say,
that he met with no encouragement as a special pleader, consummately
qualified as he was for success in that department, and scarcely ever to
be found absent from his chambers; where he was at all hours to be
found, modest, patient, though sometimes a little dejected,--yet

True as the dial to the sun,
Although it be not shone upon.

I question whether, during this two or three years' bitter and
disheartening probation, he made more than thirty, or at least forty
guineas; his annual certificate for leave thus to do--nothing, cost him,
nevertheless, L12. Yet I never once heard him, nor I undertake to say,
did any of his friends, express fretfulness or impatience at his
disheartening lack of employment. He manifested, on the contrary, a
quiet fortitude that was touching to witness. I recollect him once,
however, when we were conversing on the subject, saying rather
pensively, "If one has not connexions, and cannot make them, it is next
to impossible to get any business." The professional public possess
conclusive and permanent evidence of the admirable use which he made of
his time, during the first year or two of his essaying to practise as a
pleader; for in July 1834, two months after having been called to the
bar, he gave to the world a work which, as soon as it had become known,
raised him to the very highest rank of legal writers. The more it was
read or referred to the higher was the estimate formed of its writer's
intellect and learning, alike by the bench and the bar; for he had most
discreetly, yet boldly, chosen a subject of great difficulty and
importance, properly treated by no work extant, and which gave him
opportunity of supplying a long-acknowledged deficiency in professional
literature. He undertook, in fact, to produce a comprehensive practical
treatise, within an exceedingly moderate compass, on "Mercantile Law:"
and he succeeded to admiration--did this neglected young man of scarce
twenty-five years old--in producing, entirely unassisted, a work
signally calculated to attain the proposed object; condensing into a
very small space, and with almost unerring accuracy, a great amount of
exceedingly difficult law, beautifully and perspicuously arranged, so as
that even laymen might read as they ran, and receive guidance in the
most perplexing exigencies of business, while the ablest lawyers, might
safely refer to the pages of the "Compendium" for a terse and true
statement of the result of m