The necromancer went on with his discourse, and asked me what store of lawyers and attorneys in Spain at present. I told him, that the whole world swarmed with them, and that there were of several sorts: some, by profession; others, by intrusion and presumption; and some again by study, but not many of the last, though indeed sufficient of every kind to make the people pray for the Egyptian locusts and caterpillars in exchange for that vermin. “Why then,” quoth the necromancer, “if there be such plagues abroad, I think I had best e’en keep where I am.” “It is with justice,” said I, “as with sick men; in time past, when we had fewer doctors (as well of law as of physic) we had more right, and more health: but we are now destroyed by multitudes, and consultations, which serve to no other end than to inflame both the distemper and the reckoning. Justice, as well as truth, went naked, in the days of old; one single book of laws and ordinances, was enough for the best ordered Government in the world. But the justice of our age is tricked up with bills, parchments, writs, and labels; and furnished with millions of codes, digests, pandects, pleadings, and reports; and what’s their use, but to make wrangling a science? and to embroil us in seditions, suits, and endless trouble and confusion. We have had more books published this last twenty years than in a thousand before, and there hardly passes a term without a new author, in four or five volumes at least under the titles of glosses, commentaries, cases, judgments, etc. And the great strife is, who writes most, not best; so that the whole bulk is but a body without a soul, and fitter for a churchyard than a study. To say the truth, these lawyers and solicitors are but so many smoke-merchants, sellers of wind, and troublers of the public peace. If there were no attorneys, there would be no suits; if no suits, no cheats, no serjeants; no catchpoles, no prisons; if no prisons, no judges; no judges, no passion; no passion, no bribery or subornation.