⁵⁵ He is also, significantly, a figure of the part-time professional whose involvement with the law seems extremely cursory. In other words he is, just as Hardy was in the 1860s and 1870s, a writer who supports himself by a profession he seems hardly to practise at all, apparently spending most of his time in chambers producing ‘social and ethical essays’ for The Present, as Hardy spent time writing poems in various architects’ offices.