548 APPENDIX OF NOTES. 



After certain private examinations by committees of the Faculty of 

 Advocates, there is a public " disputatio," where the candidate for 

 honours, as in the old universities, publicly defends certain theses 

 or propositions before all comers. The theses opened to impugn- 

 ment must be from the Pandects. His public impugnment and 

 acceptance are thus entered in the Faculty Minutes : "1st June 

 1800. Mr Henry Peter Brougham, eldest son of Henry Brougham, 

 Esq., of Brougham Hall, was publicly examined in Title 5, Lib. 

 III., Digest. De Negotiis Gestis, and found sufficiently qualified." 



XVI. (p. 237.) 



Charles Hope, Lord Advocate in 1801, and Lord President of 

 the Court of Session in 1804 ; died 1851. The speech on the 

 powers and duties of the Lord Advocate will be found in Han- 

 sard's Debates for 22d June 1804. It has been severely com- 

 mented on as announcing dangerous and unconstitutional doctrine. 

 The Lord Advocate of the day had written a vehement letter to 

 the sheriff of a northern county, denouncing the conduct of an 

 employer who had dismissed a man for deserting his service to 

 become a volunteer. 



It was a period of panic about invasion by the Boulogne arma- 

 ment, and the gravity of the Lord Advocate's letter lay in the 

 steps which he directed the sheriff to take against the employer 

 " on the landing of the first Frenchman." Hope in his defence of 

 his successor cited the instances in which executive officers in 

 extreme emergencies had taken extreme measures on their own 

 responsibility. 



XVII. (p. 247.) 



Somewhere about the year 1856, Sydney Smith's daughter Saba, 

 the wife of Sir Henry Holland, compiled a memoir of her father. 

 This was not published, but she most kindly sent me a copy. I 

 have already referred to Smith's not very accurate account of the 

 origin of the ' Edinburgh Review.' I have no further desire to 

 criticise or to find fault with Lady Holland's book ; but I lately 

 laid my hands on a letter I received from Sir David Brewster, 

 which relates to a matter connected with Sir Isaac Newton, a name 

 at all times quite as interesting to me as to Sir David. 



