COLLOQUY III. A FEW WORDS UPON SHAKSPEARE. "Death makes no conquest of this Conqueror; HAVING attained this stage of intimacy and confidence with the tenant of Ivy Lodge, I thenceforth made a weekly pilgrimage thither, with admirable uniformity. A lawyer's protestation of disinterestedness is so often considered and treated as a matter of levity, that I have long since declined protesting by it, and do not, therefore, assert for the steady constancy of my movements that charm which inflexible regularity derives from the evident absence of self-interest. Were I not constrained by the consciousness, that a complaint urged by so impotent a limb as am I, against that K 66 gross moral injustice (unfortunately not an indictable offence,) which the legal body sustains, in the ceaseless suspicion which attaches to the actions and asseverations of so overwhelming a majority of its members, I would certainly labor hard to blow the cruel doubt in every censorious and contumelious eye, till the pains and penalties of ophthalmia should have wrought remorse. The moral mischief which has been done by squint Suspicion" is incalculable; and the chronicles of the law would, probably, demonstrate its amount more amply and more accurately than those of any other profession not under the immediate cognizance of the police. Faculties cannot be borne for ever meekly, where to the frail bearer is always imputed a brow of bronze; nor can clearness in office preserve its immaculacy, exposed to the perpetual stigma of collusion. I have been a regretful witness to repeated proofs, that virtue, frequently mistaken for vice, has been vitiated; and I know members of the profession who, had fine feeling not been rendered callous by indiscriminate sinister accusations, might even to this day, on coming designedly in contact with the dinnertable of an unsuspecting country gentleman, have disdained to tax him-a non-inviting host-for a passing opinion, proffered en mangeant. |