Let this chapter close with a lawyer's testimony to the moral qualities of his brethren. In the garden of Clement's Inn may still be seen the statue of a negro, supporting a sun-dial, upon which a legal wit inscribed the following lines:—
"In vain, poor sable son of woe,
Thou seek'st the tender tear;
From thee in vain with pangs they flow,
For mercy dwells not here.
From cannibals thou fled'st in vain;
Lawyers less quarter give;
The first won't eat you till you're slain,
The last will do't alive."
Unfortunately these lines have been obliterated.
[31] Robert Dallas—one of Edward Law's coadjutors in the defence of Hastings—gave another 'manager' a more telling blow. Indignant with Burke for his implacable animosity to Hastings, Dallas (subsequently Chief Justice of the Common Pleas) wrote the stinging lines—
"Oft have we wondered that on Irish ground
No poisonous reptile has e'er yet been found;
Reveal'd the secret stands of nature's work—
She saved her venom to produce her Burke."
[32] In the 'Anti-Jacobin,' Canning, in the mock report of an imaginary speech, represented Erskine as addressing the 'Whig Club' thus:—"For his part he should only say that, having been, as he had been, both a soldier and a sailor, if it had been his fortune to have stood in either of these relations to the Directory—as a man and a major-general he should not have scrupled to direct his artillery against the national representatives:—as a naval officer he would undoubtedly have undertaken for the removal of the exiled deputies; admitting the exigency, under all its relations, as it appeared to him to exist, and the then circumstances of the times with all their bearings and dependencies, branching out into an infinity of collateral considerations and involving in each a variety of objects, political, physical, and moral; and these, again, under their distinct and separate heads, ramifying into endless subdivisions, which it was foreign to his purpose to consider, Mr. Erskine concluded by recapitulating, in a strain of agonizing and impressive eloquence, the several more prominent heads of his speech; he had been a soldier and a sailor, and had a son at Winchester school—he had been called by special retainers, during the summer, into many different and distant parts of the country—traveling chiefly in post-chaises. He felt himself called upon to declare that his poor faculties were at the service of his country—of the free and enlightened part of it at least. He stood there as a man—he stood in the eye, indeed, in the hand of God—to whom (in the presence of the company and the waiters), he solemnly appealed. He was of noble, perhaps royal, blood—he had a house at Hampsted—was convinced of the necessity of a thorough and radical reform. His pamphlets had gone through thirty editions, skipping alternately the odd and even numbers. He loved the Constitution, to which he would cling and grapple—and he was clothed with the infirmities of man's nature."
CHAPTER XLII.
WITNESSES.
In the days when Mr. Davenport Hill, the Recorder of Birmingham, made a professional reputation for himself in the committee-rooms of the Houses of Parliament, he had many a sharp tussle with one of those venal witnesses who, during the period of excitement that terminated in the disastrous railway panic, were ready to give scientific evidence on engineering questions, with less regard to truth than to the interests of the persons who paid for their evidence. Having by mendacious evidence gravely injured a cause in which Mr. Hill was interested as counsel, and Mr. Tite, the eminent architect, and present member for Bath, was concerned as a projector, this witness was struck with apoplexy and died—before he could complete the mischief which he had so adroitly begun. Under the circumstances, his sudden withdrawal from the world was not an occasion for universal regret. "Well, Hill, have you heard the news?" inquired Mr. Tite of the barrister, whom he encountered in Middle Temple Lane on the morning after the engineer's death. "Have you heard that —— died yesterday of apoplexy?" "I can't say," was the rejoinder, "that I shall shed many tears for his loss. He was an arrant scoundrel." "Come, come," replied the architect, charitably, "you have always been too hard on that man. He was by no means so bad a fellow as you would make him out. I do verily believe that in the whole course of his life that man never told a lie—out of the witness-box." Strange to say, this comical testimony to character was quite justified by the fact. This man, who lied in public as a matter of business, was punctiliously honorable in private life.