y profession. Yet the circumstances of his career, as
well as his own disposition, prevented him from being absorbed in
professional duties. For the fifteen years which succeeded his call to
the bar he was in fact following two professions; he was at once a
barrister and a very active journalist. This causes some difficulty to
his biographer. My account of his literary career will have to occupy
the foreground, partly because the literary story bears most directly
and clearly the impress of his character, and partly because, as will be
seen, it was more continuous. I must, however, warn my readers against a
possible illusion of perspective. To Fitzjames himself the legal career
always represented the substantive, and the literary career the
adjective. Circumstances made journalism highly convenient, but his
literary ambition was always to be auxiliary to his legal ambition. It
would, of course, have been injurious to his prospects at the bar had it
been supposed that the case was inverted; and as a matter of fact his
eyes were always turned to the summit of that long hill of difficulty
which has to be painfully climbed by every barrister not helped by
special interest or good fortune. This much must be clearly understood,
but I must also notice two qualifications. In the first place, though he
became a journalist for convenience, he was in some sense too a
journalist by nature. He found, that is, in the press a channel for a
great many of the reflections which were constantly filling his mind and
demanding some outlet. He wrote for money, and without the least
affectation of indifference to money; but the occupation enabled him
also to gratify a spontaneous and powerful impulse. And, in the next
place, professional success at the bar was in his mind always itself
connected with certain literary projects. Almost from the first he was
revolving schemes for a great book, or rather for a variety of books.
The precise scheme changed from time to time; but the subject of these
books is always to be somewhere in the province which is more or less
common to law and ethics. Sometimes he is inclined to the more purely
technical side, but always with some reference to the moral basis of
law; and sometimes he leans more to philosophical and theological
problems, but always with some reference to his professional experience
and to legal applications. So, for example, he expresses a desire (in a
letter written, alas! after the power of