force themselves by
their own merit into places that others would fain have occupied, but
they always run straight, their practice and their performance are
disfigured by no trick, and in the end they bring their honour
untarnished to the goal, and receive the applause even of their
vanquished rivals. With them the Advertising Barrister has no point in
common, save the robes he wears in virtue of his call. For his ambition
is as sordid as the means whereby he attempts to fulfil it are
questionable. He must be credited with the knowledge that his natural
abilities are by themselves insufficient to assure him either fame or
wealth. But he consoles himself by reflecting that if only impudence,
_reclame_, and a taste for the arts of a cadger, be protected by the
hide of a rhinoceros, they are certain to prevail up to a certain point
against the humdrum industry of those inferior beings who hamper
themselves with considerations of honour and good-feeling. It must not
be understood that the Advertiser puffs himself in a literal sense in
the advertising columns of the press. The rules of his profession, to
which even he pays an open deference, forbid this enormity; but in the
subtler methods of gaining a certain attention, and of keeping his name
under the public eye, he has no equal even in the ranks of those who
spend thousands in order that the million may be made happy with soap.

The boyhood and youth of the Advertising Barrister will have been passed
in comparative obscurity. The merchant who relieved the monotony of a
large and profitable wholesale business by treating him as a son,
impressed upon him at an early age the necessity of making the family
history illustrious by soaring beyond commerce to professional
distinction and a fixed income. In furtherance of this scheme the son
was sent to pick up a precarious education at a neighbouring day-school,
where he astonished his companions by his ease in mastering the polite
literature of the ancients and the vulgar fractions of Mr. BARNARD
SMITH, and delighted his masters by the zeal with which he generally
took his stand on the side of authority. Having, however, in the course
of a school examination been detected in the illicit use of a volume of
Bohn's Library, he was called upon for an explanation, and, after
failing to satisfy his examiners that he meant only to reflect credit
upon the school by the accuracy of his translations, he was advised to
leave at the end o