For the present I merely throw out these suggestions in a brief,
incomplete manner, intending, however, to return to the subject on
another occasion.

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A NUT FOR THE LAWYERS.

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Authors have long got the credit of being the most accomplished
persons going--thoroughly conversant not only with the features of
every walk and class in life, but also with their intimate sentiments,
habits of thought, and modes of expression. Now, I have long been of
opinion, that in all these respects, lawyers are infinitely their
superiors. The author chooses his characters as you choose your dish,
or your wine at dinner--he takes what suits, and leaves what is not
available to his purpose. He then fashions them to his hand--finishing
off this portrait, sketching that one--now bringing certain figures
into strong light, anon throwing them into shadow: they are his
creatures, who must obey him while living, and even die at his
command. Now, the lawyer is called on for all the narrative and
descriptive powers of his art, at a moment's notice, without time for
reading or preparation; and worse than all, his business frequently
lies among the very arts and callings his taste is most repugnant to.
One day he is to be found creeping, with a tortoise slowness through
all the wearisome intricacy of an equity case--the next he is borne
along in a torrent of indignant eloquence, in defence of some Orange
processionist or some Ribbon associate: now he describes, with the
gravity of a landscape gardener, the tortuous windings of a
mill-stream; now expatiating in Lytton Bulwerisms over the desolate
hearth and broken fortunes of some deserted husband. In one court he
attempts to prove that the elderly gentleman whose life was insured
for a thousand at the Phoenix, was instrumental to his own decease, for
not eating Cayenne with his oysters; in another, he shows, with
palpable clearness, that being stabbed in the body, and having the
head fractured, is a venial offence, and merely the result of
"political excitement" in a high-spirited and warm-hearted people.

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These are all clever efforts, and demand consummate powers, at the
hand of him who makes them; but what are they to that deep and
critical research with which he seems, instinctively, to sound the
depths of every scientific walk in life, and every learned profession.
Hear him in a lunacy case--listen to the deep and su