problem which he did not believe himself capable of solving as easily as he could eat his dinner when hungry.  “Common-sense business-habits”—­his favorite phrase—­he believed to be quite sufficient for the elucidation of the most difficult question in law, physic, or divinity.  The science of law, especially, he held to be an alphabet which any man—­of common sense and business habits—­could as easily master as he could count five on his fingers; and there was no end to his ridicule of the men with horse-hair head-dresses, and their quirks, quiddits, cases, tenures, and such-like devil’s lingo.  Lawyers, according to him, were a set of thorough humbugs and impostors, who gained their living by false pretence—­that of affording advice and counsel, which every sane man could better render himself.  He was unmistakably mad upon this subject, and he carried his insane theory into practice.  He drew his own leases, examined the titles of some house-property he purchased, and set his hand and seal to the final deeds, guided only by his own common-sense spectacles.  Once he bid, at the Auction Mart, as high as fifty-three thousand pounds for the Holmford estate, Herefordshire; and had he not been outbidden by young Palliser, son of the then recently-deceased eminent distiller, who was eager to obtain the property, with a view to a seat in parliament which its possession was said to almost insure—­he would, I had not at the time the slightest doubt, have completed the purchase, without for a moment dreaming of submitting the vender’s title to the scrutiny of a professional adviser.  Mr. Linden, I should mention, had been for some time desirous of resigning his business in Mincing Lane to his son, Thomas Linden, the only child born to him by his long-since deceased wife, and of retiring, an estated squire-arch, to the otium cum., or sine dignitate, as the case might be, of a country life; and this disposition had of late been much quickened by daily-increasing apprehensions of negro emancipation and revolutionary interference with differential duties—­changes which, in conjunction with others of similar character, would infallibly bring about that utter commercial ruin which Mr. Linden, like every other rich and about-to-retire merchant or tradesman whom I have ever known, constantly prophesied to be near at hand and inevitable.

With such a gentleman the firm of Flint & Sharp had only professional interviews, when procrastinating or doubtful debtors required that he should put on the screw—­a process which, I have no doubt, he would himself have confidently performed, but for the waste of valuable time which doing so would necessarily involve.  Both Flint and myself were, however, privately intimate with him—­Flint more especially, who had known him from boyhood—­and we frequently dined with him on a Sunday at his little box at Fulham.  Latterly, we had on these occasions met there a Mrs. Arnold and her daughter Catherine—­an apparently amiable, and certainly very pretty and interesting young person—­to whom, Mr. Linden confidentially informed us, his son Tom had been for some time engaged.