, and books in which there have been the

details of new experiments, and occasionally scraps of theories; but,

like successive days in the kalendar, the one has usurped the place

and extinguished the remembrance of the other; and, at the present

moment, the most unmarketable article which an author could carry to a

bookseller would be a profound treatise on any of the sciences. With

regard to periodical learning again, (I use the word “learning” as

distinguished from and even opposed to literature,) the case is very

nearly the same. The philosophical journals, of all the periodicals,

have the most limited circulation, are the least read, and the least

worth the reading,--just because the proprietors of them cannot afford

to pay for the labour which it would require to make them better.

 

Now, if this be the case with the British dominions generally, and with

the British metropolis, where every species of talent has the means of

being stimulated to the greatest exertion, and where every exertion

meets with the most ample reward, much more must it be the case in

the Athens, where there is not only no adequate remuneration for the

labours of learning, but where there is a more honoured and rewarded

pursuit, constantly soliciting the choice, not only of the Athenian,

but of the Scottish talent generally, away from it. It cannot be

hoped, that when a man of very ordinary talents can get a comfortable

living and honourable distinction in society, by managing the estates

of Scotch lairds, or the causes of Scotch litigants, men of superior

ability will consent to starve in obscurity for the love of learning