In the December of 1663, Pepys was present at a trial in Guildhall

concerning the fraud of a merchant-adventurer, who having insured his

vessel for L2400 when, together with her cargo, she was worth no more

than L500, had endeavored to wreck her off the French coast. From

Pepys's record it appears that this was a novel piece of rascality at

that time, and consequently created lively sensation in general society,

as well as in legal and commercial coteries. "All the great counsel in

the kingdom" were employed in the cause; and though maritime causes

then, as now, usually involved much hard swearing, the case was notable

for the prodigious amount of perjury which it elicited. For the most

part the witnesses were sailors, who, besides swearing with stolid

indifference to truth, caused much amusement by the incoherence of their

statements and by their free use of nautical expressions, which were

quite unintelligible to Chief Justice (Sir Robert) Hyde. "It was," says

Pepys, "pleasant to see what mad sort of testimonys the seamen did give,

and could not be got to speak in order; and then their terms such as the

judge could not understand, and to hear how sillily the counsel and

judge would speak as to the terms necessary in the matter, would make

one laugh; and above all a Frenchman, that was forced to speak in

French, and took an English oath he did not understand, and had an

interpreter sworn to tell us what he said, which was the best testimony

of all." A century later Lord Mansfield was presiding at a trial

consequent upon a collision of two ships at sea, when a common sailor,

whilst giving testimony, said, "At the time I was standing abaft the

binnacle;" whereupon his lordship, with a proper desire to master the

facts of the case, observed, "Stay, stay a minute, witness: you say

that at the time in question you were _standing abaft the binnacle_; now

tell me, where is abaft the binnacle?" This was too much for the gravity

of 'the salt,' who immediately before climbing into the witness-box had

taken a copious draught of neat rum. Removing his eyes from the bench,

and turning round upon the crowded court with an expression of intense

amusement, he exclaimed at the top of his voice, "He's a pretty fellow

for a judge! Bless my jolly old eyes!--[the reader may substitute a

familiar form of 'imprecation on eye-sight']--you have got a pretty sort

of a land-lubber for a judge! He wants me to tell him where _abaft the

binnacle is_!" Not less amused than the witness, Lord Mansfield

rejoined, "Well, my friend, you must fit me for my office by telling me

where _abaft the binnacle_ is; you've already shown me the meaning of

_half seas over_."

With less good-humor the same Chief Justice revenged himself on Dr.

Brocklesby, who, whilst standing in the witness-box of the Court of King's

Bench, incurred the Chief Justice's displeasure by referring to their

private intercourse. Some accounts say that the medical witness merely

nodded to the Chief Justice, as he might have done with propriety had they

been taking seats at a convivial table; other accounts, with less

appearance of probability, maintain that in a voice audible to the bar, he

reminded the Chief Justice of certain jolly hours which they had spent

together during the previous evening. Anyhow, Lord Mansfield was hurt, and

showed his resentment in his 'summing-up' by thus addressing the Jury:

"The next witness is one _R_ocklesby, or _B_rocklesby--_B_rocklesby or

_R_ocklesby, I am not sure which; and first, _he swears that he is a

physician_."

On one occasion Lord Mansfield covered his retreat from an untenable

position with a sparkling pleasantry. An old witness named _Elm_ having

given his evidence with remarkable clearness, although he was more than

eighty years of age, Lord Mansfield examined him as to his habitual mode

of living, and found that he had throughout life been an early riser and

a singularly temperate man. "Ay," observed the Chief Justice, in a tone

of approval, "I have always found that without temperance and early

habits, longevity is never attained." The next witness, the _elder_

brother of this model of temperance, was then called, and he almost

surpassed his brother as an intelligent and clear-headed utterer of

evidence. "I suppose," observed Lord Mansfield, "that you also are an

early riser." "No, my lord," answered the veteran, stoutly; "I like my

bed at all hours, and special-_lie_ I like it of a morning." "Ah; but,

like your brother, you are a very temperate man?" quickly asked the

judge, looking out anxiously for the safety of the more important part

of his theory. "My lord," responded this ancient Elm, disdaining to

plead guilty to a charge of habitual sobriety, "I am a very old man, and

my memory is as clear as a bell, but I can't remember the night when

I've gone to bed without being more or less drunk." Lord Mansfield was

silent. "Ah, my lord," Mr. Dunning exclaimed, "this old man's case

supports a theory upheld by many persons, that habitual intemperance is

favorable to longevity." "No, no," replied the Chief Justice, with a

smile, "this old man and his brother merely teach us what every

carpenter knows--that Elm, whether it be wet or dry, is a very tough

wood." Another version of this excellent story makes Lord Mansfield

inquire of the elder Elm, "Then how do you account for your prolonged

tenure of existence?" to which question Elm is made to respond, more

like a lawyer than a simple witness, "I account for it by the terms of

the original lease."

Few stories relating to witnesses are more laughable than that which

describes the arithmetical process by which Mr. Baron Perrot arrived at

the value of certain conflicting evidence. "Gentlemen of the jury," this

judge is reported to have said, in summing up the evidence in a trial

where the witnesses had sworn with noble tenacity of purpose, "there are

fifteen witnesses who swear that the watercourse used to flow in a ditch

on the north side of the hedge. On the other hand, gentlemen, there are

nine witnesses who swear that the watercourse used to flow on the south

side of the hedge. Now, gentlemen, if you subtract nine from fifteen,

there remain six witnesses wholly uncontradicted; and I recommend you to

give your verdict for the party who called those six witnesses."

Whichever of the half-dozen ways in which it is told be accepted as the

right one, the following story exemplifies the difficulty which

occasionally arises in courts of justice, when witnesses use provincial

terms with which the judge is not familiar. Mr. William Russell, in past

days deputy-surveyor of 'canny Newcastle,' and a genuine Northumbrian in

dialect, brogue, and shrewdness, was giving his evidence at an important

trial in the Newcastle court-house, when he said--"As I was going along

the quay, I saw a hubbleshew coming out of a chare-foot." Not aware that

on Tyne-side the word 'hubbleshew' meant 'a concourse of riotous

persons;' that the narrow alleys or lanes of Newcastle 'old town' were

called by their inhabitants 'chares;' and that the lower end of each

alley, where it opened upon quay-side, was termed a 'chare-foot;' the

judge, seeing only one part of the puzzle, inquired the meaning of the

word 'hubbleshew.' "A crowd of disorderly persons," answered the

deputy-surveyor. "And you mean to say," inquired the judge of assize,

with a voice and look of surprise, "that you saw a crowd of people come

out of a chair-foot?" "I do, my lord," responded the witness.

"Gentlemen of the jury," said his lordship, turning to the 'twelve good

men' in the box, "it must be needless for me to inform you--_that this

witness is insane_!"

The report of a trial which occurred at Newcastle Assizes towards the

close of the last century gives the following succession of questions

and answers:--_Barrister._--"What is your name?" _Witness._--"Adam,

sir--Adam Thompson." _Barrister._--"Where do you live?" _Witness._--"In

Paradise." _Barrister_ (with facetious tone).--"And pray, Mr. Adam, how

long have you dwelt in Paradise?" _Witness._--"Ever since the flood."

Paradise is the name of a village in the immediate vicinity of

Newcastle; and 'the flood' referred to by the witness was the inundation

(memorable in local annals) of the Tyne, which in the year 1771 swept

away the old Tyne Bridge.

CHAPTER XLIII.

CIRCUITEERS.

Exposed to some of the discomforts, if not all the dangers,[33] of

travel; required to ride over black and cheerless tracts of moor and

heath: now belated in marshy districts, and now exchanging shots with

gentlemen of the road; sleeping, as luck favored them, in way-side

taverns, country mansions, or the superior hotels of provincial

towns--the circuiteers of olden time found their advantage in

cultivating social hilarity and establishing an etiquette that

encouraged good-fellowship in their itinerant societies. At an early

date they are found varying the monotony of cross-country rides with

racing-matches and drinking bouts, cock-fights and fox-hunting; and

enlivening assize towns and country houses with balls and plays, frolic

and song. A prodigious amount of feasting was perpetrated on an ordinary

circuit-round of the seventeenth century; and at circuit-messes, judges'

dinners, and sheriffs' banquets, saucy juniors were allowed a license of

speech to staid leaders and grave dignitaries that was altogether

exceptional to the prevailing tone of manners.

In the days when Chief Justice Hyde, Clarendon's cousin, used to ride

the Norfolk Circuit, old Sergeant Earl was the leader, or, to use the

slang of the period, 'cock of the round'. A keen, close-fisted, tough

practitioner, this sergeant used to ride from town to town, chuckling

over the knowledge that he was earning more and spending less than any

other member of the circuit. One biscuit was all the refreshment which

he permitted himself on the road from Cambridge to Norwich; although he

consented to dismount at the end of every ten miles to stretch his

limbs. Sidling up to Sergeant Earl, as there was no greater man for him

to toady, Francis North offered himself as the old man's travelling

companion from the university to the manufacturing town; and when Earl

with a grim smile accepted the courteous suggestion, the young man

congratulated himself. On the following morning, however, he had reason

to question his good fortune when the sergeant's clerk brought him a

cake, and remarked, significantly, "Put it in your pocket, sir; you'll

want it; for my master won't draw bit till he comes to Norwich." It was

a hard day's work; but young Frank North was rewarded for his civility

to the sergeant, who condescended to instruct his apt pupil in the

tricks and chicaneries of their profession. "Sir," inquired North at the

close of the excursion, emboldened by the rich man's affability, "by

what system do you keep your accounts, which must be very complex, as

you have lands, securities, and great comings-in of all kinds?"

"Accounts! boy," answered the grey-headed curmudgeon; "I get as much as

I can, and I spend as little as I can; that's how I keep my accounts."

When North had raised himself to the Chiefship of the Common Pleas he

chose the Western Circuit, "not for the common cause, it being a long

circuit, and beneficial for the officers and servants, but because he

knew the gentlemen to be loyal and conformable, and that he should have

fair quarter amongst them;" and so much favor did he win amongst the

loyal and conformable gentry that old Bishop Mew--the prelate of

Winchester, popularly known as Bishop _Patch_, because he always wore a

patch of black court-plaster over the scar of a wound which he received

on one of his cheeks, whilst fighting as a trooper for Charles I.--used

to term him the "Deliciae occidentis, or Darling of the West." On one

occasion this Darling of the West was placed in a ludicrous position by

the alacrity with which he accepted an invitation from "a busy fanatic,"

a Devonshire gentleman, of good family, and estate, named Duke. This

"busy fanatic" invited the judges on circuit and their officers to dine

and sleep at his mansion on their way to Exeter, and subsequently

scandalized his guests--all of them of course zealous defenders of the

Established Church--by reading family-prayers before supper. "The

gentleman," says the historian, "had not the manners to engage the

parish minister to come and officiate with any part of the evening

service before supper: but he himself got behind the table in his hall,

and read a chapter, and then a long-winded prayer, after the

Presbyterian way." Very displeased were the Chief Justice and the other

Judge of Assize; and their dissatisfaction was not diminished on the

following day when on entering Exeter a rumor met them, that "the judges

had been at a conventicle, and the grand jury intended to present them

and all their retinue for it."

Not many years elapsed before this Darling of the West was replaced, by

another Chief Justice who asserted the power of constituted authorities

with an energy that roused more fear than gratitude in the breasts of

local magistrates. That grim, ghastly, hideous progress, which Jeffreys

made in the plenitude of civil and military power through the Western

Counties, was not without its comic interludes; and of its less

repulsive scenes none was more laughable than that which occurred in

Bristol Courthouse when the terrible Chief Justice upbraided the Bristol

magistrates for taking part in a slave-trade of the most odious sort.

The mode in which the authorities of the western port carried on their

iniquitous traffic deserves commemoration, for no student can understand

the history of any period until he has acquainted himself with its

prevailing morality. At a time when by the wealth of her merchants and

the political influence of her inhabitants Bristol was the second city

of England, her mayor and aldermen used daily to sit in judgment on

young men and growing boys, who were brought before them and charged

with trivial offences. Some of the prisoners had actually broken the

law: but in a large proportion of the cases the accusations were totally

fictitious--the arrests having been made in accordance with the

directions of the magistrates, on charges which the magistrates

themselves knew to be utterly without foundation. Every morning the

Bristol tolsey or court-house saw a crowd of those wretched

captives--clerks out of employment, unruly apprentices, street boys

without parents, and occasionally children of honest birth, ay, of

patrician lineage, whose prompt removal from their native land was

desired by brutal fathers or vindictive guardians; and every morning a

mockery of judicial investigation was perpetrated in the name of

justice. Standing in a crowd the prisoners were informed of the offences

charged against them; huddled together in the dock, like cattle in a

pen, they caught stray sentences from the lips of the perjured rascals

who had seized them in the public ways; and whilst they thus in a frenzy

of surprise and fear listened to the statements of counsel for the

prosecution, and to the fabrications of lying witnesses, agents of the

court whispered to them that if they wished to save their lives they

must instantly confess their guilt, and implore the justices to

transport them to the plantations. Ignorant, alarmed, and powerless, the

miserable victims invariably acted on this perfidious counsel; and

forthwith the magistrates ordered their shipment to the West Indies,

where they were sold as slaves--the money paid for them by West India

planters in due course finding its way into the pockets of the Bristol

justices. It is asserted that the wealthier aldermen, through caution,

or those few grains of conscience which are often found in the breasts

of consummate rogues, forbore to share in the gains of this abominable

traffic; but it cannot be gainsaid that the least guilty magistrates

winked at the atrocious conduct of their brother-justices.

Vowing vengeance on the Bristol kidnappers Jeffreys entered their

court-house, and opened proceedings by crying aloud that "he had brought

a broom to sweep them with." The Mayor of Bristol was in those days no

common mayor; in Assize Commissions his name was placed before the

names of Judges of Assize; and even beyond the limits of his

jurisdiction he was a man of mark and influence. Great therefore was

this dignitary's astonishment when Jeffreys ordered him--clothed as he

was in official scarlet and furs--to stand in the dock. For a few

seconds the local potentate demurred; but when the Chief Justice poured

upon him a cataract of blasphemy, and vowed to hang him instantly over

the entrance to the tolsey unless he complied immediately, the

humiliated chief magistrate of the ancient borough took his place at the

felon's bar, and received such a rating as no thief, murderer or rebel

had ever heard from George Jeffrey's abusive mouth. Unfortunately the

affair ended with the storm. Until the arrival of William of Orange the

guilty magistrates were kept in fear of criminal prosecution; but the

matter was hushed up and covered with amnesty by the new government; so

that "the fright only, which was no small one, was all the punishment

which these judicial kidnappers underwent; and the gains," says Roger

North, "acquired by so wicked a trade, rested peacefully in their

pockets." It should be remembered that the kidnapping justices whom the

odious Jeffreys so indignantly denounced were tolerated and courted by

their respectable and prosperous neighbors; and some of the worst

charges, by which the judge's fame has been rendered odious to

posterity, depend upon the evidence of men who, if they were not

kidnappers themselves, saw nothing peculiarly atrocious in the conduct

of magistrates who systematically sold their fellow-countrymen into a

most barbarous slavery.

Amongst old circuit stories of questionable truthfulness there is a

singular anecdote recorded by the biographers of Chief Justice Hale,

who, whilst riding the Western Circuit, tried a half-starved lad on a

charges of burglary. The prisoner had been shipwrecked upon the Cornish

coast, and on his way through an inhospitable district had endured the

pangs of extreme hunger. In his distress, the famished wanderer broke

the window of a baker's shop and stole a loaf of bread. Under the

circumstances, Hale directed the jury to acquit the prisoner: but, less

merciful than the judge, the gentlemen of the box returned a verdict of

'Guilty'--a verdict which the Chief Justice stoutly refused to act upon.

After much resistance, the jurymen were starved into submission; and the

youth was set at liberty. Several years elapsed; and Chief Justice Hale

was riding the Northern Circuit, when he was received with such costly

and excessive pomp by the sheriff of a northern county, that he

expostulated with his entertainer on the lavish profuseness of his

conduct. "My lord," answered the sheriff, with emotion, "don't blame me

for showing my gratitude to the judge who saved my life when I was an

outcast. Had it not been for you, I should have been hanged in Cornwall

for stealing a loaf, instead of living to be the richest landowner of my

native county."

A sketch of circuit-life in the middle of the last century may be found

in 'A Northern Circuit, Described in a Letter to a Friend: a Poetical

Essay. By a Gentleman of the Middle Temple. 1751.'--a piece of doggrel

that will meet with greater mercy from the antiquary than the poetical

critic.

In seeking to avoid the customary exactions of their office, the

sheriffs of the present generation were only following in the steps of

sheriffs who, more than a century past, exerted themselves to reduce the

expenses of shrievalties, and whose economical reforms were defended by

reference to the conduct of sheriffs under the last of the Tudors.--In

the days of Elizabeth, the sheriffs demanded and obtained relief from an

obligation to supply judges on circuit, with food and lodging; under

Victoria they have recently exclaimed against the custom which required

them to furnish guards of javelin-bearers for the protection of Her

Majesty's representatives; when George II. was king, they grumbled

against lighter burdens--for instance, the cost of white kid-gloves and

payments to bell-ringers. The sheriff is still required by custom to

present the judges with white gloves whenever an assize has been held

without a single capital conviction; but in past times, on every

_maiden_ assize, he was expected to give gloves not only to the judges,

but to the entire body of circuiteers--barristers as well as officers of

court.[34] Wishing to keep his official expenditure down to the lowest

possible sum, a certain sheriff for Cumberland--called in 'A Northern

Circuit,' Sir Frigid Gripus Knapper--directed his under-sheriff not to

give white gloves on the occasion of a maiden assize at Carlisle, and

also through the mouth of his subordinate, declined to pay the officers

of the circuit certain customary fees. To put the innovator to shame,

Sir William Gascoigne, the judge before whom the case was laid, observed

in open court, "Though I can compel an immediate payment, it being a

demand of right, and not a mere gift, yet I will set him an example by

gifts which I might refuse, but will not, because they are customary,"

and forthwith addressing the steward, added--"Call the sheriff's

coachman, his pages, and musicians, singing-boys, and vergers, and give

them the accustomed gifts as soon as the sheriff comes." From this

direction, readers may see that under the old system of presents a judge

was compelled to give away with his left hand much of that which he

accepted with his right. It appears that Sir William Gascoigne's conduct

had the desired effect; for as soon as the sheriff made his appearance,

he repudiated the parsimonious conduct of the under-sheriff--though it

is not credible that the subordinate acted without the direction or

concurrence of his superior. "I think it," observed the sheriff, in

reference to the sum of the customary payments, "as much for the honor

of my office, and the country in general, as it is justice to those to

whom it is payable; and if any sheriff has been of a different opinion

it shall never bias me."

From the days when Alexander Wedderburn, in his new silk gown, to the

scandal of all sticklers for professional etiquette, made a daring but

futile attempt to seize the lead of the circuit which seventeen years

later he rode as judge, 'The Northern' had maintained the _prestige_ of

being the most important of the English circuits. Its palmiest and most

famous days belong to the times of Norton and Wallace, Jack Lee and John

Scott, Edward Law and Robert Graham; but still amongst the wise white

heads of the upper house may be seen at times the mobile features of an

aged peer who, as Mr. Henry Brougham, surpassed in eloquence and

intellectual brilliance the brightest and most celebrated of his

precursors on the great northern round. But of all the great men whose

names illustrate the annals of the circuit, Lord Eldon is the person

most frequently remembered in connexion with the jovial ways of

circuiteers in the old time. In his later years the port-loving earl

delighted to recall the times when as Attorney General of the Circuit

Grand Court he used to prosecute offenders 'against the peace of our

Lord the Junior,' devise practical jokes for the diversion of the bar,

and over bowls of punch at York, Lancaster, or Kirkby Lonsdale, argue

perplexing questions about the morals of advocacy. Just as John

Campbell, thirty years later, used to recount with glee how in the mock

courts of the Oxford Circuit he used to officiate as crier, "holding a

fire-shovel in his hand as the emblem of his office;" so did old Lord

Eldon warm with mirth over recollections of his circuit revelries and

escapades. Many of his stories were apocryphal, some of them

unquestionably spurious; but the least truthful of them contained an

element of pleasant reality. Of course Jemmy Boswell, a decent lawyer,

though better biographer, was neither duped by the sham brief, nor

induced to apply in court for the writ of 'quare adhaesit pavimento;'

but it is quite credible that on the morning after his removal in a

condition of vinous prostration from the Lancaster flagstones, his

jocose friends concocted the brief, sent it to him with a bad guinea,

and proclaimed the success of their device. When the chimney-sweeper's

boy met his death by falling from a high gallery to the floor of the

court-house at the York Assizes, whilst Sir Thomas Davenport was

speaking, it was John Scott who--arguing that the orator's dullness had

sent the boy to sleep, and so caused his fatal fall--prosecuted Sir

Thomas for murder in the High Court, alleging in the indictment that the

death was produced by a "certain blunt instrument of _no value_, called

a _long speech_." The records of the Northern Circuit abound with

testimony to the hearty zeal with which the future Chancellor took part

in the proceedings of the Grand Court--paying fines and imposing them

with equal readiness, now upholding with mock gravity the high and

majestic character of the presiding judge, and at another time

inveighing against the levity and indecorum of a learned brother who had

maintained in conversation that "no man would be such a----fool as to go

to a lawyer for advice who knew how to get on without it." The monstrous

offender against religion and propriety who gave utterance to this

execrable sentiment was Pepper Arden (subsequently Master of the Rolls

and Lord Alvanley), and his punishment is thus recorded in the archives

of the circuit:--"In this he was considered as doubly culpable, in the

first place as having offended, against the laws of Almighty God by his

profane cursing; for which, however, he made a very sufficient atonement

by paying a bottle of claret; and secondly, as having made use of an

expression which, if it should become a prevailing opinion, might have

the most alarming consequences to the profession, and was therefore

deservedly considered in a far more hideous light. For the last offence

he was fin'd 3 bottles. Pd."

One of the most ridiculous circumstances over which the Northern Circuit

men of the last generation delighted to laugh occurred at Newcastle,

when Baron Graham--the poor lawyer, but a singularly amiable and placid

man, of whom Jeckyll observed, "no one but his sempstress could ruffle

him"--rode the circuit, and was immortalized as 'My Lord 'Size,' in Mr.

John Shield's capital song--

"The jailor, for trial had brought up a thief,

Whose looks seemed a passport for Botany Bay;

The lawyers, some with and some wanting a brief,

Around the green table were seated so gay;

Grave jurors and witnesses waiting a call;

Attorneys and clients, more angry than wise;

With strangers and town-people, throng'd the Guildhall,

All watching and gaping to see my Lord 'Size.

"Oft stretch'd were their necks, oft erected their ears,

Still fancying they heard of the trumpets the sound,

When tidings arriv'd, which dissolv'd them in tears,

That my lord at the dead-house was then lying drown'd.

Straight left _tete-a-tete_ were the jailor and thief;

The horror-struck crowd to the dead-house quick hies;

Ev'n the lawyers, forgetful of fee and of brief,

Set off helter-skelter to view my Lord 'Size.

"And now the Sandhill with the sad tidings rings,

And the tubs of the taties are left to take care;

Fishwomen desert their crabs, lobsters, and lings,

And each to the dead-house now runs like a hare;

The glassmen, some naked, some clad, heard the news,

And off they ran, smoking like hot mutton pies;

Whilst Castle Garth tailors, like wild kangaroos,

Came tail-on-end jumping to see my Lord 'Size.

"The dead-house they reach'd, where his lordship they found,

Pale, stretch'd on a plank, like themselves out of breath,

The coroner and jury were seated around,

Most gravely enquiring the cause of his death.

No haste did they seem in, their task to complete,

Aware that from hurry mistakes often rise;

Or wishful, perhaps, of prolonging the treat

Of thus sitting in judgment upon my Lord 'Size.

"Now the Mansion House butler, thus gravely deposed:--

'My lord on the terrace seem'd studying his charge

And when (as I thought) he had got it compos'd,

He went down the stairs and examined the barge;

First the stem he surveyed, then inspected the stern,

Then handled the tiller, and looked mighty wise;

But he made a false step when about to return,

And souse in the river straight tumbled Lord 'Size.'

"'Now his narrative ended, the butler retir'd,

Whilst Betty Watt, muttering half drunk through her teeth,

Declar'd 'in her breast great consarn it inspir'd,

That my lord should sae cullishly come by his death;'

Next a keelman was called on, Bold Airchy by name,

Who the book as he kissed showed the whites of his eyes,

Then he cut an odd caper attention to claim,

And this evidence gave them respecting Lord 'Size;--

"Aw was settin' the keel, wi' Dick Slavers an' Matt,

An' the Mansion House stairs we were just alongside,

When we a' three see'd somethin', but didn't ken what,

That was splashin' and labberin', aboot i' the tide.

'It's a fluiker,' ki Dick; 'No,' ki Matt, 'its owre big,

It luik'd mair like a skyet when aw furst seed it rise;'

Kiv aw--for aw'd getten a gliff o' the wig--

'Ods marcy! wey, marrows, becrike, it's Lord 'Size.

"'Sae aw huik'd him, an' haul'd him suin into the keel,

An' o' top o' the huddock aw rowl'd him aboot;

An' his belly aw rubb'd, an' aw skelp'd his back weel,

But the water he'd druck'n it wadn't run oot;

So aw brought him ashore here, an' doctor's, in vain,

Furst this way, then that, to recover him tries;

For ye see there he's lyin' as deed as a stane,

An' that's a' aw can tell ye aboot my Lord 'Size.'

"Now the jury for close consultation retir'd:

Some '_Death Accidental_' were willing to find;

'God's Visitation' most eager requir'd;

And some were for 'Fell in the River' inclin'd;

But ere on their verdict they all were agreed,

My Lord gave a groan, and wide opened his eyes;

Then the coach and the trumpeters came with great speed,

And back to the Mansion House carried Lord 'Size."

Amongst memorable Northern Circuit worthies was George Wood, the

celebrated Special Pleader, in whose chambers Law, Erskine, Abbott and a

mob of eminent lawyers acquired a knowledge of their profession. It is

on record that whilst he and Mr. Holroyde were posting the Northern

round, they were accosted on a lonely heath by a well-mounted horseman,

who reining in his steed asked the barrister "What o'clock it was?"

Favorably impressed by the stranger's appearance and tone of voice, Wood

pulled out his valuable gold repeater, when the highwayman presenting a

pistol, and putting it on the cock, said coolly, "_As you have_ a watch,

be kind enough to give it me, so that I may not have occasion to trouble

you again about the time." To demur was impossible; the lawyer,

therefore, who had met his disaster by _going to the country_, meekly

submitted to circumstances and surrendered the watch. For the loss of an

excellent gold repeater he cared little, but he winced under the banter

of his professional brethren, who long after the occurrence used to

smile with malicious significance as they accosted him with--"What's the

time, Wood?"

Another of the memorable Northern circuiteers was John Hullock, who,

like George Wood, became a baron of the Exchequer, and of whom the

following story is told on good authority. In an important cause tried

upon the Northern Circuit, he was instructed by the attorney who

retained him as leader on one side not to produce a certain deed unless

circumstances made him think that without its production his client

would lose the suit. On perusing the deed entrusted to him with this

remarkable injunction, Hullock saw that it established his client's

case, and wishing to dispatch the business with all possible

promptitude, he produced the parchment before its exhibition was

demanded by necessity. Examination instantly detected the spurious

character of the deed, which had been fabricated by the attorney. Of

course the presiding judge (Sir John Bayley) ordered the deed to be

impounded; but before the order was carried out, Mr. Hullock obtained

permission to inspect it again. Restored to his hands, the deed was

forthwith replaced in his bag. "You must surrender that deed instantly,"

exclaimed the judge, seeing Hullock's intention to keep it. "My lord,"

returned the barrister, warmly, "no power on earth shall induce me to

surrender it. I have incautiously put the life of a fellow-creature in

peril; and though I acted to the best of my discretion, I should never

be happy again were a fatal result to ensue." At a loss to decide on the

proper course of action, Mr. Justice Bayley retired from court to

consult with his learned brother. On his lordship's reappearance in

court, Mr. Hullock--who had also left the court for a brief period--told

him that during his absence the forged deed had been destroyed. The

attorney escaped; the barrister became a judge.

[33] Lord Eldon, when he was handsome Jack Scott of the Northern

Circuit, was about to make a short cut over the sands from Ulverstone to

Lancaster at the of the tide, when he was restrained from acting on his

rash resolve by the representations of an hotel keeper. "Danger,

danger," asked Scott, impatiently--"have you ever _lost_ anybody there?"

Mine host answered slowly, "Nae, sir, nae body has been _lost_ on the

sands, _the puir bodies have been found at low water_."

[34] With regard to the customary gifts of white gloves Mr. Foss

says:--"Gloves were presented to the judges on some occasions: viz.,

when a man, convicted for murder, or manslaughter, came and pleaded the

king's pardon; and, till the Act of 4 & 5 William and Mary c. 18, which

rendered personal appearance unnecessary, an outlawry could not be

reversed, unless the defendant came into court, and with a present of

gloves to the judges implored their favor to reverse it. The custom of

giving the judge a pair of white gloves upon a maiden assize has

continued till the present time." An interesting chapter might be

written on the ancient ceremonies and usages obsolete and extant, of our

courts of law. Here are a few of the practices which such a chapter

would properly notice:--The custom, still maintained, which forbids the

Lord Chancellor to utter any word or make any sign, when on Lord Mayor's

Day the Lord Mayor of London enters the Court of Chancery, and by the

mouth of the Recorder prays his lordship to honor the Guildhall banquet

with his presence; the custom--extant so late as Lord Brougham's

Chancellorship--which required the Holder of the Seals, at the

installation of a new Master of Chancery, to install the new master by

placing a cap or hat on his head; the custom which in Charles II.'s

time, on motion days at the Chancellor's, compelled all barristers

making motions to contribute to his lordship's 'Poor's Box'--barristers

within the bar paying two shillings, and outer barristers one

shilling--the contents of which box were periodically given to

magistrates, for distribution amongst the deserving poor of London; the

custom which required a newly-created judge to present his colleagues

with biscuits and wine; the barbarous custom which compelled prisoners

to plead their defence, standing in fetters, a custom enforced by Chief

Justice Pratt at the trial of the Jacobite against Christopher Layer,

although at the of trial of Cranburne for complicity in the

'Assassination Plot,' Holt had enunciated the merciful maxim, "When the

prisoners are tried they should stand at ease;" the custom which--in

days when forty persons died of gaol fever caught at the memorable Black

Sessions (May, 1759) at the Old Bailey, when Captain Clark was tried for

killing Captain Innes in a duel--strewed rue, fennel, and other herbs on

the ledge of the dock, in the faith that the odor of the herbage would

act as a barrier to the poisonous exhalations from prisoners sick of

gaol distemper, and would protect the assembly in the body of the court

from the contagion of the disease.

CHAPTER XLIV.

LAWYERS AND SAINTS.

Notwithstanding the close connexion which in old times existed between

the Church and the Law, popular sentiment holds to the opinion that the

ways of lawyers are far removed from the ways of holiness, and that the

difficulties encountered by wealthy travellers on the road to heaven are

far greater with rich lawyers than with any other class of rich men. An

old proverb teaches that wearers of the long robe never reach paradise

_per saltum_, but 'by slow degrees;' and an irreverent ballad supports

the vulgar belief that the only attorney to be found on the celestial

rolls gained admittance to the blissful abode more by artifice than

desert. The ribald broadside runs in the following style:---

"Professions will abuse each other;

The priests won't call the lawyer brother;

While _Salkeld_ still beknaves the parson,

And says he cants to keep the farce on.

Yet will I readily suppose

They are not truly bitter foes,

But only have their pleasant jokes,

And banter, just like other folks.

And thus, for so they quiz the law,

Once on a time th' Attorney Flaw,

A man to tell you, as the fact is,

Of vast chicane, of course of practice;

(But what profession can we trace

Where none will not the corps disgrace?

Seduced, perhaps, by roguish client,

Who tempt him to become more pliant),

A notice had to quit the world,

And from his desk at once was hurled.

Observe, I pray, the plain narration:

'Twas in a hot and long vacation,

When time he had but no assistance.

Tho' great from courts of law the distance,

To reach the court of truth and justice

(Where I confess my only trust is);

Though here below the special pleader

Shows talents worthy of a leader,

Yet his own fame he must support,

Be sometimes witty with the court

Or word the passion of a jury

By tender strains, or full of fury;

Misleads them all, tho' twelve apostles,

While with the new law the judge he jostles,

And makes them all give up their powers

To speeches of at least three hours--

But we have left our little man,

And wandered from our purpos'd plan:

'Tis said (without ill-natured leaven)

"If ever lawyers get to heaven,

It surely is by slow degrees"

(Perhaps 'tis slow they take their fees).

The case, then, now I fairly state:

Flaw reached at last to heaven's high gate;

Quite short he rapped, none did it neater;

The gate was opened by St. Peter,

Who looked astonished when he saw,

All black, the little man of law;

But charity was Peter's guide.

For having once himself denied

His master, he would not o'erpass

The penitent of any class;

Yet never having heard there entered

A lawyer, nay, nor ever ventured

Within the realms of peace and love,

He told him mildly to remove,

And would have closed the gate of day,

Had not old Flaw, in suppliant way,

Demurring to so hard a fate,

Begg'd but a look, tho' through the gate.

St. Peter, rather off his guard,

Unwilling to be thought too hard,

Opens the gate to let him peep in.

What did the lawyer? Did he creep in?

Or dash at once to take possession?

Oh no, he knew his own profession:

He took his hat off with respect,

And would no gentle means neglect;

But finding it was all in vain

For him admittance to obtain,

Thought it were best, let come what will,

To gain an entry by his skill.

So while St. Peter stood aside,

To let the door be opened wide,

He skimmed his hat with all his strength

Within the gate to no small length.

St. Peter stared; the lawyer asked him

"Only to fetch his hat," and passed him;

But when he reached the jack he'd thrown,

Oh, then was all the lawyer shown;

He clapt it on, and arms akembo

(As if he had been the gallant Bembo),

Cry'd out--'What think you of my plan?

Eject me, Peter, if you can.'"

The celestial courts having devised no process of ejectment that could

be employed in this unlooked-for emergency, St. Peter hastily withdrew

to take counsel's opinion; and during his absence Mr. Flaw firmly

established himself in the realms of bliss, where he remains to this day

the black sheep of the saintly family.

But though a flippant humorist in these later times could deride the

lawyer as a character who had better not force his way into heaven,

since he would not find a single personal acquaintance amongst its

inhabitants, in more remote days lawyers achieved the honors of

canonization, and our forefathers sought their saintly intercession with

devout fervor. Our calendars still regard the 15th of July as a sacred

day, in memory of the holy Swithin, who was tutor to King Ethelwulf and

King Alfred, and Chancellor of England, and who certainly deserved his

elevation to the fellowship of saints, even had his title to the honor

rested solely on a remarkable act which he performed in the exercise of

his judicial functions. A familiar set of nursery rhymes sets forth the

utter inability of all the King's horses and men to reform the shattered

Humpty-Dumpty, when his rotund highness had fallen from a wall; but when

a wretched market-woman, whose entire basketful of new-laid eggs had

been wilfully smashed by an enemy, sought in her trouble the aid of

Chancery, the holy Chancellor Swithin miraculously restored each broken

shell to perfect shape, each yolk to soundness. Saith William of

Malmesbury, recounting this marvellous achievement--"statimque porrecto

crucis signo, fracturam omnium ovorum consolidat."

Like Chancellor Swithin before him, and like Chancellor Wolsey in a

later time, Chancellor Becket was a royal tutor;[35] and like Swithin,

who still remains the pluvious saint of humid England, and unlike

Wolsey, who just missed the glory of canonization, Becket became a

widely venerated saint. But less kind to St. Thomas of Canterbury than

to St. Swithin, the Reformation degraded Becket from the saintly rank by

the decision which terminated the ridiculous legal proceedings

instituted by Henry VIII. against the holy reputation of St. Thomas.

After the saint's counsel had replied to the Attorney-General, who, of

course, conducted the cause for the crown, the court declared that

"Thomas, sometime Archbishop of Canterbury, had been guilty of

contumacy, treason and rebellion; that his bones should be publicly

burnt, to admonish the living of their duty by the punishment of the

dead; and that the offerings made at his shrine should be forfeited to

the crown."

After the conclusion of the suit for the saint's degradation--a suit

which was an extravagant parody of the process for establishing at Rome

a holy man's title to the honors of canonization--proclamation was made

that "forasmuch as it now clearly appeared that Thomas Becket had been

killed in a riot excited by his own obstinacy and intemperate language,

and had been afterwards canonized by the Bishop of Rome as the champion

of his usurped authority, the king's majesty thought it expedient to

declare to his loving subjects that he was no saint, but rather a rebel

and traitor to his prince, and therefore strictly charged and commanded

that he should not be esteemed or called a saint; that all images and

pictures of him should be destroyed, the festivals in his honor be

abolished, and his name and remembrance be erased out of all books,

under pain of his majesty's indignation and imprisonment at his grace's

pleasure."

But neither St. Swithin nor St. Thomas of Canterbury, lawyers though

they were, deigned to take the legal profession under especial

protection, and to mediate with particular officiousness between the

long robe and St. Peter. The peculiar saint of the profession was St.

Evona, concerning whom Carr, in his 'Remarks of the Government of the

Severall Parts of Germanie, Denmark, &c.,' has the following passage:

And now because I am speaking of Petty-foggers, give me leave to tell

you a story I mett with when I lived in Rome. Goeing with a Romane to

see some antiquityes, he showed me a chapell dedicated to St. Evona, a

lawyer of Brittanie, who, he said, came to Rome to entreat the Pope to

give the lawyers of Brittanie a patron, to which the Pope replied, that

he knew of no saint but what was disposed to other professions. At which

Evona was very sad, and earnestly begd of the Pope to think of one for

him. At last the Pope proposed to St. Evona that he should go round the

church of St. John de Latera blindfold, and after he had said so many

Ave Marias, that the first saint he laid hold of should be his patron,

which the good old lawyer willingly undertook, and at the end of his Ave

Maryes he stopt at St. Michael's altar, where he layed hold of the

Divell, under St. Michael's feet, and cry'd out, this is our saint, let

him be our patron. So being unblindfolded, and seeing what a patron he

had chosen, he went to his lodgings so dejected, that a few moneths

after he died, and coming to heaven's gates knockt hard. Whereupon St.

Peter asked who it was that knockt so bouldly. He replied that he was

St. Evona the advocate. Away, away, said St. Peter, here is but one

advocate in Heaven; here is no room for you lawyers. O but, said St.

Evona, I am that honest lawyer who never tooke fees on both sides, or

pleaded in a bad cause, nor did I ever set my Naibours together by the

ears, or lived by the sins of the People. Well, then, said St. Peter,

come in. This newes coming down to Rome, a witty poet wrote on St.

Evona's tomb these words:--

'St. Evona un Briton,

Advocat non Larron.

Hallelujah.'

This story put me in mind of Ben Jonson goeing throw a church in Surrey,

seeing poore people weeping over a grave, asked one of the women why

they wept. Oh, said shee, we have lost our pretious lawyer, Justice

Randall; he kept us all in peace, and always was so good as to keep us

from goeing to law; the best man ever lived. Well, said Ben Jonson, I

will send you an epitaph to write upon his tomb, which was--

'God works wonders now and then,

Here lies a lawyer an honest man.'

An important vestige of the close relations which formerly existed

between the Law and the Church is still found in the ecclesiastical

patronage of the Lord Chancellor; and many are the good stories told of

interviews that took place between our more recent chancellors and

clergymen suing for preferment. "Who sent you, sir?" Thurlow asked

savagely of a country curate, who had boldly forced his way into the

Chancellor's library in Great Ormond Street, in the hope of winning the

presentation to a vacant living. "In whose _name_ do you come, that you

venture to pester me about your private affairs? I say, sir--what great

lords sent you to bother me in my house?" "My Lord," answered the

applicant, with a happy combination of dignity and humor, "no great man

supports my entreaty; but I may say with honesty, that I come to you in

the name of the Lord of Hosts." Pleased by the spirit and wit of the

reply, Thurlow exclaimed, "The Lord of Hosts! the Lord of Hosts! you are

the first parson that ever applied to me in that Lord's name; and though

his title can't be found in the Peerage, by ---- you shall have the

living." On another occasion the same Chancellor was less benign, but

not less just to a clerical applicant. Sustained by Queen Charlotte's

personal favor and intercession with Thurlow, the clergyman in question

felt so sure of obtaining the valuable living which was the object of

his ambition, that he regarded his interview with the Chancellor as a

purely formal affair. "I have, sir," observed Lord Thurlow, "received a

letter from the curate of the parish to which it is my intention to

prefer you, and on inquiry I find him to be a very worthy man. The

father of a large family, and a priest who has labored zealously in the

parish for many years, he has written to me--not asking for the living,

but modestly entreating me to ask the new rector to retain him as

curate. Now, sir, you would oblige me by promising me to employ the poor

man in that capacity." "My lord," replied Queen Charlotte's pastor, "it

would give me great pleasure to oblige your lordship in this matter, but

unfortunately I have arranged to take a personal friend for my curate."

His eyes flashing angrily, Thurlow answered, "Sir, I cannot force you to

take this worthy man for your curate, but I can make him the rector; and

by ---- he shall have the living, and be in a position to offer you the

curacy."

Of Lord Loughborough a reliable biographer records a pleasant and

singular story. Having pronounced a decision in the House of Lords,

which deprived an excellent clergyman of a considerable estate and

reduced him to actual indigence, the Chancellor, before quitting the

woolsack, addressed the unfortunate suitor thus:--"As a judge I have

decided against you, whose virtues are not unknown to me; and in

acknowledgment of those virtues I beg you to accept from me a

presentation to a living now vacant, and worth L600 per annum."

Capital also are the best of many anecdotes concerning Eldon and his

ecclesiastical patronage. Dating the letter from No. 2, Charlotte

Street, Pimlico, the Chancellor's eldest son sent his father the

following anonymous epistle:--

"Hear, generous lawyer! hear my prayer,

Nor let my freedom make, you stare,

In hailing you Jack Scott!

Tho' now upon the woolsack placed,

With wealth, with power, with title graced,

_Once_ nearer was our lot.

"Say by what name the hapless bard

May best attract your kind regard--

Plain Jack?--Sir John?--or Eldon?

Give from your ample store of giving,

A starving priest some little living--

The world will cry out 'Well done.'

"In vain, without a patron's aid,

I've prayed and preached, and preached and prayed--

_Applauded_ but _ill-fed_.

Such vain _eclat_ let others share;

Alas, I cannot feed on air--

I ask not _praise_, but _bread_."

Satisfactorily hoaxed by the rhymer, the Chancellor went to Pimlico in

search of the clerical poetaster, and found him not.

Prettier and less comic is the story of Miss Bridge's morning call upon

Lord Eldon. The Chancellor was sitting in his study over a table of

papers when a young and lovely girl--slightly rustic in her attire,

slightly embarrassed by the novelty of her position, but thoroughly in

command of her wits--entered the room, and walked up to the lawyer's

chair. "My dear," said the Chancellor, rising and bowing with old-world

courtesy, "who _are_ you?" "Lord Eldon," answered the blushing maiden,

"I am Bessie Bridge of Weobly, the daughter of the Vicar of Weobly, and

papa has sent me to remind you of a promise which you made him when I

was a little baby, and you were a guest in his house on the occasion of

your first election as member of Parliament for Weobly." "A promise, my

dear young lady?" interposed the Chancellor, trying to recall how he had

pledged himself. "Yea, Lord Eldon, a promise. You were standing over my

cradle when papa said to you, 'Mr. Scott, promise me that if ever you

are Lord Chancellor, when my little girl is a poor clergyman's wife, you

will give her husband a living;' and you answered, 'Mr. Bridge, my

promise is not worth half-a-crown, but I give it to you, wishing it were

worth more.'" Enthusiastically the Chancellor exclaimed, "You are quite

right. I admit the obligation. I remember all about it;" and, then,

after a pause, archly surveying the damsel, whose graces were the

reverse of matronly, he added, "But surely the time for keeping my

promise has not yet arrived? You cannot be any one's wife at present?"

For a few seconds Bessie hesitated for an answer, and then, with a blush

and a ripple of silver laughter she replied, "No, but I do so wish to be

_somebody's_ wife. I am engaged to a young clergyman; and there's a

living in Herefordshire near my old home that has recently fallen

vacant, and if you'll give it to Alfred, why then, Lord Eldon, we shall

marry before the end of the year." Is there need to say that the

Chancellor forthwith summoned his Secretary, that the secretary

forthwith made out the presentation to Bessie's lover, and that having

given the Chancellor a kiss of gratitude, Bessie made good speed back to

Herefordshire, hugging the precious document the whole way home?

A bad but eager sportsman, Lord Eldon used to blaze away at his

partridges and pheasants with such uniform want of success that Lord

Stowell had truth as well as humor on his side when he observed, "My

brother has done much execution this shooting season; with his gun he

has _killed a great deal of time_." Having ineffectually discharged two

barrels at a covey of partridges, the Chancellor was slowly walking to

the gate of one of his Encome turnip-fields when a stranger of clerical

garb and aspect hailed him from a distance, asking, "Where is Lord

Eldon?" Not anxious to declare himself to the witness of his ludicrously

bad shot, the Chancellor answered evasively, and with scant courtesy,

"Not far off." Displeased with the tone of this curt reply, the

clergyman rejoined, "I wish you'd use your tongue to better purpose than

you do your gun, and tell me civily where I can find the Chancellor."

"Well," responded the sportsman, when he had slowly approached his

questioner, "here you see the Chancellor--I am Lord Eldon." It was an

untoward introduction to the Chancellor for the strange clergyman who

had traveled from the North of Lancashire to ask for the presentation to

a vacant living. Partly out of humorous compassion for the applicant who

had offered rudeness, if not insult to the person whom he was most

anxious to propitiate; partly because on inquiry he ascertained the

respectability of the applicant; and partly because he wished to seal by

kindness the lips of a man who could report on the authority of his own

eyes that the best lawyer was also the worst shot in all England, Eldon

gave the petitioner the desired preferment. "But now," the old

Chancellor used to add in conclusion, whenever he told the story, "see

the ingratitude of mankind. It was not long before a large present of

game reached me, with a letter from my new-made rector, purporting that

he had sent it to me, because _from what he had seen of my shooting he_

supposed I must be badly off for game. Think of turning upon me in this

way, and wounding me in my tenderest point."

Amongst Eldon's humorous answers to applications for preferment should

be remembered his letter to Dr. Fisher of the Charterhouse: on one side

of a sheet of paper, "Dear Fisher, I cannot, to-day, give you the

preferment for which you ask.--I remain your sincere friend,

ELDON.--_Turn over_;" and on the other side, "I gave it to you

yesterday." This note reminds us of Erskine's reply to Sir John

Sinclair's solicitation for a subscription to the testimonial which Sir

John invited the nation to present to himself. On the one side of a

sheet of paper it ran, "My dear Sir John, I am certain there are few in

this kingdom who set a higher value on your services than myself, and I

have the honor to subscribe," and on the other side it concluded,

"myself your obedient faithful servant, ERSKINE."

[35] Swithin was tutor to Ethelwulf and Alfred. Becket was tutor to

Henry II.'s eldest son. Wolsey--who took delight in discharging

scholastic functions from the days when he birched schoolboys at

Magdalen College, Oxford, till the time when in the plenitude of his

grandeur he framed regulations for Dean Colet's school of St. Paul's and

wrote an introduction to a Latin Grammar for the use of children--acted

as educational director to the Princess Mary, and superintended the

studies of Henry VIII.'s natural son, the Earl of Richmond. Amongst

pedagogue-chancellors, by license of fancy, may be included the Earl of

Clarendon, whose enemies used to charge him with 'playing the

schoolmaster to his king,' and in their desire to bring him into

disfavor at court used to announce his approach to Charles II. by

saying, "Here comes your schoolmaster."

PART IX.

AT HOME: IN COURT: AND IN SOCIETY.

CHAPTER XLV.

LAWYERS AT THEIR OWN TABLES.

A long list, indeed, might be made of abstemious lawyers; but their

temperance is almost invariably mentioned by biographers as matter for

regret and apology, and is even made an occasion for reproach in cases

where it has not been palliated by habits of munificent hospitality. In

the catalogue of Chancellor Warham's virtues and laudable usages,

Erasmus takes care to mention that the primate was accustomed to

entertain his friends, to the number of two hundred at a time: and when

the man of letters notices the archbishop's moderation with respect to

wines and dishes--a moderation that caused his grace to eschew suppers,

and never to sit more than an hour at dinner--he does not omit to

observe that though the great man "made it a rule to abstain entirely

from supper, yet if his friends were assembled at that meal he would sit

down along with them and promote their conviviality."

Splendid in all things, Wolsey astounded envious nobles by the

magnificence of his banquets, and the lavish expenses of his kitchens,

wherein his master-cooks wore raiment of richest materials--the _chef_

of his private kitchen daily arraying himself in a damask-satin or

velvet, and wearing on his neck a chain of gold. Of a far other kind

were the tastes of Wolsey's successor, who, in the warmest sunshine of

his power, preferred a quiet dinner with Erasmus to the pompous display

of state banquets, and who wore a gleeful light in his countenance when,

after his fall, he called his children and grandchildren about him, and

said: "I have been brought up at Oxford, at an Inn of Chancery, at

Lincoln's Inn, and in the King's Court--from the lowest degree to the

highest, and yet have I in yearly revenues at this present, little left

me above a hundred pounds by the year; so that now, if we wish to live

together, you must be content to be contributaries together. But my

counsel is that we fall not to the lowest fare first; we will not,

therefore, descend to Oxford fare, nor to the fare of New Inn, but we

will begin with Lincoln's Inn diet, where many right worshipful men of

great account and good years do live full well; which if we find

ourselves the first year not able to maintain, then will we in the next

year come down to Oxford fare, where many great, learned, and ancient

fathers and doctors are continually conversant; which if our purses

stretch not to maintain neither, then may we after, with bag and wallet,

go a-begging together, hoping that for pity some good folks will give us

their charity and at every man's door to sing a _Salve Regina_, whereby

we shall keep company and be merry together."

Students recalling the social life of England should bear in mind the

hours kept by our ancestors in the fourteenth and two following

centuries. Under the Plantagenets noblemen used to sup at five P.M., and

dine somewhere about the breakfast hour of Mayfair in a modern London

season. Gradually hours became later; but under the Tudors the ordinary

dinner hour for gentlepeople was somewhere about eleven A.M., and their

usual time for supping was between five P.M. and six P.M., tradesmen,

merchants and farmers dining and supping at later hours than their

social superiors. "With us," says Hall the chronicler, "the nobility,

gentry, and students, do ordinarily go to dinner at eleven before noon,

and to supper at five, or between five and six, at afternoon. The

merchants dine and sup seldom before twelve at noon and six at night.

The husbandmen also dine at high noon as they call it, and sup at seven

or eight; but out of term in our universities the scholars dine at ten."

Thus whilst the idlers of society made haste to eat and drink, the

workers postponed the pleasures of the table until they had made a good

morning's work. In the days of morning dinners and afternoon suppers,

the law-courts used to be at the height of their daily business at an

hour when Templars of the present generation have seldom risen from bed.

Chancellors were accustomed to commence their daily sittings in

Westminster at seven A.M. in summer, and at eight A.M. in winter months.

Lord Keeper Williams, who endeavored to atone for want of law by

extraordinarily assiduous attention to the duties of his office, used

indeed to open his winter sittings by candlelight between six and seven

o'clock.

Many were the costly banquets of which successive Chancellors invited

the nobility, the judges, and the bar, to partake at old York House; but

of all the holders of the Great Seal who exercised pompous hospitality

in that picturesque palace, Francis Bacon was the most liberal,

gracious, and delightful entertainer. Where is the student of English

history who has not often endeavored to imagine the scene when Ben

Jonson sat amongst the honored guests of

"England's high Chancellor, the destin'd heir,

In his soft cradle, to his father's chair,"

and little prescient of the coming storm, spoke of his host as one

"Whose even thread the Fates spin round and full,

Out of their choicest and their whitest wool."

Even at the present day lawyers have reason to be grateful to Bacon for

the promptitude with which, on taking possession of the Marble Chair, he

revived the ancient usages of earlier holders of the seal, and set an

example of courteous hospitality to the bar, which no subsequent

Chancellor has been able to disregard without loss of respect and

_prestige_. Though a short attack of gout qualified the new pleasure of

his elevation--an attack attributed by the sufferer to his removal "from

a field air to a Thames air," _i.e._, from Gray's Inn to the south side

of the Strand--Lord Keeper Bacon lost no time in summoning the judges

and most eminent barristers to his table; and though the gravity of his

indisposition, or the dignity of his office, forbade him to join in the

feast, he sat and spoke pleasantly with them when the dishes had been

removed. "Yesterday," he wrote to Buckingham, "which was my weary day, I

bid all the judges to dinner, which was not used to be, and entertained

them in a private withdrawing chamber with the learned counsel. When the

feast was past I came amongst them and sat me down at the end of the

table, and prayed them to think I was one of them, and but a foreman."

Nor let us, whilst recalling Bacon's bounteous hospitalities, fail in

justice to his great rival, Sir Edward Coke---who, though he usually

held himself aloof from frivolous amusements, and cared but little for

expensive repasts, would with a liberal hand place lordly dishes before

lordly guests; and of whom it is recorded in the 'Apophthegmes,' that

when any great visitor dropped in upon him for pot-luck without notice

he was wont to say, "Sir, since you sent me no notice of your coming,

you must dine with me; but if I had known of it in due time I would have

dined with you."

From such great men as Lord Nottingham and Lord Guildford, who

successively kept high state in Queen Street, Lincoln's Inn Fields, to

fat _puisnes_ occupying snug houses in close proximity to the Inns of

Court, and lower downwards to leaders of the bar and juniors sleeping as

well as working in chambers, the Restoration lawyers were conspicuous

promoters of the hilarity which was one of the most prominent and least

offensive characteristics of Charles II.'s London. Lord Nottingham's

sumptuous hospitalities were the more creditable, because he voluntarily

relinquished his claim to L4000 per annum, which the royal bounty had

assigned him as a fund to be expended in official entertainments.

Similar praise cannot be awarded to Lord Guildford; but justice compels

the admission that, notwithstanding his love of money, he maintained the

_prestige_ of his place, so far as a hospitable table and profuse

domestic expenditure could support it.

Contrasting strongly with the lawyers of this period, who copied in

miniature the impressive state of Clarendon's princely establishments,

were the jovial, catch-singing, three-bottle lawyers--who preferred

drunkenness to pomp; an oaken table, surrounded by jolly fellows, to

ante-rooms crowded with obsequious courtiers; a hunting song with a

brave chorus to the less stormy diversion of polite conversation. Of

these free-living lawyers, George Jeffreys was a conspicuous leader. Not

averse to display, and not incapable of shining in refined society, this

notorious man loved good cheer and jolly companions beyond all other

sources of excitement; and during his tenure of the seals, he was never

more happy than when he was presiding over a company of sharp-witted

men-about-town whom he had invited to indulge in wild talk and choice

wine at his mansion that overlooked the lawns, the water, and the trees

of St. James's Park. On such occasions his lordship's most valued boon

companion was Mountfort, the comedian, whom he had taken from the stage

and made a permanent officer of the Duke Street household. Whether the

actor was required to discharge any graver functions in the Chancellor's

establishment is unknown; but we have Sir John Reresby's testimony that

the clever mimic and brilliant libertine was employed to amuse his

lordship's guests by ridiculing the personal and mental peculiarities of

the judges and most eminent barristers. "I dined," records Sir John,

"with the Lord Chancellor, where the Lord Mayor of London was a guest,

and some other gentlemen. His lordship having, according to custom,

drunk deep at dinner, called for one Mountfort, a gentleman of his, who

had been a comedian, an excellent mimic; and to divert the company, as

he was pleased to term it, he made him plead before him in a feigned

cause, during which he aped the judges, and all the great lawyers of the

age, in tone of voice and in action and gesture of body, to the very

great ridicule, not only of the lawyers, but of the law itself, which to

me did not seem altogether prudent in a man in his lofty station in the

law; diverting it certainly was, but prudent in the Lord Chancellor I

shall never think it." The fun of Mountfort's imitations was often

heightened by the presence of the persons whom they held up to

derision--some of whom would see and express natural displeasure at the

affront; whilst others, quite unconscious of their own peculiarities,

joined loudly in the laughter that was directed against themselves.

As pet buffoon of the tories about town, Mountfort was followed, at a

considerable distance of time, by Estcourt--an actor who united wit and

fine humor with irresistible powers of mimicry; and who contrived to

acquire the respect and affectionate regard of many of those famous

Whigs whom it was alike his pleasure and his business to render

ridiculous. In the _Spectator_ Steele paid him a tribute of cordial

admiration; and Cibber, noticing the marvellous fidelity of his

imitations, has recorded, "This man was so amazing and extraordinary a

mimic, that no man or woman, from the coquette to the privy counsellor,

ever moved or spoke before him, but he could carry their voice, look,

mien, and motion instantly into another company. I have heard him make

long harangues, and form various arguments, even in the manner of

thinking of an eminent pleader at the bar, with every the least article

and singularity of his utterance so perfectly imitated, that he was the

very _alter ipse_, scarce to be distinguished from the original."

With the exception of Kenyon and Eldon, and one or two less conspicuous

instances of judicial penuriousness, the judges of the Georgian period

were hospitable entertainers. Chief Justice Lee, who died in 1754,

gained credit for an adequate knowledge of law by the sumptuousness and

frequency of the dinners with which he regaled his brothers of the bench

and learned counsellors. Chief Justice Mansfield's habitual temperance

and comparative indifference to the pleasures of the table did not cause

him to be neglectful of hospitable duties. Notwithstanding the cold

formality of Lord Hardwicke's entertainments, and the charges of

niggardliness preferred against Lady Hardwicke's domestic system by

Opposition satirists, Philip Yorke used to entertain the chiefs of his

profession with pomp, if not with affability. Thurlow entertained a

somewhat too limited circle of friends with English fare and a

superabundance of choice port in Great Ormond Street. Throughout his

public career, Alexander Wedderburn was a lavish and delightful host,

amply atoning in the opinion of frivolous society for his political

falsity by the excellence and number of his grand dinners. On entering

the place of Solicitor-General, he spent L8000 on a service of plate;

and as Lord Loughborough he gratified the bar and dazzled the

fashionable world by hospitality alike sumptuous and brilliant.

Several of the Georgian lawyers had strong predilections for particular

dishes or articles of diet. Thurlow was very fanciful about his fruit;

and in his later years he would give way to ludicrous irritability, if

inferior grapes or faulty peaches were placed before him. At Brighton,

in his declining years, the ex-Chancellor's indignation at a dish of

defective wall-fruit was so lively that--to the inexpressible

astonishment of Horne Tooke and other guests--he caused the whole of a

very fine dessert to be thrown out of the window upon the Marine Parade.

Baron Graham's weakness was for oysters, eaten as a preparatory whet to

the appetite before dinner; and it is recorded of him that on a certain

occasion, when he had been indulging in this favorite pre-prandial

exercise, he observed with pleasant humor--"Oysters taken before dinner

are said to sharpen the appetite; but I have just consumed half-a-barrel

of fine natives--and speaking honestly, I am bound to say that I don't

feel quite as hungry as when I began." Thomas Manners Button's peculiar

_penchant_ was for salads; and in a moment of impulsive kindness he gave

Lady Morgan the recipe for his favorite salad--a compound of rare merit

and mysterious properties. Bitterly did the old lawyer repent his unwise

munificence when he read 'O'Donnell.' Warmly displeased with the

political sentiments of the novel, he ordered it to be burnt in the

servants' hall, and exclaimed, peevishly, to Lady Manners, "I wish I

had not given her the secret of my salad." In no culinary product did

Lord Ellenborough find greater delight than lobster-sauce; and he gave

expression to his high regard for that soothing and delicate compound

when he decided that persons engaged in lobster-fishery were exempt from

legal liability to impressment. "Then is not," inquired his lordship,

with solemn pathos, "the lobster-fishery a fishery, and a most important

fishery, of this kingdom, though carried on in shallow water? The

framers of the law well knew that the produce of the deep sea, without

the produce of the shallow water, would be of comparatively small value,

and intended that turbot, when placed upon our tables, should be flanked

by good lobster-sauce." Eldon's singular passion for fried 'liver and

bacon' was amongst his most notorious and least pleasant peculiarities.

Even the Prince Regent condescended to humor this remarkable taste by

ordering a dish of liver and bacon to be placed on the table when the

Chancellor dined with him at Brighton. Sir John Leach, Master of the

Rolls, was however less ready to pander to a depraved appetite. Lord

Eldon said, "It will give me great pleasure to dine with you, and since

you are good enough to ask me to order a dish that shall test your new

_chef's_ powers--I wish you'd tell your Frenchman to fry some liver and

bacon for me." "Are you laughing at me or my cook?" asked Sir John

Leach, stiffly, thinking that the Chancellor was bent on ridiculing his

luxurious mode of living. "At neither," answered Eldon, with equal

simplicity and truth; "I was only ordering the dish which I enjoy beyond

all other dishes."

Although Eldon's penuriousness was grossly exaggerated by his

detractors, it cannot be questioned that either through indolence, or

love of money, or some other kind of selfishness, he was very neglectful

of his hospitable duties to the bench and the bar. "Verily he is

working off the arrears of the Lord Chancellor," said Romilly, when Sir

Thomas Plummer, the Master of the Rolls, gave a succession of dinners to

the bar; and such a remark would not have escaped the lips of the

decorous and amiable Romilly had not circumstances fully justified it.

Still it is unquestionable that Eldon's Cabinet dinners were suitably

expensive; and that he never grudged his choicest port to the old

attorneys and subordinate placemen who were his obsequious companions

towards the close of his career. For the charges of sordid parsimony so

frequently preferred against Kenyon it is to be feared there were better

grounds. Under the steadily strengthening spell of avarice he ceased to

invite even old friends to his table; and it was rumored that in course

of time his domestic servants complained with reason that they were

required to consume the same fare as their master deemed sufficient for

himself. "In Lord Kenyon's house," a wit exclaimed, "all the year

through it is Lent in the kitchen, and Passion Week in the Parlor."

Another caustic quidnunc remarked, "In his lordship's kitchen the fire

is dull, but the spits are always bright;" whereupon Jekyll interposed

with an assumption of testiness, "Spits! in the name of common sense I

order you not to talk about _his_ spits, for nothing turns upon them."

Very different was the temper of Erskine, who spent money faster than

Kenyon saved it, and who died in indigence after holding the Great Seal

of England, and making for many years a finer income at the bar than any

of his contemporaries not enjoying crown patronage. Many are the bright

pictures preserved to us of his hospitality to politicians and lawyers,

wits, and people of fashion; but none of the scenes is more

characteristic than the dinner described by Sir Samuel Romilly, when

that good man met at Erskine's Hampstead villa the chiefs of the

opposition and Mr. Pinkney, the American Minister. "Among the light,

trifling topics of conversation after dinner," says Sir Samuel Romilly,

"it may be worth while to mention one, as it strongly characterizes Lord

Erskine. He has always expressed and felt a strong sympathy with

animals. He has talked for years of a bill he was to bring into

parliament to prevent cruelty towards them. He has always had some

favorite animals to whom he has been much attached, and of whom all his

acquaintance have a number of anecdotes to relate; a favorite dog which

he used to bring, when he was at the bar, to all his consultations;

another favorite dog, which, at the time when he was Lord Chancellor, he

himself rescued in the street from some boys who were about to kill it

under the pretence of its being mad; a favorite goose, which followed

him wherever he walked about his grounds; a favorite macaw, and other

dumb favorites without number. He told us now that he had got two

favorite leeches. He had been blooded by them last autumn when he had

been taken dangerously ill at Portsmouth; they had saved his life, and

he had brought them with him to town, had ever since kept them in a

glass, had himself every day given them fresh water, and had formed a

friendship for them. He said he was sure they both knew him and were

grateful to him. He had given them different names, 'Home' and 'Cline'

(the names of two celebrated surgeons), their dispositions being quite

different. After a good deal of conversation about them, he went

himself, brought them out of his library, and placed them in their glass

upon the table. It is impossible, however, without the vivacity, the

tones, the details, and the gestures of Lord Erskine, to give an

adequate idea of this singular scene." Amongst the listeners to Erskine,

whilst he spoke eloquently and with fervor of the virtues of his two

leeches, were the Duke of Norfolk, Lord Grenville, Lord Grey, Lord

Holland, Lord Ellenborough, Lord Lauderdale, Lord Henry Petty, and

Thomas Grenville.

CHAPTER XLVI.

WINE.

From the time when Francis Bacon attributed a sharp attack of gout to

his removal from Gray's Inn Fields to the river side, to a time not many

years distant when Sir Herbert Jenner Fust[36] used to be brought into

his court in Doctors' Commons and placed in the judicial seat by two

liveried porters, lawyers were not remarkable for abstinence from the

pleasures to which our ancestors were indebted for the joint-fixing,

picturesque gout that has already become an affair of the past.

Throughout the long period that lies between Charles II.'s restoration

and George III.'s death, an English judge without a symptom of gout was

so exceptional a character that people talked of him as an interesting

social curiosity. The Merry Monarch made Clarendon's bedroom his

council-chamber when the Chancellor was confined to his couch by

_podagra_. Lord Nottingham was so disabled by gout, and what the old

physicians were pleased to call a 'perversity of the humors,' that his

duties in the House of Lords were often discharged by Francis North,

then Chief Justice of the Common Pleas; and though he persevered in

attending to the business of his court, a man of less resolution would

have altogether succumbed to the agony of his disease and the burden of

his infirmities. "I have known him," says Roger North, "sit to hear

petitions in great pain, and say that his servants had let him out,

though he was fitter for his chamber." Prudence saved Lord Guildford

from excessive intemperance; but he lived with a freedom that would be

remarkable in the present age. Chief Justice Saunders was a confirmed

sot, taking nips of brandy with his breakfast, and seldom appearing in

public "without a pot of ale at his nose or near him." Sir Robert Wright

was notoriously addicted to wine; and George Jeffreys drank, as he

swore, like a trooper. "My lord," said King Charles, in a significant

tone, when he gave Jeffreys the _blood-stone_ ring, "as it is a hot

summer, and you are going the circuit, I desire you will not drink too

much."

Amongst the reeling judges of the Restoration, however, there moved one

venerable lawyer, who, in an age when moralists hesitated to call

drunkenness a vice, was remarkable for sobriety. In his youth, whilst he

was indulging with natural ardor in youthful pleasures, Chief Justice

Hale was so struck with horror at seeing an intimate friend drop

senseless, and apparently lifeless, at a student's drinking-bout, that

he made a sudden but enduring resolution to conquer his ebrious

propensities, and withdraw himself from the dangerous allurements of

ungodly company. Falling upon his knees he prayed the Almighty to

rescue his friend from the jaws of death, and also to strengthen him to

keep his newly-formed resolution. He rose an altered man. But in an age

when the barbarous usage of toast-drinking was in full force, he felt

that he could not be an habitually sober man if he mingled in society,

and obeyed a rule which required the man of delicate and excitable

nerves to drink as much, bumper for bumper, as the man whose sluggish

system could receive a quart of spirits at a sitting and yet scarcely

experience a change of sensation. At that time it was customary with

prudent men to protect themselves against a pernicious and tyrannous

custom, by taking a vow to abstain from toast-drinking, or even from

drinking wine at all, for a certain stated period. Readers do not need

to be reminded how often young Pepys was under a vow not to drink; and

the device by which the jovial admiralty clerk strengthened an infirm

will and defended himself against temptation was frequently employed by

right-minded young men of his date. In some cases, instead of _vowing_

not to drink, they _bound_ themselves not to drink within a certain

period; two persons, that is to say, agreeing that they would abstain

from wine and spirits for a certain period, and each _binding_ himself

in case he broke the compact to pay over a certain sum of money to his

partner in the bond. Young Hale saw that to effect a complete

reformation of his life it was needful for him to abjure the practice of

drinking healths. He therefore vowed _never again_ to drink a health;

and he kept his vow. Never again did he brim his bumper and drain it at

the command of a toast-master, although his abstinence exposed him to

much annoyance; and in his old age he thus urged his grandchildren to

follow his example--"I will not have you begin or pledge any health, for

it is become one of the greatest artifices of drinking, and occasions of

quarrelling in the kingdom. If you pledge one health you oblige

yourself to pledge another, and a third, and so onwards; and if you

pledge as many as will be drunk, you must be debauched and drunk. If

they will needs know the reason of your refusal, it is a fair answer,

'that your grandfather that brought you up, from whom, under God, you

have the estate you enjoy or expect, left this in command with you, that

you should never begin or pledge a health.'"

Jeffrey's _protege_, John Trevor, liked good wine himself, but emulated

the virtuous Hale in the pains which he took to place the treacherous

drink beyond the reach of others--whenever they showed a desire to drink

it at his expense. After his expulsion from the House of Commons, Sir

John Trevor was sitting alone over a choice bottle of claret, when his

needy kinsman, Roderic Lloyd, was announced. "You rascal," exclaimed the

Master of the Rolls, springing to his feet, and attacking his footman

with furious language, "you have brought my cousin, Roderic Lloyd,

Esquire, Prothonotary of North Wales, Marshal to Baron Price, up my back

stairs. You scoundrel, hear ye, I order you to take him this instant

down my _back stairs_, and bring him up my _front stairs_." Sir John

made such a point of showing his visitor this mark of respect, that the

young barrister was forced to descend and enter the room by the state

staircase; but he saw no reason to think himself honored by his cousin's

punctilious courtesy, when on entering the room a second time he looked

in vain for the claret bottle.

On another occasion Sir John Trevor's official residence afforded

shelter to the same poor relation when the latter was in great mental

trouble. "Roderic," saith the chronicler, "was returning rather elevated

from his club one night, and ran against the pump in Chancery Lane.

Conceiving somebody had struck him, he drew and made a lunge at the

pump. The sword entered the spout, and the pump, being crazy, fell

down. Roderic concluded he had killed his man, left, his sword in the

pump, and retreated to his old friend's house at the Rolls. There he was

concealed by the servants for the night. In the morning his Honor,

having heard the story, came himself to deliver him from his

consternation and confinement in the coal-hole."

Amongst the eighteenth century lawyers there was considerable difference

of taste and opinion on questions relating to the use and abuse of wine.

Though he never, or very seldom, exceeded the limits of sobriety, Somers

enjoyed a bottle in congenial society; and though wine never betrayed

him into reckless hilarity, it gave gentleness and comity to his

habitually severe countenance and solemn deportment--if reliance may be

placed on Swift's couplet--

"By force of wine even Scarborough is brave,

Hall grows more pert, and Somers not so grave."

A familiar quotation that alludes to Murray's early intercourse with the

wits warrants an inference that in opening manhood he preferred

champagne to every other wine; but as Lord Mansfield he steadily adhered

to claret, though fashion had taken into favor the fuller wine

stigmatized as poison by John Home's famous epigram--

"Bold and erect the Caledonian stood;

Old was his mutton, and his claret good.

'Let him drink port,' an English statesman cried:

He drunk the poison and his spirit died."

Unlike his father, who never sinned against moderation in his cups,

Charles Yorke was a deep drinker as well as a gourmand. Hardwicke's

successor, Lord Northington, was the first of a line of

port-wine-drinking judges that may at the present time be fairly said

to have come to an end--although a few reverend fathers of the law yet

remain, who drink with relish the Methuen drink when age has deprived it

of body and strength. Until Robert Henley held the seals, Chancellors

continued to hold after-dinner sittings in the Court of Chancery on

certain days of the week throughout term. Hardwicke, throughout his long

official career, sat on the evenings of Wednesdays and Fridays hearing

causes, while men of pleasure were fuddling themselves with fruity

vintages. Lord Northington, however, prevailed on George III. to let him

discontinue these evening attendances in court. "But why," asked the

monarch, "do you wish for a change?" "Sir," the Chancellor answered,

with delightful frankness, "I want the change in order that I may finish

my bottle of port at my ease; and your majesty, in your parental care

for the happiness of your subjects, will, I trust, think this a

sufficient reason." Of course the king's laughter ended in a favorable

answer to the petition for reform, and from that time the Chancellor's

evening sittings were discontinued. But ere he died, the jovial

Chancellor paid the penalty which port exacts from all her fervent

worshippers, and he suffered the acutest pangs of gout. It is recorded

that as he limped from the woolsack to the bar of the House of Lords, he

once muttered to a young peer, who watched his distress with evident

sympathy--"Ah, my young friend, if I had known that these legs would one

day carry a Chancellor, I would have taken better care of them when I

was at your age." Unto this had come the handsome legs of young

Counsellor Henley, who, in his dancing days, stepped minuets to the

enthusiastic admiration of the _belles_ of Bath.

Some light is thrown on the manners of lawyers in the eighteenth century

by an order made by the authorities of Barnard's Inn, who, in November,

1706, named two quarts as the allowance of wine to be given to each

mess of four men by two gentlemen on going through the ceremony of

'initiation.' Of course, this amount of wine was an 'extra' allowance,

in addition to the ale and sherry assigned to members by the regular

dietary of the house. Even Sheridan, who boasted that he could drink any

_given_ quantity of wine, would have thought twice before he drank so

large a given quantity, in addition to a liberal allowance of stimulant.

Anyhow, the quantity was fixed--a fact that would have elicited an

expression of approval from Chief Baron Thompson, who, loving port wine

wisely, though too well, expressed at the same time his concurrence with

the words, and his dissent from the opinion of a barrister, who

observed--"I hold, my lord, that after a good dinner a certain quantity

of wine does no harm." With a smile, the Chief Baron rejoined--"True,

sir; it is the _uncertain_ quantity that does the mischief."

The most temperate of the eighteenth-century Chancellors was Lord

Camden, who required no more generous beverage than sound malt liquor,

as he candidly declared, in a letter to the Duke of Grafton, wherein he

says--"I am, thank God, remarkably well, but your grace must not seduce

me into my former intemperance. A plain dish and a draught of porter

(which last is indispensable), are the very extent of my luxury." For

porter, Edward Thurlow, in his student days, had high respect and keen

relish; but in his mature years, as well as still older age, full-bodied

port was his favorite drink, and under its influence were seen to the

best advantage those colloquial powers which caused Samuel Johnson to

exclaim--"Depend upon it, sir, it is when you come close to a man in

conversation that you discover what his real abilities are; to make a

speech in a public assembly is a knack. Now, I honor Thurlow, sir;

Thurlow is a fine fellow: he fairly puts his mind to yours." Of

Thurlow, when he had mounted the woolsack, Johnson also observed--"I

would prepare myself for no man in England but Lord Thurlow. When I am

to meet him, I would wish to know a day before." From the many stories

told of Thurlow and ebriosity, one may be here taken and brought under

the reader's notice--not because it has wit or humor to recommend it,

but because it presents the Chancellor in company with another

port-loving lawyer, William Pitt, from whose fame, by-the-by, Lord

Stanhope has recently removed the old disfiguring imputations of

sottishness. "Returning," says Sir Nathaniel Wraxall, a poor authority,

but piquant gossip-monger, "by way of frolic, very late at night, on

horseback, to Wimbledon, from Addiscombe, the seat of Mr. Jenkinson,

near Croydon, where the party had dined, Lord Thurlow, the Chancellor,

Pitt, and Dundas, found the turnpike gate, situate between Tooting and

Streatham, thrown open. Being elevated above their usual prudence, and

having no servant near them, they passed through the gate at a brisk

pace, without stopping to pay the toll, regardless of the remonstrances

and threats of the turnpike man, who running after them, and believing

them to belong to some highwaymen who had recently committed some

depredation on that road, discharged the contents of his blunderbuss at

their backs. Happily he did no injury."

Throughout their long lives the brothers Scott were steady, and,

according to the rules of the present day, inordinate drinkers of port

wine. As a young barrister, John Scott could carry more port with

decorum than any other man of his inn; and in the days when he is

generally supposed to have lived on sprats and table-beer, he seldom

passed twenty-four hours without a bottle of his favorite wine.

Prudence, however, made him careful to avoid intoxication, and when he

found that a friendship often betrayed him into what he thought

excessive drinking, he withdrew from the dangerous connexion. "I see

your friend Bowes very often," he wrote in May, 1778, a time when Mr.

Bowes was his most valuable client; "but I dare not dine with him above

once in three months, as there is no getting away before midnight; and,

indeed, one is sure to be in a condition in which no man would wish to

be in the streets at any other season." Of the quantities imbibed at

these three-monthly dinners, an estimate may be formed from the

following story. Bringing from Oxford to London that fine sense of the

merits of port wine which characterized the thorough Oxonion of a

century since, William Scott made it for some years a rule to dine with

his brother John on the first day of term at a tavern hard by the

Temple; and on these occasions the brothers used to make away with

bottle after bottle not less to the astonishment than the approval of

the waiters who served them. Before the decay of his faculties, Lord

Stowell was recalling these terminal dinners to his son-in-law, Lord

Sidmouth, when the latter observed, "You drank some wine together, I

dare say?" Lord Stowell, modestly, "Yes, we drank some wine."

Son-in-law, inquisitively, "Two bottles?" Lord Stowell, quickly putting

away the imputation of such abstemiousness, "More than that."

Son-in-law, smiling, "What, three bottles?" Lord Stowell, "More."

Son-in-law, opening his eyes with astonishment, "By Jove, sir, you don't

mean to say that you took four bottles?" Lord Stowell, beginning to feel

ashamed of himself, "More; I mean to say we had more. Now don't ask any

more questions."

Whilst Lord Stowell, smarting under the domestic misery of which his

foolish marriage with the Dowager Marchioness of Sligo was fruitful,

sought comfort and forgetfulness in the cellar of the Middle Temple,

Lord Eldon drained magnums of Newcastle port at his own table. Populous

with wealthy merchants, and surrounded by an opulent aristocracy,

Newcastle had used the advantages given her by a large export trade with

Portugal to draw to her cellars such superb port wine as could be found

in no other town in the United Kingdom; and to the last the Tory

Chancellor used to get his port from the canny capital of Northumbria.

Just three weeks before his death, the veteran lawyer, sitting in his

easy-chair and recalling his early triumphs, preluded an account of the

great leading case, "Akroyd _v._ Smithson," by saying to his listener,

"Come, Farrer, help yourself to a glass of Newcastle port, and help me

to a little." But though he asked for a little, the old earl, according

to his wont, drank much before he was raised from his chair and led to

his sleeping-room. It is on record, and is moreover supported by

unexceptionable evidence, that in his extreme old age, whilst he was

completely laid upon the shelf, and almost down to the day of his death,

which occurred in his eighty-seventh year, Lord Eldon never drank less

than three pints of port daily with or after his dinner.

Of eminent lawyers who were steady port-wine drinkers, Baron Platt--the

amiable and popular judge who died in 1862, aged seventy-two years--may

be regarded as one of the last. Of him it is recorded that in early

manhood he was so completely prostrated by severe illness that beholders

judged him to be actually dead. Standing over his silent body shortly

before the arrival of the undertaker, two of his friends concurred in

giving utterance to the sentiment: "Ah, poor dear fellow, we shall never

drink a glass of wine with him again;" when, to their momentary alarm

and subsequent delight, the dead man interposed with a faint assumption

of jocularity, "But you will though, and a good many too, I hope." When

the undertaker called he was sent away a genuinely sorrowful man; and

the young lawyer, who was 'not dead yet,' lived to old age and good

purpose.

[36] In old Sir Herbert's later days it was a mere pleasantry, or bold

figure of speech to say that his court had risen, for he used to be

lifted from his chair and carried bodily from the chamber of justice by

two brawny footmen. Of course, as soon as the judge was about to be

elevated by his bearers, the bar rose; and also as a matter of course

the bar continued to stand until the strong porters had conveyed their

weighty and venerable burden along the platform behind one of the rows

of advocates and out of sight. As the _trio_ worked their laborious way

along the platform, there seemed to be some danger that they might

blunder and fall through one of the windows into the space behind the

court; and at a time when Sir Herbert and Dr. ---- were at open

variance, that waspish advocate had on one occasion the bad taste to

keep his seat at the rising of the court, and with characteristic

malevolence of expression to say to the footmen, "Mind, my men, and take

care of that judge of yours--or, by Jove, you'll pitch him out of the

window." It is needless to say that this brutal speech did not raise the

speaker in the opinion of the hearers.

CHAPTER XLVII.

LAW AND LITERATURE.

At the present time, when three out of every five journalists attached

to our chief London newspapers are Inns-of-Court men; when many of our

able and successful advocates are known to ply their pens in organs of

periodical literature as regularly as they raise their voices in courts

of justice; and when the young Templar, who has borne away the first

honors of his university, deems himself the object of a compliment on

receiving an invitation to contribute to the columns of a leading review

or daily journal--it is difficult to believe that strong men are still

amongst us who can remember the days when it was the fashion of the bar

to disdain law-students who were suspected of 'writing for hire' and

barristers who 'reported for the papers.' Throughout the opening years

of the present century, and even much later, it was almost universally

held on the circuits and in Westminster Hall, that Inns-of-Court men

lowered the dignity of their order by following those literary

avocations by which some of the brightest ornaments of the law supported

themselves at the outset of their professional careers. Notwithstanding

this prejudice, a few wearers of the long robe, daring by nature, or

rendered bold by necessity, persisted in 'maintaining a connexion with

the press, whilst they sought briefs on the circuit, or waited for

clients in their chambers. Such men as Sergeant Spankie and Lord

Campbell, as Master Stephen and Mr. Justice Talfourd, were reporters for

the press whilst they kept terms; and no sooner had Henry Brougham's

eloquence charmed the public, than it was whispered that for years his

pen, no less ready than his tongue, had found constant employment in

organs of political intelligence.

But though such men were known to exist, they were regarded as the

'black sheep' of the bar by a great majority of their profession. It is

not improbable that this prejudice against gownsmen on the press was

palliated by circumstances that no longer exist. When political writers

were very generally regarded as dangerous members of society, and when

conductors of respectable newspapers were harassed with vexatious

prosecutions and heavy punishments for acts of trivial inadvertence, or

for purely imaginary offences, the average journalist was in many

respects inferior to the average journalist working under the present

more favorable circumstances. Men of culture, honest purpose, and fine

feeling were slow to enrol themselves members of a despised and

proscribed fraternity; and in the dearth of educated gentlemen ready to

accept literary employment, the task of writing for the public papers

too frequently devolved upon very unscrupulous persons, who rendered

their calling as odious as themselves. A shackled and persecuted press

is always a licentious and venal press; and before legislation endowed

English journalism with a certain measure of freedom and security, it

was seldom manly and was often corrupt. It is therefore probable that

our grandfathers had some show of reason for their dislike of

contributors to anonymous literature. At the bar men of unquestionable

amiability and enlightenment were often the loudest to express this

aversion for their scribbling brethren. It was said that the scribblers

were seldom gentlemen in temper; and that they never hesitated to puff

themselves in their papers. These considerations so far influenced Mr.

Justice Lawrence that, though he was a model of judicial suavity to all

other members of the bar, he could never bring himself to be barely

civil to advocates known to be 'upon the press.'

At Lincoln's Inn this strong feeling against journalists found vent in a

resolution, framed in reference to a particular person, which would have

shut out journalists from the Society. It had long been understood that

no student could be called to the bar _whilst_ he was acting as a

reporter in the gallery of either house; but the new decision of the

benchers would have destroyed the ancient connexion of the legal

profession and literary calling. Strange to say this illiberal measure

was the work of two benchers who, notwithstanding their patrician

descent and associations, were vehement asserters of liberal principles.

Mr. Clifford--'O.P.' Clifford--was its proposer and Erskine was its

seconder. Fortunately the person who was the immediate object of its

provisions petitioned the House of Commons upon the subject, and the

consequent debate in the Lower House decided the benchers to withdraw

from their false position; and since their silent retreat no attempt has

been made by any of the four honorable societies to affix an undeserved

stigma on the followers of a serviceable art. Upon the whole the

literary calling gained much from the discreditable action of Lincoln's

Inn; for the speech in which Sheridan covered with derision this attempt

to brand parliamentary reporters as unfit to associate with members of

the bar, and the address in which Mr. Stephen, with manly reference to

his own early experiences, warmly censured the conduct of the society of

which he was himself a member, caused many persons to form a new and

juster estimate of the working members of the London press. Having

alluded to Dr. Johnson and Edmund Burke, who had both acted as

parliamentary reporters, Sheridan stated that no less than twenty-three

graduates of universities were then engaged as reporters of the

proceedings of the house.

The close connexion which for centuries has existed between men of law

and men of letters is illustrated on the one hand by a long succession

of eminent lawyers who have added to the lustre of professional honors

the no less bright distinctions of literary achievements or friendships,

and on the other hand by the long line of able writers who either

enrolled themselves amongst the students of the law, or resided in the

Inns of Court, or cherished with assiduous care the friendly regard of

famous judges. Indeed, since the days of Chancellor de Bury, who wrote

the 'Philobiblon,' there have been few Chancellors to whom literature is

not in some way indebted; and the few Keepers of the Seal who neither

cared for letters nor cultivated the society of students, are amongst

the judges whose names most Englishmen would gladly erase from the

history of their country. Jeffreys and Macclesfield represent the

unlettered Chancellors; More and Bacon the lettered. Fortescue's 'De

Laudibus' is a book for every reader. To Chancellor Warham, Erasmus--a

scholar not given to distribute praise carelessly--dedicated his 'St.

Jerom,' with cordial eulogy. Wolsey was a patron of letters. More may be

said to have revived, if he did not create, the literary taste of his

contemporaries, and to have transplanted the novel to English soil.

Equally diligent as a writer and a collector of books, Gardyner spent

his happiest moments at his desk, or over the folios of the magnificent

library which was destroyed by Wyat's insurgents. Christopher Hatton was

a dramatic author. To one person who can describe with any approach to

accuracy Edward Hyde's conduct in the Court of Chancery, there are

twenty who have studied Clarendon's 'Rebellion.' At the present date

Hale's books are better known than his judgments, though his conduct

towards the witches of Bury St. Edmunds conferred an unenviable fame on

his judicial career. By timely assistance rendered to Burnet, Lord

Nottingham did something to atone for his brutality towards Milton,

whom, at an earlier period of his career, he had declared worthy of a

felon's death, for having been Cromwell's Latin secretary. Lord Keeper

North wrote upon 'Music;' and to his brother Roger literature is

indebted for the best biographies composed by any writer of his period.

In his boyhood Somers was a poet; in his maturer years the friend of

poets. The friend of Prior and Gay, Arbuthnot and Pope, Lord Chancellor

Harcourt, wrote verses of more than ordinary merit, and alike in periods

of official triumph and in times of retirement valued the friendship of

men of wit above the many successes of his public career. Lord

Chancellor King, author of 'Constitution and Discipline of the Primitive

Church,' was John Locke's dutiful nephew and favorite companion. King's

immediate successor was extolled by Pope in the lines,

O teach us, Talbot! thou'rt unspoil'd by wealth,

That secret rare, between the extremes to move,

Of mad good-nature and of mean self-love.

Who is it copies Talbot's better part,

To ease th' oppress'd, and raise the sinking heart?

But Talbot's fairest eulogy was penned by his son's tutor, Alexander

Thomson--a poet who had no reason to feel gratitude to Talbot's official

successor. Ere he thoroughly resolved to devote himself to law, the cold

and formal Hardwicke had cherished a feeble ambition for literary

distinction; and under its influence he wrote a paper that appeared in

the _Spectator_. Blackstone's entrance at the Temple occasioned his

metrical 'Farewell' to his muse. In his undergraduate days at Cambridge

Lord Chancellor Charles Yorke was a chief contributor to the 'Athenian

Letters,' and it would have been well for him had he in after-life given

to letters a portion of the time which he sacrificed to ambition.

Thurlow's churlishness and overbearing temper are at this date trifling

matters in comparison with his friendship for Cowper and Samuel Johnson,

and his kindly aid to George Crabbe. Even more than for the wisdom of

his judgments Mansfield is remembered for his intimacy with 'the wits,'

and his close friendship with that chief of them all, who exclaimed,

"How sweet an Ovid, Murray, was our boast," and in honor of that "Sweet

Ovid" penned the lines,

"Graced as thou art, with all the power of words,

So known, so honored in the House of Lords"--

verses deliciously ridiculed by the parodist who wrote,

"Persuasion tips his tongue whene'er he talks:

And he has chambers in the King's Bench walks."

As an atonement for many defects, Alexander Wedderburn had one

virtue--an honest respect for letters that made him in opening manhood

seek the friendship of Hume, at a later date solicit a pension for Dr.

Johnson, and after his elevation to the woolsack overwhelm Gibbon with

hospitable civilities. Eldon was an Oxford Essayist in his young, the

compiler of 'The Anecdote Book' in his old days; and though he cannot be

commended for literary tastes, or sympathy with men of letters, he was

one of the many great lawyers who found pleasure in the conversation of

Samuel Johnson. Unlike his brother, Lord Stowell clung fast to his

literary friendships, as 'Dr. Scott of the Commons' priding himself more

on his membership in the Literary Club than on his standing in the

Prerogative Court; and as Lord Stowell evincing cordial respect for the

successors of Reynolds and Malone, even when love of money had taken

firm hold of his enfeebled mind. Archdeacon Paley's London residence was

in Edward Law's house in Bloomsbury Square. In Erskine literary ambition

was so strong that, not content with the fame brought to him by

excellent _vers de societe_, he took pen in hand when he resigned the

seals, and--more to the delight of his enemies than the satisfaction of

his friends--wrote a novel, which neither became, nor deserved to be,

permanently successful. With similar zeal and greater ability the

literary reputation of the bar has been maintained by Lord Denman, who

was an industrious _litterateur_ whilst he was working his way up at the

bar; by Sir John Taylor Coleridge, whose services to the _Quarterly

Review_ are an affair of literary history; by Sir Thomas Noon Talfourd,

who, having reported in the gallery, lived to lake part in the debates

of the House of Commons, and who, from the date of his first engagement

on the _Times_ till the sad morning when "God's finger touched him,"

while he sat upon the bench, never altogether relinquished those

literary pursuits, in which he earned well-merited honor; by Lord

Macaulay, whose connexion with the legal profession is almost lost sight

of in the brilliance of his literary renown; by Lord Campbell, who

dreamt of living to wear an SS collar in Westminster Hall whilst he was

merely John Campbell the reporter; by Lord Brougham, who, having

instructed our grandfathers with his pen, still remains upon the stage,

giving their grandsons wise lessons with his tongue; and by Lord

Romilly, whose services to English literature have won for him the

gratitude of scholars.

Of each generation of writers between the accession of Elizabeth and the

present time, several of the most conspicuous names are either found on

the rolls of the inns, or are closely associated in the minds of

students with the life of the law-colleges. Shakspeare's plays abound

with testimony that he was no stranger in the legal inns, and the rich

vein of legal lore and diction that runs through his writings has

induced more judicious critics than Lord Campbell to conjecture that he

may at some early time of his career have directed his mind to the

study, if not the practice, of the law. Amongst Elizabethan writers who

belonged to inns may be mentioned--George Ferrars, William Lambarde, Sir

Henry Spelman, and that luckless pamphleteer John Stubbs, all of whom

were members of Lincoln's Inn; Thomas Sackville, Francis Beaumont the

Younger, and John Ferne, of the Inner Temple; Walter Raleigh, of the

Middle Temple; Francis Bacon, Philip Sidney, George Gascoyne, and

Francis Davison, of Gray's Inn. Sir John Denham, the poet, became a

Lincoln's-Inn student in 1634; and Francis Quarles was a member of the

same learned society. John Selden entered the Inner Temple in the second

year of James I., where in due course he numbered, amongst his literary

contemporaries,--William Browne, Croke, Oulde, Thomas Gardiner, Dynne,

Edward Heywood, John Morgan, Augustus Caesar, Thomas Heygate, Thomas May,

dramatist and translator of Lucan's 'Pharsalia,' William Rough and Rymer

were members of Gray's Inn. Sir John David and Sir Simonds D'Ewes

belonged to the Middle Temple. Massinger's dearest friends lived in the

Inner Temple, of which society George Keate, the dramatist, and Butler's

staunch supporter William Longueville, were members. Milton passed the

most jocund hours of his life in Gray's Inn, in which college Cleveland

and the author of 'Hudibras' held the meetings of their club. Wycherley

and Congreve, Aubrey and Narcissus Luttrell were Inns-of-Court men. In

later periods we find Thomas Edwards, the critic; Murphy, the dramatic

writer; James Mackintosh, Francis Hargrave, Bentham, Curran, Canning, at

Lincoln's Inn. The poet Cowper was a barrister of the Temple. Amongst

other Templars of the eighteenth century, with whose names the

literature of their time is inseparably associated, were Henry Fielding,

Henry Brooke, Oliver Goldsmith, and Edmund Burke. Samuel Johnson resided

both in Gray's Inn and the Temple, and his friend Boswell was an

advocate of respectable ability as well as the best biographer on the

roll of English writers.

The foregoing are but a few taken from hundreds of names that illustrate

the close union of Law and Literature in past times. To lengthen the

list would but weary the reader; and no pains would make a perfect

muster roll of all the literary lawyers and _legal litterateurs_ who

either are still upon the stage, or have only lately passed away. In

their youth four well-known living novelists--Mr. William Harrison

Ainsworth, Mr. Shirley Brooks, Mr. Charles Dickens, and Mr. Benjamin

Disraeli--passed some time in solicitors' offices. Mr. John Oxenford was

articled to an attorney. Mr. Theodore Martin resembles the authors of

'The Rejected Addresses' in being a successful practitioner in the

inferior branch of the law. Mr. Charles Henry Cooper was a successful

solicitor. On turning over the leaves to that useful book, 'Men of the

Time,' the reader finds mention made of the following men of letters and

law--Sir Archibald Alison, Mr. Thomas Chisholm Anstey, Mr. William

Edmonstone Aytoun, Mr. Philip James Bailey, Mr. J.N. Ball, Mr. Sergeant

Peter Burke, Sir J.B. Burke, Mr. John Hill Burton, Mr. Hans Busk, Mr.

Isaac Butt, Mr. George Wingrove Cooke, Sir E.S. Creasy, Dr. Dasent, Mr.

John Thaddeus Delane, Mr. W. Hepworth Dixon, Mr. Commissioner

Fonblanque, Mr. William Forsyth, Q.C., Mr. Edward Foss, Mr. William

Carew Hazlitt, Mr. Thomas Hughes, Mr. Leone Levi, Mr. Lawrence

Oliphant, Mr. Charles Reade, Mr. W. Stigant, Mr. Tom Taylor, Mr.

McCullagh Torrens, Mr. M.F. Tupper, Dr. Travers, Mr. Samuel Warren, and

Mr. Charles Weld. Some of the gentlemen in this list are not merely

nominal barristers, but are practitioners with an abundance of business.

Amongst those to whom the editor of 'Men of the Time' draws attention as

'Lawyers,' and who either are still rendering or have rendered good

service to literature, occur the names of Sir William A'Beckett, Mr. W.

Adams, Dr. Anster, Sir Joseph Arnould, Sir George Bowyer, Sir John

Coleridge, Mr. E. W. Cox, Mr. Wilson Gray, Mr. Justice Haliburton, Mr.

Thomas Lewin, Mr. Thomas E. May, Mr. J.G. Phillimore, Mr. James Fitz

James Stephen, Mr. Vernon Harcourt, Mr. James Whiteside. Some of the

distinguished men mentioned in this survey have already passed to

another world since the publication of the last edition of 'Men of the

Time;' but their recorded connexion with literature as well as law no

less serves to illustrate an important feature of our social life. It is

almost needless to remark that the names of many of our ablest anonymous

writers do not appear in 'Men of the Time.'