Your noisy people generally grow taciturn in their cups--but Sir
Blue-bottle, though he drinks deep draughts of your wine, particularly
if it abound in sweetness, is never changed. He is naturally giddy, and
according to entomologists, always sees more than double, while his head
was never made to be turned. So may you hope for peace--only in his
flight or death!--_Absurdities: in Prose and Verse_.

* * * * *


LAW AND LAWYERS.

(_For the Mirror._)


William the Conqueror entertained the difficult project of totally
abolishing the English language, and for that purpose, he ordered that
in all schools throughout the kingdom, the youth should be instructed in
the French tongue. Until the reign of Edward III. the pleadings in the
supreme courts of judicature were performed in French, when it was
appointed that the pleas should be pleaded in English; but that they
should be entered or recorded in Latin. The deeds were drawn in the same
language; the laws were composed in that idiom, and no other tongue was
used at court. It became, says Hume, the language of all fashionable
company; and the English themselves ashamed of their own country,
affected to excel in that foreign dialect. At Athens, and even in France
and England, formal and prepared pleadings were prohibited, and it was
unlawful to amuse the court with long, artful harangues; only it was the
settled custom here, in important matters, to begin the pleadings with a