“Why,” he replied, “there’s not a man in England can touch that Mr. Brougham.”
“But you gave all the verdicts to Mr. Scarlett?”
“Why, of course; he gets all the easy cases.”
It is eloquence that persuades the jury that your case is the easy case. As Cobbett said—and Cobbett had a common jury mind—“He is an orator that can make me think as he thinks, and feel as he feels.”
Mr. Montagu Williams has pointed out that the best English eloquence of his time was founded on what he calls a solid style of advocacy. “As leading examples,” he writes, “of what I may call the solid style, I should name Serjeant Shee, Serjeant Parry, and Lord Justice Holker. When I say ‘solid,’ I do not refer to heaviness of manner, but to solidity of appearance, robustness of speech, and a general air of good English honesty. This style is very taking with the juries of this country. It was the heavy, nay, almost languid, way in which Lord Justice Holker opened his cases, taken in conjunction with his sudden awakenings and bursts of eloquence when important points were reached, that rendered his style of advocacy so telling.”
Nearly every great advocate has found it necessary to make use of the eloquence of persuasion. Charles Russell is the one exception. He did not seek to persuade, he directed the court and jury. Whether or not he was, as Lord Coleridge said, “the biggest advocate of the century,” he was undoubtedly a very great advocate. Clearness, force, and earnestness were the basic qualities of his eloquence. It was said of him that “ordinarily the judge dominates the jury, the counsel, the public,—he is the central figure of the piece. But when Russell is there the judge isn’t in it. Russell dominates every one.”
But no man can dominate a jury in a doubtful case, and though Russell was supreme in a good case, he had not that power possessed in a high degree by another great advocate—still, happily, among us—Sir Edward Clarke, who could not only insinuate doubts into the hearts of the jury, but could leave his arguments so clearly in men’s minds that he became, as it were, the thirteenth man on the jury when they retired to consider their verdict. This requires real eloquence.
The moral of the lives of the advocates seems to be that in the house of eloquence there are many mansions, and any style natural to the man who uses it is his right style, and may succeed. One besetting sin of many would-be eloquent speakers is fatal, and that is bombast. The young advocate who opened a libel case, “My client, gentlemen, is a cheesemonger; and the reputation of a cheesemonger is like the bloom upon a peach. Touch it, and it is gone for ever,” must have been immune from eloquence. Yet there are solicitors and clients who still like that kind of thing, and advocates who supply it.
Nearer to eloquence was the advocate who, in defence of a woman for child murder, said in passionate tones: “Gentlemen, it is impossible that the prisoner can have committed this crime. A mother guilty of such conduct to her own child! Why, it is repugnant to our better feelings! Gentlemen, the beasts of the field, the birds of the air, suckle their young——”
The simile might perhaps have passed with the jury had not a dry, unsympathetic voice from the bench interrupted with: “Mr. X, if you establish the latter part of your proposition, your client will be acquitted to a certainty.”