Life & Wisdom Quote by Washington Irving

The jab lands because it pretends to be a simple observation while smuggling in a whole social diagnosis: the courtroom as a theater where ambition goes to look busy. Irving isn’t accusing “young lawyers” of laziness so much as exposing the early-career panic that turns institutions into waiting rooms. They “attend the courts” the way a hopeful actor hangs around auditions - not to perform, but to be seen near the stage, hoping proximity will pass for belonging.

The line’s neat reversal (“not because... but because...”) is doing most of the work. It flips the respectable image of legal apprenticeship into a deadpan confession of underemployment. “No business” reads two ways at once: they lack clients, and they lack any real purpose. Irving’s comedy is genteel, but the subtext is acidic: a profession that markets itself as indispensable still requires a long stretch of performative hovering before it can deliver dignity or income.

Context matters. Irving wrote during a period when the American professional class was consolidating its prestige, and law was a primary ladder into politics and status. Courts were public spaces, and watching proceedings was plausible “training.” Irving twists that respectable rationale into satire about networking, visibility, and the hunger for social credit. It’s an early glimpse of a modern pathology: when opportunity is scarce, people congregate where opportunity is rumored to be, and the crowd becomes its own alibi.