such wore his first surtout. We hear of him reporting later in the
Lord Chancellor's Court, probably for some daily paper; but beyond the
exception which I shall mention presently, we have no record of his
taking an active and direct part in any of those mysterious rites that go
to make up our legal procedure.

Upon this question of the opportunities he had for knowing in what way a
lawyer is trained, I must here acknowledge the debt of gratitude that I
am under to my very good friend Mr. Henry Fielding Dickens, one of her
Majesty's Counsel; and how rejoiced, Mr. Attorney-General, would that
father have been had he been able to see the position which his son has
won for himself. He wrote to me a long and kind letter, in which he gave
me further information as to his father's opportunity for observing
lawyers and their mode of living, and he told me that which I did not
know before, and which I think but few people knew before, namely, that
his father had kept a term or two at one of the Inns of Court. He had
eaten the five or six dinners which is part of the necessary legal
education for a barrister; and he had suffered in consequence the usual
pangs of indigestion. But it is not to that that I wish to allude to-
night. Dickens did that which I venture to think but few have done; for,
giving up all idea of pursuing a legal education, and finding that the
dinners did not agree with him, he got back from the Inns of Court some
of the money which he had deposited at that Inn. You are all familiar
with the process which is known as getting butter out of a dog's mouth; I
venture to think that that is an easy thing compared with getting money
back from an Inn of Court.

But that is not all that Mr. Dickens told me. He wrote down for me an
experience his father once had with the family solicitor, which, I think,
is worth your hearing. "My father's solicitor, Mr. Ouvry," he says, "was
a very well-known man, a thorough man of the world, and one in whose
breast reposed many of the secrets of the principal families of England.
On one occasion my father was in treaty for a piece of land at the back
of Gad's Hill, and it was proposed that there should be an interview with
the owner, a farmer, a very acute man of business, and a very hard nut to
crack. It was arranged that the interview with him should be at Gad's
Hill, and the solicitor came down for the purpose. My father and Ouvry
were sitting over their wine when the ol