finds out his mistake, I shall be at Dumfries.
My luggage is packed—and I start for the North
by the next train.

"Your deeply obliged,

"VIRGINIE LECOUNT."

LITTLE OLD MEN.

ERROR and I may be twin brothers; but still
I cannot help fancying that the age in which we
live exhibits a sensible decline in the average
number of Little Old Men, walking and talking
in their appointed time and their allotted section
of infinite space.

You, I, all the world, must remember how
plentiful little old men used, or, at least, seemed
to be when we were young. Almost all of us
must have had little old grandfathers, little old
uncles, and especially little old godfathers, who
were in the pleasant habit of presenting us with
guineas on our birthday, or pot-bellied silver
watches, and of treating us to the play at
Covent Garden Theatre. "No play for you
tonight;" that was a dire threat indeed in the
golden age of the Rejected Addresses, when we,
perchance, imperilled our prospect of dramatic
entertainment by thrusting our little sister's doll
between the bars and melting off half her nose.
It appears to me that the children of the present
age, when they go to the play at all, take their
parents and guardians instead of being taken;
and as for little old godfathers and their birthday
presents, it is in the first place patent that
the sponsor, as a philanthropist, is all but extinct,
that when you meet your godfather he usually
crosses to the other side of the street to avert
the possibility of being compelled to ask you to
dinner, and that the only notice your godmamma
ever takes of you is to beg autographs and cartes
de visite, or to solicit your "well-known extensive
influence" in procuring a nice little Indian
appointment, or something of that kind, for
her son Ulric, aged twenty-seven and a born
fool.

Presents! When you are grown up they want
gifts from you; when you are small, and they
must perforce give you something, it is generally
something cheap from the Lowther Arcade, or
else a two-shilling book bound in pink calico
with Dutch metal binding, setting forth how
happy Frank and Willy and Herbert were at
Concord House, or Euphuism Academy, with an
Alexandre harmonium to perform upon, and a
vivarium to amuse them out of school, under
the benevolent auspices of Dr. Wise, the
schoolmaster, and Mr. Loveboy, his assistant (who
eventually goes into the Church, and becomes
Bishop of Bungaree, Central Africa). Nothing
is ever said about Dr. Muff, or Mr. Canechild,
or Professor Screwboy, or Mr. Swindleparent,
B.A. These books are generally written by
schoolmasters for the purpose of puffing (often
in the most undisguised manner) middle-class
schools. There were books about schools and
schoolboys, too, in the little old godfather days,
but they were lifelike and true. Dr. Prosody
was a kind pedagogue, and patted Harry on his
flaxen head when he gave his pocket-money to
the blind fiddler, or behaved so nobly in not
betraying his playfellows in that matter of the
rifled orchard; but what a tremendous flogging
he administered to the traitor Philip, who should
have confessed his share in the apple robbery,
but allowed Harry to be brought within an inch
of the horse for his (Philip's) misdeeds! I say
that godfathers and godmothers have degenerated
into mere simulacra. They accept an awful
responsibility with as much alacrity—and, as a
rule, with as much sincerity—as the gentlemen
who were wont to pervade Westminster Hall
with straws in their shoes, and were ready to
go bail for anybody, and to any extent, for half-
a-crown. When we were young our sponsors
made much of us, and left us fat legacies. I
was blessed with one—a very little old gentleman
who used to come from Finchley to
Paddington once a month for the express
purpose of teaching me my catechism. What
has become of the conscientious people who
used to renounce Satan and all his works, and
the pomps and vanities of this wicked world for
you?

I walk down Chancery-lane, and dive into the
mouldy yards of the Inns of Court; I peep up
staircases fretting with the dry rot; I lift the
musty curtains at the portals of the Great Hall
of Pleas, and wander from the King's Bench to
the Exchequer, from the Common Pleas to the
Lords Justices; but I can discern no sign of
the little old lawyer once so familiar to me.
What has become of him? Was he esteemed
an intrinsic part and parcel of Mesne Process,
and so swept away by my Lord Brougham? Did
he fade away and die of grief when the Petty
Bag, the Pipe, the Pells, and the Palace Court
were abolished? By the little old lawyer, of
course, I mean the practitioner who is either
attorney or solicitor. The barrister is, and has
always been, in nine cases out of ten, a big man,
addicted to profuse whiskerage. Now and then
you see a little counsel at the Chancery Bar, but
you can discern at a glance that he is not strong
enough for Common Law, and that at the Old
Bailey, the jury—who like quantity, not quality,
in counsel—would make light of him. He is only
fit to descant, in a thin piping voice, on the
infringement of a patent right in the matter of a
fishtail burner, and to quote precedents out of books
well-nigh as big as himself. There is a play by
Massinger, called the Little French Lawyer;
and the hero, who is almost a dwarf, is an advocate;
but then you must remember his nationality,
and that in his days the line of demarcation
between barristers and attorneys was
not very strongly drawn. His name, La Writ,
shows this.

The little old lawyer I knew, was never at
the bar. He lived in Lincoln's Inn-fields,
or dwelt over his offices in Bedford-row. He
wore hair-powder, a large bunch of seals at
his fob, and was frequently given to knee-shorts.
He delighted in a neatly-plaited shirt-frill, and a
petrified-looking brooch, that might have been a
fossil oyster, secured in some bygone lawsuit