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 V. Mr. Jabez Snavel, who now seated himself by the fire, after carefully dusting the chair with his handkerchief, and taking in each hand a skirt of his coat, lest the weight of his person should disagree with its texture, was what used to be termed an attorney, but is now known by the more ambitious title of a solicitor. His practice, however, such as it was, lay more in criminal than in civil cases. Mr. Jabez Snavel was perfectly well aware that, as self-preservation is the first law of nature, so the practice of a written law that was brought in aid of that object, or was supposed to assist to that end, would, in all probability, be as well remunerated as the pursuance of any other branch of law with which he was acquainted. He knew very well that, when the law is broken, to the law you must apply for means to make it appear that it is not so. At all events, the compensation must be of the same material as the outrage. In like manner, one poison is prescribed to expel another; and it is popularly believed that the best way to catch a thief is to set another after ‘him. This was Mr. Jabez Snavel’s view of the question. But this gentleman, I fear, in spite of his excellent ami irrefragable arguments, very seldom contrived tobring his clients off, when their causes were brought on; his peculiar system being, when a hole had been effected in the great mesh or net of law?not to show the victim another small hole by which he might, perchance, escape, but to take him boldly up to the very fissure he had made, that he might there contend that there was no hole at all. No wonder then, that, while cases of this description were suffered to stand on their own merits, the platform occasionally gave way, and his unhappy clients found that though, indeed, they had good legs to…