There are several grades of lawyers' clerks. There is the articled clerk, who has paid a premium, and is an attorney in perspective, who runs a tailor's bill, receives invitations to parties, knows a family in Gower Street, and another in Tavistock Square; who goes out of town every Long Vacation to see his father, who keeps live horses innumerable; and who is, in short, the very aristocrat of clerks. There is the salaried clerk--out of door, or in door, as the case may be--who devotes the major part of his thirty shillings a week to his personal pleasure and adornment, repairs half-price to the Adelphi Theatre at least three times a week, dissipates majestically at the cider cellars afterwards, and is a dirty caricature of the fashion which expired six months ago. There is the middle-aged copying clerk, with a large family, who is always shabby, and often drunk. And there are the office lads in their first surtouts, who feel a befitting contempt for boys at day-schools; club as they go home at night for saveloys and porter: and think there's nothing like "life." I fancy Dickens never rose above the status of office boy, and probably as such wore his first surtout. We hear of him reporting later in the Lord Chancellor's Court, probably for some daily paper; but beyond the exception which I shall mention presently, we have no record of his taking an active and direct part in any of those mysterious rites that go to make up our legal procedure. Upon this question of the opportunities he had for knowing in what way a lawyer is trained, I must here acknowledge the debt of gratitude that I am under to my very good friend Mr. Henry Fielding Dickens, one of her Majesty's Counsel; and how rejoiced, Mr. Attorney-General, would that father have been had he been able to see the position which his son has won for himself. He wrote to me a long and kind letter, in which he gave me further information as to his father's opportunity for observing lawyers and their mode of living, and he told me that which I did not know before, and which I think but few people knew before, namely, that his father had kept a term or two at one of the Inns of Court. He had eaten the five or six dinners which is part of the necessary legal education for a barrister; and he had suffered in consequence the usual pangs of indigestion. But it is not to that that I wish to allude to- night. Dickens did that which I venture to think but few have done; for, giving up all idea of pursuing a legal education, and finding that the dinners did not agree with him, he got back from the Inns of Court some of the money which he had deposited at that Inn. You are all familiar with the process which is known as getting butter out of a dog's mouth; I venture to think that that is an easy thing compared with getting money back from an Inn of Court.