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first case he buys a few small palaces, and takes rank as a merchant prince; in the second he arrives at a smaller degree of comfort and elegance, through a marriage settlement. The nest in the last instance is built with creditors’ twigs, and put out of the reach of hungry assignees by a legal family conveyance.
The legal profession, who so often build or destroy other people’s nests, furnish a very good number of these particular apes. Starring barristers who neglect every case that does not lead to notoriety; who address juries from half-built nests only to collect more twigs, or to be lifted bodily into a warm woolsacky retreat, are certainly no unworthy members of this species. The web-spinning lawyer, who partly feeds the barrister—who looks out from a bower of bills of costs—is about as fine a specimen of the “nest-building ape” as any fancier of the tribe would like to examine. They all have one little fault,—selfishness a little too strongly developed; they all believe devoutly in the same worldly-wise maxim,—each one for himself and God for us all. And yet are they not all “men and brethren?”
