BAINBRIDGE HOLME. CHAPTER I. O THE CATHEDRAL. And love the high embowed roof, In service high, and anthems clear, As may with sweetness through mine ear, And bring all Heav'n before mine eyes. MILTON : "Il Penseroso." N the fifth day of July in the year of grace 18-, towards four o'clock in the afternoon, a gentleman might have been seen slowly wending his way towards the north door of the cathedral church at Rockby, VOL. I. B in England. The reader has probably often amused himself in a crowded thoroughfare by singling out a chance individual and speculating whence he came, whither he might be going, upon the probable cause of his walking in the particular direction he is seen to take, as to the nature of his home, whether any loved ones were following him in thought and waiting to welcome his return, and so forth. Be this as it may, such a course will now be adopted with regard to the gentleman in question. Mr. Edgar Trevelyan was a lawyer, residing and carrying on business in Hamfield, a market town fifteen miles from the cathedral city. On this July afternoon he had come to Rockby in order to keep an appointment at the office of another lawyer where he had been, as the legal brotherhood say, "examining abstract with deeds." But Mr. Trevelyan, although an able member of his profession, and doing his duty thoroughly and conscientiously, hated the practice of the law. Entering upon his studies with the lofty aspirations of educated youth, regarding the lawyer's labours from a distance, and in an abstract sort of way as equivalent to the enforcement of justice between man and man, and believing he was commencing a career which would call into exercise some of the finest qualities of his being, he found on a closer acquaintance an interminable maze. The system seemed to him to be so involved that he thought it like playing a game of chess to keep right. How man, even ingenious and contriving man, could have built up such a mass of complications, so that, whereas every individual in the land, however ignorant, was presumed to know the law, the learned judges were often at a loss amongst statutes, judicial decisions and precedents, and often even divided amongst themselves, was to him a mystery. The manoeuvring, too, the quiddits, the quillets, and the tricks were far from tending to diminish his disgust. So that gradually the conviction had dawned upon him that in his choice of a profession he was a disappointed man. It must not be supposed, however, that he admitted this result hastily even to himself. On the contrary, he struggled to resist a conclusion which he knew must be fraught with bitterness to him, but he was at last obliged to confess that whatever the legal system might have become under more favourable circumstances, or whatever in the future it might become beneath the hand of improvement and consolidation, it was for him rotten at the core. Such, then, being Edgar Trevelyan's state of mind as to his profession, it is not surprising that on quitting the musty parchments. and the artificial complexities connected with the title he had been considering, his soul should long for the refreshing influence of a cathedral service. Finding that he had above an hour to wait before the next train departed, he slowly ascended the hill upon |