When he started at the bar, however, he had not acquired the tact to impress an ordinary assembly.

In one case which he conducted before the General Assembly of the Kirk of Scotland, when defending a parish minister threatened with deposition for drunkenness and unseemly behaviour, he certainly missed the proper tone,--first receiving a censure for the freedom of his manner in treating the allegations against his client, and then so far collapsing under the rebuke of the Moderator, as to lose the force and urgency necessary to produce an effect on his audience.

But these were merely a boy's mishaps.

He was certainly by no means a Heaven-born orator, and therefore could not expect to spring into exceptionally _early_ distinction, and the only true reason for his relative failure was that he was so full of literary power, and so proudly impatient of the fetters which prudence seemed to impose on his extra-professional proceedings, that he never gained the credit he deserved for the general common sense, the unwearied industry, and the keen appreciation of the ins and outs of legal method, which might have raised him to the highest reputation even as a judge.
All readers of his novels know how Scott delights in the humours of the law.

By way of illustration take the following passage, which is both short and amusing, in which Saunders Fairford--the old solicitor painted from Scott's father in _Redgauntlet_--descants on the law of the stirrup-cup.