“Yes, he has his head screwed on the right way, I think.”
“Why that air lad,” said Bumpkin, “might make a judge.”
O’Rapley laughed and shook his head.
“In old times,” said he, “he might ha’ made a Lord Chancellor; a man as was clever had a chance then, but lor’ blesh you, Mr. Bumpkin, now-a-days it’s so very different; the raw material is that plentiful in the law that you can find fifty men as would make rattlin good Lord Chancellors for one as you could pick out to make a rattlin’ good bowler. But come, we’ll have a look round.”
So round they looked again, and Mr. Bumpkin was duly impressed with the array of wigs and the number of books and the solemnity of the judges and the arguments of counsel, not one word of which was intelligible to him. Mr. O’Rapley explained everything and pointed out where a judge and jury tried a case, and then took him into another court where two judges tried the judge and jury, and very often set them both aside and gave new trials and altered verdicts and judgments or refused to do so notwithstanding the elaborate arguments of the most eloquent and long-winded of learned counsel.
Then the Don asked if Mr. Bumpkin would like to see the Chancery Judges—to which Mr. Bumpkin answered that “he hadn’t much opinion o’ Chancery from all he’d ’eeard, and that when a man got into them there Cooarts maybe he’d never coome out agin, but he shouldn’t mind seein’ a Chancery Judge.”
“Well, then,” said the distinguished bowler, “now-a-days we needn’t go to Chancery, for they’ve invented the ‘Round Square.’”
Mr. Bumpkin stared. Could so great a man as the O’Rapley be joking? No; the Don seldom laughed. He was a great admirer of everything relating to the law, but had a marked prejudice against the new system;
and when he spoke of the “Round Square” he meant, as he afterwards explained, that confusion of Law and Equity which consists in putting Chancery Judges to try common law cases and Common Law Judges to unravel the nice twistings of the elaborate system of Equity; “as though,” said he, “you should fuse the butcher and the baker by getting the former to make bread and the latter to dress a calf.”
Mr. Bumpkin could only stare by way of reply.