80 PROLEGOMENON. 



with smaller fish of the same scale, who carry the still more 

 enormous weight of their own self-sufficiency. 



Thus it has come that wheel-within-wheel-to-the-infinite 

 difficulties of legal labyrinths have been threaded through ; 

 gordian knots, twisted by legal quibblers, have been un- 

 tied, or cut through, by legal gentlemen; crotchet within 

 crotchet, dead fall below dead fall, of small-potato attorney- 

 logic have been dissected to the light of day, and whole 

 nests of vipers' eggs destroyed. Yerily, this entirely fas- 

 cinating game of eels in the mud, of bore vs. boree, plucker 

 vs. pluckee, in all its exquisite details, has been agonizingly 

 squirmed and wriggled through. This involved frequent 

 and ferocious skirmishes before that august potentate, the 

 country justice of the peace, a gorgeous but fatal Jugger- 

 naut, in whose presence, and compared with whose over- 

 whelming consciousness of grandeur and assumption of 

 power and self-importance, all forms of the tyrant man 

 submerge instantly. Then came the more formidable 

 array of the regular legal battle of saws, coming down 

 from the ancients, from other men, under other forms of 

 government, under other circumstances, and in other 

 conditions of human society, but still with the solemnity 

 and awful paraphernalia of obsolete abstractions and dusty 

 rags of the graves of buried formulae, under the over- 

 shadowing dignity of the presidency of courts and juries, in 

 the assumption of the administration of that attribute of the 

 Eternal called Justice. This sublime consummation upon 

 earth is supposed to be fully attained and executed when 

 twelve bean-bags that is, twelve drowsy men, rudimen- 

 tary, unlettered, with half-born spiritual bodies, faculties 

 still in chaos, but with their natural bodies stuffed with 

 sour-crout, pork, and beans, ruminating upon tobacco- 

 quids, and moping like melancholy owls over a frog-pond 

 are squeezed into a jury-box, and are silently and grandly 

 brooded over by a trinity of buzzards, also with gorged 

 stomachs, sleeping profoundly on a roost called "the 

 Judges' Bench," whilst the kennel of dogs, " hell-hounds 



