The
youth got up with the ease of a youngster that would
be thought a man of fashion rather than of business,
and endeavoured, with some success, to walk out of
the room, as if the locomotion was entirely voluntary;
Miss Catherine and her sisters left us at the
same time, and now, thought I, my trial comes on.
Reader, did you ever, in the course of your life,
cheat the courts of justice and lawyers, by agreeing
to refer a dubious and important question to
the decision of a mutual friend? If so, you may
have remarked the relative change which the arbiter
undergoes in your estimation, when raised,
though by your own free choice, from an ordinary
acquaintance, whose opinions were of as little consequence
to you as yours to him, into a superior
personage, on whose decision your fate must depend
_pro tanto_, as my friend Mr Fairscribe would
say. His looks assume a mysterious if not a minatory
expression; his hat has a loftier air, and his
wig, if he wears one, a more formidable buckle.
I felt, accordingly, that my good friend Fairscribe,
on the present occasion, had acquired something
of a similar increase of consequence. But a
week since, he had, in my opinion, been indeed an
excellent-meaning man, perfectly competent to
every thing within his own profession, but immured
at the same time among its forms and technicalities,
and as incapable of judging of matters of
taste as any mighty Goth whatsoever, of or belonging
to the ancient Senate House of Scotland.
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