and by Lord Romilly, whose services to English literature have won for him the gratitude of scholars.

When Sir William Jones, eminent as a lawyer but famous as a scholar, resolved to conquer his strong bias for literary labour and to apply steadfastly to the unalluring study of law, he wrote to his friend Hawkins, "As to the years in which the poems were written, I would wish to specify them; for it would hurt me as a student at the bar to have it thought that I continue to apply myself to poetry; and I mean to insinuate that I have given it up for several years, which I must explain more fully in the preface; for a man who wishes to rise in the bar must be supposed to have no other object." The poems thus mentioned were published in 1772; and two years later he gave the world his great work on Asiatic Poetry. The Oriental scholar wrote thus cautiously to his friend at a time when attorneys seldom received a liberal education, and consequently were, as a class, firm believers in the maxim-popular with illiterate persons in every grade of life-which teaches that no man can thoroughly master the secrets of more than one craft. At the present day when lawyers of the inferior branch are, with comparatively few exceptions, men of culture and polite associations, the literary barrister, who really "knows his profession," has so little to fear from this antiquated, and almost obsolete prejudice, that he no longer endeavours to cover with a veil of reticence or conventional misrepresentation his relations with editors and publishers. When Mr. Townsend,* a sound lawyer and able author, wrote the Lives of Twelve Eminent Judges'—a work which supplied Campbell with the materials, and in many places the language, of the best memoirs in the Chancellors' and 'Chief Justices'-he was able to write "The Lawyer's Farewell to the Muse' of Blackstone; the lament of Pope, How sweet an Ovid, Murray, was thy boast; the prejudices of the benchers who could tolerate no music but the chorus of Burns's Justice,' encouraged for a long time the superstitious notion, which it would have appeared too paradoxical to question, that law must be divorced from literature. This heretical tenet is, at length, almost exploded,

* Mr. Townsend was recorder of Macclesfield.

and lingers only in a few nooks and corners of Westminster Hall. A Vinerian professor has ventured on a continuation of Dryden's Hind and Panther.' A King's Counsel has favoured this prosaic age with a play equal to that of Elizabeth, whose very spirit it appears to have imbibed. A learned serjeant has proved in a drama, worthy of its classical model, that the richest imagination and deepest feeling are not alien from a successful and daily practice in our courts. A quondam editor of our earliest great Review has been elevated to the bench; and the editor of the Quarterly Review adorns the judgment seat of the Queen's Bench; and, not to dwell on inferior examples, one of the most active and able of our periodical writers has drawn the first prize in the law's wheel, and has rested, though not reposed, on the woolsack. It must be confessed that these are all modern examples, and still regarded as instances of lucky rashness by the more staid practitioners of the statute and common law." In these days literary lawyers, strong in law as well as letters, are so numerous that to speak of them at the bar-table of any lawyers' dining-hall as instances of lucky rashness" would raise a smile of dissent on the face of nearly every hearer.

Of each generation of writers between the accession of Elizabeth and the present time, several of the most conspicuous names are either found on the rolls of the inns, or are closely associated in the minds of students with the life of the lawcolleges. Shakespeare's plays abound with testimony that he was no stranger in the legal inns, and the rich vein of legal lore and diction that runs through his writings has induced more judicious critics than Lord Campbell to conjecture that he may at some early time of his career have directed his mind to the study, if not the practice, of the law. Amongst Elizabethan writers who belonged to inns may be mentionedGeorge Ferrars, William Lambarde, Sir Henry Spelman, and that luckless pamphleteer John Stubbs, all of whom were members of Lincoln's Inn; Thomas Sackville, Francis Beaumont the Younger, and John Ferne, of the Inner Temple; Walter Raleigh, of the Middle Temple; Francis Bacon, Philip Sidney, George Gascoyne, and Francis Davison, of Gray's Inn. Sir John Denham, the poet, became a Lin

coln's-Inn student in 1634; and Francis Quarles was a member of the same learned society. John Selden entered the Inner Temple in the second year of James I., where in due course he numbered, amongst his literary contemporaries, — William Browne, Croke, Oulde, Thomas Gardiner, Dynne, Edward Heywood, John Morgan, Augustus Cæsar, Thomas Heygate. Thomas May, dramatist and translator of Lucan's Pharsalia,' William Rough and Rymer were members of Gray's Inn. Sir John Davis and Sir Simonds D'Ewes belonged to the Middle Temple. Massinger's dearest friends lived in the Inner Temple, of which society George Keate, the dramatist, and Butler's stanch supporter William Longueville, were members. Milton passed the most jocund hours of his life in Gray's Inn, in which college Cleveland and the author of Hudibras' held the meetings of their club. Wycherley and Congreve, Aubrey and Narcissus Luttrell were Inns-of-Court men. In later periods we find Thomas Edwards, the critic; Murphy, the dramatic writer; James Mackintosh, Francis Hargrave, Bentham, Curran, Canning, at Lincoln's Inn. The poet Cowper was a barrister of the Temple. Amongst other Templars of the eighteenth century, with whose names the literature of their time is inseparably associated, were Henry Fielding, Henry Brooke, Oliver Goldsmith, and Edmund Burke. Samuel Johnson resided both in Gray's Inn and the Temple, and his friend Boswell was an advocate of respectable ability as well as the best biographer on the roll of English writers.t

* Describing the penurious habits of this eccentric diarist, Hearne says, “But though he was so curious in collecting and amassing together, yet he affected to live so private as hardly to be known in person; and yet for all that he must be attended to his grave by judges and the first of his profession in the law, to whom, such was the sordidness of his temper, he would not have given a meal's meat in his life."-Hearne's MS. Diary. Thus living diarists criticise their dear brother diarists departed.

The foregoing are but a few taken from hundreds of names that illustrate the close union of Law and Literature in past times. To lengthen the list would but weary the reader; and no pains would make a perfect muster roll of all the literary lawyers and legal littérateurs who either are still upon the stage, or have only lately passed away. In their youth four well-known living novelists-Mr. William Harrison Ainsworth, Mr. Shirley Brooks, Mr. Charles Dickens, and Mr. Benjamin Disraeli-passed some time in solicitors' offices. Mr. John Oxenford was articled to an attorney. Mr. Theodore Martin resembles the authors of the 'The Rejected

Addresses' in being a successful practitioner in the inferior branch of the law. Mr. Charles Henry Cooper was a successful solicitor. On turning over the leaves of that useful book, 'Men of the Time,' the reader finds mention made of the following men of letters and law-Sir Archibald Alison, Mr. Thomas Chisholm Anstey, Mr. William Edmonstone Aytoun, Mr. Philip James Bailey, Mr. J. N. Ball, Mr. Serjeant Peter Burke, Sir J. B. Burke, Mr. John Hill Burton, Mr. Hans Busk, Mr. Isaac Butt, Mr. George Wingrove Cooke, Sir E. S. Creasy, Dr. Dasent, Mr. John Thaddeus Delane, Mr. W. Hepworth Dixon, Mr. Commissioner Fonblanque, Mr. William Forsyth, Q.C., Mr. Edward Foss, Mr. William Carew Hazlitt, Mr. Thomas Hughes, Mr. Leone Levi, Mr. Lawrence Oliphant, Mr. Charles Reade, Mr. W. Stigant, Mr. Tom Taylor, Mr. McCullagh Torrens, Mr. M. F. Tupper, Dr. Travers, Mr. Samuel Warren, and Mr. Charles Weld. Some of the gentlemen in this list are not merely nominal barristers, but are practitioners with an abundance of business. Amongst those to whom the editor of 'Men of the Time 'draws attention as 'Lawyers,' and who either are still rendering or have rendered good service to literature, occur the names of Sir William A'Beckett, Mr. W. Adams, Dr. Anster, Sir Joseph Arnould, Sir George Bowyer, Sir John Coleridge, Mr. E. W. Cox, Mr. Wilson Gray, Mr. Justice Haliburton, Mr. Thomas Lewin, Mr. Thomas E. May, Mr. J. G. Phillimore, Mr. James FitzJames Stephen, Mr. Vernon Harcourt, Mr. James Whiteside. Some of the distinguished men mentioned in this note have already passed to another world since the publication of the last edition of 'Men of the Time;' but their recorded connexion with literature as well as law no less serves to illustrate an important feature of our social life. It is almost needless to remark that the names of many of our ablest anonymous writers do not appear in 'Men of the Time.' The writer of this book numbers amongst his personal friends a dozen lawyers, who are most efficient journalists, but whose names do not appear in that excellent repertory of living celebrities.

A of

CHAPTER LXXIX.

LAW AND CULTURE.

SURVEY of the literary achievements of the bar may be appropriately followed by a few remarks on the general culture of the legal profession. In the last century lawyers were by no means so liberally trained as they have been during the last sixty years. With the exception of a few gracious and graceful scholars who exercised no perceptible influence on the less cultivated members of their order, the successful practitioners were a pedantic and narrow-minded class. A prosperous

attorney, who had learnt Greek in the forms of a public school, would have been regarded as a strange social phenomenon by Thurlow in his younger days. A successful solicitor who had graduated at Oxford, or who held a fellowship in the sisteruniversity, was a character unknown when George III. was a little boy. In that period boys destined for the inferior branch of the law were caught in their thirteenth year and articled to attorneys, who treated them something better than they would have treated parish apprentices, much worse than any decent householder of the present day would treat his errand-boy or his page. To stand in the presence of his instructor until he had received express permission to take a seat; to call this instructor's wife mistress,' and to touch his cap (without presuming to speak to her) whenever he met her in the street; to follow at her heels when she went to market, and bring back her purchases to his master's kitchen; to spend eight hours a-day in copying papers or engrossing parchments, these were some of the duties and services required of an attorney's articled pupil when George II. used to play whist with Lady Yarmouth. The treatment which