nd
slowly and solemnly, on the several dishes which with ostrich stomach he
has to digest.

As to the absence of all examination previous to an admission to the bar,
the fact, that not only in our own inns of court, but in all similar
institutions, such examinations have been allowed to dwindle into some
empty and puerile form, sufficiently demonstrates their inutility. If an
examination were appointed, it would be no test of the efficiency of the
advocate; no sufficient guarantee to the ingenuous client who should
wander into Westminster Hall in search of a lawyer. Not to add that the
learned gentleman may have had ample time to forget all his legal
knowledge in the interval between his call to the bar and the opening of
his first brief. A license, indeed, is given to practise as an advocate,
without any other qualification than that of respectability of character,
and the payment of certain fees; but the case of no client is confided to
the young orator, unless those who have the greatest interest in his
competency are satisfied that he can be safely relied on. Men suffer their
_health_ to be trifled with by ignorant quacks and ridiculous
pretenders--not their money. We need no Sir James Graham's bill in the
profession of the law. Besides, it is not the good opinion of an
uninformed public which the barrister has to seek or to depend upon. A
lawyer, he is judged by lawyers. It is in the estimation of attorneys and
solicitors that he must rise--not that of respectable ladies and nervous
baronets. They stand between him and that unlearned public to which the
physician, on the contrary, at once appeals.

The very circumstance, however, that there is no such public course of
instruction marked out, and no prospective examination to be prepared
for--that all is to be gained from that silent array of books which fill
the long shelves of a legal library or from those chambers of the
practitioner which, to those who look at them from without, seem as dark
with mystery as they are with dust and smoke--this, we repeat, renders
such a guide-book as that which Mr Warren has presented to the public,
almost indispensable. In forming a critical estimation of his labours on
this publication, it would be extremely unfair to forget, for a moment,
the peculiar nature of the work. He is writing for the young. It is an
elementary treatise. It is a book peculiarly practical; the very opposite
of whatever is theoretical or speculative. If