Henry IV., can a pupil be so well
grounded in the rudiments and humanities as in our grammar and public
schools. A studious, pains-taking, and docile youth, will, no doubt,
learn a great deal, no matter where he has been placed in pupilage;
but we have heard from a contemporary of M. Rollin, that he was not
particularly distinguished either for his industry or his docility in
early life. The earliest days of the reign of Charles X. saw M. Ledru
Rollin an _etudiant en droit_ in Paris. Though the schools of law
had been re-established during the Consulate pretty much after the
fashion in which they existed in the time of Louis the XIV., yet the
application of the _alumni_ was fitful and desultory, and perhaps
there were no two classes in France, at the commencement of 1825. who
were more imbued with the Voltarian philosophy and the doctrines and
principles of Rousseau, than the _eleves_ of the schools of law and
medicine.

Under a king so sceptical and voluptuous, so much of a _philosophie_
and _phyrroneste_, as Louis XVIII., such tendencies were likely to
spread themselves through all ranks of society--to permeate from
the very highest to the very lowest classes: and not all the lately
acquired asceticism of the monarch, his successor, nor all the
efforts of the Jesuits could restrain or control the tendencies of
the _etudiants en droit_. What the law-students were antecedently and
subsequent to 1825, we know from the _Physiologie de l'Homme de Loi_;
and it is not to be supposed that M. Ledru Rollin, with more ample
pecuniary means at command, very much differed from his fellows.
After undergoing a three years' course of study, M. Rollin obtained
a diploma as a _licencie en droit_, and commenced his career as
_stagiare_ somewhere about the end of 1826 or the beginning of 1827.
Toward the close of 1829, or in the first months of 1830, he was, we
believe, placed on the roll of advocates; so that he was called to
the bar, or, as they say in France, received an advocate, in his
twenty-second or twenty-third year.

The first years of an advocate, even in France, are generally passed
in as enforced an idleness as in England. Clients come not to consult
the greenhorn of the last term; nor does any _avoue_ among our
neighbors, any more than any attorney among ourselves, fancy that an
old head is to be found on young shoulders. The years 1830 and 1831
were not marked by any oratorical effort of the author of the _Decline
of E