“Why not?”
“Don’t ask me questions, Sir, I’m asking you. Do you deny, Sir, that the man was neither more nor less than a common Boots in the yard of a Public House, wearing an old tattered hat and jacket—very different from the suit in which you have rigged him up here to-day?”
Mr. Pickwick was astonished and silent. He was suffering. He had never dreamed of this view.
“Why,” he said, “I suppose—”
“We want none of your supposes, Sir, answer yes or no.”
“Well he certainly was such as you describe.”
A flutter ran round the court.
“And this creature of yours, you would impose on the Jury as a trained man servant. You may go down Sir.”
PLEA FOR “DODSON AND FOGG.”
This famous firm of city attornies has become a bye-word in legal history—being considered the most notorious of practitioners for sharp, underhand, scheming practices. Boz was always vehement against the abuses of the law, but his generous ardour sometimes led him to exaggerated and wholesale statements that were scarcely well founded. This is found in some degree even in the sweeping attacks in Bleak House. But he was so vivid, so persuasive, in his pictures, that there was no appeal.