and public schools. A
studious, painstaking, 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 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 Rosseau, than
the _eleves_ of the schools of law and medicine.

Under a king so skeptical and voluptuous, so much of a _philosophe_ and
_pyrrhoneste_, 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 _Physiologic 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 England_; nor was
it till 1832 that, being then one of the youngest of the bar of Paris,
he prepared