The Lawyers of Dickens-Land Dickens hits off a delicious bit of satire in making Spenlow, who had been so careful in other people's affairs and an expert in testamentary dispo sitions, die leaving his own affairs in a very disordered condition and without having made a will. As Tiffey, the old clerk, said to David, "if you had been in the Commons as long as I have, you would know that there is no subject on which men are so incon sistent, and so little to be trusted." It appeared a wonderful thing to David, but it turned out that there was no will. Mr. Spenlow had never so much as thought of making one, so far as his papers afforded any evidence; for there was no kind of hint, sketch or memorandum of any testamentary in tention whatever. But if lawyers are apt to resent these types of the profession, through which Dickens seems to show an almost uni versal ridicule and contempt for their kind, they may be consoled in the re membrance that it is a lawyer whom the author presents to the world as the noblest and most sublime character in the whole range of literary fiction. This character is Sydney Carton, in "The Tale of Two Cities." There is not a grander or lovelier figure in all literature than this self-wrecked, self-devoted man, who in the Old Bailey of London saves his double from conviction on a capital charge, and after the Revolutionary Tribunal in France has condemned him to the guillotine, saves the same man's life by sacrificing his own. Profligate and ambitionless, leading a life of sloth and sensuality, he is like one who died young. All his life might have been, and he drifts, through indifference and cynicism, into a disappointed drudge playing the jackal to Stryver's lion, — doing the other man's work and per mitting the other to take the credit for
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it. Meeting Darnley, who remarkably resembles him in face and figure, he is shown suddenly and vividly what a life of temperance and diligence might have made him. The sting of a hopeless love for the fiancd of Darnley throws him, however, into deeper dejection and despair. "Waste forces within him, and a desert all around, this man stood still on his way across a silent terrace, and saw for a moment, lying in the wilder ness before him, a mirage of honorable ambition, self-denial and perseverance. In the fair city of this vision there were airy galleries from which the loves and graces looked upon him, gardens in which the fruits of life hung ripening, waters of hope that sparkled in his sight. A moment and it was gone. Climbing to a high chamber in a well of houses, he threw himself down in his clothes on a neglected bed, and its pillow was wet with wasted tears. Sadly, sadly, the sun rose; it rose upon no sadder sight than the man of good abilities and good emotions, incapable of their directed exercise, incapable of his own help and his own happiness, sensible of the blight on him, and resign ing himself to let it eat him away." And again we may forgive Dickens all his other lawyers in the delightful crea tion of Tommy Traddles, in "David Copperfield," who becomes a staid and respectable judge at the end of the book and who, we are told, stands for the portrait of the author's intimate and dear friend, Sergeant Talfourd. Eugene Wrayburn, in "Our Mutual Friend," is another lawyer who deserves well of us, at whom we must smile during his cynicisms, but who comes through the plot unscathed and finally lands right side up. Many a young attorney will appreciate that delicious piece of Eugene's, which well hits off the inertia with which the ethics of the legal pro
