fession whose habitual discipline so well trains them for legislative action, and the exercise of the highest political functions.
Brown cannot be supposed to have been insensible to these obvious views; and, indeed, from one of his letters in later life, he appears to have clearly recognised the value of the profession he had deserted. But his object was, at this time, to justify himself in his fickleness of purpose, as he best might, in his own eyes and those of his friends. Brown was certainly not the first man of genius who found himself incapable of resigning the romantic world of fiction, and the uncontrolled revels of the imagination, for the dull and prosaic realities of the law. Few, indeed, like Mansfield, have been able so far to constrain their young and buoyant imaginations as to merit the beautiful eulogium of the English poet; while many more comparatively, from the time of Juvenal downward, fortunately for the world, have been willing to sacrifice the affections plighted to Themis on the altars of the Muse.
Brown's resolution at this crisis caused sincere regret to his friends, which they could not conceal, on seeing him thus suddenly turn from the path of honourable fame at the very moment when he was prepared to enter on it. His prospects, but lately so brilliant, seemed now overcast with a deep gloom. The embarrassments of his situation had also a most unfavourable effect on his own mind. Instead of the careful discipline to which it had been lately subjected, it was now left to rove at large wherever
