eneral, or a sergeant, or a leading counsel, quietly talking
over a matter of law with the judge, or a matter of fact with the jury,
like men of business as they are, and shunning, as they would a
rattlesnake, all clap-trap arguments, figures, flowers, and the obsolete
embroidery of rhetoric?

The days of romantic eloquence are fled--the great constitutional
questions that called forth "thoughts that breathe, and words that
burn," from men like Erskine, are _determined_. Would you have men
oratorical over a bottomry bond, Demosthenic about an action of trespass
on the case, or a rule to compute?

To be sure, when Follett practised before committees of the House of
Commons, and, by chance, any question involving points of interest and
difficulty in Parliamentary law and practice came before the Court,
there was something worth hearing: the _opportunity_ drew out the _man_,
and the _orator_ stepped before the _advocate_. Even now, sometimes, it
is quite refreshing to get a topic in these Courts worthy of Austin, and
Austin working at it. But no man need go to look for orators in our
ordinary courts of law; judgment, patience, reading, and that rare
compound of qualities known and appreciated by the name of _tact_, tell
with judges, and influence juries; the days of _palaver_ are gone, and
the talking heroes extinguished for ever.

All this is well known in London; but the three or four millions (it may
be _five_) of great men, philosophers, poets, orators, patriots, and the
like, in the rural districts, require to be informed of this our
declension from the heroics, in order to appreciate, or at least to
understand, the modesty, sobriety, business-like character, and division
of labour, in the vast amount of talent abounding in every department of
life in London.

London overflows with talent. You may compare it, for the purpose of
illustration, to one of George Robins' patent filters, into which pours
turbid torrents of Thames water, its sediment, mud, dirt, weeds, and
rottenness; straining through the various _strata_, its grosser
particles are arrested in their course, and nothing that is not pure,
transparent, and limpid is transmitted. In the great filter of London
life, conceit, pretension, small provincial abilities, _pseudo_-talent,
_soi-disant_ intellect, are tried, rejected, and flung out again. True
genius is tested by judgment, fastidiousness, emulation, difficulty,
privation; and, passing through many ord