he miniature effigy of a town-crier, with a little placard on his bell, inscribed ‘Lost—a Lawyer’s conscience!’ was a favourite toy for children not many years ago; and about the same time a song was in vogue, warbled by a whole generation of young misses, ‘all about the L-A-W,’ in which that venerable profession was made the subject of a warning chant, whose dolorous refrain, doubtless, yet lingers in many an ear. Thus early is law associated with uncertainty and shamelessness; Messrs. Roe and Doe become the most dreaded of apocryphal characters; red-tape the clew of an endless labyrinth; Justice Shallow, with all his imbecility, a dangerous personage; and human beings, even a friend, transformed by the mysterious perspective of this anomalous element to a ‘party.’ The most popular of modern novelists have found these associations sufficiently universal to yield good material in ‘dead suitors broken, heart and soul, on the wheel of chancery;’ and Flite, Gridley, and Rick, are fresh and permanent scarecrows in the harvest-field of the law.
From the Mosaic code, enrolled on tables of stone, to the convention which inaugurated that of the modern conqueror of Europe, law has been a field for the noblest triumphs and most gross perversions of the human intellect. No profession offers such extremes of glory and shame. From the most wretched sophistry to the grandest inference, from a quibble to a principle, from the august minister of justice to the low pettifogger, how great the distance; yet all are included within a common pale.
In every social circle and family group there is an oracle—some individual whose age, wit, or force of character, gives an intellectual ascendency,—and there are always Bunsbys, to ‘give an opinion’ among the ignorant, to which the others spontaneously defer; and thus instinctively arises the lawgiver, sometimes ruling with the rude dogmatism of Dr. Johnson, and at others, through the humorous good sense of Sydney Smith, or the endearing tact of Madame Recamier. These authorities, in the sphere of opinion and companionship, indicate how natural to human society is a recognized head, whence emanates that controlling influence to which we give the name of law. Like every other element of life, this loses somewhat of its native beauty, when organized and made professional. To every vocation there belong master-spirits who have established precedents, and there are natural lawgivers; as in art, Michael Angelo and Raphael; in oratory, Demosthenes; in philosophy, Bacon. The endowments of each not only justify, but originate their authority; they interpret truth through their superior insight and wisdom in their respective departments of action and of thought; but of the vast number who undertake to illustrate, maintain, or apply the laws which govern states, a small minority are gifted for the task, or aspire to its higher functions; hence the proverbial abuse of the profession, its few glorious ornaments, and its herd of perverted slaves.
From this primary condition, it is impossible for any human being to escape; if he goes into the desert, he is still subject to the laws of Nature, and, however retired he may live amid his race, the laws of society press upon him at some point; if his own opinion is his law in matters of fancy or politics, he must still obey the law of the road: in one country the law of primogeniture; in another, that of conscription; in one circle, a law of taste; in another, of custom; and in a third, of privilege, reacts upon his free agency; at his club is sumptuary law; over his game of whist, Hoyle; in his drawing-room, Chesterfield; now l’esprit du corps; and, again, the claims of rank; in Maine, the liquor law; in California, lynch law; in Paris, a gens d’armes; at Rome, a permission of residence; on an English domain, the game laws; in the fields of Connecticut, a pound; everywhere, turnpikes, sheriffs’ sales, marriage certificates, prisons, courts, passports, and policemen, thrust before the eyes of the most peaceable and reserved cosmopolite—insignia that assure him that law is everywhere unavoidable. His physician discourses to him of the laws of health; his military friends, of tactics; the beaux, of etiquette; the belles, of la mode; the authors, of tasteful precedents; the reformer, of social systems; and thus all recognize and yield to some code.
If he have nothing to bequeath, no tax to pay, no creditor to sue, or libeller to prosecute, he yet must walk the streets, and thereby realize the influence or neglect of municipal law in the enjoyment of ‘right of way,’ or the nausea from some neglected offal; the accidents incident to travel in this country assure him of the slight tenure of corporate responsibility under republican law; and the facility of divorce, the removal of old landmarks, the incessant subdivision and dispersion of estates, indicate that devotion to the immediate which a French philosopher ascribes to free institutions, and which affects legal as well as social phenomena. In a tour abroad, he discovers new majesty in the ruins of the Forum, from their association with the ancient Roman law, upon which modern jurisprudence is founded; and a curious interest attaches to the picturesque beauty of Amalfi, because the Pandects were there discovered. Westminster revives the tragic memories of the State trials, and seems yet to echo the Oriental rhetoric that made the trial of Hastings a Parliamentary romance. At Bologna, amid the old drooping towers, under the pensive arcades, in the radiant silence of the picture-gallery, comes back the traditionary beauty of the fair lecturer, who taught the students juridical lore from behind a curtain, that her loveliness might not bewilder the minds her words informed; and at Venice, every dark-robed, graceful figure that glides by the porticoes of San Marco’s moonlit square, revives the noble Portia’s image, and that ‘same scrubbed boy, the doctor’s clerk.’
No inconsiderable legal knowledge has been traced in Shakspeare. His Justice Shallow and Dogberry are types of imbecile magistracy; in the historical plays, the law of legitimacy is defined; and not a little judicial lore is embodied in the Merchant of Venice and Taming the Shrew. Lord Campbell wrote a book to prove that Shakspeare, in his youth, must have been, at least, an attorney’s clerk. One of the characters in a popular novel is made to say that he is never in company with a lawyer but he fancies himself in a witness-box. This hit at the interrogative propensity of the class is by no means an exaggerated view of a use to which they are specially inclined to put conversation; and if we compare the ordeal of inquiry to which we are thus subjected, it will be found more thorough and better fitted to test our knowledge than that of any other social catechism; so that, perhaps, we gain in discipline what we lose in patience. It is to be acknowledged, also, that few men are better stocked with ideas, or more fluent in imparting them, than well-educated lawyers. There is often a singular zest in their anecdotes, a precision in their statement of facts, and a dramatic style of narrative, which render them the pleasantest of companions. In all clever coteries of which we have any genial record, there usually figures a lawyer, as a wit, a boon companion, an entertaining dogmatist, or an intellectual champion. In literature, the claims and demerits of the profession are emphatically recognized; and it is curious to note the varied inferences of philosophers and authors. Thus, Dr. Johnson says to Boswell: ‘Sir, a lawyer has no business with the justice or injustice of the cause he undertakes;’ and ‘everybody knows you are paid for affecting a warmth for your client.’ ‘Justice,’ observes Sydney Smith, ‘is found, experimentally, to be best promoted by the opposite efforts of practised and ingenious men, presenting to an impartial judge the best argument for the establishment and explanation of truth.’ ‘Some are allured to the trade of law,’ says Milton, ‘by litigiousness and fat fees;’ one authoritative writer describes a lawyer as a man whose understanding is on the town; another declares no man departs more from justice; Sancho Panza said his master would prattle more than three attorneys; and Coleridge thought that, ‘upon the whole, the advocate is placed in a position unfavourable to his moral being, and indeed to his intellect also, in its higher powers;’ while it was a maxim of Wilkes, that scoundrel and lawyer are synonymous terms. Our pioneer littérateur, Brockden Brown, whose imaginative mind revolted at the dry formalities of the law, for which he was originally intended, defined it as ‘a tissue of shreds and remnants of a barbarous antiquity, patched by the stupidity of modern workmen into new deformity.’ ‘In the study of law,’ remarks the poet Gray, ‘the labour is long, and the elements dry and uninteresting, nor was there ever any one not disgusted at the beginning.’ Foote, the comic writer and actor, feigned surprise to a farmer that attorneys were buried in the country like other men; in town, he declared, it was the custom to place the body in a chamber, with an open window, and it was sure to disappear during the night, leaving a smell of brimstone. A portrait-painter assures us he is never mistaken in a lawyer’s face; the avocation is betrayed to his observant eye by a certain inscrutable expression; and Dickens has given this not exaggerated picture of a class in the profession: ‘Smoke-dried and faded, dwelling among mankind, but not consorting with them, aged without experience of genial youth, and so long used to make his cramped nest in holes and corners of human nature, that he has forgotten its broader and better range.’
A French writer defines a lawyer as ‘un marchand de phrases, un fabricant de paradoxes, qui ment pour l’argent et vend ses paroles;’ and another remarks of the profession that it is a ‘vaste champ, ouvert aux ambitions des honnêtes; une tribune offerte aux subtilités de la pensée et l’abus de la parole;’ while Arthur Helps declares that ‘law affords a notable example of loss of time, of heart, of love, of leisure. I observe,’ he adds, ‘that the first Spanish colonists in America wrote home to Government, begging them not to allow lawyers to come to the colony.’[20] On the other hand, what an eloquent tribute to the possible actual beneficence of law is the close of Lord Brougham’s memorable speech in its defence:—
‘You saw the greatest warrior of the age—conqueror of Italy, humbler of Germany, terror of the North,—saw him account all his matchless victories poor, compared with the triumph you are now in a condition to win,—saw him contemn the fickleness of Fortune, while in despite of her he could pronounce his memorable boast, “I shall go down to posterity with the Code in my hand!” You have vanquished him in the field; strive now to rival him in the sacred arts of peace. Outstrip him as a lawgiver whom in arms you overcame. The lustre of the Regency will be eclipsed by the more solid and enduring splendour of the Reign. It was the boast of Augustus—it formed part of the glare in which the perfidies of his earlier years were lost—that he found Rome of brick, and left it of marble. But how much nobler will be the Sovereign’s boast, when he shall have it to say, that he found law dear and left it cheap; found it a sealed book, left it a living letter; found it the patrimony of the rich, left it the inheritance of the poor; found it the two-edged sword of craft and oppression, left it the staff of honesty and the shield of innocence!’
‘Why may not this be a lawyer’s skull?’ muses Hamlet, in the graveyard; ‘where be his quiddets now, his quillets, his cases, his tenures, and his tricks? Humph! this fellow might be in ’s time a greater buyer of land, with his statutes, his recognizances, his fines, his double-vouchers, his recoveries; and this, the fine of his fines, and the recovery of his recoveries, to have his fine poll full of dirt! The very conveyances of his lands will hardly lie in this box; and must the inheritor himself have no more?’