‘When I got the letter which has brought me here to-day, I felt its appeal so strongly, that I made immediate arrangements to be present. Tom has always been an exemplary boy in conduct, though I must say his progress in the classics is deplorably slow. When I was his age, I read Homer for the pleasure it gave me; and I had Horace by heart. Now, a scholar Tom never will be; of that I have satisfied myself before dinner in a private talk with him. Well, the ground is so far cleared. Tom cannot be a scholar, _ergo_, he cannot be a clergyman; for of all things inappropriate, in my opinion, the extreme is an ignorant divine. In my profession, one ought to be steeped in Greek, permeated with Latin, and saturated with Hebrew. But even if Tom were a born student and of a serious order of mind, I could not advise his parents to devote him to the Church.’ Something like a blank fell on Tom’s mother at the emphatic closure of the reverend cousin’s speech. She had hoped that Tom might have gone to Oxford, as other grammar-school boys had done, and thence to some pretty rectory as a rural parson. While she sat in silent depression, the rest of the company talked in little knots, until the reverend president stopped them by saying: ‘Now, Uncle John, I call upon you. No one is better able to say if the law promises fame and fortune for the rising generation, as it has done for the past generations since Cicero’s time. Shall we make Tom an attorney or a barrister?’ ‘I am flattered by the manner you esteem my humble abilities,’ answered Uncle John. ‘It is a strange coincidence of thought. I have also come down from town expressly to deprecate the putting of our young hopeful to _my_ profession. I believed I could lay my reasons before my brother and his good wife better by a few spoken words, than by any extent of correspondence; so I took an early train. Tom must not be a lawyer. Why, I proceed as briefly as I can to explain. First, the profession is more crowded than the market-place. Second, the crowd is daily increasing, because almost every family of the middle classes that has thriven during the past twenty or thirty years is sending a boy into a solicitor’s office. The business is supposed to be very lucrative, and it is esteemed highly respectable, which allures the _parvenu_ mind. As to the fiction of the law being a lucrative pursuit, I cannot understand how it originated, still less how it is maintained. A few solicitors, with quite exceptional luck and good connections, may attain to opulence. But the rank and file of the profession merely earn a decent livelihood. If you want to know what fortune does for lawyers in England, read the reports of wills and bequests in the newspapers. While these are telling us of manufacturing, banking, and trading millionaires dying in all parts of the country, they rarely record the demise of a lawyer worth twenty thousand pounds. No, no; the law is not a money-making trade.