Project Gutenberg's The Bay State Monthly, Volume 3, No. 6, by Various
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Title: The Bay State Monthly, Volume 3, No. 6
Author: Various
Release Date: February 9, 2006 [EBook #17726]
Language: English
Character set encoding: ASCII
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[Illustration: Henry W. Paine]
THE BAY STATE MONTHLY.
_A Massachusetts Magazine._
VOL. III. NOVEMBER, 1885. NO. VI.
* * * * *
HENRY W. PAINE.
BY PROF. WILLIAM MATHEWS, LL.D.
Among the callings acknowledged to be not only useful, but indispensable
to society, there is no one, except the medical, which has been oftener
the butt of vulgar ridicule and abuse than the legal. "Lawyers and
doctors," says a writer on Wit and Humor in the _British Quarterly
Review_, "are the chief objects of ridicule in the jest-books of all
ages." But whatever may be the disadvantages of the Law as a profession,
in spite of the aspersions cast upon it by disappointed suitors,
over-nice moralists, and malicious wits, it can boast of one signal
advantage over all other business callings,--that eminence in it is
always a test of ability and acquirement. While in every other
profession quackery and pretension may gain for men wealth and honor,
forensic renown can be won only by rare natural powers aided by profound
learning and varied experience in trying causes. The trickster and the
charlatan, who in medicine and even in the pulpit find it easy to dupe
their fellow-men, find at the bar that all attempts to make shallowness
pass for depth, impudence for wit, and fatal for wisdom, are instantly
baffled. Not only is an acute, sagacious, and austere bench a perilous
foe to the trickery of the ignorant or half-prepared advocate, but the
veteran practitioners around him are quick to detect every sign of
mental weakness, disingenuous artifice, or disposition to substitute
sham for reality. Forensic life i
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