for that chair. The patronage of this professorship is nominally in the town
council of Edinburgh, but virtually in the faculty of advocates; the election, under an act of parliament passed in the reign of George I. , being made in the following manner: The faculty, by open suffrage of all the members, send a
leet, (as it is called,) or list, containing the names of two of their number, to the town council; one of whom the patrons must choose. The candidate favoured by his brethren is of course joined in the leet with another member of the body, who, it is known, will not accept; and although, in case of collision, this arrangement might occasion embarrassment, practically the effect is, to place the nomination to this chair in the body best qualified to judge of the qualifications of the candidates. Hence this preferment is, generally speaking, a very fair test of the estimation in which the successful candidate is held by his brethren ; and their choice has seldom been more creditable to themselves than it was in the case of Mr Erskine. The list presented to the town council contained the names of Erskine and of Mr James Balfour, advocate, a gentleman who had no desire for the appointment, and Mr Erskine was consequently named professor. The emoluments of the office consist of a salary of 100 per annum, payable from the revenue of the town, in addition to the fees paid by the students.
Mr Erskine entered on the discharge of his academical duties with great ardour; and, from the ability which he displayed as a lecturer, his class was much more numerously attended, than the Scots law class had been at any former period. The text book which he used for many years was Sir George Mackenzie's Institutions of the Law of Scotland; but, in the year 1754, Mr Erskine published his own "Principles of the Law of Scotland," 8vo, which he intended chiefly for the use of his students, and which, from that time forward, he made his text-book. In this work, Mr Erskine follows the order of Sir George Mackenzie's Institutions, supplying those omissions into which Sir George was betrayed by his desire for extreme brevity, and making such farther additions as the progress of the law since Sir George's time rendered necessary. The book is still very highly esteemed on account of the precision and accuracy, and, at the same time, the conciseness, with which the principles of the law are stated ; nor is it an inconsiderable proof of its merit, that, notwithstanding the very limited circulation of Scottish law books, this work has already gone through numerous editions.
After having taught the Scots law class with great reputation for twenty-eight years, Mr Erskine, in 1765, resigned his professorship, and retired from public life. For three years after his resignation, he occupied himself chiefly in preparing for publication his larger work, "The Institutes of the Law of Scotland." It was not published, however, nor, indeed, completed, during his life. The work, in the state in which Mr Erskine left it, was put into the hands of a legal friend, who, after taking the aid of some of his associates at the bar, published it in 1773, in folio. Although marked with some of the defects incident to a posthumous publication, Erskine's Institutes has been, for the last eighty years, a book of the very highest authority in the law of Scotland. It is remarkable for the same accuracy and caution which distinguish the Principles; and as additions have been made in every successive impression, suitable to the progressive changes in the law, there is perhaps no authority which is more frequently cited in the Scottish courts, or which has been more resorted to, as the ground-work of the several treatises on subordinate branches of the law, which have appeared within the last fifty years. It has been said, that the Institutes partakes somewhat of the academical seclusion in which it was written, and indicates occasionally that the author was not
