CHAPTER XLIV.
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.