ll have a venerable man whose
name is famous, who has lived for half a century in the Inn, whose
brains are full of books, and whose shelves are stored with classical
and legal lore. He has lived alone all these fifty years, alone and for
himself, amassing learning, and compiling a fortune. He comes home now
at night alone from the club, where he has been dining freely, to the
lonely chambers where he lives a godless old recluse. When he dies, his
Inn will erect a tablet to his honour, and his heirs burn a part of his
library. Would you like to have such a prospect for your old age, to
store up learning and money, and end so? But we must not linger too long
by Mr. Doomsday's door. Worthy Mr. Grump lives over him, who is also an
ancient inhabitant of the Inn, and who, when Doomsday comes home to read
Catullus, is sitting down with three steady seniors of his standing,
to a steady rubber at whist, after a dinner at which they have consumed
their three steady bottles of Port. You may see the old boys asleep at
the Temple Church of a Sunday. Attorneys seldom trouble them, and
they have small fortunes of their own. On the other side of the third
landing, where Pen and Warrington live, till long after midnight, sits
Mr. Paley, who took the highest honours, and who is a fellow of his
college, who will sit and read and note cases until two o'clock in the
morning; who will rise at seven and be at the pleader's chambers as soon
as they are open, where he will work until an hour before dinner-time;
who will come home from Hall and read and note cases again until
dawn next day, when perhaps Mr. Arthur Pendennis and his friend Mr.
Warrington are returning from some of their wild expeditions. How
differently employed Mr. Paley has been! He has not been throwing
himself away: he has only been bringing a great intellect laboriously
down to the comprehension of a mean subject, and in his fierce grasp of
that, resolutely excluding from his mind all higher thoughts, all better
things, all the wisdom of philosophers and historians, all the thoughts
of poets; all wit, fancy, reflection, art, love, truth altogether--so
that he may master that enormous legend of the law, which he proposes
to gain his livelihood by expounding. Warrington and Paley had been
competitors for university honours in former days, and had run each
other hard; and everybody said now that the former was wasting his time
and energies, whilst all people praised Paley for hi