Page:The Green Bag (1889–1914), Volume 01.pdf/586

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Perseverance. and said, " I have only £200 in the world; I have saved it a little at a time, for my two daughters. Here is your share, my chil dren." Then he gave his daughter £100, and she handed it to the bridegroom on the spot. The good minister smiled approval; and they sat down to what fine folk call breakfast, but they called dinner, and it was. After dinner and the usual ceremonies, the bridegroom rose and surprised them a little. He said, " I am very sorry to leave you, but I have a particular business to attend to; it will take me just one hour." Of course there was a look or two inter changed, especially by every female there present; but the confidence in him was too great to be disturbed, and this was his first eccentricity. He left them, went to Gray's Inn, put down his name as a student for the bar, paid away his wife's dowry in fees, and re turned within the hour. Next day the married clerk was at the office as usual, and entered on a twofold life. He worked as a clerk till five, dined in the Hall of Gray's Inn as a sucking barrister, and studied hard at night. This was followed by a still stronger example of duplicate existence, and one without a par allel in my reading and experience, — he became a writer and produced a master piece, which, as regarded the practice of our courts, became at once the manual of attor neys, counsel, and judges. The author, though his book was entitled "Practice," showed some qualities of a ju rist, and corrected soberly but firmly unsci entific legislative and judicial blunders. So here was a student of Gray's Inn, supposed to be picking up in that Inn a small smattering of law, yet, to diversify his crude studies, instructing mature counsel and correcting the judges themselves, at whose chambers he attended daily, cap in hand, as an attorney's clerk. There's an intellectual hotch-potch for you! All this did not in his Inn qualify him to be a bar rister; but years and dinners did. After

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some weary years he took the oaths at Westminster, and vacated by that act his place in Bishop's office, and was a pauper — for an afternoon. But work that has been long and tedi ously prepared can be executed quickly; and adverse circumstances, when Persever ance conquers them, turn round and be come allies. The ex-clerk and young barrister had ploughed and sowed with such pains and labor, that he reaped with comparative ease. Half the managing clerks in London knew him and believed in him. They had the ears of their employers, and brought him pleadings to draw and motions to make. His book, too, brought him clients, and he was soon in full career as a junior counsel and special pleader. Senior counsel, too, found that they could rely upon his zeal, accuracy, and learning. They began to re quest that he might be retained with them in difficult cases, and he became first junior counsel at the bar; and so much for Per severance. Time rolled its ceaseless course, and a silk gown was at his disposal. Now, a popular junior counsel cannot always afford to take silk, as they call it. Indeed, if he is learned but not eloquent, he may ruin himself by the change. But the remarkable man whose career I am epitomizing did not hesitate; he still pushed onward, and so one morning the Lord Chancellor sat for an hour in the Queen's Bench, and Mr. Robert Lush was appointed one of her Majesty's Counsel learned in the Law, and then and there, by the Chancellor's invitation, stepped out from among the juniors and took his seat within the bar. So much for Perseverance. From this point the outline of his career is known to everybody. He was appointed in 1865 one of the Judges of the Queen's Bench, and, after sitting in that court some years, was promoted to be a Lord Justice of Ap peal. A few days ago he died, lamented and revered by the legal profession, which is