life ideas, and if he have observed character and manner in different ranks and situations before the time comes when he must give his undivided attention to books and professional studies, probably during the course of his serious reading witty and ludicrous analogies will be suggested between what he has seen and what he is studying. These trains of amusing coincidences, connected with dry learning, will tend to fix it by pleasurable associations in the memory, and will also increase the taste for wit and the power of being witty. Whoever will take, not the trouble, but the pleasure, of perusing "The Pleaders' Guide," will find, in the brilliancy of wit in the text, and the learning in the notes, innumerable examples of the advantage which a man of wit obtains from the union of the most recondite and the most trivial knowledge. The Pleaders' Guide, in which the fictions of the law are embellished by all the fictions of poetry, could not have been written by any but a well-informed lawyer; one who united professional knowledge to an acquaintance with classical literature, with the manners and humours of men, and with the common business and arts of life. That the talent for wit is highly advantageous to a lawyer in the course of his practice, will not be disputed by any one who knows the world, or the habits of the profession. Many a point has been made good in the courts by a ready turn of wit or humour.

"My lords, the judges, smile, and you're dismiss'd."

It may be apprehended, that, if a young lad should spend the time between quitting school and going to college in travelling and seeing varieties of new objects, he would forget all that he had acquired at school, before he went to college.

But this objection may be obviated by selecting for his travelling companion a man of classical learning; and even if this could not be done, the classics are now reduced to such compendious forms, that a young man could not be much encumbered, even on horseback, by Horace, Homer, or Virgil: and books are now so easily to be had, that there would be little danger of his not being able to meet with some one of the ancient authors in a bookseller's shop in any country town on his journey. Where the will is not wanting, the means of acquiring or preserving knowledge are seldom found deficient. By giving up one hour a day to classical studies, a youth would retain all his school acquisitions, and would, by this scheme of travelling, collect a variety of other useful and entertaining ideas.

Perhaps it may be thought, that the vulgar sort of knowledge we recommend would not mix well with the elegant literature of Greece and Rome; but it should be recollected, that the coarsest materials are used in purifying those which are the most costly: what does not coalesce with the purer parts, sinks through the mass, and refines the whole.

Public opinion has varied in England at different times concerning the advantages of academical education for lawyers. Formerly, there were no adequate instructions given at our universities on the nature of English laws, or on general jurisprudence; and young men, after having acquired a taste for nothing but elegant literature or science during their college education, went unprepared in their peculiar profession to commence the dry and thorny study of the law at the inns of

court. The transition was violent and shocking, especially to young students of any taste or genius; the difficulties by which they were beset are thus feelingly described by Sir Henry Spelman, who wrote in the sixteenth century.

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My mother sent me to London to learn our law; when "I had saluted the threshold, I found a foreign language, a "barbarous dialect, an uncouth method, a mass not only large, but which was to be continually borne on the shoul"ders; and I confess that my mind sunk within me."

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Blackstone, who wrote a hundred and fifty years after Spelman, laments with still more forcible eloquence the difficulties and dangers, to which the young students of the law were exposed in his times.

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"A raw and inexperienced youth, in the most dangerous season of life, is transplanted on a sudden into the midst of "allurements to pleasure, without any restraint or check, but "what his own prudence can suggest: with no public direc❝tion in what course to pursue his inquiries; no private as"sistance to remove the distresses and difficulties, which will "embarrass a beginner. In this situation he is expected to sequester himself from the world, and by a tedious lonely process to extract the theory of law from a mass of undigested learning, or else by an assiduous attendance on the courts, to pick up theory and practice together, sufficient to qualify him for the ordinary run of business. How little "therefore is it to be wondered at, that we hear of such frequent miscarriages; that so many men of bright imagina

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"tions grow weary of so unpromising a search, and addict "themselves wholly to amusements, or other less innocent pursuits; and that so many persons of moderate capacities "confuse themselves at first setting out, and continue ever "dark and puzzled during the remainder of their lives!"

Parents were by these failures convinced, that there was something wrong in the course of education that was then pursued; but, instead of discerning the true cause of their sons' errours and difficulties, the want of some preparatory instruction in the principles of law, they laid the blame altogether upon academical education, which they fancied must have given a distaste for the severer studies necessary for a barrister. Consequently it became the fashion to lay aside all liberal education at the university, and to place young men intended for the bar under the care of attorneys and solicitors in London, who undertook to initiate them into the mysteries of legal practice. Blackstone with great judgment and spirit inveighed against this contracted scheme of education; he observed, that if practice be the whole that a barrister be taught, it must be the whole that he will know: and even this practice, for want of being founded on general principles, will be liable to errour, for the least variation from established precedent must bewilder the mere man of form, who has no reason for the rule he follows. Blackstone did something better than declaim against these errours and evils; he contributed much towards remedying them. His excellent "Commentaries" on the laws of England, being first delivered in the form of lectures at Oxford, drew numbers of students to the university to hear them; and it was perceived, that the elegance of litera

ture and the solidity of law-learning were not incompatible". Blackstone insisted upon the advantages of an academical education for barristers, and prophesied with vehemence, that, if the practice of breeding up lawyers at attorneys' desks were persisted in, the profession would be utterly degraded, no gentlemen would send their sons to the bar, and no young men of talents and spirit would submit to the drudgery and debasement of such a mode of tuition. These arguments, and the authority of a high name prevailed; and it is now the general custom to send young men intended for the bar to one of our universities, to lay a foundation of various literature, and a general knowledge of the principles of foreign and English jurisprudence, before they go to the inns of court, or follow their professional studies. The time of apprenticeship to attorneys, solicitors, and special pleaders, is now postponed till after the student has been at college.

As to the choice of a university, what has been said of governments is fairly applicable:

"That which is best administered is best."

The choice must vary with circumstances; wherever there are at the time the ablest professors, and best public lecturers, or wherever there may happen to be the most assiduous young men, literature and industry will be most in fashion: these considerations should guide the decision. The desire for im

• The writer of this essay was witness to the great effect, which Blackstone's lectures produced when they were first given at Oxford; he can appeal to a few more of Blackstone's auditors, alas! a very few, who are still alive, and will give testimony, that this praise is not exaggerated.