Henry W. Paine
THE BAY STATE MONTHLY.
A Massachusetts Magazine.
VOL. III. NOVEMBER, 1885. NO. VI.
Contents
AUTHORITATIVE LITERATURE OF THE CIVIL WAR.
AMESBURY: THE HOME OF WHITTIER.
THE MONUMENT AND HOMESTEAD OF REBECCA NURSE.
THE PRESENT RESOURCES OF MASSACHUSETTS.
HENRY W. PAINE.
By Prof. William Mathews, LL.D.
Among the callings acknowledged to be not only useful, but indispensableto society, there is no one, except the medical, which has been oftenerthe butt of vulgar ridicule and abuse than the legal. "Lawyers anddoctors," says a writer on Wit and Humor in the British QuarterlyReview, "are the chief objects of ridicule in the jest-books of allages." But whatever may be the disadvantages of the Law as a profession,in spite of the aspersions cast upon it by disappointed suitors,over-nice moralists, and malicious wits, it can boast of one signaladvantage over all other business callings,—that eminence in it isalways a test of ability and acquirement. While in every otherprofession quackery and pretension may gain for men wealth and honor,forensic renown can be won only by rare natural powers aided by profoundlearning and varied experience in trying causes. The trickster and thecharlatan, who in medicine and even in the pulpit find it easy to dupetheir fellow-men, find at the bar that all attempts to make shallownesspass for depth, impudence for wit, and fatal for wisdom, are instantlybaffled. Not only is an acute, sagacious, and austere bench a perilousfoe to the trickery of the ignorant or half-prepared advocate, but theveteran practitioners around him are quick to detect every sign ofmental weakness, disingenuous artifice, or disposition to substit