you get
strange glimpses of the ways of thinking and living among classes
otherwise unknown to you. These criminal courts, he says in another
letter, are a 'never-ending source of interest and picturesqueness for
me. The little kind of meat-safe door through which the prisoners are
called up, and the attendant demon of a gaoler who summons them up from
the vasty deep and sends them back again to the vasty deep for terms of
from one week to six years, have a sort of mysterious attraction.'

Mr. Franklin Lushington, who was my brother's contemporary on the
circuit and ever afterwards an intimate friend, has kindly given me his
impressions of this period. It would have been difficult, he says, to
find a circuit 'on which the first steps of the path that opens on
general eminence in the profession were slower to climb than on the
Midland.' It was a small circuit, 'attended by some seventy or eighty
barristers and divided into two or three independent and incompatible
sets of Quarter Sessions, among which after a year or so of tentative
experience it was necessary to choose one set and stand by it. Fitzjames
and I both chose the round of the Lincolnshire, Nottinghamshire, and
Derbyshire sessions; which involved a good deal of travelling and
knocking about in some out-of-the-way country districts, where the
sessions bar is necessarily thrown into circumstances of great intimacy.
Even when a sessions or assize reputation was gained, it was and
remained intensely local. The intricate points relative to settlements
and poor-law administration, which had provided numerous appeals to the
higher courts in a previous generation, had dwindled gradually to
nothing. Even the most remarkable success, slowly and painfully won in
one county, might easily fail to produce an effect in the next, or to
give any occasion for passing through the thickset hedge which parts
provincial from metropolitan notoriety. The most popular and admired
advocate in the Lincolnshire courts for many years was our dear friend
F. Flowers, afterwards a police magistrate, one of the wittiest, most
ingenious, and most eloquent of the bar. Though year after year he held
every Lincolnshire jury in the hollow of his hand, and frequently rose
to a strain of powerful and passionate oratory which carried away
himself and his hearers--not Lincolnshire folk only--in irresistible
sympathy with his cause, Flowers remained to his last day on circuit
utterly unknown and untrie