profession. To my mind they have never been quite placed in their proper
order. Perker has been universally admired and looked up to; Dodson and
Fogg have been universally denounced; Mr. Pell has been suffered to
remain unnoticed. Well, let us judge fairly the merits of these three
gentlemen.
If Mr. Perker had lived to-day instead of in the year 1827, he would
undoubtedly have been tried for the part he took in the Eatanswill
election. What is the charge, after all, against Messrs. Dodson and
Fogg, except that question with regard to poor Ramsey?--which, after all,
is only a story told by the clerk Wicks, upon whom I do not think we can
place very much reliance. What else did Dodson and Fogg do that should
make them the object of obloquy and universal execration? They brought
an action for breach of promise of marriage--some people think such
actions should never be brought at all--they brought the action for
breach of promise of marriage; they made a little arrangement with regard
to costs, unprofessional if you like, but still nothing to bring down
upon them the denouncement to which they have been made subject. So far
as Mr. Pickwick was concerned, he had absolutely nothing to complain of
in their conduct; and I venture to say it was most reprehensible in him
under the circumstances to use the language which he did upon the
occasion which I have quoted. But against Mr. Pell there is absolutely
nothing to be said. He perhaps romanced a little with regard to his
friendship with the Lord Chancellor; but which of us would not like to be
on friendly terms with the Lord Chancellor? On that trifling
exaggeration there is nothing practically to be urged against him; and
while I claim for Mr. Pell the position of premier in this matter, I am
sorry I have to accord to Mr. Perker the third place.
Well, now, although I would love to linger over Mr. Pell, I must pass on
to say something of the counsel mentioned in this admirable work. But
before I consider the more eminent and the more conspicuous of these,
there is one member of the Bar who is seldom alluded to, but of whom I
wish to say something to-night. I refer to Mr. Prosee. Mr. Prosee very
few of you have ever heard of. He dined with Mr. Perker at Montague
Place, Russell Square, on one occasion. It must have been rather a dull
dinner party, for there were present two good country agents, Mr. Snicks,
the Life Office Secretary, Mr. Prosee, the eminent counsel, three
solicitors, one Commissioner of Bankrupts, a special pleader from the
Temple, a small-eyed, peremptory young gentleman, his pupil, who had
written a lively book about the law of demises, with a vast quantity of
marginal notes and references; and several other eminent and
distinguished personages, including the Mr. Prosee just mentioned.
Ladies and gentlemen, I do not know how it is, but I have always
associated Mr. Prosee with the Equity Bar. It may be that his name
suggests it.
Well, I come now to the counsel which is better known to you, namely
Serjeant Snubbin.
"We've done everything that's necessary," said Mr. Perker. "I have
retained Serjeant Snubbin."
"Is he a good man?" inquired Mr. Pickwick.
"Good man!" replied Perker. "Bless your heart and soul, my dear sir,
Serjeant Snubbin is at the very top of his profession. Gets treble
the business of any man in court--engaged in every case. You needn't
mention it abroad, but we say--we of the profession--that Serjeant
Snubbin leads the court by the nose."
"I should like to see him," said Mr. Pickwick.
"See Serjeant Snubbin, my dear sir!" rejoined Perker, in utter
amazement. "Pooh, pooh! my dear sir, impossible! See Serjeant
Snubbin! Bless you, my dear sir, such a thing was never heard of
without a consultation fee being previously paid, and a consultation
fixed. It couldn't be done, my dear sir--it couldn't be done!"
Thus was Mr. Pickwick brought face to face with the difficulty of seeing
his own counsel. He could not understand why, having retained the
services of a professional man and paid for them, there should exist any
impediment to prevent access to him. I won't discuss to-night the
advisability or non-advisability of dividing the profession of the law
into two parts, but I do say that any system which prevents litigants
having the fullest personal communication with those they have paid to
represent them is an anomaly and an absurdity.
But Mr. Pickwick was a person of determination, and he did see Serjeant
Snubbin, and he delivered to that learned gentleman a short address that
was well worthy of his attention, as it is of every member of the Bar,
including your very humble servant.
"Gentlemen of your profession, sir," continued Mr. Pickwick, "see the
worst side of human nature. All its disputes, all its ill-will and
bad blood, rise up before you. You know from your experience of
juries (I mean no disparagement to you, or them) how much depends upon
_effect_; and you are apt to attribute to others a desire to use, for
purposes of deception and self-interest, the very instruments which
you, in pure honesty and honour of purpose, and with a laudable desire
to do your utmost for your client, know the temper and worth of so
well, from constantly employing them yourselves. I really believe
that to this circumstance may be attributed the vulgar but very
general notion of your being, as a body, suspicious, distrustful, and
overcautious. Conscious as I am, sir, of the disadvantage of making
such a declaration to you, under such circumstances, I have come here,
because I wish you distinctly to understand, as my friend Mr. Perker
has said, that I am innocent of the falsehood laid to my charge; and
although I am very well aware of the inestimable value of your
assistance, sir, I must beg to add that, unless you sincerely believe
this, I would rather be deprived of the aid of your talents than have
the advantage of them."
The only effect this had upon Serjeant Snubbin was to cause him to ask
rather snappishly,--
"Who is with me in this case?"
"Mr. Phunky, Serjeant Snubbin," replied the attorney.
"Phunky, Phunky," said the Serjeant, "I never heard the name before.
He must be a very young man."
"Yes, he is a very young man," replied the attorney. "He was only
called the other day. Let me see--he has not been at the Bar eight
years yet."
"Ah, I thought not," said the Serjeant, in that sort of pitying tone
in which ordinary folks would speak of a very helpless little child.
"Mr. Mallard, send round to Mr.--Mr.--"
"Phunky's--Holborn Court, Gray's Inn," interposed Perker. (Holborn
Court, by-the-bye, is South Square now.)
"Mr. Phunky, and say I should be glad if he'd step here a moment."
Mr. Mallard departed to execute his commission, and Serjeant Snubbin
relapsed into abstraction until Mr. Phunky himself was introduced.
Although an infant barrister he was a full-grown man. He had a very
nervous manner, and a painful hesitation in his speech; it did not
appear to be a natural defect, but seemed rather the result of
timidity, arising from the consciousness of being "kept down" by want
of means, or interest, or connection, or impudence, as the case might
be. He was overawed by the Serjeant, and profoundly courteous to the
attorney.
"I have not had the pleasure of seeing you before, Mr. Phunky," said
Serjeant Snubbin, with haughty condescension.
Mr. Phunky bowed. He _had_ had the pleasure of seeing the Serjeant,
and of envying him too, with all a poor man's envy, for eight years
and a quarter.
"You are with me in this case, I understand?" said the Serjeant.
If Mr. Phunky had been a rich man he would have instantly sent for his
clerk to remind him; if he had been a wise one he would have applied
his forefinger to his forehead, and endeavoured to recollect whether,
in the multiplicity of his engagements, he had undertaken this one or
not; but as he was neither rich nor wise (in this sense, at all
events) he turned red and bowed.
"Have you read the papers, Mr. Phunky?" inquired the Serjeant.
Here again Mr. Phunky should have professed to have forgotten all
about the merits of the case; but as he had read such papers as had
been laid before him in the course of the action, and had thought of
nothing else, waking or sleeping, throughout the two months during
which he had been retained as Mr. Serjeant Snubbin's junior, he turned
a deeper red and bowed again.
"This is Mr. Pickwick," said the Serjeant, waving his pen in the
direction in which that gentleman was standing.
Mr. Phunky bowed to Mr. Pickwick with a reverence which a first client
must ever awaken, and again inclined his head towards his leader.
"Perhaps you will take Mr. Pickwick away," said the Serjeant,
"and--and--and--hear anything Mr. Pickwick may wish to communicate. We
shall have a consultation, of course." With this hint that he had
been interrupted quite long enough, Mr. Serjeant Snubbin, who had been
gradually growing more and more abstracted, applied his glass to his
eye for an instant, bowed slightly round, and was once more deeply
immersed in the case before him, which arose out of an interminable
law-suit originating in the act of an individual, deceased a century
or so ago, who had stopped up a pathway leading from some place which
nobody ever came from to some other place which nobody ever went to.
Mr. Phunky would not hear of passing through any door until Mr.
Pickwick and his solicitor had passed through before him, so it was
some time before they got into the Square; and when they did reach it
they walked up and down, and held a long conference, the result of
which was that it was a very difficult matter to say how the verdict
would go; that nobody could presume to calculate on the issue of an
action; that it was very lucky they had prevented the other party from
getting Serjeant Snubbin; and other topics of doubt and consolation
common in such a position of affairs.
Mr. Pickwick's lawsuit was to be tried in the Court of Common Pleas, a
division in which Serjeants-at-Law had the exclusive right to practise.
At this time, 1827, and indeed up till 1873, every common law judge was
turned into a Serjeant, if he were not one ere he was promoted to the
Bench. It was a solemn kind of ceremony. The subject of the operation
was led out of the precincts of the Inns of Court; the church bell tolled
as for one dead.
He was then admitted member of Serjeants' Inn; and the judge would
address the Serjeants who practised before him as Brother So-and-So.
Justice Lindley was the last judge who took the degree, a degree the only
outward visible sign of which is the black patch or coif which is
attached to the top of the wig. I do not know what kind of counsel
Serjeant Snubbin, retained by Mr. Perker for the defendant, was; but
Dodson and Fogg had retained Serjeant Buzfuz for the plaintiff, and we
all know that Serjeant Snubbin was no match for Serjeant Buzfuz. It has
been objected by a writer in _Fraser's Magazine_, to the account of this
trial, that it is full of inconsistencies. Serjeant Buzfuz' case, he
says, was absurd, and that he would not have been able to browbeat any
witness, and that no jury could have given a verdict on such evidence.
This criticism resembles many other criticisms of Pickwick. Had the
description in Pickwick been intended as a serious picture of the
proceedings in a court of justice, it would have been open to much
serious dissection and examination.
But the writer just quoted did not, it seems, possess a sufficient sense
of humour to enable him to see that this chapter of "Pickwick" was
intended for broad fun amounting to burlesque, and nothing more; and to
examine Mr. Buzfuz' proceedings by the light of the law is to strip them
of their meaning.
I mentioned just now that this trial took place in 1827. At that time,
as I daresay some of you are aware, the parties to the action could not
be called upon to give evidence; and Lord Denman did not, I think, till
1843 remove the Arcadian fetters which bound the litigants in this
fashion. But, ladies and gentlemen, what a fortunate thing it was for
Mr. Pickwick that he could not be called upon that occasion. If Mr.
Pickwick had been called he would have been cross-examined. Let us
imagine for a moment what that cross-examination would have been. Suppose
merely for the sake of example that that operation had been performed by
my honourable and learned friend the Attorney-General. Cannot you
imagine how in the first place he would forcibly but firmly have
interrogated Mr. Pickwick with regard to his conduct after the cricket
match at Muggleton; how he would have asked him whether he was prepared
to admit, or whether he was prepared to deny, that he was drunk upon that
occasion? Could you not imagine how my honourable and learned friend,
passing on from that topic, would have alluded to what I think he would
have termed the disgraceful incident when, on the 1st of September, Mr.
Pickwick was found in a wheelbarrow on the ground of Captain Boldwig, and
was removed to the public pound, from which he was only extricated by the
violence of his friends and servant? Passing on from that topic, would
not my honourable and learned friend have reminded him of how he had been
bound over at Ipswich before Mr. Nupkins, together with his friend Mr.
Tupman, and called upon to find bail for good behaviour for six months?
Then in conclusion how my friend would have turned to that incident in
the double-bedded room at Ipswich, at the Great White Horse, and how my
learned friend, with that skill which he possesses, would, bit by bit, by
slow degrees, have extricated from that miserable man the confession that
he had been found in that double-bedded room, a spinster lady being there
at the same time. Ladies and gentlemen, what would have been left of Mr.
Pickwick after that process had been gone through? His only relief would
have been to write to the _Times_ newspaper, and to complain of cross-
examination.
Indeed, no notice of this case, as indeed no reference to the lawyers of
"Pickwick," would be regarded as in any sense complete that did not
include the remarkable forensic efforts of Serjeant Buzfuz. Oft read,
oft recited, oft quoted, it stands to-day, perhaps, the best-known speech
ever delivered at the Bar.
We are told that the speech of Serjeant Snubbin was long and emphatic,
but at any rate it was ineffective, and that learned gentleman committed
a grave error in entrusting the cross-examination of Mr. Winkle to Mr.
Phunky. Now it does sometimes happen, in the course of a case, that
owing to the absence of the leading counsel, which sometimes occurs, the
cross-examination of a witness, perchance an important one, is left to
some junior; but this excuse did not exist in this case. Serjeant
Snubbin was there in Court, because we hear that he winked at Mr. Phunky
to intimate to him that he had better sit down; and this, as we know,
from what I have told you just now, was the first brief that Mr. Phunky
had ever had. No, Serjeant Snubbin was over-matched throughout by
Serjeant Buzfuz, and Mr. Phunky was no match even for the scheming junior
on the other side, and Perker was no match for Dodson and Fogg. The law,
as we are told in one of George Eliot's books, is a kind of cock-fight,
in which it is the business of injured honesty to get a game bird with
the best pluck and the strongest spurs; and I venture to think that the
combined pluck of Buzfuz and Skimpin by far outweighed any of that
commodity possessed by Snubbin and Phunky. No wonder Mr. Pickwick lost
his case; but his case never recovered the effect of the speech which I
now propose to read to you.
Serjeant Buzfuz began by saying that never, in the whole course of his
professional experience--never, from the very first moment of his
applying himself to the study and practice of the law--had he
approached a case with feelings of such deep emotion, or with such a
heavy sense of the responsibility imposed upon him--a responsibility,
he would say, which he could never have supported, were he not buoyed
up and sustained by a conviction so strong, that it amounted to
positive certainty that the cause of truth and justice, or, in other
words, the cause of his much injured and most oppressed client, must
prevail with the high-minded and intelligent dozen of men whom he now
saw in that box before him.
Counsel usually begin in this way, because it puts the jury on the
very best terms with themselves, and makes them think what sharp
fellows they must be. A visible effect was produced immediately;
several jurymen beginning to take voluminous notes with the utmost
eagerness.
"You have heard from my learned friend, gentlemen," continued Serjeant
Buzfuz--well knowing that, from the learned friend alluded to, the
gentlemen of the jury had heard just nothing at all--"you have heard
from my learned friend, gentlemen, that this is an action for breach
of promise of marriage, in which the damages are laid at 1,500 pounds.
But you have not heard from my learned friend, inasmuch as it did not
come within my learned friend's province to tell you, what are the
facts and circumstances of the case. Those facts and circumstances,
gentlemen, you shall hear detailed by me, and proved by the
unimpeachable female whom I will place in that box before you."
Here Mr. Serjeant Buzfuz, with a tremendous emphasis on the word
"box," smote his table with a mighty sound, and glanced at Dodson and
Fogg, who nodded admiration to the Serjeant, and indignant defiance of
the defendant.
"The plaintiff, gentlemen," continued Serjeant Buzfuz, in a soft and
melancholy voice, "the plaintiff is a widow; yes, gentlemen, a widow.
The late Mr. Bardell, after enjoying, for many years, the esteem and
confidence of his sovereign, as one of the guardians of his royal
revenues, glided almost imperceptibly from the world, to seek
elsewhere for that repose and peace which a custom house can never
afford."
At this pathetic description of the decease of Mr. Bardell, who had
been knocked on the head with a quart pot in a public-house cellar,
the learned Serjeant's voice faltered, and he proceeded with emotion,--
"Some time before his death he had stamped his likeness upon a little
boy. With this little boy, the only pledge of her departed exciseman,
Mrs. Bardell shrunk from the world, and courted the retirement and
tranquillity of Goswell Street; and here she placed in her front
parlour-window a written placard, bearing this inscription--'Apartments
furnished for a single gentleman. Inquire within.'" Here Serjeant
Buzfuz paused, while several gentlemen of the jury took a note of the
document.
"There is no date to that, is there?" inquired a juror.
"There is no date, gentlemen," replied Serjeant Buzfuz; "but I am
instructed to say that it was put in the plaintiff's parlour-window
just this time three years. I entreat the attention of the jury to
the wording of this document. 'Apartments furnished for a single
gentleman!' Mrs. Bardell's opinions of the opposite sex, gentlemen,
were derived from a long contemplation of the inestimable qualities of
her lost husband. She had no fear, she had no distrust, she had no
suspicion, all was confidence and reliance. 'Mr. Bardell,' said the
widow, 'Mr. Bardell was a man of honour, Mr. Bardell was a man of his
word, Mr. Bardell was no deceiver, Mr. Bardell was once a single
gentleman himself; _to_ single gentlemen I look for protection, for
assistance, for comfort, and for consolation; _in_ single gentlemen I
shall perpetually see something to remind me of what Mr. Bardell was
when he first won my young and untried affections: to a single
gentleman, then, shall my lodgings be let.' Actuated by this
beautiful and touching impulse (among the best impulses of our
imperfect nature, gentlemen) the lonely and desolate widow dried her
tears, furnished her first floor, caught the innocent boy to her
maternal bosom, and put the bill up in her parlour-window. Did it
remain there long? No. The serpent was on the watch, the train was
laid, the mine was preparing, the sapper and miner was at work. Before
the bill had been in the parlour-window three days--three days,
gentlemen--a Being, erect upon two legs, and bearing all the outward
semblance of a man, and not of a monster, knocked at the door of Mrs.
Bardell's house. He inquired within--he took the lodgings; and on the
very next day he entered into possession of them. The man was
Pickwick--Pickwick, the defendant."
Serjeant Buzfuz, who had proceeded with such volubility that his face
was perfectly crimson, here paused for breath. The silence awoke Mr.
Justice Stareleigh, who immediately wrote down something with a pen
without any ink in it, and looked unusually profound, to impress the
jury with the belief that he always thought most deeply with his eyes
shut. Serjeant Buzfuz proceeded.
"Of this man Pickwick I will say little; the subject presents but few
attractions; and I, gentlemen, am not the man, nor are you, gentlemen,
the men, to delight in the contemplation of revolting heartlessness
and of systematic villainy."
Here Mr. Pickwick, who had been writhing in silence for some time,
gave a violent start, as if some vague idea of assaulting Serjeant
Buzfuz, in the august presence of justice and law, suggested itself to
his mind. An admonitory gesture from Perker restrained him, and he
listened to the learned gentleman's continuation with a look of
indignation, which contrasted forcibly with the admiring faces of Mrs.
Cluppins and Mrs. Sanders.
"I say systematic villainy, gentlemen," said Serjeant Buzfuz, looking
through Mr. Pickwick, and talking _at_ him; "and when I say systematic
villainy, let me tell the defendant Pickwick, if he be in Court--as I
am informed he is--that it would have been more decent in him, more
becoming, in better judgment, and in better taste, if he had stopped
away. Let me tell him, gentlemen, that any gestures of dissent or
disapprobation in which he may indulge in this Court will not go down
with you; that you will know how to value and how to appreciate them;
and let me tell him further, as my lord will tell you, gentlemen, that
a counsel, in the discharge of his duty to his client, is neither to
be intimidated, nor bullied, nor put down; and that any attempt to do
either the one or the other, or the first, or the last, will recoil on
the head of the attempter, be he plaintiff or be he defendant, be his
name Pickwick, or Noakes, or Stoakes, or Stiles, or Brown, or
Thompson."
This little divergence from the subject in hand had, of course, the
intended effect of turning all eyes to Mr. Pickwick. Serjeant Buzfuz,
having partially recovered from the state of moral elevation into
which he had lashed himself, resumed,--