We copy the following eloquent and impassioned paragraph from the last
_Edinburgh Review_:--
"Thanks unto our ancestors, there is now no _Star-chamber_ before whom may
be summoned either the scholar, whose learning offends the bishops, by
disproving incidentally the divine nature of tithes, or the counsellor,
who gives his client an opinion against some assumed prerogative. There is
no _High Commission Court_ to throw into a gaol until his dying day, at
the instigation of a Bancroft, the bencher who shall move for the
discharge of an English subject from imprisonment contrary to law. It is
no longer the duty of a privy councillor to seize the suspected volumes of
an antiquarian, or plunder the papers of an ex-chief justice, whilst lying
on his death-bed. _Government licensers of the press_ are gone, whose
infamous perversion of the writings of other lawyers will cause no future
Hale to leave behind him orders expressly prohibiting the posthumous
publication of his legal MSS., lest the sanctity of his name should be
abused, to the destruction of those laws, of which he had been long the
venerable and living image. An advocate of the present day need not
absolutely withdraw (as Sir Thomas More is reported to have prudently done
for a time) from his profession, because the crown had taken umbrage at
his discharge of a public duty. It is, however, flattery and self-delusion
to imagine that the lust of power and the weaknesses of human nature have
been put down by the Bill of Rights, and that our forefathers have left
nothing to be done by their descendants. The violence of former times is
indeed no longer practicable; but the spirit which led to these excesses
can never die; it changes its aspect and its instruments with
circumstances, and takes the shape and character of its age. The risks and
the temptations of the profession at the present day are quite as
dangerous to its usefulness, its dignity, and its virtue, as the shears
and branding-irons that frightened every barrister from signing Prynne's
defence, or the writ that sent Maynard to the Tower. The public has a deep,
an incalculable interest in the independence and fearless honour of its
lawyers. In a system so complicated as ours, every thing must be taken at
their word almost on trust; and proud as we, for the most part, justly are
of the unsuspectedness of our judges, their integrity and manliness of
mind are, of course, involved in that of the body out of which they must
be chosen. There is not a man living whose life, liberty, and honour may
not depend on the resoluteness as well as capacity of those by whom, when
all may be at stake, he must be both advised and represented in a court of
justice."
Our readers will easily recognise the great events in the history of the
law in England, to which the reviewer alludes. Seldom have we read a more
masterly page; it would even form an excellent rider to Mr. Brougham's
recent speech on the same subject.
* * * * *