After this clerical failure, my good father urged me to turn to the law, thinking that as a chamber counsel my intellectual attainments (and I had worked hard for many years) might yet be available to society and to myself, though on the "silent system:" but alas! verbal explanations are as necessary in a room as at the bar; I soon perceived that all could not be done on paper, and as I thoroughly hated law I speedily turned to other sorts of literature, in especial the fixing of my own rhymed or rhythmed thoughts in black and white.
There is a small chamber in the turret of No. 19 Lincoln's Inn Old Square, on the second floor of rooms then belonging to my late friend Thomas Lewin (afterwards a Master in Chancery, and well known not only for his Law books, but also for his Life of St. Paul) where I used to dream and think and jot down Proverbial morsels on odd bits of paper which gradually grew to be a book. Lewin once, I remember, picked up from the wastepaper basket these lines which he admired much, and asked me where they came from:
"For that a true philosophy commandeth an innocent life, And the unguilty spirit is lighter than a linnet's heart."
They occur in my Essay on Ridicule, first series, so I had to confess as found out.
When my book appeared Lewin offered to review it for me in the _Literary Gazette_, then edited by his friend Mr. Landon, L.E.L.'s brother. An unusual rush of business just then coming in to him, and the editor pressing for copy, Lewin begged me to write the Article myself, to which I most reluctantly assented; resolving however to be quite impartial. The result was that when I handed the critique to my busy friend, he quickly said after a hurried glance, "Why, this won't do at all; you have cut yourself up cruelly, instead of praising, as you ought to have done. I must do it myself, I suppose. Here, copy out this Opinion for me, if you can read it: it's Mr. Brodie's, and I can't." With that he threw my MS. into the wastepaper basket, and I did his work for him, whilst he commended me with due vigour, and sent his clerk off with a too kind verdict in hot haste to the expectant editor.
The mention of Brodie reminds me that I spent a year copying old deeds in his murky chamber, 49 Lincoln's Inn Fields, where nobody could read his handwriting except his clerk (appropriately yclept Inkpen), and when _he_ couldn't it was handed back to Mr. Brodie for exposition, wherein if he himself failed, as was sometimes the case, he had to write a new Opinion. Inkpen was a character, as a self-taught entomologist, breeding in me then the rabies of collecting moths and beetles, as a couple of boxes full of such can still prove. He lived at Chelsea, near the Botanical Gardens there; and attributed his wonderful finds of strange insects in his own pocket-handkerchief garden to stray caterpillars and flies, &c., that came his way from among the packets of foreign plants. He used also to catch small fowl on passengers' coats and blank walls, as he passed on his daily walks to his office and back, having pill-boxes in his pocket, and pins inside his hat to secure the spoil. In the course of years he had amassed butterflies and beetles to so valuable an extent, that when he was compelled by adverse fortune to sell his cabinets by auction at Stevens's, he netted £1200 for his collection: this he told me in later years himself; immediately after the sale, he commenced collecting anew,--and having been made curator of Lincoln's Inn Fields (through Mr. Brodie's interest), he soon found an infinity of new insects,--derived perhaps from the Surgeon's Hall Museum, or straying to the nine acres of that Garden,--is it not the area of Cephren's Pyramid?--as a refuge for them out of smoky London. The good man always brought a new flower to look at every morning while at desk work; it lived in an old inkbottle of water, till one happy day I bethought me charitably of giving him a pretty China vase,--that good man, I say, is now long since gone to a world of light and beauty--whence, I am sure, flowers and butterflies cannot be excluded.