Page:The Green Bag (1889–1914), Volume 12.pdf/538

 Dr. JoJinson on Law and Lawyers.

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DR. JOHNSON ON LAW AND LAWYERS. IT must always be interesting to lawyers to hear the opinion of an intelligent lay man on them and their profession, especially when the layman is one with the robust good senses of a Dr. Johnson, for too many lay men talk sad trash about the law and its professors. Even a man like the poet Wordsworth, himself the son of a country solicitor, could write like this in "A Poet's Epitaph " : A lawyer art thou? — draw not nigh : Go, carry to some other place The keenness of that practised eye, The hardness of that sallow face.

This kind of abuse is cheap; retaliation easy : A poet art thou? Scarecrow fly, And carry to some other clime The frenzy of that rolling eye, The twaddle of that tuneless rhyme.

Johnson was full of prejudices, but on law and lawyers he was remarkably lucid and just. "Lawyers," he said, "know life prac tically. A bookish man should always have them to converse with. They have what he wants." It is a curious fact that at the age of fifty-six "the great lexicographer," as Miss Pinkerton in "Vanity Fair" delighted to call him, had thoughts of studying the law him self, and actually composed a prayer — and a very good one, too — that his study of it might be sanctified " to direct the doubtful and instruct the ignorant, to prevent wrong and terminate contention." It is a matter for real regret that he never carried out his design. How well we can picture the pon derous Doctor as a learned Queen's (or rather King's) Counsel, refining on his points to the Court, or haranguing a jury while " words of wondrous length and thundering sounds" amazed the gaping occupants of the jurybox!

A friend of Dr. Johnson's once said that he was like a ghost, who never spoke until he was spoken to — the truest description of him, the Doctor said, ever given; and it is to the initiative of the inquisitive Boswell, of course — the admiring showman — that we owe the Doctor's dicta on the law and law yers. Boswell was going to the English Bar, or rather playing at it, and a gay friend, yer, he said, because had advised he would himbeagainst excelled being bya plod kwding blockheads. (By the way did not this brilliant contemner of blockheads move once for a writ " Quare adluzsit pavimento?"} "Why sir," said Dr. Johnson " in the formu lary and statutory part of the law a plod ding blockhead may excel, but in the ingen ious and rational part of it a plodding block head can never excel." " You must not in dulge," went on the Doctor, " too sanguine hopes should you be called to our Bar. I was told by a very sensible lawyer that there are a great many chances against any man's success in the profession of the law. The candidates are so numerous, and those who get large practices are so few. He said it was by no means true that a man of good parts and application is sure of having busi ness, though he, indeed, allowed that if such a man could but appear in a few causes his merit would be known, and he would get forward; and that the great risk was that a man might pass half a lifetime in the courts and never have an opportunity of showing his abilities." This is as much a melancholy truth to-day as it was a hundred years ago. " What means may a lawyer legitimately use to get on? " Nice questions of casuistry arise. "A gentleman," says Boswell, "told me that a countryman of his and mine, Wedderburn— afterwards Lord Loughborough — who had risen to eminence in the law, had when first making his way solicited him to get him em ployed in city causes.