Yet it was this learned and successful counsel, alone of the party, who knew the poet’s works through and through, and had the list of them at his finger-ends. Good Master Chaucer for this touch we offer hearty thanks! Was it in Herrick’s mind when he penned his fine tribute to Selden?
“I, who have favoured many, come to be
Graced, now at last, or glorified by thee.”
Wits and poets have had many hard things to say in jest and in earnest about the legal profession and its work. Herrick bracketed law and lawyers with diseases and doctors, in a fashion hinting that the relation of cause and effect existed between both pairs:—
“As many laws and lawyers do express,
Nought but a kingdom’s ill-affectedness.
Even so those streets and houses do but show
Store of diseases where physicians flow.”
It was an old story this linking of the practitioners of law and medicine in one yoke of abuse. The reason given for both categories in early satire is sufficiently curious. It was because they took fees! Walter Map declared the Cistercian creed to be that no man could serve God without mammon. Ancient satire equally objected to the service of man, either legally or medically, under these conditions. “The Romaunt of the Rose” has the traditional refrain of other strictures in verse, when it declares that
“Physiciens and advocates,
Gon right by the same yates,yates, gates
They selle hir science for winning.winning, gain
····
For they nil in no maner greeno kind of good will
Do right nought for charitee.”
The same idea, precisely, finds voice in the poem attributed to Walter Map, wherein the doctor and the lawyer come together under the lash, because no hope can be based upon either of them unless there be money in the case. “But if the marvellous man see coin, the very worst disease is quite curable, the very falsest cause just, praiseworthy, pious, true, and pleasing to God.” Perhaps these ancient sarcasms were keener on the leech than the lawyer. “The Romaunt of the Rose” goes so far as to say that if the physicians had their way of it,
“Everiche man shulde be seke,
And though they dye, they set not a leke
After: whan they the gold have take
Ful litel care for hem they make.
They wolde that fourty were seke at onis!
Ye, two hundred in flesh and bonis!
And yit two thousand as I gesse
For to encresen her richesse.”