intellectual labour applied to purposes of remote, or not
immediately appreciable usefulness, as in social literature, and the
loftier branches of the fine arts, are, with us, so few, as hardly to be
worth mentioning, and pity 'tis that it should be so. The law, the
church, the army, and the faculty of physic, have not only their fair
and legitimate remuneration for independent labour, but they have their
several prizes, to which all who excel, may confidently look forward
when the time of weariness and exhaustion shall come; when the pressure
of years shall slacken exertion, and diminished vigour crave some haven
of repose, or, at the least, some mitigated toil, with greater security
of income: some place of honour with repose--the ambition of declining
years. The influence of the great prize of the law, the church, and
other professions in this country, has often been insisted upon with
great reason: it has been said, and truly said, that not only do these
prizes reward merit already passed through its probationary stages, but
serve as inducements to all who are pursuing the same career. It is not
so much the example of the prize-holder, as the _prize_, that stimulates
men onward and upward: without the hope of reaching one of those
comfortable stations, hope would be extinguished, talent lie fallow,
energy be limited to the mere attainment of subsistence; great things
would not be done, or attempted, and we would behold only a dreary level
of indiscriminate mediocrity. If this be true of professions, in which,
after a season of severe study, a term of probation, the knowledge
acquired in early life sustains the professor, with added experience of
every day, throughout the rest of his career, with how much more force
will it apply to professions or pursuits, in which the mind is
perpetually on the rack to produce novelties, and in which it is
considered derogatory to a man to reproduce his own ideas, copy his own
pictures, or multiply, after the same model, a variety of characters and
figures!

A few years of hard reading, constant attention in the chambers of the
conveyancer, the equity craftsman, the pleader, and a few years more of
that disinterested observance of the practice of the courts, which is
liberally afforded to every young barrister, and indeed which many enjoy
throughout life, and he is competent, with moderate talent, to protect
the interests of his client, and with moderate mental labour to make a
re