THE OLDEST CHANCERY SUIT IN THE WORLD.
ON many occasions we have heard of the father of the bar, the father of the City, and of the father of lies; but a discovery has just been made of something which may be perhaps likened to the last, in other matters besides antiquity. We allude to the father of equity, or what we believe to be the oldest suit in Chancery. This precious relic was dug up a few days ago, and its tattered remains were exposed for a few minutes to the air in the Court of Vice-Chancellor Kindersley. It arose out of a bill filed nearly a hundred years ago; and we need not say that it must be by this time a precious old file that keeps the tattered old thing together. It was a bill to distribute all the property of an old Scotchman among all his poor relations, and as the Scotch can always scrape or scratch a relationship with each other, and as the relations of a Scotchman are certain to be poor enough to want something, the whole of Scotland may be said to have been more or less interested in the suit in question. Four hundred and sixty-three persons had already made out a claim, and the descendants of all these are now contending with the descendants of another batch of poor Scotchmen with "itching palms," who have filed bills of reviver for the purpose of galvanising this spectral old suit, which still haunts, like a ghost, the Courts of Chancery.
The Vice-Chancellor made an order for a reviver, "no one appearing to oppose;" and, indeed, who could have appeared but a few ghosts of dead legatees to demur to the galvanising of this sepulchral business? We are satisfied that his Honour, when making the inquiry if "any one appeared to oppose," must have felt, with a shudder, that he was performing a species of incantation, and that to call upon any one to "appear" under such circumstances was almost equivalent to an invocation of Zamiel. The "suit," however, is to be permitted again to walk the earth for a time by the agency of a bill of "reviver," and we suppose it will disappear at the cock crow of the long vacation, to come forth again in the dark days of term-time during the ensuing November.