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legal studies. "I have given him," said Winning, afterwards, "the best advice in my power, and now I leave him-to neglect it, as I am certain he will do."

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There was something in the mind of our "coming man more French than English in its character. He had the Frenchman's national passion for abstract ideas, that passion, which (as Sir James Stephen has truly remarked) animates not the books of the French only, but their discourses in the senate, their speeches at the bar, their conversations in their clubs and salons. Reuben had acquired the habit of making abstractions as other men do the habit of rhyming or joking. He could be transcendental, at a moment's notice, upon anything, or upon nothing at all. His mind, like a distempered stomach, rejected everything solid and substantial. Facts would never lie on it for a moment. It lived upon intellectual trifle and whip't cream, upon half-meanings and no-meanings, with the appetite of a chameleon for air, or the devotion of the comic Socrates to the clouds. In short it was a petticoated mind, floating in muslins, swimming in gauzes, and fluttering with gay ribbons, an admirable mind to bustle and rustle through life with, if life were a conversazione, or the world a mere Debating Society.

CHAPTER II.

MR. MEDLICOTT IS CALLED TO THE BAR.

In one respect, however, Mr. Medlicott did not fulfil the predictions of those who best knew him, for he was called to the bar in due season, after three years spent in many pursuits very loosely connected with the law, and some far enough removed from it. There was a place at the profession for him, in which, with very little knowledge, his peculiar talents might have been brought into play with effect and profit.

Those only who understand the secrets of the craft are able to form an idea with how small a pittance of legal learning the very highest honours of the bar are attainable, and frequently attained by men of ordinary acuteness, shrewd enough to hide their ignorance, and confident enough to make the best use of the little information they possess. At Nisi Prius especially, with

plenty of tongue for the jury, and a few points of law for the court, or rather to impose on the attorneys, some men manage to turn their brass into gold rapidly. The ". progress of a lawyer" would be admirable matter for a satiric poem. A very useful essay, also, might be written upon the various causes both of success and failure in the profession, upon its high-ways and byeways, its blanks and its prizes, the marvellous fortunes of a few, and the rocks that many split on. As to Mr. Medlicott, he split not upon one rock, but on several-he went to pieces on a reef.

In the first place he took one of his excessively broad views, and aimed at being a constitutional lawyer, and a jurist forsooth. He filled his superb book-cases with the State Trials and Rhymer's Fædera, with Montesquieu and Bentham, Vattel and Grotius. He had heard of the study of the English law narrowing the mind, and being determined that his own at least should not be narrowed by it, he paid considerable attention to the law of nations, and the Code Napoléon. Nor was he content with thus expanding his faculties in the privacy of his chambers; he made all his acquaintance fully aware of the range of his researches; the Pandects were his table-talk; he harangued upon the casus belli, until he got the nickname of Puffendorf; and just about the time that he bought his wig and formally presented himself to the public as a practising barrister, he not only published a big pamphlet on Codification, but talked at large wherever he went of a design of editing Vattel.

Should the reader, unacquainted with such matters, be at a loss to understand the propriety of these studies, undertakings, and proceedings, considering Mr. Medlicott's declared professional views, it will assist his perceptions to imagine the Duke of Wellington in the peninsular war devoting himself to the geology of Spain, or Professor Airy, during a transit of Venus, engrossed with the last new novel.

The pamphlet on Codification, however, brought its author into connexion with a law-bookseller, named Trevor, who was mightily taken with Mr. Medlicott, and did all in his power to serve him.

Mr. Trevor had a box at Hampstead, where Reuben soon became a regular guest on Sundays, when there was always a social little audience, partly literary, partly legal, assembled round a comfortable dinner to listen to his dissertations on the " casus belli." Between two of the habitués of this house, a proctor named

Fox, and an attorney of the name of Reynard, Mr. Medlicott was somewhat in the position of Lucian in his dream, with art and literature pulling him in opposite directions. The proctor wanted to entice him into the Arches Court, and urged him to take a doctor's degree; the attorney was equally bent upon "marking him for his own," and securing him exclusively for

Nisi Prius.

Sometimes Mr. Fox would get him all to himself, and almost persuade him to enter the lists with Lushington; again the attorney would have the advantage, in the other's absence, and Reuben would persevere in his design of disputing the palm with Scarlett. Mr. Reynard, however, it was observable (being a man of more prudence than sincerity), though he put down some thousands as a moderate calculation of Mr. Medlicott's probable income in a few years, allowed term after term to pass, without sending him a single guinea from his own office.

In one respect, it must be admitted, Mr. Medlicott's acquaintance with Mr. Trevor was a humiliating one. Instead of bringing him celebrity, it brought him nothing but sordid money. Mr. Trevor not only dissuaded him from his edition of Vattel, which would have been a pure addition to his fame, but he threw some humdrum business in his way, which was not merely profitable, but calculated to advance him in the vulgar and plodding track of the profession. The first job put a hundred guineas in his purse, the second and third still larger sums; between the three he netted upwards of five hundred pounds, which Mr. Trevor thought a very good thing for a briefless barrister, particularly as the employment was of that kind which tended to attract briefs, instead of repelling them.

But Mr. Medlicott himself was inexpressibly disgusted at such success. Doing well, indeed, but in what a paltry and obscure way! No applause, no distinction-a name like his on the titlepage of a book of practice; he felt his mind growing narrow already; his five hundred gave him no satisfaction; it weighed down his spirits while it weighed down his pockets; in fine, he magnanimously determined (encouraged most probably in his noble resolution, not only by his mother's letters, but by his aunt's remittances) that he would go through no more of such base, servile drudgery, for any pecuniary consideration. The earnestness of this declaration was soon tested. Trevor made another offer, and still more favourable than the preceding ones. Mr. Medlicott declined it, and Trevor never troubled him again with

propositions of the kind. Dining the same day at the Temple, Mr. Medlicott vaingloriously related his refusal to work any more for the law-booksellers; several of his friends applauded him loudly, some shook their heads dubiously, and one plain-spoken man, more good-humouredly than politely, told him he was a fool. The next morning, one of the friends who had been foremost in commending him for scorning to be a bookseller's hack, called on him in his chambers, and begged an introduction to Mr. Trevor, confessing that he was a poor fellow, under the necessity of putting his pride in his pocket, and prepared to do so, if the publisher would employ him, even for a much smaller sum than had been offered Medlicott. Reuben was now in the proud position of a patron of industry, and very frankly and generously did he perform the duties of that office, flattering himself with the notion that he was not less industrious, but only more ambitious, than the honest poor fellow who stepped into his shoes.

In the same elevated frame of mind, he disdained to cultivate the attorneys. Mr. Trevor, who continued to wish him well, gave him more than one hint to take his friend Reynard down to Greenwich in the white-bait season, but Mr. Medlicott not only neglected the suggestion, but actually went out of his way to entertain the Proctor, which was the most superfluous hospitality in the world.

He made, however, some useful acquaintances, without courting them: he met a few attorneys here and there, in the chambers of his friends, or up and down the world, and stole the hearts of one or two of them, without the least deliberate intention of committing such petty larceny. Thus the guineas did, in process of time, begin to flow in-not in an actual Pactolus, certainly, but in a pretty little sparkling streamlet, very agreeable to contemplate, and wonderfully interesting for a season even to the young lawyer himself, though Mammon had never a much less devoted servant.

When the rumour that he was making money crept into the provinces, and got as far as Chichester, it made a prodigious sensation among his relatives and friends there, gratified even his mother (wondrous to tell), but pleased nobody more than Mr. Broad, who multiplied every guinea in his imagination by ten, and even by larger multipliers, until he began already to fancy Reuben very near the top of the ladder, and a dangerous rival to the chiefs of the bar.

Mr. Medlicott's fee-book showed that he received fifty guineas

in his first year of practice, nearly twice that amount in the second, and the third year he realised a sum which, with some money that remained over from his transactions with Trevor, amounted to about a thousand pounds, which, acting on the advice of Mr. Trevor, he invested in certain Brazilian mines, considered at that time an eligible speculation.

This was palpable success, and the more remarkable as the success of a man who seemed to be prospering in spite of himself; for he considered the business which came to his share as a junior rather derogatory to him than otherwise-spoke of it with supreme contempt, and went through it with an air of superciliousness, as if he scorned to be employed except in weighty causes. A little avarice mixed with Reuben's ambition would have made a better working metal of it; but he cared much too little for money, particularly for money obscurely earned in King's Bench Walk, without reputation, and without even newspaper notoriety. The fastidiousness with which he accepted business was enough of itself to prevent its rapid accumulation. The attorneys were not over-anxious to employ a man who was ostentatiously indifferent whether he was employed or not; and he that disdains his work, or takes it in hand squeamishly or languidly, is not likely to execute it either with care or punctuality. Reuben lost one attorney by not keeping time; another by not keeping to his instructions; a third by not keeping to himself the contempt he entertained for the formalities and prolixities of the profession. The most perverse of all his complaints was his objection to prolixity, which he was only averse to when it was in the way of his vocation, and tended to put money in his purse.

CHAPTER IIL

A RIVAL ORATOR.

BUT his forensic career was distinguished by something more whimsical still than even his perverse dislike for that prolixity which was in his day as much the soul of law, as brevity has been said to be the soul of wit. There was one short, very short, period of Mr. Medlicott's life, in which (extraordinary to relate) he conceived an actual aversion to the exercises of that faculty which,

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