connected with the law, still lived in flats or dungeons of the
Old Town. The manners also of some of the veterans of the law had
not admitted innovation. One or two eminent lawyers still saw
their clients in taverns, as was the general custom fifty years
before; and although their habits were already considered as old-
fashioned by the younger barristers, yet the custom of mixing wine
and revelry with serious business was still maintained by those
senior counsellors who loved the old road, either because it was
such or because they had got too well used to it to travel any
other. Among those praisers of the past time, who with
ostentatious obstinacy affected the manners of a former
generation, was this same Paulus Pleydell, Esq., otherwise a good
scholar, an excellent lawyer, and a worthy man.

Under the guidance of his trusty attendant, Colonel Mannering,
after threading a dark lane or two, reached the High Street, then
clanging with the voices of oyster-women and the bells of pye-men;
for it had, as his guide assured him, just' chappit eight upon the
Tron.' It was long since Mannering had been in the street of a
crowded metropolis, which, with its noise and clamour, its sounds
of trade, of revelry, and of license, its variety of lights, and
the eternally changing bustle of its hundred groups, offers, by
night especially, a spectacle which, though composed of the most
vulgar materials when they are separately considered, has, when
they are combined, a striking and powerful effect on the
imagination. The extraordinary height of the houses was marked by
lights, which, glimmering irregularly along their front, ascended
so high among the attics that they seemed at length to twinkle in
the middle sky. This coup d'aeil, which still subsists in a
certain degree, was then more imposing, owing to the uninterrupted