The clever one had her disciples, too:
But as time went on and knowledge grew,
They became uneasy, indulged in quarrels,
And even began to talk about morals.
The final attack on her and her school
Was made by the second son of the fool,
Who inscribed his book in a manner quaint:
'To the hearthstone, where, if high hopes faint,
From ambition's ashes still arise

A hope more high, and a creed more wise.'

So restless and dissatisfied

The clever one took to her bed, and died;
And the papers published notes of her fame
With several letters after her name.
And not long after, grave and oppressed,
Four strong sons laid the fool to her rest,
And carved on her tomb for all to see:
'Bene merenti, dilectae.'

This little story of mine, I must own,
Is thoroughly retrograde in tone,
Full of the prejudice of that day
Long-since-happily-passed-away.
Still, I would plead in the critic's ear,
At least I have made my moral clear.
For you see my meaning: one of the two
Took a false view of life, and one a true;

One missed the substance and clasped the shade;
One listened, and heard the call, and obeyed-
Or, to make it plain, I will say again,

Till death, from their earliest days at school,
One was clever and one was a fool.

A. H. S.

'JUDGES' WUT?

BY VISCOUNT ST. CYRES.

PROVERBS have been pronounced by high authority the oracles of the unlearned; and it is odd that they have been drawn upon so seldom by historians of men and manners. Think-to take only a single instance-of the light they throw on the rank our three learned professions held in popular esteem. 'It is not the cowl that makes the monk' is certainly their typical judgment on the clergy; and Every man of forty is a fool, or his own physician,' their definitive utterance on medicine. But He who has himself as his lawyer has a fool for his client' is couched in very different tones. Yet the law is certainly not the most popular of the three; for the old joke that the three stages in a legal career are getting on-getting honour-getting honestis repeated, in one form or another, in every country in Europe. Nor does law owe its position to its mystery, for medicine is still more mysterious. Witness the ancient Spanish saying that physicians never acknowledge their mistakes; they hide them in Mother Earth. Nor is force the explanation, for the clergy wield powers much more tremendous. A judge can only order a man to be hanged, but a curate can order him to be damned. But then, in the former case he is hanged, as the Master of Balliol observed. The truth is that the pre-eminence of the law is due to a judicious mingling of mystery and force. No layman, when he begins an action, has the remotest notion of what is going to happen; all he knows is that most unpleasant consequences will follow, should the verdict chance to go against him.

Lawyers have always taken care to keep him in this happy ignorance. Deep and loud was their indignation when Sir William Blackstone published his 'Commentaries' in 1785. Sciolists like Jeremy Bentham might praise Sir William for teaching jurisprudence to speak the language of the scholar and the gentleman'; but his contemporaries at the Bar knew better. One black-letter sage went so far as to say that a man who could write clearly on such a subject was a disgrace to his profession. This was hard on poor

Sir William, who was really quite as great an obscurantist as the rest. He may have allowed himself an occasional fling at Coke on Littleton, in the quaint verses it was his great amusement to compose; but in his heart of hearts he knew that Coke and Littleton were right:

With sounds uncouth and accents dry,

That vex the soul of Harmony,
Each pedant sage unlocks his store
Of mystic, dark, discordant lore,

And points with tottering hand the ways
That lead me to the thorny maze,
Where, in a winding close retreat,

Is Justice doomed to fix her seat.

And there, from vulgar sight retired

Like Eastern Queens, is much admired.

Like Eastern Queens again, she has an unbridled love for paradox. Mr. Lecky, in the 'Map of Life,' has discoursed at length on the curious passion for legal injustice that flourishes in many Courts of Appeal-I mean the love of letting some quibbling technicality upset the fair and reasonable settlement of a case. This, more than anything else, has brought the legal jest-books into being. Most of them are made up of cases where what may be by courtesy supposed to be summum jus has proved most undoubted summa injuria to the unfortunate clients.

Examples multiply on every side. Readers of Samuel Warren's 'Ten Thousand a Year' will remember how a property of that value changes hands (1) because a conveyance bore a stamp of insufficient value, (2) because the clerk who engrossed it made a blot on the parchment, and then scratched it out. This was a 'material erasure.' Truth is at least as strange as Warren's fiction. A famous Scotch judge once refused to receive a deed because the word 'justice' was there spelt without the final e; while another unlucky copying clerk lost a most important case for his employer by speaking of the Sheriffs of London and Middlesex-for the shrievalty is really a single office, though always held conjointly by two persons. Still more striking is the famous suit of Dovaston v. Payne, duly recorded by Sir Frederick Pollock in 'Leading Cases done into Verse.' Payne had impounded some of Dovaston's cattle, which had strayed through a broken hedge on to his land. Dovaston, bringing an action for their recovery, was unfortunate enough to describe them as being simply in the high road:

They were in it, they erred and escaped thereout

Where Payne should of right amend the way.

To this Payne replied:

Result

For aught he hath said they were there of wrong
(Fair and free is the king's highway),

For if they were passing through and along
Not a word thereof does his pleading say.

And if the hedge I must needs repair

(Fair and free is the King's highway),

Why, that is for such that of right are there,
Not for folk or beasts who idly stray.

Judgment for the defendant.

But the law has been guilty of strange escapades much nearer our own time. In February 1841 'Balaclava' Lord Cardigan was tried by his peers for shooting Captain Harvey Tucker in a duel. By some strange mischance, however, the deceased was described in the indictment as Captain Harvey Phipps Tucker; and the defence therefore rested its case on the fact that no such person had existed—the dead man having been simply christened Harvey, and borne no surname but Tucker. Thereupon Chief Justice Denman, Lord High Steward, told the peers that they must acquit the prisoner; and this they proceeded to do all except the last Duke of Cleveland, who insisted on voting 'Not guilty legally, upon my honour.'

Formalities stood Lord Cardigan in good stead; but on the luckless criminals of an earlier time they weighed with terrible force-how terrible may be judged from an excellent satire written some half century ago by a Bencher of the Inner Temple :

For sundry wise precautions
The sages of the law

Discreetly framed, whereby they aimed

To keep a rogue in awe.

For lest his only advocate

The Court should overreach,
That advocate was not allowed
The privilege of speech.

Yet such was the humanity
And wisdom of the law,
That if in the indictment there
Appeared to be a flaw,

The Court assigned him counsellors
To argue on the doubt,

Provided he himself could first

Contrive to point it out.

Yet, lest their mildness should perchance

Be craftily abused,

To show him the indictment they
Most steadily refused.

Nor were these the prisoner's only disabilities. Prosecuting counsels of the good old school were generally masters of a terse and vigorous eloquence, and by no means backward in its display. The great Chief Justice Coke's contests with Sir Walter Raleigh are well known, though they by no means form his highest title to fame. He was at his best on the ecclesiastical field. Few amenities of controversy were so successful as his definition of a Papist, one who eats his God, kills his king, and saints his murderers.' The allusion is to Jacques Cl ment, murderer of Henry the Third of France, whose canonisation was discussed by the zealots of the Ultramontane faction-then, as always, 'insolent and aggressive.' Beside this, Coke's definition of a Jesuit sounds a trifle wordy. When prosecuting Father Garnet for complicity in the Gunpowder Plot, he described that unfortunate ecclesiastic as 'by profession a Jesuit and a Superior, as indeed he hath no superiors in devilish treason. He is a Doctor of Jesuits-that is, a Doctor of five DD.'s, as Dissimulation, Deposing of Princes, Disposing of Kingdoms, Daunting and Deterring of Subjects, and Destruction.' Charles the Second's Lord Chief Justice Scroggs did his best to live up to this high level while trying the victims of Titus Oates. Periodically he was disturbed by the violence of his own language. 'I may have been warm, gentlemen,' he used to say to the jury, but not so warm as all of us would be at Smithfield, if the prisoners had their way.' It is to be feared that none of these seventeenth-century judges took to heart the maxim of their contemporary, Thomas Fuller, 'The sentence of condemnation is best when steeped in the judge's tears. He avoideth all jesting on men in misery; easily may he put them out of countenance whom he hath power to put out of life.'

If Coke and Jeffreys listened to Fuller too little, Baron Graham (a once famous judge of the Eldon period) listened to him too much. The Baron, according to a gossiping contemporary, was distinguished by a sort of antiquated politeness, which he practised in all circumstances and towards all persons. At one county Assize nine men were capitally convicted before him, and were brought up together to receive sentence. By some mistake he overlooked one of the names, and was leaving the Court when