A Memoir of Benjamin Robbins Curtis, Ll D

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER HI. Enters the Law School at Cambridge. ? Steady Progress. ? Quits the School for a Country Residence.?Finishes his Studies at Northfleld.? Admitted to the Bar. ? Marriage. ? Country Practice. ? Invitation to remove to Boston. ? Acquisitions and Reputation. ? Character and Professional Standing of...
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Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER HI. Enters the Law School at Cambridge. ? Steady Progress. ? Quits the School for a Country Residence.?Finishes his Studies at Northfleld.? Admitted to the Bar. ? Marriage. ? Country Practice. ? Invitation to remove to Boston. ? Acquisitions and Reputation. ? Character and Professional Standing of Mr. Charles Pelham Curtis. ? Letters to G. W. Phillips and Mr. Ticknor. It would be quite an unnecessary refinement to speculate about the causes or reasons that made my brother choose the law as his profession. He was not led to it by any accident, whether of association or employment. He was not apprenticed in his youth as a lawyer's clerk or office-boy, and he had no relative or acquaintance whose example or influence might have affected him.1 Nor was he advised by any one to choose this profession. Nature made him for a lawyer, ? and a great one; and when, as we have seen, some of his college classmates cast his horoscope, the elements of their calculation were all patent to their perceptions of his natural gifts. In resorting to the study of the law, he simply followed what was as much a dictate of his moral and intellectual, as the appetite for food was a dictate of his physical constitution. I do not think that there was ever any question in his mind about a profession from the time when he was eighteen years old. Some of his voluntary studies, during his last two years in college, show what he expected to become. He devoted much time during 1 In Lord Campbell's Lives of the Chancellors, we read that the great Lord Somers was clerk to his father, who was a country solicitor, and that Lord Hardwicke was an articled clerk to Mr. Salkeld, a London attorney. those years to English history, reading systematically Hume, Lingard, and Hallam; thus making the best...