Page:Samuel F. Batchelder - Bits of Harvard History (1924).pdf/397



the Harvard Law School in the late sixties things were going pretty comfortably. That great triumvirate, Parker, Parsons, and Washburn, were still the instructors. One of them lectured for a couple of hours every day. The list of textbooks they covered each half-year—some twenty-five or thirty in each course—was rather appalling to a conscientious student who tried to read them all. Very few tried, and fewer succeeded. The lectures were quite enough. Such of the students as attended them and did not read a newspaper meanwhile might hear in a pleasant, informal way the rule of law on almost any given point. Such of them as attended, or at any rate paid their term-bills, for eighteen months, received the LL.B. as a sort of reward of constancy.

To an occasionally expressed doubt of the actual legal ability represented by such a degree the answer was ready: “Can’t you take the word of a gentleman that he has learned the law?” To the same effect was the weight of authority and respectable antiquity. There had been no advance since the dictum of Dr. Johnson, a hundred years before:—