repeating this operation scores of times between nine and ten o’clock.
But you are not to delude yourself, that either by wheeled vehicle or by
the humbler conveyances known as “Shanks’s mare,” and the “Marrowbone
stage”—in more refined language, walking—have all those who have business
in the city reached their destination. No; the Silent Highway has been
their travelling route. On the broad—would that I could add the silvery
and sparkling—bosom of Father Thames, they have been borne in swift,
grimy little steamboats, crowded with living freights from Chelsea,
and Pimlico, and Vauxhall piers, from Hungerford, Waterloo, Temple,
Blackfriars, and Southwark—straight by the hay-boats, with their lateen
sails discoloured in a manner that would delight a painter, straight
by Thames police hulks, by four and six-oared cutters, by coal-barges,
and great lighters laden with bricks and ashes and toiling towards
Putney and Richmond; by oozy wharves and grim-chimneyed factories; by
little, wheezy, tumbledown waterside public-houses; by breweries, and
many-windowed warehouses; by the stately gardens of the Temple, and the
sharp-pointed spires of city churches, and the great dome of Paul’s
looming blue in the morning, to the Old Shades Pier, hard by London
Bridge. There is landing and scuffling and pushing; the quivering old
barges, moored in the mud, are swaying and groaning beneath trampling
feet. Then, for an instant, Thames Street, Upper and Lower, is invaded
by an ant-hill swarm of spruce clerks, who mingle strangely with the
fish-women and the dock-porters. But the insatiable counting-houses soon
swallow them up: as though London’s commercial maw were an hungered too,
for breakfast, at nine o’clock in the morning.
TEN O’CLOCK A.M.—THE COURT OF QUEEN’S BENCH, AND THE “BENCH” ITSELF.
The author presents his compliments to the “neat-handed Phillis”
who answers (when she is in a good temper, which is but seldom) the
second-floor bell, takes in his letters, brings up his breakfast,
stands in perpetual need of being warned not to light the fire with the
proof-sheets of his last novel, pamphlet on the war, or essay on the
Æolic digamma, or twist into cigar-lights the cheques for large amounts
continually sent him by his munificent publishers, and exercises her
right of search over his tea-caddy and the drawer containing his cravats,
all-round collars, and billet-doux; the author and your servant presents
his compliments to Phillis—ordinarily addressed by Mrs. Lillicrap,
the landlady, as “Mariar, you ’ussey”—and begs her to procure for him
immediately a skin of the creamiest parchment, free from grease, a bottle
of record ink, a quill plucked from the wing of a hawk, vulture, or some
kindred bird of prey, a box of pounce, a book of patterns of German text
for engrossing, and a hank of red tape or green ferret, whichsoever, in
her æsthetic judgment, she may prefer. He would be further obliged if
she would step round to the author’s solicitor, and ask, not for that
little bill of costs, which has been ready for some time, but which he
is not in the slightest hurry for—but for copies of Tidd’s Practice, the
Law List, and Lord St. Leonards’ “Handy Book on Property Law.” For I,
the author, intend to be strictly legal at ten o’clock in the morning.
I serve you with this copy of “Twice Round the Clock” as with a writ;
and in the name of Victoria, by the grace, &c., send you greeting, and
command—no, not command, but beg—that within eight days you enter an
appearance, to purchase this volume. Else will I invoke the powers of
the great _ca. sa._ and the terrible _fi. fa._ I will come against you,
with sticks and staves, and the sheriff of Middlesex shall take you, to
have and to hold, wheresoever you may be found running up and down in
his bailiwick. _Son nutrito di latte legale._ I am fed with law’s milk
at this hour of the morning. Shear me the sheep for vellum, fill me with
quips and quiddities; bind me apprentice to a law stationer in the Lane
of Chancery, over-against Cursitor Street; and let me also send in a
little bill of costs to my publishers, and charge them so much a “folio,”
instead of so much a “sheet.”
This exercitation over, and the necessary stationery brought by Phillis,
_alias_ “Mariar,” I approach my great, grim subject with diffident
respect. What do I know of law, save that if I pay not, the Alguazils
will lay me by the heels; that if I steal, I shall go to the hulks;
that if I kill, I shall go hang? What do I know of _Sinderesis_,
feoffors and feoffees, and the law of tailed lands? What of the Assize
of _Mortdancestor_, tenants in dower, villein entry—of _Sylva cædua_,
which is, I am sure you will be glad to hear, more familiarly known as
the 45th of Edward the Third? These things are mysteries to me. I bought
the _habeas corpus_ once (the palladium of our liberties is an expensive
luxury), but its custodian scarcely allowed me to look at it, and,
hailing a cab, desired me to “look alive.” I have been defendant in an
action, but I never could make out why they should have done the things
to me that they did, and why John Lord Campbell at Westminster should
have been so bitter against me. I never was on a jury; but I have enjoyed
the acquaintance of an Irish gentleman whose presence on the panel was
considered invaluable at state trials, he having the reputation of an
indomitable “boot-eater.” Finally, I have, as most men have, a solicitor,
a highly respectable party, who, of course, only charges me the “costs
out of pocket.” But what is the exact measure of “costs out of pocket?” I
never knew.
Not wholly destitute of legal literature is your servant, however. In
Pope and Arbuthnot’s Reports (_vide_ Miscellanies) I have read the great
case of Stradlings _versus_ Styles, respecting the piebald horses and
the horses that were pied, and have pondered much over that notable
conclusion (in Norman-French) by the reporter—“Je heard no more parceque
j’etais asleep sur mong bench.” I have followed the arguments in Bardell
_versus_ Pickwick: I have seen the “Avocat Patelin” and the “Lottery
Ticket;” I have paced the Salle des Pas Perdus in Paris, and Westminster
Hall, London; I knew a captain once who lived in the equally defunct
“rules” of the Queen’s Bench; and I have played racquets in the area of
that establishment, as an amateur(?). So, then, though, in a very humble
degree, I conceive myself qualified to discourse to you concerning legal
London at ten o’clock in the morning.
The judges of the land—of Queen’s Bench, Exchequer, and Common Pleas,
Chief-Justices, Barons, and Puisne Judges, and Sages of the Court of
Probate, Divorce, and Matrimonial Causes—are mostly jaunty, elderly
gentlemen of cheerful appearance, given in private life to wearing
light neckcloths, buff waistcoats, and pepper-and-salt trousers, and
particularly addicted to trotting down to the Courts of Westminster
mounted on stout hacks—’tis the bishops, _par excellence_, who ride
the cobs—and followed by sober grooms. There are judges who, it is
reported, make up considerable books for the Derby and Oaks—nay, for
the double event. I have seen a judge in a white hat, and I have seen a
vice-chancellor drinking iced fruit effervescent at Stainsbury’s in the
Strand.
Parliament Street and Palace Yard are fair to see, this pleasant morning
in Term time. The cause list for all the courts is pretty full, and
there is a prospect of nice legal pickings. The pavement is dotted
with barristers’ and solicitors’ clerks carrying blue and crimson bags
plethoric with papers. Smart attorneys, too, with shoe-ribbon, light
vests, swinging watch-guards, and shiny hats (they have begun to wear
moustaches even, the attorneys!), bustle past, papers beneath their arms,
open documents in their hands, which they sort and peruse as they walk.
The parti-coloured fastenings of these documents flutter, so that you
would take these men of law for so many conjurors about to swallow red
and green tape. And they do conjure, and to a tune, the attorneys. Lank
office-boys, in hats too large, and corduroys and tweeds too short, and
jackets, stained with ink, too short for them; cadaverous office-runners
and process-servers, in greasy and patched habiliments, white at the
seams; bruised and battered, ruby-nosed law-writers, skulking down to
Westminster in quest of a chance copying job; managing clerks, staid
men given to abdominal corpulence, who wear white neckcloths, plaited
shirt-frills, black satin waistcoats, and heavy watch chains and seals,
worn, in the good old fashion, underneath the vest, and pendulous
from the base line thereof, file along the pavement to their common
destination, the great Hall of Pleas at Westminster. The great solicitors
and attorneys, men who may be termed the princes of law, who are at the
head of vast establishments in Bedford Row and Lincoln’s Inn Fields,
and whose practice is hereditary, dash along in tearing cabs: you look
through the windows, and see an anxious man, with bushy gray whiskers,
sitting inside; the cushions beside and before him littered, piled,
cumbered, with tape-tied papers. He has given Sir Fitzroy three hundred,
Sir Richard five hundred, guineas, for an hour’s advocacy. Thousands
depend upon the decision of the twelve worthy men who will be in the
jury-box in the course of an hour. See! one of them is cheapening apples
at a stall at this very moment, and tells his companion (who has just
alighted from a chaise-cart) that in that little shop yonder Marley
murdered the watchmaker’s shopman. Great lawyers such as these have as
many noble fortunes in their hands as great doctors have noble lives.
Of the secrets of noble reputations, doctors and lawyers are alike
custodians; and, trustworthy.
The briefless barristers would like to patronise cabs, but they can’t
afford those luxuries. They walk down Parliament Street arm-in-arm,
mostly men with bold noses of the approved Slawkenbergius pattern, and
very large red or sandy whiskers. Whiskers cost nothing, noses are
cheap—I had mine broken once for nothing, though it cost me several
pounds sterling to get it mended again. Their briefless clothes are very
worn and threadbare, their hats napless, their umbrellas—they always
carry umbrellas—gape at the mouth, and distend at the nozzle. These
barristers are second wranglers, fellows of their college, prizemen; they
have pulled stroke-oar, and bibbed at wine parties given by marquises.
They are very poor and briefless now. The chambers in the Temple are very
high up; the carpet, ragged; the laundress is a tipsy shrew who pilfers;
the boot-boy insists upon serving up small coal broiled with the mutton
chops. It is but seldom, but very seldom, that they can order a steak
at the “Rainbow,” or demand a bottle of Port from the plump waiter the
“Cock.” No attorneys ascend their staircase; no briefs are frayed in
being pushed through the aperture of their letter-boxes; editors are
deaf, and the only magazine which receives their contributions don’t pay.
They cannot help asking themselves sometimes, sadly and querulously,
poor fellows, of what avail is the grand classical education, tedious
and expensive; the slaving for a degree or for honours; the long nights
spent beneath the glare of the reading lamp, learning and re-learning the
palimpsests of law; of what avail are the joints of mutton and bottles of
heady wine consumed at the keeping-term dinners; of what avail the square
of the hypothenuse, and the knowledge (in the best Latin) that strong men
lived before Agamemnon; of what avail the wig (it is getting unpowdered),
the gown (it is growing threadbare), and the big Greek prize-books
with the College arms emblazoned on the covers? Lo! there is Tom
Cadman, who has been an unsuccessful play-actor and an usher in a cheap
boarding-school, writing leaders for a daily paper in the coffee-room of
the “Albion,” or returning thanks for the press at a champagne dinner;
there is Roger Bullyon, of the Home Circuit, whose only talent is abuse,
who knows no more of law than he does of the conduct to be expected from
a gentleman, who will never, if he live till ninety, be more than a
fluent, insolent donkey, and yet there he is, with more briefs than he
can carry, or his clerk compute the fees on. But console yourselves, oh,
ye briefless ones. Though the race be not to the swift, nor the battle to
the strong, your chance is yet in the lucky-bag; the next dive may bring
it forth splendid and triumphant.
“No one is so accursed by fate,
No one so utterly desolate,
But some heart, though unknown,
Responds unto his own.”
Mr. Right, the attorney, is coming post-haste after you, his waistcoat
pockets distended with retainers and refreshers. In that tremendous
lottery of the law, as wise Mr. Thackeray terms it, who shall say that
you may not be next the fortunate wretches who shall win the prize—the
_gros lot_? To-day is poverty and heart-sickening hope deferred and
the pawn-shop; but to-morrow may make you the thunderer before the
judicial committee of the Privy Council on the great appeal from Bombay,
Parsetjee-Jamsetjee-Ramsetjee Loll _versus_ Boomajee-Krammajee-Howdajee
Chow. It may make you standing counsel to the Feejee Islands Company, or
defender of group 97 of Railway Bills. So, despair not, briefless man;
but pause before you sell that sheet anchor of hope, of yours, for old
iron.
Barristers in large practice drive over Westminster Bridge’s crazy arches
(the rogues have houses at Norwood and Tulse Hill, with conservatories
and pineries) in small phætons or gleaming clarences, with sleek white
horses. They have wives rustling in sheeny silks and glowing with
artificial flowers, who, their lords being deposited in the temple of
Theseus, are borne straight away to Stagg and Mantell’s, or Waterloo
House; or, perchance, to that glorious avenue of Covent Garden Market,
where they price cucumbers at Mrs. Solomon’s, and bouquets at Mrs.
Buck’s. For, note it as a rule, though it may seem a paradox, people who
have kitchen-gardens and hot-houses are always buying fruit, flowers,
and vegetables. The steady-going old Nisi Prius barristers, in good
practice—sedate fogies—with their white neckcloths twisted like halters
round their necks; pompous old fellows, who jingle keys and sovereigns in
their pockets, as, their hands therein, they prop up the door-jambs of
the robing-room, in converse with weasel-faced attorneys, are borne to
Westminster in cabs. Very hard are they upon the cabman, paying him but
the exact fare, and threatening him with the severest terrors of the law
at the slightest attempt at overcharge; and much are they maledicted by
the badged Jehus as they drive slowly away. These Nisi Prius worthies are
great hands at a rubber of whist, and are as good judges of port-wine as
they are of law.
Whence comes the Chief, the leader, the great advocate of the day, who
carries attorney and solicitor general, chief-justice, chancellor,
peer, written as legibly on his brow as Cain carried the brand?—how he
reaches Westminster Hall, or how he gets away from it, no man can tell.
He will make a four hours’ speech to-day, drive eight witnesses to the
verge of distraction, blight with sarcasm, and sear with denunciation, a
semi-idiotic pig-jobber, the defendant in an action of breach of promise
of marriage, in which the plaintiff is a stay-maker of the mature age
of thirty-seven. What shrieks of laughter will ring through the court
when in burning accents, in which irony is mingled with indignation, the
Chief reads passages from the love-smitten but incautious pig-jobber’s
correspondence, and quotes from his poetical effusions (they _will_ write
poetry, these defendants) such passages as—
“When you tork
You are like roast pork.”
Or,
“Say, luvley chine,
Will you be mine.”
Two hours afterwards, and the Chief will be on the other side of
Westminster Hall, in the Commons’ House of Parliament, pounding away on
the wrongs of a few people in Staffordshire who object to the odour of
some neighbouring gas-works, and, to use an Americanism, “chawing up”
the ministry at a tremendous rate. How is it that about the same time he
manages to dine with the Merchant Cobblers at their grand old hall on St.
Crispin’s Hill; to take the chair at the festival of the Association for
improving the moral condition of Mudlarks; to make a two hours’ speech
at the meeting for the suppression of street “catch-’em-alive-O’s;” to
look in at half-a-dozen west-end clubs; to hear Bosio—ah! poor Bosio,
ah, poor swan, miasma’d to death in the horrid marshes of Ingria and
Carelia—in the last act of the “Traviata;” and to be seen flitting out
of the bar-parlour of Joe Muttonfist’s hostelry in Mauley Court-yard,
Whitechapel, where the whereabouts of the impending great fight between
Dan Bludyer, surnamed the “Mugger,” and Tim Sloggan, better known as
“Copperscull,” for two hundred pounds a-side, will be imparted to the
patrons of the “fancy?” Tom Stoat, who knows everything and everybody,
says he saw the Chief at the Crystal Palace Flower Show, and it is
certain that he (the Chief) will be at the Queen’s Ball to-night (he has
a dinner party this evening), and that after the opera he will take a
chop and kidney at Evans’s. And after that? What a life! What frame can
bear, what mind endure it! When does he study? when does he read those
mammoth briefs? when does he note those cases, prepare those eloquent
exordia and perorations? Whence comes the minute familiarity with every
detail of the case before him which he seems to possess, the marvellous
knowledge he displays of the birth, parentage, education, and antecedents
of the trembling witnesses whom he cross-examines? What a career! and
see, there is its Hero, shambling into Westminster Hall, a spare,
shrunken, stooping, prematurely-aged man. He has not had a new wig these
ten years, and his silk gown is shabby, almost to raggedness. He is no
doubt arguing some abstruse point of law with that voluble gentleman,
his companion, in the white waistcoat. Let us approach and listen, for I
am Asmodeus and we are eaves-droppers. Point of law! Upon my word, he is
talking about the Chester Cup.
[Illustration: TEN O’CLOCK A.M.: INTERIOR OF THE COURT OF QUEEN’S BENCH.]
In with ye, then, my merry men all, to the hall of Westminster, for
the Court of Queen’s Bench is sitting. It is not a handsome court; it
is not an imposing court. If I were to say that it was a very mean and
ugly room, quite unworthy to figure as an audience-chamber for the
judges of the land, I don’t think that I should be in error. Where are
the lictors and the fasces? Where the throned daïs on which the wise
men of the Archeopagus should properly sit? The bench looks but an
uncomfortable settle! the floor of the court is a ridiculous little
quadrangle of oak, like a pie-board; the witness-box is so small that it
seems capable of holding nothing but the shooting “Jack” of our toyshop
experience; and the jury-box has a strong family likeness to one of
the defunct Smithfield sheep-pens, where sit the intelligent jury, who
have an invincible propensity, be the weather hot or cold, for wiping
their foreheads with blue cotton pocket handkerchiefs. A weary martyrdom
some of those poor jurymen pass; understanding a great deal more about
the case on which they have to deliver at its commencement than at
its termination; bemused, bewildered, and dazzled by the rhetorical
flourishes and ingenious sophistry of the counsel on both sides, and
utterly nonplussed by the elaborately obscure pleas that are put in. But
the usher has sworn them in that they “shall will and truly try” the
matter before them; and try it they must. To a man who has, perhaps, a
matter of sixty or seventy thousand pounds at stake on the issue of a
trial, the proceedings of most tribunals seem characterised by strange
indifference, and an engaging, though, to the plaintiff and defendant, a
somewhat irritating _laisser aller_. The attorneys take snuff with one
another, and whisper jokes. The counsel chat and poke each other in the
ribs; the briefless ones, in the high back rows, scribble caricatures on
their blotting-pads, or pretend to pore over “faggot” briefs, or lounge
from the Queen’s Bench into the Exchequer, and from the Exchequer into
the Bail Court, and so on and into the Common Pleas; the usher nods, and
cries, “Silence,” sleepily; the clerk reads in a droning monotonous voice
documents of the most vital importance, letters that destroy and blast
a life-long reputation of virtue and honour: letters that bring shame
on noble women, and ridicule on distinguished men; vows of affection,
slanderous accusations, outbursts of passion, anonymous denunciations,
ebullitions of love, hatred, revenge. Some one is here, doubtless,
to report the case for to-morrow’s papers, but no active pens seem
moving. The Chief has not assumed his legal harness yet; and the junior
counsel employed in the case are bungling over their preliminaries.
The faded moreen curtains; the shabby royal arms above the judge, with
their tarnished gilding, subdued-looking lion, and cracked unicorn; the
ink-stained, grease-worn desks and forms; the lack-lustre, threadbare
auditory, with woe-be-gone garments and mien, who fill up the hinderpart
of the auditory: though what they can want in the Court of Queen’s Bench
Heaven only knows; the bombazine-clad barristers, in their ill-powdered
wigs—quite fail in impressing you with a sense of anything like grandeur
or dignity. Yet you are in _Banco Reginâ_. Here our sovereign lady
the Queen is supposed to sit herself in judgment; and from this court
emanates the Great Writ of Right—the Habeas Corpus. To tell the truth,
neither counsel, jury, nor audience seem to know or to care much about
what is going on; but there are three persons who sit up aloft—not
exactly sweet little cherubs, for they are very old, wrinkled men—who
know the case like a book, and considerably better than many books; who
have weighed the _pros_ and _cons_ to the minutest hair’s breath, to a
feather’s turn of the scale, who are awake and alive, alive O! to all
the rhetorical flourishes and ingenious sophistry of the advocates, and
who will tell the jury exactly what the case is made of in about a tithe
of the time that the junior counsel would take in enumerating wrongs of
which the plaintiff complains, or whose commission the defendant denies.
It is an edifying sight to watch the presiding judge—that shrivelled
man in petticoats—with his plain scratch wig all awry. Now he hugs his
arms within his capacious sleeves; now he crosses his legs; now, yes,
now he twiddles his judicial thumbs; now he nods his august head, allows
it to recline over one shoulder, and seems on the point of falling off
to sleep; now he leans wearily, his cheek in his hand, his elbow on
the bench, first on one side, then on the other; then he rises, shakes
his old head, yawns, and, with his hands in his pockets, surveys the
outer bar through gold-rimmed spectacles. He seems the most bored, the
most indifferent spectator there; but only wait till the chiefs on both
sides have concluded their eloquent bamboozling of the jury; mark my
Lord Owlett settle his wig and his petticoats then, sort and unfold the
notes he has been lazily (so it seemed) scrawling from time to time, and
in a piping, quavering voice, begin to read from them. You marvel at
the force, the clarity, the perspicuity of the grand old man; you stand
abashed before the intellect, clear as crystal, at an age when man’s
mind as well as his body is oft-times but labour and sorrow; you are
astonished that so much vigour, so much shrewdness, so much eloquence,
should exist in that worn and tottering casket. Goodness knows, I am not
an optimist, and give but too much reason to be accused of _nil admirari_
tendencies; yet I cannot help thinking that if on this earth there exists
a body of men grandly wise, generously eloquent, nobly impartial, and
sternly incorruptible, those men are the judges of England.
Come away though, now, Don Cleophas; we must go further afield. The case
that is “on” just now is not of sufficient interest to detain us; though
here is an episode sufficiently grotesque. An old lady is entitled to
some damages, or to some verdict, or to some money or apology, or, at all
events, something from somebody. My Lord Owlett suggests a compromise,
and instructs counsel to ask her what she will take to settle matters.
“What will you take?” asks the gentleman in the bob-tailed wig of the old
lady.