THE MUSES AND THE LAWYERS.

New Zealand Times, Volume XXX, Issue 4565, 6 November 1875, Page 2 (Supplement)

THE MUSES AND THE LAWYERS.

(From the Gentleman's Magazine.) Boccaccio would have been a lawyer had it not been fora sight of Virgil’s tomb. Petrarch was a law-student, and an idle one, at Bologna. Goldoni, till he turned strolling player, was an advocate at Venice. Metastasio was for many years a diligent law-student. Tasso and Ariosto both studied law at Padua. Politian was a doctor of law. Schiller was a law-student for two years before taking to medicine. Goethe was sent to Leipzio and Heine to Bonn, to study jurisprudence. Übland was a practising advocate, and held a post in the Ministry of Justice at Stuttgart, lluckert was a law-student at Jena. Miokiewicz, the greatest of Polish poets, belonged to a family of lawyers, Kaziuczy, the Hungarian poet and creator of his country’s literature, studied law at Kaschau. Corneille was an advocate and the son of an advocate. Voltaire was for'a time in the office of a procureur Chaucer was a student of the Inner Temple. Gower is thought to have studied law; it has been alleged that he was Chief Justice of the Common Pleas. Nicholas Eowe studied for the bar. Cowper was articled to an attorney, called to the bar, and appointed a commissioner of bankrupts. Butler was clerk to a justice of the peace. Sir Walter Scott was in the profession. Moore was a student of the Middle Temple. Gray, until he graduated, intended himself for the bar. Campbell was iu the office of a lawyer at Edinburgh. Longfellow, a lawyer’s son, spent some years iu the office of his father. If these six-and-twenty names were omitted from literary history, Italian and German poetry would be nowhere, France would be robbed of one of its greatest and most national poets, English poetry would lose its father, and in all respects be very appreciably poorer. If these classic names iu poetical liistory are taken, such as Talfourd, Macaulay, Bryant, and Barry Cornwall, the list might be infinitely extended ; and if filial relationship to the legal profession be considered, as in the case of Wordsworth, the close connection between poetry and law will look such a matter of course that the few eminent exceptions will only tend to prove the rule. Milton was the sou of a scrivener. There is no need to endorse the fancy that Shakespeare may have been a law clerk, or to suggest that Dante might have been influenced by a residence at the grand legal university of Bologua. But there is another list strikingly to the purpose, the long roll of great lawyers who, like Cicero, Sir Thomas Moore, Lord Somers, Blackstone, and Sir William Jones, have found flirtation -with the Muses no impediment to their marriage with the law.