That a clergyman is licensed, at least in certain circles, to indulge in a little wider latitude in his jokes than would be thought quite discreet in a layman. This is noticeable in our literature. I will not call up the reverend names of Swift and Sterne, to either of whom the blushful public must a thousand times have whispered, "It is only your cloth protects you." I myself had experience lately of the disadvantage of seasoning a dish with any pepper but black pepper. I sent one of my poetical bantlings-as chubby a little innocent as ever you set eyes on-to one of those foundling hospitals called Monthly Magazines. You have heard Hood's story-I think it was Hood's-at all events, he was father to so many "scapes" of the kind that there can be little danger in swearing it to him; his story of the squashed child. The fat nurse sat down upon the baby, and pressed it so flat that it could not be seen when held up edgeways. Now, my little darling experienced a like fate. The fat monthly nurse of the establishment alluded to (Editor is the technical term for this functionary) sat upon it, not in this case by accident, but according to cruel and deliberate custom; and so flattened it out that whilst to his view it appeared, as he said, "a little too broad," to mine (which you will understand was at right angles to his own, as is generally the case in regard to the views taken by author and editor) it appeared, I assure you, not to be broad at all. I had had, I confess, some apprehensions that its length (for it was very tall of its age) might have been made a reason for its not being received permanently into the asylum; but as to its other dimension, it seemed to my judgment to resemble, as Bulwer says of one of his characters, Euclid's definition of a straight line-it was "length without breadth." You would be astonished, my dear Gondicarius, to learn how many of the cases that apply at these hospitals are attenuated into conformity to the same description; how many, with an excess in the dimension of length, have neither breadth nor depth, weight nor substance. Now, I assure you I have known infants lodged and done for, in that same asylum, broad enough to have been wrapped three times round mine; but then they were the bantlings of a clergyman, and the offspring derived a propriety from the reverendness of the father. It used to be said that there was no rose without its thorn. I believe if you inquire at Messrs. Loddidge's, or at any respectable floricultural establishment, you will find that this is not strictly true. There is, however, no rose-when I say no rose I mean no species or variety, I do not speak of individual blossoms― there is, I say, no rose that has not its earwig, or caterpillar, or green beetle; and every position in life every trade, every profession, has drawbacks to set against its particular advantages. Thus, in the Church, though it may be very pleasant to be passing rich, among your professional brethren, with forty pounds a year, it by no means necessarily occurs that you will have this forty pounds to exult over them upon. Parson Polyglot is by no means the only clergyman who has had but one shirt; and it is well we do not see all the darns that are wanted underneath the surplice. The gown hides often many defective stitches; there is many a ragged place, many a button wanted, many an inkspot hid from view beneath it. It is not my fault if you choose to apprehend me metaphorically; I say it in a literal sense, though the other may be likewise true; a white patch at the elbows is often cloaked over in the vestry. And if a clergyman do chance to be "out of a situation," that is a vulgar mode of expressing it, as bad almost as an inquiry I once heard from an ingenious youngster, after his first visit to church: "Mamma, why did the man in the smock-frock get into the puncheon?" but let us express it vulgarly, so that we be distinct-if a clergyman do chance to be out of a situation, without some little private property to fall back upon, his position is by no means enviable. There is what they call living on the Guinea coast-that is, taking chance duty for any professional brother who may be laid up with the gout; but it is precarious, and not very remunerative. And there are private pupils; but these are not so plenty as hops (in a good season) are in Kent. If I took private pupils I should ask a thousand a year. I have a great notion that "the dodge" would be successful. I know men who ask forty or fifty, and they never get a nibble; I know others, not more capable, who boldly lay themselves out for three hundred, and never have a bed-room to spare. Modest merit is a very fine thing; but if a man do not find out his own value, can he suppose that the world will be at the pains of making the discovery for him? Virtues and talents (I am considering things, you know, in a worldly way) are stock in trade; at least to those who are unlucky enough to have no other fixed or floating capital. And they are, in one respect, like objects of fine art. The "world in general" has not discrimination sufficient to estimate them at their real worth, but gives fancy prices led to believe them genuine and of a high order. Would the trustee it is of our National Gallery, think you, buy the finest Raffael in the world, were it offered for a hundred pounds? No offence to the trustees of the National Gallery, they would not. It is not in human nature that they should do so. Were a hundred thousand the price, they would begin to think how they might raise the money. Would they have purchased "the Holbein," think you, had it been modestly offered at its true value? Gondicarius, they would not. They would have known that John Bull would not honour so insignificant a draft. The Sybil would never have sold her books, had she lowered her demand in proportion to their reduced number. Impress it on your son, Gondicarius, as a first principle in worldly wisdom, to ticket himself above, rather than below, even his own notions of his intrinsic worth. But a man may keep school instead of taking private pupils. Delightful task," cries Thomson. The lazy hypocrite! It is very easy to call all tasks delightful so long as we are not obliged to participate in them. Thomson, bless you, would have lain with his nose under the bed-clothes at one o'clock in the day, and called reefing the foresail on a squally night a delightful task-shaving madmen a delightful task-walking up the treadmill a delightful task. Dante, strangely enough, has not introduced the reciprocal offices of the pedagogue and disciple among the punishments of his Inferno. He might have done so, and formed another Caïna. Among the cants that are universally canted, is that which speaks of the blessed days of our infancy and youth, as though all the troubles of mortal life belong to more advanced age. "Man never is, but always to be bless'd," says the poet. He might with equal propriety have said, "Man never is, but always has been blessed." Such is the perversity of our nature that both are true. At Rome we love Tibur, at Tibur, Rome. "We look before and after, And to intrude yet one more quotation-a trite one, I confess ""Tis distance lends enchantment to the view." We talk of "the cares of the man," as though the cares of childhood were nothing. But our troubles begin early; we come weeping into the world, and the first season of life, like that of the year, is stormy. There are high winds in the March, and showers in the April, of our being; as well as sweat of the brow in the July and August. You and I, Gondicarius, have our gout and lumbago; but are croup, and scarletina, and hooping-cough nothing, think you, to the tender frames of early childhood? You have lost your back teeth: I wish you could cut them afresh, that you might the more vividly remember the days ere cares came upon you. It is pleasant enough now to talk of the "two geese you stole out of the pen;" the stripes on the shoulders which formed the sequel to that achievement were a sore set-off to the pleasure of the exploit, and, I suspect, turned the balance in favour of loss. It was a source of annoyance to you, when that Jew-Christian scoundrel brought an action against you, and sneaked off without paying the costs; but the bitter and sweet came together, for I fear, Gondicarius, you exulted as you watched his maggoty hue whilst the judge was commenting on his baseness and treachery. But what balm was there to the heart-burning of our little friend in the Wordsworthian ballad, when her brother John treated her in a manner so unbecoming their relationship? "So to my drawer he goes Takes out my doll, and, oh! my stars! Melting a doll's nose may appear a small matter to you; but to little Ellen, or Mary, or whatever her name may have been, your lawyer's bill was of infinitely less importance, I have struck a little out of my path, I perceive; but I hate walking straight to the goal, especially when I have no particular goal to arrive at. And talking of diverging from one's path, I will just pause to mention a circumstance (though altogether beside our present subject), for the honour of your canine friend, Hector. I took a walk with him a few days since, and in the first field we came to he met with a bone. My dog, I must tell you, reasons inductively, for he is very fond of bacon; and from the experience of many former walks taken in my company, he felt warranted in drawing the conclusion that I should go to some distance, and return through the same field. Now if, my dear Gondicarius, you will for one moment imagine yourself a dog, you will perceive how inconvenient, not to say impracticable, it must be, to pick a bone whilst walking, since the fore-paws are indispensible for each operation. To stay behind and pick the bone, allowing me to proceed by myself, would have been neither sociable nor respectful, seeing that we had walked forth together, for the pleasure of each other's society. To have carried the bone all the way would have been troublesome and tantalizing, and would have prevented conversation to leave it where he found it would have been to resign it to the next dog that should come by; "for those rascally curs,' said Hector, "make no due distinction between the ego and the non ego, and the things which pertain to each." So Hector bolted across the field, and hid the bone in the further hedge; and then came back to me with a peculiarly waggish expression in his tail, which I knew very well to signify a bone is a bone, and I don't wish it boned;" and we walked on gravely together, conversing about the crops, the weather, and free trade. "Let us import our corn," said Ilector, "and keep up the beef and mutton of old England." You will readily guess that as we returned through the field, Hector did not forget his bone. He carried it home with him; and that same evening he saw me take a plum cake out of a cupboard, having previously been present when I locked it up therein. "Ah!" said he, "I observe that you likewise act, my good master, upon instinct." Truly, between instinct and reason we draw very arbitrary lines. 66 Hector is a clever dog: he takes after his father. You remember his father, Nero, that used to live at the brushmaker's. They were wont to send out Nero with money and a basket, to the shops of the butcher and baker. The smell of the steak in the basket would draw a whole host of lesser dogs about him; and I have seen him, in such a case, set the basket on the pavement, and retire to the further side of the street, looking back with an expression that signified, as plainly as the phonetic alphabet could accomplish the terms, "Touch it who dare! Ware Daniel Forrester." 66 But to go back to our subject. What was it? Oh, the disagreeables incidental to the clerical profession: and I was talking of school-keeping as the harsh and grating strife of tyrants and of foes." Well, I will commit it to your own reminiscences; requesting you to consider whether, when you were at school, you had a very pleasant time of it; and whether you think the master's was much more delightful. There is another course open to the clergyman without a living, and hard up for a livelihood. He may emigrate as a missionary. With every respect for missionary labours, I cannot think that, regarded merely in a worldly view, this is a resource to be willingly adopted. I will not, whilst your son is the subject in our mouths, remind you of Sidney Smith's joke about cold parson on the sideboard; nor of that other joke of his about agreeing with the man that eats you. But it seems quite plain that the advantages of emigrating in the character of a missionary are not such as to be taken into account by the man who adopts the Church as a profession, merely upon grounds of the opportunities offered by it for worldly advancement. Thus I have plainly pointed out what, without the least doubt in the world, had just as plainly occurred to you before-that the Church, considered only in a worldly view, has points to recommend it as a profession, and points that should cause hesitation. But it is my private opinion, my dear Gondicarius, that it is one that should not be adopted merely from mundane motives; and as I feel convinced you will coincide with me in this view-particularly as your son would have no distinct prospect of a bishopric, nor even, I believe, of a good fellowship or living-I would recommend that he should consider the ' question for himself, and decide according to his own impulses, seconded by his father's experience and practical wisdom. Well, then, there is the bar. That is highly respectable. So highly respectable, indeed, as with its overplus of respectability to render respectable doings that would be scoundrelism in any other walk of life. If, for example, you pay your tailor for a coat, you expect him to send it home; and would feel yourself justified in denouncing him as a rascal if he declined to do so on the plea that he had likewise sold it to another person, and that it was impossible to deliver it to both. But in the honourable and liberal profession of the bar, it is perfectly legal, decent, and in every way justifiable indeed, the daily practice of men who are in training as the arbiters of justice from those most noble thrones, the benches of our British courts of law-to receive payment in advance for a specific object, and to neglect the duty for which they have been so paid, either because the time and talent bargained for has been sold likewise to another, or because some fox-hunt or yacht party has offered a more enticing "refresher." But if the barrister sometimes neglect what association of ideas makes us consider his duty to his client, he balances the account at other times by excess of zeal. What would be mean, dastardly, despicable, in other circumstances, is honourable when sheltered beneath the wig and gown of this most liberal and learned profession, and undertaken for the purpose of "gaining a cause;" the question, even, of whether that cause be rightful or wrongful not weighing for a moment in the matter. To seek to damage, by inuendo, the characters of upright men-to insult from behind the screen of law those whom he would quail to meet in the open arena of the world-to humble respectable age-to terrify the weak-to call up the burning and torturing blush upon the cheek, and tears into the eyes of modest womanhood-to reduce to stony silence the lips of truth, by a display of the Gorgon face of British practical justice-these are courses which, whilst they would damn the pilferer, the swindler, the assassin for hire, to a deeper hell of obloquy, do but add gloss to the laurels that encircle the brow of the successful advocate. I will not speak of remembered cases, in which, out of some most distorted notion of duty, counsel have pledged their honour in a solemn manner to what they have known to have been false, because those are exceptional; phenomena of abnormal idiosyncracies of view; fungus growths within the great social ulcer I am considering, but not characteristics of the disease. These are not among the admitted proprieties of practice. You will think that the "gentlemen of the robe" are not in favour with me. You are mistaken, Gondicarius. Out of court there is scarcely any other class of men whom I so much respect and esteem. Out of court your barrister is, nine times out of ten, a delightful acquaintance. His mind is well stored, and he is practised in the arts by which the stores of the mind are turned to account in conversation. Out of court he practises the most punctilious courtesy, has the nicest sense of honour, apprehends distinctly, and balances delicately the multiplex obligations of social life, and rules himself in accordance therewith. He has ever before him the dangers and manifold evils of doing wrongfully, even in apparently slight degrees; and the course of his studies leads, certainly, to subtle discrimination in matters of ethical nicety. The court seems to offer a larger valve of escape for the injustice, and tyranny, and pride, and tendencies to sophisticate-all the bad passions and habits that constitute "the imputation hereditary ours"-than most other conditions of life present: and truly so much of these are evolved that we may expect a reduced proportion for the intercourse of life. We must not judge of men always by the degree in which they conform to our abstract views of moral propriety, but make considerable allowances where they deviate from this to adapt themselves to some conventional standard. Indeed, wherever error is conventional, we should lay it to the account of the society in which it prevails, not charge it upon individual partners in the firm. It would now be a great moral enormity in judge and jury to condemn an old woman to be burned for keeping a cat; but two hundred years ago the enormity was chargeable upon the superstition of the age, not upon jury or judge. And as "the thoughts of men are widened by the process of the suns," I believe, Gondicarius, the time will come when the every-day doings of our courts of law, in this our boasted nineteenth century, will be looked back upon as indications of a period of but semi-enlightenment, of very imperfect social liberty. We live in an age of reforms, but the business of social reformation has as yet but commenced. The system of so-called justice has great changes to undergo. At present law is a kind of chess, where black and white have an equal chance; nothing depends upon the men; all upon the players. There are, of course, exceptions. You and I, Gondicarius, for example, have each won a cause; and in our individual instances, it was no doubt the distinctness of our right that produced the result in our favour; but under the best of circumstances, law, as we both can testify, is a game that is not won without the loss of some pieces; and in general, the story of Justice and the oyster holds true to this day. The game is exciting and amusing to those who make the moves; but were the men upon the board, who undergo the checks, anything else than blocks, they would understand that the amusement is not contrived for their advantage. Although, under the present practice, I cannot but regard the profession of the bar as -l'arte Da vender parolette, auzi menzogne, I would not, nevertheless, on that account recommend you to withhold your son from it, if the fountain of his genius manifest any strong disposition to deliver its waters into that channel. For I regard the evils to which I have referred as by no means necessary to the honourable mystery of an advocate; and it would be a note-worthy thing, Gondicarius, if your son should introduce the first hyssop for the removal of the present unclean inward state of the profession. There are other considerations bearing upon the question of how far it may be wise for him to adventure in this path. You know it is proverbially the lot of a large majority of young barristers to spend eight or ten years in paring their nails; and though if that labour be skilfully performed, it may confer some additional grace upon the finger tips, it is a question whether this advantage can be commensurate with the outlay in time, thought, pen-knives, and diamond dust. Again, in the profession of the bar, a break down in the commencement of a career may be fatal; and a break down may occur, without any lack of talent, through diffidence, or some mere freak of fortune. In this point, the church offers a great advantage over the bar; in the former there is no such thing as breaking down, after the path is once entered upon; any dunce that can once straddle over the pons asinorum of his examination—and precious dunces do, by some accident, accomplish that-is thereafter as good for the best living and the largest parish as the deepest theologian among them all. Yet there are good "possibilities," as Sir Hugh Evans hath it, appertinent to the profession of the bar. There is reporting, either parliamentary or that of the law courts, and sometimes of the police-offices; and writing law-books, newspaper leaders, and magazine articles. There is writing for the stage; there is spinning poetry for Moses, and the other advertisers; and there is copying sermons at a shilling a piece. But one of the most tempting considerations is the tyranny the bar exercises over the solicitors, who tyrannise over the rest of mankind; and the sublime contempt with which the professors of the former E |