And both consisting of much legal lumber
Adapted to occasion yawns and slumber!
'Woe to the weal where many lawyers thrive'
Said Bishop Hall—who seemed to be alive
To some of the results of their proceedings—
The pocketing of fees for their misleadings![1]
NOTES
- ↑ The pocketing of fees for their misleadings,] The author of a Treatise upon the Star Chamber, in his remarks on the origin of solicitors, says, 'This branch of legal practice seems to have arisen, in great part, out of the suits of the Star Chamber. In its origin, the calling appears to have been of doubtful legality and their character not over good.'
'In our age,' says Hudson (a barrister of Gray's Inn, in the reign of Charles I), 'there are stepped up a new sort of people called solicitors, unknown to the records of the law, who, like the grasshoppers in Egypt, devour the whole land; and there, I daresay, were express retainers, and, could not justify their maintenance upon any action brought; I mean not where a lord or gentleman employed his servant to solicit his cause, for he may justify his doing thereof; but I mean
as follows: 'Your leading journal is utterly untouched by any particle of sympathy with any noble ideal. It simply expresses the views of the most narrow-minded and uncharitable section of the English public; and if any man or any body of men, ventures to strike out some new line which they hope will lead to the advancement of mankind, they are immediately assailed with fury in the columns of the Times, and either scoffed at as contemptible dreamers, or denounced as unscrupulous criminals. You will find nothing in Paris so abjectly immoral as that.'
