“Hear him in a lunacy case--listen to the deep and subtle distinctions he draws between symptoms of mere eccentricity and erring intellect--remark how insignificant the physician appears in the case, who has made these things the study of a life long--hear how the barrister confounds him with a hail-storm of technicals--talking of the pineal gland as if it were an officer of the court, and of atrophy of the cerebral lobes, as if he were speaking of an attorney’s clerk. Listen to him in a trial of supposed death by poison; what a triumph he has there, particularly if he be a junior barrister--how he walks undismayed among all the tests for arsenic; how little he cares for Marsh’s apparatus and Scheele’s discoveries--hydro-sulphates, peroxydes, iodurates, and proto-chlorides are as familiar to him as household words. You would swear that he was nursed at a glass retort, and sipped his first milk through a blow-pipe. “Like a child who thumps the keys of a pianoforte, and imagines himself a Liszt or Moschelles, so does your barrister revel amid the phraseology of a difficult science, pelting the witnesses with his blunders, and assuring the jury that their astonishment means ignorance. Nothing in anatomy is too deep--nothing in chemistry too subtle; no fact in botany too obscure--no point in metaphysics too difficult. Like Dogberry, these things are to him but the gift of God, and he knows them at his birth. Truly, the Chancellor is a powerful magician; and the mystic words by which he calls a gentleman to the Bar must have some potent spell within them. “The youth you remember as if it were yesterday, the lounger at evening parties, or the chaperon of riding damsels to the Phœnix, comes forth now a man of deep and consummate acquirement--he, whose chemistry went no further than the composition of a ‘tumbler of punch,’ can now perform the most difficult experiments of Orfila or Davy, or explain the causes of failure in a test that has puzzled the scientific world for half a century. He knows the precise monetary value of a deserted maiden’s affections--he can tell you the exact sum, in bank notes, that a widow will be knocked down for, when her heart has been subject to but a feint attack by Cupid. With what consummate skill, too, he can show that an indictment is invalid, when stabbing is inserted for cutting; and when the Crown prosecutor has been deficient in his descriptive anatomy, what a glorious field for display is opened to him.