“Gentlemen of your profession, sir,” continued Mr. Pickwick, “see the worst side of human nature. All its disputes, all its ill-will and bad blood, rise up before you. You know from your experience of juries (I mean no disparagement to you, or them) how much depends upon effect; and you are apt to attribute to others a desire to use, for purposes of deception and self-interest, the very instruments which you, in pure honesty and honour of purpose, and with a laudable desire to do your utmost for your client, know the temper and worth of so well, from constantly employing them yourselves. I really believe that to this circumstance may be attributed the vulgar but very general notion of your being, as a body, suspicious, distrustful, and overcautious. Conscious as I am, sir, of the disadvantage of making such a declaration to you, under such circumstances, I have come here, because I wish you distinctly to understand, as my friend Mr. Perker has said, that I am innocent of the falsehood laid to my charge; and although I am very well aware of the inestimable value of your assistance, sir, I must beg to add that, unless you sincerely believe this, I would rather be deprived of the aid of your talents than have the advantage of them.”
The only effect this had upon Serjeant Snubbin was to cause him to ask rather snappishly,—
“Who is with me in this case?”
“Mr. Phunky, Serjeant Snubbin,” replied the attorney.
“Phunky, Phunky,” said the Serjeant, “I never heard the name before. He must be a very young man.”
“Yes, he is a very young man,” replied the attorney. “He was only called the other day. Let me see—he has not been at the Bar eight years yet.”
“Ah, I thought not,” said the Serjeant, in that sort of pitying tone in which ordinary folks would speak of a very helpless little child. “Mr. Mallard, send round to Mr.—Mr.—”
“Phunky’s—Holborn Court, Gray’s Inn,” interposed Perker. (Holborn Court, by-the-bye, is South Square now.)
“Mr. Phunky, and say I should be glad if he’d step here a moment.”
Mr. Mallard departed to execute his commission, and Serjeant Snubbin relapsed into abstraction until Mr. Phunky himself was introduced.
Although an infant barrister he was a full-grown man. He had a very nervous manner, and a painful hesitation in his speech; it did not appear to be a natural defect, but seemed rather the result of timidity, arising from the consciousness of being “kept down” by want of means, or interest, or connection, or impudence, as the case might be. He was overawed by the Serjeant, and profoundly courteous to the attorney.
“I have not had the pleasure of seeing you before, Mr. Phunky,” said Serjeant Snubbin, with haughty condescension.
Mr. Phunky bowed. He had had the pleasure of seeing the Serjeant, and of envying him too, with all a poor man’s envy, for eight years and a quarter.
“You are with me in this case, I understand?” said the Serjeant.
If Mr. Phunky had been a rich man he would have instantly sent for his clerk to remind him; if he had been a wise one he would have applied his forefinger to his forehead, and endeavoured to recollect whether, in the multiplicity of his engagements, he had undertaken this one or not; but as he was neither rich nor wise (in this sense, at all events) he turned red and bowed.
“Have you read the papers, Mr. Phunky?” inquired the Serjeant.
Here again Mr. Phunky should have professed to have forgotten all about the merits of the case; but as he had read such papers as had been laid before him in the course of the action, and had thought of nothing else, waking or sleeping, throughout the two months during which he had been retained as Mr. Serjeant Snubbin’s junior, he turned a deeper red and bowed again.
“This is Mr. Pickwick,” said the Serjeant, waving his pen in the direction in which that gentleman was standing.
Mr. Phunky bowed to Mr. Pickwick with a reverence which a first client must ever awaken, and again inclined his head towards his leader.
“Perhaps you will take Mr. Pickwick away,” said the Serjeant, “and—and—and—hear anything Mr. Pickwick may wish to communicate. We shall have a consultation, of course.” With this hint that he had been interrupted quite long enough, Mr. Serjeant Snubbin, who had been gradually growing more and more abstracted, applied his glass to his eye for an instant, bowed slightly round, and was once more deeply immersed in the case before him, which arose out of an interminable law-suit originating in the act of an individual, deceased a century or so ago, who had stopped up a pathway leading from some place which nobody ever came from to some other place which nobody ever went to.
Mr. Phunky would not hear of passing through any door until Mr. Pickwick and his solicitor had passed through before him, so it was some time before they got into the Square; and when they did reach it they walked up and down, and held a long conference, the result of which was that it was a very difficult matter to say how the verdict would go; that nobody could presume to calculate on the issue of an action; that it was very lucky they had prevented the other party from getting Serjeant Snubbin; and other topics of doubt and consolation common in such a position of affairs.
Mr. Pickwick’s lawsuit was to be
tried in the Court of Common Pleas, a division in which Serjeants-at-Law had the exclusive right to practise. At this time, 1827, and indeed up till 1873, every common law judge was turned into a Serjeant, if he were not one ere he was promoted to the Bench. It was a solemn kind of ceremony. The subject of the operation was led out of the precincts of the Inns of Court; the church bell tolled as for one dead.
He was then admitted member of Serjeants’ Inn; and the judge would address the Serjeants who practised before him as Brother So-and-So. Justice Lindley was the last judge who took the degree, a degree the only outward visible sign of which is the black patch or coif which is attached to the top of the wig. I do not know what kind of counsel
Serjeant Snubbin, retained by Mr. Perker for the defendant, was; but Dodson and Fogg had retained Serjeant Buzfuz for the plaintiff, and we all know that Serjeant Snubbin was no match for Serjeant Buzfuz. It has been objected by a writer in Fraser’s Magazine, to the account of this trial, that it is full of inconsistencies. Serjeant Buzfuz’ case, he says, was absurd, and that he would not have been able to browbeat any witness, and that no jury could have given a verdict on such evidence. This criticism resembles many other criticisms of Pickwick. Had the description in Pickwick been intended as a serious picture of the proceedings in a court of justice, it would have been open to much serious dissection and examination.
But the writer just quoted did not,
it seems, possess a sufficient sense of humour to enable him to see that this chapter of “Pickwick” was intended for broad fun amounting to burlesque, and nothing more; and to examine Mr. Buzfuz’ proceedings by the light of the law is to strip them of their meaning.
I mentioned just now that this trial took place in 1827. At that time, as I daresay some of you are aware, the parties to the action could not be called upon to give evidence; and Lord Denman did not, I think, till 1843 remove the Arcadian fetters which bound the litigants in this fashion. But, ladies and gentlemen, what a fortunate thing it was for Mr. Pickwick that he could not be called upon that occasion. If Mr. Pickwick had been called he would have been cross-examined. Let us imagine for
a moment what that cross-examination would have been. Suppose merely for the sake of example that that operation had been performed by my honourable and learned friend the Attorney-General. Cannot you imagine how in the first place he would forcibly but firmly have interrogated Mr. Pickwick with regard to his conduct after the cricket match at Muggleton; how he would have asked him whether he was prepared to admit, or whether he was prepared to deny, that he was drunk upon that occasion? Could you not imagine how my honourable and learned friend, passing on from that topic, would have alluded to what I think he would have termed the disgraceful incident when, on the 1st of September, Mr. Pickwick was found in a wheelbarrow on the ground of Captain Boldwig,
and was removed to the public pound, from which he was only extricated by the violence of his friends and servant? Passing on from that topic, would not my honourable and learned friend have reminded him of how he had been bound over at Ipswich before Mr. Nupkins, together with his friend Mr. Tupman, and called upon to find bail for good behaviour for six months? Then in conclusion how my friend would have turned to that incident in the double-bedded room at Ipswich, at the Great White Horse, and how my learned friend, with that skill which he possesses, would, bit by bit, by slow degrees, have extricated from that miserable man the confession that he had been found in that double-bedded room, a spinster lady being there at the same time. Ladies and gentlemen, what would have been