The Study and Practice of the Law, Considered in Their Various Relations to Society; In a Series of Letters - Softcover

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1805. Excerpt: ... LETTER X. THE SUBJECT CONTINUED. THE business of this and a few following letters will be to point out to you an argument against the two kinds of fear, of which I spoke in my former letter, namelyjhe kar lest your powers should prove incompetent to the performance of the task you have undertaken, and the apprehension lest, by the want of success, the labours you so greatly dread, may be rendered useless. As to your incompetence to the task of studying the Law; I would advise you to consider well how you have been led to conceive thus highly of the difficulties attending that study, and thus humbly of your own powers; for there may be Secret motives, as I have before observed, which may influence you to an opinion upon these matters, that will neither be allowed by reason nor confirmed by experience. The disinclination you feel may not be disinclination from the general study of the Law, taken as a science, but from those particular parts of it that appear harsh and uninteresting; and this may be so, although you do not suspect it: but you must recollect that were you to relinquish the law, you would find similar obstructions at the entrance into any other science; physic, for instance, has its materia medica, and the first principles of the anatomical study must be, in many respects, not only very abstruse, but very disgusting. Can the most heavy imagination conceive any thing more completely dry and tedious, than some of those expositions and commentaries that were once said to load the reading of a young divine? but of which indeed I know not whether it be the case at present. Even the tactics of the military science, when the general character of military com H manders is considered, do not offer, I conceive, any thing. peculiarly inviting to the fanc...