out. I am bound to say there was a very great charm
to me in the idea of lecturing my constituents. I know it does sometimes
occur that constituents lecture their representatives, especially in
Scotland, and I was anxious, if I might, to have an opportunity of
lecturing those who had so many opportunities of reading, no doubt very
useful lectures to me. But the difficulty was to find a subject. My own
profession suggested itself to me as a fit topic for a lecture, but
unfortunately my profession is not a popular one. I do not know how it
is, but you never find a lawyer introduced either into a play or into a
three-volume novel except for the purpose of exposing him as a scoundrel
in the one, and having him kicked in the third act in the other. I do
not know how it is, but so it is. All the heroes of fiction either in
the drama or in the novel are found in the ranks--no, not in the ranks of
the army, but in the officers of the army, or in the clergy. It is so in
novels, it is so in dramas; Mr. Attorney-General, I believe it is so in
real life.

And so, looking about for a subject, being reminded, as I was, that the
subject of the law was unpopular, I turned--as I have often done in the
hour of trouble--I turned to my Dickens, and there I found that at any
rate in Dickens we have a great literary man who has been impartial in
his treatment of lawyers. He has seen both the good and the bad in them,
and it occurred to me that my lecture might take the form of dealing with
the lawyers of Dickens. I soon found that was too great a subject to be
dealt with within the short space which could be accorded to any
reasonable lecturer by any reasonable audience. I found that the novels
of Dickens abounded with lawyers, to use a perhaps apt expression. Having
regard to my profession, they fairly bristled with them, and so I
determined to take the lawyers of one of his books; and I chose as that
book "Pickwick"; and I chose as my title "The Law and the Lawyers of
'Pickwick.'"

Ladies and gentlemen, it is an extraordinary thing when we look at this
book, when we reflect that it contains within its pages no less than
three hundred and sixty characters, all drawn vividly and sharply, all
expressing different phases of human thought, and of human life, and
every one of them original; when we reflect that that book was written by
a young man of twenty-three years of age. In that book I found that he
portrayed with life-like f