Let me not be thought as intending anything derogatory to the profession of the law, or to the distinguished members of that illustrious order.  Well am I aware that we have in this ancient city innumerable worthy gentlemen, the knights-errant of modern days, who go about redressing wrongs and defending the defenceless, not for the love of filthy lucre, nor the selfish cravings of renown, but merely for the pleasure of doing good.  Sooner would I throw this trusty pen into the flames, and cork up my ink-bottle for ever, than infringe even for a nail’s breadth upon the dignity of these truly benevolent champions of the distressed.  On the contrary, I allude merely to those caitiff scouts who, in these latter days of evil, infest the skirts of the profession, as did the recreant Cornish knights of yore the honorable order of chivalry; who, under its auspices, commit flagrant wrongs; who thrive by quibbles, by quirks and chicanery, and like vermin increase the corruption in which they are engendered.

Nothing so soon awakens the malevolent passions as the facility of gratification.  The courts of law would never be so crowded with petty, vexatious, and disgraceful suits were it not for the herds of pettifoggers.  These tamper with the passions of the poorer and more ignorant classes; who, as if poverty were not a sufficient misery in itself, are ever ready to embitter it by litigation.  These, like quacks in medicine, excite the malady to profit by the cure, and retard the cure to augment the fees.  As the quack exhausts the constitution the pettifogger exhausts the purse; and as he who has once been under the hands of a quack is for ever after prone to dabble in drugs, and poison himself with infallible prescriptions, so the client of the pettifogger is ever after prone to embroil himself with his neighbors, and impoverish himself with successful lawsuits.  My readers will excuse this digression into which I have been unwarily betrayed; but I could not avoid giving a cool and unprejudiced account of an abomination too prevalent in this excellent city, and with the effects of which I am ruefully acquainted, having been nearly ruined by a lawsuit which was decided against me; and my ruin having been completed by another, which was decided in my favor.

To return to our theme.  There was nothing in the whole range of moral offences against which the jurisprudence of William the Testy was more strenuously directed than the crying sin of poverty.  He pronounced it the root of all evil, and determined to cut it up root and branch, and extirpate it from the land.  He had been struck, in the course of his travels in the old countries of Europe, with the wisdom of those notices posted up in country towns, that “any vagrant found begging there would be put in the stocks,” and he had observed that no beggars were to be seen in these neighborhoods; having doubtless thrown off their rags and their poverty, and become rich under the terror of the law.  He determined to improve