“I have always been proud, jealous--I might say overjealous perhaps--of my profession, to which I have given the flower of my maturity; and I have always felt that whatever degree of talent it may please God to bestow upon a man, this great profession of ours offers a field which brings it to the test. You must let me say, Mr. Northcote, that when I heard you deal with that poor woman this morning, and I heard you frame those questions which you put to her with a really beautiful sincerity which told heavily with the jury, I felt proud that so young a man could stand up so fearlessly and so collectedly in his first great criminal cause and put to so fine a use the talents that God had given to him. Had you been my own son I could not have felt prouder of you, and prouder of the traditions that you were upholding. Many of the great lights of the past came before my eyes--Pearson, now the Lord Chief Justice; Hutton, the Master of the Rolls; poor, dear Fred Markham, in many respects the most brilliant of them all, who was cut off, poor fellow, almost before he had reached his prime; the late George Stratton; Lord Ballinogue; Walker; Skeffington; and I know not how many more--but I did not hesitate to believe, although we old men are tenacious of our prejudices, that the bounty of nature had placed you already on their level, and that great and good and glorious as were all these names I have mentioned, you were starting at the point where they were content to end.” Northcote leaned forward and lowered his head with a fierce, almost uncontrollable sensation of bewilderment, in which, however, pain was predominant. Every word that was uttered by that low, trembling, old voice appeared to spring from the heart. It was something more than an old man babbling of his youth. There was a pride, an eagerness, a solicitude, in the manner of this aged judge which seemed to clasp Northcote like the impersonal devotion of a noble woman to something more radiant but less pure and less rare than that which emanates from herself. In the keenness of his distress it was as much as Northcote could do to refrain from rushing from the room.