mystic origin for his knowledge, no whis pered word from behind the stars, no genius but the genius of interminable labor. He had no moment of inspiration when he heard better than other men, no moment of illu mination when his sight was clearer. What he has known of truth, he has learned, where all may learn, watching the great face of nature day and night, and every day and night. But the law hath yet another hold upon the body of this maid. Our craft, if you please, and this art, if you please, bears the deep stamp of a common kinship. In the beginning, the law of fitness obtained with out question. He who was swift of foot hunted for the tribe, and he who was big of limb fought for the tribe, hurling its wea pons and bellowing its war-cry; and he whose head was clearest, observed and reasoned, plotted and planned and counselled, that the tribe might win and live. This man who re flected, who pondered over the experience of his fellows seeking the truth, who hunted for the cause behind the things around him, who foresaw the event afar off and prepared his people to meet it; this man, who said whether the tribe should go out to the chase or up to the battle or lie hidden in the caves among the hills, this first leader was the first lawyer. To him men came with their simple quarrels, and he passed judgment; learning to detect the truth from word and gesture and incident and the rule of probabilities — and then, as the daylight broke into the world, he saw the rights of men and bound the families into the tribe and the tribe into the state. He was also the first man of letters. He remembered and handed down the traditions of old times. He gathered the strange stories of his people, and lopped off the grotesque, the improbable, the absurd, re casting them into proper proportion. He built, too, the fable and the tale, modelled
after events as he had seen them, but with a finer harmony and a more artistic sequence. It was not until the work-a-day world ap proached its meridian, and the business of the law had grown vast and exacting, that this splendid lover of literature was forced out of her street companionship. It was then only that she came lingeringly and at longer intervals to call him out into the sunshine. She who loved the great world so well, its green hills, its broad stretches of meadowland and the deep forests where the Faery haunted. And standing with her, he saw what men dreamed of when they slept, — treasure buried by the sea, and the lost spring of perpetual youth gushing out un der the roots of the mountains. And with his hand in hers, together they wandered across the world into a land of unending summer, to the kingdom of Queen Mab, to the enchanted island of Morganna the Fay, and with them went trooping the men and maids who love the moon, and the merry children of the rainbow and Pan piped, and the world was young. But the chiefest blessing was to see her when she came to him, — the lure of her beauty, how can it be written? Hair like hers he had sometimes seen tum bling down from a painter's canvas; shoul ders like hers he had sometimes seen rising out of a sculptor's marble, but such a smile he had not seen before on the crust of the earth. Like hers glowed the face of the golden Helen when she prayed to Venus in the temple at Sparta. Like hers glowed the faces of the nixies when they danced bare-limbed on the banks of the Rhine; and like hers glowed the faces of the sirens when they flashed their naked bodies on the haunted isles of the Aegean sea. It is little wonder that the great Chancel lor d'Aguesseau, with the jurisprudence of France in his hand, pined like a captive for the republic of elegant letters.
