And so, looking about for a subject, being reminded, as I was, that the subject of the law was unpopular, I turned--as I have often done in the hour of trouble--I turned to my Dickens, and there I found that at any rate in Dickens we have a great literary man who has been impartial in his treatment of lawyers. He has seen both the good and the bad in them, and it occurred to me that my lecture might take the form of dealing with the lawyers of Dickens. I soon found that was too great a subject to be dealt with within the short space which could be accorded to any reasonable lecturer by any reasonable audience. I found that the novels of Dickens abounded with lawyers, to use a perhaps apt expression. Having regard to my profession, they fairly bristled with them, and so I determined to take the lawyers of one of his books; and I chose as that book "Pickwick"; and I chose as my title "The Law and the Lawyers of 'Pickwick.'" Ladies and gentlemen, it is an extraordinary thing when we look at this book, when we reflect that it contains within its pages no less than three hundred and sixty characters, all drawn vividly and sharply, all expressing different phases of human thought, and of human life, and every one of them original; when we reflect that that book was written by a young man of twenty-three years of age. In that book I found that he portrayed with life-like fidelity constables, sheriffs' officers, beadles, ushers, clerks, solicitors, barristers, and last, but by no means least, a judge. Every incident of the early life of this great author bore fruit in his writings. No portion of his struggles and experiences seemed to have made a deeper impress on him than did those early days, as he said himself in the character of David Copperfield:-- If it should appear from anything I may set down in this narrative that I was a child of close observation, or that as a man I have a strong memory of my childhood, I undoubtedly lay claim to both of these characteristics. His first introduction to the terrors of the law was an unspeakably sad one--sad, indeed, to his affectionate and imaginative nature. "I know," he writes, "that we got on very badly with the butcher and baker, that very often we had not too much for dinner, and that at last my father was arrested." He never forgot--how could he, knowing what we know the lad to have been?--often carrying messages to the dismal Marshalsea. "I really believed," he wrote, "that they had broken my heart." His first visit to his father he thus describes:--