Reach me yonder diary and legal register. Two thousand practising lawyers in the city of New-York! Out of these one hundred are "notables;" fifty are "distinguished;" twenty-five are eminent. A large body of them are "conveyancers" growing thin in person and thinner in mind over deeds and titles; a larger body "attorneys"—getters up and supervisors of suits—providers of ammunition for "distinguished counsel" to discharge with loud reports (the said counsel brilliant by the flash: the attorney obscured in the smoke); many, very many, chained to "larcenies" at the Sessions, "landlord dispossessions" at the Marine Court, suits on butcher’s bills at Ward Courts, or "malicious prosecutions" in the Common Pleas. Yet there are hundreds of coral reefs and pearls for persevering divers in this ocean of litigation. Three thousand pending cases every month are three thousand nutshells where the meat is often fresh and oily, even with the weary keeping on the calendar for months and years. There are _some_ counsel who pocket fees and costs to the tune of twenty thousand a year. We know many a Quirk, Gammon and Snap, who realize an undoubted "ten thousand a year," with no Tittlebat Titmouse for a standing annoyance. And we can taper off on the finger many who do not realize five hundred a year, and work like negro slaves at that: they are continually rough hewing, but no divinity shapes their ends. Five years of "starvation," and five more years of toil and trouble, constitute the depth of a lawyer’s slough of despond in New-York; to say nothing of the giants’ castles to storm upon the way, or the fights with the Apolyons of Envy. Obviously so! A man now-a-days will let a young Sawbones advise ice for his child’s croup, or even experiment with his own much-abused liver, when he would not intrust a young attorney with the suing a note where ten witnesses saw the note signed and the "consideration money" paid over. And if the public really knew how much danger their pockets were in when the "buttons" were under the control of inexperienced lawyers, the number of "starvers" would be doubled. What "eminent" lawyer is there who does not look back to the "practice" of his youth, in perfect terror to witness the mistakes he made, as the helmsman, who has scudded through the breakers to the open sea, glances back at the dangers he escaped? The young lawyers of a year back are, however, five years—perhaps ten—in advance of the lawyers of this year’s growth. The latter have greater rivalry in the _hordes_ of practitioners from the interior whom the "new code" have driven from their _trespass quare clausum fregit_ into the city. Many of them, too, were men of mark in their ports of departure, bold and confident in their new haven!