Lawyers and Marriage.
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LAWYERS AND MARRIAGE. ly/TARRIAGE tends to get later and later, ^•»-1- as the Registrar-General tells us. People who twenty years ago married at twenty-five, now put it off till thirty-five, and of all classes the latest to marry are lawyers. A doctor is bound to marry. Lady patients do not like an unmarried doctor. Clergymen, too, must marry, for a clergyman's wife is as essential a part of the parish as her husband. Moreover, the persistent worship of curates by young lady devotees is sooner or later fatal to the most determined celibate. A lawyer, professionally speaking, is none the worse for being unmarried. Ambitious men (and ambition is the besetting sin of lawyers) think themselves very much better without it. A variety of qualifications for getting on in that profession have been enumerated, — influential connections, " devilling," writing a book, and not possessing a shilling, — but marriage is not numbered among them, unless it be the pseudo marriage of the song, with a solicitor's " ugly elderly daughter. Hence marriage to an unrisen lawyer is a luxury, and an expensive one. We hear much of the uncertainty of the law, but its uncertainty as a source of income is undeniable. When Lord Bacon spoke about giving hostages to fortune, he was probably thinking of his own profession. Certainly he did not commit the imprudence of early marriage himself, for he was forty-five before he found the " hand some maiden to my liking," whom he married, and who afterwards incurred his deep dis pleasure by flirting with his gentleman usher, or whatever else was the " great and just cause " for which he disinherited her. And the " handsome maiden " he took care should be one with a handsome portion too. But Bacon was of a cold nature, and like many others he waited too long. " I 'm no for a man marrying," says Mrs. Poyser in " Adam Bede," " before he 's old enough to know the difference between a crab and an apple; but he may wait ower long, and then he 's like a
man that goes past his dinner-time, and he turns his meat ower and ower wi' his fork, and finds fault wi' the victual when the fault 's wi' his own inside." There are many men who are predestined old bachelors, like the eminent lawyer mentioned in Sergeant Rob inson's Reminiscences, who said " he was born a bachelor, and in that persuasion he intended to remain." Seiden, himself a great lawyer, was one of this type. In his " Table Talk," he calls marriage " a desperate thing." "The frogs in ¿Esop," he says, " were ex tremely wise. They had a great mind to some water, but they would not leap into the well because they knew they could not get out." This is rank misogyny. Even Lord Campbell contemplated a solitary old age with dismay. Over and above professional prudence or ambition, there may be a want of susceptibility on the part of lawyers to the tender passion. Their energies, to put it physiologically, all run to brains, leaving the emotional or sentimental part atrophied. Lawyers, at all events, are credited with hard hearts as well as hard heads. " Gentlemen of your profession," said Mr. Pickwick to Sergeant Snubbin, " see the worse side of human nature. All its disputes, all its illwill and bad blood, rise up before you." "You must admit," said a doctor, addressing Bobus Smith, Sydney's lawyer brother, " that your profession does n't make angels of men." "No," replied Bobus; "your profession gives them the first chance ofthat." On the other hand, there is a great deal of truth in the saying that a man never settles down to work till he gets married, — ranges himself, as the French say. Lady Hardwicke often humorously laid claim (as she had good right to do) to so much of the merit of Lord Hardwicke's being a good Chancellor, in that his thoughts and attention were never taken from the business of the court by the private concerns of his family, the care of which, the management of his money matters, the
