The Green Bag
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fession hedge in the youngster during his first years as a briefless barrister: "Idiots talk," says Eugene to his friend, Mortimer Lightwood, "of energy. If there is a word in the dictionary, under any letter from A to Z, that I abomi nate, it is 'energy'. It is such a con ventional superstition! such parrot gab ble! What the deuce! am I to rush out into the street, collar the first man of wealthy appearance that I meet, shake him, and say, 'Go to the law upon the spot, you dog, and retain me, or I'll be the death of you?' Yet that would be energy." Hiram Grewgious, Esquire, Agent and Collector of Rents, is another of Dickens' quaint lawyer-characters whom we all hold in loving memory. He is one of the most felicitous of Dickens' creations as well as one of the last —
HIRAM GREWGIOUS, ESQ.
appearing in "The Mystery of Edwin Drood." Awkward and hesitating in manner, ungainly in appearance, whim sical, near-sighted, wooden and impas sive — yet shrewd withal — he "still had some strange capacity in him of making on the whole an agreeable impression." He was an arid, sandy man who, if he had been put into a grinding-mill, looked as if he would have ground im mediately into high-dried snuff. He had a scanty flat crop of hair, in color and consistency like some very mangy yellow fur tippet; it was so unlike hair that it must have been a wig, but for the stu pendous improbability of anybody's vol untarily sporting such a head. The little play of features that his face pre sented was cut deep into it, in a few hard curves that made it more like work; and he had certain notches in his fore head, which looked as though Nature had been about to touch them into sensi bility or refinement, when she had im patiently thrown away the chisel, and said "I really cannot be worried to finish off this man; let him go as he is!" An habitual characteristic gesture was to smooth his head from back to front, as if he had just dived. With too much throat at the top and too much shank at the bottom, he is a "particularly angular man," as he himself frankly admits to Rosa, his ward. "A particu larly angular man, I half believe I was born advanced in life, and seem to have come into existence a chip. I was a chip — and a very dry one — when I first became aware of myself." And when she invites him to eat his Christ mas dinner with her, he accepts, saying, "As a particularly angular man, I do not fit smoothly into the social circle, and consequently I have no other en gagement at Christmas time than to partake, on the twenty-fifth, of a boiled turkey and celery sauce with a — with
