Grope in your memory (before you answer) among legal collectanea and the newspaper reports of famous, or infamous, trials. What then? “Lord!” you admit, “these bones unearthed seem wretched remains indeed! I find your grooms of the horsehair, young and old, cracking their ineffable chestnuts for the benefit of an obsequious tipstavery; I find a bench so conservative that, though it be pitched in the very markets of chicanery, it is never to be won from its affected ignorance of those topical affairs which are matters, else apart, of common knowledge; I find the profession for ever given to whet its wits on a thousand examples of resourcefulness and impudence, and most often failing in the retort piquant.” Give me a cheeky witness to cap the best drollery ever uttered by counsel. Legal facetiæ, forsooth! The wit that tells is the wit that can cheat the gallows, not send to it. Any dullard can hang a dog.
Look at the autobiographies of your retired legal luminaries: what scurvy bald reading they make as a rule. Look at—but no: he rests in Abraham’s bosom; he is studying the Mosaic law; we may be in need of him again some day.
There is an odd family likeness between the personalia of lawyers and of actors. The fellows, out of court, stripped of their melodramatic trappings, can’t raise a laugh which would tickle any one less than a bishop. They are obsessed with the idea of their own importance. Much self-inflation has killed in them all sense of proportion. They prove themselves, the truth is, dull dogs on revision.
The law is not so exhausting a study as it appears on first sight to a layman. Given an understanding of its main principle, which is syllogism, and there you are already in its Holy of Holies. As, for instance, I call a man a beast: a cheetah is a beast: I have called the man a cheater—ergo, he can proceed against me for defamation. There is its rubric in a nutshell—perfectly simple.
However, exceptis excipiendis, there were Curran, and Erskine, and some others. There was also Brindley, the great Crown Prosecutor, whose eloquence was of such persuasiveness that it was said the very Bench hung upon his word. I had the chance to meet him once, in such a place and on such a night as I began by describing. It was in the “Maid’s Head” at Norwich, and my experience is at your service.
It had, I knew, been a full list and a varied; yet the great man, it seemed, had found nothing in it all to stimulate his humorous faculties. The liveliness was all supplied by a pert Deputy Clerk of the Peace, whose bump of reverence was as insignificant as his effrontery was tremendous. The Bar began by tolerating him; went on to humour his sallies; chilled presently over his presumption; grew patronizing, impatient, and at last rude. He didn’t care; nor I, certainly. His readiness was the only relief from a congested boredom.
The talk drifted, in the course of the evening, upon legal posers—circumstantial evidence, ex-statutory cases, and so forth. There were some dull examples proffered, and I observed, incidentally, that the Law, when it couldn’t hark back to precedent, was wont to grow a little hazy and befogged. Many solemn conundrums were propounded; but the Deputy Clerk, as usual, pushed himself to the front with an impertinence—
“If I slink out of the company of a bore, am I guilty of stealing from his person?”
“Pooh, pooh!” said Brindley, with contempt. “Don’t be flippant, sir.”
The Deputy Clerk was not a whit abashed.