JUST THE BOY WANTED(霍姆斯：男孩儿想要的东西)中英对照.pdf

1 某 x@2013 The Youths Companion, Feb.7 1889, p.73(Vol 62) JUST THE BOY WANTED, II IN THE LAW, by Judge Oliver Wendell Holmes (from Howe, Mark DeWolfe. Research materials relating to life of Oliver Wendell Holmes.) A boy who wants to succeed in the law will probably do so. An encouraging thought, as far as it goes. But the power to want to do a thing is as much a talent as the power to do it well, and the two are very apt to go together. So that I am not offering encouragement, but stating the first inborn gift which the boy born for the law must have. The boy who is wanted in the law must be able himself to want something very hard all the time, and for a long time. But this is true for the most part of all who are wanted any where in life. There are some other talents which have a more special connection with the law. The law is a great mass of rules, showing when and how for a man is liable to be punished, or to be made to hand over money or property to his neighbors, and so forth. These rules are contained in books. A lawyer learns them in the main by reading books. He begins by doing little else then read, and after he has prepared himself by, any, three years study to practice, still, all his life long and almost every day, he will be looking into books to read a little more than he already knows about some new question which he has got to answer. The power to use books, then is a talent which the would-be lawyer ought to possess. He ought to have enough flexibility and fineness or mental fibre to make it easy for him to collect ideas from printed words. Be ought to have some readiness in finding what a book contains, and something of an instinct for where to look for what he wants. But although this is the power of which he will first feel the need, it is not the most important. A lawyer does not study law to recite upon it, as a boy studies the Latin grammar or mathematics; he studies it to use it and to act upon the rules which