There is an event now to be recorded. He becomes a magistrate, and his first essay in court makes him think the business very amusing. He shouts huzza! on hearing that his brother Robert is about to come home. True, however, to his character, of never undertaking anything unless he knew its obligations sufficiently to be able to acquit himself {98} in them to the satisfaction of his conscience, he goes to London, and studies "Blackstone's Commentaries," to qualify him for a proper discharge of his duties as a magistrate. He dines, dances, goes to balls and theatres, pays visits and bills during his stay in London, notwithstanding. Now he begins to prepare seriously for his future profession. Full nine months before he is to receive Orders, on March the 12th he begins to write a sermon. That is the point; let a man give a sermon, and he may become a minister any day, provided he has an earl or a viscount at his back, and a bishop who sits _tête â tête_ with either in the House of Lords, and has two or three sons whom he wishes to put into posts of honour. The sermon is everything. Any one can read the Service, provided he has a good voice and distinct utterance; but the sermon--that requires brains, views, style, and paper. How these things can be done without we shall see further on. For the present, poor George did not discover the secret. He could bowl to a wicket, play cribbage, read Walter Scott, and shoot partridges, but where was his theology? The twenty-five lectures were buried long ago under some stone between Cambridge and Althorp. Well, the fact of it was, he must do something. He goes to hear the "crack" preachers of London, and even the "twaddle" ditto. He catches up some idea from them, borrows the book Lord Althorp reads from on Sunday afternoons, and gets an idea of what a sermon is like. He sets to, therefore, to write one himself, and in six months that sermon is finished.