'Hell fire.'
His lordship ran through a list of trifling faults; the punishment was always the same—'Hell fire.'
Counsel then suggested that the boy was scarcely intelligent enough to be sworn. But the judge thought otherwise, and expected he would grow up a very good man, seeing he believed that the most trifling error involved the penalty of hell fire, and the boy was sworn. The boy, of course, was a fool, through no fault of his, but through that of his bigoted teachers.
It was mentioned above that in the days of Sir Matthew Hale professional etiquette allowed clients to have interviews with counsel without the intervention of a solicitor. But gradually, after his time, the public were deprived of this privilege, and a rigid rule was enforced that all communications to counsel must be through the solicitor only, a rule highly detrimental to litigants, since it caused constant misunderstandings and misleading instructions. It is a roundabout way of doing business, which would not be tolerated for a day in any commercial transaction. It was from the first a tyrannical assumption on the part of the profession that the public should submit to a restriction, based nominally on professional etiquette, but really on professional interest. The public have begun to object to the rule, and in 1888 the Attorney-General (Sir R. Webster), on being asked to express his views in reference to the occasions when a barrister may advise and otherwise act for a client without the intervention of a solicitor, replied that in contentious business, necessitating inquiry into facts, which could not possibly be undertaken by a barrister, it was essential that the latter should have the advice of a solicitor. But might this advice not be given in the presence of the client to exclude the possibility of misapprehension? As to non-contentious business Sir Richard allowed of direct communication between counsel and client. My own rule, whenever it has been my misfortune to be involved in a legal dispute, has always been to push aside this bogie of professional etiquette, and insist on telling counsel my own story myself.
The profession, as we hardly need remind the reader, has produced many distinguished characters; to choose from amongst them those most deserving of praise would be difficult, and perhaps invidious; still, the actions of those whose conduct has not imparted to them the mere splendour of passing meteors, but has conferred permanent benefits on the country, seem to entitle them to a certain pre-eminence. A man entitled to such pre-eminence and the grateful remembrance of Englishmen was Sir Samuel Romilly. His father was a jeweller in Frith Street, Soho; the boy was first placed with a solicitor, then with a merchant, and finally articled to one of the sworn clerks of Chancery. At the expiration of his articles he qualified himself for the Bar, but he had to wait long before he was rewarded with any practice. But when briefs came, they came in a flood; his income rose to about £9,000 a year. He was returned to Parliament in 1806 by the electors of Westminster, without the expenditure of a shilling on his part—a significant fact of his merits in those days of bribery and corruption. He was also appointed Solicitor-General and knighted. He distinguished himself in the House by his speeches in favour of the abolition of the slave trade, but his great claims to the gratitude of the nation are the efforts he made to mitigate the Draconic code of the criminal law, in which nearly three hundred offences, varying from murder to keeping company with a gipsy, were punishable with death. The first success he had was the repeal of the statute of Elizabeth which made it a capital offence to steal privately from the person of another. He next tried to get several statutes repealed which made it a capital offence to privately steal from a house or a shop goods to the value of five shillings. But this Bill was lost. What bloodthirsty savages the members of the House must have been in those days! Some of this savagery remains in their blood now, for when the abolition of training children to become acrobats, contortionists and similar horrors, the abolition of vivisection and such-like cruelties, are mooted in the House, the introducer of the Bill is hooted down. Romilly, as we have seen, did not succeed in all his humane efforts, but he kept on agitating session after session, and cleared the way for the modification and mitigation of the ferocious laws which turned England into human shambles. And what Romilly had been striving for was a long time in coming. In the first decades of this century it was no unusual sight to see from a dozen to twenty criminals, many for slight offences only, hanged in one morning in front of Newgate. The end of Romilly was sad; it showed the malignity of fate. He who had spent his life in endeavouring to lighten the lot of others was terribly stricken himself. In 1818 he lost his wife, whom he had married twenty years before, and her loss was such a shock to him that he fell into delirium, and in an unwatched moment he sprang from his bed, cut his throat, and expired almost instantly.
Nowadays briefless barristers utilize their legal knowledge as financiers and company promoters; before those two honest pursuits had been invented they had to turn their attention to other specs. Thus Francis Forcer the younger, the son of Francis Forcer, a musician, had received a liberal education, and, on leaving Oxford, entered Gray's Inn, and was afterwards called to the Bar, where he practised for a short time. He was very gentlemanly in his manners, and in person remarkably tall and athletic. In 1735, having been disturbed by legal interference, or some other cause, he petitioned Parliament for a license for Sadler's Wells, which application, we are told, was rejected at first, but in the end it must have been granted, for we are informed that he was the first who exhibited there the diversions of rope-dancing and tumbling, and performances on the slack wire. It is doubtful whether the speculation paid, for at the time of his death (he died in 1743) he directed by his will that the lease of the premises, together with the scenery, implements, stock, furniture, household stuff and things thereunto belonging, should be sold for the purpose of paying his debts, which direction was carried out soon after his decease. This seems as if the refreshment bar, for which Mr. Forcer had left the legal Bar, had not proved very remunerative; perhaps he had better have stuck to the litigation oyster, than to the native he dispensed at Sadler's Wells.
XVIII.
THE SUBLIME BEEFSTEAKERS AND THE
KIT-KAT AND ROTA CLUBS.
The last two centuries were very prolific in the production of clubs, founded to gratify rational purposes or fanciful whims. In those days, as soon as a set of men found themselves agree in any particular, though ever so trivial, they immediately formed themselves into a fraternity called a club. The Apollo Club, which held its meetings at the Devil tavern in Fleet Street, comprised all the wits of Ben Jonson's day; the Cauliflower in Butcher Hall Lane was the sober symposium of Paternoster Row booksellers. Humdrum clubs were composed of peaceable nobodies, who used to meet at taverns, sit and smoke and say nothing. A few of these latter clubs survive. But Addison, who knew something of the club life of his day, said: 'All celebrated clubs were founded on eating and drinking, which are points wherein most men agree, and in which the learned and the illiterate, the dull and the airy, the philosopher and the buffoon can all of them bear a part.' Just so, though not every club would acknowledge it; but the Beefsteakers boldly proclaimed their object in the name they assumed; theirs was the worship of beef-steaks.
Now, chops and steaks are relics of barbarism, of ages when men, having not as yet invented cooking apparatus, made a fire between some stones, and laid their slices of raw meat on the top, and ate them when half burnt and blackened. Steaks done on a gridiron are antediluvian enough, but mutton chops diffusing, when undergoing this roasting process, throughout the room the stench of a tallow candle just blown out, are enough to turn the stomach, not of the refined gourmet only, but of the untutored savage. It is only custom which enables the visitor to the grill-room to stand its effluvium, and to eat the food placed before him. Steaks are not so bad, because they have not the sickening smell of the chop, and so they actually found a set of worshippers, who formed themselves into a society to pay due adoration to their idol. Of course, in this age of higher culture and more widely diffused intelligence, such a proceeding must appear to us not only childish, but somewhat degrading; it was, however, a phase of the convivial life and tendency of the Georgian era, and as such merits a record; but lest we, in producing it, should be suspected of sympathizing with it, we deem it necessary to preface it with the above remarks.