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My studious disposition, my sobriety, and my industry, gave my family a notion that the law was a proper profession for me; but I found an unsurmountable aversion to every thing but the pursuits of philosophy and general learning; and while they fancied I was poring upon Voet and Vinnius, Cicero and Virgil were the authors which I was secretly devouring.
Galba, who, in Suetonius, puts to death, with their wives and children, the Governors in Spain and Gaul who did not side with his party during the life of Nero, is, with Tacitus, a prince remarkable for integrity and justice, and such faults as he has are not, strictly speaking, his own, but those of worthless friends who abuse his confidence, for we are told that it is the pernicious counsels of Titus Vinius and Cornelius Laco, the former depraved and profligate, the other slothful and incapable, which first lose him the popular favour and ultimately prove his ruin: "Invalidum senem Titus Vinnius et Cornelius Laeo, alter deterrimus mortalium, alter ignavissimus, odio flagitorum oneratum, contemptu inertiae destruebant."
This school has subsisted until our time: it has never been without writers of the greatest taste, judgment and erudition; the names of Cujacius, Augustinus, the Gothofredi, Heineccius, Voetius, Vinnius, Gravina and Pothier, are as dear to the scholar as they are to the lawyer; an Englishman however must reflect with pleasure, that the Commentaries of his countryman, Sir William Blackstone, will not suffer in a comparison with any foreign work of jurisprudence.
About a year later, Hume's family tried to launch him into the profession of the law; but, as he tells us, "while they fancied I was poring upon Voet and Vinnius, Cicero and Virgil were the authors which I was secretly devouring," and the attempt seems to have come to an abrupt termination. Nevertheless, as a very competent authority wisely remarks:
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