Publisher's Synopsis
This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1897 edition. Excerpt: ... life in london. The first plunge of the Oxford scholar into his new profession was not encountered without some natural shudders of dislike. The contrast between London life and the familiar pursuits and pleasant intercourse of the University was, no doubt, more striking than agreeable. The legal neophyte was depressed by his uncongenial surroundings. "I well recollect," he said, addressing the Birmingham Law Students' Society in after-years (January 8, 1884), "the dreary days with which my own experience of the law began, in the chambers of a once famous Lincoln's Inn conveyancer; the gloom of a London atmosphere without, the whitewashed misery of the pupil's room within--both rendered more emphatic by what appeared to us to be the hopeless dinginess of the occupations of the inhabitants. There stood all our dismal text-books in rows--the endless Acts of Parliament, the cases and the authorities, the piles of forms and of precedents--calculated to extinguish all desire of knowledge, even in the most thirsty soul. To use the language of the sacred text, it seemed a barren and a dry land in which no water was. I london lodgings. 77 And, with all this, no adequate method of study, no sound and intelligent principle upon which to collect and to assort our information. One felt like Dante before he descended into the shades. 'In the middle of the journey of our life, ' says the great Italian poet, ' I found myself in a dark wood, for the straight way was lost. How hard it is to say what a wild and rough and stubborn wood it was! So bitter is the thought thereof that death hardly can be more bitter.'" So deep was this impression that for years after, as Bowen told one of his friends, he used to make a dttour in order to avoid passing these...
