catalogue of contingent ills, there is a remainder unmentioned, before which all recited evils "hide their diminished heads:" can the briefless need a reminder that their condition is not included in his detail of professional calamities? But the sanguine temperament of youth is not prone to anticipate chagrin or privation, and dwells more interestedly on arenas of legal contention-anticipates the applausing hum of courts, the murmured homage to eloquence-forefancies championship and conquest; and preconceives the florid invocation, resistless argument, and eloquent propitiation of a decree, on which are suspended the absorbing interests of Life, and Fame, and Honor;and speeds, by an ideal path, to renown, preferment, ease. Soon, on the stoicism of adolescence, ambition works; and soon I looked at this, the bright side of the scene. Hume (the historian) estimates a natural disposition to view things on the sunny side, as more than equivalent to a fortune of £10,000 a year.-A living economist might think the calculation hasty, and feel disposed to cavil at so large a "tottle." In embracing law I had, moreover, home anticipations— not to realise, for they were utopian, but to cherish, for they were fond. Advising, after twelve months application, with a visitor at the paternal residence,

on a plain principle, a copious (and superfluous) use of technicalities convinced my father that my time had been well spent, and threw around me the halo of an oracle in the dim eyes of a venerable maternal ancestor, who would " die happily could she live to see me a judge❞—her ne plus ultra of forensic dignity. Dear old Lady! without this anodyne her "sleep of death" was peaceful as a pleasant dream, and little recked she of the superadded " labor and sorrow" that must have been entailed on her by the fruition of her wish. For my own part, my aspirations are less presumptious; and a silk gown, which never would have occurred to her as a desideratum with men, would appease my longings and be gratefully acknowledged.

Prolixity, O Reader! is, as thou mayest haply know, peculiar to the Law and its disciples; and if herein I stand accused of circumlocution, would that I could truly interpret to thee that encouragement to expatiate which now I feel, in assured freedom from the frowns of impatient jurymen, ungifted with eye or ear to comprehend the subtleties of the statute-book, and willing to cut off Magna Charta from their children, so they—sires of the spirit of Esau-might 'scape judicial durance vile, devour their pottage at-home, and rejoin their aprons.

66

On an April morning in 41, I was proceeding to my chambers in I had been engaged during the greater part of the night in a complicated investigation, and having arrived at an opinion which I considered to be as well-grounded as it would be satisfactory to my client, I was disembarrassed of care, and my spirit seemed gifted with the volatility of an angel's wing. Town-imprisoned," as gentle Mary terms it (William Howitt's Mary, not mine), town-imprisoned, we taste but a dilution of the joyenkindling elixir which Delight, prime almoner to the Queen of seasons, pours lavishly by wood, and field, and stream, in the golden light of an April morn. Yet, weakened as becomes the pure effluence by commixture with the murky atmosphere of busy haunts, it still retains ingredients which inspire with a joyous consciousness of the time; and even in the clamour of a city the heart recognises and leaps lithely at the voice of Spring. For stony limits may sooner shut out Love than exclude Nature; and when the allanimating Spring passes over creation, with her vivifying breath making the old world young again, her influence operates in man like a renewal of GOD'S

*“With Love's light wings did I o'erperch these walls,

For stony limits cannot hold Love out."-Romeo and Juliet.

breath of life; and the indefinable exultation which rises in his bosom attests but his participation in the instinctive and insuppressible sympathy which all things living own for youth-the doctrine of whose infinite prolongation in a happier sphere lends the tint of transport to fabled felicity, and gilds the pinions of a surer and sublimer Hope. Eternal youth! What other epoch of existence can imagination appropriate to the glad heritage of bliss? Not the dawn of capacity, or its decline; not immaturity or imbecility -but the ever-ripening, ever-rosy Morn;-Morn which prevails in perpetuity, and which cannot hasten Noon, for Noon is Night's precursor, and Night may not spread her sable mantle over the Realm of the Rejoicing!

On the morning to which I have adverted, I had resigned myself to the Spirit of the Air,—

"The pleasant season did my heart employ;
My old remembrances went from me wholly,

And all the ways of men, so vain and melancholy."

Who has not smiled at his own locomotive irregularities, when governed by the impulses of an ecstasy to which all temporal care is alien, and inspired with

which the human heart yearns, from its most hallowed depths, with the boundless desire TO BLESS?

"To me that morning did it happen so;"

and having, in changing mood and by changing motion, nearly attained my destination, I had lingered in loving dalliance before the attractive exposition of a bibliopolist—one of those tempting arrays of titlepages, which to this day (unless urged onwards by a professional pressure from without,) detain me with the virtue of an arrest. There were treatises, by master-minds, on the Religion which reconciles the contradictions and irradiates the oft-beclouded perspective of life; on the pharmaceutic Science, by which purchasers might secure an immortality içi bas; and on Law, by which its mysteries were simplified to the scale of Readings made Easy. And, above these, a rank of Poets, living and dead—if indeed true Poets can die-cherished titles all, the humblest of which by mere articulation sounds a chord that kindles rapture. There were-but what need to recapitulate names "familiar as household words?" Last of all stood Burns; and, swift as thought, the rapture within me found utterance in jocund words of song:

C