From My Commonplace Guide, No. 3

That is the Courtroom of Chancery, which has its decaying homes and its blighted lands in each shire, which has its worn-out lunatic in each madhouse and its lifeless in each churchyard, which has its ruined suitor together with his slipshod heels and threadbare gown borrowing and begging via the spherical of each man’s acquaintance, which provides to monied may the means abundantly of wearying out the precise, which so exhausts funds, persistence, braveness, hope, so overthrows the mind and breaks the center, that there’s not an honourable man amongst its practitioners who wouldn’t give—who doesn’t usually give—the warning, “Endure any flawed that may be achieved you reasonably than come right here!”

This tidy 115-word sentence—and I needed to learn it over to persuade myself that it’s certainly only one sentence—comes, as I am positive a lot of you suspected, from Charles Dickens’ Bleak Home.  When you’ve got not learn it, I extremely advocate it; if you’re a lawyer or regulation professor and haven’t learn it, I’m afraid I’ve to insist that you just accomplish that. Shakespeare might have written “The very first thing we do, let’s kill all of the legal professionals,” nevertheless it’s under no circumstances clear, in context, that he actually meant it, even figuratively. Dickens meant it.  Bleak Home‘s description of a authorized system gone amok is actually chilling—as a substitute of simply declaring that we must always kill all of the legal professionals, he makes the reader need to kill all of the legal professionals. [Figuratively speaking, of course] And his descriptions of life in London within the mid-1800s are extraordinary, positively … Dickensian.