Eskgrove succeeded Braxfield as the head of the Criminal Court, and a more ludicrous personage surely never existed. “His face,” says Cockburn, “varied according to circumstances, from a scurfy red to a scurfy blue; the nose was prodigious; the underlip enormous, and supported by a huge, clumsy chin, which moved like the jaw of an exaggerated Dutch toy.” When addressing a jury, if a name could be pronounced in more ways than one he gave them all. Syllable he invariably called sylla-bill, and wherever a word ended with the letter “g,” the letter was pronounced, and strongly so. And he was very fond of meaningless successions of adjectives. The article “a” was generally made into one; and a good man he would describe as “one excellent, and worthy, and amiabill, and agreeabill, and very good man.” Condemning a tailor to death for murdering a soldier by stabbing him, he addressed him thus:—“And not only did you murder him, whereby he was bereaved of his life, but you did thrust, or push, or pierce, or project, or propell the le-thal weapon through the belly-band of his regimen-tal breeches, which were his Ma-jes-ty’s!”
In the trial of Glengarry, for the murder of Sir Alexander Boswell in a duel, a lady of great beauty was called as a witness. She came into court veiled. But before administering the oath, Eskgrove gave her this exposition of her duty in the situation: “Young woman, you will now consider yourself as in the presence of Almighty God, and of this High Court. Lift up your veil; throw off all modesty, and look me in the face.” Having to condemn two or three persons to death who had broken into a house at Luss, and assaulted Sir James Colquhoun and others, and robbed them of a large sum of money, he first, as was his almost constant practice, explained the nature of the various crimes—assault, robbery, and hamesucken—of which last he gave them the etymology. He then reminded them that they had attacked the house and the persons within it, and robbed them, and then came to this climax—“All this you did; and God preserve us! joost when they were setten doon to their denner!”
A common arrangement of his logic, when addressing juries, was—“And so, gentlemen, having shown you that the panell’s argument is utterly impossibill, I shall now proceed to shew you that it is extremely improbabill.”
Brougham delighted to torment him. Retaliating, Eskgrove sneered at Brougham’s eloquence by calling it, or him, the Harangue. In his summing up he would say—“Well, gentlemen, and what did the Harangue say next? Why, it said this——.” Candidly, however, he had to declare that “that man Broom, or Broug-ham, was the torment of his life.” Lord Eskgrove, of course, was an unconscious humourist. So also in great measure was Lord Hermand. When Guy Mannering was first published, Hermand was so much delighted with the picture of the old Scottish lawyers in the novel that he could talk of nothing else but Pleydell and Dandie Dinmont and High Jinks for many weeks. He usually carried a volume of the work about with him; and one morning on the bench his love for it so completely got the better of him that he lugged in the subject—head and shoulders—into the midst of a speech about a dry point of law. Getting warmer every moment he spoke of it, he at last plucked the volume from his pocket, and, in spite of the remonstrances of his brethren, insisted upon reading aloud the whole passage for their edification. He went through the task with his wonted vivacity, gave great effect to every speech and most appropriate expression to every joke; and, when it was done, the court had no difficulty in confessing that they had very seldom been so well entertained. During the whole scene, Mr. Walter Scott himself was present, in his official capacity as Clerk of the Court of Session, and was seated close under the Judge.
Before Hermand was elevated to the bench, and was known among men as Mr. George Fergusson, his addresses were delivered with such animation and intense earnestness that when it was known he was to speak the court was sure to be filled. His eagerness made him froth and splutter, and there is a story to the effect that, when he was pleading in the House of Lords, the Duke of Gloucester, who was about fifty feet from the bar, and always attended when “Mr. George Fergusson, the Scotch counsel,” was to speak, rose and said, with pretended gravity, “I shall be much obliged to the learned gentleman if he will be so good as to refrain from spitting in my face.”
Hermand was very intimate at one time with Sir John Scott, afterwards Lord Eldon. They were counsel together, says Cockburn, in Eldon’s first important Scotch entail case in the House of Lords. Eldon was so much alarmed that he wrote his intended speech, and begged Hermand to dine with him at a tavern, where he read the paper and asked him if it would do.
“Do, sir? It is delightful, absolutely delightful! I could listen to it for ever! It is so beautifully written and so beautifully read! But, sir, it is the greatest nonsense! It may do very well for an English Chancellor; but it would disgrace a clerk with us.”
Bacon’s advice to judges is to “draw your law out of your books, not out of your brains.” Hermand generally did neither. He occasionally showed great contempt for statute law, and would exclaim, “A statute! What’s a statute? Words—mere words! And am I to be tied down by words? No, my Laards, I go by the law of right reason, my Laards. I feel my law—here, my Laards”—striking his heart.
Drinking, in this old fellow’s estimation, was a virtue rather than a vice; and when speaking to a case where one Glasgow man was charged with stabbing another to the death in the course of a night’s carousal, “They had been carousing the whole night,” exclaimed Hermand, “and yet he stabbed him! After drinking a whole bottle of rum with him! Good God, my Laards, if he will do this when he’s drunk, what will he not do when he’s sober?”