“Authors have long got the credit of being the most accomplished persons going--thoroughly conversant not only with the features of every walk of life, but, also, with their intimate sentiments, habits of thought, and modes of expression. Now, I have long been of opinion that, in all these respects, lawyers are infinitely their superiors. The author chooses his characters as you choose your dish, or your wine at dinner--he takes what suits, and leaves what is not available to his purpose. He then fashions them to his hand--finishing off this portrait, sketching that one--now bringing certain figures into strong light, anon throwing them into shadow: they are his creatures, who must obey him while living, and even die at his command. “Now, the lawyer is called upon for all the narrative and descriptive powers of his art, at a moment’s notice, without time for reading or preparation; and worse than all, his business frequently lies among the very arts and callings his taste is most repugnant to. One day he is to be found creeping, with tortoise slowness, through all the wearisome intricacy of an equity case--the next, he is borne along in a torrent of indignant eloquence, in defence of some Orange processionist or some Ribbon associate; now he describes, with the gravity of a landscape gardener, the tortuous windings of a mill-stream: then, he expatiates in Lytton Bulwerisms over the desolate hearth and broken fortunes of some deserted husband. In one court he attempts to prove that the elderly gentleman, whose life was insured for a thousand at the Phœnix, was instrumental to his own decease, for not eating cayenne with his oysters; in another, he shows, with palpable clearness, that being stabbed in the body, and having the head fractured, is a venial offence--merely the result of ‘political excitement’ in a high-spirited and warm-hearted people.... These are all clever efforts, which demand consummate powers of him who makes them; but what are they to that profound and critical research with which he seems, instinctively, to sound the depths of every scientific walk in life, and every learned profession.