" "Tush, you fool," cried he, "I was foretelling of my two
callings--as lawyer and poet--and which sayest thou now bears greatest
resemblance, whether a lawyer to a raven, or a poet to a whale? How many
will a single lawyer lay bare of flesh to swell his own paunch, and oh!
so callously doth he shed blood and leave the man half dead! The poet,
too, what fish can gulp as much as he? And though he hath always a sea
round him, not all the ocean can quench his thirst. And when a man is
both a poet and a lawyer, who can tell whether he is fish or flesh, and
especially if he be a courtier as well, as I was, and had to change his
taste with every mouth. But tell me, are there many of these folk now on
earth?" "Yes, plenty," answered I, "if a man can patch together any sort
of metre, straightway he becomes a chaired bard. And of the others,
there is such a plague of barristers, petty lawyers, and clerks that the
locusts of Egypt preyed less heavily on the country than they. In your
time, sir, there were only roadside bargains and a hands-breadth of
writing on the purchase of a hundred pound farm, and a cairn or an
Arthur's quoit {49b} raised as a memorial of the purchase and boundaries.
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