A general mischief in these our times, an insensible plague, and never so many of them: "which are now multiplied" (saith Mat. Geraldus, a lawyer himself,) "as so many locusts, not the parents, but the plagues of the country, and for the most part a supercilious, bad, covetous, litigious generation of men, a purse-milking nation, a clamorous company, gowned vultures, who live by robbing and killing their fellow-citizens, thieves and seminaries of discord; worse than any pollers by the highway side, that take upon them to make peace, but are indeed the very disturbers of our peace, a company of irreligious harpies, scraping, griping catchpoles, (I mean our common hungry pettifoggers, love and honour in the meantime all good laws, and worthy lawyers, that are so many oracles and pilots of a well-governed commonwealth), without art, without judgment, that do more harm, as Livy said, than sickness, wars, hunger, diseases; "and cause a most incredible destruction of a commonwealth," saith Sesellius, a famous civilian sometimes in Paris.

- Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy 1621.