A Book About Lawyers

This historic book may have numerous typos, missing text or index. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. 1867. Not illustrated. Excerpt: ... CHAPTER LXXIX. LAW AND CULTURE. A SURVEY of the literary achievements of the bar may be appropriately followed by a few remarks on the general culture of the legal profession. In the last century lawyers were by no means so liberally trained as they have been during the last sixty years. With the exception of a few gracious and graceful scholars who exercised no perceptible influence on the less cultivated members of their order, the successful practitioners were a pedantic and narrow-minded class. A prosperous attorney, who had learnt Greek in the forms of a public school, would have been regarded as a strange social phenomenon by Thurlow in his younger days. A successful solicitor who had graduated at Oxford, or who held a fellowship in the sisteruniversity, was a character unknown when George III. was a little boy. In that period boys destined for the inferior branch of the law were caught in their thirteenth year and articled to attorneys, who treated them something better than they would have treated parish apprentices, much worse than any decent householder of the present day would treat his errand-boy or his page. To stand in the presence of his instructor until he had received express permission to take a seat; to call this instructor's wife 'mistress/ and to touch his cap (without presuming to speak to her) whenever he met her in the street; to follow at her heels when she went to market, and bring back her purchases to his master's kitchen; to spend eight hours a-day in copying papers or engrossing parchments,--these were some of the duties and services required of an attorney's articled pupil when George II. used to play whist with Lady Yarmouth. The treatment which Philip Yorke, afterwards Lord Chancellor of England, received at the hands of his mast...