btle distinctions
he draws between the symptoms of mere eccentricity and erring
intellect--remark how insignificant the physician appears in the case,
who has made these things the study of a life long--hear how the
barrister confounds him with a hail-storm of technicals--talking of
the pineal gland as if it was an officer of the court, and of atrophy
of the cerebral lobes, as if he was speaking of an attorney's clerk.
Listen to him in a trial of supposed death by poison; what a triumph
he has there, particularly if he be a junior barrister--how he walks
undismayed among all the tests for arsenic--how little he cares for
Marsh's apparatus and Scheele's discoveries--hydro-sulphates,
peroxydes, iodurates, and proto-chlorides are familiar to him as
household words. You would swear that he was nursed at a glass
retort, and sipped his first milk through a blow-pipe. Like a child
who thumps the keys of a pianoforte, and imagines himself a Liszt or
Moschelles, so does your barrister revel amid the phraseology of a
difficult science--pelting the witnesses with his insane blunders, and
assuring the jury that their astonishment means ignorance. Nothing in
anatomy is too deep--nothing in chemistry too subtle--no fact in
botany too obscure--no point in metaphysics too difficult. Like
Dogberry, these things are to him but the gift of God; and he knows
them at his birth. Truly, the chancellor is a powerful magician; and
the mystic words by which he calls a gentleman to the bar, must have
some potent spell within them. The youth you remember as if it were
yesterday, the lounger at evening parties, or the chaperon of riding
damsels to the Phoenix, comes forth now a man of deep and consummate
acquirement--he whose chemistry went no further than the composition
of a "tumbler of punch," can now perform the most difficult
experiments of Orfila or Davy, or explain the causes of failure in a
test that has puzzled the scientific world for half a century. He
knows the precise monetary value of a deserted maiden's affections--he
can tell you the exact sum, in bank notes, that a widow will be
knocked down for, when her heart has been subject to but a feint
attack of Cupid. With what consummate skill, too, he can show that an
indictment is invalid, when stabbing is inserted for cutting; and when
the crown prosecutor has been deficient in his descriptive anatomy,
what a glorious field for display is opened to him. Then, to be sure,
what droll fell