dressing
wrongs and defending the defenceless, not for the love of filthy lucre,
nor the selfish cravings of renown, but merely for the pleasure of doing
good. Sooner would I throw this trusty pen into the flames, and cork up my
ink-bottle for ever, than infringe even for a nail's breadth upon the
dignity of these truly benevolent champions of the distressed. On the
contrary, I allude merely to those caitiff scouts who, in these latter
days of evil, infest the skirts of the profession, as did the recreant
Cornish knights of yore the honorable order of chivalry; who, under its
auspices, commit flagrant wrongs; who thrive by quibbles, by quirks and
chicanery, and like vermin increase the corruption in which they are
engendered.

Nothing so soon awakens the malevolent passions as the facility of
gratification. The courts of law would never be so crowded with petty,
vexatious, and disgraceful suits were it not for the herds of
pettifoggers. These tamper with the passions of the poorer and more
ignorant classes; who, as if poverty were not a sufficient misery in
itself, are ever ready to embitter it by litigation. These, like quacks in
medicine, excite the malady to profit by the cure, and retard the cure to
augment the fees. As the quack exhausts the constitution the pettifogger
exhausts the purse; and as he who has once been under the hands of a quack
is for ever after prone to dabble in drugs, and poison himself with
infallible prescriptions, so the client of the pettifogger is ever after
prone to embroil himself with his neighbors, and impoverish himself with
successful lawsuits. My readers will excuse this digression into which I
have been unwarily betrayed; but I could not avoid giving a cool and
unprejudiced account of an abomination too prevalent in this excellent
city, and with the effects of which I am ruefully acquainted, having been
nearly ruined by a lawsuit which was decided against me; and my ruin
having been completed by another, which was decided in my favor.

To return to our theme. There was nothing in the whole range of moral
offences against which the jurisprudence of William the Testy was more
strenuously directed than the crying sin of poverty. He pronounced it the
root of all evil, and determined to cut it up root and branch, and
extirpate it from the land. He had been struck, in the course of his
travels in the old countries of Europe, with the wisdom of those notices
posted up in country towns, tha