spoke with a good deal of feeling and spirit, and when
the Jury had got accustomed to him, they listened most attentively; and
the result is what I tell you."

[9] To this gentleman he dedicated, in 1843, the third edition of
his "Mercantile Law." Within a very few months of each other, both
of them died--Mr. Richards himself having, as he once told me,
ruined his health by his intense and laborious prosecution of his
profession. He had found it necessary to retire a year or two before
his death. His brother, also, Mr. Griffith Richards, Q.C., one of
the ablest members of the Chancery Bar, recently died under similar
circumstances.

Following the course of his professional progress, in 1840 Mr. Smith was
appointed a revising barrister for one of the counties on his circuit,
by Mr. Baron Alderson, who was personally a stranger to him, and named
him for the office solely on account of his eminent fitness for the
post. He held it for several years, giving unmixed satisfaction to all
parties, until precluded from further retaining it, in reference, I
believe, to a rule of etiquette respecting seniority, prevailing at the
bar of the Oxford circuit.

I recollect that, on one occasion, while he was waiting, apparently in
vain, for the chance of professional employment, and not long before the
occurrence of that moment of despondency already mentioned, when he
contemplated quitting the profession, he and I were walking in the
Temple Gardens, and he said, "Now, if I were to choose my future life at
the bar, I should, of all things, like to have, and should be delighted
with, a first-rate pleading business; not made up of many petty things,
but of a few very important cases,--of 'heavy business,' in short. I
feel that I could get on very well with it, and that it is just the
thing suited to me. It would exercise my mind, and also secure me a
handsome income, and, before long, an independence. What I should do
_then_ I don't know." His wishes were amply gratified a few years
afterwards, as the reader must have already seen. So rapidly, indeed,
did the calls of private practice increase upon him, that he was forced,
early in 1843, to resign his lectureship at the Law Institution, having,
in fact, got fairly into the stream of his desired "first-rate pleading
business" to an extent which heavily taxed both his physical and mental
energies. Whatever was brought to him, he attended to thoroughly, nev