s and countries.
Think what strumming of the seven-stringed heroic lyre, torturing
of the less heroic fiddle-catgut, in Hellenic Kings' Courts, and
English wayside Public Houses; and beating of the studious
Poetic brain, and gasping here too in the semi-articulate
windpipe of Poetic men, before the Wrath of a Divine Achilles,
the Prowess of a Will Scarlet or Wakefield Pinder, could be
adequately sung! Honour to you, ye nameless great and greatest
ones, ye long-forgotten brave!

Nor was the Statute _De Tallagio non concedendo,_ nor any
Statute, Law-method, Lawyer's-wig, much less were the Statute-
Book and Four Courts, with Coke upon Lyttleton and Three Estates
of Parliament in the rear of them, got together without human
labour,--mostly forgotten now! From the time of Cain's slaying
Abel by swift head-breakage, to this time of killing your man in
Chancery by inches, and slow heart-break for forty years,--there
too is an interval! Venerable justice herself began by Wild-
justice; all Law is as a tamed furrowfield, slowly worked out,
and rendered arable, from the waste jungle of Club-Law. Valiant
Wisdom tilling and draining; escorted by owl-eyed Pedantry, by
owlish and vulturish and many other forms of Folly;--the valiant
husbandman assiduously tilling; the blind greedy enemy _too_
assiduously sowing tares! It is because there is yet in
venerable wigged justice some wisdom, amid such mountains of
wiggeries and folly, that men have not cast her into the River;
that she still sits there, like Dryden's Head in the _Battle of
the Books,_--a huge helmet, a huge mountain of greased parchment,
of unclean horsehair, first striking the eye; and then in the
innermost corner, visible at last, in size as a hazelnut, a real
fraction of God's justice, perhaps not yet unattainable to some,
surely still indispensable to all;--and men know not what to do
with her! Lawyers were not all pedants, voluminous voracious
persons; Lawyers too were poets, were heroes,--or their Law had
been past the Nore long before this time. Their Owlisms,
Vulturisms, to an incredible extent, will disappear by and by,
their Heroisms only remaining, and the helmet be reduced to
something like the size of the head, we hope!--

It is all work and forgotten work, this peopled, clothed,
articulate-speaking, high-towered, wide-acred World. The hands
of forgotten brave men have made it a World for us; they,--
honour to them; they, in _spite_ of the