POVERTY OF THE ENGLISH BAR.

With the exception, perhaps, of the lower order of the working clergy, there is no class of the community, as a body, so desperately poor as the bar. If it were not for extrinsic aids, one-half, at least, of its members must necessarily starve. Of course a considerable number of them have private property or income, and in point of fact, as a general rule, he who goes to the bar without some such assistance and resource is a fool—and probably a vanity-stricken fool—a fond dreamer about the

forgetting that at the outset these worthies had the leisure to acquire, and the ample means to pay for the best education that the world could afford. The aspirant for forensic fame who can not do this is dreadfully overweighted for the race, and can scarcely hope to come in a winner; for the want of all facilities of tuition and of one's own library, which is a thing of great cost, must be severely felt, and the necessity of working in some extraneous occupation for his daily bread must engross much of that time which should be devoted to study, and the furtherance otherwise of the cardinal object he has in view. We have read of many cases in which men have struggled triumphantly against all such obstacles, and no doubt some there were—but for the most part, as in Lord Eldon's instance, they were grossly exaggerated. Next, of those who have no patrimony or private allowance from friends, the press, in its various departments, supports a very large number. Some are editors or contributors to magazines or reviews—daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly; some are parliamentary reporters; some shorthand writers; some reporters of the proceedings in the courts of law for the daily journals and the now almost innumerous legal publications, from the recognized reports down to the two-penny pamphlet; then some are secretaries to public boards or bodies, some to private individuals. All these are comparatively well off in the world, and may "bide their time," though that time very rarely comes in any prolific shape, and meanwhile devote their tempora subseciva to the profession without the physical necessity of doing any thing ungentlemanly. But there are hundreds of others hanging on to the profession in a most precarious position from day to day, who would do any thing for business, and who taint the whole mass with the disgrace of their proceedings. These are the persons who resort to the arts of the lowest tradesmen, such as under-working, touting for employment, sneaking, cringing, lying, and the like. These are the persons who, in such shabby or fraudulent cases as may succeed, share the fees with low attorneys, and who sign habitually, for the same pettifogging practitioners, half-guinea motions in the batch, for half-a-crown or eighteenpence apiece; and, in short, do any thing and every thing that is mean and infamous. Alas for the dignity of the bar! The common mechanic, who earns his regular thirty shillings a week, the scene-shifter, the paltry play actor, enjoys more of the comforts and real respectability of human life than one of those miserable aspirants to the wool-sack, who spends his day in the desperate quest for a brief, and sits at night in his garret shivering over a shovel-full of coals and an old edition of Coke upon Littleton.—Frazer's Magazine.