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Updated: June 12, 2025
There was scarcely an attorney in the whole country that did not carry on the double trade of quill-driving and clod-hopping. Most of them purchased land, even if they borrowed the money to pay for it; and many, many of them, after having farmed and farmed, till they had not a shilling in their pockets to support their families, have been compelled to give up their estates to the mortgagee.
"Why don't you write a story, Percy?" said his mother to him next morning at breakfast. "Plenty of quill-driving at Somerset-House, mother. I prefer something else in the holidays." "But I don't like to see you showing to disadvantage, Percy," said his uncle kindly. "Why don't you try?" "The doctor-fellow hasn't read one yet. And I don't think he will." "Have patience. I think he will."
And thus during all those eventful days-the last weeks of July and the first weeks of August the clerical deputation remained in England, indulging in voluminous protocols and lengthened conversations with the Queen and the principal members of her government. It is astonishing, in that breathless interval of history, that so much time could be found for quill-driving and oratory.
Besides, it is not the "literary historian," the moralising and quill-driving "historians," as conceived by Daunou and his school, that we have had in view; we are here only concerned with those scholars and historians who intend to deal with documents in order to facilitate or actually perform the scientific work of history. These stand in need of a technical apprenticeship.
Did he felicitate himself like a simple Teuton, on the wonderful learning and eloquence of his Greek-Roman secretary? Or did he laugh a royal laugh at the whole letter, and crack a royal joke at Cassiodorus and all quill-driving schoolmasters and lawyers the two classes of men whom the Goths hated especially, and at the end to which they by their pedantries had brought imperial Rome?
There was no end to his superstitions, and, whether by reason of them or in spite of them, he certainly prospered. When he died, ten or twelve years ago, he left fifteen thousand pounds. 'I have to thank him for my own good luck. "Look here," he said to me, "it's only duffers that go on quill-driving at a quid a week. A fellow like you ought to be doing better." "Show me the way," I said.
The reporters' gallery, was merely occupied by one or two watchful sentinels of the quill-driving guild; the main body cared nothing for a debate that had dwindled to a mere vaporing of dull speakers and now and then a brief quarrel over a point of order; but there was an unusually large attendance of journalists in the reporters' waiting-room, chatting, smoking, and keeping on the 'qui vive' for the general irruption of the Congressional volcano that must come when the time was ripe for it.
"It is not because we met no luck with the 'Endraght' that there is nothing to be gained, Peter," he said. "There is an island I have heard of which, if we can strike it, will make us rich men. Nothing venture, nothing win, and there is little prospect here for a man like you to make money by quill-driving."
"Glad to see you, Cousin Deb, though times have changed since you and I played hide-and-seek in our great-aunt's garden. You have shot up in one direction and I have grown in the other considerably. And this is John Cheveley's boy, is he? You are welcome to Liverpool, lad. We'll see what we can make of you here. Plant you on a high stool, and set you quill-driving. Are you a good hand at figuring?
"We cannot," he declared, "be grateful to it for degrading our natures, for systematically crushing out all martial spirit, for converting a race of soldiers and heroes into a timid flock of quill-driving sheep." This was done not by the fact that a man did not carry arms few carry them in England but that men were deprived of the right to carry them.
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