from the civil law. It must be admitted, of course, that Scott cut no special figure as an advocate, and that in an early case he made but a poor showing. But it has been very properly suggested that experience would have taught him greater tact in the manage ment of causes, and that not being a heavenborn orator he could hardly be expected to make much of an impression at first. As against all this unfavorable matter, we have the depth of his interest in researches dry as the law, his habits of application to that which commanded his taste, his understand ing of legal questions and situations as evidenced by his writings. So we must feel with the commentator, who calls atten tion to these points, that his relative failure at the bar was due to his dislike to solicitor's patronage and merely mechanical routine, to the ill effect upon his reputation of his well-known dabblings in poetry, and his ex aggerated fondness for wild adventure, and to the fact that he was so full of literary power that he revolted at the fetters which prudence imposed on his extra-professional proceed ings. Hutton's final suggestions on the subject are such as must meet general in dorsement. He points out that the life of literature and the life of the bar, always in compatible, suited the less in Scott's case, because " he felt himself likely to be a dicta tor in the one field, and only a postulant in the other," and that literature " was a far greater gainer by his choice than law could have been a loser," since " his capacity for the law he shared with thousands of men, his capacity for literature with few or none." Scott's earnings during the fourteen years which made up the period of his practice at the bar, largely nominal for at least one third of the time, were not such as would arouse
the envy of any of our great modern feetakers. It appears that the most he ever earned in a year was less than £230, and a legal income of about ninety dollars a month presents a rather violent contrast to his enor mous earnings from his pen, which yielded him during his lifetime almost a million dol lars. However, it may be true of him, as has been suggested by one of his reviewers, and as he himself said of his father and represents the conduct of one of his characters, the roystering counsellor Pleydell, that he lost no small part of a very flourishing business by insisting that his clients should do their duty to their own people better than they were themselves at all inclined to do it. As for the disposition of the money he earned at the law, it is interesting to find that he bought a silver taper-stand for his mother with his first five-guinea fee, and that during his apprenticeship in his father's of fice he tried to earn a little extra money by copying, to be devoted to his favorite medi aeval studies, and so undertook fourteen or fifteen hours of hard work in that line. It is noted, as told by himself, that he remembered writing " 120 folio pages with no interval either for food or rest." This gives us an idea of the indomitable and unremitting in dustry that enabled him to pay off, by his own labors, so much of an overwhelming debt in his later years. Altogether we cannot help wondering that so little is told of the legal life of this writer, even by such a worldrenowned biographer as Lockhart. Nor can we help wishing that some explorer of elusive documents might light upon a few further details of the relations to the law main tained by such a master of old-time and other facts, so well woven into the tapestry of fiction.
