may enable him to get the command over their reason. He plants himself
before them in an attitude of open defiance: he takes it for granted that they
are against him, and he must and will subdue them to his power. Wherever
there is room to lay a finger, he fixes a grappling-iron, and continues to tear
and tug at everything that opposes him, so that incredulity is glad to purchase
repose by assenting to all he demands. ... His choleric demeanour gives a
zest to the dryness of the discussions in which he is commonly to be found
engaged. His unmusical voice has so much nerve and vigour in its discords,
that after hearing it on several occasions, I began to relish the grating effect it produces upon the tympanum."[1]
From these two delineations, although the latter is somewhat overcharged, a distinct idea may be formed of James Moncreiff in his professional character and bearing. These also had won their way to such just estimation, that on the 22d of November, 1826, he was elected dean of faculty, although the senior, and in some respects superior claims of Jeffrey to the office were against him. But in Jeffrey himself, with whom he had fought many a hard legal tournament, he found that best of all friends a generous, open-hearted antagonist and the great critic and eloquent barrister not only maintained Mr. Moncreiff’s claims as superior to his own, but seconded his nomination. While he held this office, the dean showed his upright disinterested love of justice in a case where many in similar circumstances would have quailed. This was in reference to the West Port murders, and the trial of their infamous perpetrators, Burke and Hare. So deep was the popular abhorrence over the whole of England and Scotland on the detection of this hideous system of Thuggism, and so overwhelming was the outcry for justice for vengeance that it was thought no advocate could be so hardy as to plead the cause of these assassins, who were already tried and doomed by universal acclamation. It was then that several leading advocates of the Scottish bar, with Mr. Moncreiff as dean, at their head, stepped forward in defence of truth and right against the universal cry, and while the storm was at the wildest; and through their exertions the two malefactors obtained a fair dispassionate trial, in which one of them was absolved, when both might otherwise have been torn to pieces without a hearing. The exertions of the dean of faculty in this thankless and most revolting case his earnestness to vindicate the claims of justice, whether to acquit or condemn, though a whole world might be arrayed against them and the discriminating talent with which he sifted the evidence of the whole perplexing affair, until it stood out in all its distinct reality were long afterwards remembered with grateful commendation, not only by his professional brethren, whom the example honoured and encouraged, but the public at large, whose hasty judgments it restrained and rebuked.
By the death of his revered father, on the 7th of August, 1827, Mr. Moncreiff succeeded to the family baronetcy, under the title of Sir James Wellwood Moncreiff, of Tullibole; his elder brother, who was king's advocate in the Admiralty Court of Malta, having died unmarried in 1813. In 1829 Sir James was appointed a lord of session, in consequence of a vacancy in the bench, occasioned by the death of Lord Alloway. This appointment was the more honourable to Sir James, that it proceeded, not from his own party, but his political opponents. They had no occasion to regret their choice, for as a judge he
- ↑ "Peter's Letters to his Kinsfolk."
