Chambers's Journal of Popular Literature, Science, and Art, Fifth Series, No. 36, Vol. I, September 6, 1884

No. 36.—Vol. I.
Price 1½ d.
SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 6, 1884.
To the majority of people, the surroundings of the legal profession, to say nothing of the law itself, are subjects fraught with no inconsiderable amount of the mysterious. For instance, what a variety of conceptions have been formed by the uninitiated with respect to one ceremony alone connected with the ‘upper branch’ of the legal profession; we mean that known as ‘Call to the Bar.’ The very expression itself has often proved a puzzle to the lay outsider, and perhaps not unnaturally, because there can be no doubt that it is one of those out-of-the-way phrases the signification of which sets anything like mere conjecture on that point at defiance. There is a hazy notion abroad that ‘Call to the Bar’ involves proceedings of a somewhat imposing character, especially as there is just a smack of the grandiloquent about the term. Accordingly, it may be disappointing to many persons to learn that, in the first place, there is no ‘calling’ at all connected with the ceremony, except the calling over the names of the gentlemen who present themselves for admission to the profession known as the Bar. And in the next place, it may be a little surprising to learn that there is no semblance even of a ‘bar’ of any description employed in the performance of the ceremony alluded to.
Again, people appear to have a somewhat indistinct notion about legal festivities, the traditional fun of a circuit mess, the precise share which ‘eating dinners’ has in qualifying a student for the Bar, and so forth. Often, too, they wonder how it is that men addicted to such grave pursuits as those followed by the working members of the Bar, are so much given to mirth and jollity and costly festivity. The answer to this is that, just in proportion to the mental tension superinduced by the demands of their calling, is the recoil of their minds in an exactly opposite direction after that tension.
Well, then, assuming that barristers are not only a learned and laborious but also at suitable times a convivial body of men, we will endeavour to describe the proceedings in the Hall of an Inn of Court on the evening of a day when barristerial conviviality is supposed to reach its culminating point—namely, on what is termed ‘Grand Day.’