Time: two minutes fifty-three seconds.
Perhaps this case was a high example of expedition, because it was not always that a learned counsel could put his questions so neatly; but it may be taken that these after-dinner trials did not occupy on the average more than four minutes each.
CHAPTER V.
MR. JUSTICE MAULE.
Of course, in those days there were judges of the utmost strictness as there are now, who insisted that the rules of evidence should be rigidly adhered to. I may mention, one, whose abilities were of a remarkable order, and whose memory is still fresh in the minds of many of my contemporaries—I mean Mr. Justice Maule. His asthmatic cough was the most interesting and amusing cough I ever heard, especially when he was saying anything more than usually humorous, which was not infrequently. He was a man of great wit, sound sense, and a curious humour such as I never heard in any other man. He possessed, too, a particularly keen apprehension. To those who had any real ability he was the most pleasant of Judges, but he had little love for mediocrities. No man ever was endowed with a greater abhorrence of hypocrisy. I learnt a great deal in watching him and noting his observations. One day a very sad case was being tried. It was that of a man for killing an infant, and it was proposed by the prosecution to call as a witness a little brother of the murdered child.
The boy's capacity to give evidence, however, was somewhat doubted by the counsel for the Crown, John Clark, and it did honour to his sense of fairness. Having asked the little boy a question or two as to the meaning of an oath, he said he had some doubt as to whether the witness should be admitted to give evidence, as he did not seem to understand the nature of an oath, and the boy was otherwise deficient in religious knowledge.
He was asked the usual sensible questions which St. Thomas Aquinas himself would have been puzzled to answer; and being a mere child of seven—or at most eight—years of age, without any kind of education, was unable to state what the exact nature of an oath was.
Having failed in this, he was next asked what, when they died, became of people who told lies.
"If he knows that, it's a good deal more than I do," said Maule.
"Attend to me," said the Crown counsel. "Do you know that it's wicked to tell lies?"