papers to a manageable form, and put the inatter in such a simple train for explanation, that I never dreamt of my further aid being required. It is difficult, however, for the ablest man to take up another's work; and poor Mr. Boyle soon found himself at sea with my successor. Had I at this time made a bargain with him, he felt his case so beset with difficulties, and so likely to survive, if not to murder him, for he was then seventy-two, that he would gladly have allowed me five per cent. on all that I might recover; indeed, he hinted as much; but I neither then nor now think such a mode of doing business quite honest, or at least, respectable. When relieved from all scruples of delicacy, by the kindness of his former solicitors, I resumed the case with all the energy I could command. His age prevented his daily coming to me; and consequently, I spent my time, often extending far into night, at his house. I succeeded for him to the full extent of his demand; but not till my statement of it, and my proofs, had been submitted to the keen scrutiny and close consideration of that clearheaded statesman, the late Mr. Huskisson. I shall not soon forget the grateful elation with

which Mr. Boyle announced to me his success. IIe had been laboring for years in vain. Ile had spent life's best existence in painful re search, in self-denying privation, in prison, in want, and in personal danger; resolved never to abandon, but with life itself, the prosecution of a case which afforded him the only prospect of satisfying creditors who owed their losses to his most unmerited misfortunes. He had at length triumphed. He frankly and gratefully acknowledged that he owed that triumph essentially to my intelligence and industry. He was placed by it in circumstances, not only of independence, but of wealth, even after paying to the uttermost farthing every sixpence that he owed; and to his honor it should be added that effluxion of time had long extinguished every legal liability. His creditors nobly acknowledged his merit, for they not only returned him the interest on their debts, but presented him with an estate which cost them sixty thousand pounds. He called for my bill, and I looked on my fortune as made: it somewhat exceeded forty-one pounds, five shillings, and sixpence, and was paid to a fraction; but I lost my client! I did afterwards conduct for him an

appeal to the privy council, involving a comparatively trifling sum of five or six thousand pounds, and I lost it on a point of law. IIe was too noble-minded to have resented this, as the failure was not mine. I attribute his desertion of me to a very different cause, and one which, I fear, vindicated it to his own mind. Having paid his creditors in full, he wished to supersede his bankruptcy. The commission was of nearly thirty years' date; he was very old and infirm; and I collected from him that complicated and serious accounts were still outstanding between him and the estate of his deceased partner. I deprecated the supersedeas of his bankruptcy, lest it should rip open differences which costly and perennial litigation alone could settle: he could not comprehend the difficulty, and, I fear, ascribed it to motives that he disdained,-a wish to protect him by technical defense, from obligations that he knew were just. If this was not the cause of his alienation from me, I know it not to this hour; but so dire was the offense that I unconsciously gave him, that he limited his gratitude strictly to my demand, and cut me from that day, or nearly so, to the day of his death,

3

twelve years after. I have met with many unaccountable disappointments in my professional career, but few of them have been more mysterious to me, than how I happened to offend this venerable client, by recovering for him half a million of money under desperate circumstances, at a cost of £41. 5s. 6d.

This disappointment mortified me much at the time, and even still I feel it; but somehow or other I gradually crept on in connexion, though still destined to lose my clients as rapidly as I acquired them. I have always had the credit of being a good-natured fellow: it is the worst reputation that an attorney can enjoy ; he may be as acid as Sir Vicary Gibbs (my younger readers will scarcely understand the allusion), as roguish as Ikey Solomons (this comes nearer the present day), as ignorant of law as my Lord B- (nobody will misunderstand this), and yet, if he is not unluckily a good-natured fellow, he will make money and retain clients. A reverend clergyman, whom I had known intimately at Cambridge, had a pretty servant-girl. The pretty servant-girl had previously lived in a wealthy family of rank, where she had given great satisfaction; so

great, that she looked for higher wages, and these being refused, she took herself off. A pretty girl is not likely to be long out of place, if she conducts herself decently, and very soon she found one to her heart's content; but character was required, and her former mistress being piqued at her abrupt departure, declared her to be all that was excellent, but nodded her head, and added that she was "unsteady." A nod of the head, whether from a prime minister or a prima donna, is no trifle; the pretty, but "unsteady" services of the girl were rejected; the fair one took refuge with the reverend gentleman; and he appealed, with Quixotic benevolence, to my confounded good-nature to see the girl "righted." I brought an action for the libel, against my pleader's advice this time, for I had had experience enough of being too clear-sighted; I laid the damages high; assigned as many mischievous inuendoes to the word "unsteady," as an Irishman reeling along in all his glory could have devised; and, against all reason, law, and common sense, recovered a hundred pounds, when as many pence would have been ample indemnity. A new trial was moved for, and of course obtained, on