rofiting his fame and pocket by means
of only a hurried glance at the elaborate brief which his junior has "got
up" for him?

Some one has said that the barrister works hard, lives well, and dies
poor. Regarding the first two conditions of his life there is little doubt
upon the question of truth; the dying in poverty _may be_ problematical.
Yet in a recent print, professing to furnish a list of wealthy tax-payers,
the list contained four lawyers, and only one was a barrister. The
instance proves little, for a lawyer may be very rich and yet pay no
taxes. The assessors may fight shy of his bell-pull as they go their
rounds, because of his penchant to find flaws in their actions and bring
them official discredit in an apparently laborious task, but in reality a
sinecure of an employment.

We have often asked ourselves if barristers have stomachs. Bowels of
compassion they have not, that is certain; but have they stomachs? Say
nine times in a year they dine at the same hour of the day; and then spoon
their soup with the blood all drawn from the digestive apparatus to feed
the brain. Yet they eat like aldermen and drink like German princes....

This much of idle reverie, as, with pen in hand, we laid down the two
bulky and elaborately-published volumes whose title we have taken as text;
this much of glance at the condition of the young and old advocate of
to-day, before we digest our reflections upon the advocate and jurist of
the past.

It was our privilege in our legal novitiate (this is but _a phrase_; for a
lawyer is always in his novitiate) to have been, at the Cambridge Law
School, a pupil of Mr. Justice Story; and thus to have drank at the very
fountain head of constitutional law--that branch of our national
jurisprudence which can least fluctuate. Judges of a day and not of a
generation, or crazy legislators with spasmodic wisdom, may alter, and
overturn, and mystify by simplification, the laws and usages of every-day
life; but it is scarcely to be apprehended that the current of our
constitutional law will ever be diverted from original channels. There is
danger rather of its being dammed into stagnation.

While fully aware of his faults and foibles as a man, and his
idiosyncracies as a judge and a legal writer, we have never wavered in
loyalty to his judicial majesty, or found a flaw in the regard we paid to
his memory. And no book was more welcome to Zimmerman in his solitude than
these volumes regarding th