A Book About Lawyers Part 18

The same originator of happy sayings pointed to Eldon's characteristic weakness in the lines--

"Mr. Leach made a speech, Pithy, clear, and strong; Mr. Hart, on the other part, Was prosy, dull, and long; Mr. Parker made that darker Which was dark enough without; Mr. Bell spoke so well, That the Chancellor said--'I doubt.'"

Far from being offended by this allusion to his notorious mental infirmity, Lord Eldon, shortly after the verses had floated into circulation, concluded one of his decisions by saying, with a significant smile, "And here _the Chancellor does not doubt_."

Not less remarkable for precipitancy than Eldon for procrastination, Sir John Leach, Vice-Chancellor, was said to have done more mischief by excessive haste in a single term than Eldon in his whole life wrought through extreme caution. The holders of this opinion delighted to repeat the poor and not perspicuous lines--

"In equity's high court there are Two sad extremes, 'tis clear; Excessive slowness strikes us there, Excessive quickness here.

"Their source, 'twixt good and evil, brings A difficulty nice; The first from Eldon's _virtue_, springs, The latter from his _vice_."

It is needless to remark that this attempt to gloss the Chancellor's shortcomings is an ill.u.s.tration of the readiness with which censors apologize for the misdeeds of eminently fortunate offenders. Whilst Eldon's procrastination and Leach's haste were thus put in contrast, an epigram also placed the Chancellor's frailty in comparison with the tedious prolixity of the Master of the Rolls--

"To cause delay in Lincoln's Inn Two diff'rent methods tend: His lords.h.i.+p's judgments ne'er begin, His honors never end."

A mirth-loving judge, Justice Powell, could be as thoroughly humorous in private life as he was fearless and just upon the bench. Swift describes him as a surpa.s.singly merry old gentleman, laughing heartily at all comic things, and his own droll stories more than aught else. In court he could not always refrain from jocularity. For instance, when he tried Jane Wenham for witch-craft, and she a.s.sured him that she could fly, his eye twinkled as he answered, "Well, then you may; there is no law against flying." When Fowler, Bishop of Gloucester--a thorough believer in what is now-a-days called spiritualism--was persecuting his acquaintance with silly stories about ghosts, Powell gave him a telling reproof for his credulity by describing a horrible apparition which was represented as having disturbed the narrator's rest on the previous night. At the hour of midnight, as the clocks were striking twelve, the judge was roused from his first slumber by a hideous sound. Starting up, he saw at the foot of his uncompanioned bed a figure--dark, gloomy, terrible, holding before its grim and repulsive visage a lamp that shed an uncertain light. "May Heaven have mercy on us!" tremulously e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.ed the bishop at this point of the story. The judge continued his story: "Be calm, my lord bishop; be calm. The awful part of this mysterious interview has still to be told. Nerving myself to fas.h.i.+on the words of inquiry, I addressed the nocturnal visitor thus--'Strange being, why hast thou come at this still hour to perturb a sinful mortal?' You understand, my lord, I said this in hollow tones--in what I may almost term a sepulchral voice." "Ay--ay," responded the bishop, with intense excitement; "go on--I implore you to go on. What did _it_ answer?" "It answered in a voice not greatly different from the voice of a human creature--'Please, sir, _I am the watchman on beat, and your street-door is open_.'" Readers will remember the use which Barham has made of this story in the Ingoldsby Legends.

As a Justice of the King's Bench, Powell had in Chief Justice Holt an a.s.sociate who could not only appreciate the wit of others, but could himself say smart things. When Lacy, the fanatic, forced his way into Holt's house in Bedford Row, the Chief Justice was equal to the occasion. "I come to you," said Lacy, "a prophet from the Lord G.o.d, who has sent me to thee and would have thee grant a _nolle prosequi_ for John Atkins, his servant, whom thou hast sent to prison." Whereto the judge answered, with proper emphasis, "Thou art a false prophet and a lying knave. If the Lord G.o.d had sent thee, it would have been to the Attorney General, for the Lord G.o.d knows that it belongeth not to the Chief Justice, to grant a _nolle prosequi_; but I, as Chief Justice, can grant a warrant to commit thee to John Atkins's company." Whereupon the false prophet, sharing the fate of many a true one, was forthwith clapped in prison.

Now that so much has been said of Thurlow's brutal sarcasms, justice demands for his memory an acknowledgment that he possessed a vein of genuine humor that could make itself felt without wounding. In his undergraduate days at Cambridge he is said to have worried the tutors of Caius with a series of disorderly pranks and impudent _escapades_, but on one occasion he unquestionably displayed at the university the quick wit that in after life rescued him from many an embarra.s.sing position.

"Sir," observed a tutor, giving the unruly undergraduate a look of disapproval, "I never come to the window without seeing you idling in the court." "Sir," replied young Thurlow, imitating the don's tone, "I never come into the court without seeing you idling at the window."

Years later, when he had become a great man, and John Scott was paying him a.s.siduous court, Thurlow said, in ridicule of the mechanical awkwardness of many successful equity draughtsmen, "Jack Scott, don't you think we could invent a machine to draw bills and answers in Chancery?" Having laughed at the suggestion when it was made, Scott put away the droll thought in his memory; and when he had risen to be Attorney General reminded Lord Thurlow of it under rather awkward circ.u.mstances. Macnamara, the conveyancer, being concerned as one of the princ.i.p.als in a Chancery suit, Lord Thurlow advised him to submit the answer to the bill filed against him to the Attorney General. In due course the answer came under Scott's notice, when he found it so wretchedly drawn, that he advised Macnamara to have another answer drawn by some one who understood pleading. On the same day he was engaged at the bar of the House of Lords, when Lord Thurlow came to him, and said, "So I understand you don't think my friend Mac's answer will do?" "Do!"

Scott replied, contemptuously. "My Lord, it won't do at all! it must have been drawn by that wooden machine which you once told me might be invented to draw bills and answers." "That's very unlucky," answered Thurlow, "and impudent too, if you had known--_that I drew the answer myself_."

Lord Lyndhurst used to maintain that it was one of the chief duties of a judge to render it disagreeable to counsel to talk nonsense. Jeffreys in his milder moments no doubt salved his conscience with the same doctrine, when he recalled how, after elating him with a compliment, he struck down the rising junior with "Lord, sir! you must be cackling too.

We told you, Mr. Bradbury, your objection was very ingenious; that must not make you troublesome: you cannot lay an egg, but you must be cackling over it." Doubtless, also, he felt it one of the chief duties of a judge to restrain attorneys from talking nonsense when--on hearing that the solicitor from whom he received his first brief had boastfully remarked, in allusion to past services, "My Lord Chancellor! I _made_ him!"--he exclaimed, "Well, then, I'll lay my maker by the heels," and forthwith committed his former client and patron to the Fleet prison. If this bully of the bench actually, as he is said to have done, interrupted the venerable Maynard by saying, "You have lost your knowledge of law; your memory, I tell you, is failing through old age,"

how must every hearer of the speech have exulted when Maynard quietly answered, "Yes, Sir George, I have forgotten more law than you ever learned; but allow me to say, I have not forgotten much."

On the other hand it should be remembered that Maynard was a man eminently qualified to sow violent animosities, and that he was a perpetual thorn in the flesh of the political barristers, whose principles he abhorred. A subtle and tricky man, he was constantly misleading judges by citing fict.i.tious authorities, and then smiling at their professional ignorance when they had swallowed his audacious fabrications. Moreover, the manner of his speech was sometimes as offensive as its substance was dishonest. Strafford spoke a bitter criticism not only with regard to Maynard and Glyn, but with regard to the prevailing tone of the bar, when, describing the conduct of the advocates who managed his prosecution, he said: "Glynne and Maynard used me _like advocates_, but Palmer and Whitelock _like gentlemen_; and yet the latter left out nothing against me that was material to be urged against me." As a Devons.h.i.+re man Maynard is one of the many cases which may be cited against the smart saying of Sergeant Davy, who used to observe: "The further I journey toward the West, the more convinced I am that the wise men come from the East." But shrewd, observant, liberal though he was in most respects, he was on one matter so far behind the spirit of the age that, blinded and ruled by an unwise sentiment, he gave his parliamentary support to an abortive measure "to prevent further building in London and the neighborhood." In support of this measure he observed, "This building is the ruin of the gentry and ruin of religion, as leaving many good people without churches to go to.

This enlarging of London makes it filled with lacqueys and pages. In St.

Giles's parish scarce the fifth part come to church, and we shall have no religion at last."

Whilst justice has suffered something in respect of dignity from the overbearing temper of judges to counsel, from collisions of the bench with the bar, and from the mutual hostility of rival advocates, she has at times sustained even greater injury from the jealousies and altercations of judges. Too often wearers of the ermine, sitting on the same bench, nominally for the purpose of a.s.sisting each other, have roused the laughter of the bar, and the indignation of suitors, by their petty squabbles. "It now comes to my turn," an Irish judge observed, when it devolved on him to support the decision of one or the other of two learned coadjutors, who had stated with more fervor than courtesy altogether irreconcilable opinions--"It now comes to my turn to declare my view of the case, and fortunately I can be brief. I agree with my brother A, from the irresistible force of my brother B's arguments."

Extravagant as this case may appear, the King's Bench of Westminster Hall, under Mansfield and Kenyon, witnessed several not less scandalous and comical differences. Taking thorough pleasure in his work, Lord Mansfield was not less industrious than impartial in the discharge of his judicial functions; so long as there was anything for him to learn with regard to a cause, he not only sought for it with pains but with a manifest pleasure similar to that delight in judicial work which caused the French Advocate, Cottu, to say of Mr. Justice Bayley: "Il s'amuse a juger:" but notwithstanding these good qualities, he was often culpably deficient in respect for the opinions of his subordinate coadjutors. At times a vain desire to impress on the minds of spectators that his intellect was the paramount power of the bench; at other times a personal dislike to one of his _puisnes_ caused him to derogate from the dignity of his court, in cases where he was especially careful to protect the interests of suitors. With silence more disdainful than any words could have been, he used to turn away from Mr. Justice Willes, at the moment when the latter expected his chief to ask his opinion; and on such occasions the indignant _puisne_ seldom had the prudence and nerve to conceal his mortification. "I have not been consulted, and I will be heard!" he once shrieked forth in a paroxysm of rage caused by Mansfield's contemptuous treatment; and forty years afterwards Jeremy Bentham, who was a witness of the insult and its effect, observed: "At this distance of time--five-and-thirty or forty years--the feminine scream issuing out of his manly frame still tingles in my ears."

Mansfield's overbearing demeanor to his _puisnes_ was reproduced with less dignity by his successor; but Buller, the judge who wore ermine whilst he was still in his thirty-third year, and who confessed that his "idea of heaven was to sit at Nisi Prius all day, and to play whist all night," seized the first opportunity to give Taffy Kenyon a lesson in good manners by stating, with impressive self-possession and convincing logic, the reasons which induced him to think the judgment delivered by his chief to be altogether bad in law and argument.

[30] One of Jekyll's best displays of brilliant impudence was perpetrated on a Welsh judge, who was alike notorious for his greed of office and his want of personal cleanliness. "My dear sir," Jekyll observed in his most amiable manner to this most unamiable personage, "you have asked the minister for almost everything else, why _don't_ you ask him for a piece of soap and a nail-brush?"

CHAPTER XLI.

WITS IN 'SILK' AND PUNSTERS IN 'ERMINE.'

Whilst Lord Camden held the chiefs.h.i.+p of the Common Pleas, he was walking with his friend Lord Dacre on the outskirts of an Ess.e.x village, when they pa.s.sed the parish stocks. "I wonder," said the Chief Justice, "whether a man in the stocks endures a punishment that is physically painful? I am inclined to think that, apart from the sense of humiliation and other mental anguish, the prisoner suffers nothing, unless the populace express their satisfaction at his fate by pelting him with brick-bats." "Suppose you settle your doubts by putting your feet into the holes," rejoined Lord Dacre, carelessly. In a trice the Chief Justice was sitting on the ground with his feet some fifteen inches above the level of his seat, and his ankles encircled by hard wood. "Now, Dacre!" he exclaimed, enthusiastically, "fasten the bolts, and leave me for ten minutes." Like a courteous host Lord Dacre complied with the whim of his guest, and having placed it beyond his power to liberate himself bade him 'farewell' for ten minutes. Intending to saunter along the lane and return at the expiration of the stated period, Lord Dacre moved away, and falling into one of his customary fits of reverie, soon forgot all about the stocks, his friend's freak, and his friend. In the meantime the Chief Justice went through every torture of an agonizing punishment--acute shootings along the confined limbs, aching in the feet, angry pulsations under the toes, violent cramps in the muscles and thighs, gnawing pain at the point where his person came in immediate contact with the cold ground, pins-and-needles everywhere. Amongst the various forms of his physical discomfort, faintness, fever, giddiness, and raging thirst may be mentioned. He implored a peasant to liberate him, and the fellow answered with a shout of derision; he hailed a pa.s.sing clergyman, and explained that he was not a culprit, but Lord Camden, Chief Justice of the Common Pleas, and one of Lord Dacre's guests. "Ah!" observed the man of cloth, not so much answering the wretched culprit as pa.s.sing judgment on his case, "mad with liquor. Yes, drunkenness is sadly on the increase; 'tis droll, though, for a drunkard in the stocks to imagine himself a Chief Justice!" and on he pa.s.sed. A farmer's wife jogged by on her pillion, and hearing the wretched man exclaim that he should die of thirst, the good creature gave him a juicy apple, and hoped that his punishment would prove for the good of his soul. Not ten minutes, but ten hours did the Chief Justice sit in the stocks, and when at length he was carried into Lord Dacre's house, he was in no humor to laugh at his own miserable plight. Not long afterwards he presided at a trial in which a workman brought an action against a magistrate who had wrongfully placed him in the stocks. The counsel for the defence happening to laugh at the statement of the plaintiff, who maintained that he had suffered intense pain during his confinement, Lord Camden leaned forwards and inquired in a whisper, "Brother were you ever in the stocks?" "Never, my lord,"

answered the advocate, with a look of lively astonishment "I have been,"

was the whispered reply; "and let me a.s.sure you that the agony inflicted by the stocks is--_awful_!"

Of a different sort, but scarcely less intense, was the pain endured by Lord Mansfield whenever a barrister p.r.o.nounced a Latin word with a false quant.i.ty. "My lords," said the Scotch advocate, Crosby, at the bar of the House of Lords, "I have the honor to appear before your lords.h.i.+ps as counsel for the Curators." "Ugh!" groaned the Westminster Oxford law-lord, softening his reproof by an allusion to his Scotch nationality, "Curators, Mr. Crosby, Curators: I wish _our_ countrymen would pay a little more attention to prosody." "My Lord," replied Mr.

Crosby, with delightful readiness and composure, "I can a.s.sure you that _our_ countrymen are very proud of your lords.h.i.+p as the greatest senator and orator of the present age." The barrister who made Baron Alderson shudder under his robes by applying for a 'nolle prosequi,' was not equally quick at self-defence, when that judge interposed, "Stop, sir--consider that this is the last day of term, and don't make things unnecessarily long." It was Baron Alderson who, in reply to the juryman's confession that he was deaf in one ear, observed, "Then leave the box before the trial begins; for it is necessary that jurymen should _hear both sides_."

Amongst legal wits, Lord Ellenborough enjoys a high place; and though in dealing out satire upon barristers and witnesses, and even on his judicial coadjutors, he was often needlessly severe, he seldom perpetrated a jest the force of which lay solely in its cruelty. Perhaps the most harsh and reprehensible outburst of satiric humor recorded of him is the crus.h.i.+ng speech by which he ruined a young man for life. "The _unfortunate_ client for whom it is my privilege to appear," said a young barrister, making his first essay in Westminster Hall--"the unfortunate client, my lord, for whom I appear--hem! hem!--I say, my lord, my _unfortunate client_----" Leaning forwards, and speaking in a soft, cooing voice, that was all the more derisive, because it was so gentle, Lord Ellenborough said, "you may go on, sir--so far the court is with you." One would have liked his lords.h.i.+p better had he sacrificed his jest to humanity, and acted as long afterwards that true gentleman, Mr. Justice Talfourd, acted, who, seeing a young barrister overpowered with nervousness, gave him time to recover himself by saying, in the kindest possible manner, "Excuse me for interrupting you--but for a minute I am not at liberty to pay you attention." Whereupon the Judge took up his pen and wrote a short note to a friend. Before the note was finished, the young barrister had completely recovered his self-possession, and by an admirable speech secured a verdict for his client. A highly nervous man, he might on that day have been broken for life, like Ellenborough's victim, by mockery; but fortunate in appearing before a judge whose witty tongue knew not how to fas.h.i.+on unkind words, he triumphed over his temporary weakness, and has since achieved well deserved success in his profession. Talfourd might have made a jest for the thoughtless to laugh at; but he preferred to do an act, on which those who loved him like to think.

When Preston, the great conveyancer, gravely informed the judges of the King's Bench that "an estate in fee simple was the highest estate known to the law of England," Lord Ellenborough checked the great Chancery lawyer, and said with politest irony, "Stay, stay, Mr. Preston, let me take that down. An estate" (the judge writing as he spoke) "in fee simple is--the highest estate--known to--the law of England. Thank you, Mr. Preston! The court, sir, is much indebted to you for the information." Having inflicted on the court an unspeakably dreary oration, Preston, towards the close of the day, asked when it would be their lords.h.i.+p's pleasure to hear the remainder of his argument; whereupon Lord Ellenborough uttered a sigh of resignation, and answered, 'We are bound to hear you, and we will endeavor to give you our undivided attention on Friday next; but as for _pleasure_, that, sir, has been long out of the question.'

Probably mistelling an old story, and taking to himself the merit of Lord Ellenborough's reply to Preston, Sir Vicary Gibbs (Chief of the Common Pleas) used to tell his friends that Sergeant Vaughan--the sergeant who, on being subsequently raised to the bench through the influence of his elder brother, Sir Henry Halford, the court physician, was humorously described by the wits of Westminster Hall as a judge _by prescription_--once observed in a grandiose address to the Judges of the Common Pleas, "For though our law takes cognizance of divers different estates, I may be permitted to say, without reserve or qualification of any kind, that the highest estate known to the law of England is an estate in fee simple." Whereupon Sir Vicary, according to his own account, interrupted the sergeant with an air of incredulity and astonishment. "What is your proposition, brother Vaughan? Perhaps I did not hear you rightly!" Fl.u.s.tered by the interruption, which completely effected its object, the sergeant explained, "My lord, I mean to contend that an estate in fee simple is _one of the highest estates_ known to the law of England, that is, my lord, that it may be under certain circ.u.mstances--and sometimes is so."

Notwithstanding his high reputation for wit, Lord Ellenborough would deign to use the oldest jests. Thus of Mr. Caldecott, who over and over again, with dull verbosity, had said that certain limestone quarries, like lead and copper mines, "were not rateable, because the limestone could only be reached by boring, which was matter of science," he gravely inquired, "Would you, Mr. Caldecott, have us believe that every kind of _boring_ is matter of science?" With finer humor he nipped in the bud one of Randle Jackson's flowery harangues. "My lords," said the orator, with nervous intonation, "in the book of nature it is written----" "Be kind enough, Mr. Jackson," interposed Lord Ellenborough, "to mention the page from which you are about to quote."

This calls to mind the ridicule which, at an earlier period of his career, he cast on Sheridan for saying at the trial of Warren Hastings, "The treasures in the Zenana of the Begum are offerings laid by the hand of piety on the altar of a saint." To this not too rhetorical statement, Edward Law, as leading counsel for Warren Hastings, replied by asking, "how the lady was to be considered a saint, and how the camels were to be laid upon the altar?" With greater pungency, Sheridan defended himself by saying, "This is the first time in my life that I ever heard of special pleading on a metaphor, or a bill of indictment against a trope; but such is the turn of the learned gentleman's mind, that when he attempts to be humorous no jest can be found, and when serious no fact is visible."[31] To the last Law delighted to point the absurdities of orators who in aiming at the sublime only achieved the ridiculous. "My lords," said Mr. Gaselee, arguing that mourning coaches at a funeral were not liable to post-horse duty, "it never could have been the intention of a Christian legislature to aggravate the grief which mourners endure whilst following to the grave the remains of their dearest relatives, by compelling them at the same time to pay the horse-duty." Had Mr. Gaselee been a humorist, Lord Ellenborough would have laughed; but as the advocate was well known to have no turn for raillery, the Chief Justice gravely observed, "Mr. Gaselee, you incur danger by sailing in high sentimental lat.i.tudes."

To the surgeon in the witness-box who said, "I employ myself as a surgeon," Lord Ellenborough retorted, "But does anybody else employ you as a surgeon?"

The demand to be examined _on affirmation_ being preferred by a Quaker witness, whose dress was so much like the costume of an ordinary _conformist_ that the officer of the court had begun to administer the usual oath, Lord Ellenborough inquired of the 'friend,' "Do you really mean to impose upon the court by appearing here in the disguise of a reasonable being?" Very pungent was his e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.i.o.n at a cabinet dinner when he heard that Lord Kenyon was about to close his penurious old age by dying. "Die!--why should he die?--what would he get by that?"

interposed Lord Ellenborough, adding to the pile of jests by which men have endeavored to keep a grim, unpleasant subject out of sight--a pile to which the latest _mot_ was added the other day by Lord Palmerston, who during his last attack of gout exclaimed playfully. "_Die_, my dear doctor! That's the _last_ thing I think of doing." Having jested about Kenyon's parsimony, as the old man lay _in extremis_, Ellenborough placed another joke of the same kind upon his coffin. Hearing that through the blunder of an illiterate undertaker the motto on Kenyon's hatchment in Lincoln's Inn Fields had been painted '_Mors Janua Vita_,'

instead of 'Mors Janua Vitae,' he exclaimed, "Bless you, there's no mistake; Kenyon's will directed that it should be 'Vita,' so that his estate might be saved the expense of _a diphthong._" Capital also was his reply when Erskine urged him to accept the Great Seal. "How can you," he asked, in a tone of solemn entreaty, "wish me to accept the office of Chancellor, when you know, Erskine, that I am as ignorant of its duties as you are yourself?" At the time of uttering these words, Ellenborough was well aware that if he declined them Erskine would take the seals. Some of his puns were very poor. For instance, his exclamation, "Cite to me the decisions of the judges of the land: not the judgments of the Chief Justice of Ely, who is fit only to _rule_ a copybook."

One of the best 'legal' puns on record is unanimously attributed by the gossipers of Westminster Hall to Lord Chelmsford. As Sir Frederick Thesiger he was engaged in the conduct of a cause, and objected to the irregularity of a learned sergeant who in examining his witnesses repeatedly put leading questions. "I have a right," maintained the sergeant, doggedly, "to _deal_ with my witnesses as I please." "To that I offer no objection," retorted Sir Frederick; "you may _deal_ as you like, but you shan't _lead_." Of the same brilliant conversationalist Mr. Grantley Berkeley has recorded a good story in 'My Life and Recollections.' Walking down St. James's Street, Lord Chelmsford was accosted by a stranger, who exclaimed "Mr. Birch I believe?" "If you believe that, sir, you'll believe anything," replied the ex-Chancellor, as he pa.s.sed on.

When Thelwall, instead of regarding his advocate with grateful silence, insisted on interrupting him with vexatious remarks and impertinent criticisms, Erskine neither threw up his brief nor lost his temper, but retorted with an innocent flash of merriment. To a slip of paper on which the prisoner had written, "I'll be hanged if I don't plead my own cause," he contented himself with returning answer, "You'll be hanged if you do." His _mots_ were often excellent, but it was the tone and joyous animation of the speaker that gave them their charm. It is said that in his later years, when his habitual loquaciousness occasionally sank into garrulity, he used to repeat his jests with imprudent frequency, shamelessly giving his companions the same pun with each course of a long dinner. There is a story that after his retirement from public life he used morning after morning to waylay visitors on their road through the garden to his house, and, pointing to his horticultural attire and the spade in his hand a.s.sure them that he was 'enjoying his otium c.u.m _digging a tatie_.' Indeed the tradition lives that before his fall from the woolsack, pert juniors used to lay bets as to the number of times he could fire off a favorite old pun in the course of a sitting in the Court of Chancery, and that wily leaders habitually strove to catch his favor by giving him opportunities for facetious interruptions during their arguments. If such traditions be truthful, it is no matter for surprise that Erskine's court-jokes have come down to us with so many variations. For instance, it is recorded with much circ.u.mstantiality that on circuit, accosting a junior who had lost his portmanteau from the back of a post-chaise, he said, with mock gravity, "Young gentlemen, henceforth imitate the elephant, the wisest of animals, who always _carries his trunk before him_;" and on equally good authority it is stated that when Polito, the keeper of the Exeter 'Change Menagerie, met with a similar accident and brought an action for damages against the proprietor of the coach from the hind-boot of which his property had disappeared, Erskine, speaking for the defence, told the jury that they would not be justified in giving a verdict favorable to the man, who, though he actually possessed an elephant, had neglected to imitate its prudent example and carry his trunk before him.

As a _litterateur_ Erskine met with meagre success; but some of his squibs and epigrams are greatly above the ordinary level of '_vers de societe_.' For instance this is his:--

"DE QUODAM REGE.

"I may not do right, though I ne'er can do wrong; I never can die, though I can not live long; My jowl it is purple, my hand it is fat-- Come, riddle my riddle. What is it? _What? What?_"

The liveliest ill.u.s.trations of Erskine's proverbial egotism are the squibs of political caricaturists; and from their humorous exaggerations it is difficult to make a correct estimate of the lengths of absurdity to which his intellectual vanity and self-consciousness sometimes carried him. From what is known of his disposition it seems probable that the sarcasms aimed by public writers at his infirmity inclined him to justify their attacks rather than to disprove them by his subsequent demeanor, and that some of his most extravagant outbursts of self-a.s.sertion were designed in a spirit of bravado and reckless good-nature to increase the laughter which satirists had raised against him. However this may be, his conduct drew upon him blows that would have ruffled the composure of any less self-complacent or less amiable man. The Tory prints habitually spoke of him as Counsellor Ego whilst he was at the bar; and when it was known that he had accepted the seals, the opposition journals announced that he would enter the house as "Baron Ego, of Eye, in the county of Suffolk." Another of his nicknames was _Lord Clackmannan_; and Cobbett published the following notice of an harangue made by the fluent advocate in the House of Commons:--"Mr.

Erskine delivered a most animated speech in the House of Commons on the causes and consequences of the late war, which lasted thirteen hours, eighteen minutes, and a second, by Mr. John Nichol's stop-watch. Mr.

Erskine closed his speech with a dignified climax: 'I was born free, and, by G-d, I'll remain so!'--[A loud cry of '_Hear! hear_' in the gallery, in which were citizens Tallien and Barrere.] On Monday three weeks we shall have the extreme satisfaction of laying before the public a brief a.n.a.lysis of the above speech, our letter-founder having entered into an engagement to furnish a fresh font of I's."[32]

From the days of Wriothesley, who may be regarded as the most conspicuous and unquestionable instance of judicial incompetency in the annals of English lawyers, the mult.i.tudes have always delighted in stories that ill.u.s.trate the ignorance and incapacity of men who are presumed to possess, by right of their office, an extraordinary share of knowledge and wisdom. What law-student does not rub his hands as he reads of Lord St. John's trouble during term whilst he held the seals, and of the impatience with which he looked forward to the long vacation, when he would not be required to look wise and speak authoritatively about matters concerning which he was totally ignorant. Delicious are the stories of Francis Bacon's clerical successor, who endeavored to get up a _quantum suff_. of Chancery law by falling on his knees and asking enlightenment of Heaven. Gloomily comical are the anecdotes of Chief Justice Fleming, whose most famous and disastrous blunder was his judgment in Bates's case. Great fun may be gathered from the tales that exemplify the ignorance of law which characterized the military, and also the non-military laymen, who helped to take care of the seals during the civil troubles of the seventeenth century. Capital is Roger North's picture of Bob Wright's ludicrous s.h.i.+ftlessness whenever the influence of his powerful relations brought the loquacious, handsome, plausible fellow a piece of business. "He was a comely fellow," says Roger North, speaking of the Chief Justice Wright's earlier days, "airy and flouris.h.i.+ng both in his habits and way of living; and his relation Wren (being a powerful man in those parts) set him in credit with the country; but withal, he was so poor a lawyer that he used to bring such cases as came to him to his friend Mr. North, and he wrote the opinion on the paper, and the lawyer copied it, and signed under the case as if it had been his own. It ran so low with him that when Mr. North was at London he sent up his cases to him, and had opinions returned by the post; and, in the meantime he put off his clients on pretence of taking the matter into serious consideration." Perhaps some readers of this page can point to juniors of the present date whose professional incapacity closely resembles the incompetence of this gay young barrister of Charles II.'s time. Laughter again rises at the thought of Lord Chancellor Bathurst and the judicial perplexities and blunders which caused Sir Charles Williams to cla.s.s him with those who

"Were cursed and stigmatized by power, And rais'd to be expos'd."

Much more than an average or altogether desirable amount of amiability has fallen to the reader who can refrain from a malicious smile, when he is informed by reliable history that Lord Loughborough (no mean lawyer or inefficient judge), gave utterance to so much bad law, as Chairman of Quarter Sessions in canny Yorks.h.i.+re, that when on appeal his decisions were reversed with many polite expressions of _sincere_ regret by the King's Bench, all Westminster Hall laughed in concert at the mistakes of the sagacious Chief of the Common Pleas.

But no lawyer, brilliant or dull, has been more widely ridiculed for incompetence than Erskine. Sir Causticus Witherett, being asked some years since why a certain Chancellor, unjustly accused of intellectual dimness by his political adversaries and by the uninformed public, preferred his seat amongst the barons to his official place on the woolsack, is said to have replied: "The Lord Chancellor usually takes his seat amongst the peers whenever he can do so with propriety, because he is a highly nervous man, and when he is on the woolsack, he is apt to be frightened at finding himself all alone--_in the dark_." As soon as Erskine was mentioned as a likely person to be Lord Chancellor, rumors began to circulate concerning his total unfitness for the office; and no sooner had he mounted the woolsack than the wits declared him to be alone and in the dark. Lord Ellenborough's sarcasm was widely repeated, and gave the cue to the advocate's detractors, who had little difficulty in persuading the public that any intelligent law-clerk would make as good a Chancellor as Thomas Erskine. With less discretion than good-humor, Erskine gave countenance to the representations of his enemies by ridiculing his own unfitness for the office. During the interval between his appointment and his first appearance as judge in the Court of Chancery, he made a jocose pretence of 'reading up' for his new duties: and whimsically exaggerating his deficiencies, he represented himself as studying books with which raw students have some degree of familiarity. Caught with 'Cruise's Digest' of the laws relating to real property, open in his hand, he observed to the visitor who had interrupted his studies, "You see, I am taking a little from my _cruise_ daily, without any prospect of coming to the end of it."

In the autumn of 1819 two gentlemen of the United States having differed in opinion concerning his incompetence in the Court of Chancery--the one of them maintaining that the greater number of his decrees had been reversed, and the other maintaining that so many of his decisions had not endured reversal--the dispute gave rise to a bet of three dozen of port. With comical bad taste one of the parties to the bet--the one who believed that the Chancellor's judgments had been thus frequently upset--wrote to Erskine for information on the point. Instead of giving the answer which his correspondent desired, Erskine informed him in the following terms that he had lost his wine:--

"Upper Berkley Street, Nov. 13, 1819.

"SIR:--I certainly was appointed Chancellor under the administration in which Mr. Fox was Secretary of State, in 1806, and could have been Chancellor under no administration in which he had not a post; nor would have accepted without him any office whatsoever. I believe the administration was said, by all the _Blockheads_, to be made up of all the _Talents_ in the country.

"But you have certainly lost your bet on the subject of my decrees.

None of them were appealed against, except one, upon a branch of Mr.

Th.e.l.lusson's will--but it was affirmed without a dissentient voice, on the motion of Lord Eldon, then and now Lord Chancellor. If you think I was no lawyer, you may continue to think so. It is plain you are no lawyer yourself; but I wish every man to retain his opinion, though at the cost of three dozen of port.