Let it be remembered that they who properly reverence themselves, always reverence others. But who ever heard of a Lawyer with any reverence—worth mentioning—for anybody out of the profession? This, to be sure, is very common with ignorant and presumptuous men. It is the natural growth of a narrow-minded, short-sighted, selfish bigotry. A mountebank or a rope-dancer will betray the same ridiculous self-complacency, if hard pushed. Were you to speak of a great man—Kossuth, for example—in the presence of a fiddler, who had never heard of him before, he would probably crook his right elbow, and cant his head to the left, as if preparing to draw the long bow, or go through some of the motions common to all the great men he had ever been acquainted with, or heard of, or acknowledged, before he questioned you further. It would never enter his head that a truly great man could be any thing but a fiddler; a Paganini dethroned perhaps—like Peter the Great in a dockyard—or that “any gentleman as was a gentleman,” could ever so far forget himself in _his_ company, as to call a man great who was no fiddler. “What do they say of me in England?” said the corpulent, half-naked savage that Mungo Park saw stuffing for a cross-examination under a bamboo tree in Africa. Just so is it with our brethren of the bar. Law being the “perfection of Reason,” and her seat “the bosom of God,” they, of course, are the expounders or interpreters of both; a priesthood from the beginning, therefore, with the privilege and power of indefinite self-multiplication. The sum and substance of all they know, and all they care for under Heaven, if they are greatly distinguished, being Law, what else could be expected of them? If they are great lawyers they are never any thing else—they are never statesmen, they are never orators—they are never writers. Carefully speaking, Daniel Webster is not a great lawyer—nor is Henry Clay—nor was Lord Brougham; but they were advocates, and orators and statesmen. Sir James Scarlett and Denham were great lawyers, before whose technical superiority and sharp practice Lord Brougham quailed and shriveled in the Court of King’s Bench. But when they encountered each other in the House of Commons—what a figure the two lawyers cut, to be sure, in the presence of the thunderer! They were phantoms, and he the Olympian Jove. William Pinkney was a great lawyer; but for that very reason he was out of place in the Senate chamber, and made no figure there.