Hooly and fairly," quo' Thomas, staring a wee astonished like, and not a little surprised to see my birse up in this manner; for, when he thought upon shearing a lamb, he fund he had catched a tartar; so, calming down as fast as ye like, he said, "Hooly and fairly, Mansie," (or Maister Wauch, I believe, he did me the honour to ca' me,)" they'll maybe no be sae hard as they threaten. But ye ken, my friend, I'm speaking to ye as a brither; it was an unco-like business for an elder, not only to gang till a play, which is ane of the deevil's rendevouses, but to gang there in a state of liquor; making yoursell a warld's wonderand you an elder of our kirk!! put the question to yourself, soberly?" His threatening I could despise, and could have fought, cuffed, and kickit wi' a' the ministers and elders of the General Assembly, to say naething of the Relief Synod, and the Burgher Union, before I wad demeaned mysell,

I

to yield to what my inward speerit plainly telled me to be rank cruelty and injustice; but ah ! his calm, britherly, flattering way I couldna thole wi', and the tears came rapping into my een, faster than it cared my manhood to let be seen; so I said till him, "Weel, weel, Thomas, I ken I have dune wrang; and I am sorry for❜t: they'll never find me in siccan a scrape again."

Thomas Burlings then cam forrit in a friendly way, and shook hands wi me; telling that he wad go back and plead afore them in my behalf. He said this ower again, as we pairted, at my shop door; and, to do him justice, surely he hadna been waur than his word, for I have aye attended the kirk as usual, standing, whan it came to my rotation, at the plate, and naebody, gentle nor semple, ever spoke to me on the subject of the play-house, or minted the matter of the rebuke from that day to this.

Is it not astonishing, that among the plans, almost numberless, of retrenchment and economy, which have been carried into so many departments,commerce, revenue, manufactures, and even private life, in this niggardly age, no project has yet been devised for correcting one of the most pernicious of all kinds of profusion, the prodigality of words? We have constructed ships to glide against wind and tide, without any apparent cause for a kind of motion, which, to our ancestors, would have seemed the work of witchcraft; and, at the bare sight of which, they would have felt as much alarm, as did the poor American Indians, when they saw the huge animals with wings, that bore in their bellies armed men across the ocean. This trouble we have taken, that we may come sooner to the end of our voyages. After many trials to economize time, by increasing the speed of our land-travelling, much to the peril and alarm of foot-passengers, and far more to the mortification of horseflesh, we are now told by some ingenious people, that we shall one day be favoured with a method of cutting the air in stage-coaches, at the rate of a stag-hunt, without the aid of any

horses at all. This, again, will be from an earnest and laudable desire to reach the end of our journeys. But the most irksome of all kinds of travelling, that of a journey from the beginning to the end of a discourse, far from sharing in these frugal improvements, grows every day more and more tedious; a disgrace to the thrift and ingenuity of an age, in which even buttons are made without hands; in which sheets of paper that are put in, blank and unspotted, issue forth with supernatural haste from an engine, which prints wit and wisdom on them by

steam.

The immense waste of words and time, perpetrated in the passage of the cheapest and poorest thoughts, from one mind to another, might be generous enough, perhaps, in those to whom such thoughts belong, and who take such trouble in conveying them to the public, if the authors only squandered their own time. But time is public property, and its waste a grievous public plunder. I do not know that I can claim a better employment of that of my reader, than by awakening his attention to this great and growing calamity.

There are, of course, two main chan

nels through which the deluge of words has overspread the nation, the one of written, the other of spoken language. They are widely different in their nature and effects. The former, indeed, sends its various rivers of quartos and octavos, canals of pamphlets, and innumerable streams of newspapers and magazines, (not to speak of its spring, summer, autumn, and winter gushes of heavy quarterly journals,) to every town, hamlet, and even private residence in the kingdom. But all these currents flow gently and regularly, and never deposit their contents outside their ordinary channels, unless the sluices are opened by voluntary victims. No one is sprinkled by a newspaper, soused by a magazine, or half-drowned in a review, without himself contributing to his misfortune. Even when the quarterly floods, the most vehement of all, are abroad, every man has warning to stand out of harm's way, and if he be overwhelmed, he has only himself to thank for it. But it is far otherwise with the deluges of speech which infest this land, without, for the most part, leaving it even the poor comfort which accompanied the overflowings of the Nile, of fertilizing the soil which it subjected to temporary desolation. This ruthless flood is restricted to no season, confined within no boundary. It meets us in the highways of public business. It pours upon us unexpectedly at the most inauspicious moment, without giving us any tokens of its approach, and often without leaving us any means of escaping or avoiding it. They who have witnessed the looks and the murmurs of despair, in the great council of the nation, assembled upon some high matter of debate, when a stream, expected to run for two hours, begins pouring from some reservoir of useless words, may form some notion of the force and extent of the evil.

But the subject demands a more serious mood.-Unless some means be adopted to check the prolixity of public speaking, the business of the nation will soon stand still. The details of public business, at the most moderate computation, have doubled within the last thirty years. Some have maintained that the increase has been in a fourfold proportion, and if the facts were closely examined, I have some reason for thinking their opinion would be

found not far wide of the truth. The parliamentary reports alone, would seem nearly to establish it; for they have been more numerous during the period I have stated, than for nearly a century preceding. The accounts which have been published of the proceedings in our courts of justice, give nearly the same result. These are the two grand concerns of the nation. The first chief business of a community such as ours is the making of its laws; the next is their administration. With us, neither can be accomplished but by means of public speaking; and the nuisance to the public is intolerable, if the laws, the life-blood of the state, be impeded either at the heart, from which they issue, or in their circulation through the whole frame of the body politic, by the slovenly vice of prolixity in our public speakers.

Now, gentle reader, what is the fact? Hast thou ever been in the Court of Chancery? If not, then hie thee there at once, for great will be thy edification. Thou shalt see, at one end, a large, sober, easy-going clock, which, day after day, telleth the time with exactness, but telleth naught else. Even so is each successive sage, who rises after his precursor, to move, like the hand of that slow and faithful repeater of admonitions, over precisely the same space which has been traversed before. It often happens that three, four, or five, or more, of these repeaters follow each other in orderly succession, resembling nothing that I know so much as that useful personage, who, between six and half past six o'clock in the evening, addresses the assembled crowd at the pit door of the Theatre Royal, Covent Garden, crying out, in terms which never vary, "Ladies and gentlemen, take care of your pockets!"

In these cases the judge has a delicate and difficult task to perform. If he confine suitors to a limited number of counsel, the restriction is denounced as invidious and oppressive by the bar, and complained of as a hardship by the parties. Yet the practice, from the excessive diffuseness of the speakers, tends perhaps as much as any other cause, to the delays, against which some persons have recently cried so loudly. It cannot be doubted that the leaning of the Court ought to be, as it has been, to the side of indulgence; because the worst of all evils,

in the dispensing of public justice, is to dismiss the claimants with the impression, that their cause has been partially, or inadequately, heard. But a remedy may, and ought, and eventually must, be applied; that of obliging advocates to prune the wild and useless luxuriance of their diffuse diction, and to avoid the repeated wringing of topics, already squeezed dry. The credit of their profession, the sufferings of the judge, when doomed to the prolonged tortures of a "thrice told tale" (of law !!); the interests of the clients themselves, whose cause would be far better examined, if more briefly debated; but, above all, the paramount, pressing, inexorable interests of the public, robbed of justice during these tricklings at its fountain, conspire to demand a reformation.

To approach the great Council of the State, is to tread upon dangerous ground; yet this is a point upon which I suspect the members of it themselves feel rather sore; and I am persuaded, if the question were once fairly put, viz. "That all sinecure sentences, all words having places, without performing any duty, and all members of periods, representing no ideas as their constituents, should be at once expelled," not one voice would be raised to oppose this most necessary plan of Parliamentary Reform. The truth is, that all parties would be gainers by it. The debates of Parliament, it need hardly be stated, are not so much discussions for enlightening and persuading the members, as appeals to the people at large. But how few are there of those who read the voluminous reports of their proceedings, that can extract from such a heap of matter what is essential, and disregard what is only incidental and accessary? Yet this must be done before the neutral power without can decide to which of the two great belligerents, who wage this mighty war of words within the walls of Parliament, they shall join their forces. Better far for the opposing hosts, or at least for that party which has truth and justice at his side, if the question were stripped of the superfluous dresses cast upon it by each successive speaker, and with which it at last walks out of doors, muffled and crippled, like a sickly child from the hands of a too careful mother, so enveloped in clothing, that his friends outside can scarcely recognize him. If

the point, which is almost always stated with precision, were but briefly argued, and if nothing were said but what its proof or its refutation required, a world of trouble would be saved at public dinners and elections. Candidates would not be obliged so often. to brave the maledictions and missiles of the crowd in endeavours to explain what their own speeches had contributed to render unintelligible; and quiet people at the Thatched-House Tavern, and other places, would be, at least sometimes, permitted to sip their wine in peace. Besides, it is incredible how much such a reform would add to the private comforts of our public men. The economy of the lungs would be prodigious. The occasions would be rendered much less frequent of catching cold, and there certainly would be a great amendment of manners, in the keeping of more seasonable hours.

But is all this practicable? The most delightful melody in nature to each individual is the sound of his own voice. Equal in esteem to the most favourite of his living children, and often far more cherished, are the issue of his brain. It is difficult to resign an enjoyment, or to banish a favourite voluntarily; they will never be aban-doned, unless from the influence of some superior inducement,-something like the desire of applause or the fear of derision.

It requires but the effort of one or two master spirits in our public assemblies, setting the example of brief, terse, forcible, matter-of-fact argument, to infuse and to circulate a taste for this rare, but honourable, most use-ful, and manly accomplishment. The time is suited to such an experiment. The baneful effects of long debates is beginning to be felt and acknowledged. The constitutions of our public men are sinking under the exhausting influence of these protracted contests. The two greatest statesmen of the last age, both fell victims to them. More lately, we have seen another public man,certainly of no ordinary powers, so worried by his parliamentary duties, as that, in the opinion of his friends, the faculties of his mind were extinguished by the excessive exertions which those duties imposed. And yet, although life and reason are thus endangered, notwithstanding the repeated imprisonment of our senators for

speeches of Demosthenes could not have detained the audience much longer than forty minutes, and some of them were probably spoken, as they may now be read, with sufficient slowness and distinctness, in less than half an hour. Yet these are the effusions of that rapid and mighty genius, the effect of whose words the language of the ancients seemed exhausted in describing; of which they felt that they could give an adequate account, only by comparing it to the workings of the most sublime and powerful agents of nature the ungovernable torrentthe resistless thunder. Pliny indeed has said, in a letter to Tacitus, that in his opinion the written orations both of Cicero and Demosthenes were mere reports, compressed and polished by the authors, of addresses which were delivered in a more expanded form. But, as to Demosthenes at least, besides the accordance of the style of his written compositions with the traditional accounts given by antiquity of his manner as a speaker, they contain internal evidence, that what modern readers peruse with an enthusiasm which forced even the cold-blooded Hume to declare that he thought, if copied, its success would be infallible over a modern assembly-was the very form of words which, among the Athenians, converted senates into armies. The picture given of Philip in the first Olynthiac; the comparison, in the second, between the Athenians of that day and their ancestors; the argument in the fourth Philippic, that Philip, under the guise of peace, was waging actual war; and a hundred other passages of equal beauty, would, if expanded, lose the far greatest proportion of their force and fervour, and consequently of their power as parts of spoken addresses. The presumption is irresistible, that the brevity of the writer was the brevity of the orator. Mr Burke is reported by Sir Philip Francis to have advanced the startling doctrine, in opposition to the opinion of Hume, that harangues such as those of Demosthenes would be, from their brevity, utterly unintelligible to a modern popular assembly. But Mr Burke was in taste and practice a determined disciple of the Asiatic or diffuse school of oratory; and his opinion on this subject is to be received with a distrust which is confirmed by his own example. His writings give some, but an inadequate notion of his

style as a speaker. He was one of the most diffuse debaters of his age. And what more? Notwithstanding his extraordinary talents and acquirements, he was, of the better order of speakers in his time, the least effective. There never was so great a disproportion between the mind of an orator and his influence over his hearers. His speeches on the American question were delivered to empty benches. It was by his writings, and not by his speeches in Parliament, that he exerted such astonishing and salutary influence in England during the French Revolution. And his retirement from public life was clearly owing, in a great measure, to the disinclination of the House of Commons to listen to his harangues.

It is a truth seldom attended to in the practice of public assemblies, but which is obvious to any one who has even casually witnessed their proceedings, that the number of topics calculated decisively to influence the mind are, in the most complicated questions, comparatively few. When all the facts are once known, it is surely unnecessary to make repeated statements of them; yet of such statements the greater part of our parliamentary debates is composed. Among the ancients, the facts, once known, were taken for granted, and the speakers gave arguments, not histories, to their audience. An extended narrative may be tolerated in an opening speech; but succeeding speakers, unless when new matter must be introduced, should busy themselves with reasonings only. Let any man try the following experiment upon himself: let him listen with the profoundest attention to a parliamentary debate upon the most interesting question; at the close of it, let him examine how much of it he remembers, or even how much of the contents of any one speech remains upon his mind; the result will be decisive in proof of the utter waste of time committed in our public proceedings. Nor is this the only mischief. Such lengthy discussions fatigue and distract the minds of those engaged in them; the confused impression left by a jumble of topics robs the judgment of fair play; and the uncertainty to which an ordinary understanding is reduced by such a process is no bad excuse for surrendering to authority what ought to be yielded only to conviction,