the bustling streets of London, or to appear in the Roman vest and toga in Kensington gardens. When Sir William Jones went to the bar, and engaged in active åffairs and real business, he lost or laid aside this Latinised style; his letters then became agreeable, and sometimes really eloquent. The difficulty which many schoolboys and many young men, who have been accounted good scholars, find in writing their own language, seems to arise from their having been exclusively accustomed to the idiom and inversions of Latin, which do not suit our language. It is evidently of great consequence to a barrister to speak and write his own language better than any other; and it is absurd in a professional man, whose time is precious, to waste it in acquiring habits of expression, which must be laid aside when he enters upon his professional

career.

It has already been allowed, there should be pure Latinists, and pure special pleaders; but there is no necessity to join forcibly together two trades, which have nothing in common: it is well that some should, for the advantage of others, be devoted to the study of Greek accents; but it is preposterous to require, that boys intended for professions, in which these things can never be of any use, should begin their education by learning them at an immense expense of labour and time; and all this merely to acquire renown at school and college, or to comply with long established routine and obsolete prejudices. The boys intended for barristers may employ that portion of time, which will thus be saved for them, in acquiring knowledge more congenial to their prófession; for surely nothing can be less congenial than

Ciceronian and law Latin. They may learn English history, and some general acquaintance with English literature; they may have leisure to read books of good reasoning on any subject, which is the best method to improve their powers of judgment and argumentation. It has been already suggested, that themes for schoolboys should be on subjects which they can understand, not on abstract topics, which they cannot comprehend, and on which, if they be compelled to write or speak, they can only string words and sentences together, to which they annex no accurate meaning. For the themes of lawyers, questions should be proposed relative to facts or opinions, which may particularly exercise the talent for discrimination, and the power of stating arguments clearly on each side of a question, and of showing where truth preponderates. Questions from real trials might be proposed, which involve no points of law, but which relate merely to the balance of probabilities, the estimating the value of contradictory evidence, or the plain principles of right and justice. A serio-comic book has been published, containing real cases in a court of conscience, which will afford ample matter for such exercises. The titles of some of the cases are, “The meek Husband and bouncing Wife," "The Coffin," "All in the Wrong," "The Merchant and the Button-maker," "The Pattern Card," "Friendship destroyed by the Fall of a Tree," "A Trip to Litchfield Races," &c. The young reader may be assured, that these attractive titles do not resemble the insipid heads of chapters in a novel; they have some reference to the contents of the chapters themselves;

66

• Hutton's Minutes of a Court of Conscience, at Birmingham.

and the whimsical mixture of good sense, oddity, and honesty in this volume, will repay those who take the trouble of looking it over.

Those who regulate their opinions by ancient authors, may perhaps be reconciled to this indirect mode of instruction, by being told, that a similar plan was proposed by Xenophon. The story of the judgment of Cyrus, in the case of the great and little coat, is on record in every child's miscellany. The system of instructing boys in the principles of justice, as it is recommended in the Cyropedia, and as it is there supposed to have been practised in the public seminaries of Persia, was simply to make the higher classes of boys monitors of those younger, or more ignorant than themselves. These monitors were in their turn subject to have their justice arraigned, and their judgments rejudged. Might not the system of fags and fagging, if it yet remain in our great schools, be reformed? and instead of the tyranny and oppression which it produces, might it not be made useful to the morals and understandings of the different classes and ages of schoolboys? And if boys were thus made judges of each other, and allowed to appeal to their superiors, and be permitted to plead their own causes, would it not be peculiarly good education for lawyers? Not that these discussions should relate to the laws of the constitution: this would introduce a democratic spirit, incompatible with the nature of that monarchy, which every master, and every man of common sense, knows to be necessary for the government of that miniature empire, a school.

Chaptal, Barruel, and other modern French writers on na

tional education, recommend, that, after youth have acquired the rudiments of education in primary schools, they should be prepared for their different professions in what they term des écoles speciales, schools for the special purpose of professional education. In some cases, this system might perhaps be advantageously adopted in England; but for lawyers, separate schools are not necessary, and would in many respects be injurious. An equal cultivation of the powers of the understanding, the acquisition of general knowledge, and a taste for literature, ought to be the objects of attention during the first sixteen or seventeen years of a lawyer's life. Technical instruction in the law should be reserved for a later period. Were boys of eleven or twelve years old taught the nature of legal fictions, or of Ca' Sa's, Ac Etiams, Quo Minuses, and Fieri Facias, and the amiable Doctrina Placitandi, we might make Counsellor Borums or Counsellor Botherums of our pupils, but nothing else. The more abilities the boys possessed, the more certainly this mode of tuition would disgust them with their profession; and the more application they might give to this premature learning, the more it would stint the growth of their reasoning faculties. The study of the law has been reproached with having a contracting power: it might reasonably be apprehended, that this would be felt most sensibly and fatally by children. Boys, who are intended for the bar, should not have their language and ideas confined to the technical dialect, and routine business of the law. This would injure them, both as gentlemen and as orators; it would render them a separate class of legal pedants, who would be insupportable in general society: it would expose them to the sort of ridicule, which, during l'ancien régime in France,

was thrown upon les hommes de robe. Men of the long robe were much less esteemed in polite society, and were in fact men much inferior in manners to our lawyers. This arose partly from the prejudices of the aristocracy, but principally from the contracted and special education which their lawyers received. Had their education been more liberal, and had they acquired a tincture of elegant literature, as well as of lawlearning, they would, like other men of letters, have found their way into what was called polite society, and they would have formed a distinguished part of the aristocracy of talents.

In Britain, a young man intended for the bar receives as liberal an education as a peer. "With the fortune of a pea

sant, I am giving myself the education of a prince," said a celebrated lawyer, while he was going through our course of school and college discipline, and while he was supplying, by his own sagacity and industry, all the deficiencies in our public modes of instruction. This is more or less in the power of every young lawyer; and to some degree this noble ambition may be excited in him even while he is at school. In the intervals of his school studies, in his vacations and holidays, while his mind is opened by affection and pleasure to all strong impressions, his parents should use their vast influence, to inspire generous ambition, to extend his views beyond his school, and his schoolboy tasks or sports, to the forming for himself a manly character and a professional reputation.

School-boys, who have applied assiduously to Greek and Latin, are often what is termed fit to go to college before they can be prudently trusted there. It is unjust and dis