Of the convivial habits of the Bar as well as the Bench in Scotland at this period many stories are told. The Second Lord President Dundas once refused to listen to counsel who obviously showed signs of having come into Court fresh from a tavern debauch. The check given by the President appeared to effect some sobering of the counsel's faculties and he immediately addressed his lordship upon the dignity of the Faculty of Advocates, winding up a long harangue with: "It is our duty and our privilege to speak, my lord, and it is your duty and your privilege to hear."
Another counsel in a similar condition of haziness hurriedly entered the Court and took up the case in which he was engaged; but forgetting for which side he had been fee'd, to the unutterable amazement of the agent, delivered a long and fervent speech in the teeth of the interests he had been expected to support. When at last the agent made him understand the mistake he had made, he with infinite composure resumed his oration by saying: "Such, my lord, is the statement you will probably hear from my brother on the opposite side of the case. I shall now show your lordship how utterly untenable are the principles and how distorted are the facts upon which this very specious statement has proceeded." And so he went over the same ground and most angelically refuted himself from the beginning of his former pleading to the end.
[Illustration: ANDREW CROSBIE, ADVOCATE, "Pleydell."]
When a barrister, pleading before Lord Mansfield, pronounced a Latin word with a false quantity his lordship rarely let the opportunity pass without exhibiting his own precise knowledge of that language. "My lords," said the Scottish advocate, Crosbie, at the bar of the House of Lords, "I have the honour to appear before your lordships as counsel for the Cur[)a]tors."--"Ugh," groaned the Westminster-Oxford law lord, softening his reproof by an allusion to his Scottish nationality, "Cur[=a]tors, Mr. Crosbie, Cur[=a]tors: I wish _our_ countrymen would pay a little more attention to prosody."--"My lord," replied Mr. Crosbie, with delightful readiness and composure, "I can assure you that _our_ countrymen are very proud of your lordship as the greatest sen[=a]tor and or[=a]tor of the present age."