another interesting series on the French Revolution, a subject in which he was deeply read.
I came across a gentleman in Manchester who well remembered his lecturing at the Athenæum in 1844, and gave him great praise for his dramatic recitals on the Oratory of the Stage. But his practice at the Bar must soon have made lecturing tours unnecessary and impossible. When he was called he said in fun to some friends he was entertaining, that as soon as he was earning a thousand a year he would give them all a far better feast. The banquet took place within four years of the invitation.
His interest in politics never diminished. But when he had made his great name as an advocate, all invitations to contest a seat in Parliament were refused. In 1847 he contested Norwich unsuccessfully against Lord Douro and Sir Samuel Peto, and in 1857 stood for Finsbury against Thomas Slingsby Duncombe, who was returned by a large majority. In this election he used to say his chances were seriously interfered with by a charge—not true, in fact—that he had signed a petition to open the Crystal Palace and British Museum on Sunday. As he explained, the only reason he had not signed such a petition was that he had never been asked.
I have often heard my father speaking in Court, but it was at a time when I could understand very little of the merits of the dispute or the quality of the advocacy. He was one of the leaders of the Home Circuit, a veritable nest of giants, with Bovill,
Ballantine, Hawkins, Lush and Shee. In those days the Home Circuit was a reality. It was before the abolition of local venue, and every case had to be set down in the assize town of the county in which it arose. Thus at Guildford, Kingston or Croydon, all Surrey cases had to be tried, and the lists took a fortnight or more to finish. My father sometimes took a furnished house at Guildford in the summer, and we all moved down there, and on occasion I was taken into Court to hear him speak. In later years I heard him in several cases, but in no speech of first-rate importance, and I never heard him defend a prisoner, at which, I have been told by good judges, he had few equals. I should say his great asset as an advocate was his honesty and openness. There is no such thing as first-rate advocacy without a large measure of frankness. He was very smooth and good-natured in cross-examination, recognising that to make your way through the defences of the enemy requires, if the enemy is alert, more strategy than force. He never indulged in those snappy interjections and quarrelsome interferences which are but too common, and which, to my mind, are the very badge and stamp of incompetent advocacy. I fancy to-day his speeches to the jury would be too ornate, too eloquent and too full of oratory, but in his own day, and among the juries he had to address, it was more true of him than of any other that “persuasion hung upon his lips.” Nor can I be very clear that his style was really too flamboyant, for I was brought up myself in the school
of Russell and Holker on the Northern Circuit, where there was a passion for business methods, and curt address and the use of the bludgeon, rather than the rapier, in cross-examination, which has not even to this day penetrated to the more leisurely south. For I find that even in southern county courts advocates are known not only to demand the presence of juries, but to address them with great complacency on any subject at any distance from that subject. County court juries are nearly unknown in the North, where a trial is regarded more as a matter of business than an affair of display.
When my late brother Judge Willis, K.C., was a junior he was a constant visitor at my father’s house at Holland Park, and I well remember him telling a capital story of Holker’s wit as an advocate. Holker was cross-examining a big, vulgar Jew jeweller in a money-lending case, and began by looking him up and down in a sleepy, dismal way, and drawled out, “Well, Mr. Moselwein, and what are you?”
“A genschelman,” replied the jeweller with emphasis.
“Just so, just so,” ejaculated Holker with a dreary yawn, “but what were you, Mr. Moselwein, before you were a gentleman?”
The answer was drowned in a roar of laughter.