We must pass lightly and rapidly over the next seven years of Thirlwall’s life. He entered as a law student at Lincoln’s Inn in February 1820, and in 1827 returned to Cambridge. In the intervening period he had given the law a fair trial; but the more he saw of it the less he liked it. It is painful to think of the weary hours spent over work of which he could say, four years after he had entered upon it, ‘It can never be anything but loathsome to me[40]’; ‘my aversion to the law has not increased, as it scarcely could, from the first day of my initiation into its mysteries’; or to read his pathetic utterances to Bunsen, describing his wretchedness, and the delight he took in his brief excursions out of law into literature, consoling himself with the reflection that perhaps he gained in intensity of enjoyment what he lost in duration. With these feelings it would have been useless for him to persevere; but we doubt if the time spent in legal work was so entirely thrown away as he imagined. It might be argued that much of his future eminence as a bishop was due to his legal training. As a friend has remarked, ‘he carried the temper, and perhaps the habit, of Equity into all his subsequent work’; and to the end of his life he found a special delight in tracking the course of the more prominent _causes célèbres_ of the day, and expressing his judgment upon them[41]. Even in these years, however, law was not allowed to engross his whole time. From the beginning he had laid this down as a fixed principle. He spent his vacations in foreign travel, and every moment he could snatch from his enforced studies was devoted to a varied course of reading, of which the main outcome was a translation of Schleiermacher’s _Critical Essay on the Gospel of S. Luke_[42], to which his friend Hare had introduced him. Why should Thirlwall have selected, as a specimen of the new school of German theology, a work which, at this distance of time, does not appear to be specially distinguished for merit or originality[43]? It is evident, from what he says in his _Introduction_, that he had a sincere admiration for the talents of Dr Schleiermacher, whom he describes as ‘this extraordinary writer,’ whose fate it has been ‘to open a new path in every field of literature he has entered, and to tread all alone.’ But the real motive for the selection is to be found, we think, in the opportunity it afforded him for studying the whole question of the origin and authorship of the synoptic Gospels, and, as the title page informs us, for dealing with the contributions to the literature of the subject which had appeared since Bishop Marsh’s _Dissertation on the Origin and Composition of our three first Canonical Gospels_, published in 1801. In this direct reference to Marsh’s work we find a confirmation of our theory that Thirlwall owed to him his position as a critical theologian, though we can hardly imagine a greater difference than that