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upon which they sit is all transacted before lawyers ; one lawyer there may be, but the rest are laymen. Certainly a right honourable gentleman* whom I see opposite to me is there sometimes by chance, and his presence is sure to be attended with great advantage to us. Occasionally we see him or my learned friend, his predecessor, †but this good fortune is rare ; the Master of the Rolls alone is always to be seen there, of the lawyers ; for the rest, one meets sometimes in company with him, an elderly and most respectable gentleman, who has formerly been an ambassador, and was a governor with much credit to himself in difficult times ; and now and then a junior Lord of the Admiralty, who has been neither ambassador nor lawyer, but would be exceedingly fit for both functions, only that he happened to be educated for neither. And such, Sir, is the constitution of that awful Privy Council which sits at Westminster, making up, for its distance from the suitors, by the regularity of its sittings, and for its ignorance of local laws and usages, by the extent and variety of its general law learning ; this is the Court which determines, without appeal, and in a manner the most summary that can be conceived in this country, all those most important matters which come before it. For instance, I once saw property worth thirty thousand pounds sterling per annum, disposed of in a few minutes after the arguments at the bar ended, by the learned members of the Privy Council, who reversed a sentence pronounced by all the Judges in the Settlement, upon no less than nineteen days’ most anxious discussion. Such a Court, Sir John Beckett, Judge-Advocate, †Mr Abercromby (now Speaker of the House of Commons).