ases, tenures, and such-like devil's lingo. Lawyers, according to him,
were a set of thorough humbugs and impostors, who gained their living by
false pretence--that of affording advice and counsel, which every sane
man could better render himself. He was unmistakably mad upon this
subject, and he carried his insane theory into practice. He drew his own
leases, examined the titles of some house-property he purchased, and set
his hand and seal to the final deeds, guided only by his own common-sense
spectacles. Once he bid, at the Auction Mart, as high as fifty-three
thousand pounds for the Holmford estate, Herefordshire; and had he not
been outbidden by young Palliser, son of the then recently-deceased
eminent distiller, who was eager to obtain the property, with a view to a
seat in parliament which its possession was said to almost insure--he
would, I had not at the time the slightest doubt, have completed the
purchase, without for a moment dreaming of submitting the vender's title
to the scrutiny of a professional adviser. Mr. Linden, I should mention,
had been for some time desirous of resigning his business in Mincing Lane
to his son, Thomas Linden, the only child born to him by his long-since
deceased wife, and of retiring, an estated squire-arch, to the _otium
cum._, or _sine dignitate_, as the case might be, of a country life; and
this disposition had of late been much quickened by daily-increasing
apprehensions of negro emancipation and revolutionary interference with
differential duties--changes which, in conjunction with others of similar
character, would infallibly bring about that utter commercial ruin which
Mr. Linden, like every other rich and about-to-retire merchant or
tradesman whom I have ever known, constantly prophesied to be near at
hand and inevitable.

With such a gentleman the firm of Flint & Sharp had only professional
interviews, when procrastinating or doubtful debtors required that he
should put on the screw--a process which, I have no doubt, he would
himself have confidently performed, but for the waste of valuable time
which doing so would necessarily involve. Both Flint and myself were,
however, privately intimate with him--Flint more especially, who had
known him from boyhood--and we frequently dined with him on a Sunday at
his little box at Fulham. Latterly, we had on these occasions met there a
Mrs. Arnold and her daughter Catherine--an apparently amiable, and
certainly very pretty and int