's interest—but because he had great professional integrity and private worth. I shall in a moment explain how this gentleman conjured up such a host of foes, by saying that he mortally hated roguery, though a lawyer. Indeed it had been doubted, by many of his brother professors, whether his odd notions and strange practice did not so decidedly operate against that strongest of all laws, custom, to the detriment of the general interest, that a point might be made to strike him off the rolls.

For, said they, very learnedly,
'as usage has, time out of mind, regulated laws; as usage has established that it shall be lawful for attornies to appropriate to themselves not only the money, goods, and chattles, lands and tenements, wives and children, consciences, peace of mind, nay even the liberty and lives of their clients; and as this said lawyer Balance absolutely rejects in toto, all such general power over his clients, shamefully contenting himself with moderate and reasonable recompence from those in whose behalf he has succeeded, and scandalously declining to prosecute and pursue to their ruin, such as he plainly sees have been already plucked and pillaged, till they totter under the weight of their accumulated misfortunes:—quere, whether, by trampling upon custom, which is paramount to law, and explaining justice and equity to be the same thing, which, for the better promotion of cavils and arguments, have been considered, time immemorial, to have distinct and different meanings, and looked upon as things that ought to be for ever kept separate and apart, the said lawyer Balance ought not to undergo a heavy censure of the court for the first offence, to be suspended during pleasure for the second, and if, upon returning to practice, he should be found infringing this custom, this usage, this law, this justice, this equity, a third time, then,

and in that case, to be considered as incorrigible, and rendered incapable to practise in his majesty's courts of justice!'

No one of these gentlemen, however, being patriot enough to rise up and rescue the laws from the gripe of so bold an innovator, he went on with this illicit practice to the great terror of the pettifogging tribe—many of whom he had caused to be struck off the rolls—and to the admiration of all good men, and, among the foremost, his particular friend Sir Sidney.
We come now to the artists. These were the same who had visited Roebuck hall for the last three years; for though the baronet had formerly made a point of having a new