One night, walking through St. Giles's by way of a short cut towards home, an Irish woman came up to Mr. Adolphus. "Why, Misther Adolphus! and who'd a' thought of seeing you in the Holy Ground?"—"And how came you to know who I am?" said Adolphus. "Lord bless and save ye, sir! not know ye? Why, I'd know ye if ye was boiled up in a soup!"
Mr. Montagu Chambers was counsel for a widow who had been put in a lunatic asylum, and sued the two medical men who signed the certificate of her insanity. The plaintiff's case was to prove that she was not addicted to drinking, and that there was no pretence for treating hers as a case of delirium tremens. Dr. Tunstal, the last of plaintiff's witnesses, described one case in which he had cured a patient of delirium tremens in a single night, and he added, "It was a case of gradual drinking, sipping all day from morning till night." These words were scarcely uttered when Mr. Chambers rose in triumph, and said, "My lord, that is my case."
On the Northern Circuit a century ago, there was a famous barrister who was familiarly known among his brother advocates as Jack Lee. He was engaged in examining one Mary Pritchard, of Barnsley, and began his examination with, "Well, Mary, if I may credit what I hear, I may venture to address you by the name of Black Moll."—"Faith you may, mister lawyer, for I am always called so by the blackguards." On another occasion he was retained for the plaintiff in an action for breach of promise of marriage. When the consultation took place, he inquired whether the lady for whose injury he was to seek redress was good-looking. "Very handsome indeed, sir," was the assurance of her attorney. "Then, sir," replied Lee, "I beg you will request her to be in Court, and in a place where she can be seen." The attorney promised compliance, and the lady, in accordance with Lee's wishes, took her seat in a conspicuous place, where the jury could see her. Lee, in addressing the jury, did not fail to insist with great warmth on the "abominable cruelty" which had been exercised towards "the highly attractive and modest girl who trusted her cause to their discernment"; and did not sit down until he had succeeded in working upon their feelings with great and, as he thought, successful effect. The counsel on the other side, however, speedily broke the spell with which Lee had enchanted the jury, by observing that "his learned friend, in describing the graces and beauty of the plaintiff, ought in common fairness not to have concealed from the jury the fact that the lady had a wooden leg!" The Court was convulsed with laughter at this discovery, while Lee, who was ignorant of this circumstance, looked aghast; and the jury, ashamed of the influence that mere eloquence had had upon them, returned a verdict for the defendant.
Justice Willes, the son of Chief Justice Willes, had an offensive habit of interrupting counsel. On one occasion an old practitioner was so irritated by this practice that he retorted sharply by saying, "Your lordship doubtless shows greater acuteness even than your father, the Chief Justice, for he used to understand me after I had done, but your lordship understands me even before I have begun."
Of Whigham, a later leader on the Northern Circuit, an amusing story used to be told. He was defending a prisoner, and opened an alibi in his address to the jury, undertaking to prove it by calling the person who had been in bed with his client at the time in question, and deprecating their evil opinion of a woman whose moral character was clearly open to grave reproach, but who was still entitled to be believed upon her oath. Then he called "Jessie Crabtree." The name was, as usual, repeated by the crier, and there came pushing his way sturdily through the crowd a big Lancashire lad in his rough dress, who had been the prisoner's veritable bedfellow—Whigham's brief not having explained to him that the Christian name of his witness was, in this case, a male one.
Colman, in his Random Records, tells the following anecdote of the witty barrister, Mr. Jekyll. One day observing a squirrel in Colman's chambers, in the usual round cage, performing the same operation as a man in a tread-mill, and looking at it for a minute, exclaimed, "Oh! poor devil, he's going the Home Circuit."
Jekyll was asked why he no longer spoke to a lawyer named Peat; to which he replied, "I choose to give up his acquaintance—I have common of turbary, and have a right to cut peat!" An impromptu of his on a learned serjeant who was holding the Court of Common Pleas with his glittering eye, is well known:
"Behold the serjeant full of fire,
Long shall his hearers rue it,
His purple garments came from Tyre,
His arguments go to it."