He's thrown away his velvet coat,
His silver buckle, hat and feather,
He burst the waistcoat from his breast,
He threw away his broad belt leather.

He's ta'en the ford, now help him Lord!
I wot he swam both strong and steady;
But the tide was broad, his strength it failed,
He never saw his bonny lady.

"O, woe betide the willow wand,
And woe betide the brittle brier!
They broke when grasped by my love's hand,
When his strong limbs began to tire.

"Now woe betide ye, Annan stream!
This night ye are a mournful river;
Over thy floods I'll build a bridge,
That ye no more true love may sever."

THE GROWTH OF THE BAR.

WE close this subject in the present
paper.

Between the ancient and the modern ad-
vocate lies the broad dark gulf of the middle
ages; in whose waters, by the side of art
and science, of literature and of civilisation,
justice and M. le Berquier's "right
of defence" lay buried. And advocacy
never revived in its old splendour. For the
masterpieces of ancient oratory we look to
the speeches of Demosthenes or Cicero
at the bar of Athens or of Rome; for
those of modern, to the records of
parliamentary eloquence. But it may console
the barrister of the present day to reflect
on the many advantages, denied to him,
which his prototype possessed. The advocate
of old, for example, was his own
reporter. No short-hand writer of the
Athenian "Chronoi," or the Roman
"Vexillum," sat by to take down his
every word for the next morning's issue,
to appear with such omissions or improvements
only as the reporter's detective
knowledge or exuberant fancy might suggest.
The speaker went quietly home and
touched up his speech, which, to begin
with, he had carefully prepared beforehand,
gathering together the scattered
threads, and omitting the interruptions of
some obstinate dicast on the bench, or the
"objections" (we may be sure there were
plenty) of his "learned friend on the other
side." What he didn't like he re-wrote;
and more than once, if his oration, on
reflection, struck him as feeble, or if it had
failed of success, or if, as sometimes
happened, he had delivered none at all, he quietly
wrote another, as he could, might, or
should have "orated" it, and published it
at leisure some months afterwards, when
the public had entirely forgotten what he
had really said, and how he had said it. In
this fashion we may imagine Cicero composing
his magnificent "pro Milone," and
working himself into a state of admiration
at the beauty of his own periods, while
his unfortunate client, in whose behalf he
had, as a matter of fact, broken down
through nervousness, was thriving, as best
he might, under sentence of transportation.
Milo's remark, when he read what might
have been said for him, but wasn't, is
pathetic in its simplicity: "If Cicero had
talked like this, I should not have been
eating figs at Marseilles."

The advocate of ancient times, again, had
a far wider scope for the exercise of tricks
of the trade. It is strange enough to us,
with our ideas, to reflect on the sort of argument
which he was wont to address to the
judges, and often with success; and of
which the most historical instance was one
we quoted in our first paper— the defence
of Phryne. In the same way did Antony,
defending the old soldier, Aquilius, unclose
his robe and show the scars of battle on
his breast. Less seductive, perhaps, than
in the case of Phryne, the argument proved
no less successful. If an accused had a
relation in distress, it was the custom to
introduce him; though some judgment
was required of the advocate in this respect.
It happened once that one Spiridion, asking
a little boy, whom he had called into
court as the son of a client whom he was
defending, why he wept, was answered,
"Because my master has just flogged me."
He had got hold of the wrong boy.
Appeals to the passions were the recognised
method of the orator, and their want of
logic was no bar to their effect. Speaking
in the open Forum, before judges who had
the right, not to acquit only, but to pardon,
amongst an excited audience of quick
susceptibilities and theatrical imaginations,
the advocate of that day had great
advantages over his successor. The time
that they were able to secure for previous
preparation, was another advantage for the
advocates of Greece and Rome. " If Demosthenes
and Cicero had had to plead as
often as we have," says Dupin, "they
would have been neither Cicero nor Demosthenes."
By these reflections we must
account, and console ourselves, for, the
decline of forensic eloquence; remembering
at the same time how our own Erskine
was able to move his public—so much that
the people not only took the horses out of
his carriage after one of his greatest displays,
but even forgot in their enthusiasm to
return them afterwards. Our age, too, has