LEGAL DIETETICS. "Sir Andrew. Do not our lives consist of the four elements? Sir Toby. Faith, so they say; but I rather think it consists of eating and drinking! Sir Andrew. You are a scholar-Therefore let us eat and drink." In regarding the learned professions, and observing the influence they exercise respectively over the minds of men, we may reasonably come to the conclusion, that the religious profession exercises what we may call a future influence, the medical profession a domestic influence, and the legal profession a public and political influence. It is a popular supposition, as vulgar as it is erroneous, that to the intimate connexion that must ever necessarily subsist between the law maker and the expounder of the law, to the great public and personal interests frequently confided to gentlemen of the long robe, as well as to the prominent position in which their avocations place them before the eyes of men, this great public and political influence of the legal profession must be fairly attributable. While the medical profession boasts only one solitary representative in the Commons' House of Parliament, the members of the bar are represented by no less than fifty-six learned friends, be-wigged and be-gowned, ready to scramble from the bar to the bench, to fill offices simply political, and to take care that no law shall ever be passed in that House, detrimental to the inte rests of the profession to which they have the honour to belong. In the Upper House, too, it is a well authenticated fact, that rather more than onethird of the Peerage springs from the successful talent of the bar; and that the descendants of former Chancellors and Lord Chief-Justices of the Court of King's Bench now control, in their senatorial capacities, the march of revolutionary destruction; and stand between the throne, whose legitimate counsellors they are, and the ragamuffin levellers who would reduce throne and constitution to one chaotic mass of hopeless anarchy and confusion. Our present purpose is to correct the vulgar errors, that, by assigning causes for the influence of the profession of the law with which the profession of the law has nothing to do, tend materially to lower the character Twelfth Night and dignity of the members of the bar; and by assigning the true and only sources of its high and deserved distinction, to raise it still more, if that were possible, in the consideration and estimation of mankind. It is to the education of gentlemen for the profession of the advocate, and to nothing else, that we are to attribute the influence he must command, and the eminence he must attain it is to the pains taken by the venerable seniors of the several Inns of Court to adapt to their uninformed disciples that sort of food most nutritious in quality, most abundant in quantity, and most easy of digestion-as well as to the appetite of the disciples themselves, that the world is permitted to admire in so eminent a degree the overwhelming erudition, and inexhaustible elocution, of the men who are fated in future times to browbeat witnesses, bully the bench, and badger their "learned friend" on the opposite side. Before I enter, however, upon an exact detail of the system of national education provided for gentlemen of the law from time immemorial, it is necessary that I should briefly describe the seminaries in which that education is conveyed; and therefore I must for a few moments entreat the patience of the non-professional reader, while I notice with as much brevity as the importance of the subject will admit, the several Inns of Court, or Colleges, as I may properly style them, of legal education. The stranger in London passing through Temple Bar, would hardly suspect that to the right and left of Fleet Street, lie hid, in perpetual murkiness, towns (for towns they are) exclusively appropriated to various grades of the legal profession, from the ministerial officers of the several courts of law down to the scriveners, law stationers, and professional applewomen; through the several gradations of benchers, barristers, practitioners under the bar, conveyancers, special pleaders, solicitors, articled clerks, bed-women, laundresses, law yers' clerks, porters, gate-keepers and so forth. On entering one of these manufactories of discord, the stranger feels his heart grow sad within him he looks around, thinking that he has straggled into a barrack, but the universal cobweb, muck, and dirt of the inhabitations speedily undeceive him. He wanders from court to court, from lane to lane, and from alley to alleyhe sees lights at noon-day in every window-the windows here not being intended to let in day-light-and he may haply observe one of the briefless amusing himself, by writing the word "fee" on the two-year-old dust of his chamber window, with several notes of admiration at the end of that rare and curious monosyllable. He observes that the several sets of apartments are approached by a common nuisance called a common stair, from which he is diverted by his olfactory organ, and on either side of the entrance to this stair, he observes catalogues of the occupants of the several chambers from the cellar up wards, names of gentlemen for whose individual occupation the present excellent Lord Chancellor is merely airing the woolsack, and who intend to occupy it in the order of their seniority! The attics he will discover to be occupied, if he chooses to go high enough, by that class of society for whose exclusive residence Grub Street was formerly appropriated, but who reside here at present in consequence of Grub Street having been pulled down, as well as for the benefit of quiet, and a purer, not to say a cheaper, air-in short, for reasons precisely similar to those which influence my own choice in residing in a garret. As he wanders up and down, his eye cannot fail to be attracted by a building having some external resemblance to a church, but which is in fact the lecture-room or academy of its respective society-the windows being decorated with escutcheons, very much resembling in size and shape transparent trenchers, of illustrious individuals who have greatly distinguished themselves in the professional exercises hercin studiously observed. Nor, when we consider the uses to which the several Halls of the Inns of Court are applied, can we wonder that they have been erected with a due regard to splendour of decoration, and convenience of space: to-day, the Lord High Chancellor presides here in his elevated chair, dispensing the equity of his court to the several sui tors; to-morrow, a waiter, for greater convenience deposits therein a halfempty soup tureen, or a bundle of dirty knives and forks-or it may happen that a party of half-cocked law students range themselves round the sacred seat with their bottles of wine, while some unholy wag is graciously pleased to assume the Seals for the nonce, and proceeds with great gravity to mimic the tone and manner of the keeper of the Royal conscienceawful profanation! misprision of treason at the very least, if not legal sacrilege itself! It was my fate to hear no less than three solemn arguments in the great case of Small and Attwood thus burlesqued, the parts of the eminent advocates engaged therein being sustained by the requisite number of loquacious scamps, and judgment delivered by a rakish young barrister of six weeks'standing, amidst cries of "order, order ""hear him out"-" another glass of wine," while one extra-facetious young lawyer gravely interrupted the judgment of the Chancellor, amid shrieks of laughter, to request that His Lordship would have the goodness to cut his judgment as short as possible, because a gentleman within the bar was anxious to favour the company with a song!! It is not my intention to dilate upon the judicial functions exercised in the several halls of the several Inns of Court, they being merely occasional, and subordinate to the great gastronomic purposes of professional educacation for which these hospitable seminaries were first erected, and which they still continue faithfully to fulfil. The profession of the law is eminently a gastronomic profession: it is not, therefore, surprising that it should have become the profession that it is, and have expanded into a plethoric and almost apoplectic robustness. The judges are feasted by the mayors of cities and boroughs, a particular banquet being peculiarly appropriated to them by the Lord Mayor of London, in the Egyptian Hall; they are banqueted as well by the nobility on their several circuits-the members of the bar have general invitations to the assizes, balls, and suppers; and mess on circuit very socially together, while in town the terms are worthily opened by a breakfast to the judges and Queen's Counsel-legal as well as military battles being contested more hotly upon a full than on an empty stomach. But this is a small portion, very small indeed, of the gastronomic powers of the law. In his respective hall, the youthful aspirant for barristerial honours eats, year after year, his impatient way to the bar, exactly as an active rat fixes his persevering tusks in one side of an old cheshire, and never leaves off until he goes right through it, poking his proboscis through the rind on the other side. In their respective halls, barristers, in like manner, eat their tedious way to a colonial judgeship, or attorney-generalship of the Cannibal Islands, a revising barristership, a commissionership of any thing-or secretaryship, or under secretaryship of any thing else, or in short, whatever they can by any possibility lay their hands on. In their respective halls, too, of which they may be considered the licensed victuallers, and whose treasurer for the time being is a sort of principal waiter, the venerable benchers, defended by a screen from the intrusive gaze of the inferior cormorants, devour their rations of victuals and wine in all the dignity of learned leisure and professional elevation. While the students eat heartily, and the barristers hopefully, the benchers, more experienced in the vanity of human wishes, handle their napkins with the gravity that becomes their years and station; while through the body of the hall resounds the professional badinage, the execrable pun, or the fifty times told joke, from the table of the benchers not a sound more articulate is heard than a low and pleasing murmur of conflicting glasses, and a silver sound of forks harmoniously jingling in the plate basket. The profession of the law is, more strictly than any other, a profession of etiquette. Not only are the several grades of devourers, or unproductive consumers, as Ricardo calls them, strictly severed by position in the hall, the students occupying the body of the apartment, the barristers the cross tables at the top, and the benchers the elevated platform, or dais, at the upper extremity of the hall; but the good things to be devoured are apportioned to the different classes of dignitaries, with an attention to professional precedence and standing, hardly less rigorous than that observable on board a seventyfour, where the midshipmen dine in the cock-pit, the lieutenants in the ward-room, the captain in the gunroom, and the boatswain and other petty officers the Lord knows where. Like every thing else in this laborious and difficult world, the law is up-hill work; and it is lucky for the students that they commence their education in the flower of their youth, with the appetite of cormorants and the digestion of an ostrich; otherwise they never could eat their way for four or five tedious years through interminably recurring legs of tough mutton (roasted) and bottles of liquid fire, by courtesy called wine, and consumed under the name of port. By degrees, however, a good digestion, sharp teeth, and indefatigable perseverance, will effect wonders: in ten or twelve years' time, the student, now a barrister-at-law, attains to the dignity of a silver fork and a morsel of cheese, subscribed for by the members of the bar, who lay their learned heads together for that purpose, and from which the unhappy students are still, being considered merely infants in law, precluded from the privilege to subscribe. Twenty years' standing, by which time the learned gentleman, if he has discharged his duty to his stomach and his profession, will have lost all his teeth, and wear a head as grey as a badger, entitles him to a full pint of the execrable port, and a morsel of cheese, at the benchers' expense, as also a cucumber in the summer season, so that he may now be said to have arrived at the highest dignities, short of the attorney and solicitorgeneralships, of the bar; and is regarded, as he slices his cucumber, with longing, lingering eyes and watering mouths, by the mob of students in the hall, who have a quarter of a century before them ere they are fated to arrive at the dignity of the coif and cucumber! The benchers, as may be supposed, taking their dinners within the bar, like the landlords of other inns, are by no means so restricted in the quality of their eatables and quantity of their drinkables, as the exclusives in the. body of the Hall. We are enabled to state, on the highest authority, that these dignitaries study two courses daily, including all the delicacies of the season, with a dessert of corresponding magnificence; and are accustomed to refresh their legal fauces after the professional fatigues of the day, with wines of all the recognised vintages, and of every possible variety. Thus wisely and well, the attentive reader will observe, is every step of professional elevation, every gradation from the lowest to the highest dignities of the law, marked by a change of diet-a promotion, as it were, in the bill of fare, ascending, as I have said, from impregnable mutton and execrable port, to the ambrosia of turtle and venison, and the nectar of sparkling champagne. Let the hypothetical reader suppose what is, indeed, the only supposable ease, that Mr Timothy Two-to-one, the opulent pawnbroker of Holborn bars, having made one son a surgeon, another an attorney, a third a clergyman, is lost in doubt as to the occupation to be provided for the fourth and youngest hope of the family of Two-to-one. Many people wonder, indeed, that one of the sons is not to be brought up to the pawnbroking line, with such a splendid business to step into when old Two-to-one is changed into a cherubim-I say people wonder; but let me take the liberty of asking people what is it to them? You may be surprised yourself, that none of the young Twoto-ones is to succeed old Two-to-one ; let me take the liberty of asking what's that to you? The fact is, inquisitive reader, old Two-to-one bas made so much money that he is obliged to bring his money to the Bank in a coal-scuttle, and Mrs Two-to-one having been, at a less propitious period of her life, under-housekeeper in a gentleman's family, the pair have come to the resolution of performing a miracle, by metamorphosing pawnbrokers' whelps into real genuine thoroughbred gentlemen, cost what it will-or as old Twoto-one, in all the pride of a bloated Toad in the hole. pocket, observes, slapping his corpulent thigh, "the genteel thing for Two-to-one, and never mind the expense!" Accordingly, one day at dinner in the back shop of old Twoto-one in Holborn bars, FrederickWilliam, the as yet unappropriated offspring of "my uncle," having solicited for the fourth time some more "toad in the hole," the amazed mother of the voracious son of "my uncle" thus addresses the ravenous FrederickWilliam. "Crikey, Fred! I'm afeared of yer brustin' yerself. Don't give him no more-d'ye hear, Timmy, dear?" "I say, mother, don't be a-comin it so werry strong. I arn't had more nor a pound and a half or so of wittels, father lays the pudding on so werry thick," was the dissatisfied reply of Frederick- William, holding out his plate for more. "Blowed if I doesn't think yer'd make a good lawryer, Fred, yer tucks in sich a reggler blow-out!" was the sage remark of the father of the Twoto-ones. "Blest if he wouldn't eat his wig!" remarked the eldest hope of the Twoto ones, who, by virtue of his seniority, thought he had a right to be extra facetious. "Or a child out of the small-pox," observed the surgeon. "Or a man on horseback," said the attorney. "Or a mystified monkey, stuffed with straw," resumed the elder Twoto-one. "Or a physic of fish-hooks," remarked the surgeon. "Or the sunny side of a donkey," echoed the attorney, determined not to be outdone by his brethren. "Or a hackney coachman stuffed with twelvepenny nails," reiterated the elder Two-to-one, amid the laughter of the whole family. “Or a barbecued wild cat with”— here the current of the surgeon's wit was diverted into the ocean of business, by the irruption of an apparition of the pawnbroker's boy, in slippers and shirt, with a smoothing-iron in his hand, which, duly presenting to Mr Two-to one— Beef-steaks laid in a pie-dish on a substratum of batter-pudding and sent to the baker's—a Cockney eatable of great and deserved celebrity. NO, CCLXXXV, VOL. XLVI, C "Here's a gal in the shop what wants to spout that 'ere flat-iron," observed the juvenile apparition. "How much on it?" enquired "my uncle," scrutinizing the flat-iron with profound attention, and shaking it well, to see if the handle was loose. "A tanner," said the ghostling in reply. "Half a tizzy," said Mrs Two-toone, indicating in her peculiar phraseology that the gal might receive one fourth of her demand, or threepence instead of a shilling, on the security of her flat-iron. "Bundle, Freddy, and make out the gal's ticket," observed the father of that young gentleman, who, after several unsuccessful efforts, got off his chair at last, snorting like a walrus, and bundled into the front shop in obedience to the paternal injunction. "I knows this 'ere flat iron this four year," observed "my uncle," taking up his old acquaintance; "the old gal as owns it gets a livin' by washin' o' sodgers' shirts, and spouts this 'ere harticle venhever them seven brats what she's got begins at her for bread. She's always werry bad off ven she spouts her flat-iron." "That's vy I cuts her down to threepence, deary," interrupted Mrs Two-to-one, with a wink at her better half. "I knows as how she can't get her livin' without that 'ere, so the littler she gets she comes the oftener." 66 "Right, ducky," remarked my uncle" approvingly; "the interest's the same, you knows, for a month or a day-so we screws it out of the old dust all the oftener." "Ve arn't turned less nor five bob on that there harticle, I'm sure, this blessed 'ear since Genewerry," observed Mrs Two-to-one. "No, I'm sartin sure we arn't," assented Mrs Two-to-one's better half. "Let-me-see," calculated Mrs Two-to-one, putting her fingers in an arithmetical position-" tvice a-veek up our spout and tvice a-veek down our spout-two browns a-veek reg gler-very well-how many veeks in yer 'ear?-Eh! Timmy?" Fifty-let me scratch-I knows it's fifty-summut, but vether its fiftythreer or fifty-seven, blow me tight if I knows Yer had as good ax Freddy" -insinuated Mr Timothy Two-to one, "Never mind," carelessly replied the lady-" fifty-threer or fifty-seven, it's no great differ; but I says agin, we arn't turned less nor four bob and a joey on that there hiron since Genewerry"-concluded the lady of "my uncle," taking down her digits and abandoning her calculation à la Pestalozzi. While Frederick-William was making out the gal's ticket for the flat-iron in the front shop, the thought flashed like lightning through the mind of "my uncle," that Frederick- William would make a splendid Lord High Chancellor of England; and, as it was considered in these our days, though by no means indispensably necessary in the olden time, that that functionary should previously be called to the bar, it was inwardly resolved by the father of the Two-to-ones that Frederick- William should, with all imagin able speed, be qualified, by a call to the bar, for the honourable and influential station of the woolsack. In his cogitations upon this subject, it never entered the old usurer's head to enquire, whether his son was fit for the profession of the law-whether he would like the profession of the lawor whether he would have the remot est glimmering of success at the profession of the law; all that he thought upon the subject was, that it would be a fine thing for him to be able to see Fred the lawyer's speeches reported in the newspapers, and to be able to get so many franks when Freddy would be in the House of Lords doing a snug business as Lord High Chancellor. I am the less surprised at the selfish turn which the ambitious cogitations of the veteran pawnbroker took upon this occasion, inasmuch as nine out of every ten elderly gentlemen whose sons suck their thumbs like young bears in the purlieus of the Temple and Westminster Hall, with grey mares' tails (not paid for) stuck upon the outsides of their heads, have been brought to this deplorable condition by a train of reflection precisely similar in selfishness and folly to the train of reflection that dictated the final determination of "my uncle." This final determination, which was nothing less than the elevation of son Freddy to the woolsack, was communicated to Mrs Two-to-one that very identi cal night in bed, where the old couple |