THE LAST OF LORD CAMPBELL--WINE AND WATER--SIR THOMAS WILDE.
Life, alas! must have its sad stories as well as its mirthful. I have
told few of the former, not because they have not been present to my
mind, but because I think it useless to perpetuate them by narration.
But for its occasional gleams of humour, life would indeed be dull,
and ever eclipsed by the shadow of sorrow.
One of the stories the Chief Baron told me is as indelibly fixed on
my memory as it was on his. Lord Campbell had been so long and so
prominently before the country that his death would be a theme of
conversation in the world of literature, science, law, and fashion.
But it was not his death that impressed me; it was the incidents that
immediately attended it.
"His lordship"--thus was the event related--"had been entertaining
a party at dinner, and amongst them was his brother-in-law, Colonel
Scarlett. In its incidents the dinner had been as lively and agreeable
as those events in social and refined life usually are. Scarlett had
an important engagement with Campbell in the city on the following
Monday, this being Saturday night. As he rose to go Scarlett wished
his host good-night with a hearty shake-hands.
"'Good-night--good-night; we shall meet again on Monday.'"
Alas! Campbell died that night suddenly, and by a singular
interposition of Providence, Scarlett died suddenly the next day,
Sunday. They met no more in this world.
* * * * *
In the course of my life I have suffered, like many others, from
nameless afflictions--nameless because they do not exist. No one can
localize this strange infirmity or realize it. You only know you have
a sensation of depression. In every other respect I was perfectly
well, yet I thought it was necessary to see a doctor. So it was, if I
wished to be ill.
Being in this unhappy condition, I consulted Sir James Paget, then in
the zenith of his fame.
It did not take him very long to test me. I think he did it with a
smile, for I felt a good deal better after it.
"Just tell me," said he, "do you ever drink any water?"
"Now it's coming," I thought; "he's going to knock me off my wine." I
thought, however, I would be equal to the occasion, and said,--
"I know what you are driving at: you want to know if I ever mix a
little water in my wine."
"No, no, I don't," said he; "you are quite wrong, for if your water is
good and your wine bad, you spoil your water; and if your wine is good
and your water bad, you spoil your wine."
I took his advice--which was certainly worth the fee--and never mixed
my wine with water after that, although I have some doubt as to
whether I had ever done so before.
I came away in good heart, because I was so delighted that there was
not a vestige of anything the matter with me.
With a view to enable me to give each case due consideration before
fixing the poor wretch's doom after conviction, I invariably ordered
the prisoner to stand down until all were tried.
I then spent a night in going through my notes in each case, so that
if there were any circumstances that I could lay hold of by way of
mitigation of the sentence, I did so.
I do not mean to say that I did this in trifling cases, such as a
magistrate could dispose of, but in all cases of magnitude possibly
involving penal servitude.
Once, however, I had made up my mind as to what was, in accordance
with my judgment, the sentence to be passed, I took care never to
alter it upon any plea in mitigation whatever.
For this line of conduct I had the example of Sir Thomas Wilde, when,
as Lord Chief Justice of the Court of Common Pleas, he travelled the
Home Circuit. He was a marvellous and powerful judge in dealing with
the facts of a case. He had tried a prisoner for larceny in stealing
from a house a sack of peas. The prisoner's counsel had made for him
a very poor and absurd defence, in which, over and over again, he had
reiterated that one pea was very like another pea, and that he would
be a bold man who would swear to the identity of two peas.
This miserable defence made the Lord Chief Justice angry, and he
summed up the case tersely but crushingly to this effect: "Gentlemen,
you have been told by the learned counsel very truly that one pea is
very like another pea, and if the only evidence in this case had been
that one pea had been taken from the house of the prosecutor, and a
similar pea had been found in the prisoners house, I for one should
have said it would have been insufficient evidence to justify the
accusation that the prisoner had taken it.
"But such are _not_ the facts of this case; and when you find, as was
the fact here, that on March 30 a sack appears in a particular place,
marked with the prosecutor's initials, safe in his house at night,
where it ought to have been but was not, on the morning of the 31st;
and when you find that on that morning a sack of peas of precisely
similar character was in the house of the prisoner in a precisely
similar sack behind the door, the question very naturally arises, _How
came_ those peas in that man's house? He says he found them; do you
believe him? Did it ever occur to you, gentlemen, to find a similar
sack of peas in the dead of the night on any road on which you chanced
to be travelling?
"The prosecutor says the prisoner stole them, and that is the question
I ask you to answer. Did he or not, in your opinion, steal them?"
I need not say what the verdict was. The man was _put back for
sentence_. That is the point I am upon.
On the following morning the Lord Chief Justice, still a bit angry
with the prisoner's counsel for the miserable imposture he had
attempted upon the jury, said,--
"God forbid, prisoner at the bar, that the defence attempted by your
counsel yesterday should aggravate the punishment which I am about to
inflict upon you; and with a view to dispel from my mind all that was
then urged on your behalf, I have taken the night to consider what
sentence I ought to pronounce."
Having said thus much about the speech for the defence, he gave a very
moderate sentence of two or three months' imprisonment. Every
sentence that this Chief Justice passed had been well thought out and
considered, and was the result of anxious deliberation--that is to
say, in the serious cases that demanded it. Of course, I do not claim
for my adopted system an infallibility which belongs to no human
device, but only that during some years, by patiently following it, I
was enabled the better to determine how I could combine justice with
leniency.