The young lawyers of a year back are, however, five years—perhaps ten—in advance of the lawyers of this year's growth. The latter have greater rivalry in the hordes of practitioners from the interior whom the "new code" have driven from their trespass quare clausum fregit into the city. Many of them, too, were men of mark in their ports of departure, bold and confident in their new haven!
One field, however, in the legal township of this city, offers room upon its face for tillers—the field of advocacy! It is ploughed by some twenty or thirty, and harrowed by some fifty or sixty. There are a dozen whom the ghosts of Nisi Prius flock to hear upon great occasions. And these will long hold the monopoly.
Why?
Because the advocate and barrister must have had vast experience at Nisi Prius (or the court where matters of fact are investigated by judge and jury); have acquired a practised tact; have had opportunities of testing their own calibre to know if they are fitted for emergencies—as the gunsmith tests his barrels before he "stocks" them. And the young lawyer has small opportunity afforded him to acquire this tact—to permit this testing. If he can play "devil" for a few years to some barrister of extended practice, or scent "occasions" like a blood-hound on the trail of the valuable fugitive from justice, then he is a happy man, and is in the fair way of soon becoming a monopolist himself.
Any juryman of two years' standing will corroborate our statement as to the openness of the field of legal advocacy. How often has he seen cause after cause "set down," "reserved," or "put off," because counsel are engaged elsewhere? How often has he heard the same advocate in four or five causes in the same week, in the same court, changing positions like the queen of an active chess-board; profiting 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[pg 177] flaw in the regard we paid to his memory. And no book was more welcome to Zimmerman in his solitude than these volumes regarding the illustrious judge, prepared by his son, were welcome to our Christmas-holiday leisure.