The Rhode Island American, And General Advertiser

SCOTCH LITERATURE, COURTS, &C
A correspondent has favoured us with a letter
from an American young gentleman—now in
Scotland, from which we have made the fol-
lowing extracts:
"Edinburgh, December 13, 1818.—
There is one feature which distinguishes
this city from all other places I have yet vis-
ited, and which is too obvious to escape the
most superficial observer. I mean its literary
character. To a stranger, it is not very mani-
fest, at first, to what Edinburgh owes its pros-
perity.—A city of more than one hundred
thousand inhabitants, with little or no com-
merce, and no manufactories, and not pos-
sessing the advantages of being the seat of the
legislative government, may be considered as
rather an anomaly in any country, and espe-
cially in a country whose inhabitants have been
proverbially styled a nation of shopkeepers.
Upon a nearer view, he will find that all this
prosperity is dependent, almost entirely, on
the celebrity of its civil and literary institu-
tions. So little is the commercial character
known here, that there is no Exchange, for the
transaction of publick business, nor anything
answering to it, in town; and the only reason
is, there are no merchants. If you have the
curiosity to listen to the conversation of the
small collections of people in the most publick
streets, you will more commonly find it turning
upon some literary topick, instead of the price
of stock, or the state of the markets, as you
would expect in similar situations in other
cities. The Courts of Law and the Univer-
sity are the centres, around which, and in
reference to which, every thing moves in
Edinburgh. Almost all the legal business
in Scotland is transacted in the metropolis,
which brings a vast concourse of people, to
the city in term time. There is a brilliant
constellation of eminent pleaders at present
at the Scottish bar, at the head of which
is the celebrated Francis Jeffrey, the reput-
ed Editor of the Edinburgh Review. I had
the pleasure of listening to his eloquence a
few days since, in a splendid speech of two
hours and a half in length. His manner is
extremely vehement and forcible, and his ra-
pidity of speech exceeds every thing I ever
heard; yet it is not hurried, and his language
has all the eloquence and perspicuity which
we find in his written composition. His elo-
quence is not of that class which is addressed
principally to the passions.—He is said seldom
to draw tears from a jury, and yet he has
brought off more criminals, that ought to have
been hanged, than any advocate at the bar.—
Jeffrey's great forte in this seems to be in in-
volving the arguments of his opponents in such
a complete labyrinth of sophistry, as to make
light darkness and darkness light, and thereby
bewilder and confound the judgement.
The lectures in the University commenc-
ed early in November—1779 students have al-
ready matriculated. They are from every
quarter of the globe, and among them are about
twenty-five Americans, mostly from the south-
tern States. Besides these there are many stu-
dents who resort here for the purposes of edu-
cation, who do not attend the University.—
There are in Edinburgh no less than fifteen
private lecturers on Medicine and its auxiliary
branches, many of whom are more distinguished
than the College Professors, and more nu-
merously attended. The names of Barclay,
Murray, Fyfe, &c. are well known to the sci-
entifick and medical world."