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To win golden opinions (we speak not of fees) from all sorts of men, in and out of Westminster Hall, as Mr. Serjeant and as Mr. Justice, is good. To win renown in literature—such renown as comes not of sounding brass and tinkling cymbal—is—well, out with it!—better. To win the loving esteem of all one's associates, as a man with heart large enough for them all, is best. This good, better, best, hath Sir Thomas Noon Talfourd. His it is to enjoy at once the three degrees of comparison—the positive forensic, the comparative literary, and the superlative humane. A case in Rule of Three with a splendid quotient. To "take a rule" of that sort, is not allowed to many. But Sir Thomas has it all his own way—"rule absolute." And probably, were his good wishes for his brethren as efficacious as they are cordial and general, there would be hardly an instance of "rule refused." But there is no surplusage of instances of combined literary and forensic success. To him who would be at once a great lawyer and a great poet, and would bind up together in his book of life the studies of Blackstone and the dreams of Coleridge,—to him Experience, harsh monitor, whispers, or if need be screams, Divide and conquer. Eminence in both departments is of the rarest. Scott retained his clerkship at the Court of Session, but who ever heard of the Wizard of the North as a law authority? Jeffrey is one of the select inner circle to which Talfourd belongs. Wilson and Lockhart—"oh no, we never mention them" in wig and gown. Sir Archibald Alison and Professor Aytoun, Mr. Procter and Serjeant Kinglake, Lords Brougham and Campbell, Mr. Ten Thousand-a-Year Warren and a few others, are not all unexceptionable exceptions to prove the rule. And yet there has ever been, more or less, a hankering alter the Muses and the Magazines on the part of Messieurs of the long robe.[1] Very natural, too, if only by a law of reaction. But very hazardous, notwithstanding; and alarmingly symptomatic of a fall between two stools. One tiling at a time the ambiguously ambitious avocat may do triumphantly; but to drive Pegasus up and down an act of parliament, whatever may be done with a coach-and-six, is no everyday sight, no anybody's feat. Lord Eldon, when plain Jack Scott, keeping his terms at Oxford, obtained the prize of English composition, "On the Advantages and Disadvantages of Foreign Travel;" and it has been remarked, we believe by Mr. Justice Talfourd himself,[2] that since the subject of this essay was far removed from John's Newcastle experience, and alien from his studies, and must therefore have owed its
- ↑ For example (though one swallow proves not summer), the French lawyers of the sixteenth century. A biographer of Etienne Pasquier, after relating his début as avocat at the barreau de Paris, proceeds to say: "Et en même temps, pour occuper ses loisirs, il se livra à la poésie, à la composition litéraire, caractère qui distingué sa génération d'avocats, et Pasquier entre tous les autres."
- ↑ Unless we err in attributing to his pen the very pleasant notice of the Lives of Lord Eldon and Lord Stowell, in the Quarterly Review for December, 1844.
