Some eminent Victorians: Personal recollections in the world of art and letters

by J. Comyns Carr

But when it came to Holker’s turn, despite the fact that he was engaged on nearly every case sent up for trial, he chose to do the whole himself, and very admirably it was done.

Herschell’s intellect differed widely from both. In power of logical statement, in clear and coherent reasoning, and in the ability to conduct an argument without a flaw from start to finish, he was certainly not the inferior of either. But his nature on the emotional side, as far at least as advocacy was concerned, was poorly furnished. He lacked the warmth to sway a jury. He was unable to realise any disability in others that he did not possess in himself, and the consequence was that he had often concluded his address to the jury before these unfortunate gentlemen had apprehended the essential features of the case he was trying to enforce. And for this reason his appeal as an advocate was far less potent than that of either of his two great rivals. The cold steel of his intellect never reached white heat. His eloquence lacked the picturesque adornments which in their different ways they could both command, and in this respect he stood in even more striking contrast with Sam Pope, who, in a brief flight of advocacy, once or twice impressed me more than them all.

The duties of the Junior of the Circuit sometimes placed me in somewhat ludicrous conflict with authority, and it happened that on my first Circuit I was forced, as the spokesman of the Bar, into a somewhat heated controversy with the Attorney-General, the late Lord Coleridge.

Charles Russell had been sent by the Crown with a special retainer to prosecute Mrs. Cotton, the notorious murderess who had poisoned a number of her nieces and nephews for the sake of small village insurances she had effected on their lives. This aroused the indignation of the Bar at Durham, who thought that Mr. Aspinall, who held the position of Attorney-General for the County, was entitled to the brief. And it was Herschell who prompted me in the letters of protest which I was instructed to send to Lord Coleridge, and which were afterwards published in the Times.

That same trial of Mrs. Cotton stands out vividly in my remembrance from among the many criminal cases which I have witnessed in the Courts. I remember Russell telling me afterwards that the several cases actually proved against her, amounting, I think, to five or six, were only a few from among many others in which her guilt was equally assured; and yet, during her trial, this elderly woman, who in appearance resembled rather a comfortable monthly nurse, never evinced the smallest trace of emotion or concern.

It was proved that she had sat up night after night assiduously nursing her victims, as, one after another, they succumbed to the poison she had administered. And yet it was only when her advocate, whose case from the first was hopeless, endeavoured to appeal to the jury by a purely fanciful picture of her constant affection for these helpless children, that Mrs. Cotton—moved rather, as it would seem, by the artistic skill of his eloquence than by any deeper feeling—shed a few tears such as might have been wrung from a spectator at a play.

My own experiences as a barrister are too slight to deserve any record. Mainly through the kindly influence of Charles Crompton I appeared in one or two civil causes, but these were before an arbitrator and not in open court. Once, and once only, I was entrusted with a brief to defend a person who was accused of having stolen a moth-eaten pillow from a passing barrow containing the household effects of a neighbour who was shifting her quarters.

I was assured by my friends on Circuit that had I chosen to pursue my career I should have made an effective advocate. But the expenses incident to this side of my calling were already beginning to press heavily upon me; and as I was then almost entirely dependent on what I could earn for myself, I rather grudged the constant drain upon my income as a journalist which my life at the Bar involved; and when in the month of July 1873 I became engaged to be married, I quickly perceived that the only speedy prospect of making a home for my wife was to devote the whole of my energies to literature and journalism, in which I had already made a successful start.

But the profession of the Law, so eagerly adopted and so speedily abandoned, has always had for me a strong fascination, and among its professors, both past and present, I have counted many of my closest friends.