he has other requisitions to answer, besides the high call of intellectual cultivation; that all his attainments will avail him little in the main object for which he pursues them-success in life, unaided by connexion,'-by friends who will take a personal interest in his welfare, that this friendship is often held by a precarious tenure, and that it can hardly exist in any great abundance, where, to use a phrase which our political readers will recognise, the reciprocity is all on one side.' He feels he has interests to consult in various ways; and that those interests, though discordant in their own nature, are of concurring importance to his prospects in life. We believe however, that, as might be expected from the tendencies of our nature, the error is very rarely made on the side of seclusion. The positive degree of acquisition which might be made in the small number of hours which will be subtracted from study, by compliance with the single enticement of the day, is too problematic, too trifling, to be set in formal array against the distinct, the defined object or gratification which is to be obtained by yielding; and it does not enter into the calculation, that the whole aggregate of sacrificed time, is the result of these identical single acts of compliance. Mr. Wright shall here apply these remarks, into which we have been almost involuntarily led away, to the subject immediately before us.

This book may be read by parents desirous of bringing up a child to the profession of the law; and it will be their duty to consider whether he is industrious, and whether his health will permit him assiduously to employ his time, and cultivate his talents. If, from his former habits of life, there is any probability of his not doing so, they will act unwisely to place him at the desk of an attorney. It is not without great caution that the public entrust their professional concerns to any persons; and daily experience evinces, that the respectable and opulent part of society will not commit them to an attorney who is known to be deficient in information, or to be inattentive or dilatory in transacting his business.'

The general impression, that the Law, as a practical study, is barren and unproductive, we have no hesitation in pronouncing to be false; provided those qualities do not attach to the mind of the student. We assert with confidence, because numerous proofs of it have come within our own circle of observation, that even in its more artificial and technical parts, it is a field which, under the view of an active and enlarged intellect, presents many subjects, of deep and important consideration; and perhaps the most important of them all, is that. which must be most obvious to every practitioner, namely, the impossibility of securing obedience, even to legislative enactnents, which are inimical to the general necessities, or the general convenience of society at large. Such enactments may

prevail for a season, but a way will be found out, because it must be found out, to evade them. The most striking instances that immediately occur to our minds of this, are, the attempt which was made in a former period to perpetuate estates in families by curtailing the power of alienation, and that which has been made in more recent times, to dictate to mankind the value of money, by putting a maximum upon the rate of legal interest. The famed statute De Donis Conditionalibus, has long been a dead letter for any other purpose than that of putting fees into the pockets of certain officers, and augmenting the aggregate of litigation by raising recondite questions upon titles; and they who know so little of business as to be ignorant of the fact, will be surprised to be told, that the market price of money loans, for several years past, (though now falling) has been from eight to ten, and even twelve per cent; and that this price has been demanded and taken, not by the professed usurers, the Jews, the men who have no money of their own,' who know a friend who might perhaps be pre'vailed upon to lend some,' but who must sell out stock to do it; but by men of character, of reputation, of honour, merely and simply in the routine of general business.

But though we are inclined to think that they have made a mistaken estimate, who represent the Law as a science wholly barren and unproductive of intellectual food, yet it is impossible not to admit that the chaff bears a most enormous disproportion to the grain. Hence it is, that it never has, and we may safely venture to predict, never will, become a part of polite education; notwithstanding the institution of academic professorships, and the ingenious attempt of the first of those professors, to render it a popular study. Whether the success of that attempt would have been in any degree beneficial to society, we must be permitted to entertain very serious doubts. There is, perhaps, no tampering to be so much deprecated, as tampering with Law. The mischief which would be produced by men's being taught to believe that they understand a system after a few week's reading, in which the most experienced practitioners, at the end of a life of hard labour, are obliged to confess that they are but half informed, is incalculable. We have already experienced the effects of medical empiricism in our constitutions; the prevalence of legal quackery, would surely involve still more inevitable danger to our property. Against this, however, we have the best possible security in the nature of the thing. It is hardly possible to contemplate men's sitting down to the study of the law of England, con amore. If the very strongest stimulants which nature has implanted in our breasts; if the desire for worldly competence, for worldly reputation, for worldly importance,

are so often insufficient to reconcile us to the elaborate task, shall we expect, in the absence of all those impulses, to find men filling up the blank spaces of social life, by musing upon the pages of the Institutes? We are sufficiently astonished at those instances that have occurred, in which lawyers have retained their devotion to the pursuit, after all the stimulants have ceased to operate, and when this world, and this world's charm, were no longer held out to them, as objects either of attachment or of hope. It is a fact not to be overlooked in the history of the human mind, that there have been men whose intellectual elasticity has remained unaltered amid desolation, and who, in a blank of existence, without object and without hope, have assiduously pursued studies the most artificial, and the most attenuated. We should have thought, looking at human nature in the absence of contrary facts, that the faculties of the imagination were those which could exclusively have retained their activity in such a state; and that where nothing was to be obtained by those intellectual exercises which are only produced by the goad, the exercitation would have ceased with the impulse. We doubted not that human beings had existed,

• Proud even in desolation —who could find,

A life within itself; to breathe without mankind;"

but we should have attributed it exclusively to the influence of that order of sensation which is described as producing it in the half-imaginary being to whom the lines which we have quoted are applied. The facts, however, are otherwise. The instance of Judge Jenkins will immediately occur to the recollection of professional readers, unless the passage which takes one so by surprise at the end of the preface to his 'Eight 'Centuries of Reports,' has escaped observation. In a state of existence which asks the pen of a Byron to exhibit, but which he has himself, as it were accidentally, alluded to in that passage, with a degree of unostentatious simplicity that is, perhaps, almost equally affecting, he compiled his Eight

Centuries,' an Abridgement,' and a series of observations upon the Year Books, Perkins,' 'Saint-Germain,' 'Broke,' The Old Tenures,' the old and new Natura Brevium,' Finch,' The Law Lexicon,' and 'Dyer.' After a preface of moderate length, upon the administration and study of the law, he suddenly concludes: Amidst the sound of drums and trumpets, surrounded with an odious multitude of barbarians, 'broken down with old age and confinement in prisons, where my fellow subjects grown wild with rage, detained me for fifteen years together, I bestowed many watchful hours upon this performance.'

We recommend this unaffected statement to the consideration of those young students, who, with every thing at stake upon future proficiency, and with all the ardour and activity of youthful vigour, find it so difficult a task to subtract a few extra hours from the dominion of ease.

If space had allowed it, we were inclined to take a rapid and general view of the profession of the Law, considered as a distinct class of men, and with reference to its moral and intellectual character. Such an inquiry we cannot think to be devoid of interest, because a body of that extent must necessarily form a feature in the moral and intellectual history of a country, not merely as a component part of the great aggregate, but in respect of the influence on society at large, which must necessarily belong to a class of the community comprising so large a portion of the talent, the rank, and the power of the nation. In this point of view, we should consider the tone of sentiment and the habits of opinion prevailing among the higher branches of that profession, as a matter of no trifling import. But we feel that to pursue this idea to its extent, would necessarily involve us in the retrospect, to a degree incompatible with our present purpose. One or two observations that more immediately strike us, the reader may perhaps anticipate us in making.

To the Lawyers, literature is certainly very considerably indebted. They have been our most profound, indeed, our best antiquaries. To a pursuit like that of antiquarian learning, it is impossible to calculate upon the importance of the habits of close thinking and strict investigation, which are produced by professional life. If any one question the preference we have given to Lawyers, among our English antiquaries, we refer them for conviction, to the works of Prynne, of Selden, of Madox, of Spelman, of Petyt, of Barrington, and of Hargrave. In many instances, indeed, an intimate acquaintance with our municipal law, is indispensable to the pursuit of antiquarian studies; particularly in the documentary department; for as Coke triumphantly exclaims, after commenting upon an ancient record presented to him by Master Joseph Holland, of the Inner Tem'ple, a good antiquary and a lover of learning :-"Good reader, "I dare confidently affirm unto thee, that never any abbot, "mouk, or churchman, that wrote any of our annals, could "have understood this excellent and well indicted concord."

With the Lawyers, however, we have one quarrel, and that a very serious ane. A blind reverence for antiquity, and precedent, and narrow habits of thinking, have made them, generation after generation, the avowed, the shameless enemies of the cause of freedom, civil and religious. The spirit of bigotry and intolerance, which has disgraced the episcopal, has scarcely less figured on the judicial bench. These are they who have set

their faces against rational investigation and discussion of the principles of society; these are they who have sacrificed truth and justice, to uphold the Prerogative of the Crown, and who have maintained the absurd doctrine of the divine right of kings, and other similar tenets, of which generations not far distant will hardly credit the existence in ages calling themselves enlightened. Among lawyers, as a body, the progress of enlightened opinion has probably been slower than among any other class of literate men; and the spirit of Lord Coke has threatened to be almost as immortal in Westminster Hall, as his Commentaries.' It is next to ludicrous, to see the pains that the lawyers of the old school take, to prove that the whole beauty of our judicial code is derived from its unviolated antiquity, and that each of the successive alterations which the increasing wants or intelligence of society have forced upon our civil jurisprudence, are so many departures from the symmetry and immaculacy of the whole. O! the shameless presumption of pretending to be wiser than our ancestors :- plus sages que les sages! The poor Burgher Elder, who had the boldness to assert a few years since, in the Associate Synod of Scotland, that the use we ought to make of our forefathers is to stand on their shoulders, and try how much further we can see, was surely the greatest heretic that ever lived.

It is astonishing what an effect is produced upon the minds of men, by the constant habit of determining matters of right by matters of precedent. Sir James Mackintosh, in his Answer to Burke, exclaims with becoming indignation, A pleader at the Old Bailey who would attempt to aggravate the guilt of a robber or a murderer, by proving that King John or King Alfred punished robbery and murder, would only provoke derision.' A man who should pretend, that the reason that we have a right to property, is, because our ancestors enjoyed the right four hundred years ago, would be justly con' temned. Yet so little is plain sense heard in the mysterious nonsense which is the cloak of political fraud, that the Cokes, the Blackstones, and the Burkes, speak as if our right to freedom depended on its possession by our ancestors. " * * * It is not because we have been free, but because we' have a right to be free, that we ought to demand freedom. Justice and liberty have neither birth nor race, youth nor 6 age. It would be the same absurdity to assert that we have a right to freedom because the Englishmen of Alfred's reign were free, as that three and three make six, because they were so in the camp of Genghis Khan.' This passion for genealogy has been carried to the most ludicrous extent by some of the old lawyers. In the preface to one of the volumes of his Reports,' Lord Coke gravely tells us, that the first re

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