with a comprehensible glance in the glass—for,
there are glasses wherein we survey ourselves
thus beautified—I go forth, a complete and
perfected mummer, ready to "go on" in the
pantomime.

My bag—I had almost forgotten that element
in the universal harmony. I should be
incomplete without that comic baubie. I may as well
have it, as the cap and bells and the rest of the
furniture. But mine is a lean and shrunken
thing; I have not the heart to distend it
artificially with old reports, and dictionaries, and
ancient Times newspapers, and the pleadings
in the matter of Grimshaws Minors,
disposed of five years back. I have no spirit to
throw myself into my part, or beat up the halls
and passages overburdened with that load of
mendacity. Let me worship Mumbo-Jumbo in
my own melancholy but genuine and realistic
way. I have tried to carry out the sham, and
have filled my blue wallet with a loose and lying
miscellany; but I could not carry it with the
requisite effrontery, and looked guilty under my
burden. Eyes followed my load with suspicion.
I broke down under the unworthy deceit, and
suffered my indigo-coloured receptacle to become
lean and atrophied again. At times, I bear it over
my shoulder with the strings down in front, and
liken myself to the children of Israel, who deal
in the waifs and strays of apparel. My little
bag is a dwindled weakly thing—a six months'
infant. It will never get its strength, I fear, or
fill out and grow robust; but will always be the
same puny, wasted, little Dombey of a thing.
When Bluster, Q.C., has been sent for, and is
"coming in" with noise, his silken gown and
decorations flapping and rustling like the cordage of
a ship—when that eminent but heated advocate
struggles past the knees of his brethren to his
place—with what a sad respect do I look on
that overgrown monster he carries with him; that
red (he is a Q.C.) receptacle, packed and stored
unto bursting—distended preternaturally, and
swelling out all over, in huge wens and fearful
lumps. That is no pantomime bag. That is no
artificial redundancy. Desponding seniors from
afar off regard the monster wistfully as it stands
up comically of its own momentum, and are
distracted with a legal envy. A couple of those
wens or swellings would be nutriment for
months; to Bluster, Q.C., they are no more
than a sandwich. Admiring eyes follow
Bluster, Q.C., as he opens out its mouth
and proceeds to burrow among its entrails:
bringing up with every dive, great paper cubes,
clean and beautiful to look at; speckless legal
fine linen, as it were, got up in the solicitors'
laundry, glistening with starch. It is a sweet
process, that disembowelling of the bag of
Bluster, Q.C. No hurry—a judicious delving
in the bag. Bale after bale drawn forth,
surveyed nicely, and arranged neatly beside him.

Sorrowfully, I come back to wigs. That
fungus growth has for me an irresistible
fascination; I am sitting in a mead, flowered
over thickly with those light downy growths
which children pluck and blow away. In the
name of the prophet, wigs!  In each of these
voluted ornaments I read a text, which may
be expanded into a melancholy but profitable
sermon. I devote a portion of my evening
hours, when the fog is thickening and the shades
are getting down, to the "improving," morally
speaking, of each individual gear. The virgin
brilliancy of the new wig, dazzling, spick and
span, without so much as a curl or even a hair.
I am given to understand that the artist
whose ingenious fingers construct this gear
holds that there is not a more beautiful object
in the world than a new wig symmetrically
set on!

What a touching eloquence in these decorations
—what phases of antiquity!  That yellowish
hay-coloured wig, mouldy-looking, frayed, limp,
ragged, mangy, belongs to a learned friend—a
"younger" learned friend that is to say, a
junior. The most wretched, desolate spectacle.
As is his wig, so is my learned friend—mouldy,
limp, frayed, and ragged. Eyes have grown
sunken, crow's-feet have gathered, cheeks have
withered and fallen in, teeth have dropped away,
all under that draggled hay-coloured thing of
my sexagenarian junior. He and his wig
have sat together, and will sit together unto
the end; and he will tell us that the law is slow
—very slow. It is not worth while purchasing
a new wig now, so he thinks he may as well
wait for that day when he shall cast his draggled
wig and his old rusted gown, and rise up a
glorified senior, and be called within the bar.

At times, given up to this settled melancholy,
the system will react, and hearkening for a
moment to those well-meaning but ignorant
advisers, who bid you stick to it, and wait and
hope, and it will come in time, and who never
knew a young man who had perseverance that
didn't get on; and there was Boggs, Q.C., who
went fifteen circuits without ever holding a
brief; and Wyndebag, the serjeant; and Stentor,
the Nisi Prius advocate, who had been there
eight or ten years without a fee; I say, cheered
by this encouragement, I begin to take a more
lively view of my prospects, when I am flung
back again into a suicidal gloom and depression
by a joke from judicial Olympus, and obsequiously
responsive merriment from the benches of
the profession. Oh, those melancholy quips!
That mourning-coach hilarity!  I resent the
familiarity and the servile cachinnations of my learned
friends, when my learned and perhaps cloudy
friend, who is now "pressing" the court with
his ravelled and obscure argument, and hints
complacently that "it may be my infirmity, my
luds, in the way of putting the matter to your
ludships;" and when Woodcock, C J., turning
to his brethren, rolls out, " Possibly, sir, there
may be an infirmity in your case;" or when
Shallow (Justice), twinkling with the humour
of the thing, says, "I thought, Mr. Rebutter,
that the days of special demurrer were gone
by;" or when Blowers (Baron), brimming over
with the conceit for minutes before, gets in,
with a smile, "You must take your client to
Chancery next, Mr. Wordy;" I say the