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He was constantly surrounded on such occasions by buffoons selected, for the most part, from among the vilest pettifoggers who practiced before him. These men bantered and abused each other for his entertainment. He joined in their ribald talk, sang catches with them, and, when his head grew hot, hugged and kissed them in an ecstasy of drunken fondness.
The story has roused a very bitter feeling, even among my own hands, who are not particularly virtuous, and now that we are on the eve of the elections some of the other side's pettifoggers are using it freely. Still, I should gladly have faced all that, but for my own shame, knowing it is true.
Their country was one of the richest and loveliest in the world; everything which impairs the enjoyment of life was eliminated or minimized; hucksters, pettifoggers and bigots were scarce as June snowflakes; indentured servants, on their emancipation, were speedily given the suffrage; it might almost be said that a man might do whatever he pleased, within the limits of criminal law.
They have put their army under such a variety of principles of duty, that it is more likely to breed litigants, pettifoggers, and mutineers, than soldiers. They have set up, to balance their crown army, another army, deriving under another authority, called a municipal army a balance of armies, not of orders. These latter they have destroyed with every mark of insult and oppression.
The persons signified by Mercury are astrologers, philosophers, mathematicians, politicians, merchants, travellers, teachers, poets, artificers, men of science, and all ingenious, clever men. When he is ill affected, however, he represents pettifoggers, cunning vile persons, thieves, messengers, footmen, and servants, etc. The moon comes last in planetary sequence, as nearest to the earth.
You pettifoggers, garblers, and masters of chicanery, speak not to me, I beseech you, in the name of, and for the reverence you bear to the four hips that engendered you and to the quickening peg which at that time conjoined them. As for hypocrites, much less; although they were all of them unsound in body, pockified, scurvy, furnished with unquenchable thirst and insatiable eating.
The pulpit is crowded with goodish "nobodies" men who have no power no unction no mission. They strain their brains to write common-places, and wear themselves out repeating the rant of their sect and the cant of their schools. The bar is cursed with "nobodies" as much as the pulpit. The lawyers are few; the pettifoggers are many.
Now there was one question that had to be examined into, and now another; there were periods of grace allowed, and summonses to be issued to the dead man to make his appearance within such and such a time, and what not besides! It was all a put-up job, so that the pettifoggers could make something out of it. He was thoroughly tired of Stone Farm.
"But these pettifoggers said this: 'We have acted illegally, and therefore not we, but you, shall suffer: we will profit by our illegal act, for we will cheat you out of your fees to the university and your fees to its professors, as well as the seed-time of your youth that we have wasted.
And if they like to muddle about with solicitors and pettifoggers and legal obstructions and weighty considerations of the tomfool order, until they have got a number of new gigantic species of vermin well established Things always have been in a muddle, Redwood." Redwood traced a twisted, tangled line in the air. "And our real interest lies at present with your boy."
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