There never were such times as these! A barrister could once, with ease,
have got as many fees, by merely signing pleas, as would have given him
something more than bread and cheese; but destiny's decrees have made it
feasible no more to get such fees; and if the lawyers please to live,
they can no longer live by pleas.
Those days, alas! are flown, when seeds of litigation, shrewdly sown,
were very often known, not through a single life alone to have thriven
and grown, but to have reach'd the state that's call'd full blown, in
time for the attorney's son to make the crop his own. But now the
lawyers are thrown over—the system's overthrown.
The common law is common now no more; full many a clause in Acts of
Parliament has clipped its claw. The time is o'er, when, for an hour,
one could jaw about the spelling of the man who did the indictment draw,
and whose mistake, or clerical _faux paw_, had floored poor ill-used
justice by a literal flaw.
If Eldon now could rise and see the changes made since _he_ would doubt
and disagree e'en with his own decree, what would the great man's
feelings be? He'd say this seems not like the Court of Chan_ceree_, in
whose old customs I had hoped that we had an estate in fee; such suits
as these would not have suited me!
Oh! who would once have dared to dream that judges could have worked by
steam? Although, without a joke, justice would very often end in smoke;
and, from the speeches still preserved on paper, we find that legal
eloquence was often only vapour; while law itself contained, as it would
seem, the element and principle of steam; for those who ever had a bout
of it, found it hot water, and were very glad when they got out of it.
Mechanics' principles the lawyers knew, and made amazing use of two—the
wedge and screw! But of the third, in early legal cases, there is little
heard; for though to scientific men of old the lever was well known, as
we are told, the lawyers seem to have refused it, or never used it. The
lever they despised; at least we find them not leaving anything they
_could_ take behind them! But it is also thought some early barristers
so often moved in court, that they had something like a notion of coming
to perpetual motion.
[Illustration:
Oh, Law!
]