The Seven Lamps of Advocacy

by Sir Edward Abbott Parry

The silver-tongued Heneage Finch advises students “to study all the morning and talk all the afternoon.” Old Serjeant Maynard, deeply learned in booklore as he was, described the calling of the advocate as ars bablativa. Brougham told the law students of London University to habituate themselves to talk about everything.

For “bare reading without practice pedantiseth a student, but never makes him a clever lawyer.” Our fathers understood this better perhaps than we do, and made provision of halls and cloisters and gardens, where students could take exercise and discuss the mysteries of their profession when the hours of reading were over.

Roger North tells us in his life of his brother, the Lord Keeper: “I remember that, after the fire of the Temple, it was considered whether the old cloister walks should be rebuilt or rather improved into chambers; which latter had been for the benefit of the Middle Temple. But in regard it could not be done without the consent of the Inner house, the masters of the Middle house waited upon the then Mr. Attorney Finch, to desire the concurrence of his society upon a proposition of some benefit to be thrown in on that side. But Mr. Attorney would by no means give way to it, and reproved the Middle Templars very wittily and eloquently upon the subject of students walking in evenings there and putting cases, ‘which,’ he said, ‘was done in his time, as mean and low as the buildings were then, however it comes that such a benefit to students is now made so little account of.’ And thereupon the cloisters, by the order and disposition of Sir Christopher Wren, were built as they now stand.”

The days of wandering in cloisters and gardens, putting cases to one’s fellow-students, and listening to the wisdom of elders by the margin of the fountain are, alas! not for us. But even to-day a wise youngster should recognise that sitting in court to listen to the conduct of cases, attendance at circuit mess and dining in Hall, where the law-talk of seniors may still on occasion be of value—these things are all forms of industry, for the advocate can only learn the true creed of his faith from oral tradition.

In recent years we have wisely revived the old moots which date back to early days when the Inns of Court were really schools of law. Dugdale thus describes the ancient ceremony of the moot: “The pleadings are first recited by the students, then the case heard and argued by the barristers; and lastly by the reader elect and benchers, who all three argue in English; but the pleadings are recited, and the case argued by the utter barristers, in law French. The moot being ended, all parties return to the cupboard, where the mootmen present the benchers with a cup of beer and a slice of bread.”

Roger North also remembers that in his day, the time of Charles II., the custom of mooting had been discontinued for upwards of a century; but modern wisdom brings us back to many old customs of our fathers, and to-day all dramatic methods of education are recognised as of greater value than dictatorial lectures.

And not only are these more social forms of industry good in themselves, but they are the only antidote to that despondency and dread of failure which cloud the brightest and most hopeful mind in the long days of apprenticeship. Even the greatest advocates have suffered such moments. Had John Scott yielded to his own sinking inclinations, he might have been a provincial barrister at Newcastle instead of Lord Chancellor; Kenyon nearly became a Welsh parson instead of Chief Justice of England; and Russell tells us that in our own day Gully nearly exiled himself to the Straits Settlements, and Herschell proposed to emigrate to the Indian Bar.

A learned County Court judge, in dealing with the unfortunate bankruptcy of a brother-barrister, expressed the opinion that for a man to come to the Bar without private means, or, at least, expectations from a maiden aunt, was “a rash and hazardous speculation.” His dictum was unsound in law and history. Some of the greatest advocates began life as poor men. And though men of wealth have succeeded in advocacy, yet poverty is a true friend to industry. “Parts and poverty,” said Lord Chancellor Talbot, “are the only things needed by the law student.”

Kenyon, when asked by a fashionable lady how her son might best prepare for success at the Bar, said: “Let him spend all his money, marry a rich wife, spend all hers, and when he has got not a shilling in the world, let him attack the law.” For a lawyer, as an old pleader said, must be prepared in his early days “to eat sawdust without butter,” or, as Lord Eldon put it, “to live like a hermit and work like a horse.”

If a man is endowed with health and industry, the profession of an advocate is not “a rash and hazardous speculation.” He may even without blame give hostages to fortune, remembering that when Erskine made his first appearance at the Bar his agitation nearly overcame him, and he was just about to sit down a failure when, he says, “I thought I felt my little children tugging at my gown, and the idea roused me to an exertion of which I did not think myself capable.” He succeeded, indeed, far beyond his expectations, and he found, when he had overcome that first modest inertia which benumbs even the greatest genius, that he was fully equipped to fight the battles of his clients against all comers. And the reason of it was that he had not failed to read and learn and digest beneath the Lamp of Industry.